Tamar Street, by Gerald Pascoe
An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.
Tamar Street had been forty houses long before the war. By the spring of 1949 it was one house long, and Miss Hosking could see it from the top of the hill: a single grey terrace end standing up out of the cleared ground like the last tooth in an old man’s mouth. All around it the bulldozers had scraped the rubble flat, and pegs with white string marked out where the new estate would go.
She was twenty-four and had a diploma in town planning and a folder with three letters in it, all addressed to Mr W. Jago, all unanswered. The fourth letter, which she carried in her handbag, was the compulsory purchase order.
He was on his front step, on his knees, polishing the brass letterbox of a door that had hardly any house left behind it. He was seventy-four and wore a collar and tie to do it.
‘You’ll be the young lady from the council,’ he said, without getting up. ‘You’ve got a kind face. They always send the ones with kind faces.’
She explained the scheme to him, as she had explained it at public meetings: the new homes with bathrooms and hot water, the playgrounds, the wide road where the slums had been. He listened politely, rubbing at the letterbox with his rag, and when she had finished he said, ‘Slums,’ as if trying out a foreign word.
‘It isn’t personal, Mr Jago.’
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘It wouldn’t be. Not from up there.’ He nodded towards the hill and the council offices beyond it. Then he stood up, slowly, one hand on his knee, and showed her the house.
There was not much to show. The front room was sound. The back of the house had gone, and a tarpaulin was nailed where the kitchen wall should have been, and it moved in the wind like something breathing. On the mantelpiece there was a photograph of a woman in a cloche hat and a clock that had stopped at twenty past nine.
‘March the twenty-first, 1941,’ he said, seeing her look. ‘Night, not morning. I’ve never been able to wind it since.’ He said it the way he might have told her the price of coal.
Miss Hosking had a speech for this, too. She found she could not make it.
‘I’ve been very stubborn,’ Mr Jago said. ‘I know that. You can put it in your report. Stubborn old man holding up progress.’ He took the order from her, read it through properly, every word, and signed it against the wall with her fountain pen. ‘I only wanted to be the one to decide. Not to be decided about. You understand.’
She did not trust herself to say whether she did.
At the gate he stopped her. He went back into the front room and came out with the street sign, the blue enamel plate that had been screwed to his end wall since before he was born, chipped at one corner, with the name in white capitals. He had wrapped it in a sheet of the Western Morning News.
‘For the new estate,’ he said. ‘It will want a name. It might as well have the one it had before.’
She carried it up the hill in both arms, like a baby, and when she turned at the top he was standing in his doorway in his collar and tie. He locked the door behind him, though there was nothing left to take, and then he bent and put the key under the mat, as if somebody might still be coming home.
“Mr Jago is presented as a stubborn old man who stands in the way of progress.”
To what extent do you agree with this view?
You should write about:
You must refer to the language used in the text to support your answer.