Wise Children (7 page)

Why should she have smiled? She was just seventeen years old, no man, no home. There was a war on. All the same, Mrs Chance always told us that she smiled and Mrs Chance was sometimes stingy with the truth but never lied. ‘Why shouldn’t she smile? She hadn’t got a mum or dad. A baby is the next best thing.’

The sky was blue, that morning, said Mrs Chance, and there was a wind that made the washing on the clotheslines dance. Monday, washday. What a sight! All over Brixton, long black stockings stepping out with gents’ longjohns, striped shirts doing the Lambeth Walk with flannel nighties, French knickers doing the cancan with the frilly petticoats, pillowslips, sheets, towels, hankies all a-flutter, like flags and banners, everything in motion. The bombs stopped and the little kids came out to play again. The sun shone, the kids were singing. When Grandma Chance had had a couple, she sometimes sang the song they sang when we were born:

Poor old Charlie, pushing up the daisies, now. Old Charlie. Hung like a horse.

So there was dancing and singing all along Bard Road and Mrs Chance picked us up, one on each arm, and took us to the window so the first thing we saw with our swimming baby eyes was sunshine and dancing. Then a seagull swooped up, past the window, up and away. She told us about the seagull so often that although I cannot really remember it, being just hatched out, all the same, I do believe I saw that seagull fly up into the sky.

There was a little sigh behind us and she was gone.

The doctor got there ten minutes after, he wrote out the death certificate. That was that. So Mrs Chance adopted us but never let us call her ‘mother’, out of respect for the dead. We always called her ‘Grandma’, and ‘Chance’ became our handle.

But I don’t think for one moment that ‘Chance’ was her own name, either. All that I know about her is: she’d arrived at 49 Bard Road on New Year’s Day, 1900, with a banker’s draft for the first year’s rent and the air of a woman making a new start in a new place, a new century and, or so the evidence points, a new name. If she decided to call herself ‘Mrs’, it was part and parcel of that shaky swipe after respectability I’ve mentioned, because I never caught one whiff of husband and, to tell the truth, she never lost a rakish air.

She wasn’t tall, about five foot two, five two and a half, but solid-built like an armoured car. She always put on so much Rachel powder she puffed out a fine cloud if you patted her. She rouged big, round spots in the middle of her cheeks. She used so much eyeblack that kiddies on Electric Avenue used to give her a chorus of ‘Two Lovely Black Eyes’ as she passed by. For all the thirty years we knew her, thanks to peroxide, she was canary-coloured blonde. She always pencilled in a big, black beauty spot below the left-hand corner of her mouth.

For outdoors, she wore black and she never went out without one of those square oilcloth carrier bags in which she kept her fat leather purse, a clean handkerchief in an envelope she’d marked in pencil ‘clean hankercheif’, a couple of safety pins, in case, as she said, her drawers fell down, and often an empty or two on its way back to the off-licence. There’d be a little black toque on her head, with a spotted veil. And I always remember her grey lisle stockings, that she secured below each knee with two lengths of knotted elastic.

Indoors, providing the boarders weren’t around, she never wore a stitch, as often as not. She was a convert to naturism. She thought it was good for us kiddies, to get the air and sunlight on our skins, as well, so we saved a lot of wear and tear on clothes and often gambolled naked in the backyard, to the astonishment of the neighbours, who were a proper lot. Brixton’s changed, a good deal. These days, you could stage a three-point orgy in the garden and nobody would bat an eye except that bloke with the earring next door might pipe up, ‘Got enough condoms?’

She didn’t so much talk as elocute. She rhymed ‘sky’ with ‘bay’, and made ‘mountaynes’ out of ‘molehills’, except sometimes she forgot herself, the air turned blue. We’d been out in the market, once, stocking up on rabbit food – she’d a passion for salads, it went with all that naturism. During her strictest periods, she’d make us a meal of a cabbage, raw in summer, boiled in winter. There we were, picking over the greens, when some prim voice behind us, rudely referring to Grandma, opined: ‘. . .  no better than she oughter be . . .’

Grandma swung round, dukes up: ‘What the fuck d’you mean?’

We never found out who set her up in Bard Road and she never volunteered the information of her own accord. She’d invented herself, she was a one-off and she kept her mystery intact until the end, although she left us everything, we owe her everything and the older we grow, the more like her we become. Triumph of nature over nurture, ducky. Only goes to show.

To this day I swear, sometimes, late at night, I hear a soft thump, thump, her bare feet on the stairs, coming down to make sure the gas is off in the kitchen, the front door is locked, us girls are safe home. And there’s a smell of crushed mint that lingers in the breakfast room, sometimes, because her favourite tipple was crème de menthe frappé, with a sprig of mint, in season, but she’d drink whatever she could lay her hands on the rest of the time. And that boiled cabbage of hers. There’s an aroma in the area we can’t get rid of, no matter what we try. At first we thought it was the drains. We never touch cabbage, ourselves, not now we’re grown up. I couldn’t look a cabbage in the eye after what Grandma did to them. Boiled them to perdition. The abattoir is kinder to a cow.

She took to children like a duck to water, enough to make you wonder why she’d not had any of her own. I asked her about that, once, years later; she said she’d never, not until she picked us up and cuddled us that very first morning, known what men were
for
. ‘I’d often wondered,’ she said. ‘When I saw you two, the penny dropped.’

You must remember that there was a war on, when we were born. If we made her happy, then we didn’t add much to the collective sum of happiness in the whole of South London. First of all, the neighbours’ sons went marching off, sent to their deaths, God help them. Then the husbands, the brothers, the cousins, until, in the end, all the men went except the ones with one foot in the grave and those still in the cradle, so there was a female city, red-eyed, dressed in black, outside the door, and Grandma said it then, she said it again in 1939: ‘Every twenty years, it’s bound to happen. It’s to do with generations. The old men get so they can’t stand the competition and they kill off all the young men they can lay their hands on. They daren’t be seen to do it themselves, that would give the game away, the mothers wouldn’t stand for it, so all the men all over the world get together and make a deal: you kill off our boys and we’ll kill off yours. So that’s that. Soon done. Then the old men can sleep easy in their beds, again.’

When the bombardments began, Grandma would go outside and shake her fist at the old men in the sky. She knew they hated women and children worst of all. She’d come back in and cuddle us. She lullabyed us, she fed us. She was our air-raid shelter; she was our entertainment; she was our breast.

The boarders dwindled off. Too much babyshit in the bathroom. Naked babies crawling in the hall. Nobody made the beds, nobody made the porridge – the help all found good jobs in the armaments factories, didn’t they, much to Grandma’s disgust. They would depart while she harangued them. What did Grandma do for money? The odd, and I mean ‘odd’, lady vocalist might rent a room for an hour, to practise her scales, or a not-too-fussy adagio dancer want to put her feet up for twenty minutes, ahem, ahem. Visitors used the front door, up the front steps; we went down the area steps to the door in the basement.

When we were just babbling our first ‘g’anma’, that clock turned up. The stag-topped grandfather. Shipped to us direct from Pitlochry, from the estate of Miss Euphemia Hazard, deceased, with a note to say that 49 Bard Road was the last known address of her nephew, Melchior, so they sent it here. She left it to him in her will. Everything else went to the poor.

Grandma cursed and swore when she read that. She couldn’t bear to think that clock was all we’d get. She moved hell and high water to seek our father out. She left no stone unturned lest, as she told us later, she found him lurking underneath. Then, all of a sudden, it was the Armistice, and there he was, in the West End, playing Romeo, no less! so Grandma put on her toque and went to a matinée. Some acrobatic dancer who’d put up in the first-floor back while she was resting kept an eye on us while Grandma was gone, she taught us back-flips, we were having a whale of a time until Grandma came back with a face like the wrath of God. ‘You look like you need a cuppa,’ said the acrobatic dancer so they adjourned and we went on back-flipping until we fancied a bit of bread and dripping, which is when, tripping into the breakfast room, we overheard our grandma. ‘He flatly denies it and there’s sod all I can do.’ Neither Nora nor I could make head or tail of that, but both of them picked us up and hugged us. ‘Poor little things!’ And we got double rations, two slices each, and a bit of raspberry jam on it, too.

That acrobatic dancer upped and married a peer, in the end. It’s a funny old world.

So life went on, as usual, until, one fine day that self-same year, just a few weeks later, came a knocking at the door.

Knock, knock; who’s there? And off I stumped to answer it.

Knock, knock.

The knocker got a shock.

A naked child greeted the stranger. Not a scrap on but for the big, blue bow in my brown hair, and a black eyepatch. There was a big scimitar of silver paper in my hand and another child perched on the stairs, the spitting image, not so much a twin, more of an optical illusion, like as two peas except that
her
ribbon was green and she wore a red flag with the skull and crossbones on it knotted round her shoulders as a cloak. Both of us little girls stared at the newcomer with cold, round eyes: what have we here?

What an unwelcome! Such an unwelcome that he couldn’t help but laugh.

Ooh, wasn’t he a handsome young man, in those days. If I find myself describing him in the language of the pulp romance, then you must forgive me – there was always that quality about Perry, especially when he was glorious in his twenties, broad of shoulder, heavy of thigh, with his unruly thatch of burnished copper hair, the lavish spattering of freckles across his nose, laughing green eyes flecked with gold. He wore a scratched, weathered flying jacket with the shoulder flash of the US Flying Corps and his left arm was in a sling. It was our Uncle Peregrine from America but we didn’t know him from Adam.

When he saw that he was hurting our feelings he smothered his laughter but there was still a delighted little quiver playing around his lips as he dropped down to his knees so that we were all three more equal in height to inspect his new-found nieces more thoroughly. He rummaged in his pocket and produced, not candy, nor pennies, but a pristine white handkerchief which he shook out and displayed to the girls: am I hiding anything?

We shook our heads. No. We could see that, like ourselves, he hid nothing.

He knotted the handkerchief and showed it to us again. A simple knot: nothing but a knot.

We inched closer to him, fascinated.

Ceremoniously he unknotted his handkerchief and, lo and behold! a white dove flew out, flew twice round the hall, then perched on top of the antlers on the grandfather clock, went: ‘Voo, croo!’ and, to the immense annoyance of our grandma, who just then ascended the basement staircase to find out what was going on, crapped on the carpet. Grandma had got her knickers on, thank God. Then we all went into the kitchen and drank tea and we little lady pirates sat on Peregrine Hazard’s knee and ransacked his pockets in search of more doves, finding none, but a Fuller’s walnut cake, instead, which Grandma accepted with wary politeness. Fuller’s walnut cake has gone the way of all flesh, worse luck, I wouldn’t mind a slice of Fuller’s walnut cake right now. It turned out we were all very partial to Fuller’s walnut cake so we had some slices of that and things eased up a bit, although Peregrine was thoroughly upset and embarrassed by the mission he’d undertaken out of a sense of duty to the brother he’d only just met again.

And not even so much out of a sense of duty to Melchior as to the dead ones, the grandparents.

Now, how had it come to pass that Peregrine Hazard, with a dove in his pocket, popped up in Brixton that glorious afternoon to make us all happy? Remember, you last saw him haring down the Great White Way out of the clutches of his Aunt Effie into –

Into what? That’s a poser.

Over the years, Peregrine offered us a Chinese banquet of options as to what happened to him next. He gave us all his histories, we could choose which ones we wanted – but they kept on changing, so. That was the trouble. Did he really meet up with Ambrose Bierce in a flophouse in El Paso and go off with him to fight in Mexico? (In confirmation of this, in
sole
confirmation, I’m bound to say, one personalised dedication in a copy of
The Devil’s Dictionary
.) Was it true he’d posed as Ben Traven? I knew for a fact he’d worked in circuses. Unless it was on the halls. Or else he’d perfected his stage magic, his juggling and conjuring tricks, to entertain his fellow prospectors during the long winter evenings in Alaska. Above all, how did he grow so rich?

‘That’s easy,’ he said and his face split in a big grin. ‘I struck gold in Alaska.’

But he was a
very
good juggler. You couldn’t deny him that. He told me once that W. C. Fields taught him how to juggle, but I’m not sure I believe that.

Grandma was pleased to see that such a handsome young man had got out of the clutches of the old men with only a flesh wound to show for it, i.e. shrapnel in the upper arm; it gave her hope for the continuance of the human race, she said. The more he and Grandma chewed the fat, the more they saw eye to eye until at last, all embarrassment, he told her the reason for his visit . . . it turned out that he’d volunteered to bear Grandma the glad tidings of Melchior’s impending marriage.