latter days of Mr Jones, The

Spectator, The, Dec 13-Dec 20, 2003 by Gardam, Jane

The last of his tribe, the last of his kind, Mr Jones walked each day from his house next to the church up to the Common as he had done for perhaps 50 years. He was well over 80, upright, amiable, a military-looking man with the old soldier's legacy of highly polished shoes. He walked, had always walked, with a couple of dogs held taut on a single lead: Yeoman and Farmer. They had tails that curled briskly over their backs, and optimistic eyes. It was said that if Mr Jones had had a tail and the dogs well-polished shoes, they would have made triplets. Alas. The last of the Yeomen and Farmers -the dogs had always had the same names - were now gone. They had become too much for Mr Jones and pulled him over now and then. He had had a fall by the pond. When the time came for the last couple to go Mr Jones did not replace them. And he now strode forth with glazed eyes, brandishing only a walking stick. Some of his less sensitive neighbours stopped him to ask, 'No dogs, Mr Jones?' and he would stare them out and say, 'No, I'm afraid not' and talk about the weather, which was one of his few topics.

When he reached the pond on the Common, Mr Jones always sat down on a long green seat. In one of the houses that stood on the edge of the Common there had been an infant school ever since he was a boy, and twice a day, even now, at break-times its big door opened to disgorge children who all made for the pond with a particular kind of shrill and shouting music. This they kept up steadily for half an hour. 'Mr Jones, Mr Jones - how's Yeoman? How's Farmer?' They danced facetiously in front of him and crept up from behind the seat to pretend to throttle him. They quarrelled about who should climb on his knee and stroke his white moustache. When they became really tiresome a teacher came blowing her whistle in short, sharp blasts to say, 'That'll do. Stop it. Don't be unkind to Mr Jones.'

But he was the mildest of men and seemed unaware of anything the children did to him. He said little and drew back beneath his beetle brows and stared across the Common at things the children had never seen, and would never see.

Mr Jones was odd.

He lived in the house where he had been born, and his mother before him, in a road of Victorian mansions in a beautiful London suburb on a hill. He had been the youngest of a big family, all now dead. He had been 'educated at home' though the other Joneses had gone away to school. There were dim photographs in family albums of all the children gathered round Mr Jones in his pram, two uniformed nursemaids in attendance. Bonneted Mr Jones had watched the others flinging sticks into the pond, pushing each other over, falling in, yelling, bursting into tears, spitting and being smacked and then everyone laughing again. The winter when Mr Jones had taken his first tottery steps, bending with mittened hands to try and pick up snow, he still remembered. The setting sun balanced orange on the edge of the Common, sending immense shadows through the trunks of the pines, had seemed to hesitate, trying to hold on to the last of the winter day.

Orange, black and white, Mr Jones remembered. Orange sun, the glossy blanket of snow and, in the hollows at his feet in their little buttoned boots, black needles of grass pricking up through crisp rime. They were only glimpses now, but very vivid, and the light of his life.

Now, children wore jeans and hunkish white sand-shoes at all seasons, or they were in tracksuits and he could not tell if they were boys or girls. They were all very fat, and always eating. Nobody was shy and they made fun of the elderly. Sometimes when they came crawling round him and the dogs, he felt like reprimanding them, but he'd never had the knack of command. He had been less than three months in the army though this was not generally known -because he could not obey orders at any speed, and his commanding officer had sent for him one day to say that they felt that he would be happier as a civilian. A courteous man. He had known Mr Jones's father. So Mr Jones did only fire-watching duties through the second world war and helped his mother in the way that sisters had once been expected to do. Mr Jones's sisters had long left home to be New Women. They had cut off their hair. One had become a suffragette.

Mr Jones's mother had adored her youngest child from the start. 'My Baby Jones,' she said each time they brought him home from the Common, lifting him from the pram and kissing him. 'You aren't quite like other people but you're a beloved son all the same.' Until he was a young man, she had read to him from the shelves of children's books in the schoolroom that had been in the family for generations. There was a first edition of Alice.

The whole house was much the same now as then. His grandparents would recognise it. As they almost would have recognised the whole road, although the road had had its ups and downs.

There were, for example, no households now in the road with five or six indoor servants, no tradesmen coming to take grocery orders twice a week. In 1940 the houses had passed into the pallor of wartime and in 1941 two of them had been bombed to rubble. Then squatters had arrived. Then squatters were flung out. The high rooms were partitioned with plywood into tenements. Then in the Seventies one by one the houses began to be bought up, and restored. Then more than restored, with every feature replaced at great expense. Cellars became underground garages with overhead doors that opened magically before their owners had reached the bottom of the hill. Gardens became paved with pastel stone set round a single palm tree. Serpentine box-bushes flanked each front door. The two bombed, rebuilt houses were now indistinguishable.