by Melvyn Bragg
‘Can we not look around for a bit longer?’
‘You’ll have to leave here some time. I don’t want to be in rooms again. Neither of us liked that. This is a start. For God’s sake, Ellen! It’s just up street! It’s just a house! What about us?’
The loudness and hoarseness of his voice impressed her. He leaned back against the door and she could almost see the colour draining out of his cheeks. His hands closed into fists. She felt more strongly than ever before the strangeness of him. The man who had lived and been fashioned by such extreme forces when she was not there had taken total possession. He was in pain, far away.
She had no choice. She would never like the place or feel settled. She must try not to hate it.
Sam took to the theme tune of Have A Go. Ellen enjoyed the wireless programme well enough, but Sam’s compulsive humming, and whistling and muttering of the signature tune and the words threatened to get on her nerves. Yet it also made her smile. He sounded cheerful. So she could moan happily which cheered him up even more.
‘You would think we’d come into Buckingham Palace,’ she said to Grace, who was not pleased to see Ellen go, despite the younger woman’s assurance that she would come back and lend a hand’. A hand was a poor substitute for being on call. The extra bedroom could be an extra lodger but that, of course, would be even more work about the house. It was not convenient. And though she would not care to admit it, she would miss them, even Sam, much improved, she thought, by the army.
‘You’ll find the place very poky after this,’ said Grace. They were in the kitchen, curtains drawn, polishing Leonard’s late mother’s modest collection of horse brasses.
‘Plenty manage.’ Ellen would not give Grace the satisfaction although she agreed with her.
‘Water Street’s always been a rough place.’
‘I know most of them there.’
‘Knowing them’s not living among them.’
‘You have to make a start somewhere, Aunty Grace.’
Grace was about to remark that it was a pretty poor start but she saw the tension in Ellen’s expression and managed to hold her tongue. Ellen did not need Grace’s view spelt out.
They polished in silence. Ellen attacked the brass strenuously as if she were attempting to rub out the lump of apprehension which lay so cold and obstinate in her stomach. She had tried to disguise her feelings, it was something she was good at. The old Sam might have spotted it.
But when Sam came in from the late shift just after ten and began to whistle that blasted tune again, Ellen’s spirits lifted. He looked happier than she had seen him for weeks!
‘Right.’ He sat down immediately and Ellen took his dinner out of the oven. ‘Alf’s going to help me to decorate – he’s the professional! Billy gets out on Friday, we start on Saturday, I’m on the morning shift all next week. Allowing for it to dry out, we could be in maybe ten days at most from then, so if we can get hold of that furniture …’
How could she be so reluctant when he was so full of hope? She joined in. The Utility Furniture had been available on two years’ payments, but Ellen would not have it. Debt worried her. The weekly furniture sale in the Market Hall would provide – she would go there. One of the women she worked for had offered her some, rather worn, curtains which could be cut down. Ellen was uncomfortably grateful. She still had the prodded rug, a gift when she had left the factory. They spent all their savings. It could be pulled together into a cosy home -and blessedly for this purpose, the room was small.
They would borrow a handcart to take the few things they had in Grace’s house. Grace herself began to help, thawed by the warmth of their talk. ‘There’s that little cupboard in the back kitchen,’ she said, casually, though the matter had been considered painstakingly ‘You can have that. Until you get a better.’
Sam smiled and Grace experienced an unusual blush of charity. ‘Mr Kneale wants a photograph on the steps,’ said Grace. ‘You three and then the lot of us.’
‘The usual suspects,’ said Sam. He had taken Ellen to Carlisle to see Casablanca and that was one of the phrases which had caught his fancy. The other was ‘a hill of beans’. Joe had liked that too. For a couple of days the expressions peppered his conversation. Like Have A Go, the words somehow gave him a grip on being back home.
‘Suspects?’ said Grace, feeling left out.
‘Just ignore him,’ said Ellen.
Sam could have kissed her for that! Instead, he went upstairs to the bedroom to make some notes on what needed doing.
The house had organised him. He had tried and failed to reattach himself to the routine and some of his interests pre-war, but he had not been very successful. He still had a flutter two or three times a week but he not longer played football and the fantasy of long evenings of uninterrupted snooker had not stood up to the reality. Of his close town friends, one had chosen to stay in the army, one had come back only to move to his wife’s birthplace in Scotland where there was work in her father’s garage, the third was absorbed in an allotment and had taken up pigeons. Sam’s course had been haphazard. Now he had the house.
When Ellen came into the bedroom, he said, ‘We mustn’t do too much to it. I want to move on.’
‘If you want to move on, why don’t we wait until what we want to move on to comes up?’ She was undressing, rather hurriedly, in a corner, as always her back to him.
‘We’ve been through that.’
‘There’s still time!’ She smiled as best she could, knowing well that now there was no time.
Sam opened his arms. ‘“Have a go”,’ he began to sing. ‘“Come and have a go”!’
Ellen picked up a pillow and swiped it at him. He caught it and used it to tug her onto the bed.
‘Water Street,’ said Sadie, ‘is paradise on earth.’ It was near the end of the morning and she had run out of games and treats.
Joe still drew the train, with full complement of carriages, along the lino, but he stopped the chuff-chuff-chuffing noises and Sadie knew she had his attention. He, too, was a little bored and anxious.
She had been his guard and then the stationmaster. Sam had knocked up a very primitive tunnel, a bridge, which was already on the tilt, and a platform. These, together with the handful of lead soldiers given him with no little ceremony by Mr Kneale, had greatly extended the life and attraction of the train. Soldiers and a train! Sadie was as absorbed in the toys as the boy, but still it had been a long morning.
She had offered to look after Joe while they moved in.
‘Now then,’ said Sadie, ‘you didn’t know you were going to live in paradise, did you?’
Joe shook his head. He had his father’s thick copper-coloured hair but his features were all Ellen’s. He looked very small, Sadie thought, down on the lino beside that big busted sofa, price two shillings and ninepence, which Alec had hauled back from an auction of the ‘entire possessions of the house of Miss Ellerby’. It dominated the dark room, whose walls festered with damp. The only colour was provided by the green alarm clock and the Indian sandalwood box on the mantelpiece.
‘I was born in Water Street,’ Sadie continued in her headline fashion. ‘Did you know that?’
Again, Joe shook his head. Sadie settled in to her monologue. It was grey outside and only a dim light crept into the dismal basement, but such as it was it caught her thin face which was filled with the pleasure of recovering happy memories.
‘There’s royalty in Water Street,’ she said, and indeed the long habit of nicknames had dealt a royal flush to what was the poorest street in the town, ‘with “King” Haney and Dusky Prince and Queenie Studholme, Queenie Fisher as was, and Duke Laws who plays the piano in the Vic at weekends. Never had a lesson.’ These were rhymed off and embellished and in Joe’s imagination the street which he had seen a few times, practically alive with excrement and bluebottles on summer days and always swarming with children, began a transformation. Sadie saw the interest in his eyes and built on it.
‘Dusky Prince,’ she sai
d, ‘has the smartest little pony and trap in Wigton. He might let you have a ride in it. He let me. And Queenie Studholme will do anything for anybody. You ask your Mam. She’s as royal as the real thing.’
‘They call it the Rabbit Warren,’ she went on. ‘That’s how many lives there! You know about rabbits!’
There was a sort of triumph in the declaration which infected Joe with ignorant pride. He nodded. He knew that rabbits were crowded in hutches and seemed happy to nibble dockings. Rabbits made you smile.
‘We’ll start at the bottom of the street,’ she said, ‘just off King Street, on the corner where the Sally Army plays on Saturday nights and Jack McGee tells you to give up drink which he can’t. He plays the melodeon like nobody’s business. There used to be an archway there when I was a girl. There’s the Vic where your Dad’ll have a drink so that’s handy for him, isn’t it? With a billiard room where your Uncle Leonard’ll come and play and pop in and see you. And when I’ve got my mushrooms or my rose-hips or my raspberries, I’ll be round at King Haney’s like a shot and I’ll pop in as well. Any excuse for me! I’ll be there. King Haney or no King Haney!’
She smiled and her thin brown gypsyish face lit up, forcing a return smile from the gullible boy.
‘There’s Scopie Pearson’s bakehouse for them with no ovens and your Mam’ll be asking you to take her bread there and maybe a big tatie-pot. Scopie could have been a chef on the Railway but he wouldn’t leave his mother. And – listen to this! – Water Street has its own barber. Arnold Fisher, clips you with sheep shears the lads say. And there’s Tommy Abut – that’s not his real name, but he says “Abut” a lot so we gave him Abut. Tommy Abut can get you anything in the world. Just you ask. Polly Bowman sells lemonade and candles and such and wears slippers day in, day out, a bit like me, and sings to herself, the old songs, and you can get your clogs recaulkered any time, day or night, at Polly Bowman’s. You’ve seen the lads play football, haven’t you?’
Joe nodded – it did not matter whether he had or not, somehow he knew that. The force and excitement of Sadie’s description had driven him towards her and now he squatted at her feet, gazing up as if he were being tossed his daily feed.
‘Well, Piggy Sharp in the auction dries out the bladders and so you’re never short of a football in Water Street. There’s nowhere in this world like Water Street for games for kids. I’ll back it against the lot. We have the best hide and seeks, the best chaseys, the best hares and hounds – nobody can beat us. There was a little place I could hide in I would never be caught! If I didn’t give myself up, nobody would have found me ‘til this day. I could have died in it. That’s Water Street for you.’
All the happiness in Sadie’s harsh life had been bottled on Water Street and now she siphoned it freely to Joe.
‘There’s a tailor, Mr Harris, takes tick, very useful, and a builder, Stan Armstrong, soft Stan, won’t send bills, there’s a fish and chip shop where you can get scrams for free, and an ironmonger. Maggie Carson makes ice-cream in summer and Sammy Bowes sweeps chimneys; Queenie lays people out and never takes her coat off, Mr Chicken and Mr Wiggins is carters, he has a handlebar moustache like a bicycle and Pringles has the garage next to the lemonade beyond the Masonic opposite the Sands where the tanning factory burned down – what a fire! And I know who set it off! – and at the end there’s the Congregational church with manse and a man in the manse and a dance hall underneath and a nice big graveyard to play in, and beasts -hundreds of cows and bullocks and sheep up and down Water Street on market days, it’s like the Wild West. You’re a lucky little lad to be going to live in Water Street, Joe, I wish I was you so I could do it all again.’
As she finished her rhapsody on a sudden wistful note, the weak sun seemed to stir itself and Sadie’s face irradiated a glow, her turbaned head looked royal and the pom-pom-less pink slippers tapped the lino with a patter of applause.
Sadie did not know that almost as she spoke the exodus from Water Street was about to begin and the inhabitants of the Rabbit Warren at the very centre of the town were to be sent almost a mile away, to the south, into houses with three, sometimes four, bedrooms and an indoor lavatory and even a bath, with gardens front and back and no damp, no TB, no rats, no cockroaches, no chesty coughs, no beatings and worse, no stench of beasts and excrement in the street: and yet those who had grown up in the Rabbit Warren would always in some part pine for it like Sadie and freely declare that nothing was the same, nothing was as good or exciting since they had been put out of Water Street.
‘We’ll go there now,’ said Sadie, after looking at the clock, and they set off together for the promised land.
CHAPTER TEN
There were bad houses in the town, but theirs was not a bad house. The damp only threatened. It was largely vermin-free. The fire warmed it through. Sam, who had slept single in a bed for the first time on his first night in the army, was well pleased. He had been brought up in a big family, packed to the walls. This was plenty good enough for three. It was their own and it was private.
It was not private enough for Ellen. Their immediate neighbours could practically reach through the window. On one side there was Madge Hartley, widowed, and Bella her daughter, who was not quite right and never would be, harmless enough, always smiling, and always in the small yard just hanging about. Mr and Mrs Rook on the other side had the best house. They were strict Primitive Methodists. Ellen always felt she had to be solemn in front of them. Their children had left home. They were polite but not neighbourly, keeping themselves to themselves and all in all a relief for that.
Across the yard the final house, a hovel, was inhabited by an old Wigton idler and cadger nicknamed Kettler, who wandered through the day on stout and tripe and dodges which entertained Sam greatly.
The privy was at the corner of the alley next to the tap. As Ellen had anticipated, it was much used by the overspill from Scott’s Yard where several big families shared the one lavatory, proudly declared to be ‘always warm’. The privy was also a hidey hole, a secret chamber for illicit cigarettes or a few minutes’ peace and a site for mighty battles with constipation. The children would scurry up the tunnel and be in and out of the forbidden privy faster than they could be caught. They were messy. Ellen became the one who kept it clean.
Sam was at the factory for eight hour shifts. Ellen was in and out all day and, whereas she had found many ways of disappearing in Grace’s house, here she felt wholly exposed. Even when the door was closed, she could see Bella Harvey in the yard or hear the slam of the lavatory door and the scuddy speed of the kids’ feet. Her own yard and Scott’s Yard and Water Street itself were always so active with people and noise. On Market Hill there were periods of activity but also intervals of peace. And there was space and it was where she had dug into her life and settled her fear of losing Sam for ever and built up her days.
It was, she knew – and she was angry with herself for it -ridiculous to be upended by moving such a short distance. Especially when Sam was so pleased with it, with the new wallpaper and the jumble of furniture – he had never taken an interest before. And Joe, who had gone down with a nasty cough and had to sleep with her for a few nights, did not seem to miss the old house.
She let the first week go by and then asked Grace and Leonard and Mr Kneale to come around for the inspection she knew they wanted and in a way, she thought, were entitled to. She wanted to get it over with. Sunday afternoon was the right time.
Sam chose the day to go and visit the parents of Ian. They had not replied to his letter but then some people were shy of letters. Sunday was a day when visitors were expected. Ellen was not best pleased and wondered if his departure was related to Joe’s clinging to her. He was over the worst of the cough now but for three days they had been as bound together as they were when Sam was in the army. Come the day, though, she was relieved that Sam was not there. The room would have been intolerably crammed. She fought successfully against being embarrassed by it before the invasion of two
such house-proud people.
They still kept their bikes down at Grace’s house in the shed. Sam went straight into the backyard without first calling to see them. Ian’s parents lived about sixteen miles away. It would give the bike its first half-decent outing since his return.
He headed towards the sea and Silloth. He could cut across country just before he reached that town and make for the little seaside village of Allonby, a few miles down the coast. It was a cool day, a light wind coming in from the sea but nothing to struggle against. He pushed down hard on the pedals, enjoying the flow of the bike, the easy control of it, the freedom, the lash of air into factory lungs. There were a few small hills and twists in the narrow road until he settled on the broad flat Solway Plain where you could spin along almost without effort. He could see, like mirror images, both the Scottish hills north across the Firth of sea and the Cumbrian fells, sentries of the Lakes. Hedges and trees were now fully out in new green, fields fat with livestock. The road itself was virtually empty, troubled only by rare cars and rarer buses and a few other bicycles.
He had never met Ian’s parents. Ian, though, had talked about them at length and on two or three occasions lovingly, and Sam had been struck by the openness with which the boy felt able to discuss his feelings for his family. He had always thought of him as the boy.
Ian had started as an oddity in their section. Among the tough working-class Cumbrians, Ian had appeared too fastidious, soft. He was teased, and though he took it good-naturedly, which helped, still he was teased and almost bullied.
Sam was landed with him. The ten-man section would split by tradition and instinct into pairs, each man having his friend, his mucker, his marra. The pair made tea for each other, looked out for each other, shared the load. Sam lost two such and found himself stuck with Ian. No one else wanted him and Sam was in charge.
It did not go well for some time. Sam was irked at what he saw as Ian’s fussing: he would be so over-elaborate when packing his kit or washing their gear. Sam’s method was the common way – fast, direct, no frills. Ian seemed to have all the time in the world to do things, well, more in a womanly manner. Certain gestures lay in that direction too. And Ian silently expressed a close sympathy towards Sam which he found uncomfortably a little reminiscent of Ellen, though more often like the oldest of his sisters, Ruth, who had mothered him when he was a toddler.
