Late Night on Watling Street Read online

  He faced her across the rug: “Were you not going to your mam’s for a fiver?” he said, trying to think it out.

  “I were goin’ for some fish an’ chips for our dinner,” she said, “an’ yours are all dried up.”

  “But what about-?”

  “Bum bailiffs?” she said. “Ee, don’t be daft, Edgar, you’ll never see a bum bailiff whilst you’ve got me for a wife.” She gave him her nice tender smile: “I’m straight with the telly payments. I only said it to cure your hiccups. Folk say a fright does it. Or is it only a rumour?”

  He didn’t speak. He got down slowly and rested himself on the firm edge of a chair. In front of him he saw the swelled pinafore, a wall of gingham from stomach to thigh, and he leant forward and pressed his face against it.

  Bit o’ Skin

  Flash Hichens hastily pulled down the blinds as the Daimler glided away from St Chad’s parish church at four minutes to three one Saturday afternoon—still pursued by fistfuls of confetti and the tail festooned with old shoes and a JUST MARRIED placard. And then, before the astonished gaze of his young bride, Flash peeled off his black coat, smartly thumbed the braces from his shoulders and slipped his trousers down, then with a jerk hopped free of those narrow pinstripes.

  “Oh, darling!” shrieked Emma hoarsely, as she spotted his hairy, muscular limbs, “whatever are you doing of?”

  He rapped on the glass and called to the driver: “Straight for Racing Hill, mate.”

  Before the car had drawn to a standstill at the hill Flash leapt out in his racing shorts and singlet. It wanted three seconds to the hour, and the starter had his pistol in the air, so that Flash had only time to turn and give his bride a hurried kiss, and then, pointing to the winner’s trophy, he whispered: “Make room for that, lass, on our sideboard— I’m fetching it back with me.”

  And he did. He won the twenty-mile road walk in the record time of 2 hours, 47 minutes, 11 seconds. When the second man arrived in Flash had already had his shower and was speeding off home with the cup under his arm—so as not to miss the honeymoon train to Blackpool.

  The honeymoon was briefly interrupted on Wednesday evening when Flash had to make a dash to Manchester to compete in the Northern Counties’ free-style swimming championship. He won that by a comfortable minute and a half, and later that evening, having missed his train connection at Preston, he hoofed the eighteen miles to Blackpool (“Probably the very best time I have done on the road”)—where Emma was reading “True Romances” and eating coffee-creams in bed, to while the time away until her husband should return.

  Two hundred and eighty days exactly from the nuptial night Mrs Hichens presented her husband with triplets.

  Flash was a postman and suffered a strong unpopularity among his workmates because, no matter how he tried to slow himself down, he could not help but knock fifty minutes off the scheduled time of two hours for a delivery —and when they arrived at the depot with sagging knees Flash would be practising weightlifting.

  In the evening he had an off-duty job as a barman at Dunn’s long bar, where alone he could handle a trade so brisk that it kept three normal barmen going on his night off. He was so sharp of eye that he would spot a hat passing the window and instantly know the wearer, and he would have his drink waiting for him when he came in—and his hand out for the cash. And most of them did not like this prompt service—they said it deprived them of some pleasure a chap gets out of ordering his drink, and also that the beer was inclined to go flat on them.

  Flash, in fact, though he never said a wrong word to anybody, was not liked a bit. It used to irk me when I heard his front gate go click at half-past four of a summer morning—knowing that he was off for a five-mile trot with a swim thrown in; and I could never avoid a stroke of malice when I moped downstairs at seven and saw his spade glistening in the garden, as he got through an hour’s digging before belting off to work.

  There was nothing he couldn’t build with his hands, and when he got in home from Dunn’s at eleven he would spend a couple of hours hammering and sawing away in his workshop. “You look a bit saggy about your upstairs,” he once told his wife. “I can’t get a pair of corsets with any support in them.” “Let’s measure you,” said Flash, taking a tape from his pocket. At a quarter to two he wakened Emma: “Here y’are, lass,” he said, “just try this ‘un on”— and he wacked a corset round her that made her the envy of all large-built women on the Estate.

  But for all that Emma did not get on well with Flash. She would sulk for days on end at him and come into our house when she felt the need to let off a bit of gas—all on account of his habit of finishing the last lines of her jokes and things for her. It seemed that his brain worked so fast that he could not slow it down to harmonize with other folk’s so that he’d know what you were going to say before you said it—and he’d say it for you.

  Now at the time I’m speaking of Flash had won all the Estate prizes for the best-kept vegetable garden, the biggest cabbage, the giantest pumpkin; he had licked anybody and everybody that was worth licking among walking and swimming champs and now he had set to wiping up all the existing bike-racing records. Some customer had heard of Flash’s habit of cycling eighty miles to North Wales on Wednesday afternoon, to have a chat and a cup of tea with his parents who kept a boarding-house there, and then of cycling back by a roundabout route of ninety miles, just for the change of scenery—and the customer had advised Flash to “take it up.”

  He mopped up all the country records and then fixed his holidays to fit in with the six-day bicycle race at White City. He allowed himself two whole days in which to cycle the two hundred miles, and as he kissed Emma goodbye he looked round the home that was fair sprouting with silver cups and vases—the triplets were already picking up prizes in baby shows—and remarked: “Looks like I’ll have to make a special new stand for that cup.”

  That sensational sixth day will ever remain one of the big moments in the annals of British sport. At the end of the fifth, it may be recalled, the Belgian and French competitors were laps ahead with the British (Flash among them) nowhere. He had been slowed down by an attack of lumbago—the consequence of sleeping in a field on his way to London. But on the morning of the sixth and last day he took to that track his real self—and scorched round in such a frenzy of energy that the foreign cracks simply could not live with him. On that final and winning lap—when he had smashed every known record—the BBC commentator swore that Flash’s wheels, touched the ground no more than twice on the circuit, for he was practically in the air the whole time.

  Now a Harley Street specialist was engaged to examine the competitors, and he got quite excited over Flash.

  “My man,” he exclaimed, with the shining light of discovery in his eyes, “you’re at death’s door!”

  “How come?” asked Flash.

  “Your thyroid body,” said the quack.—“What a blessing that I saw it! The most alarming over-activity of the thyroid gland I have ever known.”

  “What’s the thyroid?” asked Flash.

  “A deep red glandular mass enclosed in a capsule of cervical facia,” explained the quack, “consisting of two lobes which lie one each side of the trachea and lower part of the larynx—the lobes being joined across the middle by what is known as the-—”

  “Isthmus,” put in Flash, for he was very quick on the uptake, “which lies in front of the second and third rings of the trachea.”

  “Exactly,” rejoined the quack, his fingers fair itching to get a grip on Flash’s ductless gland: “I can get you a hospital bed at once, and the operation will cost you seven-and-six or so, instead of my usual fee of two hundred guineas.”

  “Do you think I’ll feel better for it?” asked Flash.

  “A new man,” declared the Harley Street chappie. “You’ll be a new man.”

  When Flash arrived home (with the “bit o’ skin,” as he called it, preserved in a bottle of spirits, down in his trousers pocket) he was certainly a new man.
r />   For six months he did no more than rise every day at five p.m. and go back to bed at half-past. His energy returned a little during the next six months, and after a year he was pronounced cured and normal.

  He never looked at a bicycle again. Every morning he trudged lazily up the street to catch the bus—he was always late on the job and now lost seventy minutes on his delivery. And yet nobody minded, and Flash soon became the most popular bloke at the depot. In the long bar he was hardly any use, for you’d have to repeat your order three or four times and then he’d serve you the wrong drink. But people could put up with that, and they grew to like him, and liked to listen to the boasting of his athletic days, and pay for his drinks at the same time. His prize vegetable plot became a mass of weeds, legs fell off chairs, knobs off drawers, and the fasteners broke on his wife’s corsets so that she grew horribly saggy—and they all had to stay that way. She didn’t mind, for now she fell in love with him, and liked to keep him up talking till all hours, when he could keep his eyes open.

  But every Saturday night he would arrive home halfkettled and have a proper tantrum. He would swipe all the trophies and cups off the sideboard and fling them out in the back garden, and then go to the meat-safe where he kept his little bottle with the thyroid gland inside, and place the bottle in the middle of the sideboard on a stand.

  “That’s the only bloody champion in this house,” he would shout: “You—you flippin’ bit o’ skin,” he would yell at it, “you won ‘em all. Tell ‘em that Flash Hichens is a bloody imposter, and has been all his life—and that you are the one an’ only champ.” And then if one of the kids was unfortunate enough to call him “Daddy” he would let out a roar: “Don’t call me that! I ain’t your Daddy. Look—that little ugly sod in the bottle—that’s your Daddy!”

  Poison Pincher

  One July evening when I was twelve, I was standing at the street corner amongst all the big lads, listening to their talk.

  “Heat wave or no heat wave,” said Alec Browitt, “I’ll bet I don’t sleep with our window open again—not after last night.”

  “Why, what happened last night?” said Jack Fish.

  “What happened?” said Alec; “well, I’ll just tell you. It was a very hot night as you know, and I’d been daft enough to open the window wide, and there I was reading The Magnet* with two candles, in two saucers, there on the old chair beside the bed. My sight isn’t as good as it was, and the old chap always turns off the gas at the meter before going to bed.”

  “We don’t want to know your family’s habits, Alec,” said Lionel Walker, “we only want to know what happened.”

  “I’m coming to that,” said Alec, “if you’ll only hold your hush. I was reading away, see, and I thinks I hear a buzzing noise come in through the window. The next thing our Harry yells out: ‘Look out—there’s a whacking great heather!’”

  “What sort of a heather?” said Jack Fish.

  “A heather” said Alec, “with a long body, an’ long wings you can see through, that make a din when it’s flyin’, and one of them ugly little heads with two eyes stickin’ out staring at you.”

  “The proper name is a ‘horse stinger’,” said Tom Haslam.

  “Dragonfly,” said Lionel.

  “They’re smaller,” said Tom.

  “Get on with the tale,” said Lionel.

  “So our Harry sticks his head under the blankets. Our Ned already had his under, because that’s the only way he can sleep.”

  “I should blooming well think it is,” said Jack Fish, “if you have two candles burning away at top speed.”

  “We don’t want to know about your Ned,” said Lionel Walker, “we want to know what you did.”

  “What I did?” said Alec. “I stuck my head down under the blankets when he shouted. I was that frightened. But it was suffocating see, and the candles were burning, and I was right in the middle of a good tale about old Billy Bunter, so when it went quiet I bobbed out. I waited a minute or two and then I picked up The Magnet. After a bit I heard the old droning again, and I takes no notice, when the next thing I hears a real whizzing and this thing dives straight down from the ceiling and lets smack!— clean on the words I was just reading. It was like somebody’s fist had come down with a swipe on to the paper. And there in front of my eyes is this whopping great heather. It must have been nine inches long.”

  “Did you catch it?” said Lionel.

  “Catch it?” said Alec. “I stuck my nut under them blankets like a shot. I didn’t even bother to blow out the candles, for I could hear this thing buzzing round the room like a bloody aeroplane. It was gone when we got up this morning.”

  Lionel Walker shook his head sadly: “You were very slow, Alec,” he said, “not to have nabbed him.”

  “Why nab him?” said Alec. “He dashed near nabbed me.”

  “Because,” said Lionel, “they bring in money.”

  At the mention of money I drew a bit closer to Lionel and listened even harder. It seemed I’d money on the brain these days—on account of it being so scarce.

  “How bring in money?” said Alec.

  “Any doctor,” said Lionel, “will pay from a shilling to a half a crown for a good-sized dragonfly or heather, as you call it, in decent condition.”

  I couldn’t believe my own ears for a moment. It was the summer holidays, and there I was doing all sorts of jobs to earn an odd copper, from running errands to chopping firewood, whilst all the time I could be raking in money from dragonflies. Why, out at Shaydow’s lodge you’d see a dozen or more any afternoon, great big long ‘uns with bright bodies and funny wings.

  “What do doctors want them for?” said Alec.

  “For the poison,” said Lionel. “They extract poison from its sting and make ointment of it. A certain cure, I might tell you, for rheumatism.”

  “And I’ve heard,” said Tom Haslam, “and on good authority, that a dragonfly, as you call it, can’t sting at all. It can only bite.”

  “Pity your poor sense, mate,” said Lionel, “if one ever does lay its sting on you.”

  “I can bear you out, Lionel,” said old Mrs Winny, who was listening from the gable-end doorstep, “because our Ada, who was crippled with the rheumatics, got stung with one at Deane Clough. And she’s never had a twinge since.”

  “It’s a well-known fact,” said Lionel, “that if you were to walk into Paddy Bryce’s surgery this minute with a dragonfly, he’d pay you cash on the spot.”

  “I’ve heard doctors are crying out for that poison stuff,” said Mrs Winny, “with all the rheumatism there’s about.”

  “Hospitals too,” said Lionel.

  “Is it right, Lionel,” said Jack Fish, “that folk eat frogs in France?”

  “By the bucketful,” said Lionel, “an’ snails too, by the panful.”

  Just then I heard my brother calling me, and I had to go home and say goodnight to my dad, who was going to the pit. I’d nothing on my mind that night but all the dragon-flies I was going to catch next day.

  I’d fully intended being sly over the matter and keeping it to myself, but somehow, when I was standing amongst my mates the next afternoon, I let them all into it.

  “I’ll tell you something for nothing, lads,” I said, “I could earn us all many a bright shilling today.”

  “How come?” said Felix Stringfellow.

  “Catching dragonflies,” I said. “Paddy Bryce pays cash down for them.”

  “Who said so?”

  “It’s a well-known fact,” I said. “Why Lionel Walker was only talking about it last night. He reckons a gradely dragonfly will bring as much as half a dollar.”

  “If Lionel says so,” said Felix, “it’s gospel. Get your jackets, chaps, for catchin’ ’um, an’ let’s get some ‘bacca tins for putting them in.”

  We all set off for Shaydow’s pond, about three miles away, out near the pits. It was a hot day, and it seemed we were all weary by the time we got there—but the dragon-flies were not. They
whizzed, skimmed and darted through the air, and we hadn’t a chance of catching any. I could soon see that my mates hadn’t got their hearts set on it the way I had, and I was glad when they all decided to give it up.

  It was quieter when they’d gone, and the dragonflies seemed to come out more. I’d three near misses, and then I spotted a real beauty. It was a whacker, and it looked right good the way it glinted in the sun. At first when I went at it with my jacket it swooped down at me, and in a fit of fright I drew back. But I soon turned and watched for it again. When it came round this time I was ready and I went at it. I forgot about the pond though, and I went over the edge and up to my thighs in slimy water.

  When I’d got dried and tidied up a bit I set off for home—all thought of catching a dragonfly gone completely from mind. But suddenly, as I came upon a stile along the path, I saw something glittering against the grey wood. It was settled there, and still as could be, the giant dragonfly.

  For a minute I couldn’t breathe properly. I wondered was it waiting—out for revenge. I stared at it and saw a fly creep up against it. I expected the dragonfly to set off, but it only gave a flutter of a wing and sent the little fly buzzing off. I didn’t know what to do. Its two big eyes were watching me. I hadn’t the nerve even to make a dash for it. Then something stirred in me—it was the money instinct. That dragonfly meant money in the pocket, toffee, pictures, lemonade and your mates listening to what you said. Off went my jacket, and I advanced cautiously. I waited till my nerves had calmed down and then I brought the jacket over my shoulder and down on the dragonfly.

  The moment I struck I realized it must have been thinking of something else, for it fell without a move. I felt a bit ashamed of myself as I rolled back my jacket. I got out my hanky and took the dragonfly firmly by the head, and put it safely away inside the tin I had. It was a real beauty. Then I hurried off for home.

  I came upon my mates near Daubhill Station, and I tapped on the tin. “Let’s have a look,” said Felix.