‘I’m not an African, Johnny. You can’t treat me like I’m a household slave.’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Come, Montgomery,’ he said. ‘This woman troubles me with her yap, yap, chatter, chatter, chatter.’
Muriel clutched his arm. ‘But don’t you want your dinner, Johnny? It’s all cooked.’
‘I have had chicken. Hamilton, wake up! We leave this sad East End to go up west.’
But Hamilton kept snoring, and Muriel wept again into the steaming pot as we went out.
4
Coloured invasion of the Sphere
Montgomery and me left Mr Peter Paul at the Aldgate station, and started the long bus ride through the City to the west. I chose the special seat which bus constructors made for those who smoke hemp (I mean the private seat, top floor at rear, which nobody can overlook), and there, while Montgomery grew more nervous, I folded up little saleable packets of my weed. ‘I must kick my heel free of this miserable life,’ I told Montgomery. ‘I must climb back again into prosperity.’
‘You might marry a fat African lady whose father owns acres of groundnuts,’ he said to me.
‘Oh, I could do that, perhaps, you know. But I want to go back home well loaded from this city …’ I folded a little packet and said to him, ‘Has Miss Theodora money?’
I saw he didn’t approve of this request of information, though a natural one, I thought, among two men.
‘She’s only her salary, I think,’ he told me. ‘But you mustn’t play about with Theodora’s feelings.’
‘Why not? She likes me – no?’
‘And you her?’
‘I could do, if it should prove necessary …’
‘I’d rather you ran a whore, like Billy, than do that. Business and no pretences …’
What did my nice English friend know about that kind of life? ‘I may come to do just that,’ I said to him.
‘I hope you don’t mean it …’
‘This Dorothy pursues me some time now. Pestering and giving me no peace at all. She wishes to leave Billy, and for me to take possession.’
‘From what I can understand,’ Montgomery said, ‘it’s the woman who takes possession of the man. She can sell him down the river any day she likes.’
Well, that was true enough from all I know of how those bad boys live – trembling, however brave, at every knock of the front door, and so afraid of the loot their women give them that they throw it all away in gamble-houses as soon as they’ve snatched it from her handbag. ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, ‘these whores are always masters of their ponces. One word to the Law, and the lucky boy’s inside.’
Montgomery sat looking sad, like the Reverend Simpson. ‘I don’t like to think of you in that miserable world,’ he said.
I smiled, and patted on his anxious back. ‘No real ill luck can come to me, Montgomery,’ I told him. ‘Look!’ And I opened my tieless shirt and showed him the wonderful little blue marks tattooed upon my skin by Mum’s old aunt, who knows the proper magic, and also the mission school badge I wear around my neck upon its chain. ‘These will protect me always,’ I explained.
‘You believe that, Johnny?’
‘So long as I believe it,’ I said to him, ‘they will protect me.’
Though it was well after morning opening time when we reached the Moorhen public house, we were surprised to find it absent of any Spade. ‘There must have been some raid,’ I told Montgomery. But no. A strange old Jumble man he knew, who looked at me as if I wasn’t there, said all my race had left the pub and moved to another further down the road, one called the Sphere.
‘But why have they gone?’ Montgomery asked him.
‘Because they’ve shut the dance hall opposite – and high time too.’
‘The Cosmopolitan? Why did they do that?’ I asked.
‘Moral degeneracy,’ the old man said fiercely at me. ‘Didn’t you read it in your Sunday paper?’
‘Good heavens!’ I cried out. ‘Have these Jumbles no mercy on our enjoyment?’
‘This place is improved out of all recognition now,’ the nasty old man informed us.
Dismal, dark, dreary, almost empty, I suppose that was improvement to his eyes.
We found that this Sphere was a small pub divided into more segregated sections than is usual even in these English drinking dens. Boys flitted in and out from one box to the other, and the publican, I could see, was not used to our African habit, which is to treat such places like a club, with