Читать книгу The Cricket Match - Hugh De Sélincourt - Страница 5

Table of Contents

Six o’clock!

Automatically Mrs Smith slipped her feet out of bed and twisted up her long hair, sitting on the edge of the bed in which Sid Smith lay asleep by the side of a baby, also sleeping. She kept yawning.

She dressed without hurry or delay, watched by two little boys of three and four, at whom she made, from time to time, expressive gestures suggesting what would happen if they broke the silence. It was clear that another baby was well on the way.

Sid snored and stirred, moving against the baby, who opened his eyes. Mrs Smith looked at both with annoyance. Not that she was one to stand any nonsense from either.

Fastening her skirt she stepped across the room (a little smaller than young Horace Cairie’s room) and leaning her face forward she said in a fierce whisper to the two little boys, who continued their impassive stare:

‘You lay there, the two of you, mind.’

And she thrust an inquiring hand under the clothes.

‘Tst! Filthy!’ she muttered with a look of disgust. ‘Wash! Wash! Wash! No end to it!’

In spite of her tousled, unkempt condition, it was still quite possible to recognise the prim parlourmaid of six years before, celebrated for the way she kept her glass, for her fine needlework, and for her immaculate manner and appearance. There was still pride in the poise of her head.

She was no sooner out of the room than Jackie, the eldest boy, leaped out of bed, climbed over the baby, and snuggled up against the sleeping man, who opened his eyes and said gruffly:

‘Hullo, matey!’—yawning. Then, ‘ ’Ere, this ain’t Sunday.’

‘I say, give us a penny, dad!’

The baby awoke, crying. Sid craned his neck round to inspect him. Then heaved himself round in bed to lift him up. He drew his hand back, scowling.

‘ ’Struth, all over the bed-clothes!’ Jackie looked unhappy, conscious that he had hit on a wrong morning for a penny.

‘ ’Ere!’ said his father, ‘get out of it!’

Jackie, infant as he was, realised that it would be wiser not to climb across his father, but to make a slight detour by the bottom of the bed. In squeezing out between the end of the bed and the wall, however, he unfortunately dragged down his father’s flannel trousers, which were hanging on the rail, a small rent having been stitched up in them on the Friday evening. Making his way on all fours, in a praiseworthy effort to conceal his existence, he, without knowing it, dragged the trousers after him across the room, and just by his own bed, being pleasantly inconspicuous, he sat up, and was seated with damp nightshirt on the trousers, which were not in consequence improved. His little brother, who had watched his progress across the floor, leaning over to see what Jackie was doing, fell out of bed and howled.

‘Now then!’ shouted Sid, ‘you ain’t hurt yerself.’

‘Just you stop that noise!’ came Mrs Smith’s voice from the kitchen beneath.

‘The little blighter’s pitched hisself out of bed!’ shouted Sid.

‘Ain’t hurt, is he?’

‘No,’ shouted Sid. ‘A bit scared!’

‘I’ll scare him! Young monkey.’

Sid Smith was by no means a brute. But it was an understood thing that, except on Sunday mornings, he did no work of any kind in the house before going to his own work. Fortunately for him, he was able to bear without too much compunction the loud woes of children, unless his head was thick after an exceptionally good time.

Mrs Smith appeared carrying a tin bowl full of water, which she set on a soap box, a convenient washstand:

‘Didn’t I tell you not to budge from yer bed?’ she said angrily to Jackie, who, not managing to avoid the slap aimed at his ear, howled lustily. Her reaching out for the baby was the sign for Sid to rise, which he did with much yawning and stretching and scratching of his head.

‘Stop that blinkin’ row,’ he announced to the room in general, as he picked a Woodbine out of its paper on the mantelpiece, lighted it, and put on his trousers, pants and socks under his long nightshirt.

‘A nice mess,’ he announced, blowing out a long puff of smoke, and watching his wife undo the baby’s napkins.

‘Faugh!’ said his wife, pitching the dirty napkin on to the floor. ‘Wash! Wash! Wash!’

The napkin fell on the trousers, which were now a little way under the small boys’ bed. Sid put on his vest and shirt and buckled his belt, and went downstairs in his socks to put on his working boots in the scullery.

The baby was held seated in the bowl, crying bravely while Mrs Smith dexterously wiped it over with a rubber sponge.

‘When’s this blasted kettle goin’ to boil?’ came a shout from the kitchen.

‘How can I tell?’ was the prompt retort.

‘Choked up with these great lumps o’ coal!’

‘Why can’t you have set the oil lamp to rights then?’ she shouted back, adding softly to herself, ‘Great booby! Can’t set his hand to nothing!’

‘Now then, you two!’ she cried to the little boys, as she dried the baby with nimble fingers.

Jackie and his brother climbed out of bed and pulled off their nightshirts, coming very slowly nearer to their mother, who rolled the baby in a blanket and set it, without getting up, on the bed, seizing Jackie’s arm on the return swing. Rapidly she topped and tailed each small boy with the same rubber sponge and dried them on a dish-clout. While she was putting on their shirts, Sid appeared in the doorway, whitening one of his cricket boots, the sight of which always infuriated his wife.

‘I’ll just put them trousers away,’ he said, making towards the bed. ‘Where in hell are them trousers?’ he cried.

‘How should I know where you put ’em? They were mended last night, that’s all I know.’

‘I laid ’em on the bed-rail, folded.’ He was peering behind the bed, under the thrown-back bed-clothes.

‘Blinkin’ swarm o’ kids,’ he muttered. ‘Home—I don’t think. All right for a man, this is.’

‘All right, my man. I’ve got ears in me head.’

‘Ah! And look out you don’t get a thick ear, my gal, afore you’re much older.’ He was groping angrily on the floor now—smoke in his eyes from the cigarette end between his lips.

‘Blast it!’ he cried. ‘What’s this? Look here.’

And rising slowly he lifted the forlorn, soiled trousers. Dismay extinguished anger on his face. It was only on the cricket field that Sid Smith, a bowler famed for many miles around, was able to feel a man’s self-respect.

‘I say, Liz, wash ’em through for me, old gal.’

‘H’m! a likely thing on a Saturday morning, too; and you being back for your dinner ‘fore I’ve hardly swept out the bedroom. Cricket! Playing the fine gentleman in your white trousers and your white boots. Fat lot of games a woman gets, don’t she?’

‘Clean ’em up and run the iron over ’em, Liz,’ he pleaded in dejection.

‘And who was talkin’ of thick ears a moment gone?’

‘Go on! You know I don’t mean half what I say.’

‘Good thing for you you don’t. Don’t come messin’ me about now just because you wants a thing done. Oh, yes, I’ll see to ’em.’

‘That’s a mummy!’ cried Sid, hoisting Jackie up, who, thinking the moment favourable, clung round his father’s neck whispering hoarsely: ‘Give us a penny, dad.’ His mind was fixed on a certain brightly-coloured sweet he had seen in Straker’s window.

‘Not half a sharp kid, is he?’ smiled Sid.

‘Oh, go on, do, and have your breakfast. You’re nothing but a pair of kids the two of you.’

‘Want penny too,’ began Jackie’s small brother, and persisted in his request until both children were let out with a hunk of bread each and strict injunctions on no account to get into mischief or to come bothering back round mum, who was specially busy that morning.

Meanwhile Sid disposed of two large slices of bread and dripping at the corner of the kitchen table, and drank two mugs of tea, after which he set out on the three-mile walk to his work, cad to a bricklayer. He called to his wife: ‘If you’re havin’ a walk round after tea you might have a look in on the field. We’re playin’ Raveley, and we could walk home together.’

‘Oh, well, I’ll see how things go. I may and I mayn’t.’