Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris & Mrs. Harris Goes to New York (16 page)

‘So I sez to the Countess, “It’s either a new ’Oover or me,” ’ recounted Mrs Harris. ‘Stingy old frump. “Dear Mrs ’Arris,” sez she, “cawn’t we make it do another year?” Make do indeed! Every time I touch the flippin’ thing I get a shock clear down to me toes. I gave ’er a ultimation. “If there ain’t a new ’Oover on the premises tomorrow morning, the keys go through the door,” ’ Mrs Harris
concluded. Keys to a flat dropped through the mail slot was the charwoman’s classic notice of resignation from a job.

Mrs Butterfield sipped at her tea. ‘There won’t be one,’ she said gloomily. ‘I know that kind. They’ll put every penny on their own back, and that’s all they care.’

From within the speaker of the little table wireless Kentucky Claiborne moaned,

‘Ugh!’ said Mrs Harris, ‘I can’t stand any more of that caterwauling. Turn it off, will you love.’

Mrs Butterfield obediently leaned over and switched off the radio, remarking, ‘It’s real sad ’im being shot and wanting ’is ’orse to kiss ’im. Now we’ll never know if it did.’

This, however, was not the case, for the people next door apparently were devotees of the American balladeer, and the saga of tragedy and love in the Far West came seeping through the walls. Still another sound penetrated the kitchen in which the two women were sitting, a dim thud and then a wail of pain, which was followed immediately by the turning up of the wireless next door so that the twang of the guitar and Kentucky Claiborne’s nasal groaning drowned out the cries.

The two women stiffened immediately, and their faces became grim and deeply concerned.

‘The devils,’ whispered Mrs Harris, ‘they’re ’avin’ a go at little ’Enry again.’

‘Ow, the poor lamb,’ said Mrs Butterfield. And then, ‘I can’t ’ear ’im any more.’

‘They’ve turned up the wireless so we carn’t.’ Mrs Harris went to a place in the wall between the houses where evidently at one time there had been a connecting hatch-way and the partition was thinner, and pounded on it with her knuckles. An equal measure of pounding came back almost instantly.

Mrs Harris put her mouth close to the partition and shouted, ‘ ’Ere, you stop hitting that child. Do you want me to call the police?’

The return message from the other side of the partition was clear and succinct. A man’s voice, ‘Aw, go soak yer ’ead. ’Oo’s ’itting anyone?’

The two women stood close to the wall listening anxiously, but no more sounds of distress came through, and soon the stridency of the wireless likewise diminished.

‘The devils!’ hissed Mrs Harris again. ‘The trouble is they don’t hit ’im ’ard enough so it shows, or we could call the N.S.P.C.C. I’ll give them a piece of me mind in the morning.’

Mrs Butterfield said sorrowfully, ‘It won’t do no good, they’ll only take it out on ’im. Yesterday I gave ’im a piece of cake left over from me tea. Cor’, them Gusset brats was all over ’im, snatching it away from ’im before he ever got a mouthful.’

Two tears of frustration and rage suddenly appeared in Mrs Harris’s blue eyes, and she delivered herself of a string of very naughty and unprintable words describing the Gusset family next door.

Mrs Butterfield patted her friend’s shoulder and said, ‘There, there, dear, don’t excite yourself. It’s a shyme, but what can we do?’

‘Something!’ Mrs Harris replied fiercely. Then repeated, ‘Something. I can’t stand it. ’E’s such a dear little tyke.’
A gleam came into her eyes, ‘I’ll bet if I went to America I’d soon enough find his Dad. ’E’s got to be somewhere, hasn’t ’e? Eating his ’eart out for ’is little one, no doubt.’

A look of horror came into Mrs Butterfield’s stout face, her duplicate chins began to quiver and her lips to tremble. ‘Ada,’ she quavered, ‘you ain’t thinkin’ of goin’ to America, are you?’ Fresh in her memory was the fact that Mrs Harris once had made up her mind that the one thing she wanted more than anything else in the world was a Dior dress, and that she had thereupon scrimped and saved for two years, flown by herself to Paris, and returned triumphantly with the garment.

To Mrs Butterfield’s great relief there apparently
were
limits to her friend’s potentialities, for Mrs Harris wailed, ‘ ’Ow can I? But it’s breaking me ’eart. I can’t stand to see a child abused. ’E ain’t got enough meat on ’is bones to sit down on.’

All Willis Gardens knew the story of little ’Enry Brown and the Gussets, a tragedy of the aftermath of the war and, alas, too often repeated.

In 1950, George Brown, a young American airman stationed at an American air base somewhere, had married a waitress from the near-by town, one Pansy Cott, and had a son by her named Henry.

When at the close of his tour of enlistment George Brown was posted for return to the United States, the woman refused to accompany him, remaining in England with the child and demanding support. Brown returned to the United States, mailing back the equivalent of two pounds a week for the care of the infant. He also divorced his wife.

Pansy and Henry moved to London, where Pansy got a job, and also met another man who was interested in
marrying her. However, he wanted no part of the child, and the price of his making her an honest woman was that she get rid of it. Pansy promptly farmed out little Henry, then aged three, with a family by the name of Gusset, who lived in Willis Gardens and had six children of their own, married her lover, and moved to another town.

For three years the pound a week which Pansy had agreed to pay the Gussets for little Henry’s keep (thus taking a clear pound of profit for herself) continued to come, and Henry, while not exactly overfed on this bounty, was not much worse off than the members of the Gusset brood. Then one day the pound did not arrive, and never again turned up thereafter. Pansy and her new husband had vanished and could not be traced. The Gussets had an address for the father, George Brown, somewhere in Alabama. A letter sent thither demanding funds was returned stamped ‘Addressee not known here’. The Gussets realised they were stuck with the child, and after that things were not so good for Henry.

From then on it became evident to the neighbourhood that the Gussets, who anyway had a kind of Jukes-family reputation, were taking it out on the child. Little ’Enry had become a matter of deep concern to the two widows who lived on either side of the Gussets, but in particular to Mrs Harris, who found that the unhappy little orphan-by-law touched her heart, and his plight invaded her dreams of the day and of the night-time.

If the Gussets had been more brutally cruel to little Henry, Mrs Harris could have done something immediate and drastic in cooperation with the police. But Mr and Mrs Gusset were too smart for that. No one knew exactly what it was Mr Gusset did to eke out a living for his family, but it took place in Soho, sometimes during the night, and the general opinion held that it was something shady.

Whatever it may have been it was known that the Gussets were particularly anxious to avoid the attentions of the police, and therefore as far as little Henry was concerned, remained strictly within the law. They were well aware that the police were not able to take action with reference to a child except in cases of extreme and visible cruelty. No one could say exactly that the boy was starving or suffering from injuries. But Mrs Harris knew his life was made a constant hell of short rations, cuffs, slaps, pinches, and curses, as the Gussets revenged themselves upon him for the stoppage of the funds.

He was the drudge and the butt of the slatternly family, and any of their two girls and four boys ranging from the ages of three to twelve could tweak, kick, and abuse him with impunity. But worst of all was the fact of the child growing up without love or affection of any kind. On the contrary, he was hated, and this both Mrs Harris and Mrs Butterfield found the most painful of all.

Mrs Harris had had her share of hard knocks herself; in her world these were expected and accepted, but she had a warm and embracing nature, had successfully brought up a child of her own, and what she saw of the little boy next door and the treatment meted out to him began to assume the nature of a constant pain and worry, and something which was never too far or entirely out of her thoughts. Often when she was, as dictated by her nature, blithe, gay, light-hearted, and irrepressible about her work, her clients, and her friends, would come the sudden sobering thought of the plight of little ’Enry. Then Mrs Harris would indulge in one of her day-dreams, the kind that a year or so ago had sent her off to the great adventure of her life in Paris.

The new day-dream took on the quality of the romantic fiction of which Mrs Harris was a great devotee via
magazines many of her clients sloughed off upon her when they were finished with them.

In Mrs Harris’s opinion, and transferred to the dream, Pansy Cott, or whatever her new name now happened to be, was the villainess of the story, the missing airman Brown the hero, and little ’Enry the victim. For one thing, Mrs Harris was convinced that the father was continuing the support of his child, and that Pansy was simply pocketing the money. It was all Pansy’s doing - Pansy who had refused to accompany her husband to America, as was her wifely duty; Pansy who had withheld the child from him; Pansy who, in order to satisfy a lover, had farmed out the little boy to this beastly family; and finally, Pansy who had vanished with the loot, leaving the boy to his awful fate.

George Brown, on the other hand, was one of nature’s noblemen; in the intervening years in all likelihood he would have made his fortune, as Americans did. Perhaps be had remarried, perhaps not, but whatever and wherever, he would be pining for his lost ’Enry.

This estimate of George Brown was based upon her experience with American GIs in England, whom she had invariably found friendly, warm-hearted, generous, and particularly loving and kind to children. She remembered how during the war they had unfailingly shared their rations of sweets with the youngsters surrounding their bases. They were inclined to be loud, noisy, boastful, and spendthrift, but when one got to know them, underneath they were the salt of the earth.

They were, of course, the richest people in the world, and Mrs Harris reared a kind of fantasy palace where George Brown would now be living, and where little ’Enry too could be enjoying his birthright if only his Dad knew of his plight. She had no doubt but that if somehow
Mr Brown could be found and told of the situation, he would appear upon the scene, wafted on the wings of a faster-than-sound jet, to claim his child and remove him from the tyranny and thraldom of the nasty Gussets. It wanted only a fairy godmother to give the knobs of Fate a twist and set the machinery going in the right direction. It was not long before, so affected was she by the plight of little ’Enry, Mrs Harris began to see herself as that fairy godmother.

Somehow in the dream she was transplanted to the great United States of America, where by a combination of shrewdness and luck she turned up the missing George Brown almost at once. As she narrated the story of little ’Enry to him tears began to flow from his eyes, and when she had finished he was weeping unashamedly. ‘My good woman,’ he said, ‘all my riches can never repay you for what you have done for me. Come, let us go at once to the aeroplane and set out to fetch my little boy home where he belongs.’ It was a very satisfactory dream.

But, as has been noted before, Mrs Harris was not wholly given to spinning webs of fantasy. She was hard-headed, practical, and realistic about the situation of little Henry, the Gussets, and the knowledge that no one had been able to locate the father, coupled with the fact that no one had really attempted to do so. Underneath the dreams was a growing conviction that if only given an opportunity she could manage to find him, a conviction not at all diminished by the fact that all she knew of him was that his name had been George Brown, and he had been in the American Air Force.

D
EEP
in her heart, Mrs Harris was well aware that for her a trip to America was as remote as a trip to the moon. True, she had managed to cross the English Channel, and the aeroplane had made the Atlantic Ocean just another body of water over which to zoom, but the practical considerations of expense and living, etc., put such a journey well out of reach. Mrs Harris had achieved her Paris visit and heart’s desire through two years of scrimping and saving, but this had been a kind of lifetime effort. It had taken a good deal out of her. She was older now and aware that she was no longer capable of making the attempt to amass the necessary number of pounds to finance such an expedition.

True,
l’affaire
Dior had been sparked by the winning of a hundred pounds in a football pool, without which Mrs Harris might never have undertaken the task of amassing another three hundred and fifty. She continued to play the pools, but without the blazing conviction which sometimes leads the face of fortune to smile. She knew very well that that kind of lightning never struck twice in the same place.

Yet, at the very moment that little Henry, under the cover of the abysmal gargling of Kentucky Claiborne, was being cuffed about in the kitchen of Number 7 Willis Gardens, and sent to bed yet another night insufficiently nourished, Fate was already laying the groundwork for an incredible change in the life not only of himself, but likewise of Ada Harris and Mrs Butterfield.