The North of England Home Service (16 page)

In their stately way, like royalty themselves in these
surroundings
, they cruised past war-scarred streets and blighted buildings, Mr Solomons taking the occasional nip from a silver flask which Jackie knew contained whisky combined with milk for his ulcer problem (‘I need a stiff milk!’ was one of the boss’s jokes
guaranteed
to get his regular court yokking and laughing), and Kid Lewis would take a more animated slug from his own smooth silver flask shaped to curve with his upper body and not conflict with the drape line of his jacket. And watching them by their reflections – Mr Solomons so brainy intelligent and well fed even through all these war-time restrictions; the Kid, who never wore shoes until he was ten years old and seldom had enough to eat and whose face was still all hollows and chalk-like and whose
ribs when he was stripped still stood out like dulcimer keys – watching them then Jackie was moved to see these two products of the Brick Lane Buildings who had taken such steps up and wore the clothes and rode in the purring car that showed the world by what increments they had bettered themselves. It made Jackie, now a denizen of the Buildings himself, fasten on with hope to the coming prospect of his own future and reflect on the small rewards he had staggered home to his father with as an amateur boxer – glassware, canteens of cutlery, and so on; on one occasion a huge armful of leather-bound volumes of the poets, from Milton to Masefield – and were still there gathering dust in his old house in the empty Fens now as far as he knew.

Mr Solomons only forty-eight hours earlier had disembarked from his latest trip Stateside on the
Queen
Mary
where (Jackie had half heard him saying just now to Kid Lewis) the top stateroom cabins had been occupied – in addition to himself and Gus
Lesnevich
, who he had inveigled to come and make sweet turnstile music for him by putting his title on the line against the people’s champion Freddie Mills at Harringay Arena – the onboard VIPs had included the newspapering legend, Lord Beaverbrook; the Liverpool football team on their way home from a profitable tour of the United States and Canada, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who the boss had missed being given an introduction to by that much thanks to the gawping useless parties at the next table. Kid Lewis, no stranger to the upper-tier sun decks of the Atlantic routes, only answered by gruffly mumbling that he had noticed VIPs was ‘spiv’ spelt backwards.

After toiling up a hill of dull suburban villas, Jackie observed the sky open up before them as if they would soon be
approaching
the ocean. When they crested the hill he saw that they had come to a wide flat public common which the road took off around in both directions, it was just a case of which. The driver slid the partition along a few inches and enquired of Mr
Solomons if he had a preference or knew his way in these
far-flung
parts. But the boss said nothing, just handed a
ragged-edged
but (from its unyellowed and quite crisp condition) recent newspaper clipping to Jackie with the instruction of
communicating
the relevant information contained within it to the driver. ‘If you’ve brought your reading glasses, my old chum-china.’

The piece of newspaper unfolded three or four times to reveal a lot of writing which was attached to a picture of about the same size. The picture showed a gathering of coloured persons in numbers that Jackie had never before seen photographed together. In the background was a ship and in the foreground was the dock at Tilbury with dressed-for-best West Indian men and women (although they were mostly men) crowding every available inch of every surface. The people in the picture seemed both shy and bemused by all the fuss their arrival seemed to be causing. The men wore pork-pie hats and roomy, peg-bottom suits and carried cardboard suitcases secured with canvas belts and lengths of raw twine. The focus of the picture was a handsome, lighter-skinned man with an oriental cast and dark almond-shaped eyes who the caption identified as ‘James Li, 26’. Li was holding aloft a
two-handled
silver cup which was the boxing trophy he had evidently won onboard,
en
route
from Jamaica to England.

The headline above the article open in Jackie’s hands said: ‘
HAPPY TO BE HERE! FORMER TROOP SHIP DOCKS AT TILBURY WITH
FIRST WAVE OF 5OO IMMIGRANTS FROM CARIBBEAN. COLONIAL
OFFICE UNPREPARED
’. Certain key sections had been underlined or circled. In addition to Li’s name and nationality (half West Indian and half Chinese), and his status as flyweight champion of Guyana, these included: ‘Clapham Common Deep Shelter’ and ‘Clapham South Station’, which is where, Jackie saw from a sign, they had now adventitiously arrived.

The common extended away from them with trees on both sides. Across the street from where they parked was a
tumble-down
encampment of khaki ex-army tents. There was a line of trestle tables with two monster tea-urns squatting in the
overhead
sun. Groups of coloured men were lounging in the shade of the tents and gathered under trees. A thin horse-hair mattress had been thrown over a branch of a tree and a group of
hard-muscled
men were taking it in turns to give it a pounding with their fists. Card games and games of dominoes were in progress and much guarded, languorous watching. This was the advance guard, ‘the 500 Sons of Empire’ as the
Daily
Mirror
had hailed them, come to that distant place where life was wider, bigger, more significant; the London whose streets from Trenchtown and Kingston and Marine Square in Port-of-Spain in Trinidad had seemed gleaming and beckoning – the site of creation and riches and power in the modern world. They had been there four days and had been allocated a former air-raid shelter as a place of emergency accommodation and they were bored.

There was a style among the men for trousers worn very high up in the waist with the ends of skinny belts hanging down. A number of them had Vaseline in their hair. A group resplendently got up in broad-brimmed hats and suits of unlikely purples and pinks was gathered around a man who was leaning against a tree playing a guitar. ‘Mr Lord Kitchener’, as he would eventually introduce himself, was strumming and singing in the middle of a softly humming circle.

‘Give us some bad song now, man.’

‘Some little evil tune, Lord Kitchener.’

And in a flamboyantly distorted British calypsonian accent Lord Kitchener sang as if he was truly making it up there and then:

Amid the cackles, the singer disengaged himself from the group and extended a large hand to Mr Solomons. ‘I embrace the rotundity of conventionality and wish you a good day.’ This went down well and even Kid Lewis managed a bleak smile. ‘That must be one of the most belligerent neckties ever seen in London‚’ Jolly Jack kidded the Jamaican, who was tall and tightly built into his suit. ‘I see’s you a smart fellow, not rich in ignorance.’ They proceeded in this manner for another few minutes and then Mr Solomons got Jackie to show the
newspaper
picture of the boxer James Li who had brought them to this, to them, very unknown part of town. ‘Probbly standin’ on him this minute now‚’ Mr Lord Kitchener said, ‘deep down where I don’t go. No no no no, your honour. Shelter down there way too hairy-scary for me. I rest my case up here where I’m sure I’m only breathing my own air.’

Clapham Deep Shelter was in the bowels of the earth. It was half a mile down and some of the new immigrants were wary about getting in the lift. The entrance to the shelter was in a
circular
concrete structure situated several yards on to the Common. And Mr Solomons had started walking in that direction flanked by Kid Lewis and Jackie when the calypsonian called him back.

Every time he crossed the Atlantic, Mr Solomons went to great pains to avail himself of the latest American cure, the absolute end-all, for ulcers. He carried the pills in a small tortoiseshell box engraved with his initials and a pendant boxing-glove motif. He kept the box in the ticket pocket of his jacket. And it was Mr Solomons’ precious pill box that Mr Lord Kitchener was offering back to him now. ‘
Ferdganef
!
’ Jack said, wagging a finger and sipping on his cigar and laughing, somehow all of this at once. ‘See if you can work that into one of your how’s-yer-fathers. It’s Yiddish for you light-fingered little son of a son of a howitzer. Like the style, pal. Like it a lot. Be good. An’ remember: if you can’t be good, be careful.’

‘Please to make your acquaintance‚’ this long-streak Jamaican said.

When they found Jimmy Li he was stretched out on his bunk, shaving the hairs off his chest with a safety razor. The shelter was a tunnel which had been bored parallel to, but deeper than, the tracks that carried the Northern Line underground trains. The walls were curved and noise from the trains reverberated through them thickly every few minutes. The bunks were painted metal and stacked in tiers and there was a sense of packed earth pressing in all around like water packing a submarine. ‘Jack Solomons!’ Jimmy Li sat up, his feet dangling in mid-air. ‘Mr Solomons.’ He had grown the traces of a goatee beard but he was still recognizably the good-looking man in the newspaper picture. ‘And Mister you got to be pure joking me I don’t believe this do not believe this Kid Lewis. I’ve seen nearly all your fights with Jack Britton on the newsreels. “The most colourful clouter ever seen.” Oh man. Man-oh-man.’

Part of Jimmy Li’s purpose in paying the
£
2810
S
for his passage to London had been to put himself on the powerful promoter’s radar. But now, through the lucky break of a picture in the papers – the power of the press – Mr Solomons had come looking for him.

‘Oh.’ Mr Solomons had forgotten Jackie. ‘This is Jackie Mabe. Nipper. Ring name “Nipper”. The next flyweight champion of the British Isles.’ It embarrassed Jackie to hear himself being spoken of in this way by the silken-tongued, snake-oil salesman Mr Solomons, reputed to be able to sell ice to the Eskimos, moheek to the Mohicans and so on and so forth if you believed the papers. Jackie’s ears burned red as he shook the hand of Jimmy Li.

‘Jackie, man.’

‘Welcome to England.’

They took Jimmy to a gym in Brixton to see if he lived up to his advance billing, and on the way he told them his family had had to sell three cows to pay for his trip over, about how strange he
had been finding it in London to see daylight at ten o’clock at night, and about how he loved walking in the parks in the evening sunlight. Above all he talked about his new-found taste for fish and chips. ‘
Gute
ta
’
am
‚’ Jackie nodded. ‘Tasting good.’

At the gym, Jackie and Jimmy stripped off and put on the 16-ounce ‘pillows’ and sparred a few rounds under the critical eye of Kid Lewis, who was Mr Solomons’ once-and-for-all arbiter in these matters. ‘I am the head man around the dump‚’ Jack liked to say, ‘but one word from me, and the Kid does as he likes.’ They stood toe to toe and traded punches, Jimmy Li at one point hanging a beautiful right-hander on Jackie’s chin, and old stone-face showed no reaction. But when in the car afterwards Mr Solomons said he would like, without plastering him with promises, to sign Jimmy on a manager’s contract, Jimmy knew that he must have impressed.

What Jimmy Li hadn’t yet fully discovered was that in London, as in the rest of the country at that time, a colour bar was in operation. Something else he didn’t know was that Jolly Jack had spotted a business opportunity in the same place that had given hundreds of pub comedians the easy punchline ‘No dogs, no Irish, no Coloureds’. Jews vs. non-Jews had been big box office in the Mosleyite thirties, when a number of East End boxers worked as bodyguards for the British fascist leader. And now, in these hangover years after the war, with a different kind of racial tension brewing, Jolly Jack had intuited that there was a market for Black vs. White promotions. Many of the best black boxers had gone home to the Caribbean on assisted passages after
demobilization
. Which is why, when he had spotted Jimmy Li’s picture in the paper, he had been quick to pounce. He had left a business card with his good new friend Lord Kitchener at Clapham Deep Shelter and was anticipating many calls to the office.

Jimmy stayed in the car and sat tight all the way into the West End with them. And that night, for the first time ever, Jackie joined the ‘jimmers’, which was the name they gave the men who
went with their flasks and their sandwiches and sat through several performances of
Revudeville
at the Windmill Theatre, clambering forward over the rows in front as the seats closest to the footlights became empty.

Each ‘edition’, as Miss Van Damm, a gym regular and the rally racing-driver in charge of the Windmill operation called them, started with a lively song and ended with the cancan. In between were the balancing acts and the comedians and the conjurers and – all any jimmer ever wanted to see – the living, light-washed flesh of the girls in their historical tableaux and classically inspired immobile
poses
plastiques.

Kid Lewis (who eventually pulled the very few strings that needed pulling to gain Jackie and Jimmy admittance) was scathing that two such fit young men in their prime would want to join the old peepers and under-their-hat masturbators with their Spam sandwiches in their pockets and not a Chinaman’s chance of ever coming within sniffing distance of one of those half-brass Windmill girls who’d all been promised by the old bird that taught them tap dancing since they were knee high to a grasshopper that they were going to be the next Vivien Leigh. ‘Them mugs in there have probably never seen a woman undressed. Probably never even seen their old lady without her flannelette on. What is it, you’re so
shmegegge
–
so
brenda
–
you think it’s just to piss through?’