The Dreaming Suburb (53 page)

The fact that he was a Jew made the old man nervous of the future awaiting Europe. He was in close touch with some of the refugee groups from the Continent, and had proved a generous subscriber to their resettlement funds. He did not like the look of things at all, and told Jim:

“That bloddy Hitler, he'll be over here before long, my frien'; you see if I'm not talking truth!”

And when Jim, who was not quite without insular arrogance, pooh-poohed this idea as monstrous, he added:

“All right, my frien', you just vait! Vot you got to stop the bloddy man, anyhows? The Pritisch Navy? Bah! There won't
be no navies, my frien', not in the vor that man is cooking up for you over there! You listen to this bloddy rubbisch about their cardboard tanks, and suchlike? You tink because you beat them vonce you beat them twice, hey? Let me tell you, my frien,' this time it is different! They fly here, and knock pieces off you before you do your braces up! You tink I stop to vatch? And me vid a nose like this? And name like I got? Not Jacob Sokolski, my frien'l Vonce is enough for me, and I get out.
Poof—
like that!”

And Jacob smote his fist on an open palm, and waddled off to the Canadian Embassy, to make preliminary arrangements for the transfer of capital to his Quebec branch, leaving Jim to grin at his fears, and tell him that he was going to a great deal of trouble for nothing. War there might be, but German occupation of Britain was unthinkable.

“All right,” said Jacob, when he returned with an attaché case full of papers, “you vait, my frien', and ven it happen you tink on vot I tell you.”

“Dammit, Mr. Sokolski,” Jim argued, “we haven't been invaded since 1066.”

“No? But there's a first and second time for efferything,” said Jacob, and then, with seriousness, “I tell you vot, Carver, I make a proposition, hey? I take you too, you and your two youngest. It iss a goot country this Canada. There's big futures there, even for you, at your age. We live in Quebec first, and then go inland, avay from it all, to my wholesale districts. Vot do you say to that, my frien'?”

“That I'm a damned sight too old to emigrate,” said Jim, “but thanks all the same, and I'm very grateful to you, Mr. Sokolski.”

“How about your children?” pursued Jacob; “vot is there here for them?”

Jim had often asked himself this question and never yet found a satisfactory answer. They all seemed settled enough, Louise with her yokel husband, the twins roaring from job to job on their infernal motor-cycles, Judith deep in the country, with her horses, Archie making money hand over fist with his grocery chain, and the twins, Fetch and Carry, now eighteen and still together, crooning
Little Old Lady
in harmony as they wiped tea-stains and picked up their threepenny
bits from their marble-topped tables in a Catford restaurant.

“I think they're all old enough to shift for themselves,” he told Jacob, “and as for me, well, it's not just a question of age, it's something to do with seeing it out from the front-row. I never saw our chaps run from the bastards yet, not even when they smashed their way through in March, 1918, and I don't intend to start running at my time of life. It's different for you, Mr. Sokolski; you're already an exile, and you're much older than I am. I don't think I could live with myself if I wasn't here when we did stand up to the swine!”

“You tink they take you for a soldier, my frien'?” asked Jacob, incredulously.

“If they don't there'll be plenty of jobs for an active man when it does start,” Jim told him.

Sokolski sighed. “Very well, my frien', but I tink you the fool just the same. These times a man looks for himself, and I stop here too long as it is.”

They left it at that for the time being, but later, when Jacob was on the point of leaving, he made a final approach, but with like result The old man did not know how near he came to persuading Jim to uproot himself, and whisk himself and his two youngest girls into the vast refuge that awaited them on the other side of the Atlantic. It was Munich that almost decided him, for Munich filled him with shame. He had never considered that the British lacked courage, and the spectacle of the nation's hysterical joy at Chamberlain's return, waving an umbrella and a piece of paper, made him sick with dismay. He found it almost impossible to believe that any sane person could regard such a document as an infallible talisman against aerial bombardment.

So angry was he, indeed, that he fell foul of his Socialist colleagues at a committee meeting that week.

Chamberlain had just returned from his final meeting with Hitler, and someone brought a portable radio into the headquarters, in order that they could all listen to the nine o'clock news bulletin.

“Herr Hitler has told me,
and
I believe him ...,” chanted the recorded voice of the Prime Minister, but at this point
Jim's patience snapped, and he leaned forward and slammed at the knob of the radio with the ball of his horny thumb, leaving Mr. Chamberlain on his pinnacle of optimism.

“Hi, hold on, some of us want to hear if you don't,” protested Figgins, the little Branch Treasurer.

“You do? Then I'm going out,” snorted Jim, “for it's a bloody sight more than I can stomach!”

Figgins decided that he preferred an argument to the tail-end of the news, which he had already heard in full at six o'clock that evening.

“That's an ostrich attitude, Carver, old man,” he declared. “After all, look at it any way you like, he's at least gained us time, hasn't he?”

“Something in that,” murmured Gates, the Area Chairman, but Jim spun round on them.

“Is there?
What do you think the Tories will do with the time they've ‘gained' as you say? What have they ever done with time since the last show-down?”

“I think it's nonsense to assume there'll be a war,” argued Figgins. “Germany doesn't want war, not the German Socialists at all events!”

Jim was amazed at their blindness. “The German Socialists, you bloody fool,” he shouted, “where do you imagine they are? Do you think they're holding a protest meeting in the compound of Dachau? Do you think
anyone
has any say in what goes on over there, since that maniac and his gang took over? This was our last chance to call his bluff, and this time we had the Russians behind us! What do you thinkll happen now, in God's name? How do you think Russia will react to this blasted bit of paper that silly old baboon keeps drooling about?”

“The Russian is no friend of British Socialism,” argued Chairman Gates; “never was, and never will be!”

“God help me,” said Jim, in a strangled voice, “she's our only sizeable ally, isn't she?”

“I say, I say, what about the Popular Front in France?” protested Figgins.

“I'll give France six months if war is declared,” snapped Jim, “and after that the Fascists will take over! You talk to
some of the Spanish refugees about France, and see if that gives you any confidence in the Popular Front!”

He realised that he was losing his temper, and reached for his cap. Whenever he lost his temper he upset his digestion, which had never quite recovered from uninterrupted months on bully beef and biscuits in the trenches of 1917, and whenever he had a bout the wind packed into his stomach, and made it feel like a distended balloon. Nothing would move it but continual doses of bicarbonate of soda. Deciding that this apology for a committee was not worth a teaspoonsful of bicarbonate, he strode out into the street, leaving them to shake their heads over his increasingly sour temper, so alien to the old Jim they remembered, in the campaigning days of the 'twenties. Sometimes they thought he was wandering off to the extreme left, and at other times he seemed more in line with the Tories, particularly when he had brazenly supported their rearmament programme. They did not quite know what to make of him these days.

Sometimes Jim did not know what to make of himself. He hated the torpor that seemed to paralyse thought among the people he met in the train, and at work. He was appalled by their collective lack of imagination, and the cynicism of the ordinary voter, people of his own Avenue, whose grasp of the situation seemed to be confined to clichés, like “Hitler is turning East”, and “Hitler is doing good in Germany”. He could never understand why everybody did not share his horror at what was going on over there, how they could listen, without howls of protest, to Tory M.P.s telling them it was “none of our business”, any more than the crucifixion of the Spanish people had been “our business”. To him it was all so clear, and so menacing, a simple case of a megalomaniac, in league with Continental capitalism, setting out to absorb the entire world, state by state, and put back the clock to somewhere around the time the first Saxon invasions had crept up the East coast estuaries, and taken possession of Roman Britain.

He went home and called the dog, and they went off into the woods, following the winding path along as far as the old Manor, where he sat on the terrace near the gazebo, and tossed sticks into the shallow water.

The stillness of the scene soothed him. He looked back into the crumbling forecourt and wondered, as Esme had often wondered, who had lived here, and how much it had cost to maintain such a vast, sprawling place. Built about 1780 he imagined, a year or two before the French Revolution, in an era of carriages pulled by matched greys, a time of doeskin top-boots, and Fencibles, and jokes about Napoleon, encouraged by the grotesque cartoons he had seen in the London Museum, an age as remote now as that of Agincourt, and the Armada. People would never live in houses like this again, not with present taxation, and the costs of staffing and heating. What would happen to this one? Would it fall down, or would it be cleared away to make room for a new housing estate? Not for a long time yet at any rate. There would be little enough home building for the next decade and perhaps, when it was all over, they would all be living in caves again. Perhaps he should have accepted Jacob's offer. These people weren't going to fight, so what was the sense of staying to watch them enslaved?

He got up, and called sharply to the dog. Over in the Avenue beyond the trees, a hundred wireless sets were tuned in to dance music, and people who had sat up to hear the midnight news for a week or more, were telling themselves that they would make an early night of it, and sleep safely tonight under Mr. Chamberlain's umbrella.

MUNICH
caused serious reflection elsewhere in the Avenue that September.

In the converted loft, above the store of his corner shop, Archie Carver had his own figuring to do and, in his own
way, he was just as grateful for the temporary shelter of Mr. Chamberlain's umbrella as anyone along the crescent.

Although not the slightest bit concerned with the state of the world as such, Archie was nonetheless a keen observer of the effect the successive alarms of the 'thirties had had upon the Stock Market.

He was not an investor, owning no single stock or share. He was not that sort of gambler, preferring to gamble on absolute certainties, but he used the Stock Market as a weathercock, and his weathercock now told him that the steady drip of depressing events would stop in a year or so, and would be, succeeded by a scorching wind liable to cause a severe drought in the suburb! Droughts meant shortages, all kinds of shortages, and shortages meant big profits for those with sufficient foresight to stock up against the day when it was impossible to replenish.

Archie had no need to go to the Book of Genesis to learn what happened when a drought caught a community on the hop. He had already engaged in the grocery trade during a big war, and had by no means forgotten the late Mr. Cole's closing-time zeal, at Coolridge's. If the war was coming, and by now Archie was quite convinced of the fact, then it behoved any intelligent tradesman who sold goods that suburbs could not do without, to buy, and buy, and buy, to stock, and stock, and stock, until every cellar, every odd corner of his premises, was full to overflowing with reserves.

Having finally made up his mind on this, Archie went to work with his customary thoroughness He closeted himself in his office for days on end, and compiled a list of every wholesaler with whom he had had dealings in the past fourteen years. Having completed the list, he made out his orders, and offered C.O.D., in this way establishing confidence among suppliers, and also getting the benefit of their two-and-a-half per cent cash discounts. There was nothing niggardly about Archie. He went at the task wholeheartedly, laying out every penny he had to his credit at the bank, and sometimes dipping into the oil drums, that he kept in a padlocked cavity under the floor of his Avenue premises.

Not another living soul knew of the existence of these oil drums, not even Maria, or his eldest boy, Tony, now away at
boarding school in the West. There were four oil drums now, and two, which were sealed, were chock full of silver (nothing under a florin), and far too heavy for one man to lift.

Archie was not a miser. He never gloated over the drums and bathed his hands in the coins like Silas Marner. He forgot the sealed drums for months together, for these held his iron rations, the fruit of systematic till abstractions over the years.

Archie consistently robbed his own tills, and had now perfected a system calculated to deprive the Department of Inland Revenue of a steady two to three thousand a year. Only now did Archie reap the full reward of his original planning, the tiny shops, the handy housing estates, particularly the small staffs, and carefully-screened branch managers, for his sort of husbandry would have been impossible in a large, busy shop, with half-a-dozen assistants on the lookout.

Nowadays Archie took his ease in the early afternoons, and went briskly back to work at four p.m. His system required split-second timing, based on his arrival, at his five busiest shops, round about closing time. As soon as the manager had gone, and the blinds were down, he went to work with devilish speed, making out a counterfeit till roll, and pocketing the difference between the old and new totals. Once a week, at each shop in the chain, he extracted thirty shillings from the petty-cash box. This was his levy, his fixed fee for the visit, and thus he began each week with a tax-free income of thirty shillings, multiplied by the number of shops he possessed. He never put his money into the oil-drums. They were fed by a number of tributaries, the chief being the till balances, supplemented by sale of damaged stock, sale of equipment charged against tax, and various other minor sources. This money went into the drums kept for notes, and this amount he did check from time to time, because he regarded it not as an emergency reserve, but as floating capital, with which he might want to acquire fresh premises at short notice.