Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (33 page)

Arnold, the proprietor – who was also my landlord – was a man in his early thirties, a rounded dandy with heavy cream-white jowls and delicate parboiled hands. He did all the work alone, both the cooking and serving, and moved with the rolling dignity of a eunuch, dressed in tight cotton gowns, buttoned up to the throat, which also gave him the appearance of one of his cloth-wrapped pies. He was bald, large-headed, red-lipped and corseted, and was given to abstractions, silence and reveries; and he seemed clearly to be a cut above his clients, though if he thought so, he never showed it. Each day, before breakfast, he padded around the tables laying out the morning newspapers like hymn-sheets; and these again were scrupulously changed in the evening. The customers also had the benefit of his soft-voiced summaries. I’ve never known a man who gave to this particular job such a sense of modest almost priest-like dedication, advising and serving the labourers at his table and taking their coppers like a church collection.

In fact, this ascetic purveyor of gross Toads and Squeaks was something of a mystery. One might have imagined him to have chosen the job as a purge, an act of self-abasement; but certainly not for the money. I lived for six months in his house, but I never knew him – though I knew he had another life. I knew, for instance, about the two pretty children who visited him briefly each Saturday night. And that in his first-floor back he kept in careful seclusion a young and beautiful wife. Sometimes as I climbed to my room, I saw her standing in her half-open doorway, a tantalizing strip of voluptuous boredom, her hair piled high and elaborately set, her eyes burning like landing lights. She wore a white silk wrap buttoned up to the throat, and her toe-nails were painted green. She was about my own age, but she never spoke. Nor did Arnold ever mention her.

My job at the buildings took it out of me at first, and I lived at a pitch of healthy exhaustion. All day I pushed barrows of wet cement till my muscles stretched and burned. At night, I returned to the steaming cafe, ate my pie, then climbed to my backstairs room, where I sat half-dozing at the window table, gazing down at the long green trains.

It was the first time in my life I’d had a room of my own, uncluttered with sisters and brothers, and I spread all over it, throwing my clothes about, and keeping the door well locked and bolted. Grateful for privacy at last, I was content just to sit there, lord of the room and its chromium furniture, spending the long summer evenings nodding alone at the table, or drawing girls, or writing short sleepy poems. London waited outside – a stubby plateau of chimneys, a low mutter of dragging sound; but at the beginning there was little I could do about it. My body was too used up.

It took a little while to get toughened-up to the job, to the stiff hours of blistering labour, which wore my hands into holes and pulled my muscles about into new and unaccustomed contortions. I was dead-beat at first, and walked in a tottering daze; but I was young, and I hardened fast. Soon my palms had callouses rough as salted leather, which I could rub together with pride. At last I could get home in the evening without falling into a stupor. I could even begin to look about me.

Of course, I’d not much identity with the city yet; it was just rooftops and a changing sky, a thump of radios coming from open windows, and the summer yelp of the back-street children. And the frail cord with my family was still uncut. Boot-boxes of flowers came by post from my mother, sweet slipshod gatherings from the fields and hedges, wrapped in damp moss and ivy leaves.

Then I made a small breakthrough. I won a poetry prize in a weekly competition organized by a newspaper,
The Sunday Referee,
for a poem I’d dashed off with a sixpenny postal order and never expected to hear of again. Arnold showed it to me one morning, his red mouth twitching; and it was the first of mine I’d ever seen printed. ‘Is this really you?’ he asked fastidiously. ‘I wasn’t aware you had such beautiful thoughts.’

Soon after this, I met Philip O’Connor distributing leaflets on Putney Common – a quick ready youth with a fine hungry face and a shock of thick obsidian curls. We were both of us living alone at that time, scribbling poetry in neighbouring streets, so for a while we visited each other quite often, establishing a defensive minority of two. To me, he had an adolescent mystery about him, a frenetic melancholy, like a schoolboy Hamlet; and his poems were the most extravagant I’d read until then, rhapsodic eruptions of surrealist fantasy. I was impressed by his poems; he thought little of mine. I was the older; he was paternal. He used to lie on my bed, nervously scratching his curls, and switching his dark eyes on and off, reciting his latest verses in clear cold tones, snappy and rather bitter. ‘You and I are the only true voices left alive in the world,’ he’d say. When using my room, his manners were perfect. Not so on his own home ground, when his claims were more self-centred. But he had a nice sense of territory.

Another friend of that period was six-foot Billy, who ate regularly in the cafe downstairs – a stranded Negro sailor from Troy, Missouri, who had either jumped ship or had lost his way. I never knew where he slept, or how he lived, but every evening he’d be there in his pew, dropping great lumps of butter into his hot strong tea and carefully stripping the bones from a kipper. His huge fat cheeks were lightly scarred by knives, and the marks of knuckledusters ran across his eyebrows. But he was sleepily gentle, never raised his voice, and his favourite diversions seemed to be tea and gossip. Billy was an excellent listener, and it seemed impossible to bore him. He’d salute the dullest story with the most flattering attention. ‘Waal, ah’ll go slash mah wrists, if that ain’t sumpin’,’ he’d murmur. ‘You may hang me up by mah entrails.’ Sometimes he’d disappear for a few days, then pop up, beaming. ‘Gouge mah eyes, shuh good to see you.’ Then we’d go next door for a game of billiards, which he played with a velvet touch. But he didn’t last long. They finally caught up with him. A dozen coppers with rolled-up macs. Stepping gingerly into the cafe, expecting a struggle. But he went with them like a child.

Then my days with Arnold, too, were numbered. A girl came to live on the floor above me. She moved into the attic cupboard just under the roof, which till then had only stored potatoes. The girl seemed to do no work, though occasionally I’d hear her gramophone playing and the sound of her bare feet dancing. Sometimes we’d meet on the stairs and have to struggle together to get round the bend in the banisters. A couple of inches from mine, her eyes never blinked. Her hair smelt of pies and doughnuts. ‘D’you see that film called
The Rat?
she asked me one day.‘You’re his bleedin’ image, you are.’ Her friends came in the evening, and left in the morning. Then Arnold would take her breakfast up on a tray. At last, apologetically, he said he’d be wanting my room. It seemed he was extending the business.

The next lodging I found was somewhat more secure, with a half-Cockney, half-Irish family, who lived in a compact little set-up a dozen yards from the High Street in a squat row of Victorian villas. Here, for twenty-five shillings a week, I got a ground-floor room, meals and laundry and a bright coal fire, the use of the parlour on Sundays, and the warmth of the basement kitchen whenever I felt like extra company.

Mrs Flynn, my landlady, was a valiant blonde, with something of the twilight beauty of Gloria Swanson – a kind of smooth open face that was tough yet wistful, backed by a garrulous and romantic fancy. There seemed to be two Mrs Flynns: one girlish and easy, the other born to furious protest. Mornings saw her most angry, a chain-smoking sweeper of rooms, a tousled mop in a dressing-gown; then at night, after supper, she emerged in laminated gold, with silkily reconditioned hair, to engage the world in a monologue of bubbling non-sequiturs, full of giggles, regrets, and yearnings. Sleekly bent to her cocoa, splendidly robed and corseted, she would then tackle any subject on earth. She’d describe the deer out at Richmond, wearing their beautiful antelopes. She’d give her views on the Russian revulsion. She’d warn me never to get married; she’d married too young, a mistake, she’d been much too impressive. But she liked men with thick lips, the curling rose-bud type – she always thought they looked so essential.. .

Mrs Flynn was Cockney, her absent husband Irish. But there was another somewhere lost in her life. He had been Irish too, a Celtic prince, now gone. She’d mention him tragically, then hoot with laughter. It was that robust, good-natured hunger about her that balanced her bouts of frenzy. Together with those easy tears and sudden giggles of self-mockery. She must have been younger than I thought at the time.

The rest of the family consisted of Mrs Flynn’s two children, who were as different as night from day – black-eyed Patsy, a sexily confident child of eight, and blond Mike, a speechless lad of eleven. There was also Beth, the landlady’s unmarried sister, a fey, self-effacing spirit, who moved in the background like an anxious guardian and held the whole house together. She watched over us all, worked in an office by day, cooked the supper and scrubbed clothes in the evening, reflected her sister’s moods like a seismograph, and shyly explained and excused. The women were much alike, though Beth was the older and took pains to conceal the likeness, having suppressed her own beauty, like a nerve-failed actress, to become her sister’s dresser and shadow.

I soon fitted into the house, and was enveloped by it. My room was small, just the kind I prefer. There was a bed, a chair, a coloured print of Killarney, and a barred window looking out on a wall. With winter coming on, I could have done much worse. The place was snug as a badger’s hole. And the women treated me well, like a fragile exotic, as though fattening me up for a prize. In the morning young Mike brought me breakfast in bed, together with a fat wad of sandwiches for work. When I returned in the evening the coal fire was blazing and the room whirling with sulphurous smoke. At six, a huge meal on a copper tray was brought in by the pigtailed Patsy, who then sat on the floor, her bare knees to her chin, and mercilessly watched me eat. She’d pay another brief visit before going to bed. ‘Ma says anything else you want?’ Squirming, coy, a strip of striped pyjamas, Miss Sweater Girl of ten years later – already she knew how to stand, how to snuggle against the doorpost, how to frame her flannel-dressed limbs in the lamplight.

Once the children were in bed, other sounds took over, mysterious but soon familiar. Beth down at the sink, mangling the evening’s wash or chopping up piles of sandwiches for the morning. Mrs Flynn, in pale fur, leaving for the Wembley dogs, or stranded alone for the night in the basement, banging her head on the table or laughing the whole thing off with a half-pint bottle of stout. Then sometimes, quite late, from away in the attic, one might hear a succession of howls and groans, reverberating alarms pitched in a sepulchral baritone like the complaining of Hamlet’s ghost. But it was only Mr Willow, Mrs Flynn’s other lodger, an old actor long since retired, who liked to fill up his solitude by repeating the lines of his one-time triumph:
The Curse ofDr Fu Manchu.

Otherwise, when home, I spent self-contained evenings, writing by the fire, or playing the fiddle, till just before bed Beth brought me a large tray of supper and perhaps something she’d copied for me to read. It was like being in a family again, except that these knocked on my door and didn’t ask me to help with the housework. And when I was ill they looked after me, reduced the rent, and Mrs Flynn brought me bottles of Guinness. ‘That Laurie,’ she’d say. ‘No wonder he goes like that. He burdens his brain too much.’ She didn’t know much about me, nor did she try to find out. It seemed enough that I made a change.

As for the great spread of London, which I’d come to discover, I don’t think I even began to get the feel of it then. Its dimensions were all wrong for my country-grown mind, too out-of-scale for my experience to cope with. In any case I was twenty, when environment plays tricks, and my portholes were fogged by illusion. I just floated around in a capsule of self-absorption, sealed in with my own private weather.

But I can remember the presence of London, its physical toughness at that time, its home-spun, knock-about air. There was more life in the streets (it cost money inside) and people thronged outdoors in the evenings. One saw them standing on corners, in the doorways of pubs, talking in groups, eating from paper bags. And the streets themselves had an almost rustic confusion – Edwardian transport in all its last-ditch vigour: rattling old buses, coster ponies and traps, prim little taxis like upright pianos, and huge dray wagons laden with beer and flour and drawn by teams of magnificent horses. Then on fine Sunday mornings, while the horses rested, Putney High Street filled up with bicycles – buxom girls in white shorts chased by puffing young men, old straw-hatted gents in blazers, whole families on tandems carrying their babies in baskets, and all heading for the open country. Private cars were few, and were often a sign of ill-omen, particularly when parked in a side-street, where the sight of a car outside a terraced house might well mean the doctor or death.

Yet to me, when off duty, London offered a well-heeled idleness, even on
£2 5s Od
a week. After paying for my lodgings I had
£1
to spend, which could be broken up in a hundred ways. A tot of whisky cost sixpence, a pint of beer fourpence-half-penny, cigarettes were elevenpence for twenty. The best seats in the cinema cost ninepence to a shilling, or I could climb to the gallery for threepence. Then there were fairs and music-halls, Russian ballet at the Alhambra, Queen’s Hall concerts – seldom more than a shilling. Suits made to measure for fifty bob, sixpenny dances, ninepenny suppers – life may have been no cheaper, considering what I was earning, but it seemed so, and I paid no taxes.

It was a time of rootless enjoyment, and also luxurious melancholy which I took care to spin out and nourish. Walking almost everywhere, and most often alone, I studied my shadow, my face in the windows, acknowledging the thrust of London and what it demanded of me – fame and fortune at the very least. This was what I was here for, and what they expected back home. Yet my head was idle and empty.