I lay in bed in some confusion wondering what had hit me. The trains rattled on their way, the fog swirled round the street lamp. It may have been an hour that I had lain there, possibly two, when I heard the clack, clack of the curtain rings and there she was standing at the end of my bed quite visible in the lamplight. For a minute or two I lay there thinking that she was just wanting to reassure herself, when she moved around to the head of my bed.
I said, ‘Hi, Tich!’
‘Can I get in?’ she said in a whisper – she didn’t wait for my ‘if you want to’, but slid in beside me and buried her head in my neck and cried silently, her tears warm and wet on my chest. There was nothing to say, nothing to do but to put my arm around her. I didn’t think I would sleep, but I did. I awoke to the sound of stifled giggles, Anna still beside me giggling like a fiend, and Carol, already dressed, standing there giggling, with a morning cup of tea in her hand. All this in less than twelve hours.
During the next few weeks we tried to find out by a bit of cunning questioning where Anna lived. The gentle approach, the sideways approach, the sneeky approach, all proved to be useless. It seemed quite possible that she had just dropped out of heaven. I was ready to believe this to be true, but Stan, being much more practical than me, didn’t agree at all. The only certain thing we knew was that she wasn’t going to no bleeding cop shop. By this time I was sure that I had initiated this idea. After all, you don’t find an orchid and then put it in the cellar. It wasn’t that any of us had anything against the cops, far from it. In those days cops were more like official friends, even if they did clip you round the ear with a glove full of dried peas if they caught you up to any funny stuff. No, as I said, you can’t lock a sunbeam in the dark. Besides, we all wanted her to stay.
By this time Anna was a firm favourite down our street. Whenever the kids played team-games like four sticks everyone wanted Anna on their side. She had a natural aptitude for all games: whip tops, skipping, fag cards. What she couldn’t do with a hoop and a skimmer wasn’t worth doing.
Our street, twenty houses big, was a regular United Nations; the only colours in kids we didn’t have were green ones and blue ones, we had nearly every other colour. Our street was a nice street. Nobody had any money, but in all the years I lived there, I can never remember anyone’s front-door being shut in the daytime, or, for that matter, for most of the night either. It was a nice street to live in and all the people were friendly, but after a few weeks of Anna the street and the people in it took on a buttercup glow.
Even our boss-eyed cat, Bossy, mellowed. Bossy was a fighting tabby with lace-edged ears who regarded all humans as inferiors, but under Anna’s influence Bossy started to stay at home more often and very soon treated Anna as an equal. I could stand by the back-door and yell myself silly for Bossy, but he wouldn’t budge for me, but for Anna, well, that was a different thing. One call and he simply materialized with an idiot grin on his face.
Bossy was about twelve pounds of fighting fury, and I’ve got the scars to prove it. The cat’s-meat man used to leave the meat under the knocker, wrapped up in newspaper. Bossy used to lurk in the dark passageway, or under the stairs, waiting for someone to reach up for the cat’s meat, at which moment he would launch himself like a fury, all teeth and claws, using whatever was available to get up to his meal. If a human leg or arm could be used to claw his way up to the meat, Bossy would use it. Anna tamed him in one day. She lectured him with an admonishing finger on the vice of gluttony and the virtues of patience and good manners. In the end Bossy could make his meal last for about five minutes, with Anna feeding him bit by bit, instead of the usual thirty seconds. As for Patch the dog, he sat for hours practising beating new rhythms with his tail.
In the back-garden was an odd collection of rabbits, pigeons, fan-tailed doves, frogs, and a couple of grass-snakes. The back-garden, or ‘The Yard’ as it was called, was for the East End a fairly sizeable place. A bit of grass and a few flowers and a large tree some forty feet high. All in all Anna had quite a lot to practise her magic on. But no one fell under her spell more completely or willingly than me. My work, which was in oils, was not more than five minutes’ walk away from home, so I was always home for dinner at about 12.30. Up to this time the answer to Mum’s question as to what time I would be home that night as I left for the afternoon’s stint had been ‘Some time before midnight’. Now things were different. I was seen off by Anna from the top of the street, kissed wetly, promising to be back about six in the evening. Knocking-off time usually meant a few pints in the pub on the way home and a few games of darts with Cliff and George, but not now. When the hooter went I was off home. I didn’t run exactly but walked very briskly.
That walk home was a pleasure; every step was one step nearer. The road I had to travel curved to the left in a gentle arc, and I had to walk just more than half the distance before the top of our turning came into sight, and there she was. Come rain or shine, snow or icy wind, Anna was always there, not once did she miss this meeting, except – but that comes later. I doubt if ever lovers met more joyously. When she saw me coming round the bend of the road she came to meet me.
Anna’s ability to polish any situation was truly extraordinary. She had some uncanny knack of doing the right thing at the right time to get the most out of an occasion. I’ve always thought that children ran towards those they loved, but not Anna. When she saw me she started to walk towards me, not too slowly, but not too quickly. My first sight of her was too far away to distinguish her features; she might have been any other child, but she wasn’t. Her beautiful copper hair stood out for miles, there was no mistaking her.
After her first few weeks with us she always wore a deep-green ribbon in her hair for this meeting. Looking back, I feel sure that the walk towards me was deliberate and calculated. She had grasped the meaning of these meetings and seen almost instantly just how much to dramatize them, how long to prolong them in order to wring out their total content. For me this minute or two of walk towards her had a rounded-off perfection; no more could be added to it, and nothing could be taken away without completely destroying it.
Whatever it was she projected across that intervening space was almost solid. Her bobbing hair, the twinkle in her eyes, that enormous and impudent grin, flicked like a high-voltage charge across the space that separated us. Sometimes she would, without any words, just touch my hand in greeting; sometimes the last few steps transformed her, she let everything go with one gigantic explosion, and flung herself at me. So many times she would stop just in front of me and hold out her closed hands. I learned rapidly what to expect on these occasions. It meant that she had found something that had moved her. We would stop and inspect whatever the day’s find was – perhaps a beetle, a caterpillar, or a stone. We would look silently, heads bowed over today’s treasure. Her eyes were large deep pools of questions. How? Why? What? I’d meet her gaze and nod my head; this was enough, she’d nod in reply.
The first time this happened, my heart seemed to come off its hook. I struggled to hold on. I wanted to put my arms around her to comfort her. Happily, I managed to do the right thing. I guess some passing angel nudged me at the right moment. Unhappiness is to be comforted, and so perhaps too is fear, but these particular moments with Anna were moments of pure and undiluted wonder. These were her own and very private moments which she chose to share with me, and I was honoured to share them with her. I could not comfort her, I would not have dared to trespass. All that I could do was to see as she saw, to be moved as she was moved. That kind of suffering you must bear alone. As she said so simply, ‘It’s for me and Mister God’, and there’s no answer to that.
The
