London Pride (35 page)

‘It's not late, Dad,' Lily began, ‘me an' Arthur…'

But she didn't get any further because her father suddenly lashed out at her, punching her about the head with both hands and roaring like a bull in a stall.

Then the hall was full of movement, Lily running towards the kitchen bent double to avoid the blows, Pearl catching her in her arms, Jim leaping at his father to grab at one punching fist while someone else was grabbing at the other. Arthur, was it? And somebody crying and wailing,‘ Oh don't. Please don't. Don't! Don't!'

‘Upstairs,' Jim shouted to Arthur. But his father braced his feet against the bottom stair and refused to budge, flailing to shake off his captors. It was several confused seconds before the two young men could drag him into the kitchen and force him into his chair.

Lily was bathing her face in the scullery with Pearl standing guard at the door.

‘Now then,' Arthur Walters said, speaking reasonably but holding Mr Boxall down with both hands gripped on his shoulders. ‘We must come to a decision.'

Now that his anger was spent, Mr Boxall was rapidly lapsing into lethargy, beer clouding his mind and thickening his speech. ‘What's ‘at?' he said, trying to turn his head so that he could see who was talking. ‘What you on about?'

‘I'm on about you,' Arthur said, ‘hitting my girlfriend. That's what I'm on about. I'm on about you lamming into the girl I'm going to marry.'

Mr Boxall didn't seem to understand what he was saying, but everyone else did.

‘Are you really?' Pearl said, instantly cheered.

‘Oh I'm so glad,' Mrs Boxall said.

And Lily walked out of the kitchen and held Arthur's arm. There were several ugly red bruises growing on the side of her face and she had the start of a black eye but she was glowing with pride.

‘We were going to tell you later,' Arthur said, ‘but now … Well now, I think we ought to get married just as soon as ever we can. You obviously can't stay in a house with a man like that.'

The man like that was snoring.

‘Quite right,' Jim said, giving his approval. ‘You get out of it, Sis. Best thing all round.'

‘How will you manage?' Mrs Boxall worried. ‘Have you got anywhere to live?'

‘I shall talk it over with my Mum and Dad,' Arthur told her. For a quiet unobtrusive young man he was handling all this extremely well. ‘We shall manage somehow. But if you think I'm going to leave my Lily to be punched about, well…'

Then Lily threw herself into his arms and burst into tears and said he was the dearest man alive and she'd marry him tomorrow.

And Arthur told her to get her hat and coat and pack a few things because he was taking her home to his parents.

‘I shall marry her as soon as ever I can,' he told Jim as Lily was kissing her mother goodbye. ‘You'll sign the consent form, won't you, if the old man won't oblige?'

‘Forge it, d'you mean?' Jim asked, delighted by his daring. Whoever would have thought it of quiet Arthur Walters?

But in the event no forgery was necessary, even though the wedding was arranged within a fortnight because Arthur soon found somewhere to live. His parents rented a three-storey house in Thames Street, which had been scheduled for slum clearance for several years. There was plenty of room in it even if it was always damp and often bug infested.

‘You're welcome here if you like,' his mother said, when she'd heard their story. ‘You could have the two top rooms, couldn't they, Percy? You'd have to cook for yourselves on the fire, but I dare say you could manage that, ‘til you find something better.'

So the banns were called and Mr Boxall signed his consent as if there had never been a row. Soon he was telling the neighbours that he was all for it, and when the wedding day arrived on a warm June Saturday with Pearl and Peggy and three-year-old Yvonne as bridesmaids he spent the afternoon strutting about the street as though he'd arranged it all.

He reverted to type within ten short days, roaring at his
wife because she'd forgotten to buy his bottled beer and lashing out at Pearl for ‘being in the bloody way'.

Fortunately, having talked it all over in advance with Lily and Arthur, Pearl now knew exactly what to do about it. She kissed her mother, packed her bag and left the house without a word. By the time Jim came home from the garage half an hour later, she was settled in at Thames Street in the little back room on the first floor that used to be the nursery.

‘Bloody ridiculous,' Mr Boxall grumbled, when he was sober enough to understand what had happened. ‘What she want to go an' do a thing like that for?'

Neither his wife nor his son enlightened him, she because she wouldn't dare, Jim because he had something more important to consider.

For several years, ever since they'd started work in fact, he and his sisters had been clubbing together to pay the rent, because their mother rarely had enough money left over at the end of the week to cover it. Now, with both girls gone it looked as though he would have to pay the entire rent himself and that was going to be an intolerable burden, besides being grossly unfair, because although he didn't mind looking after his mother he saw no reason why he should fork out for the old man as well. No, the time had come for Mum to make up her mind to leave. She could take a nice little flat, somewhere cheap that he could afford, and then he'd settle her in all nice and cosy, and he and the girls would take responsibility for her.

‘There,' he said with great satisfaction when he'd found a suitable flat and explained his plans to his mother. ‘What d'you think? Place of your own. No more rows. Steady money. What d'you think?'

Her response was a terrible disappointment. She went on clearing the cloth in her stooping methodical way as though what he'd just told her wasn't important. ‘You're a good lad,' she said, smiling at him. ‘You mean well. But I can't do it.'

‘Why ever not?' he said. It hadn't occurred to him that she might refuse and the surprise of it was most unpleasant.

‘I married him,' his mother tried to explain.

‘People get divorced.'

‘Not our sort, Jimmy. Divorce is for the nobs.'

‘Well you could leave him then. What's to stop you?' What was the matter with her? She was being really silly. She ought to have jumped at it.

‘Once you're married,' his mother tried again, ‘it's sort of difficult. You can't just up sticks when times get hard.'

‘Get hard?' he queried. ‘I've never known 'em when they wasn't hard.'

‘Well I dare say,' she said vaguely, straightening the chenille table cloth and not looking at him. ‘That's how it is though. Can't say no different.'

‘So you won't leave him,' he said and he sounded as exasperated as he felt. ‘You won't take this flat.'

‘No,' she said sadly.

‘He'll knock you about.'

‘Very likely.'

‘Don't you care?'

‘Not much good caring. You got ter put up with it.'

‘I don't understand you,' he said, throwing up his hands in exasperation.

‘You will in time,' she sighed. ‘You're young yet. Don't let's talk no more about it, eh?'

She'd put her head to one side in the placatory gesture he knew so well, an unspoken plea for gentleness and acceptance that was so familiar he'd responded to it before he could stop himself. ‘All right,' he said, ‘but…'

She put one finger on his lips. ‘Shush' she begged. ‘Jimmy dear, shush.'

So he shushed. But it upset him terribly and occupied his thoughts all through the following day. To have planned for this moment for so long only to have it rejected out of hand was very painful. It took him the rest of the day to come to terms with it, to grow through it until he could accept that his mother had a life of her own over which he had no power at all and that although he only dimly understood her reasons he had to let her live as she saw fit. It was a sobering day and one in which he matured from idealistic boy to thinking man.

When work was over he took his dog-eared advertisement out of his pocket and considered it, for the
umpteenth time that summer. The garage job was a deadend. There was no denying that. And he couldn't really help her much whether he stayed or went. If he did join the RAF at least the pay would provide her with occasional money for clothes and shoes. It would mean leaving his friends and Peggy Furnivall too, but after that one extraordinary day at the seaside they'd fallen back into their old neighbourly ways and he couldn't see any hope of anything better. Look at the way she was that evening outside the Earl Grey. It would also mean that he'd be joining the armed forces and preparing for war, which after all he'd heard from Mr Cooper was hardly something to be undertaken lightly. But the war was coming, everybody knew that, and when it came he would be involved in it sooner or later anyway. So why not take action now, as the posters were urging? Take action now and be ready when the time comes.

In the end he asked for an afternoon off from the garage and went up to the RAF recruiting office in Kingsway to sign on. It was a peaceful summer's day, an irony that wasn't lost on him, and he was welcomed with drawling enthusiasm.

‘Just the sort of chap we're looking for,' the officer said, leaning back in his chair. ‘Just fill in this form will you.'

The form was filled in and the putative airman sent home to await ‘the next step', which turned out to be a routine medical examination and a written test, both of which he passed with ease. Then it was simply a matter of waiting to be ‘called'.

His family took the news in predictable ways. His father ignored it, his sisters kissed him and teased him about being a hero, and his mother wept a little and said she was ‘proud as Punch'.

But Peggy seemed to be rather upset by it. ‘Does that mean you'll have to go away?' she asked.

“Fraid so,' he said, almost as laconically as the recruiting officer, ‘unless they train airmen by correspondence course.' She looked quite cast down. Was she going to miss him, he thought, hardly daring to hope so, but hoping so just the same.

First Lily and then Pearl and now Jim, Peggy was
thinking. I shan't have any friends left in the road. But she tried to be encouraging. ‘It's good life, so they say,' she observed, keeping her voice light. ‘When are you going?'

‘Oh not for ages yet,' he said, hiding his disappointment. She wasn't going to miss him after all. ‘All sorts of things could happen before they call me.'

The first of the expected wars broke out ten days later. On 3 October the papers were full of the news that the Italians had invaded Abyssinia. Later that week the first newsreel shots of the fighting were shown at the local cinema.

Flossie and Mrs Roderick were appalled at what they saw. And they weren't the only ones. At the ding-dong that Saturday the talk was all about dropping bombs and using gas against unarmed civilians.

‘They're just a lot of blackies with spears,' Gideon said. ‘Don't stand an earthly. Not against bombers.'

‘No more would we, come to that,' Flossie said. ‘It made my flesh creep, Gid.'

‘It's the gas,' Mrs Roderick said. ‘You just imagine if they was to use gas.'

‘Nothing worse,' Mr Cooper agreed. ‘Now d'you see why we mustn't have a war?' He was so anguished by the thought that another war might begin that he'd even persuaded one of his old comrades to push his wheelchair at the head of an anti-war rally. There'd been several in London during the last couple of months, quiet and sober and very well-attended, but still nobody was taking any notice. ‘You can't say we don't know what gas does. Not after the last lot.'

Peggy was thinking about Yvonne and little Norman. ‘If they dropped gas,' she said, ‘what would happen to the kids?'

‘Same as happened to the poor bloody infantry,' Mr Cooper said bitterly. ‘They'd have their lungs burnt out and their tongues covered in sores. They'd choke to death.' He was too upset to protect his neighbours by silence. This was too important. It had to be talked about.

‘Now Mussolini's started it won't be long before Hitler starts too,' Mr Allnutt said. ‘He's been making enough
noise about the Rhineland.' Which was horribly true, for the Führer had been making one ranting speech after another insisting that the Rhineland should be ‘returned to Germany'. ‘I reckon if we don't give it to him he'll send his troops in and take it anyway.'

‘You were right about that Hitler,' Peggy said to Jim as the bitter talk went on. ‘I reckon you'll be glad to get into the RAF.'

‘Yes,' he agreed. ‘I think I shall.'

Jim Boxall never forgot his first sight of RAF Uxbridge. For someone who until then had never travelled further than a charabanc trip to Brighton, the journey had been an excitement in itself, by tram to London Bridge and then through the complications of the tube to Uxbridge, which looked an open countrified sort of place after the hemmed-in streets of Greenwich. He was in a state of such powerful and complicated emotions that every detail of the day was etched into his mind as if it were red hot.

Outside the station he found that he was one of a group of about twenty men all clutching travel warrants and smoking cheap cigarettes and trying to look as though they knew where they were going. They were too ill at ease and embarrassed to greet one another but fortunately after four or five shuffling minutes a lorry trundled up to take them on the last leg. They were herded aboard, and began to introduce themselves to one another. Jim learned that his two immediate neighbours were called Froggy and Jock but he was too excited to remember any of the others, and in any case it didn't seem any time at all before they'd arrived.

One minute they were rocking along an empty country lane between bare trees and scrubby hedges, joking to one another about the ‘rotten bus service', the next they were gazing up into the white sky where a small silver biplane was descending gently and purposefully straight towards them. They could see the red, white and blue markings on
its tail fin, the roundel on its side, its red nose cone, even the helmeted head of the pilot. It gave them an undeniable thrill. The RAF, Jim thought. I'm in the RAF now. There's no going back.