Then We Take Berlin

by Lawton, John

  “Odd, we never met, eh kid? Still can’t be our fault, can it? Name’s Merle. Me and yer grandad’s . . . y’know . . .”

  Yes. He knew.

  Her name wasn’t Merle. It was Mary-Ann. When she and Abner had met she had been turning tricks up West and Merle (after Merle Oberon) carried less sense of violated virginity than any combination of names that included “Mary.” The fares preferred fucking a Merle to a Mary.

  The boy had his own room.

  His own room. His own bed. A jug of water and a basin on the stand. A pot to piss in. No more sleeping on roll-out on the kitchen floor. No more pissing in the sink. As he looked up at the moon peeping at him through two centuries of dirt caking the skylight, he found himself quietly grateful to Abner for creating a level of poverty a few fractions higher than his own. Grateful, still suspicious, still scared, still baffled, but also aware of lesson one in a course of which he had no need—but he learnt it all the same—crime pays.

  The funeral was apt. The church itself—St. George’s-in-the-East—as blown to bollocks as any other house not so favoured by God. They’d swept the broken glass aside, made some attempt to shovel out the rubble and held what turned out to be an outdoor/indoor, roofless service in the ruins of Hawksmoor’s vision, followed by a swift burial in the church-yard under a peeping May sun, with the last draught of April tugging at their hair. Abner had no hair, Merle wore one of her many wigs, and Wilderness stood hatless in an ill-fitting blazer and even iller-fitting grey flannel trousers. He’d no idea where either had come from. Abner had simply produced them on the morning of the funeral and said, “Can’t see yer mum orf in rags, now can we?”

  Of Herbert Henry Asquith Holderness, L/Cpl, 5th Batt., The Royal East Kents, there was no sign.

  The wake was an equal absence.

  Most of Lily’s friends had perished in the raid that killed her, and Wilderness had long ago worked out that the only friend an alcoholic has or needs comes in a bottle.

  It was left to the three of them to mourn and blame.

  “I blame meself,” Abner said.

  “Whyzat?” from Merle.

  “I spoilt the kid. Never said no to her. Not from the moment she batted her blue eyes at me. And then when her mum died, it was just ’er an’ me . . . I spoilt her even more.”

  “Yeah, well,” Merle said over her glass of stout. “Let’s not spoil this one, eh?”

  Abner laughed.

  “Spoil ’im. I’s’ll thrash ’im night and day!”

  It was obvious they were joking.

  Harry Holderness was not.

  His first act on stepping into Abner’s parlour was to knock the boy across the room with the back of his hand.

  Absence distorts. Wilderness had an idea of his father that was less than the reality. He’d always pictured a big man, and common sense told him that if he and Harry ever met again the man would appear proportionately smaller as he himself had grown.

  But the bastard was huge. At least six two, barrel-chested, rippling with muscle and churning with rage.

  “No ’ard feelings. That’s just to let you know who’s who.”

  Wilderness picked himself up off the floor, wiped the blood from his mouth. Abner, at five two and eight stone, didn’t stand a chance against Harry. All the same he got between him and Wilderness with the bread knife in his hand.

  “Hit him again Harry and I’ll gut yer.”

  Harry righted one of the chairs he’d sent flying, sat down and stared at Abner.

  “Don’t be a silly bugger, Abner. I’ve killed more krauts than you’ve had hot mash and pies. Now, be a sweetheart and get that tart o’yours to put the kettle on. We’ve a lot to talk about, and I’ve only got a forty-eight hour pass.”

  Wilderness heard the pop of the gas going on in the kitchen.

  Harry asked inane questions about his wife’s death and funeral. Inane only because he did not seem to care about the answers. When Merle finally set a tea tray in front of him, he changed to the real subject of his visit.

  “About the boy . . . ”

  “I’m right here, Dad, I’m in the room.”

  “Are you asking for another belt? Shut up. Your father is talking. About the boy, Abner.”

  “Wot about him Harry? You suddenly remembered he exists?”

  Harry ignored this.

  “Can you keep him?”

  “Already am. He’s got a home here.”

  “I’ll see you right for the money. His Majesty pays me as a man with a dependant. You’ll get what’s due to you.”

  “I don’t doubt it, Harry.”

  “The army’ll do the paperwork. All I need is a letter from you, and a copy of Lil’s death certificate for the Army Paymaster, then there’ll be a few bob each week for you at the Post Office.”

  Abner didn’t say he couldn’t read or write. Wilderness knew he’d be doing all that for the old man from now on.

  “So,” Harry went on. “All that’s left is what’s he gonna do between now and his call-up.”

  “Call-up? The boy’s only thirteen.”

  “Fourteen come August 3.”

  “And . . . this war ain’t gonna last for ever now is it?”

  “From where I stand, in a pair of size twelve army boots, Abner, I can’t see no bleedin’ end to it. We got our arses kicked in France. The Russkis are sticking to their devil’s pact, and Uncle Sam as ever don’t want to know. We’re on our Jack Jones. Either Hitler invades us, or we invade him. So, I say again, what’s the boy gonna do?”

  “Matriculate,” Wilderness said softly.

  Merle flinched, and he realised she had confused matriculate with masturbate. Abner looked baffled. The word was clearly new to him. But Harry knew what he’d meant.

  “What? Exams and that? You? You must be joking.”

  “It’s what they want at school,” Wilderness said. “They want me to matriculate. They want me to sit the exams, and they tell me I’ll pass.”

  “And you believe ’em? What then? College? University? Oxford? The likes of you and me don’t get to go to places like Oxford, son. We leaves school and we gets ourselves a job.”

  He was leaning forward now, reddening in the face, looming over Wilderness like a tethered barrage balloon, blotting out the rest of the room. It was a slapping moment. If he continued to argue, Harry would hit him again. So, he argued.

  “It’s what I want,” he said simply.

  The first blow knocked him off his stool, the second, merely a spread hand against the chest, pushed Abner firmly back into his chair. Merle fled to the scullery.

  Harry took off his belt, curled the buckle end around his fist and thrashed Wilderness. Every so often he’d turn to Abner and push him back down. Wilderness wished his grandfather would just leave, follow Merle and escape. Protest was pointless. The bastard was going to beat him until he ran out of energy.

  Hours later. Darkness. The blackout. A couple of nightlights floating in saucers of water on the table. Wilderness examining his wounds. His ribs were black and blue. Harry had drawn blood on the back of his legs.

  “I’m sorry, son,” Abner said.

  “Not your fault, Grandad. Not the first time and it won’t be the last.”

  “Still it’ll be an age before he’s back. I shouldn’t think we’ll set eyes on yer dad again this side of the autumn.”

  “And I’m growing every day.”

  Merle heard innocence and childhood where there was none, and ruffled his hair.

  “’Course you are, Johnnie. Bigger every day.”

  “No. I meant. One day I’ll be as big as him. And then I’ll fuckin’ kill him.”

  “Don’t talk like that, son. He’s still yer dad arter all.”

  §11

  Merle had not yet peaked. Wilderness had seen prostitutes outside East End pubs so raddled they could but have charged in pence for the oldest service in history. Once, inside an East End pub, in search of his wayward mother, he had seen one cross her legs an
d raise her shoe in such a way that the price was visible in scrawled chalk on the sole, and his suspicion came close to confirmation—2/6d.

  Merle was, as his mates would have said, a bit of a looker.

  “I put a stop to that game,” Abner said. “Can’t be doin’ with that.”

  Nominally, Merle worked in shops. None for long. A Debenham and Freebody up West would give way to a Woolworth’s back East and that in turn to a haberdasher’s in Hoxton. Wilderness liked her Woolworth’s phase the best—she’d come home with bags of stolen sweets from the confectionary counter.

  But she quit Woolworth’s. They’d asked her to scrape the green mould off biscuits before they were put on the counter.

  “Disgustin’,” she said. “Absolutely fuckin’ disgustin’.”

  The haberdasher’s paid less. Some evenings, Merle would rummage through her collection of wigs, put on a colourful dress, ply her old trade and have a blazing row with Abner when he found out. Abner was above belting Merle. He would shout and swear but he never laid a finger on her. Merle was not above throwing crockery at Abner. Her aim was terrible, and it was not safe to be in the same room.

  Wilderness would retreat to his own room. Retreat to his books. The only things in the room that in any way personalised it.

  §12

  Wilderness left school in July. A warm summer. He had ten days to himself before turning fourteen would thrust him into the world of work—neither child nor adult. A wet summer. The Luftwaffe had given up. The raid that killed Lily had been among the last. It wasn’t clear why until the lightest night of June when Hitler invaded Russia.

  He read the papers out loud to Abner. Panzers rolled across what was left of Poland, hammering at the gates of the Soviet Union. Stalin suffered a shift of meaning—now, and for years to come, he was “Uncle Joe.”

  “I thought it was Poland what was what we went to war on account of?” said Abner.

  “It was, Grandad.”

  “Did we ever get there?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe we never will.”

  Abner got him a job on a stall in Whitechapel Market, right in front of the Underground station. An old pal from way back who’d take Wilderness on for next to no wages and teach him how to sell cheap china seconds. Keep him off the streets by placing him firmly down on just one of them.

  If it was a trade, Wilderness could not see it. Whatever there was to learn about packing and unpacking crates from Hanley or Burslem could be learnt in minutes. If there was a patter to be learnt he’d never learn it from Frankie Hodges. Frankie never took the fag from his lips long enough to make a pitch to anyone, and Wilderness soon concluded that if a patter had been required before the war, in a time of war—houses blown to smithereens, crockery reduced to confetti—it was superfluous. Frankie could shift his entire stock twice over every day without so much as a “roll-up roll-up.” The problem, if anything, was getting supplies in. Some Monday mornings Wilderness would unpack a single crate, the contents sold by lunchtime, and Frankie would slip him a shilling and turn him loose for the rest of the day.

  Many of Wilderness’s classmates were in the same age trap. Man-boys with not enough to do and not enough to spend. The East End filled up with gangs. Every bomb site became the object of a turf war, every street corner a territorial boundary. Every trespass an insult. Most of Wilderness’s mates, those cowards of discretion, would avoid this by killing time in matinees at the Troxy cinema. Wilderness went to the library.

  §13

  When the nights began to draw in, Abner embarked on a course of instruction. How to steal.

  “I only nick what I think I can shift. I never bothers with big stuff. Attracts too much attention, and if you can fence it at all, fence’ll make more’n you do and he’ll bore you to death bangin’ on about the risk he’s taking.

  “I never do a job on me own manor. Means travelling, but that’s no bovver.”

  It was no bother because it was a major component in what Wilderness thought of as Abner’s modus operandi, and Abner as “me meffod.” Abner had elected to serve King and Country in the Heavy Rescue Squad. This had distinct advantages. To be an air raid warden was almost a full time job, even when there were no air raids, for air raid wardens dealt in possibilities. It would also have tied him to his own “manor” night after night. Fire watching carried the same restrictions, with none of the power that turned so many chief wardens into little Hitlers. No one swaggered about fire watching. Heavy Rescue went where it was needed. And when there were no raids, and there had been virtually none since Lily died, a man in a Heavy Rescue dark blue blouse might have nothing to do but was free to be seen or ignored almost anywhere.

  “Supposing I’m down Chelsea or up ’Ampstead? On me bike. I finds the shelter where the wardens drop in for a nightly cuppa and I sits down with ’em and has a brew up, and if anyone asks I been checkin’ out some building that looks unsafe in the next borough. Sounds kosher, and as I’m in uniform I’m almost one o’ them. They gets to talkin’ and pretty soon I finds out who’s locked up the house for the duration and buggered orf to Canada or who’s just asked them to keep an eye on the place while they has a weekend in the country.

  “Now . . . I suppose you think a burgliar . . .”

  Abner could no more pronounce burglar than coupon, which always resembled an utterance like “cyuoopon.”

  “ . . . I suppose you think of a burgliar as a bloke what works at dead of night, like I was on the cover of a penny dreadful, swingin’ orf the gutters at midnight in a striped jersey wiv a mask over me eyes.”

  Wilderness thought no such thing but said nothing.

  “I’m what you might call a twilight Johnnie. I does my jobs around dusk, and in summer often in daylight.”

  “A crepuscular creeper,” Wilderness ventured.

  “Whatever, son . . . I don’t work at night. And you know why?”

  Wilderness could guess but let the old man have his moment.

  “Too many buggers about when it’s dark and not enough buggers about when it’s dark. Didn’t use to be that way, but the war’s altered everything. You got coppers, always had coppers, but now every Tom, Dick an’ Harry’s in a fuckin’ uniform askin’ fuckin’ questions. And Joe Public stays at home for fear of being run over in the blackout or some such nonsense. It’s so much harder to move about. But . . . if I does a job at say five in the arternoon . . . I just gets on a bus or goes down the Underground like I was Norman Normal. Half past five is a good time to travel. You could lose Sherlock bleedin’ Holmes on the London Underground at half past five of a weekday. Camden Town in rush hour? You could lose Rommel and his fuckin’ Afrika Corps! Earl’s Court at six? Twelve Russian Divisions try followin’ you down to the Piccafuckindilly and are never seen again!”

  Wilderness cut his teeth on a job in Belsize Park at 4:45 p.m. on a September afternoon in the autumn of 1941.

  It was a Regency villa, bowfront—elegant ironwork, embraced by thick twists of wisteria—pale yellow paint flaking from the doors and windows, a scattering of dried blossom and browning leaves.

  But it was the interior that most struck Wilderness. He had never been inside a house so well, so richly furnished, nor had his reading furnished his imagination with an inkling. Persian carpets over polished boards, wall upon wall of bookshelves, a baby grand piano on the first floor, nestling in the curve of the bay.

  Abner was ready for this.

  “Bedazzled, eh kid?”

  “Yes, Grandad.”

  “Don’t be. Take a look around, take it all in and then spit it all out. Get it outa yer system. You know how most toms get caught? Trying to make off with something too big and too beautiful that just happened to take his fancy and tipped the silly sod into a daydream. Or nickin’ something so unique every nark in London’s on the lookout for it and the first fence he tries turns him in for the reward. Third, and this is real stupid, opening the drinks cupboard, knockin’ back the toffs’ whisky and gi
n, and being caught rat-arsed on the job.”

  Abner had a preference for cash. Jewellery, as he told Wilderness repeatedly, was easily traced if left intact—he broke jewellery.

  “You’d be surprised how many people don’t trust banks—how many of ’em keep large sums of money in the house. Especially now. They . . . they want readies to be readies. If you see wot I mean, son.”

  A reading of the collected tales of E. W. Hornung had rightly informed Wilderness that the rich very often had safes—in walls, behind paintings, occasionally in the floor and more occasionally just standing pritch-kemp and defiant. What Mr. Hornung had not told Wilderness was that the average safe in any private house in London was old—donkey’s years old and had in all probability been bought by the first rich man in the family, when the richesse was still very nouveau, and thereafter handed down with heirlooms and antiques, until, by 1941, the safe itself was an antique.

  Not that a kid of six could crack them, but a kid of fourteen under instruction could.

  “Anything before 1890s doable. After that, gets a bit tough. Moves up a league. They start laminating—layers of iron, layers of steel. You can’t shatter steel and drilling iron is like sucking porridge up a straw. And you end up travelling with more and more tools. The light touch goes out of the job. You end up setting off like you’re fighting a German division, kitted up and mob-handed. But, like I said. Plenty of old uns just waiting for the likes of you and me.”

  In the study at the rear of the Belsize Park villa, half hidden by the desk, was a small safe. Less than three feet high, half as wide, in a chipped green finish the colour of verdigris, bearing a brass plate—Thomas Withers & Son, West Bromwich, England. Below the plate was an off-centre handle, much resembling a pinecone, and a pivoting keyhole cover.