The Soldier's Return

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘You didn’t come back by the street, did you?’

  No reply.

  ‘Time for bed.’

  He stood up and the blank look of uncomprehending fear in his eyes cut into her.

  ‘Clothes off,’ she said over-roughly. ‘Daddy’ll be home soon to read a story.’

  But Sam did not come home until later. He had cycled aimlessly around the edges of the town, not wishing to expose or to unburden this heavy feeling. He went into a pub which he hoped would be empty this time of the evening and he was in luck. The landlord served him and returned to the other bar. Sam drank two pints of bitter, slowly, and smoked, practically chain-smoked.

  When he got home, Joe was asleep and Ellen disinclined to say much, which he took, gratefully, as a recognition of his mood. He was right. Sam’s mood was so unmistakably unhappy that instantly she decided to seek a better opportunity to tell him about Joe’s state. And anyway, that was boys, it could be forgotten the next day.

  Sam acted, she thought, as if he were sleepwalking and unless she asked him a question, he said nothing. Yet he did not rebuff her. His concentration was deep and binding and elsewhere.

  Later, upstairs, Joe awoke to a comforting rush of warmth between his legs, followed by a pleasant clamminess and then the shame of wet pyjamas. He hoped that God would not let his Daddy find out and be angry with him. He did not know what to do when his Daddy was angry. Perhaps, he thought, somehow, it would all dry by the morning. He listened hard for the murmurings of his father and mother and did not like it when he heard them unfold the bed. He shivered in his bed, his fears like cries in the forest of dark. Ellen lay awake listening out for him. But he was silent.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  For some time he kept well clear of the Water Street gang and took no more short cuts after dark. The gang on Market Hill still accepted him and after his tea he would go back to his old haunts. With its two flights of stone steps down to the Tenters, with the yards and runnels and the open space of the sloping hill, there was nothing that could not be attempted. There were also twin girls – the Harrisons -two years older than him, who made him feel excitingly uncomfortable. They knew he was their slave. And he could always slip into his old house. Mr Kneale even told him that he did not come often enough.

  Ellen watched him carefully for some days and then relaxed. Shift work and Sam’s growing restlessness meant that father and son built up no regular habits together.

  On Mondays Ellen came to the old house to clean through and do the washing, her own as well as Grace’s pile. Joe would go straight there from school. Sadie would come to the yard for a talk. These were the best days for Joe. Just as they were before Daddy came back. He said that out loud at home and Sam smiled. Just as he did when Joe would ask if he and Mammy could go out, to Carlisle, on walks, up street, just the two of them, as they had done before Daddy came home. Joe seemed to choose raw moments to say such things and it was Ellen who chided him, but mildly.

  Sam would bring him tales of the Water Street gang. He called them ‘real little warriors’. It became one of his favoured expressions. Joe felt obscurely criticised by it.

  Joe began to watch and take note.

  On that market day during the holidays, when the Hirings brought even more people into the town, and his father was at work, he sailed out to play mid-morning when his mother had gone to one of her cleaning jobs.

  First, though, Bella had to be dodged. His mother insisted fiercely that she could not help how she was and you had to treat her normally, say hello and a few words, but Bella always tried to grab Joe. He had been taken by surprise two or three times in the early days and she had caught him and held him hard against her and sort of joggled against him. She was very strong, bigger and older than Joe, and his yelling was tinged with genuine alarm. Bella became someone to be negotiated. Best of all if she was not there but that was rare. Even in the mornings on his way to school she would be beating a rug against a wall or trailing to the tap or the dustbin or just prowling in the dark yard, waiting for him.

  On school mornings he had the excuse ‘Got to get to school!’ as he fled past. She followed him down the alley but rarely went into the big yard and never out into Water Street. The worst was when he went to the lavatory. She would wait outside and sometimes lean on the door to keep him in longer. It was his Dad who helped him deal with that: he suggested that Joe take advantage of Bella’s strict mealtimes, and it worked some of the time. Joe also tried to do it at school or he would go home by way of Aunty Grace and do it there. But it was not easy to schedule.

  Sometimes he would be made to try to play with her – the simplest games like throwing and catching an old tennis ball – but she was hopeless and it always ended with her grabbing him. She was ponderous though and Joe was fast on his feet and now she rarely got within striking distance, which frustrated her.

  When Kettler watched the performance he would shout, ‘My odds is on the boy! Five to two on the boy!’

  ‘Daft baggage,’ he called her. ‘You’re a big daft baggage, Bella,’ he would call out as he stumbled from his slum of a room late morning to find the first drink. ‘Daft baggage you, Mr Kettler,’ Bella would reply, shaking her finger.

  Mr and Mrs Rook always kept walking but asked her how she was and she always shook her head. Bella liked Sam who would stop and talk to her or give her a sweet. Ellen tried not to feel too responsible for her. Whenever she went shopping she asked Bella’s mother whether she could get anything for her. She had allowed Joe off the task of doing the same. He would go to one shop or other most days.

  On this holiday morning he waited until she was at the dustbin and then hurtled out of the door and bombed down the alley shouting ‘Hello Bella! Sorry! Hello!’ while she cried ‘Joe! Play! Joe!’ in a voice which did not sound quite right.

  The girls skipping held him in the big yard.

  ‘You did you did you silly kid

  ‘You broke your mother’s teapot lid

  ‘How much will it cost to mend?

  ‘One penny, two pennies, three pennies.’

  After a certain number was reached, the two girls holding the skipping rope swung it harder and faster and called out handicaps -‘one leg!’ ‘put your arms behind your back!’ ‘eyes shut!’ – as the counting went on and the flimsy skirts flew into the air and the voices went shriller with excitement.

  ‘Have a go, Joe,’ they began to sing. ‘Come and have a go!’

  They were easy on him. Kept the rope low and slow. He got up to eight pence on his third try.

  ‘Can we use your lawy, Joe?’

  ‘Ours gets too full.’

  ‘We can’t wait.’

  ‘Can we use your lawy, Joe?’

  ‘Ask your Mammy. Promise, Joe.’

  ‘Promise, Joe.’

  Their voices chittered like starlings in the cold brick yard. Their old knowing looks and laughs flew high over his head and he promised all they wanted.

  ‘You promised, Joe.’

  ‘You’ve promised now.’

  ‘Heaven or hell

  ‘Heaven or hell

  ‘How many prayers?

  ‘Who can tell?

  ‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven …’

  The skipping hit speed again and after watching a while, Joe swung into Water Street.

  The high noon of beast traffic was imminent and Water Street was already splattered with varieties of excrement. The sun was getting to it. He heard the high fast drone of the auctioneer from the pig market along the way and out in the main street he saw a pony and trap parked outside the jeweller’s shop. In Water Street itself, a few of the inhabitants so rapturously referred to by Sadie were visible – he had already picked up many of their names. A horse was tied to the railings outside the barber’s shop and two boys were stroking it. As he stood and scanned, he weighed up the options. A whooping hollering from the far end, beyond the Congregational graveyard, announced the passage of beasts – a few beef cat
tle – being driven down through the town to be penned beside the railway station until their train came in.

  Three of the Water Street boys were helping Patchy do the drive, hoping to pick up a bob or two at the end of the day. They loped alongside the small herd, slapping the flanks, hollering at the top of their voices, now ahead to block off a yard or an alley, now behind to whoop on the amiable beasts, creating their own Wild West.

  Joe pushed himself against the wall and felt grateful when one of the boys nodded to him.

  The cattle had left a new surface glistening on the street. Joe found that he was sloping towards the pig market. Drawn by the high monotone of the auctioneer, he snuggled his way through stout and worn jackets and trousers. The pigs squealed into the sawdust ring and trotted about erratically. Their fate was sealed by the bids of grave-faced butchers. Beyond the ring were scores of empty pens and he picked up the sounds of boys playing. He went over.

  After waiting for a while he was allowed to be part of the game. The first rule was never to let your feet touch the ground. The pens were the only way to travel. The second rule was to evade the boy who was ‘it’, who tried to tag you and get you on his side. Joe was the smallest and soon he was ‘it’.

  He could scuttle crabwise along the pens but the other boys flew. Skinny legs, holes in old pullovers, patched pants, broken-down shoes; movement as elegant as gibbons. He had no chance but he was game and he loved it.

  They came closer to him. Sitting side-saddle on top of a pen until Joe puffed up to within a few feet, they would suddenly swing away. They did this for some time until they got bored.

  ‘You’re a dead loss!’

  It was said without much malice and it galvanised him but the older, bigger boys were too good for him.

  He did not want to give up.

  They lost interest in teasing him and congregated in the far corner high on a window ledge above the pens. He clambered his way there, rather laboriously now. He could not make the leap up to the ledge and so he perched below like an outcast.

  ‘Richardson.’

  He looked up.

  The oldest boy spat down directly into his face – a long dangle of sticky spit. The others screeched and rocked on their seats. Joe wiped it off with his sleeve.

  He gave it another minute or two to avoid, as he thought, any charge of backing off. Then he made for the way out. He looked back once – the boys were gazing out over the business of the morning, looking for pickings from their safe perch.

  Back in the sunlight, Joe scrubbed at his face with his sleeve and then licked his fingers and wiped his face and scrubbed again. He did not quite feel the chill of fear which had frightened him that evening in the wasteland by the wash-houses. There had been no menace in the spit, he thought. That was what older boys did to you.

  He spat hard to relieve his feelings and walked up towards the big market, ignoring the safe option of Market Hill.

  It was here that the older boys found bits of jobs – looking after horses, seeing cattle in and out of pens, fetching and carrying, scavenging. But it was too big and busy for Joe and although he saw faces he knew, they were intent on some project to hand. Sometimes a barter or searching for a bargain, months of husbandry would be slapped away with a deal stuck with a spit, hand to hand.

  Leonard took a long dinner break to be at the big auction on Tuesdays, but even he had no real time for Joe, though he gave him twopence for an ice-cream. Joe had hoped to see his Dad, who had told him he had gone to see a man about a dog, and for a short while he beavered through the crowds but there was no sign. Not a real dog, his mother had said, a way of talking.

  He went out on to High Street, just below his school, and considered which ice-cream shop to patronise. The nearest won the argument and he took his cornet and sat on the edge of the pavement, his clogs in the gutter. A dog came sniffing around and he broke off a bit from the bottom of the cone, dipped it in the ice-cream and gave it to the dog, and the dog pestered him until he was finished.

  Further down the street, around the fountain where the men stood around and smoked and spat, there was a much larger crowd than usual because of the Hirings, but Joe had passed the church clock and knew it was time for his dinner. He left the crowds and nipped up the alley next to the Market Hall, then through a runnel into Church Street. Instead of following the street round, he dared himself to cut through the pig auction, over the pens, looking for the gang he had played with, wanting to show that he was not afraid of them, just wanting to be with them.

  He had envied so much the way those pinch-faced boys had leaped from rail to rail.

  On the following Saturday Joe came back from Market Hill while it was still light. King Street was crowded, early evening, dry, grey but warm enough. People going for a walk up and down the street, sometimes an entire family, mowing up and down the two main streets, looking at the shop windows which would soon be in competition with displays at carnival time, or striking out to the Show Fields to walk by the river. Men slouched against the walls and spat now and then, calculating when they could afford to start on the drink; a queue beginning in Meeting House Lane for the second house at the pictures – The Corn Is Green, well talked about. Boys were swerving in and out of the crowds, expertly steering iron hoops – old bicycle wheels mostly, controlled with short batons – or striking sparks on the brown pavement edge with the caulkers of their clogs.

  This ferment, registered from below by Joe, was no more than a sketch to those like Ellen who really knew the town. To those embedded there, such a Saturday night was deeply detailed, multiple stories interlocked and eternal yet in constant flux.

  Jack McGee and his group from the Salvation Mission had finished their weekly attempt to convert the sinners of Wigton at the end of Water Street and marched down to their hall in Station Road with empty-handed dignity and the drum beating. There was still a crowd. Jack played the melodeon well, the songs were free entertainment and the older men liked to heckle when Jack got on his high horse, reminding him of what a drinker and a brawler he had been in his time and how rough on Sally his wife.

  It was too exciting for Joe to settle for home and it was not yet dark, which was his curfew. Irresistibly, it seemed, without knowingly thinking about it, he was drawn up the paradise street to Polly Bowman’s, where he turned down the short steep hill and on to the Waste. He felt a little tightness in his chest and hovered. He saw three women, in their large pinnies. One was Polly Bowman herself, smoking. They were sitting on some steps, taking the air, and they gave Joe confidence.

  He went on to the wasteland to sniff around and was soon helping a boy his own age and two of the older girls from the yard build a dam across the trickle of stream which flowed diagonally down the derelict space.

  The bigger boys were squatted on the roof of the wash-houses, playing chucks with pebbles. Two of the bigger girls had got hold of a ramshackle bike with no mudguards, no seat and no brakes and careered down the hill yelling loudly. It was a message for the bigger boys to join them but the game of chucks absorbed all concentration.

  After a time he edged across to the wash-houses, keeping out of spitting distance, but stalking it, pretending to be on the lookout for oddly-shaped stones. The boys ignored him.

  He veered over to the girls on the bike and watched, mesmerised by their boldness, by the long legs and flashing knickers, and flying hair, by the abandon of their yelling, by the undertone in the coarse unanswered calls for help. The allure of the Harrison twins from Market Hill began to fade.

  ‘Want a go?’

  ‘Come on!’

  ‘Hold him on first time!’ Polly Bowman’s voice carried. The sentence was spoken without, it seemed, dropping a stitch in the conference she was holding with her peers.

  ‘We will!’

  Joe was grateful. He had never ridden a two-wheeler. He had grown out of his three-wheeler which had been given away to a cousin. The two girls hoicked him on to the skeletal vehicle so that he sat astride
the crossbar just in front of the sad stump of seat.

  ‘He’s not a scaredy cat anyway.’

  ‘Hold on tight!’

  He gripped the handlebars, long stripped of their rubber grips.

  ‘Hold on tight now!’

  ‘Whooaa!’

  The girls held on to the handlebars and the seat stump, one on either side, and flew him down the hill. Joe’s heart leapt into his mouth and the exhilaration was almost unbearable.

  ‘Good lad!’

  ‘Another go?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  ‘“Please” – that’s a good lad! “Please yes”!’

  Again they raced down as escorts, their bodies close on him, their breath on his face, the same uplift of the heart.

  Joe wanted this to go on for all time. Just this.

  They did it a third time, the same.

  ‘Now you try on your own.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘We’ll watch you.’

  ‘Mind you do!’ said Mrs Bowman, as, with the other two short-pinnied women, she felt the first brush of evening coolness and rose to adjourn for some tea ever-stewing in her back kitchen just around the corner.

  Joe had not the courage to refuse.

  They held him very steadily, murmuring encouragement, and then ‘One, two – three!’

  He wobbled, moved forward a yard or two, wobbled again, stiffened, looked back at the girls and fell off. His knee was not too badly grazed. ‘One, two – three!’

  This time he did not survive the first wobble. There was a scrape up the outside thigh, riding under his short pants, and it stung but he could not cry in front of these girls.

  ‘Again?’

  He nodded, even though he had lost the taste for it.

  This time he whizzed down a dozen or so yards, swerved violently, forged up a small bank and found himself decked with the bike pinning him to the ground.

  ‘Smashing! Smashing!’

  All sorts of bits of him hurt now, but he took the compliment with an attempt at a grin.