Three of the storeys, thirty blazing windows and their huge frame of black brick, a hundred solid tons of hard, deep Victorian wall, pivoted over towards us and hung flatly over the alley. Whether the descending wall actually paused in its fall I can never know. Probably it never did. Probably it only seemed to hang there. Probably my eyes only digested its action at an early period of momentum, so that I saw it ‘off true’ but before it had gathered speed.
The night grew darker as the great mass hung over us. Through smoke-fogged fireglow the moonlight had hitherto penetrated to the pit of our alley through declivities in the skyline. Now some of the moonlight was being shut out as the wall hung ever further over us. The wall shaded the moonlight like an inverted awning. Now the pathway of light above had been squeezed to a thin line. That was the only silver lining I ever believed in. It shone out—a ray of hope. But it was a declining hope, for although at this time the entire hemispherical scene appeared static, an imminence of movement could be sensed throughout—presumably because the scene was actually moving. Even the speed of the shutter which closed the photograph on my mind was powerless to exclude this motion from a deeper consciousness. The picture appeared static to the limited surface sense, the eyes and the material brain, but beyond that there was hidden movement.
The second was timeless. I had leisure to remark many things. For instance, that an iron derrick, slightly to the left, would not hit me. This derrick stuck out from the building and I could feel its sharpness and hardness as clearly as if I had run my body intimately over its contour. I had time to notice that it carried a foot-long hook, a chain with three-inch rings, two girder supports and a wheel more than twice as large as my head.
A wall will fall in many ways. It may sway over to the one side or the other. It may crumble at the very beginning of its fall. It may remain intact and fall flat. This wall fell as flat as a pancake. It clung to its shape through ninety degrees to the horizontal. Then it detached itself from the pivot and slammed down on top of us.
The last resistance of bricks and mortar at the pivot point cracked off like automatic gun fire. The violent sound both deafened us and brought us to our senses. We dropped the hose and crouched. Afterwards Verno said that I knelt slowly on one knee with bowed head, like a man about to be knighted. Well, I got my knighting. There was an incredible noise—a thunderclap condensed into the space of an eardrum—and then the bricks and the mortar came tearing and burning into the flesh of my face.
Lofty, away by the pump, was killed. Len, Verno and myself they dug out. There was very little brick on top of us. We had been lucky. We had been framed by one of those symmetrical, oblong window spaces.
Difficulty with a Bouquet
SEAL, walking through his garden, said suddenly to himself: ‘I would like to pick some flowers and take them to Miss D.’
The afternoon was light and warm. Tall chestnuts fanned themselves in a pleasant breeze. Among the hollyhocks there was a good humming as the bees tumbled from flower to flower. Seal wore an open shirt. He felt fresh and fine, with the air swimming coolly under his shirt and around his ribs. The summer’s afternoon was free. Nothing pressed him. It was a time when some simple, disinterested impulse might well be hoped to flourish.
Seal felt a great joy in the flowers around him and from this a brilliant longing to give. He wished to give quite inside himself, uncritically, without thinking for a moment: ‘Here am I, Seal, wishing something.’ Seal merely wanted to give some of his flowers to a fellow being. It had happened that Miss D was the first person to come to mind. He was in no way attached to Miss D. He knew her slightly, as a plain, elderly girl of about twenty who had come to live in the flats opposite his garden. If Seal had ever thought about Miss D at all, it was because he disliked the way she walked. She walked stiffly, sailing with her long body while her little legs raced to catch up with it. But he was not thinking of this now. Just by chance he had glimpsed the block of flats as he had stooped to pick a flower. The flats had presented the image of Miss D to his mind.
Seal chose common, ordinary flowers. As the stems broke he whistled between his teeth. He had chosen these ordinary flowers because they were the nearest to hand: in the second place, because they were fresh and full of life. They were neither rare nor costly. They were pleasant, fresh, unassuming flowers.
With the flowers in his hand, Seal walked contentedly from his garden and set foot on the asphalt pavement that led to the block of flats across the way. But as his foot touched the asphalt, as the sly glare of an old man fixed his eye for the moment of its passing, as the traffic asserted itself, certain misgivings began to freeze his impromptu joy. ‘Good heavens,’ he suddenly thought, ‘what am I doing?’ He stepped outside himself and saw Seal carrying a bunch of cheap flowers to Miss D in the flats across the way.
‘These are cheap flowers,’ he thought. ‘This is a sudden gift, I shall smile as I hand them to her. We shall both know that there is no ulterior reason for the gift and thus the whole action will smack of goodness—of goodness and simple brotherhood. And somehow … for that reason this gesture of mine will appear to be the most calculated pose of all. Such a simple gesture is improbable. The improbable is to be suspected. My gift will certainly be regarded as an affectation.
‘Oh, if only I had some reason—aggrandizement, financial gain, seduction—any of the accepted motives that would return my flowers to social favour. But no—I have none of these in me. I only wish to give and to receive nothing in return.’
As he walked on, Seal could see himself bowing and smiling. He saw himself smile too broadly as he apologized by exaggeration for his good action. His neck flinched with disgust as he saw himself assume the old bravados. He could see the mocking smile of recognition on the face of Miss D.
Seal dropped the flowers into the gutter and walked slowly back to his garden.
From her window high up in the concrete flats, Miss D watched Seal drop the flowers. How fresh they looked! How they would have livened her barren room! ‘Wouldn’t it have been nice,’ thought Miss D, ‘if that Mr Seal had been bringing me that pretty bouquet of flowers! Wouldn’t it have been nice if he had picked them in his own garden and—well, just brought them along, quite casually, and made me a present of the delightful afternoon.’ Miss D dreamed on for a few minutes.
Then she frowned, rose, straightened her suspender belt, hurried into the kitchen. ‘Thank God he didn’t,’ she sighed to herself. ‘I should have been most embarrassed. It’s not as if he wanted me. It would have been just too maudlin for words.’
Something Terrible, Something Lovely
THE day slate-dark, the air still, the cindertrack by the cottages empty and without life in a watered middle-day light—and young Nita came running, running home from school. Her satchel swung behind her, the blue exercise book fluttered its white leaves in her windmill hand, thin long legs and young-boned knees pranced before her like the separate legs of a pony careering the rest of her along. High on the brow of the slope that led down to the cottages she was already singing it out: ‘Dody! Dody!’ so that her young voice shrill with life and so excited echoed round the black cindered emptiness of that path, sang in and out of the bricked cottage yards, rained against blind windows, rose and died with the tops of the green elms above the grey roofs, above the smoke that seemed to smell of cooked meat and coal.
Dody, her younger cousin, was squatting in the yard winding a little gramophine. The gramophone disc rotated at a wild speed, hurrying round ever faster to tin out a shrill voice that pranced up and down, as though its very bladder were bursting among the blazers and the pier-stage somewhere down the dark tin horn, screaming among the old jazz instruments to get off the stage and out of the box: ‘Swanee, Swanee, How I love you, How I love you …’ When Nita banged through the wooden yard gate and clustered herself feverishly down, all in one piece, satchel, hat, skirts, curls, like a bird alighting with wings askew by Dody’s ear, the gramophone went on singing. She put her arm ro
und Dody’s neck and breathlessly whispered into her ear. Dody’s eyes went round and fascinated, her mouth pressed itself small as though she would cry: the voice kept whispering, Nita’s eyes opened and shut and rolled with every terrible word, her head waved from side to side, retreated, then back came those lips, wet and hot with breath close to the ear. ‘I saw it … there, right in front it was, plain as day … I don’t know how long, I’m sure … anyone could see …’ In short, dreadful gasps the whispers came out, the chattering secret. A silence, long and wise, as the two girls squatted and gazed at each other. Then from Dody a deep, heart-blown sigh. From Nita a nod, then emphatic quickening nods, one after the other, racing up to get breath to tell it all again, the lovely terrible thing.
For nothing like this had ever happened before—that was plain from the start. There had been terrible things before, as when the sweetshop woman fell on the line two summers ago, on a hot afternoon, and the train had run right over her. That was terrible, especially as it had been a picnic afternoon, hot and all the flowers out—but it was funny, too, when they made jokes afterwards about strawberry jam. And there was the time when the Leadbetters had suddenly gone: one day there were all the Leadbetters, seven of them from Granny Leadbetter to little Angela, living in the cottage one door from the end—and then the next day they’d gone, there were no Leadbetters! A van had called, people said, in the night. Not a stick of a table or a chair was left in the cottage. The cottage was there still, Number Six still, but no Leadbetters! And nobody would say why or how. People knew, but there was something awful that they would never tell. They frowned, they pressed their lips into ruler-lines. ‘Don’t ask no questions,’ they said, ‘and you know what you won’t be told none of.’ Nita and Dody had asked for weeks, they had stood outside Number Six and peered into the windows. They had rattled the back door and kicked the empty bottles. The newspaper man had even left the Sunday paper sticking in the letterbox, the dead letterbox. Since then, no Leadbetter had ever been seen. They had gone in a hush. There was something nasty about the Leadbetters.
Those events were memorable but they were memories only, misted and vague as the uncley sort of God one heard stories about in Sunday School. But here—here was something new, alive, overwhelming, something that was happening now, at the very minute, as the clock ticked, as the church bell tolled! The church bell just then tolled suddenly, like some great celestial dustbin-lid beaten against the grey sky, and then started its measured echoing march through the September Wednesday noon. The children whispered frantically. The gramophone whirred round grating and clicking; the singing had stopped. All about that little yard, with its washing hanging abandoned, its pramwheels and cans and its derelict wooden hutch—all this stayed empty and desolate as the cinderpath. But the children felt none of it. They saw none of the lowering green leaves against that slatey sky with its white-bottomed clouds, nor the vegetable green of the little leaves climbing the elm-trunks, nor the old tin shelters with the weeds in them and the jars of dried paintbrushes, nor the allotment beyond, nor the blanched grey of the walls of the seven cottages—a scene of only grey and heavy green and cinder-black.
‘What shall we do? What shall we do …?’ chattered Dody to Nita and Nita to Dody, making backwards and forwards glances wise and sophisticated, lunatic and tender. At eight and nine years of age their faces were old in gesture, their expression poised into magical replicas of feelings that they seemed to expect rather than experience. And suddenly Nita was saying over for the twentieth time, ‘Who could have done it? Who could have done it?’ Dody jumped up and clapped her hands and began dancing. ‘Dody knows, Dody knows what we’ll do …’ she sang, chanted, repeated hopping round the yard with her eyes brilliant and mad. She suddenly ran back to Nita and said what was very simple, but to these two an idea of impossible daring, a breath-taking stroke. ‘It was a boy done it,’ Dody said. ‘So we’ll do it back on the boys!’
They both gasped. Nita’s hand was up at her mouth. She was going to cry or to laugh, something was bursting in her. But all she did was to say in a little voice, not exactly her own: ‘What’ll we do then?’
Dody laughed and screamed delightedly: ‘We’ll do it back on the boys …’
‘What? What though?’ whispered Nita, who knew.
‘The same, the same!’ screamed Dody, then clapped her hand over her mouth.
Nita nestled close up to her, took her arm, ran over to the corner of the yard, then whispered more slowly but with her eyes bright with appetite for the words she knew would come but only wanted to hear over and over again: ‘Tell, tell! Tell me what we’ll do, Dody …’
Dody bent her head and whispered it again.
*
Their hot dinner never seemed to be going to end, though that in itself was delicious. Nita’s Mum, in her apron still, gave them their mutton boiled juicy grey and the white wet potatoes. And all through Nita and Dody kept tittering, staring at each other across the cruet with fearful eyes, then looking down at their plates and spooning round the barley in that gluey pale gravy. Nita’s Mum kept asking them what was the matter. Then they hung their heads, continuing on a lower plane and with slanted eyes the same exchange of secret glances and held giggles. Once Nita sang out, ‘Oh dear, what can the matter be?’—but Dody, crammed with barley, nearly choked herself, and at this Nita’s Mum lost patience and told them to go straight up to their bedroom without any pudding. And that was just what they wanted, to slide out on the linoleum, with the blessed door closed behind them, to leap up the stairs away from the white table-cloth and its bread-crumbs, up to the bedspread where they just burst themselves laughing and where Nita suddenly stopped and said confidentially: ‘Tell, tell.’
Half an hour later Dody said, ‘Where’s your box? We’ll need the you-know-what …’
Nita’s face fell, suddenly blank, as though now there was something to hide. She fidgeted. Then she looked up tearfully. ‘I forgot, I haven’t got any.’
Dody jumped up appalled. ‘Where is it? Where is it?’ And when Nita pointed miserably to the washstand where, between the soap-dish and the white water-jug a pencil-box jutted out woodenly—she ran across the room and fingered it open in a second. Inside there were ink-stains, a green Koh-i-noor, a stub of pink rubber stabbed with black pencil-marks, two paper-clip-hair-pins. Dody turned round wailing, ‘There isn’t any. There isn’t any …’
At which Nita sat bolt upright and said, thoughtfully, tragically, slowly: ‘At any rate, I’ve still got my penny.’
‘Your penny!’
‘My penny.’
‘PENNY!’
In a moment they were chattering again, the penny was out, they were fingering it with love, and Dody said again and again: ‘We can get lots of it now.’
‘Lots of what?’
‘Lots of you-know-what!’
‘When?’
‘Oh, now, now, now now now …’
Nita rose then to her feet, a dreadful pallor straining her face with age and sickness. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it’s Wednesday!’
‘Wednesday!’ Dody mouthed after her, as though she were munching something she would never swallow. ‘Shop’s shut!’
*
That night they knew they would do it tomorrow. That night was as long as one of the nights sometime before Christmas, when Christmas is near yet still will never hurry nearer, as long too as the nights of early bed in the summer when the windows were open and the music of the fair came so clearly across the common. That night the windows were open too, but outside it was dark, dark and warm, telling about the winter in the wrong way, without any cold, and thus in a queer way threatening; like some Monday nights in the kitchen with the washing about, when nobody could be bothered with you, when the minutes stopped altogether and no treats lay ahead. Tonight though, there was something ahead, but still there was the waiting, and so the room lay deadly and the electric light beaming out at the back dull and unmoving.
They were told off for bed early
, as soon as that September dark came down, and when they had washed nestled near on the big pillow, sucking the stringy ends of the white coverlet, making caves in the pillow and telling, over and over again, telling. Word for word Dody knew and Nita knew exactly what was to happen, but the words themselves had to be repeated, and each time marvellously they brought the picture succulently clear.
‘When’ll we go to the shop?’ Nita whispered.
‘In breaktime.’
‘What’ll we ask for?’
‘Chalk.’
‘A ha’penny-worth?’
‘Pennyworth! A whole pennyworth?’
Then there was a giggling, and suddenly Nita stopped. Her voice sounded terrified, and as though it wanted to be terrified. ‘And what if someone sees? What if one of the boys comes round the corner, just then, and sees?’
Dody mouthed fiercely, idiotically with her tongue stuck out in the dark: ‘We’ll run and run and run and run!’
But the telling could only last minutes at a time. In between they lay in silence, thinking hard, the thoughts racing, but far too fast for the minutes, or for the long-drawn-out darkness marked only by faint noises from downstairs, from Nita’s mum’s cough, from Dad’s rustling paper. The light from the stairs came though the door and made a patch like a clown’s hat on the ceiling. There was a soapy smell.
Once, much later, as they were at last nearly asleep, Dody pushed her head nearer and whispered, much nearer than before, and as though she had been thinking of this all the time: ‘I say, Nita …’
Nita whispered: ‘Yes?’
The Stories of William Sansom Page 2