In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing [34]
She began spitting stones into the gutter, ‘See that?’ she said, giggling happily. ‘I used to be a winner at school every time.’ Now I was under her protection. She kept herself between me and the crowd, and at every moment she nodded and smiled at some man or woman leaning against a counter or a stall.
‘I was a kid down here,’ she said; and I saw that this part of the great city was home, to her; a different country from the street, not fifteen minutes’ walk away, where she now lived. Slowly the word slum, which had for me a literary and fanciful quality, a dramatic squalor, changed; and at last I saw the difference between this city and the streets that held my new lodgings. Those had a decaying, down-at-heel respectability. This was hard and battling, raw and tough; showing itself in the scepticism of the watchful assessing glances from the shopmen and women, and the humour of the greetings that Rose took and gave. She was happily nostalgic. Passing these familiar places, which knew her, acknowledging her by a gleam from a lit window or the slant of a wall, like so many friendy glances or waves of the hand, reinstated her as a human being with rights of possession in the world. ‘I used to get all my shoes here,’ she said, passing a shop. Or: ‘Before the war they sold a bit of fried skate in this shop better than anything.’
We turned into a narrow side street of short, low, damp, houses, a uniform dull yellow in colour, each with a single grey step. It was almost empty, though here and there in the failing light a woman leaned against a doorway. Rose said suddenly: ‘Let’s have a sit-down,’ and indicated a low wall that enclosed a brownish space of soil where a bomb had burst. There was a tree, paralysed down one side, and a board leaning in a heap of rubble that said: ‘Tea and Bun – One Penny.’
Rose settled herself on the wall and spat pips at a lamppost.
‘Who sold the tea?’ I asked.
‘Oh, that? He got hit. That was before the war.’ She spoke as if it was a different century. ‘You don’t get tea and a bun for a penny now.’ She looked lovingly around her. ‘I was born here. In that house down there. That one with the brown door. Many’s the time I’ve sat here with my little brother when he was driving my mother silly. Or sometimes my stepfather got into one of his moods and I’d clear out and come here for a rest, in a way of speaking. He used to make me mad, he did.’ She lapsed into a silence of nostalgic content. A man slowly cycled down the street, stopping at each lamp-post. Above him, while he paused, a small yellow glimmer pushed back the thick grey air. Soon the houses retired into shadow. Pools of dim light showed wet pavements. Rose was quiet beside me, a huddled little figure in her tight black coat and head-scarf.
It was long after the sky had gone thick and black behind the glimmering lamps that Rose came out of her dream of childhood, She stretched and said: ‘We’d better be moving.’ But she didn’t move without reluctance. ‘At any rate, the blitz didn’t get it. That’s something to be glad about. And the bombs fell around here. God knows what they thought they were trying to bomb!’ She spoke indifferently, without hate. ‘I expect the planes got lost one night and thought this would do as well as anything. The Americans do that, too, they say – they just get fed up flying around in the dark, so they drop their bombs and nip home for a cup of tea.’
As we walked back, she said: ‘I’ll have to get a hurry on. I’ve got to help Flo with the washing-up or she’ll get the pip.’
‘Do you have to help her?’
‘No. Not really. But I’ve got into the habit of it. She’s like that – I don’t want to say anything I shouldn’t. But you just watch yourself and don’t let yourself get into the habit of doing things, I’m telling you for your own good.’
At the bombed site her gait and manner changed. She withdrew into herself and became suspicious, looking into people’s faces as they passed as if they might turn out to be enemies. I couldn’t imagine this Rose, all prim and tight-faced, spitting pips with