Warlight(23)

Agnes of World’s End. Of Agnes Street, of Mill Hill, and Limeburner’s Yard where she had lost that cocktail dress. I knew even then I needed to keep this part of my life away from The Darter and The Moth. Theirs was the world I was living in after my parents disappeared. And the world of Agnes was where I now escaped to alone.



It was now autumn. The race tracks and gymkhanas were closing down. But I was still so much a participant and essential go-between in The Darter’s world that he would find it easy to persuade me to skip school when term started. It began with missing just two days a week but I would soon be claiming a host of illnesses, from mumps, which I had just read about, to whatever disease was going around, and with my new contacts I could provide forged letters about my health. Rachel knew about some of this, especially when it had progressed to three days a week, but The Darter cautioned me not to tell The Moth, giving one of those complex waves of his hand that I knew how to interpret by then. In any case, this was more intriguing work than the time I was supposed to be spending preparing for my School Certificate exams.

The Darter’s mussel boat began drifting with a new purpose. These days he was transporting European china for “the respected dockland merchant.” Boxed cargo was more manageable than greyhounds, but he claimed to have a bad back, and so needed help—“too much sex standing up in a dark mews or cul-de-sac….” He tossed the line out like a spectacular morsel. So he persuaded Rachel back onto our boat on the weekends for an extra shilling or two, and we now found ourselves travelling up narrow canals that ran north from the Thames, which we had been unaware of till then. Our starting points and destinations always varied. It might be the rear entrance of the Custom House at Canning Town, or we might find ourselves floating along the shallow streams by Rotherhithe Mill. There was no longer a need to silence twenty dogs, and it was daylight work and autumn silence. The days grew colder.

Being so much in The Darter’s company, I was now at ease with him. Sunday mornings as the barge travelled under the trees, he sat on a crate and searched through newspapers for any upper-class scandals, reading choice ones out loud. “Nathaniel—the Earl of Wiltshire has accidentally asphyxiated himself by tying a rope round his neck then tying the other end to a large lawn roller while half naked….” He refused to explain why a person in the nobility might do this. In any case, the lawn’s gentle slope meant the roller had serenely continued downhill pulling the Earl’s undressed body along with it and strangling him. The lawn roller, the News of the World concluded, had been in the Earl’s family for three generations. My more serious sister ignored such stories and concentrated on learning her lines in Julius Caesar, for she was to play Marc Antony in the school play that term. By this point I was simply expecting to fail my School Certificate exams and ignored rereading Swallows and Amazons, that “crap book” as The Darter had called it.

Now and then he would lean his head back and attempt a conversation with me, showing concern as to how I was doing at school. “Fine,” I would say.

“And your mathematics—do you know what an isosceles triangle is?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Splendid.”

Not that we are touched by such things as concern, even if false, when we are young. But now, in retrospect, I am touched.

We steered our way up a narrowing cut. It was a different atmosphere now, with sunlight falling through yellowing leaves, the smell of wet earth rising from the riverbanks. We had loaded the barge with boxes at Limehouse Reach, where The Darter said they made quicklime centuries earlier. Immigrants disembarked there from the East India ships and walked into the new country without a common language. I told The Darter I had heard a Sherlock Holmes mystery on the radio called “The Man with the Twisted Lip” that took place where we’d loaded the china that morning, but he shook his head doubtfully, as if literature had nothing to do with the world he belonged in. The only books I’d seen him read were westerns and bodice rippers, specifically one that merged the two genres called Kicking Whores Pass.

One afternoon we needed to urge the barge between the narrowing banks of the Romford Canal, my sister and I stationed on opposite sides of the deck yelling directions to The Darter at the wheel. The last hundred yards of the cut were almost fully overgrown. At its end there was a lorry waiting, and two men approached the boat and unloaded the boxes wordlessly, The Darter barely acknowledging them. Then we reversed the barge like a cornered dog for a quarter of a mile until the channel became wider.

Romford Canal was just one of our destinations. Another journey took us along Gunpowder Mills Canal. At one time only shallow-draught powder boats and ballast barges had travelled along it, transporting munitions. The innocent-looking canal had been used for this purpose for almost two hundred years because at the end of it was Waltham Abbey, a gentle edifice lived in by monks as far back as the twelfth century. During the recent war, thousands had worked on the grounds of the abbey, and its explosives were transported along those same cuts and tributaries down to the Thames. It was always less dangerous to transport munitions on quiet waterways than on public roads. Sometimes the roped barges were pulled along by horses, sometimes by teams of men on either side of the canal.

But now the munitions factories had been dismantled and the unused canals were silting up, becoming narrower between their overgrown banks. And on weekends this was where Rachel and I, the sidekicks of The Darter, now floated in the silence of those waterways, listening to a new generation of birdsong. What we carried was probably not dangerous, but we were never sure. And after our constantly changing routes and destinations, Rachel and I no longer fully believed The Darter’s stories about the delivery of European china to pay back the merchant who had let him borrow his barge during dog-racing seasons.