The Dreaming Suburb (20 page)

Harold did not shrink from an engagement with a pair of hucksters. He had an even more deep-rooted faith in the law than Esme and a good deal more experience in the art of
bluff. He gave Esme “Scandal” to hold, and crunched purposefully over the pebbles towards the booth. He went willingly, with a song in his heart.

“Now listen here—” began Fred, again seeking the initiative.

Harold held up his hand, his pale lips forming a thin, remorseless line. He had seen too many Freds in too many witness-boxes, to be impressed by their hectoring tone, in or out of a magistrates' court. He addressed himself to the constable, now sweating a little under his tight collar.

“This young man is a friend of mine, Constable. My name is Godbeer, and I happen to be managing clerk of Stillman and Vickers, Solicitors, St. Paul's Churchyard. It must be quite obvious to you what has occurred. Hadn't you better order these people to return the money at once?”

The constable spread his hands. “They've emptied their bag ... how can anyone swear to a particular coin? It doesn't make sense, Mr.—Mr.—”

“Godbeer,” said Harold testily. He disliked uniformed officials who were unable to make instantaneous mental note of one's name, but he saw, nevertheless, the grave diffiiculties in the constable's path, and his alert brain at once cast about for a workable alternative.

He found one, almost immediately.

“That's true enough,” he admitted; “but then, one knows the sort of people involved, doesn't one? That being so, one has to play them at their own game, which is precisely what I propose to do. Make an apron of your skirt, Judith!”

Instinctively, and without quite knowing why, Judith seized the hem of her print frock, and held it taut. Into it Harold began to scoop bag after bag of confetti, ignoring the sputtered protests of Fred, and smartly slapping at the claw-like hand of the old woman, as she reached out to check him.

Into Esme's eyes came a look of undisguised admiration. He would never have thought out
that
one, not in a million years! Now it was his turn to enjoy himself, and the expression on Fred's face, and the fish-like gape of the constable, were sheer heaven. Gleefully, he began helping Mr. Godbeer to scoop. Bag after bag, two dozen in all, were swept into Judith's skirt.

“It's thieving! Lumme,
stop him!”
roared Fred, at last.

“Give the constable particulars, and prosecute,” said Harold, coolly, as Judith, with sagging skirt, backed away from the stall. “I, and my ... er ... my client, would be happy to contest the case in any court you care to name, sir!”

He turned to the constable. “You may even arrest us all, on the spot, if you wish. We shall offer no resistance. Would you prefer that, or shall we settle it this way, without further trouble and expense?”

With a slight jerk the constable came to himself.

“You'd better leave it at that,” he told Fred, and, turning on his heel, crossed rapidly to the path and quickly lost himself in the crowd.

With a pleasant nod towards the astonished vendors, Harold placed a protective hand on the shoulder of each child, and directed their steps towards the main road.

“And now,” he said, “we had better dispose of the evidence as rapidly as possible. Half-a-crown, I think you said,” and he plunged his hand into his pocket, and presented Esme with a coin of that value.

Esme was overwhelmed.

“Well, thanks ... thanks ... Mr....
Uncle
Harold.... That was marvellous, just marvellous....”

“Ha, ha,” piped Harold, with excusable pride, “you see I know these people, and that man in particular. Now why don't you and Judith play nearer the house? I wouldn't come up, here if I were you. Or, better still, why don't we all go for a picnic to Manor Woods? Your mother will be ready now, and we could have fun, the four of us!”

And that was just what they did, the four of them picknick-ing in Manor Woods, where Judith poured out the story of the confetti battle to a rather startled Eunice, and Harold sat beaming in a glow of triumph that he was quite ready to share with Esme, for presently he said, removing his short briar from his mouth:

“Esme was quite right to stand up to them, and even more sensible to fetch me!”

That night, Esme lay awake thinking a long time and, as a result of his musings, sought out his mother alone the following
morning, when she was brushing her long, fair tresses at the dressing-table mirror.

“Mother,” he said quietly, “why don't you
marry
Uncle Harold and be done with it?”

Eunice was so surprised that she gave a litltle cry, and let fall the silver-backed hair-brush.

“Esme, you don't
mean
it?” she exclaimed seizing his hands, and pulling him towards her.

Esme held himself stiffly. He resented these spontaneous embraces.

“Well, why not?” he demanded. “He's mad on you, anyone can see that, and I think he's a proper sport, and so does Judith!”

“Oh, Esme,
darling?
was all Eunice could reply for the moment.

4

It was very decorous little wedding at Shirley Church, with Eunice in blue organdie, a white cloche hat, a spray of lilies of the valley, and Judith as a bridesmaid, in a Kate Greena-way gown.

There was no real reception, but later in the day, Eunice having changed into a going-away costume, and reduced the groom to a state of breathless ecstasy by kissing him lightly under the right ear, the couple left for a week's honeymoon at Torquay, taking Esme along with them, because it was holiday time, and they did not care to ask Mrs. Sturge, the daily, to sleep at Number Twenty-Two for the week.

They stayed at a large hotel, and Esme, who had never previously entered a hotel, was impressed by the opulence of the setting, particularly the bemedalled commissionaire, who showed a deferential interest in the boy when he learned the lad's father had been an officer, killed on the Marne.

This piece of information came in useful in the staff-room, where a chambermaid had admitted herself somewhat puzzled by the fact that the little boy in Number Twenty-Seven must be all of thirteen, yet continued to declare, with a leer altogether alarming in one so young, that “his people were having their honeymoon”!

1

THE
General Strike of 1926 was a great disappointment to Jim Carver, for the same reason that it disappointed the Kremlin.

Although by no means a violent man, Jim's political education had encouraged him to expect sensational constitutional changes to emerge from an upheaval of this magnitude. When none did, when the Old Gang emerged from it as smug and secure as ever, Jim's general conception of the British political scene underwent a sharp change. From May 1926 onwards, he ceased to regard his political work as an improving hobby, and in the years that led up to the Depression and beyond, his activities in this direction became an obsession. Where householders, opening their doors to receive one of his free pamphlets, had once encountered a social busybody, they now found themselves looking into the eyes of a fanatic.

The General Strike did not seriously involve the people of the Avenue as a community. Few industrial workers lived in the crescent. Some half-dozen, like Mr. Baskerville, of Number Eighty-Four, took a few days' holiday, and marched about the Lower Road, hoping to witness something exciting. They had a feeling that a stoppage of this size should provide some visual evidence of a real revolution. They too went home disappointed. No amount of fiery talk on the part of Jim Carver and his associates could induce the Cleggs, the Friths, the Frasers, or even the Baskervilles, to look upon the event as anything more than a welcome break in the monotony of their everyday lives.

One or two of the Avenue wives, recalling the uninhibited scenes of Armistice Day, went further afield in search of
spectacle, but these would-be sensationalists were in a small minority. The Avenue was only twelve miles from London, and almost everyone residing there who had work in the City got to it by one means or another, even if they did little on arrival but gossip, and gaze out of office windows. Some of them used bicycles, a few walked, and the rest gathered in little knots at the junction of Shirley Rise and the Lower Road, to be picked up and transported by volunteer motorists, or “Specials” driving lorries.

There was, among all these people, a curious detachment in their approach to the emergency. Throughout the nine days' wonder they displayed small sense of partisanship, one way or the other. In essence they were pro-Government, but there was no rancour in the suburb towards the strikers. The householders sympathised with the miners, whose case had been given plenty of advance publicity, but whose average wages were recognised as inadequate, having regard to their working conditions. Jim Carver, out stumporating night after night, despaired of persuading them to make common cause with the miners: the nearest coalfields were hundreds of miles from the Avenue, and the injustices of the men, who “talked funny”, and worked there, were as remote as those of Chinese coolies, and Tokio rickshaw-runners.

There was, it seemed to Jim, no evidence of true political awareness in the suburb, no true recognition of the class struggle, as set down in his pamphlets and statistical surveys. One could quote facts and figures to these people until one was blue in the face. They listened, occasionally asked in irrelevant question, occasionally made a weak joke at the speaker's expense, but hardly any of them saw beyond their own, pitifully limited, horizons of thought. They were blind to the danger of the Capitalist Conspirators, who were standing by with fetters, waiting for a chance to reshackle them to the Juggernaut of Victorian class-exploitation.

Meantime, those few who did see, those like himself who devoted the whole of their free time to preaching the gospel, were methodically victimised, even as the miners were being victimised.

It was not long before Jim himself felt the weight of this victimisation. Less than a month before the outbreak of the
General Strike he found himself out of a job, and branded as an agitator, without even the chilly consolation of martyrdom.

Jim Carver's political activities, throughout the six years he had worked as vanman for the removal firm of Burtol and Twyfords, were well known to the directors, but had so far resulted in no recrimination on their part. This was mainly because old Hubert Twyford, the dominant figure of the firm, had recognised in Jim a sound, conscientious workman, willing to give a fair day's toil for a limited day's pay, notwithstanding his well-known, radical sympathies.

Hubert Twyford was an old-time Liberal and Free-Trader, whose political thought had been cast in the mould of men like Lloyd George and Sir Edward Grey. Old Man Twyford took a keen interest in his employees. He knew every one of them by name, and although he had long regarded Carver as a mild crank, who sought in Socialism reforms that which could have been achieved by the Liberal Party, he shared Carver's open contempt for the Tories, past and present, and had once gone so far as to tell him as much when he had attended a meeting at which Jim was speaking in support of a Socialist candidate.

Shortly before the strike, however, Hubert Twyford died, and the direction of the firm passed to his only son, Gilbert, who was detested among the yardmen and clerks as a pompous snob, with a hundred half-baked notions of building Burtol and Twyford's—a compact business employing less than fifty men—into a dangerous rival to Carter Paterson's and Pickford's.

Gilbert took over his father's direction in March. By the end of April a dozen of the older men had been sacked, and Jim was one of the first to go.

His dismissal was made known to him at a brief, unpleasant interview.

“I'm making changes,” Gilbert Twyford had told him. “From now on, this firm is going to be run on twentieth-century lines. We can forget all about the horse-vans, can't we?”

As Burtol and Twyford's had been using motor-lorries since 1913, this remark struck Jim as particularly fatuous,
and when, at the close of his pep talk, young Twyford asked for suggestions, Jim was rash enough, and irritated enough, to make a pointed reference to the rates of subsistence pay issued to teams away from home overnight.

“If we're being brought up-to-date, I suggest we start with a review of journey-money rates for long-distance work,” he said. “We get five shillings a night. That might have bought two meals and a bed before the war, but it certainly doesn't now, Mr. Twyford!”

He was as good as out of work before he had finished speaking. Ten minutes later, when they were back in the office, Gilbert Twyford asked his chief clerk for information regarding the man who raised the matter of journey-money. Unlike his father, he had made no pretence of getting to know the men he employed. The chief clerk, who was over fifty, and nervous of his own future, had no hesitation in giving the new proprietor a colourful character-sketch of Jim Carver, stressing his reputation as a Socialist.

“Is that so?” mused Gilbert. “Well, well, we must look into this, mustn't we?”

Look into it he did, with the result that Jim Carver was given his cards within a fortnight of the pep talk. He was under no illusions as to why he was sacked and said so, bluntly, but without heat.

Gilbert Twyford pretended to be shocked.

“You're barking up the wrong tree altogether,” he protested. “We don't sack men for political opinions in England, old boy. We leave that sort of thing to Russia. I believe it's quite usual over there. No, no, no; the fact it, we contemplate quite a few changes here, and I'm cutting down on the smaller vehicles, and installing six-wheelers. A six-wheeler is a young man's pigeon—but you'll get something, you'll land something more in keeping with your age, old boy!”

“I've no doubt I will,” replied Jim grimly, “but don't talk to me as if I'll find it in a bath-chair!”

Gilbert preferred to take this as a joke, and laughed immoderately, patting Jim's shoulder affectionately. It took all Jim's self-control to check himself from standing clear and planting his fist in Twyford's face. There was, however, the matter of a reference to be thought of, and Carver walked
stiffly from the yard and into the seething labour market at the age of forty-seven. He needed no one to tell him that the years ahead would be difficult ones, more difficult perhaps than the period of job-seeking that followed his demobilisation. After all, he was a student of industrial statistics.