Walking in the Shade (56 page)

‘We'll clear them all out,' she said. ‘We'll get all this cleaned up.'

What the people in the area wanted, if any official had cared what they thought, was for their houses to be done up, bathrooms and proper lavatories put in, and the dangerous wiring replaced. They were saying, ‘But we've all been living here for years. My mother was born here. My kids were born here.' This was a plea to me, for I was middle class and therefore by definition knew the score and the ropes and probably had influence. But the tide of history was against them. Up and down this happy land, people whose hearts beat day and night with love and concern for the working classes were saying, ‘We'll clear them all out, we'll clean it all up,' and that is what they did, and presumably they noted with concern how their charges, finding themselves in some cold grey tower, far from their old neighbours, kept dying and having strokes and heart attacks. ‘They just want to get rid of us all, dear, that's all it is,' said Mrs. Pearce, from No. 58. ‘It saves them trouble. What they like is to see another funeral.'

The day I decided to buy No. 60, I knocked on the door of No. 58. During my visits to the street and the house, I was being observed from windows up and down Charrington Street. At No. 58, a large pale woman with pale ridged hair rested her arms and bosom on the window sill and commanded the street with her presence. By now a thousand surveys have instructed us in the role of working-class matriarchs, dominating their families and the community, and here she was, Mrs. Pearce, who would be my neighbour. It was not easy to knock at that door, because I believed such a close community would not welcome newcomers and particularly not one like me. The word ‘gentrification' had yet to come into common use. I announced myself, said I was to be her new neighbour, and I hoped to be a good one. This was in the spirit of the times, the matey sixties, but policy too. And I meant it. Mrs. Pearce sat in the window, her back to it for once, and said, ‘Sit down, dear. We're pleased you're going to do right by that house. It's been going to rack and ruin for years. Isn't that so?' A tiny man, a chip of a man, but as muscular, lean, and bow-legged as a jockey, agreed: ‘Rack and ruin,' and grinned welcome to me, and an immensely ancient crone, all in black, without teeth and smelling bad, bobbed about, screeching, ‘Rack and ruin, rack and ruin.' There was a dog, a cheerful mongrel, keeping out of the way of all the feet, the cleanest, prettiest thing in the room.

‘Tea,' commanded Lil Pearce, and the little man at once put the kettle on.

‘He's my husband,' said Lil Pearce, ‘though he wasn't always. And this is my friend Mrs. Rockingham.' I think that was the name. ‘I took her in off the street, I took her out of the gutter. She was in the gutter, wasn't you?' she screeched at the crone. ‘She's deaf. She's deaf and almost blind. But I'm good to her.' She leaned forward, hands on her thighs, and screamed, ‘I'm good to you, aren't I?'

‘Yes, yes,' the crone yelled back, ‘you're very good to me.' She was arranging fancy biscuits on a plate and flicking biscuit crumbs at the dog, who snapped at them like flies.

‘Don't you mind her,' said Lil. ‘She's a bit touched. You are a bit wrong in the head,' she yelled at the old woman, who yelled back, ‘That's right, dear.'

‘And now you ask me everything you need to know, and I'll tell you,' she said. And she did. She had lived next door to No. 60 since the end of the war. The old woman from whom I had bought No. 60 had been her good friend. Lil knew every detail of every happening in that house—who had been born, who had died, who had scarpered without paying rent, all the dogs and cats that had lived there.

Mrs. Pearce had her house off the GLC, but was in complicated relation to the Camden Council too, and she rented out the two top rooms. The condition of No. 58 was the same as No. 60 when I first got it—gas light, dangerous wiring, no bathroom, a single nasty lavatory, and of course no heating. A fire burned permanently in the ground floor front, where the three of them in fact lived.

Lil Pearce would have talked till the following morning, if I had had the time, and certainly I had seldom been as fascinated as by this Dickensian chronicle. When I left she said she was glad there was going to be a bit of life next door, and instructed the crone, ‘Tell her we're pleased she's come,' and obediently the old woman shouted, ‘That's right, dear, you make yourself right at 'ome.'

As for Len Pearce, he is one of the people I think of when I need to cheer myself up about the state of the world and the people in it. He is right at the top of my private list of candidates for heaven. He was a good, kind, generous, sweet man, and he was treated like a dog by his wife: Do this, get that, fetch me the other thing. He never complained. He had worked as a market porter most of his life, but now he was too old, and he did little jobs for the local council. He was illiterate. He was so small and thin and bow-legged because he was the product of the dreadful poverty England provided for its working people between the two world wars. Many a day, he would tell me, he and his brothers and sisters had nothing to eat but a piece of bread and margarine with sugar on it, and he went to school without shoes on his feet. Married to Lil, he had found security and enough to eat and space at last, but now he had to share this space with Mrs. Rockingham, who was incontinent, foul-mouthed, and generally disgusting, yet he waited on her, too, when Lil commanded. If I was observed trying to lift something she thought too heavy for me, let's say in the garden, Lil Pearce, who always knew what I was doing, would shout at Len Pearce, and he would be beside me, grinning. ‘Let me do that,' and he did it, as if I were doing him a favour. He shone, that little man, he shone like a lamp in a dark place. Like the carpenter Jimmy. I often think of them both, grateful that I knew them.

Only once, years later, when old age had made of Lil a real raging tyrant, did he ever refer to his situation. He said sadly to me, ‘If you'd known Lil when she was young, then you'd not think bad of her now. I always think of her the way she was then. She was lovely. She was a lovely young woman. I saw her the first time when she was cleaning the floors in Woolworth's, to keep her kids fed, and she had no stockings on her legs and they were red and sore. She let me buy her some stockings, and then a pair of shoes for her feet. That was my happiest day. She had all those kids then, and she let me help her.'

Lil Pearce expected to be kept informed. If I had left too long, let's say three days, before dropping in, she summoned me from her window sill with a peremptory forefinger. ‘What are you paying for that cooker?…It's too much. I know where you can get one ten pounds cheaper.' She had the pirates in, together and separately, and instructed them in how to treat me well. She had to be told how much I was paying them and informed them I was doing well by them. She told me they were doing right by me and I could trust them. She sent cups of tea to the pirates and to Jimmy when he was there, with a bottle of cough mixture for him, or some cake to take home with him, since he didn't look after himself. ‘He's not long for this world,' she shouted at the crone, ‘just like you.'

‘That's right, dear,' the crone shrieked back.

I knew Lil Pearce until she died, twenty-odd years later. I never, ever, not once, went into that house, or, later, into the council flat they took her to, without being greeted by histories of calamity. It began on my second visit. ‘It's my breast,' she announced. ‘I've this abscess. It's the size of an orange. They're going to cut it out.' And she pulled out from her dress, under the cretonne apron, a long white fat bag of a breast. ‘Look at that, see that lump there?' As well, the meter would have been broken into and three months' electricity money stolen, the cat had worms, the dog had a torn ear, she herself had fallen through the floorboards in the second floor back, because they were rotten and the council wouldn't mend them, and then she had reached for a pan over the stove and the heavy saucepan had fallen on her hand—see that bruise? There was no way you could visit Lil Pearce without hearing a tale of disaster, to her, or Mrs. Rockingham, or one of her children, who were always ill or a worry to her. I used to tell my friends, at first nervously—for it was hard to adjust to this level of ill luck—and hearing her name, they would enquire, ‘Well, what this time?' It was not possible that a single human being could support such accumulations of misfortune, but Lil Pearce could, and did, year after year. It had all started because she was illegitimate, she was a love child, and that was why her mum had hated her and would not feed her right, but her gran loved her, and so she had not died of being treated bad. ‘That's why I'm good to Mrs. Rockingham, see? It's because I want to make it up to my Gran.'

I used to sit there through my visits, keeping a good grip on myself, because I could feel the laughter welling up until it threatened my face. She had fallen out of bed and sprained her wrist. Her thighs were black and blue because her veins bruised easy. The dog had knocked a tray of boiling tea onto her lap and she had blistered you-know-where. Her knees had bad bones, and the doctor said they were past hoping for; she had lost her purse, with all her rent money in it; she had been mugged at the grocer's, but luckily she had had only a quid; she had just heard that her son had to have a terrible operation. Believe me, I learned from Lil Pearce how tight the roots of comedy and tragedy are intertwined, for I would watch the helpless hysterical laughter rising in me as each lugubrious bit of news emerged from that dramatic fate-wracked face, until I had to excuse myself and run next door, where I put my head down on my arms on the kitchen table and laughed and laughed. She never invented, made it up; it was all true. There are people who step onto some escalator marked Disaster and cannot get off again, or perhaps plug into an unlucky wavelength, and so it was with her.

‘And there I was with the three kids, it was the Blitz, the bomb got the street corner near where we were, and the kids had the blast all over them, and I got my eyes full of plaster, but the hospital said they had much worse to cope with that night and gave me some aspirin. But the bomb shelter was full of water and so we had to get under the bed, me and the kids, while the bombs fell on us, and then the roof fell on the bed and…' But we are in the exponential swell of catastrophe that is the distinguishing mark of such favourite victims of ill fate, and the tale has to go on: ‘…and a bedspring cut my face and the blood got onto us and we didn't have no more clothes to put on, only the bloody ones, and in the morning the air raid warden saw us and said, Quick, Lil, into hospital, but I said, Too late, Ron, it's too late for hospital, and the hospital didn't have time for us when we needed it last night, aspirin, that's what they gave me, and now what we could all do with is a good cup of hot tea, but the gas main's cut and I've got nothing to give my kids and I can't get to my stove because there's a cupboard fallen down over it, and my wrist's bent backwards with the blast and I couldn't push the cupboard back for myself. And Ron said to me, he said, Lil, you're a real heroine, I always said so, but now you've got to get out from under that house, because it's going to fall around your ears. And I said, Then where are we to go? And he said, I'd say the church, you'll get some soup and sandwiches, but the church took the best of the blast, so you'd better get yourself onto that bus and down to the main Shelter, but I said to him, I haven't got a penny in the world, Ron, because my purse was blown out of my hand by the bomb….'

I used to start on one of these sagas and watch my friends' faces for that moment when a look of anguished guilt showed that they were wondering just how it was they had turned into such monsters of callousness they could laugh at this tale.

No amount of trouble could stop Lil from keeping a helpful eye on her neighbours. She would send John, or Jack, to tell me that she had heard I planned yellow wallpaper for the second floor back, and I should know the sun fell into that room for hours on a sunny day, and I'd better be sure the wallpaper would stand it; or she would shout at me as I went by in the street that she saw the plumbers were digging out that new drain just where the dogs were buried, six dogs were buried in that place, and I'd better take care the bones didn't find their way into the dustbins, or the police would be asking questions. And she would haul herself along the street and up my steps, on her two sticks, because of her bad legs, to knock on the door, because she had heard from the man who had the vegetable shop on the corner that he was making a special trip to Covent Garden next day and he would get those fancy fruits for me I had asked him for. ‘Was it garlickt? Just run along, darling, and tell him what you want; he'll do it for me.'

 

With the date set for the move only a few days ahead, I got German measles. For some reason, German measles makes people laugh. Is it the word ‘German' in this context? What long-forgotten travelling epidemic does this word commemorate? Suppose we said Peruvian measles? There's a smile lurking there too. (Italian measles? Russian measles?) Measles is all right, commiseration is in order, but German measles is funny. This was the second time I had it, both times badly, with a sullen rash all over, a high temperature, a headache. I got into bed in a darkened room and waited, having rung the pirates to tell them to just get on with it. I was deep under that queasy dark ocean which is illness when the doorbell rang. Cursing, I staggered to the door, and there stood a young woman with a sullen face, angry eyes, and a baby in a pushchair, which she had had to hoist up all those flights of stairs. I said I had German measles and was certainly a danger: she was pregnant. She disregarded this. The obligatory laugh was transmuted by her rage into a sneer. She said, ‘I've come for money. You're rich and successful, and I need it.' I said, truthfully, that I was very short of money at the moment. She said, ‘Don't give me that.' I have seldom disliked anyone more. ‘I've got to have it for my children.' She wanted five hundred pounds. Or I think that was it. The trouble is, the value of money has shifted. I know it was so much that I had to increase my overdraft. Only a few weeks later I paid ten pounds for a picture to give a friend and was in a panic because I couldn't really afford it. Perhaps it was fifty pounds, or a hundred. Later I wrote to this young woman's extremely rich and famous uncle and asked if he mightn't consider refunding the money, but he said he didn't see why he should.