An Episode of Sparrows Read online

  AN EPISODE OF SPARROWS

  A NOVEL

  RUMER GODDEN

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1955 by Rumer Godden, renewed 1983

  All rights reserved.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Godden, Rumer, 1907–

  An episode of sparrows / Rumer Godden.

  p. cm. – (New York Review children’s collection)

  Summary: In post-World War II London, two street-tough children attempt to build a hidden garden, an act that awakens hidden courage in the children and profoundly disrupts the neighborhood.

  ISBN 1-59017-124-1 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-59017-993-2 (paperback)

  [1. Street children–Fiction. 2. Gardens–Fiction. 3. London (England)–History–20th century–Fiction. 4. Great Britain–History– George VI, 1936–1952–Fiction.] I. Title. II. Series.

  PZ7.G54Ep 2004

  [Fic]–dc22

  2004019298

  ISBN 978-1-68137-109-2

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the New York Review Children’s Collection and the NYRB Kids series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, Suite 300, New York, NY, 10014

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Dedication

  Author’s Preface

  Acknowledgements

  AN EPISODE OF SPARROWS

  Epigraph

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Biographical Note

  This book is for my mother

  AUTHOR’S PREFACE

  When I came back to England in 1945, the end of the Second World War, I felt, after the years of living in some of India’s remotest places, I needed to go to London. “Come into the market place,” said my literary agent, Spencer Curtis Brown but, “London!” said my father as if nobody lived in London. “If you go to London you are on your own.”

  I still knew I must go; his and my mother’s very care and kindness was inhibiting and I needed to be, for a while at least, in the current of literary life.

  It was not easy; I soon despaired of finding a flat or small house, everything was far beyond my means and I had almost decided to go back to Cornwall when I saw an advertisement in an estate agent’s window. I was attracted at once by the price, “Eleven hundred pounds for thirteen years leasehold.”

  It was in a mews off Eaton Square, squeezed between two other houses, with only one sitting room, a miniature kitchen, one fair-sized bedroom – my daughters Jane’s and Paula’s I thought – a smaller one, mine, and a little telephone room off the stairs which would hold a bed for Simon, my small nephew whose parents were in India. There was also a resident mouse with which we made friends; it always came out when the telephone rang.

  In front, the little house gave directly on to the cobbled yard; at the back it was against a wall, but it had a garage – “I’ll make that into a playroom one day.” It was possible – just.

  The house was so small it needed little furniture; fortunately it had built-in cupboards and I had bought beds, some chintzes, and the upstairs carpeting from the former owner; for the rest we had nothing and, at once, I came up against a problem: the only furniture available on coupons was “utility,” hastily made furniture replacements for bombed or blasted houses, cheap and badly finished. The alternative seemed to be antiques. I found that prices of these were not exorbitant, perhaps because people were still so numbed by loss and by restrictions that they had not woken up to true values, indeed most antique shops were still shut. Here I evolved a small philosophy which has stood me in good stead, “If you haven’t the money to buy the quality you want, go without, don’t compromise.” I decided to buy what I could – better to sit on packing cases than squander precious money on utility.

  Nobody approved of the house. “It’s rather bijou,” said Spencer, which meant he did not like it. To me it was bijou, a little jewel of a house: I adored it and had a rich wonderful time for a while but only a while. I began to find I had made a mistake, the busy whirl of London’s life was not for me and more seriously, “When are you going to do some writing?” asked Spencer. The book I had started lay untouched on my table. I was writing articles for Vogue, for the now defunct Time and Tide, encouraged by Lady Rhonda, not my real work. Then I realized with a shock I had not as much money as I had thought – I had forgotten about tax. Finally the time came when I had to tell myself miserably, “You have squandered, muddled, and wasted everything, everything from opportunity to money. Wasted.”

  There I was wrong. After the war years of hard work, poverty, and loneliness in Kashmir I needed that space of gaiety, companionship, even luxury, and I have come to believe that nothing is ever wasted; out of mistakes, or through mistakes, something quite worthwhile can come, in my case the seed of another novel.

  The mews was close to the square’s parklike garden where the railings had been taken away to be melted down for the war effort – every scrap of metal was precious – so that the children from the poorer streets used to come and play in the garden until they were chased away by angry residents. I spent every moment I could in the garden, listening and talking to the children, those little London sparrows.

  There was, too, a bombed-out church; picking my way through the rubble, slabs of cracked marble, bits of pillar, I came across that strange phenomenon of bombed-out London, flowers, weed flowers of course, pushing their way and blossoming in the ruins. Perhaps it was this that gave An Episode of Sparrows its underlying theme; all my novels are stories but underlying each is a deeper theme, never said but there.

  But what really planted the seed was when that summer I had my window boxes filled by a jobbing gardener; they were my only garden and looked fresh, as pretty as the house in that rather squalid mews. A few days later I had a call from two ladies who lived in the square. “Not a social call,” they told me because, did I know, that the earth in my window boxes had been stolen from the gardens in the square? It was the first time I knew that earth could be stolen. The elder of the two ladies, who wore a hat with blue feather wings, spoke those, to me, memorable words: “If you want earth you can buy it from the Army and Navy Stores, seven shillings and sixpence the carton.”

  It took a long time to germinate, which is often the way with a book, and it was not until ten years later that I wrote the opening lines:

  The garden committee had met to discuss the earth; not the whole earth, the terrestrial globe, but the bit of it that had been stolen from the Gardens in the Square . . .

  RUMER GODDEN, 1993

  I should like to thank Sir Norris Kenyon, J.P., B.Sc., L.C.C., a Chairman of the Metropolitan Juvenile Courts, and Mr. C. J. Collinge, Chief Clerk of the Courts, for valuable help and advice; also Inspector Rogers of Bow Street, for his assist
ance, and the Governors and Secretary of the Arethusa Training Ship, for permission to use its name.

  I must also give thanks for very special help to Mr. Alex Gaudin of L’Escargot, whose father, once upon a time, had a little restaurant like Vincent’s but not, of course, in Catford Street.

  R. G.

  AN EPISODE OF SPARROWS

  “You are making a mountain out of a molehill,” said Angela. Olivia was suddenly inspired to answer, “A molehill can be a mountain to a sparrow.”

  CHAPTER I

  THE Garden Committee had met to discuss the earth; not the whole earth, the terrestrial globe, but the bit of it that had been stolen from the Gardens in the Square.

  The three members of the Committee were the big gun, as Lucas the gardener called Admiral Sir Peter Percy-Latham, who lived at Number Twenty-nine, the little gun, Mr. Donaldson, who had the ground-floor flat at Number Forty, and Miss Angela Chesney from Number Eleven. To Lucas, Angela was not a big or little gun, she was the gun; she ran the Committee, she ran the Gardens. “And she won’t let us have wallflowers, says they’re common. I like wallflowers,” said the Admiral, but behind Angela’s back; when she was present he deferred to her, as did Mr. Donaldson; Lucas looked only at her; it was like a court round the queen, thought Olivia. Olivia, Miss Chesney, was Angela’s queer, dark, elder sister, who often attended her. They all stood looking at the holes, round pits of holes that had been made in the shrub bed at one end of the Gardens.

  “It’s the Street children,” said Angela. She did not mean any street but the Street that ran behind the Square down to the river, Catford Street.

  Mortimer Square, gracious and imposing, with its big houses, stood, like many other London squares, on the edge of a huddle of much poorer streets. That had always bothered Olivia. “It’s too rich,” she said, meaning the Square, “and too poor,” meaning Catford Street. It was always Catford Street she saw in contrast to the Square, but nowadays neither was as rich or poor as Olivia thought. The Square had gone down, its big houses were mostly divided into flats, as could be seen when the lights went on at night; probably the only whole houses were the admiral’s, the Miss Chesneys’, and the one at the corner that was the strange embassy of one of the lesser South American States. Some of the houses had not been painted for years, some of them were even noisy—there was a dancing school at Number Three, though Angela had protested—while the poor streets had come up; Catford Street, for instance, though drab and shabby, with children playing in the street, an open-air market at the river end on Saturdays, and the Canal Works behind it, was proud and respectable. That did not prevent those same children from being a small plague in the Square, and “It’s the Street children, I’m sure of it,” said Angela.

  “Looks as if an elephant had been standing in the bed,” said the admiral, looking at the holes.

  “Three elephants,” said Olivia. “There are twelve holes.”

  “Be quiet, Olivia,” said Angela. “It isn’t funny. Things are too expensive these days for it to be funny. First the shears, then all my beautiful irises!”

  They were not Miss Angela’s irises, but the admiral let it pass. “Band of hooligans,” he said.

  Mr. Donaldson said nothing but then he never did say anything, which was a disappointment; Angela had chosen him to sit on the committee because he worked for the Royal Horticultural Society. “That should be useful,” said Angela, but so far nothing useful or otherwise had come from Mr. Donaldson, and it was Angela who said, in her quick, decisive way, “We shall have to get the police.”

  “Surely if it’s children we can catch ’em ourselves,” said the admiral. “It must be children, but what did they want it for?”

  “They sell earth to the mews houses for window boxes,” said Angela. “People shouldn’t encourage it. If they want earth they can buy it at the Army and Navy Stores.”

  “But,” said the admiral, looking at the holes, “can it be children? How did they cart it away?”

  “They ought to have a medal for persistence,” said Olivia. They all looked at her, and she blushed.

  “Olivia, it’s not funny, and it must be stopped,” said Angela, and she pronounced, “Lucas must sleep in the shed.”

  The shed was at the far end of the Gardens, lonely and draughty and cold. Lucas shivered.

  “Mr. Donaldson, do you agree?”

  Mr. Donaldson nodded.

  “Admiral?” She whipped them all in and it was settled.

  “Supposing it’s one of those gangs?” said Lucas. “They’re big boys, some of them, and tough. They’ve got razors, I’ve seen them,” quavered Lucas.

  “I will give you a whistle,” said Angela.

  “There was a boy here, from the Street, sent to Borstal for using a knife. I don’t like it,” said Lucas.

  “I think,” said Olivia, “it’s a little boy or girl.”

  “Nonsense,” said Angela. “No little boy or girl could carry all that earth.”

  But Olivia knew they had; while the others were talking she had seen, under a bush, a footprint that no one had smoothed away. It was a very small footprint. Olivia had scuffed it out with her shoe.

  CHAPTER II

  CATFORD Street might have been any of the poorer streets in any city—a city that was old and had been bombed—but its flavour was of London; its stucco and its sooty brick, its scarlet buses, the scarlet post-office van, and the scarlet pillar box at the corner of Garden Row were London, as were its log-carts, the occasional great shire horses in the drays, the starlings, pigeons, and sparrows, the strange uncouth call of the rag-and-bone man, the many pubs, and the way the newspaper woman trustfully went away and left her papers, knowing that the pennies and the halfpennies would be thrown down.

  The ugly accents of the Street children were unmistakably English but the older people could have belonged anywhere; a great many had come from somewhere else—all tongues were spoken in Catford Street, faces were all colours, but even the people who had been born there and lived and died in it were like any people anywhere. It was all perfectly ordinary; seen from above, from the back windows high up in some of the Square houses—Number Eleven, for instance, from the old schoolroom at the top of the house—Catford Street, with Motcombe Terrace and Garden Row—which had no gardens—running to left and right of it, made the shape of a big cross.

  That was how Olivia, looking down from the old school-room windows, often saw it, spread out before her, yet hidden, teeming. At night it was a nest of lights, and it was always filled with sound, endless, myriad human sounds, while behind, booming from the river, came the sirens, tugs, and ships sounding almost equally big, reminding the Street, thought Olivia, of the world; and, falling down between the house walls, the sound of bells, reminding it, or failing to remind it, of heaven. The Anglican St. Botolph’s Home of Compassion, with its black-and-white-habited nuns, was just behind the Square, and hidden somewhere among the houses was a convent of the Sisters of Charity; Olivia had never found out where it was but she had often seen the Sisters’ blue gowns and big-winged cornettes going through the streets, and, as long as she could remember, the Angelus had rung from their convent three times a day. It used to be echoed by the big bell from the Catholic church in Catford Street, but that had been bombed and now there was only a tinny little bell from the makeshift hut that was used as a church.

  Four times a day there was another sound; it came from the red brick building that took up a whole block, a school with high walls round it, topped with wire netting to keep in the balls that were bounced on the asphalt playgrounds; at twelve o’clock, at half-past three, and at recreation times the noise went up to the sky as first the infants, then the girls, and then the boys came out to play. It was like a vast, lively cheeping. It was this that first made the Miss Chesneys call the Street children “the sparrows.”

  When two people say the same word it can mean two different things. To Angela they were sparrows because they were cheeky, cocky, common as sparrows; to
Olivia nothing was common; sparrows were sold for three farthings but not one should fall to the ground, though how that was possible she did not know, and apparently they fell all the time; Angela was always being summoned to cases of accident, illness, sorrow, or sudden death; it was paradoxical that it was Angela who worked indefatigably for the sparrows while the sensitive Olivia did nothing.

  Angela tried to make her. “You might at least come on the Roll of Visitors,” she said.

  “To visit whom?”

  “People, like the Street people, in their houses, and ask them questions.”

  But Olivia was appalled at the idea. “I?” she said, shrinking.

  “Yes. Why not?”

  Olivia thought of those swarming, vital houses and was appalled again. “I—I couldn’t,” she said. “They’re too rich.”

  “They’re well off, I know,” said Angela, “all but a few—ridiculously well off; that doesn’t stop them getting into messes.” But Olivia was not thinking of money; to her they seemed rich in everything she had not, children and strength and life. It’s odd, thought Olivia; half the time I’m troubled because I’ve scarcely anything at all, half the time because I have too much.

  As a matter of fact, it was Angela who had real riches; she was the one who kept up the big house in the Square. “On my own I couldn’t live like this,” Olivia said often; she did not add that she would not. They had all been left their share of the Chesney and their mother’s money—“Quite a tidy sum, even in these days,” said Noel, their brother—but Angela, who had been a beautiful and very taking child, had inherited from a rich old bachelor godfather as well. “Be polite to Aunt Angela,” Noel told his children and joked, “Besides being good as gold, she’s solid gold.”

  If anyone were well named, Olivia thought often, it was her sister Angela. She looked like all the things that went with angels—a candle, a lily. Angela’s figure was more like a tall boy’s than a middle-aged woman’s, she moved lightly and swiftly, her hair was still golden—no grey, though she’s forty-five, thought Olivia with pride—and she had the Hewitt features (the Miss Chesneys’ mother had been a Hewitt), straight, clear-cut features, with a slightly intense expression that reminded Olivia of the Burne-Jones pictures that had been fashionable when their mother was young.