The Dreaming Suburb Read online

  The Dreaming Suburb

  Also by R.F. Delderfield

  A Horseman Riding By

  Long Summer Day

  Post of Honour

  The Green Gauntlet

  The Swann Saga

  God is an Englishman

  Theirs was the Kingdom

  Give Us This Day

  The Avenue Story

  The Avenue Goes to War

  Diana

  To Serve Them All My Days

  Come Home, Charlie, and Face Them

  Too Few for Drums

  Cheap Day Return

  All Over the Town

  The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon

  About the author

  R.F. Delderfield was born in South London in 1912. On

  leaving school he joined the Exmouth Chronicle newspaper

  as a junior reporter, where he went on to become Editor.

  From there he began to write stage plays and then became

  a highly successful novelist, renowned for brilliantly

  portraying slices of English life.

  With the publication of his first saga, A Horseman Riding By,

  he became one of Britain's most popular authors and his

  novels have been bestsellers ever since. He died in 1972.

  R. F. DELDERFIELD

  The Dreaming Suburb

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 1964 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © 1958, 1964 R.F. Delderfield

  The right of R.F. Delderfield to be identified as the Author of the

  Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

  means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

  otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that

  in which it is published and without a similar condition being

  imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British

  Library

  ISBN 978 1 444 73251 1

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  To my three old friends

  Frank Gentry

  Alan Walbank

  Vic Whitworth

  each of whom, in their several ways,

  helped to father this book

  The Dreaming Suburb is dedicated.

  R.F.D.

  Although, here and there in this book, the names of actual localities have been employed, Manor Park Avenue is not any particular Avenue, and neither are the Carvers, Friths, Frasers or Cleggs any particular families, residing in or around this area. They might be any people, of any South London suburb, indeed, their lives throughout the period 1919-40 might be the lives of any suburban dwellers, on the outskirts of any large city in Britain.

  These people are, for the most part, unsung, and that even though they represent the greater part of Britain's population. The story of the country-dwellers, and the city sophisticates, has been told often enough; it is time somebody spoke of the suburbs, for therein, I have sometimes felt, lies the history of our race.

  R.F.D.

  Acclaim for The Dreaming Suburb:

  “A first-rate bit of storytelling!”

  “A book to be reckoned with.”

  “An incredible amount happens... gay, sordid, pathetic, dramatic, to a multitude of figures ... the invention is sure and prolific.”

  “Surveys the families living in a quiet road, quite literally the outermost road on the Kent/Surrey border ... between wars and in one of them. An acute, ironically endowed novelist has filled it with really fresh observation, genuine people; has worked with surprising range and made nobody, weak-headed spinster or girl adventuress, boy profiteer or jazz maniac, in the least a type. With so many threads in his long story, Mr Delderfield has to drop and pick up whole families chapter by chapter; it's a tribute to his ability that after a couple of pages you're lost in each new swing of the tale.”

  “Has an immense appeal. Mr Delderfield, an adept at graphic detail, infuses his writing with a human warmth and interest which should hold the attention of the most blasé reader.”

  Also available in Coronet, the sequel to this novel, covering the years 1940-1947, is The Avenue Goes To War.

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION:

  CHAPTER I: THE AVENUE

  CHAPTER II: HOME-COMING

  CHAPTER III: PRINCE WAKES BEAUTY

  CHAPTER IV: MISS CLEGG TAKES A LODGER

  CHAPTER V: CARVERS, AT WORK AND PLAY

  CHAPTER VI: MUTINY AT HAVELOCK PARK

  CHAPTER VII: ARCHIE TAKES A HOLIDAY

  CHAPTER VIII: NEW WORLDS FOR EDITH

  CHAPTER IX: ELAINE FRITH AND THE FACTS OF LIFE

  CHAPTER X: ALIBI FOR ARCHIE

  CHAPTER XI: HAROLD AS GIANT-KILLER

  CHAPTER XII: JIM BURNS A ’BUS

  CHAPTER XIII: EDITH IN MOURNING

  CHAPTER XIV: SCHOOLDAYS FOR THREE

  CHAPTER XV: THE ICE CRACKS AT NUMBER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER XVI: LADY IN A TOWER

  CHAPTER XVII: CARVER ROUNDABOUT. I

  CHAPTER XVIII: CHANGES AT NUMBER FOUR

  CHAPTER XIX: ESME

  CHAPTER XX: JIM HEARS RUMBLINGS

  CHAPTER XXI: ABDICATION AND USURPATION

  CHAPTER XXII: PROGRESS FOR TWO

  CHAPTER XXIII: CARVER ROUNDABOUT. II

  CHAPTER XXIV: EDITH AND THE HOUSE OF WINDSOR

  CHAPTER XXV: ESME'S ODYSSEY

  CHAPTER XXVI: JIM CLOSES THE DOOR

  CHAPTER XXVII: ARCHIE UNDER AN UMBRELLA

  CHAPTER XXVIII: ELAINE COMES IN OUT OF THE RAIN

  CHAPTER XXIX: ESME AND THE PROMISED LAND

  CHAPTER XXX: CARVER ROUNDABOUT, III

  CHAPTER XXXI: HEROICS STRICTLY RATIONED

  CHAPTER XXXII: A LAST LOOK AT THE AVENUE

  INTRODUCTION

  I have never been persuaded that history was made in the tents of the mighty. Social development, that most of us recognize as progress, together with the trends of thought and emotion that ultimately become the policy of a nation, have their origin in far less exalted places, the towns and villages of the governed whence they filter through to leaders standing in the spotlight. This, I think, is particularly true of the Western democracies, at least during the present century. The newspapers and the television screen record the outfall but they seldom penetrate to the sources, high up in the headwaters of the bedsitters, the sparsely populated rural areas of market towns and villages and, above all, the suburbs. Two-thirds of Britain's population live in suburbs of one sort or another, in long streets and terraces that have crusted round our cities. In The Dreaming Suburb and The Avenue Goes to War I have tried to tell the story of the British thought-developers and policy-makers from 1919 to 1947 and here, for the first time since the first of these books was published, the story is presented as a continuous saga, in a single volume spanning a period of twenty-eight years. A great deal of history was made in that half-generation, more perhaps than in any century that preceded it. Some of the older characters in this book, people like Jim Carver, Harold Godbeer and Miss Clegg, were closer to the England of the Stuarts in, say, 1910, than we today are within reach of the Boer War period. Life has m
oved at a terrifying tempo since the trench veterans came home to a land fit for heroes to live in after the 1918 Armistice, the real starting point of the story, and in the decades that follow after the story ends Western Europe is still catching its breath in an attempt to keep up with the pace of events. I like to think of this book as a modest attempt to photograph the mood of the suburbs in the period between the break up of the old world and the perambulator days of an entirely new civilisation ushered in by the bleat of Russia's first sputnik in the 'fifties. In the main, of course, the story concerns the personal lives of the twenty odd men and women who spent these years in the terrace houses of Manor Park Avenue but in a wider sense the main-spring of the book is the time in which they grew up, loved, laughed, despaired and had their being.,

  R. F. DELDERFIELD

  CHAPTER I

  The Avenue

  IN the Spring of 1947 the bull-dozers moved down the cart-track beside Number Seventeen and deployed across the meadow to the fringe of Manor Wood.

  The grabs and the bull-dozers ravaged the Avenue and despoiled its memories. In the first week they clawed down the tiny greenhouse, where Esme first kissed Elaine, and Elaine's father, Edgar, had tended his hyacinths, and planned to abandon his family; it was not long before concrete-mixers were set up on the very spot where Judy Carver had pledged her soul to Esme Fraser and later, when the first Dorniers droned overhead, Elaine Frith had lain with her Polish lover in the long, parched grass. The Clerk of Works himself set up his office in the abandoned sitting-room of Edith Clegg, where, long before, she and her sister Becky had played Horsey, Keep Your Tail Up on the cottage piano during the evening soirees with their lodger, Ted Hartnell. Workmen flung their tools into the half-ruined hall of Number Twenty-Two, scratching the primrose paint that Harold Godbeer had lovingly spread at the behest of the pretty Mrs. Fraser. These, and many other desecrations were performed briskly and cheerfully, for everyone was shouting for houses, more and more houses, and the Manor Estate was wide. It was merciful that the families whose homes these had been for so long were dispersed when all this took place.

  This was the first movement in the south-easterly assault on the suburb's surviving area of wild wood. Soon the axes rang, and the double-handed saws whined among the aged beeches and oaks, and huge piles of scythed brambles made a pyre of the suburb's salient along the Kent-Surrey border. By late autumn the last clump of manor beeches had been thrown, and the salient, of which the Avenue had been the advanced line for so long, existed no more. Soon the Avenue itself was swallowed up in a tangle of new roads, new crescents, new avenues, each lined with semi-detached houses, quite unlike the terraced houses of the original curve. The odd numbers still looked across at the even numbers, but for the even numbers the old outlook was entirely altered, for they could see, through gaps torn by bombs, acres of new-looking houses, and pegged-out sites stretching to the horizon.

  This is the tale of an Avenue in a suburb and of some of the people who lived in that Avenue between the long, dry summers of 1919, when one war had just ended, and 1940 when another had just begun, a tale of what they did, and what they dreamed.

  About the time the story starts the word ‘suburban' was beginning to acquire the meaning it has today. It is never said without a sneer or a hint of patronage. This is curious, for three-quarters of our population continue to reside in suburbs of one sort or another; they are not unlike other folk, and quite capable of extending their dreams beyond the realms of the 8:25 out and the 5:48 in. They dream, in fact, as consistently, and as extravagantly as anyone else.

  This story is an account of the lives and the dreams of five families of the Avenue, four on the even side, one on the odd. The Avenue is not any particular Avenue, and might exist in any suburb of Greater London. The time is important, not the place, for every decade has its own fads, fashions, hopes, and fears, just as it has its own dance-tunes and screen favourites, its own terms of approval and condemnation. That is why this is a story of boom, slump, full employment, unemployment, new freedoms, new restrictions, hope, faith, and despair; a tale of the Charleston, the General Strike, the hunger-marchers, the amateur Blackshirts, the Peace Ballot; of Amy Johnson, Al Jolson, and a strident Austrian comedian, who was said to gnaw carpets but wasn't so screamingly funny after all.

  The Avenue's real name was “Manor Park Avenue” but nobody who lived in it ever used the words “Manor Park”. They simply called it the Avenue, taking the Manor Park, which they could see across the buttercup meadow, for granted.

  The Avenue ran in a scimitar curve from Shirley Rise, off the Lower Road leading to London, to the eastern entrance of the Recreation Ground, known as “The Rec”, and was thus the southernmost rim of the most southerly suburb. It remained so for a long time because nobody could build on the Rec at one end, or the golf-links in Shirley Rise at the end. Behind it lay the older, more sedate section of the suburb, a dozen or so roads built in the eighteen-sixties, and named after generals and incidents of the Indian Mutiny. In front of it lay the Old Manor, and its surrounding woodland, that held out against the developers (no one ever discovered why) for more than a quarter of a century. Because of this the odd numbers had open views at the back but, by another happy accident, the even numbers enjoyed a similar previlege, for between their gardens and the Mutiny roads lay an abandoned Nursery, long since given over to briar, thistle, and dock.

  This is not a complete story of the Avenue or anything like it. There were over a hundred houses in the crescent and approximately four hundred dwellers therein, so we shall hear only of the Pirettas, the Cleggs, the Carvers, the Frasers, and the Friths, respectively, of Numbers Two, Four, Twenty, Twenty-Two, and Seventeen.

  The tale of these twenty-odd people as a group may be said to have commenced in the middle of the First World War, when the last of them settled in the Avenue; it ended, again as a group, when the sun was high over the beaches of Dunkirk, and dreams were cast out by stark incredulity and fear.

  I did not know the Avenue until the Spring of 1918, so my story begins shortly after that season, when men like Jim Carver were drifting home from hell to look for work.

  Some of the people I have writen about I understood. All of them I knew, and knew well. Most of them I loved much more than I knew, and when I left the Avenue I missed and remembered them.

  CHAPTER II

  Home-Coming

  MORE than a dozen people in the Avenue caught Spanish 'flu in the Spring of 1919, but only Ada Carver died of it.

  Four years' struggle on a low diet, stints of charring between pregnancies, and, on Christmas Eve, the news that her quiet, loose-limbed husband, instead of being demobbed within weeks of the Armistice, had now been posted off to Germany with the Army of Occupation, had combined to rob Ada of the will to combat the virus. She collapsed at the copper, and died within three days of tottering to bed, a few hours before Jim Carver could get home from Coblenz.

  Jim came as quickly as he could, standing nine hours in the corridor on the Monday leave train, and another seven in the Ostend boat queue. The appalling discomfort of the journey did not worry him. Three years on the Western Front had made him indifferent to the lack of sleep, and extreme temperatures. His long, lean, slightly-stooping frame, on which his new uniform hung loosely and awkwardly, had been thumped by innumerable army doctors since that day in the autumn of 1914 when he walked into the Hammersmith recruiting office; but his category was still A.l, despite odd whiffs of gas, and several pieces of shrapnel, one of which was still “travelling” between knee-cap and thigh.

  He did not know what to expect when he turned in at the gate of Number Twenty. Louise, his eldest daughter, had wired “Mother critically ill. Asking for you”, but this was a pre-arranged exaggeration on Louise's part, and was written in obedience to Jim's instructions during his last leave. Ada Carver had not asked for him, or for anyone or anything except, perhaps, to lie still, and float away from muddle, and backache, and the eternal washing of nappies, and ama
teur endeavours to repair children's shoes. The Doctor had paid her but one visit. Doctors were grossly overworked in the Spring of 1919.

  On the morning of the fourth day Louise had gone into the porch bedroom (the large front bedroom was occupied by the three boys) and found that Ada had died during the night. Jim arrived the following afternoon.

  Sergeant Carver had never been to the Avenue. The Carvers, Ada, Louise, Archie, Judith, and “Berni” and Boxer, the elder twins, had moved into Number Twenty of necessity during the previous August, when Ada was quite certain that she was pregnant again. The rent was fifteen shillings a week, inclusive of rates, and although three of them were earning, the money was very difficult to find, particularly when Ada ceased to work, and the second twins were born on New Year's Day.

  All through the war the Carvers had been a bare inch or two above subsistence level. Soldiers' wives, and ‘teenage girls like Louise, could earn good money in munitions, but if they had gone into factories there would have been no one to care for the younger children, and Archie, now turned seventeen, was himself at work all day as a shop assistant.

  So Louise and Ada took shifts of part-time domestic work, office-cleaning, milk deliveries, and long hours at the camouflage-net yard. The war seemed to go on for ever and the children, apart from Archie, seemed never to grow beyond the jam-smearing stage. The moment Ada returned from her stints Louise began hers, and she took over the cooking and housework. Usually, her day began at dawn, and ended around midnight.

  Under these conditions it was not surprising that she succumbed so swiftly to the epidemic. What was surprising was that she had held out for more than four years. Even the veterans of the front-line trench system were pulled out every now and again, and sent into rest billets. There were no rest billets available to women like Ada Carver in 1918—just Spanish influenza, at the end of the line.