Just Henry

by Michelle Magorian

  ‘Next,’ said the police sergeant, glancing at Henry’s mother.

  She rose shakily. Henry noticed him glance at his mother’s swollen abdomen. He gave her a warm smile. Henry stood by her side. She whispered something but Henry couldn’t hear what she was saying.

  ‘Speak up, my dear,’ said the sergeant. ‘Let’s have your name, shall we?’

  ‘My name?’ she stammered. She turned to Henry. ‘Oh, my goodness, what shall I say?’

  Henry pushed a piece of paper across the desk. Written on it were the words I have committed bigamy. The police sergeant picked it up and read it. Henry watched his face change. He stared at her, the smile gone.

  ‘Her name is Mrs Carpenter,’ Henry blurted out. ‘Can she see one of your women police?’

  ‘Women police?’ repeated the sergeant, frowning.

  ‘In The Blue Lamp there was this woman policeman with three stripes on her arm.’

  ‘This is Princes Road Police Station, sonny,’ yelled a woman in the queue, ‘not a ruddy Ealing film! They don’t have women ’ere. Only us,’ and she gave a hoarse laugh which disintegrated into a coughing fit.

  ‘That’ll do, Edie,’ said the desk sergeant. ‘If you’d like to wait,’ he added quietly.

  Henry’s mother nodded and he led her back to the chair. The sergeant handed a young constable the piece of paper, indicating Henry’s mother and returned to the desk.

  ‘Next,’ he said.

  After a while the constable opened a door off the waiting area.

  ‘Mrs Carpenter?’ he said.

  Henry’s mother nodded. By now she looked so pale Henry was afraid she would faint. Towering behind the young PC was a stocky policeman with greying hair. Henry and his mother rose. He felt her overbalancing as though her legs were giving way. He gripped her arm firmly as they walked together through the door. They were shown into a small room where there was a table and four chairs.

  ‘And you are?’ asked the policeman, looking at Henry.

  ‘Her son.’

  ‘By my first husband,’ explained his mother.

  ‘But I’m called Dodge. Henry Dodge.’

  ‘Dodge?’ repeated the policeman, startled. He glanced quickly at the young constable. ‘Have you got that, PC Kemp?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Henry knows all about it,’ said Henry’s mother. ‘You see, Mr Dodge got in touch with him before I knew anything about it. Up to then we thought he’d been killed in the war.’

  Hurriedly she took out a handkerchief from her handbag and blew her nose.

  ‘PC Kemp, I think Mrs Carpenter could do with a cup of tea. And give CID their names, will you?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the young constable and he left the room.

  They all sat down.

  ‘How long have you known he was still alive?’ asked the policeman.

  ‘A month. I was too frightened to come sooner because of the baby. I have a two-year-old daughter as well.’

  Henry pulled the envelope out of his rucksack, took the photograph out and slid it across the table.

  ‘Your father’s gravestone,’ remarked the policeman.

  ‘Yes,’ said Henry’s mother. ‘The funeral was in 1940.’

  ‘Dodge,’ said the policeman, reading it slowly. ‘Alfred Dodge.’

  He looked up at Henry.

  ‘Nice photograph. Did you take this?’

  ‘Yes, sir. And developed it. We have a darkroom at my school.’

  ‘Oh? And where would that be?’

  ‘Hatton Road Secondary Modern.’

  ‘Will you be putting me in a cell?’ interrupted his mother.

  ‘No. Naturally we need to go through certain procedures. Now when was the marriage ceremony between you and Mr Carpenter?’

  The young constable returned with two cups of hot sweet tea, accompanied by a plainclothes detective, an ordinary-looking man in a tweed jacket, who sat in front of Henry and proceeded to play around with his pipe.

  To Henry’s surprise, the detective turned his attention to him and not his mother, as if he was keeping him company. They chatted casually for a while, talking about Henry’s interests, including going to the Pictures and taking photographs.

  ‘So,’ said the man, smiling. ‘You took this photograph of the gravestone with your father’s name on it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he paused. ‘I thought he was a hero.’

  And then it all poured out. How Jeffries and his mother were treated so badly because Private Jeffries was a deserter, how Henry was followed by a strange man who turned out to be his father, how his father had suffered from amnesia, how he thought he was Walter Briggs. Everything spilled out effortlessly except the content of the latest photographs from London. Mrs Beaumont had warned him to keep silent about those, pointing out that if the police knew of his father’s criminal activities, he would be arrested there and then and sent to prison. Once there, he would probably refuse to divorce his mother out of revenge, since he would have nothing to lose. Henry mentioned that his father had offered him work but that was all.

  ‘Must be exciting for you,’ said the detective, puffing leisurely on his pipe.

  Henry shook his head.

  ‘I don’t really know him.’

  ‘Bit of a shock for your mother, though, him appearing out of the blue like that.’

  He nodded. And then more seemed to tumble out till he wasn’t quite sure what he had said and what he had left out, but afterwards he felt a tremendous sense of relief.

  The man rose.

  ‘You look after your mum,’ he said, pointing the stem of his pipe at Henry, ‘and keep out of trouble.’

  ‘Will she go to prison?’ Henry blurted out.

  ‘No. But we’d like to see your first marriage certificate, if you still have it,’ he added, turning to Henry’s mother. ‘And we’d prefer it if you kept this visit to yourself for the moment. Don’t mention it to your Mr Dodge yet.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Henry’s mother, looking puzzled.

  ‘We’ll be tracing any relatives of this Walter Briggs so that we can break the news of his death ourselves, to put their minds at rest. They must still wonder why he didn’t return. At least we can tell them what’s happened to him now and where he’s buried.’

  Henry and his mother had tea and buns in the Plaza café. It was like the old days when he was little and they used to go out for tea and to the Pictures on a Friday night after she had been given her factory pay. Sitting opposite her, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. She looked transformed, pretty, and the colour in her face had come back.

  ‘There are so many questions I want to ask you, Mum.’

  ‘I think it’s about time you asked them, then,’ she said.

  The most surprising revelation was the house. He had always believed his father had lived in it originally, but it turned out that Uncle Bill had lived in the house long before he and his mother had met. It was one of the houses owned by the railway.

  ‘Then Gran turned up on the doorstep and moved into the sitting room. It was only for a couple of weeks till she could find somewhere else to rent but you and her got on so well that Uncle Bill agreed to let her stay. You’d just had your tenth birthday and were top of the class at school. I thought she was proud of you.’

  ‘But she was, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, but it seems she was more proud of you if you pretended to be someone else.’

  Listening to his mother, it dawned on Henry that he had been living in a make-believe world invented by his grandmother. He decided to start from the beginning.

  ‘How did you meet Uncle Bill?’

  She smiled.

  ‘I was working in the office part of the factory, and I was picking things up really quickly so I thought I’d take a shorthand and typing course. This other girl and me came top in the examinations and we decided to get a bit more education and went to the WEA. That’s the Worker’s Education Association. It’s for working people who still want to keep lea
rning and that’s where we met Mr Cuthbertson. He persuaded us to study for the School Certificate even though you had to learn Latin for it. He was on this crusade to give those who’d missed out on an education a chance. He still is,’ she said, smiling.

  Henry nodded. He remembered the day Mr Cuthbertson had burst into their house bringing the newspapermen with him.

  ‘I know it seems daft, but working towards it gave me courage. It made me feel as if I was going to have a future. Mr Cuthbertson wanted there to be a different society after the war. More equality. I wanted those chances for you. So did Uncle Bill, which is why we were so upset when you failed the eleven plus examination.’

  ‘And why Gran was so pleased,’ added Henry bitterly. ‘I failed it on purpose, Mum.’

  ‘We knew that, Henry.’

  ‘You still haven’t told me how you met Uncle Bill.’

  ‘He sometimes turned up for the Latin classes when he was on leave. He was in the Royal Engineers, as you know, doing the same kind of work on the railways. I often overheard Mr Cuthbertson giving him homework and arranging to give him lessons at other times. The railways between here and London took a real hammering. But when there was a lull in the bombing, he’d read those books Mr Cuthbertson gave him, those Penguin New Writing books and paperbacks that are on our shelves.’

  ‘But Gran says Uncle Bill wasted money buying those books!’

  ‘Gran says a lot of things, love.’

  So that was another of her lies, thought Henry.

  ‘You still haven’t told me, Mum . . . ’

  ‘How we met? It was simple really. Mr Cuthbertson always gave an annual party for his students. Uncle Bill turned up at one. We got talking and hit it off straight away. We both knew within an hour of us meeting we were made for each other.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We had the same dreams.’

  She looked so happy that he felt bad about wanting to bring up Gran’s Christmas present. Even though he knew about it already, he wanted her to tell him herself. He wanted no more secrets between them.

  ‘Tell me about my new raincoat, Mum.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ she said, reddening.

  ‘I didn’t see the pressure cooker and the lamp afterwards.’

  ‘Oh.’ She fell silent. ‘Looks like you’ve put two and two together.’

  ‘Tell me, Mum.’

  ‘Your gran got it on tick. Uncle Bill and me have been paying it off.’

  ‘She knew you’d have to do that, didn’t she?’

  ‘You needed a raincoat anyway,’ said his mother evasively.

  ‘But not such an expensive one.’

  ‘No. I was hoping to be able to take it back to the shop.’

  ‘But I wore it to the cinema the next day and it was snowing.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because you’re fond of your gran and I didn’t want to spoil your Christmas. It’s your turn to talk now,’ she added slowly. ‘I think there’s something you’ve been keeping from me too. About Gran. Am I right?’

  ‘Yes. And it was all my fault. I told her where Jeffries and Pip lived.’

  ‘She’s the informer.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Vindictive old bat.’

  ‘She was smiling when I told her. I thought she was being kind. She looked kind. How can someone look kind when they’re planning to do something nasty?’ And then he remembered his father behaved in just the same way.

  ‘When you divorce my father, she’ll have to move out, won’t she?’

  ‘Yes.’ She took hold of his hand across the table. ‘Henry, it’s not going to be easy. I know you have the photographs, but when your father wants something he doesn’t let anything stand in his way.’

  ‘Mr Carpenter,’ asked Jeffries, ‘have you ever seen an Italian film before?’

  They were outside the Rex with Mrs Beaumont and Uncle Bill.

  ‘Never.’

  ‘I hope they show Bicycle Thieves here,’ Jeffries said.

  Henry looked over his shoulder at the queue. People had travelled by train and ferry from miles away to see Open City. Suddenly he spotted Mr Finch.

  ‘That’s our form teacher,’ he said, pointing.

  ‘I’d like to have a word with him some time,’ murmured Uncle Bill.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Teacher training.’

  There was no supporting film at the Rex, only trailers, news and documentaries, followed by the inevitable queue for ice creams. All around him people were chatting to one another excitedly. Henry could almost touch their anticipation.

  When the film began Henry felt let down. It looked like an amateur film. It had none of the colour and gloss of an American film. It was in black and white and it was jerky, and some of the slums seemed very badly lit. But bit by bit his feelings changed. It was as though he were watching a documentary about real people caught up in the war, so that when he saw German soldiers hauling men into a truck and a distraught Italian widow running after it, her arm flung upwards in an attempt to reach the man she was to marry, it shocked him.

  It was as though someone was actually there with a hidden camera.

  They didn’t speak when they left the cinema. It was Jeffries who broke the silence.

  ‘That’s real heroism,’ he said quietly. ‘That priest.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Uncle Bill, ‘and I know it didn’t have a happy ending, but it showed that the people in the Italian Resistance who sacrificed their lives helped liberate their country from Mussolini and Hitler.’

  ‘And yet there were so many funny moments, weren’t there?’ said Mrs Beaumont. ‘I suppose it was the priest’s sense of humour which made those people’s lives bearable.’

  ‘You mean like when he and the little boy hid the bomb and the old rifle under the blankets of that sick old man,’ said Henry, ‘and they hit him over the head with a frying pan to stop him giving the game away to the German search party?’

  ‘Yes. And knelt by the bed pretending to give him the last rites.’

  And it was this priest who made such an impression on Henry. He wasn’t the tall handsome kind of priest you might see in a Hollywood film. He was a short tubby man in a cassock who wore spectacles, one moment refereeing a football game for a group of small boys, the next moment delivering much needed money hidden in old books to a member of the Italian Resistance – calm, unhurried and down to earth.

  ‘What about when he got angry,’ said Jeffries, ‘and told the Gestapo officer that although his men had killed that resistance fighter, they had only managed to kill his body but not his soul.’

  ‘I thought he’d live when the Italian firing squad fired over his head,’ said Henry.

  ‘As did the gang of small boys peering through the wire,’ added Mrs Beaumont.

  ‘I never expected the German officer to do the job for them and shoot him,’ Henry added.

  ‘Neither did I,’ said Jeffries.

  Passing the railway bridge, Henry was aware that his father was waiting there to meet him. Mrs Beaumont and Jeffries said their goodnights and Henry and Uncle Bill turned into their street.

  ‘I’ll wait for you behind the yard,’ said Uncle Bill. ‘It’ll look suspicious if we don’t come in together.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Henry and he headed back towards the railway.

  His father was waiting impatiently for him by the wall.

  ‘I don’t have much time,’ he said curtly.

  ‘I came as soon as I could,’ said Henry.

  ‘I saw you with the man your mum married, or rather didn’t marry.’

  ‘I didn’t know you knew what he looked like,’ Henry said carefully.

  ‘His picture was in the newspaper, remember? And I saw the old woman you go to the pictures with and a boy.’

  ‘That’s Roger Jeffries. The son of the man I told you about.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ There was a pause as his father took a drag from his
cigarette. ‘A bit lah di dah going to a foreign film, ain’t it?’

  ‘It was about the Italian Resistance,’ Henry murmured.

  ‘Lots of shooting, eh?’

  ‘A bit. But it was more about the people struggling to stay alive. There was this priest . . . ’ and then he suddenly felt he couldn’t speak. He didn’t want his father’s remarks to contaminate his experience of seeing the film.

  ‘How could you tell what was going on?’

  ‘Subtitles.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, you told me. Lots of work having to read them all the time, eh?’

  ‘I didn’t notice it after a bit. It was good.’

  ‘The wops were the enemy, you know.’

  ‘Not after 1943.’

  Suddenly Henry realised he had answered his father back! He waited for the cuff round the ear but to his surprise there was silence. And then he heard the question he had been dreading.

  ‘Has your mum come round, then?’

  ‘She wants to know your address.’

  He pulled out a scrap of paper from his raincoat pocket and handed it to him. Henry could see that an address had been written on it. A false one, Henry suspected.

  ‘Thanks, Dad,’ he said, gritting his teeth in a forced smile.

  ‘I’ll bring more information about the film unit next week. When do you break up?’

  ‘March twenty-ninth.’

  ‘Not long now. The job starts the first week in April. Fits in nicely,’ he added, smiling. ‘You and me, son. We’ll make a good team.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Henry nonchalantly. And then he couldn’t resist adding, ‘I hope we have enough time to see each other. People who make films work long hours.’

  His father nodded sagely.

  ‘Once you’re in London, we’ll think about all that sort of thing, don’t you worry.’

  And then he was gone, only this time Henry didn’t watch him wait on the platform for his train. He walked down the steps, his head bowed, the image of the Italian priest in his head before he was about to face a firing squad. ‘It’s easy to die decently,’ he had said to a fellow priest, ‘It’s not so easy to live decently.’

  He was so absorbed in his thoughts that he didn’t notice a man on the other side of the road watching him.