Maggie Gee - The White Family

She gazed at him, indignant, then gave a short laugh like a dog barking, and sank back on her bed, where she rummaged noisily in her bag until she produced a radio and head-phones which she jammed on her head and turned up the volume until it was distantly, annoyingly audible.

‘We never allowed transistors in the Park,’ Alfred said quite loudly to Thomas, who smiled, but Alfred could see the noise annoyed him. That was writers for you. Sensitive. Perceptive.

‘How many years have you been there, Alfred?’ Thomas asked. ‘Of course I remember you when I was a boy —’

‘It was different then. There were six of us then. Six of us, with dogs and uniforms.’

‘Why did you need dogs? Was there a lot of trouble?’

‘There’s never been a major crime in that Park.’ Alfred had said it many times, and he said it now, heavily, proudly. ‘No violence, except the odd ruck when the alcoholics fight over a bottle, or two kids have a go at one another. No rape. No murder. No … There’s never been a death in the Park. It’s a record to be proud of. And a lot of it is down to the Park Keepers. I mean the whole lot of us, over the years.’ He could feel his strength coming back as he said it; he was proud of himself; he was Alfred, the Park Keeper.

‘I’ve always had a thing about parks,’ said Thomas. ‘Places where everybody can go. And people usually look happy. Don’t they? Probably because they’re not working.’

‘Too many people not working nowadays. But you’re right, Thomas. It’s a happy place. Did you know there was dancing, after the war?’

And Alfred began to talk to Thomas, seeing genuine interest in his eyes (he was a nice boy, though perhaps a touch soft), remembering things he hadn’t thought of for years, talking as if there were no tomorrow.

‘Did you know I was born twelve yards from the Park? So it really has been my life, in a way. Of course that house was bombed flat in the war.’

He told Thomas how he’d played in the Park as a boy, when all the shrubberies were ringed with railings and the Park Keepers seemed like gods to Alfred. ‘P’raps I got an inkling even then that that was what I’d like to be. But they were so tall, like men from Mars.’ The boys never bothered with the grown-ups’ end, where the flower-beds were, where people sat on seats. You had to behave, up there, which was boring. Instead they made a den down the very far end, in the middle of the shrubbery, where there was a path that led along by the wall behind the railings to a wonderful-smelling tower of grass-clippings, it seemed like years of grass-clippings, hidden in the middle of the laurel-bushes where no one could see them if they didn’t know (though of course they had to try not to laugh when the Park Keepers happened to patrol nearby, and once Alfred had wet his pants though he wasn’t going to tell Thomas that). They had hollowed out a den like a mouse’s nest. Deep down the clippings were warm, fermenting. ‘The Park seemed like heaven to us in those days. You see the best of people in parks …’

And he was off again among happy memories. The cards and presents he got at Christmas. A ham, mince pies, the odd bottle of spirits which people probably imagined he took a nip of in his little hut, though he never touched a drop till he was off duty … (well hardly ever, he thought to himself). Letters from America, Malaya, South Africa, wherever folk from Hillesden went. Scarves and gloves and cardigans, knitted by some of his married ladies, for he did have a following among the ladies, all perfectly innocent, he assured Thomas, perfectly innocent on his part at least.

‘I’ve dreamed about the place, since I’ve been stuck in here. You’d think I’d be glad of a break, wouldn’t you? I mean, it’s not a cushy job. Cleaning out the aviary I never liked. I’d give that away, any day. It’s not the little birds like the budgies, they’re child’s play, but the pheasants were always that bit aggressive, and I don’t know what to make of the new foreign birds. Too bright, aren’t they. Too bright for the Park. They don’t look right in an English park —’

‘I like them,’ Thomas put in, mildly.

‘— I don’t trust ’em. They put their heads down and look at me and I think they’re going to rush me. So now I always use my broom. I open the door of their shelter at the back and the little ones fly up into the enclosure and then I get my broom and bash on the door and the big ones scuttle out pretty quick. You have to show them who’s boss,’ said Alfred. ‘With all these things. Show ’em who’s boss.’ Something about Thomas’s face stopped him. He felt less certain. He thought about it. Why did he hate those big yellow birds? At first it was only because they were foreign. But now it was worse, somehow worse. I hate them because they’re afraid of me .

‘Tell me about the dancing,’ said Thomas, swiftly. ‘Was there really dancing in the Park?’

‘It was where the kids all ride their bikes. The big ring of tarmac. We used to have a bandstand. A proper bandstand. Thatched, like the café. Lovely. But took an awful lot of maintenance. Anyway, it started after the war. I loved dancing. Still like to watch it. Still jiggle my feet when they dance on the telly.

‘But I was in Palestine, you see. I was out there doing my National Service. Nineteen forty-seven to forty-nine. I used to think about the Park. Out there in the desert. It was like a bloomin’ oven. Nothing growing for miles and miles.’

(It looked white, in the heat, Alfred remembered. No colour at all. And the sky was so hot that was white as well. I used to remember the Park, and the dancing. I tried to imagine the colour green. You start to appreciate it then. It’s better than anywhere, really, England, although I had a lot of fun in the army, they made a man of me, Dad said.)

‘I’d met May, by then. I was sixteen when I met her. Nineteen forty-three, I think it was. She was just the girl who matched the shoes to the tickets in the shop where we took our shoes to be soled. She had just left school. She never looked at me. She just took the ticket, and her head went down. But she had big blue eyes. I expect you’ve noticed. And she wore blue ribbon in her hair. I took her dancing once before they called me up.’ (We were shy with each other, Alfred remembered. I had the wrong shoes, she stared at them, and I thought, she’ll want someone better than me, but the music was lovely, romantic, wonderful, and there was a moon behind the trees, and even though in the end it started to drizzle and the band gave up and we had to go home, the memory somehow lasted me, out in the desert, those two dry years.)

‘The day I got demobbed, I was with Reggie, wasn’t I. The two of us had travelled back together. We hadn’t any English money on us, so we walked all the way home from Victoria Station to Hillesden, in the middle of the night. Knocked on the door and my mum stuck her head out of the bedroom window and started to cry. She got up and cooked me a gigantic fry-up which must have used every bit of food in the house, and I didn’t sleep a wink all night, I felt crazy, and I couldn’t get used to not being shot at, I couldn’t sleep in a bed for months … We’d always had to sleep on the floor, you see.’

‘PTSD,’ Thomas nodded, sagely.

Then wished he hadn’t.

‘What did you say?’

‘What they call post-traumatic stress disorder.’

‘Nothing like that. I wasn’t mental,’ said Alfred, annoyed to be interrupted. There was a pause; he sucked his teeth. Mum, he thought. She was a good soul. I wonder if she’s up there waiting for me. As long as Dad isn’t waiting for me — Let’s face it, Dad was a holy terror. Took a leather strap to all of us … I never did that; I would never do that. ‘Am I boring you?’ he asked. ‘I’m talking too much.’