A Song of Sixpence

by A. J. Cronin

  ‘What big thing, Annie?’ I gasped.

  ‘Whisky!’ she proclaimed, enjoying the effect of that omnipotent word. ‘Whisky in bond. Barrels and barrels of the stuff, all sealed by the revenue, maturin’ and maturin’ and gettin’ dearer and dearer all the time. You’ll know about that too, my lad, when we come to the next bottling day.’

  I looked at her dazedly, all my notions of Leo whirling around in a haze of amazed uncertainty. What was I to make of this uncle of mine who was so outrageously rich yet starved himself, and me, on pease-meal stirabout? I didn’t dare pursue the matter for fear of further revelations.

  When dinner was over and Mrs Tobin had refused my subdued offer to help her wash the dishes, I went pensively down to the shop to ensure being there when Leo returned.

  He arrived punctually at two, seemed pleased to find me on duty and even went so far as to congratulate me in restrained terms on the manner in which I had written his letters. He then took off his jacket and put on a waistcoat with black, alpaca sleeves, then, still wearing his bowler hat, which indeed he rarely removed, indoors or out, went into his office, where for some time he was busy, alone, working over some stiff-backed ledgers. But these were restored to the safe as his customers began to arrive. What surprised me was the number of poor women, some even draped in shawls—sure emblem of the slums—who came in looking for what they described as ‘ remnants’, and which I soon discovered to be end pieces of the material just short of an adequate length. A few of these were apparently tenants of my uncle, for they addressed him as ‘Leo’ but despite this familiarity and the cajoleries, usually prefaced by the exclamation: ‘Ah, Leo, for the love of God …’, he remained unfailingly polite, merely pointing to one of a number of cards prominently displayed on the trestles and marked This house does NOT extend credit.

  It could however be said for Leo that when they did buy he courteously presented them with a pattern from Weldon’s Home Dressmaker on the back of which was stamped ‘Free Sample’. But in the main his customers were cheap, single-handed tailors in a small way of business, some of them foreign, and many of Jewish persuasion. Mr Morris Shapiro, entrusted with the honour of making my suit, and who came into the warehouse towards the end of the afternoon, was unquestionably in this category. A frail, cadaverous, ill-looking little man, pale-faced, with enormous dark shadowy eyes and a plastered streak of black hair across his yellowish skull, his manner towards Leo, expressed in fluttering gestures, was painfully ingratiating.

  Nevertheless he seemed to betray some misgivings when he was confronted by the chosen material. He looked at it, fingered it, looked at me, then at Leo.

  ‘The young gentleman likes it?’

  Too shy to speak, I permitted Leo to incline his head without a rebuttal.

  ‘Not a trifle flash?’

  ‘No.’

  Mr Shapiro hesitated, then picking a single strand from the web of the material, he struck a match on the box he took from his pocket, lit the strand and brought the charred end to his nose. He then looked up at Leo again.

  ‘Short on wool,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Leo said, turning away with, extreme coldness. ‘But it will wear.’

  ‘And make up lovely,’ Mr Shapiro agreed hastily. ‘ It will hang a treat.’

  When he had measured me, he bundled up the material and tucked it under his arm. Then, as he hurried off, he took a cautious side glance, cupped his head and literally hissed in my ear:

  ‘He’s been trying for years to get rid of it.’

  Although Leo could not possibly have heard, I sensed that for some reason unknown to me the incident had upset him. He paced up and down, glancing at me from time to time, as though about to refer to it. But, in the end, he did not. When I asked if I should light the gas, as it was getting dark, he shook his head. Inspecting his watch, thus again signalizing his immediate departure, he came forward and put his hand on my shoulder.

  ‘You’re my nephew, boy, you know I mean to do the right thing by you. You’ve done well for your first day and we’ll see how you get on. But always remember that money is hard to come by here.’ He gave me an approving pat. ‘Now I have to go out to see a man. It’s time to close up.’

  He locked the door with the key from his bunch and went quickly down the stairs while I went slowly up to Mrs Tobin. It had been for me a strange, unprecedented day and my head was spinning from it.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  During the weeks that followed it became evident that my uncle meant to keep me fully occupied, and as we were frequently together in these endeavours I had ample opportunity to observe this truly extraordinary man.

  In the morning, on his instructions, I wrote most, though not all, of his letters. There was of course no typewriter in the office, recording machines were not at all to Leo’s taste. Moreover, despite the diversities of Uncle’s business, his correspondence was relatively modest, since the major portion of his affairs was conducted by word of mouth. Nor when he wrote did he trouble the penny post. I was sent to deliver his missives. When not engaged on such forenoon errands I remained on duty in the showroom draped in the inch tape and with a pencil behind my ear. I was now allowed to sell to the odd customer who came in at that hour, provided ready money was produced on the spot. But the expeditions which I took in Leo’s company were the most revealing of all.

  Why did he take me? While using me to his best advantage I believe that a residual spark of conscience, faint survival of his early upbringing or perhaps a reluctant sense of obligation to my mother, induced him to try to give me some grounding in a commercial career or the ‘art’ of business as he practised it. Thus, while so far he had excluded me from the rent collecting, managed by Annie and himself, he permitted me to accompany him to all the auctions he attended, and to the bonded warehouse at the docks.

  At the right price Leo would buy anything, not bankrupt or salvaged stock of cloth alone, but any article whatsoever on which, immediately or in due course, he knew instinctively that he could make a profit. Standing beside him in the crowded, raucous auction marts that opened off Argyle Street I would gaze in wonder at his pale impassive face as with an almost imperceptible blink of his eyelids he increased by sixpence his bid for some incongruous object which if portable I must carry back to join the jumble in the storage rooms upstairs. These rooms, on both sides of the upper corridor, were so choked to the ceilings it was difficult to open a door without being crowned by an outrush of piled-up furniture.

  The auctions eventually proved wearisome to me, but I was never bored by our visits to what Leo referred to simply as ‘the excise’. To enter our door in this building, which was officially sealed, two keys were necessary, one from Uncle’s bunch, the other kept by the revenue officer. The array of barrels revealed in the dim light of the frosted windows confounded me at first, not only from the number and size of these deep-bellied receptacles, but because I had naturally expected Uncle’s whisky to be stored in bottles—a view which he soon dispelled by explaining that the spirit would never mature unless contained in sherry or seasoned casks.

  Here, then, was Leo’s main business, his capital, his source of future profits. He bought whisky, bought at the right time, stored it free of excise duty, and as it ripened watched its value steadily increase. He was not only a shrewd buyer but a thoroughly expert blender. How often I watched, fascinated, as he took half Highland and Lowland malts, a ‘taste’ of Islay, and mixed these with a patent still whisky the name of which he refused to divulge. Then, taking a measured sip, he would sample the blend by rolling it round his mouth and tongue, gargling almost in his throat, and finally, with a nod of approval and a hoarse expectoration, blow the whole swill out. As Annie had told me, he never let a drop down his gullet.

  Even in those early days, Leo undoubtedly possessed unique and amazing foresight. He anticipated the danger of currency depreciation and placed his trust in property and whisky. Yet, as I became aware of his present and potential wealth, I
couldn’t help asking myself, what on earth he got out of it. His life was a model of the dullest, most stringent and most utterly miserable austerity. Then it dawned on me that for Leo the supreme enjoyment, the pinnacle of inner delight, lay in the secret knowledge of his own worth, under this pretence of penury. I have said that he never smiled. Yet sometimes when in conversation during some business deal he would emit a typical phrase, such as ‘ I’m a poor man’ or ‘I couldn’t afford it’ or ‘you could buy and sell me’, I would observe a twitch, that faint transient convulsion of the lips, as though with immense difficulty he was suppressing delicious gusts of internal laughter. Strangely, although I saw or surmised all this, and despite the exactions and deceptions he imposed upon me, I could not dislike him. Instead, as I gazed at his pale, peaked face, I felt an unaccountable rush of sympathy, and was disposed to pity him. This precisely was the emotion he sought to inspire, the triumph of all his guile, for it established and confirmed the character he had created and within which the real Leo Carroll lived.

  While life with Leo was not too onerous, my main problem centred on food. Uncle himself, apart from the patent pabula towards which his faddism directed him, seemed to exist almost without sustenance. He took his breakfast alone very early before I was up, his lunch was enwrapped in equal mystery and when he came in late at night he would go to the stove and, still wearing his bowler hat and with a look of abstraction, stand silently concocting himself one or other of his messes: Gluten Groats, Arrowroot, or Sandfood Rusks and stirabout.

  Certainly, he kept us on preposterously short commons, and as I was growing rapidly, I almost constantly felt hungry. I should have fared badly but for Mrs Tobin who had an undetermined arrangement for board wages with Leo which, while lapsing periodically through Uncle’s protests that he was short of ready cash, were eventually forthcoming when she threatened to give notice. This pittance enabled her to supplement the bare necessities of our diet by what she called ‘her extras’, all of which she shared unhesitatingly with me. Indeed more often than not when it came to a matter of division it was I who received the larger portion.

  Nor was it solely through my stomach that my first impressions of Annie were reversed. When my new suit arrived, its atrocious pattern threatened to condemn me to endless misery and shame. But one Saturday night, after a week of anguish during which I felt myself the object of every laugh and stare in the city of Winton, Mrs Tobin removed the offensive garments, dyed them a dark inconspicuous brown, dried and pressed them, and by Monday morning presented me with an outfit that was at least respectable.

  Annie was without exception the most obliging, cheerful person I had ever known, seldom put out, a fount of amiability, always ready to laugh off her troubles and mine. To her most things, even my uncle’s incomparable stinginess, seemed good for a laugh, and although she would explain this to me with the most devastating cliches, such as ‘life’s a queer business, dear, we’ve got to face it with a smile’ or ‘ laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone’, these were merely the expressions of an untaught mind. Nothing could detract from a nature that exuded generosity, honourable decency, and in which there was not a single streak of malice. When she told fortunes—she greatly liked to ‘read the tea-cups’—she always predicted favourable happenings, never ill, tidings. In all our association I did not once hear her make a mean, or uncharitable remark. Even Leo, who surely merited her worst reproaches, she dismissed with a commiserating laugh. ‘You can’t help but be sorry for me poor man. Faith, he’s harder on himself than he is on us.’

  She was a widow with four surviving children, all sons. Three were in the British Army—she never said ‘the army’, invariably prefacing the qualification as though her boys were in the service of a foreign power—two in India, one in Singapore, and the fourth had emigrated, but without success, to Canada. Although she seldom heard from them and then only briefly, she would sometimes speak of them to me, recalling some incident of the past with a reminiscent smile. On the mantelpiece of the kitchen, beside the glass bowl in which she affectionately maintained a rather senile goldfish, was an old postcard with a moonlit view of the Taj Mahal on which was written: ‘Dear Mother, I hope this finds you well as it leaves me. Your loving son, Daniel.’ When it would catch her eye she would smile at me and begin: ‘Danny was always a good boy though a trifle wild at times. I’ll never forget the day he fell off the pier at Dunoon …’

  But mainly, during our long evening conversations, she had most to say about her husband. She called him ‘ Da’. I must confess that I had slight interest in these family reminiscences, but as I had become extremely fond of Mrs Tobin I made myself listen with every appearance of sympathetic interest. Usually they went like this:

  ‘Da was a good man, dear. Intelligent too. But he never had a trade. He’d get a job for a couple of weeks then be knocked off. He was too much of a gentleman, in his own way, for the labouring. He bought a horse and lorry, but the horse fell down on us. Yes, dear, it died on him. Still if he’d got paid for what he did, we’d of been well away. But making money wasn’t in him. It wasn’t his line. Oh, he was popular. When he died the whole street turned out. A lovely funeral.’

  Annie herself was deservedly popular among the group of Irish expatriates in the district who congregated, usually on Tuesday nights, at a public house kept by one of their number and named, with nationalistic spirit, ‘The Shamrock’. Not infrequently these were festive occasions for me. When Annie had a few extra coins in her purse or when she had backed a winner, since she was not above having threepence or even as much as a shilling on a horse, she would put on a man’s cloth cap which she secured carefully with long hatpins and take me first to Bonelli’s fish and chip shop for a fried-fish supper, then, although I was sill under the legal age, smuggle me in with her to the snug, of ‘ The Shamrock’. Her entry was invariably greeted with shouts of welcome and when she had ordered a Guinness for herself—she never drank more than one—and a ginger ale for me, there would be cries of ‘Give us a song, Annie.’ After an exchange of chaff and without the least self-consciousness she would oblige with ‘The Minstrel Boy’ or ‘ Tara’s Halls’, followed, as an encore, by a great favourite which I think was called ‘The Wearing o’ the Green’.

  Oh, Paddy dear and did you hear

  The news that’s goin’ round,

  The shamrock is forbid by law

  To grow on Irish ground.

  Then a chorus, in which with tremendous feeling everyone joined:

  The dear little shamrock,

  The sweet little shamrock,

  The dear little, swe-eet little, shamrock of Ireland.

  Despite these pleasures, or perhaps because of them, I could not blind myself to the fact that circumstances had reduced me to a submerged level of existence. For all practical purposes I now lived and worked in the slums of Winton. The change was alarming, the locality deadly. Back-to-back tenements surrounded us, interspersed with narrow streets and mean alleys in which one saw exhibited every sign and symptom of poverty and misery—the shawled women, idle men, and worst of all, the ragged, rickety, deformed children. Perpetually noisy, dirty and choked with traffic, Argyle Street seemed to me a running sore. Saturday night on its crowded flaring pavements was saturnalia: drunks rolling around, lying in the gutter, or being frog-marched to the police station, sailors on leave from the docks looking for trouble, factions of the rival football ‘brake’ clubs fighting it out with fists and knives after the match, while with a clash of cymbals, a thump of the drum and a blare of brass that heightened the pandemonium, the Salvation Army paraded up and down, pausing from time to time to sing a hymn, preach the terrors of damnation, and pass the tambourine.

  In all my daily contacts, human and inhuman, there was nothing to improve or stimulate my mind. When, driven by the afternoon vacuum in my stomach, I slunk into Bonelli’s for a penny plate of chips only to be met by a rush of broken English from the back shop: ‘Chipapotata no ready. Gre
en pea ready. You wanna green pea?’ I felt bitterly that my star had waned since those days of happiness and promise when Miss Greville, discoursing on the Orchis maculata in an ambience of Eton, paused to address me across the impeccable table: ‘Another cutlet, Carroll?’

  I knew now that my mother couldn’t have had the faintest precognition of what lay in store for me. Those earnest conversations with Leo, while she anxiously studied his sad, pale, plausible face, must have induced in her an entirely false impression of the prospects he could offer me. Yet I could not bring myself to write and reveal the truth. This would alter nothing of my situation, and from her frequent letters, Mother had trouble enough fulfilling her teaching obligations at the school in time to take the train journey to Cardiff to attend her all-important night classes, which, she had confided to me, were proving harder than she had foreseen, with many technicalities she found difficult to understand.

  Nevertheless, as I felt myself slipping into a kind of bog, stifled by the prevailing smoke and grime, I tried to brace myself by striving again for that elusive Greek ideal which I had pursued in the past, a physical adequacy which was so far not reflected in my attenuated form. The solitary bath in Leo’s establishment served at present as a repository for an accumulation of useless household rubbish, old door handles, bent nails, broken picture frames, bashed cardboard boxes and the like, which Uncle had not allowed to be thrown out; but aided by Annie I cleared away this debris. Although the enamel was chipped and rusted the antique tub held water, and thereafter, every morning when I got up, I did fifteen minutes of bodybuilding exercises, then took a cold dip. In the evenings, which had begun to lengthen, I returned with joy to my old love. It cost only a halfpenny fare to take the yellow tram from Argyle Street to Kelvingrove Park on the western outskirts of the city, but as I often lacked that coin I did not mind walking all the way along Sandimount Street and Western Road, since I was wearing my old gym shoes which made me feel light and full of springiness. At the Park, which extended in a series of tree-lined avenues and curving drives beneath the University, I would pause to gather myself, then begin to run, through the gathering twilight, on the circuit I had mapped out for myself. Except for an odd couple spooning on a bench, few people were about at this time. The sense of freedom and inexplicable delight which I experienced in this swift transit through the cool air, still luminous with the fading sunset, afforded me an escape from all my woes which, as though blown away by the wind of my speed, fluttered and fell behind me.