In Pursuit of the English: A Documentary Read online

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘I hope so, too. I got ever so worried about you.’ She took my arm between her hands and gently tugged me into her room. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I feel real bad, what I’m doing, but you’re my friend now. I must tell you. Flo’s got all in a state about losing you – ’ She giggled, and adjusted her face. ‘Sorry, but it does make me laugh, when Flo sees the pennies slipping through her fingers. Well, because you went out with Bobby Brent, she thinks she’ll let you the room. But Bobby Brent wants it for his fancy woman. So now she’s all torn up, wondering who’ll pay the most.’

  ‘He will, I should think,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t know our Bobby.’

  ‘Is it true he was in the Commandos?’

  ‘Oh, yes. A real war hero and all. But listen! I’ll show you the room and you can see if you like it.’ She cautiously opened the door and listened. ‘No, Flo’s too busy quarrelling with Dan to snoop.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. They’re in love. They’ve only been married three years, see? When people are in love they quarrel. Dan got real mad about Bobby. She makes him jealous on purpose, see? Then he gets mad and they quarrel and they make it up in bed. See?’

  I laughed. She giggled. ‘Shh,’ she said. We crept into the passage outside her room, and we listened again. Downstairs a din of shouting voices and music. Rose opened a door, and switched a light on. It was a very large room, with two long windows. There was a tiny fireplace at one end. The walls were cracked and the ceiling was stained.

  ‘Don’t notice the mess,’ Rose whispered. ‘It’s the war. The war damage people is coming in. They’ll fix it. But it’s a nice room, and Dan’ll paint it for you. He’s in the trade, and he’s good at those things, whatever else you can say about him. And if you’re clever with Flo, you’ll get it cheap because of the cracks and all. If you don’t mind me telling you, you don’t treat Flo right at all. I watched you. You’ve got to stand up to her. If you don’t, she’ll treat you bad.’

  ‘Tell me what to do?’ I asked.

  At this direct appeal, she hesitated. ‘I do feel bad,’ she said apologetically. ‘I’m Flo’s friend. But I’ll just give you advice in general. She’ll come and see you tomorrow. Don’t just say yes, and thank you. You must bargain with her. I know it’s not nice, how she is, but I put it down to her Italian blood. She likes to bargain.’

  ‘All right.’ I said. ‘I will. And thank you.’

  We crept back to her door, and she said: ‘Tomorrow night, when your kid’s asleep, we’ll go for a walk. It’ll be real nice to have company.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’d like it.’

  ‘And I’ll show you some ropes around here. You don’t mind me saying it, dear, but you don’t know how to look after yourself. You don’t really.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Well, never mind, Rome wasn’t built in a day, that’s what I always say. Sleep tight.’

  When I got back to my room from taking my son to nursery school next morning. Flo was standing there, with a guilty look. ‘I’ve just put away some things for you,’ she said. ‘To show you how comfortable it is. It is really.’

  I said involuntarily. ‘It’s very kind of you, Flo,’ and, as involuntarily she gave a little smile of victory, and said in a cheerful voice: ‘I told you you’d like it up here.’

  I summoned the spirit of Rose to my aid, and said: ‘But I don’t want to unpack. Because if I get somewhere with more room. I’ll move.’

  All the life went out of her, and she sat despondently on my bed. She sighed. She looked at a pack of cigarettes lying on the bed and said: ‘You’ve got so many lovely cigarettes, darling, aren’t you lucky.’ The sense of guilt which accompanied all colonials to England, in 1949, overcame me and I said: ‘Help yourself.’ Instantly she became happy again. She picked up the box and handled it, looking at me. Then she carelessly took out a handful, but dropping some in her anxiety lest I might be angry, and pushed them into her apron pockets. She understood that guilt very well by instinct, because later, when I learned to understand the role cigarettes played in that house she would say automatically: ‘We had such a hard time during the war, dear, you wouldn’t believe it.’

  ‘I’ve put your things where you can find them,’ she said. I looked at the top drawer, unable to discover any logic in her arrangement of it, until she said: ‘You’ve got some lovely things, dear.’ She had put the more expensive things on top, in a layer over the cheap ones. In the second drawer she had laid out six pairs of nylons, side by side, as if in a showcase. I began rolling them up and stacking them in a corner. She said quickly, over and over again, ‘Sweetheart, darling. I’m sorry I didn’t do them nice for you.’ She was sitting on my bed, full of innocent concern; while one hand kept touching her apron pocket, to reassure her of the existence of the cigarettes. She looked like a child who has done its best to please and now expects a reprimand. ‘I was only trying to help you, darling.’ I said nothing, and she said: ‘Please, please, darling, give your Flo some nylons.’ With an enormous effort, invoking Rose again, I said: ‘Now why should I give you my nylons?’ Her face puckered with discouragement. Then she laughed with frank good-humour, and having lost that round of the game, she said, ‘I’ll go down and get my old man’s dinner.’ At the door she remarked innocently: ‘I’m glad you’re so happy up here.’

  ‘Flo. I told you, I must move when I find something better.’

  In a wail of despair, she cried out: ‘But you wouldn’t like the other rooms we’ve got …’ She clapped her hand over her mouth; she had been instructed by Dan not to mention them. She waddled fast downstairs, with one hand nesting the cigarettes in her pocket.

  That night Rose congratulated me, ‘You’re learning,’ she said. ‘And perhaps you’ll be lucky. Because Bobby Brent hasn’t been back. They’re arguing about it. Dan and Flo, now. About the rent.’

  ‘How much should I pay?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ she pleaded. ‘It makes me feel bad – I’ve just been having supper with them, see? But when she says, bargain. Now, you’re coming out with me.’

  She put her two hands around my arm, and walked me away down past the bombed site I had been made to go round last night by Mr MacNamara-Ponsonby-Brent. I told Rose of the incident, and she listened, without surprise. ‘He’s like that,’ she commented. ‘He was always like that. That’s why he frightens me, see? So don’t you have nothing to do with him.’

  ‘He said he was going to take me to see a flat tonight.’

  She let her hands drop away from my arm. ‘You didn’t say you’d go?’

  ‘Yes. I did.’

  She was silent. ‘Why?’ she asked at last timidly. ‘You don’t believe what he says. I know that.’

  ‘Well, it’s because I’ve never met anyone like him before.’ When she didn’t reply, I said: ‘Why don’t you like that?’

  She thought. Then she said: ‘You talk like he’s an animal in a zoo.’

  ‘If you went to a new country, you’d like to meet new kinds of people, too.’ She didn’t reply. I persisted: ‘Well, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘What makes you think I’m going to any new countries?’ she said, with resentment. We walked on for a while in silence. Then she forgave me. She put her hands around my arm again, squeezed it, and said: ‘Well, never mind, it takes all sorts. I’ve been thinking. The reason I like you, well – apart from being friends now, it’s because you say things that make me think.’

  We were in streets that differed from those behind me in a way I could not name. They were dingy and grey and dirty. There were gangs of noisy sharp-faced children. Youths lounged against corner-walls with their hands in their pockets. Here was the face, which comes as a shock to a colonial, used to broad, filled-in, sunburned faces. It is a face that is not pale so much as drained, peaked rather than thin, with an unfinished look, a jut in the bones of the jaw or the forehead. People were smaller. Rose was absorbed among
her own kind and I saw her differently. I was thinking that there were miles and miles of such streets, marked only by a difference in shop-names or by the degree to which brick and stones had been stained and weathered – square miles full of deprived people. I felt alien to Rose, and as if it were dishonest to be here at all. I understood that I was dishonest because I had brought the colonial attitude to class with me. That it does not exist. I had not thought of Rose as working-class but as foreign to me. She must have been thinking me intolerably affected. Later on she said something that cleared my mind. ‘When you first came to live with us,’ she said, ‘you just made me sick. It wasn’t that you fancied yourself, it wasn’t that, but you were just plain ignorant about everything. You didn’t know nothing about anything, and you didn’t even know you were ignorant. You made me laugh, you did really.’

  Rose stopped, pulled out a purse from her bag and peered into it. We were alongside a fruit-counter that projected into the street. The man serving nodded and said: ‘What are you a-doing of down here, Rosie?’

  ‘Just off for a walk. With my friend.’ She nodded at some cherries and handed over exactly the marked price for half a pound. She kept her eye on the money in the man’s hand, and smiled and nodded when threepence was handed back. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘And this is my friend, see? She’ll be coming down here I expect, so you treat her right.’

  They smiled and nodded, then she took my arm and pulled me after her. ‘You go there for fruit, see? Now he knows you’re my friend it’ll be different. And don’t you go buying stuff on those barrows. That’s only for them who don’t know better. I mean you have to know which barrows are honest.’

  She began spitting stones into the gutter, ‘See that?’ she said, giggling happily. ‘I used to be a winner at school every time.’ Now I was under her protection. She kept herself between me and the crowd, and at every moment she nodded and smiled at some man or woman leaning against a counter or a stall.

  ‘I was a kid down here,’ she said; and I saw that this part of the great city was home, to her; a different country from the street, not fifteen minutes’ walk away, where she now lived. Slowly the word slum, which had for me a literary and fanciful quality, a dramatic squalor, changed; and at last I saw the difference between this city and the streets that held my new lodgings. Those had a decaying, down-at-heel respectability. This was hard and battling, raw and tough; showing itself in the scepticism of the watchful assessing glances from the shopmen and women, and the humour of the greetings that Rose took and gave. She was happily nostalgic. Passing these familiar places, which knew her, acknowledging her by a gleam from a lit window or the slant of a wall, like so many friendy glances or waves of the hand, reinstated her as a human being with rights of possession in the world. ‘I used to get all my shoes here,’ she said, passing a shop. Or: ‘Before the war they sold a bit of fried skate in this shop better than anything.’

  We turned into a narrow side street of short, low, damp, houses, a uniform dull yellow in colour, each with a single grey step. It was almost empty, though here and there in the failing light a woman leaned against a doorway. Rose said suddenly: ‘Let’s have a sit-down,’ and indicated a low wall that enclosed a brownish space of soil where a bomb had burst. There was a tree, paralysed down one side, and a board leaning in a heap of rubble that said: ‘Tea and Bun – One Penny.’

  Rose settled herself on the wall and spat pips at a lamppost.

  ‘Who sold the tea?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, that? He got hit. That was before the war.’ She spoke as if it was a different century. ‘You don’t get tea and a bun for a penny now.’ She looked lovingly around her. ‘I was born here. In that house down there. That one with the brown door. Many’s the time I’ve sat here with my little brother when he was driving my mother silly. Or sometimes my stepfather got into one of his moods and I’d clear out and come here for a rest, in a way of speaking. He used to make me mad, he did.’ She lapsed into a silence of nostalgic content. A man slowly cycled down the street, stopping at each lamp-post. Above him, while he paused, a small yellow glimmer pushed back the thick grey air. Soon the houses retired into shadow. Pools of dim light showed wet pavements. Rose was quiet beside me, a huddled little figure in her tight black coat and head-scarf.

  It was long after the sky had gone thick and black behind the glimmering lamps that Rose came out of her dream of childhood, She stretched and said: ‘We’d better be moving.’ But she didn’t move without reluctance. ‘At any rate, the blitz didn’t get it. That’s something to be glad about. And the bombs fell around here. God knows what they thought they were trying to bomb!’ She spoke indifferently, without hate. ‘I expect the planes got lost one night and thought this would do as well as anything. The Americans do that, too, they say – they just get fed up flying around in the dark, so they drop their bombs and nip home for a cup of tea.’

  As we walked back, she said: ‘I’ll have to get a hurry on. I’ve got to help Flo with the washing-up or she’ll get the pip.’

  ‘Do you have to help her?’

  ‘No. Not really. But I’ve got into the habit of it. She’s like that – I don’t want to say anything I shouldn’t. But you just watch yourself and don’t let yourself get into the habit of doing things, I’m telling you for your own good.’

  At the bombed site her gait and manner changed. She withdrew into herself and became suspicious, looking into people’s faces as they passed as if they might turn out to be enemies. I couldn’t imagine this Rose, all prim and tight-faced, spitting pips with a laugh. In our street of great decaying houses she clutched at my arm for a moment and said. ‘This place gives me the ’ump sometimes. It’s not friendly, not like what I’m used to. That’s why.’

  Bobby Brent was coming out of the side door from the basement, a natty brown hat pulled down over his eyes. When he saw us, he frowned; then smiled. ‘You thought I’d forgotten our appointment,’ he said. ‘Well, you don’t know me.’ Then it struck him: he examined his watch and exclaimed. ‘I say! It’s half-past nine. We agreed eight-fifteen.’

  ‘Oh, come off it, Bobby,’ said Rose giggling. ‘You do make me laugh.’

  He gritted his teeth; forced his lips back in a smile. ‘I’ll take you over now,’ he said to me. ‘Of course, the one I tried to get for you’s gone; nobody to blame but yourself. But there’s another. Just right for you.’

  Rose was leaning against the gate-pillar, watching him satirically. ‘Wait a moment,’ she said to him, and pulled me inside the front door.

  She took my handbag from me, opened it, and removed all the money from it. ‘I’Il keep this till you come back,’ she said. ‘I’ve left you two shillings, that’ll be enough. Now, if you want this room next to me, it’s a good thing you go off with Bobby. It’ll make Flo nervous. And they’re doing ever such a deal, the three of them.’

  ‘What sort of deal? Why don’t you stop Flo?’

  ‘Oh no, it’s like this. If Bobby wants, for argument’s sake, five pounds, then don’t let him have it. But if it’s a hundred and it looks all right, that’s different, see? Bobby’s got an idea for a club, a night-club or something. Dan is going to lend him a hundred. And they’re talking how to get money out of you.’

  ‘But I haven’t any.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she said, giggling. ‘Don’t mind me, but I did sort of keep my face straight, as if I thought you had money, because it makes me laugh, Flo and Dan, when they get the itch. There are two sorts of people in the world,’ she concluded, ‘the kind that get money, like Flo and Dan and Bobby. That’s because they think about it all the time. And people like us. Well, it takes all sorts. See you tomorrow. I’ll put your money under your pillow.’

  Bobby Brent said as I joined him: ‘There’s just one kind of person that I can’t stand. The envious ones. Like Rose Jennings. She’s eaten up with it.’

  ‘Where’s the flat?’

  ‘Around the corner.’

  We walked half a mile in silence. ‘H
ow’s Miss Powell?’ I asked, ‘I don’t mind telling you, she’s a real problem to me. She’s got it into her head she wants to marry me.’ ‘Bad luck,’ I said. ‘The trouble with women is, they’re monogamous.’ ‘I know. It’s all very badly arranged.’ ‘What do you mean – my arrangements aren’t crystallized.’ ‘Never mind, you’ll feel different when you’re married to the daughter of the lord.’ ‘I’m not so sure. Women never understand. They tie a man down. They expect him to live the same life, day after day. Well. I was in the Commandos three years, and now I expect to call my life my own.’ ‘Cheer up. It looks as if there might very well be a war soon.’ ‘You can’t count on it,’ he said.

  We were now in a hushed and darkened square, and outside a large house. The name on the doorbell we pushed was Colonel Bartowers. The door opened to show a martial old man, with protruding stomach, red face, and an aggressive blue stare.

  ‘We’re here on business. My name’s Ponsonby – Alfred Ponsonby.’ He thrust a card into the Colonel’s hand. The Colonel stood his ground, looking at him up and down, raising his white eyebrows in a terrifying way. ‘We understand you have premises to let.’

  The Colonel fell back, astonished, and we were in the hall. The Colonel looked at me, and said blankly: ‘Well, come inside, now you’re here. How on earth – I haven’t even sent it to an agent – ’ He pulled himself together. ‘Well, I don’t know, these days you can’t even think of moving without getting in hordes of … however. I’m very glad. Come in.’

  He showed us into a living-room. It was charming. This was the England I had read about in novels.

  ‘As a matter of interest,’ said the Colonel to me, ‘how did you hear about this flat?’

  Mr Ponsonby strode forward and announced: ‘My cousin from Africa asked me to find her a flat.’ I tried to catch the Colonel’s eye, but Mr Ponsonby was in the way. ‘I’m in the business, as my card shows. There would be no fee to either lessor or lessee.’

  ‘A question of philanthropy,’ said the Colonel gravely; and Mr Ponsonby fell back, spelling out the word to himself. ‘Blood is blood,’ he offered at last.