It was beside the imitation Tudor fireplace and within the leaded light windows that Anderson grew up, a curly-haired boy with an easy smile, exceptionally intelligent and reasonably good at games. His parents were, it may seem, exceptionally snobbish, exceptionally unimaginative in regard to any way of life except their own. But is such complacency really exceptional? Mr and Mrs Anderson had moved into the lower reaches of the middle class, and were effectively able to conceal their comparatively humble origin; such worldly success may be thought adequate for one lifetime. In the morally ambiguous but practically distinct division between satisfied sheep and unsatisfied goats, they belonged to the sheep. Sociologists have remarked that such satisfaction carries with it an illusion of security within their class by observing approvingly certain institutions outside their reach (Mrs Anderson had an encyclopediatic knowledge of the genealogy of the English royal family) and regarding with uncomprehending disapproval the behaviour of dissatisfied goatish figures (like those treasonable miners) well below them in the social scale.
When it had been decided that Anderson should not take up the scholarship, his parents planned their child’s career in a simple and satisfactory way. Grammar school would be succeeded by bank or insurance office, at first in a junior and later in a managerial position: such a course appeared to them not only desirable but almost inevitable. They were baffled, therefore, as well as distressed, by their son’s deviations from their own way of life. The first of these deviations might, indeed have upset any parents; for Anderson was expelled from his grammar school for theft. The affair was altogether discreditable and disturbing; he was found in the changing room engaged in transferring five shillings from the pocket of another boy’s trousers to his own. His parents were most injured, perhaps, by the social disgrace to themselves that attended his expulsion. As far as their son was concerned personally, they were pained equally by the fact that there was no possibility of belief in his innocence, and by their inability to induce in him knowledge of moral wrongdoing.
It would clearly, have been rash to expose such a boy to the monetary temptations of a bank; Anderson became office boy in a firm of shipping merchants. Here his conduct was for a time exemplary. He was promoted after a year to the position of junior clerk, wore striped trousers and a black jacket and carried a carefully rolled umbrella to work every day. At the age of seventeen, however, when he was earning thirty shillings a week, Anderson showed an extraordinary inability to produce the pound which his mother deducted for his board and lodgings. Mrs Anderson kept careful watch upon her son, and discovered that he was constantly in receipt of letters addressed in a backward sloping hand upon salmon-pink envelopes. It was a short step from realization that the backward hand was a woman’s to execution of a parental duty in steaming open the letters; and another disturbing and discreditable affair was disclosed. Anderson had become mixed up (the phase was his mother’s) with a girl named Ethel Smith, a shop assistant whose father was a railway brakeman. The missing weekly pound had been spent upon Ethel, and the process of mixing had gone so far that she was expecting a baby. What was particularly distasteful to Anderson’s parents in the affair was the revelation of their son’s taste for low society. “How could you?” Mrs Anderson asked him. “With a girl of that class?” But the time was one not only for reproaches, but also for swift and decisive action. Mrs Anderson saw Ethel, Mr Anderson saw the railway brakeman. Hard words were exchanged; but money was exchanged also. One more letter came in a salmon-pink envelope, to tell Anderson that Ethel had taken a job in Bradford; and that was the end of the affair. When Mr and Mrs Anderson talked the affair over in later years they agreed that their son had narrowly escaped a shameful marriage through their promptness; but at the same time they were able to convince themselves, by a curious feat of mental legerdemain, that the whole of Ethel’s mixing-up story was false. “That girl certainly pulled the wool over our eyes,” Mr Anderson, who had now retired, would say to his wife; and this instance of duplicity in the lower orders of society afforded them a satisfaction which was at least some compensation for the money laid out on their son’s behalf.
And what of Anderson himself? The central figure in this small drama appeared hardly interested in the fate of this carefully cultivated and costly relationship. His only comment when his parents tried to discover a reason for his actions seemed to be ridiculous. “Why don’t you find some nice girl of our own kind?” his mother said. “I can’t think what you could see in a common girl like that.” Anderson said then, as though the remark had some relevance: “She always had dirty fingernails.” He added after a moment’s reflection:
“She was rather dirty altogether. Her feet were never clean.” His mother was triumphant. “There you are,” she said. “Disgusting. I don’t suppose she took a bath once a month.” Anderson said nothing more, and since his father and mother never spoke of disagreeable subjects if they could be avoided, the affair was dropped.
It is perhaps instructive that the fact that a letter addressed to him had been opened never became a subject of argument between Anderson and his parents, because such conduct seemed to all three of them perfectly natural.
Soon after the end of the Ethel Smith affair, Anderson began to write poetry and short stories. One or two of his poems appeared in a local Ealing paper, and one was published in the Poetry Review; his short stories, however, were all rejected. At about the same time he gave up the striped trousers and black jacket and began to wear a bright-coloured shirt and a sports jacket when he went to work. He was sacked from the shipping firm for slackness, and for nearly two years was out of work. Most of his time was spent at the public library, or upstairs in his bedroom reading. He made little effort to look for a job, and it took all his parents’ skill in mental conjuring to separate the lower-class won’t- works who were a menace to the country from the unfortunate can’t-get works represented by their son. He did not make life at home very pleasant for his parents, and at times his attitude seemed to them quite incomprehensible. When his father tried to have a heart-to-heart talk Anderson said simply: “You’ve taken responsibility for me. Very well, keep me.” When his father asked what kind of work he would like to do, Anderson said he was not interested in any office job. When his mother asked again why he didn’t find some nice girlfriends, he said that he feared she would not approve his choice of acquaintance.
It is impossible to know what might have happened to this unhappy household had not the pattern of their family life been suddenly altered. The habit of ignoring unpleasantness can extend from mental to physical matters; when Mrs Anderson paid a long-delayed visit to her doctor she learned that the fears which had often kept her awake during the night had become reality. It was nine months before the cancer finally killed her, and during that time she was hardly ever out of pain. Her physical suffering was appalling; but the doubts she may have begun to feel about the way in which their son had been brought up were cancelled by the remarkable change in his behaviour. Anderson attended his mother in her illness with extraordinary devotion. He brought her breakfast every day, played endless games of cards with her, and behaved almost in her presence like the charming curly-haired boy she remembered. During the last weeks, when she was too weak to leave her bed, he sat by her side for hours reading light romantic novels to her. In the three days before she died he was with her almost constantly, although at this time her appearance was ghastly, and the stench that surrounded her was so unpleasant that her husband could hardly bear to enter the room. It was Anderson’s hand that his mother grasped when, pitifully yellow and gaunt, unrecognizable as the plump middle-aged woman who had visited the doctor nine months before, she completed the long journey to death.
Soon afterward Anderson, now twenty-one years old, obtained a job as a clerk in the accounts department of the Nationwide Advertising Company. At the same time he left home, and went to live in lodgings. His father sold Tudor Vista and became a paying guest with some distant relations in Birmingham nam
ed Pottle. Communication between father and son was spasmodic, and soon became limited to two or three letters a year. When Anderson last met his father he greeted a little grey bent man who seemed bewildered by the lack of purpose in his life; his father saw a young man with thin, hard, keen face, unusually serious for his age, who wore a neat blue suit, carefully brushed and pressed. Transferred to the Production Department of his firm, Anderson had attracted the attention of his superiors by making rough layouts embodying new advertising ideas for their clients, which he left lying about on his desk. He had been tried in the firm’s Studio, where he showed insufficient artistic ability for a layout man, and then in the copy department, where at last he settled. “Your mother would have been proud of you,” Anderson’s father said to him shakily. “She always said you’d make good.” The young man made no reply. Some three months later his father died suddenly of a heart attack.
Anderson was not a great copywriter, but he possessed a combination of practical common sense and verbal ingenuity which is unusual in advertising. After three years he left the Nationwide, and from that time onward moved from firm to firm, each time improving his position a little, making a reputation as a figure of solid talent. In 1939 he came to Vincent Advertising, a firm which people either left in a month because they could not stand Vincent, or stayed for years because they liked him. Anderson stayed. During the war Vincent Advertising, like other firms, handled their share of government advertising. Anderson was first deferred and finally exempted from the war service, because he was employed on the work Vincents were handling for the Ministry of Knowledge and Communication.
In 1942 Anderson married a girl named Valerie Evans. They had no children.
6
There is a part of London near the Buckingham Palace Road, behind Eccleston Bridge, where the large stucco seediness of once-fashionable squares, Eccleston and Warwick and St George’s, fades into a smaller shabbiness. There are streets here of small, identical red-brick houses, fronted by ugly iron railings; these streets branch off the main stem of Warwick Way, that backbone of Pimlico where large houses converted into a dozen one-room flats offer typists and secretaries the chance of developing an individuality untrammelled by the presence of parents or the inhibiting eyes of childhood neighbours. Such self-contained lives typify the decay that is spreading slowly over the fabric of our great cities; to be part of this decay, to visit the ballet frequently and to fornicate freely, to attain a complete irresponsibility of action – that is, in a sense, the ideal life of our civilisation. And if such a life can be worked comfortably enough in the four-storied houses of Warwick Way, it can be lived more easily still in the little red-brick houses of Joseph Street. You might find similar houses in any London suburb, where they would be the homes of clerks, schoolmasters and small businessmen; but the people who lived in Joseph Street were male and female prostitutes, unknown actors and film extras, artists and journalists who had given up worship of the bitch-goddess Success and were content to earn a few pounds here and there which they drank away at the Demon round the corner in Radigoyle Street while their teeth fell out and their tongues grew furry and their eyesight failed. Among these characteristic occupants of the small red-brick houses, however, were a few eccentrically successful figures, people whose presence in this raffish area could not have been easily explained, even by themselves. Joseph Street numbered among its inhabitants two company directors, a dress designer, an important gynaecologist and a retired trade union official. Anderson, who might also be regarded as eccentrically respectable, lived at Number 10 Joseph Street, in a house distinguished from its fellows only by the window boxes carefully cultivated by the Fletchleys, who lived in a self-contained flat on the first floor. Anderson had bought a nine-year lease of the house at the time of his marriage.
He turned out of Radigoyle Street into Joseph Street this evening, passing the bright lights of the Demon without so much as a sideways glance. Flossie Williams, one of the Joseph Street tarts, smiled at him as he passed, and Anderson, breathing deeply, caught a whiff of her cheap scent. He felt a mingled exhilaration and depression as he approached his home, an obscure sense of wrongdoing mingled with an equally obscure feeling of pleasure. His key was in the lock when something touched his shoulder. Pivoting quickly on his heel he faced the great bulk of Fletchley, shaking with laughter in the Pimlico dark. “I crept up on you,” Fletchley said. “I saw you pass the old Demon. You never heard me. Me in my rubber-soled shoes.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Old boy,” Fletchley was reproachful, “I’ve had a pint to drown my sorrows, not a snoutful. A snoutful is out of the question, much as I should like it. Tonight I have to write immortal verse. A dozen orders to fill, old boy.” He declaimed:
“I don’t know much of rhyme and meter,
So I’ll say God Bless Mummy.’ Peter.
That’s from a little kiddy, six months old, to his mother. A nice sentiment, eh?”
“Where’s Elaine?”
Fletchley wavered on his feet and then said: “Out. Won’t be back till late. I’m turning an honest penny on my lonesome.”
Fletchley was a man of many curious occupations, all of them appropriate of an inhabitant of Joseph Street. He had made money by starting chain letters and pyramids, he had held at one time a valuable insurance book, he was an agent for the pushboards by which small cricket and football clubs raise funds. His latest way of earning money was by supplying rhymed Christmas and birthday greeting wishes. The customer would give details of the recipient’s age and character and Fletchley would make notes reading: “Uncle Bill, birthday, from niece Mary. Big nose, retriever dog Laddie, granddaughter Phyllis learning to talk. Humorous.” Uncle Bill would then receive on his birthday a card which contained two or three printed verses embodying the points Fletchley had jotted down. Fletchley set up these cards, which were of a sentimental humorous or reverent nature, on a small hand press, and his charge for them varied between half a crown and five shillings according to the length of the message. The business was largely seasonal, but there was a steady birthday demand throughout the year.
The house had been clumsily converted into two flats, with a hall common to both. Anderson was just about to open the door of his flat when Fletchley said: “By the way, old boy, that police chap called round to see you this evening. He doesn’t seem to be a bad fellow. We had quite a chin-wag.”
“You’d better come in,” Anderson said. He turned on the light. “What will you drink? Gin or whisky?”
“Won’t say no to a little drop of something to keep the cold out. Whisky – and don’t kill it. Can’t think where you get the stuff.”
“Valerie got it – black market.” Anderson poured himself a drink. “What did he want?”
Who? Oh, the copper,” Fletchley shook again, a pinpoint head wobbling uncertainly on an enormous sagging body. There were food stains on his jacket, and above a mountainous belly the tapes of pants were visible, held by his braces. “He’s mustard,” he chuckled.
“What do you mean?”
“Mustard, old boy, mustard. His name’s Cresse and he’s hot as mustard, see? But what did he want? He wanted to see you. Something to do with Valerie. He’s a nice sort of a chap.”
“What did he ask you?”
“I didn’t give away any secrets, don’t worry,” Fletchley said and winked portentously. It seemed to Anderson that there was something strange about Fletchley tonight. His whole body was trembling slightly, as though convulsed by some elaborate inner joke. Sharply, Anderson said:
“Secrets, what do you mean, secrets? And why should I worry?”
“Only my joke, old boy.” Fletchley was momentarily solemn, but Anderson had an uncomfortable feeling that this solemnity was maintained only with an effort, and that if the fat man let himself go he would burst out laughing. “Do you know he’s got two kids?”
“Who?”
“He’s got two kids and he wants me to write birthday messages for ’em
. Fancy sending birthday wishes from a CID Inspector. He is CID, isn’t he?”
“But what did he want to ask you?”
“Pretty near everything from the time I get up in the morning to the width of my pyjama stripes. All sorts of questions,” Fletchley rambled. “You wouldn’t believe the sort of questions he asked.” And again it seemed to Anderson that there was something very odd, something almost menacing, about the tone of the fat man’s voice. But this impression was no sooner in Anderson’s mind than it was gone again, as Fletchley drained his glass and put on his mask of good-fellowship, if indeed it was a mask and not a true reflection of the sentimental birthday-greeting soul within his great bulk. “I must be going. ‘Night, old boy.”
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