by Melvyn Bragg
‘Ruth!’
Ellen wanted to cheer but knew it would stifle her with embarrassment. Out of her own suppressed delight she hoped she sounded casual.
‘Do I know him?’
‘He’s from Maryport.’
‘Where did you meet him?’
‘At the pictures! In Maryport. I was seeing Marjorie and there was time in hand. He sat next to me and we got talking in the interval’
‘Well’ Ellen’s sigh was deep in satisfaction. 'I'm really pleased. I’m really pleased. He’s a lucky man.’
'I’m the one who’s lucky.’ Ruth’s response was so earnest that it gave Ellen the chance to laugh aloud.
'Is he serious?’
‘Yes.’ Ruth’s expression was surprise, even wonder. ‘Although we can’t see each other much at present because of his work. He’s a salesman.’
‘With a car?’
‘With a car.’
‘Ruth Richardson!’
‘But Dad,’ she said, fighting off the elation that Ellen’s transparent pleasure provoked, ‘he’s found out and he thinks I’ll leave here.’
‘You might have to.’
‘He could come.’
‘What does your - what’s he called?’
‘Frank.’
‘Frank think about that?’
‘I haven’t raised it.’
‘Don’t rush it.’
‘I keep thinking I should.’
‘Not yet… I’m so pleased, Ruth.’ She emphasised each syllable, heavily. ‘I am so pleased.’
The park had been dull. None of Joe’s new friends had been let out on the Sunday or at least none had been allowed the pleasure of the park. He had climbed two trees behind the bowling hut: like ‘Just William’ whose tactics he studied carefully, he believed there were only two sorts of trees - those you could climb and those you could not. The coppice behind the bowling hut was rich in climbables but being alone up a tree palled quite soon after you had worn out being adrift on a raft in the middle of an ocean, looking out for an island from a crow’s nest, or pretending to be Tarzan. The usual two old men from the workhouse were in the shelter and they had tried to tease him in for the passionate hugs they traded in, but Joe avoided them. Even the banana slide was a disappointment. An earlier shower had slowed it down.
‘We were going to send out a search party,’ Ruth said.
‘That’s such good news,’ said Ellen.
‘Ssssh. Little pigs.’
‘Have big ears.’ Joe knew that. What was the secret?
I’m sure it’ll work out,’ said Ellen. 'I'm sure it will.’
Sometimes luck happened to the right people, she thought, as they walked back to Greenacres by the fields. Sometimes there was a happy ending that deserved to be a happy ending. Ruth had looked so lovely, transformed. Ellen tried to remember when she had fallen for Sam, but they had both been so young and it had happened over the years and then there was the war. But there must have been a time, a few weeks, when she, like Ruth, had been transformed and that thought made her walk faster than usual, keen to see if Sam had come back home.
It was Colin who was waiting for her. He saw them and ran directly at them, flagging them down with his right arm.
‘Aunty Grace had a fall down the kitchen stairs. She’s most likely broken her wrist. She was concussed and the doctor said if I hadn’t “acted quickly” - “acted quickly” he said - then it could have been quite nasty. They’ve taken her to Carlisle Infirmary. Uncle Leonard’s down there with her. He said I had to come and tell you right away but there was no need to worry. He said I’d done well.’
He looked so happy, Ellen thought, so proud, so happy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
‘It’ll only be for the three nights,’ Sam said.
‘You can’t not go,’ Ellen replied, straight-faced.
‘If I work a double shift on Wednesday and the early shift Thursday, Ted’ll do the Friday for me.’
‘They won’t miss him one day at school. I’ll write a note.’ She could see that her complaisance rather undermined him.
‘We catch the train Thursday afternoon, that gives us all day Friday and Saturday and be back on Sunday. Not too long, you see.’
I’ll stay with Aunty Grace,’ said Ellen. ‘She’s still shaky.’
‘That would fit nicely in for you, wouldn’t it?’
‘Whatever. You go. You both.’ She enjoyed the relief undisguised on Sam’s face.
‘What’ll Joe think?’
Ellen simply smiled her response. Joe would be dumbstruck.
The smile punctuated Sam’s anxiety and Ellen’s undisguised pleasure ruled a line under it.
‘I’m sorry you’re not included in the invitation.’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘We’ll just be watching cricket all day.’
'I would be bored stiff.’
‘He only has the two rooms, you see. Two altogether. It can’t be done.’
‘How did you meet him?’
In Burma. I was in his section for about three months. What a hard man he was. They offered him a commission if he stayed on but he wanted to come back to his family.’ Sam grinned rather bashfully, aware that this high excitement was prodding him into garrulity. ‘Like the rest of us.’ A wave of warmth broke over Ellen. ‘But, from what he told me, it just didn’t work out. Anyway, he lives on his own now. He was up in Carlisle and I just happened to bump into him in the County Bar when we were coming back from the Races.’
‘That was lucky, then.’
‘Henry’s a bit huffy about it. He says it’s his busiest time of year.’
‘Henry Allen was always given his own way as a boy,’ said Ellen. ‘They had money. That was the trouble.’
‘Huffier than he needed to be.’ His huffy attitude had nettled Sam, confirmed him of the sense of Leonard’s advice, and almost prompted him to walk out. But Henry had sensed that and his instant practised emollience had averted a rupture.
‘So I’ll tell Joe in the morning.’
It was perfectly clear to Ellen that Sam wanted to run up the stairs, wake up Joe and tell him there and then. It was only about nine o’clock. Still bright daylight.
‘He wouldn’t sleep if you told him now.’
But, Sam thought, he would know for that bit longer. He would have the extra night to be excited about it. The pleasure would be all the greater for that.
‘OK. I’ll leave him be.’
‘Tea?’
When she went out, Sam got up to walk about the room. It was rarely that he savoured their new place. He had thought it too big at first. The garden had seized his chief interest. But this evening the expanse of it made him feel well off. The neighbours were no trouble. The journey into Wigton was nothing. The distance from the town, for Sam, lent it added value: he did not quite know why but just getting out of that ingrown place, so dear to Ellen, raised his spirits. So he had left Wigton after all, he caught himself thinking, and gone all the way to Greenacres.
Joe tried to take it in at one go the next morning but it was too much. To go to Leeds. To go to a Test match. To see, to actually see, to watch, to be near, Denis Compton, Len Hutton, Cyril Washbrook, Edrich, Evans, Laker - those English cricketers he turned himself into when playing in front of the dustbin wicket - and to be in the presence of the visiting demi-gods from Australia, Don Bradman, Ray Lindwall, Keith Miller - men whose exploits were exaggerated and sanctified in the giddy conversations of awestruck boys - was simply too much to absorb. He needed it to happen.
He saw his best clothes and two clean shirts and socks and spare shoes put into a case with his daddy’s clothes. He got on the bus to Carlisle and then took far and away the longest train journey in his life. He leaned out of the window when the train swung across the bare magnificence around the Settle line, saw the curve of the many carriages, the long plume of smoke, scrunched his eyes to avoid specks. He sang a song for the black-faced, white-teethed miners who got on for
a couple of stops, and at Leeds mighty station he shook hands with Mr Carter who said, ‘Fine lad.’ He took the tram and got into a narrow bed in which his father joined him, but later on when Joe was already plumbed into exhausted sleep.
It was when they got into the ground, after queuing from seven thirty, it was when the men in immaculate white walked out on to the immaculate green and he was one of thirty thousand who cheered, it was only then that he began to believe it, but it would for ever retain something of a dream, sitting cross-legged next to the boundary rope, praying for the ball to be hit for a four and come his way. It would always be something of an unattached event, a time of enchantment.
Of so many moments, one. It was on their first day, Friday, the second of the five-day Test. He was sat beside the boundary rope and although never quite certain that he would ever find his daddy again in this, for him, uncountable city of people, he knew that his daddy would find him. He had his score card. He had his pencil. Every ball bowled was noted. Every run. The heaven was in the detail. He saw Bradman bowled and Hasset and he marked it down. He saw the unbelievably glamorous Keith Miller go and he noted it down. He saw the nineteen-year-old Neil Harvey come to the crease and begin to lay about like a crown prince of the game. He noted every run.
His hero above all, though, was the Middlesex and England cricketer, Denis Compton. Although he was honour-bound to support Cumberland and Westmorland in all things, there was space allowed in cricket, because Cumberland and Westmorland could only field a Minor Counties team. So you could support one of the great cricketing counties that rolled off the tongue like the great county regiments, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Yorkshire, Lancashire … Joe picked Middlesex, for Denis Compton, the cavalier of cricket and an England International footballer, a double of such breathtaking rarity that Joe’s natural inclination to hero-worship described a line of growth that took it off the charts. Cricket for England and Football for England: if he had played darts, they said, and darts had been for England, he would have played darts for England. His was the world. There are mists of romance and primitive magic in the hero worship of boyhood, perhaps a precursor of sexual passion, surely a form of idolatry, and a terrible yearning for initiation, and from all these pleasurable afflictions Joe suffered for Denis Compton.
The English crowd appreciated the Aussies, liked them, they knew their cricket, admired them, saw a great side usually cruising at a higher altitude than their own although in this Test the battle was gloriously even. Joe had never been encircled by so many, such a genial unison, such a pacific focus. It uplifted him.
Then the miracle occurred.
With the slightest roll of his wrist, timed to a millisecond, Neil Harvey, golden with youth from golden Pacific beaches, struck a cement-hard ball that travelled towards him at over eighty-five miles an hour. From the narrow blade of willow it bulleted over more than a hundred yards of shaven turf so quickly that the English fieldsmen scarcely had time to stir.
The ball joggled over the boundary rope and came as directly into the lap of Joe Richardson as if it had been directed by divine providence. He clasped it with both hands. For a moment he was crushed with the responsibility and the attention. Everybody would be looking at him. Most of the thirty thousand were applauding. How could he carry out his clear duty? Somehow, after a second or so, he struggled up, watery-kneed, head rather bowed with the responsibility, and held the ball out for the fieldsman who came up at an elegant leisurely pace. It was Denis Compton.
Joe held out the ball as Oliver Twist had held out his bowl.
Denis Compton smiled and spoke. He said: ‘Thanks, son.’
And he took the ball and measured the distance and lazily, easily, threw it in a high and perfect arc to land after one bounce in the gloves of the keeper.
When the boy sat down, after the daze cleared and he caught up with his score card from the others, he looked around to see if he could catch the eye of his daddy who had to have seen it because, if not, no one would believe him, not in Wigton, not on earth.
They had a memorable supper in the back room of a vast fish and chip shop and after several games of draughts in Robert Carter’s minute flat, Joe was willingly led to bed and, Sam announced, ‘dead to the world before his head hit the pillow’.
Sam had bought half a bottle of whisky, Robert had a few bottles of Guinness under the sink. They waited for the news to hear any comments on the game and read the evening edition of the paper to savour again the details of the game and then they settled down to talk in depth about the game.
Sport had become Sam’s ballast. Work at the factory was a slab of time for a slice of money. Ellen and Joe seemed to be stable enough and in so far as he could pursue domesticity he did but it did not claim him. Pre-war friends had not come back and the range of new acquaintances had not replaced them. What the war had damaged was buried as deeply as possible: but sometimes the wounds bled and sport was the staunch.
Sport was bare contest. Men fought, most nakedly in boxing, but also in football and cricket. Men fought men for their name, their honour and the validation of victory - as they always had done and, Sam thought, always had to.
Because you had practised those sports yourself, you knew the skills involved, the toughness, the courage, and you saw yourself idealised and heightened by the professionals. These men were your champions: from the ranks an Achilles took the field, a David went to battle. In such sport, as in war, you saw strong men fold: you saw the less gifted outcraft the chosen: you saw fury canalised, grace realised and character made visible. The guiding mystery of luck was almost palpable, the famous rub of the green, the punch of a lifetime, and all the complexities of confidence and form.
Sport, like war, to Sam, was fundamentally about men: men at full stretch, men pitting their best against the best, surfing luck, testing fortune, and above all things seeming unafraid.
‘I like the Aussie lads,’ Robert said. ‘Did you ever come across any?’
Sam nodded. The unaccustomed convergence of Guinness and whisky had weakened him, but happily so.
‘A few of our own fellas wanted to go over there. Some did.’
‘I thought about it myself,’ Sam replied.
‘What stopped you?’
Sam looked for words but they failed him. It was so long ago now and he wanted the sea to close over.
Robert nodded. He was drinking faster than Sam but he looked well enough, sitting on the edge of one of the two deep armchairs, jacket off, sleeves rolled up, forearms giving notice of his strength. He was balding and long, looped, inadequate wisps of fair hair testified to his disappointment at this early defeat.
‘Family, I’d bet,’ Robert said, unerringly. ‘We’re all in their hands.’
Sam waited. He was not sure he wanted to talk, the day had tired him so pleasantly, and these gold and black drinks both sated and sapped him.
‘Mine had got herself a fancy man,’ Robert said. The look of desperation that accompanied the confession was impossible to answer.
The silence was protracted but not awkward.
'It’s the kids you miss,’ he said. ‘Two. One of each. Ten and twelve.’
When he went into the bedroom, Sam decided to sleep on the floor. He had woken up in a sweat of nightmare the night before and feared that it could be much worse after such a day and Robert and all that was there, unsaid, reminding them.
He took a cushion from the armchair and the blanket off Joe’s bed, leaving him just the sheet. The night was hot.
The boy’s light, sweet breathing was like a song, he thought, in his musky near drunkenness, better than a song, the boy’s breathing, as he lay on the floor in some way the guard, a good day, looking through the skylight, his mind surging slowly into unwelcome sleep to meet the subject he and Robert had spent the day suppressing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Joe had not reckoned on grown-ups other than teachers being there. Perhaps it was that which triggered the feeling of strangeness.
Seeing his aunty Sadie with his mammy who just that morning had said she might slip across after the canteen, and other women grown-ups who also stood at the back of the room, destabilised him. Did they know he had to sing?
He liked to sing. If the word had been permissible he would have said that he loved to sing. Especially in the choir where other voices closed around his own and the basses and tenors and contraltos went their own road but always chimed in and made such an harmonious sound at the ending that inside his head he was singing their parts as well as hearing his own voice singing treble.
There was the level almost humming murmur of the psalms and the versicles and responses that quietly flowed into the silence of the church. There were traditional anthems, full of mighty words, vast adoration, absolute promises modestly proposed in calm, and antique chants that reached back thirteen hundred years. There were the hymns, Ancient and Modern, from tub-thumping to wistful, hymns you could bellow and march to war on, hymns you whispered in lullaby, love songs to Christ, hymns of triumph and pain and hope, each one drawing from Joe and others in the choir wholehearted identification. And all the words were holy, aimed for the vaults of heaven.
In the choir you were safe. In the choir you could stop for a few moments and no one would really notice especially as the choirmaster also played the organ, ambitiously, so he was not quite able to give a hundred per cent attention to the trebles a hundred per cent of the time. Yet you could still hear your own voice clear and there was a sense of well-barricaded solitude in that, a contradiction that gave it mystery.
But singing on your own. In his bed it was fine and he would often lie there humming or picking through the songs of the day neither to stave off sleep nor to encourage it but simply because of the joy of it, in the big dark room in Greenacres, lying on his back, eyes wide open, the music coming out of him. And he would be caught singing or whistling to himself sometimes when he had gone shopping and joined a queue, patiently bored while a shop assistant made an expedition of every item or a conversation developed to which purchasing was secondary. At Christmas, of course, carol singing became an industry and he worked the houses. Sometimes with Alan but mostly alone. It was quicker and you got more money. And in the class in music lessons when he was asked to sing the tune solo he did it because you did what you were told and nobody could hold that against you even if you liked doing it.
