Free Kate and Emma by Monica Dickens Page A

unwanted children on the step. He has just painted the wood of the house, and repapered the hall with violent bouquets that clash with the carpet. In the kitchen where we had lunch, he has painted all the doors and cupboards yellow, with Austrian stencilling, and converted the old coal-range alcove into a cottagy fireplace with carved inglenook seats.
    ‘He works all the time,’ his wife said, ‘but it’s always for other people. It took me six months to get him to do any of this for me.’
    She is very proud of him, her pride no less affectionate for being expressed in terms of complaint. He is comfortable with her, stowing away great forkfuls of meat and potato in proportion to his build, the peace of his home strengthening the tolerance he shows outside. We had been to two places this morning where I had been with him before, and I felt the defeat of it, because the women had made no progress, hadn’t taken his advice, hadn’t kept the rent money safe, had still not cleaned out the back room or taken the child to the dentist.
    It’s so disheartening, but he doesn’t give up. ‘Just have to keep going back and back,’ he said. ‘Takes half a dozen trips sometimes to get the floor scrubbed or a mattress burned, but you have to keep on.’
    ‘Or burn the mattress yourself,’ his wife said. ‘He’s been knownto do that too. And get in there after the dirt. Remember the time we cleaned out those two top rooms in Ely Street? Fifteen bathfuls of it, the Council took away, and the neighbours all went out because of the smell.’
    She laughed, as if she might add: Those were the days. ‘He gets all the gravy, running round in that little car and everyone knowing him and waving, but it’s me he gets to do his dirty work.’
    ‘Half the time,’ he said, ‘when I come home, there’s a child in my bed or a baby being changed on the kitchen table. Comes a bang on the front door and there’s a kid crying or a bundle in a kitbag, sometimes just while they go off for a visit, sometimes for ever. If I’m not here, Jean will take them in. They know that.’
    They have one child, a girl of about ten, who came home from school before we left. She is soft and capable, like her mother, and unflurried, like her father. His name is John. Johnny, his wife calls him. Johnny Jordan. ‘I’ve only one more family to see,’ he said, ‘and it’s a bit of a distance. Would you rather I leave you at the station now?’
    I almost said Yes, because I was full of food, and tea was swilling in me. Although it was not nearly so cold as the last time when I all but perished, it had been raining for days, and I was afraid to surrender the warmth of Jean’s kitchen to the chilly damp of the homes of Mr Jordan’s customers.
    Courage. What is this? I thought you wanted to see and know. One doesn’t crusade so well on a full stomach, but when I said I’d come, Johnny Jordan, who had eaten twice what I had, drove off with me as eagerly as a fasting monk.
    ‘It’s one of those cases,’ he told me in the car, ‘you find them quite often, where only one child is abused. You’d think that if parents were capable of ill-treating one child, they’d do the same with the others.’
    ‘But with dogs,’ I said, ‘there’s sometimes one puppy which gets pushed away from the milk, or the mother rolls on it.’
    ‘Yes, or the father picks it up and takes it away. We had a collie once did that, in our camp, I mean, where I was stationed in Germany. He put it under a hut, that dog did. We reared it with milk on our thumbs, but it was wasted time. When it was grown,we gave it to the Colonel’s wife, and it tore the heart out of a sofa and bit one of her children.’
    ‘Perhaps the father was right.’
    ‘Perhaps. With kids, Miss Bullock—’
    ‘Emma.’
    ‘Yes. With kids, when they pick on just one, as if there was something about that child they couldn’t stand. I was called out once in the middle of the night to a woman who had