Joy and Josephine (15 page)

‘’E says ‘e’s stuck,’ panted Norman, who was alternately pushing and pulling now, as if he were doing artificial respiration. ‘’E is too. Can’t move the bleeder either way. Pull on that leg, Bill, while I takes the other. Come on you lot!’ He had forgotten to keep his voice low. ‘Pull, you bastards! Don’t stand gawpin’ there.’

Arthur’s broad shoulders were stuck fast. His headless body, spreadeagled in the hole with a boy tugging at each leg and three children tugging at the boys, must surely come apart. His stifled gurgling was horrible to hear.

‘Oh poor Art,’ sobbed Tess. ‘He’ll suffocate. He’ll die. Oh, what will we tell your mother?’

‘Shut up and pull,’ muttered Norman, pale with fear. They pulled. Jo, at the back, strove like the anchor man in a tug-of-war. Something must give.

Something did. A brick at the edge of the old drain shifted and crumbled, and Arthur, black in the face, his eyes wild with
the vision of death, slumped into the hole like a sack of potatoes, and lay inert, with his arms still in the drain among the filth and rubble.

Norman shook him. ‘Speak to me, our Artie,’ he cried dramatically.

‘Is he dead?’ Wilfred held up a candle and peered at him. He had always wanted to see a dead person.

‘’E will be if you don’t give ’im air.’ Norman pushed back Tess, who was kneeling on the edge of the hole, tenderly picking strings of slime off Arthur’s face.

Arthur suddenly gave a shuddering gasp, rolled over and sat up. The children recoiled as if a corpse had risen in its coffin.

‘What’s he say?’ they asked, as Arthur spluttered and coughed.

‘’E says it’s a smashin’ old drain. Bigger farther up. ’E could see light, ’e says. What say, Art? Coo, ’e’s got some guts, this kid. No, son, you ain’t going in again. I’ve had me bellyful of drawin’ you like you was a cork. Let someone else go. Who’s the littlest? You, Jo. You go on up to the end and tell us what it’s like, then us others can knock out a few more bricks and go up arter.’

‘Me, Norm?’ Josephine shuddered.

‘Oh, Norman, ought she?’ asked Tess,

‘Course she ought,’ said Billy. ‘She’s the only one small enough. Come on, Josie.’ No one but he called her that. He knew she liked it.

She hung back, and Norman said: ‘Come on, kid, we’re counting on you,’ knowing this would bring her.

She put her head into the noisome drain, then withdrew it, and looked at Billy and Norman. ‘I don’t want to,’ she whispered.

‘Don’t be a baby,’ they said.

‘I ain’t I’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘It’s so dirty and all,’ she hedged, looking down at her clean underclothes.

‘Cissy!’ they taunted. ‘Mummy’s darling.’

‘I
ain’t!’

‘You’d rather let young Art go in again and choke hisself to death, I suppose,’ said Norman. ‘But you could go through easy
as a dose of salts. Girls I You can ’ave ’em. This is the last time I let you come with us, Jo Abinger, cut me froat if it ain’t.’

‘Oh Norm!’ She looked at him big-eyed, and he scowled at her. Then she stuck out her lower lip and drew in a snuffling breath like a pekinese. ‘I’ll go. Just let’s have another look.’ As she put her head tentatively into the drain again, Billy and Norman seized her and wriggled her in like a maggot going into rotten wood. The soles of her bare feet kicked and disappeared, and the boys, both trying to look up the drain, jammed their heads together, scrapping and shoving like two people with one telephone receiver.

When Jo had been gone for a few minutes, Tess began to wring her hands and wonder what they were going to tell Mrs Abinger.

‘What can you see?’ Wilfred was in the hole, trying to squeeze his head between the two boys. ‘What can you
see?’

Norman cuffed at him. ‘Nuffink,’ he said. ‘She’s blocking the light. She don’t seem to move. No, Art, you ain’t goin’ in, not till we clear the bricks for them bull-ox shoulders of yours.’

‘Poor Jo, I liked her,’ said Wilfred, as if she were already dead. He climbed out of the hole and went to find the brass sugar scoop, which he had always coveted.

It was horrible in the drain, slimy and fetid. Josephine, who disliked even getting treacle on her fingers, had never hated anything so much in her life. She held her breath until her head sang, and butted on, not looking up towards the grating. The faint, growing light showed her on what she was crawling, and she shut her eyes.

Suddenly, her bursting head split into a thousand stars. She lay with her skull against the grating, half-stunned, and whimpering with the mixture of rage and self-pity that a blow on the head or face induces.

‘Mum!’ she moaned, without knowing she was saying it. ‘I want my Mum. Poor Jo,’ she sobbed. ‘Poor Jo.’ But presently, through her desolation there began to creep a glow of pride that turned the pain in her head into a martyr’s crown of triumph. She had done it. She had got there when no one else could. She had suffered for the boys and they would praise her. She would
go back now, and tell them what she had suffered, and bask in their admiration.

What could she see? She must see something to tell of when she got back. The grating was made of close zinc mesh like a meat safe, and she could see nothing at all through it. As she began to retreat down the drain, she invented what she would tell them she had seen. What had they wanted her to find? A yard, with prisoners exercising, wasn’t it? And the nails in Mr Goldner’s boots.

Half-way along the drain, where it bent slightly downwards, Jo stuck for a moment, and was washed with the icy death sweat that had stood on Arthur’s brow when they pulled him out. She panicked, and struggling, hit her head again. Something warm and moist clutched her foot and she screamed, and her scream was all round her in the suffocating tunnel.

When they pulled her out and crowded round where she crouched in the hole, dirtier than ever before in her life, tears were running down her face like drizzle on a sooty window. Tess, motherly, crooned over her, and dropped candle wax into her hair.

Even Norman was quite worried. ‘Are you all right, kid?’ he asked. ‘What’s up? Did you get there?’

Jo knuckled her eyes, and looking round through her long lashes that were stuck together with dirt and tears, realized that she was the centre of all their attention. The triumphant glow that had been knocked cold half-way down the tunnel came back to light her face to a grin, although her mouth was still jerked by the mechanics of her sobs that persisted dryly after the tears had ceased.

‘’Course I got there,’ she swaggered, watching the boys’ eager faces. ‘I done it all right.’

‘What are you blubbin’ for then?’ asked Arthur suspiciously.

‘I ain’t.’ She beamed at him, then frowned suddenly as the pain shot across her brow.

‘What’s it like?’ asked Norman.

‘Can I get through?’ asked Billy. ‘Is it big enough for me?’

‘Did you see me Dad?’ rumbled Arthur.

‘Is it safe?’ asked Tess, and Wilfred said: ‘Shall I need my screwdriver to take off the grating?’

She told her tale. They hung on her words, inspiring her to embroider still further.

It was the hour of Jo’s glory. For at least five minutes, she felt like the leader of the gang. Norman said she was a proper little sport, and Billy thumped her on the back and said: ‘Goodo – kiddo,’ which was the latest expression at his school. Tess took the seaside bucket and went out to the flooded gravel hole for some water to clean Jo up. Wilfred offered her a threepenny bit. His rewards to others were always as practical as he would wish for himself.

As she had no pocket in her underclothes, she returned the coin in a lordly way, adding nobility to her courage. It was only when Arthur spat on his hands, and Norman said: ‘Yus, come on troops – now for it,’ that Jo came down to earth and discovered that her head was aching enough to make her feel sick.

She could not go up there again to-night, not feeling like this. But she could not stay behind while they stormed Wormwood Scrubs gaol without her. She began to shiver, and sobs bubbled up in her throat.

Clenching her chattering teeth, she reached up and clutched at Norman’s trousers. ‘Not to-night, Norm,’ she pleaded. ‘Let’s go to-morrow, eh?’

‘Why not to-night?’ said Norman. It’s proper dark now. Nothing to wait for.’

‘Strike while the iron’s hot!’ exulted Billy, and bit at Norman’s hand which was clapped across his mouth.

Jo’s head was throbbing and the tears were pressing like a bursting dam behind her eyes. Before they overwhelmed her, she managed to invent rapidly: ‘Not to-night, ’cos there’s people about everywhere. I seen ’em. Drilling and that in the yard. They’ll nab us – ’ The flood gates broke and she dissolved into an abandonment of exhausted howling.

The boys turned their backs on her and argued among themselves.

‘Overtired,’ said Tess briskly, coming back with the bucket
and quoting Nanny. ‘I always say these things only end in crying.’

‘Can’t you make her stow it?’ Norman threw over his shoulder. ‘She’ll give the whole show away.’

‘Now stop it, Jo,’ said Tess, shaking her, ‘or we shan’t take you into the prison. Are we going now, Norm? It’s getting ever so dark outside.’

Arthur growled something at her, standing moodily hunched up, with his hands in his pockets and his head sunk between his shoulders.

‘That’s right,’ said Norman. ‘We daresn’t go when the coast ain’t clear. I say we won’t go to-night.’

‘I say it’s silly to go when the enemy’s massed against us,’ said Billy, as if it was his idea alone.

Josephine, who had held her breath to hear their decision, now let her tears flow again in relief.

‘Oh turn it off,’ said Norman, irritable in his disappointment. ‘Fair gets on your nerves. Take her home before they gets wind of ’er up the drain. Come on, Art. So long, gang. Same time, same place to-morrow.’ He and Arthur slipped out like wolves into the smoky twilight of the Scrubs.

Tessa put on Jo’s dress back to front over her filthy bodice and knickers. The lights had gone out of the tousled chestnut hair. The white satin bow was a limp string dangling from the end of a damp curl.

‘Oh dear,’ said Tess. ‘Your mother – ’

Josephine was too tired and sore to worry. When they got her outside, she could barely walk. Tess and Billy gave her a bandy chair, stumbling sideways with her across the common towards the bus stop, stopping at intervals to argue about who had the most weight.

Wilfred went round the hut, tidying the tools and putting out candles. Then he shut the rickety door behind him as carefully as an old gentleman locking up for the night, and trotted into the dusk after the teetering, swaying figures of his brother and sister.

Mrs Abinger did have plenty to say about Josephine’s appearance, but she stopped saying it when she realized what a state
the child was in. She accepted Tessa’s explanation of a fall into the Serpentine, and put Jo to bed and kept her there for two days.

The child was obviously in for one of her ‘heads’ again. She had been subject to these attacks of head pains ever since she was old enough to say why she was crying. Mrs Abinger put it down to the old injury caused on the night of the fire by the heavy frame of ‘The Age of Innocence’, although there was nothing to show for it now but a thin white line over her left eyebrow. The doctor thought it was due to a damaged nerve, and that Jo would grow out of it in time. When she had to miss school, Mrs Abinger took quite a pride in telling Mrs Mortimer that Jo was ‘laid up with her nerves’. It was grand to have nerves.

Apart from the headaches, Jo usually liked being in bed in the little room which led off her parents’ bedroom. It was papered in dark ochre and the paint was a blistering brown and what little furniture she had filled its narrow width, so that she had to climb into bed over the end; but it was her own, and Jo liked it better than any place in the flat.

Being laid up meant missing school, and her mother pampered her with toys and delicacies. Whenever she could leave the shop, Mrs Abinger would pop up with some candied peel, or a toffee, or a comic paper, or simply for a kiss. Jo felt more cuddlesome when she was in bed; she was more willing to be kissed than when she was on her feet and busy with something else.

Jo liked her father better at these times. Mr Abinger had a solemn, envious respect for illness. He paid more attention to Jo than when she was getting in his way about the flat, or distracting customers’ attention from himself in the shop. Although he was not actually unkind to her, and enjoyed a certain pride of possession when Jo was admired, he had never relaxed from the thought that she had not been his idea in the first place. Having a child had not disrupted his life, but he was still on his guard. Ignorant of the ways of children, he did not know when to scold and when to overlook. Carping was second nature to him, and a child was an easy target to carp at. He had got into
the habit of hardly speaking to her except in reproof or criticism.

Ordinarily, he never bothered to come and say good-night to her, but when she was in bed with one of her ‘heads’, he would come in and out of her room to turn her pillows, or give her pills and draughts from his collection of patent medicines. After closing time, he would sometimes read to her, sitting by the window with just a corner of the curtain raised, so that he could see the book without letting the evening sun into the room. He mistrusted the sun as much as he mistrusted fresh air. It did not matter that he usually read some mousy-smelling book of his boyhood, which his monotonous rendering did nothing to enliven. His voice made Jo pleasantly drowsy, and she liked to have him sitting there, very upright, with the book held at the correct angle, and Mrs Abinger peeping in from time to time to relish the unusual domestic scene.

But this time, Jo did not enjoy being in bed, because she was fretting for the hut. Her mother pampered her as much as usual, and her father read her bits of
Froggy’s Little Brother
but Jo could think of nothing but the gang at Wormwood Scrubs, who might finish the adventure without her. By the time she was allowed out again, it might all be over, the Goldners monoplized by their father and the gang disbanded.