All The Days of My Life (75 page)

“It'll have to be up and down the drive,” Wayne told her. She, Sid and Ivy assembled on the step in front of the house and watched.

“Will it work?” called Molly nervously to the two men who were bending over the bike in the half circle of gravel in front of the house.

As she spoke, George jumped, then went back to making adjustments. Wayne called back, “Might do.”

The cycle standing between the two of them was small, with an unpainted frame which was dented in places. The engine in the poor light was a bulge, rather like an udder, set on the frame just in front of the bicycle chain. The handlebars were rather wide in order, George said, to balance the machine.

In fact from the front it looked rather like a small longhorn steer. Molly wondered whether, even if it worked, purchasers would find the bike's slightly odd appearance appealing. It certainly lacked streamlining.

Now George sat on the machine, one foot on the ground. He revved the little engine, which choked, and died. Molly set her teeth and told herself not to worry. Suddenly George was off, careering down the drive in the twilight. He disappeared under the trees. In the silence of the country evening they heard him cut the motor. He came back up the lawn, pedalling. He switched the motor on again and came towards them, ploughing up the turf. From the corner of her eye Molly saw a taxi coming up the drive beside him. Raising one hand above his head he shouted, “She made it!” Wayne, both arms raised, cried, “Yeah!” Then, as George got closer and closer he shouted, “Cut the engine, man.” George did. He braked and fell off in the gravel in front of the taxi.

Isabel Allaun got out. “What is this?” she asked Molly. “And where's Tom? He was supposed to collect me at four.” Upstairs the baby began to wail. George got up, holding his arm. Molly said, “Didn't Tom come?”

Isabel stared first at Wayne, then at George, and then back at Wayne again.

“This place is a bear garden,” she said. “Perhaps you'd like to tell me what's happening, Molly – inside the house.” She took Molly by the arm and began to steer her through the front door past Sid and Ivy, whom she did not acknowledge. Molly resisted. “You'd better pay the taxi driver, Isabel,” she said. “And I'm going upstairs to see to Fred.”

“The taxi's on account,” Isabel told her. “And I'm sure your mother will look after the baby.” The pressure on Molly's arm continued. She withstood it. Turning to George and Wayne she said, “Why don't you two go down to the pub for a celebratory drink?”

“And we'll join you,” said Ivy, who was furious. Once inside, with the baby settled down, Molly poured Isabel a drink, apologized for the disorderly scene in front of the house and said nothing of her plans. She felt nervous, but assured. She considered she might get some capital from Charlie Markham for the development of the little bike. It worked. It used only a small amount of petrol. It offered the rider the choice of pedal power or motor power at will. It would be cheap to produce and, she suddenly thought, even its odd appearance would not necessarily count against it. If it was not smart it was, at least, original, almost as if it competed against, rather than trying to copy, the world of streamlining and excessive horse power. But she knew that if she revealed her plans to try and put it into production Isabel would, in her present mood, obstruct her. She needed the use of the stables and the yard in front of them.

She also needed to keep hold of any money Charlie could raise for her. If she told Isabel her plans there would be builders in the house renovating and restoring, clothes and furnishings would be purchased before she had even got George to plan the workshop. It would happen in the least blatant and nicest possible way – but it would happen and bills would start arriving before the money had been banked.

The lack of explanations made Isabel even angrier. Not long after Tom arrived, also in a temper. Isabel was accusing him of leaving Hove only fifteen minutes after he should have arrived to collect her. During the discussion which followed Molly set the table for supper in the dining room and cycled down to the pub to meet the others. She hoped that by the time they all trooped back for the meal some of the animus would have evaporated.

She sat down with a drink and told George and Wayne that she had a source of possible capital and that if she could get backing she would be happy to fund them to make a proper prototype of the bicycle and then put it into production.

“I'm sure there's enough room to build another workshop on the other side of the yard,” she said. “Or use it for warehousing. It'd only be small at first but I'd like to try it. If it works, we could expand.”

George instinctively looked at Wayne. “What do you think?” he asked.

“I'd give it a go,” Wayne replied. “I'm sick of that garage.”

“It'd have to be a partnership,” Molly said. “Low wages and a share of the profits – all drawn up by lawyers.”

“You have to make the decision yourself,” Wayne said to George. “It's your machine –”

“I don't know where they'd live,” Ivy said. “They can't live up there.”

“There's a few people round here who could do with lodgers,” Molly said.

“Like me?” Wayne asked.

“The vicar'd take you in,” Molly grinned. “To provide an example of racial tolerance – there's a couple of empty cottages to let, too – it's not a problem.”

“George?” Wayne asked. “Listen – I don't want to bully you into this –”

George, who had been staring dreamily in front of him said, “What? What, Wayne?”

“Do you want to do it, man?” Wayne said patiently.

“Of course I do,” George said, as if he were surprised to be asked. “If we get a cottage we can store some of the parts in one of the rooms. Storing enough frames'll be a problem.”

“If I get the money,” Molly said. She bought a round of drinks and said, “Well – to the Messiter.”

They lifted their glasses to the grinning George and all repeated, “The Messiter.”

“You going to have some explaining to do to the people over there,” Wayne said, nodding in the direction of Allaun Towers.

Molly told him, “They'll do it if there's money in it.”

That evening, after supper had been eaten in a chilly atmosphere – Wayne had set off home on his motor bike before the meal – Molly telephoned Charlie Markham and arranged to see him in London in two days' time. Then she put down the receiver and, reassured that no one in the house had overheard the call, went upstairs to lie down. It had been a long day. She was experiencing, now, the fatigue which accompanies a new venture.

The baby was asleep in his cot near a lighted lamp. She lay beside him in half-darkness, wondering whether she would get the money from Charlie and whether, if she did, the experiment stood any chance of success. She had now involved two other people, George and Wayne. She was moving in territory she did not understand. Charlie had been right about one thing, though, she reflected – she had witnessed the manoeuvrings of men like Ferenc Nedermann, had observed the hard attitudes of professional criminals like the Roses
and had learned from what she saw. She had watched Joe Endell at work, steering committees, looking at the problems of his constituents, making deals and she had learned from that, too. She knew a lot – but, she thought, had never done anything herself.

She must have drifted into a doze for suddenly she was back in the prison laundry, surrounded by huge, steaming drums, full of sheets and dresses. She had been hauling out long, boiling strips of sheets, all tangled together, when she saw, through the cloudy atmosphere, a familiar face. The woman standing beside the wardress walked into the middle of the room and greeted her in a low voice, “Hullo, Moll. I heard you was here.”

She recognized Peggy Jones, larger and fatter than she had been the last time she had seen her standing on a corner in Soho. Peggy started hauling at the sheets, in order to avoid the wardress's eye. Obviously she had been here before.

“What are you in for?” asked Molly.

“The usual,” Peggy responded calmly. “Prostitution. Not the first time – don't suppose it's the last.”

“Come along, girls,” the wardress called. “Stop talking.”

In a way Molly almost resented the arrival of Peggy Jones. She had insulated herself as far as possible from the prison.

She went through her days, from the unlocking of the doors in the morning to the locking up at night, in a carefully maintained state of semi-consciousness. She took no notice of the insults of the other women or the occasional brutalities of the staff. She made no friends and tried to make no enemies. She looked no one in the eye and spoke only when she was spoken to. She did not know, at night, who screamed, or why. She kept herself from her own distress and that of the others. She was rewarded by relative peace and the maximum remission of sentence. She was punished by not being able to leave the state she had created when she walked from the prison door, free. But Peggy's brief stay in the gaol took her, for a time, out of voluntary numbness. One day they were both sitting at the back of a large room where other women were watching TV and Peggy began to talk about her short spell as an evacuee at the Rectory in Framlingham. “Half of us should never have gone,” she told Molly. “Half of us were home a year later, Blitz or no Blitz. I wish my Mum had never sent me, though. That woman – Mrs Templeton – she still haunts me. Thank God I was with Cissie. I don't know what would have happened to me if she hadn't been like she was.” Her big, round face was suddenly sad as a
child's. “She wouldn't have sent me, I don't think, my mum, if it hadn't have been for that house in Meakin Street going – the one next to Tom Totteridge's stables, where we used to live. Course, Mum wanted me out of the way because she was making a fortune off the GIs. But I reckon that bombsite next door kept on nagging at her.”

“What happened?” asked Molly.

“Didn't they tell you?” Peggy said in astonishment. “About how old Tom saved them poor little children. You see, there was a direct hit on that house, in the early morning, and only old Tom out on the street, because he wouldn't ever take any notice of the sirens. So he's clopping up Meakin Street with his horse and cart when, whoomph, there's a bomb – and bang goes the house next to the stables. So the horse shies and there's dust everywhere and by the time he's got the horse under control some of the dust has settled and he can see the house is on fire, right up the back. And above the sound of the crackling there's this horrible screaming sound. So old Tom just runs up the street, into the house, where it isn't burning, and right up the stairs, which he thinks are going to give way at any moment – there's no roof, all the back rooms are on fire. He opens a door, there's flames everywhere – and on the bed, there's this dead woman.

“And underneath there's a boy, still alive. He's the one who's screaming. So old Tom grabs him and beats him out, because his shirt's on fire and then –” Here Peggy paused and a woman turned round and said, “Keep it down, for Christ's sake – you're interfering with the sound.” “Then,” said Peggy, “he realizes. Under the boy there's another kid. So he picks them both up and he runs – just as he gets to the front door the whole staircase collapses.”

“God Almighty,” Molly said. “I never thought of old Tom as a hero.”

“Nor me,” Peggy said. “He was a dirty old man.”

“What happened to the children?” Molly asked.

“Dunno,” Peggy said, with a characteristic lapse of interest and concentration. After a little while she added, “Hadn't of been for that I'd never've been sent away.”

Molly awoke and shook her head, finding it hard to remember she was at Framlingham, in the bedroom she had slept in as a child, that her son lay in a cot beside her. She had forgotten about her meeting with Peggy in prison. It was part of the time she wanted to forget. She could almost smell the prison smell. She gazed, blinking, into the lamp, thinking that Sid and Ivy and George were downstairs in the drawing
room with the Allauns and that she should go and mediate between them. She put her legs over the edge of the bed and stood up wearily. But as if she had planned to do it, her hand reached out for the top drawer of the tallboy beside the window. She opened the drawer and took out the fat buff envelope Vera Endell had given her six months earlier. She took the first sheet, which had a letterhead – St Barnabas's Orphanage, Kilburn, London. The date was September 21st 1940. It was a doctor's report. The small precise hand had written, “The boy now called Joseph was apparently brought to the orphanage and left in the care of the nuns by an itinerant street trader named Thomas Frederick Totteridge of Meakin Street, London W. He appears to be about six years old. He was found hiding under a burning bed in a bombed house in Meakin Street from which the body of a woman, presumably the mother, was later recovered. His burns, on the left arm and left side, are not serious and are responding to treatment. But he is suffering from shock. He moves very little and does not speak, although he appears to hear and understand what is said to him. The owners of the house were killed in the raid and neighbours state that the woman believed to be Joseph's mother had moved into the house as a lodger only a short time before.

“The police have been notified and advertisements have been placed in newspapers all over the country in an attempt to find the boy's friends or relatives. The discovery of someone familiar with him would probably help his mental state. I do not believe him to be mentally sub-normal.” The doctor's signature followed the report.

St Barnabas's Orphanage, Routledge Street, thought Molly, putting the paper down carefully on the top of the tallboy. She had seen the noticeboard outside the high-walled building often as a child – and shuddered, imagining being an orphan penned up in there, in the charge of frightening women in long black habits and funny headdresses. And that was where Joe had begun his life. Not begun – that was somewhere else. And she turned the pages which followed eagerly but found no more information about Joe's origins. There were further reports from the doctor. A fortnight after his arrival at the orphanage the boy was responding better to the nuns who were taking care of him. But he still did not speak and would not make friends with the other children. His burns were healing. But he had not been claimed. The doctor commented also, evidently with some surprise, that he looked as if he could read to a fairly high standard. He had entered the room where the boy was sitting by a window and watched him turning
the page of
Gulliver's Travels
which he appeared to be reading and understanding. A later report was more encouraging. The boy had begun to speak but, it added, he never apparently asked about his mother and father, or referred to the bombing. And the reports got briefer as the busy doctor began to include the child on the record sheets with the other children at the orphanage. The next papers, eight months later, began the story of Joe's adoption. And, after that, the record of an ordinary boy growing up in a secure home in the north of England, away from the bombing. There was the programme of a brass band concert – Joe Endell, cornet. There were school reports, exam results, a cutting from a local paper, with a photograph of a young man with a grin and big ears, who had won an exhibition to an Oxford College. There was an article from the
Yorkshire Post
by-lined Joe Endell, “Can We Save Our Railway History?” Molly, wearier still by now, put all the papers back in the big envelope and again hid it under a pile of nightdresses. She couldn't understand why Joe had never spoken of all this to her. Had he forgotten his entire life up to the age of six? – it seemed unlikely. Had he been too scarred to speak of it? Perhaps that was it – or perhaps he had once been unable to speak of the past and, even when the trauma had gone, the habit of silence remained. She could not reconcile the outward-looking, enthusiastic man he had been with the idea of a man badly damaged by the past. And now, she thought, glancing across at the sleeping child who lay with his arms above his head in the position of a footballer who had just scored – now there was Fred, grandchild of a woman killed in a back room in Meakin Street and a missing father, perhaps a serviceman. What peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented anyone from coming forward to ask what had happened to him? Had the woman run away from home so no one knew where she was? Had the father been killed in action? Perhaps, she thought, there was no father as such. No father, no relatives – what would have brought a woman and child with no connections in the world to a top bedroom in Meakin Street in the early part of the war? Or had she been a refugee from Europe, a fugitive without friends or relatives? There was no way now, Molly thought, of ever finding out who Joe really was. Now, she thought, she had better go downstairs to keep her son's living relatives from quarrelling. But on her way downstairs she wondered why she had never heard the story of Tom Totteridge's rescue. Hadn't Sid and Ivy heard about it? Peggy Jones had. And what about the other child Peggy had mentioned? She resolved to ask her parents what they knew
about the story, now part of their grandchild's history. But the sound of raised voices from the sitting room drove this idea from her head and sent her hurrying forward. When she got into the room she found that George had begun, naively, to talk about Molly's plans for converting the stables. When she came in, Isabel and Tom stared at her in horror and disbelief. Ivy's face wore a look of resignation. George looked blank and it was Sid who broke the silence by saying, as she walked into the room, “George has been talking about your plan to turn the stables into a workshop-cum-factory. I think you've got a bit of explaining to do.”