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  Frightened at first, shrinking back as they passed, the locals soon warmed to them, their politeness and their wealth, their sexy vehicles and tight trousers, unlimited gum and Lucky Strikes and a sensational way of marching that was more like the chorus line from a Hollywood musical. They brought the manners of sub-tropical deltas or lawless northern slums to this drizzling suburb. Theo and Inky marvelled at their likeness to the only royalty they admired – Duke Ellington, Count Basie, King Oliver and Earl Hines.

  The loss of face brought about by Vince’s very public arrest at last persuaded Fred to move house. Even lesser neighbours from Schubert and Gainsborough Villas smirked when they passed him and refused to give the time of day to any of the Light family. A member of the Lodge was bolting to mid-Wales, his house in Henleaze going for a song. This was Rose’s Nirvana, the land of her dreams. The detached house –”‘in its own grounds!”’ she told Kay and Tilda – was one of a crescent lined with flowering cherry trees and with a serving-hatch from kitchen to dining-room. It wasn’t far from The Downs and, for Theo, close to The Orpheus, one of the new smarter suburban cinemas. The local shopping parade had a broad pavement with a decorative pillory and plaque notifying residents of its history as a mediaeval village. The nice neat labour-saving garden had a swing and krazee-paved terrace where she and her friend Laura Tombs could take tea. Laura and her errant hubbie lived only a street or two away. Best of all, their outlook was no longer that blesseéd Victorian orphanage with its sequence of air-raid wardens, auxiliary firemen and first coloured and then white Yanks.

  At Rosemount, nothing was older than ten years.

  Theo and Hazel were on the bus across The Downs to Henleaze. Dusk had given way to dark during the bus-ride from The Embassy where they’d seen ‘Down Argentine Way’ that afternoon and done a Nicholas Brothers dance across Queen’s Road. Carmen Miranda’s fruity hats were a promise of post-war plenty. But between the Brazilian singer and the negro dancers came stretches of tepid boredom featuring the white stars.

  “It’s what the Yanks believe in that interests me,” he said, “not just their advantages, but Freedom, everybody doing what they like.”

  “You still think they do, after all I’ve told you and all you’ve seen at the orphanage?”

  “I know they exploit the rest of the world but don’t we English too?”

  “Of course. That’s what empires are about.”

  “But ordinary English people don’t get much share of all that, do we?”

  “Only because it goes to Churchill and his friends.”

  “Okay. So why do ordinary Yanks get so much more than us? The coloureds are supposed to be their poorest people but anyone can see they’re far better off than our so-called posh in Clifton. A negro private earns more than a British officer.”

  “Abroad, yes. When they want him to give his life to save capitalism. It’s a different story at home.”

  “No, that’s not right. Even teenagers over there have got cars.”

  “In films.”

  “No. I read it in the Yank mags I get secondhand in the arcades. One out of every five Americans owns a car. Well, Fred’s Morris is the only one in our whole avenue.”

  “Not now you’ve moved to Henleaze. Every bungalow’s got a garage and every garage a car.”

  In practice, Fred’s was still one of few on the road. Most were laid up for the duration, wheels removed, standing on piles of bricks, waiting for post-war petrol.

  “And is car-ownership your only criterion for heaven on earth?” Hazel asked.

  Theo went on: “One in seven Yanks has got a phone. But everyone in our district near Villa Borghese uses the public box or that one in the shoemaker’s shop.”

  “That’s an economic accident. Their millionaires are richer than our lords and ladies, in terms of money. Ours value privilege more. Land. Rent. Power. For them, this war is about hanging on to their property. That’s why they wanted to be friends with Hitler, thinking he could beat the Russians for them. That didn’t work, so now they’re pretending to fight Fascism. And they’ve got another surprise in store because after the war Churchill will be voted out.”

  “Who says?”

  “Geoff knows how the men are thinking. The soldiers want no more of all that. He’s organised a Soldiers’ Parliament in Cairo, the people’s voice beginning to be heard. Our salvation lies with the common people, not tagging along behind the Yanks.”

  Dusk was falling on the blacked-out streets as they covered the distance between Embassy and Orpheus. From the lower deck, the conductress called out the landmarks: Whiteladies Road, Blackboy Hill and, across the Downs, the White Tree. Their stop. They got to their feet and made for the stairs. This was the darkest stretch of the route, skirting the great unlit open common that ended at the Avon Gorge. From the rear window Theo could just make out a black G.I. belting after the bus like that one in the Berlin Olympics, as though his life depended on reaching it.

  “Mother-fuckin’ nigger!” someone shouted some way beyond him.

  Theo paused on the steps, Hazel behind him. Now they could see the white soldier chasing without much hope of catching up.

  “Think yo’ can fuck with white women, .. just because yo’ in a foreign land, boy?”

  The black leapt for the moving platform. From their high position they saw that the white had stopped running and was standing in the road.

  “Yo’ heah me, boy?” and there came the crack of a single gunshot. A window splintered. Another shot and the first soldier fell, trying to grab the bar. As the driver braked, they were thrown forward.

  “Go ‘ead,” shouted the clippie, “keep goin’!”

  Theo saw her try to push the collapsed and injured body off into the road.

  “What are you doing? Stop the bus!” Theo shouted, climbing down.

  “No bloody fear,” the woman said, “this b’ain’t no business of ours. I got my passengers’ welfare to think of.”

  “He’s been shot,” Hazel told her, “he may be dying.”

  Theo went behind the conductress, rang her bell and kept ringing like rapid fire. The clippie was more appalled by this than the shooting.

  “Go ‘ead, Stan!” she yelled, “keep goin’!”

  The driver accelerated, pitching off the wounded man.

  “You can’t leave him there,” Theo said.

  “Tis Yankee business. Let they sort it.”

  Hazel moved up the gangway towards the cab. All the passengers had faced front again after a brief look-round.

  “Didn’t any of you see that?” she asked.” A man’s been shot. You must have seen the other one on the road with the gun?”

  Theo stood on the platform watching and admiring her, waiting till the bus slowed enough to risk jumping off into the dark.

  “You bloody cowards, you should be ashamed,” she went on, “you deserve the lives you’ve got, the miserable existences your bosses have decided you’re fit for. And for once I agree with them. You’re too bloody feeble for anything with a bit of guts to it.”

  She pulled up the concertina-shade on the driver’s window and knocked on the glass with her wedding-ring.

  “Stop the bus, you bastard! A man may be dying.”

  One of the women passengers, stung at last, said: “Them Yanks is turning this city into Chicagawl.”

  “We never asked ‘em over yer,” said a man across the aisle, “They can bloody go ‘ome soon as they like, for I.”

  “I don’t mind them,” another said in a posher accent, “it’s those white ones they brought with them I can’t abide.”

  The conductress followed Hazel.

  “You let that light out and we shall all be bombed.”

  “There aren’t any bombers any more, you dunce. Haven’t been for a year,” Hazel told her.

  “Right, that’s it.”

  “And if there were,” Theo asked her, “d’you really think some Jerry half a mile up there can see some little glimmer on the ground? You’l
l swallow any shit they give you.”

  “That’s enough of that language. Off you get, you two.”

  “We want to get off, to help that man. Tell the driver.”

  As as the bus slowed enough, they both jumped clear and ran back to find the injured G.I. A jeep had since arrived near his body and two white military police in blancoed gaiters and webbing belts were attending him on the verge.

  “We saw it happen,” Theo said, coming close.

  “Okay, buddy. Got hit by the bus, huh?”

  “No.”

  “Looks like he already had a skinful.”

  “No. The other one shot him.”

  “Other what?”

  “G.I. American Soldier.”

  “A white one. We saw him fire and this one was hit and-” Hazel was saying as they lifted the injured soldier into their vehicle.

  “Okay, guys, we’ll handle this. Sorry you were bothered. G’night, ma’am, sir.”

  And, giving them no chance to answer, they drove off the way they must have come.

  Hazel was coming home on the pretext of an hour or two of maths and physics. This late, the family would either be at home revelling in Rosemount’s splendour or about to arrive home from their various jobs so there’d be no chance of practical biology. In fact, when they reached the house, having walked the rest, they found Kay and Fred listening to the news. The shooting incident had left Hazel and Theo shaken and they blurted out the whole story and asked what they should do – ring the police, The Evening Post, or the orphanage near their old home where that dead or dying man was very likely stationed, or what? Military phone numbers wouldn’t be in the directory, would they?

  Fred advised them to keep well clear.

  “What?” Theo barked at him, “pretend it never happened?”

  “Best not get involved.”

  “You’re no better than those people on the bus. Eyes front and minds dead.”

  “Hold your tongue, son.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Hush your mouth,” Fred told him.

  Theo stepped up to him and put one hand across his face, the other behind his neck, as though to squash his head like an egg.

  “Hush your mouth? That the only answer you can make? Uh? You pathetic bloody clown!”

  “Theo, easy,” Hazel said, moving to grab his hands.

  And “Stop it,” said Kay, helping to free her father, who fell back on to an upright chair. “Dad’s right.”

  “What?”

  “You can’t do anything useful, only cause trouble for yourselves.”

  “What do you know about the Yanks ?”

  “More than you.”

  “You weren’t even there,” Hazel said.” That poor coloured man could be dead. It’s like the Ku Klux Klan.”

  “Right. And do they ever get caught?” Kay asked.

  “They’re not in Alabama now. This is England.”

  “You don’t honestly believe they’d take any notice of our police? If an English person had been involved, they just might –”

  “An English woman was, from what we heard. The coloured man had been with a white girl.”

  “Then he knew the risks he was taking.”

  “How d’you know what he did to her?” Fred said from his chair, “how d’you know she was willing? The sight of a white woman drives them wild, they say. You surely can’t –”

  “Shut up, Dad, don’t show your ignorance,” Kay said, “you know nothing about it.”

  “I’m on your side, girl.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “The whites are right. I’ve nothing against the blacks but the races must be kept apart. God wouldn’t have made oak trees and chestnuts different if he’d meant them to grow together.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  On the tablecloth in the bay, various condiments and sauces always stood ready for the next meal. Theo took the tomato sauce bottle, unstoppered it and held it above his father’s head. Fred always eked it out by adding malt vinegar to the dregs, so when his son banged the end a splodge of the stuff was squirted on to his balding forehead and a scarlet mess dribbled down his face. Theo threw the bottle across the room and stormed out. Rose met him in the hall, arriving back from a drink with Laura. Theo passed her and took the stairs three at a time, roaring like an animal. Shaken and confused, she went on into the living room at the back. Her husband came towards her, head and face a gory mess.

  “Oh, my God, what’s happening?”

  “Your son’s gone off his chump,” Fred said, bending down to retrieve the ketchup bottle from under the sideboard.

  Rose said “I thought it was blood. I thought he’d cut your head open.”

  “All but. Look at this. All down the wall.”

  Rose, already bewildered, now heard Hazel’s laughter from the far corner. Kay laughed too and soon Rose joined them. Fred stood staring, the mixture dribbling down to stain his shirt.

  For Hazel, that wasn’t all. The last half-hour’s events had epitomised two nations at this crucial point in both their destinies: America murderous, divided, callous, all-powerful; England cowardly, long-suffering, its former grandeur reduced to slapstick comedy, the family headman stained with Heinz’s most popular variety.

  SIXTEEN

  The other flats at Charlotte Street became vacant one by one, as tenants found safer places to live. A few were requisitioned for serving officers or rarely-seen ministry men. So Hazel thought it safe to give Theo lessons there again, on the way home from school or on half-days when he should have been kicking or hitting balls on Golden Hill. Mostly, though, she still came to Rosemount. His mother too had been requisitioned, after her brief stay in the aircraft factory, now as an incompetent two-finger typist for the Board of Trade in a big house on The Downs. Fred had failed to arrange her exemption with a few grips of influential knuckles. In the event, she found she could manage some simple filing and tea-making and enjoyed getting out of the house. Soon she was accepting lifts home in the Regional Controller’s Humber and once Theo, watching from the front upstairs as she arrived, saw him give her a kiss before she got out. He’d just put the cine-camera down after practising some really crazy angle shots of the crescent they all thought so beautiful but by the time he’d retrieved it and got the car in focus, she was walking up the front path between the laburnum and lilac.

  He still pestered Hazel to write to her husband about their affair. Liking and admiring Geoff’s letters and his serious face in the bedside photo, he couldn’t wait for the day he’d come home and all three of them would share a new life. Many a time, in the bedrooms of Henleaze or her attic flat in Charlotte Street, he’d remind her their world of sharing and free love would be worthless if not be based on truth. Lying was what old people did, even dear Gran who had to lie to Fred for Rose. Hazel no longer seemed able to grasp the simple purity of this and he had to remind her that it was she who had first shown him that marriage was only a nicer form of white slavery. The abolition of marriage (and therefore the family) was a consummation devoutly to be wished. When he insisted, she told him there was no rush. Then Theo would declare them revolutionaries, not gradualists, guerrillas not Fabians,and press her to write one of those air-mail forms telling Geoff she’d been going to bed with this boy for more than a year and that both of them could hardly wait for him to join them.

  Hazel stared.

  “D’you mean literally,” she asked, “in bed?”

  They were in Rosemount, she in the living-room, he mixing milk-shakes and passing them through his mother’s beloved serving-hatch.

  “All three?” The suggestion puzzled him. He saw that one man would have to wait for the other and that would cheapen Hazel in his eyes. She’d be like one of those good-time girls or Yankees’ hussies his Gran was always cursing. Also the thought of Geoff being that close, perhaps undressed, was actually grotesque. He liked hairless bodies of his own age, like Swifty’s, whom he’d sometimes kissed and cuddled, but not a mid
dle-aged man of over thirty.

  “What would be the good of that? No, I meant, it’ll be something for Geoff to look forward to. If you don’t, I will.”

  “No! Not till I say.”

  They’d made love in Theo’s bed that afternoon and were now ready for whichever family member came home first. This was one of Fred’s one-in-five weeks away so Kay was most likely.

  To change the subject, she asked how he felt about having a new brother or sister.

  “Why?”

  “What, they haven’t told you yet?” she said, opening a textbook.” I overheard them talking to your gran.”

  “Heard who?”

  “Your mum and sister.”

  “Not Mum? She can’t have any more, can she? At her age?”

  “Forty? It’s not common but quite possible. Don’t they teach you biology either?”

  “Only the sex life of the axylotl.”

  “Well, why d’you think your dad keeps Frenchies in his drawer?”

  The grotesque image and the possibility of a baby brother made trigonometry even harder to grasp and Hazel finally turned to revising Clive of India, whom she used as a cogent denunciation of The East India Company. Theo sucked his glass dry, making the gargling sound that was part of the pleasure of a milk shake.

  “Mum gets pregnant – at her age! – and you never do. Is it me, d’you reckon? Am I – what is it ? – impotent?”

  “That you aren’t, darling. And you must mean sterile. I’ve told you: it’s me. As Dr.Johnson said, Madam, I cannot conceive. Let’s thank our lucky stars.”

  Within the family, nothing was volunteered about Rose being pregnant and he was too appalled to ask. A doubt he didn’t even divulge to Hazel was the identity of the father. It was repulsive but not impossible that Vince had sired his future brother/sister. A thought on the same lines as imagining Geoff undressed. ‘Sire’ was a word he and Inky had learned lately and used as a euphemism for any sort of sexual doings. ‘“Hell, man, what about siring Margo?”’ was followed by the usual grandiloquent groans. After Hazel had gone that evening, he evaded Kay’s sly digs about the teacher’s tuition by retreating to his room. He hadn’t raised the matter of Rose being in the club, in case Hazel had misheard, but he now thought about other possible sires – cousin Harry, the Regional Controller of the Board of Trade… even Fred.