What Was Promised

by Tobias Hill

  This is the field, the world below,

  In which the sower came to sow;

  Jesus, the wheat; Satan, the tares;

  For so the word of God declares.

  And soon the reaping time will come,

  And angels shout the harvest home.

  Saturdays he had to wash in the tin bath by the kitchen door. And he had to shave. Hughes taught him. He lent him a razor but his hands shook. He didn’t like to use it. They were only safety blades but Moon laughed when he read that. Hide one, Moon said, but he never did. He knew about the blade itself.

  There were books but only true ones. There were no crosswords because Hughes took no newspapers. Hughes didn’t hold with printing lies.

  We believe that our first parents were created in a state of innocencey, but by their disobedience they lost their purity and happiness, and that in consequence of their fall all men have become sinners, totally depraved and as such are justly exposed to the wrath of God.

  That was what the true books said and they made sense to him.

  There was no drink, except there was. Hughes hid it from himself like filth. Sometimes he could smell it on him and those nights Hughes made him drink and wept in the armchair beside him. He told him about Ricks and Hendry who had gone down like Vikings. They were good men who had looked to him. He hadn’t known what he was at. Those are pearls that were their eyes.

  They were drinking. Hughes said, ‘You do know there is no God? It’s the worst lie there ever was. All we have is us. It’s only us and we have to make a bloody fist of it. You know that, son, don’t you?’ And he said he did although he hadn’t, not until then.

  They had a bargain. He had kept his side and Hughes had kept his, but still, he left in the spring. Hughes was sorry to see him go. He said so and he meant it. And he didn’t say but he was sorry too. He didn’t say that he was afraid Hughes would die. ‘It’s for the best,’ he said. Hughes didn’t see it, but it was. It is. It’s for the best to leave before your sins catch up with you. They come like cloud shadows, they race across the land behind you, and you do well to run. That’s why he left Solly and Dora. He misses them more than anyone, but the memories he has of them are still pure, wheaten, golden.

  He went towards London. Hughes put him on the train but at Chatham he got off. He had clean castoffs but the guard was watching. And it was April and fresh and he wasn’t in a hurry. He followed the estuary to the river and he walked inland beside its coombs and downs of mud.

  From Hughes he had money and the castoffs. They were suits and shoes. They were too big for him but the old clothes were too small and anyway he liked them. They smelled of Hughes, of his house, and on his lapel Hughes had pinned a Sally Army badge. Blood & Fire, it said. Hughes said he’d grow into them but he thought he was done with that. He was smaller than other men but stronger than they thought and smarter. Small and smart is useful things. You shouldn’t bet against them.

  In Erith he stopped for three years. The shoes were chafing. He sat by the memorial and watched the people come and go into and out of London. There were drinkers and they welcomed him. There were dogs too but they didn’t mind. Library Mary, Little Mary, Yorkie and Arnold were the drinkers’ names, and Arnold said they would be friends and that the place to go was King’s. He found it by the drinking fountain and paid a night up front. They had room for him but no rooms, it was only cubicles. In the washroom there were basins and you could ask for soap. You hung your clothes in front of you so as to keep an eye on them. The orderly said they had no fishers but he didn’t know what that meant. He thought it was to do with meals. He said he didn’t mind but the orderly laughed at him.

  He never slept well at King’s. You could hear the other men tossing and turning in the dark, each within his own partitions. Sometimes they cried out or moaned into their bedding. But you always slept in the end. It was warm, it was spring, and by day the drinkers were kind to him.

  Arnold taught him something:

  There are men in Erith

  That no one sees or hears,

  And there looms on the marge of the river a barge

  That no one rows or steers.

  ‘That’s us,’ Arnold said. He’d never seen the barge but he’d met a man who had.

  King’s was a dosshouse. Some men could never settle in them. Yorkie said he couldn’t breathe indoors. Other men had other names for King’s, they called it The Royal or The Crown. If they expected letters they called it The Eighth House. The postmen knew what was meant. Most people knew most of the names. They were old and worn and they didn’t hide much, but some men were always ashamed and so they went on using them.

  The tenth night when he woke his castoffs were gone. It wasn’t all of them. It was the trousers he had used and the jacket he had saved, but in that jacket was all the money Hughes had given him. Arnold said he had been fished. You did it with a hook and line over the cubicle partitions. They all knew which fellow it was but by the time they looked for him he was long gone himself.

  You were to pay each night up front at King’s and he couldn’t. He spent a fortnight rough. He went with Arnold and begged for the shillings for King’s. More often than not the wind came inland off the estuary and brought a sour haze of dust from the cement factories. People fretted about the dust and there were slim pickings then, but sometimes, if the wind was clean, they did well enough to drink. The Lord provides a man with bread but precious little wine. It was a long time that he begged in the end but he didn’t feel it pass. The drink made the days run together, riverine. They were his days, but their surface was placid and he never felt their current.

  He had never begged on purpose. His first mum had hated beggars. She had called them bad men, had said they were not fit to love. He hadn’t ever wanted to become the thing she’d hated. He wasn’t any good at it. He wanted to be colourless, to be one of the Men of Erith, but that was no use for begging. You needed to be seen. To beg you have to prove yourself, to be the proof of what you lack. You have to leave yourself open to the sidelong glances; and when you do you see your state reflected in the eyes of others.

  A man stopped in front of him. He looked him up and down and dropped a shilling on his jacket. He said, ‘What are you thinking?’

  He said, ‘I’m thinking it will rain tonight. That will buy me something to keep me dry. Thanks for it. I’m grateful.’

  The man with the money frowned at him. He looked let down, as if he’d been shortchanged by a fairground slot. Not shortchanged by much: one coin was no great loss to him.

  It was a lie, about the rain. What was he thinking? Sometimes it was why he didn’t go on into London. Sometimes it was the kites. Solly at his shoulder and the strings drumming in his fingers. Sometimes he tried to sing the songs that Dora sang for him. Often he thought of Mrs Malcolm. The time she stood up for him against the man who took her life, and the time she died in the street of flowers with the flowers all around her. It might have been one of those things, but this was years ago and he really can’t remember. Whatever it was, it wasn’t something you sell to a man for a shilling.

  All that time he was on the threshold of London. In Erith he was close enough to see the lights and feel the warmth, and he wanted to go in to them but he didn’t. Moon said Wait. Moon was always careful as an animal that smells a trap.

  Was there a trap? He thought he’d stopped because his shoes had hurt, but no. It was the trap, and the trap was home. The old places tugged at him and they were dangerous. He wanted to revisit them, Shoreditch and Bethnal Green, the Buildings and the land where the house had stood where he was born, but Solly and Dora would be there. He wanted to see them most of all, but not to be seen. He didn’t want them to know what he was or what he had become. It does no good to go back. That was what he thought, and that was why he lingered in the half-lands where London goes out into darkness.

  One morning before throwing-out a subbie came into King’s. He was from the Cement Combine and he wanted a dozen men
for Swanscombe. There was cash in hand for the day and a hot meal if it went late.

  Arnold was leery. He said he’d done it once and that was once too often. He warned him off but he didn’t listen. He’d had enough of begging. He got on the truck with the other King’s men and it took them downriver, past the pits and ponds, towards the Swanscombe tower.

  They worked at the tip wagons. A train of them had gone over a way short of the kilns and the limestone had to be hauled back on. It was blasted quarry rocks. Some hid sharp edges and it took two men to cradle them. It was bloody work if you weren’t careful. He was careful enough, but there was nothing you could do about the dust. They shouldered through it and it turned them into weary ghosts. It lay like snow on the scrub and along the telegraph wires. It settled in their hair and on their necks and faces and he thought of the woman Alice had let in. Long afterwards you tasted it and sweated the smell of it.

  Four of the King’s men left at noon, but he didn’t. He saw it out and got his cash in hand. Vicars the subbie doffed his cap, slapped it clean and put it on him. ‘That for an honest day, son,’ he said. He told him to come back if he wanted more of the same, and he did.

  For two years he was casual at the cement works. Often it was Swanscombe but sometimes it was one of the others, Kent or Johnson’s or Bevan’s. The times were not good for the works and they were all pulling together. Mostly he had odd jobs – shifting, sweeping and shovelling – but later Vicars taught him to light the kilns and mill the hard clinker that was dragged out of them. That was better. The dust lay more peacefully inside and it was warmer in the winter.

  He stayed on at King’s. He hid the money that he saved. On days when there was no work he lazed with Arnold and the Marys. Yorkie had gone away and no one knew where he lived or even if he did. He had enough to buy them drink and he was eager for it. The dust leached him dry and he always had a thirst on him.

  He drank more towards the end because there was less to do. Vicars sat him down. He said, ‘Now look here, Henry. You never heard this from me but listen. People round here are changing. They all want jam today but they won’t get their hands dirty for it. It’s going to be different from now on. You’ll have heard some of the works are closing. You’re a young fellow and a young man needs to keep busy. You keep your hand in and you’ll stay out of trouble. What I’m telling you is this isn’t the place for you. You’re best off away from here. Are you listening to what I’m saying?’

  He was. It was all true. The half-lands weren’t right for him any more than the countryside was. Moon had said to wait, but he didn’t understand the way the drink could fish away the days. The drink had made him wait too long, and for the first time he saw that Moon didn’t know everything. It was Vicars who knew about the drink. When Vicars said trouble it was the drink he meant and all that followed from it. He thanked Vicars and shook his hand and that night he slept better than he had in all the years at King’s. The next day he said his farewells and walked on, westwards, into London.

  He always thought he would meet Solly or Dora, but he never did. The city gives us collisions, it throws people together just when they least expect it, when they’ve lost hope or when their guards are down. You never know who it’ll be or whether you’ll be glad to see them, and it might be people or then again, it might be other things and you no more than an onlooker. Hopes or songs, architectures, parades or bicycles or hungers. But all these things start with people and sometimes all it comes down to is two strangers, say, in a crowd. Once he was in Bermondsey, in lodgings by the railway, and he saw the man who used to make the dogs fight in Petticoat Lane. They were in the smoking room, where the lodgers gathered to wait for supper, and aside from them the others were all travelling salesmen, but the dog man didn’t know him. He was old by then and he was older himself.

  It was 1959 when he came back to London and since then it has been ten years. There has always been work for him. At first he took whatever the subbies were offering. For a while he lived south of the river and now it is Rowton’s, in Camden Town, but everywhere there were subbies wanting men. Mainly it was putting up buildings or tearing them down. ‘You,’ they said, ‘you and you. You’re with Ridout today,’ or, ‘You’re with McGuire.’ It was rough work but it was ready money and more than enough to meet his needs.

  Through one winter and spring he worked at a yard in Somers Town. It was scrap metal mostly. He was a wrecker and repairer. He learned something. Most things, you strike them and they break, but not all. Heat iron, hammer it, and its substance draws strength from your own. Beat at it, burn it or douse it, iron only hardens. Most things are weakened by what they endure, but some are tempered. He wondered which thing he was like, and whether you could ever know or have any choice in the matter.

  There were days he didn’t want to work and others when he couldn’t. It was four years before he put the drink behind him. At Rowton House throwing-out is nine o’clock and if he wasn’t working then he used to walk until they’d let him in. From Arlington Road he went west to Primrose Hill or north to Hampstead Heath or south as far as the river. He never went far east. He always had his own room at Rowton’s and he paid by the week, but sometimes he couldn’t face the house itself, the din of it, and then he slept a night or two in the parks or under the arches or bridges. It is no bad thing to find a place where you can be alone in London. Sometimes it would be lashing rain and then he only walked as far as the National Central Library. The Central is on Store Street now but it was a little nearer then, off Gower Street, on Malet Place.

  At first he read anything. He didn’t know how it worked and he didn’t like to ask. He took down whatever was to hand, it might be a telephone directory or a map or a dictionary. The dictionaries were alright. He learned French from them. He asked Moon if he remembered what was in the French books Alice kept, but he no longer could. Moon was forgetful because often he lay forgotten. He was becoming faint by then.

  There were porters and assistants and then there were librarians. There was one called Miss Collins. Her Christian name was Kitty. He didn’t like to look at her because she was beautiful. He would never have spoken to her if she hadn’t started it.

  They were in the last aisle of History. She was up a ladder. He was on a chair. She leant off the ladder to whisper. She asked if he was after anything in particular.

  He didn’t know how to answer that. He thought he might mention that she should mind the ladder. Instead he found himself asking whether they had any names. He was sorry when he’d spoken because her smile dimmed.

  ‘Well, I’m sure we could find you some. Did you have any preference? You know, famous beekeepers, Scottish kings?’

  ‘It was mine,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘You’re looking for your name,’ she said, and because she waited he tried to explain. He said that he wasn’t. He told her that he had but it had done no good, that he had never got it back, and that she had asked and it had just occurred to him. It was awkward talking so much, he wasn’t used to it, and all the time he went on Kitty just looked at him. She didn’t smile again but when he was done she came down the ladder and touched him on the arm. Probably he flinched because she said, ‘It’s alright, I want to help. I can, if you’d like. Come with me.’ Then she led him away and she did.

  It took them three years. There were other names they found with his, those of his family. Other facts. His birthday, his age. That his father was born in Kent, not far from the estuary, and his mother in Ireland. He was glad to know all of it. He wrote everything down in the notebook he keeps with the other things that matter, which are his savings, Dora’s gloves, Vicars’s cap and the Sally Army badge. Some of the facts he half recalled, but most were long buried or else he never knew them at all.

  Kitty is married now, but they can still be friends and colleagues. He doesn’t know how it is they’re friends, but they’re colleagues because they work together. Kitty made it happen. At first he was a bureau porter a
nd on paper he still is, but most of the time they prefer him up in the library. He’s good with its systems, and he is so quiet, Kitty says, that he might have been born a librarian. It’s a good library, the Central. They have a motto: Any book to anybody anywhere. You can order from the regions and they send it to London for you. Anyone can do it.

  There is a pattern to his days. At seven he wakes. He does his teeth and shaves and makes his sandwiches. He has a cup of tea at Sampson’s in Inverness Street. At eight he walks to the library. He takes his lunch with Kitty. If it’s not too wet they share their sandwiches in the square. At five he’s all done. If Kitty can they go for tea but mostly she can’t any more. If not he always tries to take a book home to Rowton House.

  After reading he gets into bed. He sleeps better now, but some nights he still wakes from dreams. There is one. There is this one of the man he killed when he was small. In the dream it all happens afresh: the man all over him; the knife. It is always terrible, but there is no God to pray to, neither for the man nor for himself.

  If he has no other book he sometimes reads his notes. He likes to look over the facts, but he doesn’t do it often. They make him dream too much.

  He dreams that he wakes. He is small again. It’s dark and Mum is dressing him. Together they are counting buttons. Whisper five, whisper six, and he’s in his siren suit and cloak, when suddenly there’s uproar. The floor upheaves, the world is burning. He tumbles and gets up and runs. He can’t see anyone to save him. Find a safe place, Dad would say, so he looks and he does and he hides in it. Outside there’s noise but he stays still and it doesn’t last forever. It’s raining and he’s glad it does, because rain keeps the bombs at bay. Even once it’s quiet he can hear the rain, still coming down.