Love Fifteen Read online

  “Sah!”

  Inky straightened up and made off to the bike-sheds, Theo to the main door where Sergeant stood, short cane twitching, eyes on stalks, ready to erupt into an earthquake of offence whenever some oik broke one of his crazy rules.

  “Sarge, those prep titches aren’t coming here, are they?”

  “Ask no questions you’ll be told no lies.”

  “So you don’t know? Nobody’s told you ?”

  “Where d’you expect them to go now their school’s burnt down? And I seem to recall it’s not that long since you yourself were a prep school titch with a little voice all up there somewhere. Just because it’s dropped a bit, along with one or two other things –”

  “Two, Sarge-”

  “-doesn’t mean you’re a great big man –”

  “Oh, aren’t I?” he thought but didn’t say, only dodging the cane that was aimed vaguely at his behind in passing.

  “Through the night of doubt and sorrow

  Onward goes the pilgrim band,

  Singing songs of expectation

  Marching to the promised land.”

  Theo tried singing an octave lower but had to compromise in harmonic growls, while far above piped the titches in timid treble, awed by the vast hall, the thundering of Artie’s diapason and the baritone roar of about nine hundred seniors.

  “Clear before us through the darkness

  Gleams and burns the guiding light;

  Brother clasps the hand of brother,”

  – and Inky did his Dracula-with-the-garlic face across at him at the very thought of clasping his own titch’s snotty mitt-

  “Stepping fearless through the night.”

  A good few hadn’t been there at register. Jimmie said many bus-services were disrupted and some families in the city and outside may have been bombed out so numbers would be depleted for a day or two. At prayers, Hines had asked them all to close up, making room in the hall for the titches to sit in rows right in front, near the swots, and the smallest of all, eight-year-olds like Inky’s ’s kid, sat cross-legged on the floor looking at Hines as if he was old Charles Laughton doing Captain Bligh.

  “The morning’s hymn was chosen with the past hours in mind. For have not we all come through a night of doubt and sorrow? Not merely those of us here assembled but all our fellow townspeople, many of whom will have lost their homes in last night’s heinous atrocities. These younger boys ranged before me are themselves without a school. Let us hasten to console them: room will be found. They will be housed here among us as a mere expedient until some other recourse be arrived at.”

  Heinous atrocities, expedient, recourse, wrote Theo in the margin beside Hymn 678.

  Hines turned his gaze on the juniors.

  “Expedient,” he went on, “means For The Time Being or Not For Long.”

  The swots responded with their usual audible smirk but the head was in solemn mood and frowned them to silence. He settled into his own version of Their Finest Hour and how long would be the journey ahead but that right would prevail, meaning ‘our side will win the war’, which none of them ever doubted anyway.

  Theo stared up into the hammer-beams as Quasimodo nimbly scrambled to his favourite spot above the dais. He pulled back his filthy tights, positioned his hairy arse, studded with dried clinkers, and dropped his load, a direct hit on Hines’s forehead and, like Alfred the city’s famous turd-hurling gorilla, gave a satisfied grunt and scampered off.

  Theo turned from that to work his flickergraph and saw the bod in grey flannels safely climb the ravine’s cliffside, reaching the scantily-clad Maureen O’Sullivan, taking her in his arms. Only a few days ago he hadn’t known what would happen next, what the bod did when he’d taken off her tunic of animal hides to reveal her own soft flesh beneath. He had no intention of trying to complete the sequence. His drawing wasn’t up to it, for one thing. If he tried, the marvellous treat he and Hazel had given each other four times between alert and all-clear would at best resemble gymnastics. More likely a plate of toad-in-the-hole. He longed to do it all again tonight but she’d said no, he must stay away, unless he wanted them to be found out. They couldn’t afford to take chances, Society being what it was. Society to Hazel was like God was to people like Hines, a reason for everything. Yet her idea wasn’t submission but change. As the hymn reckoned, the object of our journey, the faith which never tires, brightened all the path we tread.

  He longed to tell Sister Kay that he’d come of age. And Inky Black, Swiftie, Margo Carpenter and, most of all her accomplice Gale Sondergaard the conductress on the bus… anyone who’d listen. But he felt even deeper pleasure in not telling. He saw now why everyone reckoned those braggers like Coxie were probably liars too. But how long could he wait before he was with her again? Tomorrow night? Two days? Hell’s tool, man!

  “Oh, God, our help in ages past” followed Hines’s speech. Rose would have called this dirge ‘cheerful’. Anything to do with hymns or church brought the sort of shudder she gave to spiders in the bath or a mouse in the larder. Theo changed the course of his thoughts, hoping his jack would soon go down, reflecting that at least he always enjoyed the hymn-singing. Not exactly real music of Dad’s sort, but – like jazz – a terrific noise. If the bombs had fallen here, a hundred yards from the prep, there’d have been no more of that, the great echo-chamber and its beamed roof would have gone, along with old Artie’s thunderous organ. Or perhaps those firemen and volunteers had let the prep burn so as to save this one? Had they stood in a phalanx between the two, hoses ready to put out fires that started near the big school ? That sort of choice would have to be made now that so much was going up in smoke. Every building and every person couldn’t be saved. But old Hines’s sermons would never admit that.

  Prayers finished with a whole lot of new orders read out by the assistant head and Hines couldn’t let them go without another Churchill imitation, giving Theo some new material to use in his end-of-term show: arduous combat, resolute in strife, triumphal aftermath. He warned them not to go sight-seeing and interfere with the efforts of the valiant men who strove so blah-blah-blah-ly to something-or-other.

  That morning, room was found for the influx of titches. Two of their forms took lessons in the Hall, one at either end, told by their teachers to speak low, as raised voices would create acoustic chaos. Made no odds to Quasi who was already deafened by the bells of Notre Dame. Senior classes were realloted to pungent science labs and woodwork annexes, gym changing-rooms or even – on dry days – part-covered fives-courts. In time to come, as war turned to siege, the school would colonise undamaged wings of the university. Nearby houses were let to the school by well-off owners when they escaped even farther west. Midday most seniors bolted their sandwiches and went damage touring, though many hadn’t thought of it till Hines told them not to. Theo avoided Inky, wanting to be alone. Queen’s Road was a mess of salvaged rubble from the burnt-out university hall and city museum. Some stuffed animals had survived in their cases, no longer behind glass. A lion and elephant still struck roaring, trumpeting poses in the devastated rooms, now open to the street. When Theo crunched over broken glass through one of the opened archways, the same old bloody-sergeants, museum versions, bawled at him to be off. Park Street was closed to traffic so he went along Park Row and could see ahead the burnt-out Prince’s Theatre where he’d enjoyed pantos as a titch but had long since outgrown. His parents had gone there to see ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ and thought it a real let-down. Rose said they’d expected a nice mystery but it was nothing but moaning nuns. Theo saw what a crafty title Eliot had chosen to get people to go. Well, as long as the cinemas were untouched, he could do without Thomas a Becket.

  From there he crossed Park Street, its facing rows of shops now showing as many gaps as an old man’s mouth, and stood some distance from Hazel’s flat, pretending to gaze up at a burnt-out house, wondering if she was at home and would see him and invite him up. No, today was too soon but later, when they felt safer, she’d
be looking out for him from one of those sentry-boxes she called dormers.

  *

  Hazel was still a part-timer. Married women were allowed to teach, replacing the men, only till war ended and they came home. Next year she’d be taken on full-time. Her advantage was being childless. Pregnancies could disrupt time-tables for weeks on end. She sometimes thought of joining an auxiliary service like the Observer Corps. One of her afternoons off was Wednesday, when Theo’s last class ended well before dark. When enough weeks had passed, they risked more sessions. He was usually outside the house by four, daylight already fading as he pressed her bell push.

  As far as the other tenants were concerned, he came like several others for private tutorials, more often girls than boys. If her neighbours met Theo on the stairs, gas-mask and bursting satchel, rakish cap and school tie, purposely kept on, his appearance was the perfect cover. For him the flat was a new world of shared sex, low lamplight, candid books and weird potted snacks from before the shortages. She wore a full set of clothes to go down and open the street door but hardly were they in the flat than he’d removed his Just William disguise to show the lean young body beneath. And, while she stood admiring, he’d start pulling her sweater over her head, her face drawn back by the narrow neck, as though caught by bomb-blast.

  “Wait, it’s tangled up in my hair.”

  “Chinese,” he said, “you look Chinese.”

  She raised her hands to help and he reached around her to unfasten the brassière brassiere at the back.

  “Wait,” she said again, features still distorted, jumper tangled in hair-clip, “wait!”

  “I can’t. You’re at my mercy.”

  He knelt to kiss the breasts that fell slightly as Kay’s didn’t yet and Rose’s did but a lot more so. Once free, she went ahead of him to the bed. When he joined her and began, her little cries and gasps still startled and scared him. He’d never imagined anything like them when he’d tossed off over Miss Poland or Princess Margaret. ‘“It’s so easy, after all that wondering,”’ he said over the Senior Service they shared later, inhaling in turn. “What about before Geoff? Or was he the first?”

  “No. In our circle it was a point of honour to take lovers. More than one, if possible.”

  “What’s a point of honour?”

  “A good thing. A feather in your cap. At college we broke away from our homes and all our parents’ unexamined principles.”

  She explained that their friends (whom she called comrades) were rebels, believing in Free Love as only one of a number of freedoms that would follow when we had a real society where all men and women shared the fruits of their labour. Theo said he didn’t much fancy sharing anything with the snotty kids from down near Mina Road where his Gran lived. Hazel patiently enlarged: there wouldn’t be any snotty kids in a new world after the war, as long as we used the time to educate people who were at present set against one another by primitive tribal chieftains disguised as toffs and bosses. This he understood: like Ralph Richardson in ‘Things To Come’ that he’d lately seen for the first time in the Metropole De Luxe. That had been made long before the war but old H.G. Wells had predicted it almost to the day. So far the populace hadn’t panicked and run screaming to the shelters at the first air-raids like in the early sequences but all in good time…

  “It’s all a question of education,” she said.

  “This what you teach them in Bedminster?”

  “I try. I have to sneak it in. It’s going to be our turn at last, darling. Only through Communism can we achieve fair shares and a world of music and art and foreign films.”

  She threw back the covers and reached for Geoff’s rough woolly dressing-gown. By the time he’d pulled on his pants and joined her, she’d made tea and was toasting bread on a trident at the gas-fire. She put it on a tray on the floor and they ate and drank with the heat beating out at them, the blue flame warming the biscuity burners till they turned a glowing orange. “Free love and a better world would be bang-on,” he told her, “but I don’t want Russia or Poland… you know, old peasants and Jews in funny hats and beards. We’re not like them, are we?”

  He didn’t care for tea, even drunk from mugs without saucers, preferring strawberry milk-shake, but the toast-and-marge was wizard and he wolfed it down while telling her again how he wished Hitler would burn all the old places down so they could have a new city of white hotels and glass-walled factories, skyscrapers and film-studios.

  “America!”

  “That’s not America,” she said, “it’s Hollywood.”

  “Well, Hollywood’s what I want. California, here I come! Hey, let’s go there, after the war. You and me and Geoff? If he believes in free love and everyone sharing? See, I want that too, all my favourite films are about that – Robin Hood and Tortilla Flat and You Can’t Take It With You. But we needn’t bother with Communism. America’s already got all that equality and one day the rest of the world will want everything American too.”

  Patiently but earnestly she explained that America’s wealth and supposed freedom was were based on the suffering of people in poorer lands who provided goods at slave-wages, as Britain’s was drawn from all the pink parts of the map, but that in Russia progress would be slower because it would all be fair.

  “Like rationing?”

  “Somewhat like these wartime measures, yes, fair shares for all, as long as we don’t go back afterwards to all that inequality.”

  “But raising everyone to the same level could take ages, by which time we’d be too old to enjoy it. So why don’t we all go and see, the three of us, and if we like it we could stay?”

  As she leant across to pour more tea, she spoke as though she’d only half-listened.

  “Theo, dear, don’t go away with the idea I don’t love Geoff. I do, of course. He’s just been so long away.”

  “Yeah, and that’s why this is alright, what we’re doing. I’m keeping you happy till he comes back and you’re teaching me what he taught you.”

  You’ve already outgrown the teacher, she thought.

  NINE

  Most Sunday mornings The Salvation Army played outside the Lights’ bay-window: a loose circle of uniformed men, women, boys and girls, obstructing the road, forcing the occasional car to take another way, as this was God’s day, dedicated to tuneless songs of praise on cornet, trombone, tuba, cymbals, bass drum and half a dozen thin voices exhorting the street to “Stand up, stand up, for Jesus, The trumpet call obey…” while Rose again sighed her longing to be released from this blessed district that had once been the summit of her hopes.

  “I bet they don’t get this in Henleaze.”

  Kay plucked aside the net for a better view of the tall dark boy burping away on the tuba.

  “Careful, Kay, love, they’ll be seeing in.”

  “What’s there to see?” Kay asked, then: “Theo, isn’t that your bosom friend beating the big drum?”

  “Was for about three weeks six years ago.”

  Rose squinted at the band over Kay’s shoulder.

  “That common boy,” she said, “with the runny nose from down near Mina Road, always wiping it on his sleeve? My Lord, and there’s more of them moving in all the time.”

  “More what?” asked Fred from behind News of the World.

  Rose lowered her voice: “Poverty-stricken people.”

  A straw-bonneted woman and girl now left the group and began their door-to-door progress down the street with begging-boxes. Theo saw Deanna Durbin go to the facing house, leaving the wicked witch of the north to do theirs. Fred was sent to give her sixpence, get rid of her and receive her icy blessing.

  “Blooming cheek, making people give them money every blessed week!” Rose said, as Fred came back.

  “A small price,” he said, “if it helps staunch the running noses of the poor…“

  “And I hope you weren’t too familiar, like you are with the coalman. You’ll talk to anyone.”

  “‘Have to, Rose, in my job.”’r />
  “Stand up, stand up, for Jesus,” Kay sang along, “the buggers at the back can’t see.”

  “Shush, Kay” hissed her mother.” That the language they teach you at Redland High?”

  “No, the Youth Club.”

  “It’s a bad influence, that place,” their father said.

  “Go on, Fred,” Rose said, “it’s mostly ping-pong and woodcraft.”’ Kay gave a brieif snoprt of luaughter but said no more. So Rose went on : ‘“Isn’t there anything cheerful on the wireless? What with the bombing and that blessed noise, my nerves are shot to bits.”

  “Stand up, stand up for Jesus!

  The strife will not be long,” promised the frail voices in the avenue,

  “This day the noise of battle,

  The next the victor’s song.”

  “There you are,” Fred said, “That could have come from Winnie himself.”

  “You shouldn’t laugh at them, whether you believe in it or not,” Rose said, turning on the radiogram.” God could blind you.”

  “I wasn’t,” Fred said. Sometimes even he had to wonder how Rose managed life without any sense of humour.

  After some moments of deep humming from the speaker while the valves warmed up, a Hines-like voice announced that morning service would come today from St. Stephen Walbrook in the City of London.

  “As though there’s not enough religion every blessed Sunday,” Rose said.

  Theo, who had the Radio Times, said “Nothing till Bob Hope at half-past-twelve.”

  This gave them two hours for their weekly baths: Rose and Fred then Kay and Theo.

  “The royal family have set an example,” Fred had said, “by showing that five inches is enough for anyone.”

  First Kay, then Rose, then Fred himself couldn’t contain their laughter at this but Theo now felt himself above smut and only sighed. Fred put on his straight face again and argued that their family’s total depth of bathwater would alleviate needless sacrifice from the nation’s merchant seamen. Theo wondered how they managed in the palace with three women and one man? Perhaps Margaret Rose, as the youngest, got in last? That’s after her mum and dad and sister? Hellish sludge. Inky and Theo had done a comic strip in his Art exercise-book where she’d asked her dad if he wanted to have it first and, while he’d been stuttering and trying to answer yes, she’d said ‘“okay, you second”‘ and jumped in. That was what they hoped she was like anyway. They reckoned she looked a good sort, unlike her sister.