Donkey Boy (36 page)

Hastening up the gully, that fine July night, he found Gerry holding the winder, while the kites were ever so high in the sky.

Winking an eye, Gerry beckoned Phillip; then transferring the handles to Phillip, he said “So long, old man, see you later. I’m meeting my Dinah by the Refreshment House.” Phillip thought Gerry was a wonderful grown-up person to be able to speak of a girl like that, much less to
dare
to meet one.

Certainly Phillip did not dare to think of—he dared not even formulate in his mind the name of Helena Rolls. She was too far above him, she was remote as the high blue of the sky.

The summer wind, blowing from over the distant downs and the fields of Kent, coming from the high chalk cliffs above the fretted edge of ocean, passed over the streets and houses, the open spaces and the diminishing trees south of the river; and streaming up from the heated slopes of the Hill, ascended in flowing strata under remote cloudlets which lay at the zenith seemingly without movement. Under the speckled white flitch of cirrus the small speck of the pilot kite was trying ever to rise higher against the weight of the twine holding it to the wooden backbone of its big brother below, the broad double-box with wings giving it a bat-like appearance; or an Emperor Moth, thought Richard, with its hues of purple, brown, and black. He thought of his splendid kite as alive above the earth, a thing inanimate but with a soul, as it strove to break away, as it hummed its plaint, moth-like, upon
the ascending cord curved by wind and terrestrial gravity in tension from himself. He imagined the kite looking down upon the scene below, wanting freedom, but attached to its master. Unaware of the thoughts of the small boy behind him, the human captive holding with tired arms the ends of the horizontal rod that supported the winder, Richard felt glad to be alive.

Two hundred yards away, aloof, lest his home-made newspaper kite foul those of the dogmatic Mr. Maddison—for the two had by now exhausted all conversational possibilities—stood Mr. Muggeridge, wondering by the feel in his abdominal scar if the weather was about to change.

Phillip looked about him to try and find interest in something. There was only the usual sight of people standing still, looking up at Father’s kites for a while before moving on. The pilot on top was lifting the double-box. Father wore his two thick leather gloves, and had to hold on as hard as he could. The cuttyhunk line scorched the flesh if it slipped, said Father. Looking across the grass, Phillip saw Mr. Muggeridge holding his silly old paper kite with one hand, while it swung to and fro and wiggled its tail like a lamb when it punched the ewe for milk. Mr. Muggeridge’s kite was a soppy newspaper one, its tail in curl-rags. Huh! Any fool could make a kite like that; he had made one himself earlier in the summer, and given it away for nothing.

Father was hauling in now, hand over hand, slowly, and he had to ask someone to wind the slack on to the winder. A smaller boy obliged. The double-box that Father called the Emperor Moth was slowly moving from left to right against the grey clouds which had half covered the white flossy ones up above. Then the cuttyhunk jerked on the winder, and nearly pulled it out of his hands. The wind was gusty.

“I can’t hold it, I daren’t take a turn round my hand,” Father was saying to another man. “It would cut my hand in two.” Others were waiting now, ready to help. Someone said a storm was coming up.

“Take the boy’s winder, do you mind?” Father said. A man took the winder and Phillip, happy to be free, ran forward to watch. It was like a tug of war! Father was saying that he would try and go forward to fasten the line to a seat; that would hold it.

Mr. Muggeridge’s paper kite was now weaving like a mongoose before a snake. Suddenly it turned right over and plunged down
with a flapping noise. Hurray, thought Phillip, that would teach the old fool a lesson for daring to argue with his father! He hoped it would hit the keeper’s hut and stick in the roof like a harpoon. The wind was now very cold under his jersey. A grumble of thunder came from behind the Crystal Palace. A storm was coming, hurray! The pilot kite, very high up in the sky, was swinging from side to side. Father and the man helping to hold the cord by the winder were now being pulled over the grass.

“I ought to warn you!” cried Father: “If the seat won’t hold it, you must watch that the line doesn’t foul you anywhere.”

Many people were now hurrying up. When Father got to the seat, he shouted to the man to lower the winder, so that he could pass the line under the top bar of the seat, at the side. The line hummed a dangerous high note as it was held taut on the wood. Father took a turn round the top bar, and once again, and then again, and tied a knot, saying: “By Jove, my palm felt on fire”, and shaking off his leather glove, there was a blue line right across like a cane mark where the cord had cut his skin.

Several people pressed to see, and Father cried: “Stand back, please! If this powerful cuttyhunk breaks it will crack like a whip-lash, and may take an eye out!”

Then the seat began to tilt back on the grey galvanised loops of its legs and several men tried to grab it, but it fell over
backwards
, and so did they, and, Oh glory, on the strong wind that turned the trees grey the seat was bouncing and sliding over the empty tennis court. It hooked up the net and went on dragging and tearing it.

People were shouting, “Billo! Billo there! Look out! Hi!” but the seat caught in the big thorn tree and started to climb up it, then it went right through the branches and over the grass where the East London Industrial boys played football in the winter. A lot of boys were running after the seat, and hanging on to it. It was terribly exciting!

Phillip ran after them with the others, shouting out “Let it go! Let it go!” for he wanted to see the seat rise up into the air and go on forever, like Johnny-head-in-air in
Struvelpeter.
But the seat was held at last, and then to Phillip’s utter disappointment, Father took out his ivory penknife and cut the line. At once the kites dropped away, waggling slowly, falling about limply and
growing smaller and smaller, shaking their heads as though sadly as they went far over the poplar trees at the end of the Hill and at last were lost to sight.

Thunder was rolling nearer with livid flashes of lightning. They all hurried away off the Hill, while Father said he would see the keeper later, measly Skullface who tried to catch boys, about the damage to the seat. The trees all had a pale, grey look in their twirling leaves.

“You see, old chap,” he said to Phillip, as they hastened down the gully, the winder with only a little line left on it under his arm, “wet cord is a conductor of electricity, and we all might have been struck dead if lightning had taken it into its head to travel down from those nimbus clouds overhead. I wonder if I shall see the kites again? I marked my name and address in indelible pencil on the struts, with promise of a reward.”

Later that evening, when Phillip was in bed, there came a knock on the front door. He heard the bell ring as well. He hopped out of bed and crept along the passage. Three rough voices spoke at once when Father opened the front door on the chain. Then there was talking, the men calling Father “Guv’nor”. Phillip heard the chain go off, and then the chink of money. A voice said, nastily, “Blimey, what’s this?” Father said, “That is one-tenth of the value to which you are entitled by law. You can take it or leave it.”

“It’s not worth the tram ride up from Vilo Dogs! What you fink we are, ’king kids?”

“That’s all you’ll get, the kites aren’t worth very much, you know.”

“Come on, leav’r old Jew, mates, an’ next time let ’im climb on the roof and get ’is ’king kites by is ’king self!”

Phillip crept back to bed, thinking of the awful swearing at Father. Mum came up later, and told him that the men had been very rude when Father had given them ninepence each. Phillip immediately felt ashamed because Father had not given them more.

Father put the kites in his workroom, and then Phillip fell asleep. At breakfast Father talked about a windlass and piano wire, which was beyond him, he said. When Phillip went on the Hill to look at the seat, it was cemented back in its place.

P
HILLIP
made friends with a dog on the Hill. They used to go hunting deer together, and Rover, as Phillip called him, kept the wolves at bay when they attacked his herds in his domain. He was Sir Phillip now, as Cousin Gerry had knighted him one Saturday morning, saying: “Those are your lands, Sir Phillip”, and pointed with his switch before galloping away. But Father saw him with Rover one afternoon and said he must not consort with strange dogs, in case they bit him. If a dog had
hydrophobia
, said Father, it would go mad if you gave it a saucer of water to drink. Everyone it bit would foam at the mouth and scream at the sight of water.

Phillip listened, and that was all: for he was beginning to see and feel Father as something that was always trying to stop him doing what other boys did, and besides, he was always grumbling and so the only thing to do was to keep out of his way as much as possible and not let him find out anything.

There had been a glut of cherries earlier that year. Masses of cherries were for sale in barrows in the street outside the school for a halfpenny a pound, black ones and red ones. The black ones were sweeter. Father had objected to him buying cherries in the gutter, saying they had been handled by dirty paws with no idea of sanitation. They must be washed first, before being eaten. As far as Phillip was concerned, they were washed in his mouth; the daily after-school bag was empty long before he reached even Charlotte Road. He bought some for the other boys, out of his fretwork money from Grannie. He made all his fretwork things for Grannie, who gave him a shilling an object. After selling her the seventh pipe-rack, Grannie said gently that she did not smoke, and would Phillip think of something else for the next time? So with pattern pasted on thin sycamore wood clamped to the vice on the edge of the kitchen table, Phillip began an entire piano front, to be completed in sections of twelve. He grew tired of fretwork after the second section, and asked Grannie
if she would mind if he did not do the rest. After all, he pointed out, she had not got a piano.

“No, dear,” said Grannie. “But it is very good of you to think of me. Perhaps I shall have a piano one day, and then you can finish the screen for me.”

In compensation Phillip brought her a chaffinch’s nest, from which the young birds had flown. They were not fleas in the bottom of it, among the horsehair and the feathers, he said, but only tiny beetles which did not bite you.

Cherry hogs were the rage at school that summer. All along the walls of the playground boys crouched behind their wooden frames made in the workshop, inviting all comers with bags of dried stones to try and win lucky shots. You knelt down at a chalk line and flipped or rolled your hog towards the satinwood frames, which had square holes in them along one edge, like the holes of a mouth-organ. If you got a hog in the smallest hole, you got ten hogs back, but the largest hole at the other end was worth only two. Mother made him a little linen bag to keep his hogs in; but Father saw them, and saying they were stones harbouring germs, sent him to wash his hands—he was an hour late for tea—and confiscated the hogs.

Phillip swopped the rest of his cherry hogs for five-stones. A boy had got five knuckle-bones of a sheep from a butcher, and boiled them to get the shreds of meat off them. You threw them up, while crouching down, and tried to catch them on the back of your hand. Then on your fist at the side, and other places in succession. Some boys bought five-stones at the shop, five for a ha’penny, but real bones were best, for then you could think of cannibals in canoes in the South Seas, like in Father’s book, which had been his prize at school by what was printed inside the cover.

Meanwhile Richard had thrown the grubby cherry stones one and two at a time among the thorns of the gully, hoping the seeds would sprout and take root. He had never forgotten what he had heard, as a boy, of the effects of cholera sweeping through the East End of London, killing hundreds of men, women and children. It had been said at the time that the germs had been brought on a ship arriving at the East India Docks, with a Lascar crew, and that they had spread by way of an infected hawker with a fruit barrow.

Having got rid of the cherry-stones, Richard felt that he ought to make it up to Phillip with some marbles. So he bought him a box from the newspaper shop by the station, and a big blood alley with green, red, and yellow stripes inside it. Germs were less likely to live on stone or glass.

When Phillip took the blood alley to school, Mildenhall took it from him and put it in his pocket, saying, with thumb showing through clenched fist, that Phillip would get that in his eye if he told his cousin Gerry. A score of times as he lay in bed at night Phillip saw himself, stripped to the waist, rippling with muscles, weaving around Mildenhall and then with a tremendous straight left, knocking him backwards off his feet, while boys cheered and in the distance Helena Rolls smiled at him, and giving him a bow off her plait, asked him to wear it for her sake.

Now it was time to go away for the summer holidays. With some of the money Grannie had given him for the pipe-racks Phillip was going to buy some fishing tackle, hire a boat, and get
Pluck
Library
as well as the
Union
Jack,
for holiday reading. Father had forbidden this literature, saying it gave a boy entirely wrong ideas about life, and tended to make him wild and in some cases encouraged possible criminal tendencies. Father had no objection to him reading the
Strand
Magazines,
in their thin pale-blue covers, which filled an entire drawer below the clothes cupboard in his bedroom. Phillip had read every Adventure of Sherlock Holmes during the past winter and spring, and had been horrified to learn that in the end Sherlock Holmes had fallen in a death clutch with the terrible Professor Moriarty over a precipice.

Yet, despite exercises with his father’s dumb-bells and Indian clubs, Phillip remained a thin, pale little boy, frightened of Mildenhall; until the summer holidays came, with fresh and sunlit prospect. They were going to the seaside, to a faraway place called Hayling Island.

Phillip duly bought his
Plucks
and
Union
Jacks
at the bookstall at Waterloo, and put them to mark his ownership of a corner seat facing the engine. This time he was determined to be strong, and not to be sick. His sisters also had their special holiday papers: Mavis had
Comic
Cuts
and Doris had
Little
Folks.

“Now I must sit here, by myself, at this end,” said Phillip. “Please tell Mavis to get in the other corner, Mummy. I may
want to change my seat at any moment. Also, her face opposite always worries me.” So far the family had the carriage to themselves.

“I like this end best, too,” said Mavis. “And your face not only worries me, it makes me laugh, the way you look when you are reading.”

“Come along to this end, Mavis, it is just as good, dear.”

“Oh, you always put him first, Mummy! It isn’t fair!”

“Go on, Mavis, obey your mother, this is my end!”

“I don’t see why I should, just because you say so, so there!”

“Mother said so, too. Wash your ears out.”

“It’s going to be a lovely day, and so don’t let’s start bickering, there’s good children.”

“I like that! Why, you
never
wash. Who pretends to have a cold bath, when he swishes the water with his hands, I’d like to know.”

“Who puts powder on her face—to cover grime with chalk dust?”

“What about the dust in your ears! You
never
wash them.”

“Children, don’t bicker so!”

“I wasn’t bickering, Mum, I was just asking Mavis to move in case I want to be sick.”

“I know, dear.”

“You favour Phillip, just as Daddy says!” cried Mavis, from the opposite corner.

“You silly fool, shut up!” said Phillip. “If I have to put up with that from Father, there’s no reason why I should have to put up with it from a bit of a girl like you.”

“Bit of a boy yourself! You aren’t very strong, are you? Anything makes you sick.”

“Your ugly mug does, certainly.”

“Phillip, I won’t have you speaking to your sister like that! I’ve told you before. I shall tell your father if you are not a good boy.”

“I don’t care. You can’t frighten me! All right, if I spew right over you, Mavis, it will be entirely your own fault.”

“Have this orange,” said Hetty. “It will settle your stomach, dear. And I won’t have you using such an expression. Where you pick up such things from I do not know.”

“I heard it from your brother Hugh.”

“Phillip, how dare you speak so familiarly of your uncle! I
am not concerned with what Uncle Hugh or anyone else does, I will not have you speaking like a common little boy.”

At this point an elderly woman got in. She was dressed all in black, and conveyed such an atmosphere of lugubrity that the conversation closed. Phillip had his stories folded beside him; he was putting off the wonderful moment of beginning to read, pretending to himself that he did not know they were there, so that he might pretend suddenly to have discovered them. Then Mavis was on her feet, to look out of his window as the whistle blew. Phillip got up and elbowed her away, while Hetty told him not to put his head out, in case it struck a signal. She worried in case the door had not been closed properly after the lady had got in, and was in apprehension until the lady said, “There is a distinct draught, I think I must ask you to let me put the window up half-way”, as she rose to do it.

“Sit down now, Sonny,” Hetty said politely, “and read your papers, like a good boy.”

The elderly woman put on a pair of steel-framed spectacles and took a Bible out of her rush bag, watched by Phillip during intervals of looking intently out of the window. When she got out at Clapham Junction he said, “Phew! What a niff! I bet she don’t use Pears soap.” There were many enamel
advertisements
for this luxury fixed to the sooted yellow-brick walls beside the railway lines. “It’s enough to make anybody sick.”

“Phillip, how dare you!”

Despite herself, Hetty could not help smiling.

“There you go again, encouraging Phillip!” said Mavis, watching her from the opposite corner. “You pander to him.”

“Hush, Mavis; you should not say such things.”

“Father says them, so they must be true, so there!” and Mavis wrinkled her nose at Phillip.

“Now who would like a nice banana?” asked Hetty, taking up her bag, in an attempt to restore harmony.

“I would like a nasty one for a change,” said Phillip.

“You won’t get one at all, Sonny, if you talk like that! There’s a black one here, I’ve a good mind to take you at your word. Now be a good boy, and don’t annoy. We are all going to have a lovely holiday.”

Doris sat beside her mother, holding tight to a wooden spade and a little painted bucket.

“Give Phil the black banana, Mum, just to show him!” said Mavis.

“I’ll put it in my pipe and smoke it, like the mat in the hall!” retorted Phillip.

“Isn’t he barmy, Mum?”

“Then Father is barmy too, for he said it first!”

“Hush, Sonny, you should not say such things about your father.”

“Well, you tell Father not to say such silly things to me. Putting the hall mat in my pipe to smoke! Poof!”

The incident of the mat had happened when, after a raining day, Phillip had come home with muddy boots and forgotten to wipe them on the mat. Father had been home, and sending him back, had told him to come in the front door quietly, close it, wipe his boots thoroughly, go out again and repeat the same actions six times running, to teach him to remember.

“Don’t let me or anyone else have to remind you about the mat in the hall again, young man. Now put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

Phillip had imagined a huge bowl, stuffed with the coconut mat, and thick blue smoke rising out of a pipe with a stem as thick as a cricket-bat handle. Recalling the pipe, the thought of it made his head ache, and nearly broke his neck, to have such a monstrous thing in his mouth. It made him feel sick, too. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep; but opening them again, there was Mavis staring at him with a grin. She was hoping he would be sick, he thought. He closed his eyes again, but now the smell of the mat being smoked in that pipe made him feel sick. He kept very still.

It was only lately that the antagonism between Phillip and Mavis had become sharpened. They had never really been friends, and now their worlds did not even touch. Phillip was in Gerry’s Band; Mavis had two particular friends in the school, who absorbed her emotions and feelings. Both her girl friends lived in Charlotte Road. The trio usually walked to and from school together, in a world of their own.

Little notes passed between them occasionally; sometimes two were not speaking to the third; the quarrel was made up. Arm-in-arm three loving girls, oblivious of boys, walked together on
the pavement; then another remark—it is always what was said by the third girl—would cause a different coalition of Mavis and Violet against Marjorie, or Marjorie and Violet were not speaking to Mavis. In times of harmony they exchanged Confession Books, where heart-burning statements about best friends were recorded, sometimes to be scratched out with ink or smothered by wetted indelible pencil, substitutions made, later to be cancelled. Once Phillip had written sarcastic remarks about Violet’s thin legs and Marjorie’s calves like table-legs, in Mavis’s book, an action that caused protest from Mavis, a reprimand not to spoil other people’s things from Hetty, and “I don’t care, I’ll do what I like” from the culprit.

These sarcasms and antagonisms between the children were hurtful to both Richard and Hetty, in their separate worlds or provinces of thought. Richard could not understand it; he and his brothers and sisters had not been like that. He had long decided that it was through Turney traits that such things occurred. As for Hetty, she looked back on the life of her old home with Charley, Dorry, Hughie, and little Joe as one of merriment and accord. Why could not Phillip and his sisters be as they had been, in the old days? So while Richard withdrew into himself more and more—while continuing to like Mavis, because obviously she liked him, whereas Doris showed no desire to be other than her mother’s child—Hetty strove, by acting always as peacemaker and ameliorator, to avoid the discord which was wearing her out.