Chapter 16
Tom and Gordon Baxter were friends now. They went walking together through London. Gordon worked for London Underground, and had made it his mission to get to know the city above ground.
Jenny knew Gordon; Tom had proof of this now.
One day in spring, three years after he’d arrived, he was walking past the building site where the bomb had fallen.
He had just turned twelve. The previous week Tony Powell had found a nest of rats and had boasted to everyone he was wondering what to do with them: whether to barbecue them, or release them into posh nobs’ houses, or put them down the dresses of girls at school.
Tom had waited around a bit, wanting to make sure Tony didn’t do anything stupid.
He felt anxious, stupidly concerned, but, more than anything else, he hated unfairness, and bullying.
It was March, but it was freezing cold, smog filling the wide pavements and avenues.
It hung over the bomb site like a ghost house.
Tom turned to go, on the way out bumping into Johnny Hillman on the pavement.
‘You off?’
Tom nodded. ‘Seems stupid if you ask me.’
‘La di dah,’ Johnny muttered. ‘Piss off, then.’
‘I will, thanks. Don’t know why you bother with Tony.’
Johnny had shoved him. ‘I said, piss off.’
Tom was surprised, but Johnny was like that sometimes, usually nice but then angry out of nowhere, whereas Tony was angry all the time, and Johnny’s brother Robert was even worse. He’d been in trouble with the police and all sorts.
The smog chilled him to his bones. Scotland was cold but the smog was worse: it made you cough, made you feel like melted coal was seeping into your throat. He stopped on the corner of his road to cough, and that’s where he saw Gordon.
He was standing outside their house, and Jenny was on the front doorstep. Tom walked towards them, as quietly as he could, then hid behind a car for a few seconds. He didn’t know why he didn’t just make his presence known.
‘There’re no more letters, Jenny. I told you.’
‘But it’s been two months, Gordon. Two months. It’s never been that long before.’
‘Her friend, that fella, whatever his name is. He’s ill sometimes. Sometimes that delays it. You got to be patient. He’ll write.’
‘Are you sure you haven’t missed something?’
Tom could just see round the corner of the car. Jenny was gripping Gordon’s hands. ‘Are you sure no one’s interfering with the post, Gordon?’
‘It’s not me,’ Gordon said, shaking his head. He pulled his hands away, held them up to the skies. ‘That’s all the news I’ve got, Jenny –’
‘You’re lying to me –’
‘Me? You’re lying to everyone.’ Gordon raised his voice. ‘You want me to say it out loud, in front of all these nice neighbours? “Hey! This kid, she stole him off his dad!” When you going to tell Edward, hey? When you going to tell that boy?’
Jenny’s voice was a hiss. ‘Shut up. Go away.’
He heard Gordon sighing. ‘I said I’d help you. For Irene, and Edward. You gotta help yourself, my dear. I can’t do any more.’
A van drove past, and Tom took the opportunity to return to the pavement He approached Jenny and Gordon, smiling, as if everything were normal, and watched as they sprang apart.
‘Gordon was just passing and he thought he’d say hello, which is lovely, because I haven’t seen him for aeons,’ Jenny said. ‘Especially now he’s such a great friend of yours.’
‘Will you come in for a cup of tea, Gordon?’ Tom asked politely.
‘Nah, boy. But I’ll see you for one of our walks, yes?’ Gordon’s hand squeezed his shoulder and he stared at Jenny for a moment, then walked away.
Tom was a pragmatic child. After three years in London, he understood uncertainty and disengagement with reality was just how Jenny and Henry were.
They didn’t know their neighbours; they never walked north of Blenheim Crescent; they bemoaned the changes that meant people didn’t queue properly and never said please and thank you; and they were visibly repulsed by the cracked, broken city still recovering from war.
Tom had learned about Dante Gabriel Rossetti from his aunt and how he grew tired of his models when they got old; he thought Jenny and Henry were rather like that about their city: they loved it only if it looked nice, with no interest in what was underneath.
The old houses towards Kensington and the park were still lived in by families like theirs – his. These were people who remembered Julian Caldicott and a world of servants, Oxford and Cambridge boat race parties, cabinet ministers and Royal Academicians as neighbours.
The one activity Tom undertook with his aunt and uncle was a walk every few weeks, on a Sunday.
They walked to St James’s Park via Kensington Gardens and the Peter Pan statue, the boating lake in Hyde Park, the still-wild patches through which he liked to imagine Henry VIII had gone hunting, down to Harrods, then across to the Ritz, where Uncle Henry and Aunt Jenny had both drunk White Ladies and gone dancing during the Blitz.
The route always varied: sometimes through Mayfair, and the little lanes of Shepherd Market, or the grandness of backstreet Mayfair, where countesses were helped out of ancient Daimlers purring on St James’s Square, and old boys in top hats nodded as doormen swept open the vast porticoes of the private clubs on Pall Mall, where the country was really run, and then to the Mall, where Jenny had stood on VE Day, tossing her peaked grey-blue WAAF cap in the air and cheering for the king and queen.
On these walks Jenny was not a half-figure of shadow, sitting at the kitchen table looking blankly at sums or writing letter after letter about her father’s work to dealers who never wrote back; and Henry was not absent – whenever Tom thought of his uncle in later life, he remembered him as constantly shuffling away down a corridor, out of sight, on the way to the pub.
For a short time they were brother and sister, full of gaiety and high spirits, with a constant supply of good stories and jokes: the time Henry had tried to rescue a cat in the park and got stuck up a tree; the day they drove from the Ritz down to Sevenstones, and during the journey Jenny and an American WAAC friend had produced a cat they’d adopted; the evening Irene had got into an argument with an American serviceman and then slapped him across the face, leading to a night in a Mayfair police station.
Tom loved hearing them talk about their family, their lives, for in these stories Jenny and Henry and all their friends were people with purpose, who believed in something – freedom – and were willing to fight the enemy – the Nazis – for that freedom, for the common good of all, and so they put up with bombing and friends dying and indignities and terror, and when the situation called for it they had rolled up their sleeves and dug deep – people out of holes, in some cases.
It was this London that Tom loved exploring, the private and the public, and it was this London that he loved showing Gordon, with whom he would re-create the walks a week later.
Gordon brought food, wrapped in waxed paper in small tin containers – curried lamb, rice and peas, patties stuffed with meat and spices, peeled pink grapefruit and oranges – and cordials that tasted of velvet and musky sweet fruit, and bottles of beer.
Tom did not remind him he was only ten and shouldn’t be having beer; he just drank it.
Occasionally they joined the early market traders off for the day in a pub on the Edgware Road, and once Tom drank with such gusto that he elbowed one of them and caused him to double over in pain, and Gordon had to pull Tom away before there was a fight.
Sometimes there was more food than at other times, depending on whether Gordon had been to a ‘shebeen’, which is what he called the parties and gatherings of his friends, Jamaican and Trinidadian, where they ate food and danced and talked, usually in someone’s house, because where else could they go?
But, even if there wasn’t much food, Gordon always brought apples.
There were no apples in Trinidad, he said; there was breadfruit and papaya and something called cocorite, which had a hard shell and firm, sweet juicy flesh inside around a large black stone and was the most delicious fruit in the world.
But no apples. One of the things he missed most about England when he went back to Trinidad after the war was apples.
When he’d first come here, in 1942, he’d had an apple straight off the boat, given to him by a man in a pub in Southampton, and it had been so friendly, such a kind gesture.
His favourite apple was the Cox, sharp and sweet at the same time, he said.
So he always brought apples, from September to January onwards.
As they walked, Gordon often recognized bus conductors, or musicians, or electricians fixing the street lights, or men working on the roads.
He would stop to talk to them, and he always introduced Tom.
These men would smile politely and shake Tom’s hand and they’d slap each other on the back and talk about a party, or a gathering, or a new house that was being let with an understanding landlord if Gordon knew anyone in need and Gordon would always nod and make a mental note, repeating it to himself, then carry on walking.
Sometimes someone on a bus, hanging on to the back, called out to him.
‘Gordon! You go and see Yvonne! She needs some help. You hear me?’ And Gordon would repeat what they’d said, nod to show he’d taken it in and then carry on walking.