England's Lane Page 3

  Breakfast is nice because it’s just Auntie Milly and me and we have tea and cereal and boiled egg with soldiers because Uncle Jim is already in the shop downstairs which I don’t know why he always opens so early when there’s nobody about. It’s called J. Stammer, the shop, because that’s his name. It’s not my name, it’s his name. I’m Paul Thimbleby, because that’s what my Mommy and Daddy were called. We live in this street called England’s Lane and there’s two rows of shops opposite each other and houses on the top. Our shop is the ironmonger and it’s really dark and stinks of Pink Paraffin and varnish and dead animals or something. All these wonky drawers with nails and hooks and washers and hinges and stuff. Brooms and bins and mousetraps and candles. My friend Anthony’s father is six doors up and he’s got Miller’s the sweetshop, which is just typical. Sometimes I get a chew or a flying saucer for nothing, but Anthony, he just gets everything. If only we owned the sweetshop I’d never go up to my room at all—I’d just live all the time in the sweetshop and my tea would be Toffee Cups and Fry’s 5 Centre and Picnics and maybe even the really expensive chocolates in the glass counter and piled up in these plates with a doily on. I get a quarter of sherbet lemons every Monday and they’re supposed to last a whole week which is impossible. And the last one is never good anyway because you have to pick the bits of paper bag off it but you never get them all.

  Another great shop is at the other end of the Lane and called Moore’s but the people who own it are called Jenkins so they must have bought it from the Moores and never changed the name which is painted in big white loopy letters on shiny black I think it’s glass. This is a stationer’s which is run by an old lady called Miss Jenkins and an even older lady still called Mrs. Jenkins, and they haven’t got any children because although related they obviously aren’t married. Auntie Milly says they’re very sweet. Anyway, as well as all the paper and envelopes and birthday cards and things they’ve got Platignum biros in eight different colors and I’ve got five of them already and I can’t wait to get the other three because then I’ll have the set. I still need light green and orange and pink. Anthony says that the pink one is pathetic and I know what he means but I’ve still got to get it because otherwise I won’t have the set. The yellow one you can hardly see when you write with it, but the brown one’s lovely—it’s really narrow and doesn’t smudge, or anything. I don’t know anyone else who’s got the brown one. They’re one-and-six each though, and Bics are only a shilling but Bics you can only get in four colors and masters have them so they’re not nearly so good. You can’t use the Platignums for proper writing at school though because it’s against the rules. Old Colly, who is the Latin master, would go all purple and have a fit because he’s stupid. You have to use your Osmiroid except for drawing margins which you’ve got to do in pencil. Anthony’s got a Parker 51 in a box with silk in it. At school they glug out permanent blue-black Quink into the inkwells in the desks which are always clogged up with blotch and bits of bungee.

  And they’ve also got Matchbox Toys in Moore’s, which I really really like. If I was rich like the Queen I’d get every single Matchbox Toy in the whole wide world—two of each so that one could be all brand-new in the box, and then the others I could play with. I’ve got some really good ones—the dark-green Jaguar racing car is best and I’ve got a maroon and cream Austin A40 with a hook at the back which you attach this pale blue caravan on to. And a United Dairies milk float—and there’s a real United Dairies in England’s Lane nearly opposite us and you see them outside with the horses and everything and on our way to school Auntie Milly always gives them sugar lumps and apples sometimes and she tries to get me to but their teeth are a bit big and disgusting. Not so good Matchboxes are things like the cement mixer which my Uncle Jim brought back for me one time, which is just typical. He was drunk, I could tell. He stank even worse than usual and was staggering about the place. Broke a teacup which Auntie Milly said was one of her very best. He only ever buys me something when he’s drunk, but it’s never anything I want. That time he put the wireless on and was waving his arms around and he said Come on, Mill—let’s you and me have a little bit of a dance, will we? What you say? She said to him not to be so stupid, which I really really liked and I wished I could say it too. He got hold of her anyway and she tried to laugh because of me, I think, and he dragged her about the room, barging into the sideboard and Auntie Milly getting her legs kicked to pieces. She hated the whole thing, I could tell. If I was twenty-one I could’ve got him by the scruff of the neck and chucked him down the stairs and said Let that be a lesson to you my man and dusted off my hands like I’ve seen at the pictures. But when you’re eleven you’ve just got to sit there in your stupid short trousers and itchy stockings and pretend you don’t mind that he’s hurting Auntie Milly.

  There’s loads of other shops too. There’s Barton’s the butcher (he’s really big, Mr. Barton—his hands are huge and as red as all the meat he chops up with an ax thing. He’s got a daughter called Amanda who’s my age and I really like a lot and she says he puts Brylcreem on his eyebrows and mustache. And his hair as well, of course). She’s very pretty, Amanda. Much more than all the other girls who live around here. Sometimes she has plaits with bows, but not always. And there’s Dent’s the fishmonger. Very pongy in there (I don’t like fish except for yummy fish fingers made by Captain Birdseye) and Mrs. Dent, Auntie Milly says, is a martyr to her bunions, which I don’t know what it means, but that’s why you never see her smiling. And a bread and cake shop called Lindy’s and the woman in there who isn’t called Lindy but she is called Sally is so very fat she can hardly move because she’s always eating her own eclairs. And Lawrence’s the newsagent where I get my Beano (Bash Street Kids is my favorite—wish I could go to school with them) and Dandy (Desperate Dan is great, miles better than Korky the Cat which isn’t much good because cats aren’t really like that) and sometimes if Auntie Milly’s in a really good mood and feeling a bit what she says is flush, then the Beezer and Topper as well. She gets Woman and Woman’s Own and the Radio Times. Uncle Jim gets the Evening News every day. But he doesn’t actually read it or anything. He just goes over things like the racing results and the football pools and usually he says all bad words when he does it. And there’s what is called Bona Delicatessen which I’m not quite sure how you spell it and they’ve got foreign food in there which must be quite delicate, but Uncle Jim says it’s all muck. They’ve got open barrels of things which do look quite bad—and there’s a man and a woman in there who wear white coats like in Emergency Ward 10 who must be called Mr. and Mrs. Bona I suppose, but I don’t really know for sure. Auntie Milly says they’re Swiss and Uncle Jim says they’re chancing it. I go in because they’ve got Pez, which Anthony’s father’s shop doesn’t sell for some reason, and I really like the dispensers because they click open like a cigarette lighter and I’ve got a yellow and black one and I want a red-and-white one next. The little sweets come in tiny packets and they’re twopence each which Auntie Milly says is a scandal and I like orange but my favorite one is wild cherry. Uncle Jim hasn’t even got a cigarette lighter, of course—not even a cheap one. He uses Swan Vestas, and sometimes he scrapes them on the underneath of the dining table after his tea to light up a fag and Auntie Milly says You’re not in the Washington now, Jim. Which is the pub on the corner where he goes all the time, and it’s across the road from Barclays Bank. It would be really great to be Mr. Barclay with a shop full of money, but I’ve never seen him because I think he might be one of those millionaire madmen who never cut their fingernails.

  There’s also a greengrocer called M. Levy who’s missing the little finger of one hand and the thumb on the other which he goes and scares people with. I love to go there because of all the smells and heaps of fruit in colored tissue and imitation grass. There’s another shop called Marion’s which sells all pink stuff for ladies like Auntie Milly’s corsets and stockings which she keeps behind a cushion on the settee, but I don’t know why. I sometimes go
in there with her, but you do always feel a bit funny. What else is there …? Oh yes—there’s Amy’s the hairdresser but that’s just the name of the shop because the main lady who works there is called Gwendoline. I know that because she does Auntie Milly’s perm which takes about a million years and Auntie Milly keeps it all yellow with this stuff called I think she says prockside which she puts on with an old toothbrush with cotton wool wrapped around the handle and she says don’t come near when she’s doing it, and it makes her cry. Gwendoline also gives me haircuts—she’s not really supposed to because it’s a hairdresser for ladies but Auntie Milly won’t send me to the barber that Uncle Jim goes to because she says she doesn’t want them using the clippers on the back of my neck, I don’t know why. Maybe because the back of Uncle Jim’s neck looks just like Fray Bentos corned beef. Which we get every Tuesday at school and I hate it. It’s the second-worst lunch after Thursday cheese pie. Best is mincemeat on Fridays and chocolate splosh for afters.

  Then of course there’s the wood shop, wood yard, sort of carpenter’s place which is quite new and that’s the one that’s run by the negroes, who I’ve only ever looked at but not talked to. I’d never seen one before because usually they’re in Africa. One of them smiles a lot, but he still looks a bit frightening but I wouldn’t say that or anything because it’s rude. I can’t believe they’re really that color all the time. It’s so odd. Uncle Jim says they swing in trees and don’t belong and they’ve all got filthy habits, which is very funny coming from Uncle Jim because everything about him is a filthy habit. And anyway he thinks the same things about pop singers, and especially Cliff Richard who he says is a cosh boy. Auntie Milly says about the negroes, who she calls colored—like with my brown Platignum, except you’d need zillions of them—that she’s sure they’re very nice people, just different, that’s all.

  Another shop is Curios, which I’m not sure what it means—maybe it’s the name of the man with a beard who sits in the window on a rocking chair and always seems to be doing a crossword and smoking a big curvy pipe with a funny little lid on it. Anyway it’s all full of old furniture and vases and clocks and jumble sale things which Uncle Jim says just after the War everyone was chucking out or burning for firewood and now they’re trying to flog it, what a hope. Everything he says is about Before the War, During the War or After the War. I once said to him I’m glad you remember it’s over then, and he said I didn’t know I was born. Another very stupid thing to say because obviously I do.

  There’s other shops too, and we know all the owners because everyone’s been here since the Battle of Hastings 1066. Not the darkies, though. Nobody seems to know them. Uncle Jim, that’s what he calls them: darkies. Also sambos and wogs. I don’t know why he talks about them so much if he doesn’t even like them. But all the other people we do know—and at Christmas everyone gets together in someone’s sitting room or one of the shops (they take it in turns) and Victoria Wine—oh yes, that’s another one: Victoria Wine on the corner opposite Allchin’s the chemist which I also forgot—she always gives things like sherry and cherry brandy and gin and whisky. I’ve never met Victoria Wine though. She’s maybe shy, like Auntie Milly says my mother was before she was killed. Don’t know. Can’t remember. And I always get Britvic pineapple juice which is my absolute favorite drink in the whole wide world, not counting Tizer and Lucozade when you’re not well and in bed. Which can be good if it’s only a cold or something, except for Beecham’s Powders and thermometers, but not if it’s mumps which I had last year and it hurts quite a lot and you don’t even want any Lucozade. Chicken pox was worst though because you’re not allowed to scratch yourself and Auntie Milly put this I think it’s called calomine lotion on my face which goes all hard and feels like you can’t move it and then when it’s gone all scabby you can’t pick them off because if you do you’ll be scarred for life like a leper in the jungle and no one will ever want to marry you. The decent bit is that you don’t have to go to school, but when I had mumps I got prep which Anthony had to bring over which I really really hated. I got Algebra, and I’m no good at that because I don’t understand why if you’ve got all these numbers you go and use letters instead and Dismal Dawkins my math master just goes mad and says “I—I—I—Corwumph” just like Mr. Wilkins in the Jennings books which are the best books in the world and then he says If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand times. Didn’t say x and y times though, did he? No he didn’t, QED.

  This is what I mean about grown-ups, you see. I look at them, and I see some very strange things. They don’t understand anything, you see. Most of what they say is just total rubbish, actually—that’s what me and my friends think. I hate them. Particularly masters.

  I’d just like to line them up, the grown-ups, and say to them Look—you are mad and I am right. Got it? And then I’d biff them all on the nose. Except for Auntie Milly. She’s the only one. I can talk to my Auntie Milly. She’s the only one who ever makes any sense. And I really do think that she loves me.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It’s Truly Very Clean

  They don’t like it, of a morning—Mill and the boy. They don’t take to it at all if ever I’m still just hanging about up there in the kitchen—after she done with rousing the lad, and me still sat there, having my tea and a slice. Oh no—they don’t like that, not one iota. And don’t they make you know it. Feel like I got something catching. Well—don’t bother me. Don’t touch me a bit. I’m best off down here in the back of my shop, way I see it—have a little natter with Cyril here, while he nibbling away at his millet, and me with my Thermos of Tetley’s and a nice heel of Hovis with a real good slick of blackberry jelly on the top of it. Then I lights up a fag. And Cyril—he don’t come the high and mighty with me, Cyril don’t. Not like them two upstairs. The king and queen of wossname. He’ll peck at my finger, Cyril will. I run the back of my thumbnail across the bars, coo at him a bit, and he get all perky, like—then I holds out a little bit of seed for him: come on, I says to him, I won’t hurt you, will I? I loves ya, I does … and he’ll be pecking away like billy-o, I can tell you—happy as Larry, he is. Mill, she says to me it’s cruel, she says, cooping up a budgie down here with all the fumes, and all. Fumes? I goes to her. Dunno what you talking about. Fumes? What fumes? I don’t smell no fumes. And I don’t, neither—I’m being straight with her when I says it. I been down in this shop for so bleeding long, I don’t smell nothing no more. Paraffin. Creosote. Bleach. Rat poison. Don’t smell none of it. What I do do, though, is I senses things. Like if Cyril’s poorly. Or like, see, I got this little bell way up the top of the door there. Jangly bugger it is—cracked some years back, blessed if I know how, no one never touched it. And yeh—it ain’t melodic. Anyway—idea is, customer open the door, I’m out the back and I hears the bell and comes running. Only it ain’t like that, on account of for years now—more bleeding years than I want to know about—I senses it before. Just before some cove’s barging in here, right? I senses he’s about to. Ain’t never wrong. Why I says to Cyril: half a mo, son, back in a jiffy—some bod’s about to jangle the bell. And he do, this bod, in he come, just like I always know he’s going to. Turns out this time it’s Barton, the butcher three doors down. Expect he’ll be wanting the usual. Christ only knows what he do with the buggers. Every other week he’s in for more of the bleeding things. Not complaining—charging him twice what I got to pay for them, ain’t I? I tell you, though—I can’t be doing with him, God’s honest truth. He ain’t like no butcher I ever knowed. Always got a three-piece suit on him, rain or shine. Stiff bleeding collar and all, don’t know how he stick it. Sunday best, and all he is is a bleeding butcher. Hair as shiny as a gramophone record—and that tache he got on him, looks like a photo in the bloody barber’s. Now Mill, she reckon the sun shine out of his wossname—but then of course she would do that, wouldn’t she, my Milly? Had an education, Jonny Barton has—plain as day to anyone with half an ear. And in Mill’s book, well—puts him up there with royalty, an
education do. Another way of getting at me too, course. Giving me a dig. Reminding me how bloody low I am. Reminding me she married into a bloody farmyard. Goes without saying, all that. As if I need reminding. Most of the reason I act like I does—come out with all the muck I does. Feel I owes it her, somehow. Make her feel better about herself. Cos she a real good sort, Mill is. Better than me? I should bloody say so. Mill’s in another class. I don’t know I does it right by her, though. Whether it’s like the right thing to be doing. But I can’t go changing it now, can I? After all this time. Wouldn’t hardly know how to begin. Yeh so I reckon she just stuck with me the piggish way I is, poor cow. Don’t hear no complaints from her about the money what I’m taking, though, do I? Hey? No—don’t hear no complaints about that. Enough to put food on the table, buy for Milly any little knickknack, and send young Pauly to that bleeding school up the road. That bleeding la-di-da school of his, where they teaches him how to be a bloody little girl. All he’s wanting is a ribbon in his hair. Yeh. And I don’t know why I does—the school, I mean. Well—do really. It’s Mill, ain’t it? All she wants. And of course it’s on account of we never had no kids of our own—think I don’t know that? Think she never told me? Think my nose ain’t been ground right into it? Well … weren’t for the want of trying. Said I were sorry, didn’t I? Thousand bleeding times. But she ain’t never like forgiven me for, I dunno … all that sort of side of things. Like I wanted it, or something. Like I had a say in it. I could’ve done something, I would’ve, wouldn’t I? What’s a bloke to do, hey? It’s hard, that is—dead hard. Women, they don’t understand. And then when her sister Eunice pass on, well … Pauly, not much more than a baby, he weren’t, not back then he weren’t. Yeh so he suddenly come into her life and, well—he take it over, don’t he? Lock, stock and wossname. I mean, she wanted it to be took over, I ain’t saying she didn’t. Took over mine and all, whether I liked it or not. Never said nothing. Can’t, can you? And now me, she just don’t see me no more. She don’t look at me, she can help it. She don’t listen. Why I got to shout. Why I got to get plastered. And so now, me, muggins, I just got to lump it, ain’t I? Yeh well. But still it’s her I does it all for. Right or wrong. Well you got to, ain’t you really? And they’re real good mates, the two of them now. Mill and the boy. Two peas in a … yeh. Snug as a bug in a wossname, sort of style, them two is. But me … well me, I’m just out of it. Oh well. Attend to this bloody butcher bloke now then, will I?