We pulled up in the square and got out of the car. Around the square were small, old houses. Opposite us, under trees, were the tables of the Hotel de Ville. We sat down gratefully and began to talk to the patron about what to eat. “And we’d love to see the abbey. Is it up there?” asked Corrie, pointing past the car to a gap between two old houses, on the other side of the square, where a footpath evidently led upwards, between trees.
“That’s it,” he told us. “You can’t see it from here because of the trees. But we can see the rooftop of the abbey, above the trees, from our upstairs windows.” He added that the building was no longer an abbey, although the chapel attached to it was still open, Poulaye-sur-Bois having no other church – the other had been burned down many years before and never rebuilt. At that point the hotelier’s elderly mother, in black dress and black stockings, came out of the restaurant and said that if we wanted to see the abbey she would have to telephone the curé’s housekeeper, who was in charge of the keys. We protested a little about the amount of effort involved – she or the housekeeper would then have to come with us up the steep slope to the abbey – but she was proud of the place and insistent that we must see it if we wanted to.
Sure enough, after we had finished our meal a sturdy looking sixty-year-old, also in black dress and stockings, pedalled into the square and approached us. Parking her bicycle and refusing our offers of coffee or a drink she led us, with a springy step, across the square, between the houses and up a steep path through trees until we came out into a small clearing. The abbey, a low building built of dark stone, stood in front of us. The elderly woman, whose black-stockinged legs had taken her up the path in front of us like a goat, went up the step in front of the massive wooden doors, studded with big brass studs, and, producing a large key from her pocket, opened the door. Before us lay a large square of overgrown grass. The monastery buildings formed a square around this. The cloisters lay opposite, beyond the large dry fountain in the middle of the grass. All was silent. There was a smell of herbs and hot stone. So we went, Corrie and I, through the cloisters into the ancient, once-whitewashed refectory, into the little stone cubicles where the brothers had once slept. Through the slit windows of the cubicles we could see the overgrown remnants of the vegetable garden, the beds marked now only by the different patches or lines of weeds and grass which grew there. Inside, in the silence, the noise of crickets was loud in the long grass. Then we turned and walked out of the cloisters to the dried-up fountain. I declared that we must next see the chapel, the door of which lay outside the abbey proper beyond the main building. But Corrie, in that kind of female, ruthless, to-the-point attack which often embarrasses the men who witness it, asked, “Et l’Abbé Benoit, madame, est-il toujours en vie?”
The woman gazed at us and some kind of comprehension came into her face. She knew something, even if it was only that there was something to know. She answered that the Abbé Benoit was indeed still alive and, having retired when the abbey closed, was now living with her employer, the curé, who was a relative of his. Corrie, still determined and obviously fascinated by talking to a woman who actually looked after the Abbé, asked her whether he was in good health. The curé’s housekeeper replied that although the Abbé was almost eighty years old he was, in fact, very fit for his age. And my wife remarked confidently that she was very glad to hear this. She added that she did not know the Abbé personally but had heard of him from friends. The best of women, I have noticed, are very good at making strange things seem ordinary, when it suits them. They can get amazing concessions and acceptance for the most bizarre propositions, just by casting an air of normality over everything. On the other hand, although men may be deceived and find themselves suddenly accepting the existence of a lover or agreeing to move house, just because a woman had made it seem like the most ordinary thing in the world, other women are less easily deceived. That was what happened here. I saw the cure’s housekeeper’s black eyes take in Corrie’s shoes, her clothes, her face. Her eyes rested for a moment on me and then she said, in French, of course, “The old English lady goes to mass every Sunday.” This, I could see, stopped Corrie in her tracks completely. An ace had been carelessly thrown on the table. For my part I was quite bewildered. I could not see what they were talking about. The woman went on, “Are you looking for her?” And Corrie, mastering her features, said, “We must be back in England tomorrow. Is she still well?” And the woman said, “Oh, yes. Considering her age. This is a very healthy place to live.” I simply stood there, wondering who they were talking about, and why. That is to say, I could not accept the truth I was hearing. And finally we went to see the chapel, small, with thick stone walls, five, six hundred years old. As we left, Corrie turned in the bright doorway and looked into the darkness to where the red light burned at the altar. “A light which burns for six hundred years must have shed itself on many strange sights,” she said poetically to the housekeeper.
The housekeeper appreciated this, replying, in the same vein, “And over many secrets.”
I was thoroughly relieved to be getting into the car, saying goodbye to the woman, giving her money for the church and waving farewell to the landlord of the Hotel de Ville who came out in his apron to say goodbye. The visit had been too much for me. During Corrie’s conversation with the old Frenchwoman I had felt like a man standing with his dog, while the dog reacts to sounds which he, the dog’s owner, cannot hear and feels anxious about – is the noise that of a man with a revolver coming closer and ready to shoot or is it just a rabbit in a faraway bush? We drove for a mile in silence, while I tried to remember that we were on holiday, that we were going home. Corrie spoke first. “Well, well,” she said. “I wonder who else knows about all this?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You mean – you don’t understand?” she asked.
“I understand perfectly well,” I said. “I just wish we’d never gone there.” I recalled the dry fountain, the smell of herbs, the sound of the crickets in the garden.
“Why do you wish we’d not gone?” she said.
“Because we’re meddling in matters which have nothing to do with us,” I told her.
“And are you so sure they haven’t?” she said angrily.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
She told me. After that I drove on in silence. Then I asked her what she expected me to do about all this. She said it was none of her business, that decision was mine. I said, very well then, supposing the decision was hers, what would she do? And she said, “Go and see Molly. What else?”
“Perhaps. I’d better think about it,” I said. But when we returned to England events in the family began to claim all our time again. I did not go to see Molly.
1979
Those three or four years after George and Wayne came back went in a whirl. I didn’t realize it at the time – you never do until later – but I’m surprised now at what I did and how I managed to cope with it all. I wouldn’t do it again, that’s for certain. I was sailing close to the wind all the time. The books wouldn’t have borne close examination, nor the premises, nor the workforce. I had no plans for the future except not to go bankrupt and to keep on paying the wages. The CBI sent a smooth chap down a couple of years ago to write me up. A Celebration of British Industry, it was going to be called – a celebration of British infamy, Josie said, when she heard about it. I must have been mad to agree because when he came and started asking questions I couldn’t remember anything. Half the records, at least, were creations of Shirley’s and she told me there was no way she was going to get the microfiches of the real records out of the Swiss bank where she’d put them. It was a sod’s opera, she said. There was enough in those records to put us all in jail nine times over. In the end I had to send the chap packing and he was only too glad to go. I heard they called off the project and no wonder. I daresay all these few celebrated British industrialists he was going to interview had the same story behind them – it’s like the old da
ys when they called you a pirate until you started to do well and then you became a British merchantman. And I started up in business just in time to establish something before it got tougher and tougher so don’t tell me anyone who started after, and survived, could have done any different. As for me, half my employees were on the dole or social security back in the old balmy days before the recession of the late ’70s and ’80s. You could call me a pioneer in the business of cash in hand and no questions asked. I made sure I never had to pay any insurance stamps, even for the ones who weren’t getting unemployment or pensions from the state – I never even paid a stamp myself until they caught up with me in 1981. I broke fire regulations, planning regulations, I defrauded the Inland Revenue, took cash payments where I could and paid bills and wages in cash as often as possible. I bribed planning officers, I talked my way round the health and safety regulations, I had four companies operating, at one time, each with a different bank account, and then I was playing silly buggers with two bank accounts in the names of Shirley and Tom Allaun. Half the time I didn’t know what regulations I was breaking – I just kept on running. In the end these things go by their own momentum – you feel as if you’re in a car with no brakes and you just keep on steering and hoping you don’t crash into anything. The only rules I stuck to were mine – I had to pay the wages and I had to pay the suppliers. Apart from that Houdini had nothing on me and I’ll never know how I got away with it. Later, I think blind eyes were turned. They needed me. I even think they liked me.
We got the Messiter prototype sorted out fairly quickly and the next spring, just as the money was running out badly, we had a first batch of 2,000 bikes ready for sale. I had everybody working, even Sid, the weekend we were due to get the bikes out. I had Tom, of all people, loading them on the lorry. But the problem was we had to expand immediately because then we needed warehousing for spare parts, a proper office to handle orders and all that. I told Isabel I was going to put prefabricated factory buildings on the front lawn. She nearly went mad – in the end I had to buy the bottom field, past the lake, from the Twinings, and a nice price they charged for it, too. Then I had to pay the council officer to look the other way while I put up the buildings. But in the end Framlingham got too complicated. Housing was difficult for the labour I brought in and that wasn’t going to get any better. The locals didn’t take to Wayne’s team, which was nine black kids, and they wouldn’t let them in the local disco so there was a fight and the police were called. It’d all have improved in the long run, the way it did between us evacuees and the local kids, but I could see that expanding any more in Framlingham would bring in more strangers, make the housing problem worse and we’d have culture-shock, mixed marriages and God knows what while I was turning the village into something like a small industrial town. They couldn’t really take a lot more and I was already getting too much attention from the West Kent Preservation Society. I could see myself with all these preservers, interested parties and nosey-parkers breathing down my neck and then goodbye privacy and my tolerant relationship with the local council and the fact that half the workforce was drawing benefit of one kind or another and a lot of the wages were paid out in cash – dirty notes which never saw a tax officer from the moment when somebody paid me (and probably hadn’t seen one before that) right to the day when they were put down on a three piece suite. Don’t forget that all the while the women were hard at it with electric sewing machines leased to them by the firm. The toys kept going and we were making a lot of dresses – I had put Vera Harker in charge of the whole operation and before long she was running up to London in a Mini, having lunch with the buyer at Harrods. You never know what people can do until you ask them to do it. Anyway, what with one thing and another I thought I’d better move some of the operation back to the smoke. I knew the landscape and the language there. It’s easier to fiddle where you aren’t the only one doing it – you aren’t so conspicuous. So I left the spares business, which was going to expand anyway, down there and turned one side of the stable block over to George for Research and Development. As a matter of fact I thought after he’d developed the Messiter, George had shot his bolt – he certainly spent a few years sitting on his bum or fiddling about on a lathe and getting no results – I little knew what was going through his head or what it would mean for all of us. I just thought he needed a rest and maybe he’d come up with a new mousetrap in due course.
So I got a crumbling old engineering works in about an acre of spare ground beside the railway lines at the end of Wattenblath Street. I could remember when it was quite a thriving little business, turning out enamel sink bowls and basins and all sort of drums – they used to stand about outside and sometimes we’d nip over the fencing and kick them, to make a noise and run away. Anyway, with plastics and so forth they changed over to making cheap toys and novelties and mugs with names on them and all that, so by the time I got there the staff was four old men and one of them was the boss. But it was a building and land which I got for a song, and because of previous use the regulations about noise and preserving the amenities didn’t bother me. The other advantage was I knew a few of the Town Hall officers, through Joe. Wayne started the work on the place and I reckoned that we could treble our output over the next year and that was as fast as I wanted to go. The beauty of the situation was that what with the constantly rising price of petrol, plus the fashion for bikes, plus transport strikes, we never had any problem selling the bikes. But I had to keep the costs low so I used nearly all part-timers, which meant I could cut down on the facilities and I paid as much cash as possible and one little skinny girl, you’ll never believe it, was paid to do nothing else but stroll around making sure there weren’t any snoops about snooping. The rest of the time she kept a complicated rota to make sure the labour was diving in and out at irregular intervals so no one could keep a proper check – it was diabolical. I lived in terror of a really bad accident, apart from anything else. I did everything I could about safety but there’ll always be one silly bugger with a hangover or she’s had a row with the old man and they’ll be the ones who drag you down when they cut a finger off. It was a farce, all right – I had school-leavers, pregnant women and old men working there, and I argued that as long as people were working, getting a bit of training and getting paid, then I wasn’t doing any harm. If they were collecting from the state at the same time, well, they would have been anyway, so why worry. No one was any worse off and a lot were a bit better off. I started a small garment factory not far off, too, and got a girl with three children in to manage the outworkers. What I did was employ three women and a lad full-time and all the rest was sweated labour. The factory was more for warehousing and distribution than actual production. Again, I couldn’t see the harm in it. I was keeping people in work and paying what I could and the main sufferer was me, because I was never out of debt and I wonder I ever slept a wink, with all the worries. Of course, when Jack got to hear about it he was furious.
It must have been 1979, because he’d nearly lost his seat in the election and I was over in Beckenham because Ivy’s first operation hadn’t been successful and she’d just come out of hospital after the other one. She thought it would be all right, did Ivy, but I don’t think Sid was so confident and nor were the rest of us. Anyway, we both arrived to visit Mum at the same time and we were having a cup of tea in the kitchen afterwards, with Sid, when I realized Jack was giving me funny looks. By this time Jack was well and truly divorced from Pat and he’d married this woman from the TV company and he’d got a small baby called Jasper which his wife, as they say, wasn’t letting interfere with her career. I liked him better when he was living with Pat, whether she was a dogmatic Communist or not, and I sometimes had her and the kids down at Framlingham for a break because her problem was that Jack had interfered with her career – in fact she’d never had one because he had – and now she was having to turn to with nothing but twelve years of being acting unpaid secretary and tea lady to a gang of political activists
, all men, behind her. In the end she got started in a little East End print shop with a few other women, so it worked out all right, but at the time, because I stayed friendly with her, it created tension between me and Jack, because his new wife didn’t like it. So at first I thought that was why he was acting funny.
Finally, I said, “What are all those funny looks about?” and he denied it, the way people do, and I asked Sid, who told us both to shut up because Ivy was ill upstairs and then Jack said, “I don’t want to drag it all up while Ivy’s not too good.”
“No need for a row,” I said. “If it’s because you think I’m seeing too much of Pat – well, I’ve known her a long time and I can’t switch loyalties every time you get married again.”
He just looked uncomfortable and said, “It isn’t that at all.”
“It’s the business,” Sid said. “That’s what he’s making all these faces about. And if you want my opinion, Jack” – not that any of the Waterhouses ever did want each other’s opinions but they were sure to get them anyway – “if you want my opinion,” said Sid, “I think you shouldn’t interfere. Molly’s doing the best she can and she’s got a boy to keep.”
“The old cry through the ages,” said Jack. “It’s not an excuse for non-union labour. That’s not what we’ve been fighting for all these years. It’s employers like Molly who are eroding all the others struggled and fought for.”
And I told him I couldn’t afford to use union labour. I told him the truth – if I did, I’d go out of business. It’d put a third on the price of the bikes and I’d lose sales. I said, “And moreover I can’t afford the tax and insurance either. I can’t afford to run proper canteens, observe full fire regulations and I can’t afford proper rest breaks. That’s why I use so many part-timers. They can eat and rest in their own time. On mine, they’re working.”
All The Days of My Life Page 64
