make them open the door. Afterwards the policeman had said: ‘Crazy as they come. You’d better get them out before they do damage.’ This pronouncement from the Law itself, or so Dan and Flo saw it, had confused them; for a time they had believed all they would have to do was to call a policeman and get the couple turned into the street. Meanwhile, they could not go anywhere near the first floor without shouts and imprecations being hurled at them from behind the locked door. Dan went to a lawyer and was told he could not turn them out so easily. It had been decided between them to go to Court and complain the flat was kept in a disgusting condition. Rose, who had actually been inside it, said this was true. It contained a single bed, with stained bedding; a cupboard made of boxes, and a couple of gas rings. Rose said the filth and the smell was so she was nearly sick. But a week before the Court case, Dan lost his temper and threw a flat-iron at the door with all the strength of his enormous arms and shoulders. The door splintered inwards, the old lady brought a counter-claim, and both parties had been bound over to good behaviour in Court.
From that time, they behaved as if they regarded each other as a species of wild animal.
When I said to Flo that such and such an action might have killed the old lady, she replied: ‘Yes, but she threw a saucepan full of boiling potatoes at me the week before. That might have killed me, mightn’t it?’ Or: ‘Well, dear, if I had, she wouldn’t be much loss to the world, would she? She might just as welt be dead for all the good it does her.’
But there had been long spells of comparative peace. Flo would make a point of raising her voice in insulting remarks as she passed their door; the old lady inside would retaliate by shrieking like a parrot. And before Dan went to bed every night he had made a point of climbing up to the room I was now in where he stamped up and down for a good ten minutes. The old lady, if she got the chance, emptied her dustpan or shook her duster down Flo’s stairs. Or she would summon a policeman to say: ‘That bitch is trying to kill me.’ The policeman knew her; and would take down her tale in the book, and then drop down for a cup of tea with Flo. This stale of affairs might continue for weeks. And then everything flared up into open war.
A few months after the binding over, Dan applied to have the couple removed to a lunatic asylum. The old lady had screamed that her tap was broken and it was the landlord’s responsibility, Dan at once went to mend it; he was longing to get his capable hands on to the disorder inside that flat. But he was met with a locked door and silence. Soon there came a lawyer’s letter demanding that he should mend the tap at once, Dan attempted to enter the flat in the presence of the police and failed. He pointed out that no one but a crazy woman would behave like that. At once the old lady attempted to prove he was mad because he would not let them use the lavatory or bathroom, but complained because they emptied their slops into the wash-basin in their room.
The rent collecting was a weekly drama. Every Friday at about six. Dan looked meaningfully at the clock, set his teeth and climbed the stairs, followed by Flo, Aurora and jack, Dan banged on their door and shouted. Silence, He banged again, threatening lawyers, asylums, court cases. Unpredictably, perhaps after five minutes, perhaps after fifty, the door opened an inch, and a handful of silver scattered into the hall, followed by a scream of rage. The door slammed, and continued to shake and vibrate as the old lady hammered on it with both fists and shouted that he must take himself off her premises. Sometimes Dan grinned, shrugged and pointed an ominous forefinger to his head. Sometimes his face swelled purple with anger, and he pounded on the door till he was sobbing with exertion.
Worse than stews and flat-irons was to come, One day Dan was in the yard with Aurora. A heavy ladder rested against the wall near the old couple’s back window, where he had been mending a drainpipe. The old lady leaned out and pushed down the ladder, which missed Aurora by a couple of inches. Dan went mad with rage; he replaced the ladder, bounded up it, and in the space of a few seconds was in the flat, shaking the old lady like a pillow and threatening to kill her. He was checked by the realization that the old man, supposed to be a co-villain with his wife, was seated all this time on the bed reading the newspaper. He did not even raise his eyes at the scuffle. Dan was so astounded that he dropped the old lady on the floor, gazed in a hypnotized way at the old man, and withdrew, shrugging and scratching his head. In the basement he said to Flo: ‘He’s madder than she is. He doesn’t even fight. He just sits there.’
The case went to Court, both sides claiming damages for assault, both being bound over for the second time.
Next, the old lady climbed down the ladder in full view of Flo and shook red pepper over a bed of Flo’s tulips.
Flo said: ‘I told the Judge she put pepper on my tulips once before and he bound us over. It isn’t fair. Dan shouted: Is this British Justice? and the Judge got mad. And the old lady said: We’ll get our rights in a British Court against the dirty foreigners. She meant me, because of my Italian grandmother. You should have seen her face when the Judge told her she was an old nuisance.’
‘He said you were a nuisance, too,’ commented Rose.
‘That was because he didn’t know about the potatoes on the stairs. Do you know — she rolls potatoes down the stairs hoping I’ll slip on them and break my neck. Well, I just pick them up and use them. But it’s not right, dear, is it? You’ll come and be witness for us, won’t you, sweetheart?’
‘But how can I be? I never see or hear them.’
Ah, my Lord, it’s not fair. Dan and me, we’ve been waiting to quarrel until you’re out of the house, and keeping ever so quiet so’s you’re not disturbed, and now you say you haven’t heard them.’
Rose said, speaking loudly as to one deaf: ‘Flo, I’m going to explain something to you. And you must listen careful.’
‘What, dear, what, darling? Why are you shouting at me, sweetheart?’
‘Because I want you to understand. Now there’s this oath, this thing they have in the Courts.’
‘Ah, my Lord, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, I know about
‘Yes? But you’re supposed to tell the truth in Court. That’s what the oath is, just telling the truth.’
‘But, Rose, you’re my friend.’
‘Flo, I’ve told you. I’m going to answer the questions just what I know. And that’s all.’
‘Me, too,’ I said.
‘But there’s no use your coming at all, because you didn’t see the pepper and the potatoes and the stew that missed me by half an inch.’
‘Or that great iron, neither, that Dan threw.’
Flo considered. She said with a sly look: ‘And there’s that policeman, that Froggy, you know about the police, dear, don’t you? And when did they tell the truth in Court?’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ But Rose was beginning to blush.
Flo was delighted, and pressed on: ‘You know as well as everyone else, he was getting fifty, sixty pounds a month along your street, for shutting his mouth about the black market stuff for the restaurants — all that butter? All that eggs and stuff? And I didn’t see Rose running to tell anyone, oh no, you was thinking of marrying him.’
Rose was really distressed. She said to me: ‘Well, now you’ll think bad of me. But you have all those ideas about our police — I’ve heard you, and I didn’t say nothing, because all you foreigners are the same, like my Canadian boy. But the police take this and that on the side, my Froggy wasn’t nothing special.’
‘That’s what I’m saying,’ said Flo, ‘So why should you be so high and mighty about a little fib for a friend in the Courts?’
‘Because I am.’
‘Well, I don’t hold it against you. But when I think of what the lies were that the police said about your little brother so that he got to go to prison.’
‘Flo,’ said Rose, desperate.
‘What’s all this?’ I said.
Flo glanced at me, saw Rose in tears, exclaimed ‘Ah, my Lord, Dan’ll give it to me now,’ and rushed out of the room.
‘I didn’t want you to know, Flo promised not to tell you.’
‘What?’
‘Because you’d think bad of me. Because my little brother’s turned out bad, but he’s the only one of the kids that did.’
‘I don’t see why you should think that.’
‘If you don’t you’ve got funny ideas, but you can’t help it. But now Flo’s told you, I’ll tell you proper. My little brother, he got into trouble — he was fourteen, and he was in with a bad lot of kids. He got into trouble over and
