London Pride (32 page)

‘What I would like,' Lily Boxall said one particular airless evening, ‘is to go down to the seaside and sit in the sea right up to my chin. Suit me a treat that would.'

‘Well why not?' Mr Allnutt said. ‘We could all go down. Bank Holiday Monday. We could take a charabanc. Needn't cost the earth if we was to all club together. What d'you think?'

Once it was said they could all see what a marvellous idea it was. Providing they could afford it.

‘Would kids be half-price?' Mrs O'Donavan asked with understandable anxiety.

So they clubbed together, kids half-price, and the charabanc was hired and they went to Brighton, singing all the
way in their open-topped wagon as it trundled between wooded hills and the long dry Weald of brown cornfields and sun-baked meadows. And Joan and baby Yvonne came with them because they were ‘family'. It was a proper treat, especially as nearly three quarters of them had never seen the sea before except at the pictures. And Brighton was a wonderland with all those little kiosks along the promenade selling shrimps and cockles and whelks and jellied eels, and pubs roaring on every corner.

‘London by the sea,' Mr Allnutt said, as they climbed out of the charabanc on the high promenade. After the dust and stink of Greenwich this place was so clean and bright, with the white paint of the huge hotels gleaming behind them and the railings along the promenade as blue as the sky and two piers like something out of a fairy-tale. ‘London by the sea.' He was twice the size with the pleasure of the outing and the thrill of his successful planning.

The O'Donavan kids were shrill with excitement. ‘Can we go on the beach, Ma? Can we? Can we?'

So the party divided, men to the pubs and women and children to the pebbles, where they found another row of kiosks built in the arches under the promenade, where they were selling cheap tin buckets and spades, and sticks of rock and Indian toffee like pink cotton wool.

‘Gaw! What a place,' Lily Boxall said. ‘Look at all the people.'

The roads and pavements had been crowded enough but there were so many people on the beach they could barely see the pebbles. Every inch of space between the promenade and the edge of the sea was covered by some body or other, standing or strolling or sitting on the stones. Some were even spread out on their backs fast asleep, as though they were in bed. It was as if the entire population of London had come down to the seaside for the day.

‘Let's paddle!' Pearl said, heading off towards the sea.

So the Boxalls and the Furnivalls edged themselves an inch or two of foreshore, and while Flossie, Mrs Geary, Mrs Roderick and Mrs Boxall guarded the bags, the younger ones stripped off their sandals and headed for the water.

It was luxurious, beautifully cooling after the heat of the
journey and lukewarm when you got used to it, like a huge salty bath that you didn't have to fill or empty. Pearl and Lily and Baby tucked their dresses in their knickers and waded out until the water was above their knees and Joan took all the baby's clothes off and let her wallow in the water in chortling nakedness. But Peggy went for a swim.

As soon as she'd been sure they were really going on this outing Peggy had treated herself to one of the new knitted swimming costumes. It was years since she'd been for a swim, not since Tillingbourne, and she knew she might have forgotten what to do, but she was determined to try, just the same.

Now, after struggling out of her clothes and into the costume inside an awkward tent made by two towels held up by Mum and Mrs Geary, she picked her way over the painful pebbles and strode out into the sea. And of course she hadn't forgotten. She could swim as well as ever. And the touch of the water, silky against her skin, brought back so many remembered pleasures, the sensation of speed as her thrusting legs propelled her through the water, the rhythmical splashing she could hear in her wake, the sight of her hands and arms flashing pearly-white against the green, the sun warming her face and shoulders when she finally stood up to catch her breath, throwing back her head and shaking her wet hair, so that water drops spun from her in a dazzling shower.

Which was how Jim Boxall saw her as he walked down the beach to join his sisters. It stopped him in his stride with an upsurge of desire that was as strong and sudden as it was unexpected. Peggy? he thought. Could that really be Peggy swimming? He'd had no idea she could swim. Nor that she could look so beautiful.

‘Come an' join us,' Lily yelled at him. ‘It's lovely. Ever so warm.'

So he rolled up his trousers and joined them, and got splashed for his pains so that his shirt clung to his chest and his dark hair was soon as wet as Peggy's. They paddled until Joan said Yvonne was beginning to feel cold to the touch and then they all staggered back up the pebbles to dry themselves while Peggy disappeared inside her tent to change back into her cotton dress again. And
he wanted her all the time.

‘I'm starving,' she said, when she emerged from the tent and she began to rub her hair vigorously with her towel.

‘You would be,' Baby said, arranging herself on her towel ready to sunbathe.

‘We'll get some shrimps,' Jim offered, hoping she'd accept and the others would stay where they were.

To his annoyance both his sisters took him up on his offer and Baby came too. When the shrimps had been bought and he suggested a walk along the promenade, they said they wanted to go on the pier. So off they all trooped, eating and giggling, to sample the delights of the hall of mirrors, the helter-skelter, what the butler saw and a new machine called a ‘love meter' on which you could ‘measure your sex appeal'. Baby spent five minutes squeaking and protesting before she would submit herself to the test and then walked off in a huff when the machine pronounced her ‘harmless'.

‘Let's go back on the beach,' she said. ‘I'm sick of this silly pier.'

So to Jim's considerable pleasure, Baby and his sisters went giggling back to the beach and he and Peggy were able to go for the walk on their own.

They climbed the hill of an upper promenade, heading east and gradually leaving the crowds behind them, eating their shrimps as they strolled. The view from such a high vantage point was spectacular. They could see both the piers and the entire length of the promenade below them and the people on the beach were as small and dark as a swarm of ants.

But Peggy was mesmerized by the sea, spreading before them, vast and green and endless.

‘I never thought it'ud be so big,' she said.

‘You've seen it in the pictures,' he said. ‘Must have.'

‘Yes,' she agreed. ‘But it's not the same.' At the pictures you saw a dark heaving mass, hardly worth looking at. But this was very different. She leaned her arms against the railings and gazed at it, trying to find words to express what she felt. It was so beautiful, all that gorgeous greeny-blue water, so still and peaceful and yet powerful too, sparkling all over with little flashes of sharp white light as
though someone had sprinkled it with diamonds.

‘It makes me think of a piece of Shakespeare we had to learn at school,' she said. And she tried to quote it. ‘ “This precious stone set in a silver sea.” Or something like that.'

‘ “This demi-paradise”,' Jim said, quoting it for her.
Richard III
was one of the plays he'd studied in his first course at the evening institute.

‘This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war.

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in a silver sea

Which serves it in the office of a wall

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.'

She was most impressed by his learning, but sensible as ever, asked, ‘Will it?'

‘Will it what?'

‘Protect us. Like a moat.'

‘Don't know,' he admitted. ‘I haven't thought about it, to tell the truth.' And he wasn't thinking about it then either. He was enjoying the sight of her bare arms, her bare warm rounded arms, leaning along the railing, rousing him most pleasurably for the second time that day. In fact he'd been in an almost continuous state of desire for her ever since he'd seen her swimming. It was as if she'd been transformed, as if she wasn't Peggy Furnivall his next-door neighbour, the girl he'd known nearly all his life, but some rare gorgeous creature ripening in the sun, a water-nymph or a goddess or a …

‘I could go a cup of tea,' she said, smiling at him. ‘Shrimps don't half make you thirsty.'

‘We'll get one,' he said. But he didn't move.

‘Good,' she said. But she didn't move either.

‘There's a good film on at the Empire this week,' he said. ‘Would you like to see it?'

‘Who's going?' she said, still easy and lazy, looking out to sea.

‘Well,' he said. ‘I thought you might like to come with me.'

‘Just you?' she said, looking at him quizzically. ‘Are you asking me out?'

He realized he was feeling nervous, almost anxious. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘I am.'

She smiled at him again, surprised but pleased. If she accepted, this would be her first date. Fancy her first date turning out to be with Jim Boxall. But why not? They were both nineteen now. She'd just had her nineteenth birthday. They were old enough. And there'd be no harm in it. ‘Yes,' she said. ‘All right. Ta.'

He was filled with delight, as if he'd won a great prize. ‘Come on,' he said seizing her hand and pulling her away from the railing. ‘Race you back to the others.'

It was his third surprise of the afternoon that she beat him with yards to spare. I'm going to take her to the pictures, he thought, escorting her into the cafe. I'm actually going to take her to the pictures. If it's all right we might go every week.

But the Fates had other plans for Jim Boxall and Peggy Furnivall.

On Tuesday morning when Jim Boxall went back to Warrenden Brothers after the Bank Holiday he found the workshop buzzing with anxious talk and no work being done.

‘What's up?' he asked his fellow apprentice.

But the boy didn't know. ‘Foreman said to wait,' he told Jim. ‘Not to start or nothink, just ter wait.'

‘Sounds bad,' Jim said, and foreboding clenched its fist in his belly.

It was bad. They could see that as soon as the foreman came back. He looked as though he'd shrunk and his face was grey. ‘Can't wrap it up,' he said. ‘The firm's going bust. There's no new orders come. This one's the last.'

‘How long d'you think we got?' one of the older men asked.

‘Two, three weeks,' the foreman said. ‘They'll close down gradual.'

‘Can't yer do nothink?'

‘Fer Chrissake Percy, I can't
make
work. I only wish I could.'

They accepted his answer and his news dully. In two or three weeks they would be unemployed. They'd been half-expecting it for over a year, and talking about it for several months, but even so there was an awful finality about being told. In two or three weeks they would be on the scrap heap. It was shattering news. They set about their work that morning, listless with defeat.

At the end of the day the foreman had a quiet word with his two apprentices.

‘You're young yet,' he said to the boy. ‘You ain't done two years, have yer, so my advice to you would be ter try something else.'

‘Like what?' the boy said dully. ‘Course there's masses a' jobs round here. I don't think.'

The foreman ignored his misery and his sarcasm. What could he say to either?

‘It's you I'm sorry for,' he said to Jim. ‘Being so near an' all. How long you done?'

‘Five years,' Jim said. Five years of grinding effort in the heat and stink, of burnt hands and cut fingers and bone-aching exhaustion, five years from the first humiliation of being greased in to the last humiliation of being sold out, five years for nothing.

‘I'll see you get a good reference,' the foreman said.

‘Thanks,' Jim said, being polite because the foreman was trying so hard. Not that it would help him get another apprenticeship or even another job. And if he didn't get another job he wouldn't be able to afford any more evening classes. And just when he'd started on his third course, which was Economics and really interesting.

The unfairness of it kept him numb all through the day. He worked mechanically, saying nothing. It wasn't until he was home and out in the yard sprinkling the lavvy with Keating's powder and flushing out the drains with Jeyes fluid the way he did every evening, that his rage burst through. He hurled the milky fluid into the drain with such force that it splashed up the wall. ‘Bloody sodding God-awful world!' he swore.

‘What's up?' Peggy's voice said from the other side of the fence.

‘Lost my job,' he said briefly, looking up at her. ‘Sorry about the French.'

‘That's all right,' she said. ‘You swear all you like. I don't mind. You got a right to swear.'

Then they both realized that their outing to the pictures might be affected, and neither of them knew what to say, he because he didn't want to call it off, she because she didn't want to embarrass him.

‘These drains are awful,' she said. ‘If it don't rain soon we shall be stunk out the house.'

‘This time yesterday we was at the seaside,' he remembered. ‘Down to earth with a vengeance today.'

‘Yes,' she agreed, picking up her can of Keatings. ‘If only it wasn't so hot.'

‘We're still going to the pictures,' he said. It was half statement, half question and she answered it as such.

‘Yes. Course. We could go Dutch if you'd like.'

The idea of asking her to pay for her own ticket appalled him. ‘No we couldn't,' he said stiffly. ‘I asked you, so I'll pay.'