London Pride (22 page)

‘Because they kept killing her kittens and I couldn't bear it.'

For a few seconds there was a thinking silence in the kitchen. The clock ticked, Tabby purred, the kittens made tiny squeaking noises as they suckled. And it seemed to Peggy that Jim's presence was protective, and she was glad he was there.

Finally Flossie spoke. ‘If that isn't just like you, Peggy Furnivall,' she said, and there was affection in her voice as well as exasperation. ‘Well you'll have to feed 'em and look after 'em, that's all. You can't expect me to do it.'

‘Oh yes,' Peggy promised happily. ‘I will. They won't be any trouble I promise.'

And they weren't. They were a source of daily delight.

For the next six weeks Peggy watched them, enthralled. They seemed to grow by the hour, opening dark blue eyes to look at her, learning to stagger about on those tiny ineffectual paws, becoming plumper and more fluffy as their fur thickened, and finally developing full sets of charming whiskers that stuck out above their eyes and on either side of their pretty faces like fine white cotton threads. When they started to play, hiding behind chair-legs, and leaping out to stalk imaginary prey or scuttle after screwed-up bits of newspaper, it made her warm with pleasure just to watch them. Tabby was an excellent mother too, despite all her early miseries, although feeding such a healthy family reduced her to a scraggy leanness that Peggy hadn't seen in her before.

Fortunately Jim Boxall kept her regularly supplied with fish heads and as many pieces as he could scrounge, and in return, Peggy looked after his books, receiving them into her care as soon as his father got home from work or the pub in the evening and handing them back to him every morning on the way to school. He was very useful when the time came to find homes for the kittens, for he seemed to know the family history of all the many eager applicants.

‘Not there,' he would say when he was consulted. ‘They had a dog once an' never fed it.' Or, ‘Yes, they'll do. Their mum's ever so kind.'

By the time half-term arrived Peggy had accepted him as her principal ally, after Megan Griffiths, in the necessary childhood conspiracy against difficult adults.

‘I'd like to give him a Christmas present,' she confided to Joan. ‘He's been ever so good with Tabby an' everything.'

‘What would you use for money?' Joan asked, ever practical.

Peggy had to admit she hadn't got any.

‘Well there you are then,' Joan said. ‘So you can't, can you?'

But it would have been nice just the same. ‘I could have bought him a book. He's ever so fond a' books.'

‘What sort a' book?' Joan asked.

‘One like that,' Peggy said, nodding in the direction of Jim's latest library book.

‘
Kidnapped
,' Joan read, opening it and scanning a couple of pages. ‘What's he reading this for? It's about Scotland. I didn't know he was interested in Scotland.'

‘He's interested in everything,' Peggy said, admiringly. ‘He reads two books every week.'

‘I don't know where he finds the time,' Joan said. ‘It'ud take me a month a' Sundays to get through a thing like that.'

But reading was as much a pleasure to Jim Boxall as following the progress of her kittens had been to Peggy. This was partly because it gave him such a feeling of power and competence to be pitting his wits against the great writers, but mostly because he had found a mentor.

On his third visit to Greenwich library he'd been browsing among the fiction shelves, wondering what on earth he should chose, when there was an odd scraping sound behind him, and looking round he saw Mr Cooper in his wheelchair being pushed towards the shelves by one of the O'Donavan boys.

‘Whoa back,' Mr Cooper said to his assistant. ‘There's our Jim. Which one are you going to pick eh, Jim?'

Feeling rather foolish Jim admitted that he wasn't quite sure, yet.

‘Have you read any Dickens?' Mr Cooper asked.

‘Only bits of
David Copperfield
at school.'

‘Try
Oliver Twist
,' Mr Cooper said. ‘Make yer hair curl, that will.'

So Dickens' classic was found and chosen, and after they'd both had their books stamped, Jim offered to push his neighbour to the picture palace, since that was where he said he had to go.

‘Much obliged,' Mr Cooper said and added, grinning at the young O'Donavan boy, ‘you cut off home before you crack yer jaw with all that yawning.'

They talked about books all the way to the cinema, and when they parted Jim offered to wheel Mr Cooper to the library whenever he went there himself, ‘which looks like being once a week if I'm to do as Mr Gurton says'.

‘Take him serious,' Mr Cooper said. ‘Nothink like reading. You take my tip. I've done a powerful lot a' reading since the Great War. Opened my mind, it has. Well I tell you, if I'd known everything I know now when the war started, I'd never ha' gone rushing off to join the colours. Never in a million years. Take Dickens for example. He can tell you more about poverty in five pages than all the politicians in the country could do in five years. Even if they knew about it, which I very much doubt. You read as much as you can, son.'

‘There's so many books in that library, that's the trouble, Mr Cooper,' Jim said. ‘They make my head spin.'

‘Don't know where to start, eh?' Mr Cooper said. ‘Is that it?' And when Jim nodded. ‘Well then I tell you what. What say we make a bargain? If you'll push me down to the library once a week, I'll tell you what you want to know about the books. How would that be?'

So another bargain was struck. One pair of young hands to push the wheelchair in exchange for as much information as a thirty-year-old head could provide.

It was very useful information. Over the next few months Jim was introduced to tales of adventure by Robert Louis Stevenson, Raphael Sabatini, Victor Hugo and Sir Walter Scott. He read a play by George Bernard Shaw which he didn't really understand and poetry by Keats and Shelley which he didn't understand either but which sounded lovely and poetry by Wilfred Owen, which he understood very well indeed with a searing pity for the suffering of the soldiers the poet described, and he'd just borrowed a novel called
Mr Kipps
by H G Wells when something happened one morning in May that made him wonder whether you really could learn everything you needed to know from books.

The three Furnivall sisters woke that Tuesday morning to an extraordinary silence.

‘Why is everything so quiet?' Peggy said. She could hear all sorts of tiny sounds, sparrows chirping in the garden outside, the blind trilling in the chill breeze of early morning, even the trickle of water falling back into the basin where Joan was washing herself. It was like being back in the country.

‘Don't know,' Joan said, bending forward to splash the soap from her face.

‘There's no trains,' Baby said. ‘That's what it is.' The railway station was less than a hundred yards from Paradise Row and the noise of trains chuffing and clattering was such a perpetual accompaniment to their street life they'd long since ceased to notice it. Now there was no sound of it at all, no doors banging, no feet running, no whistles shrilling, nothing.

Peggy was thinking about all the other sounds that were missing. ‘There's no trams either,' she said. ‘How funny! Why has everything stopped?'

Mum didn't know and hadn't noticed. ‘Has it?' she said, pouring out the tea. ‘Well never mind, eat your bread and butter.' She still called it butter even though they never rose to anything better than margarine these days.

‘Perhaps Mrs Geary'll know,' Peggy said.

But they'd slept rather late that morning and there wasn't time to talk to Mrs Geary. So it was Megan who
enlightened them on the way to school.

‘It's a strike,' she said. ‘Everybody's stopped work. Dad says.'

‘Will there be school?' Peggy hoped. The streets were full of children all heading towards the gates, so it didn't seem likely.

‘Oh yes,' Megan said. ‘There'll be school. Bound to be.'

And sure enough the teachers were all there, every single one of them, and the school day wasn't changed a bit, which was rather a disappointment. But the silence continued. It was really rather eerie.

That afternoon when school was over, Jim Boxall wheeled Mr Cooper down to the library and all the other kids in Paradise Row walked through St Alphege's churchyard into Church Street to see what was happening, but nothing was. There were gangs of dockers all in their dirty work-clothes mooching about between the Mitre and the Eight Bells, smoking cigarettes and watching the road as though they were worried about what they might see in it, and down by the Empire Cinema on the corner of Bridge Street, there was another crowd, this time of tram drivers and conductors, all standing very close together and some of them reading leaflets. The children were amazed at how wide the street looked without any trams, and how important the shops seemed. But the emptiness was unnerving and it was chilly standing about.

‘Is it going on long?' Megan wanted to know.

Nobody knew.

‘What's it for?' Peggy asked. But none of them knew the answer to that either. So after a while as there was nothing happening and nothing to see and rain was beginning to spit down upon them, they all drifted back to Paradise Row.

Joan came home that evening laughing because Mr Margeryson had gone off to work on a bicycle. ‘He didn't half look soppy!' she said. ‘Ol' Miss M was ever so cross. You'd think the railway had come out on strike on purpose to upset her. She went on and on about it all day. And then the milkman came, and milk's gone up tuppence a quart. She wa'n't none too pleased about that neither. Oh it's been a day an' a half!'

The strange happenings continued. The next day as Peggy and Baby were eating their dinner there was a sudden hullabaloo from the direction of Church Street. Despite Flossie's protests the two girls ran off at once to see what it was. This time the street was full of people and bristling with anger. There was a tram in the middle of the road beleaguered by a seething mass of cloth caps and punching fists and flying stones. Most of its windows had been smashed and there was a policeman on the running board hitting out with his truncheon and roaring at the driver.

‘Start up!' he was shouting. ‘Start up! Run 'em down if you have to!'

What a horrid thing to say! Peggy thought, and she looked at the driver to see whether he would do as he was told. He looked very well-fed. More like a nob than a tram driver. And he was wearing beautiful clothes, kid gloves and a classy check jacket and a most expensive-looking hat. But he didn't seem to want to run people down. He was trying to inch the tram forward, and he was doing it very badly so that the long vehicle bucked on the rails and swayed quite dangerously from side to side. After a few seconds it gave such a wild lurch that the crowd leapt away from it in case it struck them, and at that it was off, humming along the rails and shedding broken glass as it went.

‘Gosh!' Baby said. ‘Fancy that!'

‘I wonder what'll happen next,' Peggy said, looking at the shards of broken glass littering the road. ‘Someone ought to sweep that up or the next horse to come along'll get its hooves cut.'

The street was full of men hot from their fight, milling about, shouting and wild-eyed, reliving their victory.

‘I don't think I like this, our Peggy,' Baby said, edging backwards away from the kerb. ‘Why is everyone so cross?'

‘I don't know,' Peggy said, and added sensibly, ‘I vote we keep out of it.'

But that was easier said than done. On Saturday morning Mum sent them both shopping as usual, and Megan went with them because she had errands to run too.
It was a dark morning, already drizzling with rain. The cobbles were slippery and the unused tramrails black with greasy moisture, so the three girls walked at the trot, eager to be out of the weather and away from the strike as quickly as they could. The shopping took longer than usual because the market was crowded and prices were up whichever stall they visited. They hunted in vain for cheaper goods and Peggy even queried the new prices, but the answer was always the same. ‘It's in short supply, dearie. Can't get the stuff through, you see, on account a' this strike.'

‘I shall have to leave something out,' Peggy said, when she'd bought the eggs her mother had ordered and the cheapest bag of flour and half a pound of loose sugar. ‘I shan't be able to buy soft soap as well as potatoes.'

Baby agreed. ‘We can put off washing for a bit,' she said, ‘but you got to eat.'

Megan just had enough money to cover her purchases, but not a ha'penny left over. ‘I don't know what my Mum'll say,' she worried, gazing into the emptiness of her purse.

‘Better get back quick,' Peggy advised, ‘In case there's another tram.'

So they picked up their shopping baskets and marched out into Church Street. And got a shock.

The street was full of armoured cars, a whole long convoy of them spinning over the wet cobbles on their solid wheels, all painted khaki and pointing their cannon at the crowds of strikers who lined the street to watch them, sullen with fury. They were escorting about a dozen lorries, grimly driven and with labels on their sides saying ‘Food Only' and ‘Food Supplies', and there were mounted police clopping along on either side of the column, caped against the rain, and two lorry loads of troops with rifles.

‘It's like a war,' Megan said. ‘That's a cannon sticking out the front a' that one.'

‘They won't fire it, will they?' Baby said nervously.

The sight of the soldiers and the anger and tension all round her put Peggy into such a muddle of emotions that she couldn't answer for a moment. She was remembering her father, striding along beside the State Coach in his
beautiful red uniform, smiling at her as he passed, and the guardsmen at the Ceremony of the Keys, so protective and splendid, with the Yeoman Warder shouting ‘God Preserve King George' and how safe she'd felt being looked after by them. This was like a nightmare. It was unreal to be watching British soldiers pointing guns at her neighbours. That wasn't what they were for, them or their guns. They were for fighting the enemy. And it was just as unreal to see the dreadful state her neighbours were in. Their faces were so dark and so distorted with rage they were almost unrecognizable. Like Grandpa Potter when he was in one of his terrible tempers. And in a deeper and more terrified level of her mind she was wondering what on earth she would do if they started firing those awful guns. Where could they hide out here in the street? Would people let them run into their shops and houses for protection?