new, modern and popular monarch on the throne.” Looking over the top of his glasses he asked if he had made himself clear.
“Perfectly, sir,” the two friends had replied in unison.
That morning Julian’s main worry, however, was not politics, bedbugs nor the love life of the king but the welfare of May. She was only a flight of stairs away in the cramped room usually occupied by the landlady’s three daughters but he felt as if an entire terrace of houses might be between them. Julian tried to imagine May wrapped up in his spare, grey-flannel shirt, probably the cleanest garment in the whole place. He smiled at the thought of the sleeves of his shirt enfolding her slim, naked body. Julian shifted his weight in the bed, pushing the sleeping figure that lay beside him clean off the mattress and onto the floor where it just missed toppling a nearly full chamber pot. Without a word the still-drowsy man climbed back into bed and resumed his sleep.
As he had explained to May when he asked her to drive him to Wigan, Julian had hoped that a few days in the North would show him something of the poverty in which, so he had read, a third of Britain’s city dwellers lived. But he was beginning to think it was perhaps not as simple as that.
May’s scepticism had been quite obvious in the car on the way up. “Do you really think you are going to understand what it is like to be poor by walking around a few streets and seeing a bit of dirt?” she had asked him.
“Well, it’s a start isn’t it?” he had replied, taken aback by her implicit criticism.
“You may think so,” she said with a shake of her head. “But from what I see of being poor in Bethnal Green it will take a lifetime to really understand what it means to go without. I should introduce you to our neighbours there. Ten children crammed into two bedrooms with the parents sharing the settee downstairs, and the mother wondering every morning which half of the family she is going to be able to give any tea to that day. Mind you it’s not all gloom. On the contrary. I think you would be surprised by how people keep up their spirits. On our plantation we had to lay off people when orders dwindled or the rains had failed to nourish the sugarcane. But they rarely complained. ‘God will provide,’ they used to say. That’s the mistake some people make, I think. They forget ‘the poor’ are not just some statistic to cause concern to well-off do-gooders, charities and the government.”
Julian had not answered. A memory of something his mother had told him years ago had returned to him with a thump of guilt. He had not forgotten a single detail of the story she had recounted more with amusement than pride. Before the war Mrs. Richardson had travelled down south from her home in Yorkshire to visit a school friend whose wealthy parents lived in London. To fill in the long aimless periods between one evening party and the next the two young women had on a couple of occasions ventured in the family carriage into the East End. Two large wicker baskets containing thermoses of hearty carrot soup had been packed into the back of the carriage by the butler. For several hours the two friends had taken up their positions in a small room in the Bethnal Green town hall and distributed soup to the hungry and destitute of the area.
“I think the women appreciated us coming,” she said, “though I certainly never considered slumming as my vocation. Nasty dirty work. Smelly too!”
“Slumming?”
“Yes, slumming. That’s what we called it. Good description, don’t you think?”
Appalled as Julian was by the memory of the smug superiority of his mother’s tone of voice, a tiny suspicion that he might be about to embark on a variation of the same sort of behaviour occurred to him. He dismissed the thought. The visit to Wigan was surely to be one of genuine information gathering, not the action of a self-satisfied hypocrite like his mother. He had Sir Philip to thank for making the trip possible.
“Excellent idea, my dear chap. I would like to hear your report. And what a good opportunity to give Rupert’s car its inaugural outing,” Sir Philip had said with a smile at once regretful and grateful.