WELCOME STRANGER

by MARY HOCKING

  Mary Hocking

  WELCOME

  STRANGERS

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  To Pam and Geoff

  Chapter One

  On a grey January afternoon in 1946 there were more police than usual in Parliament Square and the roads leading off it. Their attention, however, was not focused on the Houses of Parliament, or on Westminster Abbey, but on the Central Hall where the first meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations was being held.

  ‘Do you think that is Mr Molotov?’ Alice Fairley asked, looking down from the window of a tall, straight-faced building just off Parliament Square. She pointed to a man hustling to a waiting car, head bent to avoid photographers.

  ‘I don’t even know if he attended.’ Alice’s companion made it clear that Mr Molotov’s movements were a matter of little consequence when compared with this latest evidence of Miss Fairley’s distractibility. ‘It will go the way of the League of Nations, you’ll see. Changing names doesn’t bring about miracles.’

  ‘You mean multilateral is the same as grammar school, under the skin?’

  Mr Hadow pursed his lips. He had first come to work in the offices of the West London Education Authority in 1911, and did not approve of sauciness in newcomers. He looked furtively at Alice. This was the first time, in his long service as committee clerk, that he had had to share a room with a woman. He noted with disapproval that during a recent absence, supposedly to collect a stencil, she had taken the opportunity to prepare for the evening. Her long, sandy hair had been freshly combed and drawn back from her face in a thick swathe at the nape of the neck. There was something old-fashioned about the face which was not entirely attributable to the hair style. He was reminded of portraits of women he had seen on visits to elderly aunts, women with composed faces and still hands, yet not serene. Something unsatisfied had smouldered behind those eyes. A more imaginative man might have thought that the women would have liked to break out of their frames. Mr Hadow, a bachelor, thought that all women were acquisitive and predatory by nature, and that no man was safe from them until he rested in his grave.

  Big Ben chimed the quarter hour. A cloud seemed to lift and. expectancy brightened Miss Fairley’s face. Mr Hadow was just about to ask her if she had any filing to do (which was unlikely, since he had devised a secret system known only to himself) when the telephone rang and he was summoned to attend on the Assistant Education Officer for Secondary Education. He departed, leaving behind him a sour smell of old, if not actually dirty, clothing.

  Alice picked up her handbag, got out a hand mirror and touched up her lipstick. Then she realised that girls in an office in the adjacent wing of the building were looking at her. A trickle of despair ran down her spine. Would she ever be able to adapt herself to this curious world with its mysterious concerns? She had been demobilised from the Women’s Royal Naval Service only a few months ago, but already the war years seemed like a period out of time. Life flowed around them, leaving them isolated, a strange territory unconnected with the mainland. She didn’t like the mainland very much, and she did not understand what was happening on it.

  The activity outside the Central Hall seemed to have died down. Men were running here and there amid the rubble of a bombed site, but presumably these were plain-clothes policemen, since they were allowed to scramble about unchallenged. A small group of men and women were huddled beneath a street lamp near the entrance to Great Smith Street. Earlier in the day they had provided the only drama, booing in a dispirited way on the arrival of the man whom Alice had taken to be Mr Molotov. Passers-by showed little interest in them, or in the comings and goings at the Central Hall.

  It was twenty past five. Alice looked round the room, wondering how she was to occupy herself for the remaining ten minutes. Mr Hadow had given her no work to do, and she guessed this was a strategy aimed at getting her removed as soon as possible. ‘She spends all her time looking out of the window,’ he would say. The girls in the adjacent wing were probably saying it already. She reached to a side-table and took up a report which she had already read several times. She read it again. It had a fascination for her.

  The war was over and the battlefront had shifted. The Labour Party, which had come into power with a huge majority, was fired by a crusading zeal to eradicate the inequalities of English society. Education was seen as a major factor in achieving this aim. This was the gestation period of the secondary school revolution, the time when, here, in the offices of the West London Education Authority, and in other offices up and down the land, a development plan was being prepared which would eventually put an end to the iniquities of secondary selection and bring about the age of equality of opportunity. As is the way of revolutions, all that had preceded it was deemed not merely bad, but positively evil. Alice, who had had a keen sense of purpose when the war broke out, was baffled by this peacetime conflict in which, in some extraordinary way she could not understand, she seemed to have got herself on the wrong side. She, a Fairley, so concerned to fight the good fight!

  She was the daughter of an elementary school head teacher who was also a Methodist lay preacher. Mr Fairley’s salary had been modest. This was a matter of pride rather than regret. He could have done much better for himself, but God had called him to work among the less privileged children. Luxury was not for the Fairleys. A car would have been considered an unwarrantable indulgence, and for most of Alice’s childhood communications were conducted without the aid of the telephone. Boarding house accommodation sufficed the Fairleys on holiday, and if any comment was made about private hotels, the parents would say, ‘You wouldn’t enjoy staying there, now would you?’ and the children would concede that it would be very ‘stuffy’ to stay in such places. Of course, there was no real hardship. The family was always well-clothed and never hungry, although Alice was frequently cold in the draughty semi-detached house in Shepherd’s Bush. She and her sisters had been aware that they were fortunate. The Methodist chapel in which the family worshipped was in the poorer part of Acton where the deprivations of unemployment were grimly evident. The Fairleys mixed with and cared about the unemployed. Alice had always been proud that her parents were so much more public-spirited and compassionate than most of her friends’ parents. How then had it come about that she now found herself regarded as the representative of an elite?

  The answer, it seemed, lay in her education. Her parents had wanted their children to have the benefit of a good education and they had made sacrifices (which were never represented as such) to send their daughters to the Winifred Clough Day School for Girls. They had believed that this was a good and wise thing to do.

  But yesterday’s good was tomorrow’s wrong doing. Alice, on returning from the war, found that in her absence she had become a member of a privileged class by virtue of the fact that she had attended an independent school. What her father would have made of this, she had no means of knowing. He had been killed by a bomb early on in the war. Her mother had married again and would not welcome a discussion on the class system – her new husband had attended a public school, was a graduate of Durham University and a senior partner in a rather superior publishing firm.

  Alice read with dismay
a description of the conditions prevailing in senior elementary schools which seemed to owe more to Dickens than her recollection of her father’s devoted treatment of his boys. It was a relief when the telephone rang. A junior in the general office said crisply that if Alice did not bring her post along straight away it would not go out today. Juniors in general offices, Alice had learnt, carry honorary rank. She hurried towards the big room with the windows facing on to the corridor, enabling its occupants to observe the comings and goings of staff, particularly those entering the Director’s and Deputy Director’s offices opposite.

  ‘I never can remember this,’ she said apologetically as she presented the post folder.

  ‘You people think you can just dump stuff in here on your way out,’ she was told sharply. ‘We have to get home, too, you know.’

  Another thing which Alice had learnt was that however hard other people may work, it has to be acknowledged that general office staff are more stretched and put upon than any. Perhaps there was justice in this claim. Not so long ago, letters for signature had been laid before the Assistant Education Officers neatly contained in leather-bound books, each letter placed between pages of blotting paper. Any book large enough to contain the present volume of post would have needed a small crane to hoist it on to an Assistant Education Officer’s desk, and post now arrived at the general office in a series of bulging buff folders. Alice had come too late to understand the impact of these changes on people who had hitherto enjoyed an ordered, leisurely existence. There was little sympathy between her and the general office staff.

  It was with a feeling of intense relief that she left the office. ‘It gets worse, not better,’ she told her friend Irene Kimberley when they were seated in a café in Tothill Street. ‘Each morning I feel I have woken up in a strange place. I don’t know where I am – or even who I am.

  Irene made rather a business of studying the menu. She was finding it difficult to tolerate the recital of Alice’s grievances. They had been close friends since schooldays, but had not seen much of each other during the war. Irene valued Alice as a cheerful person who tried to make the best of things, and she was dismayed by this change in her friend. ‘You’ll soon settle down,’ she said. She had had none of Alice’s problems. During the war she had studied at London University, and when she graduated she had entered the civil service. All this time, she had continued to live at home. There had been few dislocations in Irene’s life.

  ‘But do I want to settle down?’ Alice asked dejectedly. ‘I’m not sure that local government is the right thing for me.’

  ‘What else could you do?’

  There was nothing else Alice could do. A series of prospective employers had made it only too apparent that she lacked the only skills in which they were interested, namely shorthand and typewriting. It was uncharitable of Irene to draw attention to this, she who had a first class honours degree and now worked in the Cabinet Office. To Alice it seemed that everything Irene touched turned to gold. She had the alert look of a person who finds her employment both congenial and stimulating. Across the table from Alice, her brightness was dazzling. She was inventive with scarves so that they had the effect of making quite ordinary clothes look stylish; once knotted, they did not come undone. Alice wore her scarf as if she had a sore throat.

  ‘There’s a woman in the office called Mildred,’ Alice said, prodding a spam fritter. ‘She dresses like the staff at school, a shapeless sack with a girdle round the middle and shoes like bedroom slippers. She flipflops about looking old enough to be my grandmother. She doesn’t have a proper home, just a bedsitter in Kilburn. The only thing that matters to her is that she has a job with a pension.’

  ‘For goodness sake, Alice! That’s never going to happen to you!’

  ‘Why not? I never imagined myself working for West London Education Committee, but I’m doing it.’ Her doleful expression suggested she was only one step from woolly sacks and bedroom slippers.

  Irene, suppressing a desire to laugh, said, ‘You always were up in the clouds or down in the dumps. You need to find a middle way.’

  ‘But that’s the whole point! Can’t you see? I have found a middle way.’ She was quite pale now.

  Irene supposed it must be hard, coming back from service life with its constant excitements and changes of scene, men and parties, sleeping while other people were working and going on watch as they went to bed, mixing with people with whom one had no shared values or expectations. There had been times during the war when Irene had been afraid she might be missing something. She could remember being quite disturbed about it at one time, even obscurely frightened.

  ‘Use your gift,’ she said. ‘Now, if ever, is the time, surely? Write it down.’

  ‘Miserable reading that would make!’

  ‘Not necessarily, if you made it funny.’

  Tears came into Alice’s eyes. Irene reminded herself that employment was probably the least of Alice’s problems. Her home had been bombed, her father was dead, and her mother was now living in Sussex with her new husband. Both her sisters were married and the younger, Claire, was expecting her first child. The family, which had once been so close, was now scattered. Alice, a lodger in the home of her older sister, Louise, must miss that sense of belonging which she had taken for granted in her childhood. Irene, an only child, was particularly attached to her parents and could not imagine what her life would be without them. She made an effort to master her irritation.

  ‘What is it that is so particularly awful?’ she asked.

  Alice gazed at her. If she could have communicated with Irene in a series of animal howls, she might have managed to convey the extent of her desolation. Instead, she looked out of the window. It was raining steadily, but not spectacularly. Even the wind seemed wearied, sighing as it skirted corners, spasmodic in its assaults on umbrellas and the tarpaulin over a newsvendor’s stall. She thought of Alexandria, the colour and warmth, the feeling that everything one did and said was of tremendous importance, that it was all leading to that moment when the curtain would at last go up on life and it would all begin. Instead of which, it had petered out into this. So grey and drab.

  They ate in silence, Alice wondering how to change the conversation. It was no use asking Irene about her work because she could not talk about it. In spite of this, she gave the impression of knowing everything, so that conversation about national affairs usually left Alice feeling that her opinions were ill-informed and partial as opposed to Irene’s silent, all-inclusive wisdom. It was rather like talking to God. Irene would not discuss Mr Attlee, but one sensed that she knew all there was to know about him. While Mr Aneurin Bevan would bring a guarded look into her eyes, the mention of Mr Ernest Bevin produced an affectionate smile. Alice recalled that there was always Ellen Wilkinson.

  ‘Have you met our Minister?’ she asked, and without waiting for a reply, went on, ‘I must admit I have a soft spot for her, after reading South Riding.’

  ‘South Riding?’

  ‘The headmistress, you remember, was supposed to be a portrait of Ellen Wilkinson.’

  ‘Really? I had forgotten. Not an exact portrait, I would have said.’

  So much for Winifred Holtby.

  Irene looked at her watch. ‘Are we going to this rehearsal?’

  Alice brightened. ‘Do you know, I had forgotten!’

  ‘You’ll make a splendid prompt!’

  ‘They don’t need me at present. I haven’t been to a rehearsal yet. You would like to come, wouldn’t you?’

  Irene said yes, although in fact she did not want to go. Apart from Alice’s sister, Louise, she did not know any members of the dramatic society. She gathered that most of the men had recently come out of the services and she did not think she would be at ease in their company. She was reluctant to let Alice see how difficult she found it to mix informally with men.

  ‘Tell me something about this company,’ she said when the bus was on its way down the Bayswater Road.

 
‘They have their own theatre in Notting Hill. It was a small factory, but the society converted it some time in the Thirties.’

  ‘They are amateurs, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, but they are very good. They couldn’t do much during the war, of course; but now that people are coming back they are planning to do four plays a year.’

  ‘Isn’t Asmodée a bit ambitious?’

  ‘Oh no! They don’t do popular plays – Terence Rattigan and all that stuff.’

  ‘Rattigan probably needs professionals anyway,’ Irene said, to show that she, too, knew about theatre. ‘The lighter the work, the defter the touch. Witness the Lunts.’

  ‘There’s nothing light about Mauriac.’

  There was not much light in the theatre and it was very cold. Everyone except the producer was muffled in heavy clothing. Louise was wearing a borrowed duffel coat and the men sported service overcoats and scarves; one man was wearing a Mae West. Two girls who were not on-stage were sharing a blanket. Irene and Alice seated themselves at the back of the auditorium. Not one head turned in their direction.

  The producer was wearing a pin-striped suit. The theatre was his life and everyone knew it; he had no need of affectation. His was a cold passion, but he had formidable energy which, presumably, kept him warm. He addressed one of the characters on stage in a quiet, dry voice. ‘You’re not disturbed by any of this, but you are not impervious, either. You see? There is a difference.’

  The man in the Mae West blew on his fingers and said that he did see.

  The producer went on, ‘I suppose one answer would be to play this scene as if the other characters were some distance away from you – try to put a distance between yourself and them.’

  ‘Not easy on this stage.’

  ‘Theatre is always a matter of illusion,’ the producer said austerely, ‘You create the illusion of space and the audience will accept it.’

  The Mae West said restively, ‘Shall we go through it again?’

  ‘I feel you might find it easier if you didn’t look as if you were floating on your back.’ The producer threw this line away into the dark auditorium in a manner worthy of Alfred Lunt.