Open Writing

Feeling stifled as he crossed the room, he saw wet washing drying all round the kitchen; on the big wooden clothes horse near the fire, over the backs of kitchen chairs, and on the ends of the big black fireguard. A doubled sheet hanging on an improvised line on the landing outside had prepared him for the scene that was usual on a wet washing day. He knew there was no alternative living in the upstairs flat, and they could not afford to light a second fire in the front room.

He had been up to Rosebery Avenue on the tram that morning to sign on, and had walked back through the murky streets to save the fare.

Kit was out shopping, with Eileen in the pushchair. He would wait for a cup of tea until they came back and they would have it together. The memory of his morning mug of tea with the other men in the small cafe in Clerkenwell Road, reminded him how dejected they had all looked. The shortage of work in the early years of the ‘twenties was getting every-one down. The friendly Italian couple who ran the cafe, concerned for their customers who were down on their luck, sometimes allowed credit, and they had been good to him.

Reaching down for his old brown leatherette slippers, warming on a corner of the steel fender, he unlaced his boots. He placed them on a folded newspaper to dry, being careful not to cause rust by letting any wet near the polished steel. He would need his boots again that evening when he went back into London. He might get a night’s work on the “Mirror” or “Herald”. He had been lucky last Saturday when he was called for a night’s packing on “The Dispatch”. Being a Sunday paper it paid well.

He sat nearer to the low fire and dared to move the clothes-horse back a bit, looking into the glowing coals, rubbing his eyes which were smarting a bit from the foggy weather.

He wrinkled his forehead, and scratching behind one ear, he began to see in his mind’s eye cold wet days in France and the putrid mud of the trenches. He told himself he was lucky to be alive and here with only the smell of wet washing.

He heard the key go in the front door and the sound of the pushchair being lifted up over the high step into the passage; the sound of its wet gritty wheels sticking to the lino as Kit pushed it along to the bottom of the stairs.

Leaving the chair by the fire he stood up. From the dresser shelf he reached down the small tin of Kit’s Singer Sewing Machine Oil, and from a drawer took the flat sharpening stone in its old cardboard box. From under the flattened chair cushion he took another piece of old newspaper, and sitting down, spread it on the kitchen table.

From his jacket pocket he took his old packing knife to sharpen, ready for the job he was in hopes of getting tonight in a Fetter Lane warehouse or up Long Acre, where he would be parcelling up stacks of newspapers, tied in string, ready to be taken in the paper vans to the big London stations, for delivery next morning in all parts of the country.

Well, he thought, Spring must surely come, eventually, and once more the washing hung to dry in the tiny backyard below.