Peter was just fifteen and Kay was nearly nine when all this happened. It made a deep impression on both of them, but especially on Peter. For months the crushed shoulders and sunken face of Uncle Waffles haunted his memory, so that it seemed a crime to be happy. He could not bear to enter the stable; he was always expecting to hear a hoarse voice addressing him in a whisper from the loft, calling him a ha’penny marvel or enquiring whether he knew the story of the husband whose wife had black hair. Often in the street he would turn sharply at the sight of some shabby outcast, shuffling through the crowd with bowed head. He would run to the window, hardly daring to own what he expected, when he heard the mournful singing along the Terrace of a group of out-of-works:
“We’ve got no work to do,
We’ve got no work to do;
We’re all thrown out, poor labourin’ men,
And we’ve got no work to do.”
Sooner or later he would recognize, he knew, in one of the tattered singers his Uncle Waffles. Peter was suffering from a suddenly awakened social conscience; he did not know enough to call it that.
It was partly because Barrington had observed and was distressed by his boy’s sadness, that he granted his desire. He granted it to give him a new interest. Peter had always dreamt of a day when he should polish up the tandem tricycle, put Kay on the back seat and ride off with her into the country.
“Well, Peter, I’ll let you do it if you’ll promise to be very careful.”
It was early summer when these splendid adventures commenced. Peter had to do all the work—Kay’s legs were too short to reach the pedals. But what did he care? Just to have his little sister all to himself, London dropping away behind and the world growing greener before him—what more could a boy ask to make him happy?
The tandem trike was a clumsy solid-tired affair—desperately heavy and beyond belief old-fashioned. Peter managed to accomplish six miles an hour on it. The way out, along Green Lanes to Wood Green and up Jolly Butcher’s Hill, would have been full of ignominy for anybody less light-hearted. Kay’s flying hair and plunging legs would have attracted attention had the tricycle been ever so new and handsome.