Opposite the Cross Keys (4 page)

A coda, however. This was not one of Maud's undiluted victories. When I finally began school – I was almost six and Maud had run out of reasons why I was not yet ready to go – my mother gently but firmly pointed out that, as there was no longer an infant to be taken walkies, there was now plenty of time in the afternoons for Maud to do the ironing. Mrs Hewitt was demoted back to washer-woman
tout simple
, the electric iron disinterred from the cupboard where Maud had buried it. My mother bravely announced that one really must move with the times. The electric iron
must
be used.

‘Well, Maud,' she inquired, after the first Tuesday had passed without complaint. ‘How did you get on with it?'

‘Not so dusty,' Maud replied with surprising good humour. ‘On'y thing was the cord. Bothersome, the way it dangled about.' Finishing meekly: ‘Still an' all, once I cut it off, it heated up on the range pretty much as well as the others.'

I don't know how Mr Ballard contrived to make Maud look so plump in that photograph, and so nearly pretty. Perhaps at sixteen she had a brief blooming I was too young to catch. On the other hand, I don't quite know what it was that made her so plain, either. Her wart, after all, was the same colour as the rest of her skin, not brown and obtrusive, like some. You could really only appreciate it in profile, when it lent an interesting outline to what was otherwise a deeply uninteresting nose. The slight cast in her right eye didn't count for much, either. I can only conclude that my confident apprehension of her essential unattractiveness arose from her own deep conviction of it.

I don't know, either, how it was that I knew she was on my side, since she practically never praised anything I did, and her usual tone to me was shot through with a mockery only carelessly disguised: simply that I knew it and that, safe in her love, I was unconquerable. She dressed me, fed me, attended to my most intimate needs with a lack of tenderness which was a wonderful antidote to the anxious adoration lavished on me by my besotted family.

One of the few books she had read was
The Pilgrim's Progress
, given her as a prize for Good Conduct and kept wrapped up in a brown paper cover on which she had printed, each letter in a different colour crayon, MAUD MARY ANN FENNER, A PRIZE. She was fond of telling me that I was the burden Christ had seen fit to put upon her, one of which, like Christian's in the story, she could not hope to divest herself until the Celestial City was in sight, if then.

‘Knowing you,' she said, with that familiar mixture of mockery and complaint, though this time it wasn't clear to whom exactly the complaint was addressed, ‘once I get through the pearly gates what's the odds the first thing I'll hear 'll be a certain little voice piping up, “Maud, can I try out your wings? Maud, can I have a go on your harp? Pleeease. Maud –” a passable imitation of myself in the wheedling mode – “can I?”‘

‘At least,' I pointed out, ‘it'll mean I must have been good enough to get to heaven myself.'

‘You good! Artful, you mean. Slipped in when Peter had to go and do a Number Two.'

Apart from the family, who, in her book, were put on earth to serve my needs, Maud hated everyone who was so much as civil to her charge. Even the milkman, whose dashing good looks always set Maud's face aflame when he strode up to the kitchen door looking like Tom Mix except that the wide leather belt swaggering about his hips was hung with the pint and the half-pint measuring mugs instead of pearl-handled shooters, was punished with the withdrawal of his weekly sweetener of Woodbines after the day he took me for a ride in his milk chariot, among the clanking churns. Her chief enemy was May Bowden, our neighbour, a spinster who would have been dumbfounded had she been able to plumb the depths of Maud's hatred for her.

May Bowden, who, being rich, was said to be a little eccentric – as distinct from being soft in the head, a condition which only afflicted the lower orders – often proclaimed her intention of leaving me her fortune when she died.

‘That'll be the day!' Maud would mutter, not very inaudibly.

The only other person allowed unrestricted access to my favours was Mrs Fenner, who, as Maud's mother, was, one might say, a mere extension of Maud herself; the only other Fenner I knew until I went to Salham St Awdry.

Mere!

Mrs Fenner was the blooming miracle who, once a week, erupted into our pleasant, but bland, existence. She was a large, handsome woman with polished apple cheeks, whose abundant flesh, electric vitality, and sheer animal high spirits appeared all three indifferently restrained by the Edwardian corset and costume of antique mode which, summer or winter, were her best for a day in town. There was scarcely a Saturday, out on the Market Place, when one or other of the pearl buttons which marched in formation down the front of the close-fitting, three-quarter length coat did not pop off, a small explosion, to be scrabbled for by me under people's feet, or among the trash accumulated beneath the stalls; sometimes to be found, more often not, which was why none of the buttons quite matched, the spaces being filled in, upon our return for tea, from the nearest my mother's sewing box could provide. How Mrs Fenner laughed whenever a button took off! Often enough to launch a second mini-missile upon the Market Place air.

Nature's overflowing cornucopia – that was what my father said you thought about when you looked at Mrs Fenner; heard her rich, Norfolk voice and her laughter which stirred the lees of mirth. Maud, inordinately proud of this prodigy which was, so improbably, her progenitor, was at the same time, in our kitchen especially, a little afraid of it, as of a large, friendly lioness who might yet, with a carefree swish of tail, bring the plates crashing down from the dresser. As soon as dinner was cleared away, she vanished upstairs to her attic bedroom to change into the dim
toilette
of excruciating refinement which was
her
best, the navy coat and skirt which were, in fact, her nurserymaid walking-out uniform, together with the navy hat – straw in summer, felt in winter – which went with them. On Saturdays, to signify that despite what the raiment might seem to indicate, her services were not available, Maud pinned to the hat a bunch of red cherries interspersed with some other fruit she always asserted were medlars, but which, at a much later date, I was able to identify positively as testicles. The fruit on the hat was the equivalent of the red flag on the breakwater which tells you it is forbidden to swim. Once the fruit was hoisted, it was no earthly use asking Maud to pick up so much as a paper of pins for you, since she was going to be in the Market anyway.

It was her afternoon off.

Once Maud was out of the way titivating herself, Mrs Fenner and I got down to business. Mrs Fenner had never been to school. She could neither read nor write; and every Saturday – so soon, that is, as I myself had mastered those skills – she would ask me to read to her extracts from the previous Sunday's
News of the World
, saved for that purpose, to say nothing of old favourites cherished in a biscuit tin until they fell apart along the creases.

‘Read me that one again,' she would demand admiringly, ‘'bout the feller what chopped up them women an' buried the bits under the hen run. You read it so lovely!'

Newspapers, in our household, were issues of the day in more ways than one, my father as an addict subscribing to several, of varying degrees of seriousness and political complexion. He had been known to rise at the crack of dawn in order to stand at the front door, ready to commandeer the lot the moment the delivery boy arrived – before, that is, Maud could get her hands on them. On days when he had overslept, you might find him in the drawing-room with the carpet rolled back, absorbed in the news-sheet spread out under it to discourage moths; or else, down on his hands and knees, with his head in the cupboard under the stairs where we kept the Wellington boots and galoshes, studying, between the mud marks, a page of the
Daily Chronicle
which Maud had whisked away before he had had time to do more than glance at it.

‘You'd never think newspapers were made to be read,' was his constant lament; and indeed, if you lived in our house, actually reading a paper came pretty low in our – or rather, Maud's – list of priorities. They were made to bear away the cold ashes of the fires, and to be laid artfully crumpled under the kindling and coals of the new ones awaiting the liberating match. They were made to protect freshly scrubbed floors, or the scrubbed deal table in the kitchen. Newspapers were in never-ending demand for lining knife boxes and silver boxes, shoe-cleaning boxes and polishing boxes, and the box reserved for the cleaning rags. My poor father, who was always intending to cut out this article or that to preserve for some ill-defined future purpose, and then forgetting to do it until the article in question had vanished from human ken, could think of no better counter-measure than to add yet another newspaper to the list; knowing in his heart of hearts that the newcomer, like all its companions, was doomed to disappear with the rest.

So far as I was concerned, once I had learned how to manage a pair of scissors, the day of the week when newspapers came into their own was Friday. Every Friday, after tea, Maud and I would sit at the kitchen table, reducing the Thunderer of Fleet Street and all its satellites impartially to Fenner toilet paper. Unlike the unfortunates at St Giles, who had to make do with rolls of polished stuff, chill to the skin and about as flexible as quarry tiles, the Fenners of Salham St Awdry wiped their backsides on great events, cut into fine, generous squares. Every Friday Maud and I cut a week's supply for Mrs Fenner to take back with her on Saturday, Maud wielding a skewer to pierce the completed pile with a hole through which, with an enormous sense of achievement, I threaded a piece of string which I knotted and finished with a loop so that it could hang on the nail knocked into the Fenners' lav door.

Once, greatly daring, I abstracted a piece ready for bunching, and retired with it to our lavatory; but, there, could not bring myself actually to use it. It seemed a kind of blasphemy, seeing it had a picture of Lloyd George on it.

However, as I had already crumpled it, I couldn't hope to return it, undetected, to the kitchen. Needing to get rid of the evidence, I dropped it in the pan and pulled the chain. Horror of horrors – plumbing in St Awdry's must have been different (It was. I later discovered there was none) – it
would
not go down. That is, it did at last, but not before I had learned never again to get ideas above my station.

When I came back downstairs, Maud, who had heard the cistern filling, emptying and refilling, looked up dourly from her scissoring to remark, ‘What you been doing up there, then? Cannon-balls?'

1. See frontispiece.
   

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The Saturday afternoon which, of all the Saturday afternoons I spent on the Market Place with Maud and her mother, I select from my treasury, was a day mellow as honey, one of those autumn days you sometimes get in East Anglia, the memory of which keeps you going through the months when Arctic gales sweep down from the North Pole, and the damp of the Broads corrodes your very soul. I was just six years old, in my first term at Eldon House School, and looking very chic, I congratulated myself, in my new school uniform – double-breasted navy overcoat with a dinky little half-belt at the back, hat of plushy velour with a badge in front embroidered with EHS, and a hatband striped in black, purple and white, the school colours; knee-high white socks, black lace-up shoes and navy gloves, knitted ones, with a narrow edging of black, purple and white which showed that they came from Green Brothers, the officially appointed school outfitters, not any old shop. To be seen out on the street in your school uniform not wearing your gloves was, if not the sin against the Holy Ghost, the next thing to it.

Was it OK to take them off for eating? I hadn't been at Eldon House long enough to be sure. I was already a bit uneasy about the gloves even before I bumped into the Saunders girls – the younger one was in my form – out with their mother. I had purchased a pennyworth of locust beans, or ‘lokusses', as they were called by the
cognoscenti
, something purportedly vegetable with the texture and taste of varnish and the further advantage that neither Maud nor her mother could stand them, so that I could safely pass them round. I was very fond of them, though I had to admit, that particular Saturday, they did not taste quite as good as usual, stuck all over with glove fluff.

‘Take your gloves off, fathead!' Maud commanded: and when I explained that to do so was against school rules, she made a face, not having yet forgiven them, whoever ‘them' might be, for removing me from her jurisdiction for the better part of the day, and said, ‘
They
tell you to go jump in a barrel of cowpats, you'd do it!'

I had been on the point of compromising by removing one glove, when I suddenly remembered that eating out in the street whilst wearing your school uniform was an even worse offence than taking your gloves off in public.

And that wasn't all.

Mrs Fenner had bought a chamber pot. It was pink, with
Evening Exercises
inscribed about its ample girth in letters of gold – ‘Genuine twenty-two carat,' swore the man at the crockery stall – Gothic script, visible at a hundred paces.

No one gave wrapping paper in the Market, and as we moved on to the fruit and the vegetable stalls we all had a good laugh as Mrs Fenner, in her exuberant progress, explained loud enough for all to hear that she had made her purchase because her old man liked his tea out of a real big cup. Even Maud permitted her lips to twitch slightly, and, as for me, I was quite weak from laughing. When Mrs Fenner bought a bunch of celery and stuck it inside the chamber pot with the explanation that she had always wanted a pot plant for her window sill, I could have died.