by Melvyn Bragg
That was what Mr. Tillotson had said. Joe nodded it through. But the main challenge had to be resisted.
‘Maybe he thought they’d all end up fighting among themselves when he died and so he wanted to sort it out before then,’ Joe said.
‘Who told you that?’
‘I thought it up.’ Mr. Tillotson had said he had a point.
‘Well, he miscalculated that one, then, didn’t he? They’re at his throat in ten minutes and then at each other’s throats.’
‘Did he need a hundred knights?’ Joe asked. ‘That was the problem.’
‘You sound like her in the play. One of the daughters.’
‘But how would you like it if somebody said they’d let you rule and then turned up all the time with a hundred knights who caused havoc and did whatever they wanted?’
‘Whose word do we take for that? The two ugly sisters?’
‘You make it sound like a pantomime.’
‘P.G. Wodehouse would have made a great comedy out of it.’
‘Mr. Tillotson says it’s Shakespeare’s finest tragedy.’
‘You listen to Mr. Tillotson.’ Sam meant it. Enough.
He dropped the stub of the cigarette into the fire. Joe was relaxing now. He could always add on ten minutes at the end to keep up his hours.
‘That’s not what I came to talk to you about.’ Sam took out another cigarette. ‘I think you can let go some of your jobs downstairs,’ he said. ‘You’ve enough to do up here. So,’ rather hurriedly, ‘if you help me to carry up on Friday and Saturday mornings and chop the week’s kindling - we’ll manage the rest. Same pay.’
‘And sweeping the front?’
‘You hate that, don’t you?’ Sam’s smile was sympathetic. ‘Especially when your friends come on those school buses and catch you at it. Sadie says she’ll share it. You’re coming up for the final furlong -so. You do hate sweeping that front, don’t you?’
Joe nodded, not knowing whether to grimace or smile. He felt trapped when his father knew him so well and yet he also felt pleased, even flattered, to be so thoroughly known.
‘There’s this.’ He fumbled in his school bag and pulled out A Selection of Essays by William Hazlitt. ‘There’s a really smashing piece on boxing.’
‘I’ve not read many good books about boxing.’ Sam took it.
‘Thanks.’
‘It’s just an essay,’ Joe said. ‘But it’s still good.’
‘I’ll let you know.’ He went to the door. ‘I suppose there wouldn’t have been a play at all if he hadn’t given his kingdom away at the start.’
Joe laughed. He would tell Mr. Tillotson that one. The Latin Unseen ought to be easier now: more relaxed, as, unexpectedly, he was. ‘Omne appetitum appetitu sub specii boni.’ The familiar alarm bells rang - ‘appetitum appetitu’? He reached out for the dictionary.
There were good days, Sam thought, and that was one. As he read in the kitchen after closing time he found his mind drifting back magnetically to that earlier exchange in the parlour. He wished he’d said more: there was so much more to say but it had been enough.
‘What are you looking so pleased about?’ she said.
‘Never you mind.’
‘Bad manners to keep secrets from your wife.’
‘Bad manners it is then.’
‘It’ll come out when you least want it to,’ she warned. ‘Let me get on with my book, woman,’ he said and there was concord with Ellen, and that, too, was enough.
He knew that ‘Houn’ Dog’ and ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ would be a risk but surely the skiffle numbers should have worked - ‘Rock Island Line’, ‘Cumberland Gap’, ‘Bring a Little Water Silvie’ should work, while there was at least a bit of belt in ‘Cool Water’, ‘Jezebel’, ‘Walking My Baby Back Home’ and ‘Rock Around the Clock’. But the reaction was hardly a reaction at all. No sympathy vote for this being their debut.
True, the two ukeleles were not in tune and Malcolm tried to be too complicated on the drum and washboard; Joe’s own thumping of the home-made broom, twine and tea-chest double bass was very patchy, largely owing to his attempt to put in the actions while he sang, and Alan’s saxophone was spectacularly under-rehearsed. But still, he thought, it was the new sound. It felt good to be inside it. Now and then it really rocked. Why didn’t they just stand still and listen instead of walking around eating sandwiches? It had seemed such a safe bet for a debut - the Scouts Annual Autumn Fund Raising Dance, music wholly from records save for them, the Memphis Five, in the interval. But they just fizzled out. Nobody even seemed to notice when they finished. Some of the younger Scouts had begun sledging across the floor and most of the girls who mattered had gathered in a huddle in the furthest corner, including Rachel and her pals. All of the band had themselves been in the Scouts and felt aggrieved that their act of generosity had been greeted with such indifference, even, in some numbers, with hostility.
Joe had not imagined this. None of them had. Triumph or near-triumph had been the only possibilities. They came down from the platform shiftily and split immediately.
‘To tell you the truth,’ said Rachel, as they tried a modern waltz, ‘I had to laugh. You looked so serious.’
It was serious. They had practised for hours on the Saturday in the singing room. They had thought they were nearly great. Just a bit of polish from a live performance - and who knows?
‘Linda liked your Lonnie Donegan,’ Rachel conceded. ‘She’s got good taste in music, hasn’t she?’
‘What about you?’
‘I thought you all looked a bit clueless.’
Joe danced on. He kept his nerve but his confidence flew out of the hall like a trapped sparrow through an open window.
‘I was interested,’ said Mr. Braddock, ‘in that “Rock Island Line” business - quite a story there. I didn’t realise they were folk ballads. Do we really need the American accent?’
That was little comfort either.
‘Perhaps if you had the right instruments,’ said the Music teacher, ‘and learned how to play them.’
‘We weren’t ready,’ Malcolm said, when they regrouped, moodily, sharing an illicit fag in the cloakroom. ‘I told you that’ He had. He had been the only one. He had been overruled. He had only agreed to join because Joe had sweet-talked him about how it would impress the girls.
‘That saxophone,’ Alan said. ‘It’s a matter of getting your mouth round it and your fingers going at the same time. It’s not easy.’
‘No ukulele,’ said Edward, ‘however hard you twang it, can compare with an acoustic guitar.’
‘If you have one foot on a tea chest and you’re supposed to be making a broomstick and a bit of thick string sound like a double bass while you’re singing, you can’t always guarantee a result,’ said Joe.
‘Maybe if we cut out your singing next time,’ said Malcolm, ‘then we could concentrate on the real thing.’
‘Who’ll have us next time?’ Joe asked Rachel.
‘There’s always somebody,’ she said helpfully, ‘who’ll be looking for something to fill in while they get the refreshments.’ Then she burst into giggles, the only consolation being that she leaned her head on his shoulder and so he could feel her breasts. ‘Sorry, Joe.’
Later, as the buses drew up outside the school hall, Linda said, ‘You need a microphone. And an echo chamber. And get rid of the tea chest. You should wiggle a bit more. People like that’
The Scouts had laid on buses which would take home those who came from outside the town. Joe went back in to help clear up. The buses had been laid on far too early, he thought. Maybe the group should have come on later, when everybody was warmed up. When they did not have to contend with the full lighting in the school hall and all the junior Scouts in their short-trousered uniforms rushing around. They should have stood in the centre of the stage not at the side, even though it would have meant moving the headmaster’s assembly desk. They should have had another rehearsal before the performance.
&n
bsp; Alan really had to learn the saxophone. Who would tell him? And Joe had been so nervous. Before, during and after. Why did he do a thing that made him so nervous?
The floor was swept. The chairs were put back in their rows for Monday morning.
Brenda was good at table tennis which she called ping-pong and there was a rather battered table - for use of the Upper Sixth only - in what had once been a large kitchen. Joe had learned his game at Butlin’s, free of charge (if you discounted the down payment), just as everything in that heaven for the boy - the roller-skating, the swimming pool, the dancing, all the games, the meals, everything - was gloriously free and if you could hog a table you could play all day for all anyone cared. Brenda had been coached. The only way he could beat her was by smashes and his smashes were erratic.
She had suggested a quick game after school and here they were on game five, two all, Brenda coolly in the lead in the decider. Joe had become uncertain of his smashes. Her spin was hard to deal with: it even seemed a bit unfair, Joe thought, but kept the thought to himself. She won. He congratulated her.
‘Another?’ She held up her bat. ‘No thanks.’
‘Frightened to be beaten again?’
‘No.’ But not too keen.
‘Homework calls?’
‘No.’ Nobody liked to admit that.
‘I don’t believe you. People say you’re just a swot.’
‘What about you?’
‘I don’t have to swot much. People say you do.’
‘What people?’
‘Everybody.’
‘Everybody who?’
‘Everybody who doesn’t like you.’ Brenda was putting on her coat. She glanced at him quite calmly. ‘Most people don’t like you.’
Joe forced out the smile. He had sensed and suspected it but this bluntly? From the source of all truthfulness?
One or two do,’ he said, very weakly.
‘Lower forms,’ said Brenda. ‘Not us.’
He let her go ahead, pretending some business with his satchel. He walked back slowly through the northern streets already dark now that the clocks had changed, now that winter was coming in. He took a detour around Vinegar Hill but Diddler wasn’t there.
It was not until he telephoned Rachel at their agreed nine o’clock, after he had done his homework, that he felt easier. When she asked what was wrong with him he said he was having trouble with the Latin.
They were going to a dance in Carlisle the next day, the Saturday, with a gang of them, down on the six-twenty, back on the last train. This was the first time Joe and Rachel had joined this gang - Malcolm went, Veronica, Brenda sometimes and others who, Joe now saw, meshed together in several ways. He had been looking forward to showing all this off, the gang, the County Ballroom in Carlisle with the full orchestra, the last train home, but now the thought of it after Brenda’s assault made him rather miserable. Yet at the same time the prospect of being with Rachel was nothing but happy. How could he be both at once? He wandered across towards the pub from the telephone box with no stability in him: the noise of the pub pushed into his face. He veered up the hill to see his Aunt Grace.
‘What we’re seeing,’ said William, ‘is a real change in the way people think, especially the young.’
They listened respectfully. They usually did. Even now there was still a frisson of pleasure that William worked alongside them in the pub, just doing the washing-up and for nothing. Alfrieda, unmarried, was attempting to attract warmer attention from the desirable widower but so far he seemed content as he was. Everyone accepted he had a soft spot for Ellen which did not go over the mark. But Alfrieda had now set her sights on him. First step to get in on those car trips with Ellen. Jack Ack and Tommy sipped at their free drink, tired after a heavy Saturday night, Ellen on her usual low stool in front of the fire, Sam in the corner where he could most easily get to the bar. For William, it was something of a court.
‘Look at the way the young protested about Suez. And look at how gallant the young have been in Hungary against the Russians. Two sides of the same coin. They won’t stand for the old ways much longer.’
‘So what will they do instead?’ Sam asked. There was the slightest hardness in his tone. Ellen chose to ignore it.
‘They want a new world order,’ said the secretary of the Wigton Labour Party with certainty. Out with the old, in with the new.’
‘What is it that’s new?’
The other men scarcely listened. They had chewed through the good stuff, the gossip of the night. Alfrieda though sensed a conflict and squirmed forward on her chair. Ellen ceased to glance at the magazine which had been mopping up her tiredness.
‘It all comes back, doesn’t it, to socialism?’ Mr. Hawesley sounded both deeply confident and resigned.
He stuck the pipe in his mouth without lighting it, something Sam always considered rather comical. But it did give him a more studious air - that and the brightness there was about him, the birdlike brightness which came from a week’s undemanding work and one night only behind the bar, but more than that, the brightness of the zealot, bright morning, bright day.
‘Why should it?’ Sam asked. ‘Why should it all come back to socialism? America isn’t coming back to socialism, as far as anybody can see. Russia’s just another tyranny, nothing socialist there. Socialism here in Wigton’s only just recently got any sort of a grip.’
‘But surely, surely,’ the pipe was taken out and tapped and cleared preparatory to the last charging of the evening, ‘bringing America and Russia and Wigton together misses the point.’
‘What point?’ His look was direct and William held it only for an instant.
Ellen looked at Sam more intently. He would not give up. But William was the intellectual in the company.
‘Both here and in Eastern Europe,’ said William, speaking thoughtfully out into space and charging his pipe with St. Bruno ‘- and I’m sure in America and Russia, but it doesn’t make the news -young people are saying, “We’ve had enough of your ignorance that led to fascism and Stalinism and we want a more equal society but one where you have enough goods for all as well as freedom for all.” In other words I see it as an altogether different mood. The authoritarian idea is on the way out - it will take time - but it is on the way out. In whatever form it has assumed. So is the worship of mere self-interest. Maybe it’s the legacy of two world wars and all that terrible suffering, maybe it’s just a historical shift,’ he tapped the top of the tobacco with his index finger, ‘but to my mind the young today are, in essence, Sam, in essence, saying no to war, no to oppression, no to force.’
‘Fat lot of good it did them in Hungary.’ Sam jabbed out his cigarette.
‘This will take time. The Uprising itself was what was significant. The suppression was not unexpected.’
‘It found out a lot of your communist friends.’
Sam’s tone was harsh. Alfrieda looked to William. Ellen thought of how to bring down the temperature. William snapped on his lighter and the flame leapt out. He sucked it through the pipe. The action hollowed his cheeks ghoulishly. Alfrieda thought it made him look distinguished.
‘It’s a very common mistake, very easily made, to lump communists and socialists together, but you know better than most, Sam, that it’s a mistake and a bad mistake. The British form of socialism owes more to Methodism than to Marxism, it has a long tradition of its own in this country through the trades unions and the Philanthropic Societies. Marxism, Stalinism, that’s just fascism by another name.’
‘I can’t see how you’ll ever be able to give up war.’ Sam had caught Ellen’s eye and he was calmer. ‘Lads today are just like we were, and when the call comes, they’ll fall in. I’d bet on it.’
‘Human nature can change, Sam. We don’t have gladiatorial combats any more. We don’t have bear-baiting.’
‘We drop bombs from thousands of feet up instead.’
‘I’m for bed,’ said Ellen, and everyone knew it was time to go.
; ‘I enjoyed that,’ William emphasised as he stood on the doorstep for his usual last word with Sam. ‘Nothing like a vigorous difference of opinion between friends.’
‘You’re an optimist, William. It’s nice to see.’
He watched him go across the road for his car. Waited until he climbed into it. Waved. Turned back in.
News had filtered through about Speed. Some said cashiered. Some said dishonourable discharge. Found work in Liverpool on the docks.
Sam smoked a couple of cigarettes alone, watching the fire die out. He was sad about Speed. His father, who had not been seen for years now, used to come into the district now and then, not for years now. Dead most likely. Unidentifiable. Poor Jackie. The Japs got him in the end. There had been such good reports about Speed before this.
Joe came in wearily, pushing his bike up the outside steps, stood it in the hall where he would park it for the night.
‘Good night?’ Sam’s voice from the kitchen.
‘Yes,’ the boy said. But still that lump of misery. Even despite the time alone together in the empty train on Carlisle Station when they had crept away early from the dance. Cycling back from the village, the misery had returned and with it, or prompting it, the unbalance in his head, the dislocation, the bursting into nothing. He thought that had gone for good. He thought he had seen the last of that.
‘Fancy a cup of tea?’ Sam would have enjoyed a few minutes’ chat.
‘No thanks. Night, Dad.’ Still from the hall. Going up the stairs.
‘You’re a good lad, Joe,’ Sam called out. ‘Everybody says that.’ The boy stopped, checked himself for a moment and then took the stairs two at a time, lifted up by the words so casually but authoritatively thrown at him.
Stripped, fast prayers, too late for music, Rachel, now in the dark alone, think over every move they made. This had to last.
PART THREE
TESTS, 1957
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
