Half an hour later and two long streets further on – the last leg of his early round before going to his own home where his wife Marie would have a mug of cocoa waiting ready to drink – Charlie Partridge went in by the back door of his parents’ home in Jubilee Lane where his father, Sam, ready for work in his park-keeper’s uniform, was as usual waiting with a ready-poured mug of well-sugared, dark-brown Co-op 99 tea at just the right temperature for Charlie to drink quickly. His mother, Dolly, on her way down the garden with a basket of washing and a bag of pegs dangling from her mouth, put her face up for a peck which she returned with a wink.
Charlie squeezed into the chair at the cramped coal-cupboard end of the table, nodded to his father. ‘Dad.’
‘Charlie.’ The father, in his usual meal-time place beside the back door at the cramped larder end of the table, inclined his head in acknowledgement. ‘How’s Marie?’
‘Right as rain.’
‘Bonnie?’
Charlie nodded without giving chapter and verse of his daughter’s health. His mother and Marie would chew that over when they went out shopping together this afternoon. Not that there was really anything to chew over, Bonnie was as bonny as she had always been for the entire five years since her birth. ‘You all right then, Dad?’
‘All right as I’ll ever be.’
Which exchange of greeting they had been making ever since Charlie had got promoted from telegram boy to postal delivery service at the station end of Markham. On Charlie’s round there were probably twice as many houses as on some of the other rounds, but people got few letters. At the railway end the houses progressed downhill – not in the literal sense, for this was the floor of the valley – from the streets of small shops and terraced cottages that spoked out from the hub of the centre of the country market town, the boss of which was the great Norman abbey. The best houses on Charlie’s round were the rows of single-bays of Station Avenue where he had seen the hazy naked outline of Hugh Kennedy’s wife.
Father and son sat with the back door open and watched Dolly as she looped up very white sheets and pillowcases.
Dolly Partridge, in her late forties, was still a very good-looking woman. Brown eyes and brown hair streaked with grey, and good teeth that had stood up well to the ravages of years of bad nutrition and lack of dental treatment. A handsome buxom woman with large breasts and heavy hips and veins that made her legs ache. Her only indulgence was powder, lipstick, and the best tight Eugene perm twice a year. Whether it be early morning when whitening the front step, or late at night putting out the milk-bottles for the Co-op, she had on a bit of make-up. She had married Sam when she was barely seventeen.
As a hero in the War to End All Wars of 1914, Samuel Partridge had been one of the first ex-servicemen to move into one of the six houses on Jubilee Lane reserved for such men. More aptly to be moved into, because one and a half of his own legs had not returned from France with him and artificial ones had not been ready. Sam, Dolly, their daughter Paula and two sons, Charlie and Harry.
Harry was the last child Dolly and Sam managed to make before all that kind of thing became difficult for them when Sam was blown up in that terrible French mud-hole. Sam could affirm that lightning did strike twice. The first shell split one leg and blew off most of the other, the second penetrated his groin with shrapnel. He still had nightmares in which he struggled to thrust a bayonet into a disembodied voice that called, ‘Out! You can’t play with two stumps and one ball.’ When, in this dream, he wept with shame and frustration, a Red Cross official bent over him and said, ‘Don’t cry, corporal, it’s not like castration, you’ll still need to shave.’
Dolly talked him through the nights of his nightmares. But, being a young woman of normal appetites, she had had her own dreams that she could not speak of to anyone.
Between his park-keeping hours Sam sat in the kitchen or in the King William, spreading his Bolshie notions and running the Labour Party and a family Savings Club known as the Diddle’m. Dolly got fed up with politics, but she couldn’t blame him, a lot of ordinary soldiers and their families had a rough deal – first from the nincompoop generals and then from a two-faced government. It’s a wonder the men hadn’t kept their guns and turned on them.
She came back in, wanting to get on with her chores, pushing round the two men filling the kitchen. ‘Move yourself a bit, Charlie.’
‘You know what I just seen?’ Charlie asked. ‘You know Hugh Kennedy, cricket captain?’
‘A course I know him, works at the flour mill, lives in Station Avenue,’ said Sam. ‘Officer in the Territorials.’
‘Got a blonde wife, years younger,’ said Dolly. ‘What about him?’
‘Her… his missis…’ Charlie leaned forward and lowered his voice ‘…just as I was putting the letters through, she was just going up the hallway… in the buff… without a stitch on.’ His hands revealed that he was a man who liked bosoms.
Sam Partridge supped deeply, the star-creases at the corner of his eyes deepening as he withdrew his nose from the mug and heaved several quiet laughs. ‘Hope you never got your fingers trapped in the excitement, our Charl.’
‘You might laugh, I bloody nearly did. Theirs is one of those in the middle of the row that’s had a frosted-glass door put in and one of them new-fangled rat-trap letter boxes right down where it breaks your back and every dog in the road can cock his leg on it.’
‘You shouldn’t put up with that, Charlie. See your Union about it.’
Missing the irony in his father’s tone but hearing the word Union and knowing what would come next if he didn’t go now, Charlie gathered up the few letters he still had to deliver. ‘Ah. Well, I’d better get on.’
‘It’s what you got a Union for to protect you from that kind of thing. It’s what you pay dues for.’
‘Don’t start, Sam,’ Dolly said. ‘Take no notice, Charlie, you go on and get your round finished.’
‘You’d best tell the Union that that’s what dues is for then, Dad: they thinks it’s for building a bloody great office in Southampton.’ Still not seeing his father’s purse-lipped smile, ‘So long, Dad.’
Dolly watched her son rebutton his tunic, run the crown of his uniform cap around his elbow and place it squarely on the fine head of hair which he had inherited from the Partridges.
‘Charlie.’
Charlie swivelled his head to settle his hair inside the cap and patted the shoulder-strap of his delivery bag in place. ‘I have to get on.’ But he stayed until his father had had his say.
‘You swore twice in the last five minutes. I never swore in my life and don’t expect any of mine to neither, whether they’re grown men or not – and specially in front of your mother. If you was still living under my roof, I should a had a bit more than this to say.’
‘Ah, sorry, Mum. It just slips out.’
‘No, it don’t,’ Dolly said, ‘not if you don’t let it.’
‘All right, Mum.’
‘Just watch it, lad.’
‘I will.’ Now he had got as far as the back gate.
‘Oh, and Charlie,’ his father called, ‘your Diddle’m club’s due.’
‘I’ll get Marie to give it to Mum.’
‘Remind her, you’ll be glad of it at Christmas.’
I’m twenty-five, Mum. I’m married, Dad. I’ve got a wife, and a child starting school in September. Stop bloody treating me like I was still a kid. Not aloud of course. Mum and Dad only ever had the best interests of the family at heart. Mum was right – she always was – they would be glad of the money at Christmas.