Crossing the Lines

by Melvyn Bragg

  Between times, Rachel pulled on her wellingtons, buttoned the tough school gabardine to the neck, found a use for the hated school beret and went to see Linda where she enjoyed her friend’s sly enquiries about Saturday night, told her in detail about the attractions of Marlon Brando and skated around the topic of Jennie, who had happened to turn up at the Aspatria coffee bar, and was rumoured to have found herself on a back row double seat with Richard. It doesn’t mean she isn’t one of my best friends still,’ said Rachel, although it was a disconcerting development.

  ‘Why should it?’ Linda agreed, but later she would float a remark, ‘Jennie always had her eye on the main chance,’ or rather cuttingly, and in a strictly neutral tone, ‘Mind you, nobody can deny her vital statistics,’ or, more forgivingly, ‘Jennie’s always fancied him,’ or, most telling of all, ‘If he’s that fickle you’re better off with Joe.’ Rachel agreed. On the Monday Joe had been like a dog with two tails. At break time she had scarcely been able to move without him there, smiling, beckoning, chatting, just preening himself on being with her, until she had to send him away, but he understood. Now three days without contact although they had agreed on the second house once more. But still not the back row. He said he understood. She laughed at his expression when he said that.

  Linda’s passion was records and the money she earned working in her parents’ village shop went to vinyl. Mel Torme’s ‘Mountain Greenery’ and 'The Platters’.

  ‘The Great Pretender’ were her latest purchases and she played them until she was word perfect and then she played them again. She had also worked out the basic steps for Rock ‘n’ Roll but her father had forbidden those records and so she just sang it. The attic bedroom was a little small for the size of Linda in full flow and the awkwardness of Rachel. They ate only slightly stale fancy cakes from yesterday.

  As she walked home along the flooded lane Rachel laughed aloud at the ducks proudly claiming the human right of way. Looking very pleased with themselves, Rachel thought. Their world winning. And Linda’s support for Joe, given in her own indirect way but given, had been a help. Linda was shrewd as well as being a friend. She would be extra friendly to Jennie if they got into school on the Friday. The rain had eased a little: the forecast was not as alarming: it was surprising how quickly it drained away. She wanted to be back at school, out of the house, seeing Joe.

  ‘There was a young man phoned while you were gallivanting about the village.’

  Her father had waited to say this until Rachel had put on the large black kettle at his order for tea. Her back was to him. She did feel, and literally, a chill about her. The tone was menacing and when she turned she saw her mother was frightened. The boys, as her two older brothers were always called, were out taking the herd back to the fields after the milking.

  ‘Name of Joe. He said he would telephone later. I told him not to bother. What do you think, Mother?’

  She shook her head, but giving what signal it was impossible to judge.

  ‘It was Mother persuaded me to have that telephone. The rich, you see!’

  His smile showed his strong straight white teeth and it could have fooled a stranger. Rachel knew she was in for it.

  ‘Is this the fella you were seen with on the back row of Wigton pictures last Saturday making a fool of yourself with?’

  ‘I wasn’t on the back row.’

  ‘That’s not what they told me.’

  ‘Well, they were liars!’

  ‘And who are you calling liars, young lady?’

  ‘Whoever told you.’

  ‘She’s getting her dander up, Mother, eh? So what about this kissing and canoodling in public?’

  ‘I didn’t. That’s another lie.’

  ‘Don’t you set yourself against me.’

  ‘I’m not.’ But she was. ‘So who is this fella?’

  ‘I’m not saying.’

  ‘Oh. Are we ashamed of him then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or are we mixed up with the sort of fella we shouldn’t be?’

  ‘He’s at my school if that’s what you’re worried about.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what I’m worried about. I’m worried about my daughter making a public exhibition of herself at Wigton pictures and some good for nothing thinking he can just make a telephone call whenever it pleases him and have you at his beck and call. That’s the start of what I’m worried about.’

  His words stirred his rage. The game play he had been drawn into by her gutsy daughterliness dissolved as his fury sped to the surface. He gripped the arms of the wooden chair as if to manacle himself to it.

  ‘I’ve only been out with him once!’

  ‘And I suppose you think you’ll be going out with him again?’

  ‘Yes!’ A recklessness now began to possess Rachel. She wanted to throw off this, this man, this dark place, this fear all about her. ‘Well, you won’t.’

  ‘Who says?’ She ought not to have done that. Isaac gave the two words space as if waiting for them to reach the final boundary of their echo.

  ‘Who says?’ Softly spoken now. ‘Did you hear that, Mother? Did you think it would come to that?’ The voice began to rise and so, with a terrible slowness, did Isaac himself. ‘Who says? I’ll tell you, young lady. I says! That’s who says. I says!’ He was now on his feet.

  ‘You shouldn’t have said that.’ Her mother’s intervention -addressed to Rachel - was a plea to both of them. ‘You should pay your father more respect.’

  Isaac was baulked: a wild look of frustration was directed with venom at his wife who yet had come in on his side. But a break in the rhythm had been made.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Rachel said.

  ‘I can’t see it in your face.’

  ‘I can’t help how I look.’

  ‘Well,’ he sat down slowly, stiffly, ‘thank your mother for letting you off.’

  The kettle began to sing. Rachel turned to lift it and pour it into the pot and discovered she was shaking. She checked it. She used both hands to steady the large black vessel. With her back to him, he said quietly,

  ‘You’ll not go to Wigton pictures again until I say.’

  This time she sensed that saying nothing would be the most effective response. After a breath she turned to face him once more: and just looked.

  ‘Not until I say.’

  ‘I’ll pour the tea.’ Rachel stood aside to let her mother pour and took in the full meaning of her stare - stop now, no more. ‘I have no time for tea,’ Isaac said.

  He went across to the door without looking at either of them. In the porch he pulled on his old coat and jammed on his cap. Without turning he said,

  ‘Some of us work.’

  The rain had begun again. A soft drizzle this time, but penetrating. Rachel now shook violently.

  ‘I won’t stay here if he does that,’ she said to her mother. ‘And you can tell him if you want. I’ll live with Auntie Claire in Wigton and I’ll get a job in a shop. I’ll be sixteen in three weeks. Then he can’t stop me doing what I want.’

  Rachel did get to school the next day and told Joe that her father had gone mad. She would not be able to come to the pictures. It was not an excuse. It would be better if he did not phone. In fact she would much rather he didn’t. She would phone him from the village. No phone? Well, they would have to wait until Monday. Better not to write either and not come through. It would blow over. She let him kiss her in the doorway of the school hall where they had loitered after the dinner break, lolling around conspicuously until all the others had drained back to their classrooms. He wanted to tell her he had been picked for the team again but it did not seem appropriate.

  Joe had been listing the girls he had fallen for. Time and again he had fallen. Lizzie out on her own. Girls on Market Hill and Water Street before that. At school, Kathleen, Marjorie, Jennie, Christine, Betty, Jean, hopeless loiterings, embarrassed encounters. A few times it had been more than letters passed across the classroom, S.W.A.L.K. capital-lettered o
n the back of the envelope, sometimes a date to meet at a social, at the pictures, a walk, high blocked spiked excitement, and once it had lasted a month until she had packed it in. Only twice had he done the packing in. The Glasgow girl at Butlin’s in Ayr who had been perfect until she had put on a fancy dress for the barn dance and somehow become so different that Joe had run away; and the girl on a holiday from Maryport who had been a mistake from the beginning.

  There had been the Catholic girls met at the socials set up by Sister Philomena and Sister Francis at St. Cuthbert’s. Margaret, Cecilia, Theresa; and Eileen from Carlisle, met in that city of dance halls’ most junior academy, meeting again on Burton’s Corner at the end of Sunday afternoons to go to the pictures, and that had seemed good for a while, letters through the week, poems, a feeling of arrival with a girl from Carlisle and slightly older. But she too had gone, though it was his own fault, he knew; the reckless kissing of another girl from the same school on an A.Y.P.A. outing.

  He knew he was always on the lookout. Nothing yet had happened for which he could be accused of being fast, although the moist and grassy fumblings and tugging of clothes, hands on, hands off, and extreme clinging with the second girl from Carlisle had seemed close, until she suddenly just sat up, tidied herself and said she had to go home. There was a perpetual longing and lust about him, buried deeply and subjected to many religious forebodings and social strictures, but unmistakably there, waiting, wanting to be released. It was as if he were the only sufferer, though he had to assume that every other boy had it. Certainly Alan talked enough about it. Joe did not like to spell out any details: there were very few.

  There could be flashes of wildness which caught him unawares. A photograph of naked breasts in the National Geographic Magazine. A pouting seductress in TitBits studied in shame at the barber’s. The lift of a skirt on the screen when a Hollywood Goddess spun in a dance or Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth just gave their look. There were days when he thought he fancied every girl he saw and believed that he would have made a go of it with any of them, however they looked, whatever their reputation, as long as they said yes. He wondered everyone could not see it steaming from his ears. But except for those confused gropings in the grass it had not really taken off. Lena Barton had been reported as saying, ‘I just don’t fancy him.’ It was Lena Barton simple: they just didn’t fancy him.

  But Rachel did. He could tell. Rachel did and that certainty offered the promised land. Rachel did.

  Rachel made a point of going out at ‘pictures’ time when she would have joined the others anyway. Linda, who only went to the pictures when she got a lift, met her outside the shop and they went to the Donaldsons, where they played cards in the big light farm kitchen and Mrs. Donaldson made them sandwiches and tea. She got back while they were still up. She was civil but went to bed immediately.

  Isaac burned.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Mr. Braddock had told them they need not wear school uniform which put Joe in a dilemma. There was his best suit - too good to waste on a school outing which would involve scrambling about in the open, most likely in the rain. There was his old suit but that was only for knocking about in. And there was an old sports jacket, too battered, he thought, for the occasion. There was the uniform, which he settled for but without the school cap or tie.

  Most of the other boys wore sports jackets as did Mr. Braddock, whose prized ancient garment was leather-patched at cuffs and elbows. Malcolm’s sports jacket was almost new but it too was leather-patched, which Joe thought daft and somehow showing off.

  The trip to the Housesteads Camp, fifty miles away on the Roman Wall, was open to all Sixth Forms, Upper, Lower, Science and Arts, basically in order to fill the bus, although the Headmaster had put on the circular to parents that the visit could be useful for the General Affairs paper they all had to take alongside their more specialised exams. The early autumn morning was fine: Joe did not take his mac. It began to rain after half an hour or so. He tried to get a sing-song going - ‘Ten Green Bottles’, One Man Went to Mow’, ‘I’ve Got a Luwerly Bunch of Coconuts’, the usual starters but there were few and timid takers, as if there were an unwritten rule against such singing in such a bus. A vague disapproval. Brenda looked snooty. It soon petered out. Joe felt embarrassed. You always sang in buses on trips. He was sitting next to Malcolm and put up with Malcolm’s inept impersonation of Al Read until he recovered his composure.

  The bus moved north, through the Wastelands over which the Scots and English had battled themselves to a standstill nationally, tribally and family to family for more than three hundred years. The teacher brooded on the small villages which had only recently felt confident enough to build in stone. This had been nomad land. The few cities were fortified, Carlisle itself, Newcastle to the east, Lancaster and York to the south, Edinburgh to the north and between them, smaller forts, peel towers, fortified farmhouses, fortified churches, a land of ravage and plunder, boys of eleven and twelve in the saddle, cattle raids by night, blood feuds unending even when ringleaders were shipped west across the sea or fled further across the ocean. Even though he had been a navigator in the war, Mr. Braddock’s imagination and his sympathies had always been excited by the army, armies, men in combat, battles which could still, just, trace their source to Homer. Epic battles had been waged here, tragedy and glory, and now they were headed for the magnificent outermost wall of one of the greatest military peoples and Mr. Braddock chewed over how he could pass on what he knew.

  They were good, the children. He took out his pipe and stuffed it tight with cheap tobacco which stank. They enjoyed that. That was Mr. Braddock. Haddock was his nickname, but not many bothered with it. His sentimental determination to give them the best he could earned him their respect. Son of a missionary, educated far from his parents who were devoted to Central Africa, marooned with reluctant relatives on too many school vacations, finding both solace and companionship in war, in the air, in danger, he had landed in this far northern town as a staging post but was increasingly drawn in to it. The Lakes are so near, he would tell friends; property’s so reasonable; a great spot to bring up kids - he had two, both under five.

  But it was the schoolchildren, the variety and character in them, that held him. He liked to imagine them as the crucible of a new England. Some came from the mining town of Aspatria, others from the port of Silloth, others from the hill villages still speaking the dialect of their conquerors eleven hundred years ago, others from the rich Solway Plain, others from the market town of Wigton. The enduring land, the industry which had made England so great, the trade which had made her so wealthy and the history which seeped from the place, intoxicated the keen young teacher. And in the children themselves he thought he could discern those differences and yet also see those qualities held in common which made the English, as he thought, such an exceptional mongrel breed.

  The schoolteacher saw some of them as the first of their kind to be off the land after centuries in thrall to it, first out of the mines, out of the factories, and he saw himself bringing them to a new and better life through the salvation of scholarship. At times he could feel deeply moved by the journey they were about to embark on and connected it to the emotion he had felt when in his study of History he had first encountered the life stories of ordinary people.

  One in particular he had cut out and kept and though now it was buried in some overstuffed drawer, he knew it was there. It was the testament of a ploughman of the eleventh century speaking to the Lord of the Manor: A work very hard, dear Lord. I go out at daybreak driving the oxen to the field and yoke them to the plough; for fear of my lord, there is no winter so severe that I dare hide at home; but the oxen having been yoked and the share and coulter fastened to the plough, I must plough a full acre or more every day. I have a lad driving the oxen with a goad, who is now also hoarse because of the cold and shouting. I have to fill the oxen’s bins with hay and water them and carry their muck outside. It’s hard work, sir, because I am not
free.’ Learning would free them, and he would bring them that.

  As the bus climbed north to that waist of Britain, between the Solway and the Tyne, where the Romans had thrown down their final word in stone to the barbarians, Joe looked out of the window and wished Rachel were sitting next to him. She had not been able to come out on Saturdays for a fortnight now and while Joe told her he understood, he did not, really. Seeing her at school had become more important, finding the moments in the day, the places. Linda and occasionally Jennie too, on guard.

  He used to get sick on buses and the trace of it remained and so he breathed deeply and made himself think of something other than the queasiness imminent in his stomach. Brenda suddenly looked attractive in those non-school clothes, he thought, yet whenever he caught her eye she seemed to look mockingly at him, some sort of taunt which was both provocative and provoking. Veronica had turned up with a ponytail, quite unselfconscious, and again transformed as all the girls were in their non-uniforms. Joe had attempted a wolf-whistle and then bit his tongue because it could get back to Rachel and there was nothing in it at all. The only one with whom he felt wholly comfortable was Arthur, who had arrived in full school uniform, not a single concession. Joe did not know why Arthur’s fidelity pleased him so much. Like Mr. Braddock’s stinking pipe and tramp’s jacket.

  It was odd about Malcolm. He riled Joe and yet Joe thought of him as a friend, one of his old gang with Alan and John - now at the factory - and Paul who had drifted away. There was something in Malcolm which made Joe feel inferior and while he resented it he was also attracted to it. Malcolm’s posh detached house, Malcolm’s posh things, Malcolm’s father’s posh car. But it was not all that. Mr. Braddock had branded into them that money was of no real importance. One of the many lessons in living he gave to children whose superfluous income was negligible, most of whose houses were rented, whose holidays were ‘a day at a time’ or at home, whose material possessions were few, was that money did not matter. He drove this into them. Character mattered. Duty mattered. Loyalty, honour, humour, humility, grit - yes - but money - no. Money was no more than a means to an end and the ends sought in this life had to be modest. A gentleman was modest, though he rarely used the word ‘gentleman’, for he wanted the girls to be advised of this first social commandment too. And modesty had nothing to do with the making of money, the mere accumulation of cash and possessions, the waste of life in a trade for profit. Modesty had to do with helping others, cultivating decent values, playing the game in the right spirit. On that scale money was unfortunately necessary but its pursuit was not for the finest. Joe was a devoted disciple of Mr. Braddock and so it could not merely be Malcolm’s advantage in money.