CATFORD Street might have been any of the poorer streets in any city—a city that was old and had been bombed—but its flavour was of London; its stucco and its sooty brick, its scarlet buses, the scarlet post-office van, and the scarlet pillar box at the corner of Garden Row were London, as were its log-carts, the occasional great shire horses in the drays, the starlings, pigeons, and sparrows, the strange uncouth call of the rag-and-bone man, the many pubs, and the way the newspaper woman trustfully went away and left her papers, knowing that the pennies and the halfpennies would be thrown down.
The ugly accents of the Street children were unmistakably English but the older people could have belonged anywhere; a great many had come from somewhere else—all tongues were spoken in Catford Street, faces were all colours, but even the people who had been born there and lived and died in it were like any people anywhere. It was all perfectly ordinary; seen from above, from the back windows high up in some of the Square houses—Number Eleven, for instance, from the old schoolroom at the top of the house—Catford Street, with Motcombe Terrace and Garden Row—which had no gardens—running to left and right of it, made the shape of a big cross.
That was how Olivia, looking down from the old school-room windows, often saw it, spread out before her, yet hidden, teeming. At night it was a nest of lights, and it was always filled with sound, endless, myriad human sounds, while behind, booming from the river, came the sirens, tugs, and ships sounding almost equally big, reminding the Street, thought Olivia, of the world; and, falling down between the house walls, the sound of bells, reminding it, or failing to remind it, of heaven. The Anglican St. Botolph’s Home of Compassion, with its black-and-white-habited nuns, was just behind the Square, and hidden somewhere among the houses was a convent of the Sisters of Charity; Olivia had never found out where it was but she had often seen the Sisters’ blue gowns and big-winged cornettes going through the streets, and, as long as she could remember, the Angelus had rung from their convent three times a day. It used to be echoed by the big bell from the Catholic church in Catford Street, but that had been bombed and now there was only a tinny little bell from the makeshift hut that was used as a church.
Four times a day there was another sound; it came from the red brick building that took up a whole block, a school with high walls round it, topped with wire netting to keep in the balls that were bounced on the asphalt playgrounds; at twelve o’clock, at half-past three, and at recreation times the noise went up to the sky as first the infants, then the girls, and then the boys came out to play. It was like a vast, lively cheeping. It was this that first made the Miss Chesneys call the Street children “the sparrows.”
When two people say the same word it can mean two different things. To Angela they were sparrows because they were cheeky, cocky, common as sparrows; to Olivia nothing was common; sparrows were sold for three farthings but not one should fall to the ground, though how that was possible she did not know, and apparently they fell all the time; Angela was always being summoned to cases of accident, illness, sorrow, or sudden death; it was paradoxical that it was Angela who worked indefatigably for the sparrows while the sensitive Olivia did nothing.
Angela tried to make her. “You might at least come on the Roll of Visitors,” she said.
“To visit whom?”
“People, like the Street people, in their houses, and ask them questions.”
But Olivia was appalled at the idea. “I?” she said, shrinking.
“Yes. Why not?”
Olivia thought of those swarming, vital houses and was appalled again. “I—I couldn’t,” she said. “They’re too rich.”
“They’re well off, I know,” said Angela, “all but a few—ridiculously well off; that doesn’t stop them getting into messes.” But Olivia was not thinking of money; to her they seemed rich in everything she had not, children and strength and life. It’s odd, thought Olivia; half the time I’m troubled because I’ve scarcely anything at all, half the time because I have too much.
As a matter of fact, it was Angela who had real riches; she was the one who kept up the big house in the Square. “On my own I couldn’t live like this,” Olivia said often; she did not add that she would not. They had all been left their share of the Chesney and their mother’s money—“Quite a tidy sum, even in these days,” said Noel, their brother—but Angela, who had been a beautiful and very taking child, had inherited from a rich old bachelor godfather as well. “Be polite to Aunt Angela,” Noel told his children and joked, “Besides being good as gold, she’s solid gold.”
If anyone were well named, Olivia thought often, it was her sister Angela. She looked like all the things that went with angels—a candle, a lily. Angela’s figure was more like a tall boy’s than a middle-aged woman’s, she moved lightly and swiftly, her hair was still golden—no grey, though she’s forty-five, thought Olivia with pride—and she had the Hewitt features (the Miss Chesneys’ mother had been a Hewitt), straight, clear-cut features, with a slightly intense expression that reminded Olivia of the Burne-Jones pictures that had been fashionable when their mother was young.
Angela not only had good looks, she had good works. “By their fruits ye shall know them” was carved over the porch at St. Botolph’s, the big church in the Square; for years none of them had gone into St. Botolph’s—Mother had been well known as a rationalist—but now Angela, being thoroughly modern, had begun to go again and had made friends with the new young rector, Mr. Wix, whom she called David. “By their fruits . . .” That haunted Olivia because she had no fruits. If there should one day be a recording angel—and how funny, thought Olivia, if there should turn out to be one after all—while most people got three or four out of ten, and some, like Angela, full marks, Olivia could imagine him looking at her and saying, “No marks at all.” How had that happened? Olivia did not know.
She had had the same chances as Noel and Angela. Then why was she so different? If she had felt well it might have been easier. Olivia’s headaches were a family nuisance, and she was given to hot dark blushes that turned her face a mulberry colour—hideous, thought Olivia—and her attacks of indigestion were so sharp that she had grown a habit of pressing her hands suddenly against her chest—“Like a tragedy queen,” said Angela. Sometimes Olivia wished she had a real illness, something for which a doctor could be called in; as it was, “You think you are going to have a headache, and you do,” said Angela.
“Yes, I do,” said Olivia wearily.
It was not only her health. “I was born inept and clumsy,” said Olivia often. No one contradicted her.
It had been one of Mother’s maxims that her children, the girls as well as the boy, must be qualified. Angela had been qualified at twenty-one; she was that still uncommon thing among women, a trained accountant, but Olivia had never qualified for anything. It was strange that she, who had not been able to stand against Mother for a moment, had been the one to defeat her in the end. Perhaps I always defeated her, thought Olivia, and that was why I irritated her so much. That faraway girl, the young Olivia, used to spend half her time banished to the schoolroom—which is perhaps why I’m so fond of it, thought Olivia now.
She had wanted to move up here when the house was converted and a flat made on the second floor for Noel’s family to use when they were in town, the basement altered to make a home for old Hall and his wife. Hall had been the butler—“When we had butlers,” said Angela lightly. Now they had old Ellen, who had been their nurse, and a procession of dailies, and Mrs. Hall came up to do the cooking. Angela and Olivia had moved their rooms down to the first floor, though Olivia still hankered after the schoolroom. “Olivia is sentimental,” said Angela. “She likes to go back into the school-room world.” But up here in the schoolroom Olivia did not go back, she seemed to go a long, long way beyond any world.
Here, high over the Catford Street houses, she had a feeling of immensity, of power, as if—as if I could play God, thought Olivia. She could look down over the Street, and the roofs of other streets, over thousands and thousands of chimneys from which the smoke went curling up; she could look away to faint spires of unknown churches, past the big bulk and flat roofs of the new council flats—no chimneys there—to the cranes and warehouses that showed where the river ran; across it, on the other bank, above other cranes, other warehouses, rose the great shape of the power station. As Olivia watched, the whole, all the world she could see, tilted against the sky; it was the passage of the clouds that made it seem as if the world moved, Olivia knew that very well, but she liked to think, as she had thought as a child, that it was the earth tilting, slowly tilting, as it turned on its axis in the sky. I, a pinprick, in this pinprick city, can feel the power of the earth, she thought, and, on the afternoon of the Garden Committee meeting, thinking that, the word “earth” made her pause; “earth,” and again she remembered the footprint in the garden bed.
As if she had been Crusoe and the footprint a little Man Friday’s, Olivia had followed it most of the day in her mind. All day she had wondered whose it was. But there must have been more than one child to carry all that earth, she thought. What were they doing? What did they want? thought Olivia.
“Want.” It was like a match put suddenly to a pile of tinder, old wood, cut long ago, lying for years, and drying so that it caught and flamed. What did I want? thought Olivia. So many things; the things all girls want, and it wrung her to think with what supreme confidence she had waited for them to come. “There is no reason,” said Mother, “why a woman should not have a career and a home . . .” “When you have your own home . . .” she said often to Olivia and Angela. “When your children are grown up . . .” but those premises, thought Olivia, had rested on one thing, a man; and there had never been the vestige of a man for Olivia.
It was not the absence of a man that Olivia regretted so much, though she could have wished that both she and Angela had married—Angela was too fastidious—that blank in her life was not the worst; but I wish children were not so unknown to me, she thought, looking down on that hotbed of children, the Street. Olivia divined something in children—not in her nieces and nephews, Noel’s children, who were precocious and spoiled—but in the children who were let alone, real children. Though she knew from Angela’s dealings with them that they were blunt, even rude—as I am myself, thought Olivia—they seemed to her truer than grown-ups, unalloyed; watching them, she knew they were vital; if you were with them you would be alive, thought Olivia.
Angela was, in a way, Olivia’s child; she was ten years younger, though she might have been ten years older in experience; and she needs me, Olivia thought in surprise, and she said aloud, because she was so surprised, “She makes mistakes.” Olivia said that as if it were a miracle; but I wanted real children, she thought—and today that want was even sharper than before—children and to be rooted in the earth, not in manmade things, bricks and stones, but in the earth; and a confusion of things came into her mind, things of which she knew scarcely anything—dew, haystacks, compost, picking peas, and marrows, tangles of flowers, sweet williams, larkspur, marigolds, all the naïve cottage flowers that are seldom found in shops; and animals, thought Olivia, not pet dogs but real animals, calves and kids and chickens, and she remembered how she had once begged to keep a hedgehog in this very schoolroom.
I didn’t want extraordinary things, she said, to go up the Amazon or dig for gold—if you do dig for gold—an ordinary little bit of life would have done for me; and she leaned far out from the window sill, as far as she could, for it was high, as if she wanted to see into all those countless thousands of ordinary lives below. I wish I could have one chance, thought Olivia, one real chance, the chance and the courage—she could see she had been singularly lacking in courage—not to have a life of my own, she thought—it was a little late for that, she could see—but the chance to join in something real—real, pleaded Olivia.
There was, of course, no answer. The house was quiet; at this time of the afternoon the Halls were in their own sitting room, far down in the basement; Ellen was out, gone for what she called her “little potter.” Angela was in the office with her secretary, Miss Marshall.
After the war Angela had not gone back to her Clarges Street firm; she had turned, as the Times had said in the obituary notice of Mother, “her talents to voluntary work.” “I don’t need a salary,” Angela had said. “If I take it I keep it from somebody who does, and these old charities are crying out. They can’t be run in a slipshod old-aunt fashion these days; they must be organized and administered professionally.”
There was certainly nothing amateur about Angela; she had an office in what had been the morning room on the ground floor; Miss Marshall worked in the old dining room, which was now a waiting room; and the typist, Jeannie, had the dark little room they had always called “the Slit.”
Angela was secretary or auditor or member of so many different boards and committees that Olivia had long ago given up trying to remember which was which; if she did remember, Angela called them by their initials, which confounded Olivia again. Angela found time to run a literary club and discussion group—“Just for refreshment,” said Angela—and to be Chairman of the Anglo-European Women’s Initiative Movement as well, the A.E.W.I.M. “That pays me,” said Angela. “I get my trips abroad with all expenses.” And in her spare time—she still had spare time, Olivia marvelled—she was writing a book, “On economics” said Olivia reverently. It was only Olivia who was unoccupied and idle. This afternoon, for instance, there seemed no place for her, nothing she need do, and she stayed where she was. After a moment she began to think again of the stolen earth and the footprint, and again the questions began. Who were they? What did they want? How did it all begin?