by Sue Gee
‘Me great-granddad worked on that, sir.’
‘Me uncle’s out of work, sir.’
Shipyards were closing. Steelworks were closing. The Jarrow march down to Westminster had changed nothing.
‘He’s on National Assistance now.’
Summer unfurled. In May they had a day off for the Coronation: bunting all around the Square, trestle tables set out beneath the trees. When Edward VIII abdicated so shockingly in December, it was days after Margaret’s funeral, and Steven had barely noticed. Now Miss Aickman played the National Anthem in Assembly as if she were at the Proms. She was all excited about the little princesses.
Then it was cricket, exams, meetings.
The yearly school exams were held in the classrooms; the big public ones, School Certificate, and Higher, in the hall: Miss Aickman welcoming the invigilators, Mr Straughan in his gown at Assembly, tall as a Scots Pine, telling his boys he knew they would be a credit to him. Kirkhoughton Boys, one of the best in the county, and don’t forget it. His general kindness made his rare anger all the more terrifying: unruly boys who were sent to him were sometimes sick whilst waiting outside his room. He used the cane rarely, but he used it.
Papers turned over, pen caps off, eyes down. You may begin.
Before that, as every term, came the departmental meetings, and in the summer Straughan sat in on them – summoned the staff to his office, in fact. It was like having an inspection, one or two new, younger staff muttered now and then, but it certainly focussed the mind.
‘Come in, gentlemen.’
His windows were open on to the fresh May morning; they could hear Miss Aickman clattering away next door, the ping of her typewriter as she came to the end of a line.
‘Have a seat.’
Embleton, Steven and Dunn took the chairs before the mahogany desk.
Straughan, an historian, was also something of a philosopher. He thought there were questions to be asked about the past, and the progress of mankind, liked to engage his staff in discussion. Frank had responded to all this at once, when he arrived in ’34, and Straughan had at once been alert to that, to his gifts and intellect.
And he’d passed over David Dunn, as everyone knew he would have to: a man who’d come back from the Somme with a smashed leg and shellshock, who was now in his fifties and still not quite right. Fit to teach? Just. Better in class than out of it, apparently. A man like Straughan wouldn’t get rid of a man like Dunn.
Steven had been passed over, too, or rather not encouraged to apply for the departmental headship when old Ogilvie retired, but he hadn’t expected anything else: a local boy who’d made it to university, he knew he needed a good few years under his belt before promotion. And now he was glad that he had no more responsibility: teaching steadily was as much as he could manage. Even in meetings, her face sometimes swam before him. It swam before him now, and he briefly closed his eyes.
Straughan lit his pipe. ‘Shall we begin with the reports?’
They went through them all, year by year, noting the rising stars, the strugglers. From Jack Bown and Tom Herron, destined for Oxford, to Donald Hindmarsh, who’d only just scraped through the first year. But a good lad, they all agreed.
‘History is about how men have learned to live, is it not?’ said Straughan, tamping down his pipe. ‘If a lad like Hindmarsh can be brought to understand that – how Alcibiades lived and suffered, as Aristotle had it – he might be a bit more interested.’ He dropped a match in a vast wastepaper basket. ‘How did men learn to make tools, build somewhere to live, use the wheel, reckon time? How did they learn to write? Even within the constraints of the syllabus we can go back to first principles, can we not, Mr Coulter?’
Steven said that they could. Straughan’s rhetorical questions could make you feel as if you’d been told to get up from your desk and stand by the blackboard.
‘And of course the individual man is subject to great events, is he not?’ Straughan went on, puffing away. ‘Why do men live where they do? Because of invasion, colonisation, war.’
Dunn was tugging at a long loose thread on his shirt cuff. Was he listening?
Frank was: he leaned forward intently, as Straughan went relentlessly on.
‘When did men begin to think about themselves, and the world?’ he demanded of the smoky room. ‘These are the kind of things I hope you’re discussing with your sixth-formers, Mr Embleton. If you try to answer them, you cover the history of religion, politics, science. History itself, do you not?’
‘Of course!’ You could see that Frank loved all this. He raised his hand, flung it open, as if he were making a debating point, or taking part in an animated tutorial, college windows offering a view of the quad’s immaculate lawn. ‘And to get the boys thinking about how history is described – that’s so important, isn’t it? To understand that nothing is neutral, that historians have their own drum to beat.’
The thread round Dunn’s finger grew tighter, and snapped. He sat up, as if he’d been discovered doing something foolish at the back of the class.
‘There are times when the same drum has to beat for everyone.’
‘You’re absolutely right.’ Frank looked at him warmly, and with that look Steven saw, not for the first time, how compelling he was: clever, but always generous, wanting a man who had been through hell, and perhaps would never quite recover, to feel equal and included. How some girls might fall for that, he thought suddenly. Fall deeply, even.
‘Now for instance,’ Frank went on. ‘Europe – Spain – that little town bombed to bits – the boys should know about it, we should all be discussing it in class. Are we?’
‘I believe Mr Coulter is on the Industrial Revolution at the moment,’ Straughan said drily.
‘But history is now!’ said Frank, as the bell rang out in the playground.
‘And now we need to get the boys through their examinations,’ said Straughan, reining him in, turning from philosopher to pragmatist in a moment.
‘But Mr Dunn is right.’ Frank flung out his hands, and knocked the ink well on the desk. ‘We need to be standing together against what looks like the rise of something terrible, don’t you agree?’
Straughan reached for the inkwell and rose. They rose with him. ‘Thank you, gentlemen.’
They gathered up their papers. Dunn dropped a heap, and bent stiffly to scoop them up. Out in the corridor, as the boys swarmed by, he said: ‘If there’s another war—’ He gave his strange, exploding laugh, and Steven looked away, seeing a few boys snigger.
Cricket was out on the playing fields at the bottom of the hill, next to the recreation ground. In winter, football, and hockey for Kirkhoughton Girls; now it was cricket again, and the girls played tennis on the court behind their school. The boys poured out on to the Square in the afternoons, walked in pairs beneath the trees and down along Main Street: Armstrong up at the head, Embleton or Coulter, as Steven thought of himself at school, bringing up the rear.
The talk was of County cricket, of how Wisden had once named Frank Townsend cricketer of the year even though Northumberland had never won the Cup. When they passed the turning to Milk Lane he looked away, though he noticed one or two boys from the Lower Sixth turning towards it now and then at the sound of girls’ voices.
‘Sir, Mr Coulter, sir? When are we playing Hexham?’
He thought it was July, once the exams were over.
They were crossing Bridge Street. A bus rumbled by. Elaborate summer clouds sailed over the hills ahead of them, dotted with grey stone farmhouses and dry stone walls, sprinkled with the sheep which were always there, always grazing, moving this way and that in sun and enormous shadow.
Windswept and rain-washed in winter, splashed now with sunlight as the clouds moved slowly by, the hills and enormous feudal fields were part of the great continuities which, amidst talk of unemployment, of dark events in Europe, still
anchored all their lives: sheep on the hills, farming, football, cricket; the piano at assembly, the bell ringing out between lessons, the lessons themselves. And sometimes all this was enough to make him forget, for half a morning, or part of an afternoon, what had happened.
Then she returned to him, her sweet clever face and red-brown hair before him, and he blinked, or shook his head: what could he have been thinking of? And it all began again.
‘All right, boys, go and change.’
They raced to the pavilion.
Towards the end of the summer term came two more annual events: the Governors’ meeting and the Sixth-form dance, held with Kirkhoughton Girls in the Assembly Rooms.
‘Will you come?’ asked Frank Embleton, as he and Steven sat outside the Queen’s Head. The evening sun slanted along the Shambles. Inside, in the snug, they were playing darts as usual.
‘I don’t think so.’
When he and Margaret had gone together, the summer of their wedding, she’d spun beneath his arm, and skipped in and out of the stamping, clapping line, the bows of the ceilidh band on the platform going so fast you’d think they’d fly out of their hands. Everyone was there, as always, Mr Straughan twirling Miss Brierley like a spinning top, the sixth-formers with their exams all behind them whooping and shouting. At the end, when they stepped out into the dusky street, they’d passed a boy and a girl pressed tight up against one another in the shadows, and he’d pulled Margaret to him and kissed her hard.
‘It might do you good,’ said Frank now, draining his glass.
Darts thudded into the target in the snug; the pub cat came out and wound herself round his legs. Steven bent down to stroke her.
‘I’ll see. Let me get you another.’
When he came back, the cat was on Frank’s lap. He talked, as he caressed her, about taking his sixth-formers to walk in the Bavarian Alps for a week at the end of term. The trip had been planned with Duggan, Head of Geography, for months, though with things as they were now in Germany it felt—
‘Well, I half-wonder if we should be going. On principle, I mean. But it gives us an opportunity to get to know the boys properly – I’m sure we’ll be safe.’ Frank had such confidence, such charm, you felt he’d be safe anywhere. ‘Then it’s home with the family,’ he said. ‘Usual sort of summer, I expect.’
The usual sort of summer at Great Whitton, it seemed, was tennis, boating on the lake. Steven sat listening to this talk of another world, unable to imagine it, really. Lunch parties, drives. Frank was one of the few members of staff to run a car, which he parked on the Square, attracting glances. A Riley Imp, he told the boys who clustered round it at the end of the day. It was red. Red! They gazed at its open top, and long sleek bonnet.
‘Want a spin?’ he’d ask sometimes.
‘Yes, please, sir!’
‘Hop in.’
Now he said to Steven: ‘Come over one day, we’d love you to.’ And he mentioned his sister again, Diana, who played the cello, and her best friend, Margot Heslop, whom he might invite to the school dance, and who lived out at Hepplewick. The garden of Hepplewick Hall, like the one at Great Whitton, had been done by Capability Brown.
‘Diana and I spent our early childhood there. Shared a governess.’
And as he had done once or twice before, Steven wondered that someone with this kind of background was not teaching at some great public school, instead of an old Board School turned Grammar. But Frank, on the face of it cast in an upper-class, Oxbridge mould, was individual, alert to a world beyond his: he made that clear in every meeting. ‘History is now!’ He read widely, belonged to some kind of left book-club in London, said in the staffroom that George Orwell was changing his life. Gowens had growled.
But now he was talking again about the summer. Margot played with his sister in the trio he’d mentioned in the staffroom, with another old friend, George Liddell. ‘We all grew up together, it was a lot of fun.’ He hesitated. ‘I know it’s hard for you, Coulter – what’s happened – but do come over if you can. We’d love it.’
‘Thank you,’ said Steven, and wondered: why would someone like Embleton stretch out a hand to someone like me? The beer on an empty stomach was making his head swim. ‘Let’s get something to eat.’
They ate bread and ham in the snug: mellow evening light at the windows, old men at their dominoes in a corner, the darts game concluding with a sudden shout.
He didn’t go to the dance, but the Governors’ meeting, held the week after, was something you just had to do. A hot July evening, almost the end of term, walkers out on the hills, windows flung wide. Straughan, in his gown, stood at the door to greet the little group: Arthur Shaw, the vicar of St Peter’s; two retired teachers; Ernest Bradbury, the head of a tannery in Gosbridge, whose son was shining in the Lower Sixth.
Straughan looked taller and craggier than ever.
‘Good evening, gentlemen. Splendid to see you all.’ He was good at welcomes, always finding something to make people laugh and unwind a bit.
‘Do sit down.’ And as Miss Aickman gave out the agenda he made the same little joke he made every year. ‘Six items to get through before the main business of supper.’
A good spread was laid out in the dining hall; Miss A. had done the flowers. The only woman in the school, apart from the cooks and the cleaners.
‘Now, then. Item One: raising funds to renew the Science lab.’
And so it began, with talk of a grant from the Local Education Authority, and the announcement of a donation from the tannery. ‘Very generous, Mr Bradbury.’ Then it was on to the appointment of a new classics teacher, with Thompson’s retirement; the possibility of a music teacher, which Mr Embleton had raised.
The hymns at Assembly were generally accompanied in workmanlike fashion by Miss A. The piano was scuffed and unremarkable, had stood in the hall for ever. But some of the boys sang pretty well, she said, looking up from the Minutes – you could hear Benwell and Naylor, for instance, and what about young Stote in the first year, whose voice was lovely, really. Wispy Mr Shaw said he’d heard Stote sing at St Peter’s, coming now and then with his parents, and though music had never been on the curriculum – wasn’t an academic subject, after all – perhaps they should develop it a bit.
‘I think we should,’ said Embleton. ‘I think we should have a school orchestra. Piano lessons at least. I have a friend—’
Dunn gave an embarrassing yawn. Embleton always had a friend. It was very hot; the agendas became fans. But Straughan was never one to make a meeting longer than it had to be, and within the hour music had been put on hold, the interview date for the classics applicants arranged, and they were on to the annual prizes.
Steven proposed Wanless for the history prize in the second year and Johnny Mather as the best all-rounder. Duggan put forward Tom Herron for the Sixth Form Cup. And then it was over, and everyone milling into the dining room, complementing Miss A. on the flowers, talking about the holidays.
‘You’ll be getting away, I hope,’ people said to Steven, one after the other. Wispy Mr Shaw pressed his hand. And he felt their unspoken thoughts: that he was too young to grieve for too long; that what had happened was a tragedy, of course it was. But life lay ahead, did it not?
4
That summer, he began to write to her.
Dearest Margaret . . . My dearest love . . . .
He wrote sitting at the kitchen table, the door open on to the grassy track and the paper lifting a little in the breeze. When it rained he kept the door open still, listening to its patter into the water butt beside it, and on to the slate roof, watching it soak into the ground.
He wrote after breakfast. Last night I let myself think you were in my arms again. I held you to me, as if you were well again . . .
He wrote before he climbed the stairs to bed, the evening light filling the kitchen with shadows. I’m praying I’ll d
ream of you tonight. Perhaps I should murmur a spell . . .
Sometimes he did dream of her, once had a nightmare from which he woke shouting her name. I dreamt you were dying out on the moor, and I couldn’t find you . . .
No, he couldn’t tell her that, it would upset her too much.
That was how close he felt to her now, in this solitude.
He did the same things every day: it was like settling a coat round his shoulders. In the mornings he tended the vegetable garden, weeding, digging up potatoes, picking the beans and carrots his father had got him to sew in the spring, telling her how they were getting on. The hawthorn tree was in dark leaf now, chaffinch and stonechat flitting in and out.
I remember you sitting beneath it, my love. I remember you watching me while I made the new door. You would have watched our children in that way – they would have thrived, doing things under your eye.
In the afternoons he went walking, and the letters ran within him, over and over.
The gorse is so bright, and the air is full of lark song – the larks are everywhere now. I stand and listen, and watch them drop like stones to the nest . . .
Today, by the river, I saw an otter. He slipped into the water when he heard my footsteps, and I saw him as clear as anything – a big dog, his head above the water as he swam with the current. The river is very full and fast, after all the rain we had last week. You would have loved him . . .
A card came from Frank Embleton, walking with Duggan and the boys in Bavaria.
We’ve tramped round ice-age lakes and bogs. Everyone pretty fit. Do come and have lunch when I get back. I’ll be in touch.
Steven propped it up on the mantelpiece above the range. He didn’t want to go to Great Whitton for lunch, or meet new people. These weeks were for Margaret, for the two of them, close to one another again, and if nobody understood that, so be it.
