The Dreaming Suburb (7 page)

She saw in his surprised expression the grim necessity of making a clean breast of her utter inexperience.

“We've never had anyone before: perhaps you could tell me what is usual?”

He was genuinely touched by her naiveté. In the three years since he had left school, and been out to work, he had encountered a dozen or more landladies. Some had been unpleasantly off-hand, showing him round with a studied take-it-or-leave-it air; others, the majority, had looked him over very thoroughly, and asked him a number of questions about the sort of hours and company he kept. One had even told him: “No women, definitely no women!” Edith was his first experience of a landlady who consulted him on the amount she should charge for bed and board. He began to relax and congratulate himself on his good fortune.

“Place where I was,” he said, with a wide engaging grin, “charged me twenty-five bob, but the grub was shop stuff; nothing really cooked, if you see what I mean.”

She saw, nodding sympathetically. Poor young man! No wonder he was thin and undersized. He must have been living for years on soggy, pieshop pastry, stewed tea, and kippers. He probably had severe indigestion, took powders.

“I like cooking,” she told him; “I always have, ever since ...” She was going to say ever since she had taken full charge of Becky, after the Vicarage housekeeper walked out during
one of Becky's “getting-supper-for-Saul spells,” but she realised that these sort of confidences would have to come later, if indeed they came at all. She completed the sentence rather lamely with “ever since I was a girl”.

They finally fixed on twenty-five shillings, to include a packed lunch five days a week, and Edith left him sitting on the bed, to savour his miraculous good fortune.

When he was sure Edith was downstairs, and could hear her talking to the blank, good-looking one who had answered the door, he bounced about on the bed, prowled around the room fingering the curtains and the washstand, its dainty jug, bowl, and flower-decked soap-dish, and finally opened his music-case, and took out his banjolele, striking a single, soft chord—the opening chord of
Coal-black Mammy.
Having done this he decided that he must not strain his luck at this early stage, and resolutely replaced the instrument in its case.

He wondered if she would object to smoking, and decided to take the chance, sitting on the cane-bottom chair beside the window and inhaling, deeply. He gurgled to himself with sheer delight. Ted, old sport, he told himself, Ted boy, you've struck oil! Take it easy and you've struck oil! A room like this, fifteen minutes from work, and home cooking! Boy! You're in clover—clover!

Ted Hartnell talked to himself more than most people, partly from natural exuberance, and partly because he had made no real friends since the uncle, with whom he had lived after his parents' death, had presented him with the “chuck-it-or-else” ultimatum involving his banjolele and his gramophone.

Ted Hartnell had no real interest in the job that provided him with a bare livelihood. He was a stonemason simply because a post at a stonemason's yard had presented itself the week he left school, more than four years ago. His mission in life was to play jazz tunes in public, or, if no such opportunity presented itself, to listen to them, hum them, beat them out with his chisel as he chipped marble gravestones, tap them with his feet as he munched lunchtime sandwiches, pick them out, chord by chord, on his wire-strung banjolele, or follow them, beat by beat, on his portable gramophone—now,
alas, in a Hammersmith pawnbroker's window, and likely to remain there until he could save enough out of his thirty-two-and-sixpence a week to redeem it.

The gramophone and banjolele had been responsible for frequent shifts of lodging on the part of Ted Hartnell. No landlady could endure one or the other for long and, once the initial impact of his cheerful personality was spent, out he went, neck and crop, to look for a fresh lodge. The woman in Catford had helped him to establish his record, a mere nine weeks in one bed, but that was because she was stone deaf. He was asked to leave two nights after her married daughter came to live with her.

Ted did not much mind moving about. Once his gramophone was going, or he became absorbed in strumming, he was as oblivious of his immediate surroundings as a Montparnasse painter. The trouble lay in the limited number of stonemason's yards available, and the vast distances that stretched between them. Every time he moved he seemed to go further and further from work, and the fares were a great strain on his pocket. What he was searching for was a room within easy reach of a stonemason's, let by a landlady who was either stone-deaf, or excessively partial to New Orleans rhythm. It seemed an unending quest. Even now, having met a landlady who taught music, liked cooking, and asked what she should charge, he lacked the confidence to unpack, and contented himself with extracting pyjamas and sponge-bag. He would have been immensely cheered if he could have heard Edith discussing him as she stood by the gas-stove, stirring jam, for Edith was saying:

“He's a lodger, dear; no,
not
Mr. Fosdyke's boy, but a friend of his, I expect. I don't
know
whether he'll stay, Becky dear. I think not. I expect he'll find us
old-fashioned.
Young men like that like a bit of life, dear.”

Nobody would have been more surprised than Edith Clegg if somebody had whispered in her ear that evening: “Stay, Miss Clegg? Why, bless you, he'll stay nearly twenty years!”

1

THE
four male Carvers were products of the pre-war era, the war itself, and the Charleston, or vo-deo-do era.

The forces that moulded the character of James Carver, and made him what he was, and what he was to become, were those familiar to the great majority of European males, born during the late 'seventies, and early 'eighties, men who had endured the horrors of trench warfare, yet survived to taste the full bitterness of victory.

Jim was discharged in the late summer of 1919, when the drought went on and on, and the leaves hung, dust-bowed, along the parched hedgerows. It seemed, that summer, as if the sun would never stop shining, as though it had made up its mind to burn away the memories of the long, hard frosts of wartime winters, and make the veterans forget the days and nights under the weeping skies of Artois and Picardy.

It was not the sort of weather in which one would have chosen to go looking for work, but Jim had no choice but to set out on the quest day after day, and with increasing desperation, for Louise was needed to keep house, and mother the new twins Felicity and Caroline, now referred to by the Carvers as “Fetch” and “Carrie”, and of his remaining children only Archie was earning.

More than a million ex-servicemen, many of them much younger than Jim, and some with pre-war trade training behind them, joined him in his search for limited security.

Jim was not long in discovering his handicap. Prior to 1914 he had never followed a regular trade, preferring to earn his money by piecework, as various jobs presented themselves. Because he was strong, honest, clever with his big, red hands, and very conscientious in his dealings with
those who employed him, he had never been idle for more than a day or two between spells. He liked it that way. It flattered his strong sense of independence, so damaging to him during his army career, and in days when two pounds a week was a good wage for an untrained man, he had often brought his wife three, withholding but a shilling or two for tobacco and tram-fares.

He had been a leather-dresser, drayman, market porter at both Smithfield and Covent Garden, omnibus driver, groom, coach-builder, and even clerk, for he wrote an exceptionally neat, legible hand, and was quick at mental arithmetic.

He entered the post-war labour-market with confidence but it was soon evident that either his qualifications, or the economic system in which he was trying to market them, was at fault. He could find temporary jobs, but he lost them when the younger men joined the queue.

He was astonished at the number of young men who had managed to survive the successive slaughters of the Somme, Passchendaele, and the final German offensive. He had sometimes imagined, during the last months of the war, that he was one of the few Englishmen alive and whole, but at the local Labour Exchange his impression was soon corrected, for here they were, by the thousand; young, hefty, strident-voiced men, some of whom looked blank when the Marne and Ypres were mentioned, and many of whom, he was informed by sardonic ex-infantrymen, had managed to avoid active service for years on end.

Yet Jim did not at first take refuge in the general bitterness that had soured the easy comradeship of the trenches by the time the first anniversary of the Armistice came round. He was an obstinate man and prided himself on being a fair-minded, level-headed, unemotional sort of chap. It was 1920 before he began to relate his personal problems to those of Society. The victorious Empire, it seemed, would never find its way back to the highway it had been swinging down so blithely, when the fateful shots were fired at Sarajevo.

Jim, however, was inclined to blame his bad luck on his own fecklessness in the closing years of the century, when he could have learned a trade years ago, and made a niche for himself. Had he done so, he reasoned, he could now claim
re-entry into industry, even if those who had performed his job during his absence were disinclined to step down, and make way for a veteran.

He was not alone in his bewilderment. Up and down the queues, and in and out the transport yards where he presented himself every day, he ran across plenty of other ex-servicemen as unfortunately situated as himself. They were not all as fair-minded. The majority were inclined to blame the women, who had taken their places at lower rates of pay while they were serving abroad, but this seemed unfair to Jim, who recalled seeing young girls perched on the topmost girders of Charing Cross Station when he came home on leave, and doing a man's work very efficiently if his short experience as a painter had taught him anything. Others blamed the politicians. They had always been fair game in the trenches. “The Pilot who weathered the Storm!” grunted one hard-bitten Cockney, as he turned away from beneath a poster of Lloyd George in sailor-rig at the wheel—“Blimey, thinker that! We're still in the bloody middle of it, an' he don't even know it!”

Everybody blamed somebody else, and what made the struggle so wretched for men like Jim Carver was the collapse of that solid-scaffolding of trench comradeship, that had kept the morale of units intact through years of unmitigated hell. That, to Jim at all events, was the most disappointing aspect of the situation. It made him feel mean and small to see men scratch and snarl at one another, when one had secured a temporary advantage over the others. He found it difficult to witness, unmoved, this one undoubted spiritual gain of four years' struggle, being dissipated in a sordid wrangle over a two-pound-ten-a-week job.

In March, 1920, he retired from the fray, and took stock of himself. The result was rewarding. He successfully applied for training as a motor-transport driver, under a minute Government Grant. At the end of three months he passed out as a heavy-van driver, with 87%, and thus qualified for an ex-service vacancy at Burtol and Twyford's Removal and Storage Mart, in the Crystal Palace Road, Anerley.

Here, at least, he found his niche, and not a moment too soon. He had been more frightened than he cared to admit,
and donned the leather apron they gave him with an overwhelming sense of relief. The job, driving a removal van, and helping with the loading and unloading, suited his taste for roving, acquired long before the war, and developed during his overseas service. He was thirty-nine, and exceptionally fit. He felt that, given luck, he had a better chance of survival than most.

2

Archie Carver was typical of those males in the Avenue who belonged to the age group too young to serve in the war, yet old enough, when it began, to be men about a house.

Archie was nearly fourteen when his father enlisted, and had just started as errand boy at Coolridge's, the multiple grocer's in the Lower Road. There were, as he quickly learned, certain advantages in belonging to the provisioning trade at that particular time, and perhaps it was this circumstance, more than his own natural shrewdness, that encouraged him to begin thinking as a man while he was still little more than a child.

His thoughts, as he pushed his heavy carrier cycle up the steep drives of the larger houses on his extensive round, were not by any means original, but they were certainly precocious in a pink-cheeked lad of fourteen. They were concerned, in the main, with the odd relationship between commerce and patriotism, with the preoccupation of the few with profits, and of the many with the fate of “the boys out there.”

In his trapesings about the suburb he became aware of many social contrasts, and the conclusions he drew from them were docketed, and filed away in his memory for future use. Archie was that sort of boy. He wasted nothing, least of all experience.

He noted, for instance, that some people were getting rich very quickly, and after pondering this in general for a month or two he began to study it in relation to the people he worked among, notably Mr. Cole, the senior hand.

Mr. Cole, his immediate superior at the shop, and the man responsible for making up the cardboard boxes containing the
week's shopping list for the Lucknow Road district, underwent a mysterious change of heart about January, 1915. Almost overnight he stopped nagging Archie and went out of his way to be helpful to the boy, even going so far as to offer to relieve him of all those heavy boxes, still awaiting delivery after closing time.

The first time this happened Archie gladly skipped off within five minutes of completing shutter-drill. The second time, being curious, he concealed himself in the smoking-nest, made up of crates in the yard, and from here, through a convenient embrasure made for the observation of seniors, he watched Mr. Cole add various packages to certain of the boxes. He knew where the boxes were going and it was a simple matter to slip out of the yard, and settle himself in a new ambush, this time a rhododendron screen, abutting the tradesman's door of Number Five A, Outram Crescent.