Crossing the Lines

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘Take my arm, Joe.’

  They walked down the High Street, step for step.

  Why did Edward’s mother run away? he asked his mother. Maybe there was a bus to catch, was the reply he got, and all he got.

  ‘This is Jackie Cassidy,’ said Sam. Joe came into the bar, too full of the day to want to shut himself away in his bedroom yet.

  ‘The seven stone weakling,’ said Jackie.

  ‘More like the “ghost with the hammer in his hand”.’

  ‘That wasnae me, landlord.’

  ‘I know. But not far off. British Bantamweight Champion!’ Sam’s delight in having the man as a customer was contagious.

  Joe shook the man’s hand. It was smaller than his own. The boxer was little, sadly thin, the skin on his face a dry parchment stretched so tight across the bones you feared it might snap if he should laugh, but there was no laughter in him. His raincoat was too big and stained with oil.

  He was the sole customer in the bar.

  ‘I saw this man fight,’ Sam said. ‘Gamest little fella on two feet. They were frightened of him at his own weight.’

  ‘Bantam,’ he explained. ‘I had to fight above my weight to get contests.’

  ‘They were frightened of you.’

  ‘Makes no difference now, landlord.’ He looked sadly but with transparent cunning at his two empty glasses, the whisky and the half-pint chaser.

  ‘On me,’ Sam said. ‘I saw you once in Newcastle - Jimmy Fletcher - how much did you give him?’

  Jackie waved his hand - dismissing the punishing disadvantage.

  ‘He was good,’ he said, reaching out for the half-pint, ‘Fletcher was good.’

  He sipped, several rather dainty sips.

  ‘It was a hell of a fight.’ Sam turned to Joe. ‘Jackie had him down twice.’

  ‘It’s no life,’ he said to Joe. ‘Stick to your father’s trade.’

  ‘And they gave the decision against you!’

  ‘Changed my luck, that fight.’ Jackie smiled. ‘I was up for anything ‘til then.’

  ‘They avoided you.’

  Jackie did not disagree.

  Joe felt obliged to contribute.

  ‘Who’s the best world champion, do you think?’

  The man grimaced, as if caught by pain.

  ‘World champion,’ he said. ‘They thought I …’ He swallowed the whisky, eyes closed, face white, hollowed, ill.

  ‘There’s a fella I’m meeting in Carlisle,’ he said. He looked at the clock. ‘Got to get there. We’re setting something up.’

  Joe saw his father’s exuberance suddenly drain away. His tone was now consoling.

  ‘There’ll be a bus in a couple of minutes,’ he said. ‘Just across the road.’

  The ex-boxer guzzled the rest of the half-pint. ‘I’ll be away then.’

  Sam wanted to ask a question but he did not want to impose on the man. Yet it was not intrusive and the odds against him meeting another contender for a world championship were very long.

  ‘How do you know when you’ve - you’ve really nailed somebody?’

  The man drained the very last drops of the whisky.

  ‘It goes right up the arm,’ he said. ‘To the shoulder. You always know. Then you move in.’

  Sam nodded, satisfied, and almost as an afterthought, said:

  ‘You’d nailed Fletcher that night, hadn’t you?’

  The little fighter went to the door, looked back at Sam.

  ‘There was big money on Fletcher that night,’ he said.

  Sam was so silent that Joe felt he ought to leave him alone with it, but as he made to go, his father said, ‘Poor little beggar, eh? What is there left for him? He’ll be - thirty-five? Look at him. But what a fighter in his day, Joe: the real thing. Jackie Cassidy.’

  Joe could see that his father was moved by the encounter but no more was offered and so he went through into the kitchen where his grandfather now parked himself on Friday evenings, happy with the two bottles of Guinness per evening courtesy of the house, enjoying a late sociability in his son’s pub, pleased to have Joe to talk to at this empty early hour. Joe liked him being there. He liked his dad calling his grandad dad.

  I know what’ll happen to that poor little beggar, Sam thought. He’ll be bought drink. He lives on it now. All that wasting’ll have turned him off food. Forced starvation. Anyway he’s skint. Not the type a pro gym would take on. Not the type to do anything but labouring and look at the size of him for a shovel and pick job. He’ll have come from nothing and he’ll go back to nothing. Found in some cheap digs or in an alley, pushed under, not a friend to help him.

  From then on for some years, Sam watched the papers for news of Jackie Cassidy, hoping that his sentimental prophecy would be confounded. It was not. He was given very few lines in the newspapers. Age, thirty-nine. ‘A tragic end.’

  ‘British Bantamweight champion found dead.’ No details.

  Sam had gone back to fan-childhood at the sight of Jackie but the thought of what he saw as a certain desolate end to such a game life, a life which had held out glory, depressed him. The feeling clung to him through the evening, the pub less full than usual on this Good Friday. No hound trails, no dog men in.

  Ellen, he thought, was rather distant, no doubt dwelling on her trip with William Hawesley the following day. That, unjustly, and knowing he was being unjust, was how Sam chose to see it. And what sort of man was it who insisted on the William - no Will, Willie, Bill, Billy - the formal William? Nothing fitted. Joe over-earnest with this overheated adolescent piety, even asking, as they were counting up the takings, if he could go to Glasgow the next day to take part in a Billy Graham rally, be one of the thousands ‘being saved’. At least that had been easy to say no to.

  Yet again, as at the beginning of the day, the boy had turned his back on his father. This time, though, he had let him go.

  Later, as he followed Ellen to bed, he remembered the spent boil on the boy’s neck and saw himself in a long queue in India when they were on their way to Burma. Women were promised at the end of the queue and despite the shocking films on sexual diseases which had been shown them, Sam had for the first time joined the queue and shuffled silently forward for a few minutes until he focused on the neck of the man in front, and the boil, large, angry, a red sore ready to burst. He had pulled out.

  That first time had been the last time and he smiled to himself as he went into the bathroom. Thank God for boils! What would Joe make of that?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Joe was sweeping the front of the pub when Colin came over. He had brushed all the dirt into the gutter and was about to push it down towards the drain where he had placed the shovel ready to take it through the back to the dustbin. It was not such a bad job when the school buses were not running. When they swirled onto the hill and caught him the embarrassment was like prickly heat.

  Colin gave him an envelope.

  'This is for Sis.’ He gave the Blackamoor a glance meant to be contempt, but Joe saw the hurt in it and felt for him. ‘I can’t go in to give a message to my own sis, thanks to you-know-who! But it’s important. Comprendez?’

  ‘I’ll just finish the front.’

  ‘He has everybody working for him!’

  Colin hesitated, wanting to express more bile, to wound the son for want of the father, but Sam might come out any time. ‘You and me was pals once.’

  His bitterness could never be consumed. Hurt never drained from the surface.

  Joe finished the job rapidly.

  ‘Come across,’ the message said. ‘Right now.’ And as soon as she could, Ellen obeyed.

  ‘He’ll be up in his own room,’ said Leonard.

  Because he knows he’s not welcome down here, Ellen thought, resenting her uncle’s dislike for her half-brother even though she understood it.

  ‘If he wants one of his summit conferences,’ Leonard peered above the racing pages of the local paper, ‘use the sitting room. Grace isn’t herself. I�
��ve made her stay in bed. She’s sleeping.’

  ‘It’s not serious?’

  Leonard shook his head and returned to study the form. She padded up the stairs, nervously. Yet she had to get to him. It was not usual for Colin to write.

  ‘Ellen!’

  Mr. Kneale spied her on her way past the sitting room. His moon face, spectacled, his pate rising balder by the year through whitening hair, his eyes fond on the young woman.

  ‘Mr. Kneale.’

  So many years, he thought, companions through a war, some sort of parent to Joe, never a wrong move or word or slip of his feelings for her, feelings well buried, and still she called him Mr. Kneale.

  ‘I am usurping the Royal Quarters.’ The ornate over-furnished space with its controlling view across Market Hill and beyond was Grace’s throne room.

  ‘Is she bad?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Mr. Kneale, carefully considering his words in the way which had always reassured her. ‘Anno Domini, Ellen. And Leonard is coming into his own. She listens to him nowadays.’

  Both of them smiled and both felt warm in the snap spontaneity of that rather conspiratorial smile.

  ‘Sometimes quite a modest change of location can …’ Was he holding her up? She was outside the door, stood rather politely, as if she were something of a stranger. ‘Are you …?’

  ‘No, no.’ She stepped over the threshold. There was, there always had been, a compliance before Mr. Kneale, respect, gratitude, more than that even. He took her for what was best in her.

  ‘Same old mess,’ he said, pointing to the neat stacks of notes on the table beside the window.

  ‘You’re the tidiest man I know, Mr. Kneale.’

  The warmth of tone far exceeded the modesty of the compliment and Mr. Kneale responded in his usual way, by diving for cover.

  ‘I’ve been looking up the early settlements in Wigton,’ he said. ‘The first we have any real evidence for after the Romans were called back to defend Rome. Except for King Arthur - now there’s a book! I feel in my bones he came from these parts, Ellen, and Carlisle was his Camelot, but bones are no good for historians, we must leave them to the medicine men - there’s nothing until the Anglo-Saxon - the High Street, the Crofts, still there today, you know’ - as she did; as he had recited her to her many, many times, as she never tired of hearing, it gave her town a deep root, a long engagement with the past, a sense of being securely moored in time - ‘and these men worshipped Warrior Gods - Thor, Odin - you can see what I’m getting at, can’t you? The men who marched off to war had these warrior ancestors inside them somewhere. But the mystery is, how do they keep it going when they’re now supposed to worship a God who tells them to turn the other cheek and think not of this world but the next? How do you think they square that when they go off to war?’

  He wanted an audience, not an answer, Ellen knew that. For fifteen years now she had been his most trusted audience. He waited for her arrivals, she knew that also, to pounce on her: and his assault was always like this - an expression of present affection by way of his love of the past, a romancing devoid of all display, all softness self-denied, love which could express itself fully only wholly masked, a passionate declaration by way of local history. ‘Ellen!’

  The raucous shout ripped through the tender cord between them.

  Ellen went upstairs.

  Colin had fixed up his small room, inspired by Do-It-Yourself, so that it was more than a bedroom. She sat in one of the two chairs, feeling on trial: Colin could still do that to her.

  ‘So what’s this about meeting my mother today without telling me anything about it, then?’

  He crossed his legs, cocked his cigarette, triumphant.

  ‘Auntie Grace told you?’

  ‘I got it out of her,’ Colin conceded.

  ‘Well,’ Ellen tried to hold his look steadily, ‘it’s true.’

  ‘So why wasn’t I told? She’s my mother, you know. Not yours.’

  ‘I know. I should have said.’

  ‘So why didn’t you?’

  Because I wanted time alone with someone who knew my father and would not make me grovel for every scrap of information about him. Because you would have wrecked all that. Because I have asked you more than once to come to his grave and you have always found excuses. Because I wanted time alone with him, and with her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘You didn’t want me there,’ Colin said. ‘That was it.’

  ‘You must come along then. After all it was you she told she was coming.’ Ellen was firm. ‘Mr. Hawesley’s driving me down. He has an aunt nearby. We’re leaving at one-thirty.’

  ‘What if I’ve got something else to do?’

  ‘Couldn’t you put it off?’

  ‘Typical! What Colin does doesn’t matter enough to count, does it? He can just come to heel whenever there’s a shout. And “put it off’. He’s got no life, Colin.’

  Ellen winced.

  ‘You’ll be very welcome.’

  ‘Not welcome enough to give notice to.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that.’

  ‘I never thought you were a sneak, Sis. Our dad would never have thought he’d had a sneak.’

  Ellen pulled back her face, as if hit.

  ‘I’m sorry, Colin. I don’t know what got into me.’

  ‘I do!’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘I’ll keep it to myself. I know you. I know more than you think.’

  ‘One-thirty.’

  ‘I’ll make up my own mind in my own time, Ellen. I have business this afternoon. Sneak!’

  He looked out of the window at the row of old cottages across the cobbled yard, indicating that the meeting was over. Ellen was too ashamed to protract it.

  Mr. Kneale watched her from the bay window and noted that she walked carefully, looking at her feet as if afraid of stumbling.

  Joe wandered up street after he had finished his set jobs, partly to avoid being given more. Alan would be working in his father’s shop. Edward was not in: his mother had taken him away with Edna to stay with a relative in the country. He knew that Malcolm did things with his father on Saturdays, enviable things, cleaning the car, going to Carlisle to a record shop, and John spent these mornings with his father too, scavenging in the fields and copses beyond their damp little cottage on the western edge of the town.

  Perhaps he would meet one of the others in the gang just by drifting up the busy street, an Easter gift to trade, chocolate eggs returning to the sweet shops, Easter bonnets, new suits for some, new shoes, something new for Easter: Joe had been bought a new pair of grey flannel trousers.

  He met Alistair. Alistair stood on the lip of the pavement opposite Meeting House Lane. Hands in pockets, pepper-and-salt drape jacket, black shirt, no tie, fag in gangster corner of mouth. His pose was defiant. Law-abiding shoppers who passed by thought he should never have been let out of Borstal, and the sooner he was packed off to the army the better. But the men who leaned against the Fountain railings could be provoked into embattled pride in him.

  ‘Joe!’

  The greeting was a demand. Alistair’s younger brother, Speed, had been Joe’s hero and in some manner, though two or three years older, a friend. Alistair’s mother was certainly a friend of Sam and Ellen. They used to be neighbours in the long-condemned Victorian congestion of Water Street. She still lived there. They said even she was scared of Alistair.

  ‘I was looking for somebody for a walk.’

  Joe fell into step as Alistair moved smartly up the street, ignoring the numerous short cuts offered by the alleyways, keen to be seen, nodding at passers-by, greeting people by name, undoubtedly legitimised by the company of Joe. For Joe, to be with this much older boy - he might even be nineteen - and a boy of such a terrible reputation for violence, was thrilling. He basked in reflected danger, tough by association.

  Alistair was not tall. His force came from the power of his shoulders and a taste for brutality. Y
ou felt muscle there, and a constant readiness to use it. He was deeply chested, strong thighed, but his best feature, the men said, was that he was fast, quick with his feet. The head was large, nose even classical, lips thin, skin pale and the hair, which fascinated Joe most, was being perfected into an enviable D.A. with the front tuft bouncing onto his broad fine forehead.

  Joe wanted to ask about Alistair’s father who had gone on the tramp after suffering ‘a breakdown’ when he came back with Sam after the war. It was the word ‘breakdown’ that drew the boy in. When people asked Speed about his father he would ask them if they were looking for trouble. Alistair, Joe sensed, would not be as courteous as his brother. Everyone had heard of the last fight, the one which had finally sent him to Borstal. Alistair had badly bashed up three of them. How could you be sent away for bashing up three of them, Joe thought, indignantly. Winning against three deserved a medal. And after all, the boy thought, they had come from another town.

  They moved swiftly out of the old town, up to the Syke Road.

  ‘See that house?’ Alistair jabbed out his finger. Joe nodded: it was on his paper round. ‘There’s a boy came there - years ago, years. Them’s his grandparents live there. He only came for his holidays. Never been let back. They just keep him. Wouldn’t let him go to school, nothing. Just keep him for themselves.’

  Joe had seen the boy occasionally, hugely fat, always between the two grandparents, always near the front door, gazing myopically at the outside world.

  ‘Just keep him?’

  ‘He’s in prison in a back room. There’s nothing I don’t know about what goes on in this town. Dead hole.’

  ‘I like Wigton,’ Joe replied, ‘there’s always plenty to do.’

  ‘For kids maybe.’ Alistair’s walk was a fast march: his expression was grim. ‘They’re in the Dark Ages, man. When I can get away, you won’t see me back’

  They swung down towards Old Carlisle, the large unexcavated Roman camp to which Mr. Braddock had taken them for a local history outing. Before then, Joe had loved it as a unique place of huddled little hillocks, paths winding between beehive mounds, corrugated with turf ridges to hide behind or gather your forces in stone fights. After the history outing the magic of the place had diminished but the description of what lay under the surface partly compensated.