Rice looked down at the two shining round helmets primping up in front of him. He laughed, and felt the corners of his mouth split and all the teeth catch in the wind, he laughed and seemed inside to shine with laughter; how could frying and falling walls happen on this kind of a glass morning? Hot smoke in this pure air? Such things happen to a rosy-cheeked crew of bright tin soldiers? The wind echoed in his ears like a sea-breeze, thrumming past as regular as telegraph wires, and still the sun shot pinpoints off the brass and glared whitely from the chimney-tops ahead. Suddenly Pudden began to hum a march, a high-pitched jigging march for dwarfs stomping off to the forest and the anvils—as joyfully repetitive as train music….
They skidded round a corner and braked to a stop. They were in a cul-de-sac made up of small white houses with painted doors. Trees growing behind showed above the roofs, an effect peculiar in a large city. These looked like country cottages, and the windows were in each case so cramped up and warped that the houses seemed to be no more than a pack of doors and windows clustered together, balancing for breath. A few trained bushes stood in tubs like sentinel birds before the black and pink and primrose doors. And there on the pavement corner stood the fire alarm post, singular and red, as bright a red as when the snow is on the ground.
They leapt off the machine, the officer ran up to the alarm and then stood by it, looking right and left, uncertain, while the broken glass twinkled beneath his polished boots. Rice thought: ‘Bright as the day Teetgen went to the paint factory fire and came away with his boots varnished, bright for days!’
The officer peered into the alarm—it had certainly been pulled. But no one was there to direct him. He looked up at the windows, then behind him—searching with his eyes anxiously for smoke. ‘That’s the crazy people they are‚’ thought Rice, ‘pulling the bell and then running away expecting us to find the job by magic. That’s them.’
A small boy appeared from behind one of the bird-bushes. The officer frowned and strode heavily towards him in his big boots.
‘Well, son—and who pulled it?’ He looked like a giant wooden soldier towering above the suddenly real boy. Blue coat splashed with red, silver buttons and axe, round red face as neat as a doll’s, shining black leggings stiff-legged.
Ignoring the question, the boy said: ‘Is there a fire, mister?’
‘How long have you been here?’ the officer asked, his voice sharpening with suspicion—then turned his head, so that his face shone brightly in the sunlight. He yelled over his shoulder to the firemen peering about: ‘One of you—scout round the corner.’
Attracted by the sound of bells and brakes and the stamping of boots, there had by then collected a small crowd of onlookers. Half of these were boys, carrying rifles and swords, or driving small pedal cars. One wore on his head a top hat peaked with half a brim only, painted blue and labelled La France. Two painters in white overalls looked sadly at the fire engine. A tall man with a thin face clouded with red veins asked if he could lend a hand. A smartly dressed woman dragging a trolley laden with shopping smiled and smiled, as though she was the mother of all and ‘she knew’. A man in a blue uniform winked at Teetgen, because he knew too—he knew it was just another bloody exercise, mate. Three Jewish exiles passed hurriedly, twisting their necks round to keep the uniforms in sight, frightened, round-eyes as owls.
By then Graetz, a tall white sunflower with his round face drooping off his long neck—Graetz was standing isolated in a circle of boys and saying aloud for their benefit: ‘It’s a false alarm—and from now on we’ve got our eye on this post. Got a policeman on it, we have, so in future …’
When suddenly in a garden wall between two houses a door burst open and a fat woman in a broad white apron came bustling out. She ran towards the Pump with her arms outstretched, as though the Pump might at any moment recede and vanish. She began shouting as soon as she appeared: ‘Don’t go! Don’t go! Oh, I’m so glad you came! Milly’s up a tree.’ Then paused for breath as the officer went up to her. ‘It’s round the back, round the back,’ she panted, ‘and I pulled the alarm, you see. They told me it was right—you see, she’s been up there since last night. She mews so.’
The officer said, ‘How do we get through?’ And at the same time shouted back to the men, ‘Cat up a tree. Bring the ladders.’
Teetgen and Nobby jumped up to the front of the ladders on top of the Pump. Graetz and Rice began to pull at the bottom. The straps uncoiled and then the long ladder came sliding out. Once again Rice felt like a puppet, a wooden soldier clockworked with the others into an excited, prearranged game. The sunlight seemed to blow by in bright gusts. Now everybody was laughing—except one of the lugubrious painters, who began to grumble loudly about the bleeding waste of petrol and men’s time. But the other onlookers found it great sport, and in the laughing dazzling light began to shout: ‘Pretty Pussy!’ and ‘Mind it don’t bite you now!’ and ‘See you keep her nightdress down!’—this last from the thin man with the bad veins.
Pulling at the ladder Nobby said: ‘Last week an old girl called us for a parrot up a tree. But we wouldn’t go. Cat-up-a-tree’s legal, parrots isn’t.’
Now the fat woman in the apron bolted back through the garden door with the officer following. The four men carrying the ladder squeezed through at the double. Rice at the rear end nearly jammed himself between the brick wall and the heavy wooden ladder, catching his fingers in the extension pawl, nearly coming a cropper and laughing again. Then they were in the garden—apple-trees and young beech saplings, a black winter tracing of branches everywhere against the glowing white cloud beyond. The sun glared through this filigree, striping the litter of dry leaves, striping the air itself with opaque lightshafts.
‘There she is, lads‚’ shouted the doll officer, pointing upwards. The other dolls doubled up with the ladder working like clockwork, raising their knees in a jocular movement as they ran.
Above them, isolated at the very top of a tall sapling, crouched on the tapering end of this thin shoot so that it bent over under the weight like a burdened spring—sat a huge dazed cat.
In a book of children’s stories this cat would have seemed improbable and amusing. Its position was as improbable as that of a blue pig flying. It looked like a heavy young puma borne by what appeared to be a tall and most resilient twig. In real life a branch so thin would have snapped. Yet here this was—happening on a bright November morning, a real morning though rather light-headed. In children’s books too there are pictured with vivid meaning certain fantasies of the weather—lowering black storms, huge golden suns, winds that bend all the trees into weeping willows, skies of electric blue with stars dusted on them like tinsel, moons encircled by magical haloes. These appear highly artificial, drawn from the inspiration of a dreamland: but they are true. These skies and suns and winds happen quite frequently. So that on the morning what appeared to be unreal was real, apparently richened by association, but originally rich in its entity that had created the fairy association. Thus this was a witches’ morning, a morning of little devils and hats popping off, of flurry and fluster and sudden shrill laughter.
Teetgen put his weight on the foot of the ladder and the others ran up underneath so that the ladder rose with them until at last it was upright. It was thicker by far and heavier than the sapling—but as its head crashed into the tapering sprout branches they supported it easily. They swayed precariously, then sprang back into position, while the cat, refusing to be disturbed by these alien perplexities, looked away scornfully—or, as animals often do, pretended to look away, keeping an ear cocked sharply towards the new varnished ladder-head now extending towards it.
The officer began to climb at the run, stamping on the ladder as firemen are taught to stamp, to punish the ladder and thus to control it. More than ever he appeared to be playing a game with this deliberate kicking of his boots. Pudden and the others held the ladder firm at the bottom. They were thinking: ‘What if he breaks his neck? A man for a cat? What a life …’ Th
rough the rungs of the ladder a line of gaily coloured underclothes flapped and danced their strange truncated dances. The fat woman stood a little way off, chequered by sunlight, her hands clasped, talking all the time. Some birds started singing, and in the middle of the city a cock crowed.
The officer pranced to the top and picked off the cat by the scruff of its neck. He stuck it on his shoulder and climbed down. The crowd now jammed in the doorway cheered and whistled. They all wanted to stroke the cat. So did Pudden. But as the officer reached the bottom rung the cat jumped from his shoulder to the ground. It was a black cat, fully grown, with white whiskers and paws. As it collected itself on the ground, several of the firemen stretched down their free hands to stroke it, somehow to congratulate it also upon its narrow escape.
However, the cat never even looked at them. With deliberation it stiffened its legs, so that it seemed to stand on its toes, flung up its tail straight as a poker—and walked disdainfully away from the firemen, leaving only the bright adieu beneath its tail.
THE END
About the Author
William Sansom (1912–1976) was a leading writer of his day, both for fiction and non-fiction. In 1946 and 1947 he was awarded two literary prizes by the Society of Authors, and in 1951 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. During the Second World War he became a full-time London firefighter, serving throughout the Blitz. His experiences during this time inspired much of his writing, including The Blitz and many of the short stories in his celebrated collection Fireman Flower. He also appeared as the fireman who plays the piano in Humphrey Jennings’s famous film about the Blitz, Fires Were Started.
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2011
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© William Sansom, 1963
The right of William Sansom to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–27972–2
The Stories of William Sansom Page 47