Hopjoy Was Here

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Never before had the inbabitants of Beatrice Avenue seen a bath carefully manoeuvred through one of their front doors, carried down the path by four policemen, and hoisted into a black van. Everybody watched, of course; whether from the vantage point of a bedroom window or delicately through parlour lace or with bold and naked curiosity at the gate. A postman was frozen in sidelong contemplation on a doorstep five houses farther up. A butcher’s boy and two window cleaners huddled in temporary comradeship with a rate collector on the opposite kerb and stretched involuntarily in time with the policemen’s efforts as the bath was lifted and eased along the floor of the van. Twenty or more children, mysteriously summoned by their extra-sensory perception of odd goings-on, formed the nearest and most importunate section of the audience. They savoured the affair with the discrimination of experts, comparing it with the fire in Harley Close two months back, last summer’s impaling of the greengrocer’s horse, and the wonderful, blood-chilling entertainment in Gordon Road the previous Easter when Mrs Jackson had gone bonkers and thrown all the portable contents of the house, including a gramophone and two chamber pots, down upon some men from the council.

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