Sunday at the Cross Bones

‘Boil a kettle, Miss Churchill, dissolve this in five parts water, and sip the result over thirty minutes. You will find it promotes refreshing sleep and interesting, sometimes inspiring, dreams.’

She looked pleased. ‘Well, thanks, Reverend. Good luck finding Emmy, if you can. And all right then, it’s true we had words and I regret what I said, about her being a hopeless tart and then a hopeless washer-upper, that was a bit mean and I didn’t expect her to flounce out, but Christ, she’s so stupid sometimes. Anyway, she’s somewhere in Islington or Highbury, I got an address somewhere, could hardly read her writing, something like Herbert Street, number 140 or 142. She said she’d be staying with friends of her sister Flo, and beyond that I don’t know nothing, OK? And now I’m a bit tired and I think you should go.’

‘Does this Florence work?’ I asked, cautiously, ambiguously. When asking pros about other pros, one has to be wary of giving offence. That word ‘work’ is itself capable of a dozen interpretations.

‘She’s a chanteuse in a Palace of Varieties,’ said Nellie, closing her eyes. ‘It’s not what you’re thinking, either. She makes proper money from her voice, and she’s given up the other, I mean the alternative employment.’

‘That is most encouraging,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you might yourself benefit from her example.’

‘I just don’t care, to tell you the truth, Harold,’ said Nellie. ‘I really couldn’t care less about anything any more.’

I left her to her thoughtless life and her laudanum dreams. My thoughts were for poor Emily, ensconced in squalid surroundings in north London, her apartment abandoned, her job aborted, her morale dismally low, her soft animals unlooked-after, her flatmate comatose with narcotics. How has it come to this, when all was so promising, barely a month ago?

Should I write a stern letter to the Café Royal, demanding to learn the details of her foreshortened employment? Should I have shaken Nellie, and told her to go and find her former pal and fetch her back? Should I give the whole thing up as a failure? But then I applied to myself the words, ‘What would Jesus do?’ and my course was clear. I will set out to find Emily Murray, and bring her safely home.

CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_fb033294-dcb5-57fe-b669-d2a53c131e5b)

Letter from Mrs Moyra Davidson

Stiffkey Rectory 15 August 1930

My dearest Oona,

Sometimes I think I’m going off my head here. I spent the morning searching for a screwdriver, because the lock on the bathroom door is half off and Mrs Maitland is coming to tea today to discuss the Home Management classes and there is nobody in the world more dainty than Mrs M when she puts a mind to it. I simply cannot have her sitting in there terrified someone’s going to come in and catch her with her best bloomers round her ankles. I asked the colonel if he’d perchance have an implement of that nature in his box of tricks, and he said, ‘My dear Mimi, you will recall I arrived here one day with a suitcase and two boys, and one day I will depart with a suitcase and, God willing, the same two boys, but at no time did I ever acquire a toolbox, I would be a strange house guest if I were to begin kitting myself out with a saw, a chisel and a set of nails, for you might reasonably wonder what could possibly be my intentions.’ (This is the way he goes on.) I asked Nugent, who was writing letters in the parlour, to run down to the shop and find me a screwdriver, so I may reattach the lock on the bathroom door, and he did as I asked after only, ooh, an hour or two because he’s writing to apply for a job in the Civil Service, very swagger I’m sure, he has the confidence of the devil, but then sure he’s only just out of the college and why wouldn’t he be bursting with energy and ambition after being pumped with learning for three whole years like a Strasbourg goose? I wish young Sheilagh would find proper employment for a young intelligent girl instead of (rainy days) floating round the house all day reading books or (fine days) riding Joshua Judges at point-to-point meetings in Holt and Wells. I keep urging her to go into nursing like her mother did, but she wrinkles her nose and tosses her hair and complains about having to manhandle the sick and dying all day, that she’d rather hang on for something on the stage. She’s had her hair ringletted like Helen Twelvetrees, that actress in the films who’s always weeping, but I can’t really see my darling S as an actress, she’s too earnest, she doesn’t have a fluent technique. I tell her nursing is a fine career for a girl looking to make a difference in the world, but she says well, why, in that case, Mother dear, did you yourself abandon nursing to go on the stage? And I haven’t an answer for that, except to say I was following a dream buried deep within me.

Anyway, Nugent came back after God knows how long and reported that he couldn’t find a hammer to buy anywhere, I could have boxed his ears, it was a screwdriver I wanted.

I’m tired of this stupid story. What’s really bothering me is the major. Did I tell you about the galloping Major Hammond? He was one of the nouveau grandees who came along twenty years back, when the land around these parts was sold at auction by the Townshends who used to own it and a yelping battalion of new squireens moved into the neighbourhood, ex-army types who fancied themselves as landowners because they’d bought the deeds to a few acres for a song. You could hear them in the Townshend Arms telling their mess pals, with their civvy suits and their suburban wives, ‘Oh yairs, I own all the fields around here as far as you can see to yonder copse.’ Jesus, yonder copse forsooth, they wouldn’t know a copse from a hole in the wall, but they give themselves such airs, it makes me sick – me who’s been here since King Edward was on the throne.

Anyway, the good major, ever since he bought the old hall at Morston, he’s been dropping hints left, right and centre about wanting the churchwarden’s job.

My friend Cathy Dineen is on the JP bench at Holkham, hearing cases of trespass and poaching and aggravated affray at Cromer on bank holiday weekends. She cannot stand the way the major runs the bench and tells everyone how to think. Take poor young Edward Fenny, a simple-minded lad who’s been caught fecking ripe pears from the orchard beside Blakeney Church, and selling them by the side of the road. Not a trace of compassion for the poor lad will you find in the major. ‘Speaking as the local magistrate,’ he says, making it sound like it’s Speaking As Your Commanding Officer, ‘I feel we must apply the full force of the law to this unwashed miscreant. There can be no pleas in mitigation. We must press for a conviction.’

Cathy says, ‘Just a minute, Your Honour,’ and he won’t even look at her, like he’s heard some tiny sound in the courtroom but he can’t identify where it’s coming from. ‘All that’s been stolen here are a few dozen piece of ripe fruit that nobody’s breaking their necks to pick off the trees, and nobody’s livelihood is threatened by a bit of schoolboy scrumping. Why are we discussing this, and conspiring to send to jail a young simpleton who is only trying to make, what, three or four shillings to buy himself a pair of shoes?’

‘He Is A Thief,’ says the major with that awful slow politician voice he puts on in public, ‘a furtive trespasser on Church lands, a stealer of Church property. Would you, Mrs Dillon, be equally sanguine about his crime if he were to break into the church and abscond with the silver Communion chalice and the gold platter? Would you find that no matter for judicial inquiry? I rest my case.’

Well, it’s Mrs Dineen, as a matter of fact, not Dillon, and it’s not a chalice either, it’s called a ciborium, you dish out the communion wafers from it, and the plate for the breaking of bread, that’s a paten for God’s sake – platter indeed, he’s spent too much time in roadside hostelries being asked if he’d like the seafood platter, if they can interrupt his drinking, you know he drinks like a bloody fish. Poor Cathy, she’s sitting there like a fish herself, opening and closing her gob with amazement that anyone could be so unfair, but she says, nonetheless, ‘The pears are not holy objects. The fruit on the trees are not consecrated to God. Simony is not the issue here. Young Edward Fenny may have stolen the fruit, but it would have rotted on the branch. Rather than send him to rot in prison like one of the pears, we should applaud his enterprising spirit and encourage him to direct it into more legal and lucrative arenas.’

It was no good. The major directed the bench to find him guilty of theft and he was sentenced to three months banging metal panels in Norwich Prison. But while giving his summing-up, the major made a point of saying the purloining of property from Church premises must be discouraged in the parishes and he himself was the man to do it. Listen to him: ‘We need a tighter deployment of manpower to ensure no recrudescence of such casual felonies. If the church warden at Blakeney were doing his job, this unfortunate youth would not now be losing his liberty. The work of a churchwarden must not be undertaken lightly. I shall be looking into the current arrangements in all the outlying parishes of north Norfolk, and recommending changes.’ Which was pretty well saying, ‘ME! Me, I’ll be churchwarden around here. Just you try and stop me.’

What Mr Reynolds, our churchwarden these twenty-three years, will make of it, I cannot imagine. He and Mrs R have been our neighbours and best friends as long as we’ve been in the village. Mr Reynolds is a dear, good man, a devout churchgoer and helpful handyman. He is not equipped to fight the likes of the major, with his fearsome eye and the broken veins in his cross old face, and his blustering ambitions and his running the bench like some American lawman.

There will be a fight, mark my words. As I told you, there’s no love lost between him and H and I’m fearful of the outcome. In fact, Oona dear, I think I’ll go round to the Reynoldses right this minute, so had better close. Write and tell me all the news from Dublin. God, I miss the place something awful, these days, I get so lonesome with H away so much. But maybe at least Mr R will have a screwdriver to save Mrs Maitland’s blushes.

Your loving friend,

Mimi

Journals of Harold Davidson

London 19 August 1930

Set out this morning to find poor Emily. Took the omnibus from Waterloo Station north to Islington Green. Had only sketchy information from Nellie Churchill, whom I left slumbering. I asked many strangers for Herbert Street and was rewarded with directions to all four points of the compass.

New shops are springing up all along Upper Street – furniture and brass appliances, dresses and hats and bolts of silk and cotton, pie and sweetmeat emporia, ironware, stationery, wine and cigars. A gratifying sign of prosperity in these doldrum times. We may not be suffering a Depression as badly as has befallen our friends in the United States, but we are far from enjoying an Elation. A new world of things, though, an outbreak of colours, can be relied upon to raise the spirits. Who would have thought the eye could be so thrilled by the sunlight gleaming on a mass of brand-new copper piping in Balcombe’s Yard, or the heart so lifted by the sight of a paint lorry unloading vats of pigment, their lids leaking creamy half-moons of crimson, yellow and aquamarine?

Speaking of our transatlantic cousins, a potent image of their current state of mind has appeared in the window of the Gilbert Gallery, on Essex Road. It is a new painting called American Gothic by Mr Grant Wood and depicts a poor farmer, presumably from one of the ‘Dustbowl’ states, standing in front of his run-down homestead with his helpmeet by his side. They are clearly a long-married couple but there is something severe and unyielding about the man’s looks – an unappeasable steel in his eyes, a cruelty of aspect symbolised by the pitchfork he holds – that is matched by the indomitable gracelessness of his lady wife. One extends Christian sympathy for their resilience in the face of poverty, yet one also feels sympathy for anyone dependent on their assistance, or indeed their hospitality, for five minutes.

But the title, American Gothic? I know only a Gothic style of church architecture, popularised by Mr Pugin and characterised by spires and spikes, whether on arches, windows, doorways or ceilings. What application can the word have to this portrait, unless to suggest that the Church in America is in the hands of these unsmiling (and incontrovertibly spiky) rustics?

And the Church of England? What arrangement of features, what painted, unsmiling visage would sum up the Church today? Why, surely a portrait of my old friend Cosmo Lang, once the greatest duffer that ever tried to construe Catullus in front of a teacher, more recently famous as the holder of the highest religious seat in the country. In this notional picture, he would be seated on a throne, noble as St Peter, arrogant as Saul and all-conquering as Neptune, fingering the purple satin of his archiepiscopal glory, luxuriating in his triumph, wholly unable to see how the vast majority of his co-religionists live, on the long flat shore between need and comfort.

Cosmo Lang, well, well. I simply cannot understand his elevation to the See of Canterbury, and his pre-eminence over all of us. I am reminded of what F. E. Smith, the Earl of Birkenhead, as a young advocate, said to a judge one day, when he had inadvertently begun to instruct the jury on their duty. ‘What do you suppose, Mr Smith,’ said the judge, ‘I am doing here on this bench?’ ‘It is not for me, Your Honour,’ Smith replied, ‘to attempt to fathom the inscrutable workings of Providence.’ Quite so.

Half a mile down the Essex Road, I found a Herbert Street, but no number 140 or 142. Instead, a dismal terrace of small stucco houses petered out into a ghost estate of shuttered and condemned hovels. I had been directed to the wrong street. Tsk. I uttered a silent prayer for Emily, and set off again. Seven streets later, a friendly publican cashed a cheque for me and, on hearing my enquiry, said there was a Halberd Street not half a mile away. My satisfaction at the news was tempered by the wretched environs through which I passed on the way. The hovels of Herbert Street were like the Taj Mahal, compared to the sights which now met my eyes.

The cramped rows of two-storey brick houses – acres of them, winding into the distance like a hope fading into the future – were bad enough. So were the stinking courtyards I passed, pieces of wasteland randomly flooded with pools of stagnant water and, here and there, the backwash from the sewage. So were the horrid cellars I glimpsed from the pavement as I passed – dreadful, Miltonic catacombs, seen but peripherally, before one’s eye recoiled in horror from the upturned faces below, the dim lights in the gloom of noonday, the white limbs seen through the gratings, the grim sense that perhaps a dozen human souls must live and have their being down in these shabby dungeons. I nearly turned back in despair and headed for the cheerful daylight of Essex Road. But I prayed to St Jude, patron saint of lost causes, to steady my resolve.

The worst was soon upon me. Round the corner of Halberd Street, looming over it like a beetling grey cliff, a huge tenement building, six storeys high, reared up from the pavement. There was no front door in this cliff of masonry – or rather, there were several doors but none that would admit a caller from the street. Instead, the vile construction spread tentacular concrete legs, each entwined by a mass of spiral stairwell, over half an acre of land. Through pillars, archways and walkways, one could catch glimpses of the dwellers in this morale-sapping prison. I went in as far as I could bear, and found a dozen grubby children, no more than three or two years old, playing on the stone stairs, their jerseys streaked with what I hoped was mud, their ears assaulted with the hiss and whine of the gas jets that lit their greasy faces like Caravaggio beggars.

They had no sky to look out upon, no sun or moon to tell them it was day or night, no sight of grass or river, nothing of the outside world to meet their eye, only more concrete roofs and angles, walls and stairs, gas jets and hellish courtyards. Wherever they looked, blankness looked back at them.

I felt a surge of indignation, such as I have seldom experienced, that children should have to live like this. For thirty years, I have campaigned ceaselessly to find homes for homeless boys and girls. But when I look at the homes in which the poorest are expected now to live, I could cordially wish them an early death and a roomy grave. God forgive me, it is not a Christian thought. Give me strength, dear Jesus, as thou wert strong in the garden of Gethsemane when faced with the knowledge of thy imminent suffering and death, although at least thou didst not have to put up with the foul stench that came from the great metal bins ranged along the far-left wall. I took just one step in their direction, then froze to see a score of furry bodies writhing and tumbling over each other in a frenzy to consume some vestigial fragments of pie on a cardboard tray.

I found number 142 on the fourth floor, a vertiginous climb. The door opened the thinnest of cracks. ‘I am looking for Emily Murray,’ I told a single eye, a thin nose and a twisted mouth, through the crack. ‘I am her friend, Mr Davidson. They tell me she has moved here. It is imperative I speak with her.’

‘What’s she done?’ said the twisted mouth.

‘She has done nothing wrong,’ I said. ‘She is not in any trouble. I wish to speak to her and satisfy myself that she is well.’

‘Who’re you?’

‘I told you. I am a clergyman. Mr Davidson is my name. Miss Murray is a protégée of mine. I have been directing her steps and finding her work and it is vital –’

‘We don’t need no sermons here,’ said the face, expressionlessly. ‘It’s about the last thing we need.’

‘Will you let me see Miss Murray?’ I practically shouted. The face betrayed no emotion and I could see it was about to close the door for good. I changed tack. ‘Let me in, and I will pay you ten shillings as – as an entrance fee.’

A hand appeared at chest level, or at least some very thin fingers, cupped together in a beggar’s cringe. ‘Let’s have it then,’ said the face.

‘Five now, and five when I have had satisfaction,’ I said.

‘Satis—Well, why didn’t you say that’s what you was after?’ She opened the door and I was admitted into a room perhaps the size of Mrs Parker’s kitchen in Vauxhall. The only light was a dim electric bulb, poking down from the low ceiling. One bed and two mattresses on the floor took up most of the space, although a table and two chairs appeared, half hidden behind the figures. For in the room, apart from myself and the lady doorkeeper, there were five women.

Foolishly, seeing an older lady in their midst, I took them to be a mother and her many daughters, a family in straitened circumstances. But a second look quickly disabused me. The women were of many ages ranging from a barely pubertal thirteen to a prematurely lined two-and-thirty. Their clothes shone with the kind of greasy patina that comes of much hand-wiping and no washing, and a rank odour of overhung lamb and citric perfume pervaded the room. The youngest girl was round-faced and ringletted, and looked up expectantly from her vantage point on one of the mattresses, like a little girl playing with her dog in a Pears soap advertisement; but she was dolled up in skirts and high-heeled shoes, quite unsuitably. The eldest, whom I had momentarily taken for the mother, sat at the table, still as a Maltese madonna, a shawl around her shoulders. Her dark eyes reflected the light from a single half-curtained window, but she would not look in my direction. The thin-faced woman who had opened the door stepped back into the shadows, gripping my five shillings in a fist. On the bed, a dark-haired girl in a dirty green blouse and a Negress in a white lace garment that accentuated her powerful amplitude, lay side by side against a bolster talking with an absorption from which no stranger’s arrival could distract them.

‘What’s he doing here?’ said a voice. ‘What you let him in for?’ and the sixth woman came up beside me. She had a pronounced nose, but a handsome enough face with a generous mouth, which opened to reveal surprisingly fine teeth. Her hair appeared red but may have been dyed with henna in the gypsy style.