by Melvyn Bragg
The opening bars of music came through the cheap swing doors. Joe was helpless. It had started. Snow White was there.
‘Away with you.’
He turned his back to the box office and slid down on to the floor.
‘What’s this?’ Mr Cusack, the owner, who knew Sam and Ellen well.
‘He’s only got threepence.’
‘You were in last night, weren’t you?’
Joe nodded. He was too tired to speak. Besides, if they were all quiet he could get a bit of a free listen.
‘So you like it, eh?’
Joe looked at the man uncomprehendingly. ‘Take his threepence.’
'If I give him a ticket it won’t add up.’
‘Take his threepence - no ticket - and I’ll pop him in.’
Joe did not believe it until he was on the hard wooden seat a few yards from the screen and only then did energy fill the drought of him and he was taken over again and every bit as intensely by the songs, the forest, the dwarfs, the wicked witch and he was the Prince and there was Snow White the fairest of them all, only it should have gone on for ever.
Sam came in about seven and Ellen immediately scented danger. But he said nothing for a while, just glanced at Joe now and then with a hard look that Ellen recognised. She braced herself. She was lengthening the hem of the new skirt she had just had to get in the sales.
Joe was quieter and more tired than usual. But he had been singing those songs again and now he was playing with the rather depleted Meccano set handed on to him by his uncle Leonard. He was on his knees trying to build a bridge. The slender green metal lengths, the screws and bits lay untidily about him. Tiredness was making him fumble.
‘Where did you get the money to go to the pictures this afternoon?’
The question rifled out. Joe was startled.
‘Come on!’
Joe looked at his mother.
‘Did you give it to him?’
Ellen shook her head. She must protect Joe. There would be a simple answer.
‘Aunty Grace,’ she said. ‘Or Uncle Leonard.’
'I asked them.’
‘Or Colin?’
‘I asked him as well. He said he had no idea.’
Cross your heart. Hope to die.
Joe blushed deeply.
‘There’s a guilty look.’
‘Guilty of what?’
‘Where did you get the money?’
Hope to die. Colin had no idea.
‘Where did you get it, Joe?’
Her gentleness was no better. Prickling behind the eyes. No crying.
‘I’ll count to three.’ Sam stood up and the height of him made the kneeling Joe seem horribly vulnerable.
‘Don’t shout at him!’
‘One!’
‘You’re scaring the daylights out of him!’
‘Two!’
‘Joe.’ Ellen went over and knelt down beside him, dropped her voice. ‘Where did you get it?’
‘He pinched it,’ Sam said, bitterly. ‘He pinched it most likely from Grace’s house.’
‘Did you take it, Joe, did you take it?’
Ellen’s alarm was not hidden by the soft tone.
‘He pinched it.’
‘You didn’t. Did you, Joe? You didn’t pinch it? Did you, Joe? Say you didn’t.’
The boy looked from one to the other, panting now with fear, hope to die, his daddy who could always terrify him now tall as a tree and set-faced with anger, cross my heart, his mammy talking in that funny voice as if she might start to cry, she never cried.
‘Just tell us,’ said Sam, trying hard to be calm, but with no great success.
'I didn’t pinch it,’ he heard himself speak. It helped to speak. ‘I didn’t pinch it, Mammy, I didn’t pinch it.’
‘Tell us where you got it!’ Sam’s voice rose again. ‘Just tell us!’
‘I didn’t pinch it. I didn’t. I didn’t pinch it. I didn’t.’
Ellen reached out to put an arm around his shoulders but Joe evaded her and stood up and backed over the Meccano, trampling on it, noticing, could not do anything to mend it, backing away, hope to die.
‘You must have got it somewhere!’
Sam moved towards the boy and Ellen was on her feet between them. Joe was now babbling into a scream.
‘I didn’t pinch it. I promise. I promise. I didn’t pinch it.’
‘Why won’t he answer?’
‘Why won’t you tell us, Joe?’
The boy was now against the wall.
Sam suddenly stepped past Ellen, picked him up high and shook him.
‘Where - did - you - get - that - bloody - money?’
‘Sam!’
'I didn’t pinch it, Daddy. I didn’t. Daddy! I didn’t. I didn’t pinch it! Cross my heart! Hope to die! Hope to die! Cross my heart!’
The words were screamed.
‘Sam!’
Joe broke into terrible sobs. Held high. His body shaking.
Slowly, Sam lowered him to the ground.
He nodded to Ellen, who came over and hugged the child now buckled with grief.
Sam went back to his chair and waited for it to stop. Ellen took Joe into the kitchen for a cup of water. When after a little time she brought him back she was holding his hand tightly. The boy was still not quite over the sobbing.
‘I believe him,’ said Sam, rather hoarsely, staring at Ellen as if not seeing her. 'I don’t know how he came by it. But I believe him. I believe you, Joe. You didn’t pinch it.’
Joe looked through the blur of water, his face simply aching for approval. Sam took a deep breath. 'It’ll be your secret, then, Joe. Everybody can have secrets.’
Tears came again, but unconvulsive now, tears that the storm had passed.
And then a magnificent thing happened. Something which Joe would cherish throughout his life. Something which he could never have imagined or dared to dream of. A greatness.
‘Tell you what,’ said Sam. ‘You give your face a wash. Better use cold water. And clear this Meccano up. And we’ll all three go and see the second house. How about that? Upstairs. Posh seats. OK?’
And that is what they did.
In the cinema, Joe sat between them, erect and attentive as a soldier on guard. Now and then Sam glanced at him and saw that every word was being mouthed noiselessly. Once, Joe returned the glance with a look of such gratitude that Sam remembered another look, long ago now, when he had returned from Burma and given the boy the painted wooden train with three carriages.
He carried him most of the way home. A few minutes along the road, through the lines of the old town, Joe had just gone. The soft weight of him. Bringing him back.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
On a cold Saturday afternoon in June, the orphans came to the park as they did most Saturday afternoons. The boys had cropped hair. The girls’ cut was matchingly severe. There was a cheapness and uniformity about the drab clothes that further distanced them and they tended not to mix. After the first flush of arrival they moved in rather a desultory, dutiful fashion between the banana slide, the swings, the roundabout and the long plank of the American swing. They were always under the supervision of two nuns who escorted the crestfallen crocodile through the town, one leading, one following.
On a Saturday afternoon in June, even a cold one, the serious bowling men were out for a league game in full white force on the lovingly mown green and the two tennis courts, again sporting white, boasted their usual patient Saturday queue. The putting green had just been established. It was not a great draw. Few wanted to waste their money on it. The orphans had no money.
Over the summer weeks, Joe had struck up a friendship with two of the orphans. Both were older than he was. Xavier was as tall as Speed, black-haired, gaunt, big-knuckled; Billy was more Joe’s height but broader, very white-faced, a gap between his front teeth. Both were passionate in their friendship for Joe who was deeply attuned to them, to the unimaginable idea of being orphaned, to the longing fo
r escape and normality.
Since his grandfather and his aunt Ruth had moved into Wigton a few months earlier - following the death of their employer, Miss Jennings, and their subsequent eviction from the tied cottage - Joe had acquired status. His grandfather was employed part time in the park and he was given part payment in a minute but rent-free cottage a few yards from the main park gates, a cottage left over from humbler days before the road to the park had become lined with the detached villas of the town’s top drawer. Ruth, to her relief, had been helped by Ellen to find cleaning jobs, including two in Park Road itself. She also went in for lemonade at weekends. This base made the park - which lay perfectly placed between Greenacres and the town - more than just a playground for Joe. It was owned.
He had taken the orphans to meet his aunty Ruth and they had shared a free bottle of dandelion and burdock and a dainty cake each. Joe had felt royal.
The best thing of all was to commandeer the long plank American swing. Settle one of the three of them alone in the middle and have the other boys at each end push it so high that it bucked and the boy sitting had to duck deep to avoid crushing his skull against a crossbar. Unfortunately the swing was near the neat beehive-shaped shelter from which the nuns ran the operation and at the first sign of high bucking one of them would stand up and windscreen-wiper wave and they would have to slow down immediately. The next best thing was to skin the banana slide with candle grease and dare each other to zip down: if you did not jump off with fine judgement you would certainly overshoot and land splat on tarmac. That depended on candles for the greasing and although Billy usually managed to nick a stump of candle, being an altar boy, he had failed to strike lucky on this day. So they settled for spinning the roundabout as fast as they possibly could and jumping on and off it when it was at the highest speed they could manage.
It had limited appeal.
They went into the long grass near the river, looking for sweet dockings to eat. Finding a few of the elephant-eared leaves, the three boys sat on the riverbank and chewed contentedly.
This is our last Saturday,’ said Xavier, casually.
‘The boys are being shifted,’ Billy explained. ‘The girls are staying put.’
‘We’re being sent to Lancashire. All fathers. No nuns.’
‘So you won’t be here again?’
Billy shook his head and continued to disturb the surface of the water with the small stones he always seemed to have in his pockets.
‘Maybe it’ll be better,’ said Xavier. ‘Without the nuns.’
Neither boy showed emotion but Joe felt the looming loss.
‘Come to our house for your tea,’ he suggested, out of nowhere.
‘What’ll your mammy say?’
‘She knows,’ he lied. ‘I said. Come on.’
Obediently, his two friends stood up.
It was a simple matter to drift past the nuns in the shelter and then run across the two fields that took them to the new estate.
No one was in.
‘They’ll be upstreet,’ Joe said.
Ellen had done the usual Saturday morning baking for the week and there were a dozen teacakes. The boys limited themselves to two each but they did use up all the jam. Neither Xavier nor Billy was keen on scones but the thinly layered currant squares went down well, the whole tray. They took only one slice each of the plate cake. Perhaps Joe ought not to have cut it with the short blade of his pocket knife. He offered to put the kettle on but Xavier sensed the probable consequences and they settled for diluted orange, finishing off the half-bottle which with reasonable economy would have seen Joe through another week.
They ate on the hoof. Neither the gaunt Xavier nor the ivory-faced Billy could get enough of walking up and down the stairs and, best of all, going into Joe’s room, sitting on the bed, just looking around at the bare walls and then bouncing up and down and then jumping up and down on the bed.
The boxing gloves were greeted with delighted disbelief and Xavier’s proposal that each of them should wear one and they should all fight each other on the bed while they were finishing the juicy slices of rhubarb plate cake was adopted enthusiastically. Billy suggested they did war-whoops at the same time.
This was how Ellen found them.
Silence came down like the Iron Curtain.
‘Are these the friends you told me about?’
‘Yes.’ The three of them were in a line in the kitchen stoically awaiting execution.
I’m pleased to meet you,’ said Ellen.
Joe, after a moment to let it register, beamed proudly. Xavier and Billy looked at the ground. The iron fist would surely follow.
‘Have you had enough to eat?’
‘Yes, thank you, missis, thank you,’ said Xavier, without a compass in this new sea.
‘I got some sweets with the last of the coupons. Joe won’t mind, will you, Joe?’
He shook his head as his mother produced the white bag full of aniseed balls. When Xavier and Billy were encouraged to take two each and Joe saw them light up, it was almost true that he did not mind.
‘We'll have to go,’ said Xavier, ‘they’ll have set off by now.’
‘We’ll get belted,’ said Billy.
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Ellen, touched by the awful loneliness of the boys. The terrible ease with which a little common generosity could provoke such a longing of trust in their expression.
‘Doesn’t matter, missis, who comes back with us. Father Doyle’ll belt us for going off.’
‘He belts Xavier all the time,’ said Billy. ‘He hates Xavier.’
‘We’re going into Lancashire,’ the older one said. ‘It’ll be better down there.’
‘I’m sure Father Doyle,’ whom Ellen saw in the street, a dumpy cheery man of God, much respected and not only by the Catholics, ‘doesn’t hate you.’
‘He likes to belt me,’ said Xavier bleakly, and Ellen pulled back from what she did not want to know.
Joe ran back to the park with them but the rest of the orphans had already marched off. They went up through Ma Powell’s field and fled down the street but no sign. They had been well and truly left behind.
Outside St Cuthbert’s, in the East End of the town, into which Joe strayed very little, the three of them paused for a moment, the briefest moment.
Perhaps the boys wanted to say, ‘Thanks,’ or express their envy of such a house or their deeper envy of such a mother, or just hold, for a few seconds more, hold the freedom of that short time, when they had been for tea in a normal home with a boy they had met in the park, not even a Catholic. And Joe wanted to say, ‘Goodbye,’ and also some sort of thanks for the unexpected and raw company of boys without parents for the intensity of the friendship.
But words failed them all and after the smallest acknowledgement, Xavier and Billy walked steadily through the black gates towards their certain beating.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ellen decided that the socials in the room under the Congregational church were ideal for teaching Joe to dance. It was a good floor. The socials were well attended but not crowded. The music was only Johnnie King on the accordion and Tom Pattinson on the drums but they kept strict time. Not many men turned up. Other children learned there too. It was friendly.
On this Wednesday of the factory-holiday week the committee branched out and announced that the social would be preceded by a Pea and Pie Supper (bring your own knife and fork). Joe’s first lesson would be coupled with a treat. Ellen had hoped that in the holiday week they might have taken ‘days’ - the schools and so the canteen were on holiday too - but Sam had been willingly commandeered by Henry Allen to help him out at Carlisle racecourse where he always rented a pitch for Race Week. There had been a successful visit of all three to the John Patrick Supreme Equestrian Circus on the sands at Carlisle one evening and the two of them had taken a Carlisle Bus Service Mystery Tour to Silloth and Allonby, but the coast had been stormy. There was nothing else planned.
Colin and
Sadie came along, which made it more of a party. Sam said he would join them later, if he could.
As soon as the trestle tables were cleared away, the band put out their cigarettes and struck up for a St Bernard’s waltz. Sadie grimaced at the carthorse plod of the music but partnered by Colin she made a fluent graceful routine out of the simple step and twirl rules of St Bernard.
Although Joe was markedly smaller, Ellen made him hold her like the man so that he would be used to it from the start. She had seen him jumping around to music from the wireless. He could follow rhythm. Singing in the choir helped. He had done well in the piano exam. He had got the hang of swimming quickly enough. She had hopes.
The tap dancing had been a disappointment. Ellen was not to know that an encounter with the earthquake force of Speed’s scorn had finally ripped the heart out of Joe’s rather modest commitment to an activity that could be bettered in several ways on a Saturday morning, including singing for a wedding (which he had been forced to miss) at the inflated fee. Ellen could not persuade him to keep it up, little helped by Sam’s poorly disguised pleasure in the boy’s obstinacy. Seeking consolation she could be relieved that she had only hired the tap shoes. But even the few lessons with Rita Irving, she thought, should have rubbed off an idea of it.
‘You’re as stiff as a board,’ she said, though she smiled.
‘To the left,’ she said, as two other mothers were also saying, ‘three steps. Here we go. One. Two. Three. Bum. Bum. (Stamp your feet.) Two steps forward for you. Now two steps back for me. Now I turn around under your arm. Then one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. And, stop again. One. Two. Three. Stamp. Stamp. Two steps forward for you. Two steps forward for me …’
Stiff as a board.
Joe felt that he was being scrutinised by every eye in the room. The blush did not leave his face. He could not listen to the music for concentrating on his mother’s words. He was too small when she turned around under his arm. In the final ‘one-two-three, one-two-three’ bit, his feet always collided with his mother’s and he did not quite know what ‘one-two-three, one-two-three’ meant.
‘Here we go again. Just relax. To the left. One. Two. Three. Bum. Bum. That was better.’
