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‘Do you mind if I smoke while you’re eating, Tich?’ I asked.
‘What?’ She sounded a little alarmed.
‘Can I have a fag while you’re eating?’
She rolled over and got to her knees and looked me in the face.
‘Why?’ she said.
‘My Mum’s a stickler for politeness. Besides, you don’t blow smoke in a lady’s face when she’s eating’, I said.
She stared at half a sausage for a moment or two, and looking at me fully, she said, ‘Why? Do you like me?’
I nodded.
‘You have a fag then,’ and she smiled at me and popped the rest of the sausage into her mouth.
I took out a Woodbine and lit up and offered her the match to blow out. She blew, and I was sprayed with bits of sausage. This little accident produced such a reaction in her that I felt that I had been stabbed in the guts. I had seen a dog cringe before, but never a child. The look she gave me filled me with horror. She expected a thrashing. She clenched her teeth as she waited for me to strike her.
What my face registered I don’t know, perhaps anger and violence, or shock and confusion. Whatever it was, it produced from her the most piteous whimper. I can’t describe this sound after all these years, no words are fitting. The feeling I can still taste, can still experience. My heart faltered at the sound, and something came undone inside me. My clenched fist hit the pavement beside me, a useless gesture in response to Anna’s fears. Did I think of that image then, that image which I now think of, the only one that fits the occasion? That perfection of violence, that ultimate horror and bewilderment of Christ crucified. That terrible sound that the child made was a sound that I never wish to hear again. It attacked my emotional being and blew a fuse.
After a moment or two I laughed. I suppose that the human mind can only stand so much grief and anguish. After that the fuses blow. It did with me, my fuses blew in a big way. The next few minutes I know very little about – except that I laughed and laughed, then I realized that the kid was laughing too. No shrunken bundle of fear – she was laughing. Kneeling on the pavement and leaning forward with her face close to mine, and laughing – laughing. So very many times in the next three years I heard her laughter – no silver bells or sweet rippling sounds was her laughter, but like a five-year-old’s bellow of delight, a cross between a puppy’s yelp, a motor-bike, and a bicycle pump.
I put my hands on her shoulders and held her off at arm’s length, and then came that look that is entirely Anna’s – mouth wide open, eyes popping out of her head, like a whippet straining at the leash. Every fibre of that little body was vibrating and making a delicious sound. Legs and arms, toes and fingers, the whole of that little body shook and trembled like Mother Earth giving birth to a volcano. And what a volcano was released in that child!
Outside that baker’s shop in dockland on a foggy November night I had the unusual experience of seeing a child born. After the laughter had quietened off a bit, but while her little body was still thrumming like a violin string, she tried to say something, but it wouldn’t come out properly. She managed a ‘You – You – You –.’
After some little time and a great deal of effort she managed ‘You love me, don’t you?’
Even had it not been true, I could not have said ‘No’ to save my life; true or false, right or wrong, there was only one answer. I said ‘Yes’.
She gave a little giggle, and pointing a finger at me, said, ‘You love me,’ and then broke into some primitive gyration around the lamp-post, chanting ‘You love me. You love me. You love me.’
Five minutes of this and she came back and sat down on the grating. ‘It’s nice and warm for your bum, ain’t it?’ she said.
I agreed it was nice for your bum.
A moment later: ‘I ain’t arf firsty.’ So we upped and went along to the pub just down the road. I bought a large bottle of Guinness. She wanted ‘one of them ginger-pops with the marble in the neck’. So she had two ginger-pops and some more saveloys from an all-night coffee stall.
‘Let’s go back and get our bums warm again,’ she grinned at me. Back we went and sat on the grating, a big un and a little un.
I don’t suppose that we drank more than a half of the drinks, for it seemed that the idea of a fizzy drink was to shake it vigorously and then let it shoot up into the air. After a few showers of ginger-pop and a determined effort to do the nose trick, she said, ‘Now do it to yourn.’
I’m sure even then that this was not a request but an order. I shook hard and long and then let fly with the stopper and we both were covered with frothy Guinness.
The next hour was filled with giggles and hot dogs, ginger-pop and chocolate raisins. The occasional passer-by was yelled at: ‘Oi, Mister, he loves me, he do.’ Running up the steps of a nearby building she shouted, ‘Look at me. I’m bigger than you.’
About ten-thirty that evening, whilst she was sitting between my knees having an earnest conversation with Maggie, her rag-doll, I said, ‘Come on, Tich, it’s about time you were in bed. Where do you live?’
In a flat, matter-of-fact voice she exclaimed, ‘I don’t live nowhere. I have runned away.’
‘What about your Mum and Dad?’ I asked.
She might have said the grass is green and the sky is blue. What she did say was just as factual and effortless. ‘Oh, she’s a cow and he’s a sod. And I ain’t going to no bleeding cop shop. I’m going to live with you.’
This was no request but an order. What could you do? I merely accepted the fact. ‘Right, I agree. You can come home with me and then we will have to see.’
At that point my education began in earnest. I’d got myself a large doll, but not an imitation doll, a real live one and, from what I could make out, a bomb with legs on. Going home that night was like coming home from Hampstead Heath, slightly tiddled, a little dizzy from the merry-go-round I’d been on, and not a little bewildered that the beautiful doll I’d won on the shooting-range had come to life and was walking beside me.
‘What’s your name, Tich?’ I asked her.
‘Anna. What’s yours?’
‘Fynn,’ I said. ‘Where do you come from?’
I didn’t get an answer to this question, and that was the first and last time she didn’t answer a question – I gathered later the reason for this. It was because she was afraid that I might have taken her back.
‘When did you run away?’
‘Oh, three days ago, I think.’
We took the short way home by climbing over the ‘cut’ bridge and crossing over the railway yards. This was always my way in because we lived next to the railway and it was convenient, to say nothing of the fact that it meant I didn’t have to get Mum out of bed to open the front-door.
We got into the scullery by the back-door and then into the kitchen. I lit the gas. For the very first time I saw Anna. God only knows what I expected to see; certainly not what I did see. It wasn’t that she was dirty or that her frock was about ten sizes too big; it was the mixture of ginger-pop, Guinness and her paint-tin. She looked like a little savage, smears of various coloured paints all over her face and arms, the front of her frock a complete riot of colour. She looked so funny and so tiny, and her response to my bellow of laughter so reduced her to her cowering self again, that I hurriedly picked her up to the level of the mirror over the mantelpiece and made her look. Her delicious little giggle was like closing the door on November and stepping