Shilling a Pound Pears

by Claire Rayner

  CLAIRE RAYNER

  Shilling a Pound Pears

  Claire’s third novel; from 1964.

  e-book ISBN 978-1-84982-055-4

  Published in e-book by M P Publishing Limited 2011.

  M P Publishing Limited,

  12 Strathallan Crescent

  Douglas, Isle of Man,

  IM2 4NR, British Isles

  Copyright © 1964 Claire Rayner

  Copyright © 2011 M P Publishing Limited

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Rayner, Claire / Shilling a Pound Pears

  A novel for children in 15 chapters

  e-book - Stephen Holmes; 2011-06-08

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  About this book

  From the 1964 edition of this book.

  Running a fruit barrow? Dead-easy thought the younger members of the Jackson and Cooper clan marooned in London for a hot and dusty summer. Even Jane, ever sober and practical, thought it could be done. Richard was dubious, but the thought of some pin-money to spend on his beloved car was a powerful incentive. Hilary was determined to have a go, if only for the sake of old Yossell. So they took it on.

  That was the beginning. They hadn't reckoned on the murderously early hours, the jockeying for position at the wholesale market, the problems presented by rash purchases. It was lucky that Hilary had such a firm ally and guide in Peter Minsky. It was through Peter that they learned that someone coveted their pitch—someone who wouldn't (and didn't) hesitate to use every dirty trick in the trade.

  This is a story of city streets, of hustling, bustling crowds in a district of London where people of all nations argue and joke and buy the day's meal off barrows in a street market. It has the jollity and vitality of a great metropolis, and some pretty rough moments as well. It is a story of quite ordinary young people, right now.

  Also from the 1964 edition, About the author:

  Claire Rayner is a Londoner born and bred, though she spent three years in Canada, supporting herself in a variety of odd jobs: waitress, summer stock, jewellery saleswoman, untrained aide in the Toronto Hospital for Sick Ghildren. This last job inspired her to come back to London to hopefully qualified as a nurse. She trained at the Royal Northern Hospital, Holloway, and has worked at Guy's, the Royal Free, and at the Whittington Hospital, Highgate in the Children's Unit.

  She is married to an advertising executive, [Des], and with the birth of their first child — they now have two — she reluctantly gave up nursing. By that time, however, she had begun to write. She has published innumerable articles, a book for adults titled MOTHERS AND MIDWIVES, and a non-fiction account for children of WHAT HAPPENS IN HOSPITAL. She has broadcast, both on sound and television, and has been active in Youth Clubs.

  This is her first novel for the young. It has nothing whatsoever to do with nursing, but purely with her own enjoyment of life, and her sympathy with the enthusiasms and problems of young people today.

  Claire Rayner has written several books under the pseudonym, Shiela Brandon; these have now been e-published by MPP under her own name: include Doctors of Downlands, The Final Year, the Cottage Hospital.

  Shilling a Pound Pears was her first book under her real name, (Final Year and Cottage Hospital preceded Shilling) and was originally published by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd. with cover illustration by Kay Brewer. It sold for 13s 6d.

  Thanks from MPP to Gloria Knecht, Maria Smith, and especially to Des Rayner.

  Claire Rayner died in 2010, in her eightieth year; she is survived by her husband, Des, her three children Amanda, Adam and Jay, and four grand-children.

  Contents

  chapter 1

  chapter 2

  chapter 3

  chapter 4

  chapter 5

  chapter 6

  chapter 7

  chapter 8

  chapter 9

  chapter 10

  chapter 11

  chapter 12

  chapter 13

  chapter 14

  chapter 15

  Chapter One

  THEY sat sprawling around the big shabby room, silent for once, looking sad dejected as it was possible for them to look: Richard, his long legs flung over the arm of the chair, chewing his lower lip, Hilary on the floor beside him, hugging her knees as she stared out of the window, Jane, neat and prim, sat on the window-seat. Barbara and Jojo sat at the table, their elbows planted in the middle of the wreck of breakfast, and the three boys, Stephen, Philip and John, were perched on the ancient grand piano in the corner. The early morning sunshine lit the room brightly, glancing off Hilary’s red hair and Stephen’s bug round spectacles, showing every worn patch in the carpet with cruel clarity. A fly buzzed lazily at the window-pane, and then zoomed across the room to dance round Richard’s head.

  “This is one hell of a way to spend a summer vac,” he said explosively, swatting viciously at the fly. “I might just as well have taken that job.”

  “Don’t swear,” Hilary said automatically, looking across at Barbara and Jojo. “You know you wouldn’t if the folks were here.”

  “But they’re not, are they?” Richard was bitter. “Honestly, Mum makes me mad! Just about the only chance we get to see them is during the holidays, and now—”

  Hilary got to her feet and stood beside Richard’s chair, looking down at him, her pretty face suddenly flushed and angry. “Look, Richie. You’re not being fair. They didn’t want to go away for the whole of the summer holidays - but they couldn’t help it. There isn’t that much work available for them these days, and you know it. This is a No. 1 tour they’ve got, and Mum said they’ll earn enough from this one to make a down payment on a smallholding—and then they’ll give up theatre altogether. So stop sulking.”

  Barbara looked up from the little tower of sugar-lumps she was building. “You mean they won’t be actors any more?”

  Hilary nodded. “That’s right! No more tours abroad, no more long rep seasons out in the sticks.”

  Barbara returned to her tower with a satisfied little nod. “Good,” she said. “I don’t know why they didn’t give up the stage a long time ago—I don’t know why you want to start, either.”

  “That’s my business,” Hilary snapped. “Anyway, it’ll be different for me. Daddy’s putting me through drama school, so that I’ll be better trained than he and Mummy were, and I’ll be sure to get plenty of marvellous parts—West End ones.”

  “Daddy says Uncle Arthur is feckless,” Jojo said unexpectedly. “And he says Uncle Arthur’s a lunatic to let you be the same. What’s feckless, Hilary?”

  “That’s enough, Jojo.” Jane’s voice came coolly from the window-seat. “Sorry, Hilary—Jojo shouldn’t have said that.”

  Hilary shrugged, her mouth set a little angrily. “Doesn’t matter. We all know what your father thinks of ours.”

  Stephen gave a sudden hoot of laughter, and leaned over to cuff his brother. “When we’re grown up, Pip, shall I be a solicitor like Uncle Joseph, and you be an actor like Daddy and then we’ll argue with each other?” He jumped down from the piano and stood in front of Philip, his thumbs th
rust into the armholes of his shirt, his chin tucked down into his neck. “Really, Arthur, I can’t understand you! Five children and you still run around with these tatty theatricals! About time you settled down,” he said, his voice deep and plummy.

  Philip grinned lazily. “Poor old Joseph,” he said, his voice resonant and strong, in a fair imitation of his father’s. “Still nagging?”

  Only Jane didn’t join in the general laughter. “Honestly, Hilary, you shouldn’t let them,” she said, her face a little flushed. “it’s not very polite.”

  “Nor was Jojo, was he?” Hilary chuckled. “And it’s true, anyway. Uncle Joseph and Daddy have been saying the same things to each other as long as I can remember - but all the same, Stephen—and you, Pip—we’ve got to spend the next month living together, so layoff, will you? No more cracks about Uncle Joseph, and no more of what your father says from you, Jojo. Right?”

  The boys nodded and Stephen climbed back on to the piano. John made room for him, and Stephen winked at his cousin. John smiled back solemnly, and once again the room slid into silence.

  They were an interesting-looking collection of young people. Hilary and Richard, both tall and red-headed, and dressed in casual slacks and sweaters, looked almost like twins, though at nineteen Richard was beginning to fill out, losing the stringy, gawky look of his younger years, and Hilary, two years younger, was developing some of her mother’s cool elegance. Stephen and Philip, their younger brothers, also had an air of twinship about them, even though they looked so unlike. Stephen’s round face, made even rounder by his big spectacles, hid a sharp brain and a gift for mimicry he had inherited from his actor father, while Philips’s lazy good looks belied an equally quick mind, and a gentleness his brothers and sisters respected. These two, at fourteen and fifteen, were inseparable, seeming able to communicate with each other without bothering to talk. Barbara, the youngest of the five Coopers, with dark hair cut into a swinging bob, always seemed a bit left out of things, at eleven too young for Richard and Hilary, and too feminine in her interests to fit into Stephen and Philip’s private world.

  The other three were so different that it was hard to believe that they were first cousins to the Coopers. Jane Jackson, the same age as Hilary, was a small girl, fair and quiet, with a taste for dull-coloured clothes, and an apparent disapproval of Hilary’s slap-happy approach to life and liking for make-up and bright clothes.

  John, her fourteen-year-old brother, looked very like her, and was even quieter. He spoke as rarely as possible, seeming to prefer sitting quietly on the sidelines watching other people do things, but his closed and watchful face sometime lost its solemnity, and he had been known to make wry jokes that convulsed the mercurial Stephen. As Hilary had once said, “There must be more to John than meets the eye. Stephen and Philip wouldn’t like him as much as they do if he was as dull as he looks most of the time.”

  Only Jojo, the baby of the Jacksons, at eight, was different. His cheeky brown eyes peered out at the world from behind a thatch of straw coloured hair that no amount of brushing would keep tidy, and his tendency to sudden attacks of wild rushing around made it seem ludicrous that he should be named Joseph, like his rather pompous father. It had been the Coopers who nicknamed him Jojo, when he was five, and had collected all his father’s clothes from the wardrobe and given them to a man who had called at the Jackson house asking for charity.

  “No one,” Richard said gravely, “with such generous instincts could possible be called Joseph, after out tight-fisted uncle. I shall call him Jojo, because it suits him better.” And Jojo he’d been ever after. Even his own parents had come to use the name, not that they ever knew why the Cooper children had chosen it.

  Despite the differences in temperament between them, and despite the fact that the Jacksons’ father disapproval of his sister and brother-in-law’s way of life, the two families saw a fair amount of each other. Now, with the Jackson parents abroad at a legal conference, Jane, John and Jojo had been sent to spend the summer holiday with the Coopers, leaving their big modern hose in Hampstead Garden suburb to move into the shabby Cooper house in a back-street in Camden Town.

  It had been a beautiful house once, when Camden Town had been a desirable part of London in which to live, but now it was old and shabby, and the Cooper parents were saving every penny toward the country smallholding they wanted for their family. As actors, competent but not particularly brilliant, they had always made a living, but sometimes it had been hard and all their lives the Cooper children had known that money was short, unlike the Jacksons, whose father was making a good deal of money from a successful solicitor’s practice.

  It was because of money that the eight young people were now sitting alone and dejected in the big living-room of the Camden Town house. The day after the Jackson parents had flown off to Geneva, the Coopers had been offered parts in a tour of a new musical comedy, a tour that was to go to Holland and Scandinavia. The pay had been offered would be just enough to make the smallholding a real possibility instead of a dream, so, with much regret about the holidays, they had accepted the parts.

  “I’m truly sorry, darlings,” Mary Cooper had written to her children from their first stop in Amsterdam. “But we couldn’t turn this down, could we? Do forgive me, Hilary and Richard—I know how hard you’ve both worked this term (though how you’ve managed to do so well at the University this term, Richard, now you’ve got that ghastly old car of yours, I’ll never know, when did you find time to study, for Pete’s sake? Every time you came home, you spent every minute you had underneath it!)—but there it is—you’ll have to spend this holiday on your own. Hilary, love, I depend on you in particular to look after the tiddlers. Stephen and Pip will get home from their boarding school on the twentieth, and Barbara the day after. Will you meet them at the station, and tell them how sorry I am? This is the last time, I promise them—next holidays they’ll spend in the country, truly they will—won’t it be heaven? Daddy says to try not to do anything to annoy Jane— what would Uncle Joseph say if he knew we’d left you all like this? He’d have a fit! But I know you’ll be all right. You two are quite old enough to hold the fort, aren’t you? And Jane’s grown up too. Just take care of the little ones, especially Jojo—you know what a tinker he can be. I’m enclosing a money order that will cover all your costs for the next month—tell Jane I said she’s to be in charge of the money. No offence, Hilary darling, but you know what a nit you are about cash, and Jane will be much better looking after finances for the month than you will. After all, she is going to be an economist, isn’t she? What is an economist, by the way? You’ll have to explain to me when we get back—not that I suppose I’ll be able to understand, even if you do. I’m the world’s dimmest. It’s as well I’ve got five such clever children—bless you all—must go now—we’ve got a rehearsal. Take care of yourselves—your most apologetic and very loving old Mother.”

  Hilary and Richard had laughed over this very typical letter, and then done their best to explain to the rest of the family why they were to spend a hot month on their own in London, instead of having all the fun of a holiday when their parents were at home.

  It hadn’t been easy, and now Richard had sunk into dejection, irritated at the responsibility of looking after ‘a bunch of kids’ as he scornfully put it, and wishing he had taken the job he had been offered in a seaside resort garage. As a student of engineering, his idea of heaven was time spent with engines, even ordinary car engines, but he had turned the job down because, even at the advanced age of nineteen, time spent with his parents was even more fun than engines.

  It was Hilary who managed to cheer him up. She came now and sat on the arm of his chair, ruffling his red head with a friendly hand.

  “Look, Richie,” she said in a soft, wheedling voice. “You can’t alter things. The folks aren’t here, and they aren’t going to be. But it’s tougher on the youngsters, isn’t it? If you get the drears, they will too—they’re already looking like a lot of Oliv
er Twists. Cheer up, for Pete’s sake, we’ll think of something to do that’ll be fun—we always do, don’t we? Come on now.”

  Richard made a face, and then grinned good-naturedly. “You’re right, I suppose O.K. I’m happy again.” He produced a ferocious smile. “What’s on the agenda?”

  Hilary stood up. “Attaboy!” The she turned and surveyed the rest of them. “Look, it’s a glorious day. What say we clear up, then go swimming? Will the budget stretch to it, Jane?”

  Jane fished a little notebook out of the pocket of her skirt. “Hmm. How much would it cost?”

  “At Finchley open-air pool—three bob each for us, and a bob each for the kids,” Hilary said.

  “Fourteen shillings—” Jane did some scribbling. “Can do, I think,” she said at last. But we’re right out of food. We’ll have to shop carefully, and if we’re clever and buy cheaply, there might be enough over for ice-cream.”

  “Marvelous!” Jojo jumped to his feet. “Come on Bar— let’s get out swimming things.”

  “Not so fast.” Richard got to his feet and stretched. “We are not leaving this place in a mess, that’s for sure. I’m not coming back this evening to dirty breakfast dishes. Jojo —Barbara—wash up. Stephen, John, make the beds, Philip, you and I sweep and dust—and you two make with the shopping baskets. Get going now!”

  With a great deal of noise and clatter, they swept into action. However feckless Joseph Jackson thought his sister and brother-in-law, one thing the Coopers had done very successfully was to teach their children how to take care of themselves and their home. Within minutes, brooms, dusters and dishcloths were in full swing, while John and Stephen beat pillows and blankets into submission in the bedrooms. Jane and Hilary, with big shopping baskets in one hand and their small store of money safely tucked into Jane’s big brown purse, ran down the chipped and grubby front steps of the house on their way to do the shopping.