Standing at the corner of Dulcimer Street you can see down the length of the whole terrace. It stretches in an unbroken row from Dove Street at one end to Swan Walk at the other. And they are certainly fine houses. Or have been. They date from eighteen thirty‐nine, when the neighbourhood was still select, exclusive and sought‐after. They now front the street – solid‐looking and graceful – receding in a gentle curve towards the river, like a monument erected to the good taste of our grandfathers; an inhabited historical monument with the history flaking off in great chunks of discoloured stucco that occasionally comes flop‐ping down into the areas.
There had been changes, of course, during the last hundred years. And most of them had been for the worse. Down at the Swan Walk end, for instance, the large letters J. M. Bill & Sons, Builders and Decorators had been painted right across the frontage, and ladders and planks were stored openly in the basement. No. 24 next door was a normal private residence, a bit too thickly sublet perhaps, but a private residence nevertheless. Next door again, however, at No. 22, commerce had killed home life and the look of the whole place was spoiled by a framed canvas screen let into the front window with the words A. LEVINE, HIGH‐CLASS TAILOR, ALTERATIONS AND REPAIRS A SPECIALITY written there. The rest of the houses were private dwellings, with a vague and easily missed, but nevertheless real and important, social lift‐up, as you got to the Dove Street end.
They all had three storeys above ground and one below. And they all had porches supported on slender imitation Grecian pillars, and high, rather steep steps – like the ones that Mr Josser had floundered up the night before – leading to the panelled and bevelled front doors with the fanlights over them. They were large houses with eight to ten good rooms apiece.
Across the road on the South Side of the street it was different. The houses there had been built in 1888. They were simply six‐roomed affairs in grey brick with small box‐like bow‐windows, and no pillars. The two end ones had even long since decided to give up even trying to look like houses, and had become shops – one a general grocery store and the other a newsagent’s and tobacconist’s.
The whole of the south side was mean, ungracious and undeniably depressing. And of course it was the south side that Mr Josser saw every time he looked out of his window. It was at the south side that he was looking now, while he was waiting for the kettle to boil.
It was Christmas morning and he had got on all his clothes except his collar and tie. His feet were encased in a pair of carpet slippers that had once been rich and plushy but were now bald and drab. And his blue cardigan was buttoned right up to the throat because it was chilly.
The tea things were ready on the tray beside him, and he had mopped up the wet circle that the bottom of the milk‐bottle had made on the kitchen table. Altogether, he was pretty expert at getting tea. It was the result of long practice. He always helped to soften the shock of each new day by bringing Mrs Josser a cup of early morning tea. It was good strong stuff the way he made it. And it needed only a handful of fresh tea leaves added to make it an equally rousing cup for breakfast time. This small stratagem had the merits of economy, time saving and body. Those cups of brewed tea fairly routed sleep.
But this morning he had more than teacups on the tray: there were two large parcels there as well. The parcels had labels on them, addressed in Mr Josser’s handwriting – high, cursive and flourishing. The labels read: ‘To Carrie, to wish her a Happy Christmas from Fred’ – it was, he worked out, the forty‐first Christmas present that he had given his wife; and ‘To Doris, with love from her Dad.’ He had bought Mrs Josser a large Spanish shawl which in the shop‐window he had seen described as a bargain and he had bought Doris an ornamental jar of jasmine Bath Salts.
It was the shawl that was worrying him. Now that it was too late to change the thing he wondered why he had ever bought it at all. For, when he came to think of it, he realised that Mrs Josser never wore shawls. And, if she had done, she would have been certain to choose something rather quieter. Something in brown, or dark grey, or black even. But there it was. The kettle was boiling, and it was the shawl or nothing. He made the tea, gloomily pondering.
Mrs Josser was already sitting up when he reached the bedroom. She had hauled up the Venetian blinds, and the blank morning light came seeping into the room through the lace curtains, revealing the red mahogany wardrobe, the wash‐hand stand, the chest‐of‐drawers, the dressing‐table.
‘Happy Christmas,’ said Mr Josser.
‘Happy Christmas,’ Mrs Josser answered.
Mr Josser sat down on the side of the bed and carefully lowered the tray on to the counterpane.
‘Got a little present for you, dear,’ he said, adding after a pause, ‘Always change it if you don’t like it.’
‘What is it?’ said Mrs Josser, beginning to open the paper.
Seen against the pale blue of the quilt, the shawl looked even more lurid and foreign and exclamatory than Mr Josser had remembered it. It seemed to be crying out for hot sun and a bull fight. But Mrs Josser did not waver. She gave the thing a twist as though she had been wearing shawls all her life and folded it round her shoulders. She even rubbed her cheek against it.
‘It’s a real beauty,’ she said. ‘You never ought to have.’
‘So you do like it, do you?’ Mr Josser asked, relieved.
‘It’s ever so nice,’ Mrs Josser answered him. ‘Just what I wanted.’
She paused and gave Mr Josser a small flat parcel that she had been hiding.
‘And here’s a little something for you,’ she said. ‘You know you haven’t got any.’
Before he opened it, Mr Josser knew what it was: it was handkerchiefs. It was always handkerchiefs. During the whole of his married life he had never bought any handkerchiefs himself, and never been without them.
‘They’ve got your initial on them,’ Mrs Josser told him.
Balancing the tray carefully with one hand so that the things shouldn’t slide, he bent forward and kissed her.
‘Thank you, dear,’ he said. ‘I was needing them.’
He was sitting back, absent‐mindedly sipping his tea – he had a noisy, rather succulent hiss that irritated Mrs Josser at times – when he happened to glance up and catch sight of his wife’s face. She was looking at the shawl and her expression had altered. She seemed to be taking the measure of the thing. Sizing it up like an enemy.
Mr Josser leaned forward.
‘You do like it, don’t you?’ he asked again.
‘It’s ever so nice,’ Mrs Josser repeated with less conviction. ‘I said so.’
There was a pause.
‘You don’t think it’s too bright, do you?’ he asked.
‘It’s a bit bright, isn’t it,’ Mrs Josser admitted.
‘Will it go with anything you’ve got?’ he asked.
Mrs Josser thought.
‘I should have to try it,’ she said cautiously.
‘Because I could change it,’ Mr Josser went on mechanically.
Mrs Josser did not reply immediately.
‘Where did you buy it?’ she asked.
‘In the City,’ he answered vaguely.
There was another pause.
‘Did you notice if they had any thick winter gloves?’ she asked. ‘Knitted ones.’
But there were more than the Jossers waking up to Christmas morning south of the river. There were even more than the Jossers in No. 10 Dulcimer Street.
Starting from the top of the house, with the attic suite, there was Mr Puddy. Mr Puddy was a widower, a morose, fattish man. Sometimes he said ‘Good‐evening’ when he met you on the stairs, and sometimes he didn’t. You could never quite be sure of him. In age, he was about midway across the grey wilderness between the fifties and the sixties. And he had known better days. Indeed, from the way he referred to it, he seemed to derive a gloomy satisfaction from the fact that he had come down a bit in the world. He was, as a matter of fact, still coming down. And, at his present rate, there would soon be no stopping him. At thirty‐five he had been manager of a small dairy; at forty‐five he had been reduced to a common roundsman; and at fifty the dairy had got rid of him altogether. Since then he had been employed on and off at various odd jobs – though sometimes for months on end Society managed to get along without asking Mr Puddy to raise a hand to help. He had been caretaker to a succession of different firms and in his time he had taken care of ladies’ clothing, celluloid combs – a lot of care was needed here because of the danger of fire – and gramophone cabinets. He had been hotel‐porter, polisher in an undertakers, despatch clerk in a laundry, and temporary postal sorter.
He was a postal sorter at the moment. But looking into the future, the very near future – next week, in fact – he saw another of his free periods looming up.
It was greatly to Mr Puddy’s credit that in all his ups‐and‐downs he had contrived to dress respectably. This was specially creditable as each new up started on the level of the last down. But it was also to his advantage. Because, if he hadn’t taken pains about his appearance he would never have been seriously considered even for the skylight rooms. It was a very respectable house, was No. 10. As it was, however, Mr Puddy used to go off in the morning to the most undazzling of jobs with the responsible air of managerial dignity still wrapped about him. And the house gained rather than lost by housing him.
He always, except on quite short journeys, carried an attaché case. Admittedly, nowadays his case contained nothing but his lunch. But stray passers‐by weren’t to know this. And they weren’t to know that, in the really bad periods, Mr Puddy, a man who liked his chop or steak and his boiled suet roll or treacle pudding, was sometimes reduced to several thick slices of bread and butter – packed face to face, so when he separated them they came apart with the sound of a long sticky kiss – and a piece of soapy yellow cheese.
Food and Mr Puddy were in the same order of things. It occupied the place in his life which drinking occupies in some weaker natures. In consequence, he was almost always at it. On some nights he would go straight on with his evening meal consuming a whole cold pie followed by slice after slice of bread and jam, or bread and syrup, or bread‐and‐fish‐paste, until the loaf was a gaunt ruin, and Mr Puddy was sitting back in his chair, his waistcoat undone, satiated, sickly, but in a dumb way happy and contented. One of the recurrent sadnesses of his single state was that boiled puddings no longer appeared on the table. On the other hand there was no one to expect him to talk at meals. And Mr Puddy was against talking.
At this moment he was bending over the gas cooker on the landing shovelling rashers of bacon into a pan. He had broken two eggs into a cup and arranged a piece of fried bread alongside the rashers. On one end of the table the bread and butter and marmalade were set out in readiness and the milk bottle was standing on the table. He had taken down the biggest teapot so that there should be no danger of a shortage and he was about to settle down to some pretty serious feeding. Luckily he was in the second shift at the sorting office and he had the next two hours entirely to himself – to himself and his breakfast.
Taken altogether it was about as good a Christmas as he remembered.
In the second floor back, it was being a very different kind of Christmas.
A single lady lived there and she was only just waking up. This wasn’t surprising, considering the hours she kept. She never got back till about two or three in the morning and, by arrangement, she let herself in with her own key and no questions asked. There couldn’t really be any other way about it. She was a part of London’s night‐life and no one could be expected to sit up until the small hours simply to see that she got home all right.
It was the sort of life that parsons preach against that she was leading. There was danger in it. And temptation. By the time she got back to Dulcimer Street she was often a bit of a wreck. And into that sleeping thoroughfare she brought with her something of another and more glittering life. She was like an ambassadress from a different world – a world of blondes with their hair halfway down their shoulders and dark foreign‐looking gentlemen and chemin‐de‐fer and champagne and lobster patties and the sound of saxophones. And every morning when she woke up she remembered that the two worlds did not mix.
She still called herself an actress. But there was not much sense in the term any longer. She was now simply the old girl with the dyed hair who sat behind the counter in the lady’s cloakroom and had a saucer, with a few pins in it, in front of her, ready to receive the tips. Her salary, even though the club was in Dover Street5 in a very select neighbourhood, was only a pound a week. And what she could make on the side. The latter was not much. It was astonishing how many Mayfair heiresses tried to get away without leaving even sixpence.
She was just beginning to stir now, pulling the muddle of bed clothes more closely round her shoulders because she was cold. And when at last she was awake she lay there without moving. After all there was nothing to get up for. She wasn’t expecting anyone. She wasn’t late for anything. She wasn’t even early.
After a bit she roused herself and thrust a thin ancient arm out of bed. The room was so small that the dressing‐table was within arm’s length, and she was able to reach the hand mirror that she had been groping for. When she had got it she simply lay back looking at her own image.
‘Oh God, I’m old,’ she said to herself. ‘I’m the limit.’
She tilted the mirror a little and raised her head so that the light fell across her face, showing up the wrinkles, the saggings, the loose pouches of skin under the eyes, the patches of last night’s colour.
‘Old,’ she went on. ‘Old, I’m just a bleeding sunset. I’m the afterglow.’ Tears came into her eyes as she remembered something unpleasant that one of the hostesses had said to her last night and she continued her soliloquy unrestrained.
‘She said it,’ she admitted. ‘I ought to be dead. I’m as old as Methuselah. As old as the hills. I’m the oldest thing left on earth. I’m as old as creation. I’m the space between the stars.’
She was crying quite openly now.
‘I haven’t got any family. I haven’t had any Christmas cards. I can’t even remember the names of my lovers. I’m a week behind with the rent and this week will be due to‐morrow. My new second‐hand shoes hurt me. And I’ve got a pain in my side that won’t go away. There isn’t a man would look at me, not if he was ever so. I can’t get my rings off because my knuckles are so swollen. I haven’t got a winter coat. I haven’t got a Christmas dinner. I haven’t got any fresh bird‐seed for Duke. I haven’t got a box of crackers. I haven’t even got a cigarette…’
It wasn’t much that she was asking: nothing that a Christian shouldn’t have. A perishing postcard would have been enough. And not even a real old‐fashioned blush‐raiser at that. She’d given up hoping for ‘To your brown eyes, Connie darling. May our two hearts soon beat together. How about next Friday? Cheerio, George;’ and that sort of thing. Something far less would have contented her. For instance: ‘Just a line from your old Mum to wish you the kind of Christmas you’d wish yourself. Don’t leave it too long before I see you again;’ or ‘To our darling Mother in memory of the happy times she used to give us all;’ or ‘To dear old Connie from the girls. May your shadow never grow less, Babs.’ Anything in fact to show that she mattered. That someone else couldn’t get along without her. But what was the use of wishing? She hadn’t got a mother. There weren’t any children to make a fuss of her. And the only Babs she’d ever known was a dark girl from Middlesborough who had a hasty temper and married a waiter. It was just silly imagining that she might get a post card from her. Or from anyone else.
She dried her eyes on a corner of the sheet.
‘Now Connie,’ she told herself. ‘Don’t you let your imagination run away with you. There’s nothing for you, dear. Nor will there be. You’re washed up. You’re high and dry. You’re what the sea left behind it. You’re on the rocks.’
Then a change came over her and she brightened up. She had just remembered something that was in her handbag on the washstand. It was a nearly new lipstick in a silver gilt case. Brunette Rose, the colour was called. Connie had come by it the previous evening. One of the visitors to the night club had left it for a moment on the counter, and Connie had popped it into her handbag. Then, when the lady had come back, Connie had helped her to look for it. She had even gone down on all fours. But it was hopeless, and she had told the lady so. She had repented afterwards. But not now. The lipstick was nice to have. Nice to have something new on Christmas Day.
She looked up at the bird‐cage with the duster over it.
‘Happy Christmas, Duke,’ she said. ‘Be a good birdie.’
Come down one floor lower and what sort of Christmas is it?
Perfect.
And that’s because there are two people and not just one lonely one. Mrs Boon and her son, Percy, are such a devoted pair. As is only natural, it is the woman who shows her feelings more than the man. He’s tough. He works in a garage. And what with nightshifts and rush jobs coming in at the last moment and delivering cars to purchasers in remote parts of London and evenings off at dance halls – and hasn’t he earned them? – she doesn’t see much of him.
But his mother doesn’t mind. He’s got his head screwed on the right way and at twenty he’s doing better than any other young man she knows. You could tell that he was in the good money simply by looking at him. He’s easily the best‐dressed man in Dulcimer Street. Some of his suits even look a bit too good for the neighbourhood – his purple cashmere and his shadow check, in particular. But a nice‐looking young fellow can carry a smart suit. And Percy Boon is certainly nice‐looking. It’s only his hands that worry Mrs Boon. She used to be proud of his hands, so thin and long‐fingered like his father’s. Now they are rough and filthy with oil that the grease solvent only leaves more deeply imbedded. And the finger nails. They’ve practically gone. As a little boy he had the loveliest filbert nails. But with the work he does they’re just torn and ragged. And they’re stained too because he smokes such a lot. It’s a pity about his smoking. He gets through packet after packet – Gold Flake, Player’s, Top Score, Weights, Woodbines – anything that he can get hold of. Forty or fifty a day. Nerves of course. He isn’t naturally a heavy smoker – of that Mrs Boon is sure. And if the garage works him so hard that he has to smoke to soothe himself, it would have seemed only fair that they should keep him supplied with cigarettes. But they don’t. And so Percy has to go on pushing out his sixpences and shillings simply to keep going. The only consolation is that, with the good money he gets, he can afford it.
If he didn’t get good money he couldn’t possibly have afforded a handbag like the one he’s just given to his mother. It’s a fine big handbag on any showing, with a lot of pockets and two silver looking knobs on top and a mirror and a design like the rising sun let into the front in a different kind of leather. It’s the sort of handbag that a Duchess might carry. Indeed, the only thing that is wrong with it is that Mrs Boon, who is a small woman, doesn’t feel equal to the job of hauling it about.
She herself has given Percy a lighter. She had saved up for it for months, paring little bits off the housekeeping week by week – until she could buy the kind she wanted. They cost a lot of money that sort. An awful lot. It had been silly, of course. It was too much to spend on any lighter. But why shouldn’t she? she had asked herself. Wouldn’t you, if you hadn’t got a husband and every bit of pleasure and relief you got in life came from your son? Wouldn’t you make a bit of a splash for his sake just once in the year?
They’ve just finished breakfast, Mrs Boon and Percy. Mrs Boon has been talking cheerfully all through the meal because she is happy. But it’s been a one‐sided kind of conversation because Percy has been reading all the time. Propped up against the marmalade pot he has got his copy of ‘True Adventure Stories.’ His long legs are stuck out underneath the table, and the ash from his cigarette is dropping everywhere, on to the table‐cloth, into his saucer, on to his plate, into the cup. Mrs Boon doesn’t like ash in the washing‐up, and keeps on pushing a china Present‐from‐Weymouth ash‐tray in front of him. But he ignores it. He is oblivious to ash‐trays. He is not at the breakfast table at all. He is in a submarine. The submarine rests upside down on soft sand in forty fathoms, and the oxygen is used up. The port engine is on fire. The Captain has gone mad and is threatening the crew with his revolver. Two of the plates have buckled and a thin trickle of water is entering the forward compartment. The chief engineer gives them another ten minutes of life. He is nonchalantly playing cards and all of the cards keep coming up black…
‘Oh Percy, not in the butter,’ Mrs Boon is saying. ‘It’ll all have to be scraped off.’
There is something in her voice that breaks the spell. Percy stubs his cigarette end out on the first plate that comes handy.
‘Gotter phone someone,’ he says.
‘Not on Christmas Day,’ Mrs Boon complains. ‘Won’t they ever leave you alone?’
‘Back in a minute,’ Percy answers. ‘It’s a chap wants to buy a car. Only time I can get him.’
He rises, pulls down his double‐breasted waistcoat, gives a little tug to his dainty coloured handkerchief, lights another cigarette and goes out.
Mrs Boon stands at the window wondering how long he will be out. She is sad that on Christmas Day of all days she can’t have him entirely to herself. It is this sadness that is now showing in her face, making her eyes look deeper and more hollow, and the lines in her face longer. And this is strange because with Percy about the house, Mrs Boon is such a happy woman.
It’s almost as though she’s waiting for something sad that hasn’t yet happened.
We’ve already met the Jossers, so we might as well go straight on down the steep flight of dark stairs leading into the basement.
Here in the nether depths it is Mrs Vizzard who reigns. She, too, is a widow. But unlike Mrs Boon she hasn’t got a Percy. She’s childless. And as much alone in the world as Connie. But better provided for. Mrs Vizzard doesn’t suffer any morning miseries. She can look in a hand mirror without wanting to cut her throat. She isn’t the space between the stars. And that is because she is a woman of property. The house is hers. She had got her husband to make it over to her when she saw how things were going. And she had acted only just in time. When the Lord – impatient, it seemed, for Mr Vizzard’s company – had snatched him from her in his prime, the family business had yielded nothing. It was an upholsterers, and even as far back as 1910 Mr Vizzard had complained that people no longer wanted the good stuff, the horse hair, the leather, the cane bottoms. Already a weaker generation was demanding flock and velour and cretonne covers. And Mrs Vizzard had watched the decline. She had seen Mr Vizzard, pale and hairy and distracted, wondering where the next week’s wages for his workmen was coming from. Then she had pounced.
In the result, she had one anxiety. The Lease. There was only another eighteen years to run. Eighteen years; and she was forty‐six. She hoped to be comfortably dead in eighteen years time. In fact she was counting on being dead. But there was always the possibility, that she might live on and on, right through the sixties and beyond, like a runaway. And after she’d got to sixty‐four she would be living on her capital. That, in Mrs Vizzard’s religion, was the greatest of all sins. It loomed bigger than adultery. Bigger than stealing. Bigger even than murder. They were the unnecessary sins: if you read your Bible and took care not to lose your head in moments of excitement, you could avoid them altogether. But living on capital was different. It happened sometimes to the most respectable people. It was like secret drinking. Homes were broken up, lives ruined, neighbours mystified – and all because of living on capital.
It was to avoid these disasters, and this sin, that Mrs Vizzard lived so carefully in a front basement even while the going was still good.
And in the result, never seeing any sunlight except what seeped through into the area, there had come to be a pale waxiness about her. A suggestion of Madonna lilies. Her hair, which was still dark, was worn so flat to the head that it might have been strapped there: it ended in a hard circular knob riveted into the nape of the neck.
No one could have said that she was not lady‐like. She was positively steeped in a kind of austere, demure breeding. For instance, though she let rooms, she never hung a card in her window. Elsewhere Dulcimer Street was fairly decked out with such things – ‘Bed‐Sitting‐Room to Let;’ ‘Flat to Let;’ ‘Two Good Rooms to Let;’ ‘Room for Single Gentleman;’ ‘Light Basement to be Let.’ Even ‘Bed and Breakfast,’ clumsily and inexpertly‐lettered by hand – but that was at the Swan Walk end. Mrs Vizzard’s own trade announcements appeared in the specialist pages of Dalton’s Weekly. It cost more that way but you got a better class of tenant.
No one in Dulcimer Street knew anything about Mrs Vizzard’s private life. Indeed, at first glance, it seemed that there couldn’t be any. But it was there, all right. And pretty highly coloured. Mrs Vizzard was a Spiritualist. In the crumbling but imposing building with a wooden notice board outside announcing ‘The South London Spiritualist Movement,’ she conversed with Aztec princesses and Egyptian priests and Red Indian Chiefs. Conversed while the medium groaned and panted, and the table bounced about and shifted itself and luminous tambourines and trumpets drifted over her head, and the odour of violets filled the air and cold winds blew. It was all momentous and terrifying, and somewhere amid the hubbub and the confusion Mrs Vizzard waited patiently for Mr Vizzard’s voice to come through. After fourteen years she was still waiting.
At this moment – ten forty‐five on Christmas morning – she was sitting quite upright on one of the massive leather‐backed chairs that was all that remained of her old dining‐room. The table in front of her was arranged like a desk, and she was running over her rent books. There was something at once loving and superfluous about the operation. She knew them by heart already. And they were all in order. All except Connie’s, that is. Connie’s rent book remained the one disgraceful blot in that saga of sound finance.
Mrs Vizzard sat there, pursing her lips over it, and wondering when to bring the axe down.
And, last of all, completing the census of 10 Dulcimer Street there was the back basement. It was empty at the moment and for some reason it was hanging fire. Mrs Vizzard had even tried advertising in a spiritualist weekly, The Spirit World.
But, apparently, apart from herself, only spirits read The Spirit World.