Mother recognized her at once, an old friend of her vaudeville days.
I was so embarrassed that I moved on and waited for Mother at the corner. The boys walked past me, smirking and giggling. I was furious. I turned to see what was happening to Mother and, lo, the derelict woman had joined her and both were walking towards me.
Said Mother: ‘You remember little Charlie?’
‘Do I!’ said the woman, dolefully. ‘I’ve held him in my arms many a time when he was a baby.’
The thought was repellent, for the woman looked so filthy and loathsome. And as we walked along, it was embarrassing to see people turn and look at the three of us.
Mother had known her in vaudeville as ‘the Dashing Eva Lestock’ she was pretty and vivacious then, so Mother told me. The woman said that she had been ill in the hospital, and that since leaving it, she had been sleeping under arches and in Salvation Army shelters.
First Mother sent her to the public baths, then to my horror brought her home to our small garret. Whether it was illness alone that was the cause of her present circumstances, I never knew. What was outrageous was that she slept in Sydney’s armchair bed. However, Mother gave her what clothes she could spare and loaned her a couple of bob. After three days she departed, and that was the last we ever saw or heard of ‘the Dashing Eva Lestock ’!
*
Before Father died, Mother moved from Pownall Terrace and rented a room at the house of Mrs Taylor, a friend of Mother’s, a church member and devoted Christian. She was a short, square-framed woman in her middle fifties with a square jaw and a sallow, wrinkled face. While watching her in church I discovered she had false teeth. They would drop from her upper gums on to her tongue while she sang – the effect was hypnotic.
She had an emphatic manner and abundant energy. She had taken Mother under her Christian wing, and had rented her a front room, at a very reasonable rent, on the second floor of her large house which was next to a graveyard.
Her husband, a facsimile of Dickens’s Mr Pickwick, was a precision ruler maker and had his workshop on the top floor. The roof had a skylight and I thought the place heavenly, it was so peaceful there. I often watched Mr Taylor at work, fascinated as he peered intensely through his thick-lensed spectacles with a large magnifying glass, making a steel ruler that would measure one-fiftieth part of an inch. He worked alone and I often ran errands for him.
Mrs Taylor’s one desire was to convert her husband, who, according to her Christian scruples, was a sinner. Her daughter, whose features were of the same cast as the mother’s except that she was less sallow and, of course, much younger, would have been attractive but for her hauteur and objectionable manner. Like her father, she never attended church. But Mrs Taylor never gave up hope of converting them both. The daughter was the apple of her mother’s eye – but not of my mother’s eye.
One afternoon, while on the top floor watching Mr Taylor at work, I heard an altercation below between Mother and Miss Taylor. Mrs Taylor was out. I do not know how it started, but they were both shouting loudly at each other. As I reached our landing, Mother was leaning over the banisters: ‘Who do you think you are? Lady Shit?’
‘Oh!’ shouted the daughter. ‘That’s nice language coming from a Christian!’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Mother quickly, ‘it’s in the Bible, my dear: Deuteronomy, twenty-eighth chapter, thirty-seventh verse, only there’s another word for it. However, shit will suit you.’
After that, we moved back to Pownall Terrace.
*
The Three Stags in the Kennington Road was not a place my father frequented, yet as I passed it one evening an urge prompted me to peek inside to see if he was there. I opened the saloon door just a few inches, and there he was, sitting in the corner! I was about to leave, but his face lit up and he beckoned me to him. I was surprised at such a welcome, for he was never demonstrative. He looked very ill; his eyes were sunken, and his body had swollen to an enormous size. He rested one hand, Napoleon-like, in his waistcoat as if to ease his difficult breathing. That evening he was most solicitous, inquiring after Mother and Sydney, and before I left took me in his arms and for the first time kissed me. That was the last time I saw him alive.
Three weeks later, he was taken to St Thomas’s Hospital. They had to get him drunk to get him there. When he realized where he was, he fought wildly – but he was a dying man. Though still very young, only thirty-seven, he was dying of dropsy. They tapped sixteen quarts of liquid from his knee.
Mother went several times to see him and was always saddened by the visit. She said he spoke of wanting to go back to her and start life anew in Africa. When I brightened at such a prospect, Mother shook her head, for she knew better. ‘He was saying that only to be nice,’ she said.
One day she came home from the hospital indignant over what the Reverend John McNeil, Evangelist, had said when he paid Father a visit: ‘Well, Charlie, when I look at you, I can only think of the old proverb: “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap”.’
‘Nice words to console a dying man,’ said Mother. A few days later Father was dead.
The hospital wanted to know who would bury him. Mother, not having a penny, suggested the Variety Artists’ Benevolent Fund, a theatrical charity organization. This caused an uproar with the Chaplin side of the family – the humiliation of being buried by charity was repugnant to them. An Uncle Albert from Africa,
