Edith, who had been soundly taught as a child, divided her hour-long lessons into thirty minutes theory and thirty minutes practice, and was thus able to cope with two pupils at once. She relied almost exclusively on a fat book of scales, and a Down on the Farm for beginners, for the latter tinklings possessed for her, an exiled country-woman, a strong nostalgic flavour, and she never grew weary of hearing In a Quiet Wood or Now All is Sleeping.
She quickly learned to distinguish between those of her flock who would never progress beyond the musical farmyard, even when anxious mothers guaranteed regular practice with the help of twopenny canes, sold in bunches at all ironmongers along the Lower Road, and those who, with a little patience, would soon master elementary theory, and absorb as much as she could teach them.
Among her first dozen there were only two who did not regard the weekly lesson, and its accompanying obligation of at least half-an-hour's daily practice, as a monstrous inroad into their playtime. Of these two, Esme Fraser, of Number Twenty-Two, was one. The other, little Sandra Geering of Lucknow Road, subsequently obtained her L.R.A.M., but that was years later, when she had far outgrown Edith's methodical “One-two-three, one-two-three's a straight back dear, and don't, oh don't encourage lazy fingers!”
Edith found a curious sense of fulfilment in these music lessons and, as time went on, they came to mean more and more to her, for they brought her out of the tiny world in which she and Becky had been living since they left Devon, a world in which the only breaks in the routine of getting up, housekeeping, shopping, reading, and going to bed, were Becky's occasional spells, and the migrations, and prodigal homecomings of Lickapaw, the cat.
The arrival of Ted Hartnell, the lodger, provided a sharper and more permanent break with the past.
2
It might be said that, through Ted Hartnell, Edith found, and grasped, the thread of purpose that she had lost the day she left the Vicarage to fetch Becky home. Perhaps she realised this. Perhaps that was why she came to love him....
Ted knocked on the door of Number Four one evening in early autumn and Becky, who answered the knock, looked him over, shuffled back into the kitchen, where Edith was making loganberry jam, and said: “It's a man! I think it's Mr. Fosdyke's boy!”
Edith wiped her hands very carefully. She knew, of course, that it was not Mr. Fosdyke's boy; Mr. Fosdyke's boy, George, had been killed on the Somme, in 1916, but she remembered him well enough—he had sung in the choir for years, and was once very sick in the middle of For All the Saints. Edith's long habit of translating Becky's curiously accurate recollections from past to present told her, at least approximately, what the man on the doorstep would look like. He would be dark, sleek, and probably about nineteen, for that would be George Fosdyke's age when Becky ran off with her painter.
This was indeed a physical approximation of Ted Hartnell in the autumn of 1919. He was short, narrow-shouldered, pink-cheeked and brown-eyed, with lavishly brilliantined hair, and well-cared for off-the-peg clothes. Edith's first impression of him was that he was rather like a young rook. His dapper jauntiness sat upon him rather nervously, as though, at any moment, he would spread his neatly-folded wings, and soar across to the next elm, where he would sit, head thrown back, chest puffed out, swaying slightly in a high wind.
He was hatless, and carried a large canvas hold-all in one hand, and a short black music-case in the other. At first glance Edith mistook him for a new and adult pupil, who was under the mistaken impression that she gave violin lessons as well as pianoforte lessons. His hands, she noticed, were the only part of his person that looked uncared for, being rough and seamed, like the hands of a bricklayer, or pick-wielder.
“It's about that room, Miss,” he began; “they said you got one.”
Now that it had actually come to the point of inviting a young man into the house, not to drink tea, like the plumber's appentice, but to live with them, a spasm of nervousness shook poor Edith. She hesitated and, noticing as much, a clouded, almost hunted look showed in his brown eyes.
“There's the card ...” he began, and stopped when she smiled.
“Of course; come in, do,” replied Edith, consciously pulling herself together. She spread her hands and added incongruously, “I was making jam. We had lots of loganberries this year.”
She slipped across the hall, and shut the kitchen door on Becky. He walked upstairs behind her, still gripping his holdall and instrument case, still not too sure of his welcome, and neither of them said anything more until she had displayed the back bedroom, overlooking the old nursery.
He was obviously impressed with its spotlessness, and its unexpectedly open view. Edith had laid out nine pounds to get the room ready, and she had purchased wisely. There was a mahogany chest of drawers, wanting three drawer handles, an oak washstand, carefully draped cretonne curtains, a narrow but solid-looking bed, a bamboo night-table, new linoleum, and a strip of patterned carpet beside the bed.
Everything in the room was second-hand, but Edith, in her new role as business-woman, had not been fobbed off with rubbish. Over the bed Edith hung her own contribution—a framed sampler she had worked when she was ten. Its message was simple and direct. “God,” it said in royal blue, “is Love” in faded crimson.
“How much all in?” he wanted to know, as soon as a decent interval had elapsed. She bit her lip. Her stomach was making low but very distinct rumbling noises, and making them so persistently that she was sure he could hear them. He came to her rescue immediately, and she decided there and then that he must be a kind and very sensitive young man.
“I take sandwiches mid-day. I'm a stonemason at Kidd's, in Shirley,” he volunteered.
“A stonemason? That must account for the hands. He didn't look like a stonemason. A clerk or a shop assistant, but certainly not a stonemason.
“I ... we ... decided a pound, bed and breakfast ... we didn't expect to cater,” she said, suddenly quite nervous of frightening him away. “I ... I suppose I could do an evening meal. We have ours about seven, not dinner, you know ... just ... just something warmed up or ... or ... an egg.”
She saw in his surprised expression the grim necessity of making a clean breast of her utter inexperience.
“We've never had anyone before: perhaps you could tell me what is usual?”
He was genuinely touched by her naiveté. In the three years since he had left school, and been out to work, he had encountered a dozen or more landladies. Some had been unpleasantly off-hand, showing him round with a studied take-it-or-leave-it air; others, the majority, had looked him over very thoroughly, and asked him a number of questions about the sort of hours and company he kept. One had even told him: “No women, definitely no women!” Edith was his first experience of a landlady who consulted him on the amount she should charge for bed and board. He began to relax and congratulate himself on his good fortune.
“Place where I was,” he said, with a wide engaging grin, “charged me twenty-five bob, but the grub was shop stuff; nothing really cooked, if you see what I mean.”
She saw, nodding sympathetically. Poor young man! No wonder he was thin and undersized. He must have been living for years on soggy, pieshop pastry, stewed tea, and kippers. He probably had severe indigestion, took powders.
“I like cooking,” she told him; “I always have, ever since ...” She was going to say ever since she had taken full charge of Becky, after the Vicarage housekeeper walked out during one of Becky's “getting-supper-for-Saul spells,” but she realised that these sort of confidences would have to come later, if indeed they came at all. She completed the sentence rather lamely with “ever since I was a girl”.
They finally fixed on twenty-five shillings, to include a packed lunch five days a week, and Edith left him sitting on the bed, to savour his miraculous good fortune.
When he was sure Edith was downstairs, and could hear her talking to the blank, good-looking one who had answered the door, he bounced about on the bed, prowled around the room fin
gering the curtains and the washstand, its dainty jug, bowl, and flower-decked soap-dish, and finally opened his music-case, and took out his banjolele, striking a single, soft chord—the opening chord of Coal-black Mammy. Having done this he decided that he must not strain his luck at this early stage, and resolutely replaced the instrument in its case.
He wondered if she would object to smoking, and decided to take the chance, sitting on the cane-bottom chair beside the window and inhaling, deeply. He gurgled to himself with sheer delight. Ted, old sport, he told himself, Ted boy, you've struck oil! Take it easy and you've struck oil! A room like this, fifteen minutes from work, and home cooking! Boy! You're in clover—clover!
Ted Hartnell talked to himself more than most people, partly from natural exuberance, and partly because he had made no real friends since the uncle, with whom he had lived after his parents' death, had presented him with the “chuck-it-or-else” ultimatum involving his banjolele and his gramophone.
Ted Hartnell had no real interest in the job that provided him with a bare livelihood. He was a stonemason simply because a post at a stonemason's yard had presented itself the week he left school, more than four years ago. His mission in life was to play jazz tunes in public, or, if no such opportunity presented itself, to listen to them, hum them, beat them out with his chisel as he chipped marble gravestones, tap them with his feet as he munched lunchtime sandwiches, pick them out, chord by chord, on his wire-strung banjolele, or follow them, beat by beat, on his portable gramophone—now, alas, in a Hammersmith pawnbroker's window, and likely to remain there until he could save enough out of his thirty-two-and-sixpence a week to redeem it.
The gramophone and banjolele had been responsible for frequent shifts of lodging on the part of Ted Hartnell. No landlady could endure one or the other for long and, once the initial impact of his cheerful personality was spent, out he went, neck and crop, to look for a fresh lodge. The woman in Catford had helped him to establish his record, a mere nine weeks in one bed, but that was because she was stone deaf. He was asked to leave two nights after her married daughter came to live with her.
Ted did not much mind moving about. Once his gramophone was going, or he became absorbed in strumming, he was as oblivious of his immediate surroundings as a Montparnasse painter. The trouble lay in the limited number of stonemason's yards available, and the vast distances that stretched between them. Every time he moved he seemed to go further and further from work, and the fares were a great strain on his pocket. What he was searching for was a room within easy reach of a stonemason's, let by a landlady who was either stone-deaf, or excessively partial to New Orleans rhythm. It seemed an unending quest. Even now, having met a landlady who taught music, liked cooking, and asked what she should charge, he lacked the confidence to unpack, and contented himself with extracting pyjamas and sponge-bag. He would have been immensely cheered if he could have heard Edith discussing him as she stood by the gas-stove, stirring jam, for Edith was saying:
“He's a lodger, dear; no, not Mr. Fosdyke's boy, but a friend of his, I expect. I don't know whether he'll stay, Becky dear. I think not. I expect he'll find us old-fashioned. Young men like that like a bit of life, dear.”
Nobody would have been more surprised than Edith Clegg if somebody had whispered in her ear that evening: “Stay, Miss Clegg? Why, bless you, he'll stay nearly twenty years!”
CHAPTER V
Carvers, At Work And Play
1
THE four male Carvers were products of the pre-war era, the war itself, and the Charleston, or vo-deo-do era.
The forces that moulded the character of James Carver, and made him what he was, and what he was to become, were those familiar to the great majority of European males, born during the late 'seventies, and early 'eighties, men who had endured the horrors of trench warfare, yet survived to taste the full bitterness of victory.
Jim was discharged in the late summer of 1919, when the drought went on and on, and the leaves hung, dust-bowed, along the parched hedgerows. It seemed, that summer, as if the sun would never stop shining, as though it had made up its mind to burn away the memories of the long, hard frosts of wartime winters, and make the veterans forget the days and nights under the weeping skies of Artois and Picardy.
It was not the sort of weather in which one would have chosen to go looking for work, but Jim had no choice but to set out on the quest day after day, and with increasing desperation, for Louise was needed to keep house, and mother the new twins Felicity and Caroline, now referred to by the Carvers as “Fetch” and “Carrie”, and of his remaining children only Archie was earning.
More than a million ex-servicemen, many of them much younger than Jim, and some with pre-war trade training behind them, joined him in his search for limited security.
Jim was not long in discovering his handicap. Prior to 1914 he had never followed a regular trade, preferring to earn his money by piecework, as various jobs presented themselves. Because he was strong, honest, clever with his big, red hands, and very conscientious in his dealings with those who employed him, he had never been idle for more than a day or two between spells. He liked it that way. It flattered his strong sense of independence, so damaging to him during his army career, and in days when two pounds a week was a good wage for an untrained man, he had often brought his wife three, withholding but a shilling or two for tobacco and tram-fares.
He had been a leather-dresser, drayman, market porter at both Smithfield and Covent Garden, omnibus driver, groom, coach-builder, and even clerk, for he wrote an exceptionally neat, legible hand, and was quick at mental arithmetic.
He entered the post-war labour-market with confidence but it was soon evident that either his qualifications, or the economic system in which he was trying to market them, was at fault. He could find temporary jobs, but he lost them when the younger men joined the queue.
He was astonished at the number of young men who had managed to survive the successive slaughters of the Somme, Passchendaele, and the final German offensive. He had sometimes imagined, during the last months of the war, that he was one of the few Englishmen alive and whole, but at the local Labour Exchange his impression was soon corrected, for here they were, by the thousand; young, hefty, strident-voiced men, some of whom looked blank when the Marne and Ypres were mentioned, and many of whom, he was informed by sardonic ex-infantrymen, had managed to avoid active service for years on end.
Yet Jim did not at first take refuge in the general bitterness that had soured the easy comradeship of the trenches by the time the first anniversary of the Armistice came round. He was an obstinate man and prided himself on being a fair-minded, level-headed, unemotional sort of chap. It was 1920 before he began to relate his personal problems to those of Society. The victorious Empire, it seemed, would never find its way back to the highway it had been swinging down so blithely, when the fateful shots were fired at Sarajevo.
Jim, however, was inclined to blame his bad luck on his own fecklessness in the closing years of the century, when he could have learned a trade years ago, and made a niche for himself. Had he done so, he reasoned, he could now claim re-entry into industry, even if those who had performed his job during his absence were disinclined to step down, and make way for a veteran.
He was not alone in his bewilderment. Up and down the queues, and in and out the transport yards where he presented himself every day, he ran across plenty of other ex-servicemen as unfortunately situated as himself. They were not all as fair-minded. The majority were inclined to blame the women, who had taken their places at lower rates of pay while they were serving abroad, but this seemed unfair to Jim, who recalled seeing young girls perched on the topmost girders of Charing Cross Station when he came home on leave, and doing a man's work very efficiently if his short experience as a painter had taught him anything. Others blamed the politicians. They had always been fair game in the trenches. “The Pilot who weathered the Storm!” grunted one hard-bitten Cockney, as he turned away from beneath
a poster of Lloyd George in sailor-rig at the wheel—“Blimey, thinker that! We're still in the bloody middle of it, an' he don't even know it!”
Everybody blamed somebody else, and what made the struggle so wretched for men like Jim Carver was the collapse of that solid-scaffolding of trench comradeship, that had kept the morale of units intact through years of unmitigated hell. That, to Jim at all events, was the most disappointing aspect of the situation. It made him feel mean and small to see men scratch and snarl at one another, when one had secured a temporary advantage over the others. He found it difficult to witness, unmoved, this one undoubted spiritual gain of four years' struggle, being dissipated in a sordid wrangle over a two-pound-ten-a-week job.
In March, 1920, he retired from the fray, and took stock of himself. The result was rewarding. He successfully applied for training as a motor-transport driver, under a minute Government Grant. At the end of three months he passed out as a heavy-van driver, with 87%, and thus qualified for an ex-service vacancy at Burtol and Twyford's Removal and Storage Mart, in the Crystal Palace Road, Anerley.
Here, at least, he found his niche, and not a moment too soon. He had been more frightened than he cared to admit, and donned the leather apron they gave him with an overwhelming sense of relief. The job, driving a removal van, and helping with the loading and unloading, suited his taste for roving, acquired long before the war, and developed during his overseas service. He was thirty-nine, and exceptionally fit. He felt that, given luck, he had a better chance of survival than most.
2
Archie Carver was typical of those males in the Avenue who belonged to the age group too young to serve in the war, yet old enough, when it began, to be men about a house.
Archie was nearly fourteen when his father enlisted, and had just started as errand boy at Coolridge's, the multiple grocer's in the Lower Road. There were, as he quickly learned, certain advantages in belonging to the provisioning trade at that particular time, and perhaps it was this circumstance, more than his own natural shrewdness, that encouraged him to begin thinking as a man while he was still little more than a child.
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