Love, Let Me Not Hunger (4 page)

The circus people lived in a world apart, circumscribed by an especial moral atmosphere and code. They existed also under even more special and unusual physical conditions which the gajo, that is to say, the outsider, chose to regard as glamorous and romantic. People were always coming around and poking their noses into the living wagons which the circus people endured simply as a part of their way of life. But within that world the artistes, proud, aloof, as fiercely vain of their genealogies as any fourth- or fifth-generation baronet, lived wholly as human beings—fallible, weak, strong, jealous, greedy, generous, mean, kindly, bickering, backbiting, fighting—and in very few characteristics differed from the outsiders barred from their closed society.

They perpetuated themselves by intermarriage with other acts of equally noble lineage, that is to say a hundred and fifty years or more of circus background as rider, tumbler, buffoon, or juggler. They bore quantities of lusty, healthy children who, from the time they were able to toddle, were set upon horses, balanced on wires, suspended from trapezes or rings, and whose rough-and-tumble playmates were tiger and lion cubs. These children, utterly fearless, thought nothing of staggering bandy-legged before a great swaying elephant and demanding to be lifted up in his curling trunk and set down upon his broad forehead.

But then they grew up to share with other adults the same fears and desires, learned to tell the same lies and spread the same kind of gossip. Above all, they came to close ranks and turn stony hearts and frozen faces to the outsider. Occasionally, these ramparts could be breached by one not of the circus, but who showed that he or she could love and understand this world and its people; and then they proved themselves open, liberal, free-handed and warm-hearted. But never, of course, would they tolerate such a one as Rose, who, in addition to her flouting of the moral code, had not a single accomplishment in any of the fields connected with performing.

Her full name was Rose Rokcyszinski, though she was British born and brought up in London’s East End. Her mother had once, for a brief period, married a Polish sailor ashore from his ship. This had come to an end when on the next voyage the sailor slipped away, deserting his wife and unborn child but at least leaving a name behind for her. This name when she grew up she detested because it was so foreign-sounding, and when asked always gave an abbreviated version—Rose Rockie—or merely said, “Just Rose—”

The fact was that Rose had never been a tart. She had never wished to be one and therefore had always worked for her living. She had slept with men, yet never once in all her life had she prostituted herself, even when she was homeless or starving. She would never have been able to explain this fastidiousness but there it was. Her mother, for instance, practised a kind of amateur home prostitution as a sideline to charring and a means of earning some extra money or having what was known as “a good time.”

Since they lived in one room of a cold and squalid warren in the heart of a slum district, Rose when she was a child was well aware of these activities, and, even though they were usually conducted at night, both heard and saw what was going on. There was a memory which lingered in her mind long after she was grown. It was of a man’s voice speaking from the semi-darkness, saying, “What about the kid?” and her mother replying, “Never mind the kid. She’s just a baby. She don’t know nothing.”

Rose, however, was not a baby—one might doubt if she ever had been one—and she knew plenty. She herself had been violated at the age of thirteen, an experience which left her curiously undamaged, probably because all of her life was a perpetual violation of her longings, needs, and desires. The dockside night-watchman who lured her into his shack and then intruded himself into her person seemed, in retrospect, no more than a part of the squalor with which she was surrounded.

Her mother had been a slattern who never in her adult life was wholly clean or washed. Although the law had compelled her to send her daughter to school in reasonably neat clothes and not smelling too strongly, her dwelling remained a cesspool of blocked drains, communal lavatories, dirt swept under the bed, and all of the sour odours of penury pervading the building: sweat, onions and cabbage cooking, stale clothes, beer and whisky dregs, cigarette butts, and unwashed bodies.

Rose ate bad food, breathed bad air, was surrounded by unlovely people, and yet survived. It was a way of life that toughened her fibre, inured her to almost anything, and yet, oddly, did not coarsen her.

Rose ought to have grown up into a rough, tough little gutter product. That she did not could only have been due to the fact that within her was the heritage of another race and another people, and hence some of the softness, weakness, sadness, and unrequitable longing of a folk who for centuries had been squeezed between the harshness and cruelty of the Germans and the primitive savagery of the Russians.

She had come by some tiny streak of poetry which is sometimes expressed not on paper or in song, but by living it. As child, girl, and woman she had always craved for love and affection which she was never given, but she herself also had it to give. It manifested itself in love for helpless living things, such as a mouse or a stray, battered kitten or dog; she would stop to fondle a cart-horse in the street and lay her cheek against its soft nose. She was never able to possess any animal for herself, but anything living and lonely touched her: a calf being led to slaughter; rabbits cramped in a cage for sale; furry things seen in a pet-shop window. She would, had she been able, have gathered them all to her breast and held them closely to still the frightened beating of their hearts.

Rose was fortunate that when she was sixteen her mother died of septicaemia induced by filth infecting a cut and Rose was free and alone in the world.

She was at the time employed sewing in an East End tailor’s shop and looked more mature than her sixteen years.

The Health Service looked to the burial, after which Rose disappeared before she should attract the attention of the police or social welfare workers. She escaped from the room which had been her prison until then and took a lodging for herself only to discover that she had merely exchanged one squalid den for another, with the same assortment of stinks and torn-up newspapers blocking the lavatories.

The one thing that Rose had gained was independence—independence of movement as well as of action—and she discovered now that she no longer had to remain in the same place or in the same job. If she found herself with a pound or so in her purse she could board a train or a bus and go somewhere else where there were other people and other jobs. Yet, in the end, the economics of the situation always returned her to the dirty bed in the dreadful room with the cracked sink, stopped-up drains, and the fretful cries of children rising through the house. She knew her level and unerringly made for it in whatever town or city she happened to find herself, for she could afford nothing better and was used to it.

For four years she was a stray, homeless at home, never at home, in the ten-shilling lodging that was hers for a week or as long as she could put up the money. She was no stranger to hunger and penury, to newspaper inserted into the soles of her shoes, and nights spent on benches, in public parks, or sitting up in railway stations.

For she would not sell herself to live; she refused and rejected this, because by this refusal she kept alive a glow of dignity and self-respect.

Nor was she the striking kind of beauty who burns like a flame even from the husks of cheap clothing and down-at-heel shoes to light men to her side. She had wistfulness, some mischievous humour and a soul filled with yearning, all of which was concealed by poverty and shabbiness. Pathos was not a lure to attract men.

Yet she encountered them but never cared for one, as she moved from one job to another. She could be a waitress, a dishwasher, a chambermaid, a char, a factory hand when times were good, but not a salesgirl or receptionist, or anything connected with that clean, bright upper world that existed all about her but which was denied to her. She was shabby and hid her inner self beneath the hard crust of one who had been through it all and knew not only all the answers, but the questions as well.

She made friends easily: girls in the jobs at which she worked, and boys or men round about. And before long these last would want her, attracted by they knew not what, sometimes perhaps just by her availability. When the boy was kind, which was rare, she would sometimes yield, but more often not, and when she did it was without participation.

To Rose, the possession and the use of her body were something apart from her, and all of its functions were likewise as things detached. She washed it as best she could, standing before sinks disgusting with the grime of former occupants. For she herself had a passion and a craving for cleanliness even though in her environment she had never had the opportunity wholly to achieve it. She had never been in a proper bathroom to luxuriate in a hot tub with scented soap, nor had she ever viewed her own body naked in a full-length mirror, which was perhaps yet another reason why she was so much a stranger to it, why what happened to it did not seem to matter greatly one way or another. She ate, she worked, she slept, and was starved of everything else: love, affection, beauty, daintiness. She could pick up a stray cat, cuddle it in her arms, kiss it, squeeze it, but not keep it. She had no home.

Thus, from her seventeenth to her twenty-first year she passed through the factory towns of the Midlands and their grim, grey, smoke-begrimed rooming-houses, acquiring more toughness, more gutter wisdom, and hardening the defensive crust she had grown.

Yet she neither despaired nor pitied herself, nor made judgements, nor nurtured hates. She was too busy looking for jobs where she could work without being expected to whore for her wages with the boss on the side.

One night she found herself in Warrington, seventeen miles from Liverpool, down and out. She had lost a job dish-washing in a cafe for refusing to join the Greek and his wife who owned it in a bed party. Her money was used up; she had no further credit with her landlady and had been turned out. She carried her belongings in a cardboard suitcase; she had had no supper; it was after eleven o’clock. She had been walking the streets hoping to come across a sign in some shop or restaurant:
GIRL WANTED
or
CHAR WANTED
. She thought she would go to the railway station and sit. She often did that when she had no place else to go. One could stay there as though waiting for a train or meeting someone and doze through a night.

She passed the darkened entrance and façade of the Regent Palace Theatre, a variety house which a half-hour before had disgorged its patrons. The street light illuminated the billboard outside the theatre showing a comic-looking tramp in tattered garments and clown make-up, with a huge red bulb for a nose, blubbery lips, a red wig and, beneath arching, painted, red eyebrows, eyes that seemed to be both surprised and amused as he looked up at a black bird perched impertinently upon his shoulder. The poster said:
JACKDAW WILLIAMS AND RAFFLES. THE ONE AND ONLY. HERE THIS WEEK
.

The grotesqueness of the picture brought a momentary smile to the corners of her mouth, and then she passed onwards along the street that was now empty and deserted.

A man stepped out from a dimly lighted alleyway that led to the stage door of the theatre. Wrapped in a heavy overcoat, his collar turned up, a felt hat perched upon his head, he loomed enormously over the girl, who almost ran into him. He stood there for a moment, and she did not even notice the bird sitting on his shoulder.

He exclaimed, “Oop—sorry,” in a matter-of-fact tone. But then his voice changed and he said, “Hello, luv.”

Rose tried to dodge around him but he blocked her path and said, “Hey now, don’t be in such a hurry. How much?”

She replied evenly and without offence taken, “I’m not selling it.”

In the rays from the light shining over the stage door she saw a tall middle-aged man with a large nose, somewhat pendulous lips, and curious eyes with the lids drawn down at the corners.

The man said, “Well now,” but made no further attempt either to dispute or challenge her statement. However, he did continue to stand in her way while he inspected her. He took note, then, of the thin, shabby coat, the beret pulled down over her hair, the worn shoes and the cheap suitcase, but above all the droop of the shoulders. “Lost your job?” he enquired.

“What if I have?” The voice was defiant and independent.

Now the man looked again. The cold electric light had drained her of any colour. For all of her toughness her lips were full and soft, and there was something childish about them. He said, “Would you care for a cuppa coffee? Perhaps you’d join me in something to eat?”

The invitation appeared to entail no commitment. Rose was both cold and hungry. She said, “Okay,” and then remembered to add, “Thanks.”

“We’ll have to walk a bit,” he said. “There’s a lorry drivers’ cafe towards the end of the town that keeps open at this hour.” He took the girl’s suitcase from her and marched off, she keeping pace by his side.

As they passed another street light she saw the bird, which surprised but did not alarm her. She had seen so many strange things in her life that if a gentleman wanted to walk the streets at night or go for his dinner with a bird sitting on his shoulder, that was his business, particularly if he was going to treat.

They walked along then, side by side in silence, down the main street leading out of the town until the houses began to thin out and they came to an all-night petrol station and garage to which there was a small cafe attached. A number of lorries with trailers were drawn up there, and next to it was a car park.

They went into the cafe and sat down at one of the white marble-topped tables, and for the first time the man saw the girl in the light and noted that she was pale and thin, but there was an attraction for him in the boniness, in the swirl of reddish hair showing beneath the shabby beret, and in the lonely poverty of her. He asked, “What’s your name?”