‘Hell, Ju,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry for the poor little blighter too, but he’ll be all right. They’ll put him in an orphanage, or somewhere.’
‘Yes,’ she said, icily. ‘I dare say they will.’
‘Well …’ I muttered, helplessly.
‘Well, how would you like being stuck in an orphanage?’
‘I don’t know!’ I said. ‘I suppose they’re all right.’
‘You brute,’ she said.
She made me remember something. Something hidden a long way down. A time when we first moved in with my aunt, and I used to creep out of bed at night, and sit at the top of the stairs to watch the pattern of light made on the frosted glass on the landing window when cars passed by outside. I heard voices downstairs, my father and my aunt talking with voices raised.
‘You are too hard on him, Meg … He’s got to have somewhere to play. He didn’t make much mess, really.’
‘You should try clearing it up!’ said my aunt.
‘I do what I can,’ said my father, ‘but I’m not here all day.’
‘Look here, John,’ said my aunt, much more softly, in a weary sort of voice. I had to lean my head down, towards the hall, pressing my face against the banisters, to hear her still.
‘If I hadn’t taken you both in, he’d be in a Home. He would be made to toe the line all right, in there. I may not be all you’d want, but I’m better than a Home. You just remember that when you’re finding fault with me.’
My father said, ‘God knows. I’m grateful to you, Meg …’ Obscurely frightened, I had crept back to bed,
‘They can’t all be so awful!’ I cried.
‘I’ve got a friend at school who was in one till the better-off side of her family heard about it. They came driving up, late at night, and her cousin’s mother was crying, she was so sorry to have let it happen, and they took her away right then, and looked after her.’
I felt very tired. A great weight of worry, worse than ever, seemed to have been laid on my shoulders.
‘I’m sorry for him, Ju,’ I said. ‘Honestly I am. But we can’t look after him here. We just can’t. We haven’t the money for another person. We haven’t the coupons. We haven’t the strength. We can only just keep going ourselves. And it isn’t our fault what’s happened to him. ‘It’s just his bad luck.’
She didn’t answer that at all. She turned away, and wiped his nose for him.
After a bit I said, ‘So what do you suggest, anyway?’
‘I think we should look after him here, until he trusts us, and remembers how to talk. Then we can find out where his mother is.’
‘But it might take ages. He might never remember. And if he does, don’t you see that she’s probably no good to him now?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She’s probably dead!’
‘We could wait and see. His whole family can’t be dead.’
‘I’m sorry, but we can’t. We can’t manage. I’d keep him out of an orphanage, just like you would, if we could, but we can’t, and that’s all there is to it.’
‘No it’s not,’ she said, facing me squarely. ‘Because we can keep him out. We could telephone my aunt, and she would find my mother, and they would help him. It’s all very well, managing by ourselves; but I don’t call it managing if it makes us do hateful things that we wouldn’t have to do otherwise!’
The pit of my stomach lurched, and tightened. The ground seemed to drop away from under my feet. I just about managed to steady my voice, or thought I had, but it came out very odd sounding. ‘Is that what you want to do?’
She said, ‘Look, Bill, I know how much you want us to stay here. I’m ready to stay with you. But I won’t have anyone else, like Dickie, suffer for it. We have to manage as well by ourselves as we would with the grown-ups, otherwise we ought to stop.’
I went and sat down in my armchair, and put my head in my hands. That child had been listening to every word we said, though I don’t suppose he understood. He was an odd-looking little beggar, about three feet high, with dark red hair, a bit curly, and brown eyes. They looked sad, and rather vacant, like cow’s eyes.
In the end I said, ‘Well, I think we could support Dickie too if we make the barrow scheme work. If it’s still odd-jobbing, and with you always at home to look after him, we won’t be able to manage. We’ll try. If the barrow doesn’t work, we’ll give in.’
She said, to comfort me, ‘We wouldn’t have to give in at once. We could spend the rest of my money first.’
I didn’t reckon we could. If she was going back to her parents, I reckoned we ought to have as much as possible of their fifty quid to return to them, otherwise I might find myself in really nasty trouble.
The barrow was our only hope. It was the best hope for Dickie too, come to that, because I didn’t feel as sure as Julie seemed to do that her mother and aunt would jump to the rescue of a totally strange waif and stray. But I felt a long stab of regret about it all. I hadn’t imagined myself being a green-grocer. I had wanted to be an engineer.
7
It took me the whole of the next day to finish tapering the ends of the wooden axle. The banister-post I was working on was oak; that made it hard to work on, but I thought it would also make it strong enough for the job. Dickie liked the chips and shavings that came off; he sat around on the floor and played with them. At lunchtime I went out and bought fish and chips for us; I didn’t say anything, but with a sinking heart I had foreseen another snag to Dickie; we wouldn’t be able to take him into cafés without attracting attention, and one ration book wasn’t going to feed three of us with homecooked food. Perhaps at British Restaurants, where families ate together very often, we would be able to take Dickie with us without being noticed.
For the moment the axle was problem enough. I slung it on my shoulder, and trotted off with it, and then when I got it to my cart, I found I couldn’t pull away the broken one. I struggled with it for a while, but I knew I would have to get help. That was a bit tricky; I didn’t know who the cart belonged to. Pinching it was one thing, getting somebody to help me pinch it was quite another.
I thought about it for half-an-hour, and then I went to see Big Bert and Little Bert. Their stall was in the usual place. I told them about the cart, and asked them to help. They said they would come along at lunchtime.
‘Whose is it, then?’ said Big Bert, as soon as he saw it. My heart sank.
‘Mick’s. It’s Mick’s old one,’ said Little Bert. ‘’E’s in the army; ’e don’t want it now. ’E can always ask for it back when ’e comes ’ome, can’t ’e?’
‘Rightcheware,’ said Big Bert. ‘Give us a ’and, then.’
They knocked the wheelcaps off with a blow from my new axle, and then the old one slid out as easy as pie.
‘Easy, when yer knows,’ said Big Bert, smugly. ‘Just run back and fetch us a ’ammer, Bert, willyer?’
Together Big Bert and I turned the cart over, on its back. Then we pushed the new axle through, and rolled the wheels up, and lifted them on to the projecting ends of the axle. We tried them, and they wouldn’t turn. Big Bert lifted one off again, and looked at it. The ball-bearings in a runnel on the inner edge of the wheel, where it turned against the axle, were stuck fast in a thick black sludge of old dirt. They weren’t moving. He prised them out with his penknife, and scraped out the dirt.
‘I’ve got some oil, Bert,’ I said, producing a small tin of bicycle oil from my pocket.
‘Watcher going ter do wif that?’ he asked, grinning. ‘Oil yer eyeballs?’ But Little Bert had thought to bring a tin of grease as well as the hammer. Once more we lifted the wheels into place. I held the wheelcap over the axle end, and Little Bert held wedges in place, and Big Bert bashed them with the hammer until they were forced in between the wheelcap and the axle, and the wheel was held onto the end of the axle.
‘You done a good job on that axle,’ said Little Bert, and I felt proud.
We fixed the other wheel on in the same way.
‘How about the broken ’andle?’ asked Little Bert.
‘I’ve got this bit of wood, and a ball of string,’ I said. ‘I’m going to lash it onto the broken bit, like a splint.’
‘Good idea. That’ll do it,’ said Big Bert. ‘Well, now you got a cart, what you going to do with it?’
‘Sell fruit and veg, I hope,’ I said. I couldn’t help looking at them anxiously, to see if they thought it would work
‘Why not?’ said Little Bert.
‘ ’E’d better go and see Old Riley,’ said Big Bert. ‘Look ’ere, Bill, you go and see Old Riley. They’ll tell you where he is if you ask at the Garden. Tell ’im you’re a mate of ours; ’e’ll let you have a bit of stuff.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Oh, and just a word with yer,’ said Little Bert. ‘Mate of mine got into a spot of bother on ’is first stand. Got beaten up something ’orrible. Month in ’ospital. Know what ’e done?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘ ’E put ’is barrer right beside another geyser’s, and asked for a penny less for everythink. Doesn’t do. Keep your eyes skinned for other fellers’ prices.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Talk lovely to the coppers, and you’ll be all right there too,’ said Big Bert. ‘Tata. See yer.’
So then I bound up the broken handle, and trundled the cart off home. It squeaked at first, and moved jerkily, but by the time I got it home it was moving smoothly and sweetly. It would have stuck out like a sore thumb, parked on the pavement outside the house, so I took it round the back. There was a sort of lane that led between the walls of the gardens, not that they were gardens, really, only yards, and the cart fitted down there, though only just. It kept bumping the walls as I wheeled it. I pulled it up onto the rubble where Julie’s aunt’s garden had once been, and proudly went to fetch Julie to look at it.
‘I’ve got something to show you, too, Bill,’ she said. She had bought two tins of paint. Durable Gloss in blue, and in yellow. ‘And I found this too,’ she said. ‘This’ was a table-cover, a dark rust colour, and thick, like a rug with a deep pile. People used to keep them over the table in the parlour; my aunt had one.
‘Well, so what?’ I said, mystified.
‘I thought it would do to cover the barrow with, to set off the fruit,’ she said. ‘The real costermongers have that sort of green stuff, that looks like grass, but I couldn’t think how to get some of that.’
‘This will do fine,’ I told her.
Most of the rest of the day we spent painting. We could just see the old pattern, but it wasn’t as easy as it looked to paint it the same again; it was jolly hard to get the edges straight, and then we hadn’t the sense to see that you can’t have both colours wet at the same time, so soon we had a lot of green smears, wherever the two colours met. After a bit we just made it marbled, like the endpapers of an old book, and it looked quite bright and jolly like that.
It would have been fun painting, if it hadn’t been for Dickie. He wanted to be with us, and he cried, and clung to Julie’s skirts if she tried to leave him indoors, but he seemed very cold outside, and shivered a lot, and made a sort of grizzling noise, non-stop, till I could have sloshed him. We tried our best to cheer him up, but it was rather cold out there. We had pinched fingers, and red noses, and plumes of breath floating foggily around our faces. We tried to cheer him up by letting him have a go with the brush, but he just held it, drooping from his small red hand, and big blobs of clear yellow dripped off it, and made sun-shaped splashes on the rubble at his feet.
As the afternoon went on he stopped crying, and just sat, gloomily watching us, and he got paler and paler, till he looked really ill. At last Julie took him in while I did the last bit myself. There was a cloudy blue dusk thickening round me, and the siren howled overhead as I finished.
There was a pot of tea ready when I went in, and a loaf of bread, and a little jar of dripping from the butcher round the corner to eat it with. Julie had had time to warm up, and she looked glowing and fresh from the raw open air of the afternoon, but Dickie looked funny. He wasn’t pale any more, he had two round very bright red splotches on his cheeks, like a painted doll, and his eyes were glittering and bright, I glanced from him to Julie, and as if she caught my anxiety she went to him and said, ‘Tea-time, Dickie. Do you want some tea?’
He shook his head, but she picked him up, and carried him over to a chair.
‘Dickie,’ she said to him, ‘Is this what your mother gives you for tea, when you’re at home?’ He didn’t answer. ‘Where do you live, Dickie? You can tell us. Bill and I are your friends.’ He didn’t answer. ‘What’s your other name, Dickie? Dickie what?’ It was no good.
‘Perhaps he doesn’t understand the words we use,’ I suggested. ‘Perhaps he doesn’t know what home means. Dickie, where do you sleep? Can you show us where your bed is?’
Slowly, laboriously, he clambered down from the chair, and staggered over to the window seat. He leaned down onto it and said, ‘Dee … kee.’ We gave up.
He wouldn’t eat any tea, either, but just lay there.
‘He isn’t well,’ said Julie. ‘Perhaps he needs a doctor.’
‘We can’t call a doctor, here,’ I said. ‘We could take him to one, tomorrow.’
‘We might have to,’ she said. But all evening Dickie slept, though he moved restlessly.
It really was a bitterly cold night: we got frozen washing up the plates in that horrible kitchen. It had got worse, for a hole had appeared in the ceiling where the damp had been coming through, and cold air blew through it now. When we had finished we went and sat on the floor right in front of the fire, side by side, warming our backsides at some risk of scorching our clothes.
‘Bill, is there anything you miss much?’ she asked.
‘From the way things used to be? I don’t know really. Haven’t thought. How about you?’
‘Oh, this and that,’ she said, off-hand.
‘Like what?’
‘Bacon for breakfast, and butter for tea.’
‘Gosh, yes. But we wouldn’t have those now, anyway, or not often, with everything rationed.’
‘I had bright flowered wallpaper in my room, and the sun used always to shine on it in the morning. I miss that. Come to think of it, I think living in a room with daylight in the daytime is what I miss most.’
‘I think I miss school quite a bit,’ I said, after giving the question some thought. ‘I used to think I didn’t like it, but now it isn’t there any more, I see that I did. It had nice easy rules.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and poetry lessons.’
‘Poetry?’ I said, in loud disbelief.
‘Well, I didn’t like the actual lessons. It embarrassed me a bit, to see silly old Miss Hinds, waltzing round the room saying “Claads of golden daffodils” with the book hugged on her chest.’ I began to laugh. ‘But I like the way bits of it come back to you later, and seem terribly true; you know, like when you’re lying in the bath. Now that’s a thing I miss – a real bath you can lie in.’
‘You mean, like “I am the Master of my Fate, I am the Captain of my Soul”?’ I asked.
She looked dubious. ‘Well, not quite like that,’ she said, laughing herself.
‘Anyway, some things are better,’ I said. ‘Like having company.’
‘You haven’t any brothers or sisters, Bill, have you?’ she said.
‘No.’
‘I thought not.’
‘Even if I had …’ I began, but I thought better of it.
In the end we got pins and needles, sitting on our heels like that, and we had to get up and hop about a bit. It was then that we noticed that Dickie was shivering. His little form was shaking under the jackets so violently that we could see it from the other side of the room.
We went to him. He looked terribly ill now. His body, his legs, his hands were ice cold, so that they were a shock to the touch, but the nape of his neck and his forehead were burning hot. His shivering was steady,
unremitting, and his face was damp with sweat. His hair was darkened, almost brown, and stuck to his scalp.
‘My God, Ju,’ I said, ‘what shall we do with him?’
‘Get him warm,’ she said, tersely.
We lit the primus stove, and put a kettle on to boil. We pushed our chairs right back from the fire; we raked it, and piled on more coal. We laid cushions on the floor in the pool of warmth just in front of the grate, and carried him over from the window, and laid him there. When the kettle warmed we filled Cook’s hot water bottle, and put it beside him. Julie pulled a pile of clean dusters out of a drawer, and we dipped them in warm water, and wrapped them round his hands and feet, and then dipped them to warm them up again. After a bit of this we stopped, and rubbed him dry. He just lay there, letting us do things. He looked at the ceiling, if he was looking at all.
‘We need some grease, or something,’ said Julie, looking round. We got the remains of the dripping from tea.
‘Put just enough on your hands, so that they slip, and then rub him,’ she said. We bent over him together, she rubbing his chest, and I rubbing his hands and feet. In the end we got him warm enough to seem human to the touch.
‘Blankets,’ said Julie. I brought hers and mine, and we put them over him where he lay. For a little while he lay there, following Julie with his eyes. Then slowly his lids drooped, and he fell asleep.
‘Dickie?’ she whispered, very softly. He did not stir. ‘Thank heavens!’ she said, ‘he’s asleep.’
‘Is there any water left in that kettle, Ju?’ I asked. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea.’ It was while we were drinking it that I said, ‘That air-raid warning earlier on was a bit of a dud, wasn’t it?’ and with uncanny promptness there was a shattering bang, very near us, that made us both jump from our chairs. With a swift woomph noise the shutters pushed inwards against their bolts, and then slackened. An avalanche of rubble started to pour through the hole in the ceiling next door, clattering and rustling for what seemed endless minutes; then silence except for gunfire, further away.
‘Don’t say that sort of thing!’ cried Julie. I was afraid our way out might have been blocked, but when I went to look there was only a pile of debris a couple of feet deep decorating the kitchen floor, and a yawning hole above it through which I could see the stars.
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