All The Days of My Life (15 page)

“Are you Mary?” asked the man. He had not moved from under the lamp post, but stood there, black and still. The voice was like Sir
Frederick's but steadier and more reassuring. He sounded kind. A little lamplight fell on his face, which was long and mild.

“I'm Mary,” she said from her corner.

“Will you come her for a moment? I promise I shan't hurt you,” he said.

She hesitated, then went up to him. He put his thumb gently under her chin and turned her face upwards, towards his. She met his eyes, which were blue. He looked quite kind and reliable, the sort of man, she thought, who would know what to do, and do it, if you were in any trouble.

“Are you happy to be back?” he asked, quite gently.

“I don't know,” said Mary. In a rush she said, “I think I liked it better in the country.”

“Try to be happy here,” he said after a pause. “And good,” he added.

This encouragement made Mary resolve to try but it also confirmed her view that the return to Meakin Street was no great piece of good luck.

“Well – I shall,” she said, in a voice which surprised her by its own firmness.

“That's a good girl,” he said. “I know you will.”

“I think I'd better be getting back,” said Mary, growing suddenly uneasy. After all, it was dark, and although this man did not look like Alec, from Craye's farm, who could catch you in the dark and do nasty things to you, there was no way of telling, really, what he was like.

“Yes – I expect you must,” he said. Then he bent down and gave her a brief, dry kiss on the cheek. “Run along now,” he said.

And Mary ran off, calling out “Goodbye,” as she ran. When she reached the corner she turned, quickly, to get another look at him but he had disappeared. Perhaps he had backed into the shadows. Perhaps he had walked quickly off in the other direction. Perhaps he was just moving in the darkness between two lamps. Mary ran back to the party and found Ivy leaning over the piano, singing, “There'll be blue skies over, the white cliffs of Dover –” and she pulled at Ivy's hand saying, “Please – can I go to bed now?”

“‘Course, love,” said Ivy. “Shirley's been tucked up for a long time.” Ivy took her hand and led her back to number 19. After a hasty wash with a flannel and a rummage through her case to find her little rose-sprigged nightdress, Mary was in her little iron bedstead, next to Shirley, who was fast asleep. Her eyes were shutting as Ivy left and
went back to the street. Mary, wondering vaguely how the man in the black suit had known her name, grew dozier and dozier. And so, as Meakin Street sang “Keep the Home Fires Burning” under her window, Mary Waterhouse fell into a dreamless sleep on her first night back in London.

It was only years later that my father confessed to me about the visit he had paid to Mary in Meakin Street on VE Night. Of course, he knew he should not have gone and sought her out, or drawn himself so obviously to her attention. He said he thought that his visit would be overlooked in the confusion and that he had not, in any case, meant to speak to her. He was leaving, after having watched her for a little while from the end of the street, when he saw her peeping round the corner at him. The temptation to get a better look at her and say a few words of encouragement evidently proved too strong. In fact all this was rather uncharacteristic of my father's ordinary behaviour which was, above all, correct – too much so, perhaps. He told me that he was standing on a terrace, overlooking a carefully cultivated London garden and hearing, in the distance, the hooters, the car horns blaring, the singing and the cheering, when he suddenly felt that he must go and observe his little charge and see how she was managing in her new surroundings. An ounce of information gained by personal observation was often worth a pound gathered from documents. But I still believe that on that night of high emotion my father gave way to an impulse. He told me that what he saw that night disturbed him. He even partly foresaw what was going to happen – although, as he said, it would have taken a playwright to imagine the full extent of the disaster. After his visit to Meakin Street that night he made the most earnest representations to those involved, urging them strongly to remedy Mary's situation without delay. He said that such a child, with evident intelligence and courage, and the promise of beauty, could not be rescued soon enough from that mean street. He saw clearly that in that context the lack of attributes like brains or looks might be better for her – would probably give her a more peaceful life, keep her out of trouble. But for all his urgings it was decided not to interfere. He had to submit. Of course what happened proved him perfectly right – perhaps it was a mercy that he did not live long enough to see exactly how right he had been. Nevertheless, he told me that the spectacle of that child, in the fresh dress so carefully put on her by Mrs Gates at
Framlingham, standing in a bleak London street, alone, at almost eleven o'clock, with a smear of dirt on one cheek and of jam on the other, not knowing the extent of her own bewilderment, was very upsetting. He even confessed to a strong desire to kidnap her then and there.

He knew the lives of the workers on his own estates, of course, but that was completely different. I imagine that Meakin Street, out in force for a celebration, must have startled him. The idea of Mary, child of the gentry, suddenly dumped down there horrified him.

I'm forced to say, though, that just as he had no idea of the way the country was about to go, so he had no idea about the sort of conditions which help a growing child to become whole. In his day parents barely saw their children and fathers were particularly cut off from their own progeny. My father could comprehend the immediate social aspects of Mary's removal from Framlingham to Meakin Street, but he could not understand that there might be ways in which Mary would be better off as part of a poor, but sane, family, than trapped in the frozen web at Framlingham. However this is speculative. No one could have anticipated the real consequences of leaving her in Meakin Street. In the event it was a grave mistake.

Wyckender Street, in mid-February, is deserted. For a long, straight half mile the street lights throw pools of light at intervals on to the frosty pavements and over the ends of small neglected front gardens. There, uneven paths lead up to little houses with darkened windows. In some places there are weedy, brickstrewn gaps, where houses once stood. That is one side of the street. On the other runs a tall, brick wall, nine feet high, which hides the railway sidings where unseen trains clank their couplings restlessly. Occasionally a train rushes through the sidings. Occasionally there is a melancholy, muffled whistle from behind the wall. Now, a cutting, icy wind blows up Wyckender Street, past the wall on one side and the houses, shabby with post-war neglect, on the other.

Up the cold and treeless street come three girls, high heels ringing on the icy pavement. They are huddled in big coats and they turn round sometimes to giggle or shout a remark to the three boys mooching along behind them.

“Come on, Joe. 'Ave a go,” cries out the boldest girl in a mocking voice. She stops deliberately under a broken street light on the pavement by the bleak line of the brick wall. Hard light from the unprotected lamp falls on bright, fair hair. The other two girls walk on, a little faster than before. “Well –” says one in a shocked voice, glancing back at the figure under the street light.

“She's getting a thoroughly bad name for herself in our street,” says the other. “She's out till all hours with Jim Flanders. Her mum can't do nothing about it.” The speaker is Cissie Messiter. Heavy pancake make-up, black mascara and bright lipstick do not quite disguise her starveling's face. Her sparrow's legs are a little bowed and she walks with a short tripping step to keep her shoes on. She buys them from a stall in the market and they are usually too wide for her narrow feet.

Behind them, the other two boys pass the couple under the lamp, who are pressed together, kissing. “Aye, aye,” they call. They start whistling. The boy, Jim Flanders, lets the girl go. “Take no notice, Jim,” says the girl. Her coat is open. Underneath it she is wearing a pencil-slim black skirt and a tight red sweater. Her head, now thrown back slightly, is covered in little golden curls. Her face, heavily powdered, is rather pale under the street lamp, and her eyes are very wide, fringed with curly brown lashes. Her mouth is wide, soft and, at this moment, parted in pleasure and delight. There is practically no future at the laboratory, the steel foundry or in the lecture room for girls who look like this one. All these places are run by men and no man looking at a girl like this will be able to treat her the way he treats everyone else. She does not really understand, as she clutches Jim Flanders under a lamp in Wyckender Street, freezing in her tight sweater and skirt from C and A Modes and her thin, but voluminous coat, that her face and figure will make her future. But they will.

“Oh, Jim. I do love you,” says Mary Waterhouse.

“I love you, Mary,” says Jim. The heels of the others have ceased to sound on the pavement now. Jim and Mary are alone in the street.

“Let's go over there,” Jim says, nodding at the other side of the street.

“All right,” says Mary without hesitation. Other girls might argue, or pretend resistance, have to be half-dragged across the street – but not her. So hand in hand they cross the street, Jim, a tall and well setup lad with his brown hair slicked down on his head, and Mary, tall, energetic and shapely. They go into the gap where two houses once stood. Spring surges through their bodies, even on this cold night.

Mary lies, half under Jim, on the bomb site. They are right up against the back wall of the garden which once belonged to the shattered house. He can still see her face dimly in the light from the street. Her mouth is soft, the corners slightly lifted. Her eyes are dimmed and blurry with pleasure. Although she is lying in a small hollow where cold earth and frozen grass cover the remains of an air raid shelter, she might model for a cameo of an early nineteenth-century beauty.

“Oh, Jim,” she breathes out. She is helpless.

They do not know it, as they embrace, but underneath them in the remains of a fur coat, with a small string of seed pearls round her skeleton throat, lies Mrs Thompson's body, entombed permanently in
her own air raid shelter. The rescue team thought she was in Bournemouth so they did not bother to look for her.

Joe runs his hand up under Mary's sweater and feels her breast, in its tight, uplift bra. They kiss, bruising their lips against each other. Mary's hand, clutched in Jim's hair, pulls. Her other hand, tugging out his shirt, runs up his back. As they strain there on the ground, first fighting, then exhausted, panting and staring into each other's faces, muttering, fighting again to find more of each other, as the tide rises again, they are like two animals locked in a death struggle. Jim puts Mary's hand on his trousers, where his hard cock lies. He groans, “Mary – Mary.” His hand runs up her leg, past her stocking top to between her legs, feeling the wetness of her knickers. “Ah,” she says. Mary unbuttons his fly, and with their hands in each other's secret places they withdraw a little, chilled, frightened, and then return to kissing again, kissing each other's mouths, eyes, cheeks, breathing sobbing, misty breaths into each other's faces. But they, themselves, are not cold now. Across the road carriages are shunted noisily into position and joined together. In an upper window, at the house next to the bomb site, a light goes on. Mary and Jim do not hear the noise of the trains, or see the light shining into the next door garden.

“Somebody down there on the bomb site again,” says a fat man in striped pyjamas at the window, to the hump under the blankets which is his wife.

“They ought to fence it off – I've told them,” says her sleepy voice. A surge of mixed resentments goes through her sleep-fogged brain.

“Some poor, silly bitch getting herself into trouble,” says the man.

“He's enjoying it,” thinks his wife. “Beast. Peeping Tom.” She mutters, “No business of yours.”

“They ought to fence it off,” he says and crosses the floor, getting back into the bed and making it creak.

His wife, feeling the bed lurch like a ship at sea, rolls over, turning her back on him.

Behind the wall a train whistles and goes by.

Mary's hand is round Jim's hard cock, now, inside his underpants. “I love you so much, Jim,” she says.

“It's up to her to stop me,” is the thought which goes through his mind. “A man can't help himself.” But Mary will not stop and so, wrestling with their clothes, Mary's skirt, which will not go up over her hips because it is so tight, and Jim's pants and trousers, which will not go down without a struggle, and with many breaks and
pauses, to fumble with clothing, to kiss and mutter and continue again, the scene continues. All the pauses, breaks, mutters, are points where Mary should make a choice. They are the intervals at which she should decide to call a halt but, after so many embraces at the back of the dance hall, in doorways, on this very bomb site on the way home, Mary is not going to stop. She is tired of partial satisfactions, of encounters which sometimes left Jim spent and gasping while she was still unsatisfied. Without making a conscious decision, she is going on.

And so, finally, Jim enters her. Gasping with shock and pleasure her eyes open and she sees what she will never forget – the bricks of the wall they lie near, the lines of cement criss-crossing the bricks, the jagged crack in the wall, running from top to bottom. Jim takes her as she lies there, sobbing in pain and delight.

When he has finished they lie still and then, slowly, feel the cold around their bodies. Mary grows conscious of rough ground under her bottom, a piece of stone sticking into her back.

They stare at each other in the dimness. “Oh – that was lovely, Mare,” Jim murmurs. Mary smiles at him. “Oh – we shouldn't have,” he tells her.