No Man’s Land. Simon Tolkien
using his father’s proffered handkerchief to dry his tears.
‘Come on,’ said Daniel, looking across the street. ‘I know what we need.’ Weaving their way between horses, carts and bicycles, they crossed the road and went into a brightly lit confectioner’s shop. It was a perfect heaven, but an earthly version, very different from the one they talked about in church. Row upon row of cylinder-shaped show-glasses were lined up on polished mahogany shelves containing liquorice shoestrings and peppermint drops and brandy balls and tiger eyes, and on the counter was a set of brass scales and weights for measuring out purchases. But Adam wanted none of them; before they had even entered the shop he had had his mind made up and his heart set on a perfectly sculpted brown toffee pig standing on its own in the window.
On the way home he clasped it tight to his chest, while his father clutched a hunk of ice to his bruised cheek. And at the door Daniel stuck out his hand for Adam to shake. ‘Quite a day we’ve had of it, haven’t we, old man? Quite an adventure!’ And Adam nodded: the pig was the best Christmas present he’d ever had.
The New Year brought fog: the kind of London fog that was like a moving creature, sucking at the air as it moved, enshrouding the people who had to endure its wet embrace. Dirty and acrid, it crept inside their clothes, clinging clammily to the skin, breeding sickness. The traffic slowed almost to a halt and men and horses reared up out of nowhere, suddenly illuminated by the gas-fired streetlights.
One evening Adam was out with his father and they bought two jacket potatoes at a stall, holding them in their palms to warm their ice-cold hands before they began to eat. After a few minutes the fog began to clear a little and they could see a large shed-like building on the other side of the road with ‘Salvation Army’ emblazoned on a hoarding above the main door.
‘Come with me,’ said Daniel, suddenly excited. And taking his son’s hand they went inside. For a moment Adam’s eyes had to adjust to the light before he was able to take in the great size of the hall and the huge number of men inside it. They were sitting in rows on long benches all facing forwards, and most of them were resting their heads on their folded arms, which were themselves supported by the backs of the benches in front of them.
‘Listen,’ Daniel told his son, putting his finger to his lips to hush the questions about the place that the boy was clearly about to ask. And after a moment Adam could hear it – the deep rhythmic snoring emanating from hundreds of mouths and nostrils. Everyone was asleep, sitting down.
‘They can’t lie down. It’s not allowed,’ Daniel said, pointing to a notice on the wall. ‘If they pay a penny they can sit here all night and keep warm but they’ve got to stay upright. “Penny sit-up”: that’s the name of this place, and it’s better than the public library where they have to sleep standing up, hanging on to the newspaper stands. And anyway the library’s closed at night, like the parks. That’s what the iron railings are for – to keep the paupers out,’ he added with a bitter laugh.
‘But who are they? Where do they come from?’ asked Adam, awed by this mass of sleeping humanity, the rows of destitute men stretching endlessly away as far as he could see.
‘They’re the poor of London. Men who have worked hard all their lives but have now outlived their purpose. Chewed up, spat out and left to die by the capitalists who’ve got no use for them any more. Look! They’ve got nothing to look forward to but their deaths and that’ll come soon enough.’
Adam was frightened by the anger in his father’s voice. He wanted to leave this terrible place behind. But Daniel hadn’t finished.
‘The strangest part is not that the poor suffer but that they accept their suffering,’ he went on, and it was almost as if he was talking to himself; as if he had forgotten his son standing beside him. ‘Ask them, and they’d say they are truly grateful for the crumbs that are thrown to them from the rich man’s table and, if they had the vote, they’d vote without thinking for the perpetuation of the system that keeps them poor and cold, and will keep their children poor and cold when they are gone. But I won’t accept that,’ he said passionately, turning back to his son. ‘I want a better world for you to live in: one where men are valued for who they are, not for what the rich can get out of them. It may never happen, but it’s still worth fighting for. Can you understand that, Adam? I know it’s hard, but it’s important – what I’m trying to tell you.’
The boy nodded slowly. His father had used a lot of long words that he hadn’t heard before; and with his patched clothes and thin, unshaven face Daniel hardly looked convincing. In fact he looked almost as disreputable as the paupers sleeping on the benches in front of them. But the flame of his father’s conviction burnt more strongly than ever in his bright blue eyes and Adam felt in that moment that he would follow his father into any danger, even that lion’s den in Babylon that Father Paul had talked about in church, which had given him nightmares for days afterwards. It was a man called Daniel just like his father who had gone in there and come out unscathed, Adam remembered.
An attendant approached them, asking if they wanted to sit down, and his enquiry broke the spell.
‘I’m sorry, Adam. I hope I didn’t frighten you,’ Daniel said as they began to walk home through the gas-lit streets. ‘I forget how young you are sometimes.’
‘I’m not young. I’m old enough to go to school,’ said Adam.
‘So you are. So you are,’ said Daniel with a smile, as if realizing the fact for the first time. ‘Well, we shall have to see about that, shan’t we?’
School expanded Adam’s horizons. Beyond his street, beyond his tiny terraced house with the small patch of ground at the back where his father dug at the hard sooty soil with a broken spade and tried to raise shrivelled vegetables under his mother’s dripping washing line. Into a new world.
Lilian gave her son a St Christopher medal to wear around his neck because he would be a traveller now, walking to school and back with his slate hung by a string over his shoulder. And she rubbed ointment into his head each morning to stop the lice coming. It smelt of sarsaparilla and Adam hated it, but it was better than being singled out and sent home when Matron ran her steel comb hard through the children’s hair on her tours of inspection.
School was hot with combustion stoves where the children were allowed to warm their flasks of tea in the morning, and noisy with the sound of their coughing as they tried in vain to expel the coke fumes that they breathed down into their chests. All day the windows of the schoolroom were misted over with the humidity and the children drew faces in the fog. Some of them were unflattering pictures of Old Beaky, the first-form teacher, who was too short-sighted to see what they were doing. He had a tassel on his mortar board that reminded Adam of the organ grinder’s monkey. It made Adam laugh, and, not for the first time or the last, his inability to control his mirth got him into trouble. Beaky needed to make an example and he punished Adam by shutting him up in the cellar. It was dark and wet and there was a creature, maybe a rat, rustling somewhere, and Adam was frightened. And when his father found out what had happened, he went with Adam to the school and shouted at Beaky who backed away into a corner of the classroom with his hat and tassel wobbling ridiculously on top of his old bald head.
After that school was better. Beaky taught his class about the Empire on which the sun never set and showed them a map of the world covered with pink. The pink was British and London where they were was the capital, the centre of everything. Sometimes the children sang ‘Rule Britannia’ and threw their pens up into the air at the climax so that the nibs stuck in the ceiling.
Adam had boots too now, replacing the leaking, broken shoes that he had worn through the long winter. Just as in previous years, the building trade had picked up with the coming of warmer weather and his father was back in regular work. His mother coughed less and they had meat to eat on Sundays, and could go to the eel pie shop up on the High Street in the evenings where they wrapped the food in sheets from the penny newspapers which Adam read as he ate: accounts of stabbings and poisonings that made him shiver even as the hot food warmed his insides.
In the summer the travelling fair came to Islington and encamped on Highbury Fields. Adam went there