Patrick Parker's Progress

by Mavis Cheek

  Patrick noticed that Little Audrey's mother was very different with her daughter from the way Patrick's mother was with him. Dolly quite often told her little girl not to bother her, to go and play in the yard and to find something to do. Patrick's mother never said any of those things. If he was ever at a loss, she was always there to talk or amuse or suggest. And she still liked to sit him on her lap, which Little Audrey's mother very seldom accommodated, calling her daughter - though she smiled as she said it - a big fat lump and too big to be carried. Unless she was that universally invoked word 'tired' - she had a scream on her if she wanted to - she toddled off quite unconcerned. Dolly also said quite often, 'You're a big girl now and I'm busy.' Patrick - when he was called a big boy - knew it was always an invitation to stay and be praised. There were, it seemed, different ways to be and different degrees of importance. Some children were not as important as he was and this fitted in with his experience quite perfectly.

  The other difference he noticed was the difference in attitude between his mother and himself, and his mother and his father. They never touched, hardly spoke unless it was a question: Do you want tea, fish for supper, an egg? Is the rubbish out? Have you seen the paper? And sometimes Florence would listen to her husband and then, behind his back, turn to Patrick and roll her eyes and grimace. It seemed to him it was the way things were when you got older. ‘I will never grow up,' he said to Florence, putting his arms around her neck one night after a particularly exhilarating, if confusing, eye rolling. She hugged him back as if that were the right answer to some silent question.

  If he was lucky, if the crossness that Florence felt on account of this 'It' thing that his father went across town for made her truly irate, he might wheedle the odd hint or image of what it was. He imagined a place made of cotton wool in which a creature called Lilly-Her-That-One, gave presents to his father and offered him pleasure with no thought for anyone else ... To Patrick this was really intriguing. Like Santa's Grotto at Webb's.

  'Perhaps if you gave my dad some presents with no thought for anyone else he wouldn't go halfway across town to Lilly-Her-That-One for them?' he said.

  Florence looked at him with a new expression on her face, which was a mixture of anger and fear, and it was then she decided that enough was enough.

  When his father came home on that Wednesday evening, Patrick was waiting for him.

  'Where is your present?' he asked.

  George stared at him.

  'From Lilly-Her-That-One?'

  'You see,' hissed Florence. 'You see?'

  George never went for a Wednesday afternoon again. He told Lilly, by letter, that it was for the boy's sake, and for the respectability of his wife and the community. Lilly tore it up into tiny little pieces and did not reply. She knew that it was not what he wanted, that the sanctimonious tone was not his but his wife's. What she did not know was that what he really wanted to write but which was buried somewhere beneath the priggish, stilted phrases, was 'Come away with me...' But you could not say that to someone who only wanted a bit of fun. And whose husband was impaired.

  Without those afternoons there was little in life that pleased George and nothing to relish and he became more and more morose. Once more he tried to assert himself in the matter of his son. He showed him the Meccano model of the station signal box in the shed and watched, pleased, as the boy ran his fingers over it with a gentle reverence. Emboldened, George then took him for a tour of the station, letting him collect and issue tickets, and stand with one of the drivers right up next to him in the engine. He also took him down to meet Joe Mundy in the signal box. But while the levers and switches quite interested the boy, they did not thrill him and he showed more interest in being high up, which he considered grand, and in the still damaged footbridge over the rails, replaced by a temporary structure. He stood staring at it from the signal box for a long time. Eventually he said to his father, 'You could mend that, couldn't you, Dad?' And George thought he probably could if they ever asked him. He nodded. 'So could ‘I’ said Patrick firmly.

  George felt a momentary flicker of excitement and fear. 'When we get home,' he offered, 'we could go into the shed and see how I made one. A model. A little one.'

  Patrick nodded. 'And then I can make a big one later’ he said. George - without thinking too much about it - held his son's hand. It felt warm and soft and as he held it, it was as if the muscles in his body were suddenly released. They sang songs like 'Ten Green Bottles' for the rest of the journey and Patrick looked at his father with a new admiration.

  When they arrived home, Florence, who was standing at the front-room net curtains as if she had never stirred from the spot, watched them coming down the road. Saw them holding hands and how brightly Patrick chattered up at his father. Saw how their hands swung as if they hadn't a care in the world. Patrick came rushing in, words jumbling over themselves as he described the afternoon and how high up they were. Florence said, 'Yes, yes,' and sat him down at the table in front a plate of fresh-baked biscuits and said that his father shouldn't have taken him all the way up the box. 'Why?' asked Patrick, still quite happily. George sat down opposite him and knew what was coming. When Florence had finished describing to Patrick what might have happened to him (you might have missed your step and plunged onto the rails below. You could have been splattered all over the line) the boy burst into tears and looked at his father with reproving eyes. George said nothing and they did not mention the shed. No doubt Florence could have drummed up a major catastrophe for that too - the roof falling in or spider bites or a screwdriver piercing his heart. He gave up.

  But Patrick was still intrigued. On the day that he knew his mother went into town on the bus to do her shopping he feigned an earache. Very occasionally, Mrs Glaister from next door was requested (or given the privilege, as Mr Glaister would say with high irony) of looking after Patrick for a couple of hours if Florence had something to do in town that could not be delayed and Patrick was not quite up to it. As usual, Mrs Glaister tucked him up on her front-room settee. Florence told him to be a good boy, and left. Patrick told Mrs Glaister that he felt tired and thought he would have a sleep. She covered him with a blanket and tiptoed out. He waited until he could hear the radio in her kitchen and then he slid off the settee, slipped out of the front door, closing it behind him, and went around to his own garden.

  No one was about - Father was at work, Mother was on her errands, and he knew where the key was hidden. He let himself in at the front door, replaced the key carefully (being methodical even at that age, as many had already remarked) and went through to the back. He also knew where the key to the shed was kept and he let himself in. He pulled the door closed, stood on an old potato box, gazed about him at the pictures on the walls, at the neat lines of tools and the mug, kettle and primus stove - thought it was just the kind of place he would like to live in when he grew up - and then, turning to the workbench, he dismantled, very carefully, the entire Meccano structure of his father's newly completed signal box.

  An hysterical Florence, with a distraught Mrs Glaister in tow, found him, nearly two hours later, with half the Meccano pieces laid out neatly on the bench and a look of complete concentration on his face. She gasped with emotion when she found him and pulled him into her pillowy chest, nearly suffocating him. He pushed her away, ran his hands through his hair, and began to holler. Mrs Glaister bent down and stuck her nose almost into his and wagged her finger and said, 'Never, never, never again, you naughty boy . . . you need a good smacking, you do ...' and flounced out when Florence told her off for it. Florence then wept, Patrick wept. He was attempting to reach the workbench. Florence barred his way. 'I want to finish it,' he yelled. 'I want to finish it. . .' He crossed his little arms beneath his chest as he had seen his mother do and he stuck out his lower lip which was a feature entirely his own. 'I won't, I shan't. . .' he said, and stamped his foot, thereby slipping off the potato box and cutting his knee.

  Florence scooped him up. He held his
breath and nearly went purple before the piercing yell arrived. 'You must never, ever do such a thing again,' sobbed Florence, still holding him fast. 'Look how cold you are. You will be ill yourself and you will make me ill with the worry of it.' And she dragged him back indoors, by which time he had a temperature and was wheezing.

  That evening, when his father came home, Patrick, unusually, went into the hallway to greet him. Florence had left him tucked up on the settee with a book telling him not to move. But as soon as he heard his father's key in the latch he hopped down and ran out to the hall. Florence was in the kitchen with the door closed so that the smell of stewing onions did not invade the house. By the time George had closed the door behind him the boy was standing right in his path.

  'I was in your shed,' he said. ‘I like the pictures you have pinned up, Father. And the signal box you made.'

  And George, who knew nothing of the megaton bomb that his wife was about to drop into his life, smiled and patted his son's head and said that he had already made up the Eiffel Tower and Tower Bridge from those photos, and now the signal box was done - a present for his boy - he was going to work on the Clifton Suspension Bridge. He might take Patrick to see it. It was built by someone called Isambard Kingdom Brunel and it was a wonder.

  Patrick could not get his tongue around the name. He tried to say it, got in a muddle, and they both ended up laughing at the attempt. It was this uniquely cheery scene between father and son that Florence walked into when she came out of the kitchen. Instinctively, she pulled the laughing boy to her and looked up accusingly at George. He looked back at her wondering what he could possibly have done wrong now. Was it, he wanted to shout, a crime to laugh with your own son? He opened his mouth to speak, but he had no chance. Florence immediately began to tell him what had happened that day, how afraid she was, and that he must get rid of the horrible stuff in the shed at once. He refused. She asked him what kind of father he thought he was. George laughed at her, a sneering, bitter laugh, and went out to his beloved shed. He might stand up to his wife. He might tell her that he, too, wanted a share in the pleasures of their son, he might, he might - and then he saw the pieces of Meccano and the half-dismantled signal box. It was as if his son had kicked him in the stomach.

  He returned to the house. Now that Lilly was out of the picture, the constructions he made in his shed were his only private pleasure. The only physical and mental place that he could say was his. And now his own son had defiled it. He was angry. Cold with rage. It was as if the last vestiges of him as a man, as anything, were wiped out. A small boy, one who held him in contempt, had shattered the last bastion that was George alive. For the first and only time he gave Patrick a good telling off. Just for once, Florence allowed him to do so.

  'You must never, ever go out there again,' he said sternly. 'And you must never, ever be so destructive of something that doesn't belong to you ever again. You must, must, must respect other people's things.' He paused. 'Even your father's,' he added, in a sudden burst of sour irony. No one noticed.

  'But...' said Patrick.

  His father wagged his finger. 'Never. Understood?' And Florence said, meek as a lamb, "There now, Patrick. Do as your father says ...'

  Patrick, unused to such unity and such sternness, was silent.

  What he wanted to tell them was that he had dismantled the thing once and put it back together, and that when his mother found him he was doing it for the second time and thinking of ways to improve it. If they had only left him alone it would all have been good as ninepence and no one any the wiser. From that day on he held not only his father but both of them in his child's version of contempt. What did they know?

  George bought a large padlock for the shed and on the few occasions Patrick tried to follow him out and spy through the window, his mother, now on her guard, stopped him. If Patrick tried to talk to his father about what went on out there, whether the unpronounceable name's bridge would be finished soon, George merely went on reading the paper. He was under Florence's watchful eye. One false move and it could be the shed's last. But though he worked away on Brunel's wonder, the relish had gone, he felt under threat, observed, about to be punished for this little bit of freedom. And he was.

  In the end, catching Patrick sneaking down the garden path with a torch in a freezing wind, Florence declared that enough was enough. She could not stand the stress. George must get rid of his hobby. George, accepting the inevitable, did so. He ripped down the pictures and threw them away. He packed everything else into tea chests, covered them with sacking, locked the shed and pretended to forget about the whole wretched thing. As he pretended to forget about Lilly and the Wednesday afternoons. This, he thought, was what you got if you didn't look out. What you got if you married the wrong woman. What you got for being weak and cowardly.

  It was the weak and cowardly that had him marry Florence - that and her cooking. George was friendly with her youngest brother and the two of them used to sit at the table of a Sunday tea time and stuff themselves with her cakes and biscuits. While Florence looked on smiling, neat as a pin. It was the highlight of the week in gastronomic terms. Then Raymond - so quickly - died of a burst appendix. It was over before you knew it and a dreadful shock. At the funeral George put his arm around the weeping Florence and - well - she did not object. The next thing he knew he was engaged to her. It seemed the right thing to do. And Lilly was all but forgotten. Then it was wedding bells. After that nothing was what it had seemed. Even the sweetness of those cakes carried its own destruction. His teeth, as Lilly used to point out to him when they resumed their connection, were in a terrible condition. Fatherhood might have made up for most of what he had lost but he wasn't even allowed that. And this, he thought, is my life ...

  He made a few half-hearted attempts in the future. He showed Patrick how a screw went into wood and how to make a dove-tail joint. Which wood was good for what use, how a nut and bolt could hold more than two pieces of metal together, and the best way to grasp a ratchet wrench. And indeed, Patrick liked doing these things. But he was too good at them. The rudiments were not enough. George attempted to show him more sophisticated methods. He suggested that they make a swing together. Patrick asked if it could be a rope bridge instead. He drew one in firm but childish outline. George altered the drawing a little here and there but in essence - in essence - it was correct. He felt pleased to be doing something with the boy at last - almost he felt restored - but it came to nothing. Florence was not having it. Patrick was too weak (the boy coughed on cue), the rope was too flimsy - he might fall and hurt himself. George might have fathered a son but it was no more relevant than the bee stumbling out of the flower. If he had been made of mightier stuff, he knew, he might have drowned his sorrows in drink, might even have died of it. He wanted Lilly and he wanted her badly. But Florence kept a watchful eye. 'If I can see you up to your tricks,' she seemed to be saying, 'then so will everyone else.' Nothing, of course, was actually said.

  Dolly came to visit and Florence shared her fears with her. How did you let boys be boys without them killing themselves? Dolly commiserated, but she had a girl. Girls were different. They did not go out risking life and limb and wanting to screw things into wood and what not (little known to both women as they sat sipping their tea, at the end of the garden Patrick was showing Little Audrey exactly that -and she was fascinated). It was Florence's contention to Dolly that Patrick was different from other boys - more sensitive, more delicate, more thoughtful - and it was Dolly's contention to Florence that Little Audrey was no different from other girls at all. She liked pretty dresses, dolls and copying her mother and Dolly was thankful for it. Florence nodded in an understanding but superior way. Patrick was out of the ordinary. He would be somebody someday. Dolly thought to herself that he would be somebody spoilt someday, but she did not say so, valuing her long friendship. 'Unlike his father,' Florence said, 'Patrick will achieve something in this life. Whereas George just sits there in his chair and stares at the fire or
the wall. Never does a thing.'

  They talked about school. Little Audrey just could not wait to go and she could already read a bit and knew her numbers up to ten. Patrick really ought to have started last year. Florence sniffed. School was a dreadful business as far as she was concerned and she did not like to think about it. She wanted Patrick to go to the smart private seminary. But there was nothing in the kitty for school fees. 'My poor little boy,' she said, stroking his head, 'you'll never manage it. Not that horrid, rough council school.' But Patrick had no choice. Another failure on George's part. In the caves of Neanderthals George would have been thrown out for the poor quality of his fresh-killed offerings.

  'If my Little Audrey can do it, so can he,' said Dolly firmly.