An Episode of Sparrows Read online

  Angela not only had good looks, she had good works. “By their fruits ye shall know them” was carved over the porch at St. Botolph’s, the big church in the Square; for years none of them had gone into St. Botolph’s—Mother had been well known as a rationalist—but now Angela, being thoroughly modern, had begun to go again and had made friends with the new young rector, Mr. Wix, whom she called David. “By their fruits . . .” That haunted Olivia because she had no fruits. If there should one day be a recording angel—and how funny, thought Olivia, if there should turn out to be one after all—while most people got three or four out of ten, and some, like Angela, full marks, Olivia could imagine him looking at her and saying, “No marks at all.” How had that happened? Olivia did not know.

  She had had the same chances as Noel and Angela. Then why was she so different? If she had felt well it might have been easier. Olivia’s headaches were a family nuisance, and she was given to hot dark blushes that turned her face a mulberry colour—hideous, thought Olivia—and her attacks of indigestion were so sharp that she had grown a habit of pressing her hands suddenly against her chest—“Like a tragedy queen,” said Angela. Sometimes Olivia wished she had a real illness, something for which a doctor could be called in; as it was, “You think you are going to have a headache, and you do,” said Angela.

  “Yes, I do,” said Olivia wearily.

  It was not only her health. “I was born inept and clumsy,” said Olivia often. No one contradicted her.

  It had been one of Mother’s maxims that her children, the girls as well as the boy, must be qualified. Angela had been qualified at twenty-one; she was that still uncommon thing among women, a trained accountant, but Olivia had never qualified for anything. It was strange that she, who had not been able to stand against Mother for a moment, had been the one to defeat her in the end. Perhaps I always defeated her, thought Olivia, and that was why I irritated her so much. That faraway girl, the young Olivia, used to spend half her time banished to the schoolroom—which is perhaps why I’m so fond of it, thought Olivia now.

  She had wanted to move up here when the house was converted and a flat made on the second floor for Noel’s family to use when they were in town, the basement altered to make a home for old Hall and his wife. Hall had been the butler—“When we had butlers,” said Angela lightly. Now they had old Ellen, who had been their nurse, and a procession of dailies, and Mrs. Hall came up to do the cooking. Angela and Olivia had moved their rooms down to the first floor, though Olivia still hankered after the schoolroom. “Olivia is sentimental,” said Angela. “She likes to go back into the school-room world.” But up here in the schoolroom Olivia did not go back, she seemed to go a long, long way beyond any world.

  Here, high over the Catford Street houses, she had a feeling of immensity, of power, as if—as if I could play God, thought Olivia. She could look down over the Street, and the roofs of other streets, over thousands and thousands of chimneys from which the smoke went curling up; she could look away to faint spires of unknown churches, past the big bulk and flat roofs of the new council flats—no chimneys there—to the cranes and warehouses that showed where the river ran; across it, on the other bank, above other cranes, other warehouses, rose the great shape of the power station. As Olivia watched, the whole, all the world she could see, tilted against the sky; it was the passage of the clouds that made it seem as if the world moved, Olivia knew that very well, but she liked to think, as she had thought as a child, that it was the earth tilting, slowly tilting, as it turned on its axis in the sky. I, a pinprick, in this pinprick city, can feel the power of the earth, she thought, and, on the afternoon of the Garden Committee meeting, thinking that, the word “earth” made her pause; “earth,” and again she remembered the footprint in the garden bed.

  As if she had been Crusoe and the footprint a little Man Friday’s, Olivia had followed it most of the day in her mind. All day she had wondered whose it was. But there must have been more than one child to carry all that earth, she thought. What were they doing? What did they want? thought Olivia.

  “Want.” It was like a match put suddenly to a pile of tinder, old wood, cut long ago, lying for years, and drying so that it caught and flamed. What did I want? thought Olivia. So many things; the things all girls want, and it wrung her to think with what supreme confidence she had waited for them to come. “There is no reason,” said Mother, “why a woman should not have a career and a home . . .” “When you have your own home . . .” she said often to Olivia and Angela. “When your children are grown up . . .” but those premises, thought Olivia, had rested on one thing, a man; and there had never been the vestige of a man for Olivia.

  It was not the absence of a man that Olivia regretted so much, though she could have wished that both she and Angela had married—Angela was too fastidious—that blank in her life was not the worst; but I wish children were not so unknown to me, she thought, looking down on that hotbed of children, the Street. Olivia divined something in children—not in her nieces and nephews, Noel’s children, who were precocious and spoiled—but in the children who were let alone, real children. Though she knew from Angela’s dealings with them that they were blunt, even rude—as I am myself, thought Olivia—they seemed to her truer than grown-ups, unalloyed; watching them, she knew they were vital; if you were with them you would be alive, thought Olivia.

  Angela was, in a way, Olivia’s child; she was ten years younger, though she might have been ten years older in experience; and she needs me, Olivia thought in surprise, and she said aloud, because she was so surprised, “She makes mistakes.” Olivia said that as if it were a miracle; but I wanted real children, she thought—and today that want was even sharper than before—children and to be rooted in the earth, not in manmade things, bricks and stones, but in the earth; and a confusion of things came into her mind, things of which she knew scarcely anything—dew, haystacks, compost, picking peas, and marrows, tangles of flowers, sweet williams, larkspur, marigolds, all the naïve cottage flowers that are seldom found in shops; and animals, thought Olivia, not pet dogs but real animals, calves and kids and chickens, and she remembered how she had once begged to keep a hedgehog in this very schoolroom.

  I didn’t want extraordinary things, she said, to go up the Amazon or dig for gold—if you do dig for gold—an ordinary little bit of life would have done for me; and she leaned far out from the window sill, as far as she could, for it was high, as if she wanted to see into all those countless thousands of ordinary lives below. I wish I could have one chance, thought Olivia, one real chance, the chance and the courage—she could see she had been singularly lacking in courage—not to have a life of my own, she thought—it was a little late for that, she could see—but the chance to join in something real—real, pleaded Olivia.

  There was, of course, no answer. The house was quiet; at this time of the afternoon the Halls were in their own sitting room, far down in the basement; Ellen was out, gone for what she called her “little potter.” Angela was in the office with her secretary, Miss Marshall.

  After the war Angela had not gone back to her Clarges Street firm; she had turned, as the Times had said in the obituary notice of Mother, “her talents to voluntary work.” “I don’t need a salary,” Angela had said. “If I take it I keep it from somebody who does, and these old charities are crying out. They can’t be run in a slipshod old-aunt fashion these days; they must be organized and administered professionally.”

  There was certainly nothing amateur about Angela; she had an office in what had been the morning room on the ground floor; Miss Marshall worked in the old dining room, which was now a waiting room; and the typist, Jeannie, had the dark little room they had always called “the Slit.”

  Angela was secretary or auditor or member of so many different boards and committees that Olivia had long ago given up trying to remember which was which; if she did remember, Angela called them by their initials, which confounded Olivia again. Angela found time to run a literary club and di
scussion group—“Just for refreshment,” said Angela—and to be Chairman of the Anglo-European Women’s Initiative Movement as well, the A.E.W.I.M. “That pays me,” said Angela. “I get my trips abroad with all expenses.” And in her spare time—she still had spare time, Olivia marvelled—she was writing a book, “On economics” said Olivia reverently. It was only Olivia who was unoccupied and idle. This afternoon, for instance, there seemed no place for her, nothing she need do, and she stayed where she was. After a moment she began to think again of the stolen earth and the footprint, and again the questions began. Who were they? What did they want? How did it all begin?

  CHAPTER III

  IT HAD begun on a windy Saturday morning in March, in Catford Street, three months before.

  The footsteps went up and down, down and up; in the High Street that ran across the top of Catford Street they made one sound that joined with the noise of traffic; in Catford Street itself the steps were separated; though they were continual, they were—people’s, thought Sparkey, the newspaper woman’s little boy. He knew what he meant; in the High the steps were a noise, a crowd; here he could identify them with his eyes shut—man, woman, child, child skipping, man with dog; man, woman, child—and from everyone who passed, there went up, though Sparkey was too young to know it, a little steam of thought, of plans and hopes and worries—in Catford Street it was mostly worries. “Is everyone unhappy?” the child Lovejoy was to ask Vincent in despair.

  Vincent said, “Everyone,” but after a moment, when he had thought, he added, “That doesn’t prevent them from being happy.”

  Though Catford Street was in London it was a little like a village; to live in it, or the Terrace, or Garden Row, off it, or in any of the new flats that led off them, was to become familiar with its people; Sparkey, for instance, knew nearly everyone that passed, though he did not know their names. Sparkey had permission to sit on the steps of the house nearest the newspaper stand. He was delicate, one of those little boys who are all eyes and thin long legs; he was always catching chills, and his mother put a wad of papers under him to keep his bony little bottom off the stone and wrapped a copy of the Evening News round his legs; even then he was mottled with cold; his nose was as scarlet as his scarf and kept on running, so that he had to wipe it with his glove. He had objected to gloves. “Boys don’t wear gloves!” he had said. “You will,” said his mother. As he grew colder and the gloves grew dirtier his face was gradually smeared with black and damp and began to chap; his hair felt as if it were frozen to his head, but he would not move.

  “Why don’t you go and play?” asked his mother.

  “I like to watch,” said Sparkey.

  The newspaper stand was at the end of the Street, where it joined the High by the traffic lights and the bus stop. It was the busiest corner, with the queue for the bus, people waiting to cross with the lights, more people coming to buy papers. When the bus came it stopped just by Sparkey and sent out visible fumes of warmth and smell from under its red sides; it looked as if it were a real big animal breathing. Sparkey watched the people file in; the bus looked comfortable with its paint, the pale steel of its handles, the glimpse of seats behind its glass. It started with a harsh grinding noise, the people were carried away, and Sparkey’s mother rattled the coppers in the pocket of her big newspaper sling; she rattled them, thought Sparkey, because the conductor had rattled his in his bag. Sparkey liked the newspaper sling; it was crimson canvas, lettered DAILY MAIL, and looked cheerful over his mother’s old coat. Every gleam of colour was cheerful in that plain street.

  Some of the people in the bus queue had suitcases; of course, it was Saturday; Sparkey guessed they were going away for the weekend; some had babies and pale blue pushchairs that they lifted onto the bus. There was a girl in a black silk coat, her hair in a knot at the back of her head; she carried a small case, and her nails and her lips were bright red; Sparkey knew her and knew she was a dancer, going to rehearsal; he had heard her tell his mother. There were men with paper hats and green rosettes pinned to their coats; they had peaked, pale faces and their clothes were crumpled because they had been up all night; they were up from the provinces for a cup tie.

  All down the Street women were scrubbing doorsteps ready for Sunday. There was a sound of barking and soon a man passed with two big dogs; Sparkey knew them; he had seen their kennels in the area of Number Sixty-nine; they barked when they were let out, which was not often; the fur had come off their elbows from lying on the area flags, and they stank.

  There were plenty of animals in Catford Street; Sid, the log man, kept his pony Lucy behind the last house, in a shed by the canal; all the children in Catford Street knew Lucy and her little cart painted with hearts and roses. Besides Lucy and the dogs, there were budgerigars, canaries, and cats, many cats. In the very house where Sparkey sat on the steps, Mrs. Cleary and Miss Arnot kept fifteen cats; the two old ladies came creeping out every morning in old fur tippets and men’s hats, their waists hung round with shopping bags to buy food for their cats; they bought fish-heads and horsemeat and then crept home again; presently the smell of the fish and meat cooking would seep out into the Street, and the cats that on fine days ornamented the window sills and the half-wall of the portico would get up and stretch and go mewing in to dinner.

  People passed all the time. There were women with perambulators and children tagging along, holding to the handles; most of the women said “Hello” to Sparkey’s mother; most of the children, as they came from the shops, were eating something, an ice or a lollipop; Sparkey looked at them and his mouth watered. Two girls came along with green coats, their hair tied with limp white ribbons; they were Yvette and Susie Romney and they had an orange lollipop to share between them; they took it in turns, three sucks each, each sharply watched by the other; in Catford Street one had to be sharp and strictly fair. Sparkey did not really look at them, though his eyes watched the lollipop. He was not interested in girls.

  The children from St. Botolph’s Home of Compassion came past: twenty-six little girls, walking two-by-two, with a nun at the end. Another kind of nun passed; her full blue cotton skirts made a sound that was like a quiet murmur of words, but her wooden beads rattled, and the sides of her starched white hat—Sparkey called it a hat—flapped, and her boots squeaked; the fringe of her shawl had bobbles that danced up and down as she walked. She was interesting, with the constant movement of her clothes, and Sparkey watched as she turned in at the broken church steps and went up them, out of sight.

  The third house down from where Sparkey sat was the Priest’s House, and next to it was where the Catholic church of Our Lady of Sion had been bombed. Now the church was only a hut standing in a rubble of broken pillars and masonry; there was a notice board outside it, lettered in big letters, HELP TO BUILD OUR CHURCH AND SCHOOLS; above the letters was a wooden aeroplane rising slowly up the scale—£2,000, £3,000, £4,000; the aeroplane had stuck at that for a long time. “They need fifteen thousand pounds,” said Sparkey’s mother. “They’ll never get that.”

  On Saturday morning the Catholic children went to Confession. There was no school, and the Street was full of children; some of them were shopping for their mothers, a great many had got on the bus for the children’s show at the Victoria Cinema, some went down to the new Woolworth’s in the Wilton Road, and some of the boys, with carts made out of packing cases and old perambulator wheels, took a sack down to the gasworks for coke, but most were just playing; there were little girls with doll perambulators, taggles of little girls; there were boys playing mysterious games with balls, or chalking on the pavement, and smaller boys with cowboy hats and cardboard chaps and metal pistols; they lurked round corners and shouted at one another. “Go and play with them,” said Sparkey’s mother again, but Sparkey was not interested in small boys; though he was only five, going on six, he was ambitious; he was waiting for Tip Malone.

  Besides being ambitious, Sparkey was melodramatic; he frightened the other children. “Do you know what gra
vy is?” he would ask, hushed, and when they shook their heads he would say in a cold voice, “It’s blood.”

  He would ask a small girl, “Do you see that man?”

  The little girl would nod.

  “If you met him at night he would take you away in a sack,” said Sparkey.

  “That’s only old Mr. Isbister,” the little girl would say uncertainly.

  “That’s what you think,” said Sparkey.

  “Perhaps it’s being a newspaper child,” Olivia was to say when she had had some experience of Sparkey, but Angela objected. “A child that age can’t read,” she said. Sparkey could not read, but the lurid pieces of the paper seemed printed into him; not long ago one of the Catford Street boys, the boy that Lucas had told Angela about, had been caught by the police; he had slashed an old lady with a knife. “F’r her handbag,” said Sparkey with relish. “He got sent away. That was Maxey Ford,” said Sparkey. “He was in Tip Malone’s gang.”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Sparkey’s mother, but Sparkey was an authority on gangs. “Tip’s a nicely brought-up boy,” said Sparkey’s mother.

  “He isn’t,” said Sparkey indignantly.

  Sparkey had thought Tip might have been sent to Confession, but there was no sign of him; Sparkey sighed.

  Just as one day the grown-up Sparkey was to know the face of his girl, his beloved, every mark and line, so now he knew Tip’s face, his face and all about him, his clothes, his voice, his doings, and his gang. The gang was not big but it was choice. “Jim Howes, Tony Zassi, Rory Isbister, Puggy, Ginger, and John Rowe,” said Sparkey wistfully. Tip was the biggest—“Well, he’s thirteen,” said Sparkey with awe. Tip was heavy and tough and square and wore an old grey sweater and battered jeans. “Wish I had jeans!” sighed Sparkey.