Running to Paradise (5 page)

‘
You know about animals, then,’ the man said casually. ‘There aren’t many people he’ll take food from. He and I are both on the run, you see: he from a circus, and me from...oh, many things.’

‘
His hand felt so funny on mine,’ I said. ‘Why did he run away from a circus?’

‘
It didn’t suit him, I suppose,’ the man said in a noncommittal sort of voice, and looked about him once again.

‘
Look here, I must sit down, there isn’t much time and my foot hurts me like Hades. Stay and talk to me while I rest it, then home to Papa and Mama with you; I don’t often nowadays get the chance to talk to a Christian. You are a Christian, I suppose?’ He held out his hand: in a state of ecstasy I took it, my mouth too full of humbug to reply to his quite incomprehensible question.

I have never forgotten the ensuing half hour: the man, his looks, his voice and the magic of his charm will remain with me until the day I die. He sat me down between his long legs, on the damp grass beside the dying fire, the monkey now quite unafraid, chattering round us. What we talked of I was never afterwards able to remember. It was the timbre of his voice, his gentle self-mockery and above all, the way he treated me as an adult on his own level that was so unforgettably enchanting. At last, the sun that had shone so brightly it drew steam from the wet, glistening grass, went behind a cloud and the man looked up suddenly, raising his face to the sky in the manner of a hunted fox.

‘I must be on my way,’ he said in a different, harsher voice. ‘I’ve a long way to go and little time.’ I had just opened my mouth to beg him not to go, not yet, when there was a sudden shout behind us.

‘’
Enery Arthur Elliott, we are His Majesty’s Law Officers. There’s no escape, we’ve got you surrounded; just let go of the child and come quietly, there’s a good chap.’ The hoarse, Cockney voice rang out over the silent Common. A pheasant, disturbed, squawking wildly in sudden fright, rose from the grass in a whirr of wings and flew jerkily over the heads of the cordon of policemen that, as though by magic, had risen up out of the ground itself to encircle the man, his monkey and me. At the sound of the voice, the man turned to stone: he gripped me so tightly to him it hurt and I began to whimper.

‘
Come on now, son, let the little girl go. She won’t do you no good.’ The policeman’s voice was soft, wheedling, but still the man hung on. I remember burying my face in his chest and feeling his heart banging through the torn, flannel shirt that smelt of stale sweat and fear. Above me crouched the monkey, who had jumped in terror on to the man’s shoulder. The three of us clung together, utterly alone, against the world.

‘
No good, no good, I can’t go back. I won’t. Better to be dead.’ Now the man was muttering to himself.

‘
Rush ‘im, Sarge, ‘e ain’t armed.’ This time a voice from behind, a younger voice. I opened my eyes and saw through a haze of sticky tears that we were completely surrounded by the ring of policemen, all carrying truncheons, except for one who carried a rifle. The big one, who had first called out, had a whistle on a string round his neck: he seemed uncertain what to do next.

The man whispered in my ear:
‘I’m going to make a run for it; I haven’t a cat’s chance, but it’s the only way. Sit still and you’ll be alright.’

‘
Don’t leave me, please don’t leave me.’ I was sobbing now and quite beyond coherent thought.

‘
Shut up, you stupid little ass and sit still. There’s nothing for you to be afraid of,’ the man whispered furiously, then very gently relaxed his grip on me. There was silence, only the soft noises of the countryside and far away the clopping of a horse along the road from the town.

Suddenly, with one movement, the man was on his feet, hurling the terrified monkey straight at the momentarily off balance sergeant, now only a few feet away. With one bound he had jumped over the embers of the fire and, like a rabbit that, trapped in the last, small, square of uncut corn at harvest time, somehow manages to escape the ring of jeering men and boys armed with sticks, shot through the cordon of policemen and stumbled away over the Common. Knocked to the ground by the man
’s sudden bolt, I was by this time screaming blue murder; then there were other arms around me, another man’s voice, friendly, cajoling. ‘It’s alright, Miss Char, nothing to be afeared of. It’s PC Willis. You remember, I brought you back your kitty t’other day after you’d lost him.’ Refusing to be comforted, I continued to sob and wriggle in a futile attempt to escape, when suddenly a shot rang out. Then yet another voice, this one full of excitement: ‘We’ve got ‘im, Sarge. Bullet went straight through the back of ‘is ‘ead; good, clean shot it wure.’

‘
Best thing all round, really.’ The sergeant’s voice: ‘He were a bad un, but all the same I’ll have to make a report—’

‘
What on earth is going on? Has Bagland Common suddenly become part of the Wild West of America?’

‘
Ma! Oh Ma! It’s me. They’ve shot the nice man. Oh Ma!’ For once in my life the presence on the scene of my mother was what I wanted most in the world and there, miraculously, she was. I was placed (no doubt with considerable relief) gently in her arms by a deferential PC Willis.

‘
There, there, my pet, Ma is here now. There’s nothing more to be afraid of.’ And I, lying limp across my mother’s shoulder, too tired to think any more, thrust my still sticky thumb in my mouth and let her take over.

It was as I was being lifted into the waiting dog cart — Ma had been driving home from her committee when she had heard the shot and seen the police on the Common — that I saw the man for the last time. He lay on his back on a rough stretcher covered by a red horse blanket. His face was white and his beautiful eyes closed. His poor, mangled hand seemed to be clutching at his throat and there was a little smear of blood on his forehead. Suddenly, I remembered:
‘Ma, where’s the dear little monkey? He was so funny, he—’

‘
He’s gone to the animals’ heaven, dear. He’ll be quite happy there and he will be able to play all day long and never be hungry; you musn’t be sad about him.’ Ma’s voice was unusually gentle as she turned my face away from the grisly scene at the roadside. Over her shoulder she crisply addressed the police sergeant: ‘You’ll be up to make your report shortly, no doubt, Sergeant. Meanwhile, I will telephone the Chief Constable.’ With a flick of her whip, she brought Snowball, the grey mare, to life and the dog cart slowly trundled down the road and turned into the drive gates of Renton House.

And that was the end of my first great adventure. Or rather, the end of the adventure itself. There were to be many repercussions, not the least of which being that for a few, brief, exciting days I became quite famous.

The case of the man, ‘my’ man, had, it seemed, become quite a cause célebre. I did not, of course, learn the full story until many years later: it was, for diverse reasons, not considered suitable for children’s ears at the time. Annoyingly, I can remember little of the immediate aftermath of that incredible afternoon apart from being lifted down from the dog cart by a grey-faced Pa still in his City clothes and being carried up the front steps into the hall to be greeted by an assortment of people all talking at once, in the centre of which was Nurse Jump having hysterics. I remember little, too, of subsequent interviews with the gentlemen of the press, except for one nice man with a ginger moustache and a brown bowler hat, who referred to me as ‘the brave little Madam’ and gave me a lollipop. Sadly, the latter was immediately confiscated by my mother, who was present at the interview and strongly disapproved of all forms of bribery.

But it wasn
’t all excitement: nightmares became frequent. One in particular plagued me for many years. I would find myself clinging with all my strength to someone or something, I was never sure which, but it would feel warm, lovely and secure. Then, without warning, there would be a crash as of shattering glass and I would be alone, suspended in mid-air, high above a sort of vast emptiness. My hands would scrabble desperately for something to catch on to, but there would be nothing: from this dream I would awake screaming, no matter how familiar it became.

*

Now for my piece. A little on the pompous side, but not bad really, I suppose.

Biographical
Note

Henry Arthur Elliott was born in 1872, the son of a country parson who had married a rich wife. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, arriving at the latter in the early 1890s, when he at once became a member of the Aesthete Set that flourished at Oxford during the period. His first poems were published at the age of twenty and for the next few years he was very much part of the London fin
de siècle literary scene. However, as the century drew to its close, Elliott’s poetry began to change: it became harsh, brutal even, and its metre and vibrant rhythms incomprehensible to many. With the change in his work, there also came a change in his personality. From being gregarious and fun-loving, he became reclusive and would disappear for weeks at a time, no one knew where. Then suddenly, he who had never appeared to be interested in women, announced his engagement to a young woman whom, it was rumoured, he had picked up off the streets. The couple were married shortly afterwards amid more or less universal condemnation and from then on Elliott appears to have dropped out of London literary circles. His publishers turned down his next batch of poems: ‘My dear fellow,’ they said, ‘we can’t, we simply can’t — such coarseness...’ and that was that.

Several years elapsed during which little was heard of Elliott and no work published: there was talk of a child, but no one knew for certain. Then suddenly the amazing news broke; Elliott had killed his wife! The couple had apparently gone to live in a remote cottage somewhere in Gloucestershire and late one night Elliott had turned up at the local police station
‘looking wild and dishevelled’, or so the newspapers reported, and informed the police he had killed his wife. It later transpired he had, in fact, killed her in self-defence; she’d attacked him with a knife and there was a witness. The murder charge was changed to one of manslaughter and Elliott was sentenced to ten years’ hard labour. After doing only six months in Wandsworth Gaol, however, he managed to escape in the course of being moved to another prison, half killing a warder in the process. Thereafter, he was on the run for three months before the law finally caught up with him on Bagland Common, where, as a little girl of five, Mrs Seymour met him and where, tragically, he was shot in the back whilst trying to escape his pursuers.

It was while he was in prison awaiting trial that Elliott
’s notebooks were first discovered and the shocking truth revealed: the man was a sodomite! Luckily for posterity, however, there were a few who read the notebooks at the time who realised that their contents, although unpublishable in the then literary climate were, nevertheless, the work of genius. Now, of course, they form part of what is grandly known as our literary heritage and every girl or boy in the throes of A-level Eng Lit knows at least one of Elliott’s poems by heart.

*

(Char’s Fragment of Autobiography appeared to be missing a couple of pages at the beginning. It was originally written in her own big, scrawling handwriting on torn-off sheets from an old exercise book, but I somehow managed to inveigle a kindly secretary at work to type out a fair copy. I remember having to take the latter, at her request, out to dinner at The White Tower in Percy Street as recompense for her labours.)

...
but there’s no doubt that my parents, Con and Dick Osborn (‘Ma’ and ‘Pa’), were an ill-assorted couple. They only had two things in common really. The first was their background: both children of the emergent, monied middle class, and the second an overpowering, mutual, physical attraction. The latter leading them to become engaged and married in a matter of weeks rather than the customary months after their first meeting at a dance given for Ma’s best friend, Gwendoline Philbert’s twenty-first birthday.

Their friends and relations watched in astonishment the couple
’s whirlwind courtship. She tall, angular, sandy haired, with nice eyes, good teeth and a magnificent seat on a horse: not much else, apart from a mind like an adding machine. He small, emotional, attractive to women, full of charm and style and fun. Not a lot on top, but enough to get by in the family business of tea merchants. She, one of ‘that damned fella Shaw’s’ New Women, an admirer of Ibsen, a believer in women’s suffrage and all that sort of rot. He a believer in not much, really, except having a good time and keeping more or less within the guidelines laid down by his class and the era in which he lived. In other words, he believed in the Empire, the Class System, the Army, Navy and Public Schools, and the fact that sex should only be fun when practised with ‘women of a certain order’, i.e. tarts. Ladies, one’s wife in particular, were merely serviced, as a stallion a mare, in order to continue the family line. Bearing all this in mind, it seems even odder that he and Ma ever got together, but the fact remains, they did.

‘
It’s the attraction of opposites,’ people said, as they sipped their champagne at the couple’s wedding in May 1900. ‘It couldn’t be money.’ (Ma’s father was director of at least a dozen City companies and Pa made no mean living, himself, in the tea business.)

‘
It’s passion,’ said Gwendoline Philbert, greatly daring. ‘They’re mad for each other, can’t you see?’