David Essex - Faded Glory

“This is Danny, Len,” said Albert. “His chain’s broke.”

Lenny made that noise he always made when confronted with a job, a kind of hissing noise through his teeth. “Let me take a look,” he said.

“I ain’t got any money,” Danny said, feeling very uncomfortable.

“Well, maybe if you’re a friend of Albert, we can do you a favour.”

Lenny was one of those people that seemed to have everything somewhere: nuts, bolts, bits of engines. If he didn’t have exactly what he needed, he could adapt something to fix the problem.

“I need to find a link,” he said after studying the broken chain, and made off into the vast amount of precious clutter hoarded in the back room.

Through the open door, Danny could see some of Lenny’s prized personal possessions: a signed cricket bat, photos of family back in Jamaica. One photograph in particular caught Danny’s eye, a photo of a younger Lenny proudly posing in an army uniform with medals shining on his chest.

Danny couldn’t fight back his surprise.

“I never knew that black people fought in the war,” he said as Lenny returned from the back room. “Were you a soldier? Like, in the war?”

“Yeah, for all the good it did me,” Lenny replied with a grunt and a hiss as he attempted to fix the chain back on the bike.

“My dad was a soldier too, but he got killed,” said Danny. “He never came home.”

There was a silence, broken only by the sound of a train rumbling overhead.

“I’m sorry, son,” said Albert. “A lot of ’em never came back.”

“Got you!” Lenny exclaimed as the chain slid sweetly back into position. Danny couldn’t help a smile of relief.

“Do you think your dad would approve of you hanging out with those troublemakers?” Albert asked.

Danny shook his head in a moment of remorse. “But there’s nothing to do round here,” he added, back on the offensive.

“What about sport or something? Football, or boxing?” Albert suggested. “There’s a boxing gym at the Live and Let Live.”

“Yes,” said Lenny. “Back in his day Albert here was a champion boxer – you don’t wanna mess with him boy. Or try cricket, a proper game, that’s the way to go.”

“Not for me,” said Danny, taking his bike, and with a nod of thanks he rode away.

Riding slowly through the streets, Danny thought about Lenny and Albert. Sure, they were still a pair of old tossers, but he respected the things they had done in their lives. Lenny could fix things and had been a soldier. Albert was a champion boxer. That was pretty impressive.

Danny regretted being a part of the gang that had attacked Albert and vandalised Lenny’s garage. Albert’s advice began to resonate the closer he got to home. Maybe that boxing suggestion could be a goer. A way to earn both money and respect, a purpose.

Many of the streets round here had been flattened in the war, leaving wasteland to serve as an adventure playground for the local kids. A bomb crater here, a derelict half-house there, an awful reminder of the not-too-distant past; thankfully now filled with laughter and games.

One large piece of wasteland doubled as a street market. Blankets were laid out with stuff to sell by folks trying to make a few bob, alongside stalls full of fruit and veg and all manner of things. The market was well patronised by the locals and the sailors off the berthed ships waiting dormant in the docks; ships unloaded with goods from faraway places and reloaded with goods “Made in England”. Chinamen, Indians and men from all corners of the world mingled with the locals without any resentment or strange looks. It was as if they all knew that this part of London had a history of welcoming people and immigrants from far-off shores.

Danny and his mum had been evacuated in the war to escape the bombing, like many of the city’s women and children, and sent to live with a nice lady called Mrs Packham and her grumpy husband in Burton on Trent. Danny could not remember much about the adventure except for the train journey, which he’d loved. There’d been something magical about the steam-belching engine clickety-clacking through pastures new. He remembered an annoying little girl, the Packhams’ daughter, who always tried to mimic Danny’s London accent. Most of the local people who lost their homes after the war had been housed in pre-fabs that resembled Nissen huts, or in hasty, half-built blocks of flats. Danny’s mum, as a single parent and wife of a lost soldier, had been housed in a Victorian terrace house, two up, two down, which had miraculously survived the bombs.

The door was open as usual. Danny could hear his mum’s favourite record of the moment, Nat King Cole’s Unforgettable , drifting down the street. It certainly was unforgettable, Rosie had played it so many times lately. It never seemed to be off the prized radiogram, bought cut-price as it had apparently “fallen off the back of a lorry”.

Pushing his bike into the passage, Danny looked through the half-open door to the living room. His mother was locked in a romantic shuffle with her latest beau, thin, tattooed Ricky with his fashionable Tony Curtis haircut. Ricky wore a string vest, braces, navy-blue socks with bed fluff on them and ill-fitting brown trousers. His real name was Derek, but he preferred Ricky.

“Derek ain’t rock ’n’ roll,” he had explained.

Unnoticed, Danny pushed on to the kitchen and into the back yard and parked his bike by the almost derelict garden shed. Going back into the kitchen, he grabbed a glass of water, downed a couple of gulps, took a deep breath and went into his mum’s smoochy parlour.

Rosie Watson had a bit of a reputation. After a brief spell of mourning, when she had received the letter and visit to impart the sad news that her husband, Danny’s father, wouldn’t be coming home, she had soon become the local good-time gal. Ricky was the latest companion in what was a pretty long and less than impressive list.

“You’re late, sugar plum,” Rosie said. “Dinner’s in the oven.”

Danny ignored the invitation of burned offerings. “I got held up,” he said. “My bike broke, and I met this old bloke who took me to that black fella with the garage under the arches. He fixed it.”

“They shouldn’t be over here,” said Ricky, waving a half-full bottle of brown ale to make his point.

“He was all right,” Danny said, feeling that he ought to defend Lenny. “He fought in the war. Like Dad.”

“No mate,” said Ricky, shaking his head. “There wasn’t any spear chuckers in the war.”

Danny wanted to set the record straight and put Ricky in his place, but decided it was probably a waste of energy.

“Where’s Dad’s war stuff, Mum?” he asked instead. The meeting with Albert and the photo of Lenny as a soldier had made him want to make contact with his lost father.

“Ooh I don’t know, Dan,” said Rosie, her eyes half-closed on Ricky’s skinny shoulder. “Might be in the cupboard under the stairs. Why d’ya want it?”

“Just wanted to see it, that’s all.”

“All right darling. Have a look, your dad’s stuff is in a tin box under the stairs.”

Danny looked through the clutter that filled the cupboard. Right at the back, underneath a stinking old mop, he found a battered red and silver tin box. He reverently held the box in both hands, went upstairs to his room and sat on his bed.

Danny’s dad had been killed very early on in the war, before Danny had been born. He had never met his father, which was something he truly regretted. With his father’s box, Danny felt closer to him, less alone. Looking at the photograph of his proud dad in uniform, Danny thought back to his empty childhood. He’d missed the trips they would have had to his dad’s workplace, the Royal Docks: the massive ships, the cranes, the smell of spices. Not even his mother had come to watch his performance in the school nativity play. He wished he was in the photo, the way he’d seen other children, sitting high on their dads’ shoulders. He would have felt like the king of the world.