A Son of War

by Melvyn Bragg

  Sam wished Alex had not written that. A sense of loss hit his solar plexus. He lit another cigarette from the stub of the one he was smoking. His hands were steady: it was his mind that was trembling. What if he had made the wrong decision? What if his reasons and his painstaking progress to the train that would have taken him on the first leg to Australia, to a new start … Why had Alex urged, even pushed him off? Why had he let him?

  He sucked deeply on the strong cigarette.

  It had been a good decision, he told himself. His return from the war had been like an order. The second time, however close a shave, was of his own will. He had come back, and finally, to Ellen and Joe.

  But the doubt he had repressed so successfully now oozed its poison. Was that the real truth of it? Did he not want to be out there, in the purpling sun, with Alex, starting a life freed from the ball and chain of his past? What was there for him in Wigton but to do this and this and no more? To know his place, his limits, his limitations, his predestined mediocrity, his inevitable failure to be at the full stretch of himself. Those cramping chains, he believed, would have melted away under the sun. And he had turned back and turned his back on it. Ellen and Joe could always have followed. They would have followed. Surely.

  The force of this loss (this mistake?), which came like an instant onrush of retrospective insight and regret and pain, rattled him and but for the demand of the rest of the letter he would have gone outside, cold though it was, to shake it off.

  He inhaled even more deeply so that the smoke swelled out his lungs. He glanced around at Ellen. The magazine had fallen out of her hands. She was dead to the world.

  He had taken a path and he had to stick to it, he told himself. No retreat. Regrets were weak. You got stuck in.

  It can be both unnerving and exhilarating to know that most of us are stranded here every bit as much as the early convicts. They could not return until their sentence was up. We are here until that unimaginable day when we’ll have saved enough to pay the full passage back. By which time we’ll all be good Aussies saying ‘Beaut’ and ‘See you this arvo’ and we’ll look down on the next shipload of Poms.

  One thing that happened on the ship - I just want to tell you. None of us will forget the children the Japs had bayoneted and tied to trees with barbed wire. You made us bury them. Even though we should have pressed on. I never admired you more - even the time you saved my stupid life. You never referred to it.

  That scene come back to haunt me. There were dozens of children on the ship. Some of the men rigged up a sort of gym-playground with ropes and you would see them hanging there - semi-naked like the little Burmese kids. I had nightmares for days.

  The source of one of Sam’s own most violent and deeply planted nightmares found a perfectly matching echo on the thin blue paper. He felt a bond closer than kinship fly from the room over oceans and continents to Alex in his lonely dusty lodgings many thousand miles away. Alex was right. He never had referred to it, not to Alex, not to Ellen. Like so much else in the year since his return, his only defence against his past had been to use all his might to force the war out of his mind. It was some time before he could read on.

  But in the very next sentence Alex switched mood, just like that, just as he always had done.

  The refresher course for teachers is well organised and I'll be in harness soon enough. Meanwhile I am studying the inhabitants - out of interest and for survival The deadly spiders I have seen so far include the redback, a tiny little devil said to wait in ambush everywhere; then there’s the trapdoor spider and the funnel web spider which is reported to scare the business out of you. There’s the famous hairy tarantula but I can’t say we’ve been introduced yet. As serum is not readily available, you are advised to cut a cross on the skin with your knife or a razor blade and suck and spit like the boyos at the Wigton Fountain. You want snakes, Sam? Only carpet snakes and vipers so far. The rules are worse than the army. Never put on shoes or socks or anything without shaking; never put hands in crevices or under surfaces; yell and make a noise at all snakes. You, we were told in a ship’s lecture, are bigger than they are, which is not a great deal of help!

  Despite this, I’m thinking of becoming a naturalist. Honestly. I’ve been into the bush a couple of times - perhaps I got a taste for that in Burma - and found a river and camped there, eaten in the open, felt the magic and the moods of the place. I was never very good at feelings about dear old Cumberland. No romance. Though I have to confess that when I got hold of the last weekly edition of the Manchester Guardian and saw a photograph of a dry-stone wall on the front page (in Yorkshire but no matter) I did - for the first and I trust the only time - feel homesick. But the Aborigines have their own Dreamworlds - there’s a lot to find out - and, in the bush, I hope to begin to understand the Dreamworlds.

  The strangeness and newness out here, Sam! The lyre birds with their amazing tails, even the kookaburras, although they are ugly little beggars, and the scent of the frangipani -something like a philadelphus - in the evenings. The bottle brush, as it sounds, and huge gum trees, giving out great golden globules of resin when you nick them with a knife, and the colossal distances that make you think -1 don’t know why this should be - that everything is possible.

  There were a few more sentences, best wishes to Ellen and Joe and to poor Jackie and the others from the section if he ever bumped into them but the phrase ‘everything is possible’ all but clouded them out. And the final nail. ‘You’d have loved it, Sam. All the best. Yours truly, Alex. P.S. I wish I’d brought the bush hat.’

  Sam read it again, rapidly this time, then folded it with care. It would take some answering.

  Perhaps he could send Alex his own bush hat.

  He smoked a final cigarette out in the yard. The red tip was all the light. There was a spatter of hail. The wireless reported practically Arctic conditions everywhere else in the country. So far the Northwest had been lucky but it was still bitter. Sam let the cold seize him and numb him.

  He had told Ellen she could read the letter. She took her time and waited until he was down at the factory.

  Like Sam she read it thoughtfully, stopping now and then to reflect or dream a little. Like Sam, she read it twice. Like Sam, she brooded on it, fully realising for the first time the narrowness of the victory and the strength of the enemy.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Ellen walked up King Street, head bent into the punishing wind, one gloved hand clutching the collar of her coat to keep it closed around her throat. They were told on the wireless their part of the country was getting off lightly.

  It was past midday and the girls had come out of the clothing factory in which Ellen herself had worked before her marriage. They scattered into the web of lanes and yards, sucked from the streets for their dinner-break. There were few men other than the dole brigade, propping up the Vic and the Vaults, congregated at the mouth of Meeting House Lane, leaning against the railings of the George Moore Memorial Monument, better known as the Fountain, from where they chronicled the daily history of their town in pedagogic detail. Everybody knew Ellen. Most greeted her, no hello, how do? how are you? just plain, even gruff, ‘Ellen’ and a nod. Her name chimed her up the street.

  There was a queue outside the Co-op and normally she would have enquired and almost certainly joined it but time was tight between the morning cleaning job and the afternoon work in the chemist’s shop and she had a mission.

  She forced herself not to glance into the cobbled yard where the house of her dreams stood, still empty and for ever out of her reach. It was just too bad. That was that. ‘Ellen’, ‘Ellen’, ‘Ellen’ as she ran the gauntlet between the Fountain and the King’s Arms. She wondered they had not turned to stone, the men, in the deep cold of the day. Every single one, she smiled, had their hands in their pockets. Not one pair of gloves between the lot of them. ‘Ellen’. ‘Ellen’. She liked their knowing her that well.

  Ellen had always admired West Street. There was something grand
about it - the pillars outside the Mechanics’ Institute and the columned doorways of the houses opposite. And just beyond, the sandstone simplicity of the Quaker Meeting House. Ellen had been at school with some of the Quakers and, privately, when she took a view of the religious sects in the town - the Roman Catholics with their nunnery at St Cuthbert’s down the East End, the Primitive Methodists in New Street next to the police station, the Salvation Mission between the factory and Ivinson’s stables in Station Road, the Congregationalists in Water Street beside the pig auction, the Methodists in Southend next to the girls’ grammar school, the Salvation Army in Meeting House Lane right down at the bottom, the Plymouth Brethren in George Street up some steps, the Adventists next to the river Wiza, in Union Street, and beside the ancient market-place, still used seven hundred years on, the centrepiece, her own church St Mary’s, C. of E., where she had sent Joe to be in the choir in response to a call for trebles - when she considered all these competing houses of God, interpreting His word to the Wigton five thousand in so many different ways, not only dominating Sunday but colonising every day of the week with morning communions and evening youth clubs, seasonal rummage sales, whist drives, dances, outings, choirs, football teams, flower arrangements, Bible classes -when everything was accounted for, Ellen secretly plumped for the Quakers. She had been in the building once only when Noreen Morrison had broken her arm and they were stuck for someone to clean. Mrs Johnston, whose house she did twice a week, was a Quaker and asked Ellen for a favour.

  She walked past it swiftly, on her way west, past the high wall of Wigton Hall, a place beyond dreams, no more than a peep over a wall, but the memory of the Quaker Meeting House stayed with her. Something about the recollection was tender. As she went down the hill from Wigton Hall, past Ma Powell’s field, which was the shortcut they used to take (but only when feeling bold) to get to the park, she visualised that Quaker cleaning. Such a silence in the room. As if it had been worked up, over the years, Ellen thought, and preserved, sealed in this place, its own private quiet. But no altar. She had looked everywhere - even opened cupboards. No altar. No cross. Just chairs. Not even hassocks to kneel on or cushions to soften the hard wood. Plain chairs. Books, a few books. There was little to clean.

  Noreen had come in, for company, arm heavily strapped in a white sling. She explained that at a Quaker meeting people simply sat there and spoke ‘when the spirit moved them’. She told Ellen a little about their history and what an important part Cumberland had played in it and referred to Philadelphia and Pacifism and Quaker porridge oats, but it was ‘when the spirit moved them’ that had captured Ellen’s imagination.

  There were fields which acted like a moat, between Wigton Hall and the next cluster of houses known as Western Bank. The old town had ended. Ellen passed the Famous Copper Beech at the bottom of Ma Powell’s field, which she had looked up to every time she sped by on her way to the park. The park had been the daily destination in school holidays and the Show Fields across the way presented the lure of the circus that came every autumn and then camped down for a couple of months - all familiar, familiar as the Fountain and just as ‘Wigton’, yet Ellen felt outside the walls of her town. As a girl she would scurry back up the hill from the park in the evenings as if afraid invisible gates would be closed against her.

  The wind grew fiercer. On Western Bank she arrived at the settlement of houses built before the war. Sam and herself could have had one for ten pounds down and a just affordable rent but they had opted for rooms that had been dreadful. Yet it turned out for the best. When Sam joined up, Ellen had moved back into her aunt and uncle’s large semi-guesthouse where she had spent most of her childhood - a house in the heart of the old town. She had been happy there. And safe, with Joe.

  Now on the last lap of her mission, the exposed part of her face cemented in cold, she went past unattainable detached houses: the Miss Moffats’, one of whom had taught her at school and was now teaching Joe; Mr Farrell's - he who owned the sawmill and had taken a fancy to Sam before the war, offered him a job she wished he had taken because there was no shift work; Glen Ritson’s newly-built house - he was her age, the solicitor’s son who had been sent away to public school and spent four years in a prisoner-of-war camp after having been shot down in a bombing raid, a fine big man, Ellen thought, always pleasant; and on past houses less grand but no less desirable to Ellen, until she came to a gate.

  She looked through it at the field. In the foreground, a small herd of Jerseys clustered around some recently dumped hay. In the distance, machinery, a hut and a scattering of men indicated that work was starting up. This would be the next big council estate. Brindlefield, up Southend, which had already taken some of the irredeemably overcrowded Water Street residents, was already spoken for; the lists for Kirkland, to the east of the town, were reported to be full although her uncle Leonard, with his clerking and council contacts, had hinted that it was still a possibility; but this, to the west, was a clean start.

  Ellen stared at it. She wanted to be attracted to it. She wanted something to happen as she looked at that field. Something which said, ‘Come and live here: it’ll be fine. It’s almost a mile from the town but the walk is one you like and you’ve done it hundreds of times. You can always bike it. Put a basket on the front. There’ll be other young families here. You’ll still go to the same shops up in Wigton, see the same faces, be part of the same town.’ But as the wind buffeted her and she felt the cold gripping her feet, she could not shake off, however hard she tried, a persistent fear that the burrowing, intense, common, close life and stories and net of the town would no longer quite belong to her. Even in prospect she already missed them.

  Ellen shook her head in exasperation. After all that Sam had been through - and millions of others - how could she be so feeble? This bond to the old town had already put her marriage at risk, a risk of which Alex’s letter had again made her aware.

  She stamped warmth back into her feet and made up her mind for this wintry field. They would live at the very edge of the town. She would beat down the childish fear. It had almost been a curse.

  She turned and hurried away. The wind was behind her now and suddenly she laughed aloud as it pushed into her back and almost made her stumble. She had been thinking ‘as the spirit moved her’.

  The new estate would be called Greenacres.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘I know where there’s some turnips,’ said Speed.

  There were two others and Joe, by a good margin the youngest. The boys stood shivering in the middle of Water Street, cow and horse dung frozen on the ground, nothing moving in the auctions mid-Saturday afternoon.

  ‘They’re under a sheet,’ he continued. ‘Easy to swipe.’

  Speed was poorly dressed for the day. Ill-fitting hand-me-downs - vest, shirt, patched pullover, patched short trousers, short socks, old plimsolls. The two other boys were quite well wrapped up. Ellen had layered Joe like a mummy. Even a coat. Joe was vaguely uneasy because he wanted to be hard like Speed. But no one made fun of him.

  They set off at a trot, past the burnt-out tannery, past the lemonade factory and down a slit in a wall that led over a narrow early medieval bridge. Into the Lonnings where they cantered, like ponies, alongside the black iron railings that had fenced in the once great Highmoor Estate, along past the tip, taking care - Speed’s order - to hide their faces from any pigeon men on the go, until they were in real country and on the wrong side of the hedge of the targeted turnips.

  Along the way, Speed had freely given out intelligence about what they were up against: the farmer who had a stick as thick as a drainpipe and a dog as mad as a bat; the policeman who every now and then would take his bike along that particular path on the lookout; passers-by and other snoopers. Joe swallowed every word.

  The canter had put a sweat on him and, while Speed surveyed the territory, the sweating continued as he comprehended, fully, what was about to happen. This was stealing. His mammy would kill him for stealing. His
daddy would beat the living daylights out of him. According to church he would go into hell-fire. His hands moistened inside the gloves: his whole body dampened with fear under the well-belted navy raincoat. He wished he had not come. But he was in Speed’s gang.

  ‘You’re the lookout,’ Speed said to Joe. ‘You see anybody -whistle.’

  Joe nodded and swallowed. He liked whistling. He whistled a lot these days. But what sort of a whistle was this? Would ‘Bobby Shaftoe’ do?

  ‘We can get in here.’

  Speed had found a gap in the bare hawthorn hedge and he led the other two through it.

  They were away for so very long that Joe feared they had gone home by another way and left him. He looked from left to right constantly, left, right, then swiftly left again, then an even quicker flash back to the right, then right again just to fool them, then a bit longer left while the hairs crawled on his neck for fear of what was happening on the right but nothing was up on the right so he could go back to the left again and stare it out until he was fully satisfied that nobody was there and nobody was still there on the right and a slow panic began to burn low in his stomach and he sensed he might want the lavatory but how could he do it when nobody was around but somebody might come and it was hard to hide cacked pants although his mother never mentioned it, they must have taken off, or been captured and hauled into the police station, into the cells, back to the left, right, left, no farmer, no dog, no policeman … and right, left again …