A Son of War

by Melvyn Bragg

  After the reunion they had walked back past the cathedral as he was doing now and Alex had gone in to look at some feature, though which one Sam had forgotten. Staring about him, checking that no one from Wigton was there to report back, he bent his head and turned into the close and went into the cathedral for the first time in his life.

  It was a place full of greatness, he thought, but his affliction was that he did not have the means to discern why. He wandered around, tentatively, not knowing the worth or history of what he was looking at - he had not noticed the little table of guidebooks tucked behind the door. He wondered what Alex had wanted to see. The ceiling? That was magnificent, and he came across a mirror, half-way up the central aisle: when you looked in it you could see a close-up of the detailed ceiling work. The big window was probably a talking point, he thought, but it looked flat in the dull winter light. Alex would have explained it. He liked the choir stalls and when he sneaked close to them he saw the goblin and demon carving underneath the raised seats and admired that carving and the zest of it more than anything else in the cathedral.

  He was soon out. His visit had lasted no more than a few minutes. He felt that he had been dipped in something that ought to have done him good and refined him - but he had not been able to understand enough of it to feel that he had been altered as he ought to have been.

  He walked through the Lanes to the bus station. The Lanes reminded him of Water Street. He had become fond of what its detractors called ‘the gutter of Wigton’, because of the excrement left by the cattle and sheep and horses driven down the street from the auction to the railway station, but carrying another unmistakable meaning …

  It was a little village to itself, Water Street, shops and skills to call on, tinkers at one end - and squatters now - the fine Congregational church at the other end. Carlisle’s Lanes had the same kick about them. He felt more uplifted after walking through that ancient, rundown, notorious common crotch of Carlisle than he had in its crown, the cathedral. The absence of awe was a bonus for Sam. He began to relax.

  Annie was on the bus and Sam sat beside her. She would have been on her weekly visit to see Jackie in Garlands, the mental hospital a few miles the other side of Carlisle - two bus journeys for Annie and a weekly challenge to her resources that she never failed to meet. She nodded but wanted a moment or two more in her own company. He lit up and waited. There was not only Jackie to worry her: the three boys were growing wilder without their father and though Sam kept a fairly close eye on Speed and would go out of his way for the other two, Alistair, the eldest, had started to get himself into serious trouble. ‘Just once more and it’s Borstal,’ Annie had told him the previous week when he had gone to see her in her damp semi-basement ruin, the barest accommodation. There was little doubt that Alistair would ‘disturb the peace’ just once more. A big-boned fifteen-year-old, he was angry at all the world. Sam, when talking him down the once or twice he had been opportunely on hand, had picked up the indiscriminate and terrible fury that was just as likely to turn on Sam himself. It would not be constrained.

  And Jackie?

  ‘He’s looking better, I’ll give them that. He gets better feed than I could manage.’

  The bus was taking them out of the city now, on the winding road between the fields that led the eleven miles to Wigton. Annie looked out of the window, and though the bus was almost empty, she spoke softly. ‘He wants to come out, Sam. He keeps saying he wants to come out and I ask the nurse but she says it’s too early.’ She lowered her voice further. 'It breaks my heart, though, Sam, him asking me to get him out and when there’s nothing you can do where are you?’

  Her grief was reined-in but Sam knew her well and it got to him. He never failed to be impressed by Annie. With her plainest of looks, squat figure, lank hair held with a cheap clip, broad, tired, unmade-up face, borrowed coat, socks, and legs blue with cold, she was forever ignored and overlooked and that had been her lot. But she tried so hard to keep things together. Enduring. Suddenly Sam remembered Ian, his close friend in the war, who had sacrificed his own life for the sake of others including Sam himself. When he had told lan’s father of the true circumstances of lan’s violent, drawn-out, agonising death, the older man had been shaken but stood firm. Let it make its wound in him but he would endure it.

  When they reached Wigton it was dark and he walked her up the street, quite busy despite the razoring east wind. At the top of the steps leading down to her house he said, ‘Wait a minute, Annie.’

  He had manoeuvred a pound note out of his wallet while on the bus.

  ‘For something for Jackie.’

  ‘No, Sam. You’re always giving us.’

  ‘And the boys.’

  She looked at him and tightened her lips until they all but disappeared. He put the note in her hand.

  ‘Believe me,’ he said, hoping his earnestness would tell of his admiration for her stoicism, ‘believe me, Annie, you’ve done me a favour today. Never mind how.’

  Her expression was her thanks and she went down the steep steps slowly.

  When Sam opened the door of his own house he saw that both Ellen and Joe cringed and fell silent. He had seen that on previous days and resented it. It had further twisted and inflamed him. He had regretted it but the regret had been overwhelmed by the lava of anger erupting inside him.

  Now the regret predominated. He felt weak with it. How could he make them react like that? Cringe, be so much less than themselves, withdraw? What did you say to redeem that? The greetings were stiff and subdued. Joe went back to his comic. The boxing gloves were behind him on the chair. Sam noticed this with relief. They were still in favour.

  ‘I’ll make some tea.’

  ‘I’ve been to Carlisle.’

  ‘See anybody?’

  ‘No. Yes. Annie. On the way back,’

  ‘She has her work cut out.’

  ‘I’ve got a lot of time for Annie,’ said Sam, over-fiercely but with a warmth that Ellen noted. She looked at him again. Perhaps he was beginning to come out of himself.

  ‘Your sister came. She brought some scones.’

  ‘Any news?’

  ‘Not much. I think Ruth would like to move into Wigton but your dad seems stuck in that cottage. She said that Miss Jennings is having a very bad do with bronchitis.’

  ‘I suppose Ruth’s been enrolled to look after her on top of everything else.’

  ‘She didn’t complain.’

  So it went. Picking their way very carefully. Putting their story together again through short familiar sentences. He still felt uncertain.

  ‘Six times eight,’ Sam shot at Joe, knowing how the boy liked this.

  ‘Forty-eight.’

  ‘Nine times nine.’

  Again Joe heard the regular morning chant of tables in his head and skimmed down to ‘Eighty-one.’ A few more and then Joe said to Ellen, ‘You set them, see who wins.’

  ‘Eleven times seven.’

  ‘Seventy-seven,’ said Joe.

  ‘Nine times eight.’

  ‘Seventy-two.’ Joe looked triumphantly at his father. ‘Two-nil’ Sam won the next two.

  ‘First to five,’ said Ellen.

  When Joe had won, Sam said to Ellen, ‘Do you think that he’ll make a teacher?’

  'Funny,’ Ellen replied. ‘Miss Moffat said something on those lines when I met her in the street the other day.’

  ‘Miss Moffat, eh?’ Sam nodded. ‘They’re all still there, aren’t they?’

  Not only Miss Moffat, but Miss Ivinson, Miss Bell, Miss Steele, Miss Bennet, Miss Täte, a long-serving regiment of teachers -spinsters of the parish, admired, devoted, in their own way uncounted casualties of the First World War.

  ‘I still want to be a boxer.’ Joe, so soon charmed by his father’s warmth, presented a known pleaser.

  ‘He’s coming on,’ Sam said, weightily, ‘there’s no doubt he’s coming on with the gloves.’

  ‘What’s the capital of America?’ Joe asked, cock
ily hoping to catch out his mother.

  ‘Washington,’ said Ellen. ‘We were going round to the baths for the last hour.’

  ‘It’s freezing out there.’

  ‘We’ll wrap up. Won’t we, Joe?’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Sam. ‘I haven’t had a swim for months.’

  'It’ll probably be empty,’ said Ellen, concealing her warmth of reaction. ‘Just the three of us.’

  ‘I’ll race you,’ said Joe. ‘I can do a breadth now. But I should have a start.’

  Sam wanted to pluck him from the ground and hug him but he held back and felt the weaker for it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Ellen was so happy she did not know what to do with herself. The room had never felt so good. She tidied it unnecessarily yet again. She checked the time, needlessly rearranged the plates on the table, and calculated precisely where Sam would be on his walk up from the factory - past Harry Moore’s garage by now, surely, and the Blue Bell, across to Johnston’s the shoe shop, into Water Street. He opened the door only a few moments before her mind had mapped him home.

  She smiled as she had rarely smiled over the past months. For Ellen, any wholly unguarded expression of the deepest feeling was laying yourself too open. Even alone with Sam she could feel under examination as she had so often felt since the desertion of her father and the death of her mother when she was still a child. She had been schooled to feel grateful, bred into a repressed world, and learned for herself that the value of restraint was high. Ellen aimed at anonymity and although her prettiness, her energy and the bubbling quiet confidence pulled hard against it, anonymity was the goal, anonymity was a prized virtue and she thought she had achieved it.

  Yet so much about her provoked the attention she sought to evade. Had she realised how highly she was thought of by so many in the town that meant so much to her - how idealised by the girls she taught the dancing for the carnivals and by the older generation whose family histories she knew in flattering detail - she would have concluded that she must unknowingly have become a show-off.

  Showing-off was unforgivable. Show-offs should not be given the time of day. Show-offs got above themselves and who had the right to do that? Showing-off was so bad it made you blush for those who did it. In the confused constrictions of her childhood this had bitten deep, bitten into her character and bitten into her behaviour, seized the heart of her feelings and held them suffocatingly tight however often and deeply she would long to be free.

  But today, in the afternoon room already darkening under the gathering clouds of the long promised snow that had been laying siege to the rest of the country and now threatened to capture the last redoubt of the white-free North-west, on this gloomy dull winter day, she was as open as a wild rose in high summer. Her gaiety - expressed in every move she made - infected Sam instantly. He had to smile. His spirits were lifted by the lightness, the zest, the unconcealed happiness that poured out of her.

  He did not ask. Biding your time for good news was a nice rare pleasure. She would tell him when she was ready. But for a few minutes she was truly lost for words. So with Ellen bursting to talk, it was Sam who chatted away, factory talk, town talk, who was doing what, like the river, always the same, always different.

  How easy he can be, Ellen thought, how easy he is. Not much of a tea after a day’s hard physical work. Powdered eggs. Two small slices of poor bacon; fried bread to make up for it - always more or less like this, never a complaint. Often as not he would thank her and declare how good it was even though she knew it was average fare. She did not appreciate him enough, she knew that, in this full alertness, this shock of happiness.

  ‘Sam,’ she began, but so dry-throated. She sipped the strong tea. ‘I don’t know how to start.’ She appealed for help but what could he say? Silence was his best contribution.

  It’s all a bit sudden.’ She shook her head, dispelling the dizziness that had confused it. ‘Colin’s down with Leonard and Grace. He just turned up. This morning. He just announced himself. Colin,’ she said, and she drew in a full breath, ‘is my half-brother.’

  There was triumph in her voice, there was the tremble of loss, there was unsustainable excitement.

  Sam waited. So this radiance, this burnished Ellen, was not on his account, not connected to him in any way at all. He realised that he had taken it as a personal tribute and rued his mistake, which was unfair on Ellen and so he waited for more with a determined air of enthusiasm. How stupid of him to have broken the ancient rule - not counting your chickens.

  Ellen was fighting hard.

  ‘Dad,’ she began, and stumbled on the word but held herself and even repeated it to show resolution. She could not say ‘Daddy’ as Joe did. She could not say ‘Father’ like the Snaith sisters. ‘Dad, when he went away, just after I was born, met somebody else. Then he got married.’ She paused. ‘After Mam died, but Colin was born before that.’ She flushed at the implication but it was out now. ‘He died, Dad, just over a year ago Colin said, and then Colin’s mother went south with somebody else and Colin said Dad had always wanted him to meet up with Grace and Leonard - they’re his aunty and uncle as well as mine - and so he’s come up for a visit.’

  There was something passionate and child-like in this account - in the gestures as well as the words - that irked Sam. It was not true to her real character, he thought. It was new.

  He took a grip on himself. She had every right.

  ‘What do you make of him?’

  Ellen shook her head in slow motion. It was the question that had saturated her thoughts over the last few hours.

  'I want you to judge for yourself,’ she said, eventually. ‘I want to know what you think about him.’

  ‘We’ll go down now. Joe’ll find us,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’ On her feet, darting to scoop away the plates and wash them and wipe down and tidy and get herself ready and all with that sure light rapidity which elated him. ‘Joe’ll be going there anyway,’ she said, ‘for his piano practice.’

  She looked moon-struck, Sam thought, altogether out of herself.

  Grace sat in her usual chair in the bay window inside the large drawing room made solid by the bulky furniture she had inherited from Leonard’s parents. With the upswept splendour of her bodkin-fixed helmet of hair and the vast bosom secured under an unyielding black blouse, she was a true descendant of Queen Victoria, whose public attitudes she still stood by, almost fifty years on. This was how Sam had first seen her, this was how she liked to be seen and, as a girl, Ellen had been in no doubt that her scurrying and helping were executed in homage to this majesty. To be exploited by Grace was to be brought into civilisation. Sam had resented Grace’s grip on Ellen. After Ellen herself had rebelled against her overseer by marrying such a common man as himself, he had tested Grace to agitation by his refusal to moderate what he knew she despised as his coarse manners. She had noted that the war had improved him, but the old battle lines had not been eroded. Leonard, whose inheritance had hoisted his wife to the imperial state, had become Sam’s subversive ally, but their defiance of the crown took place well away from home, in snug bars and Henry Allen’s betting shop and now and then in a billiard room. Within her realm, Grace, whom Ellen still dared call nothing but Aunty Grace in her presence, within the gleaming heavy furniture of her domain, Grace was sovereign.

  But a troubled one, Sam thought, as he entered the room, and it was the first thing he noticed. Everything outward was as it had ever been. But Grace was disturbed. Not with the high giddy confused love and loss and excitement of Ellen. Darker anxieties possessed her, although, Sam noted admiringly, she was putting a good face on it.

  ‘Colin,’ said Ellen with shy pride, ‘this is Sam.’

  Sam put his best foot forward and shook hands and offered a cigarette, accepted, took one himself, sat in the chair next to the younger man - and contrived to fall silent while Colin and Grace and Ellen steered a precipitous course as if just learning to ride the new bicycle of c
onversation.

  Ellen, it was painful to see, was mesmerised by him. It was as if he were conducting her, so minutely and adhesively did she follow every nuance. When Colin said something even remotely clever or witty, she appreciated him disproportionately, Sam thought: when he listened to Grace, she listened with him. When he looked a little worried, her brow creased, smiled, she smiled with him, glanced at Sam, she too glanced at Sam, reassured, she was reassured, spoken to, spoke back in a manner that would please, seeing him pleased, was herself pleased. Sam had never seen her like this. Not anything like this.

  Grace’s reaction was much more concealed. Sam was not certain he was judging it rightly, but he would have bet on it - Grace was unnerved. He could see that the eruption of Colin, son of her disgraced brother, into a court beyond all reproach could be catastrophic. As if a rebellious subject had marched on her, gained access and, worst of all, claimed legitimate authority. What would Wigton make of her when it knew about him? Sam could have smiled as he intuited that anxiety but he set his face steadily to the attentive.

  Sam fought hard to be fair. There was a distinct look of Ellen about the young man, although his face was rather narrower than her heart-shaped face, the skin much poorer, even sallow, the nose a weak little thing, but the eyes, the whole formation and structure of his face around the eyes - these were the clear kinship. His black hair was almost glued to his skull and the quiff perched on top of his forehead looked unstable.

  What was it he did not like? The fawning repetition of ‘Aunty Grace’, said in a plangent Lancastrian accent, but said too often, ingratiating and, Sam could see, uncomfortably intimate for its recipient. But that was unfair. The new man had to walk carefully. He had no clue what reception he would get. It paid to be over-polite. Sam made himself accept that Colin could be too easily dismissed for seeking to make a treaty with Grace.

  His attitude to Ellen, though, was not as easy to excuse and yet what was the lad doing that was wrong? He seemed too amused at Ellen’s earnest curiosity and too careless of her doting. When she screwed up the courage to ask a question about their father - where he had worked, what he had done with himself, stiff little questions, all of them transparent excuses for the big questions - What was he like? Did he ever refer to, talk about my mother, about me? - he would dole out a meagre portion or say, ‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ and laugh, showing his bad teeth, and Ellen, helpless and tormented, would laugh along with him. Still, Sam reasoned, keeping calm, these were early days, allow the lad more rope. He was probably every bit as dislocated as the two women.