by Melvyn Bragg
‘You could come here with me.’
‘You know I can’t. There’s no room as it is.’
‘You and me together?’ he said, rather wildly.
‘We’ve been through that.’
There was the money. Those he was living with needed his contribution. Grace stilled the panic that threatened to ambush her these days. It was hard to hold out against a loss of control. The dream of living with her father and her daughter had been difficult to abandon.
‘I want to know about my own mother,’ she said. ‘I want to know about her.’
‘What can I tell you that I haven’t already?’
‘But that was when I was younger.’
He understood and lit up before he began. He looked tired, she thought: that bitten-in tiredness that comes from remorseless physical strain, that sense of a body all but worn out. He walked stiffly from the damage suffered in the pits. He had the appetite of a sparrow but still there was the flash of good looks about him that caught people’s attention, and the smile that seemed to know the way the world worked and be amused at it.
‘If I was to say one thing about her, it would be that she had courage,’ he began. ‘She took me on – a ragamuffin Irish papist. Everybody she knew told her I was the devil’s spawn, as trusty as a bent penny. But once she had set her heart on me, she never wavered. She would have gone into the jaws of Hell and she very nearly did with your chapel elders! She said she would come over to the Catholic Church and she would have done. That was a big thing. But I went her way and it broke my mother’s heart, so she told me, but . . .’ he looked at Grace with a stab of implacable firmness ‘. . . I would have done anything in the world for your mother. Anything. I thought she had got herself a poor bargain, but she . . .’ He paused.
He lit a new cigarette from the old stump. ‘All I knew was country work and there wasn’t much of that around, especially if you were outside the families and the cliques and most of all if you were Irish and even worse if you were a Catholic. Last to hire, first to fire. We lived on short commons. I had to go across the county at times just to get a couple of weeks’ work. I would do any job they threw at me. I ate as little as they gave me and gave up drink – only these,’ he waved the cigarette, ‘I couldn’t kick. But for the rest – it all went to her, what there was of it.’
‘What else? What else about her courage?’ That’s what I want from her, Grace thought. That’s how I want to be like her.
‘Well. You see how Wilson and Sarah keep that farm. It’s a handsome place. We lived in hovels. She can’t have liked it but she never made me feel bad about it. She would always be cheering me up, telling me what a fine fellow I was.’ He looked away and spoke very deliberately now. ‘You can have no idea, Grace, and I hope you never will. There was a miscarriage before the first two and then we lost two more before Belle and yourself. But she wouldn’t give in. And she could make something out of nothing. Whatever hovel we were in there would be something pleasant about it – a few flowers. Nothing got her down. She was alone more than was good when I was scavenging for work, and the scraping for the children you would have thought beneath a woman like her, but she never moaned.’ He looked at Grace again, more tremulous now. ‘You’ll be thinking I’m talking of a saint, Grace, and I am. She was to me. I hope there’s a next life just so’s I’ll have a chance to be with her again. There now. Nobody’s ever got that out of me! There’s a lot of her in you, Grace.’ He took a sip of the tea and Grace let the wave of those last few words break slowly over her and lift her up and give her strength.
She went back to Grasmere by train and bus and felt that she had in her own hands a broken heart that, if she held it carefully enough, if she nursed it and above all if she had Ruth’s courage, she could mend. She must not think of her life as ended. There was Mary.
Mrs Johnston was a kindly woman who had a good way with children, her own and those who went through her care. But she had her own rules and they were approved by the council. One rule was that too many visits would be upsetting for all parties and so Grace’s visits were limited to one a month in the first year and then, she told Grace, there would be one every two months in the second and third year and, as the child might begin to get confused, visits would be stopped on any regular basis after the third year.
Grace had not expected any of that. Her view, misty but assured, was that within a few months a way would be found for them to be together. The consensus of those involved in making the decision was unequivocal. One or the other of them, mother or child, had to leave the area and if they wanted to stay together that was a matter for Grace alone to organise. It would have no help from the authorities and little sympathy from the population.
That was what she could not avoid. When she travelled north from the dale-bound secret shelter of genteel Grasmere, with its poetic associations and seasonal visits of gentle hill-walking ramblers, to the bleaker exposed flatlands of her home, she felt a coolness as sharp as a dramatic switch in the weather. An illegitimate child was to be feared and the reaction to that fear was rejection. It was not unlike having the plague and the woman was to be avoided. Even sympathy kept its voice low. She felt like an outcast on those journeys back to Oulton and that was not too great an exaggeration.
Alongside the mutual support in her old small community, alongside the chapel order and the insistence on manners, there was a darkness. There were wives in terror of drunken husbands; there were children beaten and strapped. A great sin was to let it be known. Without knowledge there was no judgement. With it came ancient and cruel punishment. An illegitimate child could become a focus of morality: to condemn it was to prove to each other how good they were.
Grace knew, and knew ever more strongly, that she was thought by many to be a fouled and lesser being. To let a child be brought up and nourished by such a one was resisted by all good people. Separation could be the only solution. The only godly solution.
There were times in the next months in Grasmere when Grace’s body and spirit felt so heavy and weary that she hoped she might sleep never to wake. At times the pain became numb, which was the best she could wish for. But the merest cry of a child or reference to a birth would unnumb the pain for a few moments and bring back that agony of hope. Alan and Mary, both absent, both so deeply loved. It was too much to bear.
After almost a year of this, still unresolved, she decided to go and visit Alan’s parents. She wrote them a letter and posted it two days before she set off. She would stay overnight and arrive in the morning. The letter would make it less of a shock for them but the time of its posting would close off the opportunity to repel her.
It had been growing inside her for months, this longing to join up again with Alan. She had tried very hard but finally it had broken through her defences. She had to make the connection, for all their sakes, she would tell herself, but most of all for her own. She could not just walk away and, besides, her love for him was unimpaired and who knew what a meeting might bring? Perhaps he was waiting for her . . .
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The five-thirty a.m. forecast said that the fine weather would hold over the north of England and it would be dry and with temperatures well above average for the time of year. John set off immediately. He made it in five hours, with five cigarettes, a pit stop just north of Birmingham and a drip feed from Radio 4. Along the way he phoned ahead to double check that his mother was having one of her good days and would not be fast asleep when he arrived. He kept the duty nurse informed of his progress. It became something of a game between them, and when he got there, he saluted. Beside her, Mary was in her wheelchair, and wrapped up as if the new ice age was prowling outside the door. She could not stand the cold and this would be her first time out of the home since the daffodil run.
Even the mild breeze from the sea alarmed her as he wheeled her across to the car.
‘It’s starvation,’ she said. ‘Oh dear! Where are we going?’
‘Out,’ he said, an
d he smiled at an instant memory of her asking when he was a boy, ‘Where have you been?’ ‘Out,’ was his complete answer. ‘Out,’ he repeated and, with the help of the nurse, heaved her into the front seat, put the wheelchair in the back of the car and waved goodbye.
‘Bring her back safe!’
‘See you,’ said Mary and, entering into the spirit, she waved her hand in rather a royal manner.
‘Goodbye, goodbye.’ The car drew away. ‘What was all that about?’ she said.
He had planned an itinerary but the late-morning sun was so seductive he played with the notion of making a quick raid into the Lake District, which she had not visited for years. But it was a little too far, and it would be crowded on a Saturday like this, and . . .
He stuck to his plan but he took a winding way to Wigton so that she could enjoy some of the villages to which she had cycled on her morning delivery round for the post office in the years after the war. He said just enough to keep her company but saved his ammunition for the chief objective of the day, which was Wigton Revisited. She gazed out of the window intently, and now and then uttered praise, only praise, as if in the small allocation left of her life only praise was of value. The sun, the trees, a house, a garden, hedgerows, a few horses in a field, praise for them all. ‘Look at . . .’ ‘Look at . . .’ Never turning her head to him once, requiring no confirmation, absorbed in praising the passing present world.
John drove under the railway bridge, past the factory and into Station Road. He did not want to wear her out so he stoppered his tendency to recite the usual litany – that’s the factory where Dad used to work, that’s the sawmill where there was the big fire, that’s the walk we used to take past the West Cumberland Farmers’ buildings, that used to be Toppins farm, and Toppins field backed on to Mrs Johnston’s house . . . and as Station Road rose into the town, he even managed to hold himself back from a eulogy on Redmayne’s clothing factory in which Mary had worked from the age of fourteen to twenty-one, a factory that had dominated the road but had now disappeared without trace. A supermarket had taken over the territory. And Moore’s garage and gift shop, the long-gone barber’s shop, Billy Ivinson’s stables, the Wallaces, the cake shop now a charity shop, the razed site of the grand Victoria Arms with a yard that could take three or four dozen shire horses on horse-fair days, all these were passed by. It was more than the triggering of a few sentences he hoped for this time.
He swung into what had been the yard where Mrs Johnston had lived and pulled up. Mary could see the house. He gave her time to settle herself, and then, ‘It’s changed a lot,’ he said.
She did not respond but continued to gaze at the house. John was tentative.
‘They’ve made it all one house. It’s a big place now. They’ve painted it white . . .’ Compared with most of the houses in the town it had always been a big house. After her marriage, when her husband Harry had gone to war, she had returned. John had lived there until he was eight.
‘They’ve laid a garden,’ he said. ‘It used to be a cobbled yard.’
‘Look at the roses,’ she said.
‘It changes it a lot, doesn’t it, being a garden?’
‘We didn’t have a garden,’ she said. ‘They’re just a lot of work anyway.’
‘And everything’s gone except the house.’
‘Where are we?’
‘This is Station Road. This is Wigton.’
‘Oh.’ She was quiet. Were memories assembling, he wondered, moving into place across her mind, gradually putting together the scattered pieces of jigsaw from the past? This was the key location of her childhood, her adolescence, from this house she had been married; to this house she had returned for refuge in the war with her son, with him. Surely this would begin the great healing.
‘There was such a lot in this yard,’ he said. ‘They called it the Council Yard. You wonder how it could have fitted in.’
Did she see herself as he saw her, a young woman hanging the sheets and shirts and other washing on one of the lines that were strung across the yard? There had been several lines, and other women in Station Road had used them on Mondays. John conjured up the washing day, the women moving between the sheets, pegs in their teeth, the mangle just outside the door and his mother letting him help her with it, squeezing out every drop of water they could. He saw her among the other women, he saw her sitting on the doorstep in the sun, he saw himself sitting on his first two-wheeler bicycle propped against the wall while he gathered his courage to let go. He saw his father coming back from the war and he knew he was misremembering how that had happened. But the force of it was still there, the footfalls, the entrances and the exits, the growing and the dying.
John remembered the dead body of Mrs Johnston. It was laid out in the barely used parlour and after a discussion he was allowed to see it. Did his mother take him through? She must have done. Clearly now, on this bright day, he saw the parlour gloom. Was there a candle? He remembered Mrs Johnston’s face like wax and the urge to press his finger in that waxen cheek. In her lifetime he had been told to call her ‘Grandma’.
‘Did I live here?’ she said.
‘You did! You did!’
‘It’s very nice,’ she said. And he waited . . .
‘Sometimes I forget things, John. It’s terrible.’ She turned to him and smiled. ‘But you’ll remember, won’t you?’
‘Yes. Look. In that corner, up some steps, was the library. Dad used to take me there on Fridays. It wasn’t open every evening, just Tuesdays and Fridays, and then only for an hour or two. He used to talk to the librarian. I remember thinking that was really something. He could talk to anybody, though, couldn’t he, Dad?’ Damn!
‘Your dad . . . Is he all right?’
‘Yes.’ How long? Fifteen years? ‘Yes,’ he repeated, and she looked away.
‘Underneath the library was an estate agent’s,’ he continued hurriedly, ‘Mr Dudding. He had pebble glasses and he wore his trilby hat even in the office. We could see him through the window.’
‘Duddings . . . They were big church people, the Duddings.’
‘Yes! And the fire station next to it! That was great, wasn’t it?’
The factory hooter would wail across the town and the volunteer fire brigade would down tools and run or bike to the Council Yard to man the engine. By that time he could see a small crowd, mainly small children, gathering to cheer them on. He could not see his mother there.
‘Upstairs, among the helmets and the uniforms and the spare hose, there were chairs and the silver band used it as a rehearsal room.’
‘There was a horse,’ she said. ‘What was it called?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘You must remember. A horse, in a stable, on its own. Was it grey?’
‘I think so.’
‘You only think so?’
When she was a girl, did she go and feed the horse over the half-door of the stable? Very likely. Horses were there from the time she was a girl. There would have been two horses then for the old fire engine.
‘And in that corner was where Mr Johnston kept his brushes and whatever for cleaning the streets.’
‘He did. We got a reduction in rent for that. He was a nice man, Mr Johnston. Mrs Johnston was the boss. They were a very nice family, the Johnstons. And there were the black pipes’ – she gestured to the left side of the garden, which ran into the back of a row of cottages – ‘the council always kept pipes in our yard. I hated the pipes.’
‘Mrs Johnston, you called her?’
‘Mother. She was my mother.’
John saw Grace approaching the door to see her child and saw her again leaving alone. He saw the imprint of Grace’s visits as clearly now as he saw his mother, the child, the girl, the young woman playing hide and seek with him among the damp, drying sheets. He longed to speak of Grace.
‘She would take her chair out on a day like this,’ she said, of Mrs Johnston. ‘The boys would bring it out. And she would sit outside the
house, just over there, when it was our house, and knit. They were always on the go, those women. They made everything.’ Her look had become more concentrated, almost a stare.
‘Just over there, she would sit just over there. I would get a cushion and sit at her feet and she would always have a job for you but she would talk to you. She looked after me . . . She was very kind, was Mrs Johnston . . .’
They stayed a little while longer. He took her to the church and would have taken her in – now and then she would say that she would like to go to church – but she showed no interest. Nor did anything else in the town stir her. He realised that he had hoped for a revelation and staved off disappointment . . . He would try again some other time.
He drove back to the coast and near the home he found a calm place to park. He had brought a flask of orange juice and some shortbread. They sat and looked at the sea, the car windows open, hearing the calling of the gulls and in the distance muted music from the little fairground. She gazed out to the grey sea and was, he wanted to believe, content.
Another day.
CHAPTER TWENTY
It was the biggest journey Grace had ever made. On Carlisle Station she felt isolated even though there was a warm crowd and a prevalence of local accents. She felt a chill about her although the winter day was not especially cold. The traffic on the lines took most of her attention: the long, long goods trains, the men on the track checking the wheels with ringing hammers, the gushing of steam up to the vast dirty glass roof. Soot was already on her clothes. She was half an hour early.
She watched the soldiers closely as if she were trying to spot Alan even at this distance. They were very self-assured, she thought, unlike those she had known at Prospects. They stood in small groups; most of them smoked, and now and then there would be a small shout of common laughter. The war was over but the shock of peace had not yet been fully absorbed. The men could just as well have been setting off for the long haul to the Front. There would be no more fear of war for Alan now. That would help him, surely.
