The Toymakers

by Robert Dinsdale

LONDON, AUGUST–NOVEMBER 1953

  Consider Catherine Godman: older than you remember her, though you remember her well; greyer, more lined than she was when she first saw the Emporium lights, but still the same girl you followed up from her estuary home, into an upside-down life of mystery, memory and magic. Tonight, if you had crept through the empty Emporium aisles (as so few do these days), you would have found her at the desk in her daughter’s old room, and on the scratched surface in front of her two torn letters, salvaged from the bins where her old friend Emil had thrown them away. Three hours of painstaking recreation, of glue, ink and masking tape, was all it took to piece those letters back together. And if you had lurked there on her shoulder, you too might have seen what Cathy herself saw: one letter the notification of Mr Moilliet’s retirement from his position at Lloyd’s bank, and the appointment of a Mr Greene as his successor; the next, from Mr Greene himself, declaring a full audit of the Emporium records, surprise at the lenience with which his predecessor conducted affairs, an immediate suspension of all credit extended to Papa Jack’s Emporium and a demand for all extant payments to be made good, under threat of foreclosure.

  If you had been particularly canny (as we know that you are), perhaps you would have seen what Cathy saw last of all, the thing that brought the first tear to her eye – for in the corner of the letters, the date read April and, on the calendar on the wall, the date read August. There had always been secrets aplenty in Papa Jack’s Emporium, but perhaps none as devastating as this. Emil had known what was coming all summer long.

  Because this is how the world ends: not in the falling incendiaries of an aerial attack, not in a storm of toy soldiers laying waste to the gods who brought them into being, but in the banal letters of a bank. Where once was magic: now only economics.

  Yes: consider Catherine Godman. We have followed her all this way. We must follow her a little further yet.

  Papa Jack’s Emporium closed its doors for the final time on an overcast day in the August of 1953. There was bitterness to the wind that day and, as Cathy left the store by one of its manifold tradesman’s exits, she stopped to fasten her overcoat and thought: well, that was a life. Then she toddled off to catch a bus.

  It had been some time since she was last alone on London streets. The city was bigger than she remembered. It was more colourful too – and, as she fought for a seat on one of the crowded buses, she got to thinking that here was one of the reasons the Emporium had finally closed its doors; for if there was such extravagance to be found on an everyday London street, what place in the world could there be for a shop grown so drab and ordinary after the glory days of its youth?

  The bus took her past the green splendour of Regent’s Park, through the elegant porticos of St John’s Wood and north, before depositing her upon the Finchley Road – where, finally, she stood outside a simple redbrick terrace, distinguished from its neighbours only by the monkey puzzle standing in the garden. Here she checked the address against the notebook poking out of the top of her day bag. Satisfied, she knocked at the door.

  ‘Mama,’ came a voice as the door drew back.

  ‘My little girl.’

  ‘I’m so glad you found us. Lemuel’s been berating me all morning for not sending a taxicab – but then, he doesn’t know you like I do. I told him: she’s my mother, and she doesn’t need a fuss. She’d find her way through the Arctic.’

  Figures had appeared in the hall behind Martha: three little ones, all lined up, and behind them the beanpole that was Martha’s husband. Cathy had seen him so rarely, the rocketeer who had met Martha at the Washington embassy where she worked and allowed himself to be swept off his feet. He had the same figure as Kaspar once had, his hair swept back in the same lovingly bedraggled manner.

  ‘Mrs Godman, it’s my pleasure to see you again.’ His accent had hardly softened since the last time they met; he still spoke as if he was up on the silver screen. In time, she would learn it was an affectation, meant solely to delight his children; now, it took her by surprise. ‘Why, Mrs Godman – is that all you’ve brought?’

  Cathy lifted the day bag on her wrist and nodded. ‘I have need for so little, Lemuel.’

  ‘And yet – only this, for an entire life?’

  Cathy stepped inside. The house – her new home, she reminded herself – smelled faintly of gingerbread and peppermints. A little bowl on a sideboard was filled with bonbons. ‘I should enjoy a pot of tea, Martha dear. It already feels like the longest day.’

  It was to get longer. Martha had laid on a spread – with apologies for the haste, for the family had only days before returned from Washington to make their new life – and over sandwiches Cathy was reintroduced to her grandchildren. Bethany was nine and her rose gold hair was either a throwback to some former generation or the inheritance of her father. Lucas (who excavated his nose at the dinner table, despite dire predictions of brain damage from his father) was eight. Cathy had met both when the family made their whirlwind tours of the capital, but for Esther – who, at three years old, had come later into Martha’s life than any had expected – it was the very first time. Cathy fed her corners of cake and saw in her a Martha in miniature. Something in this dulled the ache which she had been feeling all day.

  The excitement helped too.

  ‘What is it?’ Lucas shrieked.

  ‘It’s coming to get you!’ Bethany cried.

  Esther just squalled, but when Lemuel took her in his arms she was the first to touch the new interloper – for Sirius had appeared in the dining-room door, his threadbare tail swishing as he came to meet his new hosts.

  ‘It isn’t just a toy,’ Bethany insisted. ‘It can’t be.’

  Across the table, Cathy caught Martha’s eye. ‘Why,’ she said and, opening her arms, drew her grandchildren near, as if taking them into a conspiracy, ‘there isn’t such a thing as just a toy. The stories I’m going to tell you, the things you wouldn’t believe! Your mother and I grew up in a toyshop, you know, where the most wonderful things happened every day …’

  ‘But toys are just toys,’ grunted Lucas, who had had quite enough of this nonsense.

  ‘Sometimes,’ whispered Cathy, and thought: yes, I can see how this might work. Perhaps there is a place for me here after all.

  Cathy’s quarters were on the second storey. They were modest in size, but there were two, one for a bedroom and one for a parlour, and from the parlour there was a balcony on which one might take the sun during summer. As she waited for her dinner-time summons, she set about ordering her new world. She had already arranged all of the trinkets from her bag when she heard the tread on the stairs. The door opened and in crashed the two older children, Esther toddling behind.

  They had been coming with shortbread and tea but, now that they saw the room, they were struck dumb. ‘Where did it all come from?’ Bethany asked, in wide-eyed wonder. For somehow the room had been filled with more items than their grandmother could possibly have carried with her. There were potted plants and bookshelves, a woven sampler on the wall, new bedclothes and blankets. The mantel of the old fireplace was decorated with wedding portraits in grainy black and white.

  ‘Oh,’ said Cathy, ‘it all came with me, I promise.’

  ‘In that little bag?’ Lucas demanded, insisting on an inspection.

  ‘Don’t trip now,’ grinned Cathy, handing it over. ‘You might have a nasty accident.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ Bethany asked.

  She was pointing at the portraits, so Cathy set about explaining: this is me when I was a much younger lady; and this is your mother, hardly as old as your baby sister is now; and this, this is your grandfather. His name was Kaspar, and he was the greatest man I knew.

  She was telling them the story when another figure appeared in the door. Lemuel had evidently been hunting his children all over the household, while Martha reacquainted herself with Sirius downstairs.

  ‘Are these monsters hassling you, Mrs Godman?’

  ‘Not for a seco
nd,’ she said, grappling out to catch Lucas, who was half swallowed inside her bag and threatening to topple further. ‘And please, call me Cathy. Or … Nanny. I should like that. Well …’ With the deepest grimace, she heaved Lucas up and out of the bag, ‘… I’m to be the children’s nanny, aren’t I?’

  Lucas crashed backwards, landing in the hearth, with a look of such uncertainty: the bewilderment of a baby at being born.

  ‘There are things inside. You haven’t emptied your bag.’

  Cathy flushed red. ‘I dare say I’m not the first lady not to have emptied her handbag in half her life.’

  ‘I want to see!’ Bethany exclaimed. In a second, Lucas was back on his feet. Esther, prompted by the sound of her siblings’ excitement, was shuffling over, determined to join in.

  Lemuel swept her up. ‘I imagine you’re not used to this chaos.’

  ‘Oh, there was chaos, once upon a time.’

  Lemuel crossed the room, hovering at the mantel where Kaspar’s face peered out.

  ‘This is the man, is it? Martha’s father.’ Cathy nodded. ‘He was a daring fellow, Martha says. I’ve seen some of the things he made. We never had a place like yours in New York. You must miss home sorely.’

  The details of a life, Cathy thought, were too vast to be covered in small talk. But then, she had had her fill of silences too.

  ‘For twenty-nine years … and yet every day.’

  ‘Did they …’ Lemuel stopped himself, as if what he was about to say had already been outlawed by Martha – but Cathy did not seem as troubled. ‘Did they ever find out what happened to him?’ ‘No,’ she went on, ‘but, then, a great many men went missing in those days. One among many was hardly enough to stop the world turning. Only in our little Emporium …’

  Sleep did not come easily tonight. First nights, she remembered, were always the worst, but she had been almost fifty years beneath the same roof and the change was going to take some getting used to. For the moment, she was glad of the comforts she had brought with her. Cedar and star anise were Emporium smells, and the fragrance had flurried up all evening from the candles on the ledge, Sirius curled up at the foot of the bed.

  Midnight came. Then one o’clock. Then two. At three Esther awoke and an instinct buried for more than forty years drove Cathy up, into her slippers, and out into the hall – but Martha was already at the girl’s bedside, shushing her back to sleep. So Cathy sat, instead, on the end of her bed, mindlessly winding Sirius and trying to keep away that inevitable thought: how did the long road of a life come to this?

  This is how it ends, she remembered, and Kaspar’s face beamed at her from the wedding portrait on the wall.

  It was to be another week before Martha’s new job at the Ministry, so for a time Cathy had nothing to do but acquaint herself with her grandchildren. There was enough to learn about them, their likes and dislikes, their habits and routines, that it was easy to forget that every passing day was a day closer to the moment the demolition experts would set their charges along Iron Duke Mews, bringing down the Emporium and all its neighbours in the never-ending quest for Post-War Reconstruction. The bus up to Hampstead Heath, Saturday afternoon at the Kilburn theatre, a Technicolor matinee; outside the empty Emporium, the days could easily be filled.

  September was the dawn of the new era. There were two schools for the children to attend, a boys’ school in St John’s Wood for Lucas and a girls’ prep for Bethany off Primrose Hill, and the journeys to and fro somehow seemed to dominate the day. In the between times, Esther demanded feeding and bathing and playing, and though some of this could be delegated to Sirius (who seemed to be remembering the tricks he had learned when Martha herself was a girl), Cathy took delight in the small things. When Lucas’s teachers were dissatisfied with his attitude in class (for he was more interested in telling the boy in front that he was an American adventurer every bit as famous as Huckleberry Finn), it was Cathy who sat with him at the end of the day and showed him his fractions, and in that way engaged him with his work. When Bethany slipped in the schoolyard and had to have stitches in her knee, it was Cathy who held her hand in the hospital ward and, afterwards, took her for an Italian ice cream that cured all ills. At bedtime, she plucked the old copy of Gulliver’s Travels from the shelf and, though they were far too old and grown-up for mere stories, she read to them of Gulliver’s adventures in Lilliput and Brobdingnag. And, when that was done (and Esther, too young to understand, was nevertheless demanding to join in), she reached for the only other tome she could find that contained adventures of similar daring, and that was how Martha’s THE TRUE HISTORY OF TOYS became a bedtime story for the very first time.

  ‘It can’t really have happened that way,’ said Lucas, who had embraced the logic of fractions and the certainty of his times tables with a relish Cathy had not expected. ‘Toys can’t walk and talk …’

  ‘Not the ones you play with, young man. And yet …’

  By now, Sirius had taken to sleeping with the grandchildren, and Cathy had instructed them in the solemn duty of winding him up at the end of each night. ‘He wound down only once before,’ she told them as they fixed a new patch to his hide, ‘and who knows if his heart could stand it again.’

  ‘Heart!’ Lucas snorted.

  ‘A mechanical heart might still be a heart,’ said Cathy, and was delighted to hear them bickering the question through over the days that followed. There was, perhaps, a way the Emporium might live on in hearts and minds, even if its bricks and mortar might soon be obliterated from the London streets.

  One afternoon, when half-term holidays came around, Cathy took the children on a bus down to the Oxford Circus and, though both Lucas and Bethany gaped at the garish storefront of Hamley’s, finally she lured them away, into that warren of winding Mayfair mews in which the Emporium still waited.

  ‘Is that it?’ asked Lucas.

  ‘You said it was as big as Selfridge’s inside. Ten times the size!’

  ‘Perhaps it was.’

  ‘Mama said it had its own railway, and a giant dome like at St Paul’s.’

  ‘Your mama was right. She should know. She was born through that very door.’

  ‘I think it’s all stories,’ said Lucas – but that night it was Lucas himself who demanded the honour of winding up Sirius as he lay, basking in the attention, at the foot of the bed. And the next morning, when Cathy woke late, she was not surprised to see that it was Lucas who was chasing Sirius in circles around the garden, throwing him a ball and attaching trowel blades to his paws so that he could dig for bones in the vegetable patch like a real live dog.

  Cathy was standing at the window, watching them play, when a neighbour appeared over the back fence and halloed out. Lucas, his face set in a suspicious mask, summoned Sirius to heel and answered with a respectful (if slightly scornful) nod of the head. It was good to be suspicious of strangers and his school had rightly drilled him in this fact, but on this occasion he need not have worried. Cathy had seen the way the eyes of their neighbour thrilled upon seeing the patchwork dog; a century might pass by, but you would always recognise a fellow who held the Emporium close to his heart.

  The following afternoon, Cathy was involved in writing a letter to Emil, when a knock came at the door. Writing to Emil demanded great patience and composure, for leaving the Emporium had laid him lower than it had Cathy herself – and, Cathy was given to believe, he had not truly left, for he still flitted back and forth between the home of one of his estranged sons (much to the horror of their mother), and the barren shopfloor itself. The distraction of the door knocking, while the rest of the family gambolled with Sirius in the back garden, was a deep relief.

  The man on the doorstep was the very same who had ogled Sirius with such wonder over the garden fence. He was a rotund little man, evidently given to pastries – and indeed there were the shreds of some sugary foodstuff still sparkling in his whiskers of white and grey – but he had dressed incongruously smartly for a neighbourly visit. In his
hands was a paper bag that cast Cathy back half a century in time: brown paper and green ink, with the insignia of Papa Jack’s Emporium up and down its sides.

  ‘Forgive me, madam. I’m of the hope you won’t reject a little distraction on a Sunday morning. My name is Harold Elderkin. You won’t have noticed me, I’m sure, but I couldn’t help observe your arrival on our quiet little street. I’m afraid you’ll think me a spook, an espionage artist par excellence, but what spying I’ve done has been quite accidental! I couldn’t help it, you see, that …’

  As if on cue, Sirius darted into the hall and let out a series of pillowy barks at the stranger at the door. ‘Sirius,’ she said, ‘do calm down. This is Mr Elderkin, come from …’

  ‘Good Lord,’ said Harold, ‘I was right! Until yesterday afternoon, I don’t believe I’d seen one of these in more than fifty years. We coveted these as lads. I would have cut off half my own arm to open one of these on a Christmas morning. I’m right, aren’t I? This is vintage stuff. Vintage Emporium … And you …’

  ‘I worked there,’ said Cathy, ‘once upon a time.’

  ‘I should say that you did,’ said Harold, giving weight to Cathy’s first impression that here was a man who would be happy talking to a lamp post, if only he could find a lamp post happy to listen, ‘and I remember you, madam. When I was a boy, I was boarded at a little place in Lambeth, a place called Sir Josiah’s. A squalid little place, and I dare say you haven’t given it a second thought in a generation, but … that was home, to me and my lot. Day in day out, with little to look forward to, until … the visitors from the Emporium.’

  Cathy thought back: the summer trips, the carriage over the river, the orphaned boys swarming in the yard.

  She stepped back. ‘Please Mr Elderkin, come in. I’m delighted you came.’

  Harold Elderkin revealed himself a man of the most nervous disposition. Three times he declined tea before, finally, asking plaintively if he might partake of a small cup. Biscuits were proffered twice before he lined them up on a saucer and Cathy could see, in the way his fingers twitched, how eagerly he wanted to cram them into his gullet. Biscuits, he explained, had been in short supply when he was a lad.