Paradise Court

by Jenny Oldfield

  ‘That’s right, Ern,’ Robert encouraged He’d rolled back his shirt-sleeves and now slicked back his hair with his fingertips as he watched Ernie’s greeting in the mantelpiece mirror. He turned to Daisy. ‘Ernie’s always going on about you,’ he said. ‘He thinks you’re a dazzler!’

  Daisy’s glance was suspicious. ‘You’re having me on,’ she said.

  ‘No, honest.’ Robert crossed his arms and studied Daisy. ‘He does.’ And he began to hum, ‘He’s half crazy, all for the love of you!’

  Ernie stood, enthralled.

  ‘Not funny, I don’t think!’ Hettie yelled from the kitchen.

  ‘Well, bring him along to the show, why don’t you?’ Daisy suggested. ‘I think he’d like that.’ She made a move to go.

  Robert nodded slowly, still standing his ground. ‘Maybe I will,’ he agreed.

  Hettie emerged from the kitchen threatening dire consequences if Ernie didn’t manage to tear himself away from the lovely Daisy, and Robert sent him up to help while he escorted Daisy back downstairs. He parted with her in the public bar. ‘Mind how you go,’ he said, holding the door with exaggerated courtesy.

  ‘Here, Robert, there’s three barrels standing here waiting for you to tap,’ Duke called gruffly from behind the bar. ‘Never mind the girls, just for once in your life.’

  Robert went off grinning to help his father hammer the brass taps into the new barrels. He took up the heavy wooden mallet they kept on the top cellar step and inserted the first tap with a sharp, expert blow. Then he tapped gently at the bung on the top which would let air into the barrel when they began to draw the beer. It was a skilful job, to be done without loss of liquid and without disturbing the sediment newly settled at the bottom of the barrel. Duke watched and grunted with satisfaction as Robert finished the job.

  ‘I only hope it tastes better than the last lot!’ Arthur Ogden said sourly, as he slammed his pint pot on the counter for a refill.

  Chapter Two

  By 1913, Wilf Parsons, known to all his customers as Duke, had run the pub on the corner of Duke Street and Paradise Court for almost a quarter of a century. He’d seen service in India as a farrier, chosen because of his massive build and his long-time knowledge of horses. His own father had driven a hansom cab, and his father before him. Wilf had been brought up to the ring of iron shoes on the cobbled yard below, and he’d sat alongside his father through the dirty black fogs of many a London winter.

  At seventeen the strong lad had joined the army for adventure, and left it at twenty-five with the usual conviction that the sun never set on the British Empire. Army service had impressed upon him the values of orderliness over impending chaos, sternness in the face of insurrection, and a belief in polishing, spitting and polishing again against all the combined forces of darkness.

  The army had turned him into an upright, impressive young man who didn’t question things deeply. But afterwards he sought a situation minus the constant ‘yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir’ of life in the army. He knew enough to be his own boss now.

  First he must find a wife, and through his father’s family he was introduced to a girl in service with a Chelsea property owner. She was the cousin of a cousin, named Patience, and that was her nature too. Pattie, as Wilf called her, was a drudge to the Chelsea family; a tweeny who was as badly treated by the housekeeper and the other servants as she was by the mistress of the house. Up before five each day, she had to clean and lay fires in twelve different rooms before the rest of the household had risen. It was her job to provide hot water for the bedroom pitchers, her job to cart away the lukewarm slops. If a coal scuttle was ever found empty, Pattie felt the housekeeper’s stick. She scrubbed and brushed and polished until midnight seven days a week. Bed was a box in a garret.

  Duke rescued his Pattie from this slave labour by marrying her. She was just nineteen. He was twenty-six. He found work as a cellarman in a pub in Spitalfields, where his size and muscle came into their own once more. He rolled the great barrels down chutes and up cellar steps with enviable case, and hoisted the empty ones like toys on to the dray carts. Besides, he never fell sick and he never missed a day through drunkenness, unlike so many in his trade.

  While Pattie gave him children to dote on; first Frances, a solemn, round-faced baby with her mother’s pale colouring but her father’s striking dark eyes; then gurgling, smiling Hettie, so Duke worked his way into the esteem of the pub owner. And when, in 1889, Jess was born, a third daughter and so a cause of disappointment to the burly cellarman, the offer came of a pub of his own.

  It meant moving across the water and leaving behind all Pattie’s family for new neighbours, new streets. But they went eagerly to set up home above the run-down Duke of Wellington public house at the corner of busy Duke Street and dingy, ramshackle Paradise Court.

  Five years on, the family had grown to be as much a part of the place as the bricks and mortar. Indeed, Wilf had already come to be called ‘Duke’, and the name had stuck.

  When the Parsons moved in with their young family, the Duke itself was one of the old-style beer houses; disreputable home to King Beer and Queen Gin. But the neighbourhood was a warm, closely connected one of men who’d built the underground railways, or who worked the markets and the docks, and women who’d begun to go out to work in the factories and shops. A problem shared was a problem halved, they said. And the Duke was the place to meet and give vent to troubles after work. This was true for the men at least. The women often preferred to stay at home to gossip, or else they chatted on street-corners in fine weather, while their hordes of children played at marbles in the gutter.

  Wilf Parsons, or Duke as he now was, wanted to provide a place a notch or two above the standard in the working men’s own homes. To that end he painted and spruced the place up with cast-iron tables with glossy mahogany tops. And when money allowed, he lined the walls with beautiful bevelled and etched mirrors and fancy brass brackets for the gaslights. Electricity failed to impress him, however, and he clung for many years to the familiar hiss of gas and the gauzy white mantels.

  Meanwhile, Duke’s family had increased in size. Robert was born, his pride and joy. The boy was perfect in looks and temperament; impossible to upset and with a ready smile for all the coos and caresses bestowed by his older sisters. Duke felt his heart would burst with pride whenever he took an hour off on a Sunday and walked at the head of his small procession across London Bridge and under the stem white walls of the old Tower.

  It almost burst with a more painful emotion before long, however, when he nearly lost Pattie as she bore him their next child. Never strong, she found the complicated labour was almost too much for her, and poor Ernie himself was damaged in some unseen way; not perfect like Robert.

  Duke thanked God that Pattie was spared, and for a time they were careful to have no more children. Then, in a kind of gentle, autumn affection, a baby was conceived. It was another troubled pregnancy, and this time Pattie was too weak and worn out to survive the labour. Sadie, another girl, was born, but her mother died to give her life. Duke almost went under from grief, but his own sister, Florrie, stepped in. She pulled things together, and brought up the children while he worked on behind the bar, steadily serving the drinkers of Duke Street and Paradise Court.

  Business never slackened and time lessened the hurt, though it never entirely healed the wound. After Pattie’s death a strange thing happened to Duke. As if angry with her for dying, he turned to disliking all women. A mild, slightly amused distrust of their fussy, gossipy ways developed, and he could never rid himself of the suspicion that a woman would, given half the chance, worm her way under your skin and into your affections, where she would not be welcome. There was no place there except for Pattie; Duke was adamant about that. It meant he even kept his own daughters half at bay, as if Frances, Hettie, Jess and Sadie would insinuate themselves and coax and steal away a little part of his heart.

  Now with Sadie aged fifteen, the rest were practicall
y off his hands. Frances held down her steady job at Boots the Chemist, Hettie had found herself a good life and income treading the boards. Jess was comfortably in service over in Hackney. Robert used a mixture of brain and brawn to pick up any well-paid work that was going in the docks. And Ernie, poor Ernie was at least happy in his own way. All in all, Duke felt that his motherless family had managed to stay on top.

  As for himself, he still cut a fine figure. Nearly sixty, respected up and down Duke Street, and in the court, life dealt him little blows, it was true. But nothing serious, nothing he couldn’t manage to shrug off.

  Now he looked balefully over the top of the shelf he was wiping down as Annie Wiggin marched through the swing doors. Annie was one of life’s little blows.

  She came up to the bar in her scuffed, unlaced boots and rapped her jug down. Steadily Duke wrung out the rag he was using. Rattle, rattle went Annie’s earthenware jug. ‘Ain’t no one round here got a pint of porter?’ she demanded. She rested her elbows on the bar. ‘As if my money’s not as good as the next man’s!’ she declared.

  Arthur Ogden shuffled a yard or two further down the bar. Annie’s sharp tongue was to be avoided. A couple of other young drinkers looked on in casual amusement.

  ‘Men!’ Annie proclaimed again. ‘All the bleeding same! All over you when they want something from you! Like bleeding December any other time! Freeze to bleeding death standing waiting for any of them! Here, ain’t no one going to serve a person!’

  Every tea-time Annie shuffled down Paradise Court in her lost husband’s cast-off boots. They were the only things he left behind when he went, telling her he was off to sea on another trip and would be back in two weeks. Two weeks soon stretched to two months, and still the old boots dried and curled at the hearthside. After two years to the day, Annie declared him lost at sea and began a life of her own running a haberdashery stall at the local market. She bought and sold vast yards of virginal white lace, bags of beaded, pearled and silvery buttons that sat in their boxes like buried treasure. Her stall was decked with blue and white and cherry-red ribbons, and it was stocked with hooks, needles, pins, scissors and skewers like a miniature torture chamber. And yet Annie herself trudged everywhere in her faithless husband’s boots. ‘I fell in the cart good and proper marrying him,’ she would grumble. ‘Still, it’s a gamble you have to take.’ And so life went on.

  As she stood and rattled her jug in Duke’s deaf ears, Hettie swept downstairs and into the pub, on her way out to the evening show. She gave Annie a smile and tutted at her father. ‘Here, Annie, pass us your jug,’ she volunteered. ‘I’ll fix you up.’

  ‘And tell your dad from me he’s too slow to catch bleeding cold,’ Annie moaned. Then she looked critically at Hettie’s green velvet coat and matching hat, all adorned with feathers and a kingfisher-blue bird’s wing, intact and standing proud of the crown. ‘Where you been buying your bits and pieces?’ she asked suspiciously, with narrowed eyes.

  Hettie kept on smiling as she handed back the full jug. ‘From you mostly, course!’

  ‘But not that blue item sticking up there.’ Annie pointed an accusing finger. ‘You never bought that from me!’

  ‘I said “mostly”!’ Hettie answered defiantly. ‘As a matter of fact, I got this from Coopers’.’

  ‘Ooh, la-di-da!’ Annie shrieked. ‘“As a metter of feet . . .!” Go on, tell us what you paid for that bit of dead pigeon, Hettie Parsons!’ She made fun of Hettie hobnobbing in the big department store.

  ‘Calm down, Annie.’ Hettie came round to the front of the bar and took her by the elbow. ‘Got your jug safe? Right then, I’ll walk you home. I need to talk to you about some jet buttons I seen on your stall last time I passed.’

  ‘Jet buttons?’ Annie heard the words through her disgruntled haze. She allowed herself to be propelled smartly between the swing doors and out on to the street. Through years of practice, the beer stayed in the jug as Annie shuffled down the cobbled street. Hettie steered her past lamp-posts, across the court to one of the houses at the bottom. ‘Jet buttons don’t come cheap,’ she told Hettie as the younger woman opened her front door. ‘But I might be able to do something special, seeing as it’s you,’ she promised.

  ‘Thanks a lot! I’ll drop by at the stall some time soon. Night, Annie,’ Hettie said good-humouredly. She pulled her collar high, winked at Tommy O’Hagan in residence under a nearby lamp-post and stopped to ask him where Daisy was.

  ‘Gone,’ he said darkly. ‘Gawd knows where!’

  ‘To work, you ninny!’ Hettie told him. It meant she was late, so she set off up the close at a trot, regretting the plumage on the green hat after all, for it caught in the wind and made negotiating the shallow tram step into an art form that a working girl in a hurry could well do without.

  At the tram stop Frances descended as her sister, Hettie, got on. The women had only time for a quick hello. ‘Something up?’ Hettie called through a side window. Frances looked even more serious than usual. And she was late back from work.

  ‘I’ve been to see Jess,’ Frances replied.

  ‘And?’ Hettie craned her head sideways. The feathers in her hat flapped furiously. She held it on with one hand as the tram wheels ground, sparked and rattled off.

  ‘Tell you later!’ Frances waved. She stood on the pavement in her slim grey jacket. Her fur hat, pulled well down, was practical and warm. Her gloves were good kidskin leather. People would take her for a teacher perhaps, or an officer working for the Relief Board, and they wouldn’t notice the attractive symmetry of her oval face, the fine brows, the chestnut tint in her hair. She made herself too severe and plain for that. At twenty-eight, Frances was considered a long-term spinster. She’d put herself on the shelf by choice at first, and now she was stuck there.

  No boys called out to her at the corner of Duke Street, and Arthur Ogden felt unaccountably guilty as she came quietly through the public bar. ‘Evening, Miss Parsons,’ he said politely. Then he picked up his cap and pulled it firmly on to his head. ‘Best be on my way,’ he called out to Duke.

  Frances smiled and went on up.

  Blow it, Arthur thought after she’d gone. What am I saying? Time for another one at least! And he took off his cap again.

  Robert had told Frances time and again that she was bad for business.

  ‘How can you say that?’ she said, alarmed rather than amused. ‘I don’t say anything! I don’t do anything to make you say that, do I?’

  ‘Exactly!’ Robert said, grinning. ‘You just are, Frances! Respectable, that’s what you are!’

  ‘And that’s bad for business?’ she retorted. ‘Well, then, I’m glad!’ She would storm off, unable to take Robert’s jokes.

  Now she went upstairs with a preoccupied look. As she paused at the top step to take off her hat, she sighed. But the sight of Ernie through in the kitchen, his broad back turned, his figure full of studied concentration as he stood at the sink to wash the dishes, filled her with a rush of warm feeling. She went in quickly and gave him a bright hug of greeting. ‘Now tell me about your day,’ she said. ‘While I toast some cheese here at the fire. Go on, Ernie, who have you seen?’

  ‘Daisy,’ he said slowly. He sounded unreasonably happy.

  ‘Good. And what have you done?’ Frances relaxed as she knelt by the fire. She held a slice of bread and cheese at arm’s length on a long toasting fork.

  ‘Brought up three barrels from the cellar with Robert.’

  ‘Good again! And Where’s Sadie?’

  Ernie plodded on through the pile of dirty plates. He was meticulous about the washing up. ‘Don’t know,’ he decided. ‘She’s not here.’

  Frances nodded. The heat began to send her into deep thought. She remembered the note Jess had sent to the chemist’s shop the day before yesterday. ‘Dear Frances,’ it read. ‘Come and see me on Saturday afternoon. I need to talk to you. Love from your sister Jess.’

  She’d gone along, puzzled and fearful Jess had been with the Holdens fo
r three years or more, with no trouble, no complaints. Like everyone else, she had to work hard, but that didn’t trouble their family. They’d all been brought up to work. No, it couldn’t be that, Frances had opened the iron gate and trodden up to the tradesmen’s entrance with increasing worry. She rang the bell. Jess herself came flying down the corridor to answer the door. Frances went in, spent ten minutes with her sister, listening hard.

  Then, feeling leaden and slow, she’d come back home on the tram. Now she heard her father’s heavy footstep on the stair. Ernie still worked quietly and methodically in the kitchen. Duke came in.

  ‘Joxer’s behind the bar for ten minutes,’ he said. He sighed and sat down. ‘Is there any tea up here?’ Duke was practically teetotal and never drank beer or spirits when he was working. Ernie heard, came through for the kettle and took it away to fill it at the tap. ‘Good boy,’ Duke said.

  Frances was still crouched by the fire, but the toasting fork lay on the hearth neglected. The firelight caught her face, flickering shadow then warm red light across it. There were glints of red-gold in her light brown hair. ‘Dad,’ she sighed, then stopped.

  Duke sat in the chair behind her. ‘Trouble?’ he guessed.

  She turned and saw the lines on his face, the years of hard work. She could hardly bear to be the bringer of bad news. ‘It’s Jess,’ she said quietly. She’d promised, she reminded herself. She was the oldest sister and she took the family’s troubles squarely on her own shoulders. She would have to tell him. She looked up again at the light of the fire flickering over her father’s face.

  He looked down at her and guessed the truth. ‘She hasn’t, has she?’ he said sadly. There was no need to go into any details; he just knew.

  ‘She has.’ Frances nodded.

  Duke sat and looked for a long time into the fire. ‘And?’ he prompted at last.

  Frances swallowed hard. ‘She wants to know will you take her back?’ she said. ‘Jess asked me to ask you, can she come home?’