King Dido

by Alexander Baron

  Dido and Ginger stood a few yards apart, relaxed, as if each was waiting for a bus, appearing not to look at each other; though each was aware of the other’s every movement. The pub had emptied and the crowd on the pavement quietened. Ginger heaved a long, pitying sigh. He handed his bowler hat to someone, took off his watch and chain and dropped them into the bowler hat, and, now watching Dido intently, unbuckled from beneath his waistcoat a black leather belt. The belt was thick but supple, three inches wide, with a buckle like a slab of armour plate. Ginger folded the belt into thirds, the buckle at the far end; his eyes never leaving Dido. But Dido did not interfere.

  On the embankment behind the street a goods train was passing. It rattled on and on. The two men waited as if for it to go. When the sound of the trucks had died to a faint clatter in the distance Ginger walked towards Dido. Dido’s left and right hands came apart. His left hand clutched his cap, now empty. In his right hand was the claw hammer he had been using in the bedroom. Ginger paused. Then his hand swung, and the belt shot out to its full length, Dido leaping clear to barely miss the hurtling buckle. Ginger gathered in the buckle, so that the belt was a flexible, steel-headed truncheon again. Again and again he struck at Dido; and Dido, small and lithe, ducked, darted, retreated.

  Ginger paused. He let the belt drop to its full length, then with an astonishing speed for his bulk he rushed at Dido, the belt lashing to right and left. Dido went backwards fast; and as he did so, someone stuck a foot out. He fell headlong back, the belt came down on him and the thump of the buckle into his flesh was so loud that against one male shout of, “Do ’im, Ginger”, there was a medley of women’s cries and gasps.

  Ginger was attacking with the speed of a wild beast, his boot driving in and the belt whistling down again. Dido, arms wrapped round his head, squirmed away and avoided an onslaught that would have been lethal. In a blink, he was on his feet, gasping. He scurried backwards, and as he did so he glimpsed his two brothers on the pavement. With them was Tommy Long, a little coster with whom he was on speaking terms. Ginger came in again and Dido, eyes on him, saw no-one else. To avoid being driven to the wall he retreated down the street.

  Ginger bore down on him, his eyes showing the faintest smile of victory in his heavy, brooding face. He had his challenger on the run. Dido waited. He ignored his brothers’ shouts of warning. He waited and as the belt lashed down at him he deliberately stepped forward beneath it and took it, deliberately, on his left arm, the buckle curling round him to dig into the back of his shoulder. And in that second, his will shutting out the awful pain, he drove upwards with his right hand and smashed the hammer into Ginger’s jaw. He heard the bone break and the man’s hoarse yell of agony but the belt lashed again and he took it and this time he kicked with all his force, steel-capped boot going into the big man’s kneecap. And Ginger lurched away, one leg buckling, face distorted by the broken jaw, bellowing like a wounded beast, the belt still lashing, but out of control.

  And while the people murmured on the pavement, obeying the imperative to keep out of a fight, yet fearful of the consequences if they failed to help their overlord, Dido lunged at the crippled, lurching man, catching him on the side of the head with the hammer, hitting him again, bringing the great bulk of him thumping down, and going in with steel-shod boots to kick, kick, kick. At last he stopped. Ginger lay still. Blood ran between the cobbles around his head. Chas came forward, knelt and listened. He stood up and said to the struck-still crowd, “’E ain’t croaked.”

  They murmured again. Their world had fallen to pieces and they did not know how it would be ordered again.

  Chas said to his brother, “You all right?”

  Dido was panting, almost doubled up as he hugged his left shoulder where it had taken, by his intent, the blow. The back of his suit was covered with dirt. He ignored Chas and managed to say to Shonny, “Get the barrow.”

  He and Chas waited, and so did the crowd, till Shonny came back with the barrow. Dido took his hand away from his hurt shoulder and gestured, “Lift ’im on.”

  His brothers strained to lift the inert Ginger on to the barrow. Dido gasped, sharply, to the crowd, “’Elp ’em.” He looked round. — “Tommy!” Reluctantly, Tommy Long stepped off the pavement. Dido pointed to another man. “And you!”

  The man obeyed. They and the two boys lifted the body. It rolled on to the barrow. Dido walked to one of the onlookers and took from him the bowler hat, with the watch and chain in it. These, with Ginger’s belt, he placed in the barrow. Then he made another sign and his brothers started to trundle the barrow away down the street. He limped after them.

  The crowd watched till they had turned the corner. The conversation gradually grew louder and more animated. People drifted back into the pub. Others went home. The Peach brothers took the barrow to the corner of the next street, down which Jaggs Place lay. Here they tipped the unconscious man on to the pavement. They put his belongings down next to him. Then they returned to Rabbit Marsh, put the barrow away and went home. A little while after they had gone a man came along the deserted street. He saw the recumbent body and crossed towards it. He stooped and examined it. He was a plump man with plump, smooth cheeks. He was a couple of inches under six feet in height. He wore a soberly cut grey overcoat, a trilby hat and small, lightweight boots highly polished. He drew something from an inside pocket, put it to his lips, and the blast of a police whistle shrilled. His name was Merry. He was an inspector in the detective force of the Metropolitan Police. Tonight, when most of his colleagues both in uniform and plain clothes had been drafted to central London for Coronation duties, he had been making a round of his area.

  He knew Ginger and he guessed what manner of drama had taken place. He had not interfered with Ginger in the past. He did not regard petty extortions of the Murchison kind as crime, but as part of the normal life of the riff-raff over whom he, Merry, watched. They could do what they liked to each other as long as they did not infringe what Merry regarded as law and order.

  Merry knew everything that happened in the area, and he watched it as he might watch the murderous existence of insects under glass. Tomorrow he would know who had felled Ginger; for like Ginger, he had his toadies. But he knew that those who would whisper to him would not give evidence in court. Even if he wished to, he could not arrest the assailant; but he did not wish to. Unless, of course, Ginger died.

  Already he had a notion of the future course of that unknown man’s life; at a moment when Dido, the man in question, was lying on his bed, after Chas had painfully undressed him and put plasters on the two lacerated wounds made by the buckle. Dido was aware of little but the violent throb of pain. His only clear thought was that he would be unfit for work tomorrow.

  A crowd gathered. The police came, and then an ambulance. Merry went with the injured man to hospital; and when he learned that Ginger was not likely to die, he gave little more thought to the affair. It would lead to consequences, of course, and on those consequences he would keep an eye. It was even his way sometimes to direct them with a discreet touch here or there; not interfering, of course, but making sure that events ran his way. Not the way of justice, which was one of those abstractions that he never thought about; but the way of Inspector Merry, an ambitious man, a man of authority.

  Chapter Three

  “It was him that gave your names,” Mrs Peach used to say, pointing to the photograph of her dead husband on the mantelpiece. “He said they ran in his family.”

  And when, once, Dido grunted, “Romany,” for this was the only explanation he could think of for his own Christian name and that of his youngest brother, she was indignant. To her gypsies were not respectable. She said, “He came from respectable people.”

  Dido, a damped-down derision in his voice, “Him respectable?”

  “His people were.”

  She had grown up in domestic service and consequently spoke a decent English. She had been a maid in a tradesman’s house in Dalston when Dido’s father, then in en
viable regular work as a gasfitter, had come to the house and charmed her. He had been a handsome young man. His photograph, which showed him older, fuller of face, with a spiked moustache, was that of a full-blooded and attractive man. His Mediterranean swarthiness and thick, gleaming black hair had indeed suggested a gypsy ancestry. The two younger boys looked like him. Dido alone, blond and Saxon, took after their mother.

  The little fair-haired housemaid, lonely, excited into something she called love, had thought she was coming into great good fortune when she married this man with a skill and a guaranteed job. She was soon disillusioned. It took the day of her wedding to teach her that he was a mad drinker and a few weeks after to discover that he was a ceaseless pursuer of other women. He lost his job a little later, and many other jobs after that.

  When she tried timidly to plead with him he shouted at her and the day came when he hit her. After that he hit her more and more often, until, as his decline hastened and his rancour against life grew, he would strike her without provocation, enraged simply by her weakness and passivity, furious perhaps at the continual contrast between her (in bed a limp thing, like some little creature hunted almost to death, paralysed with terror) and the innumerable brazen women he grabbed, coupled with and forgot as he lurched from pub to pub in the back streets.

  It became a mercy when he spent more time away than at home. She had five children to bring up — there was a daughter, now decently married to a market gardener along the Lea, and there had been another boy who died in infancy of diphtheria. To make ends meet she started the little rag business, at the suggestion of the Methodist minister whose chapel she attended every Sunday, as she had since childhood. When her children were small she took them with her every week, a little procession of scrubbed, neat infants. When they were older she went alone; but as a demonstration of regard for her and of the respectability she had taught them to treasure, her sons went with her at Christmas and Easter, a solemn parade in best clothes along Rabbit Marsh — a family demonstration of apartness.

  It was a small miracle that, with no other help from the chapel than occasional coals, blankets and cast-off clothes, she brought her children up in cleanliness and decency, always warm, always with a meal, if it was no more than bread and cocoa, always with boots on their feet; for the business brought in little. The children knew it. Living among the barefoot, ragged-arsed, pallid, dirty children of Rabbit Marsh, they were in no danger of taking their status for granted. All their lives they felt gratifyingly different from the rest. For this they loved their mother and, when then father occasionally appeared, looked at him with shame and hatred.

  For he did come home sometimes. He came when he was penniless, to bully money out of his wife. He came when he was cold, hungry or ill, to creep like a dog into the bed, never whining but growling and glowering, till he had regained his strength. He came when he was injured, for another thing that his wife had learned early in their marriage was that he fancied himself as a fighting man, and as time went on he got into more and more fights. He always lost. Losing only increased his combative rage. The older, the flabbier, the more drunk and muddleheaded he became, the more ferociously he fought, and the more disastrous the consequences. Nothing deterred him. His ear was pulped, his face scarred, his head split time and again; perhaps his brain was damaged, by injuries or by his excesses, for he fought on like a wild beast. Ten years ago, when drunk, he had fallen headlong under a brewer’s dray, and a wheel over his head had finished him and his wife’s martyrdom.

  It was impossible to know how she took this relief, for she just sighed and looked vacantly about her when she was told, and never showed any other reaction. She had always been quiet and passive, and her absentmindedness grew as the years went on. It was as if, utterly startled in her girlhood by the bitter shock of her marriage, she had never gathered in her scattered wits.

  It was an irony that Dido’s readiness to fight, which may have come from his father, was inflamed by his disgust for his father. The first time he tried to defend his mother from the savage drunkard was when he was twelve years old and he was knocked across the room for his pains. This did not deter him from flying to his mother’s defence every time she was attacked. After many a cruel beating he was able to give a good account of himself, and at the age of seventeen, to thrash his father. After that, when the wastrel came home, Mrs Peach at least did not have to fear bodily violence.

  And it was because of his fierce attachment to his mother that he came often to use his fists outside the house. Workless men filled the East End and converged like wolf packs whenever there were jobs going. They fought each other like hungry beasts for work outside the wharves, outside warehouses, to shovel snow in the winter, anything for a crust. The greater part of them were not savages or drunkards like Dido’s father. They were men with human love and responsibility in their hearts to drive them mad because they knew that hungry children waited for them to come home. They fought better than Dido’s father and Dido, who from the day he left school at the age of twelve was determined never to come home one single week without a pay packet to help his mother, fought for work, learned to win and always brought money home. Now, valued for his intelligence and strength, he had a regular post of responsibility on the wharf at Poplar.

  It made a strange contrast in him; the ruthless, savage streak buried in him, the animal craft and ferocity; and the outward self to maintain which he had been forced to act in this way — the outward self of respectability. He ruled his brothers quietly but with a fist of iron. As during their childhood they were always scrubbed and dressed tidily. Under Dido’s rule they all worked regularly and hard and gave most of their wages to their mother. Dido permitted Chas, as he permitted himself, an occasional drink but they never wasted their time or money in the pub. He taught the boys that the women of these parts were loose and dirty. He was haunted by a vision of his father’s paramours.

  Yet though he worshipped his mother he was a silent worshipper; like some tough, taciturn man who steps into a church to make a genuflexion then strides vigorously on his way. There was nothing of the mother’s boy about him. He was not the sort who would hand the sandwich plate around; or serve as sidesman at the chapel; nor would he look at any of the “nice girls” his mother brought home from chapel “for a cup of tea”. She was fifty-four, the gold washed out of her hair, her skin white, with the tissue-paper look and the innumerable fine lines of exhaustion. She feared her death, that would leave him uncared-for; or worse still, her own helpless infirmity. She prayed for a good wife for him, another decent and capable woman to take over the cares of the household.

  Dido was a silent man. He looked neither to the right nor to the left, not at women, not at his workmates, not at neighbours. There was a strange intensity in his face as if ceaseless thoughts churned inside him, but what they were no-one could know. He could not express himself. Even with his mother, to whom alone he was close, he could only exchange brief remarks.

  Imagine a narrow ravine whose floor consists of worn cobbles running between pavements of uneven flags. Such was Rabbit Marsh. The June sunshine gilded it as pitilessly as theatre lights show up the dirt on a bare stage. The walls of corroded brick were black with railway soot. The air was impregnated with the acrid smell and taste of soot. The rows of windows in the house fronts were mostly bare oblongs of glass which stared blind, black and grimy against the sunlight; only a few were curtained, the best with coarse lace, others with multicoloured patched rags.

  The windows of the shops at the base of these dark cliffs, each divided in its own pattern of small panes, were no less dirty, and the paltry goods within them were few, faded and grubby with age. The paintwork of the shops had long faded to a dingy dark uniformity and the names over them were barely discernible. Most of them had their shutters up, locked by great bars of rusty iron, as did the workshops, for the Coronation holiday lasted into the next day.

  That was all the street was; two narrowly facing rows of such
buildings, leaning forward with age, cleft by an alley here and there or pierced at the base by a porch leading into a yard; the line of parapets against the mocking blue purity of a bright and infinite sky broken only in the centre where a tenement block reared like a prison five stories high divided by three open iron staircases. The poorest of Rabbit Marsh lived here and it was known as the Bug Hole.

  On working days an endless procession of railway wagons passed down the street, and filled it with the noise of steel-bound wheels on the cobbles and the clash of great horses’ hooves. No wagons passed today, but there was noise in plenty on this holiday morning. The street always swarmed with small children, dirty and bare-bottomed; even the babies were put out to take the air in orange crates. Today their numbers were swelled by the liberated schoolchildren, crowding round marbles contests, pulling each other about in soapbox chariots, or playing rowdily at hopscotch, Release or the violent Jimmy-Knacker. The eternal loafers leaned against the front wall of the pub as if they were paid to hold it up or puffed their clay pipes at the street corners. The women screamed conversations from window to window, in doorways and on the pavement. A few families set off in their best clothes to see the sights in town and a sedate minority brought out chairs and sat quietly in the sun.