Long Summer Day (4 page)
Craddock stood on the Club steps pondering for a moment. The man was right of course. Post-Victorian London was not the city he remembered of less than three years ago but he would have found it difficult to put the changes into words. The streets had always been jam-packed with slow-moving traffic, and reeking with odours of horse-sweat and dust, but the changes seemed to lie in the mood of passers-by, more brash and brittle than he remembered, with a little of the class rigidity gone, more audacity among the vendors, porters and draymen, less assurance in the stride of those cigar-smoking, top-hatted gentlemen, as they walked down the hill towards St James’ Palace. He went on into the plush-lined lobby and when he mentioned Mr Franz Zorndorff the doorman at once became obsequious, and directed him to the dining-room, a vast, crowded rectangle, where the clatter of cutlery and the roar of conversation was as oppressive as the uproar outside. Zorndorff appeared through a cloud of waiters, calling, ‘Ah, my boy! Not in here, not in this babel! I’ve booked lunch in the members’ dining-room upstairs,’ and he seized Craddock by the arm and steered him up a broad staircase and along a corridor to a smaller room, with the words, ‘Members Only’ painted in gilt letters on the swing doors.
‘You’ll have heard the news, Paul? It must be a big disappointment for you,’ Franz said as the waiter, without waiting for the order, brought them two very dry sherries.
‘It might have been this morning,’ Craddock told him, ‘but after crossing London from King’s Cross I don’t mind admitting it’s a relief. Maybe I should have done it by stages, like a diver coming up from a great depth, but the noise and stink terrified me! I’m sorry for the Cockneys, though, they deserve a bit of glitter after putting up with this day and night.’
‘Come, you’re a Cockney yourself, Paul. You were born in Stepney and that’s within earshot of Bow, isn’t it?’
‘I’m not proud of it,’ Craddock said. ‘How the devil can you make decisions in such a hellish uproar?’
‘Far more expertly than I could make them beside the old rustic mill,’ Franz told him jovially, ‘for in London wits are whetted every time one crosses the street and as for this,’ he waved his hand in the general direction of Piccadilly, ‘this is nothing, my friend, to the midday congestion beyond Temple Bar, or south of the river on a weekday. We shall wait until evening before going there and drive back to my house in Sloane Street at sunset. You can stay here as arranged. I shall be busy except for today, but I imagine you have things to attend to.’
He went on to talk of general matters, the food, the King’s chances of a recovery, the effect of his illness on the political scene, Paul’s wound and the post-hospital treatment prescribed for it, anything, Paul soon realised, to steer away from the subject of purchasing a Westcountry farm, but by now Paul had, to some extent, the measure of the man and felt reasonably secure in his affections, so that when the coffee and brandy had been served, and the waiter had ceased to make his swift, discreet dashes upon the table, he said, grinning, ‘Look here, Mr Zorndorff, if you think I’m an ass to have written that letter you can say so! You don’t have to avoid the subject, like a cat walking through puddles!’ Zorndorff twinkled, put on his avuncular look and replied, amiably, ‘There is a side to you that indicates a latent business acumen, my boy! You possess a quiet obstinacy wedded to a somewhat shattering directness of manner, a formidable combination under certain circumstances!’ He sipped and savoured his brandy, as Paul waited and then, carefully setting down the glass, he said seriously, ‘I hadn’t forgotten the letter and enclosures but before I even discuss it you must do something for me. A very small thing, but also an obligation of a kind, I think.’
‘Well?’
‘You must come down to the scrapyard. This evening, after my siesta. If you have really made up your mind to stick your nose in the dirt then you should give yourself the chance of deciding on the spot whether it is the three-per-cent-barring-acts-of-God dirt of a provincial farm, or the gilt-edged dirt of a bone yard! Afterwards? Afterwards we might get around to discussing your absurd proposition. Is that agreed?’
‘Certainly I’ll come to the yard with you. As a matter of fact I should like to, out of curiosity. I’ve never once been there, at least, not to my recollection.’
‘That,’ Zorndorff said, affably, ‘I already know, for your father fell into the error common to all artisans who have risen in the world. He was determined to ensure that his son wore a clean collar to work. This is very excellent brandy, but the flavour is a little elusive I think.’
‘Certainly no more so than you, Mr Zorndorff,’ Paul said, smiling, to which Zorndorff replied, ‘From now on, my boy, it would flatter me if you would address me as “Uncle Franz”. I have cohorts of indigent nephews but none, alas, with a float of five thousand and expectations.’
The curious thing about this pronouncement, Paul noticed, was that, although larded with Zorndorff’s brand of laboured irony it was uttered in all sincerity.
They paid off the cabby at Tower Bridge, walking south-east into the maze of streets running between the Old Kent Road and the canal, and as they went along Paul was aware of a stronger and more tangible security than he had ever known. He did not understand why this should be so, only that, in some way, it emanated from the dapper little man tripping along beside him, an utterly incongruous figure here in his tweeds and billycock hat, twirling his cane to emphasise points in his flow of conversation. Zorndorff was obviously very much at home in this part of London, turning left or right without hesitation when, to Craddock, every seedy little street seemed the same and even their names ran in sets, the battles of the Crimea, the battles of the Indian Mutiny, the seacoast towns of the Cornish peninsula and a variety of flowering shrubs that had not been seen hereabouts for generations. The complexity of the brick labyrinth astonished him, for it went on and on until it melted into the bronze sky, under which the stale summer air was battened down by a pall of indigo smoke, rising from ten thousand kitchen-ranges behind the yellow brick terraces. The houses all looked exactly alike, narrow, two-storeyed little dwellings, bunched in squat, yellowish blocks, like rows of defeated coolies awaiting their evening rice issue. Here and there the occupiers (none were owners Franz told him) stood at the doors, obese, shirtsleeved men with broad, pallid faces, wrinkled old crones with furtive eyes and nutcracker jaws, shapeless, blowsy women in aprons, their moon faces curtained by great hanks of hair, and sometimes a very old man, like a Chelsea pensioner stripped of his uniform. The evening heat hung level with the chimney pots and although the litter carts were at work in the streets most of the rubbish escaped their revolving brooms and was whirled into the gutter. The curious thing was that Craddock did not shrink from the scene, as he had from the comparatively clean streets of the West End, for although, on this side of the river, there was airlessness, and evidence of an appalling poverty, there was also a sparkle and vitality that intrigued and interested him, as though he was exploring the seamier section of a foreign city. Watching the West End crowds that morning he had seen individuals hurrying past in isolation but down here, where the yards spilled into one another, and the house numbers ran up to two hundred in stretches of less than a hundred yards, the Londoners were obviously a community and, as far as he could judge, a more or less contented community. It was the urchins in the street that interested him the most, bedraggled little ragamuffins, with the zest and impudence of city gamins all over the world. He watched them spill out of their narrow houses, calling to one another in their strong nasal accents, to torment the carter in charge of the water-sprinkler who was doing a very little towards laying the dust. Every time the cart-jets sprayed the urchins dashed within range of the nipples, accepting the flick of the carter’s whip as part of the sport. Franz said, ‘It astonishes you? The richest city in the richest country in the world? Perhaps you find it difficult to believe but it is far more salubrious than it was. When I came here in the ’sixties no man dressed like us would have dared to walk these streets, not even in daylight. You have read your Dickens, I imagine?’ and when Craddock told him that he had, he added, ‘There is still squalor to spare but not nearly so much vice, I think. This is largely because there is plenty of work within easy walking distance of these hovels. It is only down nearer the Docks that a man can get knocked on the head nowadays, and then only at night.’
As they went along, moving further south of the river, Franz pointed out various local landmarks. There was Peek Frean’s biscuit factory, employing over a thousand, and nearby the ‘Grenadier’ match factory, where there had been a national scandal over a number of operatives who had contracted the dreaded ‘phossy-jaw’, from contact with phosphorus. He did not need to point out the Tannery for the stench assailed them as they rounded the corner of the high boundary wall and then, within a quarter-mile of this enormous building, they passed through the double-gates of the scrapyard and Craddock looked with amazement at his inheritance.
It was about two to three acres of wasteland, enclosed on three sides by the backs of terraced houses, and on the fourth by an eight-foot wall, surmounted with broken glass. Debris lay on all sides, strewn in what at first seemed utter confusion but when he looked more closely was seen to be stacked according to some kind of plan. The junk rose in a series of twenty-foot pyramids, built row upon row, like a terrible parody of a cornfield full of stooks, and round the base of each pyramid was a patch of cinders rutted by cart wheels. Every imaginable article of hardware was represented. Craddock saw brass bedsteads, buckled bicycles, tin baths, skeins of twisted, rusting pipes, holed and handleless pails, cracked lavatory pans, stoves, both whole and in fragments, stripped perambulator frames and at one point, between two mounds of rubbish, the better part of a tanker engine, looking like a dying dinosaur in a swamp.
‘Great God!’ he exclaimed, ‘you say my father actually
liked
working here?’
‘Most of the men and boys on piecework like it, at all events, they much prefer it to a steady job in a factory. We had a Salvation Army unit here last summer, and about a dozen of them were talked into attending a free camp on the Downs. Most of them were back here before the week was out, and even those who stayed spent their time looking for scrap.’
‘How much do you pay casual labour for this kind of rubbish?’
‘That depends on what they bring in. Certain metals, like copper, carry a bonus, but an average barrowload earns them about a shilling. If it comes by the cartload we weigh it on the weighbridge there by the office.’
Craddock glanced in the direction indicated and saw that one half of the yard was dotted by a dozen, slow-burning fires. In the still evening air the smoke ascended vertically and all the time smuts floated across his vision, drifting by like cockroaches in a trance. The wooden hut that did service as an office was built on a steep concrete ramp and under the ramp were several carts, awaiting their turn to move on to the weighbridge. Franz led the way over, mincing along the narrow tracks between the rubble stacks, lifting his cane to acknowledge the checker’s respectful greeting. Craddock followed him up the ramp and stood on the platform looking out over the vast desolation. It was like, he thought, an illustration of Dante’s
Inferno,
that he had seen among sale catalogues that his father had kept in the glass-fronted bookcase at home, and the orange glow of the setting sun, lighting up acres of slate roofs to the west, shed an unlikely radiance on the squalor. Franz had gone into consultation with a beefy man in the office and Craddock stood quite still, looking across the yards to the vast huddle that surrounded St Paul’s in the far distance. He thought, ‘Twenty-eight thousand pounds out of this! It’s an ugly joke but the laugh is on poor devils who comb through refuse heaps at a shilling a barrowload!’ and as he thought this his ear caught the pleasant warble of a mouth-organ, playing ‘Lily of Laguna’ and he looked down beyond the weighbridge to see a boy aged about ten or eleven sitting on the nearside shaft of one of the carts, his bare legs swinging free, his hands cupped to his mouth so that Craddock could only see the upper part of a face, crowned by a mop of black hair. The child’s face and air of rapt concentration arrested him, so that for a moment he forgot his disgust for the place and concentrated on the musician, noting the boy’s breadth of forehead, large, thoughtful eyes, and above all, the statuesque set of head cocked sideways, as though listening intently to the wail of his own music.
Then something happened that made him shout a warning, for a carter ducked between the tailboard of the foremost cart and the head of the horse harnessed to the cart in charge of the boy, so that the animal, startled, threw up its head and the overloaded cart tilted, sending its load of scrap metal cascading over the tailboard and producing a clatter that set the terrified horse rearing, its hooves flailing within inches of the carter now boxed between the wall of the ramp and the rear of his own cart.
The boy must have moved at fantastic speed, for when Craddock turned his head he was missing from his seat on the shaft and Craddock could only suppose him to have been thrown down between the footboard and the hind-quarters of the frantic horse. He turned to run down the steps but at that moment he saw the boy bob up on the far side and spring on the animal’s back, where he hung on with his knees as he tore off his jacket, leaned far over the neck and flung it over the animal’s head, holding it there as his body was flung backwards and forwards by the violent heaves. Gradually the animal quietened, straining outward away from the ramp and then, after what seemed to Craddock a long interval, the checker came running round to the far side of the queue and grabbed the bridle, throwing his weight on the horse’s head and then wheeling the cart out of line away from the ramp, so that the carter could rise shakily to his knees and stagger past his own vehicle to the weighbridge. The boy with the mouth-organ then swung his legs and slid to the ground and Craddock, to his amazement, saw that he was not only grinning, but still had his harmonica clutched in his right hand.