by Melvyn Bragg
Speed swung his left hand in a looping swipe that landed on Joe’s glove and rocked him. But instead of alarm, he felt fired up. He could tell that Speed was not going to hurt him. He had seen it in the pleading look his hero had cast to Sam.
Joe skipped a little more then flung his right hand forward. Speed caught it between his two gloves, as if it were a ball, and when Joe tried to free it, his hand slipped out and Speed stood there holding the empty glove like a trophy.
‘First time I’ve seen that!’ Sam laughed and Joe hoped it was not he who was being laughed at.
‘Can I stop now, Mr Richardson?’ said Speed.
‘You’re hardly warmed up.’
‘But I don’t want to fight him, Mr Richardson.’
Joe was much relieved. The stoppage had jolted him into the realisation that he was pushing his luck. But, for Mary’s sake, he tried to look keen.
‘This is boxing,’ said Sam.
Speed shook his head. You had a fight because you meant it. You could mean it so badly that you thought you wanted to murder somebody. Sometimes it was hard to stop when it was over. This with the gloves was just no good.
‘He can hit me and I won’t hit back.’
Joe gave a little jig to show willing.
Sam ruffled Speed’s cropped hair. ‘You’re a real 'un,’ he said, and unlaced the boy’s gloves. Joe looked on carefully. He remembered Speed saying, ‘I wish thy father was my father,’ and it had made him proud.
Liberated, Speed muttered a lie of excuse and fled.
‘You’ll have to make do with me again,’ said Sam, and he coaxed and coached Joe for a respectable ten minutes before taking the gloves into the house.
At last Joe could go across to Mary. He had a light sweat, a sheen against the cold, and it gave him a swagger.
‘Bella wants to see Blackie,’ said Mary.
Bella had not been seen since before Christmas, much to Joe’s relief. The big over-clumsy girl whom Kettler scorned as ‘backward’ and ‘mental’ had ceased to worry him after he had come into possession of the kitten Blackie. Bella was besotted by Blackie and a promise that she could hold her never failed to check the mauling play with which she had unsettled the much smaller Joe. He was still nervous of her.
‘Mammy says she’s very badly.’ Joe lowered his voice, as his mother did when she spoke of illness. She had referred to it in oblique and embarrassed snatches so that Joe came to the conclusion that Bella was a leper - he had heard a forceful sermon on lepers - and if he so much as touched her or let her breathe at him he would be covered in boils and sores and die.
Part of Ellen’s reluctance to tell the boy the truth - aside from her ineradicable conviction that a host of adult truths, especially on personal matters, were not to be shared with or imposed on children - was that she feared she would reveal her anger.
It was criminal, Ellen thought, and said as much to Sam, that Bella’s mother Madge should insist that she house and nurse her sister riddled with TB when everyone with any sense knew that the disease fed on such intense crowding in a small damp space. She had read the doctor in the Cumberland News who was agitated that so many people turned their back on the obvious ways of alleviating the current Wigton rampage of tuberculosis. But Madge did not take the Cumberland News and Ellen could not engineer a discussion without giving offence.
Influenced by the social rigidities of a childhood with an aspiring aunt, Ellen had no truck with unannounced neighbourliness. You were friendly but not familiar, not dropping in without knocking, not sticking your nose into private business, not giving advice unasked for. But it said clearly in the paper that the sanatorium only ten miles away was prepared to take patients and there would be no charge. Ellen had seen the doctor visit the stricken house next door and surely he would have made the point. But what if he had overlooked it? Or if Madge had been too fussed to take it in? Or had misunderstood it? There was no mistaking what was written in the paper.
Even so she would have held back but the sound of suppressed coughing which reached through the thin wall in the night -suppressed, she felt, because Madge’s sister and Bella did not want to intrude with their illness - disturbed Ellen and challenged her neutrality. What if Madge did take the hump, what if she flew up, what did that matter besides something being done for that poor wasted sister and for Bella, so docile in her obedience to a mother confining her in a room of death? Finally Ellen could bear the struggle no longer. She scissored out the relevant newspaper report and pushed it through the letterbox.
Madge knew where it had come from. She said nothing. Relations cooled. Ellen’s usual offers of ‘doing some shopping while she was upstreet anyway’ were frozen out. Bella was banned from playing with Blackie. Greetings were not returned. Ellen felt crushed.
Mary, with the clean passport of the newcomer and the apparent reliability of childhood, had already been allowed to play with Bella. Despite Joe’s efforts to distance himself from the worrying attentions of Bella, he was a little put out that Mary already was such a friend as to be a messenger.
He went to find Blackie.
‘Mammy says I can’t go in Bella’s house.’
It had taken Ellen some effort to give him that instruction. She did not want him to be rebuffed by an offended Madge Hartley, that was true. But the greater truth, and one which in the driven fairness of her spirit she felt ashamed of, was that she feared that Joe might pick up TB. She reasoned that a few minutes would be neither here nor there but the image of that condemned room infested by coughed-up infection was too much for her. Poor sad Bella. Ellen felt that she was walking by on the other side.
Joe handed Blackie over to Mary.
As usual, she battened her face into the long fur and Joe stood by respectfully while she breathed her fill
Bella’s face appeared at the window. Joe had spotted her a few times over the weeks but given her no more than the briefest nod as he sped about his business. Now he looked a little more carefully and even he saw a difference. She was not the same, he reported to Ellen, out of which she had to draw that Bella was paler, thinner, altogether subdued. But there she was at the window, her eyes full of hope.
Joe waved, properly. He pointed, indicating the cat she could not touch. She remained all but motionless, afraid that any movement would trigger a summons from her mother to leave the window.
When Mary came up for air, he indicated Bella’s presence and they went and stood in front of the window. As soon as she saw Blackie, Bella’s eyes shone, a smile came to her large sickly face, softening and sweetening it. She gazed intently on the object of her adoration, gazed as if she were feeding on it, feeding deeply and urgently to store it up for revisiting in barren hours.
Joe picked up a touch of her passion, remembering it from the past, and he took the cat from Mary and brought it closer to the glass, and closer still until its fur rubbed against the pane. Now Bella did move. She leaned towards it as if, for a moment, believing she might be able to hold it, the transparent barrier between them melt away. Joe saw into the room. Mrs Hartley’s sister lying on the bed. Mrs Hartley herself at the sink until Bella’s excitement alerted her and she turned and called the girl off and, with such reluctance, Bella slowly pulled away and stepped back and bit her lower lip.
‘He’s still in the army,’ said Ellen, of their new neighbour, ‘in Germany. As soon as he gets a house they’re off to join him.’
Sam smiled at her. He was nursing his second cup of tea. He liked the two-to-ten shift, giving him the long mornings and this quiet intimacy deep into the night. It was the best time to be easy with each other.
‘Joe told me,’ Ellen said. ‘He seems to have got it out of that Mary.’
‘She’s a quaint little article, isn’t she? Old-fashioned. They’re real country people. Down from the hills. Innocent people.’
Ellen did not reply.
‘She seems to have latched on to Joe,’ he went on. ‘Poor lad! She won’t let him alone.’
> Again Ellen held her tongue. It was perfectly obvious that it was Joe who was the infatuated one. Disturbingly so, Ellen thought.
‘He loves those boxing gloves.’ Sam smiled again. He was tickled pink that the present had been received with such rapture. Even the painted wooden train he had brought back from Burma had not met with such a reaction. ‘And it’ll do him no harm, you know.’
Ellen knew that she was being challenged to answer and she rose to it, knowing that silence would indicate disapproval. ‘He would wear them to school if he could.’
‘He would! I went up last night and he had a pair of them on. Fast asleep!’
Ellen enjoyed Sam’s pleasure. It was a short moment and a small matter perhaps but it was at times like these that she could sense that he was beginning to find a way out of the war, which still shot through his mind in nightmare and anger.
‘So you'll pop in and tell Leonard about the house in the morning?’
‘Yes.’ She hoped it sounded casual.
Ellen had given up her ambition to move into the large rundown romantic town house, a house she had dreamed of having. In fairness, she conceded, Sam was right about the amount that needed doing to it, the cost, the debt that would be around their necks, the decorating and heating and furnishing of such a place. In that scheme of things her own longing to be fortressed in the centre of the small town she loved so much had to be weighed carefully. She gave in partly because she believed she owed him a debt for not leaving them behind, not striking off alone to Australia.
'I think I got a bit carried away,’ she said, to reassure him because she knew he did not like to see her disappointed. ‘Even though the council owns it now. It would have been too posh for us.’ Saying it aloud helped her to believe it.
‘And you really want our names down for a new council house?’
‘Oh, yes.’
Sam picked up the urgency in those two syllables. She wanted out. He knew how hemmed in she often felt in this tiny one-up, one-down, the small yard, the shared tap, the lavatory she had to clean, daily, the feeling of being immured. To him, it was a perfectly acceptable first nest in a married life. There was scarcely any damp. It was a warm little place.
‘Council houses are nice and new,’ she said, loyally.
He finished his tea and shovelled a few more lumps of coal on to the fire. Almost midnight and all was well. Ellen began to get undressed.
‘I’ll let you warm the bed up,’ he said.
‘When do you imagine they might be going to Germany?’ she asked. ‘Next door.’
‘A month. Two? I’ll just pop upstairs and see him.’
'It’s those gloves you want to see,’ said Ellen.
'They can’t hurt. Take my word.’
He took the torch and, in stockinged feet, stepped silently up the twisting little staircase.
Ellen was drawn to the window by a line of light that had appeared in the crack between the curtains. She looked out. The sky had cleared. By stooping down and craning her neck she could see the moon, full, gleaming, fixed. The small well of the yard was so light you could have read a book. The moonlight lent quaintness to the crush of damp hovels. Ellen imagined the town asleep under the moon, and the country around, from the sea to the mountains, basking in its radiance.
She could see only one star, and although she knew there would be others, it was still legitimate, just about, to make a wish. As a girl, after the death of her mother, her uncle Leonard had tried to nurse her grief by telling her that her mother had turned into a star and she had gazed at the night sky earnestly again and again, hoping somehow to identify her mother’s star. A single star brought out a wish that her mother was happy. Later, as a young woman, she had found, with some distress, that she began to wish to see the father who had left them so soon after her birth. A father about whom to this day she had been told so little.
This night, she wished that Sam would find himself. There were good days here and there but he was still too often out of her reach. The war, years of growing apart, early intimacy ruptured, so much between them that was not to do with the two of them together. Perhaps Joe would help.
She remembered, ruefully, what her uncle Leonard had said when Sam turned back from emigrating to Australia: 'I would have put a bet on it,’ he said. ‘He could never leave the boy.’
CHAPTER THREE
The letter came with the second post just before the afternoon shift. Even though it was air-mail it felt like a wad. Sam put it in his kitbag. He visualised it there many times throughout the shifts which seemed to drag on. Back home there was supper and talk with Ellen. He saw it through as patiently as he could but Ellen needed no signposting and they opened up the sofa-bed earlier than usual. Only then did he mention that he had received a letter and would stay up for a while to read it. ‘From Alex,’ he said. Proudly, Ellen thought and felt a brush of unease as she watched Sam dip into the kitbag and bring out the letter with an expression that reminded her of Joe hoping he had struck gold at the lucky dip.
This first letter from Alex, the educated, the schoolteacher, who had yet been one of the private soldiers under Corporal Richardson in Burma, ought to be welcomed. Sam had told her enough for her to appreciate that it was Alex who had unlocked Sam’s paralysis, literally pushed him off the train, denied himself the companion to Australia, yet the letter unsettled her.
She undressed rapidly, pulled on her nightdress, took the Woman’s Illustrated and whipped into the cold sofa-bed, propped up on an elbow, facing the space Sam would occupy soon.
He read the back. ‘Alex Metcalfe. Bradfield Park. Sydney. Australia.’ So he had taken to ‘Alex’ in public: it had always been Alexander. Selecting the smaller blade in his pocket knife, he slit the blue paper.
Dear Sam,
Here in the Boondocks, a man could go round the bend like poor old Jackie. So please excuse the scrawl and if I’m just droning on you can always skip. I’m trying to keep cool in a dusty corrugated-iron hut on stilts out here on the edge of the Bush with the sun melting the tarmac and a pack of wild Irish kids outside playing hell or some other game. And you can soon lose your affection for screeching cockatoos. I’ve just reread this. I’m in a foul temper. I’ll stop.
Later
It’s cooler now and so am I! Coming to Australia and not being able to cope with the heat is rather bad planning. Don’t you agree?
Sam could hear Alex asking that question. He had loved the feeling of engagement in his mind when Alex rather daintily flicked his cigarette, looked into the mid-distance and began to talk in a way that Sam ached to learn.
In the north of England we rush out and worship each measly ray of sunshine as if, secretly, we were Aztecs. It’s always seemed to me that civilisations which worshipped the sun were eminently sensible, even though it provoked them to barbarities. But we in the sunless north of Europe could hand out lessons in barbarities, couldn’t we? In Wigton, the sun was rarer than a miracle - bound to happen once or twice a year, but no one knew when. No respecter of bank holidays or school holidays or even summer. Here the sun just pours down every day. It glazes the sky. On my way to the train I see men in white singlets working on their own houses and they are so tanned that the skin has a purple sheen on it. It’s like Josie’s chip shop out here: ‘Frying Tonight’. Perhaps it will warm through our rather cold manner.
Something has to. They don’t like the Poms here. Even Poms of a few years’ residence seem to feel free to despise new Poms. You have to stand up to it. I suppose they see us as imperialists and colonists, which is quite funny considering that almost everyone on the ship out here was one of those who have every right to consider themselves ground under the heel of the ruling imperialists back in England. Imperialism is first learned at home - don’t you agree?
Sam put the letter aside and lit up a cigarette. Alex’s voice was so clear. He could see them together in Burma: in a clearing on a safe night, or at a time stolen from the war. Alex would always come up with th
ose questions. Did he agree? What did he think? What was his view? And Sam, feeling inferior to his friend in knowledge and the manipulation of knowledge, would attempt to take him on. 'Imperialism is first learned at home.’ Is it?
He recalled that some of the Labour Party lads on the ship from India had given lectures and talks and some of what had been said must be relevant to this. He scratched behind the screens of his memory but he could not reassemble it with enough conviction. It was not difficult to understand what Alex meant: it rarely was. The problem was to find enough evidence for himself. You could not call the Royal Family imperialists. Or the forces - he knew that; and Sam was reluctant to apply the word to the Houses of Parliament. Besides, in his dictionary, it was not a bad word. Yet these Australians, according to Alex, the very men whose matiness and sense of equality had attracted him to them, were throwing it at the English as an accusation. Why was that? He concentrated but he could not enlist any further thoughts. He read on and smiled. Alex had addressed his own question.
You could of course say that there’s not much wrong with imperialism. Our sort, anyway. Not as bad as the other ‘isms’ that have caused such mayhem over the last few decades. Think of them. All disastrous. Most systems are strictly for the birds. How can any system take account of variety and individuals? It’s bound to repress all that. At least we’re stuck with the least worst system. Did Churchill say that about democracy after the last election? Anyway. Imperialism may have had its day but it’s a bit rich to use it as a curse, say I.
You would have enjoyed the trip out. To tell you the truth, old man, I missed you a bit. I didn’t seem to click with anybody. Pleasant enough bunch. I met two lads who had been in Burma but none of us wanted to talk about it - except for the weather! One of them was still obsessed by the Burmese girls who sold the cigars. Nobody I really fancied, though. Ships can be suffocating. I used the ship’s library as a get-out. Talking about imperialism, I rediscovered Kipling. He is fantastic! I really got stuck into the old boy. I’ll look out for a selection of his poems and send it over. An imperial gift! I would have enjoyed having you there. I enjoyed our talks a lot. Out there, I relied on them more than I realised.
