Free Kate and Emma by Monica Dickens

Trying to explain to you what’s going wrong with someone, it helps me to get my own thoughts straight about them.’
    ‘I’d like to go.’ Not from curiosity, not because I could help, but because I have to see. In my life, I may never be selfless enough to lessen by one grain the world’s misery, but it’s worse not even to know it’s there.
    ‘I’d like you to come.’
    He could say that over the telephone. When we met, he was once more rather shy and formal, although he rocked the little snub car just as recklessly round the streets and countryside, hazarding infants and slow grandfathers.
    When I thanked him for asking me again, he said: ‘Your fatherthinks that you should see more of his work, since it’s really part of his,’ which wasn’t at all what he had said on the telephone.
    I like him, though, and admire him. He has the physique of a man who tears telephone books in two and keeps a punch-ball in the cellar, but he has no conceit or violence. He used to be a sergeant-major, but I can’t imagine his voice ever terrorizing anyone into step. Perhaps he broke it, there on the barrack square, and that’s why it murmurs now, unmilitary. His hair grows like a boy’s from a point on the back of his head, and his smile makes nonsense of his soldierly jaw. He is often silent, not necessarily in thought, but because he has nothing to say, and he is absolutely marvellous with the people he takes care of.
    Although he is the Cruelty Man, and some people think he goes round in a paddy wagon carting sadistic parents off to gaol, Taking Care is the right description for what he does.
    We took some shoes to brothers who had been going to school on alternate days because they only had one pair between them, and we went to the Assistance Office to try to get more money for a widow with a mongol baby, and we went to see about a father’s debt, and a holiday for a child with asthma. Although I had done little more than play with the children and listen to the bailiff’s sinister Dickensian jokes, I felt that I had done more good in one morning than in my whole life.
    As we drive round this ugly, grey and teeming neighbourhood where Mr Jordan has worked for five years, grown-ups call out and wave to him, and urchins bang on the little tin car at red lights and cry: ‘Gis a ride, Mr Jordin!’ He is not the avenging angel, but a familiar and welcome figure, like the ice-cream man.
    We slowed down in a back street beside a monstrous beery woman shoving a child in a rickety pram, and her violent face split like a dropped tomato with pleasure at seeing him. She chatted like an old friend, droning easily away about the discomforts of her new flat and the low class of people who surrounded her.
    When we drove away, he laughed: ‘You should have seen the place I got her out of,’ and wrinkled his nose. ‘And she’s doing her best to make the new one as bad. She and her husband have both been up for neglect. She’s got two kids in Care and I’m watching the others, but she’s always glad to see me.’
    When he said that his wife had told him to bring me home for lunch, ‘if you care to, Miss Bullock,’ I said: ‘Oh yes, but please call me Emma.’
    His neck got a bit red, and after that he didn’t call me anything, not even Miss Bullock.
    His wife called me Emma though, right away, and said that she had seen me in the B.B. supermarket, and that I shouldn’t let them sell sardine tins without an opener.
    She is a lovely woman, just right for him, soft-haired and squashy in front, with pink cheeks and strong arms. The go-anywhere, do-any thing kind, who would look right fraternizing with the neighbours in Army married quarters or feeding chickens at a farmhouse door, or living on a lighthouse or answering the telephone and typing out his case notes.
    They live in a small terrace house with a gable and a bay window and a sign on the door, so that people can come and complain about their neighbours, or leave