Opposite the Cross Keys (3 page)

‘But then they'll know!' The floodgates opened and I wept copiously. ‘They'll know!'

‘Fer Chrissake!' Chicken surveyed my agony with disgust. ‘So what? What'll they do you – clap you in irons? Make you walk the plank?'

‘Don't be silly!' I wailed. I could not explain that my parents' soft-voiced regret at my breach of trust, and, even more, Maud's contemptuous silence, would be worse than any physical punishment. The baby, the family pet, I could not bear not to be loved.

‘Want my opinion?' said Chicken, proferring a considered alternative. ‘Do you a power of good. Terrible thing to be trusted. Might as well tie a sodding millstone round yer neck an' be done wi' it!'

When I patently found no comfort in this counsel, he rolled his eyes up at the sky, ejaculated ‘Kids!' and came over and took the bicycle out of my hands.

‘All right!' he commanded. ‘Turn off the water taps an' le's get on with it!' And when I continued to stand, staring stupidly, ‘Get on behind, barmy! An' keep yer ruddy feet out of the spokes if you're going to need 'em tomorrow an' the day after!'

We came back from Salham St Awdry with incredible speed. In no time at all, or so it seemed to me, we were past the pile of telegraph poles, and the bend where the bicycle and the horse and trap had had their little confrontation. The remains of the bicycle lamp lay embedded like fossil remains in the sun-warmed tarmac.

Horsford Point with its Mann Egerton sign positively whizzed past. No need for magic when you had the magnet of home to draw you safely to sanctuary. My bottom corrugated with the indentations of the narrow grid intended for the conveyance of a schoolbag or music case, my legs aching with the effort of keeping them stuck out at a safe angle from the wheel, I was nevertheless so wracked with happiness that it was itself a pain, an overflowing of love out of a vessel inadequate to contain it.

The very bicycle was happy, skittish with a youth it had thought had passed it by. The three of us sailed down the long slope to St Augustine's in a glorious breeze of our own making. As soon as I realized that I would be back at the Hippodrome with time to spare – Maud never came out looking for me unless I was late for tea – sorrow intertwined itself sweetly with the joy. The ride, alas, was almost over. When Chicken took the bike over St George's Bridge with a verve which lifted both wheels off the ground as we soared over the hump in the middle, and brought it to a stylish halt on the further side, I could, without understanding why, have cried again.

‘Time to love you an' leave you.' Chicken held the bike until I had disembarked. ‘You wouldn't want any of yer posh pals to catch an eyeful o' me an' ask, who that mucky ole tramp I seen you with yesterday arternoon?'

‘I wouldn't mind!' I protested fiercely.

‘Yes, you would, though.'

It was true. I hung my head in shamed, if belated, admission. Norwich and St Awdry's were different worlds. In Norwich I could have turned up in the company of one of those women who wear sticks through their noses and their ear lobes halfway down their chests, and elicit less comment.
They
were natives, educational. Whatever else Chicken was, he wasn't that.

St George's, thankfully, wasn't a ‘good' street, which was probably why Chicken had chosen to stop where he did, before the ‘good' streets began.

‘You better mind yourself,' he warned. ‘When Ma – when Mrs Fenner come up to market Saturday, full o' the lovely bloke what's moved in next door, don't you go letting on you've already had the pleasure of makin' my acquaintance.'

‘Ellie –' I began.

‘Her!' Contemptuously. ‘Too busy looking for nits to think of anything else.
She
won't say nothing.'

I said, both concerned for him and anxious to speed him on his way – with every passing moment I grew uneasier about running into somebody I knew, ‘You'll have to go over to Magdalen Street to get the bus back.'

‘Don't fret about me!' Chicken returned. ‘I'll find my own way home, never you fear!'

He went off in his brisk, balletic way, though his boots looked even more awful in the city, disappearing over the hump of the bridge before I could say either thank you or goodbye.

I pushed the bicycle the rest of the way home; uphill going, through Bridewell Alley and Swan Lane, along London Street to the Market Place, and so to St Giles, the last hill of all and the steepest. On my left the Market stalls clung to the slope, skeletal, awaiting their Saturday resurrection, when the pyramids of apples and oranges would rise again, cauliflowers coy in their necklets of green, canaries tweeting, tortoises crawling sadly over lettuce leaves. Chips frying, and the heavenly smell of the whelk stalls; funny men selling crockery as if on the bill at the Hippodrome; and Mr Marcantonio who always, because he had long cherished a hopeless passion for Maud, gave me a tuppenny ice-cream boat for a penny.

The clock outside H. Samuels, the jewellers, said ten to four. How well everything had turned out! Whether it was indeed a miracle, or whether Chicken's weight on the saddle had depressed the overall height of the bicycle that vital bit extra, I found, once back at the Hippodrome, that I could actually keep my feet in place on the pedals without slipping. I swooped about the forecourt with an aplomb which astonished the Cheeky Chappie and the male impersonator. I could see their painted eyes popping.

On the dot of four, Maud came out to summon me indoors for my tea.

‘What sewer they dredged you out of, then?' was her dour greeting, as she eyed the tar on my legs, the plaster in my hair, my general air of dishevelment. ‘Mr Fitt ought to be ashamed of himself and I'll tell him so tomorrow, see if I don't!'

‘Maud!' I cried, brushing aside her strictures in the euphoria of the moment. ‘I can ride it! I truly can!'

I sprang to demonstrate: but whether my exertions had finally overtired me, or whether miracles of their very nature (would the wine at Cana have gone back to water if you'd asked for a second glass?) have a short shelf-life, my legs had shortened again, and after a wavering yard or so, the bicycle and I fell over together, taking the skin off my right knee.

It didn't hurt to speak of, but it seemed politic to cry; tactics that paid off. Maud enfolded me in her arms in that exasperated way of hers which was infinitely more comforting than the tenderest embrace from any other quarter.

Bathed and clean, I lie in bed and think how lucky I am to have a great day like today happen to me when I am old enough to appreciate it: not like some other great days, such as being born, which happen when you are too young to understand what is going on. As always, when I am clean, St Awdry's seems a long way away.

Over my bed hangs a picture of a boy with his arms full of toys – so many of them that a box of lead soldiers, a teddy bear and a game of Snakes and Ladders have spilled on to the floor. One of the soldiers, who has lost his head in the fall, will never be the same again. Underneath the picture is written, in letters dripping with unction,
He who grasps at too much holds nothing fast
.

In fresh pyjamas, between crisp sheets, I grasp at too much; confident that, never mind how it is with stupid boys, my arms can safely contain Norwich and Salham St Awdry alike, to say nothing of the world, the universe, infinity. No lead soldiers are going to break in pieces at
my
feet.

I lie in bed and think about Chicken.

1. That word ‘bum'. For the reader's benefit I have to explain that, in St Awdry's, bottoms were always bums, a word which, so far as I was then aware, did not even exist in St Giles. St Awdry's being a different country, it seemed to me quite unremarkable that it should possess its own language.
   

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2. Mauther: St Awdry's for a girl, especially a great lump of one.
   

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3. Bor: all-purpose word for anybody, male or female, but mostly meaning ‘man, fellow'.
   

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Being born, in my case, was chiefly remarkable for what happened six weeks later.

Maud came.

She was sixteen and she came as a nurserymaid, my family, whilst modestly prosperous, not being in the nanny class – engaged, I imagine, because my mother, who had considered her family complete, had flinched at the prospect of a new baby after ten years pregnancy-free. In the days when I was not (so I was told), the household chores, child-minding and all, had been performed by one Eliza, a devoted household retainer for many years.

By the time I first remember Maud – and I cannot, I think, have been much more than a year old when I came to a realization that the universe revolved round a tall, gaunt woman with a doughy face and hair done up in a bun which leaked in wisps over her lace collar – Eliza had long since departed; driven to the lunatic asylum, my father asserted, by Maud's machiavellian machinations.

‘What's machiavellian machinations?' I asked, when I was of an age to get my tongue round such questions. Naturally I asked it of Maud, not my father, who whilst not unintelligent was, unlike Maud, not the fount of all knowledge. When asked something, he quite often answered that he did not know, which was upsetting, contradicting as it did all one's perceptions of the adult world. Whereas Maud always knew. So: ‘Maud – what's machiavellian machinations?'

‘Scotch motor bike,' Maud replied without hesitation. ‘One of them kind with a side-car.'

‘And did you really drive Eliza to the lunatic asylum in one?'

‘Don't be daft! They come and took her in a van.'

Proof that Maud, young as she was at the time, established her ascendancy over the household with a truly astonishing speed is provided by a photograph
¹
taken when I was coming up to three months old. It was taken by Mr Ballard, who, it was said in the town, had been a Court photographer until the day when, having drink taken, he had goosed Queen Mary whilst arranging her in a pose in her Garter robes; something he always denied on the grounds that Her Majesty, in her armour-plated corset, was ungoosable.

Whatever the truth of the story, it was almost certainly true that never before had Mr Ballard been commissioned to take a studio portrait of a domestic. People in the Twenties simply didn't shell out good money to have their servants photographed. Their families, their lovers, their dogs, yes: but not their maids.

Yet there is Maud, no more than three months in my parents' employ, sitting with me on her lap, my sister Maisie at her side, having her photograph taken.

There are other things about that photograph which are revealing. Look at the apron. See how creased it is, despite the importance of the occasion. My sister and I are immaculate – well, I am: my sister's socks could have done with a pull up, her shoes with a coating of Blanco. But then, Maisie was part of Eliza's left luggage.

But how to explain that crumpled apron? From our house to Mr Ballard's studio in St Benedict's was no more than ten minutes' walk. And anyway, the creases are not the creases of use, but of poor ironing, or even of no ironing at all. Who would deliberately choose to turn up for the first professional photograph of her life wearing an unironed apron?

Maud.

Maud hated ironing, and I take the photograph as further evidence that in this, as in so much else, she was already at work rearranging our lives.

Since Eliza's departure, the only other help in the house had consisted of a Mrs Hewitt, who came every Monday to do the washing. She was a small woman but immensely strong, capable, unaided, of lifting large tin baths filled with household linen bubbling away in boiling water off the kitchen range, crossing the kitchen floor with them, and up-ending them in the sink. Her salient features, in my imperfect recollection, are obscured by the clouds of steam which, like the cloud which interposed itself between the Israelites and the Egyptians, accompanied all her comings and goings.

Once Mrs Hewitt had got the washing hung out on the clothes lines in the yard, her job was done. Its taking down, when it had reached its ideal condition of slight dampness, its ironing, airing, and putting away, was Maud's business.

And Maud hated ironing.

The ironing was done with a set of flatirons of varying sizes and weights, first heated up on the range and then, as needed, slid into a steel shoe which ensured no soot or iron rust was left on the fresh linen. Eliza, it seemed, had managed very well with these primitive implements, which were the norm for their time, but then Eliza, as Maud frequently reminded my mother, had had a screw loose. I fancy Maud must have been taken aback when, anxious to keep her new treasure propitiated, my mother, one day, brought home one of the new electric irons which were becoming all the thing. It wasn't what she had had in mind at all.

Like most houses at that period, ours had no power plugs. We did not feel deprived for lack of them. As my mother said, the house was riddled enough with electricity as it was. Prepared for this attitude of mind, manufacturers of the early electric irons provided them with a cord and a pronged end which married with the slots of ordinary electric light fittings: as simple as putting in a bulb.

Maud accepted this triumph of technology from my mother's hands, still in its box; and, still in its box, it stayed unopened on the kitchen table week after week, until – I must have been a good six months old by then, and the creased apron already enshrined in its photograph for posterity – Maud convinced my mother that, what with my having to be taken out into the fresh air every day, leaving her with no possible time into which the ironing could be fitted, the sensible thing was for Mrs Hewitt to come in on Tuesdays as well, to finish up the job she had begun the day before. The only surprising thing about this story is that my mother held out as long as she did.