Chapter 4 Pageantry #2
His brother must have taken part in that cavalcade too, although Flynn couldn’t conjure a memory of him being there.
Charlie, younger by two years, had presumably been somewhere behind him in the ranks of legionaries.
He’d probably been up to mischief. He was the class jester; waggery was his impish brother’s forte.
He was the kind of boy who was reliable for his ability to get on people’s nerves.
Their father called Charlie an “idiot,” their mother said he was “soft in the head.” Theirs was not a home where high spirits were appreciated.
They had attended a small, private prep school, the fees for which “nearly bankrupted” their father, something he never failed to mention to them on a termly basis.
From the prep school they had both won scholarships to a state grammar (Charlie to his parents’ surprise) and their father had had to find other fiscal grievances to hold against them.
He worked in the North Eastern Railway headquarters on Station Rise.
They had visited him in his office on one or two occasions.
The office was warmed by a coal fire that was tended to by their father’s secretary, a Miss James—a woman who liked their father considerably more than their mother did.
Whatever the season outside, Miss James kept the office fire fed as conscientiously as a footplate fireman shovelling coal into an engine’s firebox.
Neither Flynn nor his brother had any idea what their grouchy father did at the mahogany desk that dominated his office.
(He had “worked his way up the ranks,” he told them.) Too late to ask now.
The NER had morphed into British Rail, but his father, a fervent Tory despite (or perhaps because of) a working-class father, was dead before nationalization.
He would have violently objected to this “communism.”
Long on obedience and short on enjoyment, it was a meagre, empty kind of household, where the examined life was not encouraged and where love and affection were in short supply.
His happy-go-lucky brother had done his best within its confines, but Flynn couldn’t wait to escape.
To his parents’ disgust, he had shunned a university place to study Medieval English at Durham in favour of an apprenticeship as a cub reporter on the Yorkshire Post. He took digs in Leeds and hardly ever returned home once he had left.
Nor had he been in a hurry to take the train north to announce his safe return to his parents after the war ended.
He thought they might not know that he was alive (presumed dead), but it turned out it was they who were dead, information relayed to him by a neighbour when he turned up unannounced on the doorstep of his old home.
A pair of heart attacks, one following swiftly on the heels of the other, if a heart could be said to have heels.
Cauterized by war, Flynn was surprised at how little the news affected him.
He made a dutiful visit to them in their new home, where they shared a grave and a headstone, probably as reluctantly as they had once shared a bed.
His brother’s name was at the bottom of the stone, reduced to a footnote.
Charles John Flynn. Known unto God. Charlie had been lost when his submarine, the Tigris, had disappeared off the coast of Italy in ’43—something else, of course, that Flynn had not known until after his return.
He had left as a son and a brother and returned an orphaned only child.
He supposed he was better off than Charlie, who had lost all there was to lose.
“All right, Harry?” Evans asked.
“Yes, yes thanks, Hywel. Sorry, miles away,” Flynn said lightly.
“Just taking a trip down memory lane.” Such a pleasant concept, he thought.
It implied hedgerows and hawthorn blossom, lambs bleating in the fields—not a stagger through monsoon and mosquito-plagued mud, or back-breaking hacking at rocks in merciless heat.
Who in their right mind thought a railway could be built by hand?
“And why not?” Evans said, equally lightly. They smiled ruefully at each other.
The idea of pageantry this morning had depressed them both.
Badger and Denholm appeared, also both uncharacteristically gloomy—Badger on account of indigestion and Denholm because Upstairs had been castigating him for the perceived indolence of their office.
“We need more ‘wartime spirit’ apparently,” he said.
“Well, bollocks to that,” was Evans’s response, echoed around the office. “We’re not at war any more.”
Their collective mood was brightened with anticipation at the sound of the Boy whistling on the stairs, returning from one of his regular patrols.
“Ah, here cometh our airy sprite,” Denholm said.
The airy sprite had acquired (he rarely paid for anything) a paper bag of humbugs that he handed around with his customary largesse and they were all cheerful again, even Evans, who caved in and told Denholm that he would take on the burden of the pageants.
“Good man,” Denholm said, helping himself to a second humbug.
—
Flynn got down to his usual stoic trawl through the Stock List, searching for items requested by various Kitchens.
Kitchens came under the Rooms’ umbrella.
The Stock List helped to furnish the interiors of the Rooms as well as almost everything else on site.
It was an enormous beast, an exhausting compendium of every item available from twenty thousand different suppliers, containing everything you could possibly think of, from a flagstaff to a Honiton lace parasol (lent by Mrs. V.
Ramsay, the Old Rectory, Somerton, Oxford) to “an original plate of Penicillium mould” (lent by Sir Alexander Fleming, FRS, St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, London W2).
Not to mention a model of the domestic sewerage system or a stuffed Emperor penguin.
For Homes and Gardens, the Stock List was the Holy Bible, containing everything they might need, from a “desk light with flexible tube clamp and aluminium reflector” (Merchant Adventurers Company, London) to “four fox brushes and a fox mask” (Edward Garrard and Son, London), not to overlook a humble “thimble” (Souplex Ltd, Morecambe) or a stuffed fish in a glass case, which for reasons kept to themselves the designers had requested for a “Bed-Sitting Room for Two School-Age Boys.” Flynn had reluctantly shared a bedroom with his brother throughout their childhood and neither of them would have welcomed a stuffed fish on their wall.
There had been no need for them to share as there was a third bedroom in the house in Acomb, as icy and austere as a monk’s cell, but it enabled their mother to refer to the “guest room,” although no guest had ever been invited to stay.
Flynn was continually surprised by the needs of the Kitchens.
In his own small scullery in Romilly Street the inventory was sparse—not much beyond a couple of plates and cups, a saucepan and a frying pan.
He dispensed salt straight from the cardboard Saxa packet and tea from a rusty old Edward VII Coronation commemoration caddy that had already been on a shelf when he moved in.
The Kitchens, on the other hand, had a seemingly endless list of requirements—not just the bigger items, such as washing machines and ovens and refrigerators, but also a parade of smaller ones: measuring cups and spoons, plate racks, table mats, condiment sets, soufflé dishes, whistling kettles and spice racks.
Some things sounded to Flynn’s ears as though they belonged in the Eccentrics’ Corner rather than a kitchen, like Spong’s No.
100 household mincer (Spong and Co., Woodland Grove, London N15).
Flynn wasn’t sure how he had become the guru of the Stock List. In fact, for some, Flynn and the Stock List had become metonymical.
It was certainly not something he had pursued, yet he had a good memory and found himself taking a rather perverse pride in his ability to troll its pages and come up with a requested item.
His expertise now extended beyond Rooms, so that, rather than hunting through this rambling leviathan, the various design teams often turned to Flynn first.
He was currently on the hunt for a cast of Florence Nightingale’s head for Midwifery and Nursing.
“A head?” the Boy asked eagerly, when Flynn managed to track one down in the Florence Nightingale Hospital.
The Boy was disappointed to learn that it was not to be removed from Florence Nightingale’s body but from a statue in the entrance to the hospital.
He had no idea who Florence Nightingale was.
Unlike Evans, Flynn found the Boy’s vast ignorance refreshing.
Knowledge was for the most part a burden, whereas finding “fifteen-fathom steel ropes, circumference from one to three inches” (British Ropes Ltd, Leith, Edinburgh) represented a small triumph over the chaos of the universe.
When sleep didn’t come, which was often, Flynn found that the Stock List provided a useful soporific with its cricket bats (Stuart Surridge and Co.
Ltd, 210 Borough High Street, London SE1) and “a Pyrex heat-resisting pudding dish” (James A.
Jobling and Co. Ltd, Sunderland). These were the kind of words that did not fail.
They were sturdy and useful. They stirred neither memory nor imagination.
Why bother with poetry when you could have a no-nonsense stainless-steel sink from W.
& G. Sissons Ltd of Sheffield to lullaby you to sleep?
“I would say that one over there is more of a strawberry blonde, wouldn’t you?” Badger whispered.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure I even know what a strawberry blonde is, Badger.”