Key to the Door (2 page)

The living-room ceiling of the house next door collapsed at four o'clock one morning, fell with an earthquake thump into the room below, breaking an arm and cutting a face of those still dead upon the brass-bed raft of sleep. Dole-day came quickly, and Seaton, who didn't want his family to be buried under a ton of rubble, paid six bob down on an equally decrepit but not yet condemned house on Mount Street, after Abb Fowler had forged the Albion Yard rent book as paid up to date. That evening, when the keys were in his pocket, Seaton called Brian over from his floor-game of dominoes.

“See this, son? Do you know what it is? No? Well, it's a rent book.” He held it outstretched in his woodbined hand.

“Yes, dad.”

“Well, take it. Got it? Don't drop it, you silly bogger. Now carry it over to the fire and drop it on. An accident, like.”

Brian threw it from a yard away, saw it devoured. “Ah! There's a good lad as does what he's towd,” Seaton said. “Now I'll give you a cigarette-card.”

“You are a sod,” Vera put in. “You'll get copped one of these days.”

“Well,” Seaton smiled, made happy by his audacity, “they know where to find me.”

A moonlight-flit had been arranged for the darkest night of the month according to Old Moore. Seaton struck up an everlasting alliance with Abb Fowler, who also had a dole-stricken family and would push one of Seaton's handcarts if Seaton would do the same whenever he needed to flit. Through a certain handicap, Seaton could not reciprocate regarding the rent book, but Fowler was enough of a jaunty cap-wearing scholar to forge his own.

Two handcarts were loaded, each the platform for a skyscraper of furniture, with clothes-lines for cement. Fowler gave a grunt and a jerk, pushed his cart away from the kerb so that its wheels rolled forward on to the cobblestones and rattled smoothly up the street. Seaton told Vera to start pushing the pram, then got his own cart into motion with a similar grunt and jerk.

Wide awake Brian walked, pulled his mother to the middle of the road, eyes riveted to swaying bedroll and sofa tilted against rooftops and eavings, afraid to leave her side and go too close for fear the heap would move into a capsizing frenzy and fall on him no matter how far the frog leap took him clear.

“You'd think the Jerries was after us,” Abb shouted from up front, to which Seaton called out: “The rent man is, and that's worse,” turning them from refugees into a jovial convoy marching its belongings to the bonfires. He clung tighter to his mother's hand in the dark troughs between gas-light heads and eyes, in the valleys of fearful dragons skulking for a meal of cats and moonlight-flitting children. “I'll gi' you a game of draughts when we get there, Harold,” came Abb's next sally. “You're gonna lose it, then,” Seaton boasted. They crossed the main road to a maze of narrow lanes. “We'll gi' Slab Square a miss,” Abb decided.

Brian felt himself lifted by the waist and set on top of a barrow, wedged between an armchair and a mattress. Stuck in the crow's-nest of the moonlight flit, he saw blue peep-holes of stars when he dared open his eyes. He clung hard at the extra peril as a corner was turned, a public house exploding like a tiger, lights and noise around the door scratching at his closed eyelids. The rocking was gentle as they went up hill.

“You flitting, mate?” a voice called from the pavement.

“Ar.”

“Where from?”

“Albion Yard”—in a lower tone.

“What number? I could do wi' a place myself.”

“Yer welcome to it,” Seaton told him. “It's condemned, though. Ain't woth a light.”

Brian's mouth was jammed with a piece of bread passed up by Vera, and he woke with it still uneaten when he was shaken down by his father and told that here was his brand new house. He finished his night's sleep in a corner on two coats.

Next morning the world was new: it had even rained to cover up the tracks of the old. A neighbour's girl liked taking Brian out because it made her feel important. She called every day, cajoled him from a game on the pavement with Billy French by a handful of blackened dolly mixtures and a promise to take him somewhere he'd never been before. “I'll let you come to our 'ouse after for some bread and tea.”

“What's 'ospital?” he asked her one day. His mother said to dad that morning that Mrs. Mather had been carted off to the General after falling into a midnight gutter. It was a knock-out collapse, and the only thing retained—discovered by nurses on a pre-entry wash—was the white handle of a jug gripped in one hand like it was a silver purse.

Mavis didn't know, but: “I'll take you and show you one of these days.”

He grunted: “Tell me now what it is.”

“No,” she was adamant, “but I'll
tek
yer soon. So come on, or we'll be too late to see one.” A pair of streets joined hands at an acute angle and the arrowhead was a boarded-up sandtip. Heavy supports to timber ran between ground and house-side to stop the wonky edifice sprawling flat on its exposed wound. Running beneath the timber, Mavis sang about London Bridge falling down, while Brian with a glum face built sand castles and bored tunnels with clenched fists. Damp sand stayed easily in place and shape, but tunnels collapsed when buildings grew above. He worked a long time, cupping hands for towers, holding them rigid and face to face for walls, but the crash was inevitable, a rift through the outworks and a crater opening from underneath when the sand, drier below, was sucked downwards as though through one of his grandma's egg-timers. No tunnel could bear such weight. Around the tip's edge he found laths of wood, and reinforced the tunnel so that his castle stayed up: until Mavis's foot sank through it because he wouldn't come to another place. At which he kicked her on the leg and made it bleed.

Her dad was a hawker and they lived in two rooms of a cellar. From drinking tea at her table Brian had only to look up at the grating to see the wheelspokes of her father's barrow stationed by the kerb. She fed him toasted bread and apple while her mother read the paper in a rocking-chair. A pustule of white light flared and went out. Grey flakes of mantle fell from the gas-bracket on the wall and Brian ran with Mavis through the rain to buy a new one. “Mam said it cost tuppence,” she said when they came out of the shop, “but it on'y cost threeha'pence. I'll not tell her, and buy a ha'porth o' tuffeys. And I'll gi' you one if you don't say owt about it.”

On a hot dry day they came to a factory whose coal cellar was close to the pavement. Bending down, he saw a row of oven doors, from which flames bellowed when they were pulled open with long-handled rakes. Gusts of heat forced him back, and a shovel-armed man told him to scram. Brian stood by a hillock of black cobbles, watched the shovel singing them into the coal-hole. Mavis came close, led him forward to see the fires again. He was hypnotized by the round holes of flame.

“That's 'ospital,” she said into his ear, and the three dreadful syllables reached his brain, bringing back to him the drunken image of old shrill Mrs. Mather, who, so mam had told dad, had been shovelled in there like coal after they had taken the white jug handle from her clenched hand. Mavis pulled him quickly away.

The moonlight barrows moved once more, a pair of collapsible lifeboats swaying down Mount Street towards Chapel Bar, Abb Fowler in front and Vera pushing the pram behind. When a copper stopped Abb to ask where he thought he was going with all that stuff, he said he was changing houses at night because he didn't want to lose a day's work. Shuttlecocked Seaton and battledored Vera were gamed from one house to another, because Mount Street also was about to fall before the mangonels of a demolishing council. Need for a bus-station gave slum-dwellers the benefit of new housing estates, though Seaton was having none of this, clung to the town centre because its burrow was familiar and therefore comfortable, and because no long walk was involved to reach the labour exchange on Thursday to draw his dole. Sometimes he was able to get a job, and there would be bacon and tomatoes for dinner (Yorkshire pudding and meat on Sunday) but though he woodbound his muscles to show willing at the hardest labour, the work never lasted and he was back on the eternal life-saving dole, running up bills at food shops that he would never be able to pay, and playing Abb Fowler at draughts, swilling mugs of reboiled tea in move and counter-move until neither had a penny left to put in the gas for light.

In every staging-post of a house they found bugs, tiny oxblood buttons that hid within the interstices of bedticks, or secreted themselves below the saddles of their toes. Cockroaches also fought: black advance-guards of the demolition squads came out in silent, scuttling platoons over the kitchen floor after dark, often encountering lethal powders sprinkled by Vera, and those that succumbed would be swept up by Seaton before he mashed tea in the morning; or they would run into Seaton's equally fatal hammerblows and be washed up by his wife when she lifted the rug on the unequal battlefield next day.

The demolition of one condemned block took a novel turn: the Albion Yard area, deserted and cordoned off, was to be the target of bombs from buzzing two-winged aeroplanes, the sideshow of a military tattoo whose full glory lay on the city's outskirts. The bombing was to be on a Sunday afternoon, and Seaton hoisted Brian on to his stocky shoulders so that he felt one with the trams that swayed like pleasure-ships before the council house, ferrying crowds to the bombing; he rocked on his father's shoulders, gripping the neck of a dad he hated when he did or said something to make his mam cry. But the grim and miserable emotion was kept to the ground as dad swung him up high, an action that split his hate in two upon such kindness. The first intimation of a good deed to him by dad only brought back his mam's agonized cries as the blood streamed from her face, but his turning head beheld his mother at this moment happy and saying he would be taken to see the bombing if he was a good lad, passing his father a packet of fags from the mantelpiece for a smoke in case they had to wait long before the aircraft played Punch and Judy with the enclave of slums in which they used to live.

Seaton's body swung as he walked and Brian was often in danger of falling overboard, pitching head first from his lifeboat-dad into the boiling sea of other heads around. Peril came at the quick switch into an unexpected short-cut, and his flailing arms, finding nothing closer, grabbed the black tufts of dad's short, strong hair. When dad cried out he'd get a pasting if he didn't stop that bleddy lark, Brian's instinct was to go forward and bind himself on to dad's bull neck, a tightened grip that brought forth a half-throttled exclamation from dad below saying that he could bloody-well walk if that was going to be his game; at which a shirt-sleeved tentacle reached up and tried to lift him outwards; but Brian reacted to the danger of his imminent slingdown by clinging tighter in every way so that the well-muscled arm dragged at him in vain. “Come on, my lad, let's have you down.” And again: “Are you goin' ter get down or aren't you?”

“I'll fall”—his arms bare and the neck slippy with sweat.

“No, you won't.”

“I will, dad, honest.” They were near the lassoed bomb-target, bustled to the kerb by those who wanted to get near the rope, maybe feel the actual blast and pick up a fallen brick for a souvenir. Mounted policemen pushed back those who infiltrated the brick-strewn neutral ground, and Brian, forgetting to struggle, saw white foam around a horse's mouth. He asked dad if it were soap.

“Yes,” Seaton told him. Brian bent his head and enquired of the nearest ear: “What do they give it soap for?”

“So's it'll bite anybody who tries to get past the coppers.”

“Why does anybody want to get past the coppers?” he whispered.

“Because they want to see the bombs closer.”

“But they'll get blown up.”

“'Appen they want to. Now come down for a bit, my owd duck, because my showders is aching.”

“Not yet, our dad. Let me stay up some more.”

“No, come down now, then you can go up again when the bombs start dropping.”

“But I want to see the horses bite somebody first.”

“They won't bite anybody today,” Seaton said. So down he came, jammed among the shoes and trousers of a surging jungle, evading a tiger boot or a lion fist, a random matchstick or hot fagend. Three biplanes dipped their wings from the Trent direction. Brian climbed up to his dad's shoulders to spot from his fickle control-tower, his hand an unnecessary eyeshade because the sun was behind a snow-mountain cloud silhouetting the yellow planes.

They swung back, flying low in silence, like gliders, because of noise from the mass of people. “They aren't going very fast, dad,” he complained. “They're slower than motorcars.”

“That's because they're high up, kid,” someone told him.

“They'll come lower soon,” dad said.

“Will they crash?” Brian asked. “I've never seen an aeroplane crash.”

“You will one day,” somebody laughed.

Each plane purred loudly along the rooftops, like a cat at first, then growling like a dog when you try to take its bone away, finally as if a roadmender's drill were going straight to the heart, so that he felt pinned to the ground. Two black specks, then two more, slid from the rounded belly of each. The gloved wheels beneath seemed to have been put down especially to catch them, but the dots fell through and disappeared into the group of ruined houses.

“Now for it,” somebody announced, and an enormous cracking sound, a million twig-power went six times into the sky—followed by the muffled noise of collapsing walls somewhere in the broken and derelict maze.

A policeman's horse reared up, tried to climb an invisible stairway leading from the explosions, then saw sense and merely stood nodding its head and foaming. A bleak scream came from some woman at the back of the crowd and Brian saw her led away by men in black and white uniforms. “Is she frightened, dad?”