Story, Volume I

by Dai Smith

  ‘I am,’ she had always seemed to be saying, ‘and that is enough.’ But now she could say with some satisfaction, ‘I am, and I look as I am.’

  Now more than ever, she appeared truly as she really felt and this simple register of the emotions on her face was itself a miraculous thing, because she was born a foundling, a workhouse child, and all her life, her expressions, her voice itself, revealed the flat, calm, passively accepting demeanour of the permanently institutionalised. She never looked as she felt and her very presence in a room was always something of an anticlimax. And yet, within her small wizened frame, her tight-skinned, immobile face whose sharp, darting eyes betrayed or missed nothing, she had felt all of the passions it was possible for her to feel, and if ever she was patronised as she had been by the boyish clergyman in the afternoon, she had learned to smile secretly to herself.

  She, Lydia Skuse, knew a thing or two. What could she not say of all the swirl of experience that had carried her to this point in time! The clergyman saw the childless widow of a small-town baker, unusually composed, but diminutive and insignificant before the fact of death itself. But she had stood before bigger chasms and felt the future yawning before her with an awful incomprehension inside her, and she had mastered that too. There was nothing she had not learned to live with, and as she sat alone, she prepared herself for the immediate decision by allowing her attention to slip a little, going over the comparative tranquillity of the last years of Leonard’s life to an earlier time when their son Bobby was alive. That was the time to think about, and it was natural that she should do so now in peace.

  But in the next room her brother-in-law, Walter, bestirred himself uneasily and voiced the fear which had haunted him since well before the funeral. He gave his wife a sour look.

  ‘Ada, it’s no good avoiding it, Lydia won’t fit in with us. She won’t feel at home there, and that’s it in a nutshell,’ he said aggressively. He spoke of the bungalow on the South Coast which he had recently bought and retired to himself.

  His wife agreed but she did not like him raising his voice so soon after the funeral. As it happened, she felt even more apprehensive than he did. She had always had unrealised social pretensions and remembered the shock of her brother Leonard bringing home a girl who was in service all those years ago.

  ‘In service, Leonard?’ She knew then that he could have done so much better.

  ‘She’s had a hard life, but now it’s going to stop,’ Leonard had said.

  ‘But marrying the Workhouse Master’s Maid?’

  ‘Lydia Skuse is her name, and from now on, you’re to call her by it.’

  Ada remembered Lydia then. Nothing to commend her in looks, manners, money. A docile little thing without a spark of humour. Said very little, only looked at you disapprovingly. Not even winsome, more like hard-faced. And if Leonard was going into business on his own, someone with an engaging manner by his side would be a godsend. There were two girls he could have married whose fathers would have helped him financially, and that was important because it was the year of the General Strike, the miners were locked out for nine months, and all the local tradesmen were in dire straits.

  Oh, that he could be so foolish! A girl with nothing to say, a surly domestic marrying literally out of the workhouse. What a comedown for a favourite brother! More than that, she felt it reflected on the family who were grocers in a small way, and she had since harboured the feeling of having been let down by Leonard all her life.

  Aware of her thoughts, Walter tried to sound cheerful.

  ‘Lydia’s taken it all very well. She may not want to come to us. She’s always been a tough nut.’

  Ada sniffed and raised her eyebrows. ‘She wouldn’t even let me make a cup of tea – and we’ve come all this way! She doesn’t want sympathy, I know that, but we have come,’ she said complainingly.

  Walter agreed. They’d come for Leonard’s sake, but the funeral was very disappointing. ‘It’s a good job we did come. Not many there. You’d have thought some of his old customers would have turned up. I can’t remember a Welsh funeral with under a dozen present before. And the singing was terrible!’ said Walter peevishly. Although he had disguised both his origins and his accent for business reasons on the South Coast, he had the old Welsh appreciation of a good funeral and he felt let down.

  ‘The valleys have changed,’ Ada said, and she pursed her lips as if to say, ‘Since we left!’

  But there was no avoiding the topic. Lydia and Leonard had spent summer holidays with them on the South Coast where Walter had also been in business since the war. Lydia had liked the change and it was suggested that they might retire there themselves. Walter and Ada had two grown-up children and several grandchildren with whom Lydia got on famously, and besides the change of scenery, they knew that Lydia was very attached to their own children who worshipped her. This was another thing.

  Lydia had an uncanny knack with children, was always willing to babysit and generally help out, and this forthcoming expertise was in a way a criticism of them for they were somewhat uneasy parents, immensely house-proud since the purchase of the bungalow, and, to tell the truth, they felt they had given enough to their children. It was all very well for Lydia to queen it for a fortnight a year. There were, and always had been, the remaining fifty weeks. But the matter was further complicated because they were jealous of Lydia’s success with their children and although they couldn’t find a single reason to justify any criticism of themselves, there remained this remarkable quality of Lydia’s which they just couldn’t see.

  It was as if she radiated a special kind of light which others saw and they couldn’t, and it annoyed them intensely. They felt she did it on purpose, and the joke was, she was so ordinary, a cut below them in every way. They saw nothing special about her at all. You’d pass her in a crowd and not notice her. In an empty room she was part of the furniture. And yet, Leonard had never hesitated, and thirty years later, their own grandchildren began to smile as soon as they came into Lydia’s presence. They just couldn’t put their finger on it, but whatever it was she had, it maddened them. All very well for her, but they’d had to raise the family. They’d had their troubles too and they hadn’t saved and succeeded just to spend their last years watching Lydia reap the benefit of their children and grandchildren. They had, after all, themselves and their own old age to think of, and they felt Lydia’s personality to be both a remonstrance to the past and a threat to the future.

  ‘No,’ Ada said firmly. ‘We must ask her because of Leonard, but there’s no doubt about whether she’ll fit in or not. We know very well, she won’t!’

  ‘I quite agree,’ Walter said, nodding. He had never had a moment’s regret about the woman he married. He was that shrewd.

  But both of them knew that they must make the offer to Lydia. They owed it to Leonard and to what remained of decency from the past.

  In the next room, Lydia heard their muffled voices and smiled. With all they had, they were such unhappy people and she paid them scant attention. Instead, enjoying the moment of quiet, she stretched herself out. She would have a morning in bed the next day, a luxury she had not experienced more than half a dozen times in her life. Even when Leonard had retired, years of habit still made him keep baker’s hours. He simply could not lie in bed for long and always awoke with the dawn when he would get up and prowl about the kitchen, doing odd jobs like black-leading the fire grate, or fetching coal and sticks which had previously been her lot. Baker’s hours had always meant that she had to be far more self-sufficient than most wives and now that he was gone, she would have to be more self-sufficient still.

  But she smiled confidently. She knew she had the training for it. One of the reasons why she could savour the sweet luxury of lying in bed was that she had for so many years to clean rows and rows of boots in the early morning, and she could still picture them laid out in the institution. She began always, as was fitting, with the workhouse master’s, and then worked down through the
hierarchy, missing most of the children, except for the toddlers in the annexe who were too small to clean their own. She could remember the hard, stiff leather of those boots and their bony toecaps. As hard as frost, she used to say, but she was not so foolish as to attribute a wonderous glow to the past. She had had to prove herself all the way up as a scullion from slop-pails to boots, from boots to vegetables, vegetables to brass, and after brass, the golden jump to waiting at the master’s table and the cushioned intimacy of the master’s separate quarters. Finally, she had been given her own room, free of the smell of disinfectant with curtains and an actual bedspread.

  Remembering, she gave a little laugh. How she had valued that room! She had told Leonard about it. But he was very sentimental. A thing like that, the mental picture of rows and rows of toddlers’ boots laid out in regimental order was enough to bring tears to his eyes.

  ‘You shall have a house with six rooms,’ he promised wildly.

  They had to wait seven years, but she didn’t mind. Leonard couldn’t understand that every privation was like a coiled spring loaded against her withdrawn emotions. She could wait seven years or more, but the moment she actually walked into her own rooms, the release of pleasure inside her was like a gun going off! If her face betrayed very little – she could do no more than smile her pinched, small-mouthed smile – her heart beat faster and her excitement was voluptuous. So it had been all her life. It was not that waiting for things made them better, that was too simple. Rather, it was that for so many years she expected nothing that she could not actually touch at the moment of wishing, and it was a fact of life that you could not touch much in the workhouse.

  She laughed again. What a thought these days! What would she have been like if she had seen a car like Walter’s with a cigar lighter and a toy tiger slung in the back as a mascot? Or Ada’s electric toothbrush and Scandinavian cutlery? It was very curious that her in-laws owned nothing that needed cleaning, except the car and they still continued to change that every year on their accountant’s advice. How strange anyway, not to have to clean anything! Her own kitchen was festooned with brass, two German shell cases that Leonard had saved from the first war, candlesticks galore, the handles of the dresser and a large Victorian hob that the Master’s wife had given her as a wedding present.

  The whole room was alight with polished brass and the coals from the fire reflected in all of it so that the impression of warmth was heightened by all the added focal points of light. It glistened because she cleaned it every day and she would not know what to do without it. She had even prevented Leonard from usurping that function when he retired. She loved brass and the abundance of it made her feel rich while it depressed her in-laws. They couldn’t say it was old-fashioned for it was now fetching a price, but in some way it must seem to hem them in. Perhaps it was also uncomfortable evidence of labour which she loved for its own sake.

  Leonard always used to remonstrate with her.

  ‘It’ll kill you. You’ll die with a Brasso tin in your hand.’

  She always had a tart reply.

  ‘Hard work never hurt a fly.’

  But she was wrong, of course. It had killed him. For the last fifteen years, he had no help in the bakehouse and they had made very little profit. He could have made more money working for somebody else. The baker’s round had diminished when a new council estate brought a supermarket and cheaper bread. Leonard’s demise lay in his stubborn nature. He would make no capital outlay and would not replace the dated machinery. It was obvious that the day of the batch and the freshly scrubbed basket of loaves and the baker’s cheery call was over, but Leonard would not admit it.

  His old customers stuck to him, mostly the colliers, but one by one, the pits shut, the men were transferred to work elsewhere and the young wives were working and simply weren’t in when he called. They all preferred to shop on the way home and made bulk purchases of all their goods in the same store. You couldn’t blame them, but Leonard refused to change. While they were shopping at night, he was baking. He was like a man shoring up an ancient sea wall while the inland river flooded at his back. He couldn’t or wouldn’t change. He wouldn’t work for anybody else, and finally, he watched the round diminish until he was working for nothing and then suddenly sold the ovens for scrap with a last defiant gesture and retired.

  Fortunately, they’d put money by and were comfortably off by their standards, without debt or hire purchase, but Leonard couldn’t live without the baker’s round and he had died, she thought, because he could not adjust himself to idleness. He fretted about the past and dwelt on it, his mind pacing out each trivial incident of the years until he was exhausted. It was a frightening thought, but she did not avoid it. She had learned to face everything, and now deciding for herself about the future, Lydia knew that it would be wrong for her to avoid anything.

  Anything at all! She had to tell the truth to herself about Leonard too. The decline of the round was part of his death, but not the whole of it. There was one day there in the past that had haunted him, sticking like gall in his mouth and clamping its awful shadow on everything he did afterwards. They had never spoken of it fully. She was ready always to comfort him, but he was beyond that, a maimed man, put beyond his conscience.

  Poor Leonard… if she could have cried, it would have been now. It was terrible for him and he could not live with the memory of that awful day. His funeral was a joyous time beside it, but she had to face it, and all the phrases which echoed in her ears all the way to his grave. You had to face everything. It was what she had always lived by.

  ‘Hard work never hurt a fly.’

  They had both been brought up on this principle. They had always needed to work, but they believed in the virtue of it, for its own sake. Perhaps it was a drug, she had come to think, but at the time, there was no room for doubt. Work was a bread and butter matter.

  She could hear Leonard’s voice and see Bobby’s face, pimply with the acne of adolescence. Ah, she had had her son, there were seventeen years of caring for him that no one could take away. They were arguing about Bobby’s attitude to the bakery. The war was on. Labour was short. Leonard needed help and did not see why Bobby, still in grammar school, could not do his homework and help out on the van.

  ‘When I was your age, I was up at three in the morning. I had to scrub and bake. I had a basket and a brown sack, and I scrubbed that basket white!’

  ‘Oh, give it a rest,’ Bobby said sullenly. ‘Take it easy will you?’

  ‘I can’t,’ Leonard said. ‘I can’t take it easy! I never have been able to take it easy. It’s not in my nature.’

  ‘Oh, give him a medal, Mum!’

  She could still smile. The adolescent-parental battle never changed. The surly tones, the smart remarks, the limp sarcasm, they were perennial. Even the clothes were as offensive then as they were with Ada’s grandchildren now. She remembered Leonard going on about Bobby’s sloppy lumberjacket.

  ‘When I was your age, I wore a blue suit, a stiff collar and a dark tie on a Sunday. But you look like a woman in that thing. Doesn’t it affect you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Bobby’s lip curved unattractively into a sneer. ‘I feel the draught above my knees.’

  Leonard gave a gasp of exasperation. ‘You’ll start work three evenings a week, and that’s that.’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘You wouldn’t want to see your mother do it? Or would you?’ Bobby shrugged his shoulders insolently and she intervened.

  ‘Leonard, you’re upsetting him.’

  ‘Upsetting him? What about me? Haven’t I got to work?’

  Leonard had craggy, black eyebrows and a small impatient mouth. He was too quick-tempered for an argument and his face was a mask of pique. ‘Well, haven’t I?’

  ‘Perhaps that’s all you’re good for,’ Bobby said sulkily. ‘Work…’

  That was going too far. Leonard’s hand was raised to strike in the instant, while Bobby, awkward and gangly and already flushed with embarras
sment moved quickly to the door.

  ‘You raise your hand to me and you’ll be sorry!’

  ‘You’ll feel it in a minute.’

  ‘I won’t! I’ll go to sea,’ Bobby screamed in his cracked, scarcely broken voice. ‘I’ll go with Hector Trencherman, he’s going back Friday.’

  ‘Go then,’ Leonard shouted. ‘Go and good riddance!’

  Of course, he did not mean it, Lydia knew. But the words were said. Such a mundane and ordinary little scene, a tiff between father and son, such as must have happened in every family. It was so commonplace that under any other circumstances it would be difficult to remember it.

  But there was only one Bobby.

  ‘You shouldn’t have threatened to hit him,’ she said afterwards. ‘You shouldn’t hit children.’ She had been hit herself.

  ‘I wouldn’t have,’ Leonard replied, but they both knew it wasn’t true. Leonard had a simple fear that the boy might turn out a waster. ‘Ah, he’d never go to sea. He couldn’t stick it.’

  Neither of them took Bobby’s threat seriously. They both knew Hector Trencherman and the Trencherman family, and while they were not exactly ne’er-do-wells, all the Trencherman family had at various times been at loggerheads with authority. Ben Trencherman, the father, was blacklisted in the colliery for activities as an agitator and had cracked open a militiaman’s face during the industrial riots, and there was an aura of lawlessness and violence about the whole family. Hector, Bobby’s acquaintance, was nineteen, well cast in the family stamp, with strong, muscular shoulders, black curly hair, and the same way of standing, hands casually lolling about his belt, as if forever tempting others to attack. He had been at sea since the war began and was by way of being a local hero since he had survived bombardment and torpedoing on several occasions. Lydia remembered him displaying a hand of frostbitten fingers with modest bravado to the girls in a local café. Bobby had witnessed this display and, while there was no doubt that the Trencherman family came into their own in a war of attrition, neither their spirit nor the times seemed to have anything to do with her Bobby. He was slight and delicate, an overgrown child still subject to bronchitis in the winter months. If she feared anything, it was that he was tubercular.