When he returned the visitors were usually in a more expansive mood than when they had first been introduced to Elaine, but her part in this little game was a close secret. Archie invariably introduced her as “…the wife, a real sweetie, but she hasn’t a clue, old man!”
The day the bulldozers arrived to give the coup-de grâce to the short-number end of the Avenue, Archie brought home a balding gentleman named Spright, who managed a small building firm in the area, and with whom Archie was anxious to come to terms.
He left Mr. Spright in the lounge after giving Elaine a quick briefing in the cloakroom, and subsequently excused himself, retiring to his office-study for an hour or so.
When he rejoined them, Mr. Spright’s original estimate for converting a pair of Archie’s semi-detached houses into four two-bedroomed flats was ready to drop by several hundreds of pounds, and Elaine was insisting that he stayed on for dinner and told her a little more of his fascinating hobby of trick-photography.
“Perhaps you’d like to take a tricksy picture of me,” she suggested, coyly. “I like having my pictures taken, don’t I Archie?”
Archie said that she did indeed and proved it by showing Mr. Spright an enlarged snapshot of Elaine in a bikini that had been taken during a brief holiday at San Marino the previous summer.
Perhaps this was why Archie and Elaine continued to prosper. The Mr. Sprights operated individually, whereas Archie and Elaine now operated as a team.
Archie had passed the end of the Avenue that very afternoon and had noticed what was happening down there, but when they retired to bed that night, with Mr. Spright’s contract safely in the strong-box, he did not tell her that the bulldozers were advancing over the meadow behind her old home but instead discussed Mr. Spright’s unusual hobby, and what an important part hobbies sometimes played in the world of commerce. He did not think that Elaine would be very interested in what was going on in the Avenue, for the Avenue was now a long way behind them.
The girl Carver twins, who had been known as ‘the Likes’, and who had been born and reared in Number Twenty, heard of the demolition in a long letter from Jim, written when the work had entered upon its second stage.
The twins had long since qualified as G.I. brides, and had sailed to the States in a specially-chartered war bride liner, called Nevada. It was not to Nevada that they went, however, but to Cleveland, Ohio, whither Mitch and Orrie, their husbands, had preceded them almost a year ago.
Fetch and Carry had far less trouble adjusting themselves to their new country than the majority of their fellow brides. They had shed their insularity years ago, as long ago as 1942, when the American vanguard first appeared in the suburb.
Even before then they had already commenced their transformation at the Odeon, in the Lower Road, so that when they actually found themselves in Cleveland they were more American than the Americans, and some of their neighbours had difficulty in remembering they had been British.
They talked like Americans, and they dressed like Americans. They scorned the use of table knives like the Americans, and it took them less than a week to acquire the American woman’s attitude towards their husbands’ little weaknesses.
Mitch and Orrie, who were already well established in the trucking business, were somewhat dismayed by this final act of acclimatisation. One of the principal characteristics of British girls that had recommended itself to the G.I.s as a whole, had been the lip-service British girls paid to the traditional superiority of the male.
They were therefore disconcerted by the speed with which Fetch and Carry set about proving that America was a woman’s country, making inroads into money that their husbands had set aside for business expansions and cheerfully entering into a sheaf of hire-purchase agreements when such money was not readily forthcoming.
“Maybe we was in too much of a hurry to get ’em back here,” Orrie confided to Mitch one day, after a lively domestic dispute about the purchase of kitchen equipment. “Maybe these dames wouldn’t expect the moon if they was still rationed, like all the rest o’ their folks!”
Mitch, the laconic, had nodded. “When we get that next truck Orrie, we’ll figger some way to send ’em home on a vacation,” he said and left it at that.
Fetch opened Jim’s letter and read it aloud to Carry. “They’re pulling down our end of the Avenue,” she exclaimed. “What you know ’bout that, Carry?”
“They c’n have it, sister!” said Carry, standing sideways in front of a mirror, in order to discover whether the new gown that had arrived that morning did or did not “do” something for her.
“Yep,” said Fetch, reflectively, “gimme the States any time! O’ny Yanks know how to treat a woman!”
Two other former residents of the Avenue received news of its demolition through the post.
Jean Hargreaves, née McInroy, who had succeeded Ted Hartnell as lodger at Number Four, and whose husband had subsequently purchased Number Forty-Five from Margy, Ted’s wife, when Ted was away at sea, had kept in touch with the Hartnells after they had settled in the holiday resort of Sandridge Bay, on the east coast.
Ted had left the sea and picked up the threads of his pre-war life within a week of Hitler’s suicide in the bunker. There had been no point in remaining separated from Margy after that. The task he had set himself, when he first learned of the goings-on in concentration camps, was now accomplished, and he might as well return to civvy street. Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels were dead, and Goering, God rot his distended belly, was in close confinement and due, no doubt, to be hanged, although Ted would have much preferred him to have been burned at the stake. The gates of all the concentration camps had been flung open, to reveal to every Doubting Thomas the actuality of the conditions therein, conditions faithfully described to him by the Bavarian violinist as long ago as 1939.
Perhaps Ted Hartnell’s most satisfying memory of the war was the moment that he picked up a newspaper and was confronted with a picture of Kramer, the “Beast of Belsen”, scowling, unshaven and, what was even better, heavily manacled! Ted took particular note of the newsreel shots dealing with the interior of Belsen after the British troops had penetrated the compound, and he rubbed his hands with glee when he learned that German civilians had been compelled to witness the film, in order to make quite sure that concentration camps had not been hush-hush factories for the manufacture of secret weapons.
If Ted could have had his way he would have preserved at least one concentration camp, in order to accommodate a selected group of war-criminals, and he would have staffed this camp with Polish, Dutch and Czechoslovakian patriots. This however, was now a matter for the politicians, and Ted had no wish to become a politician. Neither, for that matter, had he any wish to become a dance band leader again, at least, not if it meant that he had to live out of sight of the sea.
Something had brought about a permanent change in Ted Hartnell during his voyages back and forth across the Atlantic, and up and down the Mediterranean. The smell of the sea had performed an act of alchemy on his blood and he discovered to his dismay that he could not face life without it! The stale, dusty atmosphere of a suburban dance hall now made him gasp like a fish, and although, as a drummer and an inspirer of rhythm, he was as good as ever, he derived no real joy in the work, and poor Margy thus found herself faced with a new set of worries, for how else could they earn a living?
She was almost in despair when Ted bounded up with a copy of the trade paper and showed her an advertisement that he had ringed in blue pencil.
It seemed that Sandridge Bay, a thriving resort with a big future on the holiday map, was advertising for an experienced dance orchestra leader, who was to act as an all the year round entertainments’ manager! The salary offered was eight hundred a year, plus a bonus when the foreshore income increased above a certain figure.
“It’s tailored for us, Margy,” he had exclaimed. “We organise all the dances and entertainments and we live practically on the beach! Why hang it, Margy, I don’t see wh
y we can’t live on a boat!”
“Do you want to live on a boat?” she had demanded, coldly.
“Well, of course I do,” he admitted, “there’s no rates to pay if you live on a boat!”
Luckily poor Margy had learned patience during the last five years, and she decided there and then that she might as well make the best of a bad job.
As it turned out it was not really a bad job at all, for Ted was a huge success at Sandridge Bay, and after a few weeks in lodgings she had been glad to move on to a cabin-cruiser that he had bought at a give-away price.
The vessel, renamed Margy, was moored to the quay in the harbour, and once she had got used to walking up and down a sloping gangway, instead of in and out of a front door, Margy began to take great pride in her namesake, keeping it trim and spotlessly clean.
It was here, after the postman serving the harbour area had thrown the mail at her from the quayside, that Margy read Jean’s description of the last days of Manor Park Avenue. She was interested, and so was Ted in a half-hearted way, but before she had finished reading the letter she noticed that a gull had spotted the ship’s bell and she laid aside the sheets to find her duster and a tin of metal polish.
Ted finished the letter as she went to work.
“I wonder how many of the old lot are still there?” he said.
For a moment, but a moment only, his mind held a picture of the front-room of Number Four as it was twenty years ago, when he and Edith, and poor old Becky, had played ‘Valencia’, and ‘Yes, Sir, that’s my Baby’ on the old cottage piano. Then Margy interrupted his thoughts by saying:
“I got a new record while I was shopping. It’s a man playing a zither and it’s got a good beat. Have you ever played a zither, Ted?”
“I’ve played everything,” boasted Ted, vaguely, and laying down the letter he got up and leaned on the rail, sniffing the salt-laden breeze that always seemed so much fresher and more invigorating down here than it was back in the town.
After Jim and Edith had heard Harold’s account of his holiday, and had returned home that March night, Edith said she was tired and would go straight to bed.
Jim did not feel sleepy, so after he had filled Edith’s hot water bottle he brewed himself another pot of tea in the kitchen and then took a turn down the back garden in order to enjoy a final pipe in the open.
He opened the back gate and looked out across the meadow. The moon was on the wane but the sky was bright with stars, and he could just see the dark line of the woods and the huddle of heavy equipment that the builders’ teams had parked in the cart-track.
Only that morning he had viewed the bulldozers with a detached and technical interest but tonight he resented them, for it was as though they had come here to demolish the milestones in his memory, milestones that reached back through the war and the days of appeasement, to the slump, the General Strike, and the day in 1919 when he had first made his way here from the Ostend leave-boat to find his first wife lying dead from Spanish ’flu.
He had known none of these people then, indeed, he had possessed no friends outside the army, for throughout his earlier years he had never remained long enough in one street to convert nodding acquaintances into neighbours like Edith, Harold, or even the Hargreaves, next door. He was glad now that Ada, his wife, had found this place, for through the decades behind him he had come to love and cherish it.
Was that possible? Could one love bricks and mortar? Perhaps not, perhaps he would have learned to value the flesh and blood inhabiting any such row of houses, for in their comradeship, if one was patient enough, was truth.
He was sixty-seven now and it was time to take stock of his convictions. His own life did not seem to have amounted to much. He had wasted so much time on politics and it was only now that he was coming to realise that politics were really people, the kind of people who lived in these Avenues.
He let himself out of the back gate and wandered along as far as the cart track and then back once more into the moonlit avenue, crossing the road to stand on the spot where his front gate had been.
He looked west along the silent crescent and his conviction grew that here, and here only, was the real answer to all the questions that he had been asking himself for more than half a century. It was not possible to learn about people from books and pamphlets, and therefore it surely followed that it was not possible to learn how to govern from these sources. To understand, and evaluate democracy, one had to live in a place like this, and live here for a very long time! One had to see all the penny-plain democrats at their weddings and funerals; one had to watch how they behaved under fire, but most of all one had to understand and sympathise with their dreams.
Until one had learned this, words and phrases, like ‘democracy’, ‘public opinion’, ‘floating vote’, and ‘electorate’ were meaningless, just so many sounds, set down in Hansard, or spouted from platforms, but at least, in his sixty-seventh year, he had learned this lesson, and that it was about all that remained of the mountain of opinions and convictions he had accumulated in the course of his life.
Only a hard core of that mountain now remained, the simple conviction that these people were important, and that their dreams were important, for it was their dreams that fashioned the civilisation they had fought to preserve, not once but twice in his own lifetime!
Their lives, for the most part, were mean and crabbed, and in the mass he had often found them slothful, bigoted and even cowardly. Individually, however, they were none of these things. They were energetic, steadfast, large-hearted and brave as lions.
That was what living in this Avenue had taught him, and by God, it was something worth learning! If the politicians Left, Right and Centre learned as much in the decade ahead then they could all hope to profit by the past, and shape some kind of future for children waiting to be born!
The stillness of the night began to have a soothing effect upon him and gradually he extracted peace and contentment from the silence.
He knocked out his pipe and crossed to the shadows of the uneven side. Over in the woods an owl hooted twice and Jim wondered where the owl would hunt when the trees of Manor Wood had been felled. Then he remembered that there were plenty of other woods in a line from here to the coast, and that soon a new avenue would mark the limit of London’s advance into the south-east. The thought comforted him as he let himself into Number Forty-Three and went quietly upstairs to the front bedroom.
Edith was sound asleep and he undressed in the glow of the street lamp, taking as he did so, a final look through the curtains. After the clamour of the day the Avenue was very still and silent under the stars.
About the Author
R. F. Delderfield (1912–1972) was born in South London. On leaving school he joined the Exmouth Chronicle newspaper as a junior reporter and went on to become editor. He began to write stage plays and then became a highly successful novelist, renowned for brilliantly portraying slices of English life. With the publication of his first saga, A Horseman Riding By, he became one of Britain’s most popular authors, and his novels have been bestsellers ever since. Many of his works, including A Horseman Riding By, To Serve Them All My Days, the Avenue novels, and Diana, were adapted for television.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1958, 1964 by R. F. Delderfield
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-4804-9047-5
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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The Avenue Goes to War Page 68