by Melvyn Bragg
Copyright © 2001, 2011 by Melvyn Bragg
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First published in 2001 by Hodder and Stoughton, A division of Hodder Headline PLC, A Sceptre Book
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
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10 9876543 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-468-0
ALSO BY MELVYN BRAGG
The Soldier’s Return
To Marie-Elsa, Alice and Tom with love
PART ONE
WINTERING: 1947
CHAPTER ONE
‘You can hit as hard as you like and it won’t hurt.’ Sam whispered the rehearsal as he laid out the big boxing gloves like a bouquet on the table. The words would be addressed to his son but they were aimed at his wife.
The training gloves, blood red, almost new, glistening in the weak white gas-light of late winter afternoon, were nuzzled close, the four knuckle to puffy knuckle, as if waiting for the bell.
Sam stood back to admire them. Nothing in the room compared. Even the thickly berried holly, which Ellen had refused to take down on Twelfth Night with the other decorations, was eclipsed. The berries might be ‘red as any blood’ but the boxing gloves were redder and bloodier and spoke for a power beyond the holly, as Sam knew. He stoked the fire and settled the kettle on it, took the News Chronicle and lit a dog end. But he could not keep his eyes off the snuggling of the large glistening gloves, almost alive as the faintly hissing light played over them; reminded him of new pups. He hummed as he waited -'Give me five minutes more’. He wanted to extend the time for himself alone with this magnificent present. ‘Only five minutes more in your arms’. Blackie air-lifted into his lap so lightly it was almost an embrace, and when Sam stroked her under the chin she purred to match the quiet murmur of the kettle. Sounds full of peace: he felt his mind untense in this quietness that screened no threats.
Joe crashed in first, his face rose-glazed from the raw weather. To Sam’s delight he noticed the gloves instantly, a glance of disbelief at his father, and sprang on them. By the time Ellen had taken off her scarf, put down the shopping basket, slipped off her coat and focused, the cavernous gloves were on Joe’s seven-year-old paws. He stood there, not much higher than the table, the gloves like gaudy footballs fantastically stuck on the cuffs of his navy blue mac.
‘How are you going to get your coat off?’
Joe grinned at his mother and shook his hands. Despite the laces tightly pulled, the gloves dropped to the floor. He unbuttoned, unbelted, flung off his coat in seconds and went down on his knees to cram his hands once more into the hugely padded marvels, which he could not believe were to be his.
‘You can hit as hard as you like but it won’t hurt - not with those.’
‘Ding ding. Seconds out!’ said Joe, as he took swipes at an imaginary opponent, taking care to clutch hard to the glove on the inside so that it did not fly off.
‘I thought boxers were meant to hurt each other,’ Ellen replied.
‘Special training gloves. Look at the size of them! From Belgium.’
Sam seemed transfixed by Joe’s childish flailing. He wanted to kneel down and coach him but first there was Ellen.
‘It’ll help him learn to look after himself without causing damage.’
‘You’re the one who wants those gloves, Samuel Richardson.’
He looked at her directly and her laughter set off his own. Her eyes were lustrous in the light of the small room. He could see that she was taking him on.
‘Charlie Turnbull,’ he confessed, and held up a hand to ward off the flak.
‘When was Charlie Turnbull in Belgium or anywhere else? He was always up to no good.’
‘There’s nothing on the fiddle.’
Ellen shook her head but held off. The unusual high humour between Sam and Joe was too good to spoil. She picked up the two remaining gloves from the table, pretending to be alarmed by Joe’s self-absorbed punching the air. She pressed them gently to her cheeks.
‘They are soft,’ she conceded. ‘I like the smell …’ She inhaled deeply, her eyes closing.
Sam stirred towards her and then checked himself. ‘I buffed them up.’
She opened her eyes and held out the gloves, two succulent globes pressed together, stretching the shiny leather tight. She offered them to him. ‘Put them on,’ she said, and smiled down at Joe. ‘You can’t wait, can you?’
‘Come on then, Joe.’ He knelt down.
The boy sailed in and Sam let the pneumatic blows rain on him. Then he pushed his son away.
‘Joe Louis wouldn’t do that,’ he said. ‘Straight left then make a move. Remember?’
The boy skipped around a father in rare indulgent mood.
‘One-two,’ said Sam. ‘This is a one-two.’
Ellen caught his eye deliberately and held it for a message. Fair enough, the look said, but you will not have it all your own way. He winked. And she laughed but maybe because Joe had used the unguarded moment to land a blow directly on Sam’s nose.
‘Hey-up!’ He rubbed his nose with the fat cigar thumb of the glove.
‘What was it?’ Ellen said, as she swung the kettle off the hob. ‘You can hit as hard as you like but it doesn’t hurt?’
Sam smiled and Ellen was moved by the intimacy such a simple reaction could reveal. Then his attention switched. ‘I’ve got a real little warrior on my hands.’
Joe felt himself swell with giddy confidence. ‘Come on, Daddy,’ he said, squaring up. Tight me.’
Ellen wanted to calm his all but feverish excitement, but that would douse feelings she saw surging so warmly between the two who had often clashed since Sam’s return. Now Sam was smiling approval. Joe was almost dancing, fists raised, suddenly and blissfully - with the gloves on - unafraid of his father.
Tight me now.’
She put a small piece of holly on the fire and listened. The flames leaped at it but she judged that the sound would not disturb Sam who lay in the bed a few feet away, spreadeagled in early sleep for the six o’clock shift at the factory. She had checked upstairs and stood over Joe, his head nesting on the great gloves, his small face above the blanket, pale in the pillowed red plush frame. He too was sound.
Sam’s present had got to the heart of something deep in their son, she thought. It pleased her that there should be that understanding and firmly she pushed back the shadow that threatened to spoil it. For the six years of the war Joe had been hers alone: she had to let Sam find his place now. A boy needs a father, she said to herself sternly, as she had repeated endlessly since that almost miraculous moment when Sam had jumped from the train that would have taken him alone on the first leg of his passage to Australia and come back along the platform, hand in hand with Joe, come back to her. To her. Even now, after a few months, the memory of it made her hold her breath.
She had not fully absorbed it. It
was like a present, almost too good to open and, when opened, too good to use. It was a second chance and better for it. They had just made love in something of the old way, though the necessary silence constrained them with Joe just above them - sleeping?
She missed the pliable umbilical presence of the child who had slept with her into boyhood. And although Sam had subdued his son’s cries to retain the shared bed he had enjoyed until the return of the father he had been schooled to love, Ellen knew that Joe’s longing was scarcely abated, that the severance was a wound. She observed the boy struggle with the burden of expected love for the stranger who had come back to redeem his fatherless condition. She saw the bewilderment, the hurt, the anger that this father to whom he must kow-tow and wanted to, must love and wanted to, be grateful to and was, should displace him so conclusively, overrule, oust him.
Awake as the father and son slept, feeding the fire with the richly ruby-berried holly, which she had found in an overgrown lane less than two miles out of the town, Ellen let herself drowse. The fire burned, lightly, on her face and as she leaned forward her loosened hair swung down, swaying sensuously, an indulgence secretly cultivated - swaying languorously as she moved her head to the rhythm of the song she hummed low, like a lullaby. She could picture the small town all about her in the cold bleak January dark, its yards, alleys, runnels, streets, people, all so familiar she could sketch them in her mind without effort, all ready to be conjured out of the midwinter blackness, swaddling her in this cradle of her life. The town was her captive dream. It was so comfortingly easy for her to call it up but she resisted that temptation, as she had fended off the shadow provoked by Sam’s fighting gift of the gloves.
Sam and Joe. She let their names surf on ‘The Bells of St Mary’s’, which surged gently through her mind. Joe and Sam. Ebb and flow. Her face now glowed from the fire thrown up by the holly and glowed too from the scent on her, the recent weight of his body on hers, the nearness of that complete loss in pleasure. The leaf, the berry and the thorn. Aware of herself alone. And Sam. And the sight of Joe - his face in that halter of bulging red leather, his copper hair outshone, splayed on his back in perfect sleep.
Ellen frowned at the realisation that this luck was so little appreciated by her. What was here was world enough. Their one-up, one-down house absorbed all the town and fields and land and country around it. The place was in her and the three of them were safe.
She hugged herself as the last of the holly fed the dying fire, hugged herself tightly, digging her fingers into her shoulder-blades, holding it in.
CHAPTER TWO
The girl stopped him in his tracks. Joe had hurried through the narrow alley, but found the lavatory occupied. There was a growl from Kettler, who would often settle in there for the duration. Joe clenched his buttocks against the pressure that had finally forced him out of his besotted immersion in the latest Water Street kickabout, and decided to go into the house where in an emergency there was a potty. A risk. He might be kept in. He wanted straight back to the football in the softening twilight of the cold day when strained breath came out visibly and the dusk changed and charmed the game. But there she stood, in front of the house she had just moved into, and she stopped him in his tracks. She might have fallen down from the moon.
Her hair was black, short, a pudding-basin cut. Despite the weather she wore no coat but the bottle-green cardigan came below her waist and the black pleated skirt was like a frill below its severity. Her socks were also green, her pretty brass-studded clogs bright red. Joe took that in and much more that he could not consciously map or describe: the incitement about her eyes; the wraith wisp of a smile on the serious round face; the exciting angle of the body as she leaned back against the window-sill; just the fact, the presence of her there, near, now, waiting. He had to speak but there was a strong sweet nausea in his stomach that made him nervous about opening his mouth. His legs weakened with a watery sensation and he clenched hard to avert another accident. His throat thickened.
‘I’m next door,’ she said.
Joe nodded and experienced a waterfall of gratitude for this good fortune. He wanted to yell but could not even whisper.
‘Are you seven?’
Joe nodded again.
‘Mam said you would be. I’m just six.’
‘That’s my cat.’
He smiled at the triumph of speech. Blackie allowed herself to be picked up and handed over. The miraculous girl dived her face into the thick glossiness and murmured baby sounds.
‘You can hold her any time you want.’
She did not respond. In the fading light there was no seam between the girl’s jet hair and the black fur.
‘You can keep her all night if you want to.’
Joe’s recklessness came without a qualm. Still she ignored him. She imitated the purring.
Kettler came out of the lavatory at a drunken stagger and tacked towards his hovel without a glance at the children. Joe felt the pain of the pressure in his bum but he endured it. Besides, he hated going in after Kettler for the stink and the mess. He always asked his mammy to clean it up first. But it was hard not to go. The pain tightened - a strange pain that had some pleasure in it. That confused sensation mingled with this new pressure of the girl.
He had to go. Yet how could he leave her? She might disappear.
‘Mam won’t have cats,’ she said.
Tenderly she placed Blackie on the ground.
‘Can you do this?’
Mary turned to the house, took a step or so back, a skip forward, dipped onto her hands and swung her legs up against the wall, swung them it seemed to the mesmerised Joe through the most perfect arc, the legs lazily tracking each other into the air, and with a grace that winded him. He stared at the two small shiny red clogs neatly nailed on the grimy brick and saw the bare legs with the skirt now dangling towards the ground.
A year or so before, before the move to Water Street, when he had been a full member of the Market Hill gang, the rather older Harrison girls, twins, who led it, had sometimes teased the boys by being bad. Joe had been left frustrated and pining for days after these rare encounters with the incomprehensible. Now he had the same hot feeling of wanting to do something urgently but what it was he did not know.
The Harrison girls had also done handstands against a wall But they had tucked their skirts into their knickers.
That brief snap of memory was frazzled by this posed, erect figure, polished red clogs gleaming side by side, bare legs, green knickers, the skirt all but covering her upside-down face. And she stayed like that. For more than a second or two. Joe was helpless, dizzy with awe. It was beyond him yet it possessed him.
He could hold it no longer. Unmistakable. The hot clart of it on his cold thigh. Yet still he stood there. Then she reversed the action and the feet nudged lightly against the wall, the legs swung down, just as gracefully, and she stood and turned and smiled at him and saw her applause in his face.
He nodded and swallowed the saliva that had gathered in the well of his mouth. He had to take on trust that she would not vanish from the earth as he hobbled as fast as he could to the messy stinkhole just vacated by boozy Kettler to try to sort out his own mess.
How could he get her to do that handstand against the wall again?
Speed was a hero and sometimes a friend. His advantage in age was almost three full years. One of Joe’s multitude of ambitions was to be as old as Speed, to be ten, to be as brave as Speed, to be as bad and as dangerous as Speed. To have Speed in him. He envied his slight squint and tried to copy it.
Speed ate scrunts. He even ate the stalks. He chewed candlewax for gum. Speed drove cattle down Water Street and New Street to the pens at the station. Speed smoked dog ends when he found them in his scourings of the gutter. Most grown-ups shouted at him and Speed shouted back and then ran. Speed led the Water Street younger gang in stone fights and raids on other streets. He would go to the tip and always come back with something good that just needed holding
under the tap. Speed swore and then crossed himself. Nobody, said Speed, was better than the Pope. Speed’s daddy was in hospital because of the war but if anybody referred to it Speed hit them. Some days, market days, he just did not go to school. Speed boasted that his big brother Alistair would be lucky not to go to Borstal before he got called up. Joe’s daddy called Speed ‘a little warrior’ and always seemed to be smiling at him. Speed said things to Sam that Joe would never dare.
‘Put them on.’
Speed was reluctant. The gloves looked too expensive. But Mr Richardson was an idol outpointed only by his brother Alistair. He pulled on the glossy gloves and felt his fist disappear as Sam tugged the laces tight across his thin wrist.
‘Now remember you’re bigger, and remember you’re older.’
Speed nodded. The gloves were unwieldy and unnecessary. His fist felt imprisoned.
‘Just some gentle sparring,’ said Sam. ‘OK?’ He looked over to Joe who was experiencing an unexpected sense of calm. Perhaps because Sam had just sprung this on them and he had had no time to work up a funk. And he could see that Speed was uncomfortable in the gloves. And Sam was there.
‘Seconds out. Ding!’
The boys came towards each other cautiously, Joe adopting some semblance of the classic English stance - left foot forward, head tucked behind his right glove, left glove feinting for an opening. Speed was hopeless. In a fight he just flailed away until it was over. He could not play at it.
Joe saw that Mary had come out into the yard. She leaned against the window-ledge as she had the other day. Joe danced, just a touch, on the balls of his feet and waved his left glove more emphatically. He tried a punch. Speed let it land on his shoulder. Joe glanced at Mary and shot out a straight left.
‘Good lad!’
Joe burrowed his head further into the protecting right glove and found that he was advancing. Speed was waving his arms, almost as if he were trying to shake off the bulbous impediments. Joe jabbed out the left once or twice, did not connect, looked good. Mary had not moved.
