A Son of War

by Melvyn Bragg

  Sam turned on the wireless and found some big band music. ‘I wish they wouldn’t try to go for the Glenn Miller sound,’ said Sadie -they were playing ‘String of Pearls’. ‘Glenn’s the only one who could do it.’

  Still, as she drew out the simple act of making tea, her feet picked up the rhythm and in tiny steps she danced on the lino in front of the sink. ‘There’ll be more of this at the dance tonight.’ She sounded grim. Music mattered to Sadie. She hated Wigton’s failure to keep up with the fashion, indeed to seem to glory in lagging years behind it. ‘Billy Bowman and his blooming borin’ band again.’ She brought him the cup. ‘I’ve put the milk in for you.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He left it to cool. Gingerly he fingered the aching tooth and rubbed at the gum, which seemed to help. Then he fastened a grip on it and yanked firmly. It yielded nothing save further pain that flooded into his skull.

  Sadie was now wholly absorbed in the music, dancing dainty half-steps on the prodded rug, turning and swirling with her imaginary partner while holding her cup ship’s-compass steady. ‘Come on, Sam. It’ll take your mind off it.’

  He got up. Held her correctly, politely. They turned the cramped space into a dance-floor. When Ellen and Joe came in they were well into it, Sadie’s cup still in hand. Ellen immediately partnered Joe, who jumped about in time to the music. She did not try to teach him.

  ‘It always ends when it’s getting going.’ A cultured voice had replaced the band. Sam switched it off.

  ‘No arrowroot,’ said Ellen, her eyes sparkling, and Joe’s even brighter. ‘I’ve left the ice outside the door.’

  ‘We met Colin,’ said Joe. Ellen still had to stop herself from saying ‘Uncle Colin’ although that correction lit up in her mind every time Joe used the name, but the child was so pleased to be able to call a grown-up by his Christian name. ‘And he said,’ Ellen’s warning glance was too late, ‘that when he got the money together he would buy me a train set. A real one. He would put it up in the room upstairs. Railway lines, signal boxes, passenger trains and goods trains and I would sit in the middle and just make them all whizz around.’

  ‘He has to get the money together first,’ said Ellen, uneasy now at Joe’s over-excitement. ‘That could take him a long time.’

  ‘That would be fantastic, though, wouldn’t it?’ Sadie appealed to them all. ‘Would you let me have a play with it, Joe? He’s more like a brother than an uncle,’ she observed to Sam.

  ‘He sent his best.’ Ellen spoke placatingly to Sam. ‘He couldn’t come in because he was meeting somebody in the Half Moon.’

  ‘Is he going to the dance?’ Sadie asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I bet he’s a good dancer. I'll get him up. They always have a Ladies’ Choice late on.’

  ‘Maybe he’ll get you up first.’ Ellen felt flustered. I’ll get the ice.’

  While she was making the pack, Sadie took Joe down to Grace’s house where he would spend the night.

  Sam held the pack against his face until the numbness set in. The diminution of pain was dramatic enough to release him first to the pub where a couple of whiskies helped, then to the dance and back home to pick up more of the ice, and spend another half-hour nursing his jaw.

  But in the early hours of the morning the pain returned and violently. He should have had them all out on the ship on the way back like some of the others. They said the salt air hardened your gums faster than anything else could and by the time you were back in Blighty the false teeth had settled in and you were set up for life - no more trouble. It had been Alex’s expression when he had raised the idea: that expression, nothing said, had stopped him.

  He had written back to Alex and he tried to remember the letter word for word to take his mind off this wearying pain. Only the faintest glow came from the fire. He had banked it up with slack for the night. The silence outside was so complete it was eerie. It must be the snow. It had started while they were in the dance hall. Colin had thrown snowballs at them as they walked down King Street. Nothing much wrong with a chest that could take in drink, dancing - and he had proved a good dancer, delighting Sadie by asking her for the first quickstep - and now snow. But Sam turned those thoughts away.

  The letter was very awkward. He wanted to ask questions and ask for more about Kipling. Instead it was a catalogue of Wigton gossip to which Alex was never particularly addicted, and news headlines - the Big Freeze, Palestine, more rationing - he would know all that anyway. He doubted Alex would reply. Probably well into teaching and being a naturalist and getting on with his new life.

  The relentless pain was tiring and Sam managed only to surf on the crest of sleep. How was it that such a small pain could be harder to bear than the much bigger injuries of war? They had talked about mind over matter after seeing the fire-walking in India. And the lying on a bed of nails. But he had seen British soldiers, ordinary lads, put up with the most terrible pain - amputations without any anaesthetic, he’d seen that, holding on with both hands to spilled-out entrails as if they were a child to be cradled, Sam had seen that, and the terrible protracted death of Ian, his best friend before Alex, in such pain and yet lucid, able to talk gamely - how did they do that when a titchy toothache threatened to split his skull? Alex would have had a line on it all. Maybe the answer was to fill his mouth with snow and numb it all and when the snow melted do it again. What was it he had read that Australians ate on Christmas Day on Bondi beach? More like a brother? Going back soon. Just here on a visit. Maybe it was not pain at all. Maybe he could think it was something else. ‘String of Pearls.’ Was this a good life?

  In the morning when he opened the door, the snow in the yard was over two feet deep and the large flakes fell in graceful unending profusion, silently, attractively, suffocating the town.

  CHAPTER TEN

  They sledged on Pasce Egg Hill They pronounced it ‘Pace’. As the snow deepened to a glorious fastness and the obliging ice gripped it ever harder, the town became a white ecstasy for the bolder boys and Joe - thanks to Speed - was now just about in that enviable circle. Only a few of the children knew what Ellen had told Joe - that when she was a girl, they would go down to the Show Fields after the Easter Monday service and in the third field cross the river to the steepness of Pasee Egg Hill and roll their dyed extra-hard-boiled eggs down the lower slopes. That was the Easter treat. Ellen was eager for Joe to know that. She wanted him to know that she had gone before him in the town for her pleasure too and in the self-same place and out of that came the name Pasce Egg Hill, meaning Easter Hill if you knew about church. It was not something Joe passed on.

  Snow made the house better. It was so burrowed and snug, its smallness a bonus now, the fire never allowed to die. Paradise began after breakfast. Into the yard down the new white alley cut out by his daddy, snow walls either side, his full height, through the squatters’ yard, into Scott’s yard, into Water Street for the first snowball fight of the day, mittens caked white and soaked in pleasure, but nevertheless by five to nine imprisoned as usual in the neat new red-brick primary school, Miss Moffat calling the register.

  Playtimes were dreamtimes, snowballs slapped into quick shape, stacked up in ready pyramids of ammunition by the smaller boys and the gamer girls and full-scale wars between the forms. Joe found himself leading a gang and yelling, ‘Charge,’ with snowballs clutched to the chest, chapped hands, chapped thighs, face stiff with the freezing and pumped up with blood and battle and the soft violence of snow. Shoving snowballs down the necks of scaredy-cat boys or simple screaming girls and the older ones said to stuff snowballs all the way up the bigger girls’ skirts, even into their knickers. Splatting hard snowballs against a target on the lavatory wall. Failing to build an igloo. The schoolroom in those weeks only a place of refuge and recuperation, drying out between the white dramas of snow.

  Snow made life better. Snow did not hurt. Snow beat everything. Snow was for boys. Snow made you happy. Just to look at it. You could suck snow for a drink. Snow made y
our hands red and the big vein on the back of the right hand swelled up but that was OK because it was snow that did it. Snow changed everything and made everything look better. Wigton was like a picture with snow on. His mammy said that. But most of all, snow meant the bolder boys could sledge from the top of Pasce Egg Hill.

  You could get a bit in after school before it got dark but the hill was a good walk and a short time was not the same. Saturday was the day.

  Colin had asked him to come to finish that monster snowman. Joe turned up right on nine. He was badly torn. He wanted to get it over with so that he could go sledging. But Colin was Colin - see the way his mammy liked him - and so better than sledging, surely?

  ‘He’s in his bed,’ Grace told the child. ‘But he said send you up. Don’t stay long.’

  He was in the bed that Joe had shared with Ellen while Sam had been in the war. Two pillows were puffed up behind him. There was evidence of a largely consumed breakfast on a tray. He was reading Tit Bits.

  ‘Thought it might be Aunty Grace,’ he said, and opened his hand to reveal a just-nipped stump. ‘She says smoking makes it worse.’ He rolled his eyes and lit up. ‘I’ll have to spin them out.’ Talking and inhaling together caught his throat and he coughed so violently it was like retching. Even two floors down in the basement, Grace could hear it and frowned at this clear evidence of the weak chest, even though he had not helped it by larking around in the snow and getting himself soaked the night before with Joe when he had finally got round to building the promised snowman. It stood next to the pens at the bottom of the hill, a huge trunk, a lower dent indicating legs, but without arms, a neck or a head. The night had frozen it hard.

  ‘Fancy a game of pontoon?’ Colin’s deck was snappily new: a belated Christmas present from Grace. ‘I’ll divide up the matches.’

  Joe had enjoyed being taught the game but now? With the snow, and sledging, the sun bright, which could melt the snow. He took his share of the matches.

  ‘Use your loaf,’ Colin grumbled, after Joe revealed a hand on which he ought not to have twisted. 'It’s no fun if you don’t.’

  There was a vague hope in Joe’s mind that the sooner he lost all his matches, the sooner the game would be over, but Colin merely pencilled the number of victories in the margins of Tit Bits and began again.

  As the sun sparkled the snow on the rooftops he could see out of the window, Joe could not conceal his decreasing relish for pontoon.

  ‘How about Hangman?’

  The boy nodded. Colin found space in the magazine and pencilled in nine short dashes - an interrupted line.

  ‘A,’ said Joe, dutifully.

  ‘No.’ Colin drew the base of the gibbet.

  ‘E.’

  He marked the E.

  Then, abruptly, and roughly, he grabbed Joe under the arms and held him aloft, squeezing him quite fiercely.

  ‘Who’s down in the dumps today?’

  ‘Nobody is.’

  'I know somebody who is.’

  Joe wriggled. The grip hurt but Colin was smiling so it must be all right. The pressure tightened.

  ‘Who does he like best, then?’

  He wished Colin would not ask that. He really wished he would not make him answer that.

  ‘Next to your mammy.’

  And Daddy, Joe felt he ought to say.

  ‘Colin, isn’t it?’

  The boy was near breathless now. It hurt.

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  The threat was unspecific but clear.

  ‘Yes. Colin. Yes.’

  ‘Put the boy down!’

  Joe landed on the bed and rolled off it immediately.

  ‘He’ll get what you’ve got,’ said Grace.

  ‘Sorry, Aunty Grace.’

  ‘Sorry, Aunty Grace,’ Joe echoed.

  ‘Off you go,’ to Joe. ‘And you.’ Colin waited for his sentence: she sniffed, twice. ‘Just don’t let me catch you smoking a cigarette.’

  ‘Did I smoke, Joe, tell her?’

  Joe panicked. But he had to fill the pause. He looked down and muttered and blushed. Grace was not deceived but Joe was not her target. Yet Colin’s expression was of one exonerated. A flick of her head sent Joe out, down the stairs, up the street, into the yard, grab the sledge, trail it behind him on the road to polish the runners his daddy had found down in Vinegar Hill, where he used to live as a boy and where he remembered his own first sledging winter but never snow like this.

  As he trotted down the gashed black road between hedges of mottled white Joe weighed up the Wigton sledging map. The slopes beyond Howrigg were long but not steep enough; around the baths they were too short and there was no run at the bottom before the fence. Station Hill was unexplored but no great reports came back. Old Carlisle was lumpy and twisty because of the Roman ruins under the ground so you could not motor. Some of the Show Fields slopes were good for learning on but - and here Joe warmed with pride - nowhere and nothing compared with getting to the third Show Field, inching across the frozen river Wiza, finding a gap in hawthorn hedges, winter blossoming in nets of frost, dipping through the fence and then, rising up, Pasee Egg Hill, the king of all Wigton’s sledging hills, steep, glassy, long and short runs, easy and hard runs and, toughest of all in the middle of the hill, a huge bump which lifted you clear off the ground so that you sailed, just sailed, it made you scream with pleasure.

  His thighs were already chapped in the short pants, the mittens were freezing soggy, his fingers were already nipping, his wool-framed face was iced cold on the periscope window of skin unmasked by the balaclava, but his clogs had held against the weather and as he tugged the Daddy-made sledge up the hill he would not have changed places with any other soul on the planet.

  The only girls were from the tinkers down at Vinegar Hill, a few Water Street girls and others, ex-Water Street, now rehoused on airy Brindlefield. He noticed Lizzie who had once lived in the next yard and tried to catch her eye to show that he was one of the bigger boys now, but she was screaming for a go on a tray. Her gang had only a couple of sledges between them and those who could not pile on to the high child-stacked vehicles that teetered and wobbled into reluctant service would stick a tin tray or a cake-tin top under their bottoms, lift up their legs, use their hands like short urgent oars to build up acceleration and then, when they hit the run, roar and yell and spread out their arms like a tightrope-walker’s pole as they hurtled towards the Wiza river, frozen for days in its serpentine wendings.

  Speed had a tray. Joe waved and gratifyingly the wave was returned. Then Joe - one of the smallest - took his place among the boys in the queue at the very top. If you had the jitters you sat on the sledge so that falling off was easy. If you used your loaf then lying belly down flat on the wooden slats was far more thrilling and manageable although more dangerous. Your face practically shaved the snow - now sledged and runnered to packed ice. Your feet could dig in and slow down and steer, but not on the bits that mattered and slowing down was not the point. The point was sensation.

  Joe, braver now because of the boxing gloves, pushed the sledge in front of him - the runners glazed from that trail through the streets and a quick professional rub with snow - and ran, hunched over it, hurled himself on to it, his chest thwacking the wood, gathering momentum, urging it on, the surface snow surfing his bare legs, the world reduced to white, the big bump not soon enough, too soon, here we go and that freedom of leap, that soar of gut soul happiness, the lifting off and for a split second he was in the air, free, flying until jolt, crump, judder, back on earth, on track, the whistle of the descent like a high note, the finest note, the only note you every wanted to hear. Just sledging for ever and ever, sledging and being lost to everything except what was most important of all - being in that moment and nothing else, nothing at all else mattered. Now the final flat slowdown before the fence, digging in the toe of the right clog to swerve left because he had almost got to the fence, which was one of the aims but not quite yet, swerving left and luxuriating in
that beat, that searing emptiness before re-entering the world as it usually was and immediately, though a little dazed, tugging the sledge back up the steep ascent of Pasce Egg Hill, whistling, his heart high as the sun.

  Speed joined him and they went down together, Speed on the bottom, Joe lying on top of him, double-layered over the big bump and crashing down but not damaging the sledge at all. Speed took a massive run at it the next time and it was all Joe could do to keep up and hurl himself on top of his imperious friend who scraped the ground with his fingers for more pace even as they hit the steepest stretch, more and more pace and Joe on the wire body of Speed, so very happy that the world and all about it could have comprised nothing else but this, his, their, sledging.

  Malcolm, one of Joe’s new friends from the choir, came to ask for a go. Speed was adamant, and it was Joe who backed off and let the friend take his place on the back of Speed, but it was not a success. The boy was frightened of Speed. Word at home and at school had taught him to be frightened of Water Street, Roman Catholics, too much poverty, violence in the family and Speed’s family in particular. He was not a coward, the boy, but Speed’s ferocity, which was by now part of Joe’s bloodstream idolatry, unnerved him and he slunk away, aware that he was not brave. Joe was confused by it. He wanted his friends to like each other. He felt, obscurely, that he was to blame but for what? He also felt pumped up that he was the unafraid friend of the mad Speed who by now had been singled out as the hero of the hill and took his next turn, alone, standing upright on the sledge, holding the rope with one hand, with the other performing lasso movements, war-whooping as it careered towards the bump and threw him spectacularly, but he was up instantly and seven-league strides down the hill in his soaked plimsolls, leaping through the off-the-run snow to capture the runaway sledge and dare to do it again.

  Word went out it was dinner-time and the congregation filed away to their homes, hurrying through the fields, Joe running until he got home to bolt a meal and see his gloves and short trousers dry and warm on the lowered pulley beside the fire, shivering to get back as soon as humanly possible to the total life of sledging.