Trouble In Paradise

by Pip Granger

  I sighed. Rumours about Ma being stinking rich might have been true, but it didn’t mean her darling Brian wasn’t the brains behind the theft of that rotten two pounds seven and sixpence three-farthings, and the three and half feet of rubber hose. Bung’ole couldn’t resist the opportunity for thievery or villainy of any kind. It just wasn’t in his nature to pass it up; his mum and dad had seen to that. They’d taught him never to enter even their own house by the front door, but had him shinning up drainpipes and breaking open windows almost as soon as he could walk without help, just for practice. At the age of barely fifteen, he was an old hand at burglary.

  Air raids had presented the perfect opportunity for a bent boy to hone his breaking and entering skills. All that was needed was a jemmy, the nerve not to jump into the nearest shelter at the blast of an air raid siren, and a sack to carry away the haul. When that eerie wailing started, people would often just belt for the nearest shelter and count themselves lucky to have made it. They didn’t stop to grab their valuables and lock their doors and windows. Bung’ole and his pals were free to stroll around helping themselves. The little toe-rags didn’t restrict themselves to money. During the war it wasn’t unusual to find yourself buying your own half-pound of mince or onions or margarine or soap back, at hugely inflated prices, from the black market spivs that Bung’ole’s mum organized, supplied, housed and ran.

  The trouble was that, although we all knew what Ma, her mob and her precious boy were up to, nobody was ever able to prove it. Ma saw to that. Wonderful what a broken limb can do for the memory, especially if you really need it to earn another crust to replace the one Brian has just nicked. You could trip over the little rat coming out of your house as you went in, but if you knew what was good for you, you never actually saw him.

  Zinnia looked at Bung’ole swaggering down the road, our Tony trailing him like a puppy, and shook her head. ‘I knew when I delivered that laddie that I’d live to regret it, but what could I do? I couldn’t just walk away. The woman was in labour in my own kitchen.’

  ‘You could’ve smothered the little bastard – and the sow that spawned him, while you were at it,’ suggested Dad as he appeared – just too late to grab Tony – from the King’s Head in a cloud of baccy smoke and brown ale fumes.

  ‘Sows don’t spawn. That’s fish, you ignorant wee man,’ Zinnia explained, none too patiently. ‘I should make allowances, I suppose. The nearest you’ve ever been to a pig is a bacon sandwich, I’ll be bound, and your fish always comes in batter and surrounded by chips, so how would you know? Pigs have litters. Thank the good Lord, Gladys restricted herself to just the one. Can you imagine a dozen like Brian Hole? It brings on the palsy simply to contemplate it. They wouldn’t leave a one-legged sailor with a leg to stand on, that lot.’ We might have laughed, but all three of us stared at Tony’s retreating back with worried frowns ruining our looks.

  As everyone said later, at the noisy family conference, it was bad enough that I had married into the Flucks – the disgrace still hung over us all like smog, and they were only relatives of the Holes – but to be involved with someone as close to Ma as Bung’ole was definitely asking for trouble, and plenty of it.

  I had news for them; even being involved with a rotten Fluck brought trouble enough. They could take my word for it. However, I wasn’t the problem this time. Tony was. And although I was relieved to have Dad’s attention diverted for a change – he never really forgave me for Charlie – I was very worried about Tony. He was a good lad underneath it all and I didn’t want to see him sliding into trouble. It was all too easy to keep on sliding until you never found your way back out again.

  ‘The shame of it, the shame of it!’ wailed Vi. ‘We’ve never had nothing to do with the law, unless you count Charlie, and he only married in.’ She dabbed at her tears with a sodden, mascara-grey hanky.

  It was wonderful how Vi could work Charlie into any conversation where she might be shown up to disadvantage. It was as if she was reminding Mum and Dad that I was the one who had first connected our family with that particular barrel of rotten apples, not her Tony. I was the one who had brought a double dose of shame, first for not keeping my knickers on and secondly for having to marry Charlie Fluck of all people, one of the enemy. Everything paled before that; well, it did with Dad and Vi anyway. The rest of us had almost learned to live with it. There were times when my sister Vi got right up my nose, and this was one of them.

  ‘Give it a rest Vi, do,’ I told her. ‘Just this once, leave Charlie out of it. He isn’t the one leading your Tony astray. What are you doing to stop it, eh? That’s what I’d like to know. As far as I can see, it’s bugger all. As usual.’ I was red in the face, I could tell.

  Mum tried to be soothing. ‘Now, now, girls, no point in getting at each other’s throats. That sorts nothing. What we’ve got to think about is how to make young Tony see the error of his ways. I was hoping it’d wait till his dad got home …’ She trailed off. Everyone knew Fred wasn’t coming home any more. Well, everyone except me, that is. I had a funny feeling about Fred. I’d had dreams on and off, ever since we’d got the telegram saying he was missing. Once I saw him in what looked like a barn, another time he was in some sort of compound, wire all around, like a giant chicken run, and just like chickens, men seemed to be scratching at the ground, leaving pockmarks in the dust. I couldn’t make out any individual faces, but one of the men felt familiar to me and deep down I just knew he was Fred. I’d once tried to comfort Vi by telling her I didn’t believe that Fred was really dead, but Mum and Dad were furious with me for getting her hopes up, when they’d just persuaded her to accept the inevitable.

  ‘If Fred was alive,’ Dad had stormed, ‘the bleeding War Office or the Red Cross would have told her so. If his commanding officer even thought it was a possibility, he would have said so in his letter. Or there would have been a whisper among his mates in the regiment, and one of ’em would’ve said. And they haven’t! So don’t go filling the girl’s head with your bloody dreams, Enie.’ You can get a good sneer into ‘Enie’. It sort of lends itself to the curled lip and the whine, whereas ‘Zelda’ doesn’t. But Dad was right: all anyone would say about Fred was that he had almost certainly been killed in action and his body lost when his comrades had been forced to retreat.

  Dad’s grating voice brought me back to the kitchen and the business at hand – Fred’s wayward son. ‘I’ll give Tony another bloody good hiding when he gets in.’ Dad had a theory that there wasn’t much in a kid’s life that couldn’t be put right by a clip round the ear as a first resort and a hefty session with his belt as a last. His father had taught him that way, and what was good enough for him was good enough for his children and his grandchildren.

  Dad could be a very hard man when he was crossed. He believed in King and Country, or better still, old Queen Victoria and Country; her portrait still had pride of place over his mantelpiece. He demanded hard graft and rigid honesty from all of his descendants and, with the possible exception of Tony, he got it. We were all too much in awe of him to stray far from the straight and narrow, and he never forgot it if you did. I could testify to that.

  I couldn’t help thinking, though, that the belt wouldn’t work any better than it had the times before. Tony was trailing around after Bung’ole before the welts from his last beating had lost their glow. Even a night in the cells hadn’t put him off. Punishment wasn’t making a dent on the boy. In fact, it was just driving him further and further away from us. It was time to find another way to reach him, and I made up my mind to give it some serious thought. I also decided that it might be an idea to talk to his cousin, Reggie, who probably knew Tony better than anyone.

  7

  Mum’s and Zinnia’s allotments were directly behind Zinnia’s house and garden, which was handy for sharing cups of tea in the privacy of the railway carriage. I’d loved that railway carriage from the first moment I clapped eyes on it. Being allowed to play in it as a child had been my idea of heaven.
And every other kid’s as well. It felt safe and, of course, it was exciting. A real, live railway carriage could be so many things in the imagination. It could be thundering across the plains of the Wild West, chased by howling savages or gun-toting outlaws. Or it might be crawling through the lower slopes of the Hindu Kush, puffing and belching with the effort, while dark men with white turbans and unfriendly intentions bore down on it on the backs of wild stallions. Or it might simply be a railway carriage taking soldiers to war, evacuated children to the sticks or a family to Southend for a day at the seaside. Nestled quietly under the protection of the garden wall and the fruit trees, the carriage remained an enchanted place for me. In spring it had a halo of blossom. I spent hours there with Mum and Zinnia, drinking tea and chatting away about everything from the price of knicker elastic to the best way to grow runner beans, and the state of the war.

  Zinnia had furnished the carriage with an assortment of battered Lloyd Loom chairs in a variety of pastel shades of green, pink, blue and white. There was a table under one set of windows, which looked out on the rest of the garden. A primus stove heated the water for tea and a selection of cups hung from hooks above a washstand complete with a large bowl and jug. Zinnia would fill the jug with water from the house, and that supplied the tea and the washing-up water for the cups. Above the cups was a small shelf with an old Petticoat Tails shortcake tin that occasionally even held biscuits, a Coronation tea caddy and a small pile of tea plates. Sometimes, when the weather was warm enough, the chairs were pulled out on to the lawn, under the plum and apple trees, and we had picnics between our labours on the allotments.

  * * *

  I had a day off, and I was beavering away on the allotment by early morning. I’d started a few runner beans on my bathroom windowsill in some tubes I’d made out of salvaged cardboard, mainly old fag and tea packets, but anything would do. Several thicknesses of newspaper served the purpose at a pinch, but they tended to get too soggy; as newsprint got scarcer, it was better to save them for use in the toilet when the Izal ran out, which was often. Whatever they were made of, the tubes saved disturbing the roots too much, which all plants appreciate, according to Zinnia. Some mind more than others. Beans have strong views on the subject, apparently, as do peas, sweet peas and of course all root vegetables, which is why they are normally planted in the ground and then thinned out.

  Whether it was the tubes or not, Zinnia’s beans were always first when it came to judging time in the allotments’ annual competition for the best crops. The competition was eagerly looked forward to by all the allotmenteers and their families. The picnic afterwards was one of the high spots of our year, with everyone doing their bit by providing food. It brightened up the whole Digging for Victory idea, especially for the reluctant gardener, because the prizes were well worth getting your hands on.

  Mr Whitelock usually donated a cart full of horse manure for the first prize for the best overall allotment. As we all knew Zinnia got manure anyway, it was silently agreed that she never won that, although her patches were usually by far and away the best. However, there were prizes for the best individual vegetables and it was Zinnia’s beans that walked away with first prize in that category every single year. The prizes included such luxuries as a bar of Sunlight Soap, courtesy of Terry Rainbird, a ball of garden twine from Flowerdew’s Ironmongers, or a jar of the Reverend Cattermole’s honey, produced in hives that he kept on the verge of the allotments, so that his bees could feed with ease. One year, there was even a small bale of chicken wire. Such richness! No wonder everyone took it all so seriously.

  It was a toss-up between the manure and the honey for the most desired prize. The dung appealed to the serious gardener and the dedicated nosher, the allotment produce being a valuable addition to the table of many a household, but the honey was prized by everyone with a sweet tooth and was fiercely competed for.

  Gladys Hole would enter each year. God knows why. She had Brian working like a Singapore coolie on her patch in the season, but try as she might, she could never win best beans, or best anything else for that matter. It drove her bonkers, especially the beans. I often wondered why the Holes troubled at all, being as how Ma ran the local black market and could normally get first dibs on anything worth having, but there’s no accounting for greed, or the deadly rivalry Ma had with Zinnia.

  Nobody could fully explain that, either, but it was there all right. Mum said she thought it was down to the fact that they were both powerful women in their way. Which was true, but they weren’t in the same line of business, so it was difficult to make sense of it. But as Mum said, Zinnia was freely respected for her skills as healer whereas Ma had to rely on fear of pain and retribution to gain grudging respect from the locals. If Ma could compete with Zinnia, then she would.

  Zinnia would never divulge the secret of her great success with runner beans. When asked, she would say, ‘Well, there’s the root run, that helps. Then of course, there’s the sweet peas that pull in the wee beasties to pollinate and then finally, there’s my recipe for the trench.’ Here she would grin her secret grin. All the serious vegetable growers on the allotments were itching to know the exact ingredients that went into her trench mixture. We all knew that Mr Whitelock’s Dobbin made his contribution, often in nice steaming piles outside our houses, but there was more to it than lashings of well-rotted manure. All her kitchen peelings went in, eggshells if she had had any actual eggs and bits of newspaper, shredded to make a little go a long way. I’d even seen a moth-eaten garment or two dropped in before now.

  But there was still something else, and it was this that Zinnia point blank refused to reveal to the hopefuls that hung about chatting and eyeing her trench as she shovelled the earth back over her mixture. She said it helped if it all cooked down nicely over the winter months. Some sneak had even had the gall to dig up her trench in the dead of night once, to get a sample, but to no avail, because all they found was rich, crumbly earth; the winter frosts and the ‘even wee-er beasties, awfy small, too wee to see with your own eyeballs’ that lived in the soil, had seen to that.

  Anyway, there I was, bum stuck up in the air as I carefully lowered the beans’ long roots into equally long holes, when I became aware of a pair of feet, attached to a pair of grubby knees, topped off with a pair of grey flannel shorts.

  ‘What’re you doing, Auntie Zelda?’ Tony asked.

  ‘Knitting socks for sailors. What’s it look like I’m doing?’

  ‘Am I supposed to say “Ha, ha, very funny,” or something? ’Cause I’ve got to tell you, it wasn’t that good, Auntie Zelda.’

  ‘You are a cheeky little so-and-so, Tony Gunn. Now what do you want? Unless of course you’ve come to help? Nip over to the standpipe and fill this watering can, will you?’

  We worked away quietly together for a bit, Tony schlepping the watering can back and forth to give the beans a really good drink to start them off in their new surroundings. Once the beans were settled, Tony and I took a well-earned rest in the sunshine and drank a companionable cup of tea under one of Zinnia’s apple trees. Bees were humming gently on the breeze and all was peaceful apart from a robin swearing at a rival for daring to check the newly turned soil for grubs, slugs’ eggs and eelworms.

  ‘Auntie Zelda?’ Tony said, to see if he had my attention. He did. I knew he hadn’t just happened to drop by.

  ‘Yes, Tony,’ I answered, to let him know that just because my eyes were closed, it didn’t mean I was snoozing.

  ‘Do you think my dad’s dead?’ There was going to be no tarting it up, then. I opened my eyes and looked at his rosy-cheeked face, great brown eyes pleading for me to tell him everything was going to be all right. But I couldn’t. My dreams were just that: dreams. They weren’t certainties, and that’s what the boy needed.

  ‘I don’t know, Tony. I really don’t.’ I couldn’t tell him that there were times when I could have sworn that I felt his dad drawing nearer. It would have given him a hope that I wasn’t at all sure would
n’t be shattered. His grandad was right. It was best not to build up anyone’s hopes. It was hard enough as it was.

  ‘I miss him, Auntie Zelda.’ Tony’s voice cracked slightly and his eyes took on the glassy sheen of unshed tears. Poor little blighter, he couldn’t even have a cry in peace, because strong men did not cry, even before their voices broke and they were still budding, as it were. I had to strain not to gather the poor little sod to my bosom and comfort him, but I knew that if I did, he’d be off like a halfpenny rocket on Guy Fawkes Night.

  ‘I know you do, love, I know you do. You were close, you and your dad.’ It was all I could think of to say. We sat quietly for a moment, then I added: ‘I know one thing, though. If your dad is still alive, he’ll crawl over broken glass and walk through fire to get home to you and your mum. That’s certain sure, that is.’

  I heard a quiet sob beside me, but pretended I hadn’t noticed. I gazed up at the bees buzzing around the apple blossom, and listened to their gentle hum. It was soothing, and it seemed to do the trick for Tony, too, because a mighty sniff told me he was pulling himself together. My heart bled for him.

  Still, it didn’t bleed so much that I didn’t exploit the moment. It was time for a little heart-to-heart. ‘Tony, why do you hang around with Brian Hole when it gets you into so much hot water? I’ve often wondered. You know he’s a bad lot, and I know that you’re not, underneath it all.’ I ruffled his hair in a friendly fashion and he batted my hand away with a watery grin.

  ‘Geroff!’ he growled, and pulled his head away.