Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (32 page)

Four-an’-twenny blackbirds

Baked in an oven.

Ba-ba, black sheep,

Have you any wool?

Yes, sir, yes, sir,

I got plenty…

The effect of a dozen of these, left hanging in the air, was enough to dislocate the senses.

At Guildford we parted, Alf turning east for the Weald, which for him still lay three months away.

‘So long, Alf,’ I said..

‘So long, Alf,’ he answered. ‘Try not to be too much of a nuisance.’ He passed under the railway bridge and out of my life, a shuffling rattle of old tin cans, looking very small and triangular with his pointed hat on his head, and black mackintosh trailing the ground.

London was now quite near, not more than a two-days’ walk, but I was still in no particular hurry. So I turned north-west and began a detour round it, rather like a wasp sidling up to a jam jar. After leaving Guildford, I slept on Bagshot Heath – all birches, sand, and horseflies – which to me seemed a sinister and wasted place like some vast dead land of Russia. Then next morning, only a few miles farther up the road, everything suddenly changed back again, and I was walking through parkland as green as a fable, smothered with beeches and creamy grass.

Every motor car on the road was now either a Rolls-Royce or a Daimler – a gliding succession of silver sighs – their crystal interiors packed with girls and hampers and erect top-hatted men. Previously, I’d not seen more than two such cars in my life; now they seemed to be the only kind in the world, and I began to wonder if they were intimations of treasures to come, whether all London was as rich as this.

Tramping in the dust of this splendour, I wasn’t surprised when one of the Daimlers pulled up and an arm beckoned to me from the window. I hurried towards it, thinking it might be full of long-lost relations, but in fact there was no one I knew. ‘Want a pheasant, my man?’ asked a voice from inside. ‘We just knocked over a beauty a hundred yards back.’

A quarter of an hour later I arrived at Ascot. It was race week, and I’d walked right into it. White pavilions and flags; little grooms and jockeys dodging among the long glossy legs of thoroughbreds; and the pedigree owners dipping their long cool necks into baskets of pate and gulls’ eggs.

I went round to the entrance, thinking I might get in, but was stared at by a couple of policemen. So I stared, in turn, at a beautiful woman by the gate, who for a moment paused daz-zlingly near me – her face as silkily finished as a Persian miniature, her body sheathed in swathes like a tulip, and her sandalled feet wrapped in a kind of transparent rice-paper so that I could count every clean little separate toe.

Wealth and beauty were the common order of things now, and I felt I had entered another realm. It would have been no good busking or touting here, indeed outlandish in such a place. Alf, and the tattered lines of the workless, were far away in another country… So I left Ascot, and came presently to another park, full of oak trees and grazing deer, and saw Windsor Castle standing on its green-baize hill like a battered silver cruet. I slept that stifling night in a field near Stoke Poges, having spent the evening in the village churchyard, sitting on a mossy gravestone and listening to the rooks, and wondering why the place seemed so familiar.

A few mornings later, coming out of a wood near Beaconsfield, I suddenly saw London at last – a long smoky skyline hazed by the morning sun and filling the whole of the eastern horizon. Dry, rusty-red, it lay like a huge flat crust, like ash from some spent volcano, simmering gently in the summer morning and emitting a faint, metallic roar.

No architectural glories, no towers or palaces, just a creeping insidious presence, its vast horizontal broken here and there by a gas-holder or factory chimney. Even so, I could already feel its intense radiation – an electric charge in the sky – that rose from its million roofs in a quivering mirage, magnetically, almost visibly, dilating.

Cleo, my girl-friend, was somewhere out there; hoarding my letters (I hoped) and waiting. Also mystery, promise, chance, and fortune – all I had come to this city to find. I hurried towards it, impatient now, its sulphur stinging my nostrils. I had been a month on the road, and the suburbs were long and empty. In the end I took a tube.

My village, my home-town, each had a kind of duck-pond centre, but London had no centre at all – just squat little streets endlessly proliferating themselves like ripples in estuary mud. I arrived at Paddington in the early evening, and walked around for a while. The sky was different here, high, wide, and still, rosy with smoke, and the westering sun. There was a smell of rank oil, rotting fish and vegetables, hot pavements and trodden tar; and a sense of surging pressure, the heavy used-up air of the cheek-by-jowl life around me – the families fermenting behind slack-coloured curtains, above shops and in resounding tenements, sons changing their shirts, daughters drying their hair, waistcoated fathers staring at their tea, and in the streets the packed buses grinding nose to tail and the great night coming on.

I was excited, having got here, but also unprepared, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. But I had Cleo’s address – I didn’t know anyone else – so I thought this was the time to use it. I’d met Cleo in the spring, in a Tolstoyan settlement near Stroud, where she was living in a borrowed caravan, together with her handsome father – an eagle-nosed left-wing agitator – and her distressed and well-born mother.

Their origins were uncertain, but they’d recently fled from America, where I suspect the father had been in some political trouble. The sixteen-year-old girl was not the kind I’d been used to, and her beauty had knocked me silly. She’d had a husky, nutty Anglo-American accent, huge brown eyes flecked like crumbled honey, a smooth leggy figure, lithe as an Indian pony; and we’d pretended to be in love.

The family were penniless, but they had connections, and friends were always lending them houses; and the address of the last one – somewhere on Putney Heath – sounded very grand indeed. When I finally got there, having walked several miles through the dusk, the house appeared to have been hit by a bomb – only half a wing and the main staircase still standing in a huge garden of churned-up roots.

They were sitting on the staircase, which was open to the sky, and seemed rather surprised to see me – except for lovely Cleo, who cried ‘I knew it!’ and ran down the steps to meet me. She had kept up superbly with my memories of her, and looked even better than I expected, her body packed beautifully into her shirt and shorts, and her skin the colour of rosewood.

‘You walked it, didn’t you? – I
told
you, Daddy.’ She led me proudly up the eroded staircase, then took me to her room and showed me my bundle of letters which lay wrapped in her scented nightdress.

So I was invited to stay. Cleo burned my clothes and fitted me out with some of her father’s. The mansion was being torn down to make room for a block of flats, and the father had a job with the builders; meanwhile, with the half-ruin to live in, they were temporarily secure, and the mother was slowly recovering her senses.

I slept on the floor in the remaining fragment of ballroom, and ate with the family in the Victorian kitchen, whose tall Gothic windows looked from the lip of the Heath across London to the Hampstead hills. I was in luck, and I knew it, and took it easy at first. It seemed a nice soft spot to be in. Sometimes the father, in his loud public voice, would lecture me on the theory of anarchy, on the necessity for political and personal freedom, and on his contempt for the moral law. When he was out, the mother, pale and damp round the eyes, would talk about her childhood home in the shires, and lament the scruffy world of conspiratorial garrets through which this attractive bounder had led her. At other times the daughter, heart-stoppingly voluptuous in her tight Californian pants, would lead me by the hand through the ruined garden, to the last clump of still-rooted myrtles, then crouch, bare-kneed, and pull me down beside her, and demand to know my ideological convictions.

Beautiful Cleo; she never knew what she did to me, her eyes slanting under the myrtle leaves, her coiled russet limbs like something from a Rousseau jungle, her chatter never still for a moment. But not of what I expected; never a word about love, or my hunger, or the summer night. The funeral baked meats of her father’s mind were all she seemed able to serve me. He was the one, of course, and I was not old enough to replace him. I thought her the most ravishing and wasted child in the world.

Then one night I took her out on to the twilit Heath, where lovers lay thick as sheaves. We walked miles round the common, and Cleo never drew breath; her lovely mouth was a political megaphone. Finally I pushed her against a tree and desperately kissed her. She lent me her lips like an improving book. ‘But I
must
have the Movement. You understand, don’t you? You
must
join the Party,’ she said.

I didn’t give up. I made one last try. After all, I was in considerable torment. So next morning, at dawn, I fetched one of the builder’s ladders and climbed through her bedroom window. She lay easily sleeping in her rose-coloured nightdress, a soft breathing heap of love. The hushed dawn, the first birds, and me in my black Russian pyjamas – surely she must melt to this magic moment. As I slipped into her bed she rolled drowsily into my arms, then woke, and her body froze. ‘If Daddy knew about this, he’d murder you,’ she said. It was no idle figure of speech.

Scrambling back down the ladder in the dawn’s early light, I realized that blood could be thicker than theory. Later that day, Cleo’s father got me a job with the builders, and gave me the address of some Putney lodgings. I don’t know what she had told him, but he’d acted swiftly. It seemed a reasonable compromise between New Thought and the horsewhip.

On my own once again, I found a snug little room over an eating-house in the Lower Richmond Road – a shambling second-floor back which overhung the railway and rocked all day to the passing trains, while the hot meaty steam of boiling pies filtered up through cracks in the floor.

The cafe downstairs was a shadowy tunnel lined with high-backed wooden pews, carbolic-scrubbed and exclusively male, with all the comforts of a medieval refectory. My rent of twenty-five shillings a week included the furnished room and three cafe meals a day – a
carte blanche
arrangement which I exploited fully and which introduced me to new ways of eating. The blackboard menu, propped on the pavement outside, offered a list as immutable as the elements: ‘Bubble. Squeak. Liver and B. Toad-in-the-Hole. Meat Pudding or Pie.’ My favourite was the pie – a little basin of meat wrapped in a caul of suety dough which was kept boiling all day in a copper cauldron in a cupboard under the stairs. Turned out on the plate, it steamed like a sodden napkin, emitting a mournful odour of laundries; but once pricked with the fork it exploded magnificently with a rich lava of beefy juices. There must have been over a pound of meat in each separate pie – a complete working-man’s meal, for sixpence. And remembering the thin days at home, when meat was only for Sundays, I ate at least one of them every day. Otherwise I was encouraged to ring the changes on the house’s limited permutations – Squeak, Toad, Liver and B; or as a privilege, an occasional herring. A mug of tea at each meal was of course served without asking, and was so strong you could trot a mouse on it. As for afters, there was a postscript at the foot of the menu which seemed to be painted in permanent enamel. ‘During the Present Hot Spell Why Not Try a Cold Sweet?’ Winter and summer, it was custard and prunes.