A Pocketful of Rye Read online

  A Pocketful of Rye

  ANTHONY MASTERS

  To my parents,

  to Robina

  and to Johnny

  We are the Music-Makers,

  And we are the Dreamers of Dreams,

  Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

  And sitting by desolate streams;

  World-losers and world-forsakers,

  On whom the pale moon gleams:

  Yet we are the movers and shakers

  Of the world forever, it seems.

  A. W. E. O’SHAUGHNESSY

  Contents

  Goblin and Capulet

  The Power House

  Tip Toe Annie

  Crooked Ella

  The Fluffers

  Jan by the Water

  Patrick Waiting

  Father Jessell Becomes a Sinner

  Donna and the Waves

  Cold Grey Slate in the Morning

  To the Tables at Connie’s

  Bless This House

  “My Mother Said that I never Should …”

  Children With Flowers

  The Animals Went In Two by Two

  A Note on the Author

  Goblin and Capulet

  Up and over the hill rattled the trams, clanking and crashing their way over the rusted lines. Goblin rode all the tramways, travelling through wet afternoons in Peckham, with the streets glistening like pools of diamonds, and the muffled loneliness of a foggy dusk in Whitechapel. He would remember all he saw as he rode the clacking lines and dreamt away a London Saturday.

  Tram-cars—jolting in the daytime excursion and lying by night in monstrous shadow. Then rattling down Commercial Road taking clerks to city hives, or to Rotherhithe carrying dockers to short time and corner meetings. The stale ’thirties in a tired city.

  Goblin’s world was bounded by the tram-lines. Saturday afternoon he watched London from the top deck, or sometimes illegally riding on the platform watching the seasons change between the lines. The mud eddied and splattered in winter and the dust hazed in summer, while Goblin stared down wondering if the lines were all made in one section and lowered by a giant crane—or if they had been released from an enormous reel. Slaves—Egyptians or sometimes Chinamen—had borne the coils slowly and reverently from Neasden Central—the Utopia in stencilled lettering over the driver’s cab; a magical destination that Goblin had glimpsed like a great cavern for a fearful moment. He stood at the last stop and watched the cavern swallow the tram whole and belch out another one the other side.

  Neasden—the home of other mysteries the conductors had spoken of—Canteen, a strange hollow-sounding word. One conductor had told him that there was a Popsy at the Tea Counter who could dish out more than tea. Goblin imagined a kind of Eastern slave market, potent with the smell of strange spices and peopled by drivers and conductors fiercely bartering for the Popsy, who stood on the Tea Counter, surrounded by delicately patterned urns out of which issued disassociated fragrancies that Goblin had only met in the Catholic Church.

  Somehow the smell of incense had become inexplicably associated with the East in Goblin’s imagination. He was not a Catholic, but it was a Stepney aunt who had taken him to Mass. This deserved everlasting condemnation from his parents, who beat him and accused him of pagan worship. When he enquired after his aunt he was told ‘that they were not speaking’. Goblin wondered if she had suddenly been struck dumb or if she had taken some oath of silence since the Mass. He never knew for she died a year later, and relenting, Goblin’s parents attended the funeral in a glory of black and tears, coming home to a mixed grill and a pint of tea. With them came sobbing, desperately hungry aunts and strange gruff uncles.

  The service had been held in the Congregational Chapel—a sort of halfway point. When Goblin was thirteen his mother told him that the Stepney aunt had never been accepted into either the Catholic or Anglican Church—she had dallied with every faith, obsessing herself with a new one each year. Each branch of recognised faith had given her pew space, and a year previous to the Catholic trend she had been making voluntary statements among a circle of Quakers. The Spiritualist Church had been darkly hinted at a year before.

  Her gravestone bore the inscription ‘She Walked In All The Wondrous Ways’ until nettles covered it, and dutiful relatives stopped caring for the marble pile.

  Goblin thought about the burning incense and the muttered incantations as he rode the tramways. How splendid were the Catholic drapings and ornaments—and how sparse the Wesleyan Chapel that his parents rigorously attended. How he longed to carpet the chapel, to hang tapestries on the walls and to fill the air with incense. He had once seen joss sticks burn, and he wished he could take those into the stark little chapel too.

  Goblin’s father owned a ramshackle shop called Barney’s Bargain Departments—a curious building lying between a Pawnbrokers and a Gunsmiths. Brixton would have been tidier but less colourful without Barney’s. The shop overflowed on to the pavement as did the Pawnbrokers next door, but unfortunately took up more than its fair share. There was a continual feud between the management of Barneys and the genteel Mr. Smythe who ran the Pawnbrokers. The merchandise of the two shopkeepers was roughly the same, except that there was a possibility of Mr. Smythe’s pavement display being retrieved. But usually it remained very much the same, and the ticketed objects were inevitably familiar to passers-by.

  The Japanese Screen had been where the two pavement displays met. It belonged to Mr. Smythe, but had somehow become mixed up with the goods at Barney’s for Mr. Smythe wore pebbled lenses to his glasses and rarely knew what he had in stock. Goblin, who would help his father to arrange the pavement display on Saturday mornings, had seen the Screen.

  It had been a grey dismal morning in February and there were very few customers at Barney’s. It was too cold to stand and turn over the books displayed on top of the old filing cabinet with no drawers—and it was too cold to examine the grimy Victorian statuettes that Barney’s had bought off Mr. Smythe when it was obvious that the owner would never collect them. They had been Mr. Smythe’s pride and joy—pawned a few years before by a Lady who had Lost All. She had Come Down, capitalised Mr. Smythe to Goblin one day in asthmatic confidence, and drops of saliva had fallen on to the grimy brass of the statuettes.

  But there was the Japanese Screen, propped up between a boiler of Mr. Smythe’s and a mahogany-framed Victorian engraving belonging to Barney’s. Goblin had edged the Screen to a hiding place behind a Genuine But Slightly Cracked Quality Viennese Coffee Set With Antique Coffee Table and Overlaid Silver Candlestick.

  The next February Saturday, satisfying a conveniently dormant conscience, Goblin edged the Screen further and further into the shadows of the shop front. The back display rusted outside the shop all the week; it was only the front display that was rearranged on Saturdays. Then one morning, quietly and furtively Goblin picked up the Japanese Screen, and with his heart pumping he staggered into the dim recesses of the shop with it. In seconds it was in the almost pitch darkness at the back of the shop. Hurriedly he draped it with some worn embroidery.

  At twelve o’clock on a Saturday morning Goblin’s father would cross the road for a Guinness at the Drake, and for a fearful half hour Goblin would be in charge of the shop. He was terrified of the customers, who were quite often round-shouldered little men with big noses who would poke and prod at the furniture and try and beat the price down. Acting on his father’s instructions he would stare doggedly at them and monotonously chant:

  “Fixed price only, sir, fixed price only.”

  And the little men would go away and rummage through Mr. Smythe’s display next door. Sometimes they would come back and stare through the window—and Goblin would rush to the poky little office and
pretend to be busy over the huge ledgers full of his father’s spidery handwriting.

  He had grown less timorous since his eleventh birthday and had taken to deliberately exciting his fears by standing in the shadows at the back of the shop. Here there was a stuffed monstrosity of an owl, with one wing hanging broken and limp and a hollowness where one eye should have been. Goblin would force himself to stand under its shadow, timing himself by an ornate Victorian grandfather clock. Usually he lasted three minutes, standing trembling and sweating—occasionally it would be a full five minutes before he bolted for daylight with a stifled shriek. The parchment feathers would rustle with the draught of his passing body and the broken wing would rasp as it blew against the soft dust that covered the owl. But now that he had put the Japanese Screen there he would have to force himself to spend many half hours in the shadows.

  After the Screen had been there a week Goblin went to the back of the shop and lifted the cloth. The Screen had been painted a very delicate pastel colour. It was of a warrior prince, resplendent against the pastelled anaemia of a background of stunted trees and bushes. His face had blackcurrant eyes and a bootbutton nose, but his robes were perfection. The colour had been worked delicately into the Screen and only hinted at Eastern richness. Subtly muted, each colour lightly overlaid the last. But to Goblin the most magical and resplendent thing of all was the helmet—blue and golden, once again underestimating yet at once conveying the riot and strength of the pastel bronze.

  The next few months Goblin spent staring abstractedly at the Screen.

  Sometimes he would try and imagine the landscape beyond the figure—but it was too difficult, and altogether too translucent and impersonal. Just the figure stood out with a presence and dimension of its own. The owl with the broken wing ceased to bother him—not even when he left the door of the shop open and the wind moved the wing up and down with a dry and brittle rustle. But the warrior had no name, and in Goblin’s reasoning—what was the use of a friend without a name? There were plenty of names for God, for instance, thought Goblin, as he absentmindedly picked his nose before the Screen one morning.

  He remembered the draughty hall where they had Sunday School, and tightly-corseted Miss Naylor, who had once asked him to leave when he belched during the General Confession.

  “Have you no piety in the presence of Our Lord?”

  Other names, he recalled, were the Deity, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit, and yet they were apparently all the same person. Goblin could not understand why there was not just one name—perhaps God preferred to have many names. Even his father, who he merely thought of as the proprietor of Barney’s and a silent negation in the home, seemed familiar with one name. How often did he begin a sentence with Christ? He was more natural than Miss Naylor, whose repetition of the word was punctuated with a long silence before and after. Goblin thought perhaps his father knew Christ better than Miss Naylor—more as a friend.

  But it was Miss Naylor who christened the warrior prince. Quite often in Sunday School she would read from her book. She had spent long nights in her tiny semi-detached writing; her exhaustion eased with tepid cocoa and aspirin. Her mother would grumble over the breakfast table about the burning of electricity into the night, so Miss Naylor took a night-light to her room and sat hunched under its flickering light, her arthritic fingers moving rapidly over the paper. The book was set in the time of the Crusaders and was something between King Arthur and a religious tract. But in a good mood she would read from the bulky file she carried everywhere with her—clasping it protectively to her faded lilac blossom bosom.

  One of her Crusaders was named Capulet, a Frenchman and a romantic. But to Goblin the name seemed more Oriental than French—and his boot-button prince was named.

  Gradually Goblin found he was able to spend longer at the back of the shop—and once he had spent the whole half hour gazing at Capulet without worrying about the broken shadow above him. But Capulet had become a friend to Goblin, something he had never had before, and he gazed at the pastels as he gazed at Christmas shop windows up West.

  They had been to buy his new suit in Streatham—Mum, Goblin and Gran. Gran had been complaining of her back and she sat straight and unyielding at the front window with Mum, who was telling her about Mrs. White’s Jim and how he had misled Edith’s young Iris. They sat hunched in their sensible coats and talked in lowered voices, occasionally leaving long silences indicative of unspoken horrors of lust.

  Goblin sat at the other side, his heart thumping with excitement as the tram lurched forward.

  Gran looked at Goblin under scraggy lids and said regretfully:

  “Better be careful—not in front of the boy.”

  Mum changed the subject and they began to talk brightly in different voices.

  “Evenings drawing in,” said Gran as if delivering another confidence.

  “Coke been sent up?”

  “If it hasn’t that husband of yours will have to answer for me back. Something cruel it is in winter—it’s the twinges, shooting pains, makes me all of a tither. But with coke—it’s different.”

  Grinding, rattling over the rails—an Eastern carriage with Goblin at the reins.

  “It’s that dark—you can’t see out.”

  The veins in Gran’s neck stood out as she peered birdlike through the steamed windows.

  “Must say though—some rosy would be welcome.” Mum was comfortable and warm and would soon glow with cosiness as she stretched in front of the fire.

  Windows darkened with dusk and rain, and to Goblin the street lamps were flares and the crowds infantry. Great banners blazed from enemy hordes and their slogans shouted defiance from hoardings. As the tram wound its noisy way through London streets, Goblin sat on a coachman’s box, winding slowly through a dark canyon filled with threatening danger and unsuspected concealment.

  “But it’s the coke that worries me—did he remember to order it?”

  “Oh Gran—he’s not good for much, but at least he remembers the coke.”

  Add A Bisto Cube Flashed from neon brilliance, raising momentary terror in Goblin’s heart. The front window misted and blackened and Goblin saw his own face in the glass, but swarthy and Eastern. He was rattling a coach through a deep gorge lined with troops, lights and music. It was a romantically hued twilight and he had a passenger. He could see him reflected in the front window of the tram—just an Oriental headdress and darkness beneath it. And as he passed the troops drew back reverently, and suddenly there was silence, complete and sustaining. Around him a battle ceased and there was no sound except for the rattling of the coach as it passed over the barrenness of the canyon.

  “Remember what happened last year when I had me leg? All the pipes froze and me with me leg—no hot water—and I was ordered a hot soak at eight on a Tuesday.”

  Gran was in her stride and Mum nodded understandingly. They were as one when it came to making a stand against Him.

  “He’s got a lovely stove for himself in the shop —in that ramshackle old place too. And as for fuel—it’s coke he uses, and there’s coke at the shop before there’s coke in the home.” Mum smiled comfortably and received the expected support from Gran who countered:

  “That’s a man—a man all over I say, and God knows I ought to know, after all I went through with your Pa.”

  But Goblin was rolling silently out of the gorge, and he sensed the troops closing up behind them and the sound of battle recommencing. They had stopped out of respect for the Eastern dignitary he had as his passenger. Goblin and Capulet passed through in the dusk and came to a great plain.

  The tram negotiated a roundabout and stopped at the top of the wide Brixton Road.

  “Come on, Goblin, come on, child,” grumbled Gran as she rose stiffly to her feet, gathering enormous parcels to her bosom. “Always in a dream, that boy, no good will come of that—boys and dreams ain’t healthy.” And all three stepped out into the neon and whitened wastes of Brixton.

  T
hen one Saturday morning Mr. Cohen came into the shop. Once a month he called to ‘turn over stock’. He wore an astrakhan coat and lived in a large house in Streatham that smelt of cats and steamed fish. Goblin had once delivered a Victorian shepherdess there and had been invited in by Mr. Cohen to see his treasures.

  There was a room full of Victorian figurines with dresden smiles and chipped fingers. Next door was a room overflowing with dusty, spider-ridden books, and even further into the gloom was an enormous conservatory entirely given over to piles of old clothes, shoes and other anonymous material. Then Goblin had been picked up and sat astride a pile of suffocatingly large overcoats. Mr. Cohen had laughed silkily and told him that he was a fine big boy for his age. He had run a soft white hand over Goblin’s forehead and stroked his hair. Then Goblin had wanted to go home.

  Ever since his terrible visit Goblin had had an unceasing horror of Mr. Cohen, and now here he was facing him across the counter with his father in the pub.

  Mr. Cohen came so near to the counter flap that his stomach threatened to bulge over the top. He smiled, and Goblin watched his hand rise to an ear, scratch at the flabby skin and descend to the wooden top. His signet ring caught the reflection of the battered brass of a warming pan and flashed at Goblin. And somewhere in the shadows at the back a dusty wing rustled in the draught as Mr. Cohen softly closed the door. Goblin could just make out the pallid silhouette of the Japanese Screen and the bootbutton eyes of Capulet.

  “Good morning—er Goblin—is your father here?”

  “Over the road—in the booz—the pub.”

  “Well, perhaps you can help me.”

  Goblin stared at the tiny eyes over the counter—so small, so delicate those soft lids, so hard.

  “I just want to—turn over stock as usual.” Mr. Cohen laughed wheezily and picked again at the fleshy base of his ear. “So I’ll look around—and you can show me the bargains.” He laughed again and stepped around the counter—Goblin dodged to the door and stood watching Mr. Cohen as his soft hands ran over a shelf of dresden shepherd boys with pipes. He walked away from this restrained Victorian frolicking and began to look at the grandfather clocks—and then he moved to the furthest timepiece that Goblin had timed himself by, next to the now almost transparent wings of the owl.