Archie was depressed after leaving Somerset, and returning to the Avenue. He soon forgot Anthony’s sneers, James’ stupidity, and little Juanita’s hostility, but there were other, and far more serious worries to take their place and these worries were looming against the background of teeming, harassing pre-occupations of a man trying to steer a fleet of grocery businesses through the sea of total war.
His pre-war stocks were being used up at an alarming rate, and were almost impossible to replace, despite shifts, bribes, and wangles on a scale unprecedented in 1939.
He bought wherever he could, and however he could, and did business with some very shady people in the process. Behind this struggle, hastening up like a reserve army of the enemy, was the constant pressure of his accountants in matters of purchase-tax, income tax, surtax, Schedule A, and God knew what other demands of his purse and ingenuity. It was sufficient, he sometimes told himself, to encourage a man to commit arson.
Occasionally, when he sat in his office behind the corner shop and worked late into the night, surrounded by cartons of coupons, and columns of returns, he almost envied the men on the high seas, like the crazy jazz-drummer over the road, or the men in the R.A.F., like that dreamy idiot, Fraser, now cruising about the night sky in a four-engined bomber. At least these people had but known enemies to contend with, foes who declared themselves with torpedoes and flak, whereas he, hedged about with batteries of forms and ready reckoners, was liable at any time to be betrayed by someone he had been compelled to trust solely because of the fantastic difficulties he faced in keeping his shelves well-stocked.
On these occasions, particularly when it was late at night and he was tired, he would feel himself adrift on an ocean of loneliness. There was absolutely no one to whom he could turn for advice, not one single human being who cared whether he sank or swam, or who could appreciate, even partially, his cares and difficulties.
Elaine Fraser was still available across the road, but it was impossible to discuss business affairs with Elaine. Sometimes he almost made up his mind to ask her to marry him if he could bribe Maria into giving him a divorce. Sometimes he was half prepared to settle for a woman, who, as he was aware, would never prove anything but an expensive luxury, but one at least who shared his outlook and would prove companionable. Once, indeed, he went as far as to sound her on the subject and had been surprised, and slightly mortified, by her seeming evasiveness.
“You and me…? Marry? Oh, I don’t know, Archie, it might work out, then again it might not! What’s the hurry anyway? You can come here whenever you feel like it, and that’s all you really want, isn’t it?”
Was it? He was not sure any longer. Physically she more than satisfied him and he was grateful to her for this, but in the intervals between letting himself into Number Forty-Three, and emptying his pockets of keys and coins on her dressing table, while she sat hugging her knees and smiling tolerantly from the bed, he sometimes felt that he needed more than a soft, white, practised body, that he needed, if not a wife and helpmeet, then at any rate a friend, someone who could be relied upon to console him without a thought as to whether it was worth it or not.
The two plainclothes men called on Archie about dusk one autumn evening, just as he had finished his cold supper, and was peeling off his jacket preparatory to a four-hour stint at his desk in the office above the store.
They were lean, casual, softly-spoken men, in raincoats and trilby hats, but he recognised them for policemen before they had produced their authority and had asked him, civilly enough, if he could ‘spare them a few minutes to assist them in certain enquiries’.
He was obliged to spare them the better part of two hours, for one question seemed to lead easily to others, and Archie’s iron nerve, and his astonishing memory for figures, was severely taxed during the interview.
Once he was obliged to excuse himself on the pretence of making some coffee, and take a quick look at his red pocket-book in the shadow of the step-ladder leading from store to kitchen.
At last they went away, presumably satisfied, and profuse in their thanks. But Archie was far from satisfied, and his head boiled with possibilities, particularly possibilities regarding the source of two cases of whisky and one case of gin, that a gentleman by the name of ‘Swift’ had acquired for him a month or so ago.
Archie had had his doubts about Mr. Swift at the time. He now recollected his mental appraisal of him, on the occasion of their first meeting. It was ‘Swift by name and Swift by nature’, but his doubts had not prevented him from making certain arrangements with the gentleman and at the time these arrangements had appeared to be wholly satisfactory ones, and had resulted in Archie being enabled to supply certain of his privileged customers with a limited supply of good cheer.
Now that the lean, raincoated gentlemen had called, however, and shown such a solicitous interest in his dealings with Mr. Swift, he was not at all sure that the acquaintanceship had been so satisfactory after all. He sat deep in thought for more than half an hour after the detectives had left, and then, after a couple of ’phone calls, he made his decision. If they called once they would call again and next time they might have a search warrant.
It cost Archie a very big effort to destroy, in cold blood, the equivalent of a hundred pounds’ capital gain, and for a few moments he toyed with the idea of concealing Mr. Swift’s cases of spirit on the premises and not of destroying them utterly.
The moment soon passed, however, and he made up his mind to cut his losses. He put on his heavy overcoat and gumboots and stumped downstairs into the store, where he foraged about among cartons and crates until he unearthed three half-empty cases. He loaded them into the back of his car, covered them with sacks and then stuffed some cardboard cartons on top of the sacking, until the whole space at the back of the car was filled. Then he unlocked his yard gates and drove out into the Avenue, turning right into Shirley Rise and making for the hills, beyond the Old Mill.
It was drizzling as he drove slowly and carefully towards the old Roman well, in the direction of Chislehurst, and he had turned into the road that bordered the pinewoods when a war reserve constable stepped into the beam of his headlights and signalled with his torch. Archie stopped and his mouth went dry, but he forced himself to sound tolerant and cheerful.
“Well, and what can I do for you tonight, officer?”
The reservist flashed his torch over Archie’s head and into the back of the car.
“You’re pretty well loaded, aren’t you, sir?”
Archie twisted his thick neck. “Oh that? Yes, I’m still delivering. Can’t get anyone to work overtime these days, so I have to turn to myself. I’m a grocer, and I’m all behind today. I’ve got fifty orders in there, and people have been screaming on the ’phone for them!”
“You’re obscuring your rear window, sir. You couldn’t see anything approaching from behind in your mirror!”
Archie relaxed. “That’s right, officer, I couldn’t, could I? Half a tick then, we’ll see what we can do about it!” and he jumped out, and set about rummaging in the back, beating the topmost cartons flat, until the window space was cleared, and stuffing handfuls of bunched sacking down behind the crates on the cushions: “How about that? Will that do?”
“That’s all right, sir! Sorry I had to flag you but I’ve seen some nasty accidents happen that way!”
“Damn decent of you to tell me,” said Archie, breathing freely again. “Miserable night for a beat. Have a fag?”
“Thank you, sir…you don’t mind if I don’t smoke it now, do you?”
“Not in the least,” said Archie, checking an impulse to give the man the packet. “So long, then, and thanks once again!”
He got in and drove off, watching the pin-point of the man’s torch reflected in his mirror. The incident persuaded him to go further afield than he had intended, and he backtracked along the far side of the woods, towards Westerham, keeping a sharp look-out left and right for a likely dumping place.
&nb
sp; He found one at the bottom of a short, steep hill, where a by-road led off into a hollow, and a slimy pond had formed where the bank had subsided from a stubble field beyond it.
The road before and behind was empty. Having reconnoitred he turned into the lane, drove down it a distance of about fifty yards, and stopped, switching off his lights.
It was not quite pitch dark, for the rain had now ceased and faint starlight glimmered on the surface of the pond. Archie opened the offside door of the rear compartment and heaved out the top case, staggering with it to the edge of the pond, and feeling his way with his feet into the margin of slush.
When he was confident of keeping his balance he lifted the crate above his head and hurled it towards the centre of the pond. There was a noisy splash, but when he had found his torch, and flashed it on the disturbed surface, there was no sign of the case, just a jagged rent in the patch of weed.
Archie grunted with satisfaction, and returned for the second case. Fearing the noise of another heavy splash he set down this one in the mud, and threw the bottles into the water one by one, finally returning to the car and repeating this act of sabotage with the contents of the third and last crate. He counted, bitterly, as he threw. Twenty-seven bottles in all—worth, possibly, four to five pounds apiece at present black-market prices!
When he had finished he remembered the two empty cases at his feet. He shone his torch around and the beam showed him a roughly-made dyke wall, that held the pond water back from the road. The bricks were loose, and he was able to dislodge a dozen or so, which he loaded into the cases before wading out and launching them into deeper water.
The slush rose over the top of his gumboots and filled them, but this did not worry him, for bitterness had now left him and he was conscious of a feeling of achievement. Those nosey sods in raincoats could now come and go as they pleased, for with or without search warrants they would find nothing incriminating on his premises!
He plunged back to the road, sat down on the rear bumper of the car and began to empty his boots. He was thus engaged when he heard a soft squelching quite near at hand, and he looked up, quickly, his left boot in his hand.
A polite voice addressed him out of the patch of darkness towards the main road.
“Shall we resume our little chat now, Mr. Carver?”
Two torches flicked on, and Archie found himself held in their crossed beams, one waterlogged boot on, the other swinging from his hand. Two lean men in raincoats materialised out of the deep shadow, and stood quietly and inoffensively one on each side of him.
“Now then Mr. Carver, why not jump in beside me, and let me reverse you back to the main road,” said one of them, as though conferring a favour on a stranded wayfarer.
Archie was too stunned to make a reply. He sat there, half supported by the bumper, one boot on, and one boot off, and suddenly both feet seemed to go numb, so quickly, and so completely, that he almost cried out in despair and discomfort.
CHAPTER XIII
Judy: Full Circle
AS SOON AS Esme had completed his operational training course in Gloucestershire he went on leave for fourteen days.
He spent the first week in North Wales, with Edgar, his wife Frances, and the baby but the weather was bad, thin, persistent rain misting the Snowdon range and making outdoor activities cheerless.
Little Barbara, who was now toddling about the flat over the shop under the delighted tutelage of Pippa, Edgar’s step-daughter, was not much interested in him but she talked incessantly. Esme was amused to note that she was queen of the little household, and by the mere wave of a pudgy hand could reduce not only Pippa, but Edgar and Frances, to the status of capering slaves.
Himself, she regarded gravely and he was moved when she clamoured for “Grannie Oooniss” as he tucked her up in her cot. It seemed to him strange that a child of thirty months should retain the memory of his mother, dead now for almost a year. He told her that “Grannie Oooniss had had to go away” and had sent Pippa to be a sister in her stead.
The child thought about this for a moment, then accepted it and called loudly for Pippa, who came running, leaving Esme standing helplessly by the rail of the cot.
He realised that, as Barbara grew up, she would have no memory at all of Elaine, her mother, and for some reason the chain of thought set up by this reflection led him to think of Judy, who was still stationed at Queen’s Norton. He made a sudden resolve and kissing Barbara went downstairs and ’phoned a wire: “Going back to Avenue tomorrow—stop-wangle week’s leave join me.”
He excused his departure to Edgar and Frances by telling them that he felt he should spend part of his leave with Old Harold, but it was not really Harold who attracted him back to the suburb but a sudden nostalgia for Manor Wood, with its crumbling, blind-eyed mansion, and still, reed-fringed lake. It was here that he had spent the happiest hours of his life, through the long hazy summers of boyhood; it was here, in the company of the child who had been his constant companion of those years that he wished to go now, as he crossed the threshold of his first operational tour.
The excitement of actually flying, of being one of a team destined to set out, night after night, into the unknown, had ebbed during his active training period at the O.T.U. The act of flying, particularly by night, had brought moments of terror, and a kind of day-by-day drag of anxiety that was never completely swallowed up in the rough and tumble of air-crew camaraderie, but despite this he no longer regretted his decision to exchange the safety and boredom of the orderly-room for the cold and loneliness of a rear-gunner’s turret.
Guns and gunnery appealed to him strongly, and his pass-out marks had been excellent. In addition, he had found in the compact world of a crew a sense of belonging that he had lacked all his life. The men of Bomber Command, he discovered, had very little in common with the traditional flier, the helmeted man of the posters, who had been so lionised during the Battle of Britain days, days that now seemed almost as remote as the ‘Tipperary’ era. The bomber crews displayed little of the strained flippancy and the raffish self-confidence of the young fighter pilots that he had met from time to time in camp and pub. Most of his comrades now were sober, dedicated men and their average age was several years more than that of their colleagues in Fighter Command. Esme’s present skipper, Mike Ollerman, was typical of the heavy bomber pilot, a big, chunky, deliberate Midlander, with a wife and two children in a semi-detached home on a Nottingham housing estate and a junior partnership awaiting him in an estate-agency, if he survived to claim it. There was a cosmopolitan air about Esme’s crew, embracing, as it did, three Englishmen, one Welshman, two Canadians, and a dark-skinned radio-operator, from Trinidad.
Of the six men Esme most admired Mike, the skipper, but he had made a special chum (if a special chum could be said to exist in such a close-knit group) of ‘Snowball’, the Trinidad boy.
Snowball was obsessed not so much with flying in general as with the mysteries of his apparatus. Esme, who shared a room with him, would sometimes watch him ‘doing his homework’ as Mike had put it, assembling, stripping, and then swiftly re-assembling a portable radio set that he carried from camp to camp and almost from pub to pub, as though the plastic case full of coils, valves, and wires, was a tiny, crippled child who could not be left unattended for more than a few moments.
Sprawled on his bed pretending to read, Esme would watch him and marvel at the deft movements of Snowball’s brown fingers, as he prodded, threaded and sifted, his curly head bent over the table, his thick, pale lips pursed in a soft whistle, as he worked and worked at his endless task.
“Why do you do that, Snowball? What makes you want to keep fiddling with the bloody thing?” Esme had once asked him, for apart from guns Esme had the romantic’s dislike for gadgets and all things mechanical.
Snowball had paused and looked up. “Ah dunno,” he had replied, scratching his head, “Ah guess it kinda makes me feel somebody when all dese bits goes whar Ah say dey go!”
The rep
ly set Esme pondering at the unlikeliness of it all, of all the strange journeys and enterprises over the past two hundred years, that led to this man being here at this particular time and place, crooning a plantation ditty composed by enslaved ancestors, as he tinkered and tinkered with a portable radio set because its assembly ‘made him feel somebody’.
Musing to himself Esme pictured the Bristol slaver full of manacled Negroes, as it set out upon the infamous middle passage to the West Indies. He saw Snowball’s greatgrandfather hoeing and singing as he worked along the rows of some rich man’s plantation, and then Snowball’s grandfather, and father, existing under hardly more favourable conditions, in some hovel near a white, tide-washed beach. It seemed to him as if Snowball’s thread wandered back across the centuries, linking him with men who had lived out their lives in jungle clearings and had never heard the throb of aircraft, or dreamed that it was possible for anyone to pass over their forests in huge, complicated machines, like the one that Snowball climbed into each night.
He thought about Snowball again as the slow, crowded train carried him south-east to the Avenue, and he made a resolve to ask him home to Number Twenty-Two on their next leave, and show him the scenes of his own boyhood on the Kent-Surrey border. Judy would like Snowball and would be kind to him, without that slight touch of patronage that even the rest of the crew showed towards the Negro. Judy would be interested in his musings about Snowball, for always, he recalled, Judy had been interested in the same things as himself, right from the days when they had played King Arthur in the woods, and flung, oh, how many Excaliburs, into the Manor Lake?
The Avenue Goes to War Page 18