Crossing the Lines

by Melvyn Bragg

  Joe slit open the letter. It was two short paragraphs. He read it two or three times and a smile grew from way inside him, finally breaking onto his face. He handed the letter over to Sam. Sam read it as Joe had read it, intently, several times. Then he looked up, a touch bemused. The boy’s face was now a beacon of grin. Sam gave that quiet smile, shook his head and half rose so that his hand extended across the table.

  ‘Well done,’ he said. It occurred to Joe, some time later, that this was probably the first time he had shaken his father’s hand. ‘Well done.’ Sam looked at the letter again, then handed it back.

  ‘Will you tell your mother?’

  ‘Rather you did,’ said Joe. To tell her in the mood which had seized him would be showing off. He was bursting to show off. But she would not have that. ‘You do it.’

  The boy put the letter back in its envelope. He would go up to the bank and find a way to slip it to Rachel.

  There was such an unaccustomed shyness in Sam’s tone. ‘Can I have another glance?’

  The letter was passed back.

  ‘Off up street?’ Sam asked. Joe gave the most fractional nod he was capable of.

  ‘Say something as you go out,’ said Sam. ‘Something like “Dad’s got a bit of news for you.” That’ll do. She’ll feel left out if not. She’ll know anyway, as soon as you say it.’ He looked up at the boy, mad to go, scarcely able to bear the spot he was standing on.

  Ellen came in as soon as Joe had banged the front door behind him. She was excited, apprehensive, proud, fearful of seeming too proud, not quite knowing what to do about this alien news.

  Sadie said, Id’ve put money on it.’

  Sam went about his work rather more quickly and quietly than usual. He wanted to talk to somebody. Just chew it over, for himself more than anything else, just sit and talk, let it sink in. There was a man he’d known well in Burma, Alex, a schoolteacher with whom he had set off for Australia. Alex would have fitted the bill. Leonard, Grace, Mr. Kneale, Tom Johnston, Jack Ack, Mr. Hawesley, his own father: there were others. They would all have to be told.

  It was not the telling. He wanted to seek somebody out. He called out to Ellen that he might be a few minutes late which she expected now on a Saturday morning. Unusually she called back, ‘Sam?’ and he waited at the door. She looked around the pub empty save for Sadie now battling with the Ladies’ in the backyard, and kissed him.

  As he turned into Water Street he saw himself, how many? Eleven years ago, on the corner looking on empty streets, determined, absolutely as he had thought, to emigrate the next day. He passed the yard of their first house, now boarded up for demolition, along the little world of Water Street, until he was almost on the Congregational

  Church where he turned to his left and went down to the near derelict grass-moated pile of Vinegar Hill. Diddler was unloading the cart.

  ‘Just the man!’ he said. ‘This mangle, Sam. A fella helped me shift it on.’

  ‘They got it off with some effort. Diddler looked at his assortment of morning plunder with satisfaction. A woman down New Street,’ he said. ‘Wanted her wash house cleared. I was doing her a favour, she said.’ His voice was full of pity that there lived in Wigton those who valued so much so little.

  ‘I thought we might have a drink.’ Sam pulled out a quarter bottle of whisky.

  ‘Now that’s a thought.’

  The tinker led the way into one of the four small dwellings which all but collapsed into each other. Nothing prepared you for the kitchen in Diddler’s house. The ground outside was a place of scrap, of the caravan at the ready on its blocks against the wall, the two horses, the piebald and the old nag, hobbled, eating the feed he’d forked out earlier and trying to get some purchase on the grass. Vinegar Hill was a place most people passed by quickly, some with a shudder.

  The kitchen glowed. There was good china well displayed in a glass fronted mahogany cabinet. The walls were studded with fine plates. There was a ruby coloured rug on the floor, two broad and deep leather armchairs which gleamed from the polish that seemed to have been applied just that minute, nowhere more lavishly than on a long elegant walnut sideboard on which there were what looked very like silver candlesticks. His wife stood beside the blazing fire, which threw into relief the autumn darkness of the room, morning though it was.

  ‘Hello, Sam. We don’t see you so often now.’

  When he had first met her, Sam had immediately been attracted by her sly lulling voice. He had always liked the shawled dark-skinned mocking look of her. And still it was there, in her full middle age. And disturbing.

  ‘When you’re in the pub trade,’ she said, ‘it’s people paying you a visit all the time, I suppose, so there’s not so much need to visit in return. Life comes in through your own door.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Will we take some water with it?’

  Diddler was holding two squat crystal tumblers.

  ‘Half and half,’ Sam said.

  Almost stealthily, the shawled woman brought them a jug of water.

  ‘I’ll leave you,’ she said. ‘Come again, Sam.’

  ‘Back to the old place, then, Sam.’

  Diddler held out the glasses. Sam’s measures were generous.

  ‘Back to the old place.’

  ‘You were a game little beggar.’

  ‘You were a hero to me when I lived here.’

  ‘I hero is it?’ Diddler’s mouth split wide across his face, the bare gums making it all the merrier. ‘That’s something, Sam. Here’s to you and yours.’

  ‘Here’s to you.’

  They sat in the deep armchairs across the fire and supped the whisky in silence for a while.

  ‘It tastes good in the morning, whisky,’ Diddler said. ‘It tastes good any time of day, mind you, Sam, but in the morning while the stomach is still fresh, it tastes very good.’

  ‘I thought you’d’ve sold the piebald long ago,’ Sam said.

  ‘I was made many an offer,’

  ‘I heard,’

  ‘You can get very fond of a horse, Sam,’

  ‘I can understand that. A top up?’ Diddler held out his glass. ‘What are we drinking to, Sam?’

  ‘The boy. Joe.’

  ‘I'll drink to Joe.’

  He reached out and the men tapped their glasses against each other.

  ‘He’s won himself a scholarship into Oxford University.’

  ‘Well now.’

  ‘That’s what he’s done.’

  ‘Oxford University,’ Diddler said, spoken as one who was encountering these two words for the first time.

  ‘I never imagined he’d go that far.’ Sam poured himself a second and final glass and again topped up Diddler’s tumbler. ‘To be honest, there was a time when I thought he’d been thrown.’

  ‘But he got back on her.’

  ‘He got back on her.’

  ‘To Joe.’ Sam raised his glass once again.

  ‘What about the army?’

  ‘He doesn’t have to go. They’ve just stopped the call up for his age group.’

  ‘I clear field then,’ said Diddler.

  ‘I wish he’d had to go. He needs toughening up.’

  ‘But he won the university, Sam.’

  ‘The scholarship.’

  ‘Wasn’t that tough enough?’

  Sam wanted to reach out and take the man’s hand. This, he now knew, was what he had been looking for. He took his time. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that was tough enough.’

  He sank the whisky and it was good.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  ‘Don’t let it go to your head.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Now don’t! I’ve seen it ruin the best.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I mean the very best.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Joe would agree with anything to get out. Colin had ambushed him in the kitchen and embarrassed him up to the room he had now made a den. Rosettes were hung on the walls in neat
order. Cups and bowls and other prizes were displayed on what had originally been designed as a bookcase. Photographs of the prize-winning dog with proud owner were inescapable. Colin had urged a cigarette on Joe - a Sobranie, black paper, tipped with gold. Joe was enjoying the sight of this exotic stick between his fingers. Would Rachel smoke Sobranies? Colin wore a green three-piece tweed suit bought ‘at the top of the range’ from ‘Redmayne’s, the celebrated Wigton Tailor’. ‘Take me. If I’d let it go to my head I would forget what it was that made me in the first place.’ Colin coughed, hard: it was getting worse; he banged his chest with his fist. It was, Joe thought, a bit like that gorilla beating its chest on TV.

  ‘Yes,’

  ‘Don’t just say yes! Listen. This is experience talking. The day I take training that dog for granted is the day it will start losing.’

  ‘These are good.’ Joe watched his hand wave the black cigarette. ‘They’re decadent.’

  ‘They’re cool, Joe. That’s the expression. You should know that.’

  ‘Like Elvis.’

  ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’s crap.’

  ‘I said crap at school the other week and Miss Castle made me apologise. She says it’s a swear word.’

  ‘I’m talking about your prospects, Joe! This is where I come into my own. I’ll get you the best briefcase money can buy and I’ll get you one of those rolled up umbrellas they all have.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Don’t thank me, that’s just the start. Somebody’s got to take you in hand.’

  How could he get out of this room?

  When, eventually, Colin released him, it was into the waiting hospitality of Mr. Kneale, who ushered him up the final flight of stairs to his suite under the roof.

  ‘It’s a few minutes before six, Joe, but I think I can offer you a sherry. Sit you down. Sit you down.’

  It was not easy to find a space. Mr. Kneale’s notes had long ago filled up the shelf space and the broad surfaces of the good furniture he had brought with him: now they occupied most of the table and three of the chairs, leaving only one wholly free: obviously Mr. Kneale’s.

  ‘I can stand,’ Joe said.

  ‘I’ll clear a chair.’

  He poured out two small glasses of sherry from the great decanter so admired by Grace. Then with some pottering he lifted a heap of notes from a chair, looked around in vague despair and put them on the floor. Joe sat in the vacated space.

  ‘A formal congratulations, Joe,’ Mr. Kneale said.

  ‘Thank you,’

  He sipped the sherry and tried not to wince.

  ‘You’ll get to know sherry,’ Mr. Kneale said. ‘That’s all part of it.’

  Joe took another sip. No real improvement.

  ‘Your father’s very proud of you, you know.’ Joe was puzzled by this. He had seen that Sam was pleased. ‘Proud’ indicated a new range of reaction, altogether more resonant, more important. He would never have thought it. Now that it had been presented to him it took his thoughts clean away from the decorous and encouraging remarks of slippered and eternally present Mr. Kneale: ‘proud’ of him. He was proud of himself that Sam was proud of him. He could still be afraid of his father. There were still times when a look in blue eyes so much harder than his own softer blue, just as his sandy hair was a dilution of Sam’s copper crop, could alarm him, just as a sudden movement of his arm could make him flinch. Something of Sam’s war had trickled back through two or three men who had been in the pub now and then or met at hound trails, men who had been in Burma with him, and Joe’s hazy sketch of his father’s character included the certainty that his father had been tougher and braver than he could ever possibly be. Yet this man was ‘proud’ of him. He did not know what to make of it.

  He caught up with the conversation when Mr. Kneale produced a small almost black wooden box. ‘This is for you.’

  Joe got up and went across for it. Mr. Kneale was too deeply wedged in his seat to rise easily.

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  It was difficult to respond with real enthusiasm to a small almost black wooden box. He returned to his seat. It was inscribed: ‘J. Richardson. Wigton.’

  ‘You can open it.’

  ‘Oh. Thank you, Mr. Kneale!’

  A slim pair of cuff-links rested on a pillow of cotton wool. ‘They were given me by my father,’ Mr. Kneale said. ‘You should have them now.’

  All Joe’s shirts had buttoned sleeves. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It’s more the box,’ Mr. Kneale said. ‘You can use it for cuff-links and collar studs and such, but it’s the box I want you to notice, Joe, as a historian. I got Mr. Wilkinson onto it.’ The old man’s tone grew holy. ‘That box, Joe, is fashioned out of a piece of worked timber - it could be from a house - which was found preserved in the neat, in Wedham Flow, and, Joe, it is at the very least seven thousand, maybe nine thousand years old, the box that you are holding in your hands now.’

  Joe stared down at it wondering how to react, waiting for the spell of its great age to be released through his willing hands.

  The final call in the tall home on Market Hill was on his Aunt Grace and Uncle Leonard. It was not a good day for Grace but she had waited for him to come and see her. Joe was used now to listening to her slow hesitant talk and responding with sentences which did not demand long answers. Leonard patted him on the shoulder and shook his hand and a little tightly folded wad of paper was transferred from palm to palm. Outside, opened up, two five-pound notes. He bought drinks for Alan and the others.

  There had been a photograph and a short write-up in the

  Cumberland News, people in the street knew, so many of them knew Ellen, knew Sam, were customers, well done, Joe. He ducked into side alleys. School had to be endured. The headmaster announced it in Assembly and Joe was relieved that Rachel was not there.

  ‘Well done, Richardson,’ said Miss Castle. ‘I still think it was a mistake not to put Brenda in but it is literally seven times more difficult for a girl. I have reason to know. I was in the same predicament.’ Joe was too self-consumed to pick up the sadness in her voice.

  ‘As long as you don’t take it at its face value,’ said Mr. Tillotson. ‘No doubt there’ll be some very interesting people there. Did you read Jude the Obscure? Joe shook his head. ‘Do!’ The English teacher gave a rare opening of his lips, a smile. ‘While there is yet time!’

  He stayed behind after school to talk to Mr. Braddock. They sat across the big table in the library.

  ‘They sent me your marks.’

  He pushed them across. Joe scanned them rapidly.

  ‘It means you wear a long gown,’ said the teacher, steadying his enthusiasm. ‘Commoners -I was a Commoner, most are - wear short gowns. Bum-freezers. And you might room in college for two years. And of course as a scholar you’ll have to do grace with the Warden, before dinner. In Latin. Longest in Oxford.’

  Two things were happening to Joe simultaneously. He was taking it all in. And it was going right over his head. It was in plain English. And it was in Sanskrit.

  He rejoined the conversation when Mr. Braddock talked practical sense.

  ‘Have you thought of what to do? Between now and next October.’

  Joe shook his head.

  ‘Tricky one. National Service was such a natural bridge. Most of the men you’ll meet will have done it. Watch out for that.’

  ‘Why, sir?’

  ‘They won’t take prisoners.’

  Once again baffled: but he let it go.

  ‘Let me make a suggestion. Give yourself another term here. Finish the rugger season. You can concentrate on that now. I know Mr. Tillotson has a play he wants to do with a whacking great part of some sort in it and only you’d have the time. Then I think you should push off, somewhere, anywhere, abroad, we’ll find something, just get a perspective.’

  ‘That sounds a decent plan, sir.’

  ‘Meanwhile there’s the Cumberland and Westmorland Old Oxonian Association’s annual dinner comi
ng up in December. I take Marigold and I would like to invite you to join us. It’ll be at some hotel somewhere and I can promise you a very enjoyable evening.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Mr. Hawesley gave him R.H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism with the inscription: ‘By their fruits ye shall know them. Wishing you every success at Oxford, William Hawesley, November 1957. Wigton.’

  ‘You’ll need to be togged out when you go,’ Sam said. ‘Your mam and me’ll do that.’

  Ellen had said very little. She was uncomfortable with the photograph in the newspaper. She did not want everybody to know their business. After the first day or so she became politely ruthless in shifting the conversation on swiftly should anyone bring up Joe. She looked at him very closely. It would not do if he lost himself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  ‘You’re going up in the world,’ said Isaac.

  Rachel did not immediately return her father’s smile. Was it an accusation, was it a compliment, was it mockery?

  ‘She looks the part, Mother!’

  Mrs. Wardlow was on her knees, pins in her mouth, marking the adjustment to the hemline of the new dress they had bought Rachel for Christmas.

  ‘Who is it again?’

  Rachel obediently muttered the name of those who would be going to Brenda’s Boxing Day Party and Dance in the Kildare Hotel -once the Conservative Club, now both a residential hotel and a place where the cut above drank: it was never called a pub. Its main room was the natural reception room for cut above receptions and private parties such as this being thrown by the doctor and his wife for their daughter’s annual party. Almost all the names she called out were punctuated by Isaac.

  ‘Solicitor’s son! He sends his boy away to school.’

  ‘Auctioneer’s lass!’

  ‘Red Hall! Another that gets sent away.’

  ‘Bank Manager! The pick of the crop, Mother. Top Johnnies.’

  Her mother glanced up at Rachel and they laughed, a warm compliant laugh. For all his volume he was in a good mood.

  ‘The high life! Which knife and fork to use, eh?’

  And life had changed since Joe had got the scholarship. This party was the clearest evidence. Joe had never been invited to Brenda’s parties before. But that did not stand alone. Joe had used the money given him to take her to Carlisle to see Lonnie Donegan and his skiffle group at the Lonsdale: good seats. They had been to Carlisle Pictures a few times on Fridays, Joe’s excuse that you saw the best films weeks before they came to Wigton and so much was in the papers about The Wayward Bus, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and Lucky Jim, but it was a statement, Rachel knew that, a probing of a broader life, perilously near showing off but not quite. Joe’s enthusiasm for it all was catching.