Opposite the Cross Keys (28 page)

‘What kept you so long?' May Bowden wanted to know, when at last I got back to our bivouac on the bridge. And, before I could answer: ‘Well, late arrivals must take the consequences! Time and tide wait for no man.'

‘You don't mean –'

‘I most certainly do! While you were busy attending to your animal urges your boat has come and gone. Passed under the bridge like a royal procession. Oh, it was a sight to see! It'll be past the jetty now, and the lighthouse –'

‘Please,' I begged, ‘couldn't we drive to Gorleston and go to the end of the jetty, just in case we can see it from there?'

‘Certainly not! I'm not dressed to go scrambling about on jetties. You've had your chance and you muffed it.'

Nobody in the world could put my back up like May Bowden.

I shouted, ‘I couldn't help having to go to the lavatory!'

‘
I
didn't have to go,' she responded smugly.

We had a bumpy ride home from Yarmouth. At the humpbacked bridge in the middle of the marshes, half-way to Acle, we were going at such speed that May Bowden's hat and hairdo were banged even flatter against the roof of the Daimler, and we came down to earth again with such a bang that one of the panes of glass between the rear seats and the driver cracked clean across. I think that despite May Bowden's instructions the chauffeur must have contrived to trade in his beef sandwiches for beer after all.

He was very disrespectful too, telling her to stop nagging for Christ's sake whenever she called out to him to slow down. He also called her an old cow for making the kiddie cry. As it happened, I wasn't crying, but he was – thick, soapy tears that seemed to have a head on them. I leaned over and informed him through the cracked window that it wasn't May Bowden's fault I'd missed seeing my boat. I had had to go somewhere at the very moment it was passing under the bridge, and so I had missed it.

‘You tellin' me it actually made it to Yarmouth? I don't believe it!'

‘May Bowden saw it.'

‘May Bowden couldn't see her arse if it was staring her in the face,' the chauffeur returned coarsely, over his shoulder. ‘The old bag's having you on!'

This new scenario, that May Bowden hadn't seen the boat at all, was only pretending, was so much worse than missing it by chance that my own eyes spilled over in earnest. Had my darling
Ace of Hearts
, then, drowned at Cringleford after all, been shredded by a paddle steamer, sunk to a lonely grave in the mud of Breydon?

‘Take no notice of him!' May Bowden cut in sharply. ‘He's drunk, can't you see that? He's not fit to drive!'

At that, the chauffeur pulled the limousine up with a jerk which threw us against the sides. He opened his door, clambered out of the driving seat, and stood swaying in the road.

‘All right, then!' he declared thickly. ‘Le's see if you can do any better.' With which he saluted – smartly, if with some little difficulty in finding the peak of his chauffeur's cap – turned away, and began walking unsteadily along the grass verge.

‘Did you
honestly
see my boat?' I demanded. First things first.

May Bowden, who had opened the door on her side of the car, drew herself up. ‘Of course, if you prefer the word of a drunken oaf to mine –'

‘I didn't mean –' Intimidated, I began again. ‘I didn't think –'

‘Something I've noticed on more than one occasion! Now then …' She was out of the Daimler now, and then in again, into the driving seat. ‘Do you want to stay in the back or come in front with me?'

My fright was such that I forgot my galley had ever existed.

‘You don't mean
you're
going to drive!'

May Bowden fiddled about with the gear lever and the self-starter. She adjusted the mirror fixed outside the door.

‘Have you any better idea for getting us back to Norwich?'

‘But you have to have a licence to drive!'

‘What makes you think I haven't got one?' May Bowden said. ‘I'm tired of this conversation.' She pulled strongly on the starting button. It came out on a kind of string, further than I had ever seen a starter pulled before. But the car started. ‘There, you see! Nothing to it.'

‘But you have to know
how
to drive!' I wailed. ‘Alfred had a man from Mann Egerton come I don't know how many times.'

‘Whilst your brother is not a bad young man as young men go, he is not exactly a genius, is he? Not everyone who drives needs a man from Mann Egerton to show them how.'

She put the gear lever into first, released the handbrake and we were off with surprising smoothness, the shifts accomplished without jar or hesitation. As we passed the chauffeur standing at the roadside with his mouth open, she squeezed a resounding
toot-de-de-toot-toot
out of the bulb horn.

Of course she had known how to drive all along, but she never said, the old devil, she let me go on worrying. However she had come by her expertise I was too young to recognize it: lay face down on the rear seat with my fingers in my ears so as not to hear, not to see, the inevitably approaching crash. My fear so exhausted me that, incredibly, I fell asleep until awakened by a jubilant May Bowden, her hair and hat canted at a rakish angle, but looking immensely pleased with herself. The car was at a standstill, aligned perfectly with the St Giles kerb.

‘Wake up, lazybones!' May Bowden exclaimed, prodding me with her parasol. ‘
Hasn't
it been a lovely day?'

Before that summer holiday ended, I had one further day out connected with a boat.

A wonderful thing happened in that second week of September. Between one day and the next – for I measured myself against it every single day when I was at home – I grew tall enough to ride my sister's bicycle:
my
bicycle from that moment on. Suddenly I could sit as comfortably on its saddle as on a chair, even slouch there and still reach the pedals without strain. I could take a hand off the handlebars to signal a left or right turn without, as heretofore, the bike wobbling all over the road. I could ride with such sang-froid as, for the first time, to be able to take proper note of where I was going instead of being so taken up with a fierce concentration on keeping the damn thing upright that I had once, for instance, ridden smack into the back of a parked van.

Distance took on a new meaning, Salham St Awdry now no more than a hop, skip and jump away. I took to riding over there even when I could only stay an hour, if that.

However pressed for time, I knew better than to forego that moment of ritual before the great diamond at Horsford Point. It was no time for getting above oneself.
I
wasn't to be like poor old Moses who, after all he had done to get the Israelites out of Egypt, wasn't, at the end of it all, allowed to enter the Promised Land because, when they had murmured against him because they were thirsty – and they were always murmuring about something or other, it was enough to try the patience of a saint – he struck a rock and when water came out he said, ‘Here's this water I give you, you murmuring so-and-so's' when he ought by rights to have given the credit to God, who, when all was said and done, was the One who had made them thirsty in the first place.

Ma gerto o ca!

I came to St Awdry's by appointment, in the afternoon, with permission to stay the night. Waiting outside Chicken's cottage was a Ford truck, open at the back, a real old tin lizzy. One side of the bonnet was folded back and Chicken was bending over the engine fiddling with something inside. When he saw me prop my bike against the wall under Mrs Fenner's front window he came over to me, wiping his hands on an oily rag and moving with that balletic grace which always lifted my spirits. He put one of his hands on my shoulder, leaving an oily mark, of which I was glad. It was the equivalent of going through Customs and getting a stamp on one's luggage.

I lifted my pyjamas and my toothbrush and toothpaste out of the bicycle basket and took them into the Fenners' cottage, together with some jam and biscuits my mother had sent as a present. Only Ellie was in, her mother, she said, being off to cut osiers over Horsford way.

Poor Mrs Fenner! This intimation of her hard labour tempered my joyous anticipation of the afternoon ahead. Only once had I gone with her to cut osiers because there was little a child could do in the osier plantations other than bundle the whippy willow shoots up in twenty-fives, tied round with a strand of raffia, as the trade required. The osiers were cut with very sharp knives which invariably, however practised the cutters were, cut more than willow. The time I accompanied Mrs Fenner a woman had cut off the entire top joint of her thumb. The foreman had poured iodine over the stump, told the woman to wrap it round with her handkerchief, and sent her off, unaccompanied, to walk the two miles to the bus stop, to catch the bus into Norwich and the Norfolk and Norwich Casualty.

My joy was further tempered by the sight of Ellie who was, for once, dressed up, which could only mean she was coming with us. She wore a straw hat trimmed with poppies and a clean cotton dress of which little was visible below her long brown cardigan that, buttoned from neck to hem, made explicit without mercy her large breasts and the rolls of flesh which padded her stomach and thighs. She had on white ankle socks under white sandals that had actually been gone over with Blanco, and she so obviously thought she was the cat's whiskers that, almost, she was. For the first time I understood how her family could think her beautiful.

If I was sorry to have Ellie along, it was obviously as nothing to the way she felt about being lumbered with my company. It was her idea that I ride outside in the back of the truck, not the cab, and when Chicken tossed the suggestion aside as daft, she went into one of her sulks, hunching herself up on the lorry bench as close to the door as possible, so as to get away from me, the pig in the middle.

Chicken appeared to notice nothing of this lack of goodwill between his passengers. He drove out of Salham St Awdry singing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful' as lustily as even PC Utting could have wished, even if his catalogue of things made by the good Lord differed in several particulars from the list provided in the English Hymnal. His good humour was irresistible. Ellie began to giggle, which was of itself so remarkable that I even began to like her, for the time being at least.

The day had arranged itself to complement our mood. The sun shone, mellow September. Most of the corn was reaped and standing in stooks. In some fields the ploughmen and their horses were already hard at it, their shadows lengthening in the westering light. Sheep had been turned on to some of the stubbles, to tread the straw and their dung into the ground, readying it for another harvest. The hedges were bright with rose hips and shiny with blackberries, the horse chestnuts yellowing; their fingered leaves, the first to come and the first to go, hung up like bananas that in another day or so would be ripe for eating.

We drove east, our backs to the sun, out of the safe country of St Awdry's into the marshlands, north of those I had crossed with May Bowden on our trip to Yarmouth. We turned off the main road into an area of dykes and rivers and roads that grew steadily narrower, petering out at last in an unmetalled track with a rib of green along its centre. The flatness of the land was astonishing – not because it was flat, but because it was not flatter, not caved in altogether beneath the weight of the enormous sky. The drainage mills which stood about the vast green expanse looked heroic but doomed for daring to be vertical in such a landscape. By the time we reached our destination and got down from the truck on to a small concrete standing heaped with poke nets and sacks, it seemed an impertinence not to go on all fours.

We had come to visit Grig, an eel-catcher who, as Chicken told us, was an old friend from back when. Years later I learned that Grig was no more a real name than was Chicken. It was the name of a young eel.

Grig was not young: short, with bandy legs and great breadth of shoulder, so that at first sight he looked frighteningly simian, until you took in the weatherbeaten face, severe but benign, lit by eyes the colour of moleskin and topped by a thatch of yellow-white hair.

He lived in a tar-papered shack adjacent to a drainage mill which had fallen into ruin but still retained its skeletal sails, its air of defying the fates. When Chicken introduced Ellie and me he nodded pleasantly enough, but said nothing. Even to his old friend Chicken he spoke only a sentence or two: and Chicken, respecting his silence, or perhaps the silence of the place, himself became, for once, a man of few words.

We were clearly expected. The table in the one room of the shack was set with crockery for four. Besides bread and jam there was a fruit cake on a white paper doily and a basin filled with jellied eels. Except for the bed in one corner, the room, so far as furnishings were concerned, had a lot in common with Opposite the Cross Keys save that it smelled of fish instead of the Fenner pot-pourri, and was shining clean.

We sat down to tea at once, and ate our meal in amicable quiet broken only by the sound of chewing and supping and by an explosion of outraged surprise from Grig when I refused a helping of eels. I had never been offered them before, and nothing then – or since, for that matter – could convince me they were edible.

‘Wha's up wi' the bloody gal?' Grig demanded of Chicken.

‘Barmy,' was the soothing explanation. ‘Lives on love an' moonshine. Don't mind
her
!'

Grig, unappeased, eyed me sternly.

‘Eighty-seven year,' he declared, striking his chest. ‘Eighty-seven last Whit Monday. You want to live eighty-seven year, gal?'

It seemed a long time to which to commit oneself offhand. I faltered that I hadn't actually thought about it.

‘Then think about it now, an' sup your eels! What else you think's kept me goin' all that time?'