The Dreaming Suburb

by R. F Delderfield

  She wrote:

  “Today it snowed. Esme went to the big party at Mrs. Stafford-Fyffe's. I wish I could have gone. I have a feeling something would have happened there, and anyway, we should have walked home together.”

  It seemed futile to write more.

  She put the diary back in the box, and the box in the drawer, covering it with clean underclothes. She was a long time getting off to sleep, and when she did she slept fitfully, starting up in the middle of the night, and hurrying to the window when she heard a car stop in Shirley Rise, and someone turn into the Avenue, whistling.

  It wasn't Esme, however, but Ted Hartnell, Miss Clegg's lodger.

  Ted walked slowly up the Avenue to the gate of Number Four, eight doors down. He had been crooning jazz tunes for five hours, with a twenty-minute supper break, but he still had enough breath left for a few bars of The Broadway Melody.

  CHAPTER XVII

  Carver Roundabout. I

  1

  THE Spring of 1930 proved a memorable one for the Carvers, of Number Twenty. The majority of the people in the Avenue slid into the new decade almost without noticing it. They had little reason to suppose that the 'thirties would differ from the 'twenties. The upheaval and the anxieties of the war were now a long way behind them—so far, in most of the houses, that children were now growing up in the Avenue who thought of Kaiser Bill, and Earl Haig, as Jim Carver might have thought of Bismarck, and Buller. Too many sensations had interposed between the mafficking of Armistice Day and the enthronement of Amy Johnson. Small-powered cars were now commonplace in the Avenue, and it was a waste of time to send children out with bucket and shovel to collect manure for the rosebeds. Few tradesmen used horse-vans nowadays, but overhead aircraft droned and spluttered into Croydon Aerodrome all day long, and their passage failed to distract young Tony Carver, and his pot-bellied grandfather from their daily game of hopscotch or bears in Piretta's storeyard.

  The first Spring of the decade was memorable for the Carvers because it heralded a general reshuffle at Number Twenty.

  To begin with the twins left home, renting a furnished room near their Speedway, at Anerley. Jim, Louise, and Judy were sorry to see them go, for they were good company, but they were very glad of their living-space. Since Archie had married there had been an end to the 10 p.m. bedtime-drill downstairs, but for some years now the accommodation at Number Twenty had been limited, particularly in bedrooms. Louise and Judy had squeezed into the porch room, Jim and the boys shared the front room, and the babies, “Fetch” and “Carry”, slept in the rear room, overlooking the nursery. Now Jim changed with the elder girls, and Louise and Judy at last had space to make their beds properly.

  The house seemed very empty without Boxer's lumbering bulk and Berni's tuneless whistle, but Jim was grateful for a privacy he had not been able to enjoy since joining the army, in 1914. He found that a room to himself enabled him to think more clearly, and to keep his quick temper in check. In addition, there was now room to unpack, and even display his small library, and file away his vast stocks of pamphlets.

  Jim spent a good deal of his time in preparing speeches and compiling current cost-of-living indexes. Often enough there was little else for him to do, for his jobs, since leaving the furniture firm, had been of a temporary nature, and had recently begun to be spaced out by longer intervals, as the wind of depression whipped the seedy queues outside the Labour Exchange.

  Jim could see little future for himself, or his country, in the way things were going just now, notwithstanding the Socialist victory at the polls the previous summer. Much as the realisation galled him he was obliged to admit that the Labour Party might as well be out of office as dependent on the Liberal rump for its slender majority in Westminister. He was beginning to wonder, in fact, whether the victory of MacDonald was a triumph at all, for they said it had been welcomed at Tory Headquarters, as a heaven-sent opportunity to pass the buck. In addition, Jim found it difficult to display more than lukewarm enthusiasm for his Premier, with his slightly unctuous “My Friennnnnds ...”, and his disconcerting habit of hobnobbing with duchesses. Somehow, reputation notwithstanding, Ramsay MacDonald did not fit into Jim's preconceived idea of a Socialist prime minister. His speeches lacked the positive drive of a legally-elected rabble-rouser, and there was a disconcerting aura of patronage about a man who had been raised to eminence by the jobless, and collarless, yet was said to be impatient of advice from colleagues who did not receive invitations to Devonshire House.

  There was something else, too. Although it was illogical to distrust a man who had been a pacifist in a capitalist war, Jim found himself distrusting his leader on this very account. He tried, desperately hard, to rid himself of these unworthy doubts but he did not wholly succeed, for his political faith was deeply rooted in the comradeship of slimey shellholes, where he had awaited the commands of young officers, almost all of them from Tory homes, to get up and come to grips with the Hun. It saddened him to reflect that some of the officer survivors of those years were now his beloved party's bitterest enemies.

  He was pondering over these heresies on his way home from a party rally in Hyde Park one gusty March evening, when something happened to change the course of his life, and to return to him, on a plate as it were, the limited security he had forefeited in the 1926 strike.

  Jim had stayed behind after the rally to distribute literature and pack up chairs. He was that sort of convert, a man who performed the routine jobs, leaving others to climb on to soap-boxes, or continue the arguments long after they had descended from them, and the crowds had gone home.

  It was dark by the time Jim turned for the Avenue, intending to catch a tube from Marble Arch to Charing Cross, there to take the 9.30 p.m. for Addiscombe Road.

  Because it was dry and keen he decided to walk as far as the Circus, and he was about half-way along Oxford Street when he heard, but was hardly conscious of, a crash of glass from the direction of New Bond Street.

  A moment later, when he was level with the crossing, a large touring car shot from the turning, and tried to veer north, but the turn was made at too high a speed, and the car mounted the pavement, missed him by inches, and struck the base of a lampstandard, where it ricochetted and stopped dead.

  Jim, darting back, had a good view into the car's interior. A bare-headed young man was at the wheel, feverishingly trying to reverse, and beside him was an older, bulkier man, who was looking nervously over his shoulder in the direction from which the car had come.

  As the vehicle shot back Jim's brain linked the crash of glass with the presence of the car, and his eye took in the pile of furs in the rear seat, and the panic of the young driver.

  Three years on and off the dole had not slowed his reflexes. Before his eye had taken in the pursuing car, or the scattering group of pedestrians on the pavement, he had jumped on to the running-board, grabbed the driver by his upturned collar, and driven his fist hard into the boy's ear, pitching him across the older man, who was in the act of opening the car door to escape.

  The blow was powerful and well-judged. The boy was stunned and fell across the empty seat, just as the nearside door flew open, and his companion landed in the street on all fours.

  At that moment another car roared past, braked powerfully, and came to a shuddering halt at an acute angle, boxing the tourer between lamp-standard and corner shop. A police-sergeant jumped from the running-board and pounced on the man in the road. Another policeman scrambled out, and dived headlong into the car.

  “You don't want to worry about him, officer,” said Jim, a little shakily, “he's out cold, I reckon. What the hell's going on?”

  The policeman grinned without answering, and called across to the sergeant.

  “Pedestrian got him, Sarge! How about your baby?”

  The sergeant's prisoner was already handcuffed, and the policeman slipped a pair on to the boy's wrists as he sat up, vomiting. Two other constables suddenly appeared on the scene, one reversing the police car
from the pavement, the other shepherding the curious crowd away from the corner.

  “Move along, please, move along!” he said, prodding Jim in the small of the back.

  “Hi, hold on,” said the constable who had dived into the car; “he's the chap who slugged the driver!”

  In the respectful gleam of the policeman's eyes Jim read publicity, and shrank from it. Mumbling something inaudible he tried to edge round the constable and lose himself in the gathering crowd, but the sergeant saw the movement.

  “You mustn't go, sir,” he said; “we shall need you as a witness. You'd better come along to the station with us now.”

  They went, in two cars, Jim and the sergeant in one, and the two bandits and three constables in the damaged tourer.

  It was long after midnight when the police car deposited him outside Number Twenty, and Louise, who had been peering anxiously up and down the Avenue, let out a yelp of dismay when the lamplight fell on the sergeant's helmet. The policeman was in high good humour.

  “There you are, Mr. Carver—now you can tell the missis all about it!”

  “I haven't got a missis,” said Jim, with a reluctant grin, “but I dare say the kids will be interested.”

  The dog Strike ran growling on to the pavement, and at the sight of the dog Jim chuckled inwardly. He wondered what the police sergeant would say if he was told in what circumstances Strike had been acquired, nearly four years before.

  2

  Jim did not enjoy being a hero, even for the one day following, when his action was splashed all over the evening papers, and a number of photographers called at the house, or during the two-day period of the trial, when he shared the publicity with the police.

  Before the trial ended he found himself feeling slightly ashamed of his part in arresting the boy, who turned out to be only eighteen, and a graduate of Borstal, where he seemed to have spent most of his adolescence after emerging from a State orphanage.

  Jim thought the sentence severe—seven years—the same as that meted out to the older man, who had a long record of crimes of violence. When the judge pronounced sentence the boy looked stunned, and turned mutely towards the witness bench, his eyes meeting Jim's in a kind of appeal. Jim found himself unable to meet the boy's eye. Instantly, and, as he tried to console himself, quite illogically, his mind went back to the dead boy on the bank, outside Mons, and suddenly he felt sick and defeated. Was this all that Society could do for the product of an orphanage, who had probably turned to crime because he could find companionship only among criminals? Had anyone gone an inch out of their way to help this kid to find himself, when he was thrown on to the crowded labour market? God knows, it was difficult enough to get a job without a record. What must it be like with no training or background beyond Borstal? In any case, Borstal or Council School, how much would anyone pay a kid like this, even if they found him a job washing dishes in some airless basement, or heaving luggage about a railway station, or up and down the backstairs of a provincial hotel? He saw the boy as a symptom of the whole rotten system, a system of exploitation, and dividends, and gold standards, and endless hair-splitting over conference tables. What did it matter to a boy like this whether they built big ships, or little ships, or no ships at all? How did it improve his chances of survival if statesmen's signatures were scrawled over a dozen Kellogg Pacts? A boy like this would always be at war, if not with the Germans, then with the social conditions into which he had been born; all his life he would be involved in the hopeless fight of the under-privileged against the snug, and the well-breeched.

  Jim got up, found his way to the street, and was about to board a 'bus when somebody plucked his sleeve. He turned to look into the coarse, wrinkled face of Jacob Sokolski, the owner of the furs that had been stolen.

  During the trial Sokolski had struck him as being a gentle old man, somewhat distressed by the case, and certainly not on show, like most of the other witnesses. He had given his evidence in mangled English, and Jim guessed that he originated from Eastern Europe.

  “Vait, mister,” he invited, “you'n me take tea, eh? You'n me get the taste of bloddy polis from our troats, eh?”

  Jim regarded him with surprise. In spite of the man's benevolent appearance it struck him as odd that a successful businessman, whose goods had been yanked from the shop-window by professional criminals, should now refer to those who had arrested the raiders as “bloddy polis”. He let the 'bus go.

  “I‘d like some tea, yes, Mr. Sokolski,” he said civilly, “but you might as well know that it didn't give me any satisfaction to see that kid sent up for seven years. Two would have been ample. Either that, or the chap that organised it should have got fourteen. As it is, it doesn't make sense.”

  “You an' me, we tink the zame,” said Mr. Sokolski, grasping his arm, and leading him purposefully towards an A.B.C. “These polis here, they no so dam bad. No guns and no knouts, but still they are polis, eh? Vunce a polis, alvays a bloddy polis. They hit the peoples. Like that—dum-dum!”

  And Mr. Sokolski withdrew his arm, and smote his open palm very hard, signifying police oppression the world over.

  They took a fancy to one another from the beginning. Jim, who had read a good deal about Tsarist oppression, was genuinely interested in Sokolski's first-hand information on the subject.

  As a child, the furrier had been hounded from home by Cossacks, and had starved in a Lithuanian hovel. He had seen his father flogged, and his brothers marched into exile. He himself had escaped, at the age of eleven, into the relative haven of a cabin-boy's berth on a Baltic trader, where the life would have killed most children in a month, but Sokolski took a great deal of killing, and had survived to jump ship in Philadelphia, and make his way, speaking no English, and almost penniless, across a wide continent to the fruit-farms of California. A chance meeting with another Russian had brought about his entry into the fur trade, and because he had natural shrewdness, and could save ninety-five dollars out of every hundred he earned, he soon prospered, and later moved to London. His terrible childhood, and the grinding poverty of his early manhood, had not soured him, or made him arrogant in success, for, throughout his pilgrimage, he had hung on to his two major characteristics, a strong sense of humour, and a bitter distrust of all men in uniform.

  “Even my commissionaire, Carver.... I say to him, ‘No bloddy uniform ... no bloddy medals'! With the uniform it is alvays the same for the peoples—dum-dum!”, and this time he smote his fist to signify the world-wide tyranny of the military.

  Jim went to work for Sokolski the following week. He began as shopman, cleaning windows, stoking boilers, and carrying out all the menial tasks that presented themselves. Within the first year, however, Sokolski made him a van driver, and not long afterwards, when the furrier bought a controlling interest in a group of ready-made clothing shops in the north-west suburbs, he promoted him to the post of transport overseer, with a salary of six pounds a week, more money than Jim had ever drawn in the past.

  He knew all about Jim's socialism, and tolerated it with a mixture of scorn and amusement.

  “Ach,” he would say, as he stood about the transport yard watching stock-loading, “you bloddy socialists set the vorld to rights, eh? No, no, my frien' ... nobody set the vorld right! Not socialist, not Bolshevik, not priest! I dell you somding, Carver. You make effryvun rich, and comforts see, like me, but you not set the vorld right, not for ten minute! Because vy? Because half the peoples go to sleep right off, and the odders run avay vith vot the sleeping vons leave lying around!”

  This quaintly-phrased philosophy did not irritate Jim, for he recognised the Russian as possessing something that had been overlooked in all the pamphlets he had read, and the speeches he had heard. Perhaps it was common-sense, or perhaps the gospel of a battered human heart that had never quite forgotten how to laugh.

  3

  Archie Carver remembered the Spring of 1930 because it was the season in which he began his expansion.

  Archie's dream ha
d changed with the years. When he had first joined the Pirettas, in the days when he was roving the countryside looking for empty premises, the acquisition of a business had not been an end in itself, but merely a means to furnish the quick capital, and freedom of movement, necessary to provide him with A Good Time.

  His outlook had undergone some important changes since then. Somehow, his adolescent conception of A Good Time had crept into a till, and never found its way out again. He came across it now and again, when he opened the drawer for loose change, but he no longer recognised it. A Good Time, as he had understood it when he was twenty-one, had nothing whatever to do with his latter-day dreams of commerce.

  It was not that he denied himself very much. He smoked as much as ever, drank a good deal, and even seduced the odd female customer whenever the opportunity presented itself, but these diversions were no longer important to him. What was important, what occupied most of his waking thoughts and even invaded his dreams, was The Chain.

  It was stupid, he reasoned, to spend one's time and one's entire creative energy on operating a single business. Piretta's shop paid off well enough. In the five years he had been the Italian's son-in-law and partner the turnover had trebled itself. There was, however, a definite limit to the yield of a small grocery business in an outlying suburb. What was needed was a chain of such businesses—all small, all staffed by not more than two people, and all overseen and regulated by himself.

  His experiences at multiple stores had shown him the weak spot in such enterprises. The weak spot was the local manager, who had to possess enterprise and initiative, a limited amount perhaps, but still of a type superior to the ordinary counter-hand. Yet this man, the key man, was denied a stake in the business, and because of this he was, given time, certain to go sour, to become dishonest, or disillusioned and slack. Archie understood this very well. He had worked with shop assistants long enough to know that the one thing they shied away from was responsibility. They would work, sometimes until they dropped, at any kind of manual task, but to ask them to think for themselves, to make decisions involving cash, to back their judgments about goods, and customers, was to ask more than they were able to give. Loaded with responsibility against their will, they became sullen, or sick, or so nervous that they were liable to fly off the handle at awkward moments. They had to have someone at their elbow, someone on whom they could unload their worries. Provide them with someone like this and they were usually prepared to give him their unstinted labour and—what was even more essential—their personal loyalty.