by Tobias Hill
‘But you don’t have to go,’ Mary says, ‘do you? Your nephew, couldn’t he pay them off?’
‘I won’t be made an exhibition,’ Annie says again. ‘I wouldn’t ask. I wouldn’t want him fussing.’
Mary takes out the notes. They’re in an envelope, with a few half crowns. The housekeeping, and a bit she’s saved in the years they’ve been in London.
‘What’s that there?’ Annie asks sharply, before Mary has put the envelope down, even, and she knows it’s useless. Annie stands over her, the fire behind her, a pinny in her hands. ‘I don’t want your money. Put it away,’ she says.
‘But you could pay them, Annie! You could stay.’
Annie cackles. ‘Put it away, girl. I don’t suppose that’ll keep me anywhere. I’ve eight months’ owing. Besides, I won’t take charity.’
She goes to the mantlepiece. She picks up the china shepherdess and brings it over to Mary. ‘Here,’ she says. ‘I want you to have this.’
‘Oh, no –’
‘You want to do something for me, you’ll take that. I’ll be cheerfuller, knowing you’ve got it and they don’t.’
Mary is still frowning at the figure when Annie kisses her. A whiff of Ponds and powder. ‘Anyway,’ Annie whispers, ‘I owe you for all them biscuits. Now off you go. I’ve a lot to do. I’m tired already, and I’ve things to do.’
When she lets Mary out she locks and chains the door behind her.
*
Edinburgh, Nov.30th 1948
Dear Mrs Lazarus,
I am very sorry that I cannot tell you any more than that which follows. It seems to me no better or it might be worse than nothing but I am conscious of your being waiting. It would be better all round if I could have got down to see you but it is now more than eight months since we spoke in the Bird Cage and though we dock in Edinburgh six hours hence and in Liverpool thereafter there will be no time ashore for me to do more than send you this letter. Then it is the Argentine for us and no shore leave on home soil till Christmas when I will be needed at home by my mother who is not in the best of health. Therefore I am writing to you.
In Gdansk (Danzig) I spent a day ashore in April and a second in May. I hoped to return there this winter but with things the way they are, the Russians more and more our enemies, I do not think I shall be able. It seems I might have writ to you sooner and for that my apologies. I had hoped to find out more and something more definite by which you might put your mind at rest at last.
Be that as it may I did what it was you asked of me viz. looking for your family and asking of them and showing the people your photographs to as it were “jog” their memories. On my first leave it seemed to me I would be no earthly use at all for the language is a trouble and the people too are not much inclined to helpfulness. Their own lives are on the whole pretty grim and the city casts London in a fair light being in a terrible way itself as you may know first from the Germans but in the main from the Red Army who drove out the Hun with poundings day and night.
On this first leave I did find the street you wrote of by way of the church you said to look out for but no one in the houses would speak with me at all and the street and the church were both in a sorry state with the great church floor all broke up by soldiers turned grave robbers and its roof all burned away and the tower like to fall with bricks all melted together from the fierceness of the fire that took it. Jopengasse was not much better but the house of your family still stands all excepting the top floor and the wash house by the courtyard.
On this visit I did speak to a lady at the City Hall whose name if you should wish to write is Mrs. A. Belova though she is not the most friendly of women. Mrs. Belova is Russian. She does however have some English. She told me that there were still Jewish people getting out of Gdansk up until she reckons the winter of 1941 at which time the Germans locked the doors. What happened after that she says there is no record of but the Russians are all for making the most of the evils of the Germans as they do now of our sins whatever they may be. From Mrs. Belova I did ascertain that there is no one in Gdansk now who goes by the family name Rosen.
In May we docked at Gdansk for a second time. Already then our official dealings were cooler and laggardly & I had less time ashore than I would have liked & went straight to Jopengasse determined to find something for you. There had been some rebuilding there & enough in the way of mending to see them at least through this winter. There was a new roof of sorts on No. 41.
I went into the house. In the four floors were five families or couples as well as a pack of boys who I think were not family but who insisted they were. All these people were Polish and spoke that local kind of Polish which they call Kashubian & all were suspicious besides & not happy to speak to me.
On the third floor where your family were are a family of three & one of six named KULASH and MISHKA though I cannot vouch for my spelling of these. Between these two families there was but one man of working age & from my enquiries roundabout I understood that these families had been in the house three years & come from nearby in Poland though nobody could or would tell me where. As best I can make out most of those in Gdansk now are in much the same boat, the only others being Russians most of whom are soldiers. I met no one with anything like a German or Jewish name.
The man of these two families was called Thomas Mishka & at length I persuaded this other Thomas to sit & talk with me in those bits of French & German we had in common. I showed your photographs to Thomas who recognised nothing of them excepting the house he lives in himself & which he says was empty of all but the pack of boys when he moved his folk in.
Then Thomas spoke with an old fellow who said he knew your father & mother. This old fellow who would not give his name was certain he had spoken to your mother in Gdansk in the midst of the war. He could not tell us in what year that might have been exactly & when Thomas asked this old fellow about the whereabouts of your family he only shook his head & said nothing for a long while & then something which Thomas would not at first convey. Later however Thomas told me that this man had said that all the Jews of Gdansk were taken away into the forest and that they all died there.
However this is wrong of course since many left such as yourself. I tell it all to you as it was told to me since it is the nearest thing I have to an answer for you. Still it is my own belief that this old fellow spoke in ignorance. I do not think it possible that so many people could have been led into the forest as he says. I am not sure there is any need to put trust in this account.
I am very sorry that I have no more to tell you than this. I wish for your sake that I might have gone back to Gdansk again but I do not think it likely now & besides we are on the beef run all this winter & spring.
I enclose your photographs. I have kept them as well as I could but there is a spot of rain that fell on one whilst I was showing them about Jopengasse.
My fond wishes to you and Mr. Lazarus and Bernie and to her boy.
With regret,
Thomas Cowlishaw,
Leading Steward,
M.V. Lough Erne.
*
Jem is dancing from foot to foot in nothing but his Contours and his lime flannelette bathing trunks. Clarence is stripping down, folding clothes into his basket, hat off last to crown the pile. Pond is sitting listening to the myriad sounds of water: the echoes of the foot baths, foot slaps, plunge baths, rain baths, the gush of taps, and – from the pool – roars and squawks and gibberings that sound nothing like boys or men, but like the voices of the creatures in the stories that Jem tells.
‘Dad,’ the boy beside Pond whispers, ‘Dad! It’s the Banana King!’
‘So it is,’ Dad says, with his trousers round his ankles. ‘Pity you ain’t got a pen, you could’ve had his signature,’ and he winks at Jem, friendly as you like, since the King himself pays no attention.
Now they are ready, the three of them lined up on the slatted bench: there are queues here, as everywhere. ‘How much longer?’ Jem complains,
and Clarence rolls his eyes.
‘What are you in such a hurry for, Nature Boy? And what you got your specs on for? You got dirt on them needs bathing? You just be patient, like Pond here. You could learn a lesson or two from him.’
Jem takes off his specs. The changing room blurs to a congelation of male forms, pink and grey and pallid, squatting, stretching, smoking, sitting. A centaur resolves itself into a tall man kneeling with his shirt halfway over his head.
‘Forty-one to forty-six!’ the Super calls, and the autograph boy and his dad hoist their baskets and go splashing out of sight. Jem slumps down next to Pond.
Pond keeps his towel to his groin. For Dora and Solly he comes here. He doesn’t like the baths. His body isn’t like that of the others. It is scarred and rashed, and thinner, harder, more naked, as if he has shed more than others in the act of changing. He doesn’t like the changing room, with the weed-green stripe in its tiles and its reek of strangers. He doesn’t like the reek of himself. He can smell it now, coming off his armpits and the dirty things between his legs. He never used to notice it. Now he does, and he knows it’s wrong. People say so. He shrivels into himself.
An old man lingers in the foot baths, withered and troglodytic. His belly is a purse of flesh that droops over his trunks. Pond looks at him and sees what he will become.
He doesn’t like it here. He only comes for Dora. And Dora is crying so much and he doesn’t like that either.
Jem wraps himself in his own towel. It comes complimentary, like the trunks, but you have to give them back when you go. If you buy Second Class tickets then the soap’s complimentary, too, and you can go in the rain bath, but Pond’s dad got them soap from the Lane, three old green slivers of it, one for each of them. This evening the three of them are
~ Third Class Bathing ~
~ Gentlemen ~
It says so on the tickets.
‘Is your dad working tonight, then?’ Jem asks Pond, but Pond is down in the mouth today, he just shakes his head and looks at his feet, and then the Super calls their numbers, and they have to hurry on.
Pond is in Cubicle One. He locks the door and takes off his trunks. The bath dwarfs him. He washes quickly, with the soap, the way Dora taught him. But the water he sits in is dirty itself. There is grit and muck between his toes. There is a film on the top that ripples as he moves.
‘More hot?’ yells a man, and the Super yells back for his number.
‘Seven, sir!’ the man shouts, the way a soldier would do it, and men laugh up and down the rows, because it is a joke.
‘Get away from the taps, then,’ the Super grumbles, and there is a gush of water.
Pond thinks, you’re supposed to clean yourself, but this place is just as dirty as we are. All we do is sit in the water and put on the dirt of one another. It makes us all like soldiers, all in the same uniform.
For a while he stops washing. He sits with the warm water up to his chin and scratches and waits for the Super to call time. Then he thinks of Dora crying, and he stops scratching and starts to clean himself again.
When Dora cries it makes him tremble. It makes everything sick and wrong. She was crying when Pond got in from school. At first he thought she was laughing. For a long time she locked herself in the lav and Solly sat outside the door and whispered to her. He told Pond they’d just have to wait. It’s all because of a letter. What the letter said was worse than nothing.
‘You boys alright there?’ Mr Malcolm calls.
‘Alright, Dad!’ Jem calls back, and then there is a silence, into which Pond says, ‘Yes,’ his voice too small, but only one man chuckles.
‘Can I have some more hot too, please?’ Jem shouts, but the Super shouts back that he’s had enough already; and then it’s time to get out, and Pond rises from the water, the film of soap coming with him, drawing off and coating him, a second skin made from the skins of the men of the Columbia Buildings.
*
Come better days – and they will come – Michael will miss the Roman Road. It’s a sorry market and no mistake, the punters hangdog or hard-bitten, the costers hawking tat, and the wind never letting up this Monday, the sixth of December, the cold coming straight out of Russia, the East Wind whistling down the arse-end of London, raising hair on the costers’ necks, whipping the punters home along streets that smell of gasworks and the cooking of Indians who live out their lives as surreptitiously as rats in paltry basement rooms.
Michael will miss it, for all that.
Mary is upset with him. It hurts him. It riles him, that she should call him hard – as if hardness were a fault – when all he does, he does for her. Still: onwards and upwards. Here’s the good ache of work in his arms, the clout of money in his pocket. He is taking coin, turning a profit, and soon enough the winter dark will soften the unsightliness around him. The lamps and braziers will be lit, and there’s beauty to any market, then.
London loves the man who loves his business. Michael is that man. It makes some fellows small, London, it dwarfs and belittles them; but others rise to it. Others brace themselves against the city’s push, shove back, grab what they can and thrive. Michael hates indignity – the indignity of poverty, and that of answering to men with less spine than himself. He chafes at those things, but not at the hardness of London.
It has been a surprise to him, but he has begun to like Cyril’s East End markets, for all that he’s meant for better. They’re lands of opportunity, mucky though they are. There’s a freedom about them. Certainly he loves freedom.
It has been a fine year for him. He has kept his temper with Cyril Noakes, and Alan Swan is his reward. He has done well out of Wolfowitz, and Wolfowitz likewise of him: there’s no need, anymore, to sell his old friend’s pickings underhand, at the stalls, where Cyril might get wind of them from any one of his boys. Now Michael pays off the lads himself, he’s free to pass his own man’s goods along with the rest of them. Cyril buys what Michael brings him each month, gladly and none the wiser.
Four o’clock. The dusk is gathering, but it’s not yet dark. Off west, homewards, a chink of sunset remains. Between the dog and the wolf, Michael’s father used to call it, this last scrap of twilight. For all Michael knows he still does.
A man buys a jar of stropping paste. Michael sells a Gem Damascene, an imitation silvertip, four wraps of safety blades. An old Scouser with the shakes comes to have his cutthroat honed and Michael does it and takes the tuppence owed without a word: business is business. At the next stall Len Ramshaw parcels up chitterlings for Father Bright. ‘Excuse me, I was before him,’ a punter complains, and the butcher doles him out a look. ‘Right you are,’ he says, ‘but the difference between you, see, is he’s a vicar, and you’re a cunt.’
John Children, the Dogfight Man, stops by as he does every month for the Vitalis Dressing he applies – without noticeable effect – to his wayward cockerel hair. Blossie, Cyril’s best lad, comes with two cigarette cases in silver and ivorine and Michael pays him in the alley by the library.
Blossie is a tall boy-man, going on fifteen, with a disappointed look that serves him well, Michael hears, both with money and sweethearts; but Michael isn’t fooled by faces, and he pays the boy his due, no more. Blossie fingers his profits.
‘Swan’s here for you,’ he says, sourly, and, at Michael’s prodding, points out the car, an export model, drawing looks down by the Roman’s end.
‘Running errands for Alan now?’ Michael asks.
‘I’ll run him the Derby, if he pays me,’ Blossie says, and Michael tips him to mind the stall, liking the lad when it comes to it; he reminds him of himself.
‘Michael,’ Alan says warmly, when Michael stoops beside the car. ‘How are you keeping?’
‘Busy.’
‘Michael Lockhart, man of business. Family well?’
‘Well enough.’
‘Well enough, and not a word wasted. You’re not much for small talk, are you? That’s what I like about you. You’re thrifty and you don’t d
o smarm. Well, get in.’
Michael gets. Alan is sat beside him; another man is up front, one of those from the club whose names Michael never cared to learn.
‘Norman’s taking us for a spin. I thought you might enjoy the Austin, being a driver yourself. Say what you like about you Brummies, you know how to build a car. What do you think?’ Alan asks, and gestures at the saloon’s fixtures and fittings, all of which are dense, deluxe: even the windows look inch-thick, like plates of lead crystal, hushing the market’s raucousness as Norman draws them out of it and into Cambridge Heath Road.
‘Very handsome, Mr Swan,’ Michael says, and Swan tsks.
‘Now then, I’m asking for your honest opinion.’
Michael weighs the odds. ‘It’s too proud. A car like this stands out. It’s liable to get you noticed.’
‘Ah,’ Alan says, and smiles, his teeth lit by the electric lights of the showrooms on the corner. ‘That’s my boy.’
For a while they drive in silence. By Three Colts Lane the driver, Norman, turns his head to watch for traffic, and Michael sees his eyes – anxious, probing – and recalls him as the man who came back late from the war, the one who was a long time gone off East.
Norman here, he learned all kinds of things.
‘The thing is,’ Alan says, ‘I don’t mind the notice. You move up in the world, you draw attention, it’s only natural. You have to learn to live with it, you have to take pride in standing out proud, you’ll find that out soon enough. You remind me of myself at your age. Pride and ambition; those are the qualities that get you places, and you’ve got them in spades, Michael. How’s that old man of yours?’
For an instant Michael thinks Alan means his father, and then he knows he does not, and his heart sinks in the dark.