The Wooden Shepherdess (23 page)

The court was lit by a single gaslamp over the entry. Just as she closed the outside door the flickering light came on, the lamp-lighter lowered his rod and shuffled away on his round. But Godsell Street was already ablaze with light from the lighted windows of shops and pubs; and Broadgate was even brighter. Here there were dazzling plateglass windows filled with Christmas fare: with holly, and gentlemen's elegant double-breasted suits: with ivy and tinsel, and ladies' dresses with ostrich-feather stoles: or with yew and holly and paper-chains garlanding oak-colored Jacobean suites, the tables set with dozens of festal glasses and china and knives and forks. In short, there was food and gifts and decorations galore; and in spite of the weather and slush underfoot the pavements were packed. But most of the crowd only stood and gaped, or made up with joking and chaffing each other for having no money to spend any more than Nellie herself.

In Smi'ford Street the crowd poured back and forth to-and-from the shouting hucksters and naphtha flares of the market stalls beyond, in a throng so dense that the trams despairingly clanged their bells and slowed to a snail's-pace—shouldering people out of their way like a steamer shouldering waves. In that market, food that wouldn't keep over the holidays sold tonight for next-to-nothing; but Nellie hadn't the courage to face those boisterous crowds.... From the narrow alley of Ironmonger Row came the smell of frying at Fishy Moore's, but the queue reached out to the Bull Ring.... So Nellie turned into darker and even narrower streets where the crowd was a little less dense, though even here she steered well clear of the doors of the raucous pubs not to risk colliding with someone propelled from within.

Here too there were tempting smells: the frying of faggots and fish, and along the curb potatoes were baking and chestnuts roasting on buckets of glowing coke. But Nellie contented herself in the end with a penn'orth of groats for Syl, a paper of chips and a screw of tea for herself. Since tomorrow was Christmas Day, she did half think of joining a queue for two-penn'orth of bacon-ends; but the fifteen bob in her purse had to last for at least another couple of weeks. Already she owed the doctor five bob, and he still had to keep an eye on the baby's infected ears.

The chips were nearly all gone by the time that Nellie got home. The house was dark; but she paused on the doorstep, and strained her ears for the click of needles (the invalid earned her living by knitting, yet never used lamps being much too afraid of a fire). But silence, tonight.... So she must be asleep—thank God, for her tongue only ceased with her needles and Nellie was longing for bed!

She tiptoed round the bed to her stairs, and found that someone had left a jam-jar on one of them. Striking a match, she saw it contained a tiny portion of tongue with a sprig of holly on top; and she burst into tears.

For Nellie's new neighbors were like that, in Slaughter-house Yard. The butcher pitched tongues and trotters and hocks in the brine-tub just inside his slaughterhouse door: somebody called him away by ringing his shop-bell, somebody else kept watch. They never took much, for fear Old Skinflint found out—which made even less when you came to share it all round.

Coventry's Christmas morning, and everyone woken by bells who hadn't been woken already by children....

The bed-ridden woman downstairs told Nellie that Norah it was who'd reminded the cutters-up of the newcomer (Norah, the ten-year-old red-head who more or less ruled the Yard). Norah had downright insisted the widow be given a portion too, since fair is fair—and besides, her baby was ill. Then Norah had brought Nellie's round last night with the dropsical woman's own portion, while Nellie was out; and stuffing the mouth of the jar with a sprig of Christmas holly had also been Norah's idea, to save it from cats.

Norah was always the one with ideas.... Didn't Nellie agree that at Christmas whoever goes short little children
got
to get toys? But toys cost money; and few of their Dads just now had regular jobs, which had left it up to their older brothers and sisters somehow to raise the money themselves. None of those scatter-wit boys could think of anything better than barkin' (carols); and even the girls thought only of buying those twopenny bundles of snippings the dressmakers sold, to make into clothes for dolls. But Norah'd had teams out roaming the country for holly, and other teams raiding the graves for withered floral crosses and wreaths: then even the youngest had helped strip the frames, and Norah's father (who'd used to work for a florist's) had shown the bigger ones how to wire on the holly and turn out proper professional Christmas crosses and wreaths they could sell to the shops.

This morning from end to end of the Yard there'd be plenty of bleeding thumbs, but never an empty stocking....

The speaker was propped on an old brass bed that was cock-eyed because of a broken castor, with both her balloons in their hangar (the blankets were raised on a cage). She wore her sparse gray locks in permanent curlers to keep them away from her bloodshot eyes, for fear these missed some happening outside her window. The drooling lips had still got plenty to say about Norah—the duckie who carried her weekly parcel of knitting round to the pawnshop and did her shopping, the little sweetheart who emptied her slops (but none too often, to judge by the smell).

The needles clicked in time with the tongue, and Nellie for once was willing to listen: for Syl had screamed all night and now he was sleeping.

Although she was undisputed leader of all twenty-seven walking kids who belonged in the court, it was strange (the Balloon Woman said) that even Norah couldn't do nothing with Brian—the poor little scrannel! For Brian came from elsewhere, in spite of he spent all day in our Yard if he could (and if somebody left a latrine unlocked might doss on the seat all night), since he loved dumb beasts so much he could never tear himself away from the slaughterhouse....

Brian must have a home and family somewhere; and Nellie asked where he came from. But nobody knew: he had just appeared in the Yard as if from thin air, that day when a mad bull chased the butcher up into the rafters. There in the roof was the roosting butcher yelling for help; and when every-one ran, there on the ground was this unknown six-year-old dragging a bucket of water across to the bull—and standing stroking its nose while it drank. Brian had haunted that gloomy shed ever since, loving the beasts and giving the butcher what help a little boy could with the killing and flaying and carving the carcasses.

Caked as he always was in blood and dung (for no power on earth could induce him to wash), you'd hardly have been surprised if the other children had shunned him—especially Norah, who made such a thing about cleanliness! Watching the Yard from your window however you saw it was just the other way round: it was Brian himself who wouldn't have any truck with the others. He never ventured far from the slaughterhouse door, and bolted inside it if Norah so much as looked at him....

Nellie had noticed this too: it was almost as if that Temple of Death with its blood and darkness and stink was the only place in the world where a boy felt safe.... But the sight of that lone little ghoul caressing the beasts he meant to help kill fair gave Nellie the creeps: thank heavens at least on
Christmas
morning he couldn't be there, with the whole crib empty and closed—neither oxen, nor child.

Now Nellie couldn't escape if she would, for she'd lent her hands for winding a new skein of wool and the winder was taking her time. But the latter had turned from the subject of Norah and Brian to talk about Norah and Rita's Dad....

For Rita Maxwell's Dad was one of the Yard's (and there-fore of Norah's) knottiest problems: feeding his whippets on raw eggs whipped up with port—as of course he had to, to win—apparently left him unable to feed the Maxwell family too. Even the weeks when he won he never told anyone just how much—and mostly wouldn't come home till the money was gone.

The pawnshop of course was the Poor Man's Bank, where chattels acquired in prosperous times could support their owners when times grew worse (till when, those chairs could be sat on and tables be eaten off: something you couldn't have done with a savings-account). You'd expect the Maxwells in-and-out of the pawnshop? But no, the Balloon-woman said—and added that Norah surprisingly sided with Rita's Mum, when Mum chose hunger for all of them rather than part with her overstuffed sofa or Rita's christening-mug. For more money passed through the old bugger's pockets, urged Norah, than anyone else's down Yard: he got to be brought to his senses, and merely putting that off by stripping their home to the bare walls and floors would be rotten weak-minded....

Now things had come to a head. Last Saturday everyone knew the old bugger had won: yet he'd once again left them with not one penny-piece in the house when he vanished. With Christmas coming and all, Rita'd run sobbing to Norah to try and persuade her Mum just this once.... But Norah'd a better idea, and she told her friend: “You leave that sofa and mug where they are! What you and your Mum got to do is to rub his nose in it proper by pledging his Sunday suit.”

Finally Norah had won; the suit had been pawned, and now the whole Yard was agog because last night late the old bugger come home after all....

A sudden wail from above told Nellie the baby had woken. She dropped the rest of the skein on the bed and slipped from the room; but she'd barely got back upstairs when a row broke out in the Maxwells' house so prodigious it brought the whole Yard to their windows. Nellie had just reached hers when the Maxwells' door flew open and out shot Rita, narrowly missed by a flying boot as she fled into Norah's house in floods of tears....

In no time the story was all round the Yard. This morning that unpredictable Dad had got out of bed in a proper Christmassy mood; and after his bacon-and-eggs in a kitchen filled with the smell of that prime bit of beef in the oven, “Dad send me upstairs ...” gulps Rita, still barely able to speak. And then it comes out with a rush: “I'm to look in his Sunday suit and fetch him a Five Pound Note for me Mum, as a Present!”

The way of a leader is hard. Once the news got around, those Christmas stockings were all forgotten and Norah's name in the Yard was mud. She ought to have guessed Our Rita was such a gormless sap she'd never have gone through the pockets.

But back to Christmas at Mellton. For Polly, this turned out a heavenly Christmas after all: she had woken at five with her shyness all gone in the night so had crept into bed with Augustine to share her stocking, and found herself loving the new Augustine as much as the old one. But Gilbert could hardly be finding it heavenly—Gilbert, that little Jack Horner gloomily chewing his thumbful of Dead Sea fruit.

For Gilbert had pinned all his Liberal hopes on the coming election; and then when it came it had ended in three-out-of-four of last time's Liberal seats in Parliament lost. With Asquith their leader himself gone down to a Labour opponent at Paisley, and Gilbert's own “safe” Liberal seat only saved by thirty-two votes, a fat lot of hope he had now of a place on the Treasury Bench in any foreseeable Liberal ministry!

How had this disaster occurred? This Christmas morning he started racking his brains as soon as he woke. Since we had put Labour in office and only we could eject them, we'd held the Joker—the choice of a Dissolution issue entirely to suit ourselves; and what better choice—what rottener wicket for Labour to bat on and better for Liberal bowlers—than choosing MacDonald's Russian Loan, which was stealing the Tories' anti-Bolshevik thunder as well? We had only to ram home the criminal folly of putting in Russian pockets the gold
we
would put in the pocket of Britain's own workless at home, and.... Why, even without that last-minute-kick-in-the-crutch of the Red Letter Scare this should have seen Labour down for the count, and the Liberal Cause triumphant.

Instead we were now outnumbered three to one even by Labour—and
ten
to one by the Tories.... For Fate had snatched our Joker out of our hands, on its very way to the table: that was the dire effect of Labour's premature fall in the tea-cup storm over Communist Campbell's arrest and release.... The premature Dissolution this caused had meant that the crucial Russian Debate never even took place, and had left us lugging the Loan stone-cold to the hustings instead of fiery-hot from the parliamentary anvil.

As Gilbert crept out of bed he couldn't help harking back to MacDonald's strangely asinine moves throughout the whole Campbell Affair: first charging the man with incitement to mutiny, then withdrawing the charge in a way which stank to high heaven and really had left the Tories no choice but proposing a vote of No Confidence.... But then a new idea came to Gilbert, so bizarre it made him cut himself shaving:
if Campbell hadn't existed, would Ramsay have had to invent him?
In short, had all this just been a diabolical trick to duck the Russian Debate? To cheat the gallows by cutting his own throat himself the night before in the death-cell, by means of that Censure Motion the Tories had never intended to press? Then.... Why, even that typical Ramsayish huff which had forced a last-minute vote.... Then even that huff was a fake.

Dabbing his cheek with styptic, Gilbert hurried to get to breakfast before the young men arrived: for he wanted to try out his novel idea of Ramsay-the-Machiavel on Mary in private, because if true (so he pointed out as he cracked his egg) it unmasked a wholly unethical cowardly cunning which must put Ramsay for ever beyond the pale in the eyes of a man of principle. Mary shrugged her shoulders. She had certainly thought the House's proceedings on Campbell Night a trifle Alice-in-Wonderland, even by Mother-of-Parliaments standards—and that's saying something! For in with the “Ayes” for the Vote of Censure had trooped the Government's own supporters, while both other Parties in panic revoked and had voted solid against it—indeed they'd have foiled the Government's suicide-bid by sheer weight of numbers, had Simon's amendment not given the death-wish a second chance.... But
had
the whole Campbell Affair, she wondered, really been cooked up by Ramsay right from the start as Gilbert supposed? Probably Ramsay himself didn't know the answer, because (as Jeremy said so often they called it “Jeremy's Law”) the “Idealist Statesman's essential gift is a righteous right hand blissfully unaware what his crooked subliminal left is up to.” In short, political life is as full of unconscious meanings and motivations as poetry....