‘Never mind, Brian. I am sure Daddy will be all right. It is probably a mistake. We’ll tell Mummy about it. You just wait here a minute.’
Mother was taking a little nap in the bedroom and I was very afraid that if I woke her with Brian’s story she would have one of her periodic outbursts of temper, or perhaps have hysterics; but she sat on the edge of the old mattress while she considered it, and then said quite sensibly, ‘I don’t think we can do anything except wait We don’t know which police station he is in. I expect they will let us know what he is charged with.’
Her calmness calmed Brian and me, and he went off to play with Tony, while I went back to my book. I could not read, however. I realized suddenly how much officialdom Father coped with on our behalf. Without him, we were defenceless against those who would put us in the workhouse.
I began to shake with fear, fear for my father and terror at the inhumanity of the workhouse.
Edward had been put to bed, and Mother and I sat on our two chairs staring out of the window, united by our worry over Father. Occasionally, there was a steady clang-clang and flashes of electricity from behind the houses opposite as tram cars a couple of streets away swayed around a corner. The irate ‘whip-whip-whip’ of a naval vessel making its way upriver competed with the noise of the trams, and, in the far distance, the shunting yard at Edge Hill lent a background of clanking to the other sounds. No cars passed – the district was too poor for anything more ambitious than a horsedrawn milk cart. A boy came by on a bicycle and two giggling girls paused to gossip under the gaslight outside.
A car drew up outside our house so quietly that we were at first unaware of its presence. Someone got out.
‘Good night, and – thank you very much.’
It was Father. His voice was unmistakable.
We jumped up as the front door slammed in the distance. We could hear Father’s laborious step on the stairs. He was whistling ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’.
Never had the old tune sounded so welcome. If he could whistle, things were not that bad. We ran to the top of the stairs, six small grey ghosts and one adult, and peered over the banisters.
‘Hello, children. Is Brian safely home?’
‘Yes,’ we chorused. ‘What happened to you?’
Father emerged from the darkness of the stair-well. He was smiling broadly and his step was jaunty.
‘It’s a long story. Come in and I’ll tell you.’
He even smiled at his wife, I noticed, and I could see in the small light from the street the sudden, unreasoned hope spring in Mother’s eyes when she saw Father’s cheerful expression.
‘Come in. I have lots to tell you, and you are all old enough to hear it’
He led us, like the Pied Piper, into the living-room.
‘Tell us,’ we implored, hunger, filth, misery forgotten.
Father made the most of his moment. He settled himself in a chair and took Avril on his knee. He was still beaming.
He cleared his throat.
‘I expect Brian told you about our walk.’
‘Yes,’ we said impatiently.
‘What happened when the policeman caught you?’ asked Brian.
‘He wanted to see my tie.’
‘Your tie?’ exclaimed Mother.
‘Yes, my old All Saints tie. I thought he was mad, but I was afraid to do anything else but pull it out and show it to him.’
Avril shoved herself around on Father’s lap and pulled out the sad remains of his old school tie. It looked the same as usual.
‘When he saw it, he opened his own overcoat at the neck, and he was wearing the same tie – I mean a nice, new version of it.’
Alan whistled.
‘He asked me how I came to be down and out.
‘“It is a long story,” I told him. Suddenly, my legs began to give under me – we had walked a very long way, you know, and I get faint very easily these days. He saw that I was feeling ill, and said it didn’t matter.
‘“Come and sit in the car for a few minutes,” he said. “I have to wait for a colleague who has business in this building here.”
‘I was thankful to get into the car and sit down. Almost immediately his colleague came and was surprised to find me in the car – I suppose he thought the man on the beat would normally deal with vagrants like me. However, my friend of the tie put the car into gear and said that we were going to go to the police canteen.
‘“Don’t get the wind up,” he said to me. “I think you can do with a meal.”
‘I felt too weak to care what happened to me, but a meal sounded a wonderful idea. So away we went to the police station and through to the canteen.’ He paused reminiscently, and then went on, ‘He stood me a full meal – stew and steamed pudding.’
‘Delicious,’ we murmured enviously.
‘And when I had finished, he gave me a cigarette, and he seemed such a decent sort that I told him about everything that happened to us.
‘He did not interrupt me once – and his friend sat and watched me. At the end they looked at each other – and mulled over what I had said.
‘He asked me quite a lot about our school, and then said he remembered me. He left All Saints the year after I was sent there, but he recollected that blow on the head I got from a cricket ball; it caused a good deal of consternation because I took a long time to come round and they were not able to get a doctor for some time.’
‘Childhood episodes do stick in one’s mind,’ said Mother.
I looked at her in surprise. It had never occurred to me that she understood the world of children or that she had been a child herself. Nanny was the person who understood children.
Father continued, ‘He said he thought he could get me a job with the City.’
‘Really?’ queried Mother, frank disbelief in her voice.
‘Yes. I told him that I had made every endeavour to obtain employment – but now I was so shabby it was impossible. I said frankly that the rags he saw me in were all I had, that I had not even soap to wash myself with.
‘And do you know what he said then? It was most unexpected.’
‘No?’ we breathed.
‘He said the school would undoubtedly outfit me from their benevolent fund – I used to subscribe to that, you know, but I never thought of it in connection with myself. He is going to write tonight to ask for immediate help. Meantime, he is going to talk to the City about me.’
‘How wonderful,’ Alan cried.
‘Yes, it is,’ said Mother.
Fiona began to cry slowly; they were tears of relief. Her illness had left her with practically no stamina, but she rarely complained and, I believe, most of the family hardly realized she existed.
She was a great contrast to her lively, noisy younger sister, who now said unsympathetically, ‘Oh, shut up, Fiona. You’re supposed to be glad, not sad!’ And cuddling up to Father, she