“Have you seen about the competition for Britain’s most beautiful child, being run in the Sunday World?” Fanny shook her head. “That’s what all these pictures of children are for. I’ve always had a knack taking children. Seeing your little girl looking at my window, it came over me like a flash, ‘There’s a little beauty. What a picture she’d make.’”
“A competition in a paper!” Fanny wriggled on her chair. “Oh, her dad would never hear of her goin’ in for a thing like that. Very particular her dad is. Religious-minded, you might say.”
“A pity.” The photographer pursed up his lips. “Mind you, it’s not like one of these beauty competitions. Oh no, I’d never suggest a thing like that. This is more in the high art line.” He paused and then added casually, “Nice prizes there are, a hundred pounds for the first place, fifty the second, and twenty-five the third.”
Fanny looked at the photographer, and then they both looked at Flossie standing in the sunlight.
“What a picture!” he breathed.
“Come here, Floss,” Fanny said sharply, “and let me give your hair a comb, the gentleman’s goin’ to take your picture.”
The photographs were ready for them to see on the Friday before they went home.
“And mind you, Floss,” said Fanny, pausing outside the photographer’s, “you’re not to tell your dad, when he comes to fetch us to-morrow, anything about having your picture took.”
“Why not?”
“‘Cause I say ‘No,’ miss, and that’s quite enough for you.”
The photographer was waiting for them. He picked up the packet of proofs as though they were too fine for his coarse hands to touch, and reverently, breathing heavily through his nose, he laid them out one by one. He never looked at Fanny, nor spoke a word until they were all in place, then he picked up a three-quarter face in which Flossie was looking soulfully at the stars.
“I never thought, Mrs. Elk,” he said solemnly, “to take what you might call a perfect picture. I had my limitations, I thought, but now,” he held out the photograph, “I think I may say, without flattering myself, that here is a work of art.”
Fanny peered at the picture, it was very good of Flossie, she thought.
“Oh, it is good.” She stopped, and then something made her feel she had not praised sufficiently. “Sweetly pretty,” she added.
The photographer looked at the way the light showed up the modelling of the features, and at the beauty of the forehead.
“It’s more than pretty.” He had a flash of imagination. “I shouldn’t wonder if this wouldn’t be famous. There’s a line somewhere I heard as a boy, ‘This is a face that wrecked a thousand ships,’ or something like that.”
“Wrecked ships?” said Fanny, puzzled. She felt out of her depth and took her usual refuge behind George. “Oh, we shall ’ave to see about that: my ’usband wouldn’t like to ’ave her talked of that way, I’m sure.”
Flossie had listened to the conversation, it had been pleasant to hear while it was all flattery, but now it had gone beyond her. She looked at the photographer out of the corner of her eye, it seemed stupid that so much admiration should not yield some material result. She gave a tug to his coat and looked up at him with the wistful star-gazing expression that he had caught with such success.
“Other children on the front ride on donkeys.”
He looked down at her, and was hurt almost, to see her flesh-and-blood face looking up at him. Admiring his own handiwork, he had practically come to feel he had created the lovely thing he had produced on cardboard, he had put anyone else’s share of the business to the back of his mind. But now the artist in him came to the front, and he felt his heart swell with gratitude to heaven, not only for making such a masterpiece, but having made it, for seeing that it came to his door in the Western Road, Suddenly he realised that Flossie had said something.
“What is it, my dear?”
“I said that on the front other children ride on donkeys.”
He smiled, caught back in a memory of sand prickling his skin, and the jog-jog shaking his inside, and leather reins with bells on them, red reins.
“Is there still a donkey with red reins?”
Flossie nodded.
“One there is, and the goat cart has blue ones.”
He felt in his pocket for a shilling, and then changed it to half a crown. A shilling seemed a poor offering to this gift from heaven.
“Well,” said George, helping the liver and bacon, “what do you both want to do for your last afternoon?” Fanny looked at him eagerly.
“I thought maybe you’d take us to the concert party, there’s a very classy one here, much better than they are in August, she says,” she jerked her head to indicate the landlady. “I’ve been wantin’ to go ever so, but I hadn’t the money, I had to get young Floss a new hat.”
“Well, I call that silly,” George protested, “sittin’ inside a stuffy concert hall with the sun shining and all, and, what’s more, it’s a waste of money.”
“Dad,” Flossie leant to her father with an ingratiating smile, “could we go to the Aquarium? All the other children on the beach go.”
George glowed looking at her, it was wonderful what the air had done for her, he thought.
“Well, that’s an idea,” he agreed.
“But it costs money too,” Fanny protested. She turned to Flossie: “If you wanted to go to the Aquarium why on earth couldn’t you have gone this morning when we were down that way?”
“Don’t talk so silly, Fanny,” George interposed mildly. “How could the kid go to the Aquarium without having any money?”
“But––” Fanny broke off just in time, remembering George must not know that Flossie owned half a crown, all but sixpence which had gone on a donkey ride. “Oh well,” she sighed, “why you two want to spend all your afternoon looking at a lot of fish beats me, but maybe I’ll find it more interesting when I get there.”
“Like that, Floss?” George asked.
Flossie nodded to her father, and gave her mother a smug smile.
CHAPTER IV
The competition results were to be announced at the beginning of August in a special holiday edition. Fanny lay awake at night torn by the conflicting emotions of excitement should Flossie win the prize, and fright at what George would say if she did. The Elks did not take the Sunday World, but Fanny had managed to look at copies left over at the stationer’s on Monday mornings, and had seen whole pages of photographs of the entrants in the ‘Britain’s most beautiful child’ competition. Flossie’s was not among them, but one day it might be. Sundays found Fanny as jumpy as a grasshopper, quivering for the sound of a knock which would mean a neighbour excitedly clutching a copy of the Sunday World.
All her heart-burnings were for nothing. Flossie’s photograph never was published among the entrants, or if it was, none of the neighbours recognised it, and before the prize-winners could be announced, war had been declared.
The war worried George. His feelings on the subject took him unawares. During the trouble in South Africa he had not felt the same way at all. His view of the present conflict was the result of a casual encounter with a man who came in to buy some potatoes. He had shown him some post cards of Belgium. During the last war George had seen masses of pictures of South Africa, flat, sandy land with things called kopjes sticking up on it, not the sort of place he could imagine people living on, and so just the sort of place to fight a war. But this Belgium! The man had been on a walking tour there, and his post cards had pictures of ordinary towns with trams and houses with bits of gardens. There was one picture of Ghent that showed a turning very like the one that led out of the High Street into the Fordham Road.
“That’s how it looked,” said the man grimly, “till these Germans got there.”
George thought a lot about this, it seemed wrong to fight a war where the
re were ordinary streets and houses, and tram-cars about.
Fanny’s view of the war was that it was an ill wind that blew nobody any good, for maybe it would distract George’s mind if Flossie did win the ‘Britain’s most beautiful child’ competition.
Oddly enough George never did know that Flossie had entered the competition and won. Fanny heard the result by the Saturday morning post, but she managed to keep the letter out of sight, and though there was a large reproduction of the photograph the next day in the Sunday World he never saw it, for when a neighbour ran round with the paper, he had gone down the High Street to discuss the war with a friend. If any of the congregation at the mission house had seen the paper, they were too shocked to say anything; privately Fanny suspected that they had, for out of the corner of her eye she caught the family receiving, what she named to herself as, ‘some very old-fashioned looks.’
The cheque for the hundred pounds arrived the next week. It had been their original idea, the proprietors wrote, to have had a public presentation, but naturally, the moment war had been declared, they had decided that this was not the time for such things.
Fanny opened the letter in the kitchen and frowned at the cheque. Later in the day, when George had taken Flossie to Victoria Station to see some troops off to France, she got the bottle of ink and the pen from the desk in the corner of the shop, and wrote the first letter she had written since she had been married.
Dear Sir,
I am very pleased Floss has the prize hoping you are the same but I cannot do anything with it on account of it being just paper and Mister Elk being the only one who knows how to do with it and him not knowing how Floss as won.
Yours truely Mrs. Elk.
The photographer had a son, in the Territorials, just off to France, but he found time to write back explaining about endorsement, and later sent her the result in five-pound notes. If he had not been so engrossed with his own child he would have added some suggestions as to the future of the money. Himself, he spent the photographer’s prize of fifty pounds on giving his boy a wrist watch, and a good time, and there was none of it left when he stood on the platform at Victoria staring at the back of a receding train. Later, he framed Flossie’s photograph, and hung it in his office where ordinary eyes would not see it. It was to him what the portrait of a saint might be to another. He would have been unlikely to have spent fifty pounds out of his income, with the war on, and now it was a help to think the boy had everything he wanted, just that once, for he never got back to ask for any more.
Fanny put Flossie’s hundred pounds in an old glove, and took a broken dinner knife, and prized up one of the bricks round the kitchen stove, and buried the glove under it, and every day, as soon as the house was empty, took a look, to be sure the money was safe.
George joined the Army not so much from conviction that it was his duty, as because he was emotionally carried away. On a Wednesday morning he woke up a greengrocer, with no thought of being anything else. On Wednesday evening he went to bed a private in the East Surreys. Being early closing he had taken the opportunity of his freedom to walk down the High Street to hear any news that might be about. A rag-tag of recruits in miscellaneous uniforms were marching to a training camp. George watched them proudly, glad to think that young men were flocking to the support of the old country, but with no thought of joining in that support. Then a voice said in his ear, “How about you, mate? There’s more wanted.” The sergeant made George jump, he had not realised he was standing with his back to a recruiting office.
“Well, I ’ave me shop,” he explained.
“These Belgians had shops once,” said the sergeant.
That did it. In George went, dropped eight years off his age, and came out with the King’s shilling.
He came into the kitchen and looked sheepishly at Fanny.
“I’ve joined up.”
Fanny drew her head and shoulders out of the oven, and gaped at him.
“You never! Whatever for?”
George pondered her question, but could see no answer to it, so he left it.
“They’ll give you and Floss some money.” He jerked his head towards his shop. “Do you think you could manage the customers? I’ll fix up about the buyin’ of the stuff.”
“How?”
“Mr. Smith down the ’igh Street, ’e’ll see to me when he buys for hisself.” A thought struck him, it made him straighten his shoulders. “So he should too, me serving me country.”
Fanny looked at him with affectionate amusement.
“Old funny, aren’t you?”
Flossie came in from school.
“Wipe your feet, do,” said Fanny mechanically, “and the floor’s not the place for your ‘at, what d’you think pegs are for? Your Dad’s enlisted.”
Flossie swung her hat round by its elastic.
“So he should too, most of the fathers of the girls in my class have done that.”
Fanny had another look at her cake in the oven.
“All right, Miss Saucy, go and hang up that hat before the elastic’s a bit’ter string; tea’s ready.”
George sat down at the table, he looked in a worried way at Fanny’s back. She’d be sure to make a mess of running the shop, he didn’t like to ask her to do it with her inside dropping the way it did. Fanny put the pot on the table, and poured him out a cup of tea. He put three lumps of sugar into it, and stirred.
“You see how it was, Fanny?”
She looked at him and giggled.
“You, a soldier!”
The hundred pounds worried Fanny. With George away it seemed hardly safe having all that money in the house. Flossie knew about it, she did not know about it being under a brick, but she knew she had won it, and sometimes asked if she could not have some of it to spend. Fanny lived in terror that somehow the child would discover where it was hidden, and gossip about it outside. She lay awake at night, trembling at every creak. Easy for a thief to sneak in.
Flossie had, of course, learnt that she had won the ‘Britain’s most beautiful child’ competition the moment she went back to school. To the girls it was more exciting than the war. Miss Elder had seen the photograph and had been shocked to her soul. A beauty competition! Not the sort of thing her girls went in for, and sure to have a bad influence on the school. She tried to counteract the influence in her beginning-of-term speech; it was difficult because obviously the war was the subject she should be speaking on, and as well it seemed to her imperative that Flossie should not realise that her prize-winning had been noticed. She started by assuring the school that the war must be won by the Allies because God and all His angels were on their side. From there she slid to the wonderful work of Army nurses, and managed to give the impression that if they were good-looking, their work would not be wonderful. She began a thread of thought round the fate of pretty Belgian girls, but was at once in deep water, and left the subject, just hanging in the air. She finished with a parable. She drew a picture of a country village all primroses and chirping birds, and the sun shining on the steeple of the old church. Then war. The village smashed, never a bird to chirp, and the primroses crushed underfoot, and as an added touch, deep snow over everything. “All gone.” She paused dramatically. “That village had learned that its beauty was only a surface thing, that could be swept away in a moment. Girls, I want you to take a pride in your appearance, nothing can be nicer to look at than a wholesome young girl, but remember that, like my village, beauty may be swept away any moment, and what is left then? Can any girl tell me? What did my village people learn?”
There was a pause and then a hand shot up.
“That beauty is only a surface thing and can be swept away in a moment.”
“That’s right, Gladys,” Miss Elder nodded at the girl in congratulation. “Now you’ve heard what I’ve said, girls, and just bear my words in mind and I am sure we shall all do a sple
ndid term’s work, and be ready to serve our country if she should need us. Now before you go to your rooms we will sing ‘Lead us, Heavenly Father, lead us, o’er this world’s tempestuous sea.’”
As the school clattered to its classrooms, the verdict on Miss Elder’s speech was universal.
“That’ll keep young Floss Elk in her place, the stuck-up thing.”
One afternoon Fanny persuaded a neighbour to mind the shop, and took Flossie to the Bon Marché. The Bon Marché was the most advanced shopping centre of the neighbourhood; if a new coat or hat were to be bought, the canny considered it well worth the penny bus ride to ‘The Marchy’ and then you could be sure of the latest style. A skirt for Flossie was the reason for the present expedition, and Fanny wanted to match a piece of silk. They bought the skirt first, and then went down to the silk counter on the ground floor. A woman, and a well-dressed child, were hanging over some bales of green silk, so Fanny, thankful to give her inside a rest, sat down to wait.
The woman pushed away a length.
“No. Must be just right. Most particular, Madame is, about keeping the colours right.”
The assistant went away and came back with several more shades. The child pounced on one, fingered it, and held it against a scrap of material.
“This’ll do, Mum, the colour’s as near as can be, and anyway I’m alone, ’tisn’t like there are other costumes to put me wrong.”
The assistant cut off the necessary length of material, she looked admiringly at the child.
“Dancing for the soldiers?”
“Yes, Madame’s arranged a Patriotic Show. I’m Ireland.”
The mother looked proudly at the daughter.
“But you ought to see her do her number, dressed up as a colonel. Laugh! You should hear the soldiers.”
Fanny had hung on this conversation. She felt that this mother and child were not really very different to herself and Flossie, they probably had much the same home. Yet there was something in the child’s manner, and something in the way the assistant spoke to them, that made Fanny feel they were at least on their way to the world Flossie’s face should entitle her to. All this was more a feeling than defined thought, but it gave her the courage to speak.
It Pays to Be Good Page 3