Polly Put the Kettle On Read online

  Clarissa and Polly drink tea in the kitchen. With her other hand, Polly scratches another episode for the Woodland Storybook, which will be published and sold in Woolworth’s next Christmas.

  ‘“What a lovely morning”, said Floppy the Rabbit looking out of his little window one day. “Look, there are some daffodils growing under the big tree by Otto the Deer’s house.”’

  It was no use going to the laundrette—if the twins woke up, Clarissa would sprinkle hash on their cornflakes and drop tots of LSD in their milk just to cheer them up.

  ‘I said that’s not very cool, Angelo. You’ll have to split’, Clarissa told her. ‘He got very heavy and broke everything. So I split. Sorry if it’s a nuisance.’

  ‘No. But what are you going to do now?’

  ‘If it’s cool, I’ll leave Dyl here. She’s no trouble. She sleeps all morning. Then I’ll go back. If he’s still there I’ll call the fuzz.’

  ‘If he’s pushing, the place’ll be full of dope.’

  ‘The fridge is full of it. But that’s his lookout’, Lady Clarissa said.

  ‘Hm’, said Polly.

  ‘All day long the secrets went on. Mrs Hedgehog shoved Otto away from the kitchen where she was baking a great big cake. He was very upset. Floppy and Hoppy sat in the parlour making hundreds and hundreds of paper chains. When Otto knocked at the door to ask them out to play, they said they were busy and couldn’t come. Brock the Badger was painting gold and silver pine-cones, Minnie Mouse was buttering slices and slices of bread for the sandwiches, and none of them would let Otto see what they were doing. Oh dear, oh dear, thought Otto, no one seems to have much time for me today. He got rather unhappy.’

  ‘You know I haven’t felt well since I got hepatitis in Spain,’ Clarissa said. ‘They say it takes five years to recover. Also someone put a spell on me when I was into magic.’

  ‘Was that the Wicked Witch of Willesden?’

  ‘Yes. There were a lot of bad vibes up there. Oh—maybe I’ll take Dyl and go to the country. It’s a bad scene here. I might go to Glastonbury. What do you think?’

  Polly sighed. What did Martha say to Mary at seven in the morning when there were two bags of washing to go to the laundrette, a stair carpet to nail down, filth in every corner and ruin staring her in the face?

  What did Polly say to mind-blown Clarissa, whose head was full of heavy rock, drugs and notions that breathing, eating and drinking were poisoning her body?

  ‘Why don’t you send Dyl to your parents? That’ll be one thing out of the way.’

  ‘I can’t put her into that county scene. It’s too much. Its deadening. There’s nothing there.’

  ‘She’ll have to go to school soon,’ said Polly, ‘somewhere.’

  Clarissa took a bottle of pills from her reticule and swallowed two.

  ‘You’ll never believe it. Angelo tried to get me shooting smack’, she said.

  ‘Tsk, tsk, tsk’, said Polly.

  ‘Otto saw the big table, covered with sandwiches and cakes, Mrs Hedgehog’s wonderful birthday cake with the pink icing and candles, the paper chains, the balloons and, at the foot of the old oak tree, the gaily wrapped pile of presents.

  “Oh,” he said, “oh, thank you. Thank you very much.” And all the woodland folk cried “Happy Birthday, Otto.”

  In the 1930s, the three Turnbull sisters, one fair, one red, one dark, had been known as the Belles of Balham. Lively, lovely, quickwitted, agile, they had shone at Streatham ice rink, Streatham Locarno, the debates at the ethical society. Young men of all classes flocked to the door of the widow Turnbull—as she was known. Her secret, known only to her next-door neighbour and most faithful of friends, Win Hodges, was that her husband, Mo Eisenstein, was still alive and living in Eastcheap. The girls, Daniella, Dorothy, Deborah, swanned about South London in slinky two-tone dresses, pull-down hats over Marcel waves, were at the pictures three times a week with different-suited beaux.

  Daniella, the oldest, the red-headed one, married Lionel Goldstein, a bank clerk, in 1938. Dorothy, the dark one, married Frederick Jebbs, a draughtsman in 1939. Deborah, caught in the storms of war, did not marry, did not take up her scholarship to Girton, but gave birth to Polly in 1942. Only her mother ever knew who Polly’s father was, soldier, sailor, GI, rear-gunner, or even a humble ARP warden. Deborah and Polly went on living at home. Polly, a lanky, bright child with brilliant red hair, swung her glittering plait up to the top of the class and the front of every race, even got the silver Bible for pupils at St Swithin’s Sunday School. Fatherless she might be, honourless she would not be. Aggressive, aggravating, a snooper on adult conversations, voracious reader, dasher-about, drawer-searcher, nosyparker—wherever she went she made herself felt. She wore her poor mother to a frazzle, she was wilful, precocious, too clever for her own good, so sharp she’d cut herself, totally out of control.

  Then old Mrs Turnbull died, leaving two thousand pounds, the remains of the family fortune from a chain of bakery shops sold in her father’s time. So Deborah Turnbull bought herself a sweet and tobacconist shop on the corner of Brixton Market and the High Street, and had stayed there ever since. There Polly lived from the age of ten until she went to Oxford, weighing out sweets, dealing with travellers, dusting the shelves, nicking fags to give to her friends up the park.

  ‘Low on Mint Crunches’, she said, coming through the door.

  ‘Suppliers are getting very lax’, said the skinny ten-year-old behind the counter.

  ‘How are you, Carrots?’ she said, lifting the flap of the counter, ruffling his flaring curls.

  ‘Not so bad.’ He was wearing a grey flannel shirt and rather long, grey shorts.

  ‘Come on Pamela and Sue’, Polly said. The two little girls trotted after her.

  ‘Mum’s gone to Wheeler’s for some extra chops. You rang up after I’d done the shopping. Want a cup of tea?’

  ‘I’ll make it.’

  She went into the room at the back of the shop, where there was a patterned carpet, three-piece suite from Heals, Tompien clock and colour television. She walked into the kitchen at the back and put the kettle on.

  ‘Are you bored out there, Max’, she called, giving the twins a biscuit each from the round tin with the Scottie dog on top. They were very pretty in their print dresses, white cardigans, little white socks and red shoes. Lady Kops was fond of producing leather photograph albums showing generations of Kopses in top hats, Ascot clothes, nanny-washed lawn dresses and high-class dogs, and demonstrating how like Pamela and Sue were to the Rothschilds, Mendozas, Nabarros and de Witts. Mrs Turnbull showed snaps of herself, Daniella and Dorothy at Clacton in 1925 to prove a similar point. Polly, as the children sprawled, looked, ran, saw a barmy Turnbull uncle here, an international Jew there, a Viking chieftain somewhere else.

  ‘I’m reading my book’, called Max.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Treasure Island.’

  ‘Right on.’

  Polly stood by the gas stove her mother had cooked all her dinners on. She stared at the burners. Was it right? No, surely not. But why not? Her mother was—fifty-one. A fifty-one year old woman should not have to bring up a ten year old boy. A ten year old boy should not have a fifty-one year old mother. What about the football matches? Learning how to use tools? But then—what did Alexander Kops know about tools for example, or football either? Nevertheless, it was the wrong life for Max. Still, no one around had the right one for him—

  ‘—going to see Crystal Palace on Saturday with my mate, Julian. He’s black.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Not for him. He hates it.’

  ‘I meant the match.’

  ‘Oh—yes.’

  ‘What about Blockade, then? Number three. I saw them on Top of the Pops. Do they take drugs?’

  ‘From time to time.’

  ‘All the time, by the looks of it. They don’t half make a noise—more like Dr Who.’

  ‘Don’t you like them?’

  ‘
Well—they’re old, aren’t they?’

  ‘Knocking on a bit.’

  ‘They must be thirty—the whole lot of them.’

  ‘Oh there you are’, came her mother’s clear voice. ‘Oh, not that one, Sue.’

  Mrs Turnbull was tall and energetic. Her face, healthy and unlined, had the calm of women who lead traditional women’s lives, who cope with tragedy, dirt, pain and death, unmoved except by the pity of it all.

  ‘Can I go down to the station, Mum?’

  ‘Only for an hour. He goes down to the police station all the time these days’, she explained to Polly.

  ‘Do they let him in?’

  ‘No. He hangs about outside. You’d be surprised what he finds out, though. He held that Norbury murderer’s dog for two hours outside the other day.’

  ‘Ugh,’ said Polly, ‘what for?’

  ‘The murderer took it in the police car with him. Max caught it when it jumped out and they bundled the man inside.’

  The door banged and the bell tinkled.

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Turnbull, sitting down and taking her cup of tea, ‘things are much the same, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh—much the same’, said Polly.

  ‘How’s Tracy?’

  ‘Uncomfortable—she wants some more humbugs.’

  ‘How’s that boyfriend of hers?’

  ‘He hasn’t beaten her up again. How’s Max—really?’

  ‘A normal boy’, Mrs Turnbull said. ‘Don’t worry about him. Dorothy’s still very upset about Tracy. She always had the idea Tracy was meant for finer things—like being a Cabinet Minister or a film star.’

  Polly raised her eyebrows. ‘Or Mayor of Streatham. Did you think that about me?’

  ‘No,’ Mrs Turnbull said, ‘but I think you’re wasting yourself now.’

  ‘Can Max spend half-term with us? Will you mind?’

  ‘Not really, with all this business over the shop. I’ll bring him over.’

  They sat in the small walled garden at the back of the shop, overlooked by the windows of the houses opposite. Mrs Turnbull had a garden table and chairs there, a flowering cherry, some daffodils.

  The girls played with a ball.

  Polly said, ‘So that’s the ground rent, two hundred pounds, which was due at the end of March, two electricity bills, sixty pounds in all, still not paid—I’m only not cut off because I’m disputing the reading, but that can’t go on much longer. Gas, twelve pounds, grocer, forty pounds—and nothing coming in for at least two months. I can’t see any solution, but running away. Then at least I’d get Social Security.’

  ‘I can let you have three hundred pounds’, her mother said.

  ‘Only as a last resort.’

  ‘Why don’t you try Lady Kops? Pamela and Sue are their only grandchildren. I’m sure they’d be willing to help.’

  ‘I told Lady Kops and she pretended not to understand me. So I told her again and she was obliged to leave the room on an errand. I’ll take the children there in rags next time—that’ll make them sit up in Cheyne Walk.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they stare out of windows at the neighbours in Cheyne Walk. Look there’s that starling again.’

  The starling sat in the cherry tree and sang against the traffic noise.

  Mrs Turnbull looked at Polly’s face and saw the lines beginning to form round her eyes, beside her mouth … She looked at Pamela and Sue, gazing hungrily at a daffodil, telling each other not to touch. A living chain, she thought, thinking of her grandmother, her mother, a row of cut-out dollies, all linked, moving endlessly across the stage, being rocked in the cradle, rocking the cradle, being laid in bed and tended through the final illness by the hands you had once taken as a guide. Time, she thought, was a bully with women, making such great crosses on their paths that they could not step over them without noticing. From the day his feet stopped growing, a man need take no notice of his position in time until they handed him his gold watch and his pension book. And the things you were forced to learn—she knew Polly would have to break with Alexander Kops, a wet fish if ever there was one. It could be tomorrow or ten years from now, but Kops would go.

  ‘About time you got a job, Polly’, she remarked with deliberate harshness.

  ‘I suppose so’, Polly said cheerlessly. ‘Mum, who was my dad?’

  ‘Never you mind. And he’s dead now, so what does it matter?’

  ‘Well, what was his name?’ Polly whined.

  ‘What on earth difference does it make?’

  ‘If it makes no difference, why don’t you tell me? There’s nothing to be ashamed of, is there? It’s all out in the open. I don’t see why you’ve always been so secretive about it.’

  ‘There are things I prefer not to talk about’, her mother said with dignity.

  Polly, deeply conditioned from childhood, drew a deep breath and said, ‘Never mind that. It’s not fair to throw your feelings at me to stop me from asking. I should have thought I had a right to know.’

  ‘His name,’ her mother told her contemptuously, ‘was Ferdie Elias. He was a fireman in the war.’

  ‘That’s not what you told me before,’ flashed Polly, ‘you said his name was Ronald Fairbanks.’

  ‘That’s the sort of thing you tell a child. It was wish fulfilment—Ronald Coleman and Leslie Fairbanks.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Polly, mists of confusion and emotion rising, ‘it’s not good enough. It’s really not good enough. Was he married?’

  ‘Yes’, said her mother. ‘We were thrown together during an air raid. Fortunes of war. It was all over very quickly. When he found out you were on the way, he changed his job and moved out of the neighbourhood—went to Gillingham, I think. Cut and run.’

  ‘Did you mind?’

  ‘Yes, at the time, I did.’

  It was a thin, textureless story, lacking the verve of her mother’s usual tales. She was not even using her own vocabulary. True, sometimes people spoke of the critical events of their lives in just that flat tone, unable or unwilling to convey the true emotions of the time. Nevertheless, Polly, as usual, felt cheated, frustrated, furious. The great aching void which was her other parent had still not been filled, had never been filled, never would be filled.

  After lunch, they sat behind the counter of the shop. The little girls ran about sucking toffees, touching the big thick glass of the jars containing different sweets.

  ‘I’m buying old Snaith’s shop next door’, Polly’s mother explained. ‘That’s probably why I’m less forthcoming with the three hundred pounds than I might be … That girl you were at at school with—Melanie—she died having a baby, her fifth, last week, Catholics of course, tragic … Max is reading me The Vicar of Wakefield … there’s a flat over the new shop. Do you think Tracy might like to come and manage it for me?’

  ‘Mum!’ Polly burst out. ‘You can’t take on any babies—it’s too much, surely you don’t want to—’

  ‘I still feel a bit guilty about you,’ her mother said, ‘that perhaps you should have had a father. It seems rather necessary to help. Hullo, Tom, quarter of Dorset Creams … wish her a happy birthday from me, then … I’m taking over the newsagent’s business. He’s going to Somerset. And stationery. There’ll be all the alterations too … You can owe me the half-p until next time Syd … Max and his friend and possibly Daniella, all going to Rotterdam to see Mary Hendricks in the summer … Here are those mint humbugs for Tracy. Tell her Dorothy wants her to come and see her … I knitted her a purple shawl for the baby. Here it is. How are you going back?’

  ‘I’ve got Blockade’s van. I got the spare keys from Tracy.’

  ‘But you haven’t passed the test.’

  Polly grinned.

  Max burst in. ‘Blockade’s van’s round the corner. D’you come in it, Poll?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You haven’t got a licence.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘One born every minute’, he said.

  ‘How was the fuzz?’

 
‘Good sport today. Four blacks dragged in fighting. They weren’t half bashing them. They half knocked one out getting him out of the van. Should have seen his face.’

  ‘Fascist pig’, said Polly, horrified.

  ‘It’s a stage they go through’, said her mother. ‘I really don’t think you ought to drive that van.’

  ‘The kids haven’t half written some words on it while you were here’, Max said, adding, ‘Give us a lift down the road.’

  Polly, perched high in the transit van, which was covered with stickers, erotic slogans scrawled in the dust by maenad fans, and now misspelt racial slogans in chalk—ding dong bell, black men smell, a thousand miles away. Behind a cart he let off a fart, blew up the IRA. Next to her Pamela and Sue, beside them, Max, grey elbow on the window frame, waving a royal wave, looking posh.

  Polly turned on the engine and began to bump along.

  ‘Mind that bus. Blimey, you’re a shaver aren’t you. Where are you learning—the Kamikaze School of Motoring? Don’t you ever look in the mirror? It’s you he’s hooting at, Ben Hur—Jason Smith drives better than you do—and he’s only twelve. That one’s turning right here. Give that Bentley a scrape, go on. Jesus—nearly through the windscreen that time. You’re mad you know. You shouldn’t be on the road’, said Max.

  ‘That’s the name of the game’, said Polly, shaking.

  Several drivers hooted at once. ‘The lights have changed’, Max observed. ‘Never mind, I’ll nip out now.’

  ‘I’ll see you next weekend.’

  ‘Good. You can buy me some decent clothes. Mum doesn’t understand, I look like Freddie Bartholomew.’

  He hopped out. ‘Keep your hair on,’ he shouted at the crying traffic, ‘she’s out for the day from the mental hospital.’ He slammed the door as Polly ground the gears.

  ‘So long, Poll. Thanks for the memory.’

  ‘Cheers, Max’, said Polly.

  Looking in the mirror she saw him make a v-sign at the drivers still behind her, give her a jaunty wave, turn round and, hands in pockets, start to slouch up the road. Soon, he was lost in the crowds, the traffic, the shops.