by Melvyn Bragg
Sam had taken him to see The Bandit of Sherwood Forest and Joe had been Robin Hood and all his Merry Men ever since. Even Blackie had been relegated, though not neglected.
He went to collect the arrows and looked around. He had chosen a good time. Three small girls were playing in the stream. No one else was using this patch this late Saturday afternoon just into the school term. Joe knew that he couldn’t be too circumspect now that his protector, Lizzie, had departed for Brindlefield in excitement and tears. He picked up all the arrows and decided to test distance. From the wall at one end of the Waste he shot high towards the wash-houses and with his first arrow he almost made it. The second fell short, but by the third attempt he had taken account and the arrow satisfactorily clattered against the wash-houses, or the walls of Nottingham Castle as they had become.
Happily self-consumed, dodging between the mighty oaks of Sherwood Forest and keeping a sharp eye out for the deer and the Sheriff’s men, he trudged across the barren ground, his bow safely slung across his chest. His father had made it for him. He had bought the cane at Stoddarts. He had shown Joe how to slit the ends and bind them with thin string.
The arrows were made from slimmer shafts of cane, again neatly slit at the ends to fit into the bowstring with a twist of wire on the head to give balance. Feathers, Sam said, would make no difference but he had got hold of four from an old set of darts and two of the arrows were plumed in black and gold. Watching his father do this for him, out in the yard, Bella at bay, Kettler passing a word of admiration, had been a good time for Joe, a time which melted some of the fear of his father.
The fear of Speed rose in his gorge like nausea when he saw the older boy saunter onto the Waste, look around, spot one of the arrows by the wash-houses and pick it up. Joe’s heart gathered pace. His feet trailed and his legs were watery but he trudged on. Speed noted him and then spied the other two arrows and gathered them up. Joe’s head was bowed but he could think of nothing else to do but walk on.
Stand up to him his Daddy had said, whoever it is, stand up to him, you’ll only have to do it the once, straight left, catch him on the nose. That’ll do it.
Speed was examining the arrows closely. Would he suddenly snap them in two? He was looking even harder than usual. His hair had been convict cut; his pullover was riddled with holes and one of the sleeves barely survived. His pants were patched all over and the big patch on the bum was loose. The shoes were too big. He still looked as angry as a wasp.
‘Who made these?’ he demanded when Joe stopped a few yards away.
‘My Daddy.’
‘Let’s see that bow.’
Joe took it off and handed it over, which meant he had to draw nearer because Speed did not budge an inch.
Speed studied it minutely. ‘It’s great,’ he said.
He slotted in an arrow and shot it almost directly above him, high in the air, so that the boys screwed up their eyes to follow it, and then it turned and flew down and by a miracle stuck upright and quivering in the mud beside the stream.
Speed turned to Joe and his smile was seraphic. Joe was almost jolted by it, by the surprise of it, by the strength of it. ‘Your turn,’ said Speed.
Joe’s lips were dry. He licked them and took his bow. Speed offered him a feathered arrow. Like Speed, Joe shot directly upwards, into the sky, up towards the clouds, streaking for the blue. And then the arrow turned and sped down and this time it bounced on hard ground and did not stick.
Speed grinned again. ‘My turn.’
This time he shot as far as he could across the Waste and the arrow hit the wall at the other side. Again, Speed smiled and picked up an arrow for Joe. ‘You,’ he commanded.
Joe did not disgrace himself but he did not hit the wall. Speed’s next arrow threatened to penetrate it.
The boys set off, Speed going at a trot, to pick up the fallen arrows. Speed collected all three. He looked at Joe, his sharp and pinched features pointed by the force of what he had to say. Joe flinched. Straight left, then move. Don’t flinch.
‘I wish thy Dad was my Dad,’ Speed said. ‘You first this time.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
She was in bed, alone. Sam was on the morning shift. She was in the house alone. Joe and Blackie had gone to spend the weekend with Ruth and his grandfather. He had been engineered there by Ellen. It was past eight o’clock and she had drawn back the curtains to avoid comment. The light was weak. A drizzle had set in. The yard was silent and even beyond: she had to strain to catch a sound from a Water Street now being steadily depleted.
Ellen lay in the middle of the bed and spread out, luxuriating in sole possession, visited by that swirl of sensations, full of colours and warmth, that universe of impressions and fragments of thoughts which at one time – during Sam’s absence, while guarding Joe in her bed – had been a steady refuge. Since Sam’s return, that dream time had all but disappeared and Ellen had felt the loss of it. Nothing had ever been resolved in those moments as far as she could tell, and she had sought for nothing to be resolved, but she had felt a cradling, a sense of disappearing without terror, a sense of peace.
On this damp, important day, the feeling had come back and she stretched herself slowly, with infinite time, it seemed, rich in drowsiness, hoping this state would not end too soon. Then she fell asleep for a short while and woke up to find it gone. She closed her eyes and stretched again but the mood could not be summoned back. It had visited her and now it had left her and she moved out of the bed reluctantly, as if leaving Joe or Sam unwillingly, and closed the curtains tight, even though her nightdress swept from neck to ankle.
She filled in the nervousness of the morning by going to Grace’s house and giving the drawing room an unnecessary, thorough clean.
Sam arrived just after two for his dinner but the afternoon was the wrong time to speak. They had, most unusually, the day to themselves. Sam was tired after his sixth morning shift of the week and Ellen went down to Carlisle with a couple of friends to see The Blue Dahlia, while he occupied the bed lately vacated by her. When she returned he was not there but she knew that he was out for a drink or two and would be back for supper. There was a dance on at Thursby and some of their friends were making up a taxi, but Ellen had expressed no eagerness to join them.
Ellen had got hold of two fresh eggs from an old farmer who used the chemist’s and had taken something of a fancy to her. There was a sausage each, bought in Carlisle, and a black pudding for Sam only -she hated them. Then there was rice pudding. The conversation did no more than tick along. They drank tea.
She washed and dried and put away a little less rapidly than usual. She had thought about it too much now and she felt apprehensive, though why she should feel like that, part of her thought, when all she was going to do was to talk to her own husband about the future of their lives together now that he had been back a few months and settled in – why she should feel dry-mouthed was silly!
He was reading the paper. She knew that he would put the wireless on soon to hear the Saturday play. She sat across the empty grate from him. Sam’s back was to the window and though it was only early evening in early September, the continuing drizzle and the gloom of the yard made the outside almost dark.
She drew the curtains and lit the gas lamp.
The room seemed suddenly very cosy. However cramped and unsettled she felt and always would, there were moments like this when it was theirs, and Ellen wondered why that feeling of possession had to occur at this, precisely the wrong, even the worst, time.
Sam read studiously. Had he sat like that, looked like that, read like that before he went away? Had they talked so little? Had she ever been apprehensive? Never. But had he been like that? As far away at times as Burma itself. Tired, too; gripped by it.
‘Now,’ he put the paper down and smiled, which wiped the tiredness off his face and brought him back home to her instantly, what were you feeding me up for?’
‘I’m glad you noticed.’
They smiled at each other. An old familiar smile. Tender courting, the power of physical love. Secret places they had found on their walks. Dances galore. Private jokes. Bicycle rides. Silly quarrels. It was all captured in that smile, but they knew also that the game was on.
His smile broadened. ‘And no dance – Joe out and no dance? You? With who is it playing?’
‘Billy Bowman.’
‘The one and only Billy Bowman! At Thursby. On a Saturday. With a taxi or two being made up. And me caught up on sleep. I don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes.’
She took a deep breath and told him about the house. She was scrupulous. The disadvantages had been well-rehearsed and were spelled out, if anything, over-emphatically. The advantages seemed harder to offer. She could not say, there was no way of articulating, that this place in the centre of the old town, built of stone a hundred and fifty years before and built to last more hundreds of years, this solid, solid house had become in her imagination and in her deepest hopes, the very centre of the life she wanted to live as long as she did live. How could a mere building stand for all that? Yet it did. More -should it not be hers, Ellen felt there would be danger: a danger which she would not, could not have described, but which was to her as clear as the expressionless face of Sam himself. He heard her out with no interruption.
‘I can’t have been in that yard more than two or three times,’ he said. ‘If that. I remember her. When she used to come shopping. The old style. You felt you had to bow.’
‘She was very pleasant.’
‘How could you tell?’
‘She might have been old style but she was old Wigton as well. It would be a pity if they all died out.’ ‘Would it?’
‘I felt sorry for her. In that house. There weren’t cobwebs everywhere but it felt as if there could have been cobwebs everywhere and she was all on her own. For so long. She had a broken heart,’ Ellen concluded, rather firmly.
Sam nodded and folded the paper into four and put it beside the fire. Tt’s too much,’ he said.
‘We could borrow.’
‘I never thought I’d hear you say that.’
Ellen licked her dry lips. It was a justified comment. ‘I could take more on. Leonard seemed to think it would hang around for some time.’
‘I bet it will. God knows what’s behind that peeling wallpaper.’
‘We’ve already something put by, haven’t we? From your extra shifts. And my work.’
‘I want that to be …’ Sam faltered. What? At root, a small promise of independence, but from what and how did you explain it? ‘That house would eat money.’
‘But it would be for something, wouldn’t it? It would be for a home.’ She wanted him to want it as much as she did but he did not. ‘Once we’d got a house like that we would never need anywhere else, never.’
Sam took out a cigarette, lit it and then very quietly said, ‘You mean we’d be stuck in Wigton for good.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
Could she not tell? Could she not tell from every sign he had given over the past months? So uneasy in his own skin. So stretched beyond endurance by the predictable, repetitious job: with no change in sight, no advancement, no expansion, nothing but the same, flat as an iron, the same. Being the same, doing the same in the same place in the same way with the same men and the same talk and the same lack of expectation and why not if the same was what you wanted, but if not, if you had seen and smelled other worlds, then this same, however friendly and comforting, this every day every way same meant you might as well be dead.
‘It’s too much,’ was all he said. ‘Why should we pay £50 to get into an old house when half of Water Street is walking into new homes free?’
‘Our names aren’t down. Anyway, it’s nicer than the new houses,’ Ellen said and although she meant it, her words carried little authority.
‘It’ll cost a fortune to put right.’
‘There’s no rush. I’ve said I’ll get more work.’
‘I don’t want you to get more work.’
‘Until we get settled.’
‘It’s just a waste of money.’
‘Let’s put ourselves down for a new council house then.’
‘OK, if that’s what you want.’
She didn’t and both of them knew it.
‘I really want this place, Sam,’ she said, invoking his Christian name as a sign of her seriousness. ‘I really want it.’
She looked at the floor as she repeated the sentence and her hair fell forward, that thick dark hair he loved to touch yet had found few occasions to do so recently, but now he wanted to reach out and stroke it as a way of saying ‘I understand’. Because he did understand to his soul the hold this town had on her and her almost helpless need for it, a need greater, perhaps, than for him. Perhaps it was that light stroke of jealous realisation which held back his hand and left the rich glossy hair untouched.
‘It’s too big,’ he said, loudly, kicking his objections back into life by trying a new tack. Tt’s far too big for us. We would just rattle around in it. And I’m not taking lodgers. Or travelling salesmen. Grace is as Grace does, but that’s no way for me.’
‘It’s only too big …’ Ellen hesitated, because there was something forward in what she was about to say, ‘if we stay as we are.’
Sam fixed her with blue eyes which had always, when at ease, moved her: but now there was a glint which she did not recognise and, in that slenderest moment, feared. ‘You mean have another?’
‘Maybe more than one.’ She threw her fear back at him.
‘I see.’
He bent forward, elbows on knees, hands propping up his head, the hair deep copper in the gaslight. The hiss from that light made the only sound in the room. The pubs were not yet closed and the drizzle had kept the streets empty. Ellen saw that his eyes were tight shut. She noticed, though she had always known, that his hands were quite small for such a strong man. There were freckles on the back of them. It was lucky his face was not freckled, she found herself thinking, so many with red hair suffered from a freckled face.
‘I can’t do that.’
The words were guttural, as if they all but choked him. Ellen did not recognise where the tone or the sentiment came from. She had never anticipated such beaten, implacable, undiscussed opposition.
‘I can’t do that, Ellen,’ he repeated the words as if to make sure they were heard but the tone and the force stayed the same.
‘We’ll have to sooner or later.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
Still not looking at her, he rubbed the back of his neck with his left hand, rubbed it hard as if there were a knot of spasmed muscle which had to be loosened. ‘Just don’t ask,’ he whispered.
Ellen tried to sit perfectly still.
Sam sat up, still rubbing his neck, and then his hand dropped. His eyes went right past her.
‘I want to,’ she said, eventually, the words sounding loud and intrusive. ‘And I think we could be happy in that house.’
‘Who cares about a house?’
The question came out like a cry.
‘Who cares about one place or another? They’re just spots to live in. What are we going to do, Ellen, you, me, you and me? That’s what matters. Not a house. Not even a town. Not even children!’
His words were increasingly violent, bucking the sentences, but Ellen would not be thrown.
‘I say the house would be a fresh start. And I think we should have another child.’
‘No!’ he said, and he stood up as he spoke, and the single syllable rose with him into a shout. He looked quite wild. He grabbed his jacket and Ellen saw that his arms were trembling as he pushed them into the sleeves.
‘Tell me why.’
‘No. I can’t. No.’
His body seemed to flinch with each word spoken as if a devil were inside him.
‘You can’t go out.’
‘I just – just walk around – no drink. Ill be back. S
orry. Sorry, Ellen. It’s not right. I know.’
The look on his face was stricken and desperate and she got up to hold him and chase away all talk of house and money and children and all that ached so invisibly inside him, so visible in his eyes, but he lifted his arm to warn her off before she got near him and hurried for the door, leaving it open as he strode across to the tunnel that would take him away.
Ellen waited. After a while she put on the wireless but both the words and then the music were an interference. She had seen into a blankness of the man she loved and she had no purchase on it. She thought of him raging in his own silence around the dark side alleys and out to the unlit walks he knew well, and she could see the paleness of his face forging through the dark. A chill settled on her which she made no attempt to throw off.
When he did come back she was asleep. So deeply that he boiled the kettle and made tea without disturbing her but woke her up for the tea and they drank it almost scalding hot, commenting on how hot it was. Sam saying he had met only two or three on the streets and they would think he was off to a pub and Ellen wondering aloud if Joe was enjoying his first weekend away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
August had been the wettest month of 1946 the newspapers had said and September had started no better. At first, Sam had relished the damp overcast summer days, feeling at home, admiring the bloody-mindedness, the sullen independence of a region so long renowned as Arcadia, a honeypot for tourists and yet so unobliging. But the rain could become oppressive and as he looked out of the window of the bus winding between lush hedgerows to Carlisle, he would have traded one or two of the famous Lakes for a week of strong sunshine. He looked south out of the trundling old bus and saw the mountains on the northern frontier of the Lake District pressed down by clouds, the sky unrelieved grey, the fields glittering green, but even the fields prey to low drifting cloud and soaked by the unremitting drizzle. The harvest was feared for, he had read, and it was no wonder. Sam hated this sulk of summer, hated the sense of being trapped under those big loose-bellied clouds which sucked up Atlantic waters and sagged over western Britain, giving no respite.
