The Dreaming Suburb (43 page)

Nobody ever argued with Boydie when he was stump-orating. Sometimes, Sydney wished that somebody would, so that he could hear Boydie humiliate them with a well-judged thrust, or a feathered shaft of wit. Sometimes there was a little half-hearted heckling from louts, standing well back across the road, but these interruptions failed to. grow to the proportions that would justify the ordering of
Number One Routine,
which had been prepared for just such an occasion.

For on the command
Number One Routine
Boydie's bodyguard were supposed to close up, and move in a compact body towards the hecklers, to seize them, and to frog-march them into the direction of the nearest horse-trough, pond, or puddle, there to teach them that the B.U.F. had a programme, and was not a new kind of circus.

Unfortunately, Sydney did not possess the sort of physique that went with riding breeches and jackboots but, overlooked from the Rostrum by Boydie, he was confident that, if necessary, he would be quite capable of ducking a dozen town roughs singlehanded.

He did not, however, welcome hecklers, for street scuffles were beneath his dignity. He much preferred to remain glowering and statuesque, quelling possible opponents by hypnotic glare, rather than by strong-arm techniques, and this he continued to do, until the dreadful night of the Aldgate Massacre, when an incident occurred that not only led to his summary resignation from the Union, but a change of job, and loss of Boydie as boss and gauleiter.

The group had gone down to Aldgate Pump one Saturday night to hold a street-corner meeting, choosing this time, and venue, in order to coincide their meeting with the advertised march of local Communists, who were said to be parading through the East End in honour of May Day.

The Blackshirts took up a strategic position at the junction of two main roads, and there was some altercation between Boydie and a friendly police-sergeant, as to whether or not the phalanx constituted a traffic obstruction. A compromise was agreed upon, and the bodyguard moved on, to re-form a few hundred yards further east, where some old buildings
had been levelled, and there was a half-acre of broken ground.

Scarcely had Boydie begun to speak, however, when The Rabble converged on the meeting from several different directions. Police squads arrived, and kept up a moving patrol in the immediate area of the rostrum but, in spite of this, the crowd continued to press in, until its front ranks were within easy throwing distance of the storm-troopers. There were choruses of jeers and cat-calls at the end of every sentence Boydie uttered, and occasionally a cabbage-stalk or a sodden ball of newspaper would sail through the air in the general direction of the bodyguard.

Finally, Boydie was unable to make himself heard, but still the crowd pressed in, their behaviour and epithets growing more and more menacing, despite several stern warnings by the police sergeant.

Suddenly a powerfully-built man of about thirty-five stepped forward, and stood looking up from immediately below the platform.

“Will ye no', shut up and get to hell out o' here, sonny?” he demanded, in a thick, Glasgow accent.

The crowd laughed, and the man next to Sydney moved over and laid a restraining hand on the Scotsman's arm.

“I say, look here ...” began the henchman.

The Scotsman shook him off, much as an absorbed newspaper reader rids himself of a hovering wasp, and again addressed Boydie directly:

“Did ye no' hear me, ye bloody little jackanapes? Will ye no' pack up, an' get to hell out o' here, before we help ye to it?”

Boydie at length deigned to stop explaining how Fascist Germany was able to plan a magnificent Reichautobahn, while the effete British motorist was still content to crawl through innumerable bottlenecks on the Great North Road. He broke off, and looked the Glaswegian blandly in the face.

“Number One Routine!”
he barked suddenly.

In three seconds the tableau had dissolved. The Blackshirts on Sydney's right and left closed in on the Scotsman, but before they had taken hold of him the front ranks of The
Rabble bulged, and the rostrum was up-ended in a sharp frontal attack, Boydie falling into the arms of the troopers immediately behind him. These were quickly seized and overthrown by men who ran round each side of the platform, and by the time the police had moved in, the wasteland was a battlefield.

Sydney hardly had time to unfold his arms and raise them to shield his face. A spotty youth, of about his own age, flung his arms round his neck, and twisting his head under his arm, held it there in a pitiless grip, whilst he punched and punched with his free fist.

The pain was agonising. No one blow was powerful enough to daze Sydney, but each was distinctly and separately felt, as bony knuckles smashed into nose, mouth, and eyes. Sydney screamed, and kicked out with his boot, but his feet were grabbed by somebody else, and his body became involved in a tug-of-war between two parties, each of whom seemed bent on carrying away some piece of him as a trophy.

Finally, the methodically punching youth surrendered his claims, and Sydney was dragged, feet foremost, across the uneven ground, his nose streaming blood, his bruised mouth still wide-open in an uninterrupted scream. He remembered the side of his face striking a sharp object, a tin can or piece of iron, and then came the dreadful shock of sudden immersion in filthy water, and the merciful oblivion that he thought of as death.

Miraculously he was not dead, not even severely injured. Within seconds the police had fished him out of a few inches of muddy water in the adjoining claypit, and after first-aid treatment had bundled him into the ambulance, together with three or four other Blackshirts.

He came to himself while the vehicle was still on its way to hospital, and immediately began screaming again. He went right on screaming until they rushed him into the outpatients' ward, and an exasperated probationer nurse washed his face and began bandaging a cut on his cheek.

After that, they gave him something to make him sleep, and put him to bed for twelve hours.

When he awoke in the morning the first person he saw was Boydie, who was standing looking down at him with a pair of black eyes that seemed to Sydney—stiff, sore, and only half-awake—to belong to someone in one of the comic picture-postcards he had often seen hanging outside a stationer's in the Lower Road.

Boydie grinned, and patted Sydney's shoulder.

“Well done, Frith old fruit! Well done!” he commended; “they were twenty to one, but we gave a rattlin' good account of ourselves, what?”

Sydney made no reply. His nose felt as if it had been clogged with cotton wool, his cheek throbbed, there was a sour taste in his mouth, and his body, which he now gently probed, seemed to have been thrashed with an iron club, not one square inch having been overlooked.

“I'm popping along to see Forde and Semphill. They are in here, too, Semphill with a suspected rib fracture. All the others were patched up and sent home. Dirty swine—they attacked us from behind, you know! Cheery-pip, Old Fruit! It's a good war!”

And Boydie was gone—out of the ward, and out of Sydney's life. The injured Blackshirt remained in hospital all that day, until Esther, his mother, came to fetch him in a taxi.

During that long day, Sydney had ample time to reflect, and the one clear decision to emerge from his reflection was that he would never, not even for Boydie, not for the British Empire, with Sir Oswald Mosley at its head, expose himself to such terrible risks and indignities in the future.

He did not return to Boyd's, but found himself another post in Lewisham. He burned his black shirt, but he wrapped his breeches and boots in brown paper, and put them away in the drawer of his sister's empty wardrobe. After all, he reflected, he might need them for Rotten Row in the future, for there must be other ways of getting into high society and
The Tatler
than via an East End claypit and a casualty ward.

Sydney had listened carefully to the Continental rumblings, but from now on he decided to ignore them, even if they brought the house down about his ears.

2

Esther Frith was relieved to discover that her son had severed his connections with the B.U.F. Not until she had helped him out of the hospital, and into the taxi that took them back to Number Seventeen, did she realise the frightful risks he had been inviting by clumping about the streets in those absurd jackboots, and that common-looking shirt, in which he was likely to catch his death of cold, notwithstanding the woolly vest she insisted on his wearing underneath.

It had been a very trying year for Esther. Although she continued to present a frozen face to the world, Edgar's betrayal had been a terrible shock to her, outraging her pride and her entire outlook on life. She had been so shocked, in fact, that the full impact of his desertion had not been absorbed by her until he had been gone from the house for several weeks, and then, just as she was readjusting herself, Elaine had run away, and she was obliged to face the fact that the girl preferred a sinful father to a blameless mother.

For Esther thought of herself as blameless. She could never bring herself to believe that her consistent refusal to sleep with Edgar, over a period of fifteen years, justified him in so much as handing another woman out of a 'bus, much less abandoning home and family on that account. She thought of Frances—the woman with whom he had become involved—in terms of sex, and sex only. It never occurred to her that, in making such a decision, Edgar was in search of anything beyond the gratification of animal lust. The fact that lust alone was sufficiently powerful to shatter the pattern of their lives after all these years, astonished more than angered her; so much so that, when Edgar was half-way through his initial confession, it even crossed her mind to offer to share bedrooms with him again.

Mercifully, this last humiliation was spared her, for Edgar, whilst appearing subdued, and a little sorrowful, left no doubt in her mind but that he had made up his mind to abandon her. Indeed, he had already visited a solicitor, and had investigated the possibilities of his divorce on the grounds of desertion. It was only when she told him bluntly that
nothing would induce her to connive at such a plan, that, by so doing, she would be tacitly approving his bestiality, that he came out with a fantastic notion of divorcing
her,
on the grounds of her refusal to sleep with him!

He even had the legal jargon for this new approach, calling it “restitution of conjugal rights”, or some such nonsense, and he had assured her, with evident sincerity, that provision was actually made for such cases in the Courts of Law. She did not believe him at the time, but when the solicitor to whom she turned assured her that such was indeed the case, her entire faith in the English legal system suffered a setback from which it never recovered. It was only when she had time to reflect that laws were made by men, all of whom, it would appear, considered access to a woman's body an inalienable right, that she could bring herself to believe her solicitor, and only then did she consent, and with the utmost reluctance, to a divorce going forwards on grounds of desertion. She comforted herself that this at least would mean that Edgar could not marry his harlot for years, even though he might live with her, and pass her off as his wife in the meantime.

She did not commit the indignity of asking Edgar to reconsider his decision. She felt no pangs on parting with him, as a person with whom she had shared a house for nearly twenty years, but she claimed the maximum allowances, and the future care of the children, and in these respects he made no difficulties at all, committing himself to send her, month by month, two-thirds of his income, and agreeing to take no steps at all to prevent either Elaine or Sydney from continuing to reside with her at Number Seventeen. He also made over to her the house and furniture, and was obviously anxious to depart as quickly and as quietly as possible.

With the flight of Elaine the leadership at Number Seventeen slipped from Esther's hands. For years she had dominated all three of them, but now, alone with Sydney, she began to show indecision, and he was very quick to notice it, and take advantage. She did not actively resent his usurping her position as head of the household, but when he was out of an evening, or away for the week-end, her loneliness
began to trouble her as it had never troubled her in the past, either before or since marriage.

She turned more and more to her Chapel for solace, and joined the mid-week sewing circle. Even here, however, she found it impossible to escape from her gloomy thoughts, for after so many years of disciplined silence sewing-circle chatter did not come easily to her, and she made no friends. She found herself worrying more and more about Sydney during his absences, with the result that, when he did come in, she irritated him with her questions. He stood it in silence for a long time, but one night, soon after his resignation from B.U.F., he turned on her almost savagely.

“What is it to you where I've been? I'm not a kid now, and I can stop out all night if I want to. If you must know, I've been out with a girl, and I'm going out with her whenever I like. Who's going to stop me?”

She was almost as shocked by this admission as she had been by Edgar's. It seemed incredible that Sydney should want to go out with a girl.

He noted her astonishment and it piqued him.

“What's so strange about that? All the chaps at the office have got girls. What's different about me? You didn't do anything about Elaine, when she was here?”

“Elaine?”

“Of course! What do you imagine she was doing, when she went for her walks? Studying the scenery?”

“You mean she... she
went
with men?”

“Not men!” He laughed, shortly. “You really are incredible, mother—she had a pash on the boy over the road, Esme Fraser, and she imagined I didn't know, but I did, almost at once. I saw them in the “Rec”, and sometimes she used to meet him in the Lane. She even used to see him in the greenhouse at night.”

“Why didn't you tell me?”