Authors: Monica Dickens
Arthur rumbled an objection from his perch on the railings, and spat into a laurel bush.
‘Let us, Art,’ pleaded Josephine. ‘I didn’t get you no cake nor nothing to-day, but I got something better what you can have.’
‘Show us it then.’
‘I can’t. It’s hid.’
‘What is it.’
‘’S a secret.’ She glanced at Billy. ‘Cut me throat if it ain’t something smashin’ though. Let us come.’
‘Where are they going?’ Billy was intrigued.
‘You ’op it,’ said Norman menacingly. ‘Come on, young Jo, you don’t want to play with them no more.’ He pulled himself up to the top of the railings. ‘Come on, I’ll jump you over.’
‘I can get through.’ She squeezed through an impossibly narrow space, and joined the Goldners in the street. ‘Which way?’ she asked.
‘Hah!’ Arthur jeered at Billy, who was watching them wistfully through the railings like a caged animal. ‘Hah, we got a tanner now; we can take a bus. Number seven to the North Pole.’
‘What about your mother?’ Billy called after Jo, but she paid no heed. She had forgotten about her mother and going home, forgotten about the Moores, forgotten everything except the
thrill of being in on the Goldners’ adventure. She panted after their clattering boots down the hill of Ladbroke Grove, squeaking like a ratting terrier.
Billy had forgotten about going home, too. He had forgotten about his father, and the ball in the shrubbery, and the wickets toppled into the grass. He thought only of following Jo and these boys, who held the secret of adventure.
Tessa and Wilfred had drifted up to see what he was doing.
‘Quick!’ he cried, ‘we’ve got to get out of the Square and follow them.’
‘Follow who?’
‘Street boys. Real ones. I beat them at fighting. Tell you later. Quick, heave me up, Tess.’ She struggled to get him over the railings, but he kept toppling back on to her head.
‘I’ll heave you then, and you can pull me up.’ He got her as far as the spikes, where she caught her skirt, and hung head downwards until the skirt tore and she fell on her plain freckled face.
‘I can’t do it, I can’t do it.’ She sat up, grimed and tearful.
‘We must.’ He made a desperate leap, kicking with his legs as he tried to pull himself up. ‘Number seven to the North Pole!’ he gasped, as if it were a charm.
Wilfred had taken something out of the museum of his trousers pocket. ‘I’ve got a key,’ he said chattily.
‘Gosh – come on! Why didn’t you say so?’ Billy streaked for the gate with Tess after him, one side of her skirt in shreds.
‘You never asked me,’ said Wilfred, trotting after them.
‘Number seven to the North Pole! Number seven to the North Pole!’ Billy kept shrieking hysterically, as they tore down Ladbroke Grove on unstoppable legs.
‘Where’s the North Pole?’
‘I don’t know. We can ask on the bus. Gosh!’ Billy tried to check himself, but he was going too fast. ‘We haven’t got any money.’
‘I have,’ panted Wilfred, behind.
‘Good old Wilf! Number seven to the North Pole!’
‘Where
is
the North Pole?’ Tessa’s pigtails flew out like Maypole streamers.
‘I don’t
know!’
‘It’s in the Arctic Ocean,’ said Wilfred, in his class-room voice. He was too far behind for them to hear, but he did not mind. If they were going to the Arctic Ocean, they were going to the Arctic Ocean.
People got quite tired, that September, of Mrs Abinger harping on Josephine’s friendship with the Moores.
‘Between you and me,’ Miss Loscoe, returning from shopping, told her mother, ‘I shall be quite glad when the elder boy and girl go back to boarding school. Then perhaps we shan’t hear so much of “Jo’s up at Chepstow Villas again,” or “Billy Moore was down asking for Jo before she’d even finished her tea.” Ellie lets her go out at all hours with those rowdy young nobodies – for what’s a Commander in the Navy, when all’s said and done? – yet the other evening, when I suggested taking Jo out with you and the chair as a treat, it was: “Jo always has to stay in and practise her letters after tea.” “Thank you very much,” I thought. “I can take a hint as well as the next person.”’
Miss Loscoe stood in front of the overmantel mirror, whose reflections were dim and wavy, like a sunless lake. She removed the pins from her hat and lifted it off carefully, straight up into the air so as not to disturb the mats of brindle hair that were coiled over each ear.
‘Ellie thinks she can advantage Jo by getting her taken up by such as the Moores,’ she went on, ‘but no good ever came of trying to fly above your station. If the Moores knew the half of what I know about the child’s history … I could tell some tales. Ellie is riding for a fall, that’s where it is, Mother.’
‘Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross,’ chanted Mrs Loscoe. ‘To the devil with the lot of them, I say.’ She was going through one of her phases when she disapproved of everything, even her food. ‘Don’t jolt my chair like that, Dot!’ She gnashed her gums angrily. She would not wear her teeth when she was in these moods.
“I’m only trying to push you to the table, Mother, for your tea,’ said Miss Loscoe patiently.
‘Tea – ugh! Don’t talk to me of tea!’ The cracked old lady
swept an arm over the table and knocked a few things to the floor.
‘You must have something, dear. You’ve hardly touched a thing all day. I’m sure I don’t know what you live on.’ Miss Loscoe picked up the bread, and put the bread knife out of her mother’s reach.
‘Everyone eats too much,’ grumbled her mother. ‘If more people did as I do, there wouldn’t be all this disease.’ Although she would not eat or drink anything, she sat hunched at the table, staring at her daughter’s every mouthful. This put Miss Loscoe off her tea, although she had only had a snack at lunch, as it seemed a waste to cook when her mother would not touch anything.
Mrs Loscoe had looked for a long time like a living corpse, and now her daughter too was getting thinner and more bloodless than ever, which did not stop her scouring herself with great quantities of herbal tea. The rent of their basement flat had been increased, and the price of many foods remained where the war had raised them. Neither of them had had any new clothes for a long time, and Miss Loscoe kept retrimming her hat, so that people might think it was a new one. She went less and less to the Corner Stores for groceries, and when she did, invented elaborate reasons for not buying tinned salmon, or taking margarine instead of butter. Mrs Abinger might have worried about Miss Loscoe on the down grade if she had not been so obsessed by Josephine on the up grade.
‘Anyone would think the Moores were the Royal family, the way you carry on,’ grumbled Mr Abinger. ‘I grant you, it gets the kid out of the way, but how do we know what she doesn’t get up to there? She looked at me very sly last night when I asked her why she was home so late.’
‘In Chepstow Villas, George!’ How could anyone get up to anything but good in Chepstow Villas? As well suspect misbehaviour in St Paul’s.
‘I don’t know that I trust those Moores,’ said George, dipping a licked finger into some spilt sugar. ‘Reactionaries. The curse of the nation. They got us into the last war, and they’ll get us into another, you’ll see, if either of us lives long enough with
trade in the crippling condition it is. The Navy! Grown men playing with boats … Now I ask you. I don’t fancy that kind of influence on my daughter. Even if she isn’t really my – ’
Mrs Abinger coughed loudly and jostled him, because Sidney was in the shop, dawdling over the last orders of the day.
‘Their house ain’t so wonderful, anyway,’ put in the boy, who was resentful that Jo was never at home nowadays after school to help him with odd jobs. ‘I seen into the kitchen when I deliver there. Messy great hole it is, and the back door bell don’t work.’
‘Fag ends, boy,’ said Mr Abinger augustly. ‘How many times must I tell you not to pick up other folks’ conversation?’
‘No wonder the deliveries take you so long,’ said Mrs Abinger, ‘if you loiter at every house, poking your nose into what doesn’t concern you.’
Sidney said half under his breath, so that they could hear or not as they chose: ‘I could tell some things about those precious Moores if I liked. I got eyes and ears, but I’m biding me time.’ He picked up a box of groceries and sidled through the door.
‘Shut the door!’ Mr Abinger roared after him.
Sidney put his weasel head back round the door, slid a look at them and repeated: ‘Yus, I’m biding me time,’ before he shut off the buzzer and sneaked away on the old gym shoes his mother had gone over streakily with black polish.
‘That lad is up to something,’ said Mr Abinger.
‘Nonsense,’ said his wife, who knew no worries if everything were going all right for Josephine. ‘He’s jealous because he quite fancies Jo himself. He’s got a sauce though, criticizing the Moores’ house when his own grandmother was turned out of the Buildings because of the state she kept her rooms. Jo has told me all about Chepstow Villas; not that she’s in the house much this fine weather. They go up to the Park most evenings, get up to some lovely games, she says.’
‘I wonder just what they do get up to in the Park,’ Mrs Moore said idly. She was lolling in Nanny’s room, at a loose end now that her husband had gone back to Greenwich, but so used to seeing Nanny work while she sat idle that it did not occur to her to take something off the darning pile.
‘Something they shouldn’t, I don’t doubt.’ Nanny held up a pair of Billy’s shorts. ‘Another hole fit to drive a coach and four through. And the dirt they pick up! Kensington Gardens was never such a place for dirt in my time, when I had them there every day with Baby in the pram.’ She could not be broken of the habit of referring thus to Wilfred when she reminisced, ‘I often wish those days were back when I had them under my eye,’ she said.
‘They were too much for you, Nanny. I used to get quite worried about you, and wonder whether we ought to have a nursery maid.’
‘This is the first I’ve heard about it.’ Nanny made her screwed up, sewing mouth.
‘I never got farther than wondering … I don’t know … the war … and money. And you managed. But I was glad when they got old enough to look after themselves.’
‘At any rate, they never played with street children in my day,’ said Nanny, who liked sometimes to play at taking offence, since her peaceable life provided no real excuse for any such emotion.
‘If you mean Jo,’ said Margery Moore, ‘she’s not a street child. She’s far cleaner and quieter than mine.’
Nanny held up the shorts accusingly. ‘I’m sure I do my best,’ she said, undiscouraged by the fact that Mrs Moore never noticed her mild umbrages. ‘But you’re not going to tell me, ’m, that the child isn’t very lucky to be in and out of a house like this as she pleases, and lovely games up at the Park with Ours.’ She spoke of the Moore children as if they were a Victorian regiment.
‘Lovely games … yes,’ mused Mrs Moore. ‘Children nowadays are lucky. We never had such lovely games. It was always French cricket, or organized Rounders. Well it will be for them, or worse, when their father gets back.’
The lovely games that Mrs Abinger and Nanny and Mrs Moore visualized so serenely did not take place in the Park at all, but in a derelict Army hut at the southern edge of the wastes of Wormwood Scrubs.
Sneaking about behind the prison, in hope of seeing their father’s face languishing at a barred window, Norman and Arthur had discovered this hut, half collapsed against the high yard wall. Breaking into it, and finding not only a soft earth floor, but a few rusty old gardening tools, the relics of some soldier’s attempt to make the Scrubs camp like home, they had only to look at each other, and their plan was formed.
Words were never squandered between them. A jerk of Norman’s head towards the bottom of the prison wall; a grunt from Arthur. Arthur had selected a spade with half a handle, which suited his natural crouch, and had begun to dig, slowly and steadily as an old farm labourer with timeless acres before him. Norman had seized a dirt shovel and set to work feverishly, flinging earth all round him, as if he expected to break surface in his father’s cell at any moment.
They had been digging for about a week when the Moores followed them out that Sunday to the North Pole public house, and tracked them across Wormwood Scrubs to the hut. The hole was nearly two feet deep, and the Goldners were in it digging, with Jo scraping out the earth for them like the hind legs of a terrier, when the Moores, with whoops of triumph, burst in through the crazy, splintered door.
‘Hullo, hullo, hullo!’ cried Billy, who read
The Gem
and
The Magnet.
‘What are you up to, chaps?’
Norman, recovering from the shock of thinking it was the Coppers, leaped out of the hole, brandishing his shovel, backed up by growls from Arthur.
Josephine clutched his leg. She did not want him to hit Billy. ‘No good hitting ’em Norm,’ she said sensibly. ‘They’ve seen now. They’ll only go and sneak to the Coppers.’
‘They won’t get a chance,’ said Norman menacingly, but he lowered the shovel. ‘What shall we do wiv ’em, Art?’ He jerked his head at the Moores, who had recoiled from their first surge and were watching the spade, ready to advance or flee. ‘Carve ’em up?’
‘Dror and quar’er ’em,’ gloated Arthur, stepping out of the hole as if to make a start.
This was the sort of exaggerated boasting that Billy
understood. He laughed, somewhat reassured. ‘You are asses,’ he said. ‘What are you doing? Why can’t we play too?’
‘It ain’t a game.’ Norman spat scornfully on the ground. ‘You don’t play at it. We’re on a big job, see, and we don’t want your sort hangin’ around.’
‘You’ve killed someone,’ suggested Billy, ‘and you’re burying the body.’
‘Oh dear,’ said his sister. ‘Ought we to tell the police? I’d rather help dig. Is it hidden treasure?’
‘Of course not,’ put in Wilfred. ‘They’re digging a tunnel to get their father out of prison, aren’t they, Jo?’
‘Did you tell ’em?’ Norman whipped round and jumped into the hole again, almost on top of her.
She squealed like a rabbit. ‘I never! Honest –!’
‘You might just as well let us help,’ said Wilfred going calmly over to the wall, picking up a fork and running a profossional eye over the prongs. ‘It’ll get done much quicker.’