Reading by Lightning

by Joan Thomas

  The band was playing on the pier, she said, and they was all pressed together on the deck waving their handkerchiefs, our Willie right at the front waving to his mam. And we was waving ours and crying, and then the ship begun to keel over, and everyone started to scream, and they all run over to the other side. And then the ship almost tipped over that way! Poor lad, he nearly died before he even left the harbour.

  They’d no ballast, said Uncle Stanley. They’d taken out the ballast and filled the hold up with colonists. Shillingford’s brother was in the party. It was a ship built for seven hundred and they carried three times that.

  No one had ever mentioned this to me, the ship almost tipping over. Did you see it, Aunt Lucy? I asked.

  No, love, they wouldn’t let me go to the port. And Hugh was likkle, our Hugh was just a baby. But I remember the morning Willie left. I can still see his face, poor lad, when he turned on the street to wave to me. Your Uncle Roland wouldn’t even get out of his bed to say goodbye, he was that cross. He wanted to go to Liverpool to see our Willie off and Mother wouldn’t let him.

  Wouldn’t let him! cried Nan. Wouldn’t let him!! We was skint. Your da was buying his bootlaces one at a time, we was that poor.

  So how did you send Uncle Willie to Canada? asked Madeleine.

  Me Uncle Clive died, said Nan. He died and left us a few bob. He was a bachelor and he kep a little shop in Eccles, where he sold ribbons and buttons and such like, and lived above it. One day they found him at the bottom of the stairs, his neck broke. She leaned towards me and said in a fierce whisper, He took fits, poor soul.

  Your dad was my favourite brother, love, said Aunt Lucy. I was only seven when he left, but I never forgot him. I had three brothers, and he was my favourite. I always thought he might come back for a visit one day and bring his wife.

  Well, never mind, duckie, said Nan, patting my hand. He’s sent you and that’s what matters. And Boris never come back neither. What do you see of Boris and Trudy and the girls?

  Trudy and the girls? I said helplessly. Joe Pye I was eager to talk about, but my nana didn’t seem to remember him at all.

  You girls show Lily the garden, said Aunt Lucy after the pudding. Nan and I will do the washing up. You girls go out and get acquainted.

  Their house was the last house at the end of a steep street in the middle of Oldham, a semi-detached red brick at the top of a long row of terraced houses. It had a bow window in front and a fanlight over the door, and ragged roses still blooming against the iron railing in October. What was called the garden was a backyard covered with flagstones, the flagstones littered with husks fallen from a tree on the other side of the low stone wall. The garden looked out over an open space with a view of the hills. Madeleine called this open space Oldham Edge. Across the way you can see the Pennine Chain, she said. That’s Yorkshire we’re looking at.

  Do you walk in the hills? I asked.

  Not a great deal. Sometimes we go with Mother to pick whim berries. But George does. George walks everywhere. George wanted to walk home from Durham this term holiday, but Father wouldn’t let him, he said he had to take the train. So he’s not coming home at all, he’s going on a tramp on the moors, to some dreadful wild place.

  We wandered towards a red-brick outbuilding at the end of the garden, with a square window set into the bricks on its corner to look like a diamond. That’s George’s den, said Madeleine. Mother couldn’t bear all his gear in the house, so they gave him one end of the potting shed. But slowly he’s taken it all over. Father whinges about it, but he never did much potting anyway. She bent over and picked up a glossy brown nut that lay among the husks. In the catalogue of family features, Lois had got the best ones, yet it was Madeleine I found myself wanting to watch, for the listening tilt of her head and the play of expression on her face. On prairie roads in the spring little round potholes opened up and water collected in them and mirrored back the blue of the sky. Madeleine’s eyes were like that, two round blue pools in a face with no worry or pretense — just lively interest.

  I put my face to the window of the potting shed. Inside among a lot of clutter I made out the unmistakable curve of a human skull. What is that? I asked.

  I’ll show you, said Lois. She flashed me a smile and ran back into the house. Madeleine frowned. She tossed the nut away and stood against the garden wall, pulling with both hands on the red-trimmed cuffs of her grey sweater. Are you in school? she asked, turning her blue eyes towards me.

  No, I said.

  They must let you stop earlier than they do us, she said.

  You can finish when you want, I said. I stopped two years ago.

  That’s like Mother. She went until she was twelve and then Nana needed her so she stopped. She would never have been a nurse but for the war. She would have stayed a shopgirl. Or ended up in the mill.

  Lois came back down the path carrying a long skeleton key.

  Where’d you get that? Madeleine asked.

  Never mind, said Lois. She stuck the key into the lock and opened the door.

  George would have a fit, said Madeleine.

  Bugger George, said Lois, stepping boldly inside. The potting shed had an earthen floor and smelled of clay like our cellar, but also of mould and paint. There’s the skull, she said carelessly, picking it up. It’s not real, although George will tell you it is. He’ll tell you he found it in the cemetery in Hollin-wood when the sexton was digging a grave. If you call him a liar, he’ll back down and admit he got it from the stage manager at the theatre in Durham. That they had it for Yorick’s skull.

  But that’s a lie too, called Madeleine from the garden, and they both laughed.

  Torn, wanting to please both of them, I stood in the doorway, waiting till my eyes adjusted to the dark. Where did it come from? I asked.

  He made it out of clay and paid them to bake it at the kiln in Failsworth. She thrust the skull at me. I’d never seen a skull, but it looked as I thought a skull would, although browner, especially with regard to its teeth. I put my hands behind my back. Lois and Madeleine laughed and Lois drew me farther into the shed. The shelves all around were crammed with jars of chemicals, chains with heavy locks at the end, fluted seashells, a stuffed bird with a long, pointed beak, masks with feathers on them, bones, a bow and arrow, a ship in a bottle. Hanging everywhere were drawings I couldn’t make out in the dim light, charts or plans for buildings.

  What a tip, said Lois. What a filthy mess. It’s a wonder we don’t have rats. And his bedroom is just as bad.

  You can see George in every one of his phases, said Madeleine. When he was a junior chemist, when he was an architect.

  When he was Michelangelo, said Lois.

  When he was Charles Darwin, said Madeleine.

  When he was Erasmus Darwin, said Lois, which was apparently funny in a cruel way.

  He’s not your real brother, is he? I asked.

  Yes, of course he’s our brother, Lois said sharply. He’s been our brother since he was one day old.

  It had been sunny when they’d picked me up at the port, but by afternoon, when we sat on the garden wall, a cold wind had packed clouds the colour of pewter tightly into the sky. I’m in England, I thought, looking up at the fat grey clouds, homesick suddenly for the train, for the impersonality of the train on the first stage of my journey, when everyone was hurrying to different places on their own and I was invisible from both worlds, the world I’d left and the world I was going towards. Once I boarded the SS Franconia it was different: there we were all held in a little society in which it seemed I had to account for myself. Sometimes I thought the other passengers were piqued by my naïveté, and during the cool, sunny days while everyone strolled on deck I leaned against the railing and looked out to the horizon as though this were my habitual attitude, gazing across endless fields of rippling wheat. That’s how I made my way across the ocean, playing the role of the unspoiled, forthright farm girl. One night in the dining room a man in a shabby brown suit talked about the dr
ought on the prairies. It’s a sign of the end times, I said boldly. It’s in the Book of Revelations. There’s a drought on the prairies every thirty years, said the man. It’s a natural cycle. He didn’t bother even to glance at me again. And then my longing for England was fierce, for England, where I could be someone else, although I didn’t know then who that would be.

  Now I was haggard with conversation, with seeing and being seen. We sat on the garden wall and they told me about their school, Ward Street Grammar School, from which Lois had been sent home twice for turning her waistband over to make her skirt shorter, and Madeleine asked me about my school and marvelled that students of all ages studied in the same classroom. I closed my palm over my thumbnail, which was black where I’d caught it in the hinge of the feed bin the day before I left the farm. The bruise had just begun its journey up my nail. My beautiful cousins lounged on the garden wall, stockinged legs crossed gracefully in front of them, feet in slight black leather slippers. What were your subjects? asked Lois, and I thought of Miss Fielding with her hair wreaths. I was a stiff girl with a forced laugh, I became Gracie. Lois took the clip out of her hair and dangled her head forward to catch her hair up again, and Madeleine cocked her head towards me and said, Tell us about your brother. Is he very handsome? Is he very clever? And after a while I abandoned even Gracie, left her shivering on the garden wall laughing breathily; I became a pair of eyes a little apart, glazed with the effort of watching.

  Then from the street in front of the house a car horn sounded. It was time to go to Nana’s in another town, in Salford, where I would live. We all got up and followed the garden wall around to the front of the house to see Aunt Lucy helping Nan into the car. Aunt Lucy put her hand on my arm and said, Oh, lovie, you’re freezing, and it was true, I was all clammy.

  Don’t you have a jumper? she asked.

  I didn’t understand that she meant a sweater and I said, I just have this suit and two dresses.

  Well, we’ll find you sommut, she said. My girls have all sorts they aren’t wearing.

  I’m going to ride along and keep Lily company, Madeleine said, climbing into the car.

  By the time we were at the bottom of the street, rain had begun to bounce off the cobblestones. Nan dozed in the front as though she were asleep at the wheel, and from the passenger side Uncle Stanley steered the car expertly onto the main road. Outside a public house our headlights picked up a man with no legs on a low, flat trolley, pushing himself along with his hands over the rough stones, his head bent to the rain. Poor lad, sighed Nan, waking up briefly to the sight of him.

  What happened to him? I asked.

  The war, my uncle said. Lungs’ll be dodgy too.

  When I was little I used to play that I was you, Madeleine confided in my left ear. We always made you the brave one! I’ll be Lily-in-Canada, I would always say.

  She reached across the seat to squeeze my hand and I knew that I would be all right, that my terror sitting on the garden wall was just a fit of nerves.

  It was dark by the time we rolled into Salford. Madeleine took Nan’s key and unlocked the door of a narrow row house right up flat against the pavement and ran in to get the umbrella from behind the door. We scuttled in under it and Uncle Stanley carried my trunk upstairs. After they’d driven away, Nan and I took our hats off and I stood in the soot-stained kitchen, my father’s kitchen. She put the kettle on and set cups and a sugar bowl on the table and turned towards me, squeezing my cheeks between her hands, crooning, Oh, they’re lovely, aren’t they! My grandchildren are all so lovely! They’re the image of their nana, every last one of’em!

  My room was the boys’ room in my father’s day, his room. Narrow and dim and with a row of boxes lined up against one wall. I opened my trunk and a faint smell of home (of sour milk and dust and mothballs and mouse) rose from the folded things, along with the face of my mother, hovering self-consciously in the hall back at the farm, waiting for me to find the gifts she’d added to my trunk. I took them out, a new towel and facecloth, blue. A New Testament, with a motto from Ephesians inscribed on the flyleaf (Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil). I crawled into bed and lay on my stomach with my arms tucked under me because the bed was as cold as river mud in April. Boys passed under the window, their shouts gradually dwindling, and a bicycle horn hooted. A carriage went by, the horses’ hooves hammering the set stones. I felt pity and chagrin and something that was almost tenderness for the girl I’d been at home. I was in England now, where the fires of hell had been dampened to wet cinders by fog and rain, where people went complacently about their lives, entitled to their songs and their small comforts. I lay in my narrow room and listened to the rain on the roof and the horses’ hooves and thought of the sea, the vast swelling plain I’d watched from the deck of the Franconia, its restless, random waves no colour at all that you could name. The rain patted on the window and the sea washed over me, the unmanageable sea, and I sank into sleep.

  2

  I never met my granddad, but I recognized him everywhere, in the smell of pipe smoke, and the cribbage board, and the pile of yellowed Manchester Guardians knee-high on the floor in front of the window. Nan kept thinking he’d just gone down to the Woolpack for a game of darts. At night she set her teacup on the newspapers as though they were a proper side table and settled herself in her chair by the window, and I got the wireless down from its hiding place and put music on (very low, so her neighbour Mrs. Crisp wouldn’t hear and tell the inspector, as Nan had not bought a licence since Granddad passed away). But tears would begin to course down her cheeks, which already looked like the leaves of a book damaged by rain. So I would sit with her, because I’d nothing else to do. I’d want to ask about my father, and at first I did. Oh, he was a lovely lad, she’d say vaguely and start to tell me about him crawling through a hole in the wall into the next house, and then she’d get confused as to whether that was Willie or Hugh or Roland, or even her own little brother when she was a girl.

  But every night she’d tell me about how Granddad’s hand was cut off in the mill when they were engaged, and how her father came home and broke the news to her. You get over to that hospikal, he said, and you take that ring off your finger and give it back to that lad. He can’t be expected to support a wife and family now. From the voice she gave my great-grandfather, I pictured someone stout and self-satisfied, the sort of man who enjoyed delivering bad news and managing its aftermath. But when Nan went weeping into Granddad’s room at the hospital and saw his face white as the bedsheets, Granddad said (and his voice was so faint she had to lean her ear over his mouth to hear it), You put that back on your finger, I’ll show them. And he did, love, he did show them! she would cry. We was never well off, but we was no poorer than the rest of them, and there was never an unkind word!

  And then her tears would start again. Stories about Grand-dad would lead to stories about Isobel and Florence, my dad’s two little sisters, who died in the flu. And these were sad too, so I would try to steer her to earlier days, to her father, a spoiled, artistic man (and here I pictured a tall, pale, romantic father, a different father altogether from the previous story), a man who never worked but went off on holidays with his snobby sisters and left his family without a bit of food in the pantry. But how they all doted on him! Her mother would boil him a chuckie egg when there were no eggs for the children, and he would cut the top off his egg and give it to whichever child had been good that day. He died soon after she was married. He was in the hospital, and she went alone to see him, and he asked her to fetch her mother because he wanted to be shaved. And when her mother got there he had died. So she was the last to see him alive, the very last. And she would tell me how his hearse drove by the Gaping Goose and the cellar men came out and stood in the street with their hats over their hearts. After a time she would say, Put kettle on, duckie, and so I made us a cup of tea and filled the hot-water bottles. Then I took the wireless (which was very heavy) and pa
nting and gasping I climbed on a chair and pushed it up through the ceiling hole in Nan’s bedroom to hide it, in case the inspector came round first thing in the morning. And then Nan came in from using the loo and planted a big soft kiss on each side of my face, crying a little and saying, Oh, pet, it is hard, but we’ll manage, and we crawled between the clammy sheets in our two beds and went to sleep.

  When Dad first came back from town with the news that another telegram had arrived, saying that Nana was in a bad way and was asking for me, my mother had scoffed and assumed he would scoff. Imagine plucking the one daughter out of a farm family in these hard times and sending her alone across the ocean. To look after an old woman she’s never met! When there were scores of other relatives living nearby! Why don’t they get one of Lucy’s girls? I remember Mother asking. I get the impression that Madeleine may not be quite right, was what my dad said (a baffling comment when I thought about it now). Well, I’ve never heard that before, my mother answered.

  My father just sat on the backless chair beside the house, scraping the soles of his boots with a stick. Finally my mother flew into a temper. For someone who thought Leithwood was too far away, she cried, you’re awfully eager to send her halfway around the world! It was apparent that he had no intention of answering.

  My father’s implacable decision, something we had never witnessed before, threw us all into a tizzy. The morning I left, my mother’s hair was neatly braided but the bun a little off-centre. But she had a new air of purpose. Don’t forget that you are witnessing to them, she said to me at the station while Dad fixed the CPR sticker to my trunk. With everything you say and with everything you do. She had managed to find a logic for sending me — I was a missionary to a foreign land.