Crossing the Lines

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘Some of the lads let me see letters they had kept, letters they had received from their wives and sweethearts and families and two of the wives have shown me one or two of their husbands letters. Very moving, Sam. And they were moved when I looked through them -I wouldn’t take them out of their house, of course. They let me make a few notes - all above board. But I also thought, how soon have those words been robbed of much of their meaning, and in a few years they’ll be no more than reminders - historical evidence, yes, but in a personal sense almost quaint.’

  ‘Letters are a mixed blessing,’ said Sam. ‘We used to wait for them like kids. But when they came, it was always a bad day. This fellow’s wife was pregnant - not by him. Another one had run off. There was a Colonel Oliphant with us used to say the war had turned out a regiment of amateur prostitutes. And there were those who got no letters. Poor sods.’

  And Sam was again in Burma, in the place he most feared to be which was why a private encounter with the beavering Mr. Kneale was always a risk. Back there, far away from this house which had been his precise destination on arrival, the place which had housed his wife and son, the place he had seen behind the letters. The memories were too numerous, like a cloud made up of swarming insects. Now, as always when he feared questioning on Burma, he wanted to leave and soon found an opportunity. On the pavement outside he took out a cigarette. How stupid to go for that reassurance. How timid, having gone, not to get it. How relieved, though, that he had not exposed his need.

  He wandered across to the Blackamoor. Jack Dickinson was coming up the hill, the black stetson jauntily set on the back of his head. Jack liked to think of himself as the reincarnation of the cowboy Tom Mix, spoke the American drawl, told stories of gunfights, worked for the council, born a hundred yards down from the pub, still lived with his mother.

  ‘Howdy pardner,’ he always said, ‘the usual poison. Draw.’ And Sam would draw him a pint of mild.

  ‘Speed!’ There was utter delight in Joe’s voice. Speed, who was heading for the Lion and Lamb at a smart lick, stopped, a touch reluctantly even though he too smiled. But he glanced around like someone who, merely by standing still in public, made himself too easy a target.

  ‘Been playing football?’ He glanced at Joe’s bag, rather swaggeringly unzipped so that the boots and jersey and shorts could be seen.

  ‘Rugby.’

  ‘Still no job then?’

  ‘On leave?’

  ‘Out, Joe.’ He looked about him. ‘Booted out.’

  ‘How was it before they booted you out?’

  ‘Great. When do you go?’

  ‘After my exams.’

  ‘Go for the army, Joe.’ He paused. ‘Tell your dad I might not be able to get in to see him this time. I’m just up to see my mother for a day or two.’

  ‘What do you do now?’

  ‘As little as I can, Joe.’ He grinned. ‘I’m down at the docks. Some good lads.’

  He was impatient to be gone. Joe knew that he did not have the resources to engage him further. What Speed did was beyond him. ‘Still got those boxing gloves?’ Joe shook his head. ‘See you, Joe.’ And Speed was gone.

  He was jarred by the encounter and instead of rushing upstairs, he went behind the bar to join Sam who told him he could take a packet of crisps. The only two customers were absorbed in the racing pages.

  ‘How’d you come on?’

  ‘Drew.’

  ‘St. Andrew’s has always had a good team.’

  ‘Their ref cheated. He was a priest, in a cassock.’ Joe paused, but better it came from him than it got back. He spoke quietly. ‘I nearly got sent off.’ Sam waited. ‘Well, this priest. He was just biased. Whenever we had a scrum near their line he said we didn’t put the ball in straight. He picked us up for passing forward when we didn’t. Then Richard scored a great solo try and he pulled him right back down the pitch saying there’d been a knock on and there hadn’t been any such thing. Everybody knew that.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I told him he was wrong. I told him he was being unfair. He stopped play and warned me. Then I said something about a priest not supposed to behave like that and that’s when he nearly sent me off.’

  ‘Did he make you apologise?’

  ‘Yes.’ Joe’s answer was wrenched from him. Why should he apologise for telling the truth? He felt that, again, he had been cowardly.

  ‘That was the best way,’ said Sam. ‘Sometimes it’s the only way out. Even if you’re in the right. You had to stay on with the team.’

  Joe looked closely at him, for the briefest moment, to make sure he meant it.

  ‘I saw Speed,’ he said. ‘He’s just here for a day or two. He wanted me to tell you he might not get in.’

  ‘Oh. I’d like to have seen Speed. So he might not get in.’ Sam drew his conclusions, sadly.

  ‘I had my dinner at St. Andrew’s.’

  ‘Your mother’s off with William. And Alfrieda. Maybe we’ll go along with her some day.’

  ‘They’re coming at four o’clock.’ The band. For a rehearsal in the singing room in preparation for their interval appearance at the Rugby Club dance in the Drill Hall.

  ‘I’ll make sure to be out.’

  ‘We’re getting better!’

  ‘It was the only way to go.’

  ‘We’re going to make a tape.’

  ‘Bing Crosby, Mario Lanza,’ said Sam, firmly, ‘Kathleen Ferrier. They can sing.’

  Joe went upstairs. He just had time to go to the Baths. The pool was never very full on a Saturday afternoon and he lolled through some lengths, lazily changing strokes, crawl, backstroke, breaststroke, the occasional flurry of butterfly, luxuriating in the buoyancy given him by this mass of clear liquid, sometimes just lying on his back, scarcely paddling his hands, just drifting, but safe, supported. He biked home the back way, over the hill which had once so terrified him, and even now, in the still-light afternoon of the northern winter, bright grey light, he felt a tremor of fear, remembered, a reminder or still there? He did not know but faced it before swooping down past the gasometer along to the old gaol, back home.

  The rehearsal went well. They would meet up at the Drill Hall at eight-thirty. They would wear white shirts, dark trousers and black shoes. Malcolm’s dad’s microphone worked.

  Joe was strict about not working on Saturdays but Mr. Tillotson had told them that reading great English literature could improve their style and so Our Mutual Friend did not count. He was enthralled by it, hauled in, teased, angered, made to laugh aloud, indignant, almost dizzy with the concentration it brought out of him. He could see them all so clearly. They were like people he knew. He seemed to breathe in and breathe out with every character. The book took him over.

  The following Saturday, Rachel, blushing vividly, came into the pub kitchen before they went off to the dance in Carlisle. Joe’s excuse, which almost wholly overlapped with truth, was that he wanted her to see the Six-Five Special on which they had been promised an appearance by Johnnie Ray singing ‘Walking in the Rain’. Ellen asked Rachel about her mother. Sam bought her a glass of orange juice. Joe looked at the television as if he were attempting to hypnotise it.

  ‘She’s a lot like Isaac,’ Ellen said. They were in bed. Joe was not yet back. ‘Isaac was trouble in his time.’

  ‘She does take after Isaac,’ Sam said. ‘But she’s a bit like you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Just a bit.’

  Ellen smiled, in the dark.

  ‘He can’t get away from his mother,’ Sam said, ‘that’s what it is,’ and he turned to her, found her mouth and kissed her, moved closer to her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  His results in the Mock examinations were not good. No matter the received and painkilling wisdom that teachers always marked you more harshly in the February Mocks to whip you on to greater efforts for the real thing in June. No matter that all the others, save for Brenda in Latin, had not done much better. No matter that he still had four mon
ths to sort himself out. The results were not good. They would not get him the distinctions he secretly aspired to and even once or twice prayed for. They would not take him to university. Most of all they seemed such a mediocre reward for the hours he had put in. If this was all he could manage after all his timetabling and application then what did he amount to? Rachel’s Mock O level results, by any comparison, were excellent.

  ‘You should stay on at school,’ he said.

  ‘Can you imagine what he would say if I asked him that!’ Rachel smiled, rather proud of the anvil certainty of her father’s reaction. ‘I could talk to him,’ Joe said.

  ‘I bet you would, as well.’ Rachel nodded. Joe’s ease with her father impressed her. As did his ease in the big kitchen, with her mother whom he was soon helping lay the table, take away the dishes, his ease with her brothers who teased him only ritually now and preferred him to ‘spoilt on about what he was doing at school, his ease with anyone who came and went into the farm or farmyard. She was aware too that his presence cushioned her from her father and yet unlike Joe she was made aware from time to time that Isaac was watching the boy, sizing him up, ready for him.

  ‘Which is your strong arm?’ he said. Joe would proffer his right. ‘This is my weak ‘un.’ He put out his left. They would grip. ‘Push now,’ he’d say. ‘Push.’ And Joe would push, play the game, push as if his life depended on it and Isaac would laugh, he budged not a quiver, sometimes he would even fish out a cigarette, ask for a light, glance at Rachel who would not return his look, until one swift twist and Joe’s aching arm would be levelled. But the boy just rubbed it and said, ‘That’s my writing arm, Mr. Wardlow. I’ll give it a couple of weeks’ rest before I try again. Must eat some spinach.’ And Rachel would see Isaac’s bare glee cloud into respectful puzzlement.

  But much as he deflected his disappointment in celebrating Rachel’s success, it was with his own results that he was massively more preoccupied. He had not dared make concrete the hopes raised, though obliquely, by Mr. Braddock and Mr. Kneale and even with almost inscrutable gruffness by Mr. Tillotson - but he had begun to let them buoy him up. The possibility of going on, before his National Service, to a university had become his sneaking expectation.

  After these results it was: eighteen, out of school, into the army and a job. It smacked him in the face. That would be it. Two years wasted in the Sixth Form and letting everybody down. That would be the story.

  All their results came in by Wednesday afternoon. On Thursday they analysed the papers in the public court of the classroom. Joe got nothing from this but a reinforcement of the inadequacy represented by the marks.

  ‘It was quite a nice touch,’ said Mr. Tillotson, in that bass monotone which could sound like a growl, ‘to say that the main reason King Lear gave away his kingdom to his daughters was because without it there wouldn’t have been a play in the first place. Quite a promising opening. But you said nothing at all to develop the point. You’d boxed yourself into a corner in paragraph one. Not to mention Holinshed’s account which you can’t have forgotten - Shakespeare thought he was writing a real history here - and we have to assume that, unless we can prove otherwise. And saying Cordelia was just showing off won’t get you very far with the examiners. Examiners like Cordelia. If you want to be the iconoclast, Richardson, you’ll have to try harder than that.’

  ‘How did you think you’d done in the Unseen?’ Miss Castle was inscrutable.

  ‘O.K.’ Joe was very guarded. His Latin had just scraped a pass. The confusing fact was that he had thought the Unseen a walkover. He had translated it in about five minutes and spent the next fifteen smartening up the prose.

  ‘It was almost a hundred per cent wrong,’ she said, flatly, not needing to call on any of her tools for making him squirm.

  How could that be? Joe thought. It had seemed so clear. So he said nothing and tried to reveal nothing in his expression as the Latin teacher undid the test piece of Latin prose, proving without question that he had headed down the wrong path completely.

  ‘It is a collector’s item, Richardson,’ she said.

  Joe hoped for better from Mr. Braddock. He had achieved his highest mark - though nowhere near a distinction - and he had always felt the friendliness of Mr. Braddock to be personal as well as schoolmasterly.

  ‘Your answers are too mechanical, Richardson. I know you’ve had your laughs that I say there are always three or four reasons for this and three or four reasons for that, but that is merely a way to clarify matters. You banged them off as if they were the sole reasons, it was like watching a post being banged into the ground, one, two, three bangs, maybe a fourth, and move on. It wasn’t bad. But it was too much like reading multiplication tables. Do you understand what I’m getting at?’

  Not really. It was at this point on the Thursday that he felt his stomach shrink with something like the old fears which had once possessed him. Not really. He had given back to Mr. Braddock what Mr. Braddock had given to him. What else did you do? It did not matter that most of the others, as with Mr. Tillotson and Miss Castle, had also been similarly analysed. Joe could not get out of himself. He alone seemed to be hanging there, the target for these arrows of criticism. He felt it was unjust, he knew it was just, he felt he was being picked on, he knew the others were in the same boat, he felt he had failed totally, he knew he had failed only relatively, he wanted to do all the papers again, he never wanted to see an examination paper again, he should not have put A levels in his prayers, he should not have touched Rachel’s bare breast, it was entirely hopeless.

  ‘It’s by no means hopeless,’ said Mr. Braddock, to all of them. ‘We’ll get out some old examination papers. We’ll start revising in earnest. The thing is to realise your full potential and none of you did that: but you can.’

  Joe did not feel convinced.

  Friday was a ghost day. Nobody seemed inclined to make a fresh beginning - nobody wanted another requiem for the Mocks.

  ‘Were we a little too hard on them?’ Mr. Braddock asked after lunch in the Staff Room.

  ‘It usually works.’ Mr. Tillotson spoke from behind the Manchester Guardian. It brings out their character.’

  ‘I was harsh,’ said Miss Castle, ‘but fair,’ and went back to her marking of the Lower Sixth.

  Mr. Braddock wondered: it was difficult to get the balance right, especially, he thought, with some of them who were in uncharted waters, already adrift from their parents and their past, as he saw it, more than usually reliant on those who had encouraged them to slip their moorings. He packed his pipe with abstracted emphasis. Miss Castle moved to another part of the room and opened the window. Richardson had been extremely nervous. He would go further and say that the boy had got himself into a funk. It was as if the whole of his life depended on this, was at risk from this. There was an almost comical aspect. He had declared he would wear a different-coloured pullover for every exam, even though he had to borrow from his father and, so Mr. Braddock understood, one of the men who helped in the pub. He had seen that sort of funk with junior air crew. Mr. Braddock thought he might ask Richardson to baby-sit.

  Joe did not reveal his results to Sam and Ellen. They knew he had been taking exams although, become increasingly dependent on fetishes and superstition, Joe had asked them not to mention them, certainly not to wish him good luck: that worst of all.

  He felt ashamed. There was a game on Saturday and the Sports teacher told him he had played quite well, which was odd because his mind was not on it; odd, too, that he was not as pleased as he would have expected. Nor did a swim change his mood. Even the usual Saturday evening zoom around the town with Alan and the pink football results edition did not lift spirits which had been cowed by this disheartening appraisal by the outside world. What he had thought he was and more importantly might become, those waves of possibilities cultivated in the dreams of solitary study, hit the rocks.

  Rachel was genuinely surprised that she had done so well and slyly pleased that some ot
hers, especially teachers, were just as surprised. It must be you,’ she said to Joe, on their way to the dance. ‘It must have been your notes, and what you said. My notes were terrible.’ She snuggled against him, in the train on the way to Carlisle, in front of the others in the gang, unusually.

  And as the evening developed, it was Rachel who took the initiative, suggesting - invariably his restless call - that they go early, leave the multi-coloured County Ballroom and the fifteen-piece orchestra, walk into the sandstone Victorian magnificence of Carlisle Central Station, sit on their local train already in its local dock, dark, open, find a corner seat, the orange lights from the station platform the only warmth on this winter night. They kept on their coats which provided cover anyway, and being Saturday he could put his hand inside her brassiere and nurse the soft bare breast. She even let him go to the top of her leg, across the top of her stockings, and stroke her there tentatively, hushed, until she moaned, he did not know why, but it excited him immeasurably.

  It was a brilliantly clear night as he cycled back from her village and he did not go flat out. If the old fears were going to come, they would, he thought, however fast he pedalled. A rush of stars across the sky. He had been supposed to learn about stars in the Scouts but never got round to it. His mother, one night when they had been coming back from a social, had pointed out the stars and told him that in the war she used to look for the Warrior. He thought about Rachel and what they had done and felt brim full of a feeling something like happiness, but stronger.

  The old town was all but dark. Three thrifty street lights were all the illumination and they would switch off at I a.m. He dawdled past the Fountain, past the arches leading down old lanes, past gap-toothed alleyways and yards even now inhabited. His bike and his breath seemed the only sound.

  He would get up early for first communion, he decided. That would be his routine. He would never again pray to do well in exams. He would draw up a new schedule and spend more time ‘reading around’ as Mr. Braddock had advised him. He would add an extra hour to weekdays and two to Sundays. Saturdays had still to be kept free: long ago Mr. Kneale had drilled into him that one day a week was needed for recreation, whether it was the Lord’s Day or not, Genesis knew what it was talking about, he said. He would underline everything important in red once, very important twice, to learn by heart three times. As he was likely to be very bad on his Latin Unseen, to compensate he would set out to memorise the translation of key passages from Cicero and The Aeneid. That bit on Rumour for instance he bet would come up: ‘Fama Malum qua non aliud velocius ullum.’ He would always use the Parker pen his parents had bought him for his sixteenth birthday and not alternate with the flashier article which had come earlier from Colin. He would not listen to music while writing English essays.