Coronation Chicken. Nigel Barley
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was a meaty cleaver. ‘I don't want to see you back here again - ever. Do you hear me?’ Twist yank. ‘Or I'll make you wish you'd never been born.’ Twist shake. ‘I've got my eye on you. Put one foot wrong and you're for it, good and proper.’ Twist shove.
Jack backed away towards where PC Puddephat had parked his bike, opened his lips and breathed in to gob back a mouthful of shrill cheek, then thought better of it as a voice said very quietly.
‘I know where you live.’ Then the ultimate threat. ‘I know who your Dad is.’
***
Britain in the 'fifties was not at peace it was at post-war, or rather warfare had been exported to the safe distance of Asia so that the idiom of conflict was still everywhere. The young were mostly in uniform, army, air force, navy or the Scouts and Guides that anticipated military manners. Jack was a Wolf Cub and had a badge for cooking and knots and the semaphore with which messages would be sent following Russian occupation and they were all living in holes in the ground. The Third World War was developing nicely in Korea, turned from smoke to flame to raging conflagration. All around them, British cities were heavily scarred by bombing and still as blasted and devastated as the British economy. It was a pinched, careworn world where everything was either second-hand or army surplus.
PC Puddephat's gloves were ex-RAF officers' issue. He kneaded the fingers down into the knuckles and walked on down to the carriage, too warm in navy-surplus underwear, rubbing his hands on the greasy front of his tunic.
PC Puddephat did not see himself as enforcing the law. Rather, he embodied it. He was the law and his measured plod was the heartbeat of the body politick. He crunched slowly along the track, enjoying the metronome pace of his own boots and looked down on Dick's railway carriage home nesting in deepening shadow. He sighed and tipped back his helmet and wiped his forehead in what he recognised as a theatrical gesture.
Kids were just a sign of something deeper. They picked up and magnified adult tremors. The law was not just a negative thing. It was positive too. It was all a matter of fine-tuning the sticks and the carrots or was it the slings and the arrows? He hadn’t had much schooling. Anyway, it was time to do something about Dick again. For a start, he was living in a first-class carriage which couldn’t be right. He was getting too comfortable in his refusal to conform to the rules that everyone else lived by. And why should the kids have all the fun? He looked at his ex-US-coastguard watch decisively. It was nearly dark. No one to see. He clamped his glove to his mouth to stifle a naughty giggle.
***
‘He'll tell our Dad. We'll get belted.’ Tom snivelled and twisted round his grey shirtsleeve to wipe his nose on it. They were trekking back through the allotments, hushed and subdued.
‘No he won't.’ Jack was dragging a stick behind him, making very satisfactory snake lines in the soft dust. ‘Dad doesn't talk to him. He's an outsider - Scotland, Manchester, one of them places.’
‘Oh.’
Being an outsider was not just a fact, it was an affliction. There were no real immigrants in Weylands yet, to be accused of eating Kitekat and Brylcreem sandwiches, for it was a time when even British athletes were white. It is true there was a solitary French onion-seller who wallowed, perhaps to excess, in national stereotypes, cycling round the streets in a striped jersey and beret with skeins of large onions around his handlebars and sporting a bounder’s moustache. He did quite well in the upper-class areas but occasionally, in hot weather, fell foul of drink and scattered onions up and down the main road in fits of deep melancholy. The mechanics of his business were mysterious. It was popularly imagined that he returned to France, pedalling all the way, to resupply over the weekend. There were a couple of weird families with black Homburg hats and ringlets who were known simply as ‘the Acidic Jews’ but they lived a completely isolated, separate existence outside the village and what they wanted all that acid for, no one was sure. In Weylands thought, acid was associated with the irregular disposal of murder victims in the News of the World, so children were advised to avoid them. Apart from that, it was mainly Northerners that had to keep the ‘inferior alien’ slot warm until proper immigrants arrived. Northerners had silly accents and were a bit slow, almost one of the subject races of Empire. Elsewhere in the kingdom, full-time Northerners might be hard-grafting a proud folklore for their own region, compounded of pigeon-fancying, inedible food, bunions and a non-conformist religious sensibility. In the cities, kitchen sinks, still dreamed of by Jack's Mum as desirable items of sanitaryware, were becoming icons of identity for the industrial proletariat. In the countryside, alibis for rural idiocy had existed for centuries. But as a suburban Southerner Jack was not fooled by regional culture. The threadbare, State-regulated fabric of his life was not the stuff of legend. He knew he was set beyond all that myth and fakelore and only had stark reality to live in.
In later years, Jack would read of The Warm South and study the lush symbolism of oranges in the works of the German Romantics and D. H. Lawrence. In the Vietnam of his adolescence, the effetely sloe-eyed Southern capital, Saigon, would be opposed as a matter of course to horny-handed Hanoi where the purposeful Northern gaze burned with Marxist fervour. Ho Chi Minh doubtless began his rallies with, ‘Ee lads. Ahm reet chuffed to see thee 'ere,’ as he tickled oriental whippets under the chin. In Jack's readings of the United States, the South was a place where people did little but sit on porches bending hot and humid vowels into languid diphthongs, fluttering their fans and fiddle-de-deeing while Atlanta burned. Apart from cheerful Cockney sparrers, the South of England was depicted everywhere as a place of pleasure and wealth, sloth and smugness, a soft paunched underbelly fatted on the unearned tribute of Empire. So Jack might be one of the invisible southern poor but he knew he ruled the earth.
‘Puddephat eats tripe and trotters.’ Tom giggled, delighted. ‘Northern,’ he sneered. ‘Yerrgh.’
Jack swung his stick at the scaly trunk of the monkey puzzle tree that stood swirling by the main road. ‘Yeah. Yerrgh.’ But it was done without conviction for, at the back of his mind, Jack was dimly aware that he was too young yet to form opinions of his own so that those he had were second hand and worn out, like almost everything else in his world.
***
Crime was rare in Weylands yet not entirely without drama. Not so long ago, there had been a dispute at the aircraft factory over tea breaks and the workers had downed tools and gathered in a shouting mob around the gates. The manager, who had read Animal Farm, panicked and phoned the police, bringing Puddephat rushing round on his bike. By the time he arrived, it had all blown over and the men had trooped quietly back to work and a delayed tea break but PC Puddephat skidded on the trampled grass around the, by now, deserted gate and twisted his ankle. His nephew, also in the force, came over for a few days to help out and run messages. This was written up in the local paper as, ‘Police injured in aircraft strike demo. Local force doubled.’
A firm line was drawn between the street and the house and PC Puddephat knew that few things that happened behind the front door were to be dragged out into the light of day. The walls of the houses were walls of silence and decency and that suited him just fine. It was a line drawn early and children were taught never to reveal the secrets of the hearth. It would be another kind of sneaking to teacher.
Bible translators have torn their raiment and gnashed their teeth at the difficulty of turning into Eskimo the good book with all its unknown camels and unimaginable sand, its notions of pastoral care plucked from a sheep-herding culture that do not adapt to sealstabbers. The same might be said in Weylands of the term 'street life.’ The street was something to be scuttled through between the ordered islands of work and home as quickly as possible. It was a place in which PC Puddephat tolerated men to be occasionally drunk on Sundays as they struggled home but no decent people loitered there. Anyone aimlessly on the street was necessarily a villain. The Pied Piper of Hamlyn worried the children when encountered in their school fairy tales. Of course he had been up to no good. Imagine, just standing there, on the street playing a flute like a beggar. Stands to reason. He should have been run in. Look at the trouble it would have spared everyone.
In Weylands respectability was everything and a criminal record was a terrible and irremovable stain to be spoken of in whispers. Compared to the shame, the discomforts