Sunday at the Cross Bones

Speaking of our transatlantic cousins, a potent image of their current state of mind has appeared in the window of the Gilbert Gallery, on Essex Road. It is a new painting called American Gothic by Mr Grant Wood and depicts a poor farmer, presumably from one of the ‘Dustbowl’ states, standing in front of his run-down homestead with his helpmeet by his side. They are clearly a long-married couple but there is something severe and unyielding about the man’s looks – an unappeasable steel in his eyes, a cruelty of aspect symbolised by the pitchfork he holds – that is matched by the indomitable gracelessness of his lady wife. One extends Christian sympathy for their resilience in the face of poverty, yet one also feels sympathy for anyone dependent on their assistance, or indeed their hospitality, for five minutes.

But the title, American Gothic? I know only a Gothic style of church architecture, popularised by Mr Pugin and characterised by spires and spikes, whether on arches, windows, doorways or ceilings. What application can the word have to this portrait, unless to suggest that the Church in America is in the hands of these unsmiling (and incontrovertibly spiky) rustics?

And the Church of England? What arrangement of features, what painted, unsmiling visage would sum up the Church today? Why, surely a portrait of my old friend Cosmo Lang, once the greatest duffer that ever tried to construe Catullus in front of a teacher, more recently famous as the holder of the highest religious seat in the country. In this notional picture, he would be seated on a throne, noble as St Peter, arrogant as Saul and all-conquering as Neptune, fingering the purple satin of his archiepiscopal glory, luxuriating in his triumph, wholly unable to see how the vast majority of his co-religionists live, on the long flat shore between need and comfort.

Cosmo Lang, well, well. I simply cannot understand his elevation to the See of Canterbury, and his pre-eminence over all of us. I am reminded of what F. E. Smith, the Earl of Birkenhead, as a young advocate, said to a judge one day, when he had inadvertently begun to instruct the jury on their duty. ‘What do you suppose, Mr Smith,’ said the judge, ‘I am doing here on this bench?’ ‘It is not for me, Your Honour,’ Smith replied, ‘to attempt to fathom the inscrutable workings of Providence.’ Quite so.

Half a mile down the Essex Road, I found a Herbert Street, but no number 140 or 142. Instead, a dismal terrace of small stucco houses petered out into a ghost estate of shuttered and condemned hovels. I had been directed to the wrong street. Tsk. I uttered a silent prayer for Emily, and set off again. Seven streets later, a friendly publican cashed a cheque for me and, on hearing my enquiry, said there was a Halberd Street not half a mile away. My satisfaction at the news was tempered by the wretched environs through which I passed on the way. The hovels of Herbert Street were like the Taj Mahal, compared to the sights which now met my eyes.

The cramped rows of two-storey brick houses – acres of them, winding into the distance like a hope fading into the future – were bad enough. So were the stinking courtyards I passed, pieces of wasteland randomly flooded with pools of stagnant water and, here and there, the backwash from the sewage. So were the horrid cellars I glimpsed from the pavement as I passed – dreadful, Miltonic catacombs, seen but peripherally, before one’s eye recoiled in horror from the upturned faces below, the dim lights in the gloom of noonday, the white limbs seen through the gratings, the grim sense that perhaps a dozen human souls must live and have their being down in these shabby dungeons. I nearly turned back in despair and headed for the cheerful daylight of Essex Road. But I prayed to St Jude, patron saint of lost causes, to steady my resolve.

The worst was soon upon me. Round the corner of Halberd Street, looming over it like a beetling grey cliff, a huge tenement building, six storeys high, reared up from the pavement. There was no front door in this cliff of masonry – or rather, there were several doors but none that would admit a caller from the street. Instead, the vile construction spread tentacular concrete legs, each entwined by a mass of spiral stairwell, over half an acre of land. Through pillars, archways and walkways, one could catch glimpses of the dwellers in this morale-sapping prison. I went in as far as I could bear, and found a dozen grubby children, no more than three or two years old, playing on the stone stairs, their jerseys streaked with what I hoped was mud, their ears assaulted with the hiss and whine of the gas jets that lit their greasy faces like Caravaggio beggars.

They had no sky to look out upon, no sun or moon to tell them it was day or night, no sight of grass or river, nothing of the outside world to meet their eye, only more concrete roofs and angles, walls and stairs, gas jets and hellish courtyards. Wherever they looked, blankness looked back at them.

I felt a surge of indignation, such as I have seldom experienced, that children should have to live like this. For thirty years, I have campaigned ceaselessly to find homes for homeless boys and girls. But when I look at the homes in which the poorest are expected now to live, I could cordially wish them an early death and a roomy grave. God forgive me, it is not a Christian thought. Give me strength, dear Jesus, as thou wert strong in the garden of Gethsemane when faced with the knowledge of thy imminent suffering and death, although at least thou didst not have to put up with the foul stench that came from the great metal bins ranged along the far-left wall. I took just one step in their direction, then froze to see a score of furry bodies writhing and tumbling over each other in a frenzy to consume some vestigial fragments of pie on a cardboard tray.

I found number 142 on the fourth floor, a vertiginous climb. The door opened the thinnest of cracks. ‘I am looking for Emily Murray,’ I told a single eye, a thin nose and a twisted mouth, through the crack. ‘I am her friend, Mr Davidson. They tell me she has moved here. It is imperative I speak with her.’

‘What’s she done?’ said the twisted mouth.

‘She has done nothing wrong,’ I said. ‘She is not in any trouble. I wish to speak to her and satisfy myself that she is well.’

‘Who’re you?’

‘I told you. I am a clergyman. Mr Davidson is my name. Miss Murray is a protégée of mine. I have been directing her steps and finding her work and it is vital –’

‘We don’t need no sermons here,’ said the face, expressionlessly. ‘It’s about the last thing we need.’

‘Will you let me see Miss Murray?’ I practically shouted. The face betrayed no emotion and I could see it was about to close the door for good. I changed tack. ‘Let me in, and I will pay you ten shillings as – as an entrance fee.’

A hand appeared at chest level, or at least some very thin fingers, cupped together in a beggar’s cringe. ‘Let’s have it then,’ said the face.

‘Five now, and five when I have had satisfaction,’ I said.

‘Satis—Well, why didn’t you say that’s what you was after?’ She opened the door and I was admitted into a room perhaps the size of Mrs Parker’s kitchen in Vauxhall. The only light was a dim electric bulb, poking down from the low ceiling. One bed and two mattresses on the floor took up most of the space, although a table and two chairs appeared, half hidden behind the figures. For in the room, apart from myself and the lady doorkeeper, there were five women.

Foolishly, seeing an older lady in their midst, I took them to be a mother and her many daughters, a family in straitened circumstances. But a second look quickly disabused me. The women were of many ages ranging from a barely pubertal thirteen to a prematurely lined two-and-thirty. Their clothes shone with the kind of greasy patina that comes of much hand-wiping and no washing, and a rank odour of overhung lamb and citric perfume pervaded the room. The youngest girl was round-faced and ringletted, and looked up expectantly from her vantage point on one of the mattresses, like a little girl playing with her dog in a Pears soap advertisement; but she was dolled up in skirts and high-heeled shoes, quite unsuitably. The eldest, whom I had momentarily taken for the mother, sat at the table, still as a Maltese madonna, a shawl around her shoulders. Her dark eyes reflected the light from a single half-curtained window, but she would not look in my direction. The thin-faced woman who had opened the door stepped back into the shadows, gripping my five shillings in a fist. On the bed, a dark-haired girl in a dirty green blouse and a Negress in a white lace garment that accentuated her powerful amplitude, lay side by side against a bolster talking with an absorption from which no stranger’s arrival could distract them.

‘What’s he doing here?’ said a voice. ‘What you let him in for?’ and the sixth woman came up beside me. She had a pronounced nose, but a handsome enough face with a generous mouth, which opened to reveal surprisingly fine teeth. Her hair appeared red but may have been dyed with henna in the gypsy style.

‘He’s looking for Emily Murray,’ said the thin-faced one, ‘and then he said he was after satisfaction. So I thought –’ She glanced around the packed and fetid room, as if identifying several places where sexual activity might be conducted in comfort and privacy.

‘No, no, no!’ I said. The stupid girl. I repeated my quest and looked around the room with a sudden wild suspicion. Could one of these defeated slatterns be my dear Emily, whom I saved from the travails of sin at the hands of a procurer in Soho? Could Fate have so changed her features that I now did not recognise her?

‘… and so I am here,’ I concluded. ‘Can you help me?’ I drew closer. ‘Can it be that –’ I faltered – ‘that one of you ladies knows of her whereabouts?’

There was a silence apart from the chatterers on the bed (‘Well, ’e fuckin’ never dunit ter me,’ one was remarking to the other).

‘In fact,’ I asked, ‘is one of you called … Flo?’

‘That’s me,’ said the red-haired termagant. ‘What’s it to you? An’ what’s a protterjay when it’s at home?’

‘But this is marvellous,’ I cried. ‘I am getting somewhere at last. You are a singer in the local Palace of Varieties, I believe?’

‘You what? Girls, did you ’ear that?’ She gazed around the room, taking in her venal sisterhood in a glance. ‘I’m a well-known singer down the Palais according to his lordship here.’

There was raucous laughter. ‘Yeah,’ said one, ‘me too. An’ I always sing much better with me knickers off.’

‘Does your sister come to see you perform?’ I persisted. ‘emily, I mean?’

‘Sister? She’s not my sister. I ain’t got no sister. I know her, she lives here, on and off, but that’s it. She’s not, like, family. Someone’s been telling porky pies, mister.’

‘She lives here?’ I waved a hand that took in the squalor, the smell and the defeatedness that hung in the room like a miserable fog. I meant to imply, ‘How could anyone else fit in here?’ It came out as ‘How could anyone at all live here?’

‘She lives here when there’s room,’ said the thin woman from the shadows. ‘Been turning up and going again for three weeks. Stayed here last weekend when Katrin was off working, but she came back and Em had to go. Any more’n six, and the landlords complain the privy’ll break down and they threaten to boot us all out, even though the rent’s paid regular.’

‘But where would she have gone when there was no room for her?’ I cried.

The thin woman pursed her lips and blew a little puff of air between them. The henna-haired one, Flo, said, ‘Where’d you think? She went on the street. Probably met a fancy gent with one of them new Bentleys, who took her back to his place and fed her sherry and cake and tucked her up nice with a little story.’

The others laughed again. Flo seemed to be the humorist in this sorry sorority.

‘And if she met no fancy gent?’ I asked with some asperity. ‘What would have befallen her?’

The thin woman puffed her cheeks out again. ‘She’ll take her chances. We all take our chances.’ She raised her fist and jingled the five shillings within. ‘You going now? Some of us have to get on. If she calls, we’ll say you was asking for her.’

I could not wait to depart from that Calcuttan hole. ‘Please take this note and make sure she receives it,’ I said, writing my address and the Vauxhall telephone number. ‘It is vitally important that I speak with her soon. Here is five shillings more for you – and there will be a substantial cash reward if you bring us together. Do you understand?’

‘Oh, we understand, sir,’ laughed Flo, the non-chanteuse. ‘You can be sure you’ll ’ear from us the minute she comes back from Park Lane.’

I hurried away. The smell of decay, of month-worn bloomers and stale semen, of leaking gas and bletted fruit, of lies and tidal sewage, of traded flesh and cascading rubbish bins, of twining and scrambling and greed-frenzied rats, seemed to stick to me as if it would hang around me and cling to my coat for ever. I strode through Islington like a swimmer coming up from the depths, rising up gasping, lung-burstingly, towards the light.

Letter from Mrs Moyra Davidson

Stiffkey Rectory 19 August 1930

My dear Oona,

Lovely to get your letter with all your exciting news. I am so glad Finbar’s violin lessons have paid off, it is a marvellous thing to be able to fill the house with music, I mean real music played on instruments, not just having the radio on all the time like Sheilagh and Nugent. I thought all this flapper nonsense was over and done with, but not at all. Here I am in the rectory study, trying to collect my poor thoughts and in the next room the wireless is playing Jack Hylton and his Orchestra and he’s singing ‘If I Had a Talking Picture of You’. Such nonsense. I get distracted by thinking, well, if I did have a talking picture of H, it’d be a step up from what I have now, which is a silent picture of him in the living room, a framed photograph of him sitting in a chair holding one of his big cigars and looking – well, rather more crafty than sacred, truth to tell, and sometimes when it gets too quiet around here, I wish I could make it talk to me. I’ve got used to not seeing him all week, I mean, literally all week except for Sundays. Sometimes I feel lucky if he turns up for the Sabbath itself. Sometimes it’s so late on Saturday night, I can’t be bothered waiting up for him, and I go off to bed and read lovely Charlotte Yonge instead. The first I know of the presence of the Lord is when he’s eating a boiled egg in his study on Sunday morning and trying to cobble a sermon together from a dozen scraps of paper and the Bible. And then God help me if I interrupt to tell him about the dead seagull in the chimney, or the liberties that the Du Dumaine children have been taking, using my writing paper for crayon likenesses. He’ll only shush me and wave a hand as if to say, ‘Not now, don’t bother me with this trivial nonsense.’

‘Harold,’ I say, ‘this is a home. I know it is a haven for the sick and misfortunate, a confessional for the sinful and the desperate, a place of succour and retreat for the spiritually confused. But it is first and foremost, Harold, a home, where your children live and I live, and Cook and Mrs Henryson and Enid and Polly and the dogs and, while I’m at it, Colonel Du Dumaine and his sons. It’s a home where people live whom you love or at least are supposed to love when you get five minutes to devote to them in between showing your love for your fellow man in every fiddly backstreet in London, and it’s no use your sitting there with your breakfast egg and your sermon text playing the great Shepherd with his Flock if you cannot even spend five minutes with your own domestic flock where they need you most, namely here in the home.’

He’s surprised by this unaccustomed outburst. ‘I am shocked, my dear Mimi, shocked,’ he says, wiping crumbs from his lips, ‘by this imputation of neglect. That I, who spend the lion’s share of every day the Lord sends in working for the betterment of my fellow creatures, should be so cruelly accused of failing in my duty …’ He shakes his head, like he’s trying to get my words out of his ears. ‘Would you like to suggest, in the few minutes that remain before I go to address the village congregation on matters of Heaven and Hell, where my sin of omission lies?’

All I can think to say is, ‘You’re never here,’ and ‘You never talk to me, not properly any more, and you never take me out the way people take their wives out, not even to see the pierrots at the Hunstanton Empire.’ But it sounds so foolish and trivial and clingy. I know exactly what he’s going to say, because he always brings up St Matthew: ‘Need I remind you of the ocean of want that surges all around us? It is laid down in the Gospel of St Matthew: “For I was an hungred and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger and ye took me in …”’ I try to stop him around this part, because his voice takes on a bleating quality, and I know how it is going to end, but he is unstoppable: ‘“Naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick and ye visited me; I was in prison and ye came unto me.” Now my dear,’ (this is how he goes on, it drives me crazy) ‘nowhere in St Matthew, to the best of my recollection, can be found the words, “I was a touch bored at home and ye came and took me to a dinner dance in Holt.” You may search the Gospels for a month without finding the words, “I was restless and bored from spending all day gossiping with Mrs Reynolds, and ye took me to see Mr Coward in Private Lives at the Phoenix Theatre.” I must be at my work, my darling, among the genuinely conflicted and truly wretched. But that is not to say I cannot listen to your aches and woes with a sympathetic ear. Perhaps after lunch we might discuss what is troubling you.’

You see the real trouble, Oona? I have to make an appointment to see my own husband. And that casual mention of the theatre, he knows how it cuts me to the quick. It reminds me what a stage-struck pair we were when young, him on the boards with the comic monologues, me with the lovely singing voice. I was a mezzo of course.

Did I ever tell you of the first day we met, at the Oxford Playhouse? I was part of Miss Horniman’s company of Abbey Singers, and we were visiting the students from the University Drama Society. Some of us were invited to tea with the president, Sir Reginald Kennedy-Cox, and there to welcome the Irish songbirds was Harold. He stood out, not because he was tall or handsome, but because he was older than the rest of the students, properly grown-up at twenty-three or twenty-four, and he’d seen life and was a proper actor. He’d performed at the Wigmore Hall and had lived off his stage earnings to pay for his time at college. People spoke of him with respect, they called him the ‘Holy Actor’ as though it was amazing to find a theology student able to stand up onstage and declaim comic monologues about young boys being eaten by lions at the zoo. I liked him because all the evenings spent onstage had given him a very easy manner. His voice was low, never harsh nor quarrelsome, quite deep and musical, it sort of flowed along but slowly, a river of chocolate. Of course he was ‘theatrical’, but not in the way people use the word to say someone’s false and untrue, he was theatrical as a way of putting a point across. He’d fix you with his intense brown eyes, and tell you about the poor boys in the East End of London he was trying to help by setting up a club where they could get warm food and play games at nights instead of fighting. He argued the case for giving every street child a proper education and start in life and training and an apprenticeship so they wouldn’t need handouts from grand ladies such as myself, and he argued with such passionate eloquence, I was won over to the cause, to him and to his big brown eyes. As he got to the climax of his speech, I looked down and found his hand had been gripping my forearm for so long, I’d lost any feeling in it. You could have jabbed a pin into me and it wouldn’t have hurt. ‘Why, Mr Davidson,’ I said, ‘you have become quite carried away.’ Harold clutched my little white hand in his and impetuously kissed it, with the ardour of a desert sheikh. ‘I am sorry to have spoken with such heat,’ he said, ‘and sorry to feel your hand so cold. But perhaps something of what I have said has penetrated into your heart, my dear Miss Saurin.’ And of course it had, for I never knew anybody could so arouse an audience as Harold, with that voice reverberating like the throb of an Underground train. I began to fall for him at that moment, Oona, though of course there was no question of anything happening, with him being so poor and my father expecting great things for me and the Cartwright boy in Castle Lambert. But it started then all right.

Dear me, Oona, how I’ve rattled on again. No time for proper news, except to say the major has been up to even worse tricks. Apart from his public attempts to wrest the churchwardenship from poor Mr Reynolds, he’s taken to drinking in the middle of the day and making a scene in the church. On Wednesday, he shambled in and made a scene at the war memorial in the porch, complaining about the presence in the list of someone he hadn’t liked or who was unworthy, and someone else whose name should have been there but wasn’t. Mostly I just walk away from any such dispute, but this time I caught such a waft of whisky off the major’s breath I had to ask him to leave. He swayed about and glared at me with such desperate eyes, I was scared for my life. That man is capable of anything. But, please God, Harold will deal with him, should he ever get home from ministering to the hungred, thirsty, naked, ill and imprisoned.

My love to you,

Mimi xx

Journals of Harold Davidson

London 21 August 1930

Emily Murray’s breasts are a miracle of nature. Though she is lying on her back, they do not loll towards her armpits but poke upwards like proud hills, like Sheba’s mountains in King Solomon’s Mines, and draw the hand to them as if the first impulse of mankind were not shelter, food, drink or conquest but the impulse to stroke and caress this firm softness, these astounding hills.

Her skin is white as milk, save on her forearms and the V of her throat, which have been burnished by sunlight. I believe it is called a Farmer’s Tan, the product, not of Côte d’Azur beaches, but of working in the open air under the summer’s rays with sleeves rolled up and top shirt-button undone. The tanned flesh of a working girl, as she was when I found her, and as I persuaded her not to be for a moment longer; a working girl when she resumed the calling merely two weeks ago despite all my efforts, and a working girl as she remained until yesterday.

Her eyes are closed, but her lips are set in a charming pout, the face of a young woman sure of getting her way. Her teeth were always a joy to behold, so tiny and regular but for the two in front, which stuck out in a small, enchanting overbite, to rest on the soft cushion of her lower lip. Below her ribcage, the skin is taut as a sand tarpaulin, a soft down of hair making a golden meadow of her abdomen. The pudenda are neatly hidden behind a tangle of dark curls, surprisingly black and springy when her hair was always so fair and smooth. I gaze at this secret jungle, musing on Shakespeare’s lines on his mistress’s body – ‘If snow be white, why then, her breasts are dun; / If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head’ – and thinking, Why, these are genuine wires – the electrical circuits of Emily’s secret self, masked by her street finery, her hair dye and the stews of north London where her dismal journey took her. Here, in this jungle of wires lies the truth. Maybe the wires could be likened to a telephone exchange, a seemingly incoherent Gordian knot of flex and string which nonetheless connects disparate parts of the self, the conscience to the hand, the brain to the soul …

It’s no good. All sermons have deserted me. To wring metaphors from every corner of experience is second nature to me; yet even I cannot elaborate a seam of instruction from the dark pubic hairs of a dead blonde woman.