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By Root 988 0

Flo’s feet’. This pair of prisoners were bored to the point where they exploded several times a day in a violent scene, Flo cuffing and slapping Aurora and Aurora biting and scratching in self-defence so that the screams and yells reverberated through the building. Yet it seemed that this violence was of a different quality from Mrs Skeffington’s with her child; because beneath the apparent mutual hatred was a sub-stratum of something warm and friendly. Flo would look down at his scrap of humanity for whom she was responsible with a look of comic bewilderment, as if she were thinking: ‘What sort of trick has fate played on me?’ And she’d say: ‘I don’t understand it, I don’t really. All those years I was running that restaurant, no trouble at all, but this kid beats me and that’s a fact.’

It seemed to me that Aurora understood quite well this process that Flo herself referred to as ‘letting off steam’, because at one moment these two females would be screaming and tussling, and the next, exhausted but amicable, they rested in each other’s arms, Aurora grinning with a tear-smeared face; and Flo, a cigarette drooping from the corner of her mouth over the child’s head saying over and over again: ‘Oh, my Lord, it’s all too much for me. Oar, I wish you’d grow up a bit and then we’d get on better, I’m telling you.’

At regular intervals a women referred to by Flo as ‘that interfering busybody from the Welfare’ would descend, to find Flo, bland as butter, serving tea and her wonderful cake, and Aurora dressed to kill in organdie and white ribbons. If anyone was there, Flo would direct, over the woman’s head, a profound and cynical wink. ‘Yes, dear; oh, yes, I know, dear,’ she said in response to every piece of advice from the expert. ‘I did what you said, but she’s so naughty …’ Her hand extended automatically towards a slap, and withdrew itself again; for Flo sensed that Welfare would not approve of slapping.

‘You don’t have to let her in,’ I said, watching her frantically getting herself and Aurora ready, for the enemy had been observed going into a house three doors down to visit the child whose name was on the list before Aurora’s.

‘What do you mean? She’s Government, isn’t she? It’s the Labour that inflicted all these bitches on us.’

‘The Tories, too, when they get back.’

‘Lord let me see the day. But they’d never want to wear us out with all them nosey-parkers.’

‘You wait and see. And, besides, aren’t you pleased about the Health Service?’

‘I never said anything against that, did I?’

‘That was Labour.’ She was sceptical. ‘It was, too.’

‘If you say so, dear,’ she said at last, with the weary good nature which meant she was going to humour me.

When we knew Welfare was on the way, Flo always waited until the last moment in her bedroom, clutching Aurora by the hand, so as to make an entrance while I opened the outer door, from a room which was the apotheosis of a bedroom. The suite had cost nearly two hundred pounds, was being paid for on hire purchase, and was all beige-coloured varnish, highlighted with gilt. As Flo said, it would give Welfare a nice impression, to see her and Oar, all in their best, coming out of a fancy room. ‘And I’ll leave the door so she can fill her eyes with our new eiderdown. That’ll show her.’

The eiderdown was electric-blue satin and about a yard thick. It was never used to sleep under. At nights Flo wrapped it in an old blanket and put it away until she made the bed next day.

When I had opened the door for Welfare, I was expected to excuse myself and go upstairs. ‘It makes me nervous,’ Flo said, ‘with you there, and me trying to keep her happy. The Lord knows what she’ll think up next. Do you know, she said it was wrong for Oar to sleep in the same room as Dan and me?’

‘Perhaps she’s right.’

‘Are you laughing at your Flo? My Lord, the things they think up. And she said last time Oar’s teeth had to come out, they were rotting in her head.’

‘Well, they are.’

‘Yes, dear, but they’re baby teeth and they’ll fall out of themselves, the trouble they give themselves these people. Well, she