by Melvyn Bragg
The landlord walked in and stood behind the bar with a crooked smile, waiting to be let in on the joke. ‘Give the man a half,’ said Sam, and he went to the bar, fishing in his pockets for change. ‘Nothing for me. I’m off.’
He put the sixpence on the bar and turned to Kettler. ‘So things had never been better in the little town!’ he said and, laughing again, he went out to collect his bait and go to work.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
She did not know what she wanted to say and who to light on but she had to talk. The Carnival had been an interlude. She was still drifting away from Sam: Joe was becoming fearful and unlike himself. Maybe it would all pass. Given time. But she had used up all her waiting time while Sam had been away.
Ellen knew that it was not easy to talk about a marriage. Talk was disloyal. It was loose. Talk showed weakness. You could not be certain it would not spread. It was always better not to talk, especially about marriage. Marriage was the end of openness unless you were one of those who did their dirty washing in public and Ellen was not. Husbands could be joked about, caricatured, and even, in the right voice, criticised, but not betrayed.
It was known that there was bad feeling between certain couples: extremes were also registered – this couple had not spoken to each other for a dozen years, this man or those men beat their wives, this man or those men gambled or drank away the money, the wife flirted or worse. There were a couple of open scandals – a virtual bigamy, an obvious incest, one or two deeply plotted affairs and the increasingly common separation or divorce.
But the norm was endurance and silence and often enough contentment reached by humour and underpinned by modest expectation. Ellen cleaved to the norm in all things and until Sam had gone off to the war, she had been as reticent about her unusual good fortune and happiness as she was now about this pressure of anxiety. But now she simply had to talk or she would burst.
Who to turn to?
Sadie was not close enough, much as they spent time together, and she was wary of Grace. It would have been out of the question to talk to the people she worked for in the houses or in the chemist’s and men, even Mr Kneale, or Leonard, or Mr Scott, her old teacher who had always taken an interest in her, were off the agenda.
Ellen had a large range of friendships with women. Her circumstances made her more eager to reach out than most but there were in the town about two score women around her own age whom she knew well. This did not include the older women, whose interest and recognition still made a walk up the street a passage through a family. Nor were those younger, who being siblings or relatives of friends or girls she had seen through the carnival dances, any less part of the network, but it was those of her own age who formed the group. At school together, in the Guides or the cycling club or church organisations together, in the factory together and at the dances and socials, helping out with this or that in the town – tea after the football, setting out the chairs for concerts in the Market Hall, loafing around the streets, skint together and herding off for walks, all within a narrow, similar band of income and possessions. There were factions of course and quarrels or splits and cliques, but always the gang of them, always there.
Most of them were married, fourteen had been widowed by the war, many had worked on after marriage because of the opportunities presented by the war and were dropping out of work reluctantly now the men were back home. They seized on part-time jobs. A favourite was in the canteens at the schools. Or like Ellen they cleaned the larger houses – most often three-or four-bedroomed, plain, not rich. None was skilled. Hollywood was Heaven. American kitchens were paradise. Film glamour was copied instantly and with reasonable ingenuity on spectacularly small budgets: clothing coupons were not allowed to dominate the reality. If their husbands took them to the pubs on a Saturday night, it was they who led the singing and knew all the words, as they did on the bus trips when the songs would never cease. This was the first normal summer for seven years. They were approaching it carefully.
When both their husbands were on the afternoon and evening shift, she went for a walk up Longthwaite Road and into the Show Fields with Moira. It was a warm evening and others had had the same idea, but you could always draw away from the path and be private. Moira was a little older than Ellen. She had lived next door to her on Market Hill throughout their childhood. She had no children – the gossip was that she ‘couldn’t’ have any, but Ellen would not have dreamed of enquiring further. Moira was private: and also discreet.
Although she too had worked in the factory and in the war found a job delivering mail, there seemed to Ellen to be a distinction about Moira. She was taller than all the others and with that willowy figure Ellen admired in the aristocratic women and models who were in the newspapers. Her face was rather long, her hair always beautifully done, her expression a little distant as if she were seeing further than most. With many of her friends, Ellen would have crooked arm in arm, but not with Moira.
Both the young women wore summer dresses bought before the war and reshaped to meet the modern look. Their open shoes slushed through the long grasses as they moved away from the wending path and took the barely used track some distance from the river. They found a convenient hummock. For a while they chatted, rather nostalgically for such young women, about times past. Of the other life before the war – prompted by the hill beyond the river, known as Pasce Egg Hill, where they had all come after church on Easter Sunday morning to roll the hand-coloured eggs and where in a winter of snow, the boys made icy runs for their sledges and the girls came to watch, trying to cadge a go.
Moira’s husband, Alan, who worked in the booking office at the railway station, had not been in the war. A childhood bout of tuberculosis had ruled him out.
How to begin? The evening was so calm and pleasant, the deepening blue benevolent sky, the stalk of grass Ellen sucked so sweet, the wild flowers embroidering the lush pasture field so restful, it seemed inappropriate to introduce her small grief. Better surely to drift into the mood of the evening and become part of its harmony.
It was Moira who began.
‘—but it must be very hard,’ she said and Ellen’s attention was snagged back. ‘Look at poor Jackie.’
‘Sam thought he was on the mend.’
‘He just couldn’t keep up. Even when they gave him the lightest jobs. They say he went back too soon.’
Moira looked away and Ellen feared that this opening might be lost in contemplation of Jackie’s relapse, which had been dramatic.
‘They must,’ said Ellen, suddenly determined not to duck it, ‘have gone through a lot out there. A lot they don’t tell us about.’
Moira nodded. Her eyes still sought out a distant horizon and did not turn to Ellen in sympathy. This made it easier. Ellen went further.
‘I suppose it’s harder because I thought I knew everything about him before he went away. He used to say I could read his mind.’
‘You can’t hide much,’ said Moira wistfully, ‘in a place like this.’
‘No. But more than that – I knew him. All about him.’ She paused, thinking hard, how to express this without complaint or betrayal. ‘Now, though, he’s had this other life.’ It sounded so lame. ‘He’s a bit strange: sometimes. Nothing funny. But… I can’t seem to recognise him. Sometimes.’ Her voice had grown softer.
There was a pause. Moira always sat very still. Then she said, evenly, but in a charged way which pierced her friend’s heart, ‘That must be terrible for you, Ellen … I can’t think of anything worse.’
Now she did turn and Ellen wanted to run from the pity she saw in Moira’s expression. She should not have talked.
‘It’s getting damp,’ she said, made to stand up, to move on.
‘Don’t go yet.’ Moira’s pity turned into a plea, which rather embarrassed Ellen, but embarrassment was much better than the knife of pity. She put her hand over Ellen’s wrist and she let it lie there, exerting no pressure.
‘I’ve always been rather ashamed
that Alan didn’t go,’ Moira said, eventually. She turned away: in anyone else it could have been a gesture to encourage admiration of the fine profile but Ellen knew the effort that was being made. Tt’s not something you want to talk about,’ she stole a quick glance at Ellen and smiled. ‘He couldn’t help it, of course, and he would have gone – he tried, he went back three times but they wouldn’t take him. They said his lungs were a “patchwork of scars”. But I still felt rather ashamed that he wasn’t doing his bit and sometimes he picked that up which was no good for either of us.’
‘Everybody knew he wasn’t well. They sent him away to South-port, didn’t they? For the sea air.’
Moira nodded. Her divergence into the confessional was over. Her poise was back. The moment had been addressed. An exchange had been made. The conversation moved on.
Down on the river path they met up with a few others and together they strolled through the three fields, slowing their walk in the last and biggest field where so many events had taken place both big – the agricultural show – and small. It was on this stretch of river that most of the men who fished introduced their sons to the sport and there were deep pools to gaze in and now and then a trout flicked itself out from under the bank. Moira invited Ellen in for a cup of tea but Ellen pleaded Joe’s supper and bedtime.
‘Joe’s crying, Mrs Richardson.’
Bella announced this solemnly, nodding with every word. She stood like a sentry at the entrance to the yard.
‘He’s crying, Mrs Richardson.’
Joe was curled up in the armchair, small inside it, knees up to his chin, face tear-stained, wretched, and at his feet the railway engine and carriages, recently repaired by Sam, now utterly destroyed.
‘What is it then?’ More strongly. ‘Who did it?’
He cowered, as if the question were a slap.
Ellen pressed down her impatience and her anger and sat on the armchair, putting him on her knees and cradling him as if he were even more of a child. His quiet unhappiness crept into her like cold. Why had she been out, self-indulgent, when this was going on?
‘What is it, then?’
He burrowed more closely into her.
She could work out clearly what had gone on. They had teased him and started to pick on him and taken a kick at the painted wooden engine with its trim little carriages and then it had spun out of control and they had kicked it to bits and run away leaving Joe, desolate, to carry home the pieces.
At that moment Ellen would happily have thrashed the lot of them and had she known their names she would have sought them out and let loose. It was much more difficult to sit still and rock Joe back to some sort of calm.
‘I’ve got some cocoa.’ she said. ‘Would you like that?’
He wanted the cocoa but he did not want his mother to move away. Not just yet. Not when the warmth from her body, as on their nights in bed before his Daddy came home, was flowing through him, filling him slowly but surely with drowsy, happy comfort. He made no answer. Ellen understood.
She rocked him and hummed quietly and did not even move to light the gas, though the fading light from the gloomy yard darkened the room relentlessly. The mild sunny evening in the Show Fields and her conversation with Moira seemed far distant in the silence wrapping itself around the small bounded house.
‘What happened, then?’
All but imperceptibly he shook his head. His eyes tracked down to the splintered, broken toy. Already he knew enough to say nothing.
‘If I catch them,’ said Ellen, thoughtfully, ‘I’ll murder them.’ Joe smiled, for the first time, and pressed his face into the soft warm body of his mother and somehow contrived to indicate that cocoa would be welcome.
She put him to bed and went on with the story but only for a page or two because he soon dropped into sleep. She watched his sleeping face, hurt and fear dissolved, now, the unlined, unblemished, unwritten face of a child and wondered how she could ever protect him from what would surely come.
Downstairs, the light now on, she began preparations for supper but her movements were slow. There was a distraction at the heart of her. She was confined in such a small space. Beyond that the street which in summer stank, no other word, and the bluebottles settled on the excrement and the hosing was never enough. Beyond that, the town, but a town now changed since Sam had come back from the war and she had been forced in part to see it through his restless eyes. She had to work to hold on to her town and since the move away from Grace and Leonard and Mr Kneale, she herself had been restless, but maybe that was all caught from Sam.
There was loneliness, though, that inner distraction which threatened a return of the unhappiness she had endured as a child after her mother had died. She took up a magazine and flicked through to find the serial. She was so feeble! Why, in her own house, her son upstairs in a healing sleep, her husband whom she loved and who loved her about to return home; why, in health and luck and so full of life, did she want to scream aloud?
‘Just hit it,’ said Sam. ‘Don’t be frightened.’ Joe swung out his left fist.
‘No. It’s got to come straight from your shoulder. Straight out.’
Sam demonstrated. They were in the yard. Sam was kneeling on a folded piece of brown sugar paper. Joe was self-consciously trying to follow instructions. Bella was one of the problems. Though she kept her distance, she was still there, blotting him up with her eyes.
Sam held up his right hand, palm facing Joe, and encouraged him to hit out. It was not easy to get the hang of a straight left. Sam brought the small boy to him, turned him round (they were the same height with the man kneeling), took Joe’s left arm with his hand and pumped it out a few times.
‘Don’t stand so square. Left foot a little bit forward.’ He shifted his son’s left foot. ‘Right foot a little bit back. Try to balance on the balls of your feet. Straight left and move to one side. Straight left and move again. Straight left and move to one side. That’s it. Put a bit of oom-pa-pa into it – that’s better. Straight left and move to one side. Hit him on the nose and he won’t be very keen to come back. Just keep that left hand going. Straight left solves your problems. It doesn’t come easy. Now then. Have another go. Have a go, Joe, come and have a go. Hit my hand. That’s better. Go on, hit it as hard as you like. That’s better. Straight left. That’s the ticket. And again. Joe Louis. That’s what he does. And again.’
In Water Street, Ellen tracked down Lizzie who had been suspiciously elusive. She was one of the ‘big’ girls who was in the gang around Joe. She lived in the adjacent yard and had stopped raiding Ellen’s lavatory since Ellen had made her white carnival dress. She had also stopped the others.
Her summer hand-me-down dress was cheap and skimpy, ill-fitting. The sandals were badly scuffed. She was thin and malnutrition played its part in that. But her slim face was spotless, the hair clean and plaited into perfect pigtails. Everything that soap and water could do had been done. She was on the Sands, opposite the Congregational church, slowly pacing her way, head bent to the ground in concentration.
‘Lizzie?’
The girl looked up with a frown at being disturbed. Then she recognised Ellen and pleasure struggled with guilt. ‘Mrs Richardson?’
‘Come here, Lizzie.’
The reluctance was all the proof Ellen needed. ‘What are you doing?’
Lizzie opened her left hand. There were several pebbles clumped together.
‘I’m collecting for the boys,’ she said. ‘They’re going to have a fight with Church Street tonight.’ She smiled. ‘Beside the Baths.’
Ellen put that to one side.
‘You know what I want to know, Lizzie. Don’t you?’
Lizzie looked left, right, up, down, then repeated the sequence and finally settled for down.
‘It’s bullying, Lizzie, and I’m not having it. He’s smaller than the others. I thought you would look after him.’ Lizzie’s face looked even more steeply down. ‘You won’t tell me who it was?’
Lizzie shook her head, just enough to see.
‘I can guess.’
Not a tremor.
‘I relied on you, Lizzie.’
The head sank so low that Ellen could see the pinched white nape of neck where the plaits parted to swing penitently down past the small ears.
She murmured.
‘I can’t hear.’
‘I told them to stop, Mrs Richardson,’ said Lizzie.
She had. But the few moments’ flash of destructive frenzy were beyond her. And then it was done. And then the boys were all fled leaving Joe on his knees trying to put the train together again and Lizzie boiling with so many contradictory fears and feelings that she too had fled.
‘Well, tell them,’ said Ellen, ‘that one day, and one day soon, I’ll catch them. I have a good idea who they are. I’ll catch them. And they won’t forget it.’
‘Yes, Mrs Richardson.’
Ellen was finished. But it all seemed too much. This girl from a big rough family struggling just to get by was crushed.
‘You were very good in the Carnival, Lizzie. You’re a good dancer.’
At this unaccustomed compliment, the head bobbed up.
‘Was I, Mrs Richardson?’
The pinched face shone with pleasure. Ellen had to smile in return.
‘The others followed you,’ she said. It was true. Ellen should have told her earlier. ‘You were the leader.’
Lizzie’s smile split her face.
‘Those stones could be dangerous,’ Ellen said.
‘Oh, the boys,’ said Lizzie, vaguely.
‘Keep an eye on him, Lizzie.’
‘I will, Mrs Richardson. I will.’
Her expression tightened earnestly and Ellen left her feeling a little comforted.
Along the street the boys swooped and tacked, deep in plots and games but uneasy, one or two, Ellen noticed, as she walked at a deliberate pace, back to her own house.
‘I’m taking Joe up the town,’ said Sam as soon as she got back. ‘I thought I’d see if Norrie can use us for his pony and trap. He delivers on a Saturday morning.’ He nodded – the common purpose unstated between them. ‘Joe’s coming on,’ he put a hand on his son’s shoulder. ‘We’ll make him World Champion in no time.’
