Tuppence To Spend (14 page)

Sammy remembered his mother’s words, that if either of the boys ended up in prison it would kill her, and he felt sick.

No more was said about the jewellery for a few days. Nora stayed in bed most of the time, taking the iron pills Sammy had fetched from Mr Driver’s chemist shop in September Street and drinking Oxo. Sammy had also managed to get some stewing steak from the butcher, and he put this into the saucepan and boiled it along with some carrots and turnips.

Mr Hines had been sympathetic when Sammy told him of his mother’s illness and promised to help when he could. ‘Liver’s not on ration so you can have as much as you like. I’ll put a pound by next time it comes in.’

Sammy hated liver. It was like strips cut from the bottom of shoes, just as tough and just as tasteless. He
accepted it reluctantly and took it home, staring in distaste at the floppy, dark red mass.

‘I’ll have mine raw, like the doctor said, and casserole it for the rest of you,’ Nora said, coming downstairs to go to the lavatory. ‘It’ll be all right with an onion or two.’

Tommy Vickers had kept his word and asked his wife Freda to look in, and she popped in most mornings when she’d done her own work, and offered to do any shopping or a bit of washing. Her own house was like a new pin, Sammy knew from having run errands for her, and she looked around Nora’s living room as if she’d like to give it a good spring-clean. She offered to sweep through, or put something in the oven for their supper – a nice shepherd’s pie, perhaps, like she was making for herself and Tommy. But Nora shook her head.

‘We’re all right, thanks very much, Mrs Vickers. Sammy’s a big help to me and I’d rather do me own work. I don’t like being beholden.’

‘You wouldn’t be beholden,’ Freda Vickers said. ‘It’s just a neighbourly gesture, that’s all.’

‘I’d feel beholden,’ Nora said stubbornly. ‘If I couldn’t do nothing in return, it would always hang over me. Thank you all the same, Mrs Vickers.’

Freda sighed. ‘Well, as you please. But don’t you be too proud to ask if there’s anything you do want. You’ve only got to send young Sammy round, or just knock on the wall. Me and Tommy are always pleased to lend a hand.’

Nora nodded and closed her eyes. The iron pills and liver didn’t seem to be making her any less tired. Freda looked at her uncertainly and tiptoed out. Her face was set in worried lines and when her husband came home from work she gave him a cup of tea and told him she thought poor Mrs Hodges was really ill.

‘It’s more than iron, if you ask me. She looks like a ghost, you can just about see right through her. And the house is in such a mess! It’s like a slum, it is really. Not
like April Grove at all. Why, I don’t think even Granny Kinch and her Nancy live in such a pigsty as that.’

‘Well, if she’s as poorly as you say I suppose she can’t do the work,’ Tommy said, taking off his boots. He looked around their own living room, which he’d papered only last summer. It was bright and cheerful, with nice cushions that Freda had embroidered herself, a coloured rag rug in front of the fire, the furniture shining with polish and everything in its place. The houses in April Grove were only small – two rooms up and two down, with the scullery tacked on the back and an outside lavatory – but they were well built and didn’t have to be slums. ‘And it can’t be easy with two boys dragging in all the dirt. We’ve only got our Eunice and she’s just about grown up now anyway.’

‘Eunice never brought in dirt even when she was little,’ Freda said a little sharply. ‘But even if we’d had boys, I’d have kept the place a bit better than Mrs Hodges is keeping hers. It don’t look as if there’s been so much as a duster passed over that room for months. It
smells
dirty. Give me them boots and I’ll put ’em in the scullery … But it’s not that I’m so bothered about,’ she went on, coming back into the room. ‘It’s her state of health, and it’s that little Sammy. She can’t look after him properly, Tommy, and he’s being neglected.’

‘He looks pretty scruffy,’ Tommy agreed, taking a long swig of tea. ‘But some boys are like that, Free. Doesn’t matter what you do, within five minutes they look as if they’ve been mudlarking down the harbour.’

‘Sammy Hodges looks worse than that. You know he does. Shoes all broken, clothes torn and ragged. I don’t think he’s got a coat to his name. And he doesn’t look as if he gets enough to eat either. I tell you what I think, Tom. I think he ought to have been evacuated. Sent out to the country, where he’d have got some good food and fresh air. That’s what he ought to have been.’

‘Well, a lot of those that were have come back now,’ Tommy said. ‘And not all of ’em seem to have thought much of it out there. Look at that little Baker lad. But there’s nothing we can do about it, anyway. It’s not for us to say what the Hodges do about their boys. And Dan Hodges is a funny bloke, he could turn nasty if he thought anyone was interfering.’

Freda refilled his cup. Her mouth was turned down. ‘I know, and that’s another thing. He’s been hitting her, Tommy, I’m sure of it. There was a big bruise on her shoulder, I saw it before she had a chance to cover it up, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she had a black eye coming too.
Hitting
her, in the state she’s in! It don’t bear thinking of. But that don’t stop me thinking about it, all the same. They’re our neighbours and we’re here to help each other, that’s what I always say.’ She sighed. ‘Well, I’ll keep popping in anyway. She might let me do a bit of sweeping out one day, you never know. And at least I can keep an eye on the nipper.’

‘It’s not him wants keeping an eye on,’ Tommy remarked. ‘It’s that brother of his. He’s been getting thick with Micky Baxter again and I heard they’d been seen down Commercial Road, hanging round the backs of the shops. They won’t be up to no good neither, not if I knows anything.’

‘I hope they don’t get into trouble again,’ Freda said. ‘It would just about kill that poor woman. As if she hasn’t got enough to put up with!’

She took Tommy’s cup out to the scullery. He heard the oven door open and close, and got up to sit at the table. A few minutes later she came back with a steaming shepherd’s pie.

‘My, that looks good,’ he said, smacking his lips. ‘All brown and crispy on top, just how I like it. You’re a smashing cook, Freda. And that’s a real compliment, coming from me.’

She laughed. ‘Go on, just because you were a cook in the Navy!’ She plunged a spoon into the pie and rich brown gravy oozed up around the mashed potato. ‘It’s a shame Nora Hodges wouldn’t let me make her one too. It’s only mince and potatoes, after all, and she could have got the meat with her ration. But there you are, you can’t help someone that doesn’t want to be helped.’

‘You can’t,’ Tommy agreed, holding out his plate. ‘But we can still do a bit where we can, Free. And we’ll keep an eye on them. Nobody’ll be able to say we never took an interest.’

While Tommy and Freda Vickers were enjoying shepherd’s pie and Dan Hodges was coming home to faggots, Gordon and Micky Baxter were down in Commercial Road, Portsmouth’s main shopping street. Gordon, who worked in a different area of the dock from his father, had said he’d be doing some more overtime. Instead, he left just a few minutes after the other men on his shift and slid through the shadowy backstreets from Camber, meeting Micky by the war memorial soldiers who knelt at their guns at the entrance to the park.

‘I found a way into the second-hand shop,’ Micky greeted him. ‘There’s a lavvy window left on the latch. I reckon I can get through there and let you in the door. We can go through the whole place and nobody’ll know.’

Hidden by the blackout, they scurried down the back way. The alley was filled with slush and rubbish but there was a dustbin conveniently near the window. Micky climbed up and pushed the window fully open, then dragged himself through it. There was a moment when he thought he was stuck, but Gordon pushed hard on his backside and then he was through. A scrabbling sound and a splash indicated that he had been right about the nature of the room inside.

‘Bugger it, my foot’s all wet …’ Gordon waited for a
few minutes and then the door beside him opened. ‘Come on. They’ve done the blackout, so we can put the lights on and see what we’re doing.’

Gordon slipped through the door and closed it behind him. The light snapped on and Micky grinned triumphantly from the far corner. They looked around to see where they were.

The second-hand shop was actually an antique shop, keeping quality goods. To Micky and Gordon it was just a jumble of old furniture and china, but they could read a price label and knew that they could pass the stuff on for at least a quarter of the price. It was enough to make an evening’s work worthwhile.

‘It’s an old bloke keeps it,’ Micky muttered. ‘He’ll never miss anything out of all this lot. I bet he doesn’t even know what he’s got!’

‘We’ll just take small stuff, though, like we did from the other place,’ Gordon said. Their previous expedition had been to a similar shop in Arundel Street. ‘Rings, and necklaces and things, and maybe some silver. Nothing that’ll break.’

They had both brought old sacks and began to fill them, shovelling stuff in at random. It didn’t matter too much what they took – it would all go to another junk shop in Southsea. The thin, ferret-faced man who ran it had given them five pounds for their previous haul, and they hoped for at least the same amount this time.

‘It’s good stuff, this,’ Gordon said, looking critically at a chain necklace set with dark-red stones. ‘That’s real rubies, that is. You can get hundreds for rubies.’

‘Old Ratface won’t give us hundreds,’ Micky said. ‘He’ll diddle us, same as he diddles everyone. I reckon we oughter find someone else to take it—’

‘And
I
reckon’, a different voice said, ‘that you ought to come down the station with me. I’d like to have a little talk with you about all this.
And
about Old Ratface.’

The two boys spun round. A large policeman was blocking the doorway, arms akimbo, watching them with a sardonic expression on his grim face. They dropped the sack and made for the back door, but it had locked as Gordon pulled it behind him. The window through which Micky had scrambled was out of the question. Micky would never get through it in time and Gordon wouldn’t get through it at all. They turned this way and that, but there was no way out. The policeman had them trapped.

‘I thought there was something up when I saw you two skulking down the alley,’ he went on. ‘So I followed you and saw which window you went through. I got the keys to most of the shops along here – ah, didn’t know that, did you? Anyway, we don’t want to stand here nattering all evening, do we? Much warmer down the station, they’ll have a nice fire going there. You can bring the sacks along too.’

He grasped each boy by the collar and pushed them through the door. But Gordon was a big boy, and the work he did in the docks had built up his muscles. As they reached the front door of the shop, he twisted away and took to his heels, scuttling off into the darkness and leaving Micky with his bag of plunder still in the grip of the policeman.

Micky let out a whimpering cry of anger and panic, and the policeman shook him.

‘Not much of a mate, is he, leaving you to face the music? Still, don’t you fret. We’ll catch up with him. It’ll be easy, because you’re going to tell us who he is and where he lives – aincher? When we get back to the station, you’re going to tell us all about it. You’re going to spill so many beans we could set up a blooming canning factory.’

He set off at a rapid stride and Micky stumbled beside him, still dragging the sack. He was starting to cry.

It would be all Gordon Hodges’ own fault if Micky told on him. He shouldn’t never have run off like that.

*

Once Micky had told the police all he knew, Gordon’s fate was sealed. He’d been warned the last time he came before the court, the magistrate told him severely, and he’d thrown his chance away. He would be sent to an approved school for three years and if he were a sensible boy he would take the opportunity to mend his ways. He could learn a proper trade while he was there and could come out at seventeen ready to take a responsible place in the world.

Gordon listened sullenly. He was furious with Micky for spilling the beans and glowered at the younger boy. He knew perfectly well why Micky had done it. It wasn’t under torture, as Micky had claimed, nor because they’d threatened to come after his mum, though they could easily have done that. Nancy Baxter had been up in front of the court herself more than once, and if she hadn’t had a young baby she’d have been in jail for soliciting. But it wasn’t family feeling that had loosened Micky’s tongue. It was the promise that the police would get him put on probation instead of being sent away with Gordon, as he should have been. He’d given his mate away just to keep his own freedom.

‘It was him went through the window,’ Gordon had complained to his mother and father when the policeman had finally left after bringing him home that night. ‘It was him hung about round the shop and found out when the old man went home and all that. I’ll bash his head in next time I see him, see if I don’t.’

‘Don’t talk like that, Gordon,’ Nora begged, and Dan cuffed him sharply round his own head.

‘You’ll get into more trouble doing that. Leave the boy alone. You’re the oldest and you oughter known better. Now I got to take another day off work and if you get sent off we’ll lose your wage as well. Never thought of that, did you?’

Sammy sat in a corner, saying nothing. He remembered the day Micky had tried to persuade him to go down to Charlotte Street, promising to show him the gold necklaces, and when he thought that it might have been him the policeman had come about, and him having to go to court, he felt sick.

Dan and Nora both went to the court, Nora paler than ever and as thin as a shadow. Maybe they’ll look at her and feel sorry for us, Dan thought, without much hope, but if the magistrates did feel compassion towards the mother who was so plainly ill they expressed it by taking Gordon off her hands, and Nora and Dan said goodbye to him outside the courthouse and went home on the bus without him.

‘Bloody stupid fool,’ Dan growled. ‘I thought I drummed it into his head that other time that I wouldn’t have him thieving.’