A Son of War

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘C’mon then.’

  Sam did not have to allow much. He had the weight of Joe and Ellen had never been far behind him as a cyclist. They launched the black bicycles up the long slope towards the estate, Joe’s cry shrill as a corncrake in the otherwise silent light-skied midsummer evening, almost becoming a single four-wheeled vehicle so close they were as they swerved into Greenacres and pulled up at their gate.

  ‘We won!’ said Joe. ‘We won.’

  ‘Your mammy eased off,’ said Sam, and he felt a sudden flow of happiness at this wife, this son, this life.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘Who did you see?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  There could be some truth in that, Ellen thought. She herself had made no close friends in Greenacres. Half of the families had been brought in from villages round about the town. She knew the others but not well. People were friendly enough and probably thought her rather standoffish because she did not drop in or encourage others to drop in and spent so much time up in the town, but there was nothing she was prepared to do about rectifying that.

  ‘The man told you not to play in the new houses.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Joe, which just about scraped home as true because they had swung on the scaffolding all morning and that was not ‘inside the new houses’. But he was vulnerable and he moved on fast. ‘I went to see Grandad and Aunty Ruth,’ he said, and this was also true.

  ‘How were they?’

  Joe went blank. Now and then adult questions came up that were wholly impossible to answer.

  ‘Grandad wanted me to help him with the flower-beds again but I said I had to come back,’

  Which is why you are early, Ellen did not say and let the smile stay inside her head. ‘Get washed,’ she said. ‘We’re going as soon as we’ve finished dinner. I’ve made the sandwiches.’

  At his aunt Grace’s house, Colin helped them catch Blackie and stuff her into a very battered bookie’s bag, which Sam had borrowed for the occasion and lined heavily with brown paper. Colin’s attempt to insinuate himself into the trip was rebuffed by Ellen with unusual firmness. It would be just the two of them.

  Joe got on the bus for Silloth feeling confused. Why was Blackie coming with them, even though it was funny to see her head peeping out of the bag? Freddie Miller the conductor, a friend of his daddy’s, said he wouldn’t charge for the cat and he snapped his ticket machine loudly and then winked and did not take the proffered money and did not give Ellen and Joe any tickets either, which made Ellen blush and feel the coins clumsily large as she returned them to her purse.

  The bus was only half full. Saturday was not the big day for the seaside and although the weather was bright it was not sunny. It did not feel like an outing to the seaside, to Silloth. Silloth was always a destination that kept you excited days in advance. Silloth was the Solway, the sea whose incoming tide was so fast, they said, it could beat a galloping horse. Thousands of English and Scottish soldiers, Joe had also been told, lay dead beneath the ocean bed from the wars. Silloth was the deep sands over the railway line beyond the docks, it was the dunes you could jump from and play around, it was the cold water you had to brave, the ponies going along the hard ripple-ribbed sand, the gallant sandcastles and the pop from the shed. Silloth was the crock of golden time at the end of the bus-ride.

  But this time there was a discordance, which Joe sensed but could not fathom. Why was Blackie with them?

  Blackie timed her evacuation quite thoughtfully - they were already in Silloth - but the insistent ripe rich stench of cat stink reeked through the bus as Ellen grabbed the bag from the lap of her grimacing, squirming son and hurried to the platform at the back, holding the bag out into the air, masking her mortification as best she could.

  ‘Dirty things is cats,’ Freddie said helpfully and amiably: his own cleanliness was not a priority; he rather liked strong smells.

  Beside the bus stop were steps that led down to a rather halfhearted playground. Not a patch on Wigton, in Joe’s proprietorial opinion. But sometimes when they had caught a later bus home, he would go down to pat the donkeys, which were led there from the green and stood in a docile huddle under a high sandstone wall unresponsive to patting. Ellen went down the steps beckoning Joe to follow. She handed Blackie to him, stripped out the layers of paper, bundled some of them into the bin and waved the open bag in the air before lining it again. The smell would cling.

  She carried the bag at the end of a stiff right arm and hurried Joe around to the railway station to wash her hands in the public lavatories. She took the cat in with her. Joe was given a penny and pointed to the name machine.

  This was a large bulky object, taller than Joe and three times as wide, pillar-box red, with a silver pointer on its front. This could be aimed at any letter of the alphabet and any number from zero to nine. All thirty-six were inscribed around the rim of the dial like the numbers on a clock. On one side of the machine was a lever. You put in the penny, pointed at a letter, pulled the lever and that letter or number was punched on a strip of metal which tongued out of the machine a foot or so from the ground. Joe considered it carefully. He had attempted it twice before and not got what he wanted. Either he had forgotten to punch in any gaps so that all the words ran into one, or he had run out of his quota (twenty-one, including GAPS) before he had finished.

  He had been working on it. First punch the GAP, that was what he had always forgotten. Without a GAP, the J started at the very edge and looked wrong. He concentrated and swung the pointer. GAP. J. GAP. RICHARDSON. GAP. WIGTON. GAP. Exactly twenty-one. He pulled CUT and gazed intently on the strip of metal. It would last for ever.

  They crossed over the railway lines that took the goods vans to the docks and walked alongside a corrugated fence for some way before arriving at the village of marram-topped sand dunes that characterised West Silloth. A hardy little golf course threaded its way between the sandy hillocks, following the curve of the sea. There was a brown wooden refreshment hut. And the new sanatorium.

  Madge Hartley had sought Ellen out in the street as she was coming back from the canteen. She had made the request with her head averted and in a low scathing drone, reciting rehearsed lines and doing so under pressure. Bella was going crazy to see Blackie and the doctor had said it could make no difference at this stage. The date of the visit was set there and then.

  A few of the patients were sitting in deck-chairs, letting the weak sun stroke their upturned faces. A nurse took Ellen and Joe to a little fenced-off area used for parking the small children of visitors. Blackie would be safe there.

  The neat sanatorium, single-storeyed, well proportioned, carefully located near sea air, fine, and yet a tomb from which very few would return, brought to Ellen a sense of loneliness and fear. These were dying rooms. And the fear triggered sorrow: that Bella’s short, circumscribed, half-buried life in the yard should find such air, such space, such niceness only at its brief ending. Ellen found that her teeth were nipping the inside of her bottom lip as she remembered how little, really, she had done for Bella and how severely she had withdrawn Joe from contact once it was obvious that the TB had its grip on the poor girl.

  She smarted at the regrets, which were justified punishment. Her omissions could be found excuses, but she had taken the easier, uncharitable course. Suddenly, as she looked at the marram grass tall in the dunes and the hills beyond across the sword of sea, she experienced a sense of privilege that she was alive and well, that Joe was alive and well, that Sam had come back only with wounds he tried to keep to himself, that she had so much in her life. It made her hot, this waterfall sensation of good fortune, and she glanced around to make sure that she was not being observed because it must be visible, she thought, this great luck in life and to show that off in the sanatorium would be unforgivable.

  But Bella, Bella … who decided that there should be a life like that? And the sweetness of the girl
, the innocence of the girl, so often unappreciated through impatience at her mere slowness, her weak hold on a world too much and too little for her.

  When Bella came out, Ellen felt a rush of tears but she forced them back. The girl was so thin, now, spectral. But where, before, there had been clumsy bulk and uncoordinated ugliness, there was now a grace, even a wistful loveliness. Illness had refined her and Ellen found that as moving as the thought of the child’s illness was unbearable. She disliked herself for standing - unobtrusively but effectively - between Joe and Bella. To compensate, she gave the girl an uncharacteristic hug.

  ‘Hello, Blackie.’ Bella lifted the cat and pressed it to her thin chest. She crooned into its fur and turned away from Joe and Ellen to be alone with the object of her love. Then she walked a little, swaying gently, stopping now and then, a figure at peace with the world, and when she did turn around and smile, the sweetness of the smile cut Ellen to the heart.

  ‘I’ve brought a picnic,’ Ellen said, and began to lay it out.

  Bella nodded but she was on her own. Time with Blackie was too precious to share. The darkness was closing in on her and this was the best of the life she was leaving and she turned away once more to be alone with Blackie for those fragile moments.

  ‘You’re back early.’ Colin’s greeting managed to sound like a reproach and a question.

  ‘There weren’t many about,’ said Ellen, which was true but no reason.

  ‘And how’s Master Joseph?’

  ‘Tired.’ Ellen knew she sounded terse and it was she who was tired, but she knew that Colin was waiting to pounce and she was not up to it. ‘I have to wash this.’ She indicated the bag and went into the kitchen.

  Joe was thoroughly out of sorts. Nothing had been right. Taking Blackie in the bus and the terrible stink of her number two. Bella never speaking to him, hardly looking. Mammy sharp with him afterwards when he had done nothing. The tide far out and going further out so that when he got there, white in his woolly black swimming trunks, the water was shallow for miles, useless for swimming, and hardly anybody around, nobody likely to play with. Sitting beside the open door downstairs on the bus coming back, with Blackie in the luggage hole and his mammy buying return tickets which she dropped into the used ticket box when they got to Wigton, which was a waste of money and made no sense at all None of it had been right. And on top of all that, Colin was in a funny mood.

  ‘You could go upstairs and do your practice.’ Ellen’s amiable-sounding suggestion floated through from the kitchen with the effect of a command. The boy slouched across to the stairs and climbed them as slowly as a very old man. Soon the sound of resentful scales stalked the house.

  Ellen heard the resentment and smiled. Scrubbing the inside of the bag had already made her feel better. Joe’s heavy message topped it up. Perhaps she asked too much, she thought, at times. She knew that she had to stop worrying about Joe but she did and vaguely she realised that she worried much more about Joe these days when she was in Grace’s house and, to let the awful truth enter her mind, when Colin was there.

  'I know you all want me gone,’ he said when she came back into what Grace had begun to call the dining room.

  ‘Where’s Aunty Grace?’

  ‘Don’t try to change the subject! Leonard took her out for a spin in that old Tin Lizzie of his.’

  ‘Uncle Leonard. And I think it’s a very nice car.’

  ‘They didn’t want me to go with them.’

  ‘I’m sure that wasn’t it.’

  ‘What was it, then?’

  The scales had now been ousted in favour of a simplified scrap of Mozart. Ellen caught the stumbled melody. It shot through her like a smile.

  ‘There’s no need to laugh at me.’

  ‘I wasn’t laughing at you.’

  ‘You all want me gone.’

  ‘That’s just not true, Colin.’

  But it was. Even, in some undeniable way, on her part.

  ‘I can see through you, sis,’ he said. ‘I can see right through you.’

  That was also true. Ellen failed not to blush.

  ‘See?’ He was miserably triumphant.

  He tugged out a cigarette and coughed as he lit up. Joe was now playing the melody for the third and final time and it almost sounded real, Ellen thought.

  ‘I can’t help it if I can’t get a full-time job.’

  'I know,’ Ellen said, helplessly. 'It’s not your fault.’

  I’ve tried to make a fresh start. Haven’t I?’

  ‘You have. You have.’

  His desperation was unfeigned. Compared with every other man she knew, Colin’s feelings, and especially his wounds, were open. Before Ellen, they were naked. And, she knew, beneath the wheedling, the manipulation, the emotional blackmailing and cheating, the wounds were real. She knew that and latterly she had tried to avoid knowing that because it made her his subject. But he would not be denied.

  ‘Nobody’ll have tried harder.’ He took a deep pull on his cigarette. ‘But it’s health that’s against me. For full-time. Part-time, I can manage. Can’t I, Ellen? I can, can’t I?’

  ‘Yes,’ she almost whispered. Upstairs, Joe was heading for the finishing line with a laboured flourish of arpeggios.

  ‘But you all want me gone. I know what Dad would say.’

  ‘What would he say?’ And the feeling of helplessness came on.

  'I’m not telling you,’ he said. ‘You like me, don’t you, Joe?’

  Joe nodded as he came down the last few stairs. It was a silly question.

  ‘Want to go for a walk upstreet?’ Joe held his tongue, appealed to Ellen. ‘Walking upstreet,’ Colin repeated bitterly. ‘The poor man’s Saturday night out.’

  Joe had planned to track down the Market Hall gang, failing that to seek out Speed, now spindly tall and drifted away from his chief acolyte. He did not want to walk upstreet with Colin and his hesitation revealed that too clearly.

  ‘Not Joe as well?’ Colin cried and he turned to Ellen as to a judge.

  ‘You’ll go with your uncle Colin,’ Ellen said.

  ‘Colin,’ Joe corrected her.

  ‘You can’t force the lad.’ He nicked the cigarette and put it back in the packet. ‘I’ll go on my own. I’ve got plenty of friends in Wigton. Not everybody wants me gone.’

  The desperation beneath the bravado touched Ellen. She was all he had. He had no one else. No one close. Not even Grace, who seemed to fear him. In his sad-eyed petulance she saw a call for help and she had no alternative. He was her father’s son and she had adopted him as her own and would never let him down. She could see the deep well of weakness and maybe her father had been like that.

  She got her purse and took out five shillings. She held it out to him but talked to Joe. ‘We all want Colin to stay in Wigton, don’t we, Joe?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the boy, laconically, hoping he did not have to go upstreet.

  ‘I’ll let the lad find his old playmates,’ said Colin, pocketing the cash, happily bribed to instant contentment. He took up a boxer’s stance and jabbed out a left. Joe parried and they shadow-boxed each other for a few moments.

  ‘Freddie Mills is never going to be a world champ!’

  ‘You wait,’ Joe said.

  ‘I can’t.’ Colin’s reply was delivered as a stroke of wit. 'Im off upstreet!’

  ‘Can I go out?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ellen said, although she would have given a lot to have had Joe stay, just to be there, as she felt the events of the day lining up to distress her.

  On Sundays, Ellen would see Sam’s unmarried sister Ruth. The women appreciated each other more the more they met. Ruth looked so like Sam - the very tone of the copper hair, the blue eyes, quick movements and occasionally a gesture so precisely similar that Ellen would laugh aloud and say, ‘Sam does that. Exactly that,’ and it brought them even closer.

  She went down to the cottage next to the park trailing Joe who had been allowed to change out of his Sunday clothes - no matt
er the cassock covered all in the choir - into his school clothes, an act of charity enabling him to play in the park without disabling guilt. The park was always a plus for Joe, and his aunty Ruth would produce a cake and most likely a bottle of pop, which his mother would insist on paying for, and Joe would drift out of earshot of their gentle argy-bargy. The minus was that he had to sit in the little front room for at least half an hour before he was set free and there might be nobody in the park he could gang up with and his grandfather tended to commandeer him for a job even on a Sunday.

  But his grandfather had gone down into West Cumberland to visit another of his daughters.

  'I think he went to look for work,’ said Ruth.

  They were having tea. Joe was sucking at his pop. He had eaten the bread and jam. He had to wait for the interminable grown-ups to finish theirs before he would be allowed a bit of that icing cake.

  ‘What about this?’ Ellen looked in the direction of the park.

  ‘He’s frightened it’ll go.’ Ruth’s fine handsome face wore an enigmatic half-smile when she felt obliged to explain her father. ‘The council says it’s broke. They can’t do anything about that death-trap past the bridge beside the Show Fields. They can’t put in the phone boxes they promised either. They just had the money to clean the beck beside the factory. Dad’s convinced it’s him next.’

  ‘Does he have to work?’

  Ruth shrugged.

  ‘You can have the cake now,’ she said.

  ‘You can take it out with you if you like,’ Ellen added, sensing that Ruth wanted a private exchange.

  Joe catapulted from the room.

  ‘I’ll never be able to convince him that I don’t want to put him in the workhouse as he still calls it. Whatever I say. He thinks moving into Wigton is part of a plan of mine. He knows that we had to move. We were lucky to get this place.’

  With care and ingenuity Ruth had managed to redeem the old cottage and give it a brief last life.

  ‘There’s something else,’ Ruth said, later. She had rehearsed it but it made no difference. The strength of this early-middle-aged woman that had kept her father’s paranoia from breaking point, the assurance of this loyal daughter who had shared her loneliness and his fears through several thousand nights of intense cohabitation and intense separateness, none of this helped as she stammered: ‘There’s somebody. There’s … there’s somebody I’m seeing.’