Crossing the Lines

by Melvyn Bragg

  It was Mr. Tillotson himself who read the passage Joe most wanted to hear. He was a good reader, Joe thought, never rushed, made sense of it as well as finding the poetry in it. ‘Not for these I raise, The song of thanks and praise; But for these obstinate questionings/Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings; Blank misgivings of a creature/Moving about in worlds not realised.’ How did Wordsworth know that? How did he know exactly that and to be able to say it like that? First time round he had plucked up courage to ask Mr. Tillotson what it meant, which was when ‘neuroticism’ had turned up, and also ‘disturbances’. The teacher had then told him that in a letter Wordsworth as a boy had written how he had to grab hold of a rock to make sure he was still in touch with the external world. That was when Joe’s loyalty to the poet had been forever clinched. The final words rolled into the air and dissolved into silence. The teacher let the enclosed silence linger. Then the lesson was at an end.

  ‘Don’t be late again, Richardson,’ the teacher said as the boy made for the door. ‘It can become a bad habit.’

  At their table in the girls’ canteen there was conflicting advice.

  Linda said, ‘Richard’s better but he fancies himself a bit too much for my liking.’

  Jennie said, ‘Joe’s hopped about from one to the other. You’d be safer with Richard.’

  ‘I don’t have to go with either of them, you know,’ Rachel whispered, but fiercely: though they had attempted to isolate themselves at one end of the table, ears were pricked up all around the compass.

  ‘You don’t have to but you will,’ said Linda as, heroically, she pushed aside her apple crumble and custard because the other two hated school puddings.

  ‘Richard is … Well.’ Jennie struggled. What superlative could be found for him, especially in a company which distrusted superlatives?

  Linda said, ‘I don’t think Joe’ll give up.’

  Rachel bent her head slightly and smiled. His clumsy bungled advances that summer in the lane in front of her farm had been comical. Standing holding up his bike as if frightened to let go of it. But still.

  ‘Richard,’ Jennie was firm, ‘is, well, anybody would go with Richard. And not only in this school either.’

  Again Rachel smiled. Was his reach so wide? But ‘not only in this school’ was somehow comical as well.

  ‘Richard was with Marion for nearly a year,’ said Jennie. ‘So he’s a sticker.’

  ‘I like Marion.’ Rachel nibbled her lower lip, as if in vexation. ‘She was too slow for him,’ Jennie said. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘It’s what they said.’

  ‘I heard it was the other way round.’

  ‘That makes more sense to me,’ said Linda, grimly longing for the clearing up signal so that she could banish those puddings from her sight. ‘Marion’s in a rush.’

  With dishes cleared and ‘For what we have received may the Lord make us truly thankful, Amen’ mumbled by the host of green-clad girls, they went to look for a quiet spot and settled behind the tennis courts where anyone approaching would be clearly exposed and so deterred.

  They took off their blazers, rolled up the sleeves of their white shirts, kept the buttons shut to the neck, sat on the grass secure on their thick green skirts and looked over to the elegant school, young men and women most of whose mothers and fathers had been out at work at their age, tentative and rather restless in the new privilege of staying on, raw implants, their role unclear, ambitions confined, unused to this academic air.

  ‘He’s coming over.’

  Linda heaved herself up and went out to face him. The passage between the tennis courts and the wall which shut off the grounds from the rest of the crofts was rather narrow and effortlessly she barred him. Rachel looked away.

  Linda walked back as expressionless as she could manage. Joe stood his ground.

  ‘He wants to talk.’

  ‘He said more than that.’

  ‘He said he would book two tickets anyway.’

  ‘What if I don’t go?’

  ‘He said he could always get rid of one.’

  ‘What else did he say?’

  ‘He asked if you were already going out tomorrow night with somebody else.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  Linda paused. She was concerned lest she had done the wrong thing. She had, however, told the crucial truth.

  ‘I said there was nothing promised. It was left vague.’

  Rachel nodded, rather solemnly. Richard’s friend had said that he would be at the coffee bar in the neighbouring mining town in which he lived, half an hour before the first house. His gang always gathered there. Unlike Wigton, Aspatria had a coffee bar with a jukebox next to the picture house. This made it an adolescent social market, a place of trade with no necessary previous commitments. For Richard, invitation enough.

  Joe stood there, knowing he was a target. Rachel got up.

  ‘I can’t just leave the poor lad standing spare like that.’

  As she walked across to him, the air seemed to part in a special way to let her through, the boy thought, the sun behind her darkened her skin to a mystery, the nervous smile on his face opened from the heart and Rachel saw that and was suddenly, unexpectedly, abashed, gave a crooked smile in return, wished she were not wearing short, hooped green socks.

  Joe had an intimation, at the outermost limit of his mind, that with Rachel the siege would be lifted, not only the fallings away but other fears, that she would heal in yet unknown ways what work and will had only staunched and subdued. With Rachel all would one day be well and yet if his feelings and thoughts could have been summed up in a single word as she came to a stop a mere pace in front of him that day, it would have been ‘Help!’

  She saw how much he wanted to go with her and was impressed. She had never felt herself to be the object of desire. And though he had stood his ground and taken on Richard, she sensed, in what flowed between them under the hot September sun on the land of the old Saxon crofts, that he was uncertain. Rachel felt safe with that.

  ‘Where’ll we meet?’ she said, surprising herself.

  For a moment he was winded. Then he grinned, a gormless grin.

  At the end of the school day he circled the bus queues on his bike to make sure that Richard did not approach her. Rachel took the bus which went down to the little farming villages on the Solway, past the ruins of a mediaeval Cistercian Abbey, past fortified churches, across fathomless ice-age peat bogs. Her father’s farm was about three miles north of the town. Richard would bowl west towards coal, iron ore, the slag-heaped industrial eruption which rimmed the western fells and lakes. Joe circled the chattering bus queues intent as a kingfisher, ready to dive in.

  Nothing happened.

  Nothing happened for the rest of the evening either, nothing to compare. He did the three hours homework he had set himself for Fridays in the regime for this A level year. Nothing there but the pleasant slog, the notings and underlinings, the first draft of the final essay, the full-stop entry in the accounts book registering subjects done, time taken. No mention there of the faint fuse of excitement which nudged him to pause, a quiet pleasure in anticipation along his nerves which seemed to percolate into all the intervals in concentration. Restless after the essay he went down into the noisy pub but nothing took his fancy and he was not needed. The street was warm from the day and still some light but he did not want to go to see his Uncle Leonard or Mr. Kneale even though noisy Friday nights in the pub had become the time he went across for an argument or even for peace to get on with his homework. The phone box on Market Hill was a temptation but he knew it would not do to phone her - and she would have a phone, farms had phones: best to do nothing.

  In bed he read For Whom the Bell Tolls but his attention was not quite as raptly secured as usual in the grip of the fiction. The customers left. Those who had served them would be in the kitchen now, the round-up, the unravelling of the day. He preferred to be on his own, cultivating the thought of
her, the look of her which came to him like a scent, through the Spanish Civil War, through the essay on the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the apprehension of Richard, the fearful prospect of being blind side loose forward in the first game of the season the next morning, through all the usual rumble and rubble of impressions, memories, impulses swirling, clogging, infesting, irradiating inside the skull, like a scent it came, the look and thought of her.

  He found the Beethoven concert he had circled in the Radio TimeSy paused a while but a few minutes would have to do, he could not be drawn away from his purpose, not even by siren sounds in which he could utterly submerge himself.

  These concerts were a secret vice. Neither his parents nor any of his friends knew. It was not that he was too embarrassed about it, though there was some of that. Nor was he altogether ashamed, although there was a little of that too. Classical music was for posh voices, different accents, expensive clothes and outings, references chiefly designed to exclude, or so it could seem to Joe. But there was none of that when the music itself came from that common little maroon plastic box and played over him, played him, as the best singing in the choir had done, as the occasional happy few bars in the steeplechase of his own piano grinding lessons had delivered, there was none of that when the music carried him out to seas of unknowing that he would never understand and never want to leave. But tonight he needed simpler excess, someone he could be like, someone who could inhabit him, not an ocean but an island, a rock, hard, immediate, even savage. He had an appointment out there in the universe of music and he could not break it.

  He said his prayers quickly, including A levels now, but put tactfully. Then he knocked off the light. He reached down in the dark, left Beethoven and sought out the station which would weld him to that new music, that new voice, that sorcery, the promise of disturbance. He had to be patient: Frankie Laine, Doris Day, ‘Whatever Will Be’ which made him smile and sing along and then the needle hit bull on the nerve, Elvis Presley. White boy, black soul. The man. ‘Houn’ Dog’. The song. Rock ‘n’ Roll. That beat, that sex. The revolution. It shot into him.

  Would she be there?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Joe rushed in, made it to the stairs but Sam had been watching out for him and stepped out of the bar.

  ‘You did well.’

  The boy had to turn and face him though he felt glued to the ground with embarrassment. His dad had turned up at the game: so had other dads, a brother or two, a few girl friends, a scattering of the town’s sporting punters who now followed the school side playing so well but none of that mattered, it was his dad who mattered and Joe had not been prepared for it, left at nine-fifteen in good time for the ten o’clock kick-off, changed, the sweet skin-satiating feeling of pride when the dark green jersey was handed out and pulled on and then without warning there was his father, chatting away to Mr. Braddock, his History teacher, which doubled the embarrassment if doubling were possible of such a large quantity. At least he did not shout encouragement like one of the dads or instructions like another.

  Now he wanted to talk about it! Joe faced him up and then his head dropped, as if expecting and deserving criticism. He had missed an easy tackle. Plain to be seen and certain to be judged and condemned by all.

  ‘You were too strong for them all round.’

  The pub was quiet. Past dinner time. Joe had taken his dinner in the canteen with the opposing team. Ellen was visiting her father’s grave. Mr. Hawesley had said he would get her back by six. Sam was a bit lonely.

  ‘Richard dictated the play …’ said Joe. ‘He’s a natural,’

  Joe nodded over-emphatically. Richard had carved them apart, dummied, side-stepped, slung out passes unerringly, tackled with force, scored, twice. In the dressing room before and after the game he had had the grace to say nothing. Joe had had the sense to do likewise.

  ‘But you played well,’ Sam insisted, fishing out a cigarette. ‘Good covering.’

  ‘I missed that tackle.’

  ‘Everybody misses a tackle now and then. And he was a very nippy little lad, their best player, that scrum half. Everybody misses the odd tackle.’

  But not because they’re suddenly frozen in fear, Joe thought. Will I ever be picked again?

  ‘For a first game I would say very promising.’

  Sam smiled, wishing he could do more. The boy turned to go, hesitated for a fraction of time wanting to say thanks or talk further about the game or just give back for what had been given but ‘I’ve got to go’ was all he could muster and both of them knew he was running away.

  ‘Can I have For Whom the Bell Tolls when you’ve finished it?’ Sam asked the question of the boy’s back. Joe turned his head.

  ‘I like it better than that other one,’ he offered. ‘There’s more to it.’

  ‘After I’ve read it we can talk about it. Maybe. If you want.’ But the boy was gone.

  Joe took the stairs two at a time, dumped his strip into the was Leonard’s position, to which Joe was viscerally sympathetic. Yet Mr. Kneale’s respect for the United Nations and Mr. Hawesley’s uncharacteristically fierce advocacy of the anti-government position of the Labour Party also had its influence on the boy - it was another world of fairness, another view of the Empire, a difficult new order to consider, a budding feeling that invasion could be morally inferior to restraint. Mr. Braddock had set up a debate on it and told Joe he would be speaking Against the invasion. But he was glad to avoid this argument. His Uncle Leonard’s anger would have taken too much energy. Uncle Leonard wanted to blow Colonel Nasser to Kingdom Come and he wanted Churchill back pronto to make sure the Americans didn’t stop us. It was our show.

  Joe could only concentrate on meeting Rachel. He wanted time to flick past. He wanted a guarantee that she really would be there. He fingered the tickets in his inside pocket so often that they began sweatily to stick together. No friend or activity he could think of could do what he most wanted - eliminate ninety minutes. He had circled a concert in the Radio Times but simply listening would not be enough. He ran with restlessness. The pub kitchen would make him restless. Alone in his bedroom would make him restless. He forced himself to bike around the far boundaries of the town - that could put in fifty minutes and more if he doubled back on himself. He could have been on an abandoned planet for all the traffic he met and while he rode, he dreamt of her, saw her, rehearsed what he might say, worked out a list of topics, worried that the grey skies might be full of rain which would put her off the bike ride into the town, thought to go out and meet her, decided that would spoil it, the clouds were too high, weren’t they? For rain?

  And then she was in front of him.

  It was a different her.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Rachel had taken trouble. This would be the first time she had gone on a date to the pictures. Before that, village boys, an evening stroll, escorted back from a village dance, what now seemed merely girlish days. The second house of Wigton pictures on a Saturday night was serious. Whatever came of it, word would get around.

  Her father was the problem. It was essential that he did not pick up the scent. They were two peas in a pod, he said, in looks, in character, it was a pity she was not a boy. The two boys were like their mother, fair, willowy, placid, unforthcoming. Rachel was his. That was the chief reason for the circumspection of the village boys. ‘You’re turning into a honeypot,’ he would say to her: it was a criticism of sins uncommitted, it was jeering as if she were getting above herself, it was a warning, no doubt of that, and there was something else which she could barely fathom, it was hurt at the approaching betrayal, a staving off of loss. As a child she had trailed around the farmyard behind him as if attached by a piece of string, the short shadow to the light of his furious mission to transform the weedy, bog-ridden, over-small tenant farm, wanted by no one else and only landed in the lap of the former labourer because of the few hundred pounds down payment provided by his wife, whom he tormented for that benison. The war had given hi
m his chance -the war had made him.

  Rachel had been his 'luck’, he said, the youngest, the only child born on the farm. The boys were hammered into shape but he never let his physical temper loose on Rachel, and for years she was outside the rule which willed the wretched farm to improvement, to lease more acres, to start a pedigree milking herd, and through fine husbandry force it into a property which made Isaac Wardlow a man admired in the district although no amount of admiration would ever satiate his ambition. Rachel was his pet. He made no affectionate gestures, no kissing after she was a baby, no hugging, no expressions of love in word either, but she was outside the force of his passion to show them all, protected. Until she grew up.

  Now she feared him. She saw him lead in the bull, holding the pole, steering but utterly alert and she felt like that. His temper would fire at any time now, just as with the others, but Rachel was not used to it and she fought back, which he liked because it meant she was him, but he could never let her win and steadily he was crushing her. Twice she had threatened to run away and once he had all but hit her.

  The Friday night was easy because she went up to the village hall to the Youth Club but on Saturday she would have to take care. She stayed in the house throughout the day. She felt as if he were shaming her; he would give her no air. In the heavy-beamed, old-oak-furnished Victorian kitchen, which her mother hated and longed to replace -but there was never money for inside - she literally kept her distance, helping to serve the food when the three men came in for dinner, clearing away, washing up, not even risking a walk up the village but filling any free time in her bedroom, vainly trying to read. The date with Joe had become important.

  It was quite usual for a few of them to cycle into Wigton for the pictures on a Saturday night and no surprise that it was the later, the second house, because the young men and older boys would never be finished work in time to get to the six o’clock. So she did not need an excuse. But her father could pick things up about her, as she could about him, so Rachel said less than usual and gave her mother as an explanation and an excuse that it could be the time of month in case her father asked any questions.