Children of the Archbishop (58 page)

There was a pause.

“‘Ammersmith Boys'”, he said. It sounded quite convincing when he heard himself saying it.

“Parents living?”

“No, sir.”

“Guardian?”

Ginger didn't know what that one meant. So he said “no” again. But the answer didn't seem to satisfy the clerk.

“Got to have guardian,” he said.

“Have I?” Ginger asked.

The clerk looked up for the first time. He had sharp, sneaky little eyes behind his spectacles, and Ginger didn't like the way they looked at him.

“You go and sit over there,” the clerk said pointing to a hard, deal bench up against the wall opposite. “I'll get someone to deal with you in a minute. I'd like a few more particulars.”

Ginger watched him closely. He was suspicious by now. He saw the clerk deal with three other boys, all of whom had parents and addresses, and then the clerk looked up again.

“I'll be right back,” he said.

“Yus, sir,” Ginger answered.

But as soon as the clerk had disappeared inside a door at the end of the counter, Ginger scooted. There was a place marked “Exit,” and Ginger went straight for it. By the time the clerk had returned, Ginger was half-way down the street towards Sweetie.

She smiled as he came up to her.

“Is it a good job?” she asked. “Is it to do with cars? Can I come too?”

“You shut up,” Ginger told her. “We can't stand ‘ere. They're looking for me. They haven't got no jobs.”

Once they were down a side street, Sweetie turned to him again.

“Then we'll try somewhere else,” she said. “I'll try next time. They won't think anything if I go alone.”

But Ginger only shook his head.

“It's no good,” he explained. “Not unless you've got parents an' guardians. An' you gotter live somewhere. The man inside said so.”

“Oh,” Sweetie answered.

It was certainly difficult: she had been relying on things being the other way round.

“But something's bound to turn up,” she told him. “Somebody's sure to want something done.”

They walked round Doncaster until after lunchtime. It was tiring, just walking. And Sweetie began to lag behind a bit. Once or twice she took hold of his hand as she walked beside him, but Ginger shook it off again. It would look barmy two boys going around hand in hand. People would guess at once that there was something wrong.

And there was that old trouble about feeling hungry. It kept coming over him in little waves of sheer emptiness. Their tour of the city had taken them longer than he had realised: it was nearly three o'clock already. And, when he could stand the feeling of emptiness no longer, he turned to Sweetie.

“Like sominker eat?” he asked.

“Whenever you feel like it,” Sweetie answered.

She had been feeling sick and hungry herself for some time. But she hadn't liked to say anything about it. Above all things she didn't want to be a nuisance. She had made that resolution before she had asked Ginger to take her with him.

Going into a small shop, he bought some buns and a bottle of lemonade, and they sat on the canal bank. It really couldn't have been nicer, Sweetie thought, sitting there with Ginger close beside her, and their toes almost in the water. It was only the smell of the place that spoiled it. There was a factory just behind them that did tanning or something; and, to be comfortable, you had to keep your nose away from the direction the smell came from. But the buns and the lemonade made them feel better. When they had finished, Ginger bunged up the neck of the lemonade bottle with some old newspaper to make it watertight, and threw it into the canal. Then they threw stones at it until it sank.

And as soon as they got going again, their luck changed. It was Sweetie who saw the notice “BOY WANTED” over a door in a side street. There wasn't anything to say what he was wanted for, and it didn't look much of a business: it seemed to deal in broken-up boxes mostly. But it was a job. And while Sweetie waited outside, Ginger went into the shop.

He got the job immediately. Fifteen shillings a week it was, and nothing to it. All that he had to do was pick up the bits of
wood that had been chopped up and tie them with pieces of tarred twine into bundles of firewood. It astonished him that anyone should really be paid for doing anything so easy. And he reckoned that if he showed himself good at it, he'd get promoted. He'd be on to the chopping-up next.

He had to go outside again to say a word to Sweetie.

“You just hang around,” he said importantly. “I gotter job. Start right away. Meet yer 'ere at seven.”

Sweetie smiled.

“I told you you'd find one,” she said. “You go in and do it. I'll be back.”

“You be all right?” he asked suddenly.

“Of course I'll be all right,” she told him.

“Well, take this. But don't spend it.”

He put his hand into his pocket and gave her one of the two remaining shillings.

“Just in case yer need it,” he added unnecessarily.

He watched Sweetie as she moved off. She'd got his cap on again and none of her hair was showing, but even so he still wasn't sure about her. The real trouble was that she
walked
like a girl. And he didn't altogether like the idea of a girl going off like that all by herself in a place where she didn't know anybody. It didn't seem right somehow. But he reckoned that she knew how to look after herself. She'd always seemed a pretty sensible sort of girl. And anyhow he couldn't go with her: he'd promised to get back into the yard and start faggoting.

It wasn't so much that the work was difficult: he'd been quite right about that. It was simply that it had to be done so fast. The choppers were hard at it all the time and the pile of bits beside him didn't seem to get any smaller no matter how quickly he tied. It wasn't all that easy, either: the little bits of wood kept slipping out of his hand until he got the knack of it. And the splinters. At first he stopped every time he ran a splinter into himself, and tried to get it out again. But he soon saw there'd be no time to go on like that—he'd be buried underneath the heap of bits that the choppers were piling up on him. And so he went straight on with the little slivers of wood sticking into him and the tarred twine biting into his skin as he pulled the bundles tight.

It wasn't a bad sort of place to work. They gave him a mug of tea when the others had it. But they certainly kept him at it. He was supposed to tie two bundles a minute: that was what the man said. And it took a bit of doing. He got up to a hundred an
hour, and there he stuck. All the same, he had tied more than three hundred bundles by the time seven o'clock came round.

“What time to-morrow, please, sir?” he asked.

“Eight o'clock,” the man told him, “and sharp at that, lad.”

He spoke in a thick Doncaster sort of voice with a bit of a rasp in it that made him difficult to understand. But up here everyone seemed to speak like that. It was being so far from London that did it, Ginger reckoned.

And then Ginger put another question.

“Please, sir, when do I get paid?”

That seemed to startle the man. When Ginger had finished, he said. And rightly speaking, he added, he hadn't got properly started yet. That afternoon they'd merely been trying him.

But the job was too good for Ginger to start arguing about. He just said “Okay, sir,” and started off to look for Sweetie.

Provided they didn't eat too much they'd be all right until pay-day. And after that there'd be nothing more to worry about. They could get a proper room. Then, as soon as the police had stopped looking for them, Sweetie could get a job of her own. The right kind of job. A girl's job.

As soon as he saw Sweetie, he knew that she'd been up to something. She was leaning up against a lamp-post and smiling. And when Ginger came up to her she reached into the pocket of her trousers—Ginger's trousers—and took out a paper packet. It was small and crumpled.

“Open it,” she said.

And then, before he could unwrap it, she told him what it was.

“It's a tie-pin,” she said.

She was smiling and excited and happy.

“But I ain't gotter tie,” Ginger answered. And then he stopped suddenly. “You ain't blewed that shilling, ‘ave yer?” he asked.

Sweetie avoided his eye.

“It's gold,” she said. “It was sixpence.”

But Ginger wasn't listening. With the shilling half spent he was wondering where breakfast and dinner and tea and supper were all coming from.

“But you've still got another shilling,” Sweetie reminded him.

“No, I ain't,” Ginger told her angrily. “Only sixpence. The uvver sixpence don't belong to me. I borrered it.”

“I see,” Sweetie answered. “I didn't know.” She paused. “I only did it because you gave me the brooch.”

“But I didn't pay nothing for it,” Ginger pointed out.

He saw now that he should never have trusted her with the shilling. It wasn't safe to trust other people with your money. Not girls, at least. And certainly not Sweetie.

Slowly he counted out what was left. There was the shilling of which only sixpence was really his, and there was a penny left over from the shilling that had paid for supper and breakfast.

“We gotter shilling anner penny,” he said at last. “An' we gotter eat.”

Sweetie knew that she was in disgrace, and she wanted to make Ginger pleased with her again.

“I'm not hungry,” she replied promptly. “Really I'm not.”

But Ginger wouldn't listen.

“Gotter eat,” he said stubbornly. “It's barmy not eating.”

But as it happened, eating didn't prove quite so expensive as he had feared. Apparently they did things very cheaply and sensibly up Doncaster way. Fish and chips, for instance. He blamed himself for not having thought of fish and chips before. But he really didn't know much about eating out—at least not as much as he wanted Sweetie to think he knew. He was only now getting round to studying menus and price-lists.

He and Sweetie stood for some time consulting this one. There were things like plaice and rock salmon for people who were giving themselves a real blow-out, with money no object. But there were cheaper items as well like “Fish pieces, 3d.” And best of all was “Chips, 1d.” Ginger finally decided on that and, going inside, he ordered twopennyworth.

You could tell from the smell of the place how good the food was going to be. It was very nearly as satisfying as a meal, simply standing there washing your lungs in it. The shop provided their own newspaper, too, so there was no trouble about plates or anything.

Ginger and Sweetie went back to the spot on the canal bank where they had eaten lunch. There was no particular reason for choosing it—there were plenty of other places. But it had pleasant, picknicking memories about it, and they felt somehow that they belonged there. It is very important when you are on the run, that feeling that you belong somewhere: it gives you assurance. But it was dark now, and cold. Little wisps of grey mist came reaching up from the surface of the canal, and they shivered.

“Don't let's eat it here,” Sweetie whispered. “Let's go under the lamp.”

It seemed warmer under the lamp. And it was a good meal, even though there was no lemonade to wash it down this time. Ginger felt better about things in general. With chips so cheap, he reckoned that he and Sweetie could just about last out. He began boasting.

“When I git me pay,” he said, “I'll gitcher proper room somewhere. Only gotter wait a week. Then I can git a better job. Somink regular.”

“I'll get a job too,” Sweetie told him. “Then we needn't worry at all.”

Ginger had licked his fingers clean by now and was reading the paper the chips had been wrapped in. It was a clean sheet, crisply torn off the noon edition. And he was reading carefully and laboriously through a paragraph that was staring up at him. “RUNAWAYS IN DONCASTER?” it ran. “
Two inmates, a boy and a girl, of the Archbishop Bodkin Hospital in London were reported missing last night. A clerk at Hythe Street Labour Exchange reports that a boy answering the Police description applied for work at 10 a.m. this morning. The boy, who is red-haired, appeared agitated and ran away when questioned
…”

The rest was torn off. But Ginger had read far enough. He passed it across to Sweetie.

“You read that,” he said.

Sweetie looked serious.

“That's us,” she told him.

“Then we gotter get going,” he said. “We can't stop 'ere. We gotter get going now.”

There was a pause.

“What's ‘agitated?'” Ginger asked.

Neither of them remembered how far they walked that first night. They just kept on walking. It was a main road that they got on to and, though lorries, big trailer affairs like the one they had come on, kept passing them, they didn't try for a lift. A lorry-driver might give them away, Ginger said. There were rewards for missing people he told her, and the lorry-driver might go to the Police simply to get the money.

But nobody can go on walking all night even if the shoe leather stands up to it. And Sweetie's wasn't standing up to it very well. The heel on the right foot had come clean off and had been lost completely. And that meant that she had to walk with a kind of a limp.

“Do you mind if I have a rest?” she asked finally.

“Okay,” Ginger told her. “But cut it short. We gotter be in a different part of the country by the morning. If we're in a different part of the country they won't know it's us, see?”

“I see,” Sweetie answered.

And, while he was waiting, Ginger found that he needed a rest, too. He sat down beside her. Then he started yawning. But he didn't want to admit that he was tired: that would look like giving up too easily. Instead he looked all round him, trying to inspect the black landscape.