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THE STREET

And that was the year before Dad came back from the war, or the year before Granddad died, I'm not sure now. It was probably the year I realised I wasn't going to do well at school - ever - and the year of our street party and the celebrations. But more than all that it was the year when the street began to mean something more than just the place where you lived and I began to notice the subtle injustices and the blatant cruelties of urban life. I witnessed, but did not understand, the fears generated in the old when youth came to live next door, and the cruel silence that shouted at the newcomer - the Welshman, the Scot, the East Ender, or the Jew. I remember the girl with the Japanese mother.
And of course the German.
Mrs Schmidt had lived in the street for about two or three years. She was of medium height, mid-fifties, thin, and always wore a black coat with an astrakhan collar wrapped tightly round her neck and held there by a large pin. Neighbours said you had to be very careful what you said in front of her because she had come from Germany and really she shouldn't be allowed to walk around as freely as she did. She eked out a living by giving piano lessons. There were many stories of her alleged wealth, and of all the money she still had in Nazi Germany, of the expensive jewellery she had hidden away and which no one had seen - well not all of it - and of her meanness and that the reason she looked so thin was that she refused to spend much money on food although she could have afforded to buy things on the black market if she really wanted to. Somebody said she had fled Nazi Germany in 1933 after her husband had been taken away one night never to be seen again, but very few believed that story. The majority thought she'd had a deathbed conversion the day before war broke out in 1939.
I've wondered many times since what she thought of us. Our street had something special - it had us - a collection of short-trousered urchins, hovering around the scholarship, scrumping, "can I go out to play?" age. The adults had moved there when the district was known as the Queen of the Suburbs. Now, it was full of genteel poverty, net curtains, everlasting flowers in large vases, and even a few hats with ostrich feathers gathering dust in the rooms of those who still spoke affectionately of King Teddy. We had his picture in our kitchen.
At the time I lived there, the Queen of the Suburbs was defending itself against what might be called the anti-royalists - those who had settled there from Ireland, Scotland, and the East End of London. One of them once said to me, complainingly, "It's all public libraries and parks round here". The old fought a rearguard action - theirs was not the smart suburban world of coffee mornings. Theirs was the pre-war world of security in the Army, the office, and the bank. The pushy, post-war world was too slick, too businesslike. They still talked about one's station in life, long after the stations had become, as it were, nationalised.
The invaders had attacked hard. They pushed in towards the end of the war, unable or unwilling to see subtle boundaries and barriers. They went to pubs and walked back through the street clutching bottles of stout - without even wrapping them in paper. They wanted corner shops, and Woolworth's and meat and two veg in the Civic Restaurant. And most of all, they did not want to hear about the parochial church council, the events in India between the wars, and of the seedy world where reflected glory was OK - "My friend has a cousin who is a vicar/bank manager/missionary, and do you know what? He said...."
No, they did not want that world. They were living in the world of fully-fashioned nylons, second hand cars, the one-and-nines, and later, the New Look, the spiv and the drape suit. In the end of course, that world won, as they knew it would.
Did Mrs Schmidt see the world like that? Did she think of it years later as I did? … I remember the hard yellow chips of gravel sunk into the rich black tar. In the middle of the road, the gravel would thin like hair on a black scalp, and in hot summers the tar would come up in great bubbles. If you could ride your bike fairly well you could make it skid, ripping up long patches of tar on the crown of the road. Then there was the laying of the fresh tar and its smell on a hot afternoon. At the back of my mind it is always about three in the afternoon and very quiet except for the milkman and the baker finishing their rounds - the baker, pushing his three wheeled barrow at chest height and the milkman, riding back to the yard on his horse-drawn cart painted scarlet with white lettering. And the wheels and hooves and boots crunch and crunch the gravel to keep you awake.
And then, in the distance, very faintly, I hear the steamroller. The clanking gets louder and louder and louder and there! it turns the corner into our street, with its enormous front wheel, crushing the gravel, and exciting men with handkerchiefs on their heads and snakes tattooed on their arms shout to each other. They would be in the road for two or three days, setting up a small tent on the pavement which looked like a covered wagon in a Western, and from which the night watchman would guard the steamroller. The brazier was lit and the scarlet and black coals shimmered in the evening light.
But in spite of the road repairs, I'm sure there was a scar in the middle of the road for years, and that scar was my reminder of the victory party bonfire we had. The bonfire and the street party were important. They did not simply commemorate an event - they were agents of change.
The neighbours always seemed to be quarrelling with each other. Not openly quarrelling with argument and counter argument. It was not as simple or as humane as that. They would stop talking to each other - quite suddenly. One would take offence at some imagined snub or injustice and would simply ignore the other. The other would retaliate and this would go on for months - years maybe - until both had long forgotten the original grievance. And if this seems to be un-British, that's the way I saw it then, and I was puzzled in the way children are by adults’ behaviour.
Mrs Smith, or as the neighbours insisted behind her back, Mrs Schmidt, came into this uncompassionate, thoughtless, class-conscious and reactionary street. Her proudest possession was her grand piano that almost filled her small front room where she gave piano lessons. She must have polished it daily, and when I sat at it, struggling for mastery of simple exercises, I would look at my reflection in a narcissistic way, causing me to play several wrong notes. She probably never realised how the vast black expanse of her piano could distract a small boy more interested in reflections than sharps and flats.
My apprehensive arrival into her crowded room to sit before her enormous piano would be accompanied by a smile and she would say "Ant how iss my little frent today?" Her large liquid blue eyes would fill with understanding and patience when I played the wrong notes and said that I didn't think I would ever get it right. "Vee try again," she said. "All vayss we must try again. However hart it iss", she would add.
To me, Mrs Smith was part of the street, although not of it. How delighted she would have been had she known that I or anyone else thought of her as belonging to the street. For years she had not belonged anywhere. After a few months I was entered for an elementary piano examination - which I failed. When I next met her she put her hand under my chin, smiled and said: "Lifes are a series of defeats".
At the victory street parties neighbours would organise tea for all the children in the street. Long trestle tables and wooden chairs would be borrowed from church halls and set up in the middle of the road. Bread and butter and cakes and lemonade would be provided. Someone would supply jam, another sweets, and for a moment it would seem that everyone had stopped quarrelling. More important than the food though, was the bonfire lit in the road in defiance of authority and a piano was trundled over the gravelled surface to stand on the very crown of the road, and around which we would sing. The children's party finished around seven or eight o'clock after which the adults would engage in dancing and there would be a little beer and plenty of giggling. And all the time the piano would be playing.
I knew all this because I went to several parties in neighbouring streets although I really had no right to be there. When our street decided to have one, there was much discussion as to who would play the piano but no one would admit that Mrs Smith was by far the best person for the job. Others were approached but only in the last resort, and in sheer desperation was Mrs Smith invited to play. And even then it was not an adult that invited her. It was me.
"Are you playing for us tonight?", I said in my childish innocence, thinking that no one else could possibly be considered good enough. She was confused, embarrassed, and said that it wouldn't be right. "There isn't anyone else", I said. She still refused, and it wasn't until our street party had started that the children took control of things themselves.
A group of us knocked on her door and said that we couldn't sing because we hadn't got a piano and would she come out because it wasn't any good without music. She said she would love to, but it was not really her place to do so, and the honour really must go to someone else. "It's no honour", I said, "It's just that no one else will do it." A few minutes later her enormous grand piano was being manoeuvred into the centre of the road right outside our house and Mrs Smith was sitting there on her stool, her black coat and its astrakhan collar wrapped round her as tightly as ever.
And how she played! Long after the children had gone to bed, and the adults had taken over, she was still playing. From my bedroom window I could see all that was going on and Mrs Smith was still sitting there, the dying bonfire making fantastic flickering patterns on the grand piano and Mrs Schmidt playing Land of Hope and Glory over and over again with tears steaming down her face, and I couldn't think why because she looked so happy.
A small group of men still gathered around the piano drinking the last of the beer and singing a few lines whenever they could remember what they were. But Mrs Smith didn't care. They were free to drink their beer, free to shout and sing, and she was free to play Land of Hope and Glory for as long as she liked.
And I pulled the curtains aside a bit further, and the moonlight made hideous silhouettes of the late Victorian villas and the bonfire in the middle of the road still flickered, refusing to die, still flickered on the black grand piano, and the trestle tables became oblong parcels of light against the black road and the paper that had been tacked to them to form a tablecloth had come off and was blowing down the road, caught in little gusts of wind, and caught in the moonlight, and Mrs Schmidt still sat there playing Land of Hope and Glory, and that was the year Dad came home, or the year before Granddad died, I'm not sure now, it all seems so long ago.

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2100 words

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