Winner of the open short story competition
London Virgin
by
James Ward

I saw my picture in The Big Issue, yeah. Me. About a week ago. Beneath the heading, ‘Have you seen this woman?’ Not very good, rather fuzzy. Speaks volumes that they couldn’t find one decent photo of me. According to the blurb underneath, my daughters are ‘distraught’.

That makes me laugh, that does. ‘Distraught’? Oh, chance would be a fine thing!

Let me introduce myself. Hetty Mitchell. My friends used to call me ‘Hetty Wainthrop’ after the television PD, Hetty Wainthrop Investigates. And as a joke, presumably, because Hetty Wainthrop was interesting in ways I wasn’t. That is, in just about every way. I’m seventy-two now, a widow. I’m short, with cropped grey hair. I generally wear a hat made of peacock feathers, and whatever else I can kit myself out in from the Salvation Army or Oxfam or car-boot sales. In those days, I liked to wear Scholl sandals and polyester top-and-trouser combinations in pastel colours from places like Primark.

And I’d never been to London.

“You’ve never been to London?” my daughter gasped incredulously one dreary June afternoon, the day of my birthday party. And suddenly, for the first time in my life, I was mildly interesting to her. She told everyone in the room. She couldn’t get round quick enough, tottering like an idiot on her too-high heels and her fat arse. Guess what, everyone: the mater’s a country bumpkin!

That was my seventieth. I didn’t throw the party. That was my daughters’ idea. A golden opportunity for them to tart themselves up and show how caring they are. Amazingly, neither of them knew I’d never been to London. You’d think they would have, them being so considerate of me.

So they bought me a ticket. …

Two days later, I was standing alone on the station platform, green toque on my head like an upturned jam jar, looking down at the railway lines like a latter-day Anna Karenina. A bolt of electricity – that’s what it felt like – shot through my body as the tannoy announced, “The next train to arrive at Platform Three will be the 13.35 for London Victoria, calling at …”

The platform began to fill up, people with briefcases sliding purposefully into what looked like reserved positions, riding their cuffs up to peep at their watches or talking on their mobiles or both. It was a hair-grey morning, a bit cold considering it was summer. I was clutching my Travelcard, even though I’d been told the ticket inspector didn’t normally come round till halfway along. I’d got a flask of coffee and some ham sandwiches in a travel-bag.

It’s not that I wasn’t a traveller. I was – a bit. I’d been to France via Southampton, and Germany via Newcastle airport. Just not to London. I definitely wasn’t a country bumpkin.
Suddenly, my youngest appeared at the far end of the platform, waving flamboyantly. So she’d be the one who’d drawn the short straw. - Oh, they wouldn’t both have come, that would have been too much to ask.

Lavinia is short (she takes after me in that respect), trapped in a skirt-suit and a trendy hairstyle, slightly crooked teeth and three marriages behind her.

“Have a really good time!” she gushed, air-kissing me for the benefit of everyone else on the platform. This is my elderly mother, I’m a wonderful daughter, the old biddy just worships me. “Have you everything you need for the journey?”

“I’ve got a pack of ham sandwiches and a flask.”

“Ham sandwiches and a flask! That’s lovely!”

She hadn’t bought me anything, the cow. Frankly, I wouldn’t have minded one of those Cornish pasties she bought me last Christmas. But it would have been utterly incredible if she’d done that.

Bloody hell, a four-pack of Cornish pasties for Christmas. For Christmas, I ask you! The use by date was the twenty-seventh. Christmas day, I have a big lunch in the Church Hall with the vicar and all the other losers, so I wasn’t going to eat one then. That leaves just two days. Two days to eat four pasties - because they weren’t freezable!

Back a bit. Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest the vicar was a loser. To have your lunch with a bunch of people like me when you’ve got a lovely wife and two kids at home, that’s the opposite of a loser. He’s a saint, that man. And her. Not a bit like my two fat trollops. Won’t hear a word against the vicar, no.

But use by the twenty-seventh? It nearly bloody killed me, that. Four pasties in two days.

There ought to be a law against it. And she didn’t give me anything when I was going to London that day, the bloody fat shite. Ham sandwiches and a flask. That’s lovely. Right.
I was on the train for about two hours. I wasn’t going business class and I didn’t manage to get a window seat, so I was next to the aisle. People kept pushing past and falling onto me slightly. On the other side, the tinted windows made everything look maudlin. (I hate that, tinted windows.) Mostly fields outside. Then the sun came out and it started getting warm. The occasional glimpse of the wrong bit of a town – why do railway stations always seem to be in the wrong bits of a town? Then trees. Birches, oaks and pines, birches-oaks-and-pines, duddle-de-duh, duddle-de-duh, parp!

I made the mistake of not bringing a Woman’s Own, so I just had to sit there and think.

And it didn’t take me long to think I was doing this for them. I was doing it so they’d – one – be able to tell themselves they’d done something for me and – two – be able to tell everyone it was all right: since the mortifying occasion of the party, they’d helped their mother lose her London virginity.

Ironically, it was actually a Virgin train I was on!

But not for long. When we were still about an hour from London, the train pulled to a halt in this place called ‘Adlestrop’. I don’t remember much about it now. Only the name.

Anyway, we seemed to be there for quite some time, maybe a change of carriages or something. And I got out on the bare platform. Baking hot it was. Proper late June weather, for once.

Five minutes later, I watched my train pull away and I thought, What now? Suddenly, I realised: what I’d just done made me a hell of a lot more interesting than any poxy day-trip to London ever could. All I had to do was follow my nose, see where I ended up. And I knew I wasn’t going back home, oh no, not ever. I didn’t want to be Hetty Wainthrop any more. I wanted to be me. Maybe I was having some sort of breakdown or something. Probably was, thinking back.

I walked straight through Adlestrop without stopping. Until I came to the first big town. Oxford, I later discovered it was – I must have missed the signpost on the way in. That night, I slept rough on the streets. And the next night. As I’ve said; it was summer, so it wasn’t too cold out there. And I certainly didn’t starve: people kept stopping to give me food, or, money. (Still some nice people about, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.)

Eventually, a policeman came along and asked me a few questions – which I pretended not to know the answer to – and pointed me in the direction of a shelter for the homeless.
It wasn’t easy. Especially the first few months. It’s never easy on the streets, I knew that already. But I was determined to stick it out. And eventually, I made some friends. All from living at the shelter. We tended to hang out together at night first, then we started going round together in the daytime, meeting up in various familiar places – Christ Church Meadow, Magdalen Bridge, Paradise Square - until we became a proper little ‘crew’, to use the modern word.

Who are they, these friends of mine? Well, first there’s Harry: about twenty-five, thin black beard, dark skin, hollow cheeks, dresses and smells like Worzel Gummidge. Then, Kathleen, an Irish girl: broad white face, smile like a turnip-lantern but pretty, a champion arm-wrestler. (Harry and Kathleen are a couple.) Then there’s Peter, an ex-accountant who lost both his wife and his home in the same year: always sombre, likes everything properly thought through, still dresses like a suburbanite, turtle-neck jumpers and loafers; fourthly, there’s a teenager called Sammy – my adopted granddaughter, that’s the joke: skinny-Jim, likes a drink and a bet, long fingers and toes like claws, snub nose, long straggly hair. And finally there’s Peter’s dog, a black and white mongrel called Biscuit – cross between a Border Terrier and an Alsatian by the looks of him, our guardian angel.

They’re musicians. The dog excepted! I had to learn to play a tambourine so I’d fit in. Which is harder than you’d think. You see, Peter’s the leader, and he’s a violinist. Concert standard, I’d say, though I’m not an expert. Harry plays a tin whistle, Kathleen’s a guitarist, Sammy plays the bongos and sings. And I whack the tambourine to buggery.
Some days we make enough for a day out, middle-class style – with every little luxury thrown in. Of course, we tend to spend what we get when we get it. Banks don’t exist in our world. We’ve got pockets, that’s all. The Grand old Duke of York, he had ten thousand men. When they’re full they’re full, and when they’re empty they’re empty.

It was when we all went to the pop festival at Glastonbury together that they gave me my nickname. For reasons unknown, Harry had made me a hat out of peacock feathers and, when he presented me with it one evening, I was so overcome – a two-litre bottle of Blackthorn Dry may have had something to do with that - that I promised to wear it forever, or at least until it wore out. And that’s when they started calling me ‘Mrs Peacock’. I came to forget I’d ever been called Hetty Mitchell, let alone Hetty Wainthrop.

Mrs Peacock, that’s me.

That was one great excursion. The second came just a few months later. About a year after we first started going around together, they too learned that I’d never been to London. So we walked there together, across country, carrying our instruments. Simple as that. No fuss, no air-kisses, a proper family outing. I’m seventy-two now; I was seventy-one, then, but I did it. Thanks be to God, I did it.

And it felt surprisingly good, losing my London virginity.

© James Ward 2008

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James Ward was born in Middlesbrough in 1961. He is a secondary school teacher by profession, and teaches Religious Studies at an all-girls school in Tunbridge Wells. James has a Masters Degree and a DPhil, both in Philosophy. He is married with two grown-up children.
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