by Alan Moore
“I’m from Lambeth, just off Lambeth Walk in Regent Street, that little terrace. Vernall. That’s me maiden name. I can remember ’ow our mam and dad would take me out around there when I was a little girl. There was a pub they went to, up the London Road, and when we come ’ome we’d cut back across West Square. I see yer there a time or two. You had a brother what were older, didn’t yer?”
He was relieved, though hardly less amazed. The woman’s feat of memory, although far past his own capacity, was not untypical amongst those who’d grown up in crowded little neighbourhoods, where everyone appeared to know the names of everybody else within a two-mile radius, along with all their children’s and their parents’ names and all the mystifying quirks and threads of happenstance that linked the generations. Having never learned the trick of it himself, perhaps because he’d always hoped he wouldn’t be stuck in those places very long, he’d been thrown off his guard when it was played upon him, here in this improbable location, in this far-flung town. Unlike the woman, he could not remember any childhood meetings for the life of him.
“Yes. You’re right, I had a brother Sydney. Still have, for that matter. When were you around there, then? How old are you?”
She raised, at this point, a reproachful eyebrow at his lack of manners, asking her about her age, but finally replied.
“Old as me tongue but older than me teeth. I’m twenty, if you must know. I was born the tenth of March in 1889.”
The more she reassured him that there was a natural explanation for her knowing his childhood address, the eerier the incident of their chance meeting struck him. This surprisingly imposing woman had been born within a month of him and lived perhaps two hundred yards from him while he was growing up. Now here they both were, sixty miles and twenty years away from where they’d started out, stood at one of a hundred corners in one of a hundred towns. It made him think again about his previously held opinions as regards predestination, and if people ever really had an inkling of the path ahead of them. He could see now that it was actually two separate questions that required two different answers. Yes, he thought that probably there was a pattern in how things occurred that had been drafted out beforehand, or at least it sometimes seemed there was, but then again he also thought that if there were such a design it would be far too big and too outlandish to be read or understood, so no one could predict how all its curlicues were going to be resolved, except by accident. You might as well attempt to forecast all the shapes a purple sunset-cloud would make before it burned away, or which cart would give way to which when they met at the crossroads’ corners. It was all too complicated to make sense of it, whatever all the prophets and the tea-leaf readers might pretend. He shook his head, replying to her, muttering something inadequate about it being a small world.
The lovely baby was now squirming restlessly, and Oatsie was afraid her mother would use this excuse to take her home and end their conversation, but she asked instead what he was he was doing at the Palace of Varieties, or the Vint Palace as she seemingly insisted upon calling it. He told her how he generally did a bit of this, a bit of that, but how tonight he was appearing with Fred Karno’s Mumming Birds as the Inebriate. She said it sounded proper funny, and said how she’d always thought it would be nice to be someone who worked in entertainment.
“Mind you, it’s our kid, our Johnny. ’E’s the one who’s always going on about the stage. This is me youngest brother. Reckons that ’e’s gunna end up in theatre or else playin’ music in a band, but ’e’s all talk. ’E wunt ’ave lessons, wouldn’t even if we could afford ’em. Too much like ’ard work.”
He nodded in response, watching a milk cart headed back towards its depot at the bottom of the street, downhill behind her. From where he was standing it appeared about an inch high, dragged by its disconsolate and shrunken mare along the girl’s right shoulder, losing itself in the autumn forest of her hair for quite some time before it re-emerged upon her left and then slunk wearily from sight.
“Well, if your brother doesn’t want to put the hours in, he won’t get too far as a performer. Mind you, he could still make money as a manager or impresario, and then he could be as bone idle as he liked.”
She laughed at this, and said she’d pass on the advice. He took advantage of the pause to ask her why she’d called the venue the Vint Palace.
“Oh, it’s ’ad lots of names over the years. Our dad’s ’ad family in Northampton ever since I can remember, always going back and forth from here to Lambeth, so ’e’s kept up with the changes. It began as the Alhambra Music Hall, from what ’e said, and then they changed it to the Grand Variety around the time what I was born. Accordin’ to our dad there was a bad patch sometime after then, when it weren’t even a theatre for a while. For getting on five years it weren’t the same place one month to the next. It was a greengrocer’s and then it was a place where they sold bikes. It was a pub they called the Crow before that moved across the street to be the Crow and Horseshoe, and I can remember when I was a little girl ten years back and it was a coffee house. All the free-thinkers as they called ’em used to go in there, and they were some right ’Erberts, I can tell yer. Anyway, the year the Queen died, that was when they done it up and christened it the Palace of Varieties. Old Mr. Vint, he bought the place a year ago, but still ain’t ’ad the sign changed.”
Oatsie nodded, looking at the old establishment in a new light. Because he’d come here as a Lancashire Lad all those years ago and it was a variety hall then, he had assumed that it had been one ever since, that it had always been one and, in every likelihood, it always would be. The young woman’s casual listing of the purposes to which the premises had been put in the meantime made him feel uncomfortable, although he couldn’t put his finger on the reason why. Oatsie supposed it was because the world he’d been brought up in, horrible and suffocating as he’d reckoned it, at least stayed where it was from one year, often from one century, unto the next. Even this shabby corner of Northampton here, a place about as run down as the Lambeth he’d been born to, you could see most of the buildings standing round you were still housing the same businesses they’d housed a hundred years before, even if names and management were different now. That’s why the girl’s account of the hall’s changing fortunes had unsettled him, because the story was a relatively rare one still, although you heard more like it every week. What should it all be like, he wondered, if these here-today-and-gone-tomorrow fleapits came to be the rule, not the exception? If he were to come back here in, say, forty years time and found it was a place that sold, he didn’t know, electric guns or something like that, and no longer a variety hall? Perhaps by then there wouldn’t even be variety halls. Well, that was an exaggeration, obviously, but it was how May’s off-hand narrative had made him feel, uneasy with the way that things were going these days, in the modern world. He changed the subject, asking her about herself instead.
“You sound as if you know the place, gal, anyway. How long is it you’ve lived here now?”
She cast her eyes up thoughtfully at scraps of lilac cirrus on a field of deepening blue, while her astonishingly well-behaved and patient offspring sucked a gleaming thumb and stared, it seemed indifferently, at Oatsie.
“Ninety-five, I think it was, when I was six we come up ’ere, although our dad, ’e’s always goin’ back and forth, to get the work. ’E walks it, the old bugger, all the way to London and then back. Many’s the time when we’ve not seen ’im for six weeks, not ’ide nor ’air, then ’e comes waltzing in ’alf-cut with presents, little bits and bobs for everybody. No, it’s not a bad old place. This bit round ’ere’s a lot like Lambeth, ’ow the people are. Sometimes I ’ardly feel as if we’ve moved.”
Some of the narrow shops across the other side of Horseshoe Street were putting lights on now, a dim glow tinged with green around its edges that crept out between the sparse and shadowy displays in their front windows. Lowering her gaze from up among the chimneybreasts, the elder May looked proudly dow
n now at the younger, cradled in her sturdy, tiger-lily arms.
“I think I’m ’ere for good. I ’ope I am, at any rate, and ’ope the little ’un shall be, too. They’re a straightforward lot round these parts, in the main, and there’s some real old characters. It’s where I met me chap, my Tom, and we got wed up at the Guildhall. All ’is people, they’re all local, all the Warrens, and we’ve lots of family up ’ere on the Vernall side as well. No, it’s all right, Northampton is. They do a good pork pie, and there’s some lovely parks, Victoria, Abington, and Beckett’s. That’s where I’ve just took this one, down by the river there. We saw the swans and went out on the island, didn’t we, me duck?”
This was directed at the baby, who was finally beginning to show signs of restlessness. Her mother stuck out her own lower lip and turned her brows up at a tragic angle, mimicking her daughter’s glum expression.
“I expect she’s ’ungry. Goin’ down the park I stopped at Gotcher Johnson’s for two ounce o’ rainbow drops, but I ’ad one or two as well, so they were finished up some time ago. I’d better get ’er ’ome up Fort Street for ’er tea. It’s potted meat, ’er favourite. It’s been nice to meet yer, Oatsie. ’Ope yer skit goes well.”
At that, he bade goodbye to both the Mays, and said it had been similarly nice to meet the pair of them. He shook the baby’s damp, minuscule hand and told her that he hoped to see her name on a big hoarding one day. To her mother he just said “Take care of her”, then as the woman chuckled and assured him that she would, he wondered why he’d come out with it. What a stupid thing to say, as if suggesting that she wouldn’t look after a child like that. The babe and parent waited until there was nothing coming, then they crossed the foot of Gold Street and went up the hill towards the north. He stood there on his corner and admired the woman’s bum, moving beneath her swinging skirt as she mounted the slope, with her imagined buttocks like two faces pressed together as their owners acted out a vigorous two-step. Or perhaps two wrestlers full of muscles in a crush, each one in turn gaining an inch on their opponent who immediately takes it back, deadlocked so that they merely seem to heave from side to side. He noticed at this point the baby, staring soberly across the woman’s shoulder at him as she was borne off into the distance. Feeling oddly mortified to think the child had caught him looking at her mother’s bottom he glanced rapidly away towards the plot of scrubland halfway down the hill, and when he looked back just a minute later they were gone.
He looked to see what time it was, then fished another Woody from his dwindling pack and lit it. That had been a funny conversation, now he thought about it. It had made an impact on him that was only just now starting to sink in. That woman, May, born just a few weeks after he was, raised not half a dozen streets away, and somehow they’d both met up on a corner in another town twenty years later. Who’d believe it? It was one of those occurrences that he supposed were bound to happen now and then, despite the odds, yet when they did it always felt uncanny. There was always the suggestion of a pattern in the way things worked that you could almost understand, but when you tried to pin down what the meaning or significance might be it all just fizzled out and you were left no clearer than you were before.
Perhaps the only meaning that events had was the meaning that we brought to them, but even knowing this was probably the case, it frankly wasn’t that much help. It didn’t stop us chasing after meaning, scrabbling like ferrets for it through a maze of burrows in our thoughts and sometimes getting lost down in the dark. He couldn’t help but think about the woman he’d just met, how the encounter had stirred twenty-year-old sediments up from the bed of him, and how that made him feel. The root of it, he thought, was how the similarities between his background and the woman’s had made all their differences stand out in just as sharp relief.
For one thing he was on the verge, or so he hoped, of an escape from the soot-smothered prison of his and the woman’s common origins, from poverty, obscurity and streets like this, where now the sky was cut to rich blue diamonds by the iron struts of the gas-holder. Escape from England, even, if he could. In the event of a forthcoming scrap with Germany, Sir Francis Drake hoped to be in his hammock and a thousand miles away. As for the spirited young mother, May, she didn’t have those opportunities. Without the talents he’d inherited or learned from both his entertainer parents, she had lived a life more limited in terms of both its expectations and its possibilities, and its horizons, which she did not feel compelled to cross, were that much closer than the boundaries around his own. She’d said herself she thought she’d live here in this district all her life, and that her gorgeous little daughter would as well. There were no hopes or dreams that she was chasing, Oatsie knew. In neighbourhoods like this, such things weren’t practical, were only ever burdensome and painful liabilities. That lively young girl was resigned to live and die, it would appear, within the small cage of her circumstances; didn’t even seem to know it was a cage or see its grimy bars. He thanked whatever guardian angel he might have for giving him at least the slim chance to avoid a lifelong penal sentence like the one that she existed under. Every woman, man or baby passing by him through the tannery-infused slum twilight was to all intents and purposes a convict, serving out their time in harsh conditions without any likely prospect of reprieve or pardon. Everyone was safe in lavender.
But May had seemed content, and not resigned at all. May had seemed more content than Oatsie felt himself.
He thought about it, blowing out a wavering slate-and-sepia fern of smoke through pretty, puckered lips. Some of the carriages that moved across the junction had by now fired up their lanterns, as the lapis of the skies above grew gradually more profound. Chandelier snails, they crawled uphill and sparkled in the dead-end dusk.
He saw there were two sides to being poor, to having nothing, not even ambitions. It was true that May and all the others like her didn’t have his drive, his talents or his opportunities for betterment, but then they didn’t have his doubts, his fears of failing or his nagging guilt to deal with, either. These were people, heads down, crunching through the pavement’s autumn garnish, who weren’t on the run from anything, especially the streets they’d come from, so they didn’t have to feel as if they were deserters all the time. They knew their place, the worst-off, in more ways than one. They knew exactly where they were in so far as society should be concerned, but more than that they knew their place; they knew the bricks and mortar that surrounded them so intimately that it was like love. Most of the poor souls sluicing through this crossroad’s floodgates hailed from families, he knew, that would have lived around these parts for generations, just because the distance you could travel was more limited before there had been railway trains. They trudged these byways in the knowledge that their grandparents and great-grandparents had done just the same a hundred years before, had let their troubles soak in the same pubs, then poured them out in the same churches. Every mean and lowly detail of the neighbourhood was in their blood. These knotted lanes and listing pie-shops were the sprawling body they’d emerged from. They knew all the mildewed alleys, all the rain-butts where tin waterspouts had rusted paper-thin. All of the area’s smells and blemishes were as familiar to them as their mothers’ moles, and even if her face were lined and dirty they could never go away and leave her. Even if she lost her mind, they …
Tears were standing in his eyes. He blinked them back and then took three quick puffs upon his cigarette before he wiped away the excess moisture with his fingertips, pretending that the smoke had blinded him. None of the passers-by were looking at him, anyway. He felt abruptly angry with himself for all the sloppy sentiment that he still harboured and for just how easily the waterworks came welling up. He was a man now, he was twenty though he felt like thirty sometimes, and he shouldn’t still be blubbing like a little kid. He wasn’t six. He wasn’t weeping over his cropped curls in Lambeth Workhouse and it wasn’t 1895. Although he knew he hadn’t yet completely taken in the fact, this was the twentieth
century. It needed people who were bright and up-to-date and forward-looking in the way they thought, not people who got tearful dwelling on the past. If he were to make anything out of his life he’d better pull himself together, sharpish. Drawing deep upon his fag he held it in and looked around him at the slowly darkening intersection, trying to regard it from a modern, realistic viewpoint rather than a maudlin and nostalgic one.
Yes, you could come to look upon this haphazard array of weather-beaten hulks as like a mother, he could see that. At the same time, like a mother, it was not a thing that would eternally endure. Old age had ravaged it with change, and wasn’t done yet by a long chalk. Just as he’d been thinking a few moments back about how previous generations were restricted in their chances to go travelling, he understood that things should be much different in this new, enlightened age. The steam engine had altered everything, and on the streets of London now you could see motor-carriages, of which he thought there should be more in time to come. Communities of countless decades’ standing like the one around him would perhaps not seem as well-knit if the inmates stood a chance of easily and cheaply getting out, of going where the work was better without walking sixty miles like that girl’s dad had done. Even without a war to decimate its young, he doubted that the bonds connecting people to a place like this would last another hundred years. Districts like this were dying. It was no betrayal, wanting to leap out of them to somewhere safe before they finally went under. Anyone who’d seen the world, who felt that they were free to come and go just as they pleased, why would they want to be stuck in a dump, a town, a country even, that was like this? Anyone with any sense who had the means would be off like a shot, soon as they could. There wasn’t anything to keep them here, and …
Coming through the settled gloaming up the hill was an old black man, on a bicycle that had ropes fastened to its rims instead of tyres, pulling a cart with the same kind of wheels behind it, juddering like a ghost-tale skeleton across the cobbles.