Mister God, This is Anna

‘What’s your name, Tich?’ I asked her.

‘Anna. What’s yours?’

‘Fynn,’ I said. ‘Where do you come from?’

I didn’t get an answer to this question, and that was the first and last time she didn’t answer a question – I gathered later the reason for this. It was because she was afraid that I might have taken her back.

‘When did you run away?’

‘Oh, three days ago, I think.’

We took the short way home by climbing over the ‘cut’ bridge and crossing over the railway yards. This was always my way in because we lived next to the railway and it was convenient, to say nothing of the fact that it meant I didn’t have to get Mum out of bed to open the front-door.

We got into the scullery by the back-door and then into the kitchen. I lit the gas. For the very first time I saw Anna. God only knows what I expected to see; certainly not what I did see. It wasn’t that she was dirty or that her frock was about ten sizes too big; it was the mixture of ginger-pop, Guinness and her paint-tin. She looked like a little savage, smears of various coloured paints all over her face and arms, the front of her frock a complete riot of colour. She looked so funny and so tiny, and her response to my bellow of laughter so reduced her to her cowering self again, that I hurriedly picked her up to the level of the mirror over the mantelpiece and made her look. Her delicious little giggle was like closing the door on November and stepping out into June. I can’t say that I looked much different that night. I too was covered in paint. ‘A right pair’, as Mum later said.

In the middle of all the giggles there was a thump, thump, thump on the wall. That was Mum’s signal. ‘That you? Your supper’s in the oven and don’t forget to turn the gas off.’

Instead of the usual, ‘OK, Mum, won’t be long’, this night I opened the door and yelled down the passage, ‘Mum, come and see what I’ve got.’

One thing about Mum, she was never fussed about anything, she took everything in her stride. Bossy, the cat I brought home one night, and Patch the dog, eighteen-year-old Carol, who stayed with us for two years, and Danny from Canada, who stayed about three years. Some people collect stamps or beer-mats; Mum collected waifs and strays, cats, dogs, frogs, people and, as she believed, a whole host of ‘little people’. Had she been confronted that night with a lion she’d have made the same comment – ‘The poor thing.’ One look when she came through the door was enough. ‘The poor thing,’ she cried, ‘what have they done to you?’ And then, as an afterthought, to me, ‘You look a right mess. Wash your face.’ With that, Mum flopped on to her knees and put her arms around Anna.

Being embraced by Mum was like tangling with a gorilla. Mum had arms like other people have legs. Mum had a unique anatomical structure which still puzzles me, for she had a fourteen-stone heart in a twelve-stone body. Mum was a real lady and wherever she may be now she’ll still be a lady.

A few minutes of ‘ooh’s’ and ‘aah’s’, then things began to get organized. Mum heaved herself upright, and with a passing shot to me to ‘get those wet clothes off the child’, flung open the kitchen door, yelling, ‘Stan, Carol, come here quick!’ Stan’s my younger brother by two years; Carol was one of the waifs or strays that came and went.

The kitchen and the scullery suddenly erupted – a bath appeared, kettles of water on gas-rings, towels, soap; the kitchen-range was filled with coal; and there was me trying to undo sundry hooks and eyes on Anna’s clothing. And suddenly there she was, sitting cross-legged on the table as raw as the day she was born. Stan said ‘Bastard!’ Carol said ‘Christ!’ Mum looked a bit grim. For a moment that little kitchen blazed with hatred for someone; that poor little body was bruised and sore. The four older people in the kitchen were ready to bash someone and for a time we were lost in our own anger. But Anna sat and grinned, a huge face-splitting grin. Like some beautiful sprite she sat there, and I believe for the very first time in her life she was entirely and completely happy.

The bath completed, the soup downed and Anna resplendent in Stan’s old shirt, we all sat around the kitchen table and took stock of the situation. Questions were asked but no answers were forthcoming. We eventually decided that the day had had enough questions asked. The answers could wait until tomorrow. While Mum went to work getting Anna’s clothes clean again, Stan and I made up a bed on an old black leather sofa next door to me.

I slept in the front room, a room stuffed full of aspidistras, a tall-boy with the precious pieces of cut glass displayed on the top, one bed, and sundry bits and pieces scattered around. My room was separated off from the next room by a large baize curtain hung on big wooden rings that slid back and forth with their clack, clack, clack. Behind the curtain was Anna’s sofa-bed. Outside my bedroom window was a street lamp and as the window was only covered by lace curtains the bedroom was always well lit. As I said, our house was right next to the railway, with trains passing all day and all night, but you got used to that. In fact after nineteen years the rumble and rush of the passing trains was more of a lullaby than a noise.

When the bed had been made and all the night preparation attended to, I went back into the kitchen again. There was the little imp enthroned in a cane chair, swaddled in blankets, drinking a cup of hot cocoa. Bossy was sitting on her lap giving a fair imitation of Houdini trying to wriggle out of a strait-jacket, and Patch at her feet, beating time with his tail on the floor. The hiss of the gas-lamp, the bright firelight, the little pools of water on the floor, all turned that little kitchen into a Christmas scene. The Welsh dresser, the shining pots and the black-leaded kitchen-range, with its brass fire-irons and guard, seemed to sparkle. In the midst of it all sat the little princess, clean and shining. This little thing had the most splendid, the most beautiful, copper-coloured hair imaginable, and a face to match. No painted cherub on some church ceiling was this child, but a smiling, giggling, squirming, real live child, her face alight with some inner radiance, her eyes like two blue searchlights.

Earlier in the evening I had said ‘Yes’ to her question, ‘You love me, don’t you?’ because I was unable to say ‘No’. Now I was glad that I had been unable to say ‘No’, for the answer was ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’ How could anyone fail to love this little thing?

Mum gave a bit of a grunt and her usual ‘Well, we had better get to bed or we won’t be worth anything tomorrow.’ And so I picked up Anna and took her along to her bed. The bedclothes were already pulled back and I put her down and made as if to tuck her up, but this was all wrong.

‘Ain’t you gonna say your prayers?’ she asked.

‘Well, yes,’ I replied, ‘when I get to bed.’

‘I want to say mine now with you,’ she said. So we both got down on our knees and she talked while I listened.

I’ve been to church many times, and heard many prayers, but none like this. I can’t remember much about her prayer except that it started off with ‘Dear Mister God, this is Anna talking’, and she went on in such a familiar way of talking to Mister God that I had the creepy feeling that if I dared look behind me he would be standing there. I remember her saying, ‘Thank you for letting Fynn love me’, and I remember being kissed goodnight, but how I got to bed I don’t know.

I lay in bed in some confusion wondering what had hit me. The trains rattled on their way, the fog swirled round the street lamp. It may have been an hour that I had lain there, possibly two, when I heard the clack, clack of the curtain rings and there she was standing at the end of my bed quite visible in the lamplight. For a minute or two I lay there thinking that she was just wanting to reassure herself, when she moved around to the head of my bed.

I said, ‘Hi, Tich!’

‘Can I get in?’ she said in a whisper – she didn’t wait for my ‘if you want to’, but slid in beside me and buried her head in my neck and cried silently, her tears warm and wet on my chest. There was nothing to say, nothing to do but to put my arm around her. I didn’t think I would sleep, but I did. I awoke to the sound of stifled giggles, Anna still beside me giggling like a fiend, and Carol, already dressed, standing there giggling, with a morning cup of tea in her hand. All this in less than twelve hours.

Chapter Two (#ulink_dd79cb04-82eb-5d59-bebb-70def16cd90a)

During the next few weeks we tried to find out by a bit of cunning questioning where Anna lived. The gentle approach, the sideways approach, the sneeky approach, all proved to be useless. It seemed quite possible that she had just dropped out of heaven. I was ready to believe this to be true, but Stan, being much more practical than me, didn’t agree at all. The only certain thing we knew was that she wasn’t going to no bleeding cop shop. By this time I was sure that I had initiated this idea. After all, you don’t find an orchid and then put it in the cellar. It wasn’t that any of us had anything against the cops, far from it. In those days cops were more like official friends, even if they did clip you round the ear with a glove full of dried peas if they caught you up to any funny stuff. No, as I said, you can’t lock a sunbeam in the dark. Besides, we all wanted her to stay.

By this time Anna was a firm favourite down our street. Whenever the kids played team-games like four sticks everyone wanted Anna on their side. She had a natural aptitude for all games: whip tops, skipping, fag cards. What she couldn’t do with a hoop and a skimmer wasn’t worth doing.

Our street, twenty houses big, was a regular United Nations; the only colours in kids we didn’t have were green ones and blue ones, we had nearly every other colour. Our street was a nice street. Nobody had any money, but in all the years I lived there, I can never remember anyone’s front-door being shut in the daytime, or, for that matter, for most of the night either. It was a nice street to live in and all the people were friendly, but after a few weeks of Anna the street and the people in it took on a buttercup glow.

Even our boss-eyed cat, Bossy, mellowed. Bossy was a fighting tabby with lace-edged ears who regarded all humans as inferiors, but under Anna’s influence Bossy started to stay at home more often and very soon treated Anna as an equal. I could stand by the back-door and yell myself silly for Bossy, but he wouldn’t budge for me, but for Anna, well, that was a different thing. One call and he simply materialized with an idiot grin on his face.

Bossy was about twelve pounds of fighting fury, and I’ve got the scars to prove it. The cat’s-meat man used to leave the meat under the knocker, wrapped up in newspaper. Bossy used to lurk in the dark passageway, or under the stairs, waiting for someone to reach up for the cat’s meat, at which moment he would launch himself like a fury, all teeth and claws, using whatever was available to get up to his meal. If a human leg or arm could be used to claw his way up to the meat, Bossy would use it. Anna tamed him in one day. She lectured him with an admonishing finger on the vice of gluttony and the virtues of patience and good manners. In the end Bossy could make his meal last for about five minutes, with Anna feeding him bit by bit, instead of the usual thirty seconds. As for Patch the dog, he sat for hours practising beating new rhythms with his tail.

In the back-garden was an odd collection of rabbits, pigeons, fan-tailed doves, frogs, and a couple of grass-snakes. The back-garden, or ‘The Yard’ as it was called, was for the East End a fairly sizeable place. A bit of grass and a few flowers and a large tree some forty feet high. All in all Anna had quite a lot to practise her magic on. But no one fell under her spell more completely or willingly than me. My work, which was in oils, was not more than five minutes’ walk away from home, so I was always home for dinner at about 12.30. Up to this time the answer to Mum’s question as to what time I would be home that night as I left for the afternoon’s stint had been ‘Some time before midnight’. Now things were different. I was seen off by Anna from the top of the street, kissed wetly, promising to be back about six in the evening. Knocking-off time usually meant a few pints in the pub on the way home and a few games of darts with Cliff and George, but not now. When the hooter went I was off home. I didn’t run exactly but walked very briskly.

That walk home was a pleasure; every step was one step nearer. The road I had to travel curved to the left in a gentle arc, and I had to walk just more than half the distance before the top of our turning came into sight, and there she was. Come rain or shine, snow or icy wind, Anna was always there, not once did she miss this meeting, except – but that comes later. I doubt if ever lovers met more joyously. When she saw me coming round the bend of the road she came to meet me.

Anna’s ability to polish any situation was truly extraordinary. She had some uncanny knack of doing the right thing at the right time to get the most out of an occasion. I’ve always thought that children ran towards those they loved, but not Anna. When she saw me she started to walk towards me, not too slowly, but not too quickly. My first sight of her was too far away to distinguish her features; she might have been any other child, but she wasn’t. Her beautiful copper hair stood out for miles, there was no mistaking her.

After her first few weeks with us she always wore a deep-green ribbon in her hair for this meeting. Looking back, I feel sure that the walk towards me was deliberate and calculated. She had grasped the meaning of these meetings and seen almost instantly just how much to dramatize them, how long to prolong them in order to wring out their total content. For me this minute or two of walk towards her had a rounded-off perfection; no more could be added to it, and nothing could be taken away without completely destroying it.

Whatever it was she projected across that intervening space was almost solid. Her bobbing hair, the twinkle in her eyes, that enormous and impudent grin, flicked like a high-voltage charge across the space that separated us. Sometimes she would, without any words, just touch my hand in greeting; sometimes the last few steps transformed her, she let everything go with one gigantic explosion, and flung herself at me. So many times she would stop just in front of me and hold out her closed hands. I learned rapidly what to expect on these occasions. It meant that she had found something that had moved her. We would stop and inspect whatever the day’s find was – perhaps a beetle, a caterpillar, or a stone. We would look silently, heads bowed over today’s treasure. Her eyes were large deep pools of questions. How? Why? What? I’d meet her gaze and nod my head; this was enough, she’d nod in reply.

The first time this happened, my heart seemed to come off its hook. I struggled to hold on. I wanted to put my arms around her to comfort her. Happily, I managed to do the right thing. I guess some passing angel nudged me at the right moment. Unhappiness is to be comforted, and so perhaps too is fear, but these particular moments with Anna were moments of pure and undiluted wonder. These were her own and very private moments which she chose to share with me, and I was honoured to share them with her. I could not comfort her, I would not have dared to trespass. All that I could do was to see as she saw, to be moved as she was moved. That kind of suffering you must bear alone. As she said so simply, ‘It’s for me and Mister God’, and there’s no answer to that.

The evening meal at home was more or less fixed. Mum, being the daughter of an Irish farmer, was given to making stews. A large black iron pot and an equally large black iron kettle were the two most used utensils in the kitchen. Often the only way one could distinguish the stew from the brew was that tea always came in large cups and stew was put on plates. Here the difference ended, for the brew often had as much solid matter in it as did the stew.

Mum was a great believer in the saying that ‘Nature grows cures for everything’. There wasn’t a weed, or a flower, or a leaf that wasn’t a specific cure for some ailment or other. Even the outside shed was pressed into use for growing cobwebs. Some people have sacred cows or sacred cats, Mum had sacred spiders. I never quite understood the reasoning concerning spiders’ webs, but all cuts and abrasions were plastered with spiders’ webs. If spiders’ webs were not available there were always fag papers under the clock in the kitchen. These were well licked and stuck over the cut. Our house was littered with bottles of juices, dried leaves and bunches of this, that and the other, hanging from the ceiling. All ailments were treated the same way – rub it, lick it, or if you can’t lick it, spit on it, or ‘Drink this, it’ll do you good’.

Whatever the value of these things, one thing was certain, nobody was ever ill. The only time the doctor entered our house was when something was suspected of being broken, and when Stan was born. No matter that the brew, or to give it its full title, ‘the darlin’ brew’, and the stew looked the same, they tasted wonderful and meals were certainly man-sized.

Mum and Anna shared many likes and dislikes; perhaps the simplest and the most beautiful sharing was their attitude towards Mister God. Most people I knew used God as an excuse for their failure. ‘He should have done this’, or ‘Why has God done this to me?’, but with Mum and Anna difficulties and adversities were merely occasions for doing something. Ugliness was the chance to make beautiful. Sadness was the chance to make glad. Mister God was always available to them. A stranger would have been excused for believing that Mister God lived with us, but then Mum and Anna believed he did. Very rarely did any conversation exclude Mister God in some way or other.

After the evening meal was finished and all the bits and pieces put away Anna and I would settle down to some activity, generally of her choosing. Fairy stories were dismissed as mere pretend stories; living was real and living was interesting and by and large fun. Reading the Bible wasn’t a great success. She tended to regard it as a primer, strictly for the infants. The message of the Bible was simple and any half-wit could grasp it in thirty minutes flat! Religion was for doing things, not for reading about doing things. Once you had got the message there wasn’t much point in going over and over the same old ground. Our local parson was taken aback when he asked her about God. The conversation went as follows:

‘Do you believe in God?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know what God is?’

‘Yes.’

‘What is God then?’

‘He’s God!’

‘Do you go to church?’