Faded Glory (3 page)

“Lovely,” said Albert. “I’ll make a start on the writing they did.”

“Yeah,” said Lenny. He scratched his head. “I thought ‘Wog’ was short for ‘Western Oriental Gentleman’ and here I am from Jamaica. ‘Go back to Africa’? I ain’t ever been.”

“Don’t worry about it, Len,” said Albert. “We can get you a loin-cloth and a couple of spears and you can sort ’em out.”

Len smiled. “Yeah man, put me down for some poison darts and a big cooking pot!”

The two men set about getting rid of the offensive graffiti with brushes, soap and water. As they scrubbed, a bicycle flew by, ridden by a boy with a girl perched on the crossbar. It was the boy that had pulled Albert from the water in the park. Danny.

“Oi son, can I have a word?” Albert shouted.

The boy ignored him and rode on by, as the girl on the crossbar giggled in defiance.

“You know that kid?” said Lenny with an enquiring look.

Albert pictured the boy the night before, under the arches with the rest of the gang at the scene of the crime.

“I just thought he might know the idiots who did this,” he said aloud.

Why wasn’t he telling Lenny the boy had been part of the gang? Part of Albert hoped the boy was an outsider who had just fallen in with bad company. Perhaps he deserved a second chance. After all, he had helped Albert when he was dumped in the lake, and Albert had seen compassion in his eyes.

He straightened up from the clean and dripping wall. “Job done clean as a whistle, Len,” he said. “I’m off to the park.”

“Them ducks must be getting fat,” said Lenny. “Thanks for your help, Albert. I’ll see you later.”

*

As Albert walked home, he felt in two minds. Maybe he shouldn’t have protected this boy Danny, but he felt there was good in him somehow. He only looked about sixteen, younger than the others. No doubt the older yobs were a bad influence.

Getting back to his flat, he picked up some old bread and headed out to the park. If the yobs were there again, he would confront them and give them a piece of his mind. Straighten them up. And feed the ducks of course.

It was good to get some fresher air and exercise. Albert loved to hear the birds sing in the welcome oasis of the park, a sanctuary away from the busy and dirty streets. He enjoyed monitoring the growth and progress of the flowers and trees. He knew the names of some of the flowers and a few of the trees: his favourites were a stately weeping willow that seemed to reach down and almost touch the lakes and a scented rose garden, full of colour and sweet-smelling scent. He felt closer to nature and its wonder in this place where worries and trials floated away, where Mother Nature reassured and healed.

Today, thankfully, was much less eventful than yesterday. The ducks and their ducklings were either pleased to see Albert, or pleased to have an easy lunch. Albert was their friend and they would regularly take bread from his hand, as if they knew he was on their side. Pigeons and sparrows would come and join in the feast too. Albert had a special liking for a brave robin with his red breast, pride and impressive courage.

Things felt more normal after Albert had fed his feathered friends. But he still didn’t know why he hadn’t let on to Lenny that the boy Danny was a part of the crew that damaged his garage, and he felt a little guilty that he had not been honest.

“The boy must have some good in him,” he reassured himself as he walked back home for a late breakfast. “Just in with the wrong crowd.”

After a swift bowl of porridge, Albert fed the hungry Rocky with a stick of millet. He’d named his budgie Rocky in honour of the legendary boxer Rocky Marciano; only to find out later from his military neighbour Simon, a bird fancier (with and without feathers), that Rocky was actually a girl.

“A lady,” Lenny had chuckled when he found out. “I’ll call her Marion, just to annoy you, Albert.”

It was time to get to work for the early shift workers and lunch-time drinkers. As Albert walked across the wasteland that had once been a terrace of Victorian houses now flattened by the Blitz, he saw a boy with his bike turned upside-down, trying to fix it. Albert stopped. It was Danny.

The boy’s head was bent over the bicycle chain as Albert walked up behind him and whispered a little menacingly: “Hello son. Remember me?”

Danny looked startled and wary, but said nothing.

“What’s the problem?”

Albert let the question hang in the air. Danny stared at him with wide eyes.

“I don’t think what they did last night was right,” Danny blurted.

Maybe there really was some good in the boy after all, thought Albert. There was something in the boy’s eyes too, something that reminded him of Tommy. Although he had been intending to give the boy what for, he softened.

“So,” he said. “Looks like your bike’s broke.”

The boy nodded. “The chain’s broke or something.”

“Yeah, well I know who can fix it,” said Albert. “Follow me.”

And not waiting for an answer, he put the bike on his shoulder and marched off.

*

Danny followed reluctantly, weighing up the pros and cons. It was important to get the bike fixed because he cherished the freedom it gave him. Perhaps this old fella could actually fix it.

Albert walked on like the Pied Piper with Danny following behind. But when they arrived at Lenny’s garage, Danny stopped in his tracks.

“Where we going?” he said uneasily. “Give me my bike back.”

“He won’t eat you, son,” said Albert. “He hasn’t got a big enough cooking pot.”

Danny froze like a statue. But a persuasive arm round the shoulder and a gentle nudge from Albert moved them both into Lenny’s archway workshop.

Underneath a white Triumph Mayflower car, amidst grunts and groans, protruded two legs clad in Lenny’s usual dark blue and greasy overalls. Lenny slid out.

“Nice motor,” he said. “Running sweet as a nut.” He clocked Danny standing nervously behind Albert. “Albert man, who’s your friend?”

“This is Danny, Len,” said Albert. “His chain’s broke.”

Lenny made that noise he always made when confronted with a job, a kind of hissing noise through his teeth. “Let me take a look,” he said.

“I ain’t got any money,” Danny said, feeling very uncomfortable.

“Well, maybe if you’re a friend of Albert, we can do you a favour.”

Lenny was one of those people that seemed to have everything somewhere: nuts, bolts, bits of engines. If he didn’t have exactly what he needed, he could adapt something to fix the problem.

“I need to find a link,” he said after studying the broken chain, and made off into the vast amount of precious clutter hoarded in the back room.

Through the open door, Danny could see some of Lenny’s prized personal possessions: a signed cricket bat, photos of family back in Jamaica. One photograph in particular caught Danny’s eye, a photo of a younger Lenny proudly posing in an army uniform with medals shining on his chest.

Danny couldn’t fight back his surprise.

“I never knew that black people fought in the war,” he said as Lenny returned from the back room. “Were you a soldier? Like, in the war?”

“Yeah, for all the good it did me,” Lenny replied with a grunt and a hiss as he attempted to fix the chain back on the bike.

“My dad was a soldier too, but he got killed,” said Danny. “He never came home.”

There was a silence, broken only by the sound of a train rumbling overhead.

“I’m sorry, son,” said Albert. “A lot of ’em never came back.”

“Got you!” Lenny exclaimed as the chain slid sweetly back into position. Danny couldn’t help a smile of relief.

“Do you think your dad would approve of you hanging out with those troublemakers?” Albert asked.

Danny shook his head in a moment of remorse. “But there’s nothing to do round here,” he added, back on the offensive.

“What about sport or something? Football, or boxing?” Albert suggested. “There’s a boxing gym at the Live and Let Live.”

“Yes,” said Lenny. “Back in his day Albert here was a champion boxer – you don’t wanna mess with him boy. Or try cricket, a proper game, that’s the way to go.”

“Not for me,” said Danny, taking his bike, and with a nod of thanks he rode away.

Riding slowly through the streets, Danny thought about Lenny and Albert. Sure, they were still a pair of old tossers, but he respected the things they had done in their lives. Lenny could fix things and had been a soldier. Albert was a champion boxer. That was pretty impressive.

Danny regretted being a part of the gang that had attacked Albert and vandalised Lenny’s garage. Albert’s advice began to resonate the closer he got to home. Maybe that boxing suggestion could be a goer. A way to earn both money and respect, a purpose.

Many of the streets round here had been flattened in the war, leaving wasteland to serve as an adventure playground for the local kids. A bomb crater here, a derelict half-house there, an awful reminder of the not-too-distant past; thankfully now filled with laughter and games.

One large piece of wasteland doubled as a street market. Blankets were laid out with stuff to sell by folks trying to make a few bob, alongside stalls full of fruit and veg and all manner of things. The market was well patronised by the locals and the sailors off the berthed ships waiting dormant in the docks; ships unloaded with goods from faraway places and reloaded with goods “Made in England”. Chinamen, Indians and men from all corners of the world mingled with the locals without any resentment or strange looks. It was as if they all knew that this part of London had a history of welcoming people and immigrants from far-off shores.

Danny and his mum had been evacuated in the war to escape the bombing, like many of the city’s women and children, and sent to live with a nice lady called Mrs Packham and her grumpy husband in Burton on Trent. Danny could not remember much about the adventure except for the train journey, which he’d loved. There’d been something magical about the steam-belching engine clickety-clacking through pastures new. He remembered an annoying little girl, the Packhams’ daughter, who always tried to mimic Danny’s London accent. Most of the local people who lost their homes after the war had been housed in pre-fabs that resembled Nissen huts, or in hasty, half-built blocks of flats. Danny’s mum, as a single parent and wife of a lost soldier, had been housed in a Victorian terrace house, two up, two down, which had miraculously survived the bombs.

The door was open as usual. Danny could hear his mum’s favourite record of the moment, Nat King Cole’s
Unforgettable
, drifting down the street. It certainly was unforgettable, Rosie had played it so many times lately. It never seemed to be off the prized radiogram, bought cut-price as it had apparently “fallen off the back of a lorry”.

Pushing his bike into the passage, Danny looked through the half-open door to the living room. His mother was locked in a romantic shuffle with her latest beau, thin, tattooed Ricky with his fashionable Tony Curtis haircut. Ricky wore a string vest, braces, navy-blue socks with bed fluff on them and ill-fitting brown trousers. His real name was Derek, but he preferred Ricky.

“Derek ain’t rock ’n’ roll,” he had explained.

Unnoticed, Danny pushed on to the kitchen and into the back yard and parked his bike by the almost derelict garden shed. Going back into the kitchen, he grabbed a glass of water, downed a couple of gulps, took a deep breath and went into his mum’s smoochy parlour.

Rosie Watson had a bit of a reputation. After a brief spell of mourning, when she had received the letter and visit to impart the sad news that her husband, Danny’s father, wouldn’t be coming home, she had soon become the local good-time gal. Ricky was the latest companion in what was a pretty long and less than impressive list.

“You’re late, sugar plum,” Rosie said. “Dinner’s in the oven.”

Danny ignored the invitation of burned offerings. “I got held up,” he said. “My bike broke, and I met this old bloke who took me to that black fella with the garage under the arches. He fixed it.”

“They shouldn’t be over here,” said Ricky, waving a half-full bottle of brown ale to make his point.

“He was all right,” Danny said, feeling that he ought to defend Lenny. “He fought in the war. Like Dad.”

“No mate,” said Ricky, shaking his head. “There wasn’t any spear chuckers in the war.”

Danny wanted to set the record straight and put Ricky in his place, but decided it was probably a waste of energy.

“Where’s Dad’s war stuff, Mum?” he asked instead. The meeting with Albert and the photo of Lenny as a soldier had made him want to make contact with his lost father.

“Ooh I don’t know, Dan,” said Rosie, her eyes half-closed on Ricky’s skinny shoulder. “Might be in the cupboard under the stairs. Why d’ya want it?”

“Just wanted to see it, that’s all.”

“All right darling. Have a look, your dad’s stuff is in a tin box under the stairs.”

Danny looked through the clutter that filled the cupboard. Right at the back, underneath a stinking old mop, he found a battered red and silver tin box. He reverently held the box in both hands, went upstairs to his room and sat on his bed.

Danny’s dad had been killed very early on in the war, before Danny had been born. He had never met his father, which was something he truly regretted. With his father’s box, Danny felt closer to him, less alone. Looking at the photograph of his proud dad in uniform, Danny thought back to his empty childhood. He’d missed the trips they would have had to his dad’s workplace, the Royal Docks: the massive ships, the cranes, the smell of spices. Not even his mother had come to watch his performance in the school nativity play. He wished he was in the photo, the way he’d seen other children, sitting high on their dads’ shoulders. He would have felt like the king of the world.

Danny had always felt empty without a father, but looking now at his dad’s photo, his war medals and some letters to Rosie, it felt more like a deep-seated ache. He missed his father so much. And he hated the stream of “uncles” and “dads” his mum had entertained over the years. He loved his mum, but not her philandering.

Danny had tried to ask his mum questions about his dad many times, but Rosie gave him very few answers. Maybe she felt too much pain talking about her late husband and preferred to put the past behind her, trying to forget. And forget she did. Within two months of the death of her husband and childhood sweetheart, she had married Danny’s stepfather, Bill Watson. This had outraged her parents-in-law, who saw Rosie’s actions as a serious lack of respect for the memory of their dead son. They’d broken off all ties with Rosie and young Danny, and the deep family rift still remained.