CYCLE SALES by David Walser 25/11/08
This envelope would never fit in to the letterbox, so I popped it into a shopping bag and set off on foot to the post office which is less than ten minutes walk from home. One of the results of living in the same house for forty years is that every step outside the house brings back a memory. I’m not out of the drive before I’ve seen across the wall, the gardener who works for the High Master, raking leaves in the front garden. Like him we have known the three High Masters who have lived there since the school bought the house. Just after the first one moved in, a Trollopian Canon in gaiters, we heard shouting early one morning: there was a fire raging in one of the ground floor rooms; his wife had called the Fire Service, but they had not yet arrived. We rushed around with two fire extinguishers, poked them through the glass where a collection of Victorian dresses, still on their hangers, were waving about in the flames and then vapourizing with the heat. As if by magic, the flames went out. When the Fire engine arrived a few minutes late, the Fire Chief told me that the house would have been lost if we had not put out the fire when we did.
The School bought the house from an eye Consultant and his wife. They had two clever children. a boy and a girl. When Jeremy was very small, his head was a mass of tight dark curls, and someone visiting us, said he looked like a dear little pig. Someone dreamt up the exchange: ‘Beg pardon, Mrs. Arden, there’s a pig in your garden.’ ‘That’s not a pig, that’s little Jeremy’, she replies.
The eye consultant bought the house from two German sisters, called Aerenfest. They were the last of five, all spinsters, and in the war they apparently had a rough time. We heard that from a woman who was born in our house and wrote to us one day asking if she could come and see the house again; she had been born at Oakgates just before the war and had lived here until she was eleven years old. Her father had been in the Coldstream Guards and towards the end of his life, turned into a recluse. He rarely left his room and spent his time sorting through his uniforms and reliving past glories. The girl had a sister who was a few years older so she had a lonely childhood; the one place where she felt perfectly happy was the garden, which is why she wrote to us. After father died, her mother took up with a sailor, who said he would marry her but only if she got rid of the children, so the two girls were sent to a boarding convent where, being of different ages, they were not even allowed contact with each other. She said that not all the nuns had been unkind but as a result of her upbringing, she had never since been able to go into a church. Turning toward the post office as I left the drive, I passed our other neighbour, now a QC. When we first moved in, he was still a child and mad about football. Hardly a day went by without Adrian clambering onto the wall and calling ‘Can I have my ball back?’ He and his sister were gifted flamenco guitar players and on many a summer’s evening, the captivating sound of a piece by Albeniz or Manuel de Falla would drift across the wall. Their father was a Professor of Nutrition and one evening, when I was picking runner beans which that year grew along the wall between our gardens, I saw Bennie walking towards me.
‘Evening , Benny.’
‘Good evening, David. What are you doing?’
‘Picking runner beans, Benny.’
‘And..?’
”Having them for supper.’
‘Having them for supper,’ he repeated in apparent disbelief, and returned to the house.
Now I’ve reached the next houses: two post war ‘semmies’, thrown up in what must have been a large garden. They are all boarded up and being pulled down by a developer, whose first planning application was for a palacial residence with not one but two swimming pools. We neighbours objected to the high surrounding walls, which are considered essential to protect people who can afford houses like this one would have been, but the market has changed in the meantime, and the latest plan is er.. a return to two semmies, though of course much larger than the ones they are replacing.
Now I’ve reached what used to be a well known landmark, the Boileau pub, then known then as ‘The Boiler’. Inspite of being blessed with a huge garden, with pond and white geese, it gradually decayed, until one day it closed and was shortly afterwards reborn as the Old Rangoon, not before half the garden had been tarmac’d over to accommodate the cars of the expected guests. Alas, they did not materialize and with increasing rapidity and ever diminishing garden, the place changed hands and name. The last but one place offered a choice of one hundred and forty different beers and according to the notice in front, ‘ arguably the best al fresco dining in London’. Soon there was a new establishment advertising ‘French cuisine’ and a real French Chef. Now it lies boarded up and empty again.
But what is that I see at the corner of the street? I am taken back to a time when Charlie Gardener already an old man, would sell vegetables from the carrier of his sit-up-and-beg bicycle, that he had grown on the allotments behind the Harrods Depository. There was the very person I describe, right down to the toe clips and old fashioned leather boots but it must be his son or even grandson. No , he’s too old for that, but there are the little scrawled price tags on each bunch of vegetables.
‘ You’ll be here in a minute, won’t you, I’ve just got to dump this letter at the post office’, I say. Without waiting for a reply, I rush round the corner, throw the large envelope into the mail sack and run back. All the veg is still there, so I take the carrots and the two lettuces , putting them in my empty bag, which leaves only some beetroot. Well they need a home, so I take the lot, pay him the very modest sum that it adds up to and thank him. He looks at the pound coins for a second and then puts them in his pocket which has little leather reinforcements along the edge. It reminds me of a master at my prep school: Mr Wolfenden wore a brown jacket which had a fusty smell – I don’t remember him wearing any other- with patches on the elbows and narrow rims of leather on the jacket edges and pockets. It was near the end of the war, and sometimes in the playground, we would stop to look up at the formations of bombers, flying overhead on their way to bomb Dresden and the other German cities. One day, as they returned, there were gaps in the formation and Mr Wolfenden held up his arm with the patched sleeve and pointed to them, saying,
‘ those gaps are where the planes have been shot down’ .
The old man turned away, walked to the traffic light and crossed, pushing his bike with it’s now empty pannier. I turned back along our street, also crossing the road to avoid the buiding site where the car park is being replaced by ten new houses. Ahead of me I see another neighbour striding along with her two dogs. We call her the Graefin, because of her aristocratic looks and bearing. Her family house was once the Presbytery attached to Wurms Cathedral, where Luther made his complaints about the Church to Charles Vth. By St. Paul’s school entrance, I cross back. This is one of the best places for collecting leaves in the autumn for my leafmould pile: the eddies of the prevailing wind do half my work for me. Once when I was piling them on my wheelbarrow, an old couple stopped to speak to me in that slightly raised and self-conscious voice used by the English to address those we consider less fortunate than ourselves. When I answered in a cheery tone, they clearly could not cope with the idea that someone speaking in a so-called ‘educated accent’, has sunk low enough in the social scale to be a road sweeper. My fall in status must have been my fault and they moved away without a rejoinder, holding hands. What should I have said, I wonder, not to have made them ill at ease.
When I reach home, Jan asks where I have been.
‘To the post office, and you won’t believe it: there was an old man who reminded me of Old Charlie, selling veg from his bike, just as Charlie did thirty years ago.’
‘Amazing. We can have some for lunch. Where are they then?’
I lift the bag onto the dresser but as I do so, I already know something is wrong. It’s too light . When I peer inside, there’s nothing.
‘Where are they?’ Jan repeats.
‘I don’t understand’, I say as I walk away confused.
A week later, I am talking to another neighbour as I pass by her house on my daily dog-walk.
‘Do you remember Old Charlie who sold veg from his bicycle,’ she asks. I am wondering if l should risk telling her what happened so recently, when she continues, ‘I’m having rhubarb from my garden for lunch and Charlie gave me the the roots all those years ago.’
‘Could I get some from you, ‘ I ask.
‘Of course, ‘ she says, ‘ I’ll give you some in the autumn.’