A Son of War

by Melvyn Bragg

  Leonard opened with the offer of a cigarette. Both of them were on Capstan Full Strength. The semi-basement kitchen was an uncomfortable place for confidences but it was the best that could be found outside the luck of an empty snug in one of the pubs. And you could not always afford to drink. Grace was upstairs planted in her overseer’s chair in the window, chronicling the town as closely as the lads around the Fountain, relishing the sight of Joe, at the piano, doing his scales, getting on.

  Leonard wanted to talk politics. Over the past couple of months, he said, he had realised that although Mr Attlee was a gentleman and although there were one or two other gentlemen in the Cabinet - Mr Stafford Cripps came to mind - they were turning out to be no better than a bunch of Communists. He had woken up to the fact, he said, when all that ‘nationalise’ this and ‘nationalise’ that sank in. The big question nobody asked was - who was going to pay for it all? The answer was ‘Joe Soap’, at which point he would direct his right index finger towards his chest. It was a recipe for crippling the country, he said. If people got something for nothing, they would do nothing for it. That was the first law of nature.

  Sam enjoyed Leonard in full spate. He argued with him for the sake of it as much as for any difference of view. Joe would sometimes come in to listen when their voices rose and Grace would then declare that talking politics always led to trouble. Leonard was particularly inflamed this day by the continuing dock strike.

  ‘There’s food on those ships,’ said Leonard. ‘Rotting. People crying out for food. Kiddies starving. And they go on strike! Where’s all this “pulling together”? It’s needed just as much as in the war, Sam. These are selfish men. Brothers my backside! They’re holding the country to ransom. And we’re supposed to admire them because they are “the workers”. We’re all workers, Sam. Get the troops in.’

  ‘Shoot them?’

  ‘Some of them could do with it.’

  ‘Gaol them?’

  ‘Most certainly, the ring-leaders.’

  Sam took up the debate but his heart was not in it. There was no space in his mind for it, no energy there to fuel the enthusiasm needed. He went through his paces but still dominating his thoughts was the letter from Alex and the fallout from it. He was possessed by the fear that he had made the wrong decision and an irreversible decision. ‘Everything is possible’ went through his head like the call of the siren. He could be talking to Alex at this moment, not stuck in this semi-basement ding-dong that hardened and blunted all arguments but engaged in talk that led to unexpected openings and surprising advances. So as he sparred with the usually detached Leonard, whose poise was always attempting to be that of the gentleman, rather above it all, immune from it all, Sam bit on that letter like a fox in a trap gnawing at its leg.

  There seemed nothing he could do against the pull from the letter, from Alex, from that continent of possibilities in the southern hemisphere. It was an undercurrent, growing in strength, taking him out to sea however hard he tried to swim. It was a torment he could not understand and it felt like self-indulgence, which he could not tolerate.

  Sensing that Sam had not the heart for it, Leonard tailed off and they talked football. Mr Kneale came in as they were doing so - ‘Don’t mind me. Don’t let me interrupt’ - but they knew the schoolmaster had nothing to contribute to football and, politely, they let it peter out. Both of them glanced at the large parcel he had brought in with him but neither offered a comment. Sam preferred to say as little as possible to Mr Kneale these days. The history teacher and widower who had long been Grace’s prize ‘paying guest’ had pestered him about his experiences in Burma once too often.

  He had been assembling a book about the experiences of ordinary soldiers there, but although superficially willing, his sources - like Sam - soon dried up. It was just too hard. Sam had tried to make this clear without giving offence. To his relief, Mr Kneale had finally taken the hint.

  So Mr Kneale had begun to shift his centre of interest from the one campaign to the next war, the Third World War that all the signs told him was inevitable. It had the makings of an obsession. Sam had already seen Joe wide-eyed as this mild man who had been in paternal residence while Sam was in the army, and had become at the very least a mentor, had spoken of destruction, mass extinction, certain doom. Joe had been fearfully convinced.

  Sam had tried to laugh it away to protect his son and to exercise his own authority, but he could see the lad’s eyes flinch when Mr Kneale went into detail about the atom bomb. He described its ‘mushroom cloud’ - 'It was studying it as a photographer that turned the argument for me,’ he said, proud that his beloved hobby should play such a part. ‘That cloud, Joe, that cloud could be carried by the wind anywhere in the world and fall on our heads and give us the most hideous death. Hideous beyond understanding. And there will be more of these A-bombs as they call them - more and more and don’t think the communists won’t manufacture them and then how long will the Cold War so called stay cold? We can blow ourselves to smithereens and if we can, you take the word of a historian, we will. Men always use the weapons they invent. Sooner or later, the moment arrives and BANG!’

  Joe would dream about that.

  ‘I was glad of that bomb,’ Sam said. 'If it hadn’t been for that bomb the odds are we’d be out there yet, pushing the Japs back inch by inch with more killed than were ever destroyed by that one bomb. I was glad of it.’

  ‘Would you have wanted it to be dropped if you’d known it was so destructive?’

  ‘We talked about that.’ Alex, of course. ‘Maybe.’ Defiantly. ‘Very likely, yes.’

  ‘And if there had not been a bomb?’

  ‘We’d have slogged on, I suppose. For as long as it took.’

  Mr Kneale sensed the aggression and changed the subject to his friend the Reverend Rex Maiden who was leaving St Mary’s to take up a living in Northumberland.

  ‘It was the Reverend Maiden who brought proper standards of photography to Wigton,’ he said. ‘We were just amateurs before Rex. There’s not a photographer in Wigton doesn’t owe his skills to Rex Maiden.’

  Leonard and Sam had no answer to that. The silence was a good cue. The scales upstairs had stopped some time ago.

  He stood up. So did Mr Kneale, his almost unlined moon face set in an expression of kindliness.

  ‘This,’ he said, handing over the parcel well wrapped up in brown sugar paper, ‘is for you. For Joe, that is. Don’t open it,’ he said, though Sam had made no move to do so. 'It’s a music case, that’s all. It belonged to my sister - in Chester - I knew she would have no more use for it. My only anxiety was that she might have given it to the church rummage sale. But here it is - rather worn but extremely good leather and so I hope it will serve. It’s a pleasure to hear that piano played. Especially sitting where I am, at the top of the house. Distant music,’ He smiled, and handed over the parcel.

  ‘That’s very kind.’ Why did he hate getting such a present - needed, generous - from Mr Kneale - friendly, kind? What did that make him?

  'I believe you’ll find that Joe’s slipped out to play with his old friends,’ said Mr Kneale. ‘They were a good little team. It’s pleasant to see them together again after his piano practice. Just like the old days.’

  A jet of resentment soured Sam’s mood. He forced it back Mr Kneale was well-meaning but Sam could not shake off his jealousy of the schoolteacher’s closeness to Ellen and Joe during the years he had been away.

  ‘My sister played the piano beautifully,’ said Mr Kneale. ‘And then - a complete loss of interest. No rhyme or reason. None at all. We mustn’t let that happen to Joe.’ His benign, Pickwickian features furrowed anxiously.

  'I’ll be going then.’ Sam tucked the parcel under his arm. ‘Thanks again.’

  ‘Think nothing of it, Sam. A bright-eyed and bushy-tailed laddie like that deserves all the help we can muster.’

  Joe was nowhere to be seen on Market Hill. Sam hurried up the street with the brown parcel as if he were ca
rrying something he was ashamed of.

  ‘You get fourpence for every time you go and sixpence is knocked off every time you miss.’ Joe was explaining the payment of choir boys to Speed in order to lure him in. It would be a great thing to do another favour for Speed - the mittens had been well appreciated. Speed had said very little but Joe could tell, even though Speed had already lost one of them.

  ‘So,’ the smaller boy repeated carefully, as they stood outside the lavatory door which Joe had been using as a punch-bag for his boxing gloves, ‘fourpence for Thursday choir practice, fourpence for Sunday morning, fourpence for Sunday night, that’s a shilling a week and you get your pay every three months so that’s thirteen bob if you keep at it. And,' Joe’s monstrous fists biffed each other to emphasise the next point, ‘and there’s special pay for weddings and there’s a summer trip,’ Joe paused, tried to sound offhand and looked somewhere beyond Speed, ‘and you wear a black cassock - from your chin to your toes.’ Covers your clothes, the message smuggled through. ‘Thirteen bob.’

  Speed was inclined to believe him. ‘All that lolly? Just for singing?’

  ‘Just for singing. It’s easy,’ said his young acolyte. ‘You’ll know the hymns anyway.’

  Speed thought about it. Once a month his mother, Annie, marched her three sons down to St Cuthbert’s. She would have gone more often but the embarrassment about the poor state of their clothes was too hard to bear. She had to go sometimes to pray properly for her husband Jackie, still in hospital. The priest taxed her with this meagre attendance and listed the punishments in store but Annie was obstinate. She made the two older boys promise to go to confession every Saturday as she herself did when she thought the church would be empty. There was not a sign of religion in their painfully bare house and, unlike many of their fellow Roman Catholics in the overwhelmingly Protestant town, Annie rarely if ever referred to Blessed Mary or the Saints and sought no comfort from them.

  ‘I’ll have to ask,’ said Speed, and went home to wait for the right moment.

  Joe bashed the lavatory door a few more times, feeling rather lordly. To be able to do favours for Speed! Before choir practice two weeks ago he had been invited to a birthday party by Alan, another choirboy, who lived in the house over his father’s shop. There had been hundreds of sandwiches, Spam, jam, egg, sugar, fish paste! Six jelly babies each. And a slice of a Mars bar. Speed would have eaten more than anybody. He would have beaten the lot of them. They played blow football and pass-the-parcel and tiddlywinks. He could just see Speed at a party like that. He laid into the door one last time and went back into the yard and there she was.

  She needed no telling now. In truth, though he could not articulate this, Joe wished that Mary was not quite so open about it. He gave a shifty look around.

  In the dark bolted lavatory he took off his boxing gloves and by the time he had done that and found a safe place for them on the floor, Mary had taken up the opening position, bent over the toilet seat, skirt up, knickers down. Joe, almost shaking from the fear that someone would need to go right now, and as always baffled as to what he should or could actually do, stared and touched and smelled as tentatively as if he were an aesthete savouring a rose at dawn.

  They were not struck dead.

  When they were once again in the yard and Mary had done two full stand-ups, she announced, ‘We’re going away to live with my dad next Saturday.’

  Joe had a faint inkling of a terrible loss but next Saturday was far away.

  They played until his mammy came back and summoned him in for his tea. When he told her about Mary going away to live with her dad she said, ‘That’ll be nice for her, won’t it?’

  He went out after tea, in the twilight, to hear Jack McGee and his Mission Band at the end of Water Street singing hymns and calling on all sinners to repent and give up the sin of drink. Joe loved the music, especially the cornet and the big drum.

  Speed arrived and delivered the verdict on the choir at St Mary’s Anglican Church. ‘Mammy said God’d murder us if I joined your lot.’

  Joe was disappointed, but he nodded, as if he understood.

  Along the gas-lit streets they followed the Mission Band back to its home down Station Road, Speed shouting out, ‘Jack McGee, Jack McGee, he sold his wife for a cup of tea,’ as the deep winter darkness blanketed the town and people concentrated on keeping warm.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  After another week, Sam was fit to be tied. He was so restless in his own skin that there were moments when Ellen thought he was battling with the delayed emergence of some virulent disease caught in Burma. His temper was foul and the small downstairs room became a bear pit. Whatever Ellen and Joe said or did seemed to provoke him. He pushed away their most innocent overtures as if they had gone for his throat. Sam knew that he was behaving unfairly and badly and yet he was gripped by what he could neither overcome nor resist. He tried to stay out as much as he could but the weather was growing daily more dour and just too cold while pubs, with their obligation of public conversation, were intolerable.

  Joe felt that the anger streaming from his father was directed specifically at him. He scarcely dared move about the confined space, and crept like someone chained in a cell, cowed under the impenetrable burden of what he had done wrong, flinching in anticipation of the blow.

  Ellen bore it as long as she could. He had been uncomplaining since giving up his dream of Australia. It must have been hard for him. But Alex’s letter had detonated something he could not control. She watched it and at first she pitied him. In his eyes she saw the dumb torment of a beaten dog and this was not her Sam and yet it was.

  Go then, she thought she should say, just go, as you wanted to. We held you back. I thought it was me at first, more likely it was Joe. He made you turn. So, go.

  ‘Why don’t you go?’

  It was late. He had been sleeping less, going to bed later. This night she had decided to stay up with him. He was eating less, too, and in the gas-light he looked gaunt, pale skin tight on the cheekbones, lines chiselled down to the mouth, the eyes when he looked up from his dream in the fire feverish with questions he could neither ask nor answer.

  ‘We could save up again,’ she said.

  He shook his head, to dismiss her talk. She was being loving and helpful and yet she was just stirring her finger in the open sore. He could bear no reference to himself.

  lt’s no good,’ he said, eventually, bent forward in the chair, crouched in front of the embers as if yearning for a last lick of warmth.

  She had not seen him so low.

  He took a bus to Carlisle after the Saturday morning shift and made for the Tullie House library.

  He remembered that Alex had told him about schemes for recruiting teachers. One of the librarians brought him the 1944 pamphlet. He took it into the Reading Room inhabited by five old men - all wearing cloth caps and buttoned overcoats and scarves and one wearing gloves, all validated by their newspapers.

  There was a slight but undeniable lift of hope. He had once confessed to Alex that his ambition would have been to teach in a village school, given the opportunity. It had long been a shy dream, only the once confessed, but it was a true ambition.

  The pamphlet opened with the list of 'Information to be obtained regarding candidates: a. School or schools attended with dates and examinations passed.’

  From that opening sentence there arose immediate obstacles. Examinations passed? Two: one for the grammar school, another for a public school - a scholarship available only to Church of England village schools in Cumberland and Westmorland. His father had stamped out both. No money for uniforms and all the rest. Even when there was help on offer for one of the scholarships, he was adamant. There would be a catch in it and, besides, Sam was the eldest, the sooner he got out working the more help he would be. But those were not the examinations these people wanted. They wanted Higher certificates and college degrees. He knew that and he had always known it.

  ‘e. Information as
to teaching work undertaken in a civil capacity either professionally or voluntarily, or any other activity with young people.’

  Leading a section in the Forgotten Army? An activity with young people?

  There seemed a second chance in the next part.

  'In respect of candidates who are or have been in one of the Services during the War.’

  Particulars of service - information about aptitude - that should be OK. But the ‘do not walk on the grass’ sign came up again.

  ‘i. Particulars of any course of education followed while in the Services with, if possible, reports on the candidate’s work.

  ‘j. Information about any work carried out while in the Services as an Instructor or Teacher.’

  Nevertheless he read on until he hit the buffers. As he had anticipated.

  ‘We therefore recommend that the following should be accepted for interview.

  ‘a. Candidates who have passed an examination hitherto recognised for admission to a Training College.

  ‘b. Other candidates whose records as a whole furnish evidence of suitability, e.g. continued education, work as a leader or instructor in the forces or in civil life

  Would corporal in the Border Regiment in Burma be counted as ‘work of a leader’?

  He read the whole pamphlet so that he could always tell himself that he had done so.

  There was nothing in it for him.

  He sat back and took out a cigarette, struck a match.

  ‘No smoking allowed.’

  One of the old men. He looked frightened. As if it were he who would be kicked out.

  Sam returned the pamphlet, left the library and lit up on Castle Street. The castle itself looked every bit as a castle should, Sam thought, under the lowering dark grey sky, and his mind flicked back to the day of the reunion. It brought a smile to his face. How many of them had been arrested afterwards for disorderly behaviour? Just a bit of fun. Twenty shillings fine! A badge of honour, Alex had said, although he himself had been out of it.