Opposite the Cross Keys (13 page)

Now it was the old josser's turn. There was a bang and a scooping sound, as of a cardboard carton being pushed over a rough floor. Tins and bottles rattled against each other. The old josser sounded as bad-tempered as the rats.

Gingerly, I let myself down, barefooted, from the sofa on to the gritty floor, on to those lowlier forms of life which, rightly or wrongly, I imagined to be scuttling about there. I felt my way to the chest of drawers and dragged open the drawer where Mrs Fenner kept her cutlery, such as it was, feeling around until I located what I wanted.

The next part was harder: back past the sofa to the front door, which I unbolted, and out on to the pavement. The night air was an unexpected balm after the smell within, but there was a loneliness about the country dark which set me shivering with more than cold. The only thing consoling was the road, the road that led home to St Giles, shining in the starlight like a ribbon of black taffeta.

From outside, the noises from the derelict cottage sounded distant, scarcely noises at all. I squatted down, gravel pushing up between my toes, and slipped Mrs Fenner's tin opener under the door.

I awoke to a drab half-light and Mrs Fenner cutting bread at the table. The fire was red, the kettle steaming on the hob. Four bottles of assorted shape filled with tea stood on the table.

I awoke with eyes stinging. Mrs Fenner was making onion sandwiches, thick-cut rings between the thick bread. She saw that I was awake and reached across the table with a slice of bread for me to take.

‘Press it over yer eyes, it'll stop the watering. Then eat it up without messing about. It's all the breakfast you're going to get, if we aren't to get there too late. Way you were sleepin' I thought you were going to be there till Doomsday.'

I took the bread and followed her instructions. It did indeed make my eyes stop watering, even if it did make the bread soggier than I could have wished. I swung my legs out of bed, almost into the pink chamber pot with
Evening Exercises
printed on it in gold. The chamber pot had already been well used.

‘Get on with it,' Mrs Fenner urged. ‘Shy? You in't the on' y person with a bum.'

She went across to the fire, lifted the kettle off the hob and brought it over to the table, where she removed the lid and, with a spoon, fished about for half a dozen eggs which had been cooking inside. These she distributed, one to go with each sandwich, making up five packages wrapped in pages of the
Daily Telegraph
. The sixth portion she placed to one side, presumably for Ellie's dinner.

‘You tell your pa, now, to go back to the
Daily Mail
. Can't get on with this what's-it-called. I always say you can't beat the
Daily Mail
for sangwiches.'

We went out into the early morning. On the other side of the road the Cross Keys was barely visible in the mist. Overhead the rooks sounded muted, bunged up with catarrh. Only the hardness of the road beneath my plimsolls was real, everything else was a dream, deeper than any which might engulf me on Mrs Fenner's sofa. I felt damp and chilled and breathless with happiness.

Breathless, too, with trying to keep up with Mrs Fenner, who was hurrying along at a great pace. We were going plucking, she informed me, over to Randall's at Stratton Strawless. Although no hands were actually taken on before eight o'clock, if you weren't there well ahead of time you might as well never have started.
They
would be there first, you could depend on it, grabbing all the places available.

‘Not that there's a bleeding one of 'em plucks half as clean as we do, us from the village. Leave on enough feathers to trim a hat, that lot. We do that, we'd be docked an' no next time. But them – not a word said! It's that bloody foreman, silly ole fool. 'Fraid they'll put the evil eye on him if he says anything.'

I had no need to ask who
they
were. Only one kind of people in the vicinity of Salham St Awdry attracted that particular inflection, that curl of the lip. The gypsies. Their encampment, in a bit of scrubland half-way to Salham Norgate, the next village along the road, looked quite inviting with its brightly painted caravans, fires of sticks crackling under cauldrons, and the horses and ponies hobbled close by.

The men and women who lived there were less welcoming, regarding all outsiders with closed faces and, with a flaunting insolence that was next thing to a smack in the face, crossing to the other side of the road to avoid passing close by anyone not of the tribe. Even the gypsy children, tumbling down the road bright with laughter, evaporated through the hedges if they saw you coming.

‘Hedge-rooters! Diddikoy! Pickers an' stealers!' declared Mrs Fenner.

On our way we had been conscious, in the thinning fog, the strengthening sun, of others taking the same road as ourselves, other village women, middle-aged, soberly pinafored, similarly off to a day's plucking. ‘Morning,' we greeted them, not slowing down; and ‘Morning,' they responded, showing no ill will when we pulled ahead.

After we passed the gypsy encampment the atmosphere was less amicable. The women on the road now were younger, wearing flowered headscarves and patterned aprons over voluminous skirts. Many of them carried babies, slung in a shawl in front of them or carried on their backs like Red Indian papooses. The babies were sallow and dark-eyed, not one of them so much as whimpering.

The gypsy women travelled in small groups, shouting to each other as they went. Whether it was the deadening effect of what remained of the mist, or the overwhelming strangeness of the little cavalcade, I could not make out a word they said.

‘Are they talking English?' I asked Mrs Fenner.

‘Double Dutch, I shouldn't be surprised.'

As we drew near to Randall's, in the narrow loke
¹
which led to the plucking shed, things got distinctly nasty.

‘Who you think you're shoving?' yelled a young woman who seemed bowed down with the weight of a fat boy-child with flaming red hair.

Mrs Fenner, ready to use her elbows to guard our places in the queue, restrained herself nobly when she saw the size of the infant.

‘That one looks big enough to carry
you
,' she commented, yielding ground, ‘'stead of the other way round.'

‘Big enough to give you a poke in the kisser, you silly ole arse-hole,' was the gracious acknowledgement of the good deed, as the young woman forged ahead, unregarding.

Mrs Fenner went red. The gypsy women were all around us now, smelling, not unpleasantly, smoked – cured like kippers, I suppose, from sitting over so many camp fires. They looked so hard and brown and Mrs Fenner so soft and red that I suddenly felt frightened, and ventured, in a feeble attempt to defuse the situation, ‘At least we know now they speak English.'

Mrs Fenner, heaven be praised, dissolved into one of her great and wonderful laughs.

‘And do it so ladylike too! It do your heart good to hear it.'

The plucking shed was a long, low building with windows to which clung feathers and less identifiable debris from chickens that had long since gone to the great roost in the sky. At one end was a brick copper with the wooden cover off, so that one could hear, if not see, the water bubbling within, and watch the steam rising up to the metal beams in the roof and falling back in a continuous dew.

Trestle tables, with benches either side, took up the best part of the space, the gypsies sitting on one side, the village women the other: some forty or fifty in all. It looked as though the foreman, who did the hiring, had hit upon a strict equality of numbers as the best compromise between getting the birds plucked properly and averting the curse of the Romanies.

By mid-morning the shed was hellishly hot. The day was summery, the copper kept well stoked. Each bird was immersed briefly before being passed to one of the pluckers, its time in the boiling water too brief to do much in the way of loosening the feathers, but at least it killed off most of the assorted lice which had called that once brave plumage home. Since the chickens carried their guts still inside them, and would until they were spilled forth on to some kitchen table, a longer and more effective bath would have shortened their shelf-life beyond what even the refrigerator-less housewife of the Twenties was prepared to put up with.

The foreman and his two male helpers tended the copper, removed the sacks filled with feathers, kept the women supplied with birds, and removed the plucked chickens, exchanging each for a metal tag which was to be turned in at the end of the day as evidence of how much pay was owing. Before the morning was half-gone, two of the gypsy women came to blows, one asserting that the other had stolen two of her tags. They clawed at each other like wild things, the men looking on with broad smiles, nobody else taking any notice: such entertainments cost money in precious plucking time lost. Off came the headscarves, revealing bleached-blonde heads that looked comically incongruous above the weatherbeaten faces. The shed resounded with blasphemies.

After a while, during which a fair quantity of the yellow hair was disengaged from its anchorage, the two contestants simmered down, and minutes later were shouting amiably to each other as they settled afresh to their plucking. There was about them a virtuous air, an awareness of having made a contribution to the proceedings.

The air was rancid, full of dust and feather particles that fell in a constant drizzle on the heads and shoulders of the operators. Everyone was coated with grey. When I suggested to Mrs Fenner that the gypsy women were wise to wear headscarves and we should have covered our heads similarly, she brushed feathers from her mouth with the back of her hand, and exclaimed, ‘What! An' look like a bloody fortune teller!'

As a child, I did not rate a seat at the table. I sat on a sackful of feathers on the concrete floor, with a chicken between my knees, having a go at the stumps Mrs Fenner hadn't had time to get at. At first the sight of the dead heads, the filmed eyes, floppy combs and sad, naked necks was more than I could stomach, and I was quietly sick under the table, taking care that none of the vomit got on to the chicken I was currently working on.

But then I found a friend.

‘You do it this way,' said a voice at my side, and I had my first sight of Nellie Smith.

Nellie Smith was a scrawny child with a thin, pointed face which looked at the same time both young and old. I never knew how old she was – I doubt whether she knew herself – or if she were younger than me or older. She had enormous dark eyes rimmed with flesh which was darker than the rest of her sallow face – eyes which, even when alive with mischief, still regarded the world with a melancholy unredeemed by hope. Her hair, round which she wore a bandeau of rag, was black and curly and hung down below her shoulders.

She had on a woman's dress, fussy with too many frills, and pinned up at the hem with safety pins. Even so, it reached nearly to her feet, its excess width belted in with a piece of string knotted at the waist. Its sleeves flopped over her bony wrists. On her feet, sockless, she wore a pair of boots several sizes too large for her. The little miss from Eldon House thrilled to be speaking to a girl who looked the way Nellie Smith looked.

The girl put her dirty thumbs together, the nails bitten to the quick, and pressed them down on either side of a stump of feather filled with some black secretion, embedded in the pallid corpse of the chicken. The fragment of quill jumped out smartly, the horrible goo with it.

‘Don't pull,' said the girl. ‘Press. That's the trick of it.'

I tried it myself, and found the method worked beautifully, if that was the right word to apply to such an occupation. I was about to thank the gypsy girl for her help when ‘Crikey!' she exclaimed, and dodged under Mrs Fenner's skirt. A tall man with pince-nez had come into the shed and was speaking to the foreman who had his hands spread out in elaborate disclaimer about something or other. The man began to walk along the length of the trestle tables, up one side and down the other. There was something chilling about his passing, and the gypsies and the village women alike fell silent, afraid of they knew not what.

To my dismay, the man stopped and stood looking down at me. He gave a little nod of satisfaction, as if he had found what he was looking for; took a notebook and fountain pen out of his jacket pocket. Then he took another look at me, a proper look this time, and his expression soured with disappointment.

‘Chickenpox!'

He put the pen and notebook away, ramming them into his pocket with unnecessary force.

I vouchsafed timidly, ‘I can't go back to school till the scabs drop off.'

‘You don't have to tell
me
that!' The eyes behind the pince-nez became suddenly sharp and suspicious and I thought, he's noticed the glue. But all he said was, ‘I've had no notice of any case of chickenpox in the village school.'

‘I expect that's because I don't go to the village school. I go to Eldon House in Norwich.'

‘Eldon House!' Now the man looked completely floored, not to say disbelieving. ‘What on earth are you doing here if you go to Eldon House?'

Mrs Fenner spoke up.

‘She's staying with me, Mr Nosy Parker, not that it's any of your business. Still, if you want to sit down an' lend us a hand with these here birds while I'm talkin', I'll be happy to squeeze up an' make room an' tell you how such an amazing thing comes about. If not, mister, bugger off an' try somewhere else. Here in St Awdry's we don't think much of dirty old men who go about making conversations wi' little girls.'

‘Madam!' the man roared. ‘I am the school attendance officer!'

‘Oh ah?' Mrs Fenner sounded as if she did not believe a word of it. ‘In that case, go and attend, and let folk as han't got time to dawdle about get on wi' making an honest living!'

When the man had gone, face puckered, Mrs Fenner bent down, lifted her skirt and commanded, ‘You c'n come out now, you cheeky mauther.'