by Melvyn Bragg
‘Because of Joe.’
Sam put the shoes on the floor, sat back and folded his arms to get a grip. His hands covered the muscles on his biceps, muzzled them. So far he had been as patient as he knew how.
‘And don’t look at me like that,’ she said.
‘Like what?’
‘You know.’ She lashed out, blinded by her wound and his intolerable rightness. ‘At least Colin doesn’t hit him.’
Sam’s throat constricted and dried and he locked his arms together. 'It’s no more than a cuff,’ he said, looking intently at his empty shoes. ‘Somebody has to keep him right. You’d ruin him.’
‘He wasn’t ruined when you were away.’
‘Pity I came back then.’
His tone was soft, even regretful, and where mere anger would have fired Ellen up, this unexpected sadness stopped her.
In the silence the accusations they had made to each other hooped around their minds arid both realised how near the brink they were. Neither would say sorry. Ellen wanted to go out of the door, com. in and start again. Spite? No good? Sam kept his eyes away from her. Jealous? And he scarcely touched Joe.
‘Where’ll he live?’ It was flatly asked and the answer came just as empty of feeling.
‘With Aunty Grace. Until he gets a job. Until he gets settled in.’
‘He might not find it easy.’ He hesitated, then, ‘His chest,’ he added, to be perfectly clear and offer an olive branch.
It was grasped.
‘He’ll get something. He’s very clever, you know. The headmaster begged him to stay on at school but he wanted to earn his own living - even though Dad begged him as well. Would you believe that?’
You did, Sam thought and said nothing.
‘You know a lot of people,’ she said, eagerly, the wound almost miraculously healed now that Sam appeared to be onside.
‘No doubt I’ll see what I can do,’ said Sam, knowing there was no one he could trust the man with.
‘I told him you’d give him a hand,’ she said and she smiled, the smile that usually warmed his heart but there was a chill on it now, knowing that it was for Colin she smiled.
‘Bed?’
‘A cup of tea first,’ she said. To unwind. To pretend nothing had happened.
‘A cup of tea,’ Sam repeated. To put off making love. To keep him at a distance. To pretend nothing had happened.
Curly was one of the old men who chopped kindling at the workhouse and brought it down to Johnny Holdsworth’s barber’s shop in Station Road where Johnny gave them twopence a bundle, which he sold on for fourpence.
Curly always wore the same brown flat cap to conceal his baldness, a brown three-piece suit and brown boots with long shoelaces that flopped on either side like spaniel’s ears. He wore neither collar nor tie but his shirt was still fastened at the neck by a brass stud, which humped a protuberant Adam’s apple. His face was unwrinkled, almost baby-skinned, and his eyes were watery blue. His front teeth had gone, top and bottom, but the remainder, seen when he grinned, which was often, were long and yellow. Mostly he had his hands in his pockets, playing with himself, vigorously.
After he had delivered his sticks, he went up to Blue Bell corner to grin at the world going by. Everyone who passed got a nod or a word and, save for a few Puritans, the greeting was returned. They all knew about Curly. When he saw Speed and the lads approaching, a strange gurgling sound came from deep in his throat. Speed was a beloved old enemy.
There were five of them, including Joe, who was on his way to Cubs and awkward in his uniform, the cap, the woggle, the badge-spattered green jersey. Speed came close up to Curly, much closer than Joe would have dared.
‘How about it then, Curly?’
The gurgling grew and became throttled laughter. He shook his fist at the boy but it was a helpless gesture. The boy had him fixed.
‘Down there.’ Speed pointed to a yard that led off from Station Road to the back entrance of the Vaults, an unfrequented yard at this time, the pubs not yet open.
Curly shifted from one foot to another, a sort of war dance, his eyes swirling up and down the street. Who was watching? Did he dare?
‘No. Nooo,’ he said, and the laughter spluttered out, some spittle dribbled on to his chin. But the laughter was becoming a panting sound and Joe could feel the tension as Speed tugged on the line, tugged on it hard, drew it in.
‘Come on, Curly. I’ll give you a tanner.’
He produced the sixpence and held it out. Curly stomped again and then, with an expression of wicked sly mischief, he made for the yard, trotting like a fat little pony, and cackling now, loud and delighted.
Joe had no idea what was going on. But he followed. It was twilight. That was a comfort.
In the yard, the boys spread out. Speed somehow organised that. Curly stood against a wall, the top half of which supported the only billboard in Wigton - ‘Guinness Is Good For You’. He was trapped. He made as if to challenge the semi-circle and dart through it but the boys were now set on their prey.
‘Come on, Curly!’ Speed urged, in a coaxing voice. ‘Show us it, Curly. Show us it.’ Speed had not taken his eyes off the man and he feinted with his left arm as he coaxed, like a boxer, like a lion tamer.
The old man looked around wildly as excitement possessed him and then, pulling his hands out of his pockets, his head swivelling about on the lookout, his face wild with panicked pleasure, he undid his flies and there was his large erect member pointing straight at them. The boys cheered and pointed back and yelled. Curly laughed louder and did little jumps so that it bounced.
The boys cheered again, then jeered, but the man did not register their change of mood. He laughed even more and jumped even more and his mouth was flung open in gap-toothed delight and he waved to them to come closer and, goggle-eyed, he held the bared penis in his right fist proudly waving his free hand.
‘Dirty old bugger!’ Speed yelled. ‘You dirty old bugger!’ Curly honked now and tugged at himself. The boys made untranslatable animal noises, louder and louder. Suddenly fearing the attraction of the noise they were making, Speed ordered, ‘Run!’
They ran, Joe so confused that he was breathless. Curly howled. Howled at their treachery. Howled to be abandoned. Howled in fear of the policeman or that the superintendent at the workhouse would punish him and not let him bring kindling down the town to Johnny Holdsworth’s ever again.
The boys raced across King Street and up Water Street into the Straits. The size of it! What about the sixpence? The size of Curly’s thing! On to the Waste behind the wash-houses. Curly would not find them there.
They stayed on the Waste and went over the adventure many times, exaggerating and embroidering and hysterical until they had laughed it out. Then they tried to make a fire but they could not find enough dry bits of wood.
All the others drifted off, but Speed went back to the wash-houses, squatted on his haunches and leaned against the wall, ‘smoking’ a twig. Joe ought to have made for the parish rooms and the Cubs but he was trembling too much, too disorientated to want to leave Speed. He squatted beside him, although his rather plump legs were not as moulded for squatting as Speed’s skinny shanks. Some silent moments passed.
‘What’s that?’
Speed’s right index finger jabbed Joe’s arm, not gently, in the bull’s eye of one of the three badges on his thick Cubs jersey.
‘That’s for tracking.’ Speed squinted down at him and Joe already felt inadequate, even before he began the explanation. ‘You go to the park and they go in front, the ones you’re after, and they cut special signs in trees or they get bits of wood and make arrows on the ground so that you can follow them.’ Each sentence was slower than the last as Speed’s incomprehension at this activity alchemised into unmistakable contempt.
‘You don’t need tracks in the park. You can find anybody,’ he said. ‘They always land up behind the bowling hut.’
‘But you have to know the signs,’ said Joe, feeling stupid though he did not kno
w why.
‘Anybody that needs signs in the park is blind.’
‘But,’ Joe lunged, ‘it gets you better ready for wars.’
‘What if there’s no trees?’
Joe looked around, in alarm. No trees?
‘Indians listen like this.’ Nimbly Speed dropped into a kneeling position and from there pressed his ear to the ground. ‘They can hear horses coming from miles away. Does the Cubs do that?’
Joe was forced to shake his head.
Speed lost interest. Joe raced off to Cubs, late, already fearful of the inevitable rebuke.
The following week he took his Lighting a Fire test for a new badge. First you had to Make the Fire and then you had to Light it with One Match. A parent had to supervise this.
Ellen chose a Saturday morning when Sam was at the just re-opened factory, doing overtime, part of the Government’s demand to step up productivity.
‘From the beginning,’ Ellen said, rather severely. She had been in the Guides and still helped them out now and then and she had been taught to take these tests seriously.
Joe had seen his mother and sometimes his father set up the fire often enough and sometimes he had helped and he could have done it sleepwalking, but now the responsibility was totally his and he felt panicky. Still, he riddled the grate and took out the ashes without too much mess on the floor, although he himself was well smudged.
He was still in his blue and white striped pyjamas which were suffering. He had put on his green Cubs cap to validate the occasion.
He looked to Ellen but she shook her head.
He took out the clinker and put it to one side. Then he unfolded the News Chronicle and, taking care, tore it up, scrunching up each ripped fragment and placing them in the grate, soon too full of newspaper.
With sticks the lesson was a mantra. Cross your sticks. Make a deck. Criss-cross, and so he did, with the kindling that Ellen bought at Johnny’s barber shop in Station Road. It looked OK now, over-full but it looked like a real fire.
The coals were in the scuttle and there was a small indoor shovel to dig them out. Perhaps he put on too many coals and was unlucky that most of the pieces were big and heavy and still rather damp.
Ellen handed him the Captain Webb matchbox. Captain Webb, the first man to swim the English Channel, eccentrically fronted the fire-sticks in a one-piece bathing costume. Joe took out a stout red-tipped match and again looked at Ellen. She nodded. He took a deep breath, as if he were preparing to blow out a cake of candles, and struck.
Hurriedly, he dabbed it at the corners of newspaper which, insufficiently, peeped up through the weight of coal and kindling. He managed to get three points going and then his over-hastiness fluttered the match-flame and it went out. As did one of his lighted corners. He willed and stared at the other two but the flames were sickly and after a brief fight, they too gave up.
Joe began to push the box open again but his mother leaned down and took the matches from him.
‘Next time,’ she said.
‘Why can’t I try again now?’
‘Because it wouldn’t be right.’
‘But I can have one match again.’
‘That would be two matches. Even if the fire’s not lit the first time. It would still be two matches.’ She paused. ‘Like this,’ she said, and struck a match and tapped the paper with the flame, here and there and there again, at the back, the sides, the front, touching it like a fairy wand and soon there was that crackle, that little moan, the fire had taken hold.
Alex’s latest letter was much shorter but there was the promised book, a scuffed and thumbed copy of Rudyard Kipling’s poetry.
For the next few days it became Sam’s secret vice. He had often heard the Barrack Room Ballads chanted out by the lads and ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy’, ‘The Sons of Martha’ and ‘Gunga Din’. He recognised lines that had slid into his mind as if out of the wind. It was familiar, which made it friendly. Reading it surreptitiously, he was back in Burma. He saw action again and knew that the poet was on the side of the ordinary Tommy and he felt proud of that - of the poet and of himself. In Mandalay. Reopening the Indies. He saw Denny Deever swing in the mornin’ and was moved though he did not know why when he read the hero’s charter If. That was what you tried for. That sort of honour, that sort of stoic greatness. He knew McAndrew as a brother and sympathised entirely with that Scottish engineer. Of course it was the poor sod who slaved below the water line who kept the ship afloat, who got ignored or patronised for his skills and guts. Join the army! When he had finished it he hid it in his kitbag. The book lifted his spirits.
It also helped begin to wean him from Alex. Certainly his return letter to Australia was much shorter than before and when he slid it through the big cold mouth of the main post-box he sensed then that already the correspondence was dying and soon it would fade away until a Christmas card would be all, cramming a year into a few sentences, cooled embers of their former shared time breathed into a little life by an annual celebration neither he nor Alex believed in.
The library was in the council yard just off Station Road. Up a short flight of stone steps and into a muffled mantled gloom. Willie Carrick, Town Clerk, Town Historian, Town Librarian, opened the place up twice a week for two hours in the evening.
Sam was there smack on six, calculating that he would have a few minutes alone with Willie, who greeted him with ill-concealed surprise and open pleasure.
‘Do you want any help, Sam?’
Willie Carrick’s face was broad, brown from his all-weather walking, eyes that missed nothing, long thin lips, white hair neat around the tonsure of baldness, as reliable a face as you could want, Sam thought, and because Willie was friendly, he hurdled his embarrassment. ‘To be honest, Willie, I do.’
‘Westerns? Very popular with one or two of the regular men.’
’I see enough of them at the flicks.’
‘Detectives? They can take you out of yourself. There’s different varieties.’
‘No.’
‘Adventure type? Man against the odds sort of thing.’
‘Had enough of that.’ It was a useful excuse. Anything that helped to get him to the destination he was blind to.
‘You won’t want romance.’
Sam shook his head. ‘I seem to be hard to please, Willie.’
‘Not a bit of it.’ The response was a little forced and Sam noticed.
‘What are you on at present? Reading-wise?’
‘Rudyard Kipling.’
‘A bit kiddies’ stuff,’ said Willie, and Sam could not bring himself to reveal that it was the poetry so he nodded, as if agreeing, betraying the passion of the last week.
‘There’s always the classics,’ the librarian waved a hand towards the darkest part of the room, ‘over there. Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Robert Louis Stevenson - we’ve got them all on parade. There’s J. B. Priestley, Somerset Maugham. More up-to-date type of thing.’
‘I’ll try him.’
'I should give you a Thomas Hardy as well. Just to keep the balance.’
Sam did not ask what Willie meant by that.
‘And,’ concluded the librarian, seeing a potential disciple and treading carefully, ‘I'll throw in a bit of a kiddies’ book by P. G. Wodehouse. You like cricket?’
Sam laughed.
‘Mike, it’s called. There’s amusing parts in it. Now. I’ll need your particulars.’
In his beautiful copperplate handwriting, Willie filled in Sam’s library card and told him the rules, emphasising the fines, and even had time to give him a brisk tour of the shelves.
Sam took Joe along to the library the next time although by now the boy much preferred to go on his own. Ellen had taken him with her for a year or so. She liked to have a romance on the go and Mr Carrick fed the boy unhurriedly from the small but adequate selection of his ‘kiddies” books, one of which was Mike.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It was on the Saturday that Ellen had gone to Carl
isle with Joe and Colin to see Great Expectations.
Annie came to their house, her first visit, and when Sam opened the door, she said, ‘He’s gone on the tramp, Sam.’
Speed and his two brothers stood some distance away, across the yard, next to the cold-water tap.
Annie had delivered her news, and now she waited.
‘When did he go?’
‘Yesterday morning. They didn’t miss him till night.’
‘Who said he’d gone on the tramp?’
‘Me, Sam. He’s been saying he would. But…’ She had kept it to herself, another fear suppressed, another burden carried alone. Her face, rarely relieved by much colour, was lard pale, her eyes expressed misery, her sturdy shoulders slumped, hands in pockets, the cheap headscarf no protection against the rain.
‘We’ll find him.’ Sam tried to sound optimistic.
He left a note for Ellen.
‘Best if you stay at home,’ he said to Annie. ‘As likely as not, that’s where he’ll be heading. I’ll go and talk to them at the hospital’
Speed had edged forward. ‘Can I come with you, Mr Richardson?’
The boy was forlorn, his hand-me-down raincoat soaked. Sam nodded.
If he goes, I go,’ Alistair declared. 'I'm oldest.’ Alistair, as always, looking for trouble. Even now.
‘That’s why you should stay with your mother.’
Sam’s instant and rather flattering reply deflected the violent young man’s temper. But still, he pointed to the third brother.
‘He can do that.’
‘Your mother would be better off if you stayed.’
‘He can’t afford the bus fares to take the lot of you,’ said Annie conclusively.
Speed wanted to go upstairs and sit at the front. Sam let him have his way, knowing that for the boy this bus journey was, confusingly, an outing.
Somebody at the hospital had heard Jackie talk about a liking for ‘the Scottish side’. A doctor offered to run them over to Longtown, near the Border. They had to wait until he had finished his duties and in the waiting time Sam saw Speed’s growing consternation at the distressing evidence of incapacity around him. Is my dad (Sam could almost hear the boy saying this to himself) like him? Like him? Him? Sam had once told Speed his father was a hero. What sort of a hero landed up in a place like this?
