Goodbye Piccadilly

by Betty Burton

  ‘I’m sorry. I made you jump,’ Jack said.

  ‘No, only that I expected it was a customer.’ He put down the pad and polish with which he had been burnishing the brass rings of a bridle. ‘You’re Jack aren’t you? Jack Moth?’

  Jack nodded.

  ‘From your height. Arnie said that you was tall, they called you Lofty, an’t that right?’ He held out a thin brown hand, blued and powdery from the metal polish.

  ‘I’m pleased to meet you, Mr Pearce.’

  He looked down at his hand. ‘I shall be in trouble with Mother, shaking your hand like that.’

  His way of speaking, slow and ponderous, was exactly like Cully’s. He had a nice smile and his own teeth.

  ‘Mother!’ He called into the passage. ‘Come round the counter, lad.’ He lifted the flap and, as Jack emerged, Fanny Pearce poked her head round the passageway door.

  ‘What you want, Bert? I was just putting out the whites in the sun.’

  ‘This is Jack, Mother.’

  She clapped two small, plumpish hands over her mouth. ‘Oh dear Lord, what a greeting.’ She put up her arms and pulled Jack down so that she could kiss him and hug him. ‘I can’t tell you how much it means to me and Bert, you coming here.’

  ‘I wanted to… very much.’

  She squeezed his hand, her emotions on the verge of spilling over. Probably in her forties, she was as pink and soft as Bert was brown and leathery. ‘Fancy him not bringing you through the proper way through the front door.’ She wagged her head, but from the way she said, ‘You men!’ it was obvious that genial chiding was part of her regular housewifely duties to keep the man of the house from back-sliding – and to show that she knew her own manners.

  ‘Come through anyhow, if you don’t mind,’

  Ducking through doorways and under beams Jack followed her and Bert followed Jack.

  The kitchen, where she sat Jack in the coolest spot beside the open door, was what one would expect from a pink housewife wearing a white apron. Whatever he had imagined Cully’s parents to be, it was not the ill-assorted Pearces.

  ‘I dare say you could do with a wet of summit.’ Without waiting, Bert descended cellar stairs with a jug.

  ‘You’ll stop and eat with us?’

  Jack nodded.

  ‘A great lad like you wants feeding. If you don’t mind me saying, your uniform’s hanging on you. Are you sure you’re better enough to be coming all the way out here?’

  ‘I had a nice ride. A carter from the strawberry farms.’

  ‘Dick Hanway. Hm. I’ll bet there an’t nothing you don’t know about Hambledon now. Jack got a ride off Dick Hanway, Bert.’

  ‘We wasn’t expecting you or I’d have collected you.’ Bert poured three mugs of golden beer.

  ‘Home brew.’ Bert drank his like a man used to quaffing well.

  ‘It’s very good,’ Jack said.

  Fanny said, ‘I feel terrible not having anything special in.’

  They were all skating around the reason for Jack’s visit. But they all knew, so Jack left it to them to say what they wanted to when they were ready. Fanny laid out plentiful dishes of ham, cheese and pie and a cottage loaf on a board, and for the first time in weeks, Jack salivated at the smell and thought of food. Without ceremony, Fanny filled their plates.

  ‘Mmm. This ham is so succulent.’

  ‘Juicy?’

  ‘Yes, yes, and beautifully smoked.’

  ‘It was Arnold’s favourite,’ Bert Pearce said. ‘He would have ate it at every meal if you’d have let him. Iddn’t that a fact, Fan?’

  Fanny Pearce nodded. ‘Only my own cured though. Our own pig. Arnold could tell at once if it was somebody else’s. He was cute like that, wasn’t he, Bert?’

  And so they gently put their toes into the quicksand of Cully’s death.

  ‘A course, Jack’d see a different side of Arnie from what we saw. Lads is always different when they’re away from their mum and dad,’ Bert said. ‘I dare say your dad don’t know the half you get up to, Jack, do he?’

  ‘He gives me a long rope.’

  ‘Best thing,’ Fanny said. ‘A course, we couldn’t always do that with Arnold.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Apart from the fits though, he was pretty good,’ Bert said.

  ‘No he wasn’t, Bert. We couldn’t never have let him go like Mr Moth can let Jack go.’ Explaining to Jack, ‘It wasn’t just the fits, he was never going to grow up to be a man.’

  ‘He did go,’ Bert said, with a fringe of anger around his words. ‘He never had no choice.’

  Fanny Pearce sighed, the white hills of her bosom heaving beneath her crossed hands. ‘Yes, yes. It was like putting a boy of twelve into uniform.’

  ‘Some people got a lot to answer for,’ Bert said.

  ‘But they’ll not answer for it, Mr Pearce. The sort of people responsible for conscripting Cully don’t ever get their just deserts, they are too remote from the harm they have caused. I say, do you mind if I call him Cully, it was his name in the army.’

  ‘Oh no, we’d like it if you did. That’s the side we never could see. It was terrible for us wondering how he was going to manage.’

  ‘Actually, he managed very well. There were some things that he was extremely good at.’

  ‘That’s Bert’s training.’ A lone tear trickled from her eye; absently she took it on her forefinger and massaged it with her thumb. ‘He always said he’d make something of him, didn’t you, Bert?’

  ‘I’d a made a saddler of him. Wait a minute, I’ll show you.’ Stopping in the act of refilling their mugs, he went through into the shop and came back with a small, gleaming saddle. ‘Pony saddle. Made every stitch hisself.’

  Jack took the object, ran his hands over the glossy leather and fingered the gleaming brass fittings. ‘It’s absolutely beautiful workmanship. I had no idea.’ He felt the tooled ornate monogram and read out ‘“A.H.P.”?’

  ‘He wanted us to get his name changed to Pearce.’ Fanny hunched her shoulders. ‘We always put it off. You do, don’t you? You always think there’s time. He made that about five year ago, there seemed to be all the time in the world.’

  ‘I envy Cully his boyhood, being able to do something like this, living here.’

  ‘You? With your looks and brains. ’Sides, you aren’t going to tell me that you aren’t used to better than this,’ Fanny said. ‘When you’re not thinking about it you give yourself away in the way you speaks. You got a posh accent behind it all.’

  ‘I envy the happy life he must have led with you. I was boarded.’

  Fanny nodded at Bert. ‘He was happy, wasn’t he, Bert?’

  ‘It was in his nature. He couldn’t help hisself. He couldn’t learn nothing much in the way of reading and writing, but he could do things. And it didn’t matter much if he didn’t know his letters. He’d a made a damn good saddler.’

  The shop doorbell jangled and Bert rose at once. ‘You don’t have to go back tonight do you, lad? We’d like you to stop over. Fanny’s got to take stuff to Pompey tomorrow, so she could give you a ride down.’

  Jack wanted to stay. Somehow, Cully, who was the source of his nightmares, had a presence here that might put them to rest.

  Fanny said, ‘He don’t think – you men don’t. You brought nothing with you, but there’s all Arnold’s stuff if you had a mind to spend the night.’

  ‘I’d be pleased to. I really didn’t know anything much about Cully and I should like to. He’d talk about his mum and dad, and the cricket team, but mostly he seemed to like to hear about what the rest of us did. And he liked to always be doing things: domestic things, like brewing up or making porridge.’

  ‘Did he? That pleases me to hear that. I taught him that sort of thing. We was always worried about the day when he wouldn’t have me and Bert, so we saw to it that he could manage on his own. And he mostly could. But he wasn’t never fit to be in no army.’

  ‘You are right, he was too young.
’

  The afternoon was restful. Jack wandered off around the village, plunging into woodlands and tramping around fields. Early in the evening he went to the local inn with Bert who said he wanted to introduce Jack as Young Arnie’s friend. He played shove-ha’penny and table skittles and drank the local Gale’s ale. They went to bed country hours, early so as to be up and about at dawn, Jack sleeping in Cully’s room and in one of Cully’s nightshirts. His scar, which had been mending, was painful, and his mind was afire with dark memories. Outside the open window nightjars called and nightingales piped, the scent of musk-roses and warm pig wafted in through the open window.

  Still nobody had mentioned Cully’s actual death. He puzzled about that. Fanny and Bert Pearce did not appear to show anything other than normal grief at Cully’s death. Coming here, he had been apprehensive, not knowing what their reaction might be – anger, bitterness, shame even – certainly not this dignified coping with their loss. He began to wonder how much they knew.

  Next morning they breakfasted on more of the ham, fried with eggs and thick bread. ‘I’ve got to feed the animals before I load up. Do you want to come, or shall you bide there a bit, Jack?’

  ‘Let me come.’

  Leaning on the pig-sty fence, watching Fanny scratch the animal’s back with a stick, Jack asked, ‘Did you get a letter from the officer?’

  She hesitated. ‘No. You couldn’t expect them to do that when there was so many getting killed. All we got was a form that said he was dead. Just his name and number filled in and the date and that he was dead. The same as thousands of families has been getting.’

  No, Jack thought, not the same. Not many died as Cully had died.

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘Only a printed letter about his pay – he was getting it sent home. It’s indoors there, still in his savings box. We shall have to do something with it, give it to the children’s home perhaps. We don’t hold with stone memorials or nothing like that. Let’s just stop talking about it, shall we?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, no. I didn’t mean it like that. I don’t particularly want to talk about the forms they sent and that.’

  ‘You are a surprising lady, Fanny.’

  ‘Why’s that then?’

  ‘Partly, I suppose, because I had a picture of you in my mind. Cully always referred to you as “my old mum”. I never expected such a pretty lady.’

  She smiled. ‘And he called you “old Lofty”, though I can’t say there’s much he didn’t tell us about you. He thought the world of you. On his leaves he never stopped talking about you, I suppose because he couldn’t write, he remembered every little detail to tell us. He never talked much about the fighting. What was he like? Bert can’t stand to know about that side of it, but I want to know.’

  ‘I don’t think he realized the danger we were sometimes in.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. I once said to Bert that he’d either end up dead or with the VC. He was always the same. The kids would tease him into some dare that could a killed him, and he’d do it. Is that how he got killed?’

  Now Jack was convinced that the Pearces did not know the circumstances of Cully’s death. He had come here with some idea that he must provide them with an account that they could live with, but it was proving unnecessary. If anything, Fanny Pearce was the comforter.

  He decided to lie to her.

  ‘No. It could easily have been any of us. I was the reckless one. And got away with it. It doesn’t seem just, does it?’

  ‘If you’re going to look for justice in this world, you’ll need a strong magnifying glass.’

  Musk Cottage garden was long and seemingly without a boundary. She took him to a small orchard, a row of bee skeps, a vegetable plot, from each of which she gathered produce and packed it into wicker baskets. She milked two goats, put the milk into long pans, and packed some cheeses into a hamper. ‘It’s the posh London shops that buy it. People round here don’t eat goats’ cheese. It fetches decent money. We tried to see to it that our bit of land was all put down to stuff that Arnold could manage and make a living by later on. Everything here’s for feeding ourselves or selling.’

  ‘Even the flowers?’

  ‘Makes a few shillings in Havant.

  Jack shook his head and smiled at the practicality of it all, thinking of Mere and its acres and acres of grass and flower borders, of the fish in the lake that were not for eating, and the decorative crab-apples, cherry and plum trees that were grown for spring effect – unlike Musk Cottage’s pruned and fruiting varieties, which were already becoming heavy with their commercial crops.

  He helped her load up and said goodbye to Bert Pearce.

  ‘Try to come again, lad. It’s been balm to our hearts talking about Arnie.’

  ‘I have to return to my unit quite soon. But when my next leave comes…’

  ‘We want you to have this.’

  By its shape and size Jack knew that this was Cully’s apprentice-piece of saddlery. The easily-sprung tears that had made him feel so shamed and womanish at Lys House and Queen Alexandra’s, seemed not unmanly here. Even so, he dashed his knuckles at his damp eyes. ‘I’m sorry…’

  ‘Nothing wrong with men’s tears, Jack,’ Fanny said. “’Tis a pity we didn’t see a few more sometimes.’

  He had expected the ride into Portsmouth to be by horse and cart, but Fanny drove a pointed-nosed little green van skilfully along the winding country roads. For the first three or four miles they were each within their own minds, then Fanny said, ‘You’re a bit tall for my little van.’

  ‘I find it very comfortable.’

  Taking her eyes from the road to look directly at him, she said, ‘I’m glad. I love being in here, ’specially with the windows up and the engine off. Sometimes I stops along the lane just for the pleasure of being in here. I used to sing a lot on my way to Pompey, even talk to myself, have a good curse at things, say things I wouldn’t want nobody else to hear. I cried my tears for Arnold in here.’

  Jack looked around the little tin box on wheels. ‘It is rather like the secret dens one had in childhood.’

  ‘Can we pretend that’s what it is? Exchange a few secrets… tell the truth a bit?’

  ‘A confessional instead of a den?’

  ‘Perhaps so. So, if it’s not too impertinent, would you mind telling me how it is you’re hiding yourself in private’s uniform – by rights you should be an officer, shouldn’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Tell me to mind my own business.’

  ‘I’m not, as they say, officer material.’

  ‘But you’re officer class all right.’

  ‘Some of my relations are inclined to be.’

  ‘But not Jack.’

  ‘That’s right, not Lance-Corporal Moth.’

  ‘Is it to do them down then? Or is it your dad?’

  ‘My father? He’s not concerned whether I’m a private or a general.’

  ‘You’re wrong. He minds all right. All fathers need their sons to shine. That’s part of the reason why Bert wanted to give you the saddle. I doubt if he realizes it, but he wants somebody he respects to see that he had a son who could do something that not many could do.’

  Fanny halted the van and put the engine in neutral gear whilst a slow herd of cows flopped and jostled its way along a narrow lane, rubbing their rough hides against the van, rolling their eyes at the windows. Jack hated the thought that the good done to him by these last cathartic twenty-four hours with the Pearces might be undone by a wrong word. Yet, not to be honest about himself was less than shrewd and intelligent Fanny deserved. Twice she had alluded to his accent or class. She knew that he hid behind his adopted accent, and rough table-manners. But then, why stop there, why not be honest with her about Cully’s death also?

  Compromising, he said, ‘In civilian life, I am a lawyer. My father is a Scotland Yard detective, and my mother, who was a lady, is dead.’

  ‘Ah,’ Fanny said. ‘I’
m sorry about that.’

  ‘It’s six years since it happened.’

  ‘And you want to blame your father?’

  ‘Blame him? Of course not.’

  ‘All right, have it your way.’

  They sat silently for long moments, then Jack said, ‘She had my little brother Kitt late in life, and she died giving birth.’

  ‘And you don’t blame your father?’

  His gaze was withdrawn.

  ‘Dear lad, ’twould be a very natural thing if you did. When our closest love dies, we all want to blame somebody for it. What we really want is to blame the person who has gone and died and took their love away from us, but we can’t do that, can we? So sometimes we blames God, oftentimes we blames ourselves. I reckon you like to blame your father. The way you mentioned him over this last twenty-four hours, you had a strange sound of hate and love both in your voice.’

  Jack felt uneasy and wished that they could drive on. Here he was pinned down for her scrutiny and comment.

  She continued, ‘I was that way with my mother. She was a drudge and I hated her for being it: yet the reason why she was a drudge was because she loved us and wanted to make life better for us. So I loved her too.’

  ‘My father is a man of… I’m sorry, I don’t know how else to say it…’

  ‘This isn’t the outside world remember?’ She smiled. ‘There’s only the cheeses and the rhubarb in the back.’

  ‘He’s a man who can’t keep away from women.’

  ‘Truly?’

  ‘I’ve known for years that he keeps a mistress.’

  ‘And you don’t have women?’

  ‘I wouldn’t if I had a wife and children.’

  ‘Well then, I wish you a wife who will satisfy you.’

  He flushed warmly, aware of her womanly presence, as he had been since he first laid eyes upon her, feeling both bold and shy; in nature wanting to confess himself to her, in nurture trained not to do so.