Read Online Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson - Free Book Online Page B

Salad," he said, "to see those lovely little horbs dimmed." But there! Time takes and it gives, for all it's called the Great Healer. And so I tell Vin. "Your time's now," I tell him. Slim as a girl he is. But he don't seem to settle down now 'e's out. I don't see what good it's done him. Delicate made 'e is, and only a boy. Stands to reason 'e couldn't rough it with the others.'
    'I shouldn't worry too much, Mrs Salad,' Gerald said. 'Of course, I loved soldiering. But National Service doesn't do any harm, even to those who don't.'
    'National Service!' Mrs Salad repeated. She smiled to herself and then she looked sharply at Gerald, but she only said, 'H'm.'
    Gerald laughed. 'You and John should get together,' he said. 'National Servicemen's problems. That's one of John's great specialities. He's been urging a reduction in the Services all this autumn in his articles.'
    Once again Mrs Salad looked strangely at Gerald. 'Say toodle-oo to Mr John for me,' she said. 'You tell him from me there's some company that's not to be helped and it's better not to try. But there you are, life's no easy lottery, they say. As we've seen who've lived it.'
    Her feelings about the poinsettia she made very clear, for she ostentatiously left it behind when she said goodbye.
     
     
    Since Frank Rammage had grown fat, he liked to spend his time doing odd jobs indoors. With his short legs and his pot belly, he couldn't do much that required the use of a ladder, but he laboured hours painting shelves or fixing electric wires. It was easy to spend so much time on these small tasks with four houses to keep in repair, and in Frank two instincts were very strong - orderliness and economy. His innate inclination to keep things tidy had been developed into a mania by his years of service in the Navy; his passion for saving reinforced since he had become a property-owner. These two obsessions were always at war with a third - his philanthropy; he did not mind that a large number of his lodgers were petty crooks, drunkards, tricksters, and middle-class down-and-outs, indeed it was what he chiefly esteemed in them, but he hardly knew how to support their untidiness, their dirtiness, and their extravagance with light and gas. As he busied around putting up a new shelf in his large bed-sitting room, which was all the space he reserved for himself, he prepared to do battle with a lodger over the question of old pilchard tins.
    'It's no good. I've told you twice about it and you've done nothing,' he said, gobbling like a Norfolk turkey and thrusting his fat, smooth, pink face at the girl before she had fully entered the room. 'You'll have to go duckie.' He called everyone duckie or dear.
    'I'm sorry, Frank. I've been so tired coming back in the mornings,' she said plaintively. Her thin, white face, greasy with vanishing-cream above her dirty, roll-topped sweater and jeans, looked hungry rather than anxious.
    'We all get tired,' said Frank, and his little rosebud mouth closed tightly with the moral air of a reproving hospital matron.
    'Oh, God!' said the girl, swinging her emaciated boy's body on to the divan bed with its crimson coarse weave cover.
    Frank had ideas about interior decoration and the room was filled with modern Scandinavian furniture and little lamps with coloured paper lampshades. Upon the walls, each painted a different colour - crimson, grey, apple green, and lilac pink - hung ferns in wicker cases. A naval motif was given by crossings of arty ropes and crimson anchors.
    'You're too bloody fat, Frank; that's your trouble,' she said.
    'I've reduced considerably of late,' Frank snapped, 'and that doesn't answer all those fishy tins. That'll smell the place out.' It was only in his use of 'that' for 'it' and in an occasional glottal stop that Frank's East Anglian origin could be detected.
    'Well, it wouldn't do much harm if it did smell a few of the stinkers you've got here out of the place,' the girl said, and she took off one of her sandals and