A Time to Love Page 14

  Smoke columned out of his nose while they both considered this.

  ‘Would you like to be trained as an artist?’ Mr Torrance said.

  In normal circumstances it would have been a question beyond comprehension or consideration. Boys from Deal Street didn’t leave to become artists. Tailors, yes, or cutters, porters, dockers, street sweepers, labourers, burglars, drifters but never artists. But now, in this odd peaceful limbo, David knew at once that that was exactly what he wanted to be.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘I would.’

  ‘Very well,’ Mr Torrance said, ‘we will start by restoring your painting to its pristine condition. Then you will gather all your drawings together and we will put them in a folio. Then I will see your parents, and if they are agreeable I will enter you for secondary school.’

  It was a dream come true.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘An honour, don’t I tell you,’ Aunty Dumpling said, her plump face damp with delight. Technical school, Emmanuel! Think a’ that! The East London Technical School.’

  Emmanuel was thinking of it, and his thoughts were making him bite his lips. It was an honour. Of course it was. To have your only son marked out as a scholar for all the world to see. A very real honour and David was worthy of it. But it had to be paid for, that was the trouble, and the price was high. Fees of a shilling a week meant fifty shillings a year, and if the boy were accepted they’d be committed to paying it for the next four years, unless he won a scholarship, which they really shouldn’t count on. Nu-nu, it was a lot of money, and the tailoring trade was more uncertain than he’d ever known it. And then there was his keep. Ai yi! It would be very very difficult. A less devout man would have said impossible.

  ‘Can ve do this, bubeleh?’ Rachel asked him. She spoke so softly her voice was almost a whisper, and her confidential tone revealed her understanding of what this commitment would mean. ‘Ve should say no, maybe? Vhat you think?’ If they were going to say no they should decide now, while the boy was at school and out of the house.

  ‘Nu-nu, ve manage,’ he reassured them both. ‘Such an opportunity, Rachel. It don’t come twice.’ He looked at the headmaster’s letter lying on the table before them, and smiled ruefully. The choice had been made the moment it arrived. ‘He vin a scholarship maybe.’

  ‘Don’t I tell you!’ Dumpling agreed, descending upon him to reward him with kisses. ‘Ve manage. Ve save. Ve make his liddle suits. Such an honour!’

  A voice was calling excitedly from the courtyard. ‘Mrs Cheifitz! Mrs Cheifitz! Such news ve got, you never believe! Mrs Cheifitz!’

  It was Mrs Levy, waving a letter at them, her face glowing in the soft light of late afternoon. ‘From the school,’ she explained. ‘Our Hymie they vant to send to the Tech.’

  Rachel seized her letter from the table and waved it in answer. ‘Our Davey also,’ she said.

  ‘Mazel tov!’ Mrs Levy called. ‘So they go together. Two scholars. Vhat better ve vant! Oy-yoy! Great is our God and greatly to be praised for His loving kindness.’

  ‘First they got to pass the examination,’ Emmanuel warned. ‘Ve don’t count chickens before they hatch, nu?’

  But none of the women paid any attention to him at all. With boys so clever! Of course they’d pass.

  David and Hymie were’t quite so confident. Wanting to go to the Tech was one thing, winning a place was quite another. They did extra work for Mr Williams every diligent evening from then on, and they hoped they were improving, but they couldn’t be sure. A scholarship examination was a daunting thing and they both knew, only too well, that all the boys from Deal Street who’d ever attempted it had failed.

  ‘How d’you reckon our chances, then?’ they would ask one another as they walked home from school together at the end of each day. And the answer was invariably the same. ‘Slim an’ gettin’ slimmer!’ Then they would sigh and grimace if they were feeling anxious, or punch one another if they were feeling fairly confident, but neither of them would admit to hope. That would have been evidence of pride, and their God was a little too prone to chastize pride with failure.

  So they went meekly to the examination, both of them tense and pale and pretending unconcern, and for the whole of one very hot day sat in a gymnasium that smelt of tarred rope and old rubber and sweaty feet, and did heart-juddering battle with Mathematics and English Language.

  Then they had to wait for more than a fortnight before the plain important envelopes arrived with the good news. Both of them had been accepted as scholars at the East London Technical College and David had won a scholarship from the Drapers’ Company worth £10 a year.

  Then what celebrations there were. Aunty Dumpling wept and wailed for a good ten minutes and covered him with tears and kisses, and his mother smiled and smiled, and his father’s long tired face was lifted with pleasure. The two families invited each other to special meals at which their clever boys sat in the place of honour and were praised until their cheeks burned scarlet. And they were praised and petted all through the summer until September arrived and David and Hymie put on their special school suits and caught the tram rattling along the Mile End Road to the People’s Palace.

  They settled into their new life as scholars very quickly and made new friends and grew accustomed to a new pattern. And a very demanding pattern it was, with new things to be learned at every minute of the day, and several new vocabularies to be acquired, and notes and homework to be completed every evening. There were rewards in this new life, David thought as he did battle with his first set of mathematical problems, but you certainly earned them. But never mind, tomorrow was Friday, and on Friday afternoon he would have his very first Art lesson.

  It was a crushing disappointment. The Art master, Mr Eswyn Smith, was a mild looking man, stooped and untidy, with a thick fringe of grey curly hair ringing the pale bald dome of his skull and a long, uncombed, brindled beard, speckled tawny and grey and white, and dotted with scraps of paper and flecks of paint and pencil shavings. He wore a pencil behind one ear and two paintbrushes behind the other, and the kangaroo pocket in his linen apron bulged with rags and brushes and squashed tubes of paint He had a soft untidy voice too, and a trick of addressing his class with his body turned slightly away from them, so that he was looking at them sideways on. David liked him at once.

  ‘My function in this establishment,’ he said, ‘is to introduce you to the delights of Art. Now I am not such a fool as to imagine that any of you will actually wish to become artists when you leave this school. No indeed. I’m sure you will all end up as scientists or engineers, but that is no reason why you shouldn’t learn about perspective and balance or acquire some appreciation of colour and line. In short, it is my job to ensure that you do not leave this place as complete barbarians. No matter how you may have arrived. Very well, we will begin this afternoon by drawing a pencil sketch of that window. Without using a ruler. Rulers are for mathematics. In Art we draw freehand.’ And he set off along the rows of desks to distribute pencils and paper.

  Nu-nu, he’s wrong this time, David thought happily, I’m going to be an artist. Won’t he be bucked when ’e knows. And he took his folder of cartoons out of his satchel and laid it on the desk ready to surprise and please.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Mr Eswyn Smith said mildly when he saw the offering. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘My drawings, sir,’ David said proudly. ‘I want to be an artist.’ And he watched with happy anticipation as the teacher opened the folder.

  ‘Um,’ the man said flicking through the pile, much too quickly. ‘Cartoons, I see. Have you got anything else?’ He wasn’t impressed, as David could tell at once from the flat tone of his voice. ‘Well, you’ve learned one trick, I’ll grant you that. Let’s see how you get on with all the others. You’ve got a long way to go, young man, so the sooner you start the better. There’s your pencil.’ And he gave David a vague smile, settled his pencil behind his ear and moved on.

  He wasn’t impressed with the drawing of
the window either. ‘Yes, that’s the frame,’ he said mildly. ‘Now what do you see through the frame, eh? That’s the problem. Filling the frame. Quite a good start but only a start, eh?’

  I’m glad I didn’t show him the Jubilee, David thought as he drooped back to his desk to fill the frame. ’Cos ’e wouldn’t think much a’ that.

  During the next few weeks they learned the rules of perspective and drew boxes and houses and tree-lined roads and streets full of shops. But although David did his best to do exactly what was required of him, he was never praised and rarely noticed. It was a chastening experience and left him demoralized and unsatisfied. He’d come to this school to learn about Art because everybody said he was good at it, and now it seemed he was only ordinary, and his special talent wasn’t special after all. Nevertheless he worked hard, and strove to please, even though he couldn’t see the point of most of the things he was asked to do.

  Until the day he saw the rats.

  Mr Eswyn Smith had set them a special task that Friday afternoon, a subject in two tones, brown and grey, which was to display as many textures as they could contrive. As David walked home along Commercial Street through the grey mist of a steady drizzle, his mind was busy turning over possible ideas. What sort of things were grey and brown? Horses, maybe. But horses were very difficult Boots? But they’d done boots, and there weren’t a lot of different textures in a boot. Oh, why couldn’t they use as many colours as they liked?

  At the corner of Shepherd Street a gang of workmen were laying drains and a small crowd had gathered to watch them do it. Idly curious he drifted towards them. The pavement was gouged by a long deep trench, and the drainpipes were stacked beside it, mud-smeared but ready. There were over twenty men in and around the trench, some digging with varying degrees of energy and enthusiasm, some resting on their spades. They and the trench were all exactly the same colour, the heavy dark brown of wet London clay. Their waistcoats and trousers were stiff with the stuff and even their caps were daubed with it, although their boots and spades and the puddles of water under their feet were grey as iron.

  ‘Mind yer feet, son,’ the foreman warned. ‘Better not come too near the edge. Lot a’ rats this morning.’

  ‘Rats!’ David said, shivering a little at the idea.

  ‘Dozens a’ the beggars,’ the foreman said. ‘Just broke a nest up. Be bitten ter death we would if our legs wasn’t tied up proper.’

  David looked down at the man’s legs and the stout leather gaiters that protected his calves. Then, as if to prove him right, two fat damp creatures squirmed out of a nearby culvert from among a tangle of cables and slithered through the mud no more than three feet away from him. Rats, David thought. Great fat rats running about Whitechapel in broad daylight, their mud-brown fur spiky with water, and their tails trailing behind them like cables, iron grey cables and iron grey claws. A picture in two tones. I could draw that fur with lots of short straight pencil lines, and the eyes would be black with just a curve left white to show the reflected light, and the claws smudged grey inside a narrow outline.

  Two of the workmen set about the scurrying vermin with their spades, the broad iron thwacking into the mud with an echoing thump, and soon two were dead and the remainder vanished. Then as he watched, both horrified and fascinated, he realized that the mound of damp brown objects near his feet, which he had carelessly imagined to be a pile of old rags, was in fact a heap of dead rats, tied by their wiry tails. Their flesh was battered and flattened and their fat cheeks deflated, but their vicious yellow teeth and protruding claws were still chillingly obvious. Their fur was as flat as leather. He could show that by smudging again. But above their muzzle he could see the sharp spikes of wet fur – little pencil lines, very close together. I could leave the teeth white and give ’em a really heavy outline. A picture in two tones and a variety of textures.

  ‘D’you mind if I sit by the side ’ere, an’ jest make a few sketches?’ he asked the foreman. ‘I’ll keep out yer way, I promise.’

  ‘Suit yourself, son,’ the foreman said, tossing the latest victims onto the pile. ‘On’y don’t blame me if yer gets bit.’

  He sketched for over an hour even though the drizzle smudged his notebook and the crowds jogged his elbow, and when he got home he started his picture. The two live rats running from bottom right to top left, boots and spades grouped around them, grey puddles outlined beneath them, brown clay behind them and the pile of dead rats suspended like leather rags from the righthand corner. All the things he’d learned, about the variation of line and the use of light and shade, came effortlessly into his mind to help him. It was more than four days before the picture was finished to his satisfaction, but the work was a pleasure.

  And at last his effort earned real praise.

  ‘Now that’s what I call a picture, Cheifitz,’ Mr Eswyn Smith said when he handed it in. ‘You’re making your line work at last. Better than cartoons, eh?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Now you can see the possibilities, I think?’

  Yes, oh yes, he could.

  ‘You’ve caught that wet fur very well indeed.’

  David didn’t blush, because he’d gone beyond childish pride by now. He knew he had a talent but he also knew what an effort that talent would always require of him.

  Oddly enough and although he didn’t expect it, from then on Art became enjoyable again. They were still working in two tones and still struggling to make mere pencil lines express texture, but he knew he was winning the struggle. Now he drew whenever he got the chance, covering pad after pad with sketches, absorbed and happy.

  ‘Such a boy!’ Aunty Dumpling said, admiring his enthusiasm. ‘Alvays he draws. Such a scholar, don’t I tell you.’

  ‘How you gettin’ on in school?’ Aunt Rivke asked when she met him on the stairs.

  ‘Good!’ David told her. ‘I’m gettin’ on good.’

  ‘So you like it, nu?’

  ‘Like it! It’s the best thing I ever ’ad ’appen to me, in all me life. I tell you, Aunty Rivke, I’d like ter stay there fer ever an’ ever.’

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘I’ve ’ad enough a’ school,’ Ellie Murphy said to her great friend Ruby Miller. ‘I’m goin’ after that job in ’Opkins an’ Peggs Sat’day.’

  ‘Never!’ Ruby said, much impressed. Hopkins and Peggs was the local drapers and a most prestigious place. It ran the full length of Shoreditch High Street from Church Street to Bethnal Green Read, and it sold high-quality goods like they did in Barkers or Peter Robinsons in the West End. ‘That’s ’igh class, ’Opkins an’ Peggs.’ She’d been there twice with her mother and still felt overawed by it, all those rolls of expensive cloth and shop girls with snow-white collars and cuffs, and immaculately clean hands. She couldn’t imagine Ellie Murphy in a shop like that ‘You’ll never get took on in ’Opkins an’ Peggs.’

  ‘Just you watch!’ Ellie said. ‘Be thirteen Monday, then I’m off. I’m gonna better mesself. Job like that ’ud do me fine. They live in, yer know, at ’Opkins an’ Peggs.’

  It was a Thursday evening early in May and the two girls were on their way back to work in the Lane, Ellie to wash dishes at the pie and mash shop, Ruby to help her brother sell herrings. They’d been working after school for more than three years now, and ever since the Murphys had moved to Heneage Street they’d got into the habit of walking there together.

  ‘I know what yer thinking,’ Ellie said, catching the dubious expression on her friend’s plump face, ‘and yer wrong. I’ll get took on, you’ll see.’

  Trouble is,’ Ruby said honestly, ‘you don’t exactly look the part, do yer? Not really. Not when all’s said and done.’

  ‘I’ll get mesself a new rig,’ Ellie said, her jaw hard with determination. ‘’Ave a rub down. Brush me barnet’

  But Ruby wasn’t persuaded, and the expression on her face was beginning to undermine Ellie’s rather limited confidence. Fortunately they’d just reached the corner of Lolesworth Stree
t and the Lane, and that gave her an idea.

  ‘We’ll ask the innercent bird,’ she said. ‘That’s what. Then we’ll see.’

  The ‘innercent bird’ was a bedraggled blue budgerigar who hopped dolefully about in a small wicker cage balanced precariously on a ramshackle trestle table with a label above its head proclaiming that it would take a planet from the box telling your past and future life for one farthing. Its owner, a fat affable Gypsy with a face like a flat iron, stood beside it in a bundle of old skirts and tatty shawls beaming toothless encouragement at her potential clients. Tha’s right, darlin’,’ she approved as Ellie proffered her farthing. ‘You just choose your question, my lovey, and let the innercent bird look into your future.’ And she handed Ellie a greasy card full of badly written questions. ‘Which d’yer want, dearie?’

  Ellie read the card as well as she could through its coating of grime and brown grease. ‘Shall I be happy in love? How many husbands shall I have? Ought I to grant that which he asks so ardently? Have I any rivals? Shall I do well to confess all?’ What odd questions, she thought, and wondered who would ask them, but as she was wondering she saw the question she wanted to ask. Number 27, ‘Shall I be successful in my enterprise?’

  ‘Number 27, dearie,’ the Gypsy confirmed, and she raised a cardboard partition at one end of the birdcage to reveal a stack of miniature shelves, each containing an equally tiny card. The innercent bird was scratching its head, and had to be prodded with a straw to remind it of its duty. Eventually it hopped to the shelves and after two or three tentative pecks at the woodwork it contrived to push one of the cards through the slot behind it and out of the cage. ‘Come round the side, dearie,’ the Gypsy said, making way so that Ellie could stand beside her. There’s your answer, my love.’

  Ellie took the card in her hand and turned it over. ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness,’ she read. ‘What’s that supposed ter mean?’

  ‘Means you gotta wash,’ Ruby said.