A Son of War

by Melvyn Bragg

  Diddler stood a respectful couple of yards from the front door. He had refused the invitation to come in for a cup of tea. ‘Not dressed for the job, Sam,’ he said.

  The big Irish tinker was chief of the scavenging settlement called Vinegar Hill, the poorest part of the town. Diddler was kerchiefed around the neck, a horse trader and general dealer, a rogue rover, and the leader of a pack bypassed by history, outside the mechanisms of society, harking back to days before the town itself was settled.

  ‘They want us to shovel the snow, Sam,’ he said, ‘in the manky little places.’

  Diddler grinned - it split his large, slightly Mongolian-looking face and revealed within the fine sculpted skull a cavern of gum. The teeth only went in for occasions.

  'It beats the dole.’

  ‘I’ll get my coat.’

  The bell had just gone for early Communion. Ellen rapidly packed Sam some bait, which he stuffed into the deep pockets of his army greatcoat.

  Kettler joined them from across the yard. He was badly hung-over but despite his professional skiving he was known to be a good man with a spade and he never missed out when Diddler, his cousin, called on him. There would always be something more to it, there would always be a bonus somewhere, and a story.

  ‘Surprising what you get to see in these out-of-the-way country places. My old da made me wise to that,’ Diddler said to Sam as he clicked his tongue, flicked the reins and kept the strong pony at a trot. There were four of them on the cart, Diddler’s younger brother making up the gang. ‘They’ll be grateful to us, you know, for shifting this snow, and you’ll get let into houses that wouldn’t even answer your knock another day. The things that’s lying around and tucked away in those little places, you know, about those old farmyards, in the old byres and barns - they don’t know the value - it’s a rare chance for a good look-see, Sam. And all on the council!’

  ‘The money’s good,’ Sam agreed.

  ‘Beats your dole,’ he repeated, and spat a jet on to the verge. ‘Don’t let them get you on to that, Sam. They’ll have your number then, so they will.’

  Sam only nodded. He did not want to open his mouth more than necessary for a day or two. The infected molar had left a crater which his tongue probed regularly. How could anything so badly rotten at the roots - the dentist had shown him the evidence with pride - have been so violently difficult to pull out?

  The job was to meet the parish council’s responsibilities by clearing the smaller tracks and lanes that netted the farms into the town. Throughout the day they were never beyond sight of the town -the tall incongruous Italianate tower of Highmoor was always there and often they could see a portion of the impacted cramped huddle that still housed most of the five thousand inhabitants.

  Yet even by the separation of a few fields they felt cut off, well outside the place and, in Sam’s case, free of it, well free of it.

  The weather had closed the factory. With no money coming in, the cash deal that Diddler made with the council - he had the monopoly on exceptional and dirty jobs - was a godsend. The work was hard but Sam had never been afraid of that and over the following weeks he grew to love it.

  Maybe it was the gang of them - all things discounted, it was a bit like the section of eight or nine men he had been part of then led in Burma. The patter of cynicism. The plague that was on all. The work was basic, shovelling. You couldn’t hide. Now and then Diddler would stroll off to bargain or ferret around or mark down and they would all enjoy his knack of returning with loot just as certain men in the section had fine light fingers, much appreciated by their immediate comrades. There were echoes of war, echoes of the better bits.

  The root of his love of this uncomplicated labour, however, was more likely planted in his life before the war. When he was a boy in the small, ramshackle, teetering, runnelled, storeyed maze of Vinegar Hill, moated by aborted fields though plumb in the middle of town, he had been aware, made aware, that he and his kind were the bottom of the heap. As a soldier he had served in the East, India as well as Burma, and seen untouchables and mutilated child beggars, and now he knew how deep the heap was; but as a boy in Wigton he was the lowest, which was why Grace had been so resentful of his courtship of Ellen.

  Now he was back where he had started. With a shovel. Men like him. The pay of the day. Work casually given, almost contemptuously terminated. He knew where he was. And he felt not liberated, not revolutionary, certainly not resentful: he felt secure. Here he was. Bottom dog. Just like in the army. Pushing the Japs back from Imphala to Rangoon. The Borders smack in the front line. They were the front line. His section. There’s the wood. Bunkered Japs, dug in Japs. Japs! Best warriors as good as any on earth. You. Go in. No questions.

  And they went in that time and in that wood against that enemy, and they lost seven men dead and eleven wounded and slaughtered a hundred and thirty-nine of Japan’s deeply prepared élite troops. The joy of it survived, Sam knew, to be concealed throughout his life, but that was a fact. He was there. How did you get back from that?

  It was not proportionate at all to bring Burma to Wigton - he knew that - but sometimes comparisons were like that, he thought, completely out of kilter, unmatching, but an excuse for linking wildly different parts of life that craved kinship.

  To see the four of them, himself included, shovelling snow, was to feel he was thousands of miles away. Like the section he had led, they just set to and did the job, There was no hourly rate about it, no time to be filled up. They were below all that. They bent their backs to do the job as effectively as possible and then they took a view and sought out the spoils.

  Sam liked to observe Diddler with his prey. He would praise people never praised and flatter people to whom flattery was a foreign language. He would scrounge a cup of tea and a scone or two in such a way it became a favour, and then he would notice something and barter for it and not get it and tell them they were the ones, they had the nose and then suggest that this or that trifle might be dispensable and so it was and deals were struck and because of the favours Diddler granted - shift the snow off that barn roof, no extra payment, mister, who do you think I am? - gifts would come and easy access to what seemed obsolete to the farmer but Diddler knew for a bargain.

  Flattery, aped sincerity, serious hard work, favours, sleight-of-hand, the pre-agricultural arts of scavenging, and never a complaint from the fleeced - Sam had seen such reivers in Burma, the Borderers cleaning opportunity to the bone, and the cart that went back to Wigton, relieved of the grit and salt, would be laden with loot, as from a raid, loot partially concealed under the old sacks brought on purpose, and sometimes so heavily laden that the four of them had to walk as the pony hauled the spoils of victory back to Vinegar Hill

  The days of shovelling cleared a lot of snow and the shifted snow seemed to unblock his mind. He was no scholar nor would he be. That chance had gone if it had ever been there. He would always have the streak of wonder and the dreaminess of a life the other side of under-education but that was best put aside. Alex was gone now. These lads, the roughest lads, these were where he came from and if he kept to them he would be all right. Stray too far, in the Wigton he had returned to twice now, and he would dither and upset himself and everybody else. By the time the job was finished, his resolve was set.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  On the Saturday, Sam went out to see that his father and his sister, Ruth, were still in the clear. He had battled his way through after the first heavy falls of snow and spent a day with the old man carving tunnels of communication between his father’s cottage, the big house he worked for and the lane that another parish council was responsible for, but the further falls had worried him.

  There was something else. His father, now approaching seventy, a veteran of the Western Front of the First World War and the perilous coal mines in West Cumbria, had laboured alongside him to clear the snow. Sam had not worked with him since he had been a boy and forced to be his father’s unpaid apprentice - he was then a far
m labourer - after school. The old man could still shift work. The raw heft of it still gave him a command, which he turned on his son, unspeakingly bringing up those earlier times of domination, authority, beating. Sam resented it and admired it and gave up.

  This was the man who had wrecked his chances of a scholarship. Twice. This was the man who had, once, thrown a book of his into the fire. This was the man who had told him that books were no use. Yet now, side by side in the snow, father and son, the old man scooping and slinging the white spadefuls with relentless application, Sam realised that he was as near to him as ever he had been or would be. This was his father. Together in the remote and profoundly silent countryside, while they cut the packed snow, Sam observed him closely. I am this man’s son. However much harm he did me. He is in me. Together, we are making a path through the snow.

  Ellen tried not to show that she was pleased that he had gone to see his father but she was. She would never have admitted it to anyone - she scarcely admitted it to herself - but days without Sam meant days when she could concentrate on Colin.

  She had been lucky at the shops the previous evening. She had an unusual surplus of coupons left in the ration books and she had found the Co-op and Walter Wilson’s better stocked than usual. By dividing her custom between the two, though this was an embarrassment to which she would not normally have exposed herself, she managed quite legally to secure an extra tin of sliced pears, a second large tin of condensed milk, which Colin especially liked, and two bars of milk chocolate - one for Colin. And ten Players Full Strength. She was not being greedy, she told herself, because stocks were almost plentiful, she had the coupons to cover the goods and, anyway, Colin was not well and her half-brother and every visit to him was like taking a birthday party to him.

  The fact that the streets were white banked under the few working lights, the road itself a black canal, the shops lit by paraffin lamps and candles, made the whole experience, to Ellen, one of magic. Wigton became a fantasy. The drifts of snow, the alleys dark between the white, sky so clear every star hard cut, shadows shuffling in yellow flickering light that made shops seem like Ali Baba caves, and the people, cold, perhaps even fearful some of them, but actors in this frozen exotic scene as they stepped out of unlit yards and followed the directions delivered by the tyrannising snow. Wigton had never been so wonderfully isolated and independent of all others and so loved by her.

  She gave Sam an hour or so start, as if, guiltily, she were making sure she would not be caught out if he returned. She did not examine the guilt.

  She went down the street with the provisions in a basket, her heart lifting at the prospect of seeing Colin. Grace understood and sympathised. It was almost heartbreaking for her to watch the care, the love, the zeal that Ellen brought to the straightforward task of preparing a tray to take up to her brother. Grace herself was still shaken by his arrival.

  ‘Did you get any fags?’

  ‘Let me put the tray down first.’

  He glanced at what was a feast of treats but they could wait.

  ‘I’m gaspin’.’

  ‘You shouldn’t smoke so much. Not with that chest.’

  ‘It helps my chest - what do you know? It eases it up.’

  ‘There!’

  ‘Only ten!’

  Ellen tightened her lips. ‘I brought ten yesterday.’

  ‘Ten doesn’t last long.’ He was almost gobbling the cigarette. ‘Not when you’re as badly as I am.’

  His dip into pathos touched her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ll bring some more tomorrow morning.’

  Now he was smoking. He lugged the smoke into his lungs in heaves of addicted pleasure.

  ‘I can contribute,’ he said, cautiously.

  ‘No, no.’

  She looked at the tray, hoping for a comment. He took his time. Then he stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette. ‘Better be safe than sorry,’ he said, reproachfully, and stuck the stump behind his ear.

  ‘You like condensed milk on fruit, don’t you?’

  ‘Generally,’ said the young man. He took the brimful bowl and slurped a few spoonfuls of the sweet milk before attacking the tinned pears.

  ‘Very tasty,’ he pronounced, and Ellen beamed.

  ‘I knew you’d like them.’

  ‘Dad,’ he said, and paused, and licked the spoon, and paused again. ‘Our dad, sis, he used to love tinned fruit.’

  ‘Did he?’ The elation was plain on her face and Colin smiled.

  ‘You went to the flicks in Carlisle again yesterday with Sadie, didn’t you?’ His tone was not quite accusing. ‘What was it this time?’

  ‘Rebecca.’

  ‘What happens?’

  Ellen told him the story succinctly but he was soon bored.

  ‘There’s Jane Russell coming on next week, it says in the Cumberland News. The Outlaw. I hope I’ll be better enough to go to that! There’s all this talk about her cleavage. Apparently it has to be seen.’

  ‘George Formby’s on as well.’

  ‘Damn George Formby.’

  ‘I thought you might like him. He comes from your part of the world.’

  ‘That means I can see through him. Ukuleles!’

  Ellen produced the chocolate which he accepted quite civilly but deferred eating it and lit up the stump of cigarette.

  ‘I’m clapped out, sis,’ he said. ‘Just in my twenties and clapped out.’ He spluttered through the cigarette and banged his chest. ‘Your health,’ he said, ‘you’re nothing without your health.’ He felt so genuinely and deeply sorry for himself that he was generous. ‘Dad used to say you were nothing without your health. That’s what he would say about you. When he told me. “As long as she has her health,” he said, ‘I'll be satisfied.”‘

  So he had talked about her - Colin had alluded to it and, she was well aware, fibbed now and then, fibbed to please, which was forgivable. But this sounded true. So he had thought about her. She choked down the feeling that welled in her throat.

  ‘Am I like him at all?’ she asked, finally summoning up the courage.

  ‘I’ve been thinking that over and over, sis,’ said Colin, snapping off two squares of chocolate. 'I’m coming to conclusions and when I get there I’ll tell you but one thing: we’ve both got his eyes. And his hair. Both of us have the same hair.’

  He rolled back on the pillows, talk done for the moment. Ellen knew, even after their short experiences together, that to press him would be of no use.

  He had fed well. He seemed to doze. She took the ravaged tray downstairs and went over what mattered. Same eyes. Same hair. Sam had always liked her hair.

  He had talked about her.

  By the time the thaw came she and Sam were deep in love. Better than before, she thought. Better than the snatched times, better than the honeymoon, better than the first year, better than they could have imagined. Shift work, Sam said, was not so bad after all, it gave them the freedom of the afternoon when Joe was at school.

  It was a time of their lives. It was them, it was sex, it was relief, it was freedom for her - partly because of Colin - and the discovery of a father, it was the abandonment of Alex, it was fatalism for Sam, but a fierce accepting even joyous fatalism, and for Ellen it was the discovered way to have and to hold, to conquer and to keep. It was the time when all that was curled up and enfolded in the expectation of life uncurled, unfolded, undid the disciplined and oppressive instincts of years, and in that house in that small condemned yard in that thawing, bleak town, they knew that they loved each other and could do this, could do this, could do this.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Ellen and Sam had been to the second house of the pictures and mingled in the street with the last to leave the pubs. Now they were alone. Joe had spent the afternoon with Colin and he needed no urging to stay the night at Grace’s house. Sam had already taken off his slush-soaked shoes and was holding them in front of the fire.

  Finally Ellen just came out with it. The winding tactful way seemed almo
st deceitful. She had nothing to be ashamed or afraid of and yet her colour rose and she felt a pulse of trembling. But she would not be silent about her feelings for her brother.

  ‘Colin’s going back,’ she began, and rushed on as she saw Sam’s expression gladden. ‘He’s going back to get all his things and then he’s coming to live here. In Wigton.’

  ‘But he’s no good, Ellen.’

  It was like spit in her face.

  She did not hesitate for long.

  ‘Samuel Richardson that’s a terrible thing to say about my brother.’

  ‘He’s a dead loss, Ellen.’

  ‘Don’t say that! You can’t say that! Joe loves him.’

  ‘That’s another worry.’

  She had aimed to wound but only steeled him.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I think he’s a bad influence.’

  ‘And I suppose you’re such a good influence egging him on to fight?’

  ‘He has to learn.’

  ‘Colin plays with him. That’s what Joe really likes.’

  ‘I didn’t think you had it in you, Ellen.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Spite.’

  That winded her. That and the knowledge that she, too, had noted flaws, though not as ruthlessly as Sam. But they should never be admitted or brought into the equation and they counted as nothing, insubstantial passing shadows, compared with the dazzling light he had brought into her life. Colin was a new life - for what he had brought and what he was; that he was weak made it all the more necessary to defend and help him. That he could be a bit demanding at times was undeniable but understandable. There were darker areas which she would not and could not address.

  ‘I think you’re jealous of him,’ she said. ‘Because of Joe.’

  ‘Jealous? Of that drip?’