Paradise Court Read Free Page B

almost went under from grief, but his own sister, Florrie, stepped in. She pulled things together, and brought up the children while he worked on behind the bar, steadily serving the drinkers of Duke Street and Paradise Court.
    Business never slackened and time lessened the hurt, though it never entirely healed the wound. After Pattie’s death a strange thing happened to Duke. As if angry with her for dying, he turned to disliking all women. A mild, slightly amused distrust of their fussy, gossipy ways developed, and he could never rid himself of thesuspicion that a woman would, given half the chance, worm her way under your skin and into your affections, where she would not be welcome. There was no place there except for Pattie; Duke was adamant about that. It meant he even kept his own daughters half at bay, as if Frances, Hettie, Jess and Sadie would insinuate themselves and coax and steal away a little part of his heart.
    Now with Sadie aged fifteen, the rest were practically off his hands. Frances held down her steady job at Boots the Chemist, Hettie had found herself a good life and income treading the boards. Jess was comfortably in service over in Hackney. Robert used a mixture of brain and brawn to pick up any well-paid work that was going in the docks. And Ernie, poor Ernie was at least happy in his own way. All in all, Duke felt that his motherless family had managed to stay on top.
    As for himself, he still cut a fine figure. Nearly sixty, respected up and down Duke Street, and in the court, life dealt him little blows, it was true. But nothing serious, nothing he couldn’t manage to shrug off.
    Now he looked balefully over the top of the shelf he was wiping down as Annie Wiggin marched through the swing doors. Annie was one of life’s little blows.
    She came up to the bar in her scuffed, unlaced boots and rapped her jug down. Steadily Duke wrung out the rag he was using. Rattle, rattle went Annie’s earthenware jug. ‘Ain’t no one round here got a pint of porter?’ she demanded. She rested her elbows on the bar. ‘As if my money’s not as good as the next man’s!’ she declared.
    Arthur Ogden shuffled a yard or two further down the bar. Annie’s sharp tongue was to be avoided. A couple of other young drinkers looked on in casual amusement.
    â€˜Men!’ Annie proclaimed again. ‘All the bleeding same! All over you when they want something from you! Like bleeding December any other time! Freeze to bleeding death standing waiting for any of them! Here, ain’t no one going to serve a person!’
    Every tea-time Annie shuffled down Paradise Court in her lost husband’s cast-off boots. They were the only things he left behindwhen he went, telling her he was off to sea on another trip and would be back in two weeks. Two weeks soon stretched to two months, and still the old boots dried and curled at the hearthside. After two years to the day, Annie declared him lost at sea and began a life of her own running a haberdashery stall at the local market. She bought and sold vast yards of virginal white lace, bags of beaded, pearled and silvery buttons that sat in their boxes like buried treasure. Her stall was decked with blue and white and cherry-red ribbons, and it was stocked with hooks, needles, pins, scissors and skewers like a miniature torture chamber. And yet Annie herself trudged everywhere in her faithless husband’s boots. ‘I fell in the cart good and proper marrying him,’ she would grumble. ‘Still, it’s a gamble you have to take.’ And so life went on.
    As she stood and rattled her jug in Duke’s deaf ears, Hettie swept downstairs and into the pub, on her way out to the evening show. She gave Annie a smile and tutted at her father. ‘Here, Annie, pass us your jug,’ she volunteered. ‘I’ll fix you up.’
    â€˜And tell your dad from me he’s too slow to catch bleeding cold,’ Annie