Page 7 of Strangers in Time

Helped me with my elo-cu-tion, he thought with a sudden grin. She had managed, after much work, to resettle his Cockney-subtractedh’s to where they needed to be, but he still had some difficulty corralling hisg’s. His speech had gotten sopolishedthat his East End mates had taken to asking him why he was talking so funny!

So what would he buy with his newfound wealth? He needed shoes, of course. But that would not cost anywhere near what he had. His coat was nearly done in and the cold was coming. But he didn’t want to spend the money just on things heneeded. He wanted to buy something he actuallywanted.

He lay there half dozing for another few minutes and then rose, washed his face at the tap, pressed down his helter-skelter hair, and stepped into the kitchen. In the tin his grandmother believed would constitute some of his meal at school was a slice of day-old bread from the bake shop, a hard-boiled egg, a few chips fried in drippings, and a nodule of National Cheddar.

He ate it all, including the cereal and tin of dried fruit, and the bread, with the smear of marge that tasted like machine oil, and the sausage with lots of salt, which wasn’t rationed because people needed it to make the food taste passable. He washed it all down by putting his mouth under the tap in lieu of a cup of tea. That was strictly rationed as well, and was only to be taken at dinner, though Gran had old leaves for her morning cup.

His clothes were still wet, so he took them off along with his shoes and laid them over the back of a chair in the kitchen to dry for a bit. It was lucky that Gran had only felt his hair and not his clothes, which would have been proof positive of his nighttime excursions.

Wearing only his tattered undershorts he walked into his grandmother’s small bedroom and looked around. Her bed was neatly made; she did so every morning. He knew the mattress being on the floor made it hard for her to get up, with her aches and pains and rheumatic knees. But the bedframe had long since been sold to pay billsthat apparently would always come due before the money was had to pay them.

She would sometimes pawn her wedding band on Monday, pay bills with the money, and then retrieve it on Friday when her wages came in. During the week he would catch her frowning and rubbing anxiously at the empty space on her finger where the ring, for many decades, represented a solemn vow to her late husband.

His grandmother had a small wardrobe and a tiny matching vanity with a mirror cracked during the Blitz. When she had come out from shelter and first seen the damage, Gran had sobbed inconsolably. Young Charlie couldn’t understand why, since they were all alive, and it was only a bit of glass, and you could still see yourself just fine in the reflection. But then his mother explained that sometimes it was the small things that set people off. Charlie’s mother had soon made things right, telling her mother that the crack gave the mirrorcharacter, and that she would be able to tell everyone later that it had proved superior to the worst the Nazis could chuck at it. His mother had always come up with sayings like that, to make folks feel better.

He looked at the single window and saw black, because even a fraction of light constituted a target for the Germans. In their old flat Gran had sewn blackout curtains. But it had been bombed, and later demolished because the structure was no longer stable. They had survived in their cupboard that night, but it had been a close thing. Now, a neighbor had just applied tar over the windows in their current building. It was effective but smelled quite awful.

Like his mother had said, it was the small things that seemed to bother folks the most. And not being able to look out a window was one of them for Charlie.

He studied the lone picture hanging on the wall and containing the images of two people. His father was a fading memory for Charlie. Robert Matters had been tall and lanky, with a long, perpetually sad face, restless eyes, and a trim mustache. Charlie could imagine his father tipping back a pint or two on a pub stool in the snug andthinking of what he wanted from life. Robert Matters had worked long hours at a physically demanding job at the docks in return for slim wages. It had always seemed to Charlie that those sorts of jobs were the only ones available to blokes from the East End. At home his father usually fell into an exhausted sleep, but he had been kind to his son, kicking a ball with him in the street, showing him how to ride a bike that he’d borrowed from a mate with a son Charlie’s age, or taking him for long walks in Vicky Park, Charlie’s small hand in his father’s large, callused one. His father would tell him stories of his life as a kid growing up in Whitechapel, and they would sit on a bench and watch the world go by and point out funny images that the clouds made.

His father had also taken him to work on Saturdays and driven him around on a dray horse-drawn cart. He’d even shown Charlie how to manage the reins and care for the horse after its work was done. Charlie had been gobsmacked at the size of the beast as he scrubbed it down, but also at how gentle it was. His father had said the horse’s name was Puff because the equine walked with its big chest puffed out. He would even ride Puff bareback around the docks. His father had told Charlie that he was a natural with horses and he might want to think along those lines when he grew to be a man. Charlie had loved those times with both his father and Puff.

Then the war had started and his father was gone along with millions of other men, many of whom never managed to make it back to British soil. And the dock where Puff had labored was no longer there, and neither was the horse. The Germans had seen to that.

Charlie hoped they had given his father a proper Christian burial at Dunkirk. He sometimes wondered about how his father had died: bullet or bomb or knife. But when he dwelled too long on this question his insides became as squirmy as worms after a hard rain.

He next cast a furtive, anxious glance at his mother’s image in the photo. Charlie had ventured out with his mother one day, and only he had eventually returned home. And though it had been more recent than his father’s passing, precise recollections of herwere unnervingly remote in his mind. That may have had nothing to do with memory and everything to do with sorrow.

I don’t want to forget her. But it hurts so bad in rememberin’ Mum ’cause I know what I lost when she died. I lost… everythin’.

Charlie had lived with both his grandparents after his mother was killed. Then his grandfather had died during a tragic incident at the Bethnal Green Underground Station. There had been a stampede on the stairs and bodies had fallen like tenpins and over one hundred and seventy people had been crushed to death, including his grandfather.

The loss of his grandfather had been traumatizing to Charlie because he had become a surrogate father to his grandson and Charlie knew that his grandfather also took good care of his wife.

Now Charlie tried not to think about what would happen to him when Gran died. Whenever she got the cough or wheezed too often or moved creakily he would watch her closely, and do his best to nurse her back right. He was terrified that the sun would rise one day, and his gran would not; yet he worried the same about himself.

Charlie turned away from the photograph and went to check on his clothes. He pronounced them reasonably dry, as were his too-tight shoes. He dressed and, noting that the rain had passed, he stepped briskly out into the narrow street fronting his building.

And that was when Charlie saw him, his brown hair covered by a battered felt hat. He was walking slowly along and looking up at the numbers.

It was The Book Keep’s owner, I. Oliver.

HONORABLYDISREPUTABLE

WHAT WAS THE BLOKEdoing in Bethnal Green? wondered Charlie.

If the man had walked he had gotten an early start since it was at least a ninety-minute trip by foot from Covent Garden to here, what with all the debris and other wartime obstacles. He couldn’t possibly know where Charlie lived. He’d just gotten a glimpse of him. And everyone knew boys like Charlie were six a shilling in London.

Thus, he watched in growing dismay as the man halted in front ofhisbuilding and peered up at the number.

Charlie’s first inclination was to run. This was often Charlie’s first impulse, because people looking for him was never good. Instead, an idea occurred to him. He figured he could just make it, given the slow pace of the gent. He raced around to the alley and to the fire escape. He scampered up the steps, snuck in the window, and hurried to his front door. He opened it and peered out. The hall was clear, so Charlie slipped out, fled down the hall in the opposite direction, and took up a place around the corner. He looked back to see the man clear the last riser and step into the hall.

The chap made his way along, glancing at the flat numbers as he went.

Still, Charlie thought,He can’t be here for me.

He stopped thinking that when the gent halted in front of his door. Now Charlie’s heart started to beat so rapidly he felt the rush of blood and then the throb of a pulse in his ears. His face flushed, and his breaths became shallow as his small chest heaved. For one awful moment Charlie thought helmeted and brass-buttoned constables might rush up the stairs and find and arrest him. He would be led away in shackles, with Gran somehow appearing and sobbing in his shameful wake.

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