A Son of War

by Melvyn Bragg

  Colin had promised to buy Joe a bike for his birthday, or for Christmas, when he would have got the money together, because it had to be a brand new bike. The boy was now in Miss Bennett’s - the class above Miss Moffat’s - and very nearly at the end of his fourth year in the bright red brick building, nearly in the top class now and so nearer to the time when his gang could take on all comers and he himself would be expected to challenge for cock of the school. Miss Bennett, who also took the music lessons, had told Joe he would be singing ‘When Johnnie Comes Marching Home’ at the concert in front of everybody. This panicked him but he did not let it show. The flattery of it buoyed him up.

  Ellen arrived at the new canteens just before ten. They had been completed at Easter and provided dinners - in shifts - for the junior school, the national school, and the boys and girls’ grammar schools. The gleaming white new secondary modern had its own canteen. The Catholics down at St Cuthbert’s stayed with the nuns. Ellen felt lucky to have secured the job. She had not enjoyed work as much since she had been in the factory as a girl. The pleasure came from being with so many of those with whom she had spun the sewing-machines before the war. Like Ellen, those who had married had been shown the leaving gift. Like Ellen, most of them had children. Like Ellen, all of them had grabbed at the new job, so perfectly bracketed inside the day. The bonus was each other.

  It was back at school, it was in the clothing factory, it was the dances, it was the snatches of song and the socials and on the bus for the treat to Carlisle, it was the old faces, the old names, the old references, the detailed knowledge of personal histories, and there was always a laugh. It was the old town still thriving and well knit in that still young company of married women making and serving decent meals to feed the town’s next generation.

  Ellen had given up all her other jobs save the unpaid work she did for Grace. That was a lifetime’s obligation, a sort of vassalage. And now, another bonus, Colin was there and, also Joe who went to Grace’s house from school every day to meet up with her and the piano, and to set off for Cubs or choir practice. It all fitted in, kept her in with the town, her base, unimpaired.

  Luck piled on luck because Sam had begun to do some work for Henry Allen. It had started when Henry’s usual runner from the factory had given notice and Sam had volunteered, collecting the bets at the dinner break and walking up into the town right past the police station. Henry had asked him to do a little more and then more and the extra money had decided Sam to leave shift work and take the less well paid day-work.

  Sam liked being part of the betting trade. He had always liked a gamble. He liked talking to the other men about the form, the going, the jockeys, the trainers, the tipsters, unjust losses, narrow wins, missed opportunities, the quality and breed of the horses. He liked the numbers, the mathematics of each ways and doubles and trebles and accumulators, the wonderful and multiple combinations of bets that a man could squeeze out of a shilling. He liked the role of transparent secret agent slipping through police lines with the coppers and the tanners and the bobs and the occasional florins and half-crowns deep in deep pockets. The illegality of this innocent bet-reaping heightened the day. And on these summer nights he liked going off to the hound trails in the countryside with the perpetually ailing Henry, chalking the odds on the board, handing out the tickets, keeping the books, being close to the nudge and rumour, racing certainties, philosophical losers, gambling men.

  The luck for Ellen was that this kept Sam happily in the town most evenings until at least seven so that she could delay going back to Greenacres to make their supper. As often as not, Joe would eat with Colin and Grace. It was good for Joe too, Ellen maintained, rather stoutly, to herself. There were very few of his age on the new estate yet and in town he could keep up with his old pals. Sometimes it seemed Joe did little more than sleep over at Greenacres, and there were nights when he did not even do that, when Grace or Colin claimed him and Ellen yielded, happy enough to share her fortune.

  More than any other song she could think of for years, Ellen loved ‘Galway Bay’, which was all over the wireless. Bing Crosby’s crooning sorcery seeped into Ellen’s mind like a lullaby, a soothing sealing song of hope realised, down among the anonymous, those ‘scorned just for being what we are’, a song of simple powers and pleasures - the sun setting, the moon rising, and all that could be discovered plain there before you, you only had to reach out, could even catch a penny candle on a star. In those first months at Greenacres, it became her signature tune and when she hummed it she felt the world was good, and luck was on her side.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ‘Still no new P. G. Wodehouse?’

  ‘Still no new P. G. Wodehouse.’

  ‘Popular fella,’ said Sam, gloomily.

  ‘Surprisingly,’ Willie Carrick admitted as he signed Sam off on a collection of short stories by Guy de Maupassant, recommended by the librarian as the French answer to Somerset Maugham.

  ‘He just makes me laugh,’ Sam explained, apologetically. He had read the P. G. Wodehouse books at least twice on the first borrowing and occasionally reborrowed them a few months later. They had become a happy addiction. That alternative universe, with its constellations of brilliant butlers and great houses, barmy aunts, true lovers, common-touch eccentric aristos and amiable brainless wonders had ensnared him and there were sentences he wanted to read aloud. They delivered so many shades of pleasure, laughter was often the least of it. He had pressed Willie to call in reinforcements from Central Stack but Central Stack so far had not responded to the call.

  ‘Short stories,’ said Willie, pushing the Maupassant across the table, ‘rather leave me cold. Except the dialect, but that has another interest in it. You’ve just got into them and then they finish, type of thing.’

  ‘Useful when you’re busy.’

  ‘A man can be too busy,’ said Willie - whose days carried not an ounce of fat. ‘I have noticed you’ve been coming in less lately. Both ends of the candle, Sam.’

  He met Leonard in the back room of the Hare and Hounds at seven thirty. This way they could avoid Colin. Sam had helped Henry to clear up before he had gone to the library and Leonard had taken his usual hour for tea after the Friday clerking in the solicitor’s office. Friday was always a day that dragged for Leonard. There was rarely any necessary work to do. A morning would log the rents he had collected on the Thursday. No business would be undertaken after midday on Friday. It was largely a matter of sharpening pencils, looking out on the sunny street, trying not to watch the clock and thinking about Grace’s special Friday tea.

  There was a courting couple in the snug, undisguisedly glum at the entrance of the two men. They left noisily, bad losers.

  Sam seized the moment. ‘Henry’s suggesting I might think of going in with him.’

  'Is he now?’ Leonard enjoyed his opinion being sought out. He took a stiff pull of his pint of mild and porter and offered Sam a cigarette.

  ‘Thanks. His ailments don’t get any better.’ They lit up and a small drift of smoke set off to recce the brownly varnished room.

  ‘Never a well man,’ said Leonard. ‘Got it from his mother.’

  ‘Now the hound trails are back in full force. You can do very nicely at the evening meetings. But it gets too much for Henry.’

  ‘Could be nerves.’

  ‘I could take most of that off his hands.’

  ‘What happens when the hounds are out of season?’

  ‘There’s scope to build it up in the town.’

  ‘Henry takes enough from me as it is.’ Leonard was on a poor run.

  ‘I think he’s waiting for me to make a move.’

  Leonard’s nod marked the shift from Sam to himself.

  ‘You have a steady job down at the factory, Sam.’

  ‘It’s boring, Leonard. You’ve no idea.’

  ‘Henry’s offer has to carry some guarantees to beat it.’

  ‘He mentioned a six-month try-out.’

  ‘That’ll n
icely see him through the hound trailing.’

  ‘Then?’

  Leonard tapped off a droop of ash, using the gesture for dramatic effect, hung in a pause.

  ‘Not a sausage.’

  Sam waited for more. Leonard took his time. Took a thoughtful pull on the cigarette. ‘I know Henry,’ he said. ‘He’s tried this once before. Built a fellow up - I’ll keep the name to myself - business slackened, dropped him flat.’

  ‘We get on well enough.’

  ‘That’s what the other poor beggar said.’ He waited a while but Sam said nothing. ‘A half?’

  Sam nodded. He would appreciate a few moments alone. He was winded. He had anticipated encouragement. Leonard went out for the drinks.

  As he walked home west towards a flagrant scarlet sunset, he sensed that he would turn down Henry’s offer. Leonard’s certainty had blown away the froth of expectation and already he was picking up threads - phrases, even glances, the moods of the man - which drew to a conclusion similar to that reached by Leonard. He discovered that he was not surprised.

  There were even the beginnings of relief. He had escaped something. Leonard was right. He needed more than a promise and a prayer. Part-time was all there was. Boring would have to do at the factory. At work, boring was your lot. However many card schools and running gags, however much sport talk and companionable grousing and ingenious gambling, such work was and would remain for ever and ever boring. It was meant to be.

  He whistled his way through the back door, after the evening patrol of the vegetable plot.

  'It’s a bit dry,’ she said, taking his plate out of the oven. 'I didn’t know when you’d be back.’

  ‘It all comes out the same way.’

  ‘Sam!’

  His good humour lifted even higher at that authentic flash of censorious indignation. How she preserved it he did not know, but she did and, unfathomably, it made him smile with a sudden stab of love, as if she had eloquently declared unbridled passion.

  ‘And you can’t grin your way out of it either, Samuel Richardson.’

  He went up to see Joe, who was lying foetally on his side, reading a comic. The only strong colour in the room came from the boxing gloves, worse for wear now, but still carrying the reminder of raw meat as they crouched in a white corner.

  ‘Only three weeks, Joe.’

  ‘A man said it’ll be “the fight of the century”.’ The notion, the phrase and the prospect were awesome to Joe and there was some of that in his voice.

  ‘Still fancy Joe Louis?’

  To the boy it was simply not in the universal plan that Joe Louis could lose the heavyweight championship of the world, not even to wily old Jersey Joe Walcott.

  ‘I’ll take Walcott,’ said Sam. ‘Just to add to the interest. Straight bet. Evens.’

  Joe did not rush in. Sometimes he won, most times, but when he lost his daddy made him pay up. ‘Threepence.’

  ‘You’re on. I needn’t give you a ticket. Gentlemen’s agreement?’

  Joe nodded, solemnly.

  There was a mirror above the empty fireplace in the sitting room. It was oval, bevelled round the rim, the first adornment to the walls.

  ‘What did it cost?’

  ‘What do you think of it?’

  Sam had no opinion at all about a mirror. Ellen waited in vain.

  ‘More than ten bob?’

  ‘Yes. There was a sale.’

  ‘There always is.’

  She did not tell him that to afford it she had to pass up the opportunity of buying in the first clothing sale - half price, half coupons - since before the war, an event buzzing around the canteen kitchens all week, and on this Friday, threatening to become even feverish in its northern fashion.

  Ellen had slipped into the market hall on her way back because the fag end of the Friday sales often threw up a bargain. The mirror had to be bought. There was also a carpet that she knew could banish the barren feel of the sitting room, but she was outbid. The mirror had decided her against squandering money on clothes. Just because there was a clothing sale, she told herself sturdily, did not mean you had to rush out and buy. But she would still have to go and look - no harm in that. She had saved a lot of coupons after all.

  Sam was happy with his new-fashioned biro - a gift from Henry - transferring the bookie’s scrappy entries into proper columns in a hefty new account book bought for the purpose. His writing was clear and neat. The numbers were graphically elegant. It was a simple copying and culling task and he hummed intermittently as he brought order out of mess.

  Ellen was rifling through the newspapers of the last few days.

  'I see the King insisted on morning dress for the Derby,’ she said, both intrigued at the idea of glamorous high-society people wandering around a muddy racecourse in broad daylight as if they were at one of those posh dances in the films and also, by this sporting reference, throwing out a grappling iron to haul in Sam to conversation.

  ‘Showing the flag’, Henry called it. ‘Good business practice’. He did not look up.

  'I wonder what it would be like to be there.’

  ‘Next year.’ Sam did not interrupt his copying. If I hadn’t been working for Henry I’d have put twice as much on “My Love”. There’s something about the job makes you hold back when you’re on a cert because you don’t want to take it out of your own kitty. I bet less now. I could use a cuppa.’

  From the foot of the stairs she called up to Joe to turn off the light and go to sleep. When the kettle boiled she opened the new packet of digestive biscuits. She wished Sam would not dunk them in his tea but at least no one else was watching. It was enough to have stopped him slurping from the saucer.

  As she brought in the tea she was conscious of the silence and isolation of Greenacres. Years ago it would have counted as a different place, a neighbouring village, not Wigton at all. She glanced at the mirror. Things were coming together. Joe would be asleep. Sam dunked the biscuit. It was not a house she would care to spend the night in alone. The town was no longer around her. The surrounding silence was not peopled.

  ‘Tap dancing?’ His tone was intended to bury her suggestion.

  ‘Why not?’

  They whispered in bed. Even though they knew Joe was deep asleep in the next room, they could not escape the pitch of those who had lived early and long in intense cohabitation where searching out a place for urgent and secret talk was a trial of ingenuity. Intimacies were whispered by their nature, but whispering was not confined to sentimental conspiracies: even in safe places whispering was imperative for all matters of privacy.

  ‘Rita Irving,’ Ellen explained, lying relaxed after their coupling. Sam’s silence proved his ignorance of her fame. ‘She’s very well thought of in Carlisle. She does ballroom dancing, competitions, and tap dancing. It’s been a big success. She’s opening up in Wigton tomorrow in that place at the bottom of Union Street. You read the paper. It was in the paper.’

  ‘You’ll turn him into a lass if you’re not careful.’

  ‘What about Fred Astaire?’

  She knew how much he liked Fred Astaire and her retort scored a pause.

  ‘He’s a film star.’

  ‘It makes no difference.’

  Oh, yes, Sam thought, something in what I have said holds a whole world of difference. ‘Isn’t it a bit showy?’ he asked, striking, accurately, at her fear.

  ’I know of more than a dozen others taking them,’ And all, she did not need to add, normal, ordinary, unshowy Wigton.

  ‘All lasses,’

  ‘At least two other lads.’

  But why mine? Sam thought, yet in the drowse of contentment unwilling to strike. ‘The piano’s enough, isn’t it? Surely to God.’

  Joe had passed his first piano exam at Easter and the ornate, authoritative certificate had gone some way to dispelling Sam’s doubts.

  ‘Tap dancing!’

  ‘Good night.’ Ellen’s tone was amiable. She turned on to her side and let sleep come.
>
  Their talk had touched on a sore. Sam was uneasy that Joe was still too much in the magnetic field of his mother. He could see how much she wanted for him and that was good, but there was an element of dreaming, he thought, of opening up paths that simply could not be pursued, making promises that would inevitably be broken, confusing the boy. He knew she was doing it for the best and who could criticise her for that? But it would leave the boy stranded. Of that he was certain.

  Ellen was asleep but he wanted to say, kindly and not in one of those moods of fury that could still pick him up like a leaf: let the boy be. Let him learn that his life will be like mine, and much like my father’s, a life of closed doors and poor jobs you have to make the best of. For all the pianos and tap dancing in the land, Joe will leave school too early, get work he knows is basic, be aware that he is bright enough to aim higher but that won’t be possible, and what he needs to be taught early and hard is to endure - to make the best of it, even get something out of it, but mostly he needs to know how to endure. Enduring is what our lot have learned about for centuries, Sam thought. We became experts at it. We recognise it in ourselves and salute it in others. That is how we manage. Stray from the creed of enduring and you are in danger.

  Sam believed that. To be able to look after yourself and to be made fit to practise endurance: these were the lessons. You could not have what you wanted.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  When Joe heard that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was returning to Wigton ‘By Special Request’ he felt panic. What if he were not allowed to go? He had seen it first time round and been drunk on it, clutching at the melodies, jigsawing the words together with Sadie’s help, lusting after the raven-haired, peach-skinned Snow White, returning again and again to the ideal brotherhood of the Seven Dwarfs, loathing the Wicked Stepmother, ‘Who is the fairest of them all?’