by Melvyn Bragg
He sipped the beer slowly and smoked a couple of cigarettes and smiled as that careless, crucial afternoon returned to his mind with nothing but warm memories. As he lifted the glass, the sun stroked through it, making the beer sparkle, golden, floating free as they had been then. Happy days.
It took an effort for him to leave the place.
He arrived at dinner-time as he had planned and went straight to the office. This was a wooden cabin which held a table, two wooden chairs, a stack of black files, a two-bar electric fire and the obese figure of Arthur Nicholson, sole proprietor of Nicholson & Sons.
‘Sam! I heard you were back.’ He wheezed and sucked harder on his pencil. ‘Take a seat.’
Sam edged himself in.
‘You look well’
‘You haven’t changed much yourself.’
Arthur beat his chest with a pudgy fist. ‘The old asthma won’t leave me alone, Sam. Terrible thing, asthma. Underrated.’
He coughed a little, gaining time, Sam thought. Still those little raisin eyes in the expressionless face, hard to read. Though it was warm outside, Arthur was burning one bar of the fire and his head was insulated by a heavy cloth cap. A brown woolly muffler was knotted tight around his neck. Sam was sure it was the same muffler Arthur had worn the day he had got the job there before the war.
‘You’ll be looking for your old job.’
‘That’s right.’
Arthur wheezed, his eyes shifting rapidly.
‘We’re forced to take conscripts back. But not volunteers. There’s no obligation. You know that.’
‘I know that.’
‘You were a volunteer.’
Sam nodded. Arthur leaned back. The chair creaked. He spread out his hands, indicating ‘case proved’.
‘You’ve no vacancies?’
‘We’ve had a struggle, Sam. You had a struggle out there. We had a struggle back here.’
Sam let that pass. And he let the message sink in. He took his time.
‘Fag?’
He offered one. Arthur reached out eagerly for it. He had always cadged cigarettes. Sam waited, obliging Arthur to reach for the matches. When he held out the flame, Sam took his wrist, hard, and tugged, just a little, so that Arthur’s lardy face came close to his own.
‘You made me a solemn promise, Arthur.’ He grasped the wrist even tighter. The flame licked steadily down the match. ‘Remember?’
Arthur’s little black eyes twitched and darted as if they were being hunted down.
‘Remember, Arthur?’
The flame was nearing Arthur’s fingers. Sam’s grip slid up from the wrist and clamped the fingers fast.
‘Things changed, Sam. They changed.’
‘So they did.’
He never blinked when the flame touched Arthur’s fingertips. Arthur yelped.
‘I think 111 save the fag for later,’ Sam said and blew out the flame.
The next week there was an opening for a semi-skilled worker at the paper factory in Wigton. The work was hard but undemanding. It took no time at all to set up a card school. The majority vote was for solo whist.
Sadie came round as they were getting ready. Her right eye was red with new bruising. There was a small track of blood at the corner of her mouth.
Ellen took her into the back kitchen and dabbed the wounds in cold water. It was lucky that this was one of Grace and Leonard’s Sunday mornings at the Methodist chapel.
‘I want Sadie to come with us to Silloth,’ Ellen announced when Sam came down. Sadie had gone to get changed.
‘Why?’
‘She never gets anywhere.’
Sam had been looking forward to just the three of them going to the seaside resort for the day. ‘Has he had another go at her?’ He knew that Ellen did not want him to raise the subject.
‘He got into bad company last night.’ Ellen took up Sadie’s position. ‘Alec’s easily led. He always has been.’
Sam looked at her closely but she shook her head. This had been going on, at intervals, since Sadie’s marriage. Sam had offered to sort it out at the beginning. He repeated the offer. Ellen turned it down.
‘He’ll just use it as an excuse to have another go at her.’
Sam had accepted that argument years before. He found it more difficult now.
‘If he got a fright, he’d lay off her soon enough.’
‘She doesn’t want attention drawn to it. Mostly he’s quiet.’
‘He shouldn’t be let get away with it.’
‘She won’t hear anything against him.’
‘So Sadie comes with us to Silloth.’
Ellen nodded, unhappy at the fact but bound to her new promise, even though she knew what Sam had hoped for from the day.
Sam bought Sadie’s ticket with the rest, but she insisted on paying her own fare and pressed the 1s. 10d. into his hand firmly, a lump of money, mostly coppers.
‘Everybody in Wigton’s here.’ Sadie’s exaggeration was pardonable. The fine spring weather was holding up and the queue for the buses to the seaside resort was a gathering. Relief buses had been ordered up and as the ancient double-deckers cranked uphill from the garage, the crowd cheered.
The journey was like an outing.
‘We used to have to get out here and walk up,’ someone said, at the bottom of the hill at Waver Bridge. ‘To save the horses.’ On the school outing, the annual holiday, the one day trip to Silloth. ‘On Tommy Miller’s wagons.’
When the bus driver took the hump into Abbeytown at a fair speed and the bus seemed to fly for a second, there was a loud ‘whooaa’ of appreciation.
Joe was excited at seeing the aeroplanes, scores of them, all damaged, though he did not know that, hedgehopped to this remote airfield for repair.
‘You should have been a fighter pilot, Daddy.’
Sam smiled.
‘Next time,’ he said. ‘What’s that one – over there – just in front of the hangar?’
‘A bomber.’
‘Good. A Lancaster.’
They cheered when the bus came to its destination in Silloth, and then, with sandwiches and coats just in case, the more fussy or experienced with groundsheets against the sand, with buckets and spades and bats and balls, they went on to the wide spring-turfed green which lay like a stage between the stately Victorian front and the rough and treacherous Firth of sea which separates England from Scotland.
They made for the donkey-rides and all of them had a go, including Sadie, whose reservation (undeclared) was lack of money, but from now on Sam ignored that and paid and said nothing about it. It was Sadie who was assigned the only lively donkey and her loud yells of delighted panic cracked across the turf. On to the putting green, up into the little wood of pines and across to the salt baths and the amusement arcade. Joe handed the elephant satchel to Ellen and gave what to him was Ali Baba’s cave his full attention.
Sadie’s pennies came in handy there. Joe pressed his nose to the glass and strained to manoeuvre the three shiny claws of a crane on to one of the dusty treats cocked on the faded velvet. Ellen and Sadie rolled pennies, Joe raced across to a machine which tempted you to spring a ballbearing into tiny cups marked 3d., 2d., 1d. He had three unsuccessful attempts.
The firing range was for fun only. No prizes.
‘Go on, Daddy.’
Sam put down 6d. for nine pellets. The gun was well worn but the sights were straight enough.
He shot six of the pellets and then plucked Joe up on to the counter and put his arms around him.
‘Close your left eye tight shut. See that little pin thing sticking up at the end of the barrel?’ Joe nodded. ‘And see the black in the middle of the target?’ Another movement indicated yes. ‘Now point that little pin straight at the black ring.’ Sam was supporting both the rifle and Joe and he put his hand over the boy’s hand, taking it to the trigger. ‘Nice and steady. Keep them in line. Now, don’t jerk it, squeeze the trigger gently.’
Bullseye!
‘Aga
in! Again!’
As they looked for a place on the beach, Joe put his hand in Sam’s hand more warmly, Sam thought, than at any time since his return.
A wave of love and hope seemed to beat into him. Clouds scudded across the sky but they were light and unthreatening and the sun got through. The sea rolled eagerly up the sand. The beach was full but not crowded, and at the water’s edge there were sandcastles and ball-games. There were a few bathers and men paddling with trousers rolled, women calf-deep gazing over to Scotland in tucked-up skirts, greys and blacks and browns, a soaking of happiness, a congregation for simple pleasure. Sam quite suddenly rolled his head around as if easing a stiffness but the action was just to mark the deep ordinary undemanding pleasantness of it all.
‘Did you shoot many Japs, Daddy?’
‘That was why we went. Come on – I’ll race you to the sea.’
Joe darted ahead, instantly competitive, and Sam let him lead, pretending now and then to pass the boy but letting him win.
‘We could have a game of cricket over there.’
They found their patch and the afternoon settled in. With a child’s cricket bat bought by Ellen in the Christmas rummage sale, a jacket for the wicket, and a tennis ball, Joe and Sam played cricket on the hard sand just above the tide line.
Ellen was glad of Sadie’s company. She could listen and watch the cricketers more closely than if she had been on her own. She would have felt too self-conscious.
‘Did you see they warned you to bring your own soap if you come here on holiday?’ Sadie grinned toothily, her bruises looking quite gallant as she puffed mightily at the Craven ‘A’ Sam had given her. ‘And now they say, now this is true,’ Sadie’s voice carried, ‘in the paper last week, you must have seen it, that people in Carlisle is getting “telephone conscious”! How can they want telephones one minute in Carlisle and not have any soap the next day in Silloth? Telephone conscious my eye!’ Others besides Ellen smiled. Sadie picked up on it and began to sing ‘Chickery Chick’ – Ellen joined in. Nearby two or three of the women hummed along. One of them had a look of Celia Johnson.
Ellen smiled to herself as she sang along. A few days earlier, while Sam had been visiting his father, she had slipped down to Carlisle to see Brief Encounter. Celia Johnson was an idol. She would never have sung ‘Chickery Chick’ on a beach! How beautifully she spoke. Ellen enjoyed the thought of Celia Johnson and Sadie together.
Sadie followed up with ‘Cruising Down the River on a Sunday Afternoon’ and this time more of those around joined in, rocking gently as they crooned the gentle song. A song of recovery, not of triumph. A song of people back to normal. A tranquil song of people who had come through. The sounds mingled with the wash from the sea and were swept inland.
Sam, too, as he lobbed the ball to Joe, picked up the song and the gentle sway of the tune mixed soothingly with the steady pace of the game.
‘Give me Frank Sinatra any day,’ Sadie announced – and there was a scattered cheer. Ellen liked the way Sadie could always get a singsong going. It had been the same in the factory when the supervisor had let them and again after work going home up Station Road, arms linked.
All four then built a sandcastle, with proper walls and a moat, and all four defended it against the waves before standing back in surrender, despite last-minute scrabbling by Sadie and Joe, watching it seep away, dissolved by the waves. For a few moments Sam felt mesmerised by the sight.
Sadie took Joe along the shore to where there were pebbles, betting him that she could do better skimmers than he and flicking her head at Sam and Ellen to take advantage and go for a stroll together.
They went into the pines and tasted the smell of pine and salt as they ambled through the little pathways, passing other couples arm in arm or with arms around each other’s waists as they had.
Sam saw again Ellen’s attractiveness, by comparison. There were several couples like them, young, lean, beginning again. Some holding each other as much for comfort as for love, as if coming out of an illness. Tentative, rather uncertain, but with laughter breaking through and eyes alert for a private place to sit together. Sam felt that he was truly back and together with Ellen. They had wandered along these paths before. He pressed her to him as they walked side by side and, as there were not too many people about and no one she recognised, Ellen yielded tenderly.
There was a little kiosk. Sam bought two bottles of ginger beer. They sat in the shade, looking towards the sea, saying nothing, needing to say nothing.
It was a good time.
When Sadie arrived with a flustered Joe, Sam had fallen asleep and Ellen was curled around him as if protecting him.
‘He thought his Mammy and Daddy had left him.’
Joe threw himself passionately on to Ellen. His fretting threatened tears. She hugged him close and soon enough he was calm. Sam, who had been woken up by the boy’s whimpering, looked angry, Ellen noticed, and she repositioned her body slightly, instinctively, shielding the child.
‘Isn’t the smell good?’ Ellen asked.
‘Nothing smells as nice as my box Sam fetched from India.’ Sadie was in full earnest. ‘I have that on the mantelpiece. Alec says its my altar.’
‘Let’s have a paddle.’
Sam was on his feet and they were off towards the sea. The quickness and energy of him as he raced into the water, swung and flung Joe about and then darted off for the tennis ball and drew them into silly games like Donkey and geed up the day to something way beyond its previous level brought home to Ellen, fully, touchingly, the man she had fancied and courted and married.
A ride in the sway boats, Sam and Joe cheering in one, Ellen with Sadie shrieking in the other, a last ride on the donkeys, ice-cream all round, the church clock facing the green striking six, the last buses at twenty past, the exodus beginning.
On the way to the bus stop, sat propped against the lavatories, there was a tramp. He was bundled in smotherings of old clothes, bearded like Old Father Time, each big filthy hand clutching a bulging potato sack crammed presumably with his worldly goods. Sam looked around quickly to see that no one was watching and held out a shilling.
‘Here you are, marra.’
‘Thanks, pal’
Sam walked on briskly to catch up to the others.
‘Why did you give him that money, Daddy?’
‘Did I?’
‘I saw.’
‘Curiosity killed the cat!’ he said, and bent down and swept Joe up in a somersault which landed him plump on his shoulders.
There was a letter from Mr Kneale waiting for Sam. While Ellen prepared a weary but protesting Joe for bed and Sadie stuck around helping, determined to pay off what she saw as the debt and also to delay as long as possible going back to Alec, Sam read the letter in the kitchen.
He had been forced to write to Mr Kneale because he could not pronounce Xerxes or Hellespont. He had copied out the words of Churchill but never heard them spoken aloud. Shyness was not a characteristic of his, but with Mr Kneale Sam did not quite trust himself. He knew it was stupid to be jealous of the portly, kindly, harmless, little schoolteacher, but there was no doubt that his feelings towards the man who had seen Joe grow from near baby to boy and helped Ellen along the way while he was absent, were ambivalent. So he had written.
And now he was only half better off because although he might know more he still did not know how to pronounce Xerxes and Hellespont. It annoyed him because it exposed a lack of nerve on his part. Why had he not just gone and asked?
‘The Hellespont,’ Mr Kneale wrote in meticulous sloping copperplate, ‘now known as the Dardanelles, connects the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara and controls navigation between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Though almost forty miles long, it is as narrow as half a mile in parts and in 481 BC, Xerxes crossed it by constructing a bridge of boats. Xerxes, son of Darius, was King of the Ancient Persians and his mission was to destroy the Greek State – an objective in which he almost succeeded. Winston Chu
rchill was referring to the many peoples and different tribes in his army. Just as in Burma the Allied army came from (if I am not mistaken) forty countries. Incidentally, I am determined to find out more about that Burma campaign: Imphala and Kohima are names and battles which I think might rank high in British battle honours. So Xerxes brought out of Asia many different tribes and peoples …’
A list of names followed, none of which meant a thing to Sam. The letter exasperated him. For a passing moment he thought of putting it in the fire.
‘What’s bothering you?’
Ellen’s voice was light and happy, full of affection, just as he had called to mind often enough far away. He tried to pull out of his unexpected lurch into irritation.
Tt’s that letter. Let me see.’
She took it from a reluctant Sam.
‘He sounds very helpful.’
‘He’s going to find out about…’ Burma? The war? What I did? Sam could not bring himself to complete the sentence. His objection seemed so unreasonable.
‘I don’t want him involved.’
‘It’ll be nice for you to have somebody to talk to about it.’
‘Not him.’
‘You’re jealous,’ Ellen laughed, reached out and tousled his hair, ‘of Mr Kneale.’
The accusation was true and he resented her for the truth of it. Tt’s not that. It isn’t that, Ellen.’
His voice was hoarse. His use of her name in that tone indicated that he was serious. ‘What is it, then?’
His look was almost wild. How could he be seized like this, he thought, after a day which had returned to the very heart of their normality?
He wanted to talk. He could not talk to Ellen, it was too terrible. More than that. You just did not talk about it, except privately and rarely with those who had been through it with you. And never to admit pain.
Ellen sat in the chair opposite. She could see that he was in trouble and she could help only by being there.
After a while he took back the letter from her and glanced at it. ‘It was kind of him to bother,’ he said.
