Crossing the Lines

by Melvyn Bragg

  CHAPTER NINE

  Kathleen had said that she would murder Lizzie when she got her hands on her, but at the sight of her - ‘What have they done to you? Sweet Jesus. What have they done?’ - she led her to the bathroom, bathed the uncontrollably sobbing child, threw the sullied clothes on the fire, stood before Sean when he got back from the shift in the afternoon and told him he could not see the girl until she had told him what had happened.

  It took a great deal for him not to bring his fury down on Lizzie herself, but Kathleen faced him down and he had never hit her. When he did go and see Lizzie and saw her so frightened, fragile, swollen-faced, blemished, cowering against the wall, I’m sorry, Da. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Da, I’m so sorry,’ he nodded, pushed his anger down.

  ‘You’ll be all right now. Just you do what your mother says. You’ll be all right, so.’

  ‘She’s a good girl.’ The sentence was Kathleen’s shield.

  Sean sent word to two of his brothers who were in the building trade on the West Coast. They came with the sons who were of age. Lizzie’s older brother, Michael, was determined to be included although he was only seventeen.

  Lizzie’s father had no compunction about loading the odds. These three men were feared and now they were on the lookout. Everyone knew they had done it. Still they walked down to the pubs together and back together, swearing innocence, supported by no one.

  They fell on them near the estate after the pubs had closed. The O’Connells had stayed in Sean’s house for the evening, drinking steadily but not mad for it, Lizzie unseen upstairs, unseen and not referred to. They let their rage grow. When they went out and stood in the shadows of the high gates to the long driveway which led to the great house, they were ready for murder: fear had been driven out.

  Like his two brothers, Sean was a big man. Brought up to heavy work on his father’s meagre holding in Donegal, continuing with shovel and pick work daily at the factory, heavy-muscled, gentle in movement, devoted, a man who attracted no trouble. It was he, though, and his brothers, whose fury sustained itself longest, despite the recklessness of their sons, it was these three whose terrible purpose finally gave the men a brutal hammering.

  As they lay, blood, fractures, the sound of breath harsh, grabbing for air, the few spectators across the road, more in the houses, shaken with the savagery of it, Sean, whose big face was split, blood-raked, his chest in agony, lifted one by the hair as if he would have his head: Til tell you only the once.’ He breathed in with difficulty. ‘You get out of this town by the weekend or by Jesus Christ Himself swear next time I will swing for you.’

  They took her to Kathleen’s sister’s family in Liverpool. She would be looked after there.

  Lizzie cried all the way, remembering, re-living it, seeing them, the men, helplessly trying to force forgetfulness, the cold empty house, the darkness, the dank smell of it, the scream that would burst her head but not be let loose for fear she would be found, and what the men had done, what they had done that night, what they had done to her.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Joe liked to take the short cut home from school by way of Vinegar Hill. His satchel was slung on one shoulder. His cap was stuffed in his school blazer pocket.

  Diddler was there which was always a bonus. The boy went over to him. He was studying the piebald which was cropping the poor grass in the small patch of field.

  ‘How’s Joe?’

  ‘Fine. How’s yourself?’

  ‘There’s been better days, Joe. There’s been worse.’ A perfectly straight jet of spit flew from his mouth. ‘Want to get on his back?’ Joe shook his head.

  ‘School uniform.’ But both of them knew the boy was afraid of the powerful young horse. Joe felt a blush of shame. ‘So what’s the crack, Joe?’

  ‘Got to go and do my homework.’

  ‘Homework is it? Now that’s a thing.’ The man looked out at the piebald and clicked his tongue gently, rhythmically, against his palate. The horse began to move towards him. ‘Well now,’ he said. ‘Homework it is, Joe.’

  PART TWO

  LESSONS, 1956

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Rachel watched him. Morning break, upper school, lounging packs of green-blazered adolescents occupying the grounds of the wisteria-bedecked old town house, extended by an assembly hall with minstrels’ gallery, a new wing of green-tiled classrooms and two tennis courts, but still essentially the rather grand Georgian town house, quietly centred near St. Mary’s. A century earlier it had been philanthropically bestowed for the improvement of the girls in the town. It was now home to the older half of the mixed grammar school, rustily returned after the freedom of the long summer holiday, catching a breath of the golden September morning before being penned in again, independence forfeited, the uniformed green flock herded back for yet more schooling. Joe knew he was being watched.

  He wanted to go out with her. So did Richard Armstrong. Word was that Richard had fixed up to see her on Saturday night. Joe had not been prepared for that. He had thought he was nearly there with the build-up of obvious glances during the last weeks of the previous term, craftily engineered accidental encounters in the holidays, the coded encouragement of her two best friends, Linda and Jennie. Richard had just crashed in.

  Richard was repeating a year in Upper Sixth Science. He was rugby captain, an under-eighteen county player, an England schoolboy trialist, fine-jawed, good bones the girls said - like Gregory Peck -and as widely admired as, Joe feared, he himself was widely disliked. Joe was one of his warmest admirers. He would have traded a lot to be as brilliant a sportsman, a natural they all said, as popular, easy going, unafraid. He had never quite succeeded in becoming Richard’s friend. Now he was competition. By rights Richard should have her. He knew that Richard’s friends thought he should back off. Richard was better, older, nearly a man. Richard was It.

  So was Rachel, Joe thought. Two years younger, entering her O level year as he was entering his A level one. Deep black hair, eyes almost as jet, a yielding promise in her body that Joe could only have described in words he wanted to avoid, the nose strong as her will, reported on respectfully by Linda, very fat, closest friend. Rachel’s face, so expressive, already Joe believed he was an expert on her thoughts, her complexion dark after the summer, intense but with that almost smile galling, teasing, watching him.

  Once she went with Richard that would be that. As he stood there pretending to listen to Malcolm’s mirthless analysis of ‘The Ying Tong Song’ a familiar mist of panic closed on his mind. Nowadays it was nowhere near as terrifying as the previous blank-outs. He could even go for long walks in the country, face them, steep himself in the comforting undulations of the copsed and river-runnelled Solway Plain. But panic could still seize him, threaten him, force action to throw it off.

  He stared across at her. Oh yes, she was so lovely. Not to go with her could not be imagined. Richard was leaning against a wall of the old Rose Garden, full face in the sun, around him a court. Joe went across.

  ‘How’s Joe?’

  ‘Fine,’

  Richard’s smile seduced the slighter, younger boy, so charming that you wanted to please it, so confident you wanted to surrender, so honest. Joe wanted the others to peel away so that he could ask the question, but they stuck by their leader and when the bell was rung they accompanied him like a guard about him and there was no chance.

  He managed to catch Linda. Held her back until they were at the very tail of the queue. Richard had already gone in: was this manoeuvre some sort of betrayal of Richard’s smile?

  ‘Ask her could she come to the pictures tomorrow. Second house.’

  ‘What’s on?’ Linda’s gaze was very steady.

  ‘On the Waterfront. Marlon Brando. They say he’s great.’

  ‘Isn’t it about a boxer?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Joe lied. He had to get back in to school.

  ‘Would you book? Saturday second house gets crowded.’

  ‘I’ll book.’ Upstai
rs, he thought. Lash out. Back seats.

  ‘I’ll ask her then.’

  ‘I’ll see you after dinner?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what she says.’

  Joe hurried in. Linda took her time.

  In his agitation he risked being even later and veered off to the Notice Board outside the hall. Promptly after Friday morning break the first fifteen rugby team was put up. He had to know. He had trained alone in the holidays, he had practised kicking, literally for hours, he had tried to drill himself into the conviction that he was not, not really, frightened of tackling and being tackled. He had to be on the sheet. Not to be picked would expose his cowardice for everyone to note. He would be the only rugby-playing male in the Upper Sixth not in the team. Not to be picked would be public shame, condemned as a mere swot.

  He was in! He was blind side loose forward. He could conceal most of his weaknesses in that position. Richard Armstrong stand-off half and Captain. Joe Richardson, first first-fifteen game! Blind side loose forward! That would do. The relief made him feel giddy for a moment or two.

  He was late for English but Mr. Tillotson rarely made a fuss.

  ‘Nice of you to drop in, Richardson. We’re on “The Tables Turned”. Brenda?’ Brenda read the verse beginning: ‘The sun above the mountain’s head …’

  Arthur took up the next verse. There were only seven of them in Upper Sixth English and the lesson was held in what had been a handsome bedroom overlooking the gardens. It was deeply quiet, their gentle locally accented reading echoed the tones of Wordsworth’s flat Cumbrian drawl, which could sound like the murmuring of bees, Mr. Tillotson had observed, several times. He kept bees.

  Five girls, two boys, together for a year now under Mr. Tillotson, Yorkshireman, hardly moved his lips but a strong voice, black hair plastered flat on his head, long pale face, supposed to have been in military intelligence in the war, Eastern Europe, mentioned it now and then, last day of term just the brief lifting of a curtain, mad on cricket. Alison. One impulse from a vernal wood,’ she read, ‘May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.’ There was a peace here, in the double lesson ending Friday morning, in the former Georgian bedroom, fireplace intact, windows floor to ceiling, cornicing not entirely gone. Mr. Tillotson himself took the next verse, powerfully read through the tight lips, especially the last line, ‘We murder to dissect.’

  ‘Richardson.’ So he had not been left out.

  ‘Enough of science and of art, Close up these barren leaves; Come forth, and bring with you a heart/That watches and receives.’ He knew it by heart. All of them did.

  ‘Now then, Richardson, last in first in, what is the poet telling us?’

  ‘He says Nature can tell us things books can’t, do you believe that, sir?’

  ‘It makes no matter whether I believe it, Richardson. Wordsworth believed it. How do we learn from Nature?’

  ‘By listening for impulses, sir. But he doesn’t tell you how to do it.’

  ‘What about “Come forth and bring with you a heart/That watches and receives”? You’ve just read it.’

  ‘How can a heart watch, sir?’

  ‘Can anybody help Richardson here?’

  Slim, spotless, doctor’s flaxen daughter, Brenda’s hand shot up as if it were reaching for the alarm cord.

  ‘He doesn’t just mean the heart itself, sir. He means more like a good heart, being willing to be influenced, more an open heart. Heart’s a metaphor, sir.’

  The master nodded. Brenda gave Joe a conquering and pitying glance. Her marks were better than his - in all three subjects, English, History and Latin. But such triumphant glances were helpful, he thought jealously, a goad.

  Joe’s gaze drifted to the window. Would she say yes? At least he was in the team. Linda would surely have told him if Richard had already asked her out on Saturday. How could he have waited so long? Being in the team would help. He could follow what was going on in the lesson and still drift. They were going through their set books for the third time.

  ‘We have to keep in mind that this poem is an answer to “Expostulation and Reply".'

  ‘I said Mr. Tillotson, ‘hence the title “The Tables Turned”. In one sense he’s pitting the power of books against the power of Nature.’

  ‘He gives a lot more time to Nature,’ Joe said, ‘so it’s an unfair argument. But you learn from books.’

  ‘It depends what sort of learning we’re talking about.’

  ‘Wordsworth thinks that moral learning and truth and wisdom can be learned from Nature,’ said Brenda, ‘better than from books. Just by listening to a wood.’

  Yes, thought Joe, somehow you do learn. But he could not talk about it openly.

  How did it happen? When first they had read Wordsworth, Mr. Tillotson had explained the poet’s ‘neuroticism’ and ‘disturbances’, and Joe had been attracted by that. It encouraged what he was already daring himself to do in solitude, sit on a hedge bank or a hillside and just simply be there. Until the sense of it became unbearable. This now seemed a greater thing because of the experience and poetry of Wordsworth. And at times he had felt a sense of replenishment, a dream of calm, a proportioning in his mind, marked by a physical experience of lightness, inward smiles at recognitions untraceable. He did feel his thoughts, sensations, whatever they could be called, acted on just by being there, open to impulses as in the poem. But how did it happen?

  Yet the boy’s liking for argument crashed through the fragile evidence he had gained for himself.

  ‘Listening to a wood won’t get you through A levels,’ he said.

  Mr. Tillotson smiled with the others, but the teacher knew that Joe wanted more.

  ‘Wordsworth wasn’t interested in getting you through A levels, Richardson,’ he said.

  ‘God made Nature,’ said Arthur loudly. His family was strict Unitarian in one of the remote, Norse fell villages. ‘So it makes sense. Real country people have a lot of wisdom. Our preacher says that.’

  ‘But we know about God through the bible,’ said Joe. ‘That’s a book.’

  ‘No it isn’t,’ said Arthur. ‘It’s God’s word.’

  Joe backed off. Reason had, gently - fearfully - begun to question faith. But he was not remotely ready to joust with the axehead certainties of Arthur’s upland nonconformism.

  ‘There’s something going on here behind the lines, you see,’ said Mr. Tillotson. ‘I’ll give you notes on this next week. It might come up as a question. A poem is always both of its time and it has a history. Now with Wordsworth we have to remember the French Revolution -which he saw as a student - and he welcomed it - “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” - remember? We talked about that - and then what happened after the Revolution? - The Reign of Terror, which he put down to the fanatical application of Reason. “We murder to dissect.” Reason, you see, had led to tyranny. Reason was suspect. And in this century also so-called Reason has led to tyranny time and again.’

  ‘It needn’t,’ Joe said, although he could just glimpse that it might.

  One moment. Add on to this another revolution, the Industrial Revolution which Wordsworth thought destroyed the balance between man and Nature. Now that Revolution as well was based on Reason, and he thought it had gone wrong in much the same way. So you can see why he looked for something else to hang onto. Being brought up in the Lake District helped - Nature all around him, you see, overwhelming him, and he thought that Nature and instinct - our own internal deepest nature - would answer the questions that Reason and both Revolutions had failed to answer satisfactorily. Nature and -this is a key point - a new understanding of childhood - “the child is father of the man” - we discussed that last term, this is crucial, we’ve discussed that before - which brings us to the Immortality Ode. Veronica, you can start us off.’

  Joe did not really understand. How could Nature be against industry when his father used to tell him about looking for trout on the way to the factory and the mining lads from Aspatria all
kept dogs, went rabbiting, knew more about trees than he did? And wouldn’t you be the poet you were going to be whether or not there was a revolution? You just wrote a poem, didn’t you? Because you had to. That’s what poets did. As Veronica’s monotone and dogged delivery nevertheless brought lines of soaring magnificence into what Mr. Tillotson called the domesticated and Jane Austen part of the school, Joe wanted to ask the teacher to spell it out more. But not yet. If he looked out of the rear window he could catch a sight of the new block where she was at that very moment, sitting and listening, like him.

  Should he write a note? He could use poetry. ‘She walks in beauty like the night.’ Change it to ‘You walk in beauty like the night.’ Too soft? Too early and too soft. How could he put on paper how much he fancied her when ‘fancied her’ was not good enough? She couldn’t possibly be impressed that he was blind side loose forward. Or just made up to a prefect. Richard was deputy head boy. If his gang had got the skiffle group organised and were playing somewhere, that would have helped, but they were still struggling just to make the right sound and finish at the same time. What could he give her?

  Great waves of words rolled quietly through the small warm schoolroom. ‘Turn whereso’er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more.’ Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar.’

  ‘Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own; Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind.’ The diffident voices of the Wigton schoolchildren, shy before these cliffs, scaled the heights with difficulty. These were new ways of seeing worlds external and internal, surprise views, sudden clearances, and their hesitant voices expressed the uncertainty of being in unmapped territory.