City of Spades (4 page)

I gave him a Palmerstonian glare, but he met it with such a look of dignified solemnity that I wilted and said, ‘I am the new Assistant Welfare Officer. My name is Montgomery Pew.’

‘And mine, sir, is Mr Karl Marx Bo. I am from Freetown, Sierra Leone.’

We shook hands.

‘I hope, sir,’ he said, ‘you have not the same miserable opinion of our qualities as he who previously held down your job?’

‘Oh, you mustn’t think that. Come, come.’

‘May I offer you a cup of canteen coffee?’

‘I’d love it, but really, I’m in somewhat of a hurry …’

I moved towards the massive door. Mr Bo walked beside me, radiating unaffected self-righteousness.

‘Here in London, I am studying law,’ he told me.

‘That means, I suppose, that you’ll be going into politics?’

‘Inevitably. We must make the most of our learning here in London. Emancipation, sir, is our ultimate objective. I predict that in the next ten years, or less, the whole of West Africa will be a completely emancipated federation.’

‘Won’t the Nigerians gobble you up? Or Dr Nkrumah?’

‘No, sir. Such politicians clearly understand that national differences of that nature are a pure creation of colonialism. Once we have federation, such regional distinctions will all fade rapidly away.’

‘Well, jolly good luck to you.’

‘Oh, yes! You say so! But like all Englishmen, I conceive you view with reluctance the prospect of our freedom?’

‘Oh, but we give you the education to get it.’

‘Not give, sir. I pay for my university through profits my family have made in the sale of cocoa.’

‘A dreadful drink, if I may say so.’

He tolerantly smiled. ‘You must come, sir, if you wish, to take part in one of our discussions with us, or debates.’

‘Nothing would delight me more, but alas, as an official, I am debarred from expressing any personal
opinion, even had I one. And now, for the present, you really must excuse me.’

And before he could recover his potential Dominion status, I was out of the door and stepping rapidly up the moonlit road. ‘To the Moorhen public house,’ I told a taxi driver.

He was of that kind who believe in the London cabby’s reputation for dry wit.

‘Better keep your hands on your pockets, guv,’ he said, ‘if I take you there.’ 

Though fond of bars and boozing in hotels, I’m not a lover of that gloomiest of English institutions – the public house. There is a legend of the gaiety, the heart-warming homeliness of these ‘friendly inns’ – a legend unshakeable; but all a dispassionate eye can see in them is the grim spectacle of ‘regulars’ at their belching backslapping beside the counter or, as is more often, sitting morosely eyeing one another, in private silence, before their half-drained gassy pints. (There is also, of course, that game called darts.)

It wasn’t, then, with high eagerness that I prepared to visit the Moorhen. Nor was I more encouraged when the driver, with a knowing grimace, decanted me on a corner near the complex of North London railway termini. The pub, from outside, was of a dispirited baroque. And lurking about its doors, in groups, or half invisible in the
gloom, were Negroes of equivocal appearance. One of these detached himself from a wall as I stood hesitating, and approached.

‘What say, mister?’ he began. ‘Maybe you want somesings or others?’

‘Not that I’m aware of,’ I replied.

‘Oh, no?’

‘No …’

‘Not this?’

Cupped in the hollow of his hand he held a little brown-paper packet two inches long or so.

‘And what might that be?’

‘Come now, man,’ he said with a grin of understanding and positively digging me in the ribs. ‘Is weed, man.’

‘
Weed
? What on earth should I want with weed? Now if you had seedlings, or even the cuttings of a rose …’

‘I see you’s a humourisk,’ he said.

As a matter of fact, I wasn’t quite so ignorant, for I had read my Sunday papers. But this was the first time I’d seen the stuff.

‘All sames,’ he went on, closing his fingers over the little packet, ‘if you need some charge later in your evenings, come to me. Mr Peter Pay Paul is what’s my name.’

I thanked him remotely, and pushed open the door of the Moorhen’s saloon.

Within, where dark skins outnumbered white by something like twenty to one, there was a prodigious bubble and clatter of sound, and what is rare in purely English gatherings – a constant movement of person
to person, and group to group, as though some great invisible spoon were perpetually stirring a hot human soup. Struggling, then propelled, towards the bar, I won myself a large whisky, and moved, with the instinct of minorities, to the only other white face I could see who was not either serving behind the bar, or a whore, of whom there were a great many there, or a person of appearance so macabre as scarcely to be believed. The man whom I addressed was one of those vanishing London characters, the elderly music-hall comical, modelled perhaps on Wilkie Bard, all nose, blear eyes, greased clothes and tufts of hair. ‘Cheerio!’ I said to him.

He eyed me.

‘Crowded tonight.’

‘Yus.’ (He really said ‘Yus’.) ‘More’s the pity.’

‘Oh, you think so? You don’t care for crowds?’

‘Course I do – when they’re rispectable. But not when they’re darkies like what’s here and all their rubbish.’

‘Rubbish?’

He gazed all round the room like a malevolent searchlight and said, ‘Jus’ look for yourself. And to think a year or so ago this was the cosiest little boozer for arf a mile.’

‘But if,’ I said, ‘you don’t like it, why do you come here?’

‘Ho! They won’t drive me out! They drove out me pals, but they won’t drive me.’

‘Drove them?’

‘They left. Didn’t care for it as it got to be ever since the Cosmopolitan opened opposyte.’

‘That’s the dance hall?’

‘Yus. They let those darkies overrun the dance hall, but they haven’t got a licence there. So what did they do? Came trooping over the road for drinks like an invasion, and turned this place into an Indian jungle.’

‘And the landlord let them?’

‘He can’t refuse. At least, he did try to for the sake of his regulars, but when he saw all the coin they dropped on to his counters, he gave up the fight, and me pals all had to move on. But not me. This is my pub and I’m staying in it till something happens and they all get thrown out again.’ And this outpost of empire stared at me with neurotic, baleful zeal.

A juke-box that had been blaring out strident three pennyworths now stopped. I edged my way over to an argumentative group around it, one of whom, a hefty, vivid-looking Negro, was shouting out what sounded rather like:

‘Ooso, man. See molo keneeowo p’kolosoma nyamo Ella Fitzgerald, not that other woman. See kynyomo esoloo that is my preference.’

The speaker was wearing pink trousers, a tartan silk shirt bedecked with Parker pens, and a broad-brimmed hat ironed up fore and aft like a felt helmet. A watch of gold, and silver chains, dangled on his gesticulating wrists.

A smaller man beside him, an ally apparently, turned to the others and said, ‘Is best let Mr Cannibal have his own choice of record if someone will please give him a threepence bit.’

No one offered, and I ventured to hand the giant a coin.

‘Oh, this is nice,’ said the smaller man. ‘Here is this nice personality who gives Mr Cannibal his tune!’ He took the coin from me with two delicate fingers, put it in the juke-box, then said smiling wide, ‘So I offer you a cigarette? And then maybe you offer me a light in your own turn?’

I took the Pall Mall, and held out my Ronson to his own. His fingers encircled it as if to guard the flame when, hey presto! the lighter was flicked from my hand, and this person had scurried through the throng towards a farther corner.

I looked about me and saw amiable laughing faces whose eyes dropped politely when mine caught theirs. I began to make my way through them towards the robber and found that, while not exactly stopping me by standing full in my tracks, they presented hard shoulders that made progress difficult.

When at last I reached the corner, I saw an ancient hair-stuffed sofa tottering against the wall. On it were seated Mr Cannibal, the little nuisance who’d taken my lighter, and a third man who wasn’t talking, only listening. He was small, tightly built into his suit, at ease, alert, alarming, and compact. He glanced up at me: our eyes locked: his glare had such depth that my own sank into his, and while for two seconds I stood riveted, this stare seemed to drain away my soul.

I blinked, hemmed in behind a wall of dark faces and drape suits. Abruptly, I shook my brain, moved a
pace towards the thief, and said to him: ‘Can I have my lighter?’

The gabbling conversation in jungle tones went on until the third time of asking. Then the little thief looked up and said, ‘What is this stranger? You ask for some light from me, or what?’

It was a shock to see how with this race, even more than with our own, an expression of great amiability can be replaced, on the same face, within seconds, by one of cold indifference and menace.

‘No,’ I said, enwrapping myself with draped togas of torn Union Jacks. ‘Not a
light
, but the
lighter
.’

He took it out of his pocket and tossed it up and down in his hand.

‘You wish to
buy
this?’ he asked.

‘No. Merely to have it back.’

‘You mean you say that this my lighter is
your
lighter?’

‘Well, my dear chap, you know it is.’

The giant got up, and so did the lighter-lifter, but not the third man, who sat looking at eternity through his lashes.

‘Then what I ask,’ said the culprit, ‘is if your words mean that you call me now a thief?’

The giant stood looking like the Black Peril. The third man now glanced up at me again. When his eyes fixed once more on mine, I felt myself absorbed into a promiscuity of souls closer even than that which can bind, and then dissolve, two animal bodies in each other.

‘No,’ I said, faltering. ‘Keep it.’ And as I moved off: ‘I hope it brings you luck.’

Rage and disgust filled my heart. ‘That idiot at the Welfare Office was right!’ I cried out to myself, as I heaved back through the crowd. ‘Disgusting creatures! Bring back the lash, the slave trade! Long live Dr Malan!’

Standing in the doorway was a figure different from the gaudy elegants inside – one dressed in dungarees, half shaven, with anthropoid jaws and baby ears, more startling even than alarming. He gave me a great meaningless grin, held out a detaining hand and said (this is the rough equivalent), ‘You want some Mexican cigaleks?’

‘No, no.’

‘At sree sillins for twentik, misters …’

‘Oh, really? Well, yes, then.’

He slipped them to me discreetly. Lighting up, awaiting for the return of my shattered poise, I asked him, ‘How do you get these, then?’

Conspiratorially, he replied: ‘From him GIs who sells me in cartoons wisouts no legal dutiks. So you better keep him secrix.’

‘They sell them to you here?’

‘No, out in him streek, because of Law and his narks that put the eye insides. Anysing from GI stores you wants I gess you: sirts, soss, ties, jackix, nylons, overcoats, socolates or any osser foots …’

‘You make a good profit?’

He looked bland.

‘I muss have profix for my risks. That is my bisnick.’

‘Do other boys here have things to sell?’

‘Oh, misters! Here is him big Londons Spadiss markik
place! Better than Ossford Streek hisself!’ And he roared out laughing loud, doubling himself up and slapping himself all over. Then he looked coyly discreet. ‘Those bad boys,’ he said, ‘they relieves you of somesink?’

‘Yes. You saw? They stole my lighter.’

‘A Ronsons?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course. Was Mr Ronson Lighter who took it. That is his professins: when he sees Ronson lighter, he muss steal him.’

‘And who are his friends?’

‘The Billy Whispers peoples. Gambian boys, real bad. Billy his self, and Jimmies Cannibals and Mister Ronson Lighter, this that robs you.’

‘What do they do for a living?’

‘Prey!’

His eyes gleamed sympathetically and, I thought, with envy. Then he went on:

‘That is their seats over in him corners. This is the seats of all bad Asfrican boys where they go gather makin’ deals. No Asfrican boy who is not top London hustler go near their corners, and no Wess Indians dare go by never. Mister, if you have loot, or goods, or wishes they can prey on, please keep clear of him Billy Whispers and all his surrounding mens.’

He told me this as one who reveals a precious, precarious State secret. Then he looked severe.

‘Those boys they sink I stupit – “Boos-a-man” [Bushman] they call me, becos I come out from my home in him interiors, not city folks like those wikit
waterfronk boys …’ He ruminated, flashing his eyes about. ‘They sink I stupit because of no educasons. But [crescendo] my blood better than their blood! My father sieftan [chieftain]!’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes. I sief’s son.’

Diffidence but enormous pride: as if making a huge joke that was no joke, as if calling on me to recognise a splendid truth even if incredible.

‘Then why do you leave your people and come here to England?’

‘I? Oh, to see these sights. To live. Also, to learn my instrumink.’

‘Your …’

‘My sassofone. I work stoke in him governmik boiler-room by nights, to get loot for lessons for my instrumink. Then, when my time come, I go home to fashinate my cousins with my tunes.’

‘And how are your studies progressing?’

‘Whass say?’

‘Are you mastering your instrument?’

‘Man, up till now is my instrumink who is most times mastering me. Ah! But lissen!’

And we heard:

‘Thass Lord Alissander! He always come playing here evening, hopin’ for sillins and publicitix.’

He plucked at my arm and led me out to the corner of the street. Mr Lord Alexander was leaning against the pub wall, strumming and singing in the middle of a softly humming circle.

‘Give us some bad song now, man!’

‘Some little evil tune, Lord Alexander!’

‘Oh, no! No, no, not me in this respectable country …’

There was laughter; but on the far side of the street, standing against the brick fence that lined the bombed-out site, were two figures in mackintoshes who were now joined by a tall police inspector with the shape of an expectant mother. The Bushman took my arm:

‘Lissen, man,’ he whispered, ‘I soot off now, that look to me like him Law be making his customary visicts. Come! We soot off to him Cosmikpolitan dansings, and find whass cookings there …’

Looking back, we saw the three coppers sweeping on the group, which scattered; and then Lord Alexander being led off, the uniformed inspector carrying the guitar as if it was a truncheon.