The Dreaming Suburb (42 page)

“My mudder,” he said, “I tink she would hab been more proud of dis dan all the money I make since leaving her.”

Jim regarded the old man with affectionate amusement.

“What made you do it, Mr. Sokolski? Was it just the excitement of the moment?”

The Jew shook his head. “I tink you could not understan', my Zocialist frien',” he said, with a slow smile, that sent the wrinkles gliding over his face like a shoal of tiny fish, “but my mudder—she would understan', and maybe my fadder, too.”

He settled low in his swivel chair, linking his hands over his stomach, and he seemed to be looking beyond Jim, out over miles of brick and stone and across the North Sea, to the squalid Lithuanian village where he was born. He was seeing, perhaps, a snow-covered landscape, churned into slush by the Cossacks' horses, as yet another pogrom swept down on the half-starved community, and men were dragged screaming from their timber dwellings in the light of pine torches and burning barns. He saw his father staggering this way and that, under the knouts of the Little Father's horsemen, his mother standing in the open doorway, screeching defiance, and himself and his brothers running swiftly across the snow towards the birch forests.

“I ran den ...” he said quietly, “... but dis time I did not run. Instead, I felt the bone of my umbrella strike against de skull of de red-faced one, and before he could catch it, and break it, I had knocked de
pikelhaube
from de head of yet anudder one! I felt good doing dis! I tell you dis, my Zocialist friend, because I am proud to have done dis for my fadder and my mudder. It was in me to do dis thing, but I did not know it, not until de one on de horse broke de stick of de banner.”

Jim found this story interesting but unhelpful.

“It isn't the slightest good telling that yarn in Court,” he
said. “It's very picturesque, but it won't help you in the slightest.”

The Jew shrugged. “I pay vot I have to pay and go home,” he said. “Stepan, my frien',” he turned to the lawyer, “I leave you to say vot you tink best, and me—I keep my mouth tight shut. I remember dis ting because it is good, but I do not want to speak of it, only to you. Do you understan'?”

The Pole nodded. He understood a good deal better than Jim, for to him “pogrom” was more than a word in a social tract.

On the day of the trial he contented himself with advancing a plea of the extreme provocation of a bystander, who was jostled by combatants, and had regrettably lost his temper, and struck out at those nearest him.

The case against Jim was dismissed on the evidence of the Committee men. Jacob was fined ten pounds, ordered to pay Court costs, and bound over to keep the peace for one year. The miners were fined five pounds apiece, with the option of one month's imprisonment. A left-wing periodical came forward with the fines later that same day, but, by that time, the men were already on their way home to the Rhondda. Jacob Sokolski, a Russian Jew who had sneered at political agitation all his life, had paid out more than a hundred pounds on their behalf and in addition to paying the fines he had given each man the money for his railway fare to Wales. This was a gesture that Jim never forgot.

Jim Carver was possibly the only defendant who felt humiliated by his appearance in Court, and this was not simply because his presence there ran contrary to his innate respect for law and order but because, in the course of the hearing, he looked into the public gallery and caught a glimpse of Boxer's grin. Later he was obliged to suffer that young man's genial congratulations, when they met in the corridor after the case was over.

“Well, Pop, so you beat the rap?” chuckled Boxer. “Berni's here somewhere—we both came over, soon as we heard. Berni!—hi—Berni! We got to go out an' celebrate like we did last time. Whatdysay, Berni, whatdysay?”

But Bernard, having more discernment than his big twin,
shook his blond head, and laid a gentle hand on his brother's leather-encased shoulder.

“It's not the same, Boxer. I don't reckon Pop's getting a kick out of it like we did.”

Jim shot the smaller twin a grateful glance. It seemed to him then that he had underestimated Bernard.

“That's about right, son,” he said, “this sort of thing doesn't do anyone any good, and that's a fact. It's something the whole lot of us ought to be dam' well ashamed of, especially at a time like this.”

A time like this.

Jim Carver's reading, and his habit of reflecting on what he read, was taking him further and further from the parish pump these days. He listened, with some impatience, when his colleagues in committee argued interminably over wage minimums, and pit-head baths, and workers' compensation charters, for he realised that the real fight was moving away from these traditional cock-pits, that something was happening across the Channel that made the wranglings between the cartels and the unions ridiculous, as fatuous as the arguments of wayfarers lost in a wood, disputing the ownership of a broken compass. The French Socialists were aware of it, and were striving to form a popular front against the strident bullies on the far side of their Maginot Line, but the French were old and wise, and knew that these same bullies would stop at nothing, not even firing their own Chancellory to win the support of reaction all over the world. Jim knew this too and recognised, in the strutting Jew-baiters of Berlin, the men who had the insufferable arrogance to assure
him
that they had been unbeaten in the autumn of 1918—
unbeaten,
when Jim, and his gaunt trench veterans, had herded them back over the Rhine, and had kept their children alive for months with sly gifts of chocolate, and tinned milk.

That was where the real trouble was going to come from if the League, and the bemused politicians over here, were content to see Germany flout the treaty, and build up an army, in the vain hope that their legions would turn east, and leave the west to vegetate until the time came to make a new treaty of their own devising.

To Jim Carver, whose political work brought him into touch with refugee groups from Central Europe, “Pogrom” was ceasing to be a word in a tract. Delegates he had met at conferences in the 'twenties were already inside the concentration camps, camps with names that were soon to ring across the world, marking a new low-water mark of Teuton bestiality.

These, he felt, were the issues that should be debated in committee rooms, and this was the enemy against whom all democrats, blue, red, or yellow, should make common cause. Sometimes he expressed himself in these terms, but scarcely anyone listened to him, for he was never anything but a halting speaker, who lost his audience's attention the moment his mind began to grope for a quotation, or a set of figures. “Sit down and stick to the agenda, Jim, old man,” they would tell him, or “Let's put our own pig-sty in order, before we start sweeping up somebody else's muck!”

So Jim went back to Jacob Sokolski, and discussed these things with the old Jew, for their personal relationship had been cemented by the skirmish at Hyde Park Corner. Sokolski was more disposed to listen to him than his Socialist colleagues, but he held out even less hope of a political truce between capital and labour, in the face of militant Fascism in Germany and Italy.

“Ach, my dreaming frien',” he said, “in dis ting dere are no nations, no flags, only dose dat hab, and dose dat hab not, and would take it from dem. It is no different in Red Russia, my frien', believe me. I hab it from dose who come here, since de Revolution. De trouble is
here,
my frien',” and he plunged his hand into his pocket, and pulled out a fistful of silver, throwing it across his blotter. “It is here, and
here”—
and he lifted his hand from the coins, and solemnly tapped his heart.

Jim quoted the boy on the bank, at Mons.

“Not with everyone, Mr. Sokolski, not with the youngsters. That kid wasn't interested in money.”

“Dat is so,” said Sokolski, “but only because boys like dat hab no time to discover de truth. My people are born wid dis knowledge, for you Christians hab seen to dat, wid your pogroms and spittle, but in dis country you have not suffered enough. Dat is someding dat can be put right, eh? Dat is someding de flying machines vill teach you ven der moment it come!”

1

SOMEONE
else living in the Avenue heard rumblings in the early 'thirties, but although they originated from the same source, they fell upon his ear somewhat more melodiously than upon Jim's.

In the Spring of 1934, Sydney Frith, of Number Seventeen, joined the British Union of Fascists and, for a brief moment in history, constituted the Avenue's extreme right wing, just as Oliver Rawlings, of Number Eighty-Eight (who was soon to leave his bones on the glacis of the Alcazar), might be said to have carried the red banner of the Avenue's extreme left wing.

Sydney's abrupt and uncharacteristic incursion into the realm of militant politics was the direct result of his friendship with the splendid Boyd-Thompson, nephew and heir of Horace Boyd, of Boyd's, Chartered Accountants, Queen Victoria Street, where Sydney had worked since leaving school.

Vincent Boyd-Thompson, or “Boydie” as he preferred to be known in the private bars of the City's more select hostelries, was a bizarre character, of the type that later found its extreme expression in a small band of stalwarts who did the washing-up for Propaganda Minister Goebbels, and lived on to regret their bedevilment.

Not that Boydie went the whole way with these gentlemen; indeed, he was ultimately to recant absolutely, and leave his right leg in a field dressing-station, near Benghazi. In 1934, however, this was unforeseen, for Hitler appealed to a certain
section of British youth, as the sole means left to them of keeping The Rabble in its pre-ordained place.

The Rabble, to Boydie and his cronies, was made up of everyone who had not had the advantages of a private education, who sought their leisure on street-corners instead of on a golf course, who bathed once a week instead of once a day, who had a tendency to drop their aitches, and who sometimes referred to their female companions as “pushers”.

The Rabble, as Boydie saw it, had been getting badly out of hand since the General Strike and the Depression of 1931. The Rabble was now demanding work with menaces, and if something wasn't done pretty soon, to bring it back into line, it was conceivable that it might cause heads to roll in Trafalgar Square or, what was much worse, it might use democratic machinery (to which, through some surprising oversight, it appeared to have access) to vote in yet another Labour Government and slap on a capital levy.

Sir Oswald Mosley's appeal for patriotic Britons to unite, and forestall such disasters, was in Boydie's view very timely; he had been one of the first to go out and buy himself some natty riding breeches, a black shirt, and a pair of shining jackboots, in order that he might be suitably attired for lectures at B.U.F. Headquarters, and for the hawking of copies of
Action
outside suburban railway stations.

Sydney had been under Boydie's spell for two years or more. He saw him as the prototype of young English manhood, the sort of fellow that Sydney himself had always longed to be, a man with a public-school background, who owned a nippy, blue sports car, and drove it down to Virginia Water every Saturday, to drink “snifters” in the clubhouse, after playing a round with other young executives. To Sydney these young men were the élite, for they were people who knew London waiters at famous restaurants by their Christion names, who would one day marry glacial-looking girls seen in
The Tatler,
and breed sons who would be entered at Harrow the day they were born, and daughters who, in their turn, would also be photographed for
The Tatler,
with their ears projecting from the bowler hats they wore at gymkhanas in the Home Counties.

All the time Sydney had been at Boyd's Ltd. he had
carefully modelled himself on Boydie. He studied his ties, his plus-fours, his gestures, and his tricks of speech, that somehow managed to convey to people that he was bored by their conversation but far too well-bred to show it.

He began by using the same slang words and phrases as Boydie—“old fruit”, “sick'nin'”, and “a bit much, don't you think”. He watched his “a”s, and tried hard to turn them into “e”s, so that
match
became
metch,
and
back
became
beck.
He paid a dozen visits to the toilet during working hours, in order to make quite sure that his finger-nails retained no scrap of London grime after handling telephone directories and ledger-pages. He volunteered readily for the firm's sporting activities, and gave money that he could ill afford to the office appeals, launched in conjunction with patriotic Lord Mayor's Funds. He even learned to carry his gloves, and his evening paper, the way Boydie carried them, gloves nonchalantly bunched in one hand, the paper tucked under the right arm, at an angle of forty-five degrees. In short he
was
Boydie, a Boydie of the outer suburbs, and before long Boydie himself could not help becoming aware of Sydney's worship. He began to pay Sydney the compliment of addressing him by name, notwithstanding the fact that Sydney was only one among thirty clerks studying for their articles in the main office.

By the time Boydie had enlisted in the B.U.F. Sydney had become Boydie's man, body and soul, so that it was only natural that Sydney should now go out and buy himself an identical outfit, that set him back three weeks' wages, even though he got the boots second-hand, and they pinched him Hke mediaeval instruments of torture.

Then began, for Sydney, a year of unadulterated bliss.

Every week-end, and at least four nights during the week, he accompanied Boydie to rallies, demonstrations, and lecture tours all over the London area. Sometimes, on Sundays, they travelled as far afield as Brighton, or Chelmsford, and on these occasions Sydney had little to do but stand up very straight in front of Boydie's rostrum, with his feet planted
so,
his arms folded
so,
his narrow jaw clamped into a Mussolini scowl, and his large, myopic eyes fixed unblinkingly on curious passers-by, who loitered to hear Boydie's colourful
denunciations of red plots in Moscow, yellow perils in Pekin, and black omissions in Westminster.