LITMIR.BIZ

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of any possible decision, the first question asked was always, ‘What will the neighbours say?’ Usually the walls were so thin that you knew exactly what the neighbours were saying. Neighbours were the best policemen and being shown up in the local paper was the real punishment, for enormous glee was taken in the fall and disgrace of others. Respectability was a swaying tightrope where one false step might send you plunging to your doom. No one would be more vicious and dedicated in the persecution of an unmarried mother than ‘respectable’ women, eager to mark her off from themselves, just as 'respectable' felons persecuted sex offenders in jail. In the everyday life of Weylands, the chances for face-to-face humiliation were too high to permit anything but a minuet of careful reciprocal hypocrisy that allowed the keeping up of a front.

      Like celibacy among medieval Popes, reputation was passed down from father to son. After thirty years in the village, Puddephat was still an outsider but knew most of what counted. So at school, there was young Toby Beak, whose coalman grandfather was disgraced forty years before in a scandal involving delivering customers short weight and short change. Whenever a child lost its dinner money at school, no one doubted young Toby to be responsible and PC Puddephat might be asked to ‘have a quiet word.’ When he discovered Toby was the only pupil who could reliably divide twenty-three pounds three shillings and eleven pence halfpenny by two pounds three and fourpence three farthings, no one thought Toby was just clever. They thought he was showing that financial sharp practice was 'in the blood.’

      PC Puddephat had known terrible crimes committed in private but always found them comprehensible for they were carried out in pursuit of proper ends and mostly in the cultivation of respectability itself. He had once done a sticky-fingered bookkeeper whose betrayals of clients were based on the terror of being seen with frayed cuffs and, closer to home, there was the glorious time the doctor, a horse-faced lugubrious man now properly hung, had murdered his long-staying mother-in-law because he could not face the social embarrassment of asking her to leave. The detectives and the judge had had a field day with that one.

      Such was the regularity of Weylands life that crime-solving required as little intuition as a solution in the Daily Mirror crossword PC Puddephat did every day - 'Capital of France, five letters, beginning with P.' A month before, someone had walked into the jeweller's with a scarf round his face, grabbed a handful of rings and run off. To even have a getaway vehicle would have been to attract attention, so people always ‘ran off.’ Most felons simply waited for the next bus. PC Puddephat was able to cycle along the High Street, inspect the four bus stops like Fabian of the Yard, two in each direction, and arrest the only man of working age on the street at two in the afternoon and not wearing a military uniform. Just not being at work at that hour or safely corralled in the forces was as good as making a confession through a megaphone.

      ‘Right son.’ He had rattled cycle clips in simulation of the glamorous handcuffs he had never quite been issued with. ‘You're nicked.’ The rings were found in his pocket.

      Every age has its droving skills. The art of hustling a flock of sheep along a busy road with whacks to offside hind leg and rump of the last was now lost. But PC Puddephat was a master of herding bikes piggy-back style, riding one while wheeling another and, parked alongside the carriage, was an unacceptably flashy machine – Sturmey Archer gears and dynamo - too good for the likes of Dick, and the present of some bleeding heart from London. It was odd he hadn’t sold it but then who would want a bike that had been gripped between Dick’s scabby legs? PC Puddephat hooked one chubby hand under the handlebars and held it out at arm's length as he teetered off on his own machine. The tensed muscles ached dully in the small of his back as he pushed down ploddingly on the pedals, his shoes creaking at every downstroke. Small gravel hissed under the wheels.

      He took small back roads, mostly dark with just the odd light on the corners, muffled by trees. When he reached Heath Street, he dismounted, parked his own bike and wheeled Dick's softly to the front of Eva Frick's house. She had been getting above herself lately and needed bringing down a peg or two as well. Two birds with one stone. He leant the bicycle gently against the gatepost, like a man abandoning a baby and crept away on creaking toes, the light gleaming on the shiny seat of his trousers and his grinning teeth.

      ***

      Chapter Two

      They gave the children their commemorative Coronation mugs at the end of school assembly months before the event. This was definitely a mistake. They were glazed a nasty, serviceable, cream colour with a picture of Princess Elizabeth and the motif, ER II, stamped on top but nothing disguised the cheap and brittle ceramic that chipped and shattered at the slightest knock.

      ‘Keep them safe, dear children,’ the headmistress had urged. ‘When you are as old as I am, these will be rare collectors' items and may be the only things of value that you own – those of you who are left alive, that is.’ Her words were drowned by a crash and a wail as one of the girls swept hers unwittingly off the desk. By the end of the day, their rarity had increased by thirty per cent.

      The mugs were an uncomfortable form. The size suggested they were made for the drinking of Ovaltine, but the hoop-handled shape evoked stoops of ale. Jack knew there was only one place for such precious and useless things - the front room.

      Jack had learned that part of being respectable was having a front room. It was the kept-up public face of the house. It was 'having standards.’ The Arkwrights were Northerners who lived at the edge of the village and so were clearly not respectable, had no standards and were considered 'common.’ Having no special front room, they had a room they just lived in the way horses lived in a stable.

      For it was the essence of Jack’s front room that no one used it. Kitchens and bedrooms were practical places but a front room was just too good to use, was simply to look at like a picture that you put carefully in a glass frame. It was there to be dusted once a day and furiously polished once a week, the knicknacks rubbed up with soft dusters made, aptly, of old knickers. When honoured visitors came - the sort who could actually set their foot on the front step - they were received in the front room. The vicar, the doctor, the teacher, itchy young men in suits being questioned on the honourability of their intentions and the splendour of their prospects, these were the sort of people who got to sit in a front room. Also the dead. Jack's Granny Scoggins had set her heart on being laid out here in her coffin on two trestles across the fireplace, complete with gladioli in vases, before being finally screwed down.

      It had a tiled fireplace, of course, with all the impedimenta of tongs, shovels and brushes that were often polished but never saw action and the black-leaded grate itself would be lit only once in a blue moon. So whenever the sweep came, he was driven briskly through to the practical chimneys of the back of the house as the front room did not need his attentions. Here, even the chimney was pure. It confirmed the British conviction that beauty and function are opposites.

      Jack’s respectability was appropriately couched in terms of florid, easily-dirtied chairs with hand-embroidered anti-macassars, spread round a rug as if waiting for world leaders to drop in and negotiate an East-West peace treaty. Stalin would sit there by the firescreen with his head resting on needlepoint lupins - except, of course, that he was freshly dead - Eisenhower over by the table with the yellow daisies and Churchill on the sofa. There were stiff-necked chairs pushed back against the wall for the footmen to sit on and vases and cut glass geegaws that smashed if you just looked at them in the wrong tone of voice. The mantlepiece was crowded with china dogs that stared at three china ducks effortfully taking off over on the far wall, heading for a storm-tossed galleon of plaster and a lighthouse of brass. The alcove on each side of the fireplace had pictures of elegant women with jacked-up bosoms standing looking out from even grander and more impractical front rooms that were used even less than Jack's. The floor should have been polished wood but Mum and Dad scored extra points here. They had chic glossy lino with the pattern of polished boards printed on it. When he was still crawling and lino could not be got for love nor money as part of the sacrifice made to bring Germany to its knees, they had bought thick, green lino paint and lavishly sloshed it on the floor. With all solvents reserved for core industry not domestic luxury, it refused to dry. For two whole weeks the family crept stickily over it like giant bluebottles over flypaper as it captured and ambered down crumbs, cat hairs and footprints. Then

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