by John Lawton
Aunt Dolly and her inseparable friend Mrs Wisby. Troy had the dimmest recollection of meeting Aunt Dolly before the war. Brother in-law Maurice White, probably London’s best-known self-made millionaire, formerly Maurice Micklewhite, who at some point had managed to lose the first syllable of his name as neatly as Troy’s own father had lost the last of his. Troy made no effort to log the list of cousinry, and diverted himself as Kitty whispered a lengthy chronicle of Kathleens and Michaels and Alberts and Marys by wondering if cousinry might not be cousintude or cositude or some such. His dad would know. It was just the sort of trivia his dad stored up in spades.
‘Have you heard a word I’ve said?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he lied.
‘And, of course, old Mr Bell’s on the organ. You remember him? He was our lodger during the war. He still is Vera’s lodger.’
Vera was Kitty’s youngest sister. Scarcely out of her teens when the old man had been killed, she had taken control of the house and, with it, the lives of most of her siblings. She had a facial resemblance to her mother, but she had grown to her father’s bulk – a big woman, never far from an apron or a rolling-pin.
Troy drifted off. He was, he knew full well, just window dressing. An accessory Kitty could wear on one arm. It didn’t mean he had to pay attention or say anything, and with a bit of luck he might get through the whole caboodle without having to utter a word. He stood when Kitty stood, mouthed tunelessly when she sang, sat when she sat, whipped out his clean hanky when she sniffled, and the next thing he knew he was outside standing in the drizzle for the burial.
It was, by Troy family standards, all rather restrained, rather polite and rather ordered. The tearful daughters threw single roses into the grave, the son and sons-in-law stood steely and tearless, and no one flourished a revolver. In minutes, it seemed, he found himself walking slowly back from the churchyard towards the Highway in the company of George Bonham. It seemed odd having Bonham slow down for him: for years now it had been the other way round, Bonham slowed by bulk rather than age, the heavy-footed pace of a man the best part of six foot seven and, in former days, wearing his silly policeman’s helmet, nearer seven foot. He had dwarfed Troy from the day they’d met in 1936. And from that day forth Troy had dodged around Bonham like a mosquito, inflicting on him ideas and actions that either appalled or baffled him without, in either case, denting his loyalty. Troy was his protégé – that much he understood.
‘I wasn’t sure you’d be here.’
‘Kitty asked me. But to be honest, until she did it had never occurred to me to come.’
‘Stirs up old memories a funeral, don’t it? And I suppose you’ve got a few.’
‘Since you put it like that. I was the copper called out to old Walter’s murder. I saw the body before it was even cold, sprawled on the cobbles with a bullet hole in the head. I’ve never felt much like facing Mrs Stilton since. I certainly never felt like answering any questions.’
‘Aah,’ said Bonham. ‘I meant memories of you and Kitty. Sort of.’
Troy knew George’s ‘sort of ’. It was uttered as a way of toning down whatever he had just said with a hint of uncertainty. It didn’t work. ‘She’s married, George. Let’s leave the past where it belongs, shall we?’
A path ran at right angles to the one they were on into another quarter of the churchyard. A small man in a cloth cap was hurrying down it towards them.
‘It’s old Arthur,’ Bonham said. ‘You remember Arthur Foulds? Lost his missus the same week I lost mine in the Blitz.’
Arthur turned into their path and scuttled right up to them. ‘Vandals!’ he shouted. ‘Teds and yobs and bloomin’ tearaways!’
Now that Troy could see him clearly he knew him. He’d been a resident of Stepney when Troy was a fresh-faced beat bobby. Another retired docker, characteristically built like a brick shithouse. A powerhouse of muscle packed into a five-foot-four frame that had turned slowly to fat in fifteen years of retirement.
‘Just the blokes I need. A couple o’ coppers.’
‘We’re here for a funeral, Arthur. ’Sides, I’m retired and Mr Troy’s not on duty.’
‘But you’ll at least come and look?’
‘Look at what?’
‘The missus’s grave. My Janet’s restin’-place. It’s been vandalised!’
‘Arthur, there’s not a lot—’
Troy interrupted: ‘Let’s look shall we?’
Bonham glared down at him. ‘By rights it’s the sort of thing you report to the nick and let them take care of it.’
‘Won’t hurt to look. Besides, we’re way ahead of the Stiltons. They’re still standing around gabbing. Bound to be a pecking order for the cars back to Jubilee Street. Let’s buy ourselves a little time.’
Bonham accepted silently. They followed old Arthur to his wife’s grave. It was a mess: every plant, and he seemed particularly fond of polyanthi, had been ripped up and left to die. The earth looked less like the carefully tended plot Troy knew it must have been and more like an allotment. The fresh marks of footprints were beginning to fill with water as the drizzle turned to rain.
‘It’s criminal,’ Arthur stated the obvious. ‘And something’s got to be done,’ he stated the unlikely.
‘A lot of it about, is there?’ Troy asked.
‘First time,’ said Arthur. ‘Been tendin’ ’er grave for nigh on twenty years . . . and nothing like this has ever happened before. I come here two, maybe three times a week. And nothin’ like this has ever happened before. They’ve no respect. That’s what’s wrong with young people today. Got no respect.’
He was crying now. Bonham responded: ‘You leave it with us, Arthur. We’ll report it to the nick and something’ll be done. Trust me.’
A huge, avuncular arm embraced the shoulders of the older man.
‘What’s the country comin’ to? What’s the bleedin’ country comin’ to?’
Neither of them answered.
§ 22
The house in Jubilee Street had been in Edna Stilton’s family since it was built in 1887. Edna and all her children had been born there. It was big, plenty big enough to accommodate the funeral party – a barn of a kitchen, a dining room, a sitting room and – reserved, if not designed, for such occasions – a parlour. It was not a concept Troy readily grasped. A room that was virtually mothballed from one event, tragedy or celebration, to the next. His house at Mimram would dwarf Jubilee Street, but there was not a room he and his brother and sisters did not use.
It seemed inevitable to him that the parlour would look as it did. Rather like a mausoleum, a living, if that was the word, museum to the recent past. Was there another house in England still with antimacassars on the chairbacks? Could you still buy macassar to necessitate the antimacassar? Surely we’d all gone Brylcreem round about 1940?
The sepia portrait of the monarch hanging on the parlour wall was not of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, nor was it of her father George VI: it was of her grandfather, the ‘old king’, George V. Troy was prepared to bet that half the homes in England that had such patriotism as to want a portrait of the monarch still had one that matched this. It was fitting. The King had dominated pre-war England. Troy’s own sisters had been presented to Queen Mary as débutantes in the twenties – the Queen had survived the encounter – and the royal couple seemed the bridge between the world we lived in now, whatever it was coming to, and the world before the war, before the Great War, which we had lost. They had survived, solidly. A smaller world – fewer peacock plumes and fewer eagles – built around the brick notion of family. The result, as Troy’s father had wryly observed, was that there was now nothing quite so middle class as royalty. That much we owed to King George and Queen Mary.
On the mantelpiece were silver-framed wedding photos. One of them had to be of Walter and Edna his bride, circa 1910, but he would not have known the man. The slim young copper in uniform walking out under the arch of truncheons, raised military-style, bore scant resemblance to
the well-fed trencherman he had known. But he knew Edna at once. That same look in her eye. The heart of gold, the will of iron. Young she might be, but she was still the same woman who had seen off his courtship of Kitty with ‘Stick to your own kind.’ Troy had found no way to impress or even please Mrs Stilton.
‘She didn’t change much.’ Kitty, sneaking up behind him, a glass of white wine in each hand. ‘I insisted,’ she said. ‘Can’t get through a funeral on tea and brown ale. Rose thinks it’s extravagant and inappropriate. What did you have at your brother-in-law’s wake?
‘Champagne,’ said Troy. ‘But, then, we’re rich and we were glad to see him go.’
Kitty sniggered. ‘Don’t make me laugh. That would be inappropriate. Come and talk to Tel. He may be in his thirties but he’s still as awkward as a teenager. Whatever the funereal equivalent is of the spare prick at the wedding he’s it.’
Kitty introduced Troy to her little brother and vanished. Troy found himself listening to a somewhat bitter, neurotic life story – how the deaths of two elder brothers in the last war had freed him from the call-up, and how there had been nothing he had wanted but to join the navy. Even peacetime conscription had passed him by and declined his services when he volunteered.
‘What,’ Troy asked, when he could get a word in, ‘did you do?’
‘’Prenticeship. Butcher’s. Quite enjoyed it as it happened.’
‘But?’ It seemed the obvious and simplest nudge of a question.
‘But Mo made a pile and—’
‘Mo?’
‘Maurice. Reenie’s husband. You must remember Maurice?’
‘Of course,’ said Troy. ‘Yes, of course I know Maurice.’
Maurice White had formed his business partnership in 1946 –White, Bianco, Weiss. A clumsy name but, if nothing else, it at least caught a fair sample of the racial mix of the East End. Bianco had gone solo by 1950, and Maurice had taken control of the company, whittling down Weiss’s role. Mr Weiss was not much heard from. The masthead conveyed the importance of who did what in no uncertain terms, Maurice’s name being twice the size of the other two put together. WBW had redeveloped bombsites in South Wales and Plymouth, had built towering office blocks in central London and erected prefabricated factories in Derby and Birmingham. Most appropriately for a former pilot, Maurice had bought up some of the old RAF bases in Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, then sat on them until he got planning permission for housing estates. WBW had made a reputation in a very short time as one of the faces of modern Britain. A modern Britain for whom the past was less than sacred. They even had the wrecking ball as part of the company logo. These days, you could drive almost anywhere in Britain and see a sign on a site somewhere that had WBW painted up in large red letters and the slogan ‘Building a Better Britain’. There were plenty of people who admired Maurice as a man of enterprise, and as many more who mistrusted him as a chancer. Troy was never quite sure what the word ‘magnate’ meant, but perhaps it meant Maurice.
Tel was still talking: ‘Mo made his pile. And suddenly it wasn’t on for me to work in a butcher’s down Whitechapel. I had to have an office job, din’ I? I had to go and work for Mo.’
‘And you don’t like office work?’
‘Not so much that as . . . well, it’s Mo. Mo’d like to own the world. To own the world and then sell it on at a profit. That’s Mo for you. The man who sold the world.’
Tel had uttered this almost sotto voce, and glanced around just to be certain that his brother-in-law was not within earshot. He almost was. As Tel finished his litany, Troy’s eyes met Maurice’s and Maurice quickly crossed the room to clasp his hand. A big man, six foot, well groomed, wearing a black bespoke suit that looked to Troy to be almost as expensive as his own, and certainly better kept.
‘Freddie, long time no see. Not been boring you, has he?’
It had been a long time – Troy couldn’t quite remember when or where. Maurice clapped an arm around Tel’s shoulders, more proprietorial than avuncular. He exuded a bonhomie in which Troy could not quite believe. The smile was too quick, the capped teeth too perfect.
‘No,’ Troy lied. ‘Quite the opposite.’
‘Good, good. Because I mean to steal you away from him.’
Without another word to Tel, the embracing, the captivating arm moved from Tel to Troy and steered him gently to a corner. With the arrival of riches Maurice had changed his tailor but not his accent.
‘I was ’opin’ to ’ave a word. In fact, you’re just the chap I wanted to see.’
‘Ask away,’ said Troy.
‘I’d sooner show you.’
‘Show me what?’
§ 23
Troy had tried telling Maurice that they couldn’t simply duck out of a funeral. Kitty would give him hell. And all Maurice would say was that he’d have him back in good time. They crossed the Commercial Road in Maurice’s chauffeur-driven Rover 90 – ‘I could run to a Rolls, but that would be just flaunting it, wouldn’t it?’ – and over into the rough-hewn streets of Shadwell. ‘You worked out where we are yet, Freddie?’
‘Watney Street.’
‘Yep. I grew up here.’
‘And I walked it as a beat bobby.’
‘Let’s walk it again for a couple of yards.’
The chauffeur stopped the car, and Troy stepped out into the closing moments of Watney Market. On a good day, and most were, this was one of London’s most thriving street markets. It was said that in the 1920s you could have run from Commercial Road to the Highway on the heads of the packed punters. Today was their half-day – stalls wheeled away, a mountain of paper and rotting vegetables being swept up.
Maurice turned off the market into Cridlan Street – a narrower, residential street. Troy looked around. It was a timeshift, a backward glance. Many of the houses had broken windows, patched up with cardboard; there were gaping, rotten holes in the doors big enough to let rats in; paint was peeling off every wooden surface; there was rubbish piled up on the pavements; and in the street itself kids as tatty as gypsies played football with a bundle of rags tied up with string upon a sea of broken glass. It was probably the 1930s when Troy had last stood there. It still looked like the 1930s. Time had stood still. Spawned another generation of street kids, but stood still.
‘Mind the dogshit, Freddie.’
Too late. He’d stood in it and was scraping his heel against the kerb when a dashing child all but knocked him of his feet. Maurice grabbed him, yelled at the kid and steadied Troy. Twenty yards on, the child stopped, turned around, held up two fingers and said, ‘Fuck off, ponces.’
Maurice turned another corner, Troy following into Wetmore Street. More kids, more rubbish, more filth.
‘Maurice, is there a point to this trip down Memory Slum?’
Maurice stopped. ‘Why did Labour lose the last election, and the one before?’
‘I’m not going to answer that because you’re going to tell me anyway.’
‘Houses.’
‘Fine. You’ll get no argument from me. The Tories promised to build houses and Macmillan delivered a quarter of a million a year. That was our failing – my brother never stops beating his breast about it. The obvious thing. A nation that had lost hundreds of thousands of houses –’
‘One in three was damaged in the war. One in three.’
‘– and the party of the people couldn’t deliver homes for the people. Now tell me something I don’t know.’
They ambled down the street, round another corner – one more and they’d come full circle – into Holden Street, dodging broken bottles and dogshit in a bizarre game of hopscotch. Maurice stopped at a gap in the terrace, the houses to either side shored up with beams, the rendered column of the fireplaces and flues standing out like the backbone in a fossil.
‘That was my nan’s. Bombed out 1940.Still bombed out in ’59. Now, why is that, Freddie?’
‘I don’t know, Maurice, but Khrushchev said much the same thing on his visit three years ago. �
�Why do you have bombsites? In Russia we rebuild.” Now, why not cut the history lesson and tell me what’s on your mind?’
‘I want to rebuild. Too much of the East End still looks like this, though I doubt there’s much worse than this that’s still lived in. I don’t want to patch it up, fill in the gaps –’
A door opened. A shoeless young woman with her hair in curlers ran out screaming. A shirtless man, braces dangling, chased after her. ‘Cheese? I go out and do a hard day’s graft and all I fuckin’ come home to is fuckin’bread an’fuckin’cheese! You dozy tart, you dozy fuckin’ tart!’
‘– I want to knock it all down and rebuild. I want to get in the wreckin’ ball, the dynamite and the diggers and start all over again –’
Over Maurice’s head Troy could see up to the first floor of the houses behind him. In one window a pretty young woman stood smoking a cigarette, staring back at Troy. She whipped open her blouse, flashed her tits and beckoned to him with the hand that waved the fag. Troy returned his gaze to Maurice, uninterruptible in his spiel.
‘– not houses like this, with outdoor khazi and no bathrooms. I want to put up tower blocks, flats for working families, with all the mod cons. I want something that stretches as close to heaven as we can get. Fifteen, twenty storeys. Something London can be proud of.’
‘You mean, level it?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Finish what Hitler couldn’t?’
‘Hitler would have been doing this place a favour if he had. I’m going to do a damn sight more than just level it, Freddie. I’m going to level it, raise it and reach for the sky.
‘Well, I’d have no professional objection. As the districts of London go, this one probably has the highest proportion of criminals of any. It’s often been a subject for discussion when the Yard meets with the divisions. All the same I still don’t see why you’re telling me.’
‘I need political support. I need to talk to your brother.’
‘My brother?’
‘Labour can’t lose again. There’s bound to be an election soon. Rod’ll be Home Secretary any day now . . . Need I say more?’
