Key to the Door (24 page)

The opposite rooftops were covered by snow-blankets made to measure. He thought of the Nook: saw larger snowflakes through the immediate curtain of his eyes burying doors and pigsties and even the house chimneys; then saw the chimneys without smoke and the dogs gone, the doors firm but guarding emptiness. Street lamps one at a time came on.

Undaunted at losing the first, he lifted his eyes to single out another snowflake. The storm thickened in silence. Crowds and crowds of soundless snowflakes elbowed and bullied each other out of the way in their hurry to escape from something in the sky that was terrifying them. He looked up, but couldn't see what it was, again losing the chosen snowflake.

He went back to bed, still seeing a sky full of white butterflies when he closed his eyes.

CHAPTER 12

Singing in the rain and walking up Alfreton Road one Saturday morning, Brian and his cousin Dave whistled the actual song that came from a wide-open radio shop as they stopped at a big window to wonder what they could buy. Dave carried the money because he was seventeen and, so he claimed, could therefore look after it better than Brian, and this was all right by Brian because if it hadn't been for clever Dave he wouldn't be staring in a pawnshop window with a half-share in eighteenpence, a fortune earned by searching for take-backable beer bottles on the tips and collecting a penny on each after washing them well in the tadpoled cut.

Dave was Doddoe's eldest, tall and curly-headed, with sunken cheeks and dark prominent eyes. His sharp face missed nothing as he scanned each window and (like a high-enough camera) took in the pavement from doorways to gutter—bending to pick up a threepenny-bit which Brian would never have seen but which brought their moneybags to one-and-nine. Jobless Dave wore long trousers ragged behind, a brown-holed jersey, and a pair of shoes that let wet in. Brian's clothes were ragged also, but his boots at the moment kept his feet away from the rain. They passed a secondhand furniture and junk shop, and Brian read whitewashed letters painted across the window:
GET YOUR GUNS FOR SPAIN HERE
. “Are they still fightin' in Spain?”

Dave nodded, trying as he walked along to disentangle two pieces of steel, a penny puzzle bought farther down the road. “How long will they go on fighting then?” Brian wanted to know.

“Till they all drop dead,” he was told. The road was wide and cobbled, bordered by scrapyards, toyshops, pubs, pawnbrokers, cheap grocery stores, the livewire artery for back-to-backs and factories hanging like clags on either side. People carried bundles to the pawnshop or sackbags to the scrapyard, or came up from town with untouched dole or wages in their pockets so that trading went on every day of the week.

Dave was fixed by the window of a radio shop. A wireless on show was dissected, and he explained how to make it work: a valve here, a condenser there, an impedance at such a place, fasten an aerial at that point, but Brian was bored because he couldn't understand it. “If I bought that owd wireless for five bob, I could fix it up,” Dave claimed, “and I bet I could sell it for thirty bob then.”

It stopped raining, and meagre sun shone on wet pools in the road. Buses came slowly for fear of skidding, and a man whose bike brakes didn't work dragged his boots along the ground when he appeared from a side street. Dave demanded: “Who's the two best singers in the world?”

“I don't know,” Brian answered. “I can on'y think o' one and that's Gracie Fields.” Dave walked on and said: “Paul Robeson's the best, and the next is Al Jolson. So don't forget.”

They looked at the glass-framed stills outside a cinema. “Would yer like ter goo ter't pictures s'afternoon? You ain't seen ‘G-men,' 'ave yer?” He said no, he hadn't. “It's a good picture. James Cagney's in it. About gangsters. It starts where he throws a pen at a fly and pins it to the door. Then a man's fixin' 'is tie in a mirror and the mirror gets shot to bits.”

“What time does it start?” Brian said, excited at these details.

Dave took the money from his pocket and began counting. “They wain't let us in for another 'alf an hour, so we'll 'ave summat t'eat fost.” He pointed out several shops across the road. “Go into that baker's and get two tuppenny meat pies, then go into the paper shop and ask for a buckanachure. The buckanachure will cost sixpence.”

Brian drew in his breath at the long word: “What's a buckanachure?”

“Nowt for yo',” Dave said brusquely. “Yo' can't understand yet what a buckanachure is. But just go in that shop, give the man sixpence, and tell 'im yer want a buckanachure. Understand?”

Brian muttered it aloud as he crossed the road: buckanachure, buckanachure, and said it to himself in the pastry shop: buckanachure, buckanachure, so that he wouldn't forget such a strange big word and wouldn't let Dave down by going back without whatever a buckanachure was.

The word seemed ridiculous when he stood in the silent shop. Newspapers hung all around, rows of murder books lined the wall at the back, and in the window he could see magazines with bare women on the cover, and bare men as well, like Tarzans in the pictures. When a man in shirtsleeves asked what he wanted, he slid the sixpence across. “A buckanachure.”

“A buckanachure.” He would have stood there repeating it till he dropped dead, for the word was engraved on his lips for ever. The man looked hard, then rummaged beneath the counter. “Who do you want it for?”

“My cousin,” Brian told him. Nosey bleeder.

“I hope
you
aren't going to read it.” He passed a green-covered paperback across the counter, let the sixpenny-bit fall into the till. Brian picked the book up as though he were a thief, walked out, and paused at the curb to look at it:
Book of Nature
—he said it to himself, then aloud:
Book of Nature, Book o' Nature
—Buckanachure—so it's a book about nature. He'd heard of the Book of Daniel and the Book of Job, but he didn't know there was a Book of Nature. He opened it and saw drawings he couldn't understand, but it seemed to be about science, and he thought Dave must be clever to want a book like this.

Dave snatched it from him, munched his meat pie rapidly and skipped through the book with avid interest. When the first unnatural edge had been taken from his curiosity, he slipped the book into his pocket and set to finishing his meal. “Do you ever read books?”

“At school,” Brian told him.

“Have you read
Dracula?”

“No. Is it good?”

“Yes,” Dave laughed, “it frightens yer ter death.”

Brian laughed also. “I'm goin' ter buy a book, though. It's called
The Count of Monte Cristo.”

“I 'erd that on the wireless,” Dave said. “A serial as went on for months, so the book'll cost a lot o' money.”

“I know, but I've bin savin' up for a long time. Whenever I get a tanner I tek it to Larker's down town, and the manager's savin' it till I get half a crown. Then I can 'ave the book.”

Dave was impressed by the purposeful method: “'Ow much 'av you got so far?”

“Two bob. I can fetch it nex' week if I get sixpence more.” Dave fleeced his pockets of every coin, looked them over shrewdly: “'Ere's threepence, Brian, I'll gi' yer the rest on Monday. I've got a lot o' rags ter tek an' sell, so I'll cum ter your 'ouse and give it yer.”

Brian could hardly believe it: weeks might have passed before the final elusive sixpence had come his way by pennies and ha'pennies. “Thanks, our Dave. I'll let yer read the book when I've got it.”

“No,” Dave said, “I can't read long books. Yo' keep it; if I take it to our 'ouse they'll use it for lavatory paper, or Doddoe'll write bets out on it. Anyway, I've seen the picture, so I expect it's the same as the book.”

He screwed up the meat-pie paper and threw it into the road. They talked about films and film stars, until a man began opening doors on either side, and a smell of cloth upholstery that had been locked up in the depths of the small picture-house all night wafted out into the street. Then the doors slammed and a woman went into the paybox. “Come on, Brian, we can goo in now and find a good seat.”

They emerged three hours later. Saucers of sunlight danced before Brian's eyes, and they ached from the shock of such a bright day, when in the cinema he had expected it to be equally dark without. A trolley-bus at Canning Circus swept them down one hill and up another, past Radford Station to Lennington Road, on which the Doddoes lived.

The long straight pot-holed street of newly built houses ended at a railway embankment. “They're all bleedin'-well Jerry-built, though,” Dave pointed out, his finger towards the doors from which paint was already peeling. “You have to prune twigs off your doors and windows every so often.” Three children flashed by on a homemade scooter, pram-wheels and a piece of board: “They'd better watch out,” Dave laughed, “or the means-test man'll tek it away”—as he batted the tab of the rear rider.

A tune from “Top Hat” was bursting from the radiogram as they went into the house, and Dave turned it down, so that Brian heard a pan sizzling from the kitchen stove. “Where you bin, our Dave?” Ada called accusingly. “It's about time yo' brought some money into this bleedin' 'ous.”

“I would if I could get some,” he said. “I'll tek them rags in on Monday and you can 'ev a few bob.” Ada was a good-looking blonde of forty, with six kids and one expected, boss of a family reduced by approved school and borstal—Bert having been taken to the former for lifting bicycle lamps, and Colin to the latter for impersonating a gas-meter man. The table overflowed with pots and half-eaten leftovers, and Dave nearly choked on a line of clothes strung across the room. “Look where yer goin', yer daft bleeder,” Doddoe said from the hearth, speaking for the first time.

Brian found a chair, sat, and watched fourteen-year-old Johnny mending one of his father's poaching nets on the other side of the room. Johnny was gaffer of the kids while Colin was in borstal, a self-appointed sergeant-major with meaty fists, and a sense of righteousness because he brought money into the house without stealing. He had done time at an approved school, and had learned to recognize authority and know what it meant to knuckle under to it. If you did as you were told at approved school the masters put you in positions of power over the other boys; and though Johnny could hold dominion by toughness alone, it was double-sweet and sure to have your power sanctioned by those above you. He was generous and good-hearted, though firm and inclined to bullying when his righteous will was disobeyed. He was Doddoe's favourite, though it wasn't acknowledged, and they rarely spoke to each other. But Brian felt an alliance of likenesses, so obvious in fact that it was recognized and commented on by others of the family, though beyond words to Doddoe and Johnny.

The unifying quality was one of fearlessness. Unable to get work and having a family to feed, Doddoe was absolutely convinced that it was right to go poaching in order to get food. It was more a question of good and evil, for while food in the form of rabbits was running on four legs around estates of the rich, who anyway had all the grub—and more—they needed for themselves, then Doddoe was right and fearless in his pursuit of it. He went on his bike most nights into the country, dressed in an army overcoat and wearing a cap, a knapsack slung over his shoulder to carry nets and whatever fur-covered victims ran into them—of which he would have plenty by dawn. A cosh sticking from the pocket of his topcoat was useful for knocking rabbits on the head if they struggled too long in the net, or for swinging at the gamekeeper should it come to a fight.

Johnny was equally strong, though in lesser ways because still young. Brian remembered a time when a pair of shoes dropped off Johnny's feet and he lacked an overcoat in snow-covered months. Johnny had made the best of things: knocked the high heels from a pair of his mother's, put on one of her fur-collared coats she had cut down for him, and walked off well-protected to school. No boys had laughed, but his teacher made a reference to his woman's attire and Johnny, the words cutting into him like knives, couldn't hide his bitterness from Ada that night. Nevertheless, he went to school clad the same next day and halfway through the class was astounded to see his mother walk into the room. “Your name Martin?” she demanded, standing by the teacher's desk. He was even more stunned than Johnny at the buxom fierceness of blonde Ada. “Yes,” he said, “what do you want?” Ada's fist landed hard across the side of his face. “That'll teach you to tell our Johnny off because he's got no clothes”—and walked out of the room. That same day the teacher took him to the nearest shop and rigged him up with a new pair of boots. “It just shows what a lot o' good you can do when you stick up for your kids,” Ada remarked before breaking into a laugh when Johnny clomped into the house that night.

Doddoe sat by the table, bare feet stuck on the range for warmth, a basin of tea in his hand. He turned and greeted Brian: “Hello, yer young bleeder, what are yo' doin' 'ere?” He was out of work and his hard grizzle-haired head wasn't in the best of tempers. Brian was on the point of answering when Dave, just back from a scrounge in the kitchen, said: “I brought 'im 'ome, dad. He wants summat to eat.”

“He'll get nowt at this bleedin' 'ouse,” Doddoe said. “We ain't got enough to feed our bleedin' sens.” And he turned back to staring in the fire. Ada came in with a plate of bacon and tomatoes, and Dave sat down to eat. “How are you, Brian, my owd duck? Is Vera all right?”

“Yes.”

“Has rotten Harold bin on to 'er lately?”

“No.”

“I'll bet you're 'ungry,” she said. “Are you?” His answers were short, discouraged by Doddoe. “Well, just wait five minutes and I'll get yer summat.” Dusk filled the room with gloom and shadows, and Dave, chewing a piece of bread from his hand, stood up to switch on the light. “Yer'd better put that bleeder off,” Doddoe said, without turning round. “We'll have the man 'ere soon to collect some money for the radiogram and we've got nowt to give 'im.”