IT HAD begun on a windy Saturday morning in March, in Catford Street, three months before.
The footsteps went up and down, down and up; in the High Street that ran across the top of Catford Street they made one sound that joined with the noise of traffic; in Catford Street itself the steps were separated; though they were continual, they were—people’s, thought Sparkey, the newspaper woman’s little boy. He knew what he meant; in the High the steps were a noise, a crowd; here he could identify them with his eyes shut—man, woman, child, child skipping, man with dog; man, woman, child—and from everyone who passed, there went up, though Sparkey was too young to know it, a little steam of thought, of plans and hopes and worries—in Catford Street it was mostly worries. “Is everyone unhappy?” the child Lovejoy was to ask Vincent in despair.
Vincent said, “Everyone,” but after a moment, when he had thought, he added, “That doesn’t prevent them from being happy.”
Though Catford Street was in London it was a little like a village; to live in it, or the Terrace, or Garden Row, off it, or in any of the new flats that led off them, was to become familiar with its people; Sparkey, for instance, knew nearly everyone that passed, though he did not know their names. Sparkey had permission to sit on the steps of the house nearest the newspaper stand. He was delicate, one of those little boys who are all eyes and thin long legs; he was always catching chills, and his mother put a wad of papers under him to keep his bony little bottom off the stone and wrapped a copy of the Evening News round his legs; even then he was mottled with cold; his nose was as scarlet as his scarf and kept on running, so that he had to wipe it with his glove. He had objected to gloves. “Boys don’t wear gloves!” he had said. “You will,” said his mother. As he grew colder and the gloves grew dirtier his face was gradually smeared with black and damp and began to chap; his hair felt as if it were frozen to his head, but he would not move.
“Why don’t you go and play?” asked his mother.
“I like to watch,” said Sparkey.
The newspaper stand was at the end of the Street, where it joined the High by the traffic lights and the bus stop. It was the busiest corner, with the queue for the bus, people waiting to cross with the lights, more people coming to buy papers. When the bus came it stopped just by Sparkey and sent out visible fumes of warmth and smell from under its red sides; it looked as if it were a real big animal breathing. Sparkey watched the people file in; the bus looked comfortable with its paint, the pale steel of its handles, the glimpse of seats behind its glass. It started with a harsh grinding noise, the people were carried away, and Sparkey’s mother rattled the coppers in the pocket of her big newspaper sling; she rattled them, thought Sparkey, because the conductor had rattled his in his bag. Sparkey liked the newspaper sling; it was crimson canvas, lettered DAILY MAIL, and looked cheerful over his mother’s old coat. Every gleam of colour was cheerful in that plain street.
Some of the people in the bus queue had suitcases; of course, it was Saturday; Sparkey guessed they were going away for the weekend; some had babies and pale blue pushchairs that they lifted onto the bus. There was a girl in a black silk coat, her hair in a knot at the back of her head; she carried a small case, and her nails and her lips were bright red; Sparkey knew her and knew she was a dancer, going to rehearsal; he had heard her tell his mother. There were men with paper hats and green rosettes pinned to their coats; they had peaked, pale faces and their clothes were crumpled because they had been up all night; they were up from the provinces for a cup tie.
All down the Street women were scrubbing doorsteps ready for Sunday. There was a sound of barking and soon a man passed with two big dogs; Sparkey knew them; he had seen their kennels in the area of Number Sixty-nine; they barked when they were let out, which was not often; the fur had come off their elbows from lying on the area flags, and they stank.
There were plenty of animals in Catford Street; Sid, the log man, kept his pony Lucy behind the last house, in a shed by the canal; all the children in Catford Street knew Lucy and her little cart painted with hearts and roses. Besides Lucy and the dogs, there were budgerigars, canaries, and cats, many cats. In the very house where Sparkey sat on the steps, Mrs. Cleary and Miss Arnot kept fifteen cats; the two old ladies came creeping out every morning in old fur tippets and men’s hats, their waists hung round with shopping bags to buy food for their cats; they bought fish-heads and horsemeat and then crept home again; presently the smell of the fish and meat cooking would seep out into the Street, and the cats that on fine days ornamented the window sills and the half-wall of the portico would get up and stretch and go mewing in to dinner.
People passed all the time. There were women with perambulators and children tagging along, holding to the handles; most of the women said “Hello” to Sparkey’s mother; most of the children, as they came from the shops, were eating something, an ice or a lollipop; Sparkey looked at them and his mouth watered. Two girls came along with green coats, their hair tied with limp white ribbons; they were Yvette and Susie Romney and they had an orange lollipop to share between them; they took it in turns, three sucks each, each sharply watched by the other; in Catford Street one had to be sharp and strictly fair. Sparkey did not really look at them, though his eyes watched the lollipop. He was not interested in girls.
The children from St. Botolph’s Home of Compassion came past: twenty-six little girls, walking two-by-two, with a nun at the end. Another kind of nun passed; her full blue cotton skirts made a sound that was like a quiet murmur of words, but her wooden beads rattled, and the sides of her starched white hat—Sparkey called it a hat—flapped, and her boots squeaked; the fringe of her shawl had bobbles that danced up and down as she walked. She was interesting, with the constant movement of her clothes, and Sparkey watched as she turned in at the broken church steps and went up them, out of sight.
The third house down from where Sparkey sat was the Priest’s House, and next to it was where the Catholic church of Our Lady of Sion had been bombed. Now the church was only a hut standing in a rubble of broken pillars and masonry; there was a notice board outside it, lettered in big letters, HELP TO BUILD OUR CHURCH AND SCHOOLS; above the letters was a wooden aeroplane rising slowly up the scale—£2,000, £3,000, £4,000; the aeroplane had stuck at that for a long time. “They need fifteen thousand pounds,” said Sparkey’s mother. “They’ll never get that.”
On Saturday morning the Catholic children went to Confession. There was no school, and the Street was full of children; some of them were shopping for their mothers, a great many had got on the bus for the children’s show at the Victoria Cinema, some went down to the new Woolworth’s in the Wilton Road, and some of the boys, with carts made out of packing cases and old perambulator wheels, took a sack down to the gasworks for coke, but most were just playing; there were little girls with doll perambulators, taggles of little girls; there were boys playing mysterious games with balls, or chalking on the pavement, and smaller boys with cowboy hats and cardboard chaps and metal pistols; they lurked round corners and shouted at one another. “Go and play with them,” said Sparkey’s mother again, but Sparkey was not interested in small boys; though he was only five, going on six, he was ambitious; he was waiting for Tip Malone.
Besides being ambitious, Sparkey was melodramatic; he frightened the other children. “Do you know what gravy is?” he would ask, hushed, and when they shook their heads he would say in a cold voice, “It’s blood.”
He would ask a small girl, “Do you see that man?”
The little girl would nod.
“If you met him at night he would take you away in a sack,” said Sparkey.
“That’s only old Mr. Isbister,” the little girl would say uncertainly.
“That’s what you think,” said Sparkey.
“Perhaps it’s being a newspaper child,” Olivia was to say when she had had some experience of Sparkey, but Angela objected. “A child that age can’t read,” she said. Sparkey could not read, but the lurid pieces of the paper seemed printed into him; not long ago one of the Catford Street boys, the boy that Lucas had told Angela about, had been caught by the police; he had slashed an old lady with a knife. “F’r her handbag,” said Sparkey with relish. “He got sent away. That was Maxey Ford,” said Sparkey. “He was in Tip Malone’s gang.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Sparkey’s mother, but Sparkey was an authority on gangs. “Tip’s a nicely brought-up boy,” said Sparkey’s mother.
“He isn’t,” said Sparkey indignantly.
Sparkey had thought Tip might have been sent to Confession, but there was no sign of him; Sparkey sighed.
Just as one day the grown-up Sparkey was to know the face of his girl, his beloved, every mark and line, so now he knew Tip’s face, his face and all about him, his clothes, his voice, his doings, and his gang. The gang was not big but it was choice. “Jim Howes, Tony Zassi, Rory Isbister, Puggy, Ginger, and John Rowe,” said Sparkey wistfully. Tip was the biggest—“Well, he’s thirteen,” said Sparkey with awe. Tip was heavy and tough and square and wore an old grey sweater and battered jeans. “Wish I had jeans!” sighed Sparkey.
No one knew how many Malones there were. “There can’t be more than nine,” Angela often said, but they were so big and loud-voiced that the Street seemed full of them. They lived in the basement and top-floor flats of Number Seventeen, and no one would stay long in the flats on the other floors, if they could possibly find anywhere else to go, because of the Malones racing up and down the stairs.
They were all as alike as peas, all strong and well set-up and astonishingly handsome with well-shaped limbs, straight backs, clear skins, and thick brown curly hair; “The stock must be good,” Olivia was to say when she came to know them. They had the traditional blue eyes put in with smutty fingers—“Irish eyes,” said Olivia.
“Irish blarney,” said Angela. Angela, as usual, was right.
“Tip’s got a bowie knife,” said Sparkey longingly. “Every kind of knife.”
“Who told you so?” asked his mother.
“He told Puggy Carpenter and Puggy told Jimmy and Jimmy told me.” Sparkey’s mother sniffed. “He’s going to have a nair gun and he’s got a space helmet and a bike with a dual brake control.” Sparkey had faithfully learned all those difficult names. “He’s going into the Navy, he’ll be a sailor,” said Sparkey as if he saw visions.
“It’s not blarney exactly,” said Olivia. “It’s what they hope and believe is going to happen; it’s a kind of faith.”
Olivia was right too; there was something in the Malones that not even their poverty and untidiness and shabbiness could hide.
Mr. Malone, who drove a coal dray, was a big, bragging, blue-eyed man, but the one behind the whole family was Mrs. Malone; she looked, fittingly, like the pod they came from; she was big and bulging and flabby. “She looks used,” said Olivia, whom nobody had used. Mrs. Malone was firmly behind her children: when they got into trouble, and they had plenty of trouble; when they had accidents, and they were always being run over, or falling off buses or onto their heads out of windows, or being taken to hospital in ambulances and returning in bandages or plaster. She was with them in their triumphs, and they took most of the prizes at school; with them in their enterprises, and they were always going off somewhere wonderful or doing something astounding; and she was with them, very often and personally, in their fights. Tip’s nose had been broken in a fight. “He’s a fighter,” said Sparkey with pride.
It was not only because Tip had been with Maxey that Sparkey worshipped him; there was something in Tip that warmed the cockles of a little boy; Sparkey could not put it into words but, “He once pulled a face at me,” said Sparkey.
“Why don’t you pull one back,” said his mother, which showed how ignorant she was.
“I couldn’t do that,” said Sparkey, appalled. “But,” he said reverently, “Tip knows me. P’rhaps one day I’ll be in the gang.”
“You can’t be in a gang, you’re not six,” said Sparkey’s mother, “and that’s that.” Sparkey shut his lips, and his eyes looked a long way beyond her. Soon his mother would not know what he did.
It was a strange thing that up to the age of seven children were noticeable in Catford Street; the babies in their well-kept perambulators and the little boys and girls in coat-and-legging sets were prominent, but after the age of seven the children seemed to disappear into anonymity, to be camouflaged by the stones and bricks they played in; as if they were really the sparrows the Miss Chesneys called them, they led a different life and scarcely anyone noticed them. At fourteen or fifteen they appeared again, the boys as big boys that had become somehow dangerous—or was it that there was too much about them in the papers?—the dirty little girls as smart young women with waved hair, bright coats, the same red nails and lipstick as the dancer in the bus queue; they wore slopping sling-back shoes and had shrill, ostentatious voices. The Street prickled with the doings of these boys and girls, as it had admired and petted the babies, but the children were unnoticed except by Sparkey; not even experienced mothers like Mrs. Malone knew all they did. “If the twelve apostles themselves came down and asked him, Tip couldn’t help them,” said Mrs. Malone about Maxey. “Tip never even spoke to him,” she said indignantly. Sparkey knew that Tip had.
There was no Tip this Saturday morning. The first evening papers had come in and were beginning to be sold, and now the crowd of people in the Street grew thinner; Sparkey’s mother would soon take him away for dinner, leaving her papers to sell themselves; the perambulators were coming back from the shops, and the handcarts from the gasworks with the sacks stuffed now with coke; Mrs. Cleary and Miss Arnot had gone, half an hour ago, into the house behind Sparkey, and now the smell of hot fish was coming out; the biggest cat, Istanbul, jumped suddenly off the portico wall, nearly on top of Sparkey, and walked in at the open door.
It was nearly twelve o’clock. Soon the clock from St. Botolph’s in the Square would strike, and after that the Angelus. “He must have gone over the river to the park,” said Sparkey. It was disappointing; there was nothing to do but look at the parcels.
Sparkey did not look at the heavy shopping bags; with their packets of cornflakes and tea and tinned peas, they were not interesting. He looked at the parcels belonging to the children and the big girls and boys. The girls walked together, talking and giggling, with their arms round one another; sometimes they walked backwards, showing off, and a knot of boys on the opposite pavement would whistle, rude, loud whistles. Sparkey knew what the girls had bought; his mother, who was still pretty, bought the same things, and he had seen them all on Woolworth’s counters: a box of face powder, a spring flower in a pot wrapped with tissue paper, hair grips, ankle socks, sweets, a birthday card, tiny bottles of scent which they let each other smell as Sparkey watched.
Perhaps that was how he did not see the packet fall; someone must have dropped it; suddenly it was there on the pavement among the passing feet, an oblong cream-coloured packet, sealed like an envelope, splashed with brilliant blue.
Sparkey did not know what it was, but in a flash he had unpeeled the Evening News, darted down the steps, dodged among the people, and snatched it up. He nearly had his hand stepped on as a big girl almost fell over him, but he reached the packet and stood up with it in his hand; it was soiled with being trodden on but it was safe.
The blue splashes were pictures of flowers; Sparkey was only a little boy, and they caught his attention; instead of scurrying to the steps with what he had found, he stayed there in the open street to look. That was not wise. Somebody’s hand came over his and twitched the packet away.
Sparkey clutched at the corner as it went, giving piercing yelps to his mother, but she was busy with a customer; another hand joined the first, and small iron fingers began to prise his away. “Leggo, or I’ll pinch you,” said a voice.
Anyone could have told Sparkey he had no chance; the face that looked down into his was a pale, small mask with pale, set lips; it had an obstinate nose and eyes that seemed to be sealed with their lids. All the little girls in Catford Street could be baffling; if they did not want someone to know something they dropped their lids; when they raised them again they would speak breathlessly and brightly, and it was anything but the truth; but this little girl’s face was more than sly; it might have been carved in stone; when she swore at Sparkey and opened her eyes they were as grey and cold as pebbles. Her hair, which was very fine and mouse-coloured, was cut in a fringe and fell to her shoulders; when she bent her head it parted on the nape of her neck; Father Lambert saw that as he came out of the Priest’s House; it was the only part of her that looked vulnerable, that small white exposed neck.
Sparkey knew her. She was Lovejoy, Lovejoy Mason from the restaurant.
“Nobody can be called Lovejoy,” Angela was to say, but Lovejoy was.
“Your mother didn’t give you a name like that,” she was to say jealously to Tip.
“I don’t think I want a name like that,” said Tip.
What Vincent said was worse, but he did not know Lovejoy was listening. “No one who loved their child could give it a name like that,” said Vincent.
Now Lovejoy and Sparkey began to threaten each other in the shorthand speech the Street children used. “Gimme,” said Lovejoy.
“’Smine,” shrieked Sparkey.
He had steel tips on his little shoes and he kicked at Lovejoy’s shins. “You little varmint,” called Father Lambert, while Sparkey’s mother shouted, “You! Lovejoy! You leave Sparkey alone.”
“Fancy a big girl fighting such a little boy!” said a woman; but Lovejoy was not fighting, she was, simply, taking. Before Father Lambert or Sparkey’s mother could reach them Lovejoy gave Sparkey a blow in his small stomach that doubled him up, ripped the packet out of his hand, and ran.