Opposite the Cross Keys (24 page)

At my suggestion, my mother had sent a fruit cake as a gift to Mrs Fenner. It was, in fact – but this I kept to myself – a gift to Chicken, a celebratory cake in honour of his coming. I only wished it might have been covered in white icing, with the words WELCOME CHICKEN picked out on the top in hundreds-and-thousands.

At tea, thinking of the cobblers' last I had seen next door, I asked the guest of honour, ‘Are you a shoe mender?'

‘Me, gal?' Chicken took a deep sup of his tea, put down the cup, and wiped the back of his hand across his natty little moustache. I had yet to discover that he almost never answered a question directly. It was, I think, not so much that he was afraid of the truth as that he did not believe in it on principle; or, if he did believe in it, it was something not to be mentioned in polite circles, something to be sidled up to, spoken out of the side of the mouth like an offering of dirty postcards. ‘Shoe mender?' Chicken repeated with a note of interrogation in his tone, as if he were asking the question of himself. ‘Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor – Jack of all trades, tha's me.'

Mrs Fenner said, ‘You oughter see the way he patched Tom's boot. King George don't get his boots patched better 'n that.'

The conversation veered elsewhere: but a moment or two later Tom, who, bent over, had been struggling with something under the table, straightened up with one of his boots in his hand. Red-faced and triumphant, he planted the unlovely object, its sole caked with mud, straw and worse, square in the middle of the tea table.

Nobody took umbrage. Mrs Fenner exclaimed, ‘Tom, you are a one!' Maud moved the cake a safe distance away, otherwise she laughed with the rest of us. In turn we examined the patch Chicken had put on the side of the boot and agreed it was indeed a patch fit for a king. Chicken took the praise as no more than his due, Tom was radiant. Maud remarked to me across the table, ‘We'll have to get him to have a go at your ankle straps, Sylvie.'

At that I made a face, which I am sure Chicken noted. My mother, let me say, subscribed to what – having exchanged notes with my contemporaries – I now believe to be a commonly held fallacy of the time: to wit, that a child's new shoes, by definition, could not – nay, should not – be comfortable; they had to be ‘grown into'. If, by chance, the pair you tried on in the shoe shop felt just right, they were,
ipso facto
, too long, too short, too narrow, too wide, too something, to be acceptable. If they didn't need ‘growing into' there had to be something wrong with them.

In no instance were the practical results of this dire creed more evident than with one's Sunday best or party shoes, because, being worn less often than one's day-to-day footwear, they had less chance of ever becoming ‘grown into'. What made it worse, in my own case, was that my best shoes – my ankle straps – were invariably made of black patent leather, sweet and girlish according to my mother, but, according to me, unvarnished hell to wear.

If anyone in the world could do anything about patent leather ankle straps, it had to be Chicken.

‘Yes,' I answered Maud. ‘We must.'

For me the sight of Tom's boot cheek by jowl with the bread and the marge and the condensed milk tin underlined anew my marvellous luck at being
persona grata
at Opposite the Cross Keys. Imagine! If I had been so soft-headed as to have accepted Patricia Livermore's invitation that morning, I should at that moment be sitting round a table draped with an embroidered cloth without a single stain to make it interesting, a cloth without a history; fussy little napkins, fussy doilies, fussy china, fussy silver teapot, sugar basin, milk jug, fussy, fussy. The thought of Tom's boot with its mucky sole set down in the centre of Mrs Livermore's tea table struck me as so amusing that I shared my thought with the others.

Chicken had us all in stitches. Little finger crooked in exaggerated refinement he picked up the condensed milk tin and in a mincing voice inquired of me, ‘Can I pour you a little of this sodding condensed milk, ma'am, out of this sodding silver condensed milk tin?'

After tea was cleared away we went for a walk, Mrs Fenner, Maud and I. It was Mrs Fenner's idea to take the Spixworth road. I imagine my description of tea
chez
the Livermores had aroused in her a desire to take a look at Old Saffrons, if only from the outside.

We hadn't gone far along the High Street before Chicken, whom we had left out on the pavement sprawled on a kitchen chair watching Ellie with an air of mesmerized disbelief as she sat combing her hair, caught us up.

‘Felt lonely without you,' he explained, launching the compliment into the air for each of us to catch individually as addressed to herself alone. We turned merrily into the Spixworth road, falling silent as we neared the Livermores' home; quickly crossing the entrance to the drive with its wrought-iron gate, with ‘Old Saffrons' woven into its black curlicues; and stopping only in the shelter of the hedge, having first satisfied ourselves that none of the family was out on the front lawn.

My father's tuition had made me snobbish about houses which aped the architectural language of former times, and I said what an awful house Old Saffrons was. Mrs Fenner, who judged by different standards, asked what was so bad about it: she wouldn't mind finding one like it in her Christmas stocking.

‘It's because it only pretends to be a Tudor house,' I explained, ‘and it isn't. It was only built five or six years ago.'

‘Oh ah?' Mrs Fenner considered. ‘How long ago do it have to be built, then, to be real?'

‘Four hundred – three hundred and fifty years at least. And it would have been built with great big oak beams, and lovely old bricks that would just get mellower and mellower. In four hundred years' time,' I ended with contempt, ‘Old Saffrons will be a crumbling old ruin, with the roof fallen in, and the woodwork all rotted away –'

‘An' a family of Fenners living in it, I'll be bound!' Mrs Fenner's wonderful laugh rang out and, in the house, I saw an upstairs window open and someone, I couldn't be sure who, look out. The hedge hid us, and after a moment the window was shut and whoever it was went away.

For a moment I felt quite sorry for the Livermores, shut up in their fake Tudor with only themselves for company. But only for a moment. After that, with the hatefulness of childhood, I was even glad of their sadness: that nobody could ever be as happy as I.

Mrs Fenner declared, ‘All the same, I wouldn't say no to being asked there to tea.'

‘You'd hate it,' I promised. ‘You'd find it horribly uncomfortable.'

‘Not half so uncomfortable as Mrs Whatsername, I reckon, having the likes of me drinking out of one of her fancy cups.' As we fell into our stride again, the four of us strung companionably across the width of the road: ‘Tell you what, Sylvie. You're bound to get asked again when you're down here Wednesday. You can ask young Whatsername if you can bring me along.'

‘I won't – be asked, I mean,' I added quickly, anxious not to be misunderstood. Mrs Fenner could not really mean what she had just said. It was a joke. Or was it? Whilst I loved life with the Fenners I was no social revolutionary. On the contrary: I wanted things to stay the way they were for ever and ever. If there were no establishment where was the fun of escaping from it, and the reassurance of knowing it was always there to go back to? Trying to disguise the relief in my voice I explained that, when Patricia had spoken to me that morning, she had mentioned that she probably wouldn't be able to see me during my week at Opposite the Cross Keys: they were all going up to Birmingham for a few days.

‘She can stay there for good, for all I care!'

When, on Wednesday, transported with my luggage by Alfred, who experienced his usual respiratory difficulties whilst unloading it on to the horsehair sofa in Mrs Fenner's living-room, I arrived in St Awdry's, only Ellie was at home, sitting on her hair in the sunshine. Her ma, she said, speaking to me but looking at Alfred, was off berrying at Caxton's, and had left a message for me to join her if I felt like it. Otherwise she'd see me at tea, please myself.

‘Berrying,' said Alfred, when I went out to the car to say goodbye. He was taking in deep gulps of air like a diver surfacing from a considerable depth. ‘That sounds jolly.' I could see that he thought anything jolly which would keep me out of Opposite the Cross Keys. ‘Strawberries, are they?'

‘I expect so.'

‘Yum!'

I smiled kindly at my brother. Alfred had lovely hands with beautiful nails. They were never broken and you could see all the half-moons. He had no idea what it was like to pick strawberries hour after hour in the hot sun; had never seen the stain that settled, browning and gritty, into every pore of your hands, the crevices between your fingers and the lines on your palm where gypsies read your fortune. He knew nothing of the straw laid down on the ground beneath the berries which pierced the soft skin under your fingernails like red-hot needles, the slugs that stuck to the ripe fruit and had to be pulled off, little and black or large and grey like gobbets of phlegm, the agony of long squatting and the greater agony, at the end of the day, of sraightening up again.

He asked, ‘Are you allowed to eat any of them yourself?'

‘All you like,' I said, remembering how, the last time we went berrying, Mrs Fenner, Dora Chapman and I, Dora had been turned off without a penny after working hard the best part of the day, all because one of the farm men saw her eating a strawberry that a slug had already had the best part of. I couldn't tell that to my beautiful brother. He had to be protected from the facts of life.

‘Makes me wish I had the time to go myself,' Alfred declared. ‘This Caxton's – is it far? I can drive you over before I go back.'

‘Not far,' I said, though it was a good mile and a quarter. Once I was in St Awdry's I couldn't get rid fast enough of everything to do with St Giles, even Alfred. Actually, though I didn't say so, I'd already made up my mind to give berrying a miss. True, it was easier work than lifting spuds, and certainly better than plucking; but there was something about it I didn't care for. It wasn't so bad when there were only village women picking the fruit. The trouble arose when not enough of them showed up and the growers had to take on some of the gypsies.

If that sounds what today people call racist, it wasn't so at all. The trouble with the gypsy women wasn't their fault. It was to do with their nature, which was to think of today and bugger all tomorrow.

The correct way to pick strawberries was this (for all I know it's the same today): you took your punnet – actually you took four at a time, set out at one side of you – and first you picked some small strawberries to go in the bottom. Then you picked some medium-size ones to go on top of the little ones, and finally you picked some of the best ones to go on top and give the appearance that they were all like that, large and red and juicy, all the way down.

Then again, strawberries don't all ripen at once. On every plant, at any one time in the season, there are ripe berries, and others that are only partly ripe, as well as some that are still completely green and hard. Sometimes, when there hasn't been much sun to turn them red, or you're getting to the end of the crop, you are forced, to make up a punnet, to pick a few of the half-ripe berries, hiding them at the very bottom, underneath even the little ones; but the totally green ones, never. Apart from getting the grower a bad name with his retailers, which might not ordinarily worry you, it's a stupid thing for a picker to do. The green berries are your insurance that there will be more work picking them when they, in turn, come to maturity.

Strangely, however many times they were told, the gypsies could never see this, or chose not to see it. Once they began to pick over a strawberry plant, they never stopped until it was bare: green, half-green or ripe made no difference to them, they picked the lot. You could hear the grower's voice half-way down the road, shouting at them when they brought their punnets to the collecting point. He would pick out a few punnets at random and turn them upside down on to the trestle table, uncovering all the unripe berries hidden out of sight. Sometimes he grew so angry that his voice grew too hoarse to bring out words, only an animal anger, and he would throw the green berries on the ground and grind them into the earth with his boots.

When that happened, the gypsy women would act very meek. They hadn't understood, they would do better next time. But they had understood all right, you could tell by the devil in their eyes; and next time they did the same again, and the time after that. I couldn't understand why they were never turned off, like poor Dora. Perhaps the grower was afraid of a gypsy curse. I can't say.

At other times, when the grower wasn't about, only the foreman and some men who worked on the farm, things went very differently. Then, the gypsy women stole shamelessly. Their mouths, red with strawberry juice, dared the men to make something of it, but they never did. They wore petticoats with big pockets sewn into them, and these they filled with the ripe fruit to take home with them. As the day wore on, the juice gradually soaked out of the pockets into their skirts and then through their aprons, until they looked like menstruating women who had forgotten to put on sanitary towels. When they came to the collecting point a kind of horseplay would begin which made me uneasy, I didn't know why. The women, despite the evidence of the stains, would flatly deny they had any of the strawberries concealed about their persons, and the men would grab at their skirts, raising them if they got the chance, in order to see whether they spoke the truth. Everybody was laughing and screaming and jumping about. It should have been great fun for a child, only somehow it wasn't. I was old enough to know there was more to the game than appeared, but too young to know what.