“Sure is,” Orrie agreed, “kinda gets you, like one o’ Bing’s. Where in hell is this place ‘Berkeley Square’? Is it hereabouts?”
“Well, it’s not far,” Jim heard Fetch say. “We’ll take you there when we go up West.”
Jim smiled at the phrase ‘up West.’ It was so Cockney and so dated. His wife had always liked to go ‘up West’ on Saturday afternoons, and Edith Clegg still talked of ‘going up West’ whenever she intended to look at the shops in Piccadilly or Regent Street.
He pulled himself together, shook out his pipe and passed through the house into the Avenue, forgetting his promise to wash the cups.
The moon was riding high over the blur of Manor Wood, a wood, so Orrie had told him, that would soon be the site of an American transport depot, with its headquarters in the old mansion.
A sense of peace and tranquillity descended on Jim as he walked along the Avenue towards Shirley Rise.
The war, he reflected, was now almost three years old and practically everybody in the world was drawn into it, just as they had been involved the last time. Harold was right, however, there was only one end to it, and ultimate victory for the Allies was now an absolute certainty.
Jim felt that he had acquired his second wind and could await the end with equanimity.
CHAPTER XVII
Edith Returns To Olympus
THE UNEXPECTED MARRIAGE of Jean McInroy precipitated another minor financial crisis at Number Four, where Edith Clegg had for some years depended on lodgers to supplement her slender income.
She was, however, well accustomed to these crises by now. She had weathered half a dozen since the day, soon after the end of the First World War, when her bank manager had pointed out to her that Parson Clegg’s legacy was insufficient to maintain his two daughters in a world of steadily rising prices.
That had been the day she had decided to give music lessons, and to let her front bedroom, the day she had advertised for a boarder and attracted Ted Hartnell.
Later on, when Ted had been sacked from the stonemason’s yard, and was out of work for a long time, she had found a new source of income as pianist at the Granada Cinema, in the Lower Road but she was ousted from the tiny orchestra pit by Al Jolson’s Sonny-Boy. Then Ted had become well known as a jazz drummer, and had got married and gone to live over the road, which meant that his room had to be let to Jean McInroy, but now the room was vacant again and the budget of Number Four was down by thirty-five shillings a week.
Whenever she needed practical advice Edith sought out Jim Carver, a man for whom she had harboured an enormous regard dating from a winter’s day, in 1920, when he had escorted her to the Abbey in order to pay her respects to the Unknown Warrior.
Edith now pointed out to him that the care of poor Becky was costing more than she could afford, and that the cost of running Number Four was eating into her limited reserves. Jim advised her to make another bedroom out of the parlour, and let both her main bedrooms to American officers, from the depot in Manor Wood. Accommodation in the suburb, he said, was very limited now, and he was sure that she would have no difficulty in finding a couple of regular boarders. American officers, he added, would eat in their mess and Edith would thus be under no obligation to stay home and cook for them. She might even get a part-time job, as there were plenty going nowadays.
Jim gave his daughter’s friend, Orrie, a slip of paper advertising Edith’s vacancies, and in due course two officers presented themselves, Major Leonidas Sparkewell and his middle-aged adjutant, Lieutenant Ericssohn. They moved in without any fuss, and in the months ahead they proved as satisfactory as Edith’s previous lodgers, coming and going quietly about their business, and occasionally supplementing Edith’s rations with gifts of tinned soups and candy.
Edith, liked the Lieutenant rather better than his younger superior, of whom she was a little afraid. He breathed hard through his nose, reminding her of Billy Bones, in ‘Treasure Island’, and whenever he stood aside to let her pass in the hall or on the stairs, she noticed that his breath smelled very strongly of liquor. Saul’s breath had smelled like that when he had come courting Becky long ago, and perhaps it was because of Saul that Edith could not rid herself of a distrust of men who smelled of liquor, but she told herself that this was very unfair on Major Sparkewell, who always behaved towards her like a perfect gentleman, and even called her ‘Mam’ as though she was royalty.
The Major was a big, uncommunicative man, but in one of his rare confidences he told her that his adjutant, the lieutenant, was ‘lousy with dough’. She discovered, after confiding in Jim, that this did not mean that he suffered from some obscure illness, but simply that he had plenty of money and was not dependent on his army pay.
The Lieutenant was a great contrast to the Major. He was slight, balding and at least ten years older than his superior. He wore rimless spectacles, and spoke with what Edith later discovered to be a rich, Southern accent.
Lieutenant Ericssohn was much more talkative than Major Sparkewell.
He came, he told her, from Carolina, where slaves had once worked on the plantations, and where they composed the songs that she, Becky and Teddy used to sing at their evening soirées round the cottage piano. This information interested her very much but she gathered that, prior to his enlistment after Pearl Harbour, Lieutenant Ericssohn had not been engaged in the planting of cotton but the more prosaic occupation of planting timber.
He was shy, courtly and inclined to blush, not at all like most of the Americans whom Edith saw crossing the meadow all that summer. Most of these soldiers looked untidy, yet happy-go-lucky, with their toadstool helmets, worn low on their sunburned faces, their unzipped windcheaters, and the everlasting rotation of their jaws.
Jim told her there were now hundreds of thousands of Americans in the country and that they had come here to prepare for an all-out attack across the Channel. She was a little intimidated by their raucous good humour and constant horseplay, but she went out of her way to smile at each one that she passed in the Avenue. They always smiled back and sometimes said: “Howdy, mor!”, which she supposed to be some special form of transatlantic greeting.
The letting of her two rooms solved her financial problem and there was no need for her to go out and look for a part-time job, but it so happened that, in the August of that year, a job fell into her lap and set her once more upon the slopes of Olympus, where dwelt the heirs of poor dear Rudi and all the other gods and goddesses whose worshipper she had been when she had played ‘Hearts and Flowers’, and Handel’s ‘Water Music’ in the orchestra pit of the Granada.
It had taken Edith a long, long time to adjust herself to talking-pictures. Her conversion had, indeed, been postponed right through the ‘thirties,’ until she witnessed, almost by accident, the epic ‘Gone with the Wind’, during the anxious summer of 1940.
The conversion was permanent for since then she had been a regular patron of the Odeon, that had now replaced the Granada under new and glossy management.
The young man who had stood in the gilded foyer of the cinema, wearing a smart dinner-jacket, had always a kind word for her when she went in and out of a matinée, but he had recently joined up and had been replaced by a jovial, corpulent manager, who bustled in and out of the cash desk and offices and seemed not to have time to chat with regular customers like Edith.
At least, so Edith thought throughout the early part of 1942, and she was therefore surprised and delighted when he hurried across to her, as she was leaving the cinema one afternoon, and greeted her by name. His booming voice reminded her of Mr. Billington, the original owner of the Granada, and the man who had first engaged her, nearly twenty years before.
“I say! You’re the Miss Clegg, aren’t you? You used to work here in the old days, didn’t you? I wonder if you’d do me the honour of coming into the office for a cuppa, Miss Clegg? Nellie…” he snapped his fingers at a teen-age girl, who stood by in tight, grey trousers and a frogged jacket, “bring a pot of tea
into my office! This lady and I are going to have a little business chat!”
Overwhelmed, Edith followed the manager into his plushy office and was bowed into a deep armchair. She was breathless and elated, for she had very happy memories of the Granada, and found it extremely pleasant to be shown so much courtesy by a stranger, whose office, did he but know it, was situated on the very spot where the fire emergency exit had been in her day.
Tea was brought in and they chatted about the film, an exciting war film, called ‘One of Our Aircraft is Missing’.
“You’re a real regular of ours aren’t you, Miss Clegg? I’ve always been meaning to introduce myself, ever since young Hedditch, my predecessor, pointed you out to me! I say, is it true that you used to work here in the flea-pit days?”
Edith remembered then that some people had always referred to the Granada by this curious name, but she had never understood why, for in all the years that she had worked here she had never once encountered a flea and that despite Mr. Billington’s reluctance to employ a regular charwoman.
“I was the pianist here for years,” Edith told him, gravely. “It was a much smaller place then, of course. There was only Mr. Billington, his operator, and me. I…I loved it here. You see, I felt I was actually taking part in the films while I was playing for them! I suppose that must sound rather silly to you but it was how I felt, as though poor dear Rudi and dear Buster Keaton, and all the others of those days, were…well…friends of mine, if you see what I mean?”
The manager, Mr. Bliss, did see what she meant. He recognised her at once as the kind of person he was looking for, someone who might prove invaluable to him in these days of acute shortage of staff and unpredictable decisions from head office.
“How would you like to work here again, Miss Clegg?” he asked, with an engaging smile.
Edith blinked at him. “Work here? Me? But you…you don’t have a pianist now? All the music and noises off come with the picture, don’t they?”
Mr. Bliss chuckled. “Why yes, that’s so, but I didn’t mean as a pianist, I meant as a kind of…well…general factotum…a relief in the cash-desk, a relief at the confectionery counter, and even a stand-in for me on my days off! A kind of under-manageress and usherette-supervisor you might say!”
Edith sucked in her breath and clenched her plump hands with excitement. Under-manageress! Supervisor! At a real cinema! With free access to every film that was shown! Then a doubt assailed her. There was poor Becky, who could not be left alone for more than brief periods, and there was the house to be looked after, and the Americans’ rooms to be cleaned and tidied. Reluctantly she shook her head.
“I…I’d love to come here and work but it’s not possible…you see, I’ve an invalid sister, and two lodgers. I don’t cook for them it’s true, and my sister isn’t at all helpless, but…”
Mr. Bliss had been looking for someone like Edith for a long time and the fate of his weekly day off hung in the balance. Because of this he was disinclined to surrender Edith without a determined struggle. He pointed out that they could doubtless come to some special arrangement about hours of duty, and that she would find him far from unaccommodating in matters of time off, last minute readjustments of free periods and, above all, overtime rates.
She protested a little but in the end she promised to give the matter serious thought, and ‘see what arrangements could be made about poor Becky’. She left him a less harassed man than she had found him, and as he later confided to his wife—“Here was an old duck who was really sold on corn, and likely to prove a godsend in the winter ahead!”
Mr. Bliss was a good judge of character. The necessary arrangements were made that very night. Mrs. Hooper, of Number Six, agreed to come in and ‘do’ for her neighbour for two hours daily, at half a crown an hour, and Louise Strawbridge, of Number Twenty-Two, agreed to give Becky a high tea each day, reluctantly agreeing to accept a fee of two shillings per meal.
“How much are they paying you?” Jim wanted to know, after Edith had explained the situation to him over a snack in Number Twenty-Two.
“That’s funny,” said Edith, her hand flying to her mouth, “I didn’t ask him!” And when Jim roared with laughter, “Well, I hardly liked to! He was such a nice man, and so very polite to me!”
They paid her five pounds ten shillings a week, for six hours a day, six days a week.
She went in at 3 p.m., when the matinée had commenced and left about 9 p.m., soon after the second-house had gone in and it was unlikely that fresh patrons would present themselves at the cash-desk.
Edith found the work easy and the atmosphere very congenial. When she had checked her cash, and transferred it to Mr. Bliss’s office safe, she usually managed to slip into the auditorium in time to see the tail-end of the feature film before having her tea. She then picked up the beginning of the feature immediately after the news, about six-thirty in the evening, standing by the brass rail near the main exit until it was time for Elsie’s break at the confectionery counter and returning, unless she was especially busy, when Elsie came back at seven o’clock and Maureen had totted up the first-house returns.
It was rather trying, at first, to follow the stories in this disjointed manner, but she soon grew accustomed to it and occupied her mind between times in spotting the villain or working out the dénouement.
She was surprised to discover how often her guesswork proved accurate and she soon came to bestow upon stars like Clark Gable, and David Niven, the same affection as she had once lavished upon Rudolph Valentino, and Ramon Navarro.
She liked best of all the war films, of which there were now a surprising number. She grew familiar with naval and air force slang, and could soon distinguish between destroyers and cruisers, Spitfires, and Heinkels. As in the far-off silent picture days, her personality began to reflower under the magic of the screen. She became more confident, more talkative, and as knowledgeable about screen personalities as she had been in the days when their private lives were recorded swimming-bath by swimming-bath, in film magazines.
She knew for instance, that David Niven, whose popularity increased with each picture he made, was actually a serving soldier in the Forces, and not just a make-believe soldier for the purposes of the film in which he was acting. She knew just how Veronica Lake kept her long, fair hair so sleek and exciting. She grew very fond of tough little Cagney, and elevated dear, gentle, mellow Mr. Tracy to a pinnacle within hailing distance of poor, dear, Rudi, whose wordless, eye-rolling proposals had yet to be matched in these days of outspoken desire.
She began to enjoy the musicals, particularly those starring that nice man, Bing Crosby, and she once shamelessly skimped her duties, in order to hear him sing ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas’ nineteen times, during a single week’s showing of ‘Holiday Inn’.
She liked agile, whimsical Mr. Astaire, and his gay partner, Ginger Rogers, who could play dramatic roles, in addition to dancing so well. She liked them all, although the broad comedies seemed to have lost something by becoming audible, and she was always secretly hoping that Buster Keaton or Ben Turpin, would make a comeback in some of their extravagant two-reelers of the ‘twenties’.
Dear Mr. Chaplin (who would not part, bless him, with his British nationality, in spite of making so much money in America) was still going the rounds, and she laughed until she cried at his portrayal of Hitler, in ‘The Great Dictator’, particularly his excruciatingly funny shaving of the fat German customer to the ever quickening rhythm of ‘The Hungarian Rhapsody’.
As time went on the war began to recede for Edith. Gradually she ceased to become aware of the actual fighting in Russia and Africa, or of the drone of R.A.F. bombers, winging their way towards the indestructible rail-yards at Hamm. She listened to, but without really hearing, endless speculation on the advance of the Japanese in the Far East, and the public clamour for a Second Front now, and every other topic that was being discussed up and down the Avenue. Sometimes she caught brief glimpses of current
events in the newsreels, but the war news did not really interest her, and she much preferred to get through her work while it was being shown, in order to have a better opportunity to see what Mr. Cagney and Mr. Tracy, were up to that week.
Everyday worries receded from her once she had reported for duty, at 3 p.m., to begin yet another day in such splendid company, and sometimes it was difficult for her to disentangle the real war from the campaigns that she saw waged upon the screen. More than once she confused the battles of Errol Flynn, and Clark Gable, with the battles that were reported in the radio news bulletins.
Edith had, in fact, found her impregnable citadel against the assaults of rationing, shortages, blackouts and sirens. As autumn succeeded summer, and winter succeeded autumn, she lost touch with much that was going on in the Avenue and had to remind herself, time and again, to ask after the Carver boys, and Mr. Godbeer’s stepson, Esme.
That this was wrong and selfish of her she was well aware, but the heavy brass rail, opposite the main exit, was such a comfortable place to lean nowadays and surely helping to run a cinema, much patronised by the Forces, could be classified as war work? That was what Mr. Carver told her anyway, and Mr. Carver was usually right.
Everybody in the Avenue turned up at the cinema sooner or later, even her own back-room lodger, little Lieutenant Ericssohn, even that naughty wife who had been a Miss Frith, of Number Seventeen, and later the guilty party in the divorce of that nice, dreamy boy, Esme, whose poor, pretty mother had been killed at Torquay.
Edith saw these two sitting very close together, in the back row of the balcony one evening, and she thought it curious that they should be together and quite obviously ‘spooning’.
He had looked away, rather shamefacedly she thought, when she accidentally flashed her torch on him whilst combing the row for a single one-and-ninepenny, so she had hastily switched off her torch, and returned to the foyer, deciding that it was no business at all of hers, as indeed it was not, for Lieutenant Ericssohn did not have a framed photograph of a Mrs. Ericssohn on the bamboo table beside his bed, like the picture that Major Sparkewell had on his, so he was obviously still a bachelor and entitled to all the spooning he could get.
The Avenue Goes to War Page 26