His friend, who had an air of alcoholic recklessness about him, saw him first and seized him by the arm. “Here, Jack!” There was no other attempt at greeting. “You used to be game for a lark.”
Jack said, “Eh? Hallo, Fred.”
“Hallo. Jack, let’s clear out.”
“Out of where?”
“Of Blighty.”
Jack grinned and said, “You’re drunk.” He was filled with astonishment that others felt as he did. The repressed despair in him turned into a physical excitement. “Where would you go?”
“Oh, anywhere. Italy. It was all right there. Australia.”
Jack took his friend’s arm. “You come and cool off. You just haven’t got used to it, that’s all.” He was arguing with himself. “You’ll settle down.”
Fred said, with great violence, “I tell you, Blighty’s like a rotten apple. One bite and you’ve had it.”
“You come with me,” said Jack patiently, and Fred followed him.
A few weeks later the two of them sailed for the Persian Gulf. An oil company was undertaking a big construction project there. Fred was an engineer and Jack a shopfitter by trade, and each was employed to supervise and train native labour, Fred in the installation of machinery, Jack in the building of living quarters. They signed on for five years; the pay was good, and there was a bonus of fifty pounds a year.
He had not been abroad long before he regretted his flight from England. He realised that he had given way to a fit of despair and run away from a fight — an unforgivable weakness to him. In Persia he found none of the colour or adventure with which he had hoped to drug himself. They dwelt in ugly huts in the midst of a torrid desolation. Life was a round of sweat, dust, flies, boredom and short tempers. The only relief was in hard work, which Jack had always hitherto been able to enjoy but which in these surroundings soon became tedious.
As each year went by he reminded himself that he had lost a year which he might have spent in settling down. This was not a career. At the end of it there was nothing for him but some money and the uncertain chance of a similar job in another remote corner of the earth; year after year, with his life running to waste all the time.
All the longing he had ever felt — as a child in the Orphanage and as a roving soldier — for a stable, predetermined life, came back to him. He would, in the life of which he dreamed, have a home of his own; at work, and in the lonely nights, he furnished it room by room, down to the last china ornament. He would have a wife, and there would be no more pursuing a succession of strange women for a relief that was only of the body.
Thus the struggle continued between the two qualities which his life had planted in him — restlessness and the desire for rest; until, with four of the five years gone, he could wait no longer. A fit of desperate resolution seized him, he drew his bonus and savings, three hundred and eighty pounds in all, and came — that mocking word slipped into his mind again — ‘home.’
What was he to do now? He would have to go back to his trade; at thirty, it was too late to begin learning a new one. But what else? Here were all these millions of people living around him. How was he to make some of them aware of his presence? How was he to find a home for himself among his fellows?
The temptation came back to him (it had visited him several times during his return journey) to solve his problems by joining the Army again. At least he would find friends there, and an ordered life. But he had promised himself to make a fight of it this time, and he put the Army out of his mind except as a last resort.
He washed, changed his shirt and went downstairs. He had a meal at the hotel and regretted it, for he felt uncomfortable sitting alone at a table confronted by an unfamiliar array of cutlery and silver and a menu that he could not understand. He tried to be hearty with the waiters, but secretly he was cowed.
He spent the evening wandering about the streets, still telling himself that this was ‘a bit of all right’. He had a few drinks and saw a dull film. He returned to the hotel early and went to bed.
London, for all its reputation and its civic institutions, is an archipelago of life, not an island. Its boroughs are like separate towns; people who live in one may spend their whole lives without venturing into more than a couple of the others; to those who live on one side of the river the part of the town beyond the opposite bank is as remote and unknown as San Francisco. Even the boroughs are not communities. The millions of Londoners are really broken up into tens of thousands of little clusters of life. Each is gathered round some centre, perhaps a street, perhaps a block of buildings, perhaps a market, perhaps a public house or a Working Man’s Club or any one of a thousand different organizations. Within each of these little hives people live for each other as well as for themselves, and life generates a comfortable warmth. But the man or woman who tries to settle in London without gaining admission to one of these little communities (and it is not easy, for the more closely-knit each is the more hostile it is to the stranger) is like a lonely traveller wandering, as night gathers, across the vast deserted moors, mocked wherever he looks by the clustering lights of villages. He is on his own, and he can go mad or die for all anybody cares.
Jack, pondering over his plans in bed, was instinctively aware of this. To whom could he turn? The Orphanage? — It had an After-Care Committee of kindly and well-intentioned people, but the idea of approaching them after all these years seemed ridiculous. There were one or two people he had known in the Army; and there was Lamb Street.
He fell asleep feeling more contented, and in the morning he went back to Lamb Street.
Chapter Two
A hundred years ago the borough of Islington lay on the rural fringe of London. Even the maps of fifty years ago show it as an outer suburb. Today the Angel, its heart, is one of the funnels through which the life of London thunders. It pours streams of traffic from the suburbs into the central shopping districts; a black tide of cars bound for the City and lorries going to the docks rolls unendingly down City Road; while the cars, lorries, carts, coaches and bicycles heading out of town charge in such masses along Upper Street and Essex Road that several times a day the whole confusion grinds to a standstill, traffic lights blink frantically and in vain, a hubbub of hooters and angry voices succeeds to the growl of engines, and policemen sidle among the press of vehicles, shouting and gesticulating until the black tides are on the move again.
The roads that meet at the Angel are as ugly as any in the ugly sprawl of London. They are broad and dirty, lined with shops whose variety of shape, size and architectural style is a monument to the malignant ingenuity of small minds, and among which the merely shabby are less offensive than the garish shrines of up-to-the-minute salesmanship with which they alternate.
Huge hoardings dominate and depress, the pavements are so filthy with drifting dust and scuttering litter that it seems as if all the waste paper in London must have been blown to this one crossroads, funereal queues block the pavements outside half-a-dozen cinemas, fun fairs discharge their screech and blare upon the passer-by, and even the patch of sky that shows pathetically between the rooftops is crawled across by a sweep of trolleybus wires.
But a hundred yards away, in the back streets, there is a quietness and serenity that keeps the traffic’s roar at bay and even holds sway over the crying of babies and the shrill chatter of women that ascends from basement windows. Here the pattern of the past is still discernible. Broad roadways; big houses in raised terraces with long gardens, unexpectedly pleasing the eye — despite the grime and decay that have assailed them — with their simple and imposing pediments and their well-proportioned windows and doorways; spacious and pleasant squares; trees to relieve the grey and black monotony with their clouds of fresh green foliage; and the song of birds.
Why these streets and squares are so quiet it is hard to imagine; for the sedate merchants, their ladies and their carriages, have long vanished from them; the poor have swarmed in to take their places; every house is crammed with famili
es from basement to lofty attic; tired and haggard women talk in groups on the street corners while they rest their laden shopping bags for a moment; their children teem everywhere, screaming out of windows, howling on the steps and swooping across the roadways like flights of sparrows; and the bray of conviviality resounds from the public houses. Yet tranquillity prevails. It is only in the little side turnings that connect these larger thoroughfares that dirt, noise, overcrowding and the sense of haste come into their own; in each of these little streets a constant din of altercation and neighbourly intercourse echoes across the narrow pavements.
Lamb Street, where Jack Agass had passed his life between the ages of eight and twenty, is one of these. It consists of two short rows of two-storey cottages, once pleasantly rural, now blackened and neglected, with — at one end — a barber’s shop on one corner and a public house, The Lamb, on the other.
Jack had slept late, and it was almost midday when he reached the corner of Lamb Street. His home, with the Hogarth family, had been in the corner house on the left-hand side. Now, where it and a half-a-dozen other houses had stood, there stretched a rough expanse of waste ground, bounded by ragged ends of wall. Among the craters and green hillocks the course of foundations could be traced; rusty coloured clumps of wild flowers struggled towards the light between the weathered tracks of brick, overgrowing the scattered boulders of masonry and springing up in wild hedges through the cracks they had forced in patches of concrete flooring. Almost half of one of the two rows of houses had vanished; the street looked as mutilated as a man with one leg. It also seemed much smaller than it had when he was younger. A flying bomb had dropped on the street corner in December, nineteen forty-four. He had been in the Ardennes at the time, with one of the British divisions whose rest had been interrupted by Rundstedt’s last offensive; huddled, in greatcoat and woollen wrappings, in a slit trench beneath snow-laden undergrowth, looking out over silent white slopes. When he had read the letter that told him that Mrs. Hogarth and a score of his old friends were dead in a common grave he had felt for a moment as if water were freezing suddenly throughout his veins; and the recollection of it came to him now, for a second, not as a memory in the mind but as a repetition of that feeling.
He had seen the bombed site once before, when he came back to England in nineteen forty-six. It had been silent and abandoned then, and he had not let himself linger to look at it. Now it was different. A great stack of new bricks, red and bright, stood in the middle. Some distance away from him a lorry was backed up on to the pavement, and men were unloading planks. Farther away, labourers were digging a trench; the clink of their picks and the sound of their jesting seemed distant and dream-like in the morning sunlight.
He asked one of the workmen, “What’s up, nob?”
“Building job. Block of flats. For the council. Why? Lookin’ for a place to live?”
Jack grinned. “I might be, soon.”
“Well, you won’t get one o’ these. If you hurry up round the Town ’All and put your name down, you might get one before your youngest great-grandson gets wed.”
“Don’t give ’im ’opes,” grunted another labourer as he passed, “I wouldn’t like to see ’im wait a ’undred years, then die of disappointment.”
“I used to live here,” said Jack. He was eager to talk to people of his own kind. The burden of loneliness lifted from him when he heard his own cheerful voice, and the voices of others speaking to him with warmth. But the workmen had passed on. He felt the cold creeping into him again, in spite of the day’s warmth. He was dismayed at the thought that a great red building would spring up on this corner, that dozens of families would move in and would not even know who had been here before them. It had been such a happy house. It had always been full of laughter and gusto, and Mrs. Hogarth had reigned over it like a smiling queen. These workmen were building over his memories; it was as if they were trampling on a cherished grave.
A mob of small boys came charging past him. He did not know any of them; they had all been born since he left here. They looked the same as the children of his own day, each boy’s hair close-cropped with a pudding-basin fringe, each pair of dirty legs bursting out of a pair of ridiculously-small breeches, their faces lit at once with innocence and jungle cunning; vociferous, pugnacious and tireless as wild colts. Their leader screamed, “Come on, Lamb Street!” They streamed after him, whooping and screeching.
A memory came to Jack like a revelation. He was filled with gladness: He seized one of the boys by the arm. “Here, where you off to?”
“You leave us alone. We ain’t doing nothing.”
“Steady, boy,” said Jack, “you ain’t frightened of me, are you? I’m a Lamb Street boy myself.”
The child looked at him warily and muttered, “I don’t know yer.”
“I used to live up the corner, with Mrs. Hogarth. I been in the Army.”
The boy asked eagerly, “Was you in the Commandos?”
“No, the Queens.”
“Got any cap badges?”
“I might have. Not on me, though. Where you off to? Street fight?”
“Yus. We an’ arf gonna whop ’em.”
Jack beamed with delight. “Here, it’s not Bennett’s Buildings, is it?”
“Yus. They come round ’ere the other day. Dit’n ’arf kick up a stink, they did. Broke free winders. They an’ arf gonna cop it this time. We got some big boys wiv us, from White Lion Street.”
“Well, I’m blowed,”Jack gloated, “that one’s still goin’ on, is it? Many a fight with Bennett’s Buildings we had, in my time.”
The boy looked hastily along the road to make sure that his companions had not yet vanished from sight, cocked his head on one side and whispered in a hoarse and confidential voice, “Got any froopenny bits, mister?”
“What for?”
“Go to pictures wiv.”
Jack gave him a shilling. In place of thanks the boy uttered a violent, “Oo!” and dashed away up the street.
One of the two workmen had returned, and Jack said to him, “Well, that’s one thing that hasn’t changed. Except we never used to beg for money when I was a kid. We used to pester people in the streets for fag cards, but money! Blimey! Our mums would have beaten us black and blue if we’d tried that on.”
“Ah,” answered the man, “little devils they are. Run about like a mob of wild animals, they do. Can’t do nothing with ’em. It’s the war, I reckon. We used to be glad of a penny when I was a kid. If you give ’em one now they throw it at you. Takes ’alf your week’s wages to keep the kids in sweets and pictures.”
Jack continued on his way. There were few people in the street — the men were still at work and the women busy over their stoves putting the finishing touches to the Saturday dinner. He saw no-one that he knew. Strange babies sunning in their pushcarts scowled at him suspiciously. Their big eyes, following him, made him feel embarrassed. His heart sank as he walked on between the little black houses. He should have known, he told himself, that it would be like this. The bomb had killed some of his friends. Others had been scattered by evacuation. Young men had gone to the war, some to die, others to return, marry and move to new homes. He wanted to admit defeat and hasten away.
He began to whistle and quickened his step. Some of the front doors were closed, some were open to reveal dark and narrow hallways. Surely there was still a welcome for him behind some of these doors? Which? He thought of knocking at one or another of them, but the fear of coming face to face with strangers deterred him. There, half way along on the opposite side, was a house that he knew well. The window-box filled with glossy red geraniums must surely mean that the Wakerell family still lived there! He glimpsed a stir of movement behind the curtains of the upstairs window, and thought he saw fair hair. That would be Mrs. Wakerell. He slowed down, in the hope that he would hear the window slamming open and a familiar voice calling after him. He looked back. The movement at the window had ceased. Perhaps it had not been Mrs. Wakerell. E
ven if it was, perhaps she had not recognized him. Perhaps, after all these years — but he did not see how they could have forgotten him; he remembered every one of them so clearly. Perhaps she had not thought it worth her while to greet him. After all, why should she? She would say to her family tonight, “Guess who I saw walking up the street today? Jack Agass! At least, I think it was.” And that would be all.
Disappointment and nervous relief mingled in him as he walked on, although his watchful smile did not change. He was not looking around him now, but was smiling fixedly at the pavement a little way ahead of him. There was an impulse of resentment at work inside him, against the indifference of these walls and windows; he wanted more than ever to take flight once again to the ends of the earth. He was nearing the other end of the street. On the right was The Lamb, on the left the Jubilee Gents’ Hairdressing Saloon (Beniamino Leone, Prop.), He could not go across to The Lamb yet; there were still ten minutes to go before it opened. Besides, there was something — again, it was only an instinct, working in the lower levels of his consciousness — that made him hesitate to meet Mick Monaghan, the pub’s proprietor. He could give himself no reason for this. What had happened to Rosie Hogarth, he told himself for the hundredth time, was no concern of Jack Agass’s. Mick had always treated him well enough. People had a right to live their own lives. He must forget all this nonsense. While his mind made its reasonable decisions a little serpent of hatred continued to constrict his heart. He decided to go into the barber’s shop, to see if old Benno was still there.
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