The Dreaming Suburb (32 page)

Jim got up, found his way to the street, and was about to board a 'bus when somebody plucked his sleeve. He turned to look into the coarse, wrinkled face of Jacob Sokolski, the owner of the furs that had been stolen.

During the trial Sokolski had struck him as being a gentle old man, somewhat distressed by the case, and certainly not on show, like most of the other witnesses. He had given his
evidence in mangled English, and Jim guessed that he originated from Eastern Europe.

“Vait, mister,” he invited, “you'n me take tea, eh? You'n me get the taste of bloddy polis from our troats, eh?”

Jim regarded him with surprise. In spite of the man's benevolent appearance it struck him as odd that a successful businessman, whose goods had been yanked from the shop-window by professional criminals, should now refer to those who had arrested the raiders as “bloddy polis”. He let the 'bus go.

“I‘d like some tea, yes, Mr. Sokolski,” he said civilly, “but you might as well know that it didn't give me any satisfaction to see that kid sent up for seven years. Two would have been ample. Either that, or the chap that organised it should have got fourteen. As it is, it doesn't make sense.”

“You an' me, we tink the zame,” said Mr. Sokolski, grasping his arm, and leading him purposefully towards an A.B.C. “These polis here, they no so dam bad. No guns and no knouts, but still they are polis, eh? Vunce a polis, alvays a bloddy polis. They hit the peoples. Like that—dum-dum!”

And Mr. Sokolski withdrew his arm, and smote his open palm very hard, signifying police oppression the world over.

They took a fancy to one another from the beginning. Jim, who had read a good deal about Tsarist oppression, was genuinely interested in Sokolski's first-hand information on the subject.

As a child, the furrier had been hounded from home by Cossacks, and had starved in a Lithuanian hovel. He had seen his father flogged, and his brothers marched into exile. He himself had escaped, at the age of eleven, into the relative haven of a cabin-boy's berth on a Baltic trader, where the life would have killed most children in a month, but Sokolski took a great deal of killing, and had survived to jump ship in Philadelphia, and make his way, speaking no English, and almost penniless, across a wide continent to the fruit-farms of California. A chance meeting with another Russian had brought about his entry into the fur trade, and because he had natural shrewdness, and could save ninety-five dollars out of every hundred he earned, he soon prospered, and later moved to London. His terrible childhood, and the grinding
poverty of his early manhood, had not soured him, or made him arrogant in success, for, throughout his pilgrimage, he had hung on to his two major characteristics, a strong sense of humour, and a bitter distrust of all men in uniform.

“Even my commissionaire, Carver.... I say to him, ‘No bloddy uniform ... no bloddy medals'! With the uniform it is alvays the same for the peoples—dum-dum!”, and this time he smote his fist to signify the world-wide tyranny of the military.

Jim went to work for Sokolski the following week. He began as shopman, cleaning windows, stoking boilers, and carrying out all the menial tasks that presented themselves. Within the first year, however, Sokolski made him a van driver, and not long afterwards, when the furrier bought a controlling interest in a group of ready-made clothing shops in the north-west suburbs, he promoted him to the post of transport overseer, with a salary of six pounds a week, more money than Jim had ever drawn in the past.

He knew all about Jim's socialism, and tolerated it with a mixture of scorn and amusement.

“Ach,” he would say, as he stood about the transport yard watching stock-loading, “you bloddy socialists set the vorld to rights, eh? No, no, my frien' ... nobody set the vorld right! Not socialist, not Bolshevik, not priest! I dell you somding, Carver. You make effryvun rich, and comforts see, like me, but you not set the vorld right, not for ten minute! Because vy? Because half the peoples go to sleep right off, and the odders run avay vith vot the sleeping vons leave lying around!”

This quaintly-phrased philosophy did not irritate Jim, for he recognised the Russian as possessing something that had been overlooked in all the pamphlets he had read, and the speeches he had heard. Perhaps it was common-sense, or perhaps the gospel of a battered human heart that had never quite forgotten how to laugh.

3

Archie Carver remembered the Spring of 1930 because it was the season in which he began his expansion.

Archie's dream had changed with the years. When he had first joined the Pirettas, in the days when he was roving the countryside looking for empty premises, the acquisition of a business had not been an end in itself, but merely a means to furnish the quick capital, and freedom of movement, necessary to provide him with A Good Time.

His outlook had undergone some important changes since then. Somehow, his adolescent conception of A Good Time had crept into a till, and never found its way out again. He came across it now and again, when he opened the drawer for loose change, but he no longer recognised it. A Good Time, as he had understood it when he was twenty-one, had nothing whatever to do with his latter-day dreams of commerce.

It was not that he denied himself very much. He smoked as much as ever, drank a good deal, and even seduced the odd female customer whenever the opportunity presented itself, but these diversions were no longer important to him. What was important, what occupied most of his waking thoughts and even invaded his dreams, was The Chain.

It was stupid, he reasoned, to spend one's time and one's entire creative energy on operating a single business. Piretta's shop paid off well enough. In the five years he had been the Italian's son-in-law and partner the turnover had trebled itself. There was, however, a definite limit to the yield of a small grocery business in an outlying suburb. What was needed was a
chain
of such businesses—all small, all staffed by not more than two people, and all overseen and regulated by himself.

His experiences at multiple stores had shown him the weak spot in such enterprises. The weak spot was the local manager, who had to possess enterprise and initiative, a limited amount perhaps, but still of a type superior to the ordinary counter-hand. Yet this man, the key man, was denied a stake in the business, and because of this he was, given time, certain to go sour, to become dishonest, or disillusioned and slack. Archie understood this very well. He had worked with shop assistants long enough to know that the one thing they shied away from was responsibility. They would work, sometimes until they dropped, at any kind of manual task, but to
ask them to think for themselves, to make decisions involving cash, to back their judgments about goods, and customers, was to ask more than they were able to give. Loaded with responsibility against their will, they became sullen, or sick, or so nervous that they were liable to fly off the handle at awkward moments. They had to have someone at their elbow, someone on whom they could unload their worries. Provide them with someone like this and they were usually prepared to give him their unstinted labour and—what was even more essential—their personal loyalty.

Archie considered this aspect very carefully when he thought about his Chain. When he began forging it, he told himself he would have no managers as master links. A branch would consist of one or two assistants, carefully picked for lack of initiative and robust physique, and of premises that were sited in a back street near a housing estate, or among fields that would soon become a housing estate. It was a mistake, he thought, to choose premises on main roads. Motor traffic was getting heavier all the time, and it would not be long before parking problems began to affect turnover. South London was constantly expanding, and roads that were now main thoroughfares might not remain so for much longer; nor would they remain within easy shopping distance of the suburban population. What was wanted—what could be made to pay off handsomely if a man had foresight and patience—was a series of tiny shops in villages that would soon cease to be villages. Land and real estate was still cheap in these areas, and premises in village side-streets could be acquired for trifling sums, particularly when old folk died off, and their modest estates were sold up by impatient families.

In his mind Archie called these dream-shops “Pop-Ins”. Before he was thirty-five, he told himself, he would have at least a dozen Pop-Ins, all within a five-mile radius of his present business. He would pay each of them two visits a day, one to check stock and watch service, the other to check books, and satisfy himself that his employees still lacked his sort of initiative.

He made his first move in February 1930. He had never lost touch with Piretta's slightly shady solicitor, and it occurred
to him that here was a man who might put him in touch with the sort of property-owners he was looking for. His hunch was correct. The solicitor put him on to two families, each with a small property to sell.

Archie donned his best suit, called, and made offers that were at once indignantly refused by both beneficiaries. He retired unruffled. He was an expert in sizing-up people and premises. Within ten days he had both the properties in his possession, and the chain of Pop-Ins was a two-link reality.

He did not consult Piretta about this, but he did have the foresight to buy both shops in his wife's name. Maria was called in to sign papers, and two small banking accounts were opened, also in her name.

By this time Maria had three children, two boys and a girl. She seldom appeared at the counter, where Piretta had once hoped she might find a husband among the Woodbine regulars,

She was occupied all day long, cooking and washing for the children, her father, and her husband. She said very little, except when she was alone with the little girl, Juanita. She talked to Juanita a great deal, but no one ever heard what she said to her. The baby, an attractive child, with her grandfather's mild brown eyes, watched her intently as she fussed about the cot and the play-pen. Juanita must have been puzzled why her mother was so silent in company and yet so talkative when they were alone.

Maria took little interest in the two boys, who were always playing with their grandfather, but she remained very dutiful in the performance of wifely obligations towards Archie. Archie accepted her ministrations in the same spirit as he accepted the services of a 'bus conductor, or bar-tender. He was never actively unkind to her, and never criticised her. He simply ate what she put before him, dressed in the clothes she laid out for him, and paid swift and silent court to her whenever he had been too preoccupied with business to call upon one of his mistresses.

It did not occur to him that both Maria and her father knew all about these mistresses; and if he had known he would not have shown the faintest concern, or troubled to make an excuse. He himself did not take them very seriously
and was very careful to keep each relationship on an unemotional plane. He remembered Rita Ramage; having once learnt a lesson, he never forgot it.

Thus, Archie geared himself for the new decade, and was soon to be seen in his bull-nosed Morris Cowley, flitting between Addington, Wickham, and Shirley, a slightly thickening figure, with rapidly receding hair, and a confident way of carrying himself that was just short of a swagger. A businessman, a husband, a father, and a future Czar of South London Pop-Ins.

4

Louise remembered the Spring of 1930 because it was her first mating season.

At the age of thirty Louise was thin, flat-chested, and slightly stooping. Nearly two-and-a-half decades over sink and stove showed in Louise's figure, but not in her character, which was as sweet and pliant and motherly as it had always been.

Nobody had ever heard Louise complain about anything, and nobody ever caught her with her pursey little mouth puckered into a frown, or her prominent, grey eyes unsmiling. All her life she had been the steady provider of clean towels, and beautifully-ironed underwear for any Carver who needed towels or underwear, at any time of the day or night, and all her life she had performed a thrice-daily miracle of serving up hot, nourishing meals from the limited housekeeping money given her by Jim. It was on this account that all the Carvers had good teeth and excellent digestions, and each of them, in their own way, loved Louise for her gentleness and her monumental unselfishness. Perhaps this was why they welcomed Jack Strawbridge, notwithstanding the alarming possibilities his courtship presented at Number Twenty.

Jack Strawbridge was a jobbing gardener in the employ of whoever happened to be renting Stannard's nurseries, behind the Avenue. In the winter of 1929 he was sent to clear ground that had been left fallow for thirteen years, and the task of freeing the nursery from its acres of bramble, and
bindweed and dandelion, seemed likely to occupy him for some considerable time.

He was a big, shambling man, with a brick-red face, and a large head on which was balanced a cloth cap at least two sizes too small for him. The cap always looked as if it would fall off at the first sweep of Jack's long-handled bill-hook, but it never did, and Judy formed the opinion that it was fixed there by some means unknown to her—a strip of adhesive tape perhaps, that linked the lining to Jack's shining pate.

He had the stolid nature and soft burr of a Kentish countryman. Nobody ever discovered what had brought him to the suburb in the first place. He would have looked much more at home behind a plough or a lowing herd of cows. His movements were slow, deliberate, and immensely powerful. He could crack a Brazil nut between finger and thumb, and whenever he did so, or performed any similar feat of strength, he would show his delight by a short, rasping chuckle, that sounded rather like a St. Bernard's warning bark. His eyes were a vivid blue, and there was always a short, gingery stubble on his chin. He was as comfortable and as engaging as an old cart-horse, and when he made his ponderous way from the nursery into the Carvers' garden, via a gap in the rotting fence, he looked like one, recently relieved of its harness.