The Dreaming Suburb

by R. F Delderfield

  “If we're being brought up-to-date, I suggest we start with a review of journey-money rates for long-distance work,” he said. “We get five shillings a night. That might have bought two meals and a bed before the war, but it certainly doesn't now, Mr. Twyford!”

  He was as good as out of work before he had finished speaking. Ten minutes later, when they were back in the office, Gilbert Twyford asked his chief clerk for information regarding the man who raised the matter of journey-money. Unlike his father, he had made no pretence of getting to know the men he employed. The chief clerk, who was over fifty, and nervous of his own future, had no hesitation in giving the new proprietor a colourful character-sketch of Jim Carver, stressing his reputation as a Socialist.

  “Is that so?” mused Gilbert. “Well, well, we must look into this, mustn't we?”

  Look into it he did, with the result that Jim Carver was given his cards within a fortnight of the pep talk. He was under no illusions as to why he was sacked and said so, bluntly, but without heat.

  Gilbert Twyford pretended to be shocked.

  “You're barking up the wrong tree altogether,” he protested. “We don't sack men for political opinions in England, old boy. We leave that sort of thing to Russia. I believe it's quite usual over there. No, no, no; the fact it, we contemplate quite a few changes here, and I'm cutting down on the smaller vehicles, and installing six-wheelers. A six-wheeler is a young man's pigeon—but you'll get something, you'll land something more in keeping with your age, old boy!”

  “I've no doubt I will,” replied Jim grimly, “but don't talk to me as if I'll find it in a bath-chair!”

  Gilbert preferred to take this as a joke, and laughed immoderately, patting Jim's shoulder affectionately. It took all Jim's self-control to check himself from standing clear and planting his fist in Twyford's face. There was, however, the matter of a reference to be thought of, and Carver walked stiffly from the yard and into the seething labour market at the age of forty-seven. He needed no one to tell him that the years ahead would be difficult ones, more difficult perhaps than the period of job-seeking that followed his demobilisation. After all, he was a student of industrial statistics.

  2

  The month that followed was a very active one for Jim Carver, so active indeed, so studded with open-air meetings, policy-framing committee sessions, and door-to-door canvassing on behalf of local government candidates, that he had no time to reflect on his own future.

  During the Strike he was on his feet eighteen hours a day. He spent the greater part of his time on picket work, in the Elephant and Castle area, and this was how he came to be involved in a serious clash between “Specials” and strikers, that resulted in a Tilling 'bus being burned in the Walworth Road.

  He did not enjoy the scrimmage, as he thought he might when he joined in it. The 'bus, driven by two university students, each swathed in a colourful scarf, and obviously enjoying themselves, came bowling down from the direction of the river, and was stopped by a small road obstruction, set up by a picket under the leadership of a huge Clydeside docker. What a Clydeside striker was doing so far from home Jim never discovered, but the man's unintelligible directions irritated him, just, as, during the war, he had been irritated by the news that a French General was to command the British Army.

  One of the students climbed down from the 'bus to remove the obstruction. The picket closed in, and at that moment a group of three middle-aged “Specials”—office executives by the look of them—ran along the tram-lines to support the driving team.

  Jim never understood how the struggle came to involve so many people so quickly. At one moment there were less than a dozen men, shouting at one another, and giving each other provocative little pushes, and the next the whole area round the 'bus was seething with men and women, clawing at one another, punching, shouting, and kicking. Jim heard the Glaswegian shout “Burrrn the bloody thing, burrrn it!” and even in the heat of the moment was vaguely shocked by such a dreadful proposal. He fought his way towards the rear platform of the vehicle, and was surprised to find it jammed with passengers, mostly factory girls.

  They looked very frightened indeed, and as Jim approached they began to scream in unison. Before he could mount the platform a uniformed constable struck Jim a glancing blow on the side of the head. The blow did not hurt, it was little more than a tap, but the indignity of the assault caused Jim to lose his temper and he struck back, flooring the policeman with a well-aimed swing to the cheek. The struggling mob on the tram-lines then moved in, and the girl passengers went on screaming above the general uproar. Jim found himself hitting out in all directions. His coat was ripped down from the lapel, and his tie was jerked into a choking knot.

  Suddenly there was smoke all round them, and the girls stopped screaming, and began to leap from the platform. It was at that moment that Jim noticed the dog under his feet.

  The sight of the animal caused him to forget everything else—the girls, the policemen, the probable results of the picket's action in setting fire to the 'bus. He thought only of the dog, and how to extricate it from this heaving mass. Planting his feet squarely, he bent swiftly and picked it up. It was surprisingly heavy, and its weight anchored him against the stairs. He braced himself, leaped forward, and fell on one knee on the edge of the mêlée. The thickest part of the press was now swirling towards the blazing bonnet, and he was able to stagger upright and run towards the pavement His size, and the weight of the dog, carried him through. He emerged on to the pavement gasping, and his instinct for cover—returning after a lapse of eight years—directed him to dive into a maze of empty side-streets.

  Clear of the main road he stopped to set down the dog and take stock of his injuries. His coat was in ribbons, and his left-hand trouser leg had been cut by the fall. Through the rent he could see that his knee was bleeding.

  The dog made no attempt to run away, but stood looking up at him, grinning. It was a mongrel, but a handsome one, two-thirds golden-haired retriever, one-third something else, possibly spaniel, to judge by its over-long ears. It was thin-nish, but unscarred, and its long brown coat seemed to have been cared for. It had no collar.

  Jim's first thought, after he had bandaged his knee and made some attempt to pin up the lapel of his jacket, was to take the dog to the nearest police station. Then he reflected that this, together with his appearance, would amount to a tacit admission of his part in the affray.

  Looking towards the main road he could see smoke rising from the 'bus, and, judging by the distant uproar, the battle still raged round the half-burned shell. There was nothing to do but take the dog along.

  As he bent down to loop a length of pamphlet string round its neck, the dog's long tongue shot out and licked his sweating face. A feeling of comradeship surged through the man and, with it, a curious sense of gratitude towards the mongrel. It had been the means, he felt, of extricating him from an incident that might well have landed him in gaol. Notwithstanding his passionate convictions regarding the justice of the cause, Jim Carver was not a man to look upon a gaol-sentence as a badge of class loyalty. He was too near the era when such a thing branded a man for life, whatever the nature of the offence that brought him behind bars. In addition, deep down, although he brushed it impatiently aside, was a sense of shame that he had taken part in the destruction of public property, and struck out at a uniformed policeman. The dog seemed to have no such misgivings, he went on grinning and lashing his tail, and when Jim headed for London Bridge, he trotted alongside as though he had never known another master.

  “Eh, but you got me out of a pickle, pup,” Jim said to him. “What'll we call you?”

  A name suggested itself very readily as they moved together through the loose stream of sightseers, who were now pouring down the tram-lines towards the 'bus.

  “I reckon we'll call you ‘Strike',” he said.

  The dog executed a half-turn and leapt up at Jim, his pink tongue seeking the big hand that held the string.

 
It took Jim and Strike nearly three hours to walk home, and both man and dog were tired and thirsty when they turned up Shirley Rise early that afternoon.

  Out here things were quiet, quieter even than on a normal day. As Jim approached the corner, a 'bus drew up and a young man, wearing a “Special's” arm-band, jumped off, and began to walk briskly up the rise. Jim recognised the “Special” as Archie.

  The arm-band Archie wore was a shock. Of late, father and son had seen very little of one another, and Jim realised that he knew little or nothing of his son's political outlook—if indeed he possessed one, which Jim very much doubted.

  The relationship between them had been deteriorating for years. Ever since Jim's return from the war he had sensed the boy's half-concealed contempt for his father's job, his lack of ambition, his entire cast of thought. Archie had never put this contempt into words, but at the dinner-table, when Archie was still living at home, Jim had seen the boy's fleshy lips twitch on hearing his father's comment upon a news item. Jim had never forgotten that passage in his wife's war-time letter “... Archie never seems short of money ... he helps me sometimes....” and Jim's quiet contemplation of his son's way of life, as Archie passed from adolescence to manhood, had increased his suspicions regarding Archie's true character. He had heard rumours of the Gittens' children about the time that his son married the grocer's daughter, and the marriage itself had puzzled him, although it seemed to have worked out all right, and to have done something to steady the boy. Once or twice during the past few years Jim had tried, half-heartedly, to improve their relationship, but Archie had shied away from him like a frisky colt, and Jim had not persisted. Somehow, he always felt at a disadvantage with Archie, as though the boy's unspoken contempt undermined his authority as a father, and might even cease to be unspoken if the older man threw down a definite challenge.

  But here was something that could not be ignored—his own son, wearing the arm-band of the reactionaries, who were successfully breaking the strike, and putting a padlock on the hatch that had lately been burst open by the dispossessed—the men who, less than a decade ago, had been promised the earth, and everything in it, by a badly frightened oligarchy. Here was his own flesh and blood taking sides against him with people like Gilbert Twyford, and a Government determined to starve the miners into abject submission. He had to do something, and say something. He had to know if the boy realised the enormity of his betrayal of their class, or if he had simply donned the arm-band for a lark, as Jim was convinced was the case with so many of the younger “Specials”.

  Both men were turning up Shirley Rise towards the Avenue, and they could hardly have avoided walking side by side for a few steps. Jim decided to come straight to the point. He touched Archie's arm-band with his index finger.

  “What's that, son?” he asked, striving to sound semi-jocular.

  Archie shrugged, but avoided his father's eye.

  “What's it look like, Dad?”

  “I'll tell you what it looks like,” said Jim, choosing his words very deliberately, “it looks as if somebody's been making a proper monkey out of you!”

  Archie stopped. They had reached the corner of Delhi Road, a few yards from Piretta's rear entrance. The younger man pointed to a six-inch rent in Jim's threadbare jacket, and then down to his ruined trousers.

  “It looks as if someone's been making a bigger one out of you, Dad!” he replied, civilly.

  Jim felt a spurt of irritation in his stomach but he ignored it, in the way he mastered his impatience when a heckler interrupted him at a meeting.

  “I've been down the Walworth Road,” he told Archie. “They've got a way with scabs down there. The one who did this is probably in hospital, son!”

  Archie's eyes widened. “That so?” he said, making no effort to keep the mockery out of his voice. “Then it's a pity they didn't pick you up, and throw you inside. I would have, if I'd been handy!”

  Jim knew then that there could never be any sort of reconciliation between them, that from this moment onwards they would always follow opposite paths—Archie to the right, with the bosses, with Gilbert Twyford, with the arms magnates, and the pipe-sucking Baldwin, he to the left, with the outcasts, the collarless, and the sullen queues outside the exchanges. The inevitability of the cleavage freed him from his duties as a parent. From now on Archie was not a son—just one of the enemy, and could be treated as such, impersonally, if need be, mercilessly.

  “Well,” he said, with a bitterness that was uncharacteristic of him on public platforms, “I'll tell you one thing, Archie: I'd as lief see you dead as wearing that arm-band. So, from today, don't show up at Number Twenty while I'm there, or I'll make sure you're kicked all the way from the front-gate to the feather-bed you've hooked for yourself with that Eyetie! If you don't think I'm capable of doing it, you're welcome to try me, son, any time you like; and if you've a mind to, right outside the front-windows of your bloody customers!”

  Under his father's calm gaze Archie lost the initiative, and fell back on bluster. He had never thought of his father as a political opponent, but simply as a well-meaning failure, whose principles—heard over the kitchen table ad nauseam during the first years of Jim's return home—would keep him poor, and shabby, for the rest of his life. Archie was not really interested in the strike, or in politics, generally. Archie's politics were, and always would be, the short-term enrichment of Archie. His enlistment as a “Special”, during this present ridiculous business, was an act of simple insurance, agreed upon with Toni, his father-in-law, as a step towards the preservation of law and order, and the rapid return to normal deliveries and business conditions. When he had presented himself at the police station, and volunteered to ride a 'bus platform for an hour or so, he had never even thought of his father, only of the need for business-men to stand together against the hoipolloi, whose junketings were beneath notice until they caused a falling off of shop trade. He was shocked, despite his natural arrogance, by his father's edict forbidding him the house.

  “There's Louise and the kids,” he began, but Jim cut him short.

  “As long as they live there they'll do as I say. I can't prevent them calling on you—I wouldn't anyhow—but that doesn't mean they can start a family rumpus by asking you over the threshold, son. I mean that, so don't get to trying anything, Archie!”

  He turned away quickly, and walked on up Shirley Rise to the corner of the Avenue. Archie watched him go, noting his loose, shambling stride and slightly stooping shoulders. His surprise and indignation did not prevent him from feeling unhappy at the prospect of being cut off from his family. He had always been fond of Louise, and very generous with her when he made up her weekly order. He valued too the homage of the twins, and of Judith, when he met them in the Avenue, and sometimes tossed one or the other a coin.

  Then he shrugged off his regrets. If the Old Man wanted to waste his life rabble-rousing, instead of in the normal pursuit of gathering money, there was nothing that he could do about it. The important thing was to break this idiotic stranglehold on profitmaking, and drive these Bolshies underground where they belonged and where, if he had anything to do with it, they should remain.

  He threw up his chin, and crunched up the gravel alley to the back door. His father-in-law was in the spotless kitchen, playing bears with Tony, the baby. He rose excitedly as Archie entered.

  “He's a-strong, he's a-forward. Just now he almost walk! Tony, boy, show-a your father, walk-a to grandpa, there's a boy!”

  The baby, already ridiculously like Archie about the face and the set of his shoulders, rose uncertainly, and staggered on bandy legs towards the striped humpty on which the Italian sat, beaming, and holding out brown, freckled hands.

  Archie grinned at the child, and went into the shop to get the day-book.

  CHAPTER XIII

  Edith In Mourning

  l

  EDITH CLEGG never looked back on 1926 as the year of the General Strike. It had, for her, the far greater significance o
f being “about the time dear Teddy joined a dance-band, and the year poor dear Rudi died, and upset us all so much.”

  In the summer of that year Ted Hartnell gave up his part-time job in the furniture mart, and moved an appreciable step nearer Elysium He became, to begin with, the only other member of the orchestra at the Granada, in the Lower Road, and his presence in the minute orchestra pit was due less to his ability to twirl drumsticks, and to Edith's pleas on his behalf to Mr. Billings the proprietor, than to the pressing need for noises-off in Mr. Billings' latest attraction, Ben Hur.

  Mr. Billings had seen a preview of Ben Hur at a cinematograph-exhibitors' conference. He immediately recognised the film for what it was, another Covered Wagon, with the Bible thrown in, and as such, a possible source of attraction to hitherto cinema-shy audiences, such as Baptists, Congrega-tionalists, perhaps even Plymouth Brethren.

  “Point is,” he told Edith, when they were packing up after the second house one night, “point is, we gotter put it over proper! It's big, see? Not just another film, not just a good film, but a Birth of a Nation—a proper 'Unchback if you see what I mean! Why, lumme, it's even got Jesus in it! You don't see 'im, of course—that ain't allowed—but you see 'is arm come out, when 'e gives Ramon Navarro a drink o' water! That's good! That's clever! And we gotter do something about it, something special!”

  There was no need to fan Edith's enthusiasm. Jesus or no Jesus she harboured no doubts about liking Ben Hur, and she immediately produced one of those intuitive ideas that Mr. Billings had learned to expect from her.

  “I always think,” she said deliberately, “that it is such a pity we have to see things without hearing them. What I mean is, I can't do really convincing bangs, when buildings fall, and cannons go off. I can only ... well ... I can only suggest them.”