London Pride (16 page)

‘What will you do?' Joan asked. ‘Where will you start?'

‘I shall write to Uncle Gideon in Greenwich.'

She wrote that very minute, taking pen, ink and paper up into the bedroom for a bit of privacy.

‘Dear Uncle Gideon,' she said.

‘We have got to get out of the cottage by the end of the week. There has been a row. Please could you find us somewhere to live in Greenwich. Mum has a pension and Joan will go to work.

‘I am sorry to trouble you.

‘Your ever-loving niece, Peggy Furnivall.'

Aunt Maud pulled a sour grimace when she came downstairs with the letter but handed over the address almost at once.

‘Greenwich,' Peggy said as she wrote the word. ‘Where is it, Aunt Maud?'

‘Well bless me, don't you know that,' Aunt Maud said. ‘It's in London. Right in the heart of London.'

‘London!' Peggy thought with a wonderful rush of relief and hope. But what a marvellous thing! If Uncle Gideon'll only help us we can all go back to London. I'll take the poor cat.

She was aware in one part of her mind that her mother wouldn't approve, but she pushed the thought away. It was high time the poor thing was rescued from that awful Josh and if they were going to London it would be all right in the end.

‘You won't get much joy from Uncle Gideon,' Aunt Maud warned as she put her address book back in the dresser. ‘Keeps hisself to hisself, he do.'

But this time she was proved wrong. That Friday, on the very day they were supposed to be leaving, ten minutes after Grandpa had grumbled off to work, and just when Joan and Peggy had given up hope of answer, Uncle Gideon came down to the farm, in person and his employer's butcher's van.

‘He give us a lend of it,' he said, breezing into the kitchen all red-faced and bulky and dependable. ‘Good bloke our Mr Pearson. ‘Lo Maudie. You kids'll have to sit on the floor. There's only the one seat next to the driver. You packed are you, Flossie? I got you a place in Paradise Row.'

Mum had drifted down the stairs wearing an old dressing-gown and a bewildered expression.

‘Oh gor' blin' ol' Reilly!' he said, with exasperated affection. ‘What you doin' in that rig? I promised I'd be back by three o'clock.'

Mum was gaping like a goldfish. ‘Back?' she said. ‘Where we going, Gideon?'

‘Greenwich,' her brother said.

‘Nobody told me,' Mum complained.

‘Your Peggy wrote to him,' Maud said. ‘Have you really got 'em somewhere, Gid?'

‘Only if they look sharp,' Gideon said, ‘so get your skates on, Flossie.'

The realization that her impossible problem had actually been solved lifted Flossie's spirits into a thistledown gaiety. ‘I can't guarantee skates,' she said, ‘but I shall have my clothes on in two shakes of a lamb's tail, you see
if I don't. Oh Gid, it is good of you to look after us. Can you take a trunk?'

‘If it's packed in half an hour,' Gideon said, grimacing at Peggy and Joan. ‘Two minutes more an' I'll go without you.'

It took three quarters of an hour to pack the trunk but it was done with such cheerfulness that it hardly seemed a minute. The china tea-set had never been unpacked and neither had the dinner service or the cutlery, so they were lifted out of the trunk still in their packing cases, dust and all, and carried off into the butcher's van straight away. Then the three children set about gathering up their belongings. Flossie had never been any good at packing, and now her inefficiency was a positive talent. She threw things into the trunk with cheerful abandon.

‘It's only an old saucepan,' she cried, and ‘Don't bother folding. We can iron when we're there. Poke the flat irons down the corners. That china dog can go in me spare shoes.' They were all so happy it was as if they were going on holiday. Even Joan was smiling and that really was a wonder because she cried so much these days.

While the last few things were being muddled into odd corners of the trunk and Aunt Maud was saying they'd all have to sit on the lid to get it shut, Peggy took one of Mum's old hat boxes from the cupboard under the eaves, picked up a jug half full of milk from the larder and a saucer from the dresser and sneaked off to the barn to find her cat.

It was crouched on one of the crossbeams watching the straw for mice, but when it saw Peggy it stood up at once, stretched and came leaping down.

‘We're going away from here,' Peggy told it, stroking its back as it lapped the milk. ‘Your next kittens are going to be Londoners and none of them are going to be drowned. It's all going to be quite different now.' And while she was talking her mind was busy working out the best way to get the cat into the box before it could realize what was happening or start fighting.

When the saucer was clean she picked the cat up in her arms the way she often did, then holding it firmly with both hands, and still murmuring, she lowered it quickly
into the box. The cat was instantly alarmed and began to growl, clawing the sides of the box, and Peggy's restraining hand, in a frantic attempt to scrabble out, but Peggy held on and jammed the lid on tight just before its head could push up and out. She was panting with effort and there was a long angry red scratch on her left hand but the job was done. She tied the lid down with an old piece of rope, poked air holes in the lid with a stick and then picked up the box and strode off with it to the van, which had now been driven off the path and over the rough grass and was standing incongruously right in front of the door.

Mum and Aunt Maud and Uncle Gideon were struggling out of the cottage with the trunk, and Mum was still giggling even though Aunt Maud was cross.

‘All aboard,' Uncle Gideon called out cheerfully. ‘Soon be off.'

So she climbed into the van. It was dark inside and smelled of raw meat and dried blood. There was dirty sawdust on the floor and there were flies everywhere, crawling the walls and buzzing and bouncing about the ceiling.

‘What've you got there?' Baby said from the shadows. She and Joan were sitting on the packing cases.

‘The cat,' Peggy said, settling her swearing burden in the corner furthest from the door.

‘You're not bringing a cat!' Baby said in surprise.

‘Yes,' Joan said firmly, understanding and supporting at once. ‘We are. And anyway it's nothing to do with you.'

‘I'll tell Mum,' Baby started. ‘She'll be ever so …'

‘You would, wouldn't you?' Joan said. ‘You're a horrid little thing sometimes.'

‘You do,' Peggy said, sitting down beside the horrid little thing and flexing her fingers menacingly to make her meaning quite plain, ‘an' I'll pinch you all the way to London.'

The trunk was heaved aboard. Baby kept a wary eye on Peggy's fingers and said nothing. The doors were closed, leaving them with the flies in a horrid foetid twilight. Mum and Uncle Gideon climbed into their seats, making the van rock as though it was going to fall over sideways. The engine coughed and spluttered. Aunt Maud called goodbye. They were off.

Apart from Mum's incessant chatter, it was a quiet journey, once the cat had stopped swearing. Joan was feeling depressed and guilty and Peggy and Baby were too busy with their thoughts to want to talk much.

Baby had spent the last week trying to puzzle out the meaning of all the odd things that had been happening in their family ever since that letter arrived. She couldn't do it because nobody had explained anything to her, not even Peggy, but she'd gleaned enough from half sentences and meaning glances and innuendo to be aware that Joan's sin – and it was a sin, Grandpa had said so that awful time in the churchyard – Joan's sin had something to do with letting a man touch you – and she knew that because Aunt Maud had warned her about it.

‘Don't you never let a man touch
you
, gel, never,' she'd said, sternly. ‘It ain't worth it.'

And Baby had given her solemn promise. ‘No, Aunt. I won't.'

And now here they all were running away from Tilling-bourne because ‘everybody knew'. But what did they know? That was the question nobody would answer. In fact that was a question that was so awful she couldn't even ask it. Men must be terribly dangerous to cause all this, she thought. And yet they didn't look dangerous. Grandpa was frightening when he got in a temper and shouted. And Josh wasn't very nice when he kicked the cats. But most of them looked soppy really, especially when they were dressed up for the pub. It was all very worrying. Sins you weren't supposed to commit and you didn't know what they were. Men all round you who were dangerous and you didn't know how they were going to be dangerous, so you couldn't protect yourself. Well one thing, she thought, I shan't let any of them touch me. Ever.

Over in the other corner of the van, Peggy was thinking too. She was on her way back to London at last so she should have been excited and happy, but she wasn't. She was glad they were going, of course, but what she was feeling was really no more than a vague satisfaction, like a shadow in the back of her mind. Over and above that she felt weighed down with all her newly-accepted responsibilities. It was all her doing that they were moving to
London. What if it was the wrong thing? She'd taken over the care of her mother, which she'd had to do because she'd promised Dad and there wasn't anyone else to do it. Joan couldn't help her yet because she was still so unhappy. And Baby was worse than useless. What if she couldn't manage to look after them all properly? Mum could be ever so difficult. And then there was the cat. It was stifling hot in the van and the poor thing was still tied up inside the hatbox. It could be suffocating for all she knew and yet she couldn't untie the box and let it out, because it would be frightened and it would probably run all over the place and then she'd never be able to get it back in the box again to carry it safely out of the van and into the house.

Sighing, she clung to the edge of the trunk, as the van jolted over the pot-holes and the flies buzzed angrily at being disturbed. Never trouble trouble, till trouble troubles you, she reminded herself. It's silly to worry before you have to. We'll be in London soon and then everything will be all right. I wonder how far it is?

‘I can't live here,' Flossie squealed. ‘Where are we?'

The van had jolted to a halt in a short narrow street somewhere north of Greenwich Station. There wasn't a butcher's shop in sight, just a corner shop and a terrace of eight plain houses on one side of the street and a pub and a wood-yard on the other.

‘Paradise Row,' her brother said, grinning at it. ‘Number six's yours.'

Number six was towards the middle of the terrace. It was exactly the same as all the others, with a plain green door and one plain green-framed window on the ground floor and two identical green-framed windows on the floor above.

‘But that's a house,' Flossie protested. ‘I thought we was living with you an' Ethel.'

‘No,' Gideon said, putting on the handbrake like the end of an argument. ‘You're not. So don't even think it. Two rooms over the shop! There's barely room for us.' And he climbed out of the van.

‘I can't live here,' Flossie repeated, making no attempt to follow him out. ‘Not with my nerves. I shall be all on my own.'

‘Oh come on, Flossie,' Gideon said, walking round to the back of the van to open the rear doors. ‘It's a fair rent. There's no bugs. Nice clean house. You got the girls for company. What more d'you want? Out you get, girls. You're here.'

The three girls stepped out into the sunlight, blinking like owls.

We're in London now and no mistake, Peggy thought as her feet touched the cobbles, and excitement bloomed in her mind like an opening rose. She could smell it was London. All that lovely soot and smoke in the air, and horse-dung and dust and leather and old clothes, and the familiar reek of trams, hot oil and brass polish and dusty steel. There was even a faint whiff of the river somewhere nearby.

Smoke rose from the chimneys like ribbons of tattered brown gauze to drift and waver before it melted into the blue of the sky, and above the tall roof of the pub at the end of the road she could see the top of an elaborate church tower, white and outlandish as a wedding cake. But best of all was the noise of the place, the rumble and clatter of traffic, a train chuffing, woodsaws buzzing, dogs barking and lots and lots of busy London voices. Oh it was lovely!

Their arrival had gathered the usual crowd of rubbernecks, women in grubby aprons, a horde of tatty children and half a dozen mongrels, all tremulous tails, tense paws and inquisitive noses. The sooner I get this poor cat indoors away from that lot, she thought, holding the box close to her chest, the better.

Then she noticed that there was a face nodding at them from one of the upstairs windows of number six, a round amiable face with a snub nose, false teeth, small dark eyes behind a pair of round, iron-grey glasses and two rows of sausage-shaped iron-grey curls encircling a head as neat as a skull-cap.

‘Mrs Geary,' Uncle Gideon explained, hauling the trunk towards the open doors. ‘She's sub-lettin' to your Mum. House is hers by rights. She lives in the front bedroom.'

‘D'you want a hand with that, mate?' an elderly man offered, settling his grey cloth cap back on his head after he'd wiped the sweat from his forehead with it.

‘Very good of you,' Uncle Gideon said. ‘Ta.'

‘Needs four,' the man said, signalling to two of the boys in the crowd. ‘Name of Allnutt. Two doors up. Come on lads. Lend a hand.'

The head above them was smiling and nodding, its double row of curls bouncing vigorously. ‘Come on up,' it called. ‘Where's yer ma?'

So they came on up, which was easy enough because the house was small and compact and built to a very simple plan with a scullery, a narrow hall and two rooms on the ground floor and two similar rooms above. The staircase rose precipitately through the middle of the house and parallel with the street, and having no direct light it was almost as dark as the stairs in Grandpa's cottage.