Reading by Lightning

by Joan Thomas

  Well, we did go to church, didn’t we? On Sundays when we didn’t go to Aunt Lucy’s in Oldham, I went with Nan to the service at St. Ambrose Parish Church. The church was dark and cold and smelled of mould and there was organ music and little benches for kneeling. In the jewelled windows saints knelt to have their heads cut off with swords, and two men laboured to stuff Jonah head first into the mouth of a large fish. Nan was not at all abashed that she went to church only if she had nothing better to do. There she sat, with a big orange silk flower pinned to her bosom (it had fallen off her hat that morning), savouring her own goodness for having put in an appearance at all. The vicar stood in a booth that jutted from the left front corner of the church, and while he declaimed in a voice that is never used in real life (which is something you could also say about Wesley Moore, of course), Nan rooted around in her pocketbook and gave me a humbug covered with fuzz. I sucked it through the sermon, hot saliva leaking down on either side of my tongue. God had not caught up to me yet and seemed no likelier to do so in the Anglican Church than anywhere else.

  As we walked home we passed a humble hall that bore the sign PRIMITIVE METHODIST. Families streamed out, carrying Bibles. They were poorly dressed and had more children about them than God allotted to Anglicans. I recognized the signs of a more dangerous religion, but no one gave any sign of recognizing me.

  Every morning we ate bacon butties for breakfast, and then Nan poured the bacon fat on the coals to make the fire burn better and set about making soup. After the ball is over, she crooned as she stirred, after the break of morn, after the dancers’ leaving, after the stars are gone. Tin curlers dangled from hair the colour of turnips. I jumped up to catch one at the point of dropping into the soup. The smell of mashed pea rose from the pot.

  Watch, Nana, I think the soup is burning.

  She turned in my direction and lifted her tangled eyebrows. I was not to look away, but to let her lock eyes flirtatiously with me while she swayed and shuffled her feet, dancing with the soup pot. That’s why I’m lonely, no home at all. I broke her heart, pet, after the ball, she sang, lifting the spoon from the soup and waving it like a conductor. Bits of green pea splattered the cooker and the floor. Join in, join in! her baton cried. Part of me wanted to join her, but the other part stubbornly did not and smiled patiently at her, as though she were a charming child.

  In England young people were expected to be nervy and flitty and to go out pleasure-seeking, and Nan praised me to the heavens for putting the kettle on without being asked. When all on my own I took a knife and dug out the grey muck that had gathered around the base of the tap since my father was a boy in the house, Nan was not ashamed, not in the least, but cried, Oh, you are a pet! So I found I had a previously unrecognized talent for cleaning and asked Nan if I could buy some wax for the kitchen lino. Even my cousins noticed the new look of the place when they came up by coach for a half-holiday.

  No doubt you’d have done as well, Madeleine, Lois said. She was wearing a beret that she declined to take off.

  Too right, said Madeleine. I would have. Whereas you, Lois. Well! Lois! It was out of the question for Lois to come. Fancy Lois on her knees in Salford scrubbing the flagstones. Here comes Archie, rolling up Stott Street in his roadster. Oh, it’s Cinderella! he cries. I’ve found her at last!

  Nan reached for Madeleine’s ear. She offered to knock my cousins both limbless. Then she sent us all out to the shop for a bit of bacon. I swung between the two of them up along the common where the plane trees grew, reduced to sending out clumps of pencil-thin twigs where their thick limbs had been brutally hacked off. Below us stretched row after row of identical roofs. Madeleine, I said when we came out of the trees. Madeleine, were you thinking of coming to stay with Nan?

  Well, that’s what Mother wanted. She was on at me about it from the time Granddad died. She didn’t want Nan to be on her own. And then out of the blue Nana got the letter from Uncle Willie asking if you might come. Madeleine took my arm affectionately. Lucky Lily! Poor Lily! Oh, I love you, Lily-in-Canada!

  I waited until Nan and I were cleaning up the tea things, after my cousins had boarded the coach back to Oldham. Nan? I asked then. Did you send my dad the money for me to come from Canada?

  She was digging at a bit of egg burnt on to the frying pan. Why no, pet, she said. Did I heck as like! He paid your fare himself.

  It was six o’clock and the lamps were lit. I stood still in Nan’s kitchen, clutching a teacup in a damp towel. On the dark window in front of me the reflection of Nan’s frowsy head wobbled and blurred.

  At home it would be morning. An inch or two of snow would have fallen during the night and you’d see their tracks to the barn. They’ve finished milking. Dad is standing by the water trough. He’s smashed the skin of ice on the trough, it’s lying on the water in sharp triangles. He stands watching the mindless cattle sink their snouts into black water, three of them drinking at the trough while the rest blow steam and wait, governed by their bovine decorum. There’s not much grazing in November, but he’ll take the cattle out to the pasture anyway. He whistles for Chummy and sets off, his cap pulled down over his ears. I reach out and put a hand on his arm, stopping him. How did you ever manage to do it? I ask, and he shrugs and we look directly at each other, and I feel a wrench of love and wonder.

  I thought of writing to thank him, but my mother often picked up the mail. The secret compact between my father and me was formal now: I’d been drawn into his wordless way of doing things — I could not even acknowledge this gift. I sat on the bed in my room (his bed, possibly), a blanket over my knees, and considered what it meant to be the beneficiary of his splendid resolve. To be the daughter he’d been paying attention to when she had no sense of being seen. Sent now to England to carry out his purposes, whatever they may be.

  But in fact the days moved at a crawl and I was bored to a stupor. Had he sent me across the sea to spend my youth as a bit player in Nan’s domestic dramas? Every morning before breakfast I was cajoled and flattered into going down the street to Baxter’s shop to carry home four eggs and six slices of bacon, or an oiled paper with a pat of butter in it. Our Lily, I was called. (She’s off to the shops, our Lily, isn’t she a pet?) Poised to leave, I’d be pulled back into the house if the neighbour Mrs. Crisp happened to be outside, and I’d have to stand with my hat on and the little cloth change purse in my hand while Nana hissed, Oh, she’s that eager to meet you, she’s fit to be tied. But she shan’t meet you, she shan’t! This was all the consequence of a dispute in the Flat Iron Market over a hat that Nan fancied. Mrs. Crisp knew Nan fancied it, but she snatched it up and bought it herself, although it hung down over her ears and she wore it only the once. She’s nasty! She’s nasty! She’s a proper devil! Nan would cry, her face darkening, clutching me by the arm until the coast was clear.

  The autumn dragged by. Mist and fog rose up from the canal and mixed with the smoke from the factory chimneys,

  and the leaves on the trees in Chimney Pot Park turned red and yellow and fell like bits of coloured paper to the grass. Laundry days we set up tubs in the kitchen and the whole house smelled of bleach because I was trying to whiten the sheets, which were a terrible grey because Nan had been washing them in the bathtub since Granddad died (and rarely enough at that). Market days we plodded up to the Flat Iron Market, Nan and I and Mrs. Grimshaw (the neighbour on the other side), so achingly slowly that I wanted to slump down on the cobbles while they went over it all again:

  She knew you fancied it, love, it was wrong of her to buy it.

  She’s nasty, she’s proper nasty! And she lies, Mary Crisp! You can’t credit a word she says.

  Well, she is getting on.

  It’s true, she’s not the woman she was.

  And me, I’m eighty-two, you’d never know it. You’ll never go, the doctor says, you’ll never go, we’ll have to shoot you.

  Mornings I watched girls my age hurry past in twos or threes, on their way to work or over to the Labour Ex
change to pick up their dole. I stood by the window watching and longed for my real life in England to be revealed to me. In Oldham they talked about schoolmasters and parties and rides in Archie’s roadster. And about George, who did not come home once all fall. When I went to Oldham on a Sunday, Madeleine showed me the advent calendar hanging in the front room, and it seemed to me that the little doors that opened to pictures of the Judean hills were there to count off the days until George came walking home over the Pennines.

  So jump to Christmas, as that’s what we were all waiting for (except for Nan, who was waiting for Granddad to come home from the pub, and Lois, who was waiting for Archie from Altrincham to show her that he cared). Jump straight to Christmas, to a snowless Christmas Eve with a thin skin of ice on the pavement, to Nan and me taking the coach to Oldham because Uncle Stanley was away with the car. To the coach climbing up High Street and coming around the corner by Buckley and Proctor’s, where Lois stood alone in a smart plaid jacket, and across the street the Salvation Army laboured through “Oh, Holy Night.” To a tall boy standing among them, not in uniform, not playing an instrument but miming one (a trumpet maybe), and as we stepped down from the coach and Lois greeted us, watch him execute a dramatic flourish and then lay his invisible trumpet on the top of a letter box and lope across the street to meet us. Knowing without having to be told that this was George, this tall boy with the overeager face was my cousin George.

  They’ve asked me to join them, he cried. On a permanent basis. I agreed, if I could play the cymbals. But they’ve given the cymbals to a bloke from Old Man Road. To a Mr. John Fiddler. He comes from a long line of fiddlers, but he’s made the leap to cymbals in one generation. I question the fairness of it.

  George, Lois was calling sharply through all this, George! Shut your gob! Say hello to your cousin from Canada.

  George, you cheeky devil, cried Nan, and he bent to kiss her and while she squeezed his cheeks and crooned over him he turned desperate eyes to me and said, Hello, cousin from Canada.

  Now take the bags, said Lois, and he bent obediently and picked them up, swinging mine to one shoulder and Nan’s to the other. He was still going on about the cymbals. Showing off is what we called this at home. I felt relieved when we started walking and Nan and Lois and I were all abreast and he had to fall behind, from where he continued to pipe “Oh, Holy Night” softly between his lips while we walked.

  The house was full of people. My Uncle Hugh was there, my father’s little brother, a middle-aged man with a bland, expressionless face, and Aunt Margaret. They had come from Liverpool for the occasion — a staggering undertaking, I was made to understand. There were also Mr. and Mrs. Shilling-ford, neighbours from down the street, and someone named Nettie Nesbitt, a tall woman who said, in the elaborate decorum with which she crossed her legs at the ankles and the care she took not to demand anything from anyone, that she’d been invited because she had nowhere else to go. Mrs. Shillingford sat in a wine-coloured hat that matched her velvet pumps and worked her way through a list of polite queries about the health of mutual acquaintances. My new aunt and uncle did not attempt to engage me in conversation, but I felt Mr. Shillingford’s eyes on me, shy and avid, from the moment we were introduced. Finally he edged up to me and spoke. So does the name Hubert Shillingford mean owt to you? he said.

  It sounds familiar, I said cautiously (for was it possibly his name?).

  Me brother, he said. He were a Barr Colonist. Lives in Lloydminster. We had a card a fortnight ago. Only hear from him at Christmas. But it were all in the papers back then, what a trouble they went through. He gave a soft, apologetic laugh and sidled back to the settee, murmuring, Just occurred to me your dad might a knew him.

  We crammed around the table and Uncle Stanley poured a glass of red wine for everyone, including Madeleine and me. We all pulled paper crackers and laughed when they popped, and little whiffs of gunpowder rose up through the smell of roast turkey. Everyone unrolled the flimsy paper hats that fell out of the crackers and put them on. Aunt Lucy passed around the highbush cranberry sauce I’d brought. It was a last-minute gift from Canada, decided on the morning I left, when my father was eating toast and pin cherry jelly. I wish we could send some of this along, he’d said. I recall Lucy did love jelly as a girl. So Mother had sent me down to the cellar to get up some jars. I’d brought pin cherry jelly, highbush cranberry sauce, wild plum jam, saskatoon preserves, and chokecherry jelly (although my mother protested at that, as chokecherries are an inferior berry hardly worth the cost of the sugar). Everyone at the table must have been a little shocked at all the big, flat seeds in the cranberry sauce, but they praised its delicacy of flavour.

  I thought it would be nice to have a goose for Christmas this year, said Aunt Lucy, a yellow tissue hat on her fair hair. But when I saw the price of them I closed my pocketbook up with a snap.

  When we was kids we et pot roast for Christmas, said Uncle Hugh in my father’s even voice. We et pot roast and thought we was lucky to have it. Right, Mam?

  When I was a gel we et tea leaf butties on Christmas and every other day, said Nettie Nesbitt. She flashed a smile after she spoke and flipped her tongue up to hide the spot of rot at the crack between her two front teeth, like an errant tea leaf.

  George was crammed in beside her. Carotene, folic acid, manganese and potassium, he said. Although you’d be wanting protein. There were eleven of us at the table, and he couldn’t pull his chair in all the way but reached forward to his plate with long, thin arms. I was filled with private hilarity at the paper hats and longed to catch his eye.

  Last year we had a miracle for Christmas, I said. My mother wanted to make a Christmas cake and the hens had stopped laying. So in October we began to pray for eggs. And then the hens started laying again! Just four eggs, that’s all they laid, but it was exactly how many we needed.

  I wager your mother slipped them a little sommut extra in their feed, Nettie Nesbitt said cruelly. We had hens when I were a gel and that’s what we ud do. Buy a cup of flax, or some oats. Or boil up some barley, that ud do the trick. Before we knew it, there’d be a chuckie egg.

  Must have made a change from the tea leaf butties, said Lois.

  Stop staring, Madeleine said to George, for he had been staring at me since I started to talk.

  For a colonial, she does have the look of an English lass, George said.

  Of course she does, cried Nan. She’s English through and through, is our Lily.

  In spite of all temptations, George sang out, to belong to other nations, she remains an English lass, she remai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ains — an English lass! By the last line his sisters had joined in and everyone was laughing and I was filled with shy delight.

  After the pudding the men crumpled their paper hats and wandered into the hall and the ladies got up and moved to the parlour. I ended up on an upholstered chair at the archway to the hall, at the hinge between the two circles, and could listen to both, to my aunts in the parlour exchanging tender, inconsequential comments about the turkey and the pudding, to George cadging tobacco from Uncle Hugh. He bent over his pipe and the worldly smell of tobacco drifted into the parlour. Our Granddad’s pipe it was — Nan had given it to him. Above their heads the red-coated generals, the festively dressed generals, leaned over their map. Cruel that my father was so far away, that he couldn’t stand in the hall in a tweed jacket and trousers, a pipe in one hand and a glass of whisky in the other.

  The curtains were drawn, but on the fanlight in the hall you could see that the rain had turned to snow — it had begun to stick on the glass, piling up in each pie-shaped frame, like a Christmas message for Canadians far from home. I turned my head, looking first at the women and then the men. It could just as well have been them, I marvelled, it could have been them that signed up to ship to Canada instead of my father. Aunt Margaret and Mrs. Shillingford washing nappies in a sod shack, Uncle Hugh and Mr. Shillingford standing in front of a cutter in January, their celluloid collars
peeping out at the necks of buffalo coats, paper hats from their Christmas crackers still perched on their heads.

  Cold, eh? said Mr. Shillingford from the hall. He was a little man, and his eyes were set strangely high on his face, as though a child had drawn him.

  Ain’t it, said Uncle Hugh. It ud freeze the nose off a brass monkey. Not a patch on sixteen, though. Remember Christmas a sixteen? The bleedin’ water?

  It’s the bleedin’ rats I recall, said Uncle Stanley. The devils swimming down the line, trying to keep their whiskers dry. I can still see them. His voice dropped and I couldn’t hear what he said next. They puffed on their pipes, they turned their shoulders to the parlour. Some poor blighter’s hand, it seemed he said, and then he said something that had rain or brain in it, words just on the edge of my hearing.

  In the parlour Nettie Nesbitt, released from her caution at that very moment, embarked on a story about bodice fasteners. She wanted them fancy dome fasteners, she cried, but they won’t do the job for a full-figured woman. (Cleaned out the whole thing, it seemed Uncle Stanley was saying. Whatever he said the other men stirred with discomfort. Just then he glanced sideways through the arch and saw me, saw me listening, and his face darkened. He reached up a hand as if he were a police officer, as if he were pushing me back. Keep your nose out of it, he was saying, and I dropped my eyes, embarrassed.) Three times I took it apart and still she weren’t satisfied, Nettie Nesbitt was crying, while Aunt Lucy let out soft, sympathetic clucks. She’s still not paid me a penny.

  Then Mr. Shillingford said in an ordinary tone, It makes you think, when you look at this lad here. A whole new crop for the next go.

  He’s of an age, our lad, said Uncle Stanley. I will grant you that. But age is not everything. Then I did dare to look back at them. I couldn’t see George’s face, but from his posture he was miming a middle-aged man, completely absorbed in his pipe.