‘I can then,’ she said. ‘I’ve played billions of times.’
‘I don’t suppose she has,’ said Mrs Moore, steering her towards the door, ‘but never mind. It will be a new experience.’ She wanted to get them out of the house.
‘She may have,’ said her husband. ‘You see these kids playing in the street. Darned good some of them are, too. Some of the finest Pros in County cricket started their careers against the wall of a blind alley,’ he told Billy. ‘No proper coaching, but keen as mustard, and look at you, with a first-class coach at school and can’t even keep a straight bat at the age of ten. You’ll have to learn before you go to Dartmouth. Got the gear, Wilf? Good chap. Help him, Tess, he can’t carry all that Billy, you cut along and get a ball out of my blazer pocket in the hall.’
He organized them out of the room. Josephine, lingering behind, darted back to take the engine from the drawer where she had seen Billy put it. She carried it downstairs behind her back, and as they went through the garden, thrust it under a little bush near the gate. She would come back for it to-morrow. When she had played with it for a bit, she would use it to bribe Norman to let her help him rescue his father from the dungeons of Wormwood Scrubs.
Poor Commander Moore nearly went demented in Ladbroke Square. If he had had enough hair, it would have stood on end from the amount of times he clasped his head in despair. ‘You’re the most unsporting lot I ever met!’ he shouted at them, for unless they were bowling or batting, they could not see the point of cricket.
‘One for you, Tess – smart fielding now!’ he cried, as Wilfred hit a ball towards where Tess should have been. ‘Oh my God, will you stay where you’re told!’ She was half-way up a tree again, and he dragged her down by a dangling bare leg and led her back to mid-on by her pigtails.
Wilfred disappeared into some bushes, and was only accidentally discovered by his father looking for a lost ball. When Billy batted, he refused to be out, arguing shrilly each time he was bowled, stumped, or caught. Josephine behaved the best. She did more or less what she was told, without understanding why, and once held a catch by mistake, which excited Commander Moore, because it proved that an eye for a ball game could be bred in the most unlikely material, like a religious vocation.
‘She’ll be better yet than any of you duffers,’ he told his uncaring family, as he hauled Billy from the ground, where he had cast himself in an ecstasy of rolling. ‘I don’t know why I waste my time on you.’ He pretended to walk towards the gate.
‘Oh Daddy, don’t go,’ they cried half-heartedly, torn between affection for him and the hope that he would go home.
‘All right, I give you one more chance, but it’s the last time I bring you out to play cricket, I swear.’ It would not be the last time. He had not fathered a family of three for them to grow up without playing cricket. It was unthinkable. So he persevered, his exasperation rising as the sun dropped, fermented by the patronizing audience of picnic parties, and the toddlers who sat down joyfully in the middle of the pitch, and worst of all, two hooligan street boys who were perched on the railings shouting: ‘Soppy Jo Abinger, soppy Jo Abinger!’ in an inane chant.
The Goldners in the grandstand were the reason why Josephine was taking an interest in the game. She wanted them to see her playing with the Moores. She knew they were surprised and jealous; that was why they stayed there jeering.
Billy kept looking across to where Arthur and Norman crouched like monkeys between the spear-shaped tops of the railings. ‘I say – ’ he wandered over to Jo, chewing grass, while his father was hunting for the ball in the centre shrubbery – ‘d’you know those boys?’
‘Course. Art and Norm Goldner. Their Dad’s in prison.’
‘Golly. What’s he done?’
‘I dunno. Murder or something.’
‘Golly.’ His estimation of her rose again. He had been dying to know a street boy ever since he came to London. ‘Let’s go and talk to them,’ he said, seeing the back view of his father still busy in the heap of mown grass.
‘I don’t mind.’ Jo saw an opportunity to show off to both sides.
The Goldners summed Billy up. ‘Got a tanner?’ Arthur asked.
‘What did he say? He does speak funnily. Has he got a cold?’
‘Nar,’ said Norman. “E always talks like that. Chronic. ‘E said: “Got a tanner?”’
Billy brought out his pocket money.
‘Toss you double or quits!’ rumbled Arthur, and while Billy was still puzzling over this, Norman, springing down into the Square, had grabbed the sixpence, tossed it, slapped it on the back of his hand, made a pretence of looking at it, said: ‘Yah, sucks, you lose,’ and slid the sixpence into his pocket.
‘Here, I say!’ Billy lunged at him. Norman immediately put up his fists, and Billy was going at him with flailing arms, when a roar from Commander Moore made him turn his head, and Norman sent him sprawling into the sooty laurel bush.
The Commander was at the end of his tether. He had spent five minutes in the shrubbery looking for the ball. He had come out without the ball, but with a scratched face, torn blazer, and cut grass inside his socks to find Tessa turning cartwheels at the far end of the lawn, Wilfred poking about in three inches of muddy water in the goldfish pond, and Billy and the grocer’s child discernible only as an agitation of the bushes at the edge of the Square.
‘Come here, you young swine,’ he shouted. ‘Double up, or I’ll thrash the life out of you!’
‘Well I declare,’ said one knitting Nanny to another, ‘he certainly doesn’t scruple about his language for all to hear.’
‘Ah,’ said Miss Potts, slightly deaf, from the bench where she sojourned every evening with Colonel Temperley from the Lomond Private Hotel, ‘there’s dear Commander Moore. I didn’t know they were back. My aunt used to know his grandfather, the Admiral. They are the Hampshire Moores, you know, always been seafaring folk. Isn’t it delightful to see him romping with his youngsters? A real family man.’
The only people in the Square who seemed not to hear Commander Moore were his family. ‘I’m going home,’ he shouted. ‘You can look for the ball, and come home when you’ve found it.’ He picked up his hat and went in search of a drink. He knew when he was beaten.
Billy and Norman had a good fight. Billy was unskilful, but he was burlier than Norman, and as plucky. Although he could not knock the other boy down, he got up every time Norman floored him, and went for him again in a tempest of rage, his hair like a porcupine.
After a few minutes, they suddenly tired of it and stopped by unspoken consent.
‘Coo,’ said Norman, ‘you fight quite good for a cissy.’
‘I’m not a cissy!’ Billy windmilled his arms, prepared to fight again.
‘Nar, nar, lay off.’ Norman fended him off easily with a raised elbow. ‘I got better things to do than waste me time serappin’ ’ere. You know what, don’t you Jo?’ He winked at her. ‘You want to come along of us ’sevening?’ He was mellowed by his fight, and he wanted to steal Jo away from the Moores.
Arthur rumbled an objection from his perch on the railings, and spat into a laurel bush.
‘Let us, Art,’ pleaded Josephine. ‘I didn’t get you no cake nor nothing to-day, but I got something better what you can have.’
‘Show us it then.’
‘I can’t. It’s hid.’
‘What is it.’
‘’S a secret.’ She glanced at Billy. ‘Cut me throat if it ain’t something smashin’ though. Let us come.’
‘Where are they going?’ Billy was intrigued.
‘You ’op it,’ said Norman menacingly. ‘Come on, young Jo, you don’t want to play with them no more.’ He pulled himself up to the top of the railings. ‘Come on, I’ll jump you over.’
‘I can get through.’ She squeezed through an impossibly narrow space, and joined the Goldners in the street. ‘Which way?’ she asked.
‘Hah!’ Arthur jeered at Billy, who was watching them wistfully through the rai
lings like a caged animal. ‘Hah, we got a tanner now; we can take a bus. Number seven to the North Pole.’
‘What about your mother?’ Billy called after Jo, but she paid no heed. She had forgotten about her mother and going home, forgotten about the Moores, forgotten everything except the thrill of being in on the Goldners’ adventure. She panted after their clattering boots down the hill of Ladbroke Grove, squeaking like a ratting terrier.
Billy had forgotten about going home, too. He had forgotten about his father, and the ball in the shrubbery, and the wickets toppled into the grass. He thought only of following Jo and these boys, who held the secret of adventure.
Tessa and Wilfred had drifted up to see what he was doing.
‘Quick!’ he cried, ‘we’ve got to get out of the Square and follow them.’
‘Follow who?’
‘Street boys. Real ones. I beat them at fighting. Tell you later. Quick, heave me up, Tess.’ She struggled to get him over the railings, but he kept toppling back on to her head.
‘I’ll heave you then, and you can pull me up.’ He got her as far as the spikes, where she caught her skirt, and hung head downwards until the skirt tore and she fell on her plain freckled face.
‘I can’t do it, I can’t do it.’ She sat up, grimed and tearful.
‘We must.’ He made a desperate leap, kicking with his legs as he tried to pull himself up. ‘Number seven to the North Pole!’ he gasped, as if it were a charm.
Wilfred had taken something out of the museum of his trousers pocket. ‘I’ve got a key,’ he said chattily.
‘Gosh – come on! Why didn’t you say so?’ Billy streaked for the gate with Tess after him, one side of her skirt in shreds.
‘You never asked me,’ said Wilfred, trotting after them.
‘Number seven to the North Pole! Number seven to the North Pole!’ Billy kept shrieking hysterically, as they tore down Ladbroke Grove on unstoppable legs.
‘Where’s the North Pole?’
‘I don’t know. We can ask on the bus. Gosh!’ Billy tried to check himself, but he was going too fast. ‘We haven’t got any money.’
‘I have,’ panted Wilfred, behind.
‘Good old Wilf! Number seven to the North Pole!’
‘Where is the North Pole?’ Tessa’s pigtails flew out like Maypole streamers.
‘I don’t know!’
‘It’s in the Arctic Ocean,’ said Wilfred, in his class-room voice. He was too far behind for them to hear, but he did not mind. If they were going to the Arctic Ocean, they were going to the Arctic Ocean.
People got quite tired, that September, of Mrs Abinger harping on Josephine’s friendship with the Moores.
‘Between you and me,’ Miss Loscoe, returning from shopping, told her mother, ‘I shall be quite glad when the elder boy and girl go back to boarding school. Then perhaps we shan’t hear so much of “Jo’s up at Chepstow Villas again,” or “Billy Moore was down asking for Jo before she’d even finished her tea.” Ellie lets her go out at all hours with those rowdy young nobodies – for what’s a Commander in the Navy, when all’s said and done? – yet the other evening, when I suggested taking Jo out with you and the chair as a treat, it was: “Jo always has to stay in and practise her letters after tea.” “Thank you very much,” I thought. “I can take a hint as well as the next person.”’
Miss Loscoe stood in front of the overmantel mirror, whose reflections were dim and wavy, like a sunless lake. She removed the pins from her hat and lifted it off carefully, straight up into the air so as not to disturb the mats of brindle hair that were coiled over each ear.
‘Ellie thinks she can advantage Jo by getting her taken up by such as the Moores,’ she went on, ‘but no good ever came of trying to fly above your station. If the Moores knew the half of what I know about the child’s history … I could tell some tales. Ellie is riding for a fall, that’s where it is, Mother.’
‘Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross,’ chanted Mrs Loscoe. ‘To the devil with the lot of them, I say.’ She was going through one of her phases when she disapproved of everything, even her food. ‘Don’t jolt my chair like that, Dot!’ She gnashed her gums angrily. She would not wear her teeth when she was in these moods.
“I’m only trying to push you to the table, Mother, for your tea,’ said Miss Loscoe patiently.
‘Tea – ugh! Don’t talk to me of tea!’ The cracked old lady swept an arm over the table and knocked a few things to the floor.
‘You must have something, dear. You’ve hardly touched a thing all day. I’m sure I don’t know what you live on.’ Miss Loscoe picked up the bread, and put the bread knife out of her mother’s reach.
‘Everyone eats too much,’ grumbled her mother. ‘If more people did as I do, there wouldn’t be all this disease.’ Although she would not eat or drink anything, she sat hunched at the table, staring at her daughter’s every mouthful. This put Miss Loscoe off her tea, although she had only had a snack at lunch, as it seemed a waste to cook when her mother would not touch anything.
Mrs Loscoe had looked for a long time like a living corpse, and now her daughter too was getting thinner and more bloodless than ever, which did not stop her scouring herself with great quantities of herbal tea. The rent of their basement flat had been increased, and the price of many foods remained where the war had raised them. Neither of them had had any new clothes for a long time, and Miss Loscoe kept retrimming her hat, so that people might think it was a new one. She went less and less to the Corner Stores for groceries, and when she did, invented elaborate reasons for not buying tinned salmon, or taking margarine instead of butter. Mrs Abinger might have worried about Miss Loscoe on the down grade if she had not been so obsessed by Josephine on the up grade.
‘Anyone would think the Moores were the Royal family, the way you carry on,’ grumbled Mr Abinger. ‘I grant you, it gets the kid out of the way, but how do we know what she doesn’t get up to there? She looked at me very sly last night when I asked her why she was home so late.’
‘In Chepstow Villas, George!’ How could anyone get up to anything but good in Chepstow Villas? As well suspect misbehaviour in St Paul’s.
‘I don’t know that I trust those Moores,’ said George, dipping a licked finger into some spilt sugar. ‘Reactionaries. The curse of the nation. They got us into the last war, and they’ll get us into another, you’ll see, if either of us lives long enough with trade in the crippling condition it is. The Navy! Grown men playing with boats … Now I ask you. I don’t fancy that kind of influence on my daughter. Even if she isn’t really my – ’
Mrs Abinger coughed loudly and jostled him, because Sidney was in the shop, dawdling over the last orders of the day.
‘Their house ain’t so wonderful, anyway,’ put in the boy, who was resentful that Jo was never at home nowadays after school to help him with odd jobs. ‘I seen into the kitchen when I deliver there. Messy great hole it is, and the back door bell don’t work.’
‘Fag ends, boy,’ said Mr Abinger augustly. ‘How many times must I tell you not to pick up other folks’ conversation?’
‘No wonder the deliveries take you so long,’ said Mrs Abinger, ‘if you loiter at every house, poking your nose into what doesn’t concern you.’
Sidney said half under his breath, so that they could hear or not as they chose: ‘I could tell some things about those precious Moores if I liked. I got eyes and ears, but I’m biding me time.’ He picked up a box of groceries and sidled through the door.
‘Shut the door!’ Mr Abinger roared after him.
Sidney put his weasel head back round the door, slid a look at them and repeated: ‘Yus, I’m biding me time,’ before he shut off the buzzer and sneaked away on the old gym shoes his mother had gone over streakily with black polish.
‘That lad is up to something,’ said Mr Abinger.
‘Nonsense,’ said his wife, who knew no worries if everything were going all right for Josephine. ‘He’s jealous because he quite fancies Jo himself.
He’s got a sauce though, criticizing the Moores’ house when his own grandmother was turned out of the Buildings because of the state she kept her rooms. Jo has told me all about Chepstow Villas; not that she’s in the house much this fine weather. They go up to the Park most evenings, get up to some lovely games, she says.’
‘I wonder just what they do get up to in the Park,’ Mrs Moore said idly. She was lolling in Nanny’s room, at a loose end now that her husband had gone back to Greenwich, but so used to seeing Nanny work while she sat idle that it did not occur to her to take something off the darning pile.
‘Something they shouldn’t, I don’t doubt.’ Nanny held up a pair of Billy’s shorts. ‘Another hole fit to drive a coach and four through. And the dirt they pick up! Kensington Gardens was never such a place for dirt in my time, when I had them there every day with Baby in the pram.’ She could not be broken of the habit of referring thus to Wilfred when she reminisced, ‘I often wish those days were back when I had them under my eye,’ she said.
‘They were too much for you, Nanny. I used to get quite worried about you, and wonder whether we ought to have a nursery maid.’
‘This is the first I’ve heard about it.’ Nanny made her screwed up, sewing mouth.
‘I never got farther than wondering … I don’t know … the war … and money. And you managed. But I was glad when they got old enough to look after themselves.’
‘At any rate, they never played with street children in my day,’ said Nanny, who liked sometimes to play at taking offence, since her peaceable life provided no real excuse for any such emotion.
‘If you mean Jo,’ said Margery Moore, ‘she’s not a street child. She’s far cleaner and quieter than mine.’
Nanny held up the shorts accusingly. ‘I’m sure I do my best,’ she said, undiscouraged by the fact that Mrs Moore never noticed her mild umbrages. ‘But you’re not going to tell me, ’m, that the child isn’t very lucky to be in and out of a house like this as she pleases, and lovely games up at the Park with Ours.’ She spoke of the Moore children as if they were a Victorian regiment.
Joy and Josephine Page 10