Opposite the Cross Keys Page 2

  ‘Bleedin’ angel of mercy!’ the man exclaimed. Ellie giggled and blushed all over her face. To me he said, ‘Don’t go away, darlin’’, and slipped back to the derelict cottage, re-emerging a moment later with a wooden crate in one hand and a chipped enamel mug in the other.

  The mug, half-full, contained standard Opposite the Cross Keys tea – the cheapest, dustiest leaves, boiled up three times and laced to a revolting sweetness with lashings of condensed milk. Tom Fenner, the elder of Mrs Fenner’s sons, who worked for Mr Theobald, the dairy farmer, was allowed a billycan of milk every day as part of his perks; yet never, in all my time at the Fenners’, did I see a drop of natural milk pass any lips other than Gyp’s and those of a couple of hedgehogs who used to wander into the scullery on summer evenings for a sup out of the dog’s bowl.

  Back home in St Giles, I would assuredly have thrown up at the mere sight of the contents of that mug, let alone the taste. At Opposite the Cross Keys, perched on an empty orange box, I drank deeply, and was revived. The tea was tepid, a tin spoon still sticking up in it, and I guessed that the man had been engaged in drinking it himself when I had arrived. The mug was so stained there seemed no point in speculating as to whether he and I had, or had not, drunk from the same side.

  ‘Made it on me Primus,’ the man said, as if boasting of the last word in kitchen gadgetry, at the same time explaining a taste of meths in place of the usual sulphur from the Fenners’ coal fire, their sole means of heating water, and indeed of all cooking. ‘Plenty for seconds, if yer ladyship feels so disposed.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say no,’ Ellie put in, before I could answer one way or the other.

  ‘Did the wind speak?’ the man demanded, looking about him in a merry, exaggerated way.

  ‘Ellie said she would like a cup of tea,’ I supplied helpfully.

  ‘Ellie can get her own fuckin’ cup.’ Ellie, her little eyes half-closed, said nothing. She went on dragging the comb through her hair as if playing some musical instrument with a tone range beyond the reach of the human ear. ‘It’s you I was asking.’

  ‘I’ve had all I want, thank you, Mr –’ I hesitated. ‘I don’t know your name.’

  ‘Chicken.’

  ‘Mr –’ Again I hesitated, it sounded so improbable. ‘Chicken.’

  ‘Not Mr Chicken,’ the man corrected. ‘Chicken, as in which came first, the chicken or the egg.’

  ‘Please – I mean – is Chicken your Christian name or your surname?’

  ‘Either or neither.’

  ‘It has to be one or the other!’ Names, in my book, were not things to be treated lightly. ‘You have to be either Mr Something Chicken or Mr Chicken Something.’

  ‘Like Mr Roast Chicken, you mean, or Mr Chicken Soup?’

  ‘No, of course not! Like –’ I improvised wildly. ‘Like Mr Alfred Chicken, for example, or Mr Chicken Jones –’

  ‘Do I look like an Alfred Chicken or a Chicken Jones? People’d bust their sides laughing!’ He stooped over me again. I tried not to flinch at the still unfamiliar smell. ‘Feelin’ better, are you?’

  I nodded gratefully. I was feeling much better. ‘Have you come to live here in St Awdry’s?’ I asked.

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’ He took hold of my hand. His own was very hard, with splayed fingertips. ‘Come an’ see what I bin up to.’

  He led me into the derelict cottage, handing me over the shattered door sill with a parody of old world courtesy. Inside, splicing the gloom, white dust sprinkled with red revolved in the sunbeam which came through the pushed-out window panes. The air was thick with plaster and pulverized brick.

  What the man had done – what Chicken had done (I reminded myself that I must get used to the ridiculous name which, somehow, once put to use, did not sound so ridiculous after all) – was to pull down the entire wall between the front room and the scullery, making one long, low room.

  ‘Weren’t room enough to swing a fart!’ he explained. ‘I can’t abide not having a bit o’ space about me.’ He looked about him with shining eyes. ‘Not bad, eh?’

  Flattered by the way Chicken sought my approval – something grown-ups, in my experience, seldom bothered to do – I nodded eagerly. ‘Except the ceiling looks a bit saggy.’

  Deprived of the dividing wall, the ceiling looked dangerously saggy. Discreetly, so as not to give offence, I moved from beneath the saggiest part.

  Chicken said indifferently, ‘I’ll get something to hold that up, when I get round to it.’ Looking young and enthusiastic: ‘Jest you wait till I get this muck out, an’ you’ll see something!’

  I remembered the rats and asked what he had done about them.

  ‘Oh, them! Tied their fuckin’ tails together, two at a time, an’ showed ’em the door.’

  If he’d told me that he had put down poison I’d have thought nothing of it. Poison, in those days, was standard fare for rats as well as for black beetles and the murdered wives who filled the pages of the News of the World. But tying their tails –!

  ‘Oh!’ I cried. ‘That’s cruel!’

  The white teeth flashed in the brown face.

  Chicken said, ‘I’m a bad man.’

  Out in the air again, I asked the bad man where he had come from.

  ‘Nosy, aren’t you?’ was the reply. ‘I don’t ask where you come from.’

  ‘But you know where! Mrs Fenner must have said.’

  ‘You know where, too. Everywhere that isn’t here.’

  ‘But that means anywhere!’

  ‘So it do!’ A bright, congratulatory smile. ‘What matters is where you are, not where you ain’t.’

  Chicken’s words made me aware with a sudden awful certainty that, on the contrary, where I wasn’t at that moment – to wit, on the Hippodrome forecourt, cycling round and round like a good little girl – was of the greatest importance. I hurried over to the cottage wall, took hold of the handlebars and wheeled the bicycle to the edge of the pavement. Even as I did so, I knew there was no way I was going to be able to get the contraption home. My legs had never felt shorter.

  Chicken asked, ‘You got that saddle down far as it’ll go?’ I nodded dumbly. ‘That Maud o’ yours must be daft as Ellie here to let you out on the road on that ol’ four-poster.’

  Ellie scowled. She hated Maud to be classed her equal at anything, even daftness. For me, though, even in my extremity I couldn’t bear to hear Maud blamed for my wrongdoing.

  ‘She didn’t let me out! I let myself out! I’m not supposed to go riding till my legs are long enough.’ Tears welled up in my eyes.

  ‘No bawlin’!’ the man commanded sharply. ‘An’ we’ll see if we can’t figure out some way to get you home again. There’s a bus along in half an hour –’

  Trying not to cry: ‘I haven’t any money, and they won’t take the bike anyhow.’

  ‘Ferget what it costs. We can always take it out of Ellie’s piggy bank, eh, sweetheart?’ Ellie gave no indication that she had heard: lifted her bum ponderously and sat down on her hair again. ‘This bloody bedstead can go up wi’ the carrier Saturday –’

  ‘But then they’ll know!’ The floodgates opened and I wept copiously. ‘They’ll know!’

  ‘Fer Chrissake!’ Chicken surveyed my agony with disgust. ‘So what? What’ll they do you – clap you in irons? Make you walk the plank?’

  ‘Don’t be silly!’ I wailed. I could not explain that my parents’ soft-voiced regret at my breach of trust, and, even more, Maud’s contemptuous silence, would be worse than any physical punishment. The baby, the family pet, I could not bear not to be loved.

  ‘Want my opinion?’ said Chicken, proferring a considered alternative. ‘Do you a power of good. Terrible thing to be trusted. Might as well tie a sodding millstone round yer neck an’ be done wi’ it!’

  When I patently found no comfort in this counsel, he rolled his eyes up at the sky, ejaculated ‘Kids!’ and came over and took the bicycle out of my hands.

  ‘All right!’ he comma
nded. ‘Turn off the water taps an’ le’s get on with it!’ And when I continued to stand, staring stupidly, ‘Get on behind, barmy! An’ keep yer ruddy feet out of the spokes if you’re going to need ’em tomorrow an’ the day after!’

  We came back from Salham St Awdry with incredible speed. In no time at all, or so it seemed to me, we were past the pile of telegraph poles, and the bend where the bicycle and the horse and trap had had their little confrontation. The remains of the bicycle lamp lay embedded like fossil remains in the sun-warmed tarmac.

  Horsford Point with its Mann Egerton sign positively whizzed past. No need for magic when you had the magnet of home to draw you safely to sanctuary. My bottom corrugated with the indentations of the narrow grid intended for the conveyance of a schoolbag or music case, my legs aching with the effort of keeping them stuck out at a safe angle from the wheel, I was nevertheless so wracked with happiness that it was itself a pain, an overflowing of love out of a vessel inadequate to contain it.

  The very bicycle was happy, skittish with a youth it had thought had passed it by. The three of us sailed down the long slope to St Augustine’s in a glorious breeze of our own making. As soon as I realized that I would be back at the Hippodrome with time to spare – Maud never came out looking for me unless I was late for tea – sorrow intertwined itself sweetly with the joy. The ride, alas, was almost over. When Chicken took the bike over St George’s Bridge with a verve which lifted both wheels off the ground as we soared over the hump in the middle, and brought it to a stylish halt on the further side, I could, without understanding why, have cried again.

  ‘Time to love you an’ leave you.’ Chicken held the bike until I had disembarked. ‘You wouldn’t want any of yer posh pals to catch an eyeful o’ me an’ ask, who that mucky ole tramp I seen you with yesterday arternoon?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind!’ I protested fiercely.

  ‘Yes, you would, though.’

  It was true. I hung my head in shamed, if belated, admission. Norwich and St Awdry’s were different worlds. In Norwich I could have turned up in the company of one of those women who wear sticks through their noses and their ear lobes halfway down their chests, and elicit less comment. They were natives, educational. Whatever else Chicken was, he wasn’t that.

  St George’s, thankfully, wasn’t a ‘good’ street, which was probably why Chicken had chosen to stop where he did, before the ‘good’ streets began.

  ‘You better mind yourself,’ he warned. ‘When Ma – when Mrs Fenner come up to market Saturday, full o’ the lovely bloke what’s moved in next door, don’t you go letting on you’ve already had the pleasure of makin’ my acquaintance.’

  ‘Ellie –’ I began.

  ‘Her!’ Contemptuously. ‘Too busy looking for nits to think of anything else. She won’t say nothing.’

  I said, both concerned for him and anxious to speed him on his way – with every passing moment I grew uneasier about running into somebody I knew, ‘You’ll have to go over to Magdalen Street to get the bus back.’

  ‘Don’t fret about me!’ Chicken returned. ‘I’ll find my own way home, never you fear!’

  He went off in his brisk, balletic way, though his boots looked even more awful in the city, disappearing over the hump of the bridge before I could say either thank you or goodbye.

  I pushed the bicycle the rest of the way home; uphill going, through Bridewell Alley and Swan Lane, along London Street to the Market Place, and so to St Giles, the last hill of all and the steepest. On my left the Market stalls clung to the slope, skeletal, awaiting their Saturday resurrection, when the pyramids of apples and oranges would rise again, cauliflowers coy in their necklets of green, canaries tweeting, tortoises crawling sadly over lettuce leaves. Chips frying, and the heavenly smell of the whelk stalls; funny men selling crockery as if on the bill at the Hippodrome; and Mr Marcantonio who always, because he had long cherished a hopeless passion for Maud, gave me a tuppenny ice-cream boat for a penny.

  The clock outside H. Samuels, the jewellers, said ten to four. How well everything had turned out! Whether it was indeed a miracle, or whether Chicken’s weight on the saddle had depressed the overall height of the bicycle that vital bit extra, I found, once back at the Hippodrome, that I could actually keep my feet in place on the pedals without slipping. I swooped about the forecourt with an aplomb which astonished the Cheeky Chappie and the male impersonator. I could see their painted eyes popping.

  On the dot of four, Maud came out to summon me indoors for my tea.

  ‘What sewer they dredged you out of, then?’ was her dour greeting, as she eyed the tar on my legs, the plaster in my hair, my general air of dishevelment. ‘Mr Fitt ought to be ashamed of himself and I’ll tell him so tomorrow, see if I don’t!’

  ‘Maud!’ I cried, brushing aside her strictures in the euphoria of the moment. ‘I can ride it! I truly can!’

  I sprang to demonstrate: but whether my exertions had finally overtired me, or whether miracles of their very nature (would the wine at Cana have gone back to water if you’d asked for a second glass?) have a short shelf-life, my legs had shortened again, and after a wavering yard or so, the bicycle and I fell over together, taking the skin off my right knee.

  It didn’t hurt to speak of, but it seemed politic to cry; tactics that paid off. Maud enfolded me in her arms in that exasperated way of hers which was infinitely more comforting than the tenderest embrace from any other quarter.

  Bathed and clean, I lie in bed and think how lucky I am to have a great day like today happen to me when I am old enough to appreciate it: not like some other great days, such as being born, which happen when you are too young to understand what is going on. As always, when I am clean, St Awdry’s seems a long way away.

  Over my bed hangs a picture of a boy with his arms full of toys – so many of them that a box of lead soldiers, a teddy bear and a game of Snakes and Ladders have spilled on to the floor. One of the soldiers, who has lost his head in the fall, will never be the same again. Underneath the picture is written, in letters dripping with unction, He who grasps at too much holds nothing fast.

  In fresh pyjamas, between crisp sheets, I grasp at too much; confident that, never mind how it is with stupid boys, my arms can safely contain Norwich and Salham St Awdry alike, to say nothing of the world, the universe, infinity. No lead soldiers are going to break in pieces at my feet.

  I lie in bed and think about Chicken.

  That word ‘bum’. For the reader’s benefit I have to explain that, in St Awdry’s, bottoms were always bums, a word which, so far as I was then aware, did not even exist in St Giles. St Awdry’s being a different country, it seemed to me quite unremarkable that it should possess its own language.

  Back to Text

  Mauther: St Awdry’s for a girl, especially a great lump of one.

  Back to Text

  Bor: all-purpose word for anybody, male or female, but mostly meaning ‘man, fellow’.

  Back to Text

  PART I

  The way there

  Chapter One

  Being born, in my case, was chiefly remarkable for what happened six weeks later.

  Maud came.

  She was sixteen and she came as a nurserymaid, my family, whilst modestly prosperous, not being in the nanny class – engaged, I imagine, because my mother, who had considered her family complete, had flinched at the prospect of a new baby after ten years pregnancy-free. In the days when I was not (so I was told), the household chores, child-minding and all, had been performed by one Eliza, a devoted household retainer for many years.

  By the time I first remember Maud – and I cannot, I think, have been much more than a year old when I came to a realization that the universe revolved round a tall, gaunt woman with a doughy face and hair done up in a bun which leaked in wisps over her lace collar – Eliza had long since departed; driven to the lunatic asylum, my father asserted, by Maud’s machiavellian machinations.

  ‘What’s machiavellian machinations
?’ I asked, when I was of an age to get my tongue round such questions. Naturally I asked it of Maud, not my father, who whilst not unintelligent was, unlike Maud, not the fount of all knowledge. When asked something, he quite often answered that he did not know, which was upsetting, contradicting as it did all one’s perceptions of the adult world. Whereas Maud always knew. So: ‘Maud – what’s machiavellian machinations?’

  ‘Scotch motor bike,’ Maud replied without hesitation. ‘One of them kind with a side-car.’

  ‘And did you really drive Eliza to the lunatic asylum in one?’

  ‘Don’t be daft! They come and took her in a van.’

  Proof that Maud, young as she was at the time, established her ascendancy over the household with a truly astonishing speed is provided by a photograph1 taken when I was coming up to three months old. It was taken by Mr Ballard, who, it was said in the town, had been a Court photographer until the day when, having drink taken, he had goosed Queen Mary whilst arranging her in a pose in her Garter robes; something he always denied on the grounds that Her Majesty, in her armour-plated corset, was ungoosable.

  Whatever the truth of the story, it was almost certainly true that never before had Mr Ballard been commissioned to take a studio portrait of a domestic. People in the Twenties simply didn’t shell out good money to have their servants photographed. Their families, their lovers, their dogs, yes: but not their maids.

  Yet there is Maud, no more than three months in my parents’ employ, sitting with me on her lap, my sister Maisie at her side, having her photograph taken.

  There are other things about that photograph which are revealing. Look at the apron. See how creased it is, despite the importance of the occasion. My sister and I are immaculate – well, I am: my sister’s socks could have done with a pull up, her shoes with a coating of Blanco. But then, Maisie was part of Eliza’s left luggage.

  But how to explain that crumpled apron? From our house to Mr Ballard’s studio in St Benedict’s was no more than ten minutes’ walk. And anyway, the creases are not the creases of use, but of poor ironing, or even of no ironing at all. Who would deliberately choose to turn up for the first professional photograph of her life wearing an unironed apron?