Our Street Read online

  Frankie swung round with a horrified start. Yer know my name! ’Ow do yer know my –?’

  The Kraut smiled. ‘Yes, I know your name, Misster Frankie Lewis.’ She sat back in her chair, and folded her arms. ‘I know the names of all your friends in Merton Street. It isn’t too difficult to find out such things, you know.’

  Frankie felt his stomach turn a somersault. All his mates in the gang were right! The Kraut had clearly been gathering information about them and sending it back to her bosses in Berlin. She was a Nazi spy. ‘’Ow?’ The word almost stuck in Frankie’s throat. ‘’Ow do you know?’

  Frankie’s captor leaned forward in her chair, with a mischievous smile. ‘You would be surprised. Oh yes – you would be very surprised how the “old Kraut” knows.’

  Frankie stared at her. For the first time he could see her face clearly. It was quite pale, almost totally white, in fact, as though it was covered in too much face powder, and her cheeks were highlighted with rouge, which matched the colour of her thick lipstick. The lips themselves were shaped in a kind of cupid’s bow, making them look smaller than they really were, especially when she pursed them.

  ‘And what about me, Frankie Lewis?’ She leaned back in her chair again. ‘Do you know what my name is?’

  Frankie shook his head.

  ‘Do you want to know?’

  Frankie shrugged his shoulders.

  She sat up straight in her chair, hands folded in her lap. ‘Barclay,’ she said firmly, casting a proud glance at a framed photograph of an Army officer on the mantelpiece behind Frankie. ‘Mrs Robert Andrew Barclay.’ Then she turned her look to Frankie again.

  ‘In the old days it was Lieberman. Elsa Lieberman. But that was a long time ago . . .’

  Frankie felt the back of his legs being scorched by the fire, so he quickly moved away.

  ‘Do you like apple cake, Misster Frankie?’

  Frankie was rubbing his legs, which had turned a deep red colour. ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever eaten it?’

  Frankie shook his head.

  ‘Then how do you know?’

  Frankie shrugged his shoulders.

  Elsa rose from her chair and went to a small cupboard in the arched recess beside the fireplace. She took out an airtight biscuit tin, opened it, and offered a piece of sliced applecake to Frankie. ‘Here. It’s homemade.’

  Frankie flinched and shook his head.

  Elsa pursed her lips. ‘Where I come from, applecake is a great delicacy.’ She put the tin down on the small table by her chair, but did not replace the lid. ‘A boy of your age should be more adventurous.’

  ‘Please, missus. Can I go home? I ’ave ter ’ave my supper.’

  ‘Of course you can go home,’ said Elsa, returning to her chair. ‘No one is a prisoner in my house.’

  Frankie hesitated for a moment, then shuffled awkwardly towards the door.

  ‘Tell me something, Misster Frankie.’ Elsa called without turning. ‘Do you like to read books?’

  Frankie reached the open doorway, and turned. ‘Pardon miss?’

  Elsa swung round to look at him. ‘Do you read books?’

  ‘Not really, miss.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Frankie shrugged his shoulders. ‘Don’t know. Ain’t got the time.’

  ‘Time!’ Elsa spluttered with indignation. ‘A young man like you has no time? Ridiculous!’ She quickly rose from her chair and crossed the room to the endless rows of bookshelves. ‘Do you see these books, Frankie? I have been collecting them ever since I was a little girl at school – much younger than you. Without them I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t exist.’ She ran her fingers along a row of old books, the bindings of some of them ripped and worn. ‘They are my food!’

  Frankie stared at her as though she was mad. He wanted to turn and run, but he found something mesmerising about this strange woman.

  ‘Do you know something, Frankie?’ Elsa’s eyes were scanning her beloved books. ‘I have spent my life reading these books – every one of them.’ For a brief moment, she turned to look back at Frankie. ‘Some I have read more than once – two times, three – sometimes even more. They are like old friends to me. I like to visit them as many times as I can.’ One of her fingertips caressed a row of books. ‘For example – this one.’ She pulled it out slightly. ‘It’s by my favourite author, Thomas Mann – such a storyteller. It’s about a young Prince, who could not face up to reality.’ She turned to look at Frankie, who was watching her with awed fascination. ‘The story is so important, Frankie. Without it, there is nothing.’ She pushed the book into place again. ‘No good for you, this one. It’s in German.’

  Frankie watched Elsa as she continued to run her fingertips along the rows of books. He couldn’t work out why she hadn’t been angry with him when he banged on her street door. He could not understand why she wasn’t beating him instead of treating him like an old friend.

  ‘Ah! Now this you would like! Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.’ She pulled out the book, and turned back triumphantly to Frankie. ‘What boy could resist such a story!’

  ‘I saw the picture!’ said Frankie, quick as a flash. If there was one pastime that really excited him, it was going to the pictures. ‘Wallace Beery played Long John Silver. I saw it at the Marlborough a coupla weeks ago!’

  ‘The picture?’ Elsa snorted indignantly and pursed her lips. ‘The cinema is no substitute for a good book! A story should be read. It is the imagination that should paint the pictures!’ She took the book down from the shelf, and thumped the cover with the palm of her hand. ‘Did you ever read this book?’

  Frankie shook his head. ‘I don’t like readin’,’ he confessed. ‘I only read what I ’ave to fer school.’

  Elsa seemed close to a heart attack. ‘You don’t like to read? Mein Gott! What’s wrong with the young people of today? You don’t like to read a book!’

  She sighed deeply, then held out the book to Frankie. ‘Here. Take it.’

  Frankie didn’t move.

  ‘Take it! It won’t bite you!’

  Frankie approached her and tentatively took the book with both hands.

  ‘Take it home with you. And don’t give it back to me until you have read it from cover to cover.’ Elsa pursed her lips, and stared Frankie straight in the eyes. For some unknown reason she liked this boy and wanted to help him. ‘Don’t go to the cinema until you have read it. Now pleass go, young man.’

  Frankie, still in a daze, turned, and made his way out into the hall, clutching the book in both hands.

  Elsa followed him, but before they reached the street door she stopped him. ‘I trust you with my book, Misster Frankie Lewis. It is a friend to me. Do you understand that?’

  ‘Yes, miss,’ he said.

  ‘Good!’ Elsa opened the door. Outside, the mist was just beginning to clear. ‘Do you know the jumble shop on the corner of Hornsey Road.’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘When you have finished my book, bring it to me there. Now go home, Frankie Lewis. And from now on, stop playing silly games on my street door.’

  Before he could answer, Elsa had eased him out on to the doorstep and closed the door behind him. Within a few minutes, he was hurrying along Hadleigh Villas and out into the Seven Sisters Road, still clutching the old woman’s book in both his hands. On his way home, he made a slight detour so that he could pass the jumble shop on the corner of Hornsey Road and Tollington Way. The windows were shuttered so he couldn’t see inside but as he stood there in the dark, staring up at the legend above the doorway, ‘BARCLAY. ANYTHING BOUGHT OR SOLD’, he remembered where he had seen Elsa Barclay before.

  The following Friday, Helen Lewis went off to Essex to spend a couple of days with her friends, Ivy and Joyce – or that was the story she told her mother and father. Frankie, keeping his promise, backed his sister’s story. The fact that Helen was going off for a dirty weekend with her soldier boyfriend in Bognor Regis hadn’t really occurred to Fra
nkie. But he realised that if his mother found out she was out with a fella there’d be more damage to the home than anything Hitler could throw at them!

  Friday evening was bath night, so after collecting a clean towel from the wardrobe in his parents’ bedroom, Frankie made his way to Hornsey Road Public Baths. It was a brown-brick building, snugly situated on the other side of the main Seven Sisters Road. Further on up the hill lay Hornsey Rise, which eventually led to the posher areas of Crouch End and Muswell Hill, where a lot of people had bathrooms of their own and didn’t have to turn out in the cold every Friday night. Frankie always thought the Public Baths were a depressing place – even more so since the police station next door had been bombed early on in the war. Since that terrible night, when so many policemen had been tragically killed, the clock in the tower high above the Baths had stopped so many times it was now totally unreliable. But despite the fact that there was a piece of broken glass missing from its face, the old girl was still there, a kind of symbol of defiance against everything that Hitler had thrown at poor old Holloway over the past five years.

  As Frankie rushed through the main gates he asked himself yet again why it was that they had to have their bath on a Friday night. Why not a Tuesday say, or Thursday? Even Monday would be better. At least it would relieve him of the boredom of his school homework. But no, it always had to be Fridays, because – because, well because it was Friday, and that’s all there was to it. Frankie hurried as fast as he could across the yard so that he could avoid the smell of chlorine coming from the swimming pool in the other part of the building. He hated the smell of chlorine because it triggered his asthma.

  ‘You’re late!’ Frankie’s father, wearing his grubby white bath attendant’s apron, was waiting for Frankie by the cash counter in the main hall. Reg had been a bath attendant since before the war, ever since he’d had to leave the building trade after an accident in which he fell off some scaffolding. It left him with vertigo, which was also the reason he got turned down for conscription. ‘’Ow many times do I ’ave ter tell yer? If yer come late, yer miss’s yer place in the queue. I’ve ’ad to put the Gorman bruvvers in front of yer.’

  ‘Sorry, Dad,’ Frankie said apologetically, I ’ad to take Winston out. ’E piddled in the kitchen.’

  ‘Bleedin’ dog! ’E’s too fat an’ lazy ter do anyfin’ on ’is own.’ Reg collected his enamel bucket and mop, nodded to Elsie on the cash counter, who smiled back at Frankie indicating that, as usual, he could go in without paying. Frankie then followed his father through the swing doors marked MEN’S BATHS, nearly bumping into a hefty middle-aged female wearing a hair-net, who was trying to edge herself through the doors marked LADIES’ BATHS. Frankie reckoned she looked more like a woman than a lady, especially when she glared back at him as though it was his fault she was having difficulty. As Reg made his way along the steamy corridor, he called back over his shoulder to Frankie, ‘So yer sister’s gone orf for ’er dirty weekend, ’as she?’

  Frankie was puzzled. ‘What d’yer mean?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I weren’t born yesterday. She’s got ’erself a feller. Everyone seems ter know ’cept yer muvver.’ When they reached the wooden benches outside the bath cubicles, Reg put down his bucket and mop. He wasn’t much taller than his son, but he looked older than his fifty years, and his dark hair was greying at his sideburns. ‘Whatever yer do,’ he said, lowering his voice to make sure no one could hear him, ‘don’t breeve a word to yer muvver. If she knew what ’elen’s up to, she’d cut ’er up wiv a bleedin’ chopper!’

  All of a sudden Frankie realised what his sister Helen was getting up to and the thought horrified him. His sis’ goin’ off for hankey-pankey with some soldier boy? How could he have been so stupid!

  ‘Frankie boy!’

  Two voices greeted Frankie simultaneously. It was the old Gorman twin brothers, Mike and Bert, perched side by side on the wooden bench, towels clutched under their arms, waiting for their turn to take a bath. Most people found it difficult to tell them apart, which gave them a lot of opportunity to get up to all kinds of mischief. They always dressed identically, an art they had perfected during their long careers as a comedy double act on the Music Hall stage. This evening they were wearing pre-war navy blue overcoats, and flat tartan caps worn at cocky angles.

  ‘Evenin’ Mr Gorman.’ Frankie’s reply was directed at both of them.

  ‘Been to any good pictures lately?’ asked Bert, the younger twin by one and a half minutes.

  ‘Your dad tells us you went to see Gone with the Wind for the seventh time,’ said Mike from behind his bifocal glasses.

  ‘Actually, it’s the ninth time,’ replied Frankie proudly. ‘I saw it twice in one week when it came back to the Savoy last year.’

  ‘Nine times!’ spluttered the twins.

  ‘That’s means ’e’s spent more than a whole day in the picture ’ouse watchin’ one film!’ said Mike, turning to his younger brother.

  ‘Blimey!’ replied Bert. ‘That’s longer than we ever played the ’ackney Empire!’

  They roared with laughter at their own joke, but Frankie couldn’t even raise a smile.

  ‘Right, gents,’ called Reg, as he came out of one of the cubicles having cleaned the bath after the previous occupant. ‘Could you take five and six, please.’

  In a flash, Mike and Bert were on their feet and, doffing their caps briefly to Frankie, disappeared into their adjoining cubicles. Because each cubicle was partitioned to less than ceiling height, Frankie and everyone else in the men’s bath house had to listen to the old-timers’ banter. Frankie didn’t mind, he knew that the twins missed the Halls, and this was their way of keeping their memories alive.

  A few moments later, the bather in cubicle number seven came out and, after his father had cleaned out the bath and turned on the hot and cold water taps, Frankie was shown in. He was soon soaking in the relaxing warm water though because there was a war on, everyone was only allowed half a bathful of water. But Frankie always loved these five minutes he was allowed in the bath tub each week. It gave him the chance to lie back, close his eyes, and imagine he was Spencer Tracy or Clark Gable in a scene from one of their films, living it up in some luxurious hotel bathroom, with a huge cigar in his mouth and a glass of champagne in his hand. If he opened his eyes, of course, reality soon took over, and he found himself back in the old white chipped bath tub, with rusting taps, shabby white tiled walls, and the half tablet of Lifebuoy soap he was allocated by his father which had to last for at least four Friday bath nights.

  Mike and Bert’s comedy routine was a background echo which finished with a closing song. Tonight it was By the Light of the Silvery Moon, and Frankie found himself joining in. But when it came to an end Mike called out, ‘Oy, Bert! When are you gonna fix Elsa’s sink in the jumble shop?’

  Frankie’s eyes sprang open.

  ‘I’ll go in over the weekend,’ Bert called back. He was the handyman of the duo, and made the odd bob or two on the side. ‘She really needs a new sink. The one she’s got ’as just about ’ad it.’

  ‘Poor lady.’ Mike was splashing around so much in his bath he sounded as though he was swimming the English Channel. ‘She’s ’ad a tough time since ’er old man went down at Dunkirk. We oughta keep an eye on ’er, if only for ’is sake.’

  ‘I know.’ Bert’s voice across the the tops of the cubicles. ‘She’s a good type, is Elsa. Even though she is a Kraut.’

  Frankie leapt out of the bath, quickly towelled himself down and, after saying cheerio to his dad, made his way home. On the way, he could think of nothing but Elsa Barclay. Ever since he had left the house in Hadleigh Villas a week before, he had tried to put the whole experience out of his mind. But what he had now heard about Elsa had brought it all back. And if the Gorman twins thought she was a ‘good type’ then there had to be something more to her than he had imagined . . .

  By the time Frankie reached the traffic lights at the junction of Hornsey and Seven Siste
rs Road, he found himself impatient to get home. After his warm bath, the cold November evening air made the blood in his veins tingle and, without warning, he suddenly dashed across the road before the last car had cleared the traffic lights. Almost involuntarily, he found himself trotting, then running. As he turned into Merton Street, he was met with a wall of darkness, for everyone had drawn their blackout curtains for the evening. Without a torch he had to run carefully, and even though he thought he knew every inch of the road, he knocked against a pig swill bin by one of the lamp-posts, sending a stream of household left-overs on to the pavement. The sound of the bin lid clanging to the ground made every dog in the street howl with rage, including Winston. Frankie continued to rush on. He didn’t know why . . .

  As soon as Frankie got the front door of Number 1 open, Winston leapt up at him. ‘No, Winnie! Not now! Down boy!’ he yelled.

  ‘Is that you, Frankie?’ Gracie Lewis’s voice called out from the kitchen. But she wasn’t really interested – the wireless was turned up full and the sound of Forces’ Favourites was filling the house.

  ‘Yes, Mum, it’s me!’ Frankie called back, then rushed straight up the stairs, leaping them two at a time, hotly pursued by Winston.

  Frankie’s room, which he shared with his sister Helen, was tucked away at the back of the house on the first floor. Helen’s part of the room was sealed off from his by a floral patterned curtain which was draped across a piece of metal wire. As Helen was away for the weekend, Frankie drew back the curtain, threw his wet towel on to the bed, and pulled off his school blazer and pullover. Winston leapt on to Frankie’s bed, clearly believing that his young master had come home to have a good game with him. But Frankie had another matter on his mind. Kneeling on the floor, he reached under the bed and pulled out the thick, leather-covered book Elsa Barclay had given him. He had hidden it there after he had got back from his encounter with her the week before, and hadn’t looked at it since.

  He stretched out on the bed and looked at the cover: TREASURE ISLAND by Robert Louis Stevenson. He casually turned the first page, and looked at the picture there. Then he turned another page, and another. Finally, he reached the page with the heading Chapter One: ‘The Old Sea Dog At the Admiral Benbow . . .’ With his chin propped up on one hand, Frankie started to read . . .