The car squealed to a stop, and Richard got out, grimly hauling Jojo with him, while Jojo’s small face was creased into lines of misery, as he howled even louder.
Jane dropped the grass sheet she was arranging, and flew over to the car.
“What happened?” she cried anxiously. “Is Jojo hurt?”
Richard shook Jojo and shouted above the noise, “No, he’s not—but he damn' well will be, any minute, if he doesn’t shut up.”
“What happened, for Pete’s sake?” Hilary shouted. “For heaven’s sake, Jojo, stop bawling, and tell us what’s the matter.”
Jojo dropped his howling on octave, and gradually subsided into sniffles, knuckling his eyes as he looked apprehensively as Richard.
“I said I was sorry,” he mumbled.
“Sorry!” Richard shouted. “So you blasted well ought to be, you young twit! What got into you, for crying out loud? Did you go out of your tiny mind?”
John came out from behind the car, where he had been unloading the stock, dragging a colossal brown sack.
“This is what’s the matter,” he said briefly. “This and four more like it.”
The other stared at the sack, and then at John.
“What’s in it?” Philip asked wonderingly.
“Coconuts!” Richard said disgustingly. “A hundred flipping coconuts. And this nit—” he shook Jojo, whose face creased into the first signs of howls again—’this idiot bought four more! Five hundred thumping great coconuts! I ask you!”
“All right, Jojo, Jane said hurriedly. “Don’t start again.” She turned to Richard. “Now tell us—quietly if you can—why you’ve bought five hundred coconuts.”
Richard simmered down, and began to explain. Apparently, because there were only three of them to do the buying that morning, they hadn’t been able to keep quite as close an eye on Jojo as they should have done, and he had wondered off alone to inspect the produce the wholesale market had to offer and had spotted a booth full of coconuts something for which he had a decided weakness. He looked at the coconuts, and came to the conclusion that no doubt everyone else like them as much as he did, so they would be a jolly good thing to buy for the stall. He told the salesman that he had been sent over by the others—pointing out Richard a few booths away, busy haggling over trays of grapes—and ordered five. In all fairness to Jojo, Richard admitted, he had meant just five coconuts—he hadn’t realised they were sold in sacks of a hundred, and that the salesman assumed that they wanted five sacks. Anyway, the coconuts were loaded on to the car by the time Richard had made a satisfactory bargain over the grapes, and turned to find Jojo.
“The bloke handed me a bill for fifteen quid,” Richard said, furiously. And I nearly fell over with shock. I did my best to get out of the deal, but the wretched nuts had already been taken out to the car, and the man got very nasty indeed when he thought I was trying to welsh on the deal. As he said, most of the buyers had left the market by this time, and he'd be lumbered with them if he took e'm back. He said he'd turned customers away, and he wasn’t going to take them back no matter what. So I had to take them, didn’t I?”
“What on earth are we going to do with five hundred coconuts?” Stephen said blankly. “Honestly, Richard, you might have kept a closer eye on Jojo.”
Richard almost snarled at him. “That’s enough from you, young man. If you and Philip hadn’t been so damn' lazy, and got out of bed this morning, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Stephen, forced to admit the fairness of the remark, said no more. Jane, her forehead creased with worry, said, “Do you suppose we could sell them? I can’t imagine five hundred people around here wanting coconuts.”
“How about Gregory?” Hilary said suddenly. “His father’s with a fair, isn’t he? Wouldn’t they want them there for a coconut shy?”
“Gregory said he doesn’t know exactly where they are,” Richard said shortly. “Do you suppose we search the whole country looking for a fair—on the off-chance they'd buy nuts from us? Anyway, they probably get their’s from a wholesale market like we did. That’s no good.”
There was silence for a moment. Then John said slowly. “I wonder— it worked there—would it work here?”
“Don’t talk in riddles, for heaven’s sake.” Richard was still too angry to speak civilly to anyone. “If you’ve got an idea, come out with it. Otherwise shut up.”
John ignored him, looking at Jane. “Do you remember, Jane? Last summer? In Italy?”
Understanding dawned on Jane’s face. “Yes—yes! That’s a marvellous idea! Do you suppose we could?”
“I don’t see why not.”
Richard nearly screamed with impatience. “What in blazes are you talking about?”
“Listen.” John turned to them all and spoke rapidly. “Last summer we went to Rimini, a seaside place in Italy, where it gets pretty hot. People used to come around the beach selling things to eat—and one of the things they used to sell was pieces of coconut. They used to keep them in big bowls of cold water, and it was rally marvellous stuff to eat when you were hot. They used to sell stacks of it. We bought lots ourselves. Well, it’s pretty hot here, just now, isn’t it? And people might like the idea right here in Camden Town.”
“It’s a thought,” Hilary said slowly. “What do you think, Richie?”
“Oh, don’t ask me,” Richard said bitterly. “As far as I’m concerned, we’ve just lost fifteen hard-earned quid.”
“Let’s do it!” Jane said with sudden determination. “At worst, we’re still fifteen pounds down the drain— at best, it might work, O.K.?”
They looked at Richard, who had begun to calm down a little. “Oh all right,” he said at length. “It’s a possibility, I s’pose. How do we start?”
Hilary said crisply, “Right now, we get the stall out on the street—then we can work out how to begin. Come on.”
In silence, they loaded the stall, and took it out to its pitch, and then, while Richard and the three boys set about dealing with customers, Hilary and Jane held a council of war.
“We’ll need something to put the water in. The whole thing is that the coconut must be cold, otherwise it isn’t nice.” Jan said.
“We’ve a huge old china wash basin,” Hilary said thoughtfully. “You know— those old fashioned Victorian things. Would that do, do you suppose?”
“It might. We’ll have to find somewhere to get water from. I mean it’ll have to be changed often, won’t it.” And we’ll need tongs to pick up the pieces with—and pieces of greaseproof paper to put each slice in.”
“Oh, help!” Hilary said in sudden dismay. “We’ll have to crack them all! Oh, Jane, how awful! I remember trying to crack just one I got at Hampstead Heath Fair once. It was the hardest thing.”
“I know!” Jane laughed at the expression of ludicrous dismay on Hilary’s face. “I never pretended this’d be easy, did I?”
The decided to start with the nut-cracking operation that night, so that they could start selling their coconut pieces the next day. “And let’s pray the weather stays hot,” Jane said grimly to Hilary, as they returned to the stall to help the others deal with the customers who were now arriving thick and fast, “because no one’ll buy if it’s cold.”
At lunch-time, as they greedily munched sardine sandwiches and fruit cake, and drank lots of fizzy lemonade from bottles, Peter arrived, as he often did, to eat his own sandwich lunch with them.
Together, they told him of what had happened, while an unusually subdued Jojo sat perched on the stall eating an apple with much less than his usual gusto.
“It’s not a bad idea,” Peter said slowly, once he had managed to get their idea clear in his head. “But there’s something that worries me—the Clean Food Act.”
“Clean food?” Hilary said blankly.
“Yes. The law’s pretty hot on this sort of thing,. If you sell stuff to people to eat right away, it’s got to be very carefully handled, otherwise the police can close you up.”
&n
bsp; “Oh, help!” Hilary said, her spirits dashed again. “How can we know if we do it right?”
Peter turned to Richard. “Look, Richard—you’re an engineer. Suppose you could get a regular source of water—could you rig up a sort of constant fountain arrangement?”
“How do you mean?” Richard looked interested.
Peter swallowed the last of his sandwich, and pulled a piece of paper and a pencil from his pocket. “Something like this,” he said, drawing rapidly. “If you could run a rubber pipe from a tap that gives drinking water, and then see that it runs into a big container, and then rig up a drainage system, you could keep the pieces of coconut in continuously fresh water. And if the container was covered except when you were actually taking pieces out of it, it would be perfectly clean. I don’t see how anyone could say if was not healthy, do you?”
Richard nodded eagerly. “That'd be an interesting thing to do—but where do we get the water, here?”
Peter nodded his head towards the sweet shop behind their pitch. “I know old Sophie, whose shop that is. If you offered to pay her water rates—and that isn’t much— I daresay she'd oblige. She’s got a water supply.”
Richard thought for a moment, then grinned from ear to ear. “I say, Hilary—do you remember when we had the big butler’s sink pulled out of the kitchen? What happened to it, after we had that modern new one put in?”
“The old sink?” Hilary frowned for a moment. “Just a minute… .” Her face cleared. “It’s in the loft! Do you remember? Daddy said he thought we'd sink it in the garden for a fish pond or something equally daft—so we kept it!”
Peter nodded. “Marvellous. A big sink, complete with a drainage hole. If we could get some lengths of rubber tubing—”
“Run it from the sweet shop across a batten that we run from the stall to the shop—”Richard added.
“—into the sink, let the water run out of the drainage hole—”
“More rubber tubing from the drainage hole to—” Richard looked round wildly, and the pointed, “—to that drain in the gutter there—”
“—With a valve to prevent any used water siphoning back—”
Richard and Peter put their heads close together, drawing and altering their design for a constant water supply to a patent coconut-piece-holder.
When finally they had worked the whole thing out, Peter hurried across to Sophie’s sweet shop to get the use of her water supply, while Richard went off to his own favourite garage to borrow several yards of rubber tubing. At Peter’s instigation, Hilary went over to Mrs Minsky’s to borrow one of her huge plastic food-covers— “to cover the sink with,” Peter explained—and a pair of big cake tongs with which to pick up the pieces of coconut. “Then we won’t have to handle the pieces at all,” Jane said. “And if no one ever touches it, once it’s washed, and it’s kept in pure, constantly changing water, no one can say we haven’t done everything to make sure the nuts are fit for human consumption!”
Jojo was sent to buy piles of greaseproof paper, to be cut up into pieces big enough to hold each slice, and Philip and Stephen were dispatched back home to get the old sink out of the loft and scrub it, ready to be brought to the stall the next day.
All the afternoon, after Peter had gone reluctantly back to work at the supermarket, Richard worked hard, rigging up a batten from the stall to the shop doorway, and arranging lengths of rubber tubing from the tap at the back of the shop, round the shop itself at ceiling level, so that all that had to be done next morning was attach the tubing to the sink.
When they came to pack up that evening, they had some trouble with the long batten that ran out from the side of the stall, to meet the tubing at the shop doorway, but with careful jockeying and many cries of “To me!” “To you!” they managed to get the stall safely locked in the shed.
They got home tired from along, hot day’s work, to face the prospect of an evening’s’sheer hard labour, cracking coconuts. But Peter came to help, and Gregory, arriving at the house to collect a couple of wooden boxes Hilary had found for him the day before in the larder, also promised to collect his “mates” and join in.
They decided only to crack a hundred, to start with.
“About ten slices from each coconut—sell them at threepence a slice—that’s half a crown a coconut.” Jane was off on her arithmetic again. “That’s twelve pounds ten per sack—and you only paid three pounds—that’ll be an enormous profit!”
“If we well 'em all this way,” Richard said grimly. “And if none of 'em are bad or get wasted. If, as I say, we make that much, we’ll have earned it!” He brought a hammer down on a particularly tough, hairy coconut viciously.
But despite their fatigue there were enough of them to make the cracking of a hundred coconuts not too hard a job. By ten o'clock, a hundred shelled nuts stood ready to be sliced, for John advised not cutting them until the last minute, next day, to make sure they stayed fresh and juicy. “Dried coconut is horrid,” he said.
Gregory and his friends bore one nut off with them, as a reward for all the work they had done, and they departed, well satisfied, lugging the three old flat irons and two huge hammers they had got from somewhere to use for cracking (as Hilary said, it was best not to ask any questions about where they had "borrowed" these implements), leaving the others to tumble wearily to bed. And if Hilary did spend more than fifteen minutes at the door, saying good night to Peter, both Stephen and Philip were a great deal too sleepy to say a word about it.
Chapter Ten
THEY had to get up so very early next morning, Richard grumbled that it had hardly been worth going to bed at all. But as they sleepily ate toast and jam and swallowed great mugs of cold milk (“No time for tea this morning,” Jane said, as she turned the knife drawer upside down, looking for knives sharp enough to cut the coconuts), the already bright sunshine outside cheered them considerably.
“A day designed expressly for sale of slices of ice-cold coconut,” Stephen said, in his most pontifical voice. “All we need is lots of sun, and we’ll make a packet”
“Is it all better now?” Jojo sidled up to stand beside Richard where he stood at the kitchen window, eating his toast. He looked up into his tall cousin’s face with a wheedling smile.
Richard looked down at him, and grinned. “I suppose so—but heaven help you if you ever do such a thing again,” he said. “I’ll have the hide off you!” Jojo beamed from ear to ear in relief (he hated to be in bad odour with anyone) and grabbed another piece of jammy toast.
While Peter (who arrived in time for the last piece of toast), Barbara, Hilary and Stephen went to the wholesale market to buy the rest of the day’s stock—they would still have to sell the usual things, as well as coconuts—the others set to work to cut up the coconuts. Richard and Philip went off to get the stall ready. It was decided to take the stall to the pitch before putting the stock out, so that Richard could get the sink and the water supply running before the other stallholders were about.
“Once, it’s done, there can be no trouble,” Richard said wisely. “I know we haven’t seen hide nor hair of Barker for a week, but you never know. I hope old Sophie’ll forgive us for knocking her up so early to get at the water.”
Obviously she hadn’t minded too much, for by the time they all arrived at the pitch— Peter and company lugging boxes and trays of fruit, the others with the sliced coconut carried in a huge, well-scrubbed bread-bin— the stall was set up, and the sink was full of crystal clear water, water that bubbled gently as the constant fresh supply came in.
Peter stood back and looked at the contraption admiringly.
“It’s a slap-up job, Richard,” he said. “You’ve got the speed worked out to a T.” And so Richard had, for the level of the water, two-thirds up the sides of the old sink, was quite stationary. The water was running out of the drain at exactly the speed it was coming in through the chain of rubber tubing running from Sophie’s shop.
Carefully handling the pieces of freshly cut
nut with the huge cake tongs they had borrowed from Mrs Minsky, the two older girls dropped slice after slice into the clear water until the sink was full. It looked very attractive, as the water sparkled brightly over the white pieces. They lugged the rest of the sliced nuts into Sophie’s shop, for she had said they could leave their extra supplies in her little kitchen at the back, and then, once the fruit was piled on the stall, they stood back, and waited for customers.
It was half-past eight by this time, and the market was bustling. Stallholders from one end to the other were shouting their wares at the top of their voices, calling the strolling shoppers to “Try some, they’re luvly!” and announcing their stock was “fresh up from Kent this very morning!” Shouts of “Cresses! Lovely water-cresses!” vied with calls of “Tanner a pound for gooseberries! Buy 'em whilst they last, not many left now, lady, buy 'em now!”
Richard looked at the others, and with a wink and a deep breath, stepped to the front of the stall, and throwing his head back, joined in the noise.
“Something special—something special!” he bawled. “Try a piece of nice fresh coconut—cool your heads and ease your tired feet—nice fresh coconut—threepence a big slice—come and try.”
People stopped for a moment, peered in surprise at the sinkfull of water and coconut, safe from dust under its clear plastic cover and stared at Richard and at Hilary, wrapped in one of her mother’s big white aprons, as she brandished the tongs invitingly. One or to grinned, then walked on, other looked dubious, and then shook their heads and walked on too.
After ten minutes of ever louder shouting from Richard, and winning smiles from Hilary, there were still no takers. Many stopped to look, but no one had bought. Richard looked desperately at the others’ long faces, as they stood watching the passers-by with ever more worried expressions, and shouted even louder, if it were possible.
It was John who, in his own quiet fashion, found the way to start people buy. He suddenly grabbed Jojo, and pushing a tray a grapes to one side of the stall, perched the small boy on the front, so that this feet swung clear of the ground. Then, he grabbed the tongs from Hilary, fished a piece of nut out of the sink, and shoved it into Jojo’s surprised hands.
Shilling a Pound Pears Page 10