She kept walking, holding a rolled paper in each hand until the gum was safely dry. She knew what she wanted: a high fence or wall. In that district of builders’ yards and small workshops it should not be hard to find. She saw the proper setting at last, up a turning to the right. There was a big printing works on one side, small houses on the other. She turned sharply into the street, threw one of the newspapers over the printer’s wall and walked on. As soon as the two turned the corner and took up the trail, they wouldn’t miss the obvious inference that one paper had gone over the wall and that the other was still to be delivered.
By God, no, she wouldn’t be arrested now! She was really worth following. Especially since the printer happened to be a government printer. The newspaper would – presumably – be easily found, but what had been rolled up in it and who had picked it up? That unfortunate printing works was going to be turned inside out. She reckoned that the whole of the team would be instantly and urgently occupied except for her two followers. They were committed to her so long as their boots and feet held out.
She was clear of the inner suburbs and among the factories. The main avenue was landscaped, bordered by lawns and imposing offices. Behind it were the service roads, the waste lots, the dumps, the uninviting cafés. She looked at her watch, on this occasion because she really wanted to know the time. It was going to be a close thing, but she must not hurry.
Keeping her even, persuasive pace, she turned off the avenue into the worst stretch of all, empty and far too long. Surely they must realise what was going to happen and arrest her now? She imagined she heard their footsteps closing up, but dared not look back or run.
The third corner was a possible. Far from perfect, but all the chance she was ever going to get. She shot round it and crouched behind a lump of concrete, once part of a weighbridge and now standing shapeless among thistles. There were a few workers further along the road, all busily occupied with brooms or vehicles or last-minute loading.
The two followed almost at once without any precautions at all, startled out of their trance by her sudden evasion just as she hoped they would be. They were still the same pair, seen once near the post box two-and-a-half hours earlier. Hurrying to restore the broken contact, they passed within two yards of her silenced gun with their eyes fixed ahead on the parked vehicles and the factory gate. She let them pass. It had not been her intention, but why take an unnecessary risk? Lucky for them that they had panicked and tried to catch up instead of searching the corner itself.
The factory clock struck six. Cars, bicycles and pedestrians surged out of the gate and surrounded them. She saw them trying, she thought, to give orders to the mixed and flowing column. She wrapped her head in her sweat-soaked scarf, turned her coat inside out and ripped the heels off her shoes so that neither her height nor her bearing would be familiar to her followers if they were in any position to pick out individuals. At last she could allow herself to appear as tired as she felt, shuffling along in a bunch of fellow workers like a weary factory hand twice her age.
She kept walking, now no longer alone, until she saw a bus ready to start. Where it went was unimportant; for her its destination was freedom. Her name was still unknown and her papers in perfect order. After a few professional, quite simple changes in her appearance she could cross the frontier.
Yours Obediently
They all wanted to do something for Mr Melman – the Major especially – though suggestions when discussed seemed more in the nature of persuading him to do something for them. That was reasonable enough. The obvious and most valuable way to befriend a newcomer was to give him an active interest in the community.
Mr Melman was not a recluse but lived quietly. When he first arrived his manner at once attracted the pious and perplexed, for he was very ready with words of comfort. Tolerance, melancholy, a sort of watchful kindliness – all those were stamped into his worn, dark face. The Major wondered if he had not in the past been affected by some oriental creed of renunciation. He kept this surmise to himself. Long experience had taught him that the play of imagination, unless one had a more than military command of words, was usually misunderstood.
The village naturally was curious. A passive curiosity. Mr Melman was known to have lived abroad as some minor official in the Colonial Service, and that was enough. So many of the little houses of main street and square had been purchased by unknown Londoners: schoolmasters, journalists, small businessmen who had made sufficient money to retire. The past of any of the newcomers was therefore irrelevant, belonging to a wider world. Curiosity confined itself to the odder daily happenings of the present.
Melman’s gentle firmness in the affair of the vicar’s dog had impressed everyone. The dog was nearly blind with age but still preserved its youthful habit of taking chances in crossing the village street. The screech of brakes had undoubtedly enhanced its estimate of its own importance.
Punishment was the worst possible: paralysed at one end and normal enough at the other to lick bewilderedly its master’s hand. The vet was away. The vicar was distraught. The Major, to his own shame, found himself dithering. It was Melman, his face motionless, his eyes pitying, who placed the dog under the decent cover of the churchyard wall and borrowed the Major’s gun.
‘I am sorry,’ said the Major, walking home with him. ‘I am very sorry. I shouldn’t have let you. But you were the only one of us who was calm.’
‘I was glad to be of assistance. And I quite understand. I have noticed before, Major, that soldiers are very sensitive.’
‘What’s surprising about that?’
‘Well, ending life …’ Mr Melman murmured with a delicacy which seemed to the Major unnecessary.
‘Oh, I see! I’ve thought a lot about that. Put it this way! A man is prepared to die for what he believes in – country, regiment or just his unit. But it does nobody any good if he simply throws his life away. So that means – bluntly – that he must kill before he’s killed. Morally wrong perhaps, but it feels natural enough when you’re in it and excited.’
‘I’m sure you are right, Major,’ Melman said. ‘But I can’t imagine myself finding any excitement.’
Towards such a man the Major was protective. He prized a sense of duty and could spot it when he saw it. He had no doubt at all that Melman, as a civil servant, had carried out orders promptly and to the best of his ability. That picture fitted a police sergeant rather than a grave comforter, but was all the more reason for respecting Melman’s privacy.
‘If you took the trouble to draw that man out,’ his wife had insisted, ‘you don’t know what you might find.’
Well, that at least was undeniable, though she herself had failed to get anything out of Melman but reserved, conscientious politeness. Women, the Major often thought, preferred life to resemble a pond into which they could throw stones; they liked to take from and give to an ever-expanding circle regardless of the consequences. But one saved a lot of trouble by leaving ponds alone until such time as an appeal came in to drain, clean or renovate, when one accepted duty to the neighbour and did as much over as could secretly be managed.
So, continually pressed to do more than lean on Melman’s garden gate and talk genially about the weather, he compelled himself to venture a more personal approach.
‘Ever thought of standing for the Rural District Council?’
‘I couldn’t make a speech, Major.’
‘Anybody can. All you need to make a speech is an opinion. It runs away with you. Before you know it, you’ve made a speech.’
‘I wouldn’t feel strongly enough. There are always two sides to every question.’
‘That’s useful, too,’ the Major persisted. ‘You could lay off the local politics and help everyone with administration.’
Indeed he could. He seemed to be perfectly at home among government forms and was always willing to help the shy or the ignorant with their claims for benefits, licences and pensions. It had naturally been the widows and spinsters of his own age
who first came to the kind Mr Melman for advice, but word had quickly spread of his ability to fill in blank spaces with ease and authority.
He lived alone, and on two or three evenings a week came down to the pub for a social drink. He liked to be invited to join in any game but never played with exclamations or vivacity. At darts he was so solemnly accurate that Fred Emerson, who kept the pub, suggested on impulse that he might captain the local team; what the youngsters needed to win their away matches was a responsible person in charge of them. But on second thoughts, Emerson said, he was glad when Melman refused.
‘It wouldn’t do for them all to come home too early, Major,’ he added.
The Major saw what he meant. Melman was a very possible captain. He said the right things and smiled at the right jokes. His jollity was no more artificial than that of many other serious-minded neighbours, but they did give a bit of themselves with it. Melman was too noticeably limited to what was expected of him.
‘A very reliable fellow,’ the Major insisted. ‘All those women who think he’s a kind of ministering angel have got him wrong.’
‘Sometimes I think he could have been in old Efford’s trade,’ Fred remarked.
Again the Major understood. Efford was the local funeral director and highly respected on the job or off it. He had a healthy, mediaeval attitude to death. He made all the time-honoured jests with the doctors, and they with him. Efford was a deeply religious man who saw himself as the disposer of something so unimportant that he could – when not on duty – laugh at it.
But there was no resemblance between so richly charged a character and Melman who, though a church-goer, probably saw attendance as a parade: a service like any other service, the reasons for which were not his business. So much was not his business. His life of retirement followed a narrow track. Whatever appeared on it he treated with kindness; what was off to each side of the line he ignored.
Mere conjecture. The Major knew it was mere conjecture and likely to be unfair. Yet it was odd how often this searching for the essence of a man had its uses. One had a reasonable intelligence report to give, right or wrong, when somebody called for it.
It was the vicar who called for it. A new churchwarden would be needed. Did the Major think that Mr Melman would do?
‘Well, so long as you realise what you’re in for,’ said the Major cautiously. ‘He reminds me a little of a sergeant-major in my orderly room. All the evidence for and against the accused was neatly and fairly presented. But if the Military Police had run him in, he was guilty.’
‘I don’t think Melman is like that,’ the vicar protested. ‘I was much impressed by his gentleness on that … that sad occasion, and I blame myself for ever thinking he was cold. Besides, one sees how the children love him.’
They didn’t. They treated him as an animated slot machine. The Major, however, was too good-natured to say so. Mr Melman lived in a pretty white-and-yellow cottage on a lane which was used by a dozen children on their way to school. At that hour – for he was an early riser – he was generally to be seen trimming his neat privet hedge or digging the kitchen garden. The children were inclined to stop and inspect him very warily over the hedge. When they did, he was quick and eager to distribute sweets. That was the idyllic picture to which the vicar referred, but the Major doubted if any real affection was in it. To stare at Melman was cheaper than dropping a coin in a machine and nearly as dependable.
‘The point is: do you like him?’ the Major asked.
‘Yes. Oh, yes! I would call him a dedicated man in a curious way – so dedicated that he treats me as if I were some sort of official. I suppose I am, though I hope there is more to it than that.’
‘Well, we mustn’t press him too hard. He has a right to his peace. I expect he got as tired of doing his duty as the rest of us.’
‘But would you sound him? You know him better than anyone.’
Better than anyone? The Major was well aware that he knew nothing of him. But it was at least evident that he and Melman treated each other with respect. That was perhaps how the myth of understanding had grown.
Rather unwillingly he tackled him over the usual garden gate, reassuring himself by the thought that the job of churchwarden would relieve Melman’s loneliness, whatever effect he was likely to have on the vicar. He was unaccountably relieved, like Fred Emerson, when the man showed no eagerness.
‘If you tell me I should …’ Melman began.
‘It might suit you. I don’t know. But if you want me to ask you to take it on – well, I’ve no right to say you should.’
‘As good as anyone’s, Major. Obedience – that’s what I understand. It helps one to get accustomed to one’s duty. It’s like what you were saying the other day about killing in war.’
‘Obedience is no excuse at all. Nothing to do with it!’ the Major exclaimed, and then, feeling that he had been unwarrantably brusque, added: ‘I’ll tell you a thing I’ve never told anyone. I had to supervise an execution once. Unofficial, but I obeyed. We shot him in the back of the neck. Didn’t do it myself, but I can’t get out of it that way. We is we, if you see what I mean.
‘I’ve no objection to capital punishment in principle. None at all! A very useful deterrent! Nine times out of ten the world is better without the man who is executed. Those damned professional liberals have got the argument all wrong. The State has every right to take life. What it doesn’t have is the right to order somebody to take it. And whether you hang or press a button or shoot, a human hand has to do it. I won’t have that. Society has no right to demand it. Killing in cold blood is murder of the soul which kills.’
To the Major’s surprise, Mr Melman for the first time strongly disagreed with him.
‘You’re wrong about that,’ he said. ‘Now, strictly between ourselves – you always take me just as I am, Major, and I know I can trust you – strictly between ourselves, I was the official hangman. It’s a police job like any other. And I don’t think it has made any difference to me at all.’
Women’s Lib
Wasn’t there some old Greek tragedy in which a band of women tore a civil authority into small pieces because he had no gold braid on his cap? I’m pretty sure that the Ancient Greeks did not wear official caps, but the principle is the same. Ever since 1926 I can never forget that under those appealing faces lurks a profound contempt for the opposite sex.
Perhaps it was nearer the surface then than now. There were still quite a lot of virgins about, and their dreams were of marriage and a home of their own. For the inadequately educated girl few other dreams had a hope of fulfilment; professions, black-coated or brass-hatted, were all out of her reach. No wonder she had a latent, feline resentment of the pretensions of the male.
Why do I choose 1926, you ask. Because that was the year of the General Strike and a call for volunteers to man the public services. Among the misty memories of hundreds of old Londoners will be one of a giant: of a 4–4–0 Great Western locomotive stopped two yards from the mouth of the east-bound tunnel in Earl’s Court station. At a platform meant for trains of the District Line skittering like mice from one hole to another was this great, green monster which had never moved without space and due ceremony. The arch against which it would have been driven, had the six-foot driving wheels made half a revolution more, was lower than the boiler. This was before the rebuilding of the station and the approach from the west was open.
I was the guard of the empty train behind the engine. I had volunteered to wheel hand-trucks about as a porter, but when I ran into an old schoolfellow on Paddington station he appointed me to be his guard. Jimmy Fell was a railway engineer on leave from the wilds of Africa. He had been working with black labour a year or two longer than was good for him and felt imperial. He once abandoned me in the Exeter station buffet and I only found my own train because an amateur shunter had run him into the engine sheds by mistake.
He had driven all kinds of locomotive in his time, so the Great Western gave him a mainline
express and the County of London to pull it. He treated her as his own pet car, and when he wasn’t on the foot-plate he was wandering about inside her guts like Jonah with an oilcan. I call it an express, but all the signals were permanently at danger and we used to feel our way down to Devon from block to block, stopping to negotiate with other speculative railwaymen whenever we seemed to be on a line where we had no right.
After ten days or so of this, the Company chose us to take an excursion to Pangbourne. Yes, they actually wasted time on an excursion. It was a gesture, you see. Sir John Hardy always gave the saleswomen of his suburban branches an outing in the same week of June and, being proprietor of Models Ltd and on the board of the Great Western as well, was determined upon Business as Usual. The nation was paralysed, but he wouldn’t disappoint his ‘girlies’ as he called them.
Well, the Great Western were moved by this touching faith in their organisation, so they agreed to the excursion. Britain with her Back to the Wall. They ordered the line to be cleared to Pangbourne and at 10.30 a.m. we pulled out of Paddington with the trustworthy Jimmy Fell at the levers and four full coachloads of chattering girlies between myself and him. Sir John and his managers naturally went by car. Their lives were of value.
We reached Pangbourne about midday. Our average of twenty-five miles an hour was excellent considering that Jimmy had climbed down twice to see which way the points were set and had been grazed by half a brick that was meant for the fireman. We never had the slightest trouble with the strikers – we were free entertainment for dull days – but our fireman thought he was entitled to call them names which would earn him half a brick at any time. He was a sort of fascist – or whatever they labelled themselves in those days – and all out to smash the reds. In private he sold silk stockings from door to door and he was hungry for any job that called for more muscle but just as little brain. He used to splash himself with oil and coal dust to look like a real fireman. He didn’t. You might have taken him for a tramp who had been sheltering from the rain in a garage pit.
Days of Your Fathers Page 5