The Dreaming Suburb (10 page)

They would often go for weeks without knocking at doors, or pulling up carrots and radishes from the allotments, but they never tired of the string-and-parcel game. As dusk fell on the suburb they would select a new house-brick from one of the building sites, and make it up into a neat brown-paper parcel, attach a thin piece of twine to one end, and lay it carefully in a pool of lamplight, just outside one of the boundary walls of the big, detached houses, in Outram Crescent, or Lucknow Road.

Then, from their ambush among the laurels, they would sometimes wait for as long as twenty minutes for a passerby. Always the gullible pedestrian would pause, bend, reach out for the parcel. Then they would jerk the twine, and the parcel would slide out of the lamplight, and the pedestrain would either straighten up and sheepishly make off, or switch his attention to his bootlace, as though he had never seen the parcel in the first place.

Occasionally they would vary this routine by substituting a purse for bait. They would then pull hard at the line, and whisk the purse right out of sight. This was always more rewarding if the victim was a woman, for a woman usually
screamed, and Boxer, almost inarticulate with mirth, would gurgle; “Set it again, set it again! Whad'ysay, Berni; whad'ysay?”

Bernard would always pretend to think before answering this question. Finally he would shake his yellow head, and propose a variation of the sport. “Let's do the criss-cross,” he would suggest, and Boxer would bubble over at the prospect of fastening loose strings to letter-box knockers, on each side of the Avenue, in order to watch exasperated neighbours summon one another in rapid succession, as the string of Number Eighty-Four tugged the knocker of Number Seventy-Three immediately opposite, and the opening door of Number Seventy-Three rattled the knocker of Number Eighty-Two.

In spite of these and other routine annoyances, the Avenue folk were fond of the “Unlikes”—a name they acquired when their twin sisters were old enough to be labelled “The Likes”. Perhaps the true secret of their popularity lay in the boys' unswerving devotion to one another. This appealed to the womenfolk, most of whom were resigned to violent squabbles between their children. Sometimes they would quote the twins as an example of how brothers ought to behave one to another.

This relationship had its origin in an incident dating back to the early childhood of the pair, an incident that came to have an almost religious significance to Bernard, the introvert of the pair. For Bernard, at the age of six, had saved Boxer's life, and had guarded the secret ever since.

It happened in the hard frost of February, 1920. The twins' favourite playground was “the Lane”, that leafy left-over from the Old Manor's home farm, that now led to the golf-club headquarters.

The Lane was marked out by long lines of elms, and where it curved, about half-way down, there was a large duckpond, shallow in summer, but all of eight feet deep after winter rains.

During a short, sudden frost, the duckpond froze over, and the elder Carver twins were the first to discover this exciting fact. Louise was early riser, and the Carver boys were
always abroad nearly an hour before the other children of the Avenue had finished their Saturday breakfasts.

On this particular morning, they went out early to comb through the long grass near Number Four green for lost balls. They seemed to be much luckier than most children in stumbling upon almost new Silver Kings in this particular area. Possibly their good fortune had something to do with their keen vision in following the flight of a ball, but more probably it was related to the fact that a birch coppice ran close to the green, and swift movement, in and out of this coppice, was screened from the eye of approaching golfers by the big bunker, hard by.

However, on this occasion the twin did not reach the green, but paused at the bend of the Lane to test the strength of the ice on the duckpond. Boxer hesitated on the edge of the water, and looked across at Bernard, who had moved round to the opposite bank.

“Whad'ysay, Berni?” he asked, as usual.

Berni gave a crossing his sanction.

“Try it, Boxer,” he said, and watched tensely as his brother inched across the frozen surface, arms outspread like a tightrope performer, mouth set in a tight, nervous grin. He was exactly halfway across when the ice gave way. He staggered, and then, urged on by Bernard, made a run for it, slithering towards the high brick coping, here Bernard stood reaching out to grab him.

The ice split in every direction. Boxer fell on his knees and lurched down into the brown water, his hands flailing for support, and grasping, in the final split second, a thin, tenuous twig, that hung low over the water from a hazel clump on Bernard's immediate right. Miraculously, the twig held, for a mere ten seconds, but this was time enough for Bernard to act. With the speed and precision of a young baboon, he flung himself at the elm branch immediately above him, and swung out, hand over hand, to the spot where Boxer was shoulder deep in jagged fragments of ice. He reached him just as the twig gave way, and Boxer made a despairing grab at his brother's ankles. They hung there, one below the other, for the better part of a minute, and then Bernard, with a
strength he could never afterwards believe that he possessed, drew himself high enough to get his chin over the bough, and prevent his grasp being torn away.

An inch or less at a time Bernard edged himself towards the parapet, dragging the floundering Boxer in his wake. He had covered more than half the distance when his will could no longer command his fingers and he fell, the two of them rolling together in the soft, churned-up mud under three feet of water.

When Bernard got his head above it, he discovered that he was alone. Boxer was doubled up at his feet. With a sudden access of strength he bent under the water and grasped his twin by the collar of his overcoat, dragging him bodily with one hand towards the bank while, with the other, he smashed at the ice, clearing a passage.

Somehow, they won the firm mud crust, where Boxer opened his eyes and was promptly sick. They lay together gasping for a few minutes. Then Bernard got slowly to his feet.

“We got to make a fire, Boxer, and we got to keep this a secret.”

They made their fire, dried themselves, and kept their secret. Very occasionally Boxer would refer to it, looking sideways at his twin as he did so:

“Remember the pond, Berni?” And Bernard would reply: “Shut up about it, Boxer.” His own reaction to the few moments of drama, and its immediate aftermath, was something he was not even prepared to share with Boxer; and even had he wished he would have found it impossible, then or later, to put into everyday speech the curious sense of responsibility towards his twin that had been born during those few terrible moments, when Boxer's weight was dragging him down into the depths of the pond. For this, in a strange and final way, became Bernard's dream—to watch over Boxer, to look out for Boxer, to make sure Boxer survived by every means, by any means. Nothing else was of the smallest importance.

2

When the twins were nine they left the local kindergarten and crossed the Lower Road to attend Havelock Park Elementary School.

Havelock Park was a dull, red-brick Council School that stood, like a vast public convenience in about an acre of asphalted yard. The playground was surrounded by gaol-like railings.

It was a joyless place, with high-ceilinged classrooms (“septic tanks” one L.C.C. Inspector called them), each housing some sixty boys, and partitioned off from a central hall as vast, and as chilly, as a French cathedral.

The school served a tough neighbourhood, one of the outer ring of suburbs, where many of the houses were well on the way to becoming new slums. The overworked staff, faced with the hopeless task of teaching sixty children apiece, and keeping out of the way of a tyrannical headmaster, were a shambling, dispirited lot, who lived on only in the hope of drawing a pension.

Mr. Adam Little was one of those headmasters who had chosen headmastering as a profession because of the unrivalled opportunities it afforded him of getting his own back on healthy humanity. All his life he had been a chronic suffer from dyspepsia, and now that he was nearing retiring age he was constantly attacked by severe stomach cramps, that caught him mostly at night, and left his abdomen tender to the slightest pressure.

To guard against this tenderness he had developed a curious manner of walking, his body bent slightly forward, and his left arm crooked horizontally across his stomach, as though to ward off the agony that would result from a possible collision.

As he grew older, and the cramps became more frequent, Mr. Little changed from a sour nag into an active bully, and ultimately into the sort of man who, a few years later, would have qualified for a gas-chamber post under Heinrich Himmler.

Every day he had to have human sacrifices, boys or colleagues,
either or both would do, and when victims did not present themselves he went out to look for them, or sat in his study framing new and complicated school rules that would be certain to snare one group or the other.

Boys and staff, particularly female staff, lived in terror of his sudden appearance, and one and all prayed nightly that he might be taken from them, by L.C.C. whim, by illness, by forced retirement, or by swift and bloody death, they cared not which.

Under the sway of Mr. Little, Havelock Park School became a latter-day Dotheboys Hall. The headmaster spent several hours of his working day prowling along the corridors, and taking sly peeps through the glass partitions and wainscot chinks. When he saw, or fancied he saw, an undetected misdemeanour within, he would spring into the room, haul the culprit on to the teacher's dais, and proceed to thrash him unmercifully with a short cane that he carried in his trouser leg, like a concealed swordstick.

This erratic behaviour on the part of a headmaster, who should have been safely insulated in his study at that hour of the day, enraged the pupils and terrified the staff, who were usually called to account for their poor supervision as soon as the punishment was over.

At the time Boxer and Berni joined Havelock Park School a stream of prayer was ascending from the district, beseeching the Almighty to put an end to the tyranny, and the news that Mr. Little had been pulped under a No. 93 'bus in the Lower Road would have resulted in genuine mafficking on the part of his boys and colleagues. Even Mrs. Little would have been consoled by the fact that now, at last, she would be relieved of her special cooking, and be able to enjoy an unbroken night's rest.

At length God answered their prayers, and His agents in the matter were none other than the Carver twins, who earned thereby a reputation in the district second only to Jack Cornwall, the boy hero of Jutland, whose gun could be seen any fine Saturday at the Crystal Palace War Exhibition.

During the ten-minute morning break at Havelock Park, hundreds of Head-haters were turned loose in the vast playground,
and encouraged to stretch their little limbs, and air their little lungs, in the anticipation of another hour's spell in stuffy, overcrowded classrooms. They took full advantage of the interval. The scene in the playground at ten minutes to eleven each morning resembled an Asiatic revolution, and the din that rose from the enclosure could often be heard as far away as the Lower Road tramway depot.

For ten glorious minutes the boys fought and rolled, kicked and cavorted, without the smallest hindrance, whilst Mr. Little sat, as though carved in stone, in the porch of the main entrance, a gold watch in one hand, and a small, silver whistle in the other.

On the stroke of eleven he would raise his whistle to his mouth, and blow three short, piercing blasts. This was the signal for the entire school to cease fighting, rolling, kicking, and cavorting, to cease, in fact, all movement whatever, even eye-rolling, on the very second that the first, shrill blast cut across the uproar.

The effect of this signal was very curious to behold. Housewives in their front bedroom, opposite the area railings, often paused in their window-cleaning to watch, for it was like nothing so much as the sudden shutting down of a boiler factory, staffed by midget maniacs. One moment there was nothing but sound, and frantic movement; the next, there was silence, and utter stillness. For anyone to move a finger was to earn a sound thrashing on the spot.

At the close of break on the historic morning, Bernard and Boxer were in the throes of ten-sided game of hi-cocko-lorum, played against the railings, and the twins' team was jumping when the whistle sounded.

Boxer had taken off about three seconds before Mr. Little's whistle touched his lips, and when the blast reached the railings he had just landed, a clear four backs from the point of take-off.

The boy on whom he landed collapsed under the impact, and fell forward on his knees, where, having heard the whistle, he remained like a small Mohammedan in prayer. Boxer rolled sideways, and then he too lay quite still, for this instantaneous transition from violent action to immobility
tickled his humour, and Mr. Little's whistle always produced one of his harsh, inward chuckles.

Unfortunately for Boxer, Mr. Little's eye happened to be focused directly upon this group and it seemed to the headmaster that Boxer had not only flagrantly disobeyed his edict, by moving after the whistle, but was now actually laughing at him.

With a little grunt of fury, he jumped up, ploughed through the grotesquely frozen groups between his seat and the railings, dragged the grinning Boxer to his feet, and cuffed him across the side of the head with a vigour that sent Boxer staggering against the railings. Boxer immediately covered up, and this gave Mr. Little an opportunity to draw his cane. Whipping it from his trouser-leg he raised it above his shoulder and aimed a heavy cut at Boxer's knuckles.

The blow never fell. In a flash the cane was seized from behind, wrenched from the headmaster's grasp, and flung high over the railings into Cawnpore Road.

A long drawn-out gasp greeted this astounding action.

All over the yard the frozen groups relaxed. Raised arms were lowered, outstretched legs were slowly set down, and almost imperceptibly, boys began to converge on the group against the railings. With strained faces, and wildly beating hearts, the cowed five hundred waited breathlessly to see what would happen next.