sUnwanted Truthst (2 page)

‘Can't you eat any more, Gal?'

‘Not today, Charlie.'

From the wireless that stood high on a table behind the standard lamp. Wilfred Pickle's voice was loud and clear.

‘What's on the table, Mabel?'

A blanket of smog surrounded them as they emerged from Whitechapel Underground Station and turned left into Brady Street. ‘I can't see, Dad.'

‘Put your scarf over your nose and mouth, and tie it tight,' Charlie's muffled voice came through the suffocating gloom. He tightened his grip on his daughter's hand.

They strode in silence through green-tinged swirls. A dark shape collided with Charlie, the woman muttering her apologies. An amber halo of light appeared, suspended in the darkness. As they walked closer they could see it was a lamp attached to an even blacker arch. Their footsteps echoed in the tunnel. Jenny wished that someone else would bump into them, as it seemed that they were the only people alive in the whole world. A whistle screeched and wheels thundered overhead, obliterating everything.

Re-entering their silent world, indistinct lights flickered in mid-air. As they strode nearer, they heard muffled voices, and the tinkling of a piano. A door was flung open, illuminating the pavement, and releasing laughter. A man stumbled in front of them, reaching out to steady himself on a lamppost.

‘Joe, Joe Carberry,' said Charlie.

The man straightened himself, lifted his cap and placed one hand on Charlie's shoulder.

‘Good to see you again, mate. I heard your old man's sick.'

‘I got a telegram this morning. He's been going downhill for a while.'

Jenny saw her father mouth a word to the man, who said, ‘My old man had it in the gut. It always gets them in the end.'

‘It does that,' said Charlie.

‘Best drayman we had at Mann & Crossman, he was. No-one had his touch with the horses. Well, you look after yourself, Chas.'

‘Who's that?' asked Jenny as they walked away.

‘Granddad worked with him at the brewery for years.'

‘Are we nearly there?'

‘Not far now.'

At the corner of a bomb site, dark shapes huddled together, leaning against the remains of a wall. Men's voices, indistinct in the murkiness, shouted across at them; a woman's laugh and the smash of a bottle. Jenny bit her lower lip and gripped her father's hand. The dark mass of a tenement building loomed. A left turn brought them into Finnis Street and up the steep steps of number 132.

‘Hello, Cis,' said Charlie as the door opened. Jenny put her hand above her eyes against the brightness.

‘Alice not with you?' the woman said.

‘She's not been so good lately.'

Jenny recalled her parents' conversation earlier that day.

‘We'll have to go up there pretty sharpish, Gal, according to Josie. I'll leave work early.'

‘I'm not well enough to go, Charlie. There'll be enough of your family there, as it is. It's Friday, so you could take Jenny with you. Dad would love to see her if he's not too far gone.'

From the tone of her mother's voice, Jenny had thought that bad health was not the only reason for her staying behind.

Unburdening themselves of coats, hats, scarves and gloves, they were ushered up two flights of creaky stairs into a dimly-lit room. Another woman sat on a stool in the corner, and a dark cloth covered a lampshade in the centre of the room.

An old man lay propped up on pillows on a wooden bed. An enamel bowl sat on a table beside him. He turned his head.

He's not Granddad Albert
, Jenny thought. Her granddad was a smiley man with a prickly moustache, who smelt of stables. She remembered the last time she had seen him. He had hoisted her onto his shoulders, pretending she was on a horse. ‘Gee up, gee up,' he had said, as he thrust his shoulders into the air.
This man was not Granddad.

Charlie pushed Jenny forward. ‘Kiss your granddad. Kiss your granddad,' he repeated. Jenny bent forward. Her lips brushed his yellow skin. A skeletal hand reached out and touched her hair. The man's toothless mouth opened slightly, but no words came. She drew back.

‘You'd better go downstairs, Jenny,' the woman spoke softly from the shadows. ‘I want to talk to your dad.'

Jenny turned and ran from the room.

*

‘Here she is.' Four pairs of female eyes looked up as Jenny hesitated in the doorway of the sitting room crowded with unfamiliar relations. Three men stood huddled together in a cloud of smoke around a table covered with beer bottles. In the fireplace stood an electric barred fire, and a black cloth was draped along the mantelpiece. In the centre was a marble clock, with a framed sepia photograph of a man in uniform, on each side.

‘Sit down here, Jenny, I won't bite,' said the woman nearest the fire, patting the sofa beside her. Jenny sat sandwiched between two sturdy women, each wearing identical wrap-over blue floral aprons.

‘You know who we are, don't you?' asked the woman to Jenny's left.

‘Yes, you're my aunts,' she whispered.

‘I'm Aunt Josie and that's your Aunt Cissy,' she nodded to Jenny's right. ‘We remember when you were a baby, don't we, Cis?'

‘Yes, and look at her now.' Jenny felt the first aunt's eyes looking her up and down. ‘Must be all that sea air.'

Two more women were seated opposite. Jenny assumed they must be more aunts. They started whispering. They were dressed the same as the other pair, except for lines of metal curlers peeping out from under their headscarves. Jenny thought it must hurt to have them pinned to their heads, and smiled as she imagined what would happen if she was to put the large magnet in her “special box” near them. She bent her head, stared at the buckles on her shoes and strained her ears.

‘Charlie and Alice are so proud of her; she's got lovely dark curls.'

More whispers from the opposite sofa, too indistinct for Jenny to decipher. She looked around. She assumed that the three men around the table were her uncles, but they didn't ask her if she knew who they were. The one with a moustache was speaking.

‘I've heard the twins have scarpered again.'

‘You should leave well alone there, Ernie. They're trouble those Krays; always have been, always will be,' said the one with his back to Jenny.

‘Charlie's been good to me; always uses my cab; tips well too.'

‘We know why, don't we?'

‘Not now, Stan. Give it a rest,' said the third, taking a step forward and raising his arm.

‘Remember Eric, he should be here with us now, not buried on the other side of the bloody world. Jap bastards, they might just as well have killed Ma as well.'

Jenny watched as Ernie took another swig of beer and wiped the back of his hand across his moustache.

‘Cat got your tongue?' asked the aunt called Cissy.

Jenny was saved from replying by a sudden fit of coughing that rattled down the stairs. The whispering and laughter ceased and the talk turned to funeral arrangements.

Her father filled the doorway. Jenny noticed that his face was red and puffy. She looked down at her shoes once more.

Ernie stepped forward and placed his arm around Charlie's shoulders. ‘Glad you could make it, Chas. How's Alice?'

‘Not that good. She's waiting to hear from the hospital. But you know the missus, she's a fighter.'

‘She's always been that, bruv. How old's Jenny now?'

‘Seven – she started junior school last year.' Her father then chatted to his brothers about people she didn't know for what seemed like hours. Her aunts had forgotten about her losing her tongue, and had moved on to more interesting matters.

‘Who does she think she is sitting upstairs? Madam High and Mighty; she wouldn't let me in earlier today. We are his daughters after all. We have a right.'

‘Of course we have; thinks she's better than us, just ‘cos her old man owned a shop.'

‘I must say. I'm not a bit surprised that Doris hasn't turned up. She's only ever been interested in a good time. It's a good job Ma's not here, it would break her heart.'

Jenny stared at the ashtrays balanced on the sofa arms, thinking they looked like miniature bonfires.

Charlie pulled Jenny to her feet. ‘Come on, it's time we were going.'

Huge hands patted her head. She heard a jangling of coins. ‘That's for you,' her uncles said in turn, as they pressed cold metal into her hand.

‘Mind how you go, you can't see a hand in front of you,' a woman shouted as they stepped over the doorstep and tightened their scarves around their faces.

Their footsteps echoed along the street as they strode towards the railway arch. They were the only people in the world again, and Jenny tightened her fingers around her father's hand.

‘Who was that woman upstairs with Granddad?'

‘That's Nanny May. She's Granddad's friend. She's looking after him.'

Jenny thought that her father had been unusually slow in answering. She remembered postcards arriving from Margate and Southend, addressed to her parents, and signed Dad and May.

‘Look Dad,' said Jenny as they passed under a lamppost. She opened her right palm and several coins slid out from under her glove. She held three silver half-crowns under her father's chin.

‘You're a lucky girl, come on, we'd better hurry if we're going to catch that train.'

They settled in an empty second class compartment, under posters showing yellow sands and azure skies; tempting travellers to spend their annual holiday in Bognor and Littlehampton. Charlie turned to Jenny as the train clattered over Grosvenor Bridge.

‘Indonesia.'

‘Jakarta.'

‘Togo.'

‘Lome.'

‘Chile.'

‘Santiago.'

‘Oman.'

‘Muscat.'

‘Cuba.'

‘Havana.'

By the time the train drew in to East Croydon, Jenny was asleep.

*

Two days later a further telegram arrived. Charlie reached into the back of his wardrobe for a black armband which he wore around the sleeve of his coat. Jenny wondered about Nanny May. The last time she heard her name mentioned was the day after Granddad Albert's funeral. She was reading…
there are seven gates that provide an entrance to the old city of Jerusalem. The most important are the Jaffa Gate and the Damascus Gate. The city is
holy to three religions…
when she heard her father's voice from the kitchen. Instinctively she put her book down.

‘You know, Gal, the girls aren't happy about May keeping some of Dad's things. You ought to have heard the things they were saying about her after the funeral. I couldn't repeat them.'

‘That doesn't surprise me, one bit. The poor bugger's hardly six foot under and they're arguing. That's your sisters for you. They'd fight over the cat's dinner.'

Jenny thought it mean too; after all, she had been his friend.

Jenny peered anxiously out of the window as the coach nosed into Victoria. She spotted two black feathers poking out of a bright red hat. Doris was the oldest of Charlie's half sisters and the closest in age. A large boned, energetic woman of forty; she had escaped the East End through hard work and a quick brain, and now owned a Victorian house in Woolwich. As well as working full-time in a local department store, she rented rooms to overseas students from the local polytechnic.

The coach station bustled with activity. Children bored with waiting chased each other around their parents, while smartly dressed older couples stood patiently by their cases.

Jenny hesitated at the bottom of the coach steps as her aunt hurried towards her.

‘Don't I get a kiss then?' smiled Doris, and then, after looking her up and down, ‘You'll be company for Alan. Did your dad give you any money for me?'

Jenny handed over the crumpled brown envelope she had been clutching since Charlie had put her into the care of the coach driver. She stood on tiptoe and brushed her aunt's rouged cheek.

Doris stuffed the envelope in her coat pocket and grabbed Jenny's hand.

‘My case,' muttered Jenny.

‘Well, run back and get it then. Be quick, it's quite a way for the bus; then we've got to change at Elephant and Castle.'

Jenny's case bumped against her legs as she was pulled along the pavement.

‘Come on,' said Doris.

*

Jenny was relieved that her mother was in hospital, as she could stop worrying about leaving her on her own when she left for school. Her eyes would moisten whenever she thought about that day in January, and she had to blink to stop her tears. She had begged her parents to let her stay with Mrs Walters, a widow, who lived in the flat below. She could visit her mother, and be company for her father in the evenings; but was told that six weeks was far too long to stay with a neighbour. She was to stay with Aunt Doris.

Jenny eyed her cousin shyly across the kitchen table. Doris's husband Jim hovered over her as she nibbled a fish paste sandwich. He was a slight man, who worked at the local gas works. Doris told her family that she only married him because he kept pestering her and she felt sorry for him. ‘Poor Jim, he has to do what he's told,' was the usual comment by Alice, at the mention of his name.

Alan, also an only child, was eighteen months older than Jenny. He was wearing a red check, open-necked shirt and dark brown corduroy shorts which ended just above his scabbed knees. His straight dark hair was struck through on the right-hand side with a white parting. He spoke first. ‘Are you coming to school with me on Monday?'

‘I'll have to ask Aunt Doris,' said Jenny. She hadn't thought about school. She was more worried that she might have to drink all the milk that was in her glass. It had a sickly sweet taste.

‘Well, you can't ask her now. She's getting ready.'

‘Ready for what?'

‘It's Saturday night, Mum always goes out on Tuesday and Saturday nights.'

‘Goes out? Goes out where?' asked Jenny, forgetting her shyness. She had never known her parents to go out in the evening together, never mind separately.

‘She goes dancing, of course.'

*

Jenny sat cross-legged on the floor beside Alan, mesmerised by the flickering television in the wooden cabinet. The door opened. She looked over her shoulder and stared at her aunt who occupied the doorway. She thought she looked like a film star. Her dark wavy hair was styled close to her head, and her lips glistened with scarlet lipstick.

‘Desmond and I are off now, so make sure you behave yourselves,' she said, smoothing black satin gloves along her lower arm. ‘It's Saturday, so you can put yourselves to bed. I've made up the camp bed in Alan's room for you, Jenny. Don't forget to brush your teeth – that means you too, Alan.' She turned sharply on high heels; her black taffeta skirt swishing draughtily behind her. Her perfume lingered for the rest of the evening, as if to compensate for her absence.

*

A door slammed. Jenny woke in a panic. Where was she? She bit her lower lip. She needed the toilet. Suppose she wet the bed? She felt the struts of the wooden camp bed digging into her ribs through the blanket and sheet. Raised voices travelled along the landing. Turning over she could just make out the humped outline of Alan as he lay in the bed alongside her own. He was fast asleep and breathing noisily. She stared into the blackness and wished she was at home. There were witches dancing on the curtain rail, their evil faces mocking her. She turned over and lay on her stomach, her need for the toilet disappeared. More raised voices; she recognised her aunt's.

‘The dance didn't end ‘til one-thirty, I certainly wasn't going to leave before then. Anyway, you know I'm with Desmond. Get back to sleep, for God's sake. What's the matter with you?'

Then her uncle's voice, louder than usual; ‘I've told you before Dori, it's not right you coming home this late. It's two o'clock in the morning, I don't like it.'

‘Don't like what? You don't like me enjoying myself. What am I supposed to do, stay in with you every night?'

‘You enjoyed yourself before, and look what happened then.'

‘For Christ's sake; trust you to bring that up.'

Their voices trailed as Jenny fell asleep.

*

Jenny was halfway through eating a slice of toast when her aunt appeared wearing a cream silk dressing gown, covered with pink roses. Jenny waited for her to say something, but she ignored both herself and Alan. She perched on a high stool by the cupboard and pulled out a cigarette from a packet in her pocket, tapping it on the Formica surface. She put it between her lips, flicked a lighter and drew deeply. Jenny noticed that she still had powder and lipstick on from the night before.

‘Has Desmond been down yet?' she asked, as Alan and Jenny piled their breakfast plates in the sink.

‘Yes,' they both answered.

Desmond was one of three West African students who lodged at the house. He had been eating his breakfast when Jenny and Alan had come down. Jenny hadn't been able to stop staring at him. She had never seen a black man before, only pictures in the
The Peoples of
the World
section of her encyclopaedia. She was fascinated by his hair. She wanted to touch it, and wondered how he washed and combed it.

Aunt Doris sighed, and looked out of the kitchen window at her husband who was digging a patch of earth at the end of the garden. She drew deeper on her cigarette. Alan bent down to pull up one of his socks, which lay like a concertina around his ankle. Doris stubbed her cigarette in an ashtray. ‘Leave the washing up, I'll do it. Go and play in the garden – both of you.'

*

The sound of Frankie Laine bellowing “I Believe” from the radiogram drew Alan and Jenny downstairs.

The sofa and armchairs had been moved back against the wall. Desmond was leaning on the mantelpiece, his left foot tapping to the rhythm. Another student was twirling Doris around the lounge. Jim leant back in an armchair, his eyes tightly shut and a pained expression on his face. An open newspaper lay across his lap, and a pair of glasses hung from a cord around his neck.

‘Jenny, don't stand in the doorway. Come in and let me show you how to dance.' Desmond's deep voice invited her in.

‘Just follow me round, little one; put your hands on my shoulder and stand on my shoes, I'll soon have you dancing like your aunt.' He gripped Jenny under her armpits. She was enthralled. She stood on tiptoe on his shoes, her head against his chest and followed his movements, thinking that nothing like this ever happened at home.

‘Why are your teeth so white Desmond?' she ventured.

‘I've brought this special twig all the way from Nigeria. It keeps them clean and bright. I'll show it to you later.'

‘I know the capital of Nigeria.'

‘Do you?'

‘Yes, it's Lagos. Did you live there?'

‘Fancy you knowing that now. No, my village is hundreds of miles to the north. But I studied there before coming to England.' The record slowed on the turntable. ‘Shall we have another dance, little lady?'

Jenny beamed up at him and nodded.

*

Doris poked her head around the bedroom door at eight o' clock. ‘Goodnight you two,' and with a flick on the light switch she disappeared. Five minutes later, Alan whispered across to Jenny.

‘Come into my bed. I've got a torch; we can read my comic.'

Jenny slipped out of the camp bed and squeezed in beside him. They read a page and then giggled as they tried to turn it with tangled arms. Alan lifted the blankets and shone the light under the bedclothes.

‘Look,' he said nodding downwards and opening his pyjama bottoms, ‘you can touch it if you like.'

Jenny stared down and shook her head vigorously.

‘It's your turn now.'

‘There's nothing there,' she said.

‘There must be, come on show me.'

‘No, I don't want to.'

‘You've got to. I've shown you mine.'

She wriggled out of her pyjamas trousers. The beam illuminated a circle of white skin at the top of her legs. Alan peered hard and long.

‘I told you, there's nothing there,' Jenny said, pulling up her pyjamas. ‘I'm going back to my bed now.' She felt she had been tricked into revealing herself and it smarted, but she couldn't have said no. He had done it first – so it was only fair. But she wouldn't fall for it again.

*

‘Open wide.' Doris thrust a large teaspoonful of malt into Jenny's mouth. ‘I won't be here when you get home. But Alan's got a key, and Uncle Jim will do some tea for you.' Screwing the lid back on the large black jar she returned it to the cupboard. Moving in front of a round mirror by the side of the sink, she started to remove a line of rollers from her hair. Jenny wondered how much longer it would be before the line of ash, that drooped from the cigarette in the corner of her mouth, would fall to the floor.

‘Don't stare at me like that Jenny. You're always doing that. It gives me the creeps. Off you go, or you'll be late for school. Alan will look after you.'

Jenny wore a pair of black wellington boots and a belted gabardine raincoat. On her head was a hand-knitted bonnet, with a pom-pom dangling from the back. Alan was dressed exactly the same, except he had a grey balaclava wrapped around his head and neck.

‘You'd better keep up,' he said, pausing momentarily from kicking a tin can along the pavement.

They walked past terraces of identical houses. Each one with a postage stamp sized front garden edged by a wall. In some of the windows were taped cardboard signs covered with uneven black writing:

NO DOGS

NO CHILDREN

NO IRISH

NO BLACKS

‘Is she your girlfriend?' shouted a boy with metal-rimmed glasses as he ran alongside them.

‘No, stupid, she's my cousin.'

The boy tugged at Jenny's pom-pom, pulling her hat back from her head.

‘Al's got a girlfriend, Al's got a girlfriend,' taunted the boy, now joined by another.

Alan ran headlong into the first boy sending his glasses flying. The second boy hurled himself at Alan and all three fell to the pavement, their fists pummelling each other, until Jenny couldn't make out which arms and legs belonged to which boy. Satisfied that justice had been done Alan stood up, dusted himself down and grabbed Jenny's hand.

‘Come on, we'll be late,' they started running.

‘Nigger lover, nigger lover; bugger off to Notting Hill, there's plenty more there,' shouted the first boy picking up his glasses from the gutter.

The red-brick school surrounded by high railings stood like a prison at the top of Plum Lane. Instead of the brightly-coloured tables and chairs that Jenny was used to, there were battered wooden desks, their lids scarred with the names of past occupants. In the top right-hand corner was a hole that held a cracked china inkwell filled with deep blue ink.
They write with pens here
, thought Jenny, worried that she wouldn't know how to use one. The pupils were more boisterous than she was used to. Rough, her mother would have said. She hoped that she wouldn't be ignored at break time. Alan wouldn't want to play with her.

*

The first postcard from her mother, showing an aerial view of Brighton's two piers, arrived fifteen days into her stay:

The second postcard arrived two weeks later, and had a Tunbridge Wells postmark. On the other side was a black and white photograph of a large country house. It showed nurses in starched uniforms with head coverings that, Jenny thought, made them look like nuns. They were standing on a veranda, alongside a line of bed-ridden patients:

Jenny thought that her aunt hadn't done very much looking after to be thanked for. That had been left to her uncle, and whichever student happened to be around. She might just as well have stayed with Mrs Walters. But then, she wouldn't have met Desmond, or experienced Sunday afternoons, when she would perch on top of Desmond's shoes, stretch her arms around his neck, and with his arm around her waist, they would glide around the lounge to the sounds of Perry Como and Frankie Laine. She wished those afternoons could last forever.