Crossing the Lines

by Melvyn Bragg

  ALSO BY MELVYN BRAGG

  Fiction

  The Soldier’s Return

  A Son of War

  Nonfiction

  The Adventure of English:

  The Biography of a Language

  Copyright © 2003, 2011 by Melvyn Bragg

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or arcade@skyhorsepublishing.com.

  Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  First published in 2003 by Hodder and Stoughton, a division of Hodder Headline PLC

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-346-1

  PART ONE

  EASTER, 1955

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘Joe! Want a ride, Joe? I’ll show you something.’

  The words had to be repeated. The boy was deeply sucked into the shop’s display. He was not, as might seem, fastened there by the footballs and cricket balls, the tennis racquets and cricket bats. They furnished the best window-excuse in the town, but it was himself who held his hungry gazing, his own reflection, transparently imposed on the armoury of sporting objects. His own face challenged him as he tested how long he could hang on without flinching, without his mind or was it the soul abandoning him, hovering outside him, leaving him a mere body, paralysed by this unnameable affliction that he had to face out in secret and alone.

  He was winning these days, but not always. He knew he had to construct something untouchable inside himself and that could only be done by tests and dares, however often they misfired. But on this morning, this spring morning, this day when his dad had pointed out some returning swallows and the northern sun had a shine of warmth in it, he was winning. He was not divided. He half hummed, half sang to himself, in private cautious celebration, ‘Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones, now hear the word of the Lord.’

  The second shout, more imperative, hooked him and slowly, as if afraid he would spill something brim full, he turned and smiled because it was Diddler and Lizzie. It would be worth it. He crossed the street and sat on the flat cart beside Lizzie.

  ‘The time has come,’ Diddler announced, ‘to break in that young fella at the back. He’s been wild long enough, Joe, and Lizzie’s going to help me make a man of him.’

  Joe tried to look appraisingly at the glossy piebald unbroken colt whose lead had been tied to the back of the cart. He knew that it was the best Diddler had ever bought at Wigton Horse Sales. Everybody knew. ‘More than fifteen hands already. See the stamp of him,’ boasted the man whose tinker neckerchiefs and gaudy waistcoats were envied by the dully dressed schoolboy. ‘Never had an animal as just so. The breeding in him would satisfy the Queen of England.’ Now was the time for the breaking in and Joe was invited, accidentally. No matter. He would be there. ‘Lizzie here,’ Diddler continued, ‘is the best hand at breaking in a horse you could meet any place on God’s earth and I’ll swear to that!’ He gave the bold-looking girl a doting smile, which showed off all his gums.

  Lizzie laughed loudly then put her hand to her open mouth repeatedly as she let loose a continuous note which the slapping punctuated into an Indian war cry. Whenever Joe saw Lizzie - who had grown up in the yard next to his when they both lived in the slums in the nucleus of the old town - he felt a pang of grief that he was not older so that he could go with her. Lizzie had just left school, about to join the two hundred or so other Wigton girls at the clothing factory. Passing out of girlhood, she would be eternally out of reach.

  ‘She came to Vinegar Hill on the dot!’ said Diddler as his old ginger mare plodded up towards the Memorial Monument known as the Fountain. ‘On the dot. She loves Vinegar Hill now - don’t you, Lizzie?’

  Again the doting smile, again Lizzie’s challenging laugh. Joe felt left out.

  ‘My dad lived in Vinegar Hill when he was little.’

  ‘So he did,’ said Diddler. ‘And a game cock he was, the same boy. Afraid of nothing. We sort them out on Vinegar Hill.’ He sized up the boy: blue-eyed like his father but without the bite of copper hair, more sandy, gentler, like his face, more his mother’s boy, her wariness.

  Joe was pleased by the ‘game cock’ and he tried to picture his father as a boy in that ramshackle heap of buildings called Vinegar Hill, fortressed in age and squalor, moated by wisps of field though plumb in the gut of the town. ‘Afraid of nothing.’ That brought the shadow: unlike himself, afraid of everything. He concentrated on the piebald roped behind him, at the white star on its forehead, and tried to work out how they measured the fifteen hands.

  ‘Look at her now,’ said Diddler, aloud but to himself. ‘Isn’t she the one?’ It was not to Lizzie he referred but to a middle-aged woman hanging above him, as still as a portrait. There was puzzlement but more admiration in his tone, a tone which in some measure reflected the generous part of the town who respected Mrs. Stanford’s daily vigil at the window. The scandalised part despised her for it, saying it ruined dignity, dissolved sympathy, made an exhibition of her: and that this vanity excused her husband’s crime.

  ‘So what are you thinking?’ Diddler murmured, weighing her up. He was more than ordinarily entranced by her. There she sat this Maundy Thursday morning, as on every morning, framed in the central window on the first floor in the fine rooms above her brazen husband’s ambitious business. She was dressed for a visit, hair strictly parted in the old style, fine antique necklace and brooches well displayed. She looked down on the town, staring it out.

  ‘If you could turn your looks into your revenge, Mrs. Stanford, I know where they would take you. They would fly across the Fountain, up the High Street, up to the bell tower on the great house on the hill where you come from, but you’d fly over that too, wouldn’t you, missus, and find out the little bungalow he built for the other one, the one he spends all his nights with, and keeps without shame. But she’d disappoint you, missus, because I know the woman, I find the bits and pieces he gives her, the bird baths, the gnomes with fishing rods over a small pond, bits of statues he brings her for her little front garden, and she’s just a pleasant, soft, easy body, Mrs. Stanford, nowhere near what you want her to be. Nowhere near your weight.’

  For a moment or two the thought yet again flared up that one day he might contrive to steal that still figure from its frame. Diddler was seduced by her remoteness, that stillness, elegance of dress, just waiting, he thought, to be taken and despite his rock realism, there was in the silence of the man some voice that whispered, ‘But why not by me?’ What style the woman had, he thought! ‘It’s revenge you dream of, isn’t it?’ he said to himself. ‘You’ll take it one day, missus, I’d bet the piebald on it.’

  On the day she did take her revenge, the tinker was deep in the country, trading, and he did not witness the prime town taxi, the polished old funereal Daimler, take her up the Hill, past the great house of her early childhood, park outside the bungalow and wait. After, it was reported,
looking with contempt at the garden, she went in, straight-backed, and stayed for almost an hour. News of the encounter was merely gossip and rumour and all that fed it was the hunted look which replaced Mr. Stanford’s brazen air and the end of his quaint ornamental gifts.

  Diddler tipped his cap to her as he always did and Mrs. Stanford ignored him as she ignored all of them.

  A cluck, a flick of the reins and the mare grudgingly moved into a trot, taking them out of the old town, past fields in the direction of one of the new council estates, down West Hill to the field of the famed copper beech, still stripped for winter, buds not visible on the immense and complex brain of branches that spanned the River Wiza. Joe opened the gate and Diddler drove down to a place that sloped sweetly into a rare straight stretch of the compulsively wending river.

  ‘Now then,’ he said, ‘say farewell to your careless youth, my beauty.’

  He undid the lead and walked gently into the stream. The two-year-old followed, already wary. ‘He’s been handled carefully, you see,’ he said, partly to himself, partly to Joe and Lizzie, but mostly to have the sound of his familiar warm voice beguile the suspicious animal. ‘He’s got used to the bit. You can’t do anything with a horse until it is comfortable in the mouth, so.’ Joe had seen cowboys breaking horses - bucking, high-rearing, head-dipped, bow-backed frenzy - and he looked fearfully at Lizzie, who was wholly absorbed in studying the apprehensive colt.

  ‘Now then, young fella, we’ll just slip this on,’ and the tinker’s hand smoothed the slightly shivering neck and tracked down the right leg to the hoof, lifted gently, a loose figure of eight loop of thick twine slipped on, tightened but still some slack in it. His wide, rather Mongolian face turned to them and split into a smile. ‘He can’t rear up now, you see, Lizzie, they can only rear with one leg going up in front of the other. I’ll take him in a bit deeper, then he won’t be able to buck either - he has to put his head right down for that and he won’t put his head under the water.’

  Joe was impressed that Diddler walked into the river as if the water did not matter. His boots, the bottoms of his trousers, soaked in an instant. But all impressions - the sense of trespass in this private field, the vague consciousness of wrongdoing to be at this on Holy Thursday, the pride in being included - were wiped out when Lizzie, barefooted, walked forward, slim, erect, tucking her skirt into her knicker bottoms. For some moments she simply stood beside the colt and then, slowly and tenderly, laid herself over the now restless straining animal, draped herself with sure care over its back, just below the tensed black neck, her slim white legs dangling, her upper body and head hidden from Joe’s sight, and the boy stared with unacknowledged lust at the bottom half of her, supine, passive, acting dead on the trembling, shuddering body of the violated animal which could not rear or buck, could not lift his front legs but tried to kick out the back, twisted and humped with all his powers to throw off this terrible invasion, straitjacketed in panic which pushed the blood violently through his near bursting heart. He neighed shrilly, thrilling Joe with the high screaming sound of it, wrenched against this clamp, swivelled his head to bite at Lizzie, but she was well placed, just too far away, lying without moving, seeming light, while Diddler stood in the river holding the lead, murmuring, ‘Now then. Now then …’ at the young horse, sweating with fear and fury, but water-bound, maddened, trapped under the stripped network grandeur of the copper beech. Joe was swept up in a force of short-breathed excitement which had to be wordless, choked-on, he knew, not to make a sound.

  ‘Straddle him over, Lizzie. Nice and quiet.’

  Not immediately, waiting for her own guiding pulse, Lizzie swung one leg over the broad back; it seemed lazy, the way she moved, sat up, patted and soothed the sweating pelt, held onto the mane. The man let the colt calm itself, gave it full time, and then in a rapid move, plunged his hand into the water and released the front legs, ready for anything. ‘Now then,’ he repeated, his eyes fixed on those of the terrified piebald, ‘we’ll walk him in the river for a while, Lizzie.’

  She tapped its flanks with her bare heels, taking it into water a couple of feet deep, water which submerged all its forces of attack. For some time Lizzie kept it in that narrow stretch, under the open roof of bare branches, slowly backwards and forwards, her long white legs nudging, guiding, her hair covering her face as she leaned forward on its neck and talked and stroked and brought the broken colt into its new world.

  On the bank beside Joe and as lost as the boy in watching them, the man said,

  ‘She’s some girl, eh Joe?’ He took a stump of a cigarette from behind his ear. ‘She’s stopping being a girl now, Joe, she’ll be bringing out the itch in a man soon enough, but that’s not for you, not yet.’ He lit up, his eyes fixed on the pair of them.

  She was out of the water and in the field now, sure of the horse and looking round at them, knowing they were looking at her, excited.

  Joe’s friend Speed had gone with her on his last leave. Smart in his army uniform, toughened, clipped, but still friendly enough to the younger Joe, whose father had stood in for Speed’s own. Speed had said she was a sex-pot, but Joe could tell, jealousy a sure analyst, that he really liked her as well. He looked at her, bare-backed, bare-legged, in the spring meadow, the northern sun finally this late morning shifting the heavy dew, and knew that it was hopeless, even prayer would not help, ‘dem bones, dem bones’ crept across his mind once more as he willingly let himself be seduced by the sight and thought of her, ‘now hear the word of the Lord’. Helpless with longing.

  A fine animal, Diddler thought, broken in the old way, the way it had been done as long as you could think back, a kindly sure way, two beautiful creatures out there in the field, the girl the master now.

  ‘I suppose you’ll want to be paid,’ he said when eventually she brought the horse back to them. Joe drew away from the power of the creature: the rage was still in the eyes, the force of breath through pink enlarged nostrils.

  ‘You said half a crown.’ The smile slid from the slim, success-flushed face and the lean jaw lifted just a fraction, giving her, Diddler thought, the look of a woman you desired. He fished in his trouser pocket, drew out the large silvery coin, spat on it, gave it a rub on his sleeve, and placed it on the thick crinkled yellow nail of his thumb.

  ‘Double or quits, Lizzie?’

  She held out her hand.

  ‘You’re a good girl, Lizzie,’ he said and slapped the coin onto her slender palm.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sam went up the street although there was no need. True he had his day’s bets worked out and would call in and place them, but they could have waited until the bookie’s runner ducked into his pub for the usual illegal transactions at midday. True it was good business practice to be out, to be seen and greet, but in mid morning with most spenders at the factories or on the farms the male encounters would be with that unyielding core of Wigton men who preferred to pass their days philosophically, broke, leaning against the railings around the Fountain, honing their local intelligence.

  But on these quiet streets, after the army, after the factory, he felt acutely, and at last, that he was his own man.

  Sam relished that he could stroll so pointlessly on the knuckle of a working day. No matter he had been up and working since eight, no matter he would be behind the bar until after ten in the evening, this was true liberty.

  He smoked as he walked and every so often he would stop for a crack. It was as if, for a few minutes, he had slid out of his own skin and put on the workless, untied, feathered world of P.G. Wodehouse, who could always cast a spell on him, Bertie Wooster golfing down Piccadilly to his club, the grind of the world buried, out of mind. There was the lightly sentimental song that had come in a few months back - ‘Softly, softly turn the key that opens up my heart’. Sam liked the title, could hear Ruby Murray sing it, liked to use the phrase. ‘Softly, softly’ up peaceful sun-washed King Street. Ruby Murray and Maureen O’Hara both had a look of Ellen: she was in
the song for Sam. When Joe was younger, the boy had said once or twice that his mam looked ‘just like a film star’ - a passing, childish remark that Sam kept.

  Ellen, left to guard the pub, knelt on the recently installed padded bench in the darts room and looked out at Market Hill, arena of her childhood, now taken over by the bus company whose red double and single deckers claimed a space once - as Mr. Hawesley pointed out - designated as solely for the use of the people of Wigton. Designated, he had used the word more than once, in the deeds of a trust, which should have been inviolable. You have to employ eternal vigilance. Ellen liked the high talk of this new chairman of the Labour Party, which held its weekly committee meeting in the kitchen of the pub.

  She had to stay in until Sam returned because Joe also was out and there had been no cleaner for a week and the notion that the pub could be left unguarded even on a sunny innocent spring morning was unacceptable.

  Because there was no one to help, Ellen had got up earlier every morning that week, and employed Joe more than usual. That morning, after he had chopped the kindling for the weekend she had asked him to lay the fires - kitchen, darts room, bar, singing room - before helping Sam carry up the crates of beer. All three of them had hurried their work and now she was beached in unaccustomed idleness.

  So she knelt on the leatherette bench and gazed across towards the house where her Uncle Leonard and Aunt Grace had taken her in as a child. To most observers it would seem an ordinary, monotone prospect, with the sun lighting up the high row of big early Victorian terraced houses that crested the top of the hill and acted like a wall of the old town. For Ellen this small patch was a space of histories, hers, Joe’s, their friends, of adventures, fears and games that endlessly filled the lengthy light of summer evenings, of growing, of weddings, deaths, new generations. She could pluck away the facades of those houses and know something, often more than was comfortable, of the lives and ways of every one of those whose refuge and shelter they were.