The Soldier's Return

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘Again?’

  The lump in his throat was suddenly as big as a duck’s egg but he managed to nod and trailed back up the hill, a small mangled figure in the dangerous encroachment of twilight.

  He fell off immediately.

  ‘Next time!’

  ‘He got stuck in.’

  ‘Another go?’

  He really did not feel at all like it. But some obscure impulse told him that he had to have another go. He looked around to the steps so recently vacated by Polly Bowman. He could have found help there.

  ‘His pants is ripped! Look!’

  ‘You won’t tell your Mam it was us, will you? She’ll kill us.’

  Joe shook his head, overwhelmed to be doing them a favour.

  ‘Cross your heart and hope to die. She’ll murder us!’

  He crossed his heart.

  ‘And hope to die?’

  ‘And hope to die.’

  ‘Spit.’

  He spat.

  They left, taking the bike. Joe limped over to the stream where two dogged little ones were still at the dam. He let the darkness wrap around him for comfort and the little ones let him join in without fuss.

  When the gaslight popped on at the bottom of the Waste, it was time to go and he moved rather unsteadily across to one of the slits which led back into Water Street. His head was whirling. He should have followed the girls with the bike, but they had made it clear they were done with him for the day. His pants were hardly ripped at all, he thought.

  ‘Want a fight?’

  He was in Water Street and under the gaslight and the words came out of the gang of all sizes gathered in its weak yellow circle.

  Who with? Why? It was time to go home. He was very tired. He stood still.

  ‘I’ll fight him first.’

  One boy stepped forward. Joe knew him. He was the youngest of Jackie’s sons – the Jackie his Daddy had told him to say hello to if ever he saw him out and about. This was Alan, nicknamed Speed, about nine, dressed in ragged clothes, recently scalped for lice. His head seemed very small.

  Joe had been in plenty of battles, hurling and charging against other bodies, and once or twice there had been real blows, but not until now a formal fight.

  He did not want to fight.

  ‘Come on then.’

  Speed came closer and Joe registered a look of piercing, reckless hatred. It was so direct and he found it utterly baffling.

  Out of the dark came the words as swift and unexpected as bats.

  ‘He’s yellow.’

  ‘Scaredy buzzard.’

  ‘He’s a mammy’s boy.’

  ‘He’s yellow. Give him first bat.’

  ‘Have first bat.’

  Speed dropped his arms.

  Everything went slow. The gaslight cast a pool over a gang of barely moving beings who inched their way towards him, spreading out like a slow stain, beginning to encircle him, and the boy looked on foggily, trying to understand what was going on so slowly.

  Suddenly, Speed’s small hard fist hit him in the face, high on the cheekbone, jolting him hard. It hurt. He hurled himself towards the older bigger boy and Speed grabbed him, wrestled him to the ground and pounded him.

  ‘Give in?’

  Joe began to cry. He tried, very hard, not to. But he began to cry. The boys who had cheered when Speed had thrown him to the ground now crowed with raw triumph. A Cry-baby!’

  ‘Cry-baby!’

  ‘Cry-baby!’

  Speed sprang away from Joe as suddenly as he had sprung on him. A door had opened across the street and the voice of Queenie Studholme called out – ‘What’s going on?’

  The boys dissolved into the black patches of the street.

  Queenie Studholme came across but by the time she reached him Joe was on his feet.

  ‘What’ve you been up to?’

  He choked on the sobs and looked up at her in misery. Surely she would not make it even worse by asking him questions.

  ‘Get along back home. I’ll watch you down the street.’

  She flicked his shoulder to set him on his way. Then she turned to the empty darkness and announced, ‘And if I catch any of you little beggars I’ll skin you alive!’

  Joe went to the lavatory where he could stop himself crying in peace.

  Ellen waited until Sam had finished his food.

  The two to ten shift on Saturday was never popular but the overtime made it worth it and Sam’s funds had been depleted by the move. He was silent and into himself and she knew to leave him alone at such times, but what she had to say would not be repressed.

  ‘Joe came back in a terrible state tonight.’

  Sam had lit up and was hunched over the fire. He scarcely seemed to take in her words.

  ‘His clothes were torn, his face was bleeding, his legs were grazed and he’d been crying his heart out, I could tell.’

  ‘Well.’ Sam tried to summon up the attention. He wanted nothing more than to sink into his own wearily ill-defined, brooding thoughts, letting himself be drawn down deeper and deeper, seeking to touch bottom. ‘Boys are like that.’

  ‘He’s being bullied.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Did he say?’

  ‘No. But I know.’

  ‘He’ll want to sort it out himself

  ‘He’s only little.’

  ‘They all have to start some time. It’ll blow over.’

  ‘He’s being bullied, Sam. He’s scared stiff. You just have to look at him.’

  Sam regarded Ellen’s anger with some surprise. It seemed such a lot of energy to spend on such an everyday matter.

  ‘He isn’t being bullied, Ellen, they’re just giving him a bit of a rough ride to begin with. That’s what happens when you move in somewhere new.’

  ‘So we do nothing!’

  ‘I’ll keep an eye out.’

  ‘What good will that do? The boy’s terrified.’

  ‘Don’t exaggerate, Ellen. He’ll have been in a fight, that’s all.’

  ‘You didn’t see his face.’ His eyes, she meant, his stricken eyes, that the world was so.

  She sat in the chair opposite his, obdurate.

  ‘You never see him.’

  Sam looked at her directly for the first time.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  Ellen paused. It meant so much. Yet now was not the time to let go her feelings about Sam. Joe needed help first.

  ‘It wasn’t just a fight, Sam,’ she said, ‘I can tell. He’s being bullied.’

  ‘You shouldn’t dress him up.’

  ‘I do not!’

  ‘For this street you do.’

  ‘This street isn’t the whole of Wigton!’

  ‘This street is all right,’ said Sam, doggedly, dipping his memory into a much leaner childhood than Joe’s.

  ‘They’re little warriors out there,’ he added.

  ‘If you won’t stop their bullying, I will.’

  ‘You mustn’t interfere.’ Sam was peremptory.

  ‘If I see one of them so much as touch him, I’ll not be responsible.’

  Sam smiled at her ferocity. Her cheeks were flushed. The hair, coal-black, was glowing under the gaslight. Her white skin seemed to shine like armour. He reached out a hand to her. Ellen saw a gesture for which she had waited for some time but spurned it. Sam was hurt.

  ‘You can’t coddle him up for ever.’

  ‘I don’t want to coddle him. I want to stop him being bullied.’

  ‘Maybe it’s because you do coddle him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That it’s happening. Maybe,’ he said, ‘they think he’s a mammy’s boy.’

  Blood rushed to Ellen’s face and for an instant Sam thought she would leap at him.

  Instead she grabbed the coal scuttle and went out, across the yard to the hutch which held their fuel. She stood quietly for a few moments, pulling herself together. Was this what she had waited
for?

  On the streets in the town they were rolling home from the pubs. In the small yard Ellen felt as trapped as if she were at the bottom of a deep well.

  The coal scuttle was already all but full.

  Joe, in bed, heard bits of the talk but the words did not matter, he knew his Mammy and Daddy were angry.

  When he heard the door bang he pushed aside the curtain, just a little, and saw the shape that must be his mother standing over the coal hutch. He felt a ripple of cold run over his body, a goose-pimpling rash of fear that she would not come back in. His mouth opened wide and he breathed as softly as he could so as not to alarm her. Eventually, eventually, she scraped at the coal heap with the lip of the scuttle and came back in.

  The boy flung himself back on the bed, swallowing hard. She had not left him.

  The hard lump had not gone from his stomach. He knew exactly what it was. It was the lump which said that although he could go to school and up street shopping, although he would go to Market Hill and Aunty Grace’s house and Aunty Sadie’s and on walks now and then with Mammy and Daddy and maybe trips and even to church, the gang would always, from the next morning, be out there, waiting for him. There was nothing he could do about it. It was hopeless.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Annie waved him down. She had been waiting for him on his way back from the morning shift. She smiled and Sam noticed how very small her yellowing teeth were. But she was smiling, and the smile on that stoic, unblessed, hard face was a ray of sunshine.

  She led him down the steps without a word, went into the house, stood in the middle of the room and pointed at the table.

  Jackie was having a cup of tea.

  Sam looked at her. The smile was now radiant.

  Well done, he thought to himself, but repressed the words. Well done you.

  ‘Are you going to have a cup?’

  ‘Hell be late for his dinner.’

  ‘What’s he come in for then?’

  Jackie cocked his head to one side, even playfully, knowing full well that Sam was viewing a man who had recovered.

  ‘I will have a cup.’

  ‘Bring the man a cup of char!’ Jackie paused and then added, ‘There’s nobody makes better!’

  Sam nodded. He was moved. In a world sterile of compliments this was an open declaration of love. Annie grimaced and turned away to get another cup.

  ‘So what’s cooking?’ said Jackie.

  The easy question left him blank.

  ‘Not a lot.’

  ‘A lot of building. A lot of new houses, Sam.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘I’m trying for a start next week. Up at Brindlefield.’

  ‘That’s where we’re all being shifted,’ said Annie.

  ‘I’ll believe that when it happens. But they need brickies. Back with the lads.’

  ‘Maybe you’ll end up building your own house.’

  ‘That’s what the old lass said! Fight on, eh, Sam?’

  Jackie nodded at the pair of them as if they had pulled off a conjuring trick and he was the rabbit who had come out of the hat. He poured his tea into the saucer and blew on it gently.

  As Sam went up the steps back into the street and the warm summer rain began to fall, Jackie’s youngest son, Speed, arrived out of the blue and banged into him.

  ‘Steady on.’

  The boy looked up at the man, his shaven head poised to dodge the blow.

  ‘Good to see your Dad on his feet again.’

  Speed stood, alert, frozen, suspicious.

  ‘Here.’

  Sam took a sixpence out of his pocket.

  The boy’s small hand sped out like a lizard’s tongue.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Released, he shot down the steps.

  Sam’s step lightened as he walked across to his house. Jackie had come through! It was curious but Sam felt as if his own condition had been directly improved by Jackie’s success.

  He glanced up and down the street being hosed down by the rain and saw in his mind the parnee sluicing him sodden in the jungle and enjoyed the sight of a gang of the Water Street lads suddenly catapulting from the pig market, no doubt being pursued by oaths and threats. Sam liked the roughness of the boys and, as he remembered his conversation with Ellen, stood even firmer in his conviction that it would do Joe no harm to have to settle in among them. Bullying was a different matter but it had not to be confused with roughing it. Joe would get stuck in. However illogically, Jackie’s recovery had given him confidence in that belief.

  ‘Hello, Bella. You’ll get wet.’

  ‘Nice rain, Mr Richardson.’

  ‘What’s so nice about it, Bella?’

  ‘Nice and wet, Mr Richardson.’

  Sam laughed out aloud.

  ‘You’re a comedian, Bella, that’s what you are. You’re a comedian.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Richardson. Will Joe come back here today, Mr Richardson?’

  ‘You never can tell. Mind you don’t catch cold.’

  He went into the house and his high mood, so different from that of the preceding days, was instantly recognised by Ellen.

  ‘You look very pleased with yourself.’

  ‘Give us a kiss.’

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she said. He locked the door while she swiftly drew the curtains.

  Afterwards though, when Ellen had left to go shopping, he could not hold on to the mood. She had consented but there was a reluctance which had not dissolved. The brief flurry of affection had emphasised how rarely they were affectionate with each other these days. But Sam could not confront this. Not yet. Just as he did not want to admit to himself that his homecoming was so much less than he had anticipated. That would be to complain and he did not want to be of that party of ex-servicemen who complained – about lack of housing and job promises broken, of lack of recognition or funds, of the apparent preferment given those who had stayed behind and the sense of wasted time. Sam had been told early and often by a father who had no religion that God only helped those who helped themselves.

  Alone in the small house of which he was already fond, he was soon nipped by the restlessness, like a physical itch, which overcame him so often now. His work brought home the bacon but it was repetitive and tiring. However astutely it was garnished – with jokes and quick, surreptitious card games, and the gossip of the day – it exercised only what least interested him. There had to be more than that. He had felt a fuller man in uniform. He had felt more certain of himself even in those long boring stretches between actions. Something else he did not want to admit to himself was that he had felt a purpose and known what he valued then much more clearly over in Burma than back in Blighty.

  He was too weary to do even the simplest tasks. Joe’s train was under the table, broken, the back two wheels finally dislodged after weeks of hard pounding. It had been there, waiting to be mended, for two or three days. The boy had not nagged him overmuch. Maybe he had lost interest in it. Maybe it was a test. All it needed was a decent screwdriver.

  He reached out for the News Chronicle and picked the couple of horses he would back when he strolled up street, and then he thought about Jackie and his wife. That had been a victory. Tight on,’ Jackie had said. But there could be a relapse – he had seen men supposedly recovered crack again quickly once the strain took hold. He had heard talk about cases like Jackie from the First War, now and then. A cup of tea was no more than a beginning. But still, it was a beginning and a victory of sorts. Jackie had crawled towards the light. Fight on Sam? Compared with Jackie what had he done?

  He could not focus his thinking. Waves of unaccountable lethargy immersed him in a kind of blackness. It was not the boredom of waiting which he had experienced in war. It was a nothing. As if the only way he had found to cope, to rid himself of the tensions of war, was to collapse into an emptiness.

  But Jackie, perky, overconfident, admirable Jackie had tweaked his conscience. Sam was a young man of energy, intelligence, some an
ger, thwarted education, and a determination which other soldiers had come to rely on. Surely he could do better than this.

  He met Leonard, later that afternoon. Their meeting had become regular at opening time, five thirty, in the tiny back snug of the Hare and Hounds, when Sam was on the morning shift. They could be guaranteed privacy in that room, at that time. ‘The trouble is,’ he said, That, it seems stupid, this -’ he avoided Leonard’s interested gaze – how can I put it?’ Sam took a sip from his pint of bitter and lit up again. He had opened up to no one since his return.

  He trusted him – partly perhaps because Leonard had missed the war and so had no stake. And he had not been a particular friend before Sam went away and so was a clean slate. Or maybe it was the age difference or the calm of the older man, always secure, never having had to scrape, always well enough placed. Leonard was the sort of listener who left you free to talk openly. Sam had come across two or three men like that in the army – you would start the conversation out of nothing and before you knew it was going where you had never been before. It seemed strange but in the distant marooned battlefields of Burma, he had opened up his heart and mind more than in any other place at any other time in his life. Even with Ellen when they were courting and he had admitted his hopes for their future, he had been guarded. She would not let him get away with much romancing about that and besides such talk could seem like boasting or, just as bad, dwelling too much on yourself.

  Leonard listened, hinged as a shadow. He had always liked the way Sam looked and in the false twilight of the snug he studied the younger man admiringly. The hair was such a deep copper, cut short in the military fashion but still threatening a thick burnish of Celtic colour. His face, much paled since his return, was cut clean as an axe head, the few brown speckles softening glints. The blue eyes were so direct when turned on you they could make you wince. There was a soft ginger down on his cheeks, caught now in the occasional intrusion of the sun.

  ‘It might be all right if you had something to do that stretched you a bit,’ Sam began, eventually, coming crabwise to his point. ‘But what I do …’

  Leonard nodded, tapped a growth of ash neatly into the big red pub ashtray and waited. Sam was evidently struggling.