Shilling a Pound Pears Read online

  Janet picked her way with some diffidence through the groups of small children squatting at their play on the sunny pavement. Her nose wrinkled a little at the smell of hot petrol and dust that is the essence of this part of London. Jane’s part of London was quiet, and fresh with trees and lowers in front gardens. She wasn’t really used to Camden Town and its smells and noise.

  But Hilary loved it. She loved the dirty pavements, the narrow back streets, the peeling stucco of the old run-down houses, the roar of traffic in the busy road. She loved it in all weathers, when the sunshine heated the paving stones and roadway to a smell of hot tar, when the rain sluiced patches of oil in the gutters to bright rainbows, when shop windows spilled lights across the dark pavements in the dark of winter tea-times. She liked the crowds who lived there, too, the fascinating mixture of people that always comes to live in the hidden parts of London the tourist never sees.

  Now she grinned at the freckled Irish children from the house next door to her own, and shouted cheerful good mornings at the Jamaican family who lived in the basement of the next house still, receiving wide white smiles in brown faces in exchange. She rummaged in her pocket for a tube of peppermints for the curly-haired, black-eyed little Cypriot toddlers sitting on the steps of the last house in the road, before pulling Jane after her into the wide main shopping street.

  They made their way along the crowded pavement, evading prams and pushchairs and wheeled shopping baskets, dodging between gossiping women and delivery boys, and almost every step Hilary’s tall, red-headed figure was greeted with cheerful cries of “Morning, ducks!” and “Wotcha, Hilary!”

  “Do you know everybody in the district?” Jane asked curiously, as they stopped outside an open-fronted fish shop.

  “Mmm?” Hilary was peering at the silvery fish laid out on the wet marble slab. “Everybody? Not really!” She laughed suddenly. “But pretty near everybody! Don’t you, where you live?”

  Jane shook her head. “Mummy fusses rather.” She sounded almost apologetic. “She never lets us go around alone, the way you all do …” She bit her lip suddenly. “You know something, Hilary?”

  “What?” Hilary was abstracted, listening unashamedly to a spirited conversation between the fishmonger and an extremely fat and voluble customer. “I say, Jane—listen to this—it’s as good as a revue sketch—I must try it in a free-expression class next term.” As she listened, her lithe body seemed to fill out and settle itself, in imitation of the fat customer.

  “I envy you.” Jane said flatly.

  Hilary was jolted out of her absorption at this. She turned and stared at her cousin. “Envy me? For Pete’s sake, why? You have so much more that I have—plenty of money.”

  Jane rested her basket on her hip. “That’s nothing,” she said impatiently. “Money isn’t any use to me, really—I’m not allowed to do anything much—not like you lot are.”

  Hilary nodded, her green eyes sympathetic. “I know,” she said. “Uncle Joseph is a bit - well -”

  “Stuffy,” Jane said baldly. “We’re never allowed to do anything interesting—he says it isn’t proper, or something—and Mummy’s always fussing about what people will think. I wish I were you, really I do.”

  “It’ll be better now, Jane,” Hilary said, smiling down at the neat fair head. “You’re stating at the London School of Economics next term, aren’t you? You’ll have more freedom then.”

  “Mmm. I say, Hilary—” Jane stopped, and the said painfully, “Look, I’m sorry I was such a misery before, when the boys imitated my father and yours I mean—it was funny, really—I just—oh, I don’t know.”

  Hilary nodded. “Loyalty—I don’t like people to be rude about my parents either, whatever I think myself. When Jojo said my parents are feckless, I was a bit mad—who wouldn’t be? But it doesn’t alter the fact that they are a bit feckless, does it? We all know they are. Mummy needs looking after, herself—when she looks after us, she makes the most awful hoo-ha out of it. But what I know about them and what I’ll let other people say are two different things.”

  Jane nodded eagerly. “That’s it—exactly. Anyway, I just want you to know that we’re all very pleased to be with you this holiday, really we are—John doesn’t say much, but I know he’s thrilled really. And as for Jojo—well, he’s going to have the time of his life. So don’t worry about your folks being away. We’ll do our best to see it’s a decent holiday, really we will.”

  Hilary dropped her basket and hugged the other girl.

  “Janey, you’re a darling—we were a bit drear, and to tell the truth, I thought it’d be worse still because you’d keep wet-blanketing everything. But you’ve changed from the way you used to be.”

  Jane laughed. “I haven’t really. it’s just being myself, instead of what my folks want me to be—not that they’re at all wrong, of course,” she finished hastily.

  “I know.” Hilary picked up her basket, and thrust her arms through her cousin’s. “And we’ll say no more about it. Come on - we’ll shop now, and then go swimming. We’ll have a good holiday if it kills us!”

  “Right.” Jane pulled her little notebook from her pocket. “Now, supper tonight. What’ll we get? How about fish and chips? Can you fry fish?”

  “Like a veteran!” Hilary said. “But not here, I think. He’s a bit too expensive at this shop. Look, there’s a fish stall in the market—he’s usually a lot cheaper. Mummy goes there a lot. Over there—see? The road next door to the supermarket. Come on—we can cross. The lights are green.”

  The two cousins ran across the busy road to the narrow street market next to the huge supermarket on the corner.

  Chapter Two

  TO JANE, the market seemed like an explosion. Noisy and busy through the main road was, the little road they turned into now was even noisier and busier, and quite apart from sound, the visual impact was tremendous. On each side of the roadway, wood and tarpaulin stalls were piled high with assorted merchandise, and people with shopping baskets pushed and shoved their way through the small passage left between the stalls in the middle of the road. There were smells, too, some rather nasty, but most rather pleasant.

  The smell of fruit was strongest, the sweet pungency of rotting oranges fighting with the sharp crisp apply smells and the softer reek of bananas. One stall, with a tray full of cucumbers cut into halves, smelled cool and fresh, even above the stronger smell of vinegar and shellfish from the whelk stall next to it. There was the earthy smell of potatoes, the strong eye-watering odour of onions, the thick butcher-shop smell of raw meat from an open fronted shop behind the stalls, the reek of hot oil drifting down from the fried fish shop near it. There was a sugary smell of ice-cream and lemonade from a stall where trays of toffee-apples and coconut ice were piled in front of racks of gleaming lemonade bottles, and a bathroomy redolence of talcum powder and bath salts and disinfectant from a stall where soaps and bottles of perfume were jostling for space with packets of soap powder and steel wool pads for cleaning saucepans.

  Jane, bemused and a little shattered by the noise, picked her way behind Hilary, skirting slippery tomatoes where they had fallen to be squashed beneath heedless feet, piles of wood and paper shavings discarded from fruit boxes, and slimy cabbage leaves.

  Even to her rather tidy eye, the market had a beauty of its own. The fruit stalls in particular, of which there seemed to be most, were lovely to look at. There were red and green apples in orderly heaps, each row now separated from the next by screws of gaily coloured tissue paper, oranges shining richly next to the sunshine glow of lemons and grapefruit, the deep purple of plums to the vivid greens and yellows of peppers and the baby marrow the French call courgettes. Heaps of brown-speckled yellow bananas, the vivid red tomatoes, the tender young green lettuces, the orange brown of Spanish onions and the deep glow of carrots, all winked and shone in the bright morning sunshine.

  Jane averted her gaze hastily from a stall where very dead-looking chickens and ducks hung by their feet, with glass
y, unseeing eyes, and bedraggled feathers still adorning their pathetic, scrawny necks. She preferred to look at the delicate brown and creamy gleam of eggshells on the next stall along, where a man was piling miniature red-rinded cheeses behind the eggs, and gold-wrapped blocks of butter behind them again.

  They reached the fish stall at last, where it sat at the far end of the market, giving out a smell that completely drowned all others, but a smell that had enough sea in it to make it tolerable even to Jane, who found the odour of fish rather unattractive.

  Hilary ducked under the beam of wood that stuck out alongside this stall, and scrambled over the piled wooden boxes and sacks that spilled off the pavement behind. The man behind the stall, his huge belly encased in a stained blue and white striped apron, was industriously cleaning fish, slapping down the big silvery creatures with skilled abandon as he cut off the heads and slit the flesh from the bones before washing the remaining fillets in a huge tank of water by his side.

  He grinned when he saw Hilary, his leather cheeks gleaming oddly with fish scales that stuck to them. To Jane, he looked as though he was wearing some of that glittery eye shadow she had once seen Hilary wear in a Drama School production and she laughed suddenly at the thought of this big man peering into a mirror as he stuck fish scales on to himself.

  “'Allo, ducks!” the man said cheerfully. “Where’s your Ma today? On the road again, is she? Cor, there’s a life for you—better than all this eh, love?” With a sweep of his long murderous-looking knife he indicated the market stretching away down back to the main road where big red London buses ground their slow way past on their journey to the smart shops and big office buildings of the West End.

  “Abroad this time, Alf,” Hilary said, peering over his shoulder at the huge red fish he had pulled from a box at his side and laid on the scarred wooden slab in front of him. “So I’m doing the shopping for us— together with my cousin.”

  Now Alf looked at Jane across his stall and grinned again.

  “What’s that?” Hilary asked, poking the fish on the slab.

  “Salmon, ducks—for the nobs, this is. Twelve bob a pound. Fancy some?” Alf laid his knife across the fish invitingly. “Piece like that’d just be enough for you lot.—poach it—'ave it sold with salad—smashing. About a quid’s worth there.” He looked hopefully at Hilary.

  She laughed. “Come off it, Alf. Where do you suppose I’d get that sort of money? No—something cheaper. What’s good today? We want fish and chips for supper. Something without too many bones in it—you know what a fusspot old Richard is about bones.”

  “Some lovely haddock fillet.” Alf leaned across and picked up a long piece of white fish. “Enough for five—six?” He jerked his head towards Jane. “Got company, have you?”

  “Enough for eight please, Alf. How much is it?”

  He threw the fish on the scales and added another fillet, squinting at the dial as the needle swung.

  “That’ll be more than enough, then. Six bob all right?” He grinned as he saw Jane reach for her purse, her forehead creased as she did more of her rapid mental arithmetic.

  “O.K. Five bob—seein’ it’s you.”

  Hilary tucked the newspaper-wrapped bundle into the bottom of her shopping basket as Alf handed Jane two half-crowns change, and the girls turned to make their way back down the market, waving at Alf as they went.

  “That would have cost half as much again at the shop in the main road,” Hilary said with a satisfied nod. “This market is marvellous for economy—and more fun than ordinary shops. Do you like it, Jane?”

  “It’s a bit noisy—but it is fun,” Jane said. “I say, Hilary—how can they sell stuff so much more cheaply than ordinary shops? I mean—can they buy it more cheaply from the wholesale places?”

  “Don’t ask me!” Hilary laughed. “You’re the economist, Jane—you should ask them. Look, what else do we need?”

  “Eggs, butter, potatoes, something to take to the pool for a picnic lunch today—oh, and some bacon for breakfast tomorrow. We saved enough on the fish to manage that, I think—and will have ice-cream this afternoon.”

  “Right—this way, then,” and Hilary plunged into the crowds once more.

  They bought a dozen and half eggs at the stall next to the chicken one, and a pound and a half of butter at the same place. They went into a tiny delicatessen shop behind the stalls, a shop unlike any Jane had ever seen before. There were rows and rows of different sausages and salami under a glass cover, shelves full of tins of food Jane had never heard of—things like bamboo shoots, mangoes and pawpaws, water chestnuts, and passion fruit. There were big barrels on the floor full of dark green pickled cucumbers, dishes of potato salad and pale orange-coloured liptauer cheese, white cream cheese, grey chopped herring sandwich spread, pickled herrings looped with rings of white onion, deep golden-brown smoked trout and reddish kippers. The place smelled delicious, a mixture of cheese and pickles and fish and cheesecakes, great slabs of which lay on big plates at the far end of the counter.

  Hilary chose a big piece of liver sausage for their picnic sandwiches, telling Jane it was delicious, as the fat woman in a white coat who stood behind the counter cut and weighed it, and sliced the bacon Jane chose. They picked out two enormously long crusty French loaves from the box near the door, and Jane stood happily, letting her eyes roam over the strange shop, while Hilary gossiped cheerfully with the white-coated woman behind the counter, a woman who apparently had dozens of grandchildren, all of whom Hilary seemed to know by name.

  “Just the potatoes to get, now.” Hilary tucked the long tissue-wrapped loaves into her basket when she finally managed to get away from the voluble grandmother in the delicatessen shop. “And how about some fruit? We’ve only a couple of sad oranges at home.”

  “Apples would be nice to take to the pool,” Jane said, “and they seem cheap enough here—we can just about do it, I think.”

  “We’ll get the potatoes at the last stall of all, then,” Hilary said practically. “Then we won’t have so far to carry them, and we need ten pounds or so, what with the way Richard gets through chips. Apples we’ll get from Yossell of course.”

  “Yossell?” Jane followed Hilary along the crowded pavement behind the stalls.

  “Mmm. He’s a darling. He’s one of the nicest people here. I like him a lot. He’s great fun.”

  They ducked past a stall where a young man in a tight Italian-style suit, his hair growing in long sideburns down his rather spotty cheeks, was selling cheap costume jewellery, strings of vivid red and blue beads swinging from his outstretched arms as he begged passing shoppers to “—just have a look at 'em, lovey, just look—Queen of Sheba you’ll be in these—get the old man in a right tizzy you will, wearin’ these—come on, sweet'earts, just try 'em on your pretty necks…”

  On the other side of the market, Jane could see a stall she had noticed before, noticed because of the way it was arranged. Every apple shone as though it had been polished lovingly, every orange sat snugly in a nest of blue tissue paper, bananas hung from the beam above the stall in orderly bunches, each bunch pointing in the same direction. The front of the stall was covered with a sheet of artificial bright green grass, and the whole looked as neat and scrubbed as a new pin, in sharp contrast to the rather untidy, dirty-looking stall immediately next to it.

  For a moment, Jane thought there was nobody looking after the stall, until Hilary stood on tiptoe and peered over the top of the piled fruit.

  “Yossell?” she called above the hubbub. “Where are you? Yossell!”

  Between a heap of red apples and an equally big heap of golden-yellow pears, a face appeared; a round face, with bright dark eyes peering from under bushy white eyebrows. The face lit up when it saw Hilary, and disappeared suddenly, to reappear around the side of the stall.

  “'Ilary!” He was a little man, no taller than Jane herself, with a round belly and short fat arms encased in a snowy white coat, stubby legs wearing dark trousers and tucked
into the most enormous pair of boots Jane had ever seen. He had an auriole of very white hair, as well as those bushy white eyebrows, and he was so fat that his face seemed to be supported on a row of chins which disappeared into the red scarf that was tucked into the neck of the short white coat.

  “So where you been?” He peered past Hilary, obviously delighted to see her. “Weeks, it is, and no sign of you! So you buyin’ your fruit some place else, hein? Is this nice, to treat your old Yossell like he was nobody in your life?”

  “I’m sorry, Youssell,” Hilary laughed at him. “I’ve been working—at Drama School, you know that. This is my cousin, Jane, Yossell. She’s spending the holidays with us, together with her two brothers.”

  He rubbed his fat hand briskly against his white coat, and held it out.

  “Very pleased to meet you. Any cousin, of 'Ilary is my friend. Any time you should need, come to old Yossell.” He pumped Jane’s hand vigorously. So where’s your Momma, 'Ilary? I tell you, I think you all gone away, so long I 'aven’t seen any of you. You don’t eat fruit now? Or you buyin’ at Fortnum and Mason’s yet?

  “I should live so long!” Hilary said.

  Yossell burst into a gale of laughter. “You hear?” he said delightedly to Jane, in the middle of his splutters. “She talks like me, the lobbus!”| And he was off again, into another paroxysm of laughter.

  “Lobbus?” Jane murmured, puzzled, staring at the little man who was wiping tears of mirth from his eyes. “What’s that?”

  Hilary giggled. “Roughly translated I suppose it means a—a sort of lovable rascal. It sounds silly when you say that in English, but it’s a nice word when Yossell says it.”

  “Chee—” Yossell managed to catch his breath again. I 'aven’t laughed so much for—a long time,” and as suddenly as he had burst into laughter his round face settled into the lines of deepest gloom. “With my troubles, I should laugh?” He turned his mouth down and rocked his head from side to side in a way that even Jane, unused to the mercurial little man, could see indicted the depths of misery.