England's Lane

by Joseph Connolly

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Jim and Milly. Stan and Jane. Jonathan and Fiona. Winter, 1959. Three married couples: each living in England's Lane, each with an only child, and each attending to family, and their livelihoods - the ironmonger, the sweetshop and the butcher. Each of them hiding their lies, disguising sin, and coping in the only way they know how.

Release date: August 30, 2012

Publisher: RiverRun

Print pages: 496

Sample

I am a capable woman. And no, I don’t really believe that it’s vain of me to say so. Coping, when your own life and that of everyone around you is daily in danger, is really not so very terribly admirable. I am a capable woman, yes – but so very many of us had to be, during the long dark days of the war. We had to have strength. Rather surprisingly, it grew within you – the mind and body, I think, they come to sense its necessity. I drew upon it very largely in order to try to overcome the loss of my sister, who was dearer to me then than anyone on earth. This, though, all of this, it came a few years after. At a time when I foolishly believed that death and dying were over and done with. And I needed even more strength then, and of quite a different sort, to deal with the strangeness that emerged from her terrible passing – so very unexpected was this bright new love that ripened and burst inside of me (so shocking, and just unstoppably) for Paul, the little boy, hardly more than one year old, whom she left behind her. The pain from loving him, from knowing now that to me he is just quite utterly everything there is in the world, can simply stop my throat, and yet somehow it is charged with such sweetness. The agony of anxiety for his every moment fills me with warmth, a wash of warmth in which I nearly luxuriate, so happy am I to have it: and then I feel guilt for that.

Yes: guilt for that – and I suppose… no, not suppose, I don’t suppose it, of course I really do know why. Because I carried within me the knowledge that never would I have that, a child, and then suddenly one came to me, so how could I ever deserve it? Eunice, my sister, he was lost to her, and so was her very own life. That must have been the worst of her dying – she had had time to think of it, I know. That must have been the worst of her dying – knowing that soon she must leave him. And now he’s mine. So yes: guilt for that.

To me, the war itself was not really so appalling as afterwards – everything that happened, all that I felt, when finally it was over. I had married Jim in 1940 when he was home from leave – one day he had been given, just a one-day pass – and I am being neither flippant nor wilful, please do believe me, when I tell you that I really can’t remember exactly why I did that. The reasoning behind it. Not love. No – not love. Well obviously no, not that. A few of us, quite a few of the girls who were working in munitions, were happily doing it. Sounds so terribly silly now – a gang of young women who barely even knew one another debating and then deciding between themselves that on the whole they might as well go ahead and do it: get married. There never seemed to be a shortage of eligible young men, most of them soldiers. One girl, Una – she married a boy she had only just met. At a dance. Eighteen, the two of them were. And then the following weekend they had gone to the pictures. Next thing we heard, she was engaged. She had a Woolworth’s ring on her finger which she waggled in our faces while hitching up her skirt and parading up and down the canteen as if she were, oh… I don’t know – as if she were a Norman Hartnell model at a West End fashion show, or something. We did laugh. They married the very same week, and then the boy – can’t remember his name – was stationed in Africa, Egypt it might have been, and that, I am afraid, is the very last she heard of him. A more common story than you’d like to think. She didn’t really seem to be too put out. Her main concern appeared to be whether still she would pass as virginal to the next young man who came along. It makes her sound so terribly awful, doesn’t it? But she wasn’t. It was just how people were. How they came to see things. Nowadays… what is it…? Fifteen, eighteen years later, it all just seems so utterly unthinkable. But then – well, life was hanging on a thread, you see. This is what you have to remember. So fine a thread. Everyone – and particularly the young and untried – was terribly aware of that.

Jim, well… I had known him for a little bit. Not too long. Later, he used to say to me ‘Do you remember? Ay? Do you? Ay? That evening we met, Mill? That were an evening, ay?’ Yes, I’d say – course I do, Jim. But I didn’t. Had no recollection of it at all, and normally I’m very good about that sort of thing. Observant. Very retentive. But there. Speaks volumes, I daresay. Anyway – Jim, he was what my mother, had she still been alive at the time, would have dismissed as common. And she would have been right, of course. He still is. It seems unbelievable to me now, but I’m not at all sure that I noticed at the time. The way he spoke. His table manners, or the total lack of them. The unspeakable things he would do with his fingers. And, of course, the fact that we had no interests whatever in common. Or more to the point, the fact that Jim had and continues to have no interests at all that I’ve ever divined, beyond his ironmonger’s shop. Beer and budgerigars, if you count such things. I am sure he has never read a book. I mean in his life. I really do mean that. He called me Mill. Never Milly, just Mill. Which I absolutely hated, and I told him so. Made not a blind bit of difference. And still he persists with it. But… he was quite good-looking in those days, I suppose, in a roughish sort of a way. I thought if we married, we’d at least have beautiful children. And he had this way of cocking an eyebrow that for some reason or another would always make me laugh. In the manner of a budgerigar, conceivably. It doesn’t now, make me laugh. I’m not even sure if still he does it. Couldn’t tell you.

Anyway, he was amusing enough. He must have been. We had one night, just the one night together before he had to get back to barracks. He never did leave these shores though, Jim. Never was posted abroad. Something to do with his feet, he told me. Or his ankles. Something. But that night, though – that one single night… oh dear God, that I well remember. How could I ever forget it? It had only been a Registry Office wedding – over before it got started. Eunice was there – can’t remember who else. Some rather awful friend of Jim’s. Very few, though. And Jim, he had booked this room, little room, above a pub. The smell of stale ale rose up through the floor. The bed, it nearly filled the whole of the space – though still, I remember thinking, it did seem very narrow. For two people, I mean. It creaked, the metal frame, even when you so much as touched it. Jim was down the corridor ‘attending to nature’, as he called it. He still does say that: ‘Won’t be a jiffy – just got to attend to nature.’ Oh dear Lord. Anyway – I sat on the corner of the bed… not sure there even was a chair… and I felt so cold. In every sense, really. There was a draught from the grimy window, there was linoleum on the floor – no hint even of a bedside mat. And within me, of course, I was utterly frozen. I had thought about this moment – women do, I think. And you wonder. Well you go through very many moods, I suppose: curiosity, dread… embarrassment, chiefly. A sort of excitement, just possibly. But not in my case. Here was simply something to be got through: we were good at that, during the war – getting through things. There was rarely any choice in the matter. So here, I thought, was just one more little thing to be endured: couldn’t last for ever, could it? Everything comes to an end. And it wasn’t going to kill me. Was it? He still smelt of beer when finally he came to me. He told me to be brave. ‘Be brave,’ he said to me, as he fooled around with his braces. And I had to laugh. What a buffoon, I thought: what an utterly perfect buffoon. Bravery was not required, which is just as well. I still am not quite sure that he even managed what I would say to be penetration. And then he was snoring, and hogging the eiderdown. Anyway, I thought, with not inconsiderable satisfaction: it is done. I have got over it. As I knew I would. For I am, as I say, a capable woman.

On the small table in that vile little room, I had set out all of my things. Coty powder and lipstick. A little bottle of scent that Eunice had given to me – Paris Soir. I still have the bottle, kept it all these years. There is a tiny very dark residue at its base, and the label now is yellowed. My brand-new nightgown – so terribly pretty. Pink, with little satinette bows at the neckline and a sort of ruching to the cuffs. Saved up coupons for, oh – it seemed like just ever. I didn’t even get to putting it on. He just came at me, Jim. He still was wearing his boots. This was not, I remember thinking, how Clark Gable would generally go about things. Anyway – never mind: it was over.

Up until this time, I had been living with Eunice in a couple of rooms with kitchenette and shared bathroom above Amy’s the hairdresser in England’s Lane. She had begged me not to do it – marry Jim. But I didn’t listen. I don’t know why I didn’t listen – hers was the only opinion I would have respected, and always I knew how very much she loved me. It’s not as if I even wanted to, particularly. She didn’t have a boyfriend, Eunice – and that was very surprising in itself, because she was always the better-looking of us, and by a good long way. Two years older than I, and quite the beauty. All the mashers would give her the eye – but it was always me she linked arms with, me who went with her to the Odeon, the Gaumont, the Empire. I only realised – how very stupid I was – I only realised after my ridiculous wedding that I would be living apart from her, that no longer would we be able to share our sisterly little rituals – and that instead I’d be with Jim, in the flat above his ironmonger’s. In the very same street – that was the funny thing. Maybe that’s how we came to meet…? I honestly can’t remember. Anyway, the ironmonger’s was all boarded up for the duration, and he was away in the army, thank God. So I did go on living with Eunice. It was all as if nothing had happened. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but when the war is finally over, it’ll be different. I’ll lose you. When Jim comes home.’ I looked at her with love. I took her hand and touched her hair. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Maybe he won’t.’

But he did, of course. Many didn’t, so very many didn’t, but Jim was only in Minehead, you see. And so he did. But before all that of course, there was the bombing. God knows we had already had to withstand so very much ceaseless bombardment. It is really so awfully hard – impossible, really – to explain to anyone who has not themselves been through such a thing… but after a while, when you’ve had night after night of it, there comes upon you a sort of peace, an inner serenity. Sounds so mad – but I talked to Eunice about it, one of those terrible nights, and she agreed with me, Eunice, she agreed with what I said. At the very start of the war, back in ‘39, we all of us were quite terrified, of course. Even on the day that Chamberlain told us that now we were at war with Germany – beautiful morning, warm summer sunshine, it’s not at all a day you could ever forget – within hours the blessed siren was setting up its wailing. Londoners, I think, they all thought that their number was up. Nothing happened, though – nothing happened for a good long time, and that’s when people started laughing about it all. Calling it ‘the phoney war’ and saying that the blasted politicians had worried us half out of our wits, and all for nothing. I knew quite a lot of people – Marion, who sometimes worked in Mr Levy’s greengrocer’s, Eunice’s friend from work, and another woman I used to meet most mornings on the train – who straightaway went to collect their children from wherever they had been evacuated to, and only just a few weeks earlier. But soon it started. There was nothing phoney about it then. And once it had begun, no one could ever see an end to it. Except when London would be engulfed in a firestorm, and all of us must die: it’s only a matter of when.

I suppose, though, that it was the very regularity of the bombing that after a while made us see things quite differently. We had got through another night somehow – well hadn’t we? So who’s to say we can’t do it again? There entered into our standard resilience a reckless sort of bravado: Come on Hitler! Do your worst! We can take it! All that sort of thing. Which I think, on reflection, is far from healthy, overall. When the Blitz took grip, Eunice and I, at the first great mournful rising moan of the siren, would pick up the battered old suitcase that we always kept packed with all our little essentials, and hurry to the cellar. It was, of course, quite awful down there. Well it was where we kept the coal, after all, and all sorts of broken chairs and other bits of rubbish you never have time to get rid of. We had put down a few blankets and there was a hurricane lamp and a paraffin heater that always made me feel so very queasy. And piles of old Womans and Woman’s Owns from the salon just above us. I may be painting a cosy little picture, but believe me, it was very far from that. We really hated sitting down there – and more often than not it would be for the whole of the night: only at dawn would you hear the all-clear. And so one evening, later than usual, when it all started up again, Eunice and I, we just looked at one another, and I think we must have had exactly the same thought at the identical moment. ‘Blow it,’ she said. ‘I’m not going down. I just can’t face going down there again. I’m staying here. If they get us, they get us.’ I had just washed my hair, I remember, and was trying to dry it with a towel in front of just the one bar of the fire – that meter, I am telling you, it just ate up the shillings. And so we didn’t. We simply stayed upstairs, trying not to wince at the whistle and then the crumping of bombs, some of then falling really rather close. At the summit of Primrose Hill, you see, which is awfully near, there were anti-aircraft guns, and always these were a target. And from that night on, we never went down to the cellar again. So you see what I mean: reckless, very, and goodness we were lucky, because Mr Lawrence, the newsagent, he took a direct hit, completely took the roof off, and he’s only just three doors down. He wasn’t hurt, though – just a few scratches miraculously, thank the Lord.

We were very different, really – my sister and me. Well we were in some ways, anyway – mentally generally in tune, more like twins in that respect – but she was always so much more… how can I say? Feminine, I suppose, for want of a better expression. Very dainty in the movement of her hands – always smelling sweetly of Lily of the Valley. She had a way with tweezers that made her eyebrows always just so. She even used eyeshadow, which I thought was very racy. Me, I could never really be bothered. I’m not saying I wasn’t always very nicely turned out – my costumes were very becoming, and I could never abide a laddered nylon. But with Eunice, her grace and beauty seemed to come from within – all the cosmetics merely a perfectly natural extension of it, if that isn’t contradictory. And when it became clear, early on in the war, that all we women were required to do our bit, I didn’t at all mind being shunted off to Hayes every morning on the five o’clock train, there to inspect twenty-five-pound field guns, if you please! And we were even sworn to secrecy as to the exact location. But Eunice, oh dear me no: she was having none of all that sort of very unladylike malarkey. She eventually secured a job in Marshall & Snelgrove for the duration, advising hard-put housewives on how best to eke out their precious clothing coupons – taught them how, in terms of dressmaking, making do and mending – to quite literally cut their coat according to their cloth. Often she’d bring home a few remnants and fashion them into the most extraordinary creations: flair, that’s what she had. Me, I would just have consigned all those very unpromising scraps of material to the duster drawer.

And so we went along. I had more or less forgotten that I was a married woman: it didn’t seem real to me. Often Eunice and I would go to a Lyons’ Corner House or maybe a matinee at the pictures with a couple of lads – but they were very nice fellows: never a hint of monkey business, nothing of that sort. You could trust a boy in those days. Eunice, of course – she could have had any man she tipped her hat at, but she was never really very interested, much to all the soldiers’ very visible disappointment. It would happen one day, she said. One day, Milly, when I’m not even looking, then the right man for me will come my way, and I’ll know it – I’ll just know it, the moment I look at him. And that, you know, is just exactly the way it happened.

David, his name was – a very nicely educated young man just two years her senior. He taught English and history at a boys’ preparatory school in Fitzjohn’s Avenue. I took to him immediately – and although the schooling that Eunice and I had had was nothing particularly special, nothing too out of the way, I have always upheld the supreme importance of a good education. Youngsters, they need to be led out of themselves – they need to be astounded by possibilities. I always did vow that if ever I were to be blessed with children (a thing I yearned for – and the only point of getting married in the first place, so far as I could see) then I would move heaven and earth to make sure that they got off to the very best start in life. David lived just a few streets away with a couple of bachelor pals, both of them teachers – and one of them, Thomas, made it perfectly clear that he regarded me as something rather out of the ordinary. We had picnics on Primrose Hill in the shadow of the guns, the four of us. Thomas would read us poems – Clare, Keats, that sort of thing. It was a happy time, in the midst of dangerous days. Then the war, it just came to an end. I don’t know that we truly believed it ever would. And suddenly now it was VE Day – and oh that was a time, that was a time and no mistake. All the emotions you’d expect: the laughter, the happiness. And then the crying. Confusing – it confused me, and I suppose I could hardly be alone in that. It was then that I told Thomas that I was in fact married. It had not occurred to me to do so earlier, just as I am sure it had not so much as crossed his mind that I might be. He was very civil about it all, I must say. Such a very nice young man. Frightfully handsome. Still think of him sometimes. So anyway, that was the last I ever saw of Thomas… and then I got a telegram from Jim. He was coming home the following Tuesday from Minehead. When he would reopen his ironmonger’s in England’s Lane and we both would live (‘so very cosy’, is the way he put it) in the flat above, as man and wife. I stared at the telegram for such a long time. It contained no fewer than three errors of spelling. When I saw him again, I realised I had not thought of him at all. He had very recently grown a sort of moustache, which was repellent. He wears it still. His demob suit, grey pepper-and-salt, was rather too small. He puts it on when people get married… he puts it on if someone should die.

David and Eunice were married in 1947, and one year later little Paul was born. David by this time was a deputy housemaster at a small private school just outside of Reading, and they all lived in the dearest little cottage there. Eunice and I, we didn’t see nearly so much of each other as I would have liked – but there: she had a husband, a home and a little boy to look after, so I quite understood. I never really had a chance to get at all close to little Paul, not at first – saw him only at Christmas and a few odd days over the summer holidays when I’d go down and stay with them. In a way that was maybe a good thing because by this time it had been made clear to us that Jim was not able for fatherhood. There had been tests. So that was that, really. No point crying about it. Many during the war had to overcome far worse things than that. So you just muck in and carry on, don’t you? Nothing else for it.

David and Eunice had been out for a spin in the brand-new dark blue Humber that David was paying for on the hire purchase scheme. In her letters, Eunice told me how every Sunday morning he would be washing and then waxing it, buffing it up with a shammy to a bright and mirror shine. I was in the cottage taking care of Paul; Jim was back in London in the ironmonger’s, doing whatever it is that Jim habitually does there; I never did ask him to accompany me, and he had never offered. I had not before been in the cottage all on my own, and I was admiring all of Eunice’s little knick-knacks and the way she had made each of the rooms so very welcoming and gay. They had a gramophone and everything. Soon they were going to put a down payment on a refrigerator. I was nervous, I remember, about being in sole charge of an infant – because Paul, he could only have been eighteen months, not even eighteen months old in those days. But Eunice had told me not to worry – that once he was fed and changed, he was as good as gold. And he was, he really was – good as gold: no trouble at all.

When I answered the door, the policeman – he had tears in his eyes. He asked me to sit down, and he seemed himself upon the brink of collapse. In the days that followed, those terrible days and nights that followed, I was given a few more dribs and drabs of awful information. The car had veered off the road – some said to avoid an oncoming lorry, though other reports suggested defective steering on the Humber – and careered into the parapet of a bridge across a river. The car just hung there, literally in the balance, as the local police had tried to locate the necessary machinery and expertise to right and steady it so as to be able to cut the passengers from amid the twist of the thing. They both, dear souls, had sustained injuries: more than that I was not told. And then the balustrades just suddenly crumbled – buckled, gave way, the car pitching over the edge in the full sight of the despairing and helpless police and ambulancemen. After far too long, frogmen were sent into the water, but by that time, of course… but I pray, you know – I still do pray that Eunice, my dear dear sister Eunice, was no longer conscious as the car just teetered there. Her thoughts, otherwise, would have been far too terrible for me now to even contemplate. To know that Paul was to be left all alone… and that the child within her would now never be born; she had been hoping for a little girl, and she was going to call her Margaret. When the policeman had left the cottage… I decided to postpone the welter of tears, to close the door, if only for a short time, on all the racking agony to come… and I went to look at Paul, asleep in his cot. And although I neither touched him nor made even the slightest noise, he woke up immediately. He looked full at me, and smiled. It was Eunice’s smile, and I had fallen in love with him.

Adoption in those days was a quick and relatively simple formality, particularly in the cases of relatives: so very many families had been recently rent asunder, one way or another. The reassembling of differing approximations had become an abiding process. And so Paul became my own. And now, well… he is quite the young fellow. Eleven years old, not much away from eleven years old, and so very handsome and strong. The three of us still are living above the ironmonger’s in England’s Lane. Paul, when he was still an infant, he once looked up at me and called me Mummy. My heart was raw with the ring and then the tug of it. And Jim said ‘No, Pauly – no. That ain’t right, see? That’s your Auntie Mill, that is. And I’m your Uncle Jim. See? That’s how it is.’ Another time, I had stooped to kiss his little head, and Jim, who had been eyeing me sidelong, he said this very slowly: ‘You would, wouldn’t you? I reckon you would. You’d give your life up for that little kid, wouldn’t you Mill? Ay? Yeah, I reckon you would.’ I just smiled, and turned away. That ‘little kid’, I was thinking… that ‘little kid’, Jim… he is my life. He is its beginning, its core, and he will carry me unto its end. The rest I merely tolerate. The rest I stoutly bear. I can do this. I can do this, yes. For I am a capable woman.

My name is Paul. I’m eleven, nearly, and one day I’d really like to kill my Uncle Jim. I live with Auntie Milly who is lovely to me, and him, who smells of fags as well as some quite bad other things – don’t know what, don’t want to. He is a fool. Sometimes he asks me what I want to be, and although I don’t say it, all I ever want to be is old. Older, anyway. Twenty-one would be really good, that would be the best… but that’s ten whole years away, which means it’ll be 1969, and that’s just never ever going to come, is it? Stands to reason. But if I was twenty-one I’d have the key of the door and I’d be able to tell him, my stinking Uncle Jim – and I’ll be so much taller than him, then – I’d be able to say to him: listen you, you are a fool and you’d better watch out, see, because now I’m going to kill you.

This is my favourite time of the day. It can sometimes be better than today is though, because today Uncle Jim, he’s still here on the settee in the sitting room. Drinking his beer. Often he goes downstairs after our supper and sits on a giant pile of rags in the back of the ironmonger shop just talking to this budgie he’s got there, called Cyril. Cyril’s a lot unluckier than I am because whenever Uncle Jim starts talking to me and is maybe thinking I’m going to listen or something, I can just go up to my room and read or do a bit of prep, if I’ve got any. But Cyril, he can’t. Just has to nibble on millet and blink at Uncle Jim, who sits there for hours, smoking fags, drinking beer, and going on and on and on.

We had Spam and sort of macaroni with tomato on, which I like, quite like, but not nearly so much as I like when Auntie Milly does chicken on Sundays. That’s just the best food in the whole wide world – and you get crunchy potatoes and bread sauce and some sort of green muck which isn’t actually very good, in fact it’s really horrible, but Auntie Milly says if I eat it all up it will make me grow to be big and strong. After, we have jelly and Carnation, and it’s best when the jelly is the red sort. In the week, though – like tonight – there’s Jacob’s Cream Crackers and Auntie Milly and Uncle Jim, they have Cheddar, but I get two portions of Dairylea because I really really like it. I’m sitting on the rug which Auntie Milly made in front of the gas fire which is blue, and keeps going pop-pop-pop. I’ve got my Matchbox toys and I’m making a road for them out of cardboard. Auntie Milly’s knitting. She knits all the time – V-necks for me and Uncle Jim and also things like cushion covers and a tea cosy. She was humming a tune, but she’s stopped now. She’s looking at Uncle Jim. Because she can see – and I can see it too – that he’s now going to open his great fat stupid mouth.

‘Nice bit of Cheddar. You ever eaten human cheese, have you? I daresay not.’

Auntie Milly, she just looked at him, the way she always does. Like he’s dead, or something. He went on, my Uncle Jim, like I knew he would. Always does. Pointing a finger at her now.

‘They do make it, you know. Oh God yes. I ain’t saying it’s a common thing, because it ain’t. Not by a long chalk. It’s very out of the way. Very out of the way. Whole point. Why I’m asking, see? But oh yeah – they make it all right. No doubt on that score. Mongolia, round there, could very well be. I had it in Kilburn. Odd I never mentioned it before. Mind you – they only told me after, the devils. Now listen to me, Pauly – you might learn something. You want to know how they go about it? How it’s, like – sort of done, do you? The whole great gubbins?’

Auntie Milly glanced across at me, and closed her eyes quickly. That was one of her warnings. A reminder to her dim and stinky husband that there’s a young boy in the room. That whatever horrible thing he was about to say next, I was far too young to be hearing it. But I never feel that. Too young for anything. It’s not what I feel inside. The only thing I really want to be now is old. No one else – nobody at school, anyway – wants this, but I do. And people say it’s not, um – don’t know what they say, can’t remember the word. But it means I shouldn’t think it. Well so what? I do. Eleven’s no good. It’s no good to be eleven years old, no good at all. There’s no point to it. Twenty-one is what I want. If I was old, older, then I could turn round and tell people what to do. Not in a bossy way, I don’t mean – but just to explain to them. How stupid they are. Because they maybe don’t know. How everything they do, they do it wrong. Like my idiotic Uncle Jim. His eyes, when he’s going on like this, they’re always so wide open. It’s like he’s egging you on into believing him. It is, you know – it really is like he expects you to listen.

‘Whassamatter? What’s wrong with you now, Mill? Boy you’re worried about, is it? Well don’t. Pauly – he can look after himself. Can’t you, Pauly? Quite the young man about town now, aren’t you Pauly? Hey? Yeh. That’s righ