Warlight(62)

I spent the afternoon with these discovered dossiers. Learning about the make of the lorries, the weight of the nitro transported on each journey, how during the night certain streets had muted blue lights to discreetly illuminate a sudden turn. For most of his life The Darter’s careers had been camouflaged, unknown to others. The illegal boxing rings in Pimlico, the dog tracks, the smuggling. But in his wartime career he had been watched and fully known. He needed to sign in, have his face confirmed against a photograph, then sign out at Lower Thames Street. His every night journey recorded. For the first and only time in his life, he was “in the books.” He who had been so proud of not appearing in that encyclopaedic manual listing dog-track criminals. Three journeys a night from the Gunpowder Mills, back and forth, when most of the East End of the city was asleep and unaware of the existence and danger of what was happening on night roads. But always recorded. So now, these years later, in that room of hanging maps, I was able to find the marked-up routes, aware how similar the journeys were to those we had taken those nights from the East End, from somewhere near Limehouse Basin to the centre of the City.

I stood in the empty map room, the banners swaying as if touched by a sudden breeze. I knew somewhere there would be a file on all the drivers. I remembered him still only as The Pimlico Darter, but along with a passport-sized photograph would be his real name. In an adjacent room I pulled open cabinet drawers, looking at index cards of black-and-white photographs of gaunt men still in their youth. Until there was the name I had not remembered, beside a face I did. Norman Marshall. My Darter. “Norman!” I now recalled The Moth yelling in our crowded living room in Ruvigny Gardens. It was a fifteen-year-old picture of him with, somehow obsessively beside it, his updated address.

Here was The Darter.

There would be a lit cigarette in his left hand resting on the wheel as he swerved those corners, his right elbow on the open window frame so his arm was wet from the harsh rain that was keeping him alert. There was no company to talk to on those nights, and he was no doubt singing that old song to stay awake, about a dame, who was known as the flame.



Our heroes do not usually, after a certain age, teach or guide us anymore. They choose instead to protect the last territory where they find themselves. Adventurous thought is replaced with almost invisible needs. Those who once mocked the traditions they fought against with laughter now provide only the laughter, not the mockery. Was this what I came to believe about The Darter the last time I saw him? After I had become an adult? I am still not sure. I now had an address for where he was, and went to see him.

But during that final meeting, I could not tell if he was simply uninterested in me, or whether there was a hurt or an anger towards me. I had after all upped and left his world suddenly years ago. And now here I was, no longer that boy. And while I remembered my adventures with him during that confused and vivid dream of my youth, The Darter would not speak of the past as I wished him to do. I had wanted to catch up on all of them, but he kept steering me back to the present. What was I doing now? Where did I live? Was I…? So all that I could really do was interpret the visit by recognizing the conversational barriers he set up. Just as I noticed that he seemed obsessively careful of where things existed and needed to remain in his kitchen, so if I picked up something—for instance a glass, a coaster—he recalled where it had to be returned to.

He had not been expecting me to arrive at his door that day, at that hour, in fact had not been expecting me at all. So the order in his flat was clearly an everyday habit, whereas my memory of The Darter, which I admit may have become exaggerated over the years, was of a man around whom things got lost or fell to pieces. But here was a welcome mat on which you needed to brush the soles of your shoes before entering, a neatly folded tea towel, and down the hall two doors that I saw him carefully close as we walked back to the kitchen to put on the kettle.

I was living a solitary life, so I recognize solitary, as well as the small dimensions of order that come with that. The Darter was not solitary. He had a family now: a wife named Sophie, he said, and a daughter. This surprised me. I tried to guess which of his paramours had ensnared him or had been ensnared by him. Surely not the argumentative Russian. In any case, that afternoon he was alone in the flat and I did not meet Sophie.

The fact that he was married and had a child was as far back as he would go in speaking of the past. He refused to talk about the war and brushed off my laughing questions about the dog trade. He said he remembered little of that time. I asked if he had seen the programme Olive Lawrence had done for the BBC. “No,” he said quietly. “I missed it.”

I did not want to believe him. I hoped he was just continuing to be evasive. I could forgive that, that he had not forgotten but had shut her out of his life as well, rather than that he could not be bothered to turn on a television. Or perhaps I was the only one left who remembered those times, those lives. And so he kept placing obstacles on the road back to our past, that wouldn’t allow me to reach it, though he could see that was why I had come. He seemed nervous too—I wondered at first if he assumed I was judging whether he had done well or had made a disappointing choice in life.

I watched him pour tea into each of our cups.

“I heard from someone that Agnes had a difficult time. I tried to find her but couldn’t.”

“I think we all went our own way,” he said. “I moved to the Midlands for a while. I could be a new face there, if you know what I mean. Someone without a past.”