Joy and Josephine (12 page)

If it had not been for the gas stove and dresser, Jo would not have believed that this was a kitchen. She thought all kitchens were the size of the one at home, where Mum could reach anything without moving a step from the stove. She had never heard of such a thing as a scullery, like the one where they washed their caked hands before tea.

She did not think much of the tea, which was only bread and butter and one kind of jam, and cakes which were raw in the middle. She had better teas at home, where she was allowed to choose things from the shop; jam or paste or biscuits, or the slab cake if there were any left over at the end of the week. However, everything else seemed so big that it was comforting to find something to belittle. She would scoff about it to the Goldners, but it was a pity there was nothing worth slipping into her pocket or the elastic of her knickers for them.

After tea, the children took Josephine up to the bathroom. They laughed when she said she had never seen such a big bath before, so she did not say that she had thought the sink in the scullery downstairs was their bath.

It had never occurred to Billy that a bath was something you could swank about, but he made up for it now. ‘I have the water right up to here.’ He put his finger on the rim and made his
swaggering face, looking down his short sunburned nose and curling his lips in a braggart smile.

Jo peered into the depths of the great old-fashioned tub, which had straight sides coffined in by sodden, blistered boards, ‘Ain’t you afraid of drowning?’ she asked.

‘Course not. Would you be? Can’t you swim?’

‘No.’

‘Can’t
you?’ They could not understand this.

‘Where do you have your bath then?’ Tess asked her, worried. ‘Don’t you have to wash?’

‘I have a bath like this.’ Jo sketched the size of her zinc hip bath. ‘Mum hots the water in a big jug and I has me bath in front of the fire.’ This sounded to them delightful, as indeed it was.

‘You are lucky living in the Porto,’ sighed Billy. ‘I wish we did. Tess and I went down there yesterday. The market was super fun.’

‘I’m not allowed to play in the market,’ said Jo warily.

‘Aren’t you? What a waste of living there. Your mother keeps a shop, doesn’t she?’ asked Tess. ‘Can you take what you like without paying? What do you sell?’

‘All sorts. Sugar, tea, biscuits, sweets, cars, horses, toffee-apples, grand planners – ’

‘Oh Jo,’ reproached Tess, who had a troublesome conscience, which worried for everyone else’s sins besides her own, ‘that can’t be true. It’s only a grocer’s shop. You don’t sell all that.’

‘We
do
!’ cried Jo furiously, realizing she had overdone it.

‘I’m going to come down to your shop,’ said Billy. ‘I’m going to come and sell.’

‘You ain’t never going to come and sell in our shop.’

‘I am. Your mother said I could.’

‘She never.’

They were still bickering when they were sent into the nursery to unpack the toys from the boxes in which they had come from the country. Mrs Moore rashly told Jo she could choose something to take home with her. ‘Unless it’s something the others specially want,’ she qualified, seeing Billy’s pout.

‘Not at all,’ said Commander Moore, who had a tidying fit on
and had come into the nursery to see what rubbish he could throw away. ‘Do ’em good to give up something for a change. They’ve got far too many toys anyway. They only break them. Look at this.’ He held up the sailless, keelless hulk of a toy yacht.

Billy hurled himself at him. ‘Give that to me! It’s mine!’

‘You don’t want that wreck,’ his father said. ‘The damn thing’s not seaworthy.’

‘I do. It’s Round Pond worthy.’

‘Tell you what, old son, I’ll buy you a decent boat for your birthday. We’ll rig her properly and I’ll show you how to sail her.’

‘I know how to sail a boat,’ muttered Billy, as his father went out of the nursery with an armful of broken toys and torn books, which the children would retrieve later from the dustbin.

‘You can have a doll,’ Wilfred told Josephine. None of the dolls were his. ‘You can have that one.’ He gave her the only doll that Tess liked, a black Mammy, with a coloured turban round its battered head.

‘She can’t have Dinah!’ Tess snatched the doll away, and then looked strickenly at Jo. ‘You don’t want her, do you? Oh say you don’t want her, or I shall feel I’ve got to let you.’

‘Tess has a conscience,’ explained Billy. ‘It’s an awful nuisance.’

‘I can’t help it,’ Tess said. ‘It’s a disease, Mummy says, like measles.’

‘I’ve had measles,’ Jo said chattily. ‘Twenty-four times.’

Billy sucked in his breath. ‘I say, you’re an awful liar.’

Seeing that he was admiring her, Jo took the opportunity to say: ‘I want to have that engine.’

‘You can have it,’ said Wilfred sunnily. He had quietly removed all his own toys and hidden them at the back of the cubboard.

‘She’s can’t!’ Billy snatched at it. ‘It’s mine! Why should she come here and take all our things?’

‘Your Mum said I could.’ Jo hugged the engine to her. She had never had any clockwork trains; there was no room for them at the flat.

‘I say you can’t!’ Billy blazed at her. When he was angry, his whole body took part. His dark stiff hair stood erect, his limbs moved jerkily as if he were on wires, he bounced on the balls of his feet.

‘Don’t shout at me. It’s rude.’

‘Rewd,’ he mimicked. ‘You don’t even speak properly.’

‘I can speak proper.’ She stuck out her lip, still holding the engine, although he had got his fingers round it and was tugging.

‘Can speak proper, can speak proper!’ he jeered. Secretly, he admired her accent. Since he had come to London, he had lain awake in bed, listening to the street boys, luckier than he to stay up after dark, shouting and cat-calling in the Mews beyond the back-yard. Under the sheets, he whispered to himself the illicit charm of their horrid cries. It was envy as well as anger that made him taunt Jo now.

‘Porto child, Porto child!’ he mocked her, pulling hard at the engine. As it came free, it scratched her arm, and she let out a piercing yell, which brought Mrs Moore resignedly into the room. Why was it always the visiting child who got hurt?

She made no attempt to understand the clamoured explanations. ‘Never mind,’ she said, ‘Daddy’s going to take you all out now to play cricket in the Square.’

‘Oh Mummy, must we?’ sulked Billy, not knowing that his father was in the doorway.

‘You know you love cricket,’ said Commander Moore. ‘You’d like it even better if you weren’t such a duffer at it. Margery, I want them to play every day when I’m not here. You’ll keep them up to that, won’t you?’

‘Yes, dear,’ she said at random, wiping Jo’s eyes, and straightening her hair ribbon. ‘Tessa, I suppose I couldn’t persuade you to wear a big bow like this instead of those pigtails? It does look so pretty.’

‘No, Mummy, I’m afraid not,’ said Tess quite kindly.

‘Someone get the stumps and bat,’ ordered the Commander.

‘We don’t know where they are,’ said Billy.

‘I do,’ said Wilfred. He always knew where everything was. He did not mind cricket, because he could be long stop and lie in the grass to study insect life.

‘What about
her?’
Billy nodded to Jo, who had been given a sweet, and was making a great display of sucking it, because no one else had one. ‘She can’t play.’

‘I can then,’ she said. ‘I’ve played billions of times.’

‘I don’t suppose she has,’ said Mrs Moore, steering her towards the door, ‘but never mind. It will be a new experience.’ She wanted to get them out of the house.

‘She may have,’ said her husband. ‘You see these kids playing in the street. Darned good some of them are, too. Some of the finest Pros in County cricket started their careers against the wall of a blind alley,’ he told Billy. ‘No proper coaching, but keen as mustard, and look at you, with a first-class coach at school and can’t even keep a straight bat at the age of ten. You’ll have to learn before you go to Dartmouth. Got the gear, Wilf? Good chap. Help him, Tess, he can’t carry all that Billy, you cut along and get a ball out of my blazer pocket in the hall.’

He organized them out of the room. Josephine, lingering behind, darted back to take the engine from the drawer where she had seen Billy put it. She carried it downstairs behind her back, and as they went through the garden, thrust it under a little bush near the gate. She would come back for it to-morrow. When she had played with it for a bit, she would use it to bribe Norman to let her help him rescue his father from the dungeons of Wormwood Scrubs.

Poor Commander Moore nearly went demented in Ladbroke Square. If he had had enough hair, it would have stood on end from the amount of times he clasped his head in despair. ‘You’re the most unsporting lot I ever met!’ he shouted at them, for unless they were bowling or batting, they could not see the point of cricket.

‘One for you, Tess – smart fielding now!’ he cried, as Wilfred hit a ball towards where Tess should have been. ‘Oh my God,
will
you stay where you’re told!’ She was half-way up a tree again, and he dragged her down by a dangling bare leg and led her back to mid-on by her pigtails.

Wilfred disappeared into some bushes, and was only accidentally discovered by his father looking for a lost ball. When Billy
batted, he refused to be out, arguing shrilly each time he was bowled, stumped, or caught. Josephine behaved the best. She did more or less what she was told, without understanding why, and once held a catch by mistake, which excited Commander Moore, because it proved that an eye for a ball game could be bred in the most unlikely material, like a religious vocation.

‘She’ll be better yet than any of you duffers,’ he told his uncaring family, as he hauled Billy from the ground, where he had cast himself in an ecstasy of rolling. ‘I don’t know why I waste my time on you.’ He pretended to walk towards the gate.

‘Oh Daddy, don’t go,’ they cried half-heartedly, torn between affection for him and the hope that he would go home.

‘All right, I give you one more chance, but it’s the last time I bring you out to play cricket, I swear.’ It would not be the last time. He had not fathered a family of three for them to grow up without playing cricket. It was unthinkable. So he persevered, his exasperation rising as the sun dropped, fermented by the patronizing audience of picnic parties, and the toddlers who sat down joyfully in the middle of the pitch, and worst of all, two hooligan street boys who were perched on the railings shouting: ‘Soppy Jo Abinger, soppy Jo Abinger!’ in an inane chant.

The Goldners in the grandstand were the reason why Josephine was taking an interest in the game. She wanted them to see her playing with the Moores. She knew they were surprised and jealous; that was why they stayed there jeering.

Billy kept looking across to where Arthur and Norman crouched like monkeys between the spear-shaped tops of the railings. ‘I say – ’ he wandered over to Jo, chewing grass, while his father was hunting for the ball in the centre shrubbery – ‘d’you know those boys?’

‘Course. Art and Norm Goldner. Their Dad’s in prison.’

‘Golly. What’s he done?’

‘I dunno. Murder or something.’

‘Golly.’ His estimation of her rose again. He had been dying to know a street boy ever since he came to London. ‘Let’s go and talk to them,’ he said, seeing the back view of his father still busy in the heap of mown grass.

‘I don’t mind.’ Jo saw an opportunity to show off to both sides.

The Goldners summed Billy up. ‘Got a tanner?’ Arthur asked.

‘What did he say? He does speak funnily. Has he got a cold?’

‘Nar,’ said Norman. “E always talks like that. Chronic. ‘E said: “Got a tanner?”’

Billy brought out his pocket money.

‘Toss you double or quits!’ rumbled Arthur, and while Billy was still puzzling over this, Norman, springing down into the Square, had grabbed the sixpence, tossed it, slapped it on the back of his hand, made a pretence of looking at it, said: ‘Yah, sucks, you lose,’ and slid the sixpence into his pocket.

‘Here, I say!’ Billy lunged at him. Norman immediately put up his fists, and Billy was going at him with flailing arms, when a roar from Commander Moore made him turn his head, and Norman sent him sprawling into the sooty laurel bush.

The Commander was at the end of his tether. He had spent five minutes in the shrubbery looking for the ball. He had come out without the ball, but with a scratched face, torn blazer, and cut grass inside his socks to find Tessa turning cartwheels at the far end of the lawn, Wilfred poking about in three inches of muddy water in the goldfish pond, and Billy and the grocer’s child discernible only as an agitation of the bushes at the edge of the Square.

‘Come here, you young swine,’ he shouted. ‘Double up, or I’ll thrash the life out of you!’

‘Well I declare,’ said one knitting Nanny to another, ‘he certainly doesn’t scruple about his language for all to hear.’

‘Ah,’ said Miss Potts, slightly deaf, from the bench where she sojourned every evening with Colonel Temperley from the Lomond Private Hotel, ‘there’s dear Commander Moore. I didn’t know they were back. My aunt used to know his grandfather, the Admiral. They are the Hampshire Moores, you know, always been seafaring folk. Isn’t it delightful to see him romping with his youngsters? A real family man.’

The only people in the Square who seemed not to hear Commander Moore were his family. ‘I’m going home,’ he shouted. ‘You can look for the ball, and come home when you’ve found it.’ He picked up his hat and went in search of a drink. He knew when he was beaten.

Billy and Norman had a good fight. Billy was unskilful, but he was burlier than Norman, and as plucky. Although he could not knock the other boy down, he got up every time Norman floored him, and went for him again in a tempest of rage, his hair like a porcupine.

After a few minutes, they suddenly tired of it and stopped by unspoken consent.

‘Coo,’ said Norman, ‘you fight quite good for a cissy.’

‘I’m not a cissy!’ Billy windmilled his arms, prepared to fight again.

‘Nar, nar, lay off.’ Norman fended him off easily with a raised elbow. ‘I got better things to do than waste me time serappin’ ’ere. You know what, don’t you Jo?’ He winked at her. ‘You want to come along of us ’sevening?’ He was mellowed by his fight, and he wanted to steal Jo away from the Moores.