“And a handsome one too,” I said, because no parent or grandparent, however loco, can resist flattery aimed at their offspring. I asked how old he was and the old man and woman exchanged strangely nervous looks before saying that he was four.
I said that he was a big lad for four, but again the couple’s reaction was all wrong. Alluding to a big healthy child is normally taken as a compliment, but they started to back off in a defensive fashion that is totally familiar to anyone who’s spent five minutes in law enforcement. I couldn’t let them walk away, given who or what I thought the child might be, so I adopted my most positive customer-facing voice.
“Hi,” I said, “I’m with the Metropolitan Police. I wonder—” But I never got to finish, because the woman’s hands flew to her face and the man started shouting, “No, no, no. You can’t have him.”
“Why would I want him?” I asked.
The man and woman stared at each other and I saw the awful realisation that if I hadn’t been suspicious enough to intervene before, I was well and truly over that line now.
The old man seized the boy’s hand and started dragging him back up the path.
“Come on, Chester,” he said. “It’s time for us to go home.”
“But I want to stay with the policeman,” said Chester, showing his age.
“No, no, no,” said the old man. “It’s time for tea.”
The boy was resisting, not yanking his arm back or digging his heels in, but definitely resisting the old man’s pull.
“Allen,” called the old woman. “What are you doing? It’s too late. Allen!” She turned to me and I saw that she was crying, proper old-fashioned stiff upper lip tears. “I suppose we knew this day would happen. I just hoped we would have more time.”
When faced with complex and inexplicable circumstances, a modern police officer will fall back onto one of two basic policing approaches. Option one; call for backup, arrest everyone in the vicinity and sort it out down the nick. Or option two; locate the nearest source of tea, sit everyone down and hope nobody’s carrying a concealed weapon.
I opted for option two, although I did keep an eye on the old man’s walking stick all the way back to their house—just in case. Their names were Allen and Lillian Heywood and they lived in a two-bedroom Edwardian terrace further down the street opposite the community swimming pool and recreation centre. The house was neat and well cared for, but to my eye the Heywoods were losing the battle against the four-year-old agent of entropy who was living with them. There was grime building up in the seams and corners of the hallway and the walls bore a line of gunge at hip level.
The Heywoods might have been aware of this, because they quickly led me through the kitchen, worn but clean, and out into the modest garden at the back. This was well-maintained but strewn with the array of discarded action figures, deflated balls and other forsaken toys that I expected. At the far end was a low fence and, also as I expected, beyond that a metre and a half of grass bank before the course of the River Chess.
Chess insisted on talking my hand and dragging me out to see his river. What had once been a culverted course had been smothered by more of the cultivated reed banks. No doubt all the microorganisms and miniature water life that Bev says are so vital for a healthy river were sucking up nutrients to their hearts’ content before becoming snacks for the next organism in the great chain of life. Although Bev says it’s more of a web, shunting various forms of energy around the ecosystem. Waving the gauntlet of self-organising complexity in the face of entropy itself.
I told Chess that his was a lovely river and in fact quite the nicest river I’d ever seen and, content, he led me back to sit down at the white plastic garden table for tea and explanations.
“We found him two years ago,” said Mrs Heywood. “There was a terrible rainstorm one night and Allen here was worried that the river would flood, so he kept going outside with a torch to check. And then, just after midnight, he comes back into the kitchen with this poor mite here.”
“I found him standing at the end of the garden,” said Mr Heywood. “Totally starkers.”
This had led to rushing him into the house, wrapping him in a blanket and plying him with hot chocolate made with full milk, naturally.
“Naturally,” I said.
Obviously after that they had planned to call the police, honest, only it was such a dreadful night and what with the flooding and the chaos they thought the police might be busy.
“Plenty of time to call them in the morning,” said Allen.
But in the morning there was breakfast to make and clearing the muck off the flooded bit of the garden, which Chess helped with, and the next thing they knew it was evening and the poor little mite had curled up and gone to sleep on the sofa.
“When did you decide to keep him?” I asked.
Lillian paused in the act of offering me a teacake—we were on to tea and cakes by then.
“We didn’t decide,” she said. “Not as such.”
“We more sort of didn’t try to get rid of him,” said Allen.
I took a teacake, as did Chess, who then proceeded try to stuff as much of it into his mouth in one go as he could. The logistics of keeping him were surprisingly easy; they merely told everyone that Chess was a great nephew of theirs and they were looking after him. They let their neighbours assume that something vaguely Daily Mail-ish had happened to the parents—drug addiction, mental breakdown, something like that, and got on with the practical side of raising a lively young boy.
“You couldn’t have got away with something like that in the old days,” said Lillian. “Could you, Allen?”
“No,” said Allen
In the old days everybody in a village like Chesham knew everybody else and everybody knew everybody’s business. Somebody would have asked questions and sooner or later the vicar would have popped around for a “little chat.”
“Likely it would have been that young feller,” said Allen. “The one that went on to be bishop.” This being the 1950s when there were three separate parishes covering Chesham proper—Waterside where Allen and Lillian lived, Latimer and Ashley Green.
“The funny thing is,” said Allen, “that the more people who live here, the less religion there seems to be.”
A certain river goddess of my acquaintance says that the late Victorian church was less than happy to share turf with “pagan” spirits, particularly in urban areas. I looked over at Chess who took that as a cue to show me how wide he could open his mouth to display masticated teacake.
I could understand their point of view.
Lillian and Allen were old Waterside—their families had been living in the area since before the Mills were built. I wondered if there was a connection and I wondered how old Chess was going to have to get before I could ask him.
“We fell into a routine,” said Lillian, although they had wondered how they were going to register Chess for school when the time came. There being a serious absence of birth certificates and other official whatnots.
“We would have loved some help,” said Lillian. “But we didn’t know where to turn.”