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THROUGH THE KITCHEN WINDOW

“Let’s take the bicycles and make a day of it. We’ll head out Loughborough way and get right out in the country.”

“I don’t reckon I’ll ever forget some of it, daren’t tell you what I saw. I’m guilty too lass, why did I come home instead of all them other lads?”

 “Oh my God girl, I am weary. Your old Dad isn’t up for it no more. Better the workhouse than that bloody pit.”

“Art thou mad man! You won’t come to the Goose Fair? Do you know how many fine lasses are there right now, just waiting for us to arrive?”

He was seven when he had first pulled up a chair to stand on and then squeezed in alongside his father so that he could plunge his hands into the hot suds. He loved the smell of the detergent, the heat on his hands, the neat stacks of bright, white plates on the long wooden draining board, the steaming heaps of Sheffield cutlery. When he proved adept and enthusiastic at washing up, his father quickly gave him full possession of the sink and he had kept his place there ever since. He really should have ceded it to someone else many years ago, there were plenty would have been glad of the work, but even when his Dad died, and he became the manager, he kept the evening washing up to himself, the heavy session that cleared everything for the next day. Why? Well because of the window.

“I have always admired you Maeve, I’m not a rich man,, but will you have me? I’ll always be true.”

“In partnership we can beat the lot of them. We can set the price and call the tune. What say you George, this is our big chance.”

“It will be a surprise, a big surprise, we’ll all hide in the dark then jump out when she  comes. We don’t need much, just some beer and lemonade and a few sandwiches”

“Come now, sweet. It will be good, you know you like it. There, there, didn’t I tell yer.”

The window onto his community was a small one. The café was situated on the High Street and its kitchen was in the basement, so that the sash window, set high above the sink, was in a narrow, rectangular brick shaft that only allowed its top eighteen inches to look out onto the pavement. The window and the shaft were protected at pavement level by a waist high cast-iron railing and the part of the café above the window was set back from the rest of the building. This had created a backwater of pavement, a private space where folk could step away from the busy street to talk and lean on the railing.

“Very well, so we don’t go to Scarborough, but there’s plenty of spots where no one will know us.”

“You bloody arse, what did we agree? To go on as normal, and here’s you flashing white fivers like you own the place!”

“Then he says, ‘and what is that to me old chap?’ So it was up and in the canal with him, God we laughed.”

As it was difficult to clean, the window was sometimes dirty and he could barely see the feet of those who enacted out their dramas on the pavement above him. But feet alone could be surprisingly expressive and much could be said by the way that a match was dropped, a bag was placed on the flagstones, or a cigarette butt trodden out. However the brick shaft picked up even a whispered conversation and somehow amplified it, so that someone working at the sink could clearly hear every word, even over the noise from the street. It was better than the picture house and the theatre put together. For it was real, all the vibrant life of his home and his people played out for him on every evening. To him it also had a magical quality, partly because of the strange properties of the window and shaft, but also because one night, when he turned out the light, the moon above the police station opposite had cast a bright beam across the room onto the whitewashed stone wall. It was as if the Goddess looked down through the window into his little kitchen.

“The lad did right well, two good goals in the first ten minutes; they’ve never been thrashed like it.”

“Get you gone Missus, them Jerries wont bomb all the way up here, oh no.”

“If I don’t come back you must find someone else.”

“We all sang together around the piano and our Girty, well what a voice, she had us all in tears.”

“How do you know it is mine lass? I reckon there’s more than me lifted that skirt.”

As a child he had felt no guilt at listening to the secrets of others. He had found it exciting, as it gave him entry to the adult world. Much of it he did not really understand and he was aware that he perhaps trespassed, so he never shared what he heard. As he grew older and had more understanding, this long habit of never telling somehow justified his eavesdropping. He also never used what he came to know and when he served someone in the café who he thought had heard at the window, he was careful never to betray, even in his manner, his sometimes intimate knowledge of their affairs. Sometimes what he heard horrified or created in him a great despair. Then he would wash the dishes and the stained knives and forks more carefully and tears ran down his face as he washed. But whatever was said he always listened, for it became important that he witnessed all that was said. And even if he was desperate to help, he never intervened, for somehow this would have also have been a betrayal.     

“Ma please don’t cry, you mustn’t worry. I’ll talk to our Else, I’m sure between us we can fix it.”

 “I shouldn’t have done it Tom, t’was you I really loved. Now it’s all too late, all that life wasted.”

“And what kind of bloody God would take the soul of a little one like that?”

 “I can’t bear it anymore, I really can’t. This will be the second Christmas they’ve had nothing. You should see their wee faces.”

He washed up for over eighty years. That made for a pile of plates a hundred times as high as Nottingham Castle or maybe as high as the flats they would soon build here in his beloved town. And every plate was someone’s secret or someone’s story.

“If we want to sleep peaceful ever again we must see that he goes to sleep before us, do you get my drift here?”

“Oh, you got to come to bingo, it’s a right laugh, we’ll all be there, it’s good to get away, and aren’t they down the pub every other night?”

“They were brilliant, I screamed and screamed and afterwards they let me in their dressing room. They all signed in my autograph book. Look, it says ‘love to Denise’.”  

“The unions will destroy this country I’m telling you. Equality, don’t give me that, them officials have a damn sight more than the likes of us will ever see.”

“Mum’s new boyfriend said I can have record player for my birthday and we’re off to Spain in August.”

He easily got tired towards the end and could not work for long. With the help of an old customer he brought down an ancient, faded red armchair so that he could rest in the kitchen. He knew the health people from the council would not approve, but they didn’t seem bothered anymore, never even visited. So he would dream and sleep down there with the dishes, drifting off to the memories of old voices, for there were not many now who came to talk at the kitchen window.

“Aye, your right, we’ll not see its like again, all the old family firms have gone, there’s not much moved to that new industrial estate.”

 “Of course this will go, the whole place is going. Every shop and house, they’re bringing in the bulldozers next week.”

“There‘s going to be new flats Elsie, with lifts and all. You’ll be right posh me duck, riding up and down with your shopping.”

He sat and listened as they demolished the terraced houses all around him, drifting and fading away as it was all destroyed. Finally there was only white rubble, like the bones of the old community, with the ribs of roof beams protruding from it. All around the High Street the bulldozers piled it up into long mounds like the walls of an ancient hill fort, leaving him at its centre. When there was no longer a reason to stay, he too finally left.

“Hey me old mate, are you all right in there? Mr Samuels are you all right? Can you hear me?”

 His last customer, finding the café locked and knowing his ways, had crouched down and looking through the kitchen window had seen his body sitting upright in the old armchair. Then, when he was no longer there to guard it, the men and their  machines had turned on the last few shops, the police station and, last of all, the abandoned café.

To provide a foundation for what was to come, they pulled up the wooden floors over the cellars of the terraced houses and filled them with the broken bricks, plaster and stone. As the floor above the kitchen was concrete the cellar with the window escaped this fate. Rubble spilled down the stairs into the kitchen and piled against the side of the armchair, but a hollow place was left beneath the debris like a hidden tomb.

Finally even the cast-iron lampposts were taken away, so all that was left was the road and the wide pavement to mark where so much had occurred. No one walked there, there was no longer anywhere to go, the site was a desert no-one crossed. People re-housed in the flats and so now without gardens buried their pets in the patches of rubble strewn earth and others dumped old sofas and refrigerators onto the landscape of rubble, but they confined themselves to the edges. Only the moon came to the window, still casting at the right time and on the right night, a beam of light across the deserted kitchen onto the wall above the empty armchair.

Of course he returned every night to the kitchen. For all the hatred and all the love, all the living and the dying, the mistakes, the misery, the heartache, the tragedy and the intense, gut clenching happiness that had been played out on the pavement above, was stored away here in the stone, recorded by a process mediated by his spirit and his love. So if some wanderer had gone there, which they did not, they would have seen, down by the pavement, below the level of one’s eye, a tarnished yellow light still shining and perhaps they would have heard the faint whisper of forgotten voices.