A Son of War

by Melvyn Bragg

  Then, relief, even joy, as about half a dozen turnips flew over the hedge and he had to dodge them. Speed and the others crashed through the hedge and they scooped them up and hared back the way they had come. Speed stopped them before the tip.

  ‘Hide them,’ he ordered.

  The boys stuffed the turnips up their jackets or jumpers and scuttled pregnantly past the unseen pigeon men on the tip.

  Speed pointed to a straggle of pine trees, last of a handsome plantation on the estate.

  They settled in the middle of the bare copse.

  ‘Who’s got a knife?’

  Joe hurried to oblige but as he wriggled his hand under his coat and his jacket and into his trouser pocket he felt the familiar clag of his number two sticking to the inside of his pants. They weren’t his best pants or his school pants. They were his worst, two years’ ago school pants, the pants he only played in. But he knew that he was still supposed to keep them clean and he was ashamed.

  Speed opened the bigger blade after wiping the dirt off the turnip with the sleeve he wiped his nose on. He peeled it, clumsily but well enough. Then he hacked off four chunks. They ate, biting hard.

  ‘Better than goodies,’ Speed said, whose ration of sweets was rarely cashed in.

  He ate from hunger.

  The other two munched away.

  To Joe, every bite was a complication. He loved being part of the gang. Now it was done and the farmer had not come and the dog had not savaged him and the policeman had not arrested him and told his mammy and daddy, he felt proud of himself. It had been a real raid. He himself had not done the stealing. Keeping lookout was different. He tried to keep up with Speed’s turnip consumption and pushed his right eye into a squint.

  By the fourth turnip they were beaten.

  Speed looked at those uneaten.

  ‘Bury them.’

  He got on his knees and tried to dig into the ground. No yield. No chance. He stood up and hacked with his feet, but the worn-out plimsolls were useless. The other three looked on, colder now after their seated feast, though not as cold as Speed whose bluing hands and taut chilled face looked painful.

  ‘We can’t leave them like this,’ he said, ‘they’ll be swiped.’

  He walked slowly towards the edge of the copse, stopped and raised his hand. The gang arrived, with the turnips. There was a dent in the ground. The turnips just about fitted in and Speed covered them with grass.

  ‘We can have another feed tomorrow,’ he said.

  Sunday! Joe thought. He would not be let out in his playing things on a Sunday, and besides, eating stolen turnips on a Sunday would be even worse. But he said nothing. They cantered back into the town, rather more slowly, stomachs tight.

  As the evening drew on, Joe’s stomach began to hurt. He merely pecked at his tea. He would not have a slice of bread and jam before he went to bed. He tried not to groan.

  Yet he insisted on going upstairs alone - which Sam had encouraged him to do although Ellen had no conscience about going up with him when, as tonight, Sam was not in the house. But he needed to take off his pants carefully and fold them so that his mammy would not see. He had scrubbed and scrubbed them in the lavatory with the squares of paper from the News Chronicle but there was still a noticeable stain, a thin veneer, hardening. He did not want to be called ‘cacky pants’. He was sure she knew but was just not saying, just as she knew about the turnips. ‘Have you been eating anything else?’ she said. And when he said no, ‘What have you been eating?’ she said. Nothing. So he lied as well. Joe believed that his mother had X-ray eyes when it came to him. But he was grateful that she said nothing more. He had sworn to himself he would never do it again. His stomach felt almost detached from the rest of him, a tight little fist inside there, a swelling football, trapped in there. His sleep was uneasy. They were after him.

  A few days later, the tale of the raid trickled back to Sam and Ellen. One of the other boys had been sick and the evidence on the lino had been unmistakable. Sam was amused, even pleased, and the fact that it brought him out of himself for a while encouraged Ellen to let it pass, although stealing of whatever kind was a slippery slope and the wrong gang could get you into bad trouble. Joe was growing bolder, less careful, she thought, to seek his father’s approval and it coarsened the nature she alone had nurtured for almost seven years.

  Miss Snaith opened the door in the side alley that led off High Street and took them into the house behind the shop. Miss Snaith was in the shop itself. Ellen and a scrubbed, subdued Joe were pointed upstairs to Miss Snaith’s piano room.

  Ellen was not the only one in the town to find particular satisfaction in the three Misses Snaith. Wigton was rather proud of them. One of them had the business head and ran the clock and jewellery shop established by their father, another kept house and sang beautifully in the choir and was often called on for solos at social gatherings, and the oldest, to whose domain Ellen and Joe ascended on thick carpet - Ellen hushed by the glimpse of paintings on walls and good furniture, Joe fearing the worst after the cleansing and combing he had been subjected to - was the piano teacher.

  ‘Come in.’

  Ellen’s knock had been on a half-open door. The first Miss Snaith had said, ‘Go right in, Ellen, she’s expecting you.’ Ellen was compelled to knock.

  The piano teacher, like her sisters, was short and thin with a briskness that belied a lifelong asthmatic condition. Her face was pale but not sickly. Her hair bandaged her head in a thick grey plait. Spectacles swung across her chest, hanging on some sort of cord Ellen had never seen before. She wore a heavy tweed skirt and a big cardigan even though one bar of the electric fire was on. Like her sisters, she had faded blue eyes and a smile that made you smile back.

  ‘I’ve seen him in church,’ she said. ‘Do you like the choir?’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘The choir is a good grounding.’

  She noticed that Joe was glancing at the large model ship that filled the broad marble mantelpiece. ‘All boys want to know about the ship,’ she said to Ellen. ‘Father made it. Every bit of it. He could make anything. He was such a wonderful man. We do miss him so.’

  Ellen was almost winded by the force of passion that came so unexpectedly from the dry-looking little body before her.

  ‘It’s HMS Cumberland' she said to Joe. ‘Father worked from photographs but every detail is just so. And you can lift out the upper deck. See. All those little rooms and the furniture. We helped him with the furniture. And these hammocks. All from linen handkerchiefs. There was nothing he couldn’t do. He was in the choir just like you. What a beautiful light tenor voice. People commented. Such a sweet sound. I’ve never heard a man’s voice as sweet.’

  It was so personal, the way she talked, such private feelings that Ellen almost blushed to hear it, so directly from the heart.

  ‘Sit over there, Ellen.’ She pointed to a chaise-longue laden with elaborately embroidered cushions. ‘And you sit here, Joe. On this piano stool.’

  Joe hoisted himself on to it, his feet, annoyingly, not reaching the floor. He wished he were as tall as Speed. He would not tell Speed about this.

  ‘What can you see directly in front of you?’

  ‘A book, miss.’

  ‘What sort of book?’

  ‘A music book, miss?’

  ‘Do you know what those things are called?’

  ‘Yes, miss.’ He looked at her. Go on, said her expression. ‘Minims, crotchets, quavers …’

  ‘You see what I mean about the choir,’ said Miss Snaith to Ellen, who sat uncomfortably on the edge of the chaise-longue, not wanting to disturb the display of cushions. ‘Now look down, Joe. You find the letter C stuck on one of the white keys. Put your right thumb on it. No. Harder. Make a sound. Good. That is called middle C, Joe, and that’s where everything starts from. Again. Good. What is it?’

  ‘Middle C, miss.’

  ‘Put the next finger on the next note. That is D. And the next. Harder. That one
is E. The next one? F. Now. Here’s a peculiar thing. You push your thumb under those two fingers to get to that F. It seems a little bit silly now but it has a purpose. Watch me. Now you try. Just push it underneath. That’s it. Now you see you have all four fingers left to take you to the top of the ladder. To top C. Up you go. But you go by way of A and B. They didn’t think about children when they invented the piano, did they, Joe? Let’s try again. These are called scales. You’ll do a lot of scales. You should do them every day. Like your teeth. Now I’ll do it alongside you, down here...'

  One and threepence a lesson was affordable, Ellen thought. The clincher had come when her aunt Grace had said that Joe could practise on the piano in her drawing room. It would be good for the piano, to be used, she said. It would be good to see Joe again on a regular basis, too, she confessed. Both Leonard and herself and Mr Kneale missed him, for though Ellen popped in and out - giving her aunt a day’s cleaning a week and doing the washing for both of them on the Monday, Joe’s visits had dried up since his increasing involvement with the Water Street gang and the other gangs he was building up at school and the choir.

  Ellen had the one and three ready in the corner of her handkerchief.

  When the lesson was over, she unwrapped it.

  ‘No, no, Ellen. I never charge for the first lesson. This is just a little try-out for both of us. Joe must think it over for himself.’ She smiled. T think he has the makings.’ She picked up a jar of boiled sweets from a side table and held it out to Ellen, who refused, and then to Joe, who checked with his mother and took one.

  ‘Thank you, miss.’

  ‘You’re welcome, Joe.’

  They went to the door and across the small landing Ellen saw Iris Miller’s girl sitting on a bare chair, a brown music bag neat across her school skirt. So school wear was permitted, it need not be the Sunday suit, and she would have to find a music case.

  Downstairs, Miss Snaith was waiting for them. She wore a plum- coloured overcoat, a scarf and a hat. ‘I expect you would like to see inside a grandfather clock. Boys like seeing the workings,’ she said to Joe, and took him into the shop. Ellen followed. She had only twice been in the shop - when she took to be mended and later collected a fine brooch-watch belonging to her uncle Leonard’s mother and given to her aunt Grace.

  The room chirruped with the individual tickings of a dozen clocks. They made a lovely tantalising sound, Ellen thought, a tune of their own.

  ‘This was Father’s best,’ said Miss Snaith, as she opened the beautifully polished oak door on a long-case clock. ‘He even painted the face. He could do anything at all. But clockmaking - that was his pride and joy. Mr Telford said he was the best pupil ever he had and Mr Telford was a great clockmaker in his day. Wigton is very famous for its clocks, I’m sure you know that, Ellen. Father called it the Tick-Tock Town - wasn’t that marvellous? Wigton made clocks for hundreds of years, Joe. Here’s a clock by Mr Sanderson of Wigton - you see his name on the brass face, that’s what it says with the S as an F. Seventeen hundred and twenty. Father said this was “beauty in simplicity”. Those were his words. You can’t beat it, he said. He was going to write about the Wigton clocks. And what a book it would have been, wouldn’t it, Joe?’

  Joe gaped at the weights and was allowed to touch their cold pocked lead: Miss Snaith held his hand to a chain and he wound up a Simpson thirty-hour clock. She pointed out a Peet clock with a sportsman on the face whose gun went up and down with the ticking and tocking and he admired the phases of the moon on a Sill clock -all made and painted and carved and engineered by Wigton men over the centuries, said Miss Smith, probably ‘culminating in Father’ whose prize contribution in that shop display was a small graceful wall clock, unequivocally admired by Ellen, low down Joe’s list. The big clocks were for him.

  ‘Your uncle Leonard as a young man was quite a favourite with Father,’ Miss Snaith said, ‘because of the council connection. That’s why we’ve always kept a special eye on you, Ellen.’

  Ellen felt rather blessed. She had always been warmly greeted by the sisters when they passed her on their walks in the town. But ‘special eye’ … She was touched.

  Miss Snaith took advantage of Joe’s being on the other side of the shop and out of hearing. ‘Did Fanny say the boy “had the makings”?’ she whispered, her pale eyes staring.

  ‘Yes,’ Ellen whispered in echo voice. ‘That’s what she said.’

  ‘Then he’ll do,’ said Miss Snaith. ‘Fanny’s never wrong. Father always swore she had the ear.’

  Ellen was unexpectedly pierced by this final ‘Father’. The word had been given such warmth and passion by both sisters. To have had such a father, she thought. To have had a father. It rarely got to her. She turned and pinched her nose to check the prickling behind her eyes.

  ‘Would you like to learn the piano, then?’ Ellen asked the question as soon as they got back on to High Street.

  She had made up her mind even before the ‘test’ but she followed what Miss Snaith had said about Joe thinking it over for himself. Joe was fully aware of what he had to do and, besides, he had liked the sounds of the notes that played when he pressed the keys. So he nodded and Ellen squeezed his hand as they hurried back along the midwinter streets acknowledging everyone they met.

  ‘So,’ said Sam later, as all three sat around the fire, Joe reading his comic, Ellen knitting mittens for Speed at Joe’s pleading, Sam staring at the flames, ‘so we’re going to learn the pi-a-no, are we?’

  Joe glanced up, alert. Looked from one to the other. Saw them looking steadily at each other. But they were not angry. He always knew when they were angry. So. It was all right.

  ‘He starts on Tuesday,’ said Ellen.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Sam all but marched Joe down the street. Partly to beat the weather. Partly, though, because he liked to push the boy now and then and enjoyed the child’s determination to meet the challenge. After trying to match the length of his father’s step, Joe had fallen into unsatisfactory syncopation. But he squared his shoulders and mimicked his father’s bearing. One or two people noticed and remarked, ‘Like his dad, now,’ and Joe felt proud. Already around the town he was called ‘Sam’s lad’ by the older men, although grown-up women still called him ‘Ellen’s boy’.

  Sam’s copper hair was still army short with a touch of Brylcreem to keep every follicle in formation. Joe’s copper was beginning to lose the deep hue and was becoming merely ginger, even rather brown in places. But the blue eyes were father and son.

  ‘Fine lad,’ said Henry Allen, the bookmaker, who came across the street to walk with them. Sam took the compliment. Joe pretended to ignore it but felt a tickle of pleasure shimmer through him.

  ‘What brings you out?’

  ‘Good business practice, Sam. Something that has to be learned.’

  Henry’s sallow face was blank white with cold save for the redness of his nose. He was wrapped up for a Russian winter.

  ‘These landlords, you see, Sam, they do me a favour when racing’s on. Collect the bets. Or let Tommy’ - his runner - ‘come in and collect them. All definitely illegal, Sam. Outside the law and an offence. You can come to the bookmaker’s office but the bookmaker’s office can’t come to you. Sorry business, Sam. Law made to be broken. So when the racing’s off, I make a point of going into the pub, buying a round or two. Good business practice.’

  He coughed, a dry scratchy cough that felt sore just to listen to it.

  ‘Stomach bad enough. Ulcers forewarned. Chest joining in,’ he said, and they had to stop while he coughed it out.

  They were near Market Hill, early Saturday afternoon, enough people for it to be embarrassing. Henry walked to the front of the big house owned by the manager of the Lion and Lamb and coughed into the wall. Sam and Joe waited.

  He came back, watery-eyed. ‘Terrible thing,’ he said, ‘bad health.’ He diverted matters to Joe. ‘You look after your health. What’s he going to be, Sam?’

  ‘Tell h
im.’

  ‘World champion,’ said Joe, ‘or,’ and this came, new, from nowhere, ‘have a band.’

  Both men laughed at the innocent unreality of it and Joe knew he had pleased his father. He had to. And in that moment he believed what he said.

  ‘What they come out with,’ said Harry. He excavated the layers of his clothing, finally found his money pocket and fingered through the change until he found a sixpence. ‘Don’t spend it all at once.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Allen.’

  ‘See you, Sam. Frost’s got all the courses now. Not a horse moving in all the land.’

  The bookmaker peeled off to continue his good business practice in the Blackamoor Inn. Sam and Joe swung on to the crest of Market Hill and made for the house in which Ellen and Joe had taken refuge during his war years. Joe still treated it as a home. Sam rarely came to it without remembering the man who was himself, who, less than a year ago, after the eternity of the slow return from Burma, had bounded up the steps on a mild morning to reclaim his wife and child and past.

  This time he went in by the back door. Joe had already darted ahead and the door was ajar. Just as Leonard and Grace had been as parents to Ellen, so they had been as grandparents to Joe and he took all the leeway they gave him.

  Sam had picked the time carefully so that he could have a quiet talk with Leonard, who was as near as he got to a confidant in Wigton.

  Grace had made them a pot of tea. She had softened towards Sam since his second return but Sam knew that it was because she thought he was weak for not going to Australia. She had been looking forward to having Ellen back in her house, skivvying (as Sam had cruelly put it to Ellen’s distress), and Joe as the plaything. But the piano had brought Joe back and Ellen was grateful once again to the magnificently coiffed, deep-bosomed Grace, lady of this castle of a house on the hill. Now, superior in resolution to a man she had always rather feared, Grace felt well compensated. Sam tried to block it out. Of those few who had joshed him about that damned turning back at Carlisle station, only Grace had got under his skin. He was extra polite to her. She spotted that, and she enjoyed that, too.