A Ripple from the Storm

Martha followed the child across the ruts and furrows of the road into the entrance of Mansion Court. The court was built on a common pattern of the old days fifty years before: single rooms opening off a three-sided veranda. The square in the middle was a filthy dust, and covered all over with washing-lines. Sitting in the middle of the court on a candlebox was a fat dark woman, whose ancient hat was skewered to her head with broken knitting-needles. She stared suspiciously at Martha from small, squashed-up, yellowing eyes, and said: ‘Why can’t I have a paper, why can’t I have it?’ and held out her hand for a Watchdog as if her being given it were a test. Her eyes became even more suspicious when Martha held out her hand for the penny.

‘Didn’t a man come around with The Watchdog this afternoon?’ asked Martha – for this street was supposed to have been covered by Murdoch.

‘A man never came. Men are not wanted here. The police don’t want men here.’ And then, insistent and suspicious: ‘When will I get my room in the new flats?’

‘I haven’t anything to do with the housing.’

‘You said I could have a flat when I signed the papers,’ she said, fanning some flies away from her face with the The Watchdog.

‘If the man didn’t sell the papers in this court, then I’d better do it now.’

‘Yes, we all want new rooms in this court,’ said the woman.

There were twelve rooms to the court, and over a hundred people living in them. The first door, standing open, showed a man in his shirt-sleeves lying, arm over his face, on the bed; a woman knitting as she sat on the floor, four children, a baby in a candlebox, and a half-grown girl in a pink celanese petticoat who turned her head with a wide swing of her thick black plait as she hooked up a dish-cloth on a peg already loaded with clothes. The woman on the floor said to the dozing man: ‘The Watchdog.’ He brushed the sleep off his face with his forearm, plunged his fist into his trouser pocket, brought out a sixpence, took the paper, gave Martha a comradely nod, and fell backwards on to the bed again, arm over his face. The next room was locked, but felt as if it were full of people, listening, waiting for her to go away: they were afraid of the rent collector or a summons, and Martha quickly passed on to the next room. Six men squatted around the floor in the space between two beds, dicing, with a pile of pennies beside each. There were two babies asleep on one of the beds, and a woman asleep, rolled in a blanket, on the other. A young man rose, leaned across the heads of the dice-throwers, handed over two pennies, took two Watchdogs, said: ‘How’s the Reds this week?’ and settled down to his dice. Martha went on, accompanied by the small girl who had summoned her from the Indian store, and who was hopping on one leg after and around her, watching her with steady curiosity from very bright black eyes.

The next door was closed, but did not have about it the feeling of people waiting behind it in anxiety. Martha knocked, and it was opened by a young white man who said in a Yorkshire voice: ‘Come in, we was waiting for you and all.’ Martha saw he had taken her for a white-skinned Coloured girl; but when he saw The Watchdog, the moment’s flash of suspicion on his face went, and he said: ‘Oh, The Watchdog. T’revolution for me, right enough.’ He took the paper and gave her a shilling, shaking his head when she offered change. Behind him through the half-open door Martha saw two half-naked girls, and another young man on the bed. One of the girls came, rested her naked breasts on the shoulder of the man at the door, and shouted over his head to the woman sitting on the candlebox: ‘Mam, did you buy the bread?’ The woman, without turning her body around, but with prim hoity-toity movements of her shoulders said: ‘Dirty bitch, I’ll put the police on to you.’ And she continued to fan herself with The Watchdog. ‘Did you see the police?’ said the RAF man to Martha, one ally to another.

‘No,’ said Martha. ‘There’s two in the next street.’

‘Then we’d better get moving on.’ He hastily pulled the door inwards, saying: ‘I’ll be along to one of the meetings one of these days, you’ll be seeing me.’

Here the small sparrow-like girl, still hopping on one leg, said to Martha again: ‘Mam wants you.’ Martha had imagined the woman on the candlebox was her mother, but now the girl darted off across the court shouting excitedly, ‘Mam, mam, mam.’

A half-open door across the court shifted and a youngish tired-looking woman put her face around it. She said to Martha: ‘Are you the Welfare?’

‘No.’

‘I thought you was the Welfare,’ she said disappointedly.

‘Can I do anything?’

The woman promptly opened the door. It was a small room, identical with the others, rough-plastered, with a red cement floor which was cracked. Small black ants swarmed along the cracks. There were clothes hanging from hooks and in a low bed a long knobbly body under a patched sheet. A shock of black hair protruded from the top of the sheet. The body was heaving with sharp, hard and irregular breath.

‘The Welfare said they would come this day,’ said the woman, looking at the bed. At which the sheet fell back and showed a very thin young man, in a grey shirt, which was open down the front, showing a cage of knobbed ribs. His face was extremely thin, his black eyes fevered and enormous. His skin had a dry greyish look.

‘What do you want?’ he asked Martha angrily.

‘She’s not the Welfare lady,’ said the woman. ‘It’s my son,’ she said to Martha. ‘He’s very sick.’

He said: ‘I told you, I’m not going to hospital.’

‘It’s your sickness makes you talk,’ said his mother. She stood at a short distance from the bed, hands folded before her. Her feet, in canvas shoes, moved irritably on the cement. Martha was reminded of a gesture of her mother’s: the way she would sit smoothing the stuff of her dress on her knee with the flat of her hand, over and over again, in a tired irritable gesture. So did the feet of this woman move on the floor, in a compulsive, pawing way, like a horse which has been standing too long. She said to Martha: ‘It’s his sickness makes him bad. It makes him hard to please.’

A spasm of anger crossed the bony sick face. The boy flung himself down again, his back turned, and again became a heavily-shrouded body breathing hoarsely.

‘Shall I fetch someone for you?’ asked Martha.

‘The Welfare said they would come this day.’

During this conversation the small girl twirled and twiddled her thin black legs as she hung from the doorknob, her eyes fixed relentlessly on Martha’s face. ‘Oh, leave off,’ said her mother, and smacked her lightly across the face, to relieve her own exasperation. The child moved her face sideways, automatically, from the sting of the blow, and continued to dangle from the knob, splaying out her legs over the floor.

Murdoch’s flaming mop of hair appeared on the veranda.

‘What’s up?’ he said.

Martha went to the veranda and the woman followed them. Her eyes moved from Martha’s face to Murdoch’s in a patient undemanding query.

‘A good day to ye,’ said Murdoch to her. ‘How’s the patient?’ His tone struck Martha as facetious, but the woman said, moving nearer to Murdoch, ‘It’s his chest, it’s not doing better.’

‘TB,’ said Murdoch to Martha, and the woman nodded, adding practically: ‘He will die soon, I think.’

Martha was shocked by the directness of this, but Murdoch nodded and said simply: ‘Aye, and he’d be better in hospital, with the right things for him.’

At this moment a large car stopped outside the entrance of the court, and a well-dressed young woman got out of it. Martha recognized Ruth Manners, now a young matron with children: two small girls sat in the back of the car with a native nanny. She came picking her way across the court on large well-polished shoes, and did not raise her eyes to see the group of people until nearly on them. She recognized Martha, and gave her a polite smile, while her pale cautious eyes were animated for the space of a startled second at the sight of Murdoch, before she decided that he, like Martha, was outside her radius of interest. On Murdoch’s face was a wild irreverent grin: ‘The Welfare,’ he said, audibly and derisively.

Ruth Manners ignored him, and said to the woman: ‘How is he?’

‘Very bad, miss.’

‘Has he changed his mind about coming into hospital?’

‘No, miss, sorry to tell you, he hasn’t, the sickness has him unreasonable, miss.’

Ruth Manners looked full of patient distaste for the whole situation. She asked in cold clear tones: ‘Shall I try and make him see reason?’

‘If you like, miss, but he’s not himself.’

Martha and Murdoch stood to one side while the young woman went to the doorway and stood looking down at the long knobbly form under the white sheet.

‘Ronald,’ she said, or rather stated.

The form did not stir.

‘It’s the Welfare,’ said the mother helplessly, but on a note of warning.

There was a growl and a mutter of obscenities from under the sheet. Ruth came back and stood in front of the mother, her expression of distaste even more marked. ‘You must see,’ she said in a high patient voice, ‘that there’s nothing at all we can do. Is he taking his medicines?’

‘Yes, miss, I make him.’

Ruth Manners continued to stand, frowning, looking around the court as from a long distance. Suddenly all her distaste focused: her pale eyes under the black crooked brows moved in a snap towards Murdoch and Martha; her face contracted with hatred, and she said: ‘I suppose you communists have been putting ideas into his head.’

The colour flamed into her thin angry cheeks and she walked stiffly back to her car.

Murdoch grinned and said: ‘It’s the Red Hand again. Man, but we get into everything, we’re under every bed.’

The woman, tugged backwards and forwards out of her stoic and patient stance by the pull of the lively swinging little girl on her hand, said: There was a baas here yesterday talking to Ronald. Ron liked him. Perhaps he could make him go to hospital.’

‘Who was it?’ asked Martha, slowly translating the ‘baas’, in her mind, into who it must be – one of the men from the camp.