The Dreaming Suburb (12 page)

1

BY
the autumn of 1923 the families of the Avenue had shaken down and adjusted themselves to patterns they were to maintain, with little variation, throughout the decades between the wars.

The households that had lost menfolk on the battlefields and on the high seas, had ceased to mourn them. The injured had crept from the hospitals, to lick their wounds, and look for part-time employment. The unpensioned survivors, like Jim Carver, had joined in the struggle for a full-time job with a living wage. All along the Avenue the war dead had lost their individuality, and merged into a six-figure total, their photographs revered for an hour or two each November 11th, then put aside on occasional tables, and what-nots, to be taken down and dusted during a spring-clean, or when visitors in the drawing-rooms asked polite questions about the
bearded sailors, and bayonet-brandishing warriors in puttees and field-service caps.

“Who was that, Florrie? Was it your husband?”

“No, my brother, Bert. He was drowned on the ‘Creçy', at the start of it. Ever such a nice chap Bert was. D'you take sugar, dear?”

There were so many other things to worry over, and gossip about—unemployment, the Sinn Fein outrages, the Thompson-Bywaters crime, the rise of Rudolph Valentino.

Jim Carver was away on removal trips all day, and often for two or three days at a stretch. He did not look around for a second wife; for one thing he had Louise to care for the family, and for another he was now wedded to politics, and spent most of his spare time at political meetings.

One of the drivers at his depot was an active member of the Labour Party, and had talked Jim, hitherto a lukewarm Liberal, into joining his local branch.

Having once put his hand to politics, Jim applied himself to them with the same quiet doggedness that characterised everything he did. He never missed a committee meeting. He was always at hand to distribute leaflets, and to support speakers at street-corner gatherings. He took the trouble to study facts and statistics and, although a shy, halting speaker on the soap-box, he found he could usually silence hecklers by quoting a string of figures in a quiet, authoritative tone.

By the noisier members of the group he soon came to be regarded as a useful and highly dependable comrade. He had the great merit of believing everything written down for him in the party brochures and handouts. His sharp lesson in the helplessness of the unorganised manual worker, during the first post-war slump, was not easily forgotten, but the work he carried out for the cause of Labour was done without any expectation of reward, or personal aggrandisement, but simply because he had imagination, and a kind heart.

In addition, at the back of it all, was the memory of the dead boy on the bank, for by this time the scrutiny of countless pamphlets had convinced him that competitive capitalism could only mean another war, and any system of government was preferable to one that made such a horror remotely possible.

Inside the framework of his political work he was an active supporter of the League of Nations, and his main theme, in such speeches as he made in support of more spectacular demagogues, was always that of unquestioning support of the League, as the one means available to mankind for bringing about the Millennium.

He was happy enough, with his unexacting job, and his earnest, if woolly political outlook. His domestic worries were few, for Louise was a better housewife than his wife Ada had ever been, and his meals were always on the table when he wanted them, while the younger children seldom intruded into his thoughts.

Louise was always at hand, with a clean towel, and his neatly darned underwear. Archie, he hardly ever saw. Boxer and Bernard were in bed when he went out in the morning, and playing in the street when he returned to wash, and change for a meeting. Judith, he kissed absentmindedly now and again, or passed her the top of his boiled egg, when she stood expectantly beside him at high-tea. The girl-twins never came downstairs at all when he was at home, except on Sunday mornings, when Judith pushed their perambulator as far as the “Rec”, and Jim was asked to manoeuvre it along the narrow hall and over the step to the front path.

For the rest he lived remote in his dream of the Brotherhood of Man, with his steady gaze fixed upon the day when Labour would obtain a majority at Westminster. Then, if at all, would be the time to sit back secure in the knowledge that Pandora's Box had been double-locked, and cast into the Atlantic depths. Then would be the time to enjoy life as it could be lived, and devote less of his energies to the conversion of theory into practice.

Archie, meantime, was fully occupied with his own dreams, and these were of a somewhat more practical nature.

Employment at various provision shops, from the time he was fourteen, had taught Archie Carver, a valuable commercial lesson. This was simply the conviction that, to make money
all
the time, one must deal in food. One could expect quick returns in many other spheres, but not one of them (with the possible exception of funeral furnishings) could be relied upon to yield steady profits come war come peace,
come boom come slump, come glut come dearth. Food, only food, was the one commodity people could not go without, even if shortage of houses compelled them to live in homemade shacks, and shortage of money sent them scrambling to jumble-sale counters, and junk-shop marts for clothes to wear, and beds on which to sleep.

During the last two or three years of the war, Archie had been astounded at the lengths to which people would go for sugar, butter, and tinned meat, for sauces even, and other items down on the stock-lists as luxuries.

He was a young man who was determined to have money, yet there was sufficient of his father in him to make him prefer earning it honestly, and this despite his brief and successful essays in the making of money on the side, as at Coolridge's.

In short, he was determined to have a shop of his own. Once he had that, everything else would follow—car, comfortable flat, women, holidays abroad, security.

He did not crave money to buy power. Abstract power did not interest him, but what did, what interested him a great deal, was power to indulge his appetites, to go where he liked, to eat and drink what he fancied, to acquire, for as long as she amused him, any pretty girl who caught his eye.

His interlude with Rita Ramage had whetted his appetite for women, preferably sophisticated women, and it was a source of continual irritation to him that, as the employee of anyone else, he would never have the means to buy their company for long enough to make them need him for his own sake, the way Rita Ramage had needed him.

He was confident, however, that once he had a shop of his own, and its attendant source of steady profit, he could indulge himself to the full, not only in this respect, but in any other respect to which his fancy inclined him.

The thing to concentrate upon, therefore, was a small business, one that could be picked up for a hundred pounds or so. A year's hard work at his own counter, with no employees to raid the till, or lose a customer through insolence or incompetence, and his life's ambition could be realised before he was twenty-five.

Following his dismissal from the stores, immediately after the shameful business of Rita Ramage, Archie's dream looked a very long way from being realised. He had over ninety pounds put aside from his wartime tips at Coolridge's, but grocery-hands were notoriously ill-paid, employers had a helpless pool of unemployed to draw upon and, now that everything was in general supply, he was unable to supplement his thirty-two-and-sixpence a week by any sideline.

It would be folly, he reasoned, to sign on with another chain-store for the same sort of wage. By this time he had no illusions at all about the future a chain-store offered its counter-hands and storemen, even the cleverest among them. The managership of a small branch was the best he could hope for, and that meant hard work for forty years, on a salary rising slowly to something like four hundred a year. Archie at twenty-one had ceased to think in terms of anything under a thousand a year, and he had never heard of a branch manager earning that amount, or anything like it Besides, a branch manager worked all of twelve hours a day, and was lucky to manage a week's out-of-season holiday each year. This was not Archie's idea of security. It led but to the grave, via retirement, at sixty-five, on a four-pound-a-week pension.

Archie was not a victim of the post-war neurosis of the unemployed, with an uncertain future. He wanted his fun and frolic now, or next year, or—at the very most—the year after next. So he took the daring step of neglecting to sign on at the labour exchange, spent some of his savings on a second-hand Douglas motor-cycle, and began touring the new housing districts beyond Shirley, in search of a derelict business that he could buy for fifty pounds or less. Once he had acquired premises, however unpromising, he would think about getting stock on credit.

He was a dogged young man. Sometimes he rode sixty or seventy miles in a day, inspecting new housing sites, asking questions in village pubs, making tiny purchases, usually a box of matches, in any grocery store that had about it an air of defeat, and all the time what he was looking for lay directly under his nose, not a stone's throw from his own front door. It was curious that its discovery was directly
attributable to a disaster that threatened to destroy all hope of the future he had planned.

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Archie's girl-friend at this particular time was a well-built blonde, called Edna Gittens, whose family lived at the far end of the Avenue, and whose father was a diabetic tram-conductor, with innumerable children.

Edna worked at a hairdresser's, in the Lower Road. She was nineteen, matter-of-fact, and incurably lazy. Her disinclination to walk more than a few hundred yards from her home, when Archie called to take her out in the evenings, had certain advantages prior to the time Archie acquired his motor-cycle. Limited privacy was available to courting couples in the Lane, at the foot of the Avenue, and when they were not at the cinema, where Edna, leaning heavily on Archie, invariably dropped off to sleep during the first reel of the big film, they usually sat down on Archie's mackintosh in a grassy hollow, beneath the dwarf elms of the hedge bordering the golf-links.

Here, providing it was reasonably dry, Edna usually obliged him, and then dropped off to sleep in the long, sweet-smelling grass. Archie usually took a nap with her, waking her up when the night chill set in, or he was beginning to feel cramped, and leaving her at his gate (which they reached first) to yawn her way down the remainder of the Avenue to Number One-Hundred-and-Four, where she and her family lived.

It was a very somnolent courtship, and Archie liked it that way. He had not the remotest intention of letting it develop beyond its present stage, and it is doubtful whether Edna, on her part, thought about marriage at all. The same applied to her father, who had so many daughters that he would not have recognised Archie as a suitor had he passed him in the Avenue on the way to or from work.

Archie's motor-cycle was the agency that carried the romance a stage further, that brought it, indeed, to its somewhat complicated climax.

That summer., Archie felt he needed a little holiday, and
suggested that he and Edna should go camping, Archie having acquired, for the sum of thirty shillings, a battered side-car in which the tents and equipment could be stowed.

Edna agreed, as she agreed with practically everything, but she made it a condition that her sister Hilda should accompany them. She did not insist on Hilda's presence as a chaperone, but because Hilda was much more energetic than she was, and at the back of Edna's mind there was a strong suspicion that physical exertion might be associated with camping, that the putting up of tents, the lighting of fires, the cleaning of frying-pans, would demand her attention in an upright position, or at least on her knees. After all, this was supposed to be a holiday, and Hilda was out of work anyway.

Archie raised no objection to Hilda accompanying them on the trip. She was two years older than Edna, and attractive in the same heavy way. Side by side, they looked very much alike. Both had bobbed hair, good complexions, and their father's prominent blue eyes, and both had the heavy pink lower lip that Archie always looked for in women.

The camping holiday was a great success. They took two patrol tents, and the minimum of gear, and set off gaily down the Tonbridge Road, camping the first night on a lightly-wooded slope, immediately above the Penshurst Place.

That first evening, they fried supper over a wood fire that Archie lit and Hilda tended.

When it was quite dark they put out the fire and went to bed, Archie to his tiny tent, the girls to their double patrol tent, pitched a few yards higher up the slope.

Archie's camping experience was limited to reading an article or two on the subject in magazines, and he had chosen aa unfortunate spot for his tent. In the night there was a heavy thunderstorm, and streams of water were soon running under the valances, saturating his blankets, and ultimately, despite all his efforts to keep the shelter rigid, dislodging the pegs, and bringing the tent about his ears.

It was still raining hard when he fought his way free of the dripping canvas. The sidecar was full of gear, and too small to accommodate him anyway. There was nothing he could do but crawl into the girls' tent, and this he did without a
moment's hesitation, waking Hilda and persuading her to edge over an inch or two.

The tent was small and she made room for him with difficulty. Surprisingly, Edna did not stir, and Hilda and Archie discussed the situation in low tones. They soon made rather more room for themselves by shifting gear on to Edna's feet. Presently, Hilda began to giggle. She had more sense of humour than her younger sister.

“She only brought me to do the chores,” she protested, when Archie solicitously endeavoured to give the sleeping Edna even more breathing space.

“There are chores and chores,” said Archie, who had now stopped shivering, and was beginning to think there were certain unlooked-for advantages in thunderstorms.