Читать книгу At Freddie’s - Penelope Fitzgerald, Simon Callow - Страница 10

FREDDIE’S was in Baddeley Street, in the middle of Covent Garden, which in itself is in the exact middle or heart of London. In the old Garden of the 1960s the market was open every weekday and in consequence the Opera House and the Theatre Royal rose majestically, beset with heavy traffic, above a wash of fruit, flowers, and vegetables. The world’s most celebrated singers had to pick their way to their triumphs through porters’ barrows, and for the great performances, when the queue formed at night for next morning’s tickets, every empty barrow was full of sleeping Londoners. You could find a niche, too, on the piles of netted carrots which were often waiting in the colonnade of the Opera itself. Evangelists of various religions patrolled the queues late into the night, calling on them to repent, and distributing tracts which lay with the other rotting debris about the Garden. When morning came the starlings woke there earlier than in any other part of London.

This was the world of the Temple children, who had no playground, and no particular place to eat their school dinner. When the midday break came Miss Blewett unlocked the front door and stood back to let them out. The better-off got themselves something to eat at Tito’s Cafe, or at the twenty-four-hour coffee-stall outside St Paul’s, the actors’ church. The others ran, like little half-tame animals on the scavenge, through the alleys of the great market. By that time most of the warehouses had rolled down their shutters, and the ground was littered with straw and cardboard and crushed baskets, of the kind called frails. But round one corner or another there would be a wholesaler who hadn’t locked up yet, or a van loading up for the return journey. Far from wanting to sell cheap, the Garden defended their damaged and unsold fruit, declared they were only allowed by law to sell in six dozens, denounced the children as pests, muckers and bleeders and only grudgingly, on the point of departure, released in exchange for ready money a few misshapen apples or carrots. In this way every dinner-hour was a drama. To cajole the unwilling traders, in fact to Freddie them, was better than bargaining for a stale bacon sandwich from the back of the market public houses, which opened at seven o’clock in the morning and closed at nine. Whatever they got, they ate it at once, sitting on the empty floats. Yet in all those years the police never had to record a complaint against them. Doubtless they were regarded as one of the hazards of the market, like the rats, like the frails.

The children in their turn were perfectly used to the dilapidation of their school. Maintenance was supposed to be in the hands of Baines, the odd job man, who had once stood in as doorkeeper at the Old Vic, and now called himself a schoolkeeper, but in fact only gave a casual glance twice a week at the boiler and the incinerator. Baines also understood what might be called his dramatic role, as age and mortality’s emblem, muttering at the kids’ antics and hinting at the heartbreaks of a stage career, which would soon cut them down to size. He was not a skilled handyman and couldn’t have undertaken the repairs in any case; that was why he suited Freddie. Although he would never have admitted it, Baines also did whatever cleaning was allowed to take place. With Miss Blewett he constituted the permanent staff. Others, like those two who’d just been taken on, came and went with the seasons.