Coronation Chicken. Nigel Barley
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the front room. When he tried to leave, the paint had gone off - just like that - and there was no parting the bag from the floor. He had taken a whole bottle of his best surgical spirit to sponge himself free and left in a huff. You could still see the mark.
The high altar, and Jack's great joy, was the sideboard, a huge, bow-legged thing of blond wood. Its top bore further proofs of respectability, Mum and Dad's wedding photos, arranged in a careful semi-circle. They stood somewhere outside a register office in old-fashioned clothes, looking implausibly young. Under arms raised in Nazi salutes but really throwing confetti, Dad's manly hand gripped hers but far too near the camera so that he looked somehow deformed like that crab that only has one big pincher. Then there were the pictures of the children as babies, all in frocks - boys too - against wishy-washy backgrounds and some of Dad in uniform, leaning on jeeps or with arms round the bony necks of toothy comrades. Official pictures of the world were always in shades of grey, conveying a fundamental truth about the lack of colour in ordinary life. Cameras were rare so people mostly had to just remember things. Yet Jack understood that memories also became soft and worn, just like photographs, from too much rough handling.
Each object, once introduced into the front room, became fixed and unquestionable. It was here the single Coronation mug to survive the walk back from school would find its place. Being useless - indeed unusable - but an ornate formal communication, it fitted right in next to the silverish trophy of a girl showing her knickers that Susan had won in the school sports for high jump. A space stood ready for his own school certificates, a recognition perhaps that academic learning too was a sort of impractical embroidery on life.
The drawers and cupboard were full of even greater treasures, a rich lifemulch to be excavated in layers. Pictures of boozy Uncle Fred were tucked safely away here out of sight. There was Dad's army stuff, pay books, King's Regulations, discharge papers, more pictures in uniform showing bleak and windswept camps, three medals wonkily mounted on a single bar and wrapped in oily cardboard stamped 'On His Majesty's Service.’ Dad could never see them without speaking bitterly of the military. ‘Three years in the army and what did I learn? I'll tell you son. How to swear, how to cheat at cards and how to get drunk.’ Only later would Jack realise that these were actually useful skills in life.
There was a stapled, cardboard box of bullets, beautiful smooth things, each a tumbling jewel of brass, copper and lead. Jack and Tom had stolen one and set it off with a hammer on the allotments. It had whizzed off, struck one of the buckets protecting the rhubarb and ricocheted back howling over their heads. When they fingered the dent in the bucket with terrified fingers it was hot.
Best of all was the water-stained book Dad was issued just before hitting the Normandy beaches. It had a cover of red oilcloth, dog-eared and dished from being carried in his battledress top pocket. Jack always read slowly through all the stuff about groundsheets and ordinance and being financially responsible for your equipment and being fined one-and-six for negligence but his thoughts were for the last section, putting off getting there, like you might dawdle home from school on a hot day thinking of the cold drink you could have when you walked through the door or telling a joke where you put off the punchline till people screamed at you. At the back was a page dramatically headed 'Women' that consisted of a single sentence. Jack read it in his head in a haw-haw officer's voice. ‘Always remember,’ it warned, twirling its moustache man-to-man fashion, ‘that Jerry was here before you.’
***
‘He was there all right,’ said Mum. ‘Bold as brass, Eadie. Dick Moore. His bike was outside Eva Frick's all night. Just like that. Right out loud. It's disgusting.’ She licked her lips tastily. ‘Who'd have thought? Dick Moore and Eva Frick carrying on. Chalk and cheese if ever there was. You can be sure he got more than his bicycle clips off.’ She nodded contentedly, enjoying the way her newly-permed brown hair bobbed when she shook her head. Eadie had just finished the task of transformation with a box of Richard Hudnut and the very latest curlers and papers.
Eva Frick was Weylands's only Scarlet Woman. She was divorced, which made her virtually unique in itself, plied an unladylike soldering iron in the aircraft factory and had been seen smoking in the street while pushing a pram in slacks. She lived with a pack of feral daughters of addled paternity that roamed Weylands like lionesses. Her high point had been the war. With growing years her scarlet had faded to the subdued pink of her gins so that the original red remained only in her inappropriately loud lipsticks and she had begun to be redeemed, to take on a muted glow as one who had 'seen life.’
Eadie nodded too but dowdily. The dowdiness was a sort of expression of mourning for the wartime loss of her husband. ‘She was never what you'd call - sniff - respectable.’
‘Respectable?’ Mum shrieked. ‘You remember just before D-Day? There were no Americans for miles round here but you'd always find some at Vera's. Spam and fags stacked on the sideboard. No better than she should be.’
‘Him too,’ prompted Eadie, gathering her cardigan over her bosom like a breastplate of virtue. ‘Dick I mean. But you know...He's sort of gone up in my estimation. That Eva Frick's no soft option and I always thought Dick was... well...the other way.’ The two women fell silent. Their eyes swivelled like the well-oiled guns of an old battleship, sighting on Jack.
He knew what they were talking about. Everyone in Weylands knew. Eccentricities were tolerated up to a point. Weylands was sufficiently aware of its country heritage to need a 'touched' resident and Dick Moore had explored various avenues of self-expression over the years. When young he had not done very much and had continued successfully in that line ever since. After renouncing his trade as army barber, he had taken to haunting the more remote footpaths in a long overcoat, beneath which he was naked, and here, with a flapping gesture, he invited all passers-by of either sex to inspect his person without fear or favour. Perhaps it was a habit acquired in army medicals. There was no sexual terrorism in this, the whole thing was done gravely in tones of the strictest formality. Then there had been one or two ambiguous attempts to entice boys off into the woods to show them a great surprise. Nothing much had come of any of this either. Their greatest upset lay in not finding the Teddy Bears' Picnic they had been strongly led to expect. Delicacy forbade the involvement of the police because it would involve clarifying things that were better left vague and putting into language ideas for which no acceptable words existed in Weylands. Finally, some of the men had gone round to see him and, the next day, he sported a black eye while PC Puddephat turned a blind one. Now in his forties, Dick could be seen most days, always down at heel in a greasy Prince of Wales check with a bright yellow comb in his top pocket, wheeling newspapers round in a wheelchair or cycling aimlessly on his bike with more newspapers on a sort of trailer. No one knew what he did with the papers or where he got them from. The more generous would assume he was engaged in some public-spirited work of 'salvage.’ On summer days, he would be seen, sitting by the paddling pool in the rec., staring off into space.
‘I don't mind,’ said one citizen, ‘as long as he keeps his hands where I can see them.’
‘Jack,’ said Mum. ‘Why don't you go and play outside, love? Get some air.’
‘Alright.’ He picked up the yellow, toy car he had been pretending to push around the floor, and went obediently to the back door, parodying the behaviour of a perfect child.
‘There's a good boy,’ remarked Eadie with surprise.
He smiled angelically, unlatched the door to go out. As the wind stirred his hair, there was a soft breaking of another sort of wind behind him, Tom. It didn't matter. He would hear what they said anyway from Tom.
A strange sort of modesty was invoked in some Weylands households. Lavatories were decently tucked away at the bottom of the yard, filthy things to have inside. Yet pre-school children were permitted to use chamber pots anywhere about the house, only, should a neighbour come by, a large cloth would be simply dropped over them as they sat, defining them out of existence - and gossip would continue.
Jack had now reached the age of prudery but still recalled the privileged luxury of such bowel movements, enveloped in a balloon of large-meshed muslin tenting his own rich gases, a spectator on an unseeing world like a harem lady in one of his travel books, peering through a carved screen. Today,