A Son of War

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘Pity,’ said Sam, as they moved along the aisle. ‘And I’d put a few bob on him. But he was game, eh, Joe?’

  The hubbub of excitement followed them out into the balmy summer street, still light. Sam had intended to take Joe round to see Joe Moran in his dressing room but the sight of the poor lad being carried to his corner had made him think again. It would be too humiliating for the man, especially in front of a boy, Sam thought, although, as they sought out the fish and chip shop on the way back to the bus station, he could be mistaken: perhaps poor Moran would be grateful for a friendly face. On the other hand, Sam was not in any way a close friend, just that Moran followed the hound-dogs and would sometimes place a bet on Henry’s board at an evening meeting. Henry had not been best pleased when Sam had insisted on taking the evening off for the fight: the hound-trailing season was at its height and you could also chalk up the odds for the evening’s horse meetings, bring in more business that way. But since Leonard’s warning, Sam found that he tested Henry now and then, always confirming Leonard’s words.

  ‘Sam! You old bugger!’

  Dougie was leaning against the wall scooping pawfuls of chips from the greasy cone. Joe noted that the swear word was not noticed. Not here.

  ‘This your boy?’

  Sam nodded.

  ‘Been in a fight?’

  Joe fingered the Elastoplast rather proudly. In this world it was without any doubt a mark of honour. But he looked at his father for the answer.

  ‘Bit of a battle,’ Sam said.

  ‘A hard man, your father,’ Dougie said, gaping open his mouth, full of half-chewed chips and stumpy discoloured teeth. ‘Him and me was in the war, eh, Sam?’ The drink ponged at three yards. ‘Bloody great times, eh?’

  ‘How’s life treating you?’

  ‘Just now and then, Sam. Just now and then.’

  The small half-drunk ex-soldier, who had found the truth of his life as a licensed, righteous killer in Burma and since his return found those talents obstructing his admittedly reluctant attempts to lead a peaceful existence, took a last gulp of chips, scrunched up the paper, chucked it in the gutter, slid his hands into his pockets and took aim for the nearest pub. ‘Fancy a pint?’

  ‘The boy, Dougie.’

  ‘He could sit on the steps.’

  Sam was tempted. Doug lived north of Carlisle in a grim little border town; the odds against seeing him again were high. And here was someone with whom, literally, he had been through the jungle and seen and done things unimaginable to the raw young man he had been at the outset of the war, and in the brief companionship of a drink something would be said that would raise up that unreal violent time of his life.

  But one drink would not be enough with Dougie. It never had been. And with Joe there, it was not the time to take on that past. Nor, he realised, did he ever want such a time.

  ‘Another night, Dougie.’

  Dougie waved and rolled away.

  On the bus, they talked in detail about the fight and brought in Joe Louis and Freddie Mills. Their talk put the boy in a whirlpool of blows and punches and brave blood.

  ‘Dougie was the real hard man in the section,’ Sam confided, as they got off the bus opposite Greenacres and walked across the road to the lighted house. ‘Dougie was as hard a little man as I’ve ever met.’

  There was admiration in Sam’s tone and Joe understood.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Sam wrote to the brewery, without confiding in anyone. By return he received a letter authorising him to look over the premises. He went down there on the Sunday morning well before opening time.

  The Blackamoor was just across from Grace’s house, facing Market Hill. It was the first pub hit by those walking up from the East End of the town, an area of winter gypsy encampments and weavers’ cottages and men, Sam always remembered, described at the time the militia came from Carlisle to put down the riots as men who ‘would fight each other just for the love of fighting’. The pub was now sandstone-built, a steep-raked slate roof, but there were photographs of it thatched and stories of it even before that bygone time.

  Over the past years, even during the boom drinking war, it had become run down. The old widow who kept the pub had finally been persuaded to give up the tenancy but there were no takers. It took very little time to see why.

  The cellars were dark, filthy, and organised on no principle Sam could discern. There were five wooden barrels on the ramps but only two were tapped and lengths of unused black rubber piping curled over the flagged floor in a sludge of neglect. Yet, he noted, they were three good-sized rooms, with a coal-hole as well as the trap-door that opened on to the wide paved front of the pub, making delivery of the beer a simple job.

  Four small rooms made up the pub itself. A narrow men-only bar with a long settle as the sole furniture and sawdust on the floor. A Darts Room, a room without a piano nevertheless designated the Singing Room, and the kitchen. The kitchen was both the family kitchen, served by a ship’s galley of a pantry, and licensed premises. All the rooms were in a poor decorative state. The furniture was worn or cheap or both. The cost of fittings and ‘goodwill’ on the handover would be very low.

  A wooden gate at the bottom of the stairs marked off the privacy of the flat above. Mrs Hewson puffed asthmatically up the stairs at the top of which was a small landing. The biggest room had recently and brutally been battered into a bathroom and indoor lavatory and the walls still bore the scars. Sam was allowed a quick peep into Mrs Hewson’s bedroom. Like every other room, it smelt of stale beer. There were two more, narrow, single, connected by an inner door. Finally there was the parlour, more like a mausoleum, apparently undisturbed since the death of Mr Hewson of ‘a seizure’ in 1938. There was also a large loft - Mrs Hewson pointed to a trap-door - but she had never been in it. Her late husband had said it was too big and cluttered to do anything with.

  At the back there was a small yard, raked, showing the slope of the hill, with lavatories for the men. The women came upstairs and used the bathroom of the house. There were stables in the yard, above which was a good dry loft that Mr Hewson had once thought of turning into a workshop. The back yard was permanently gloomy. A very high wall hid the garden of what had once been the old grammar school, next door, now occupied by two maiden sisters.

  After the tour Mrs Hewson offered him a drink and approved when he asked for a bottle of milk stout. ‘I’ll join you,’ she said. 'It keeps me going,’

  They settled on hard chairs at the bare scratched oak table in the kitchen. Mrs Hewson poured the stout slowly and skilfully keeping the glass correctly aslant so that the bottle did not disgorge an unnecessary quantity of froth. She was of a type - a bit like Grace, Sam concluded as he studied her, but older, even more corseted, steeped in virtuous and complacent gloom about the world. She had put on widows’ weeds ten years ago and had stuck to them ever since. Her hair was grey, centre-parted and bunned. Her skin was remarkably pale, faintly criss-crossed by telltale red veins. Her hands were steady enough but the depth of the first sip betrayed her need for the stout.

  ‘Ellen won’t like it here,’ she said. ‘The hours are terrible. Eleven thirty to three, five thirty to ten weekdays, twelve to two, seven to ten Sundays. There’s no escape. Between times you’re clearing up and cleaning up other folks’ messes. Christmas Day no exception. Fires to be laid and lit, she’ll need help. Mrs Glaister says when I go she goes, she’s hung on long enough. Women coming into your kitchen and then gallivanting up into your toilet on Saturday nights - don’t tell me women aren’t as messy as men.’ Mrs Hewson took another pull of stout. 'I only carried on because Mr Hewson passed over. I’d been on at him to give up and get a nine-to-five life for years. I was always on at him for that.’ She nodded to herself in approval at the tender memory. ‘Ellen will go mad in here. It’s no life.’

  Sam had to put all that to one side. For perhaps it was true.

  And to take issue with Mrs Hewson or others of the matriarchy who wore
the moral stays of the town was a waste of breath. On market days you could see them out, the women like Mrs Hewson, heroic, broadly built from neck to hip, dressed invariably in black or deep grey, billowing on the windy streets, their ocean, often sporting bare gums, peering with unhappy appraising look, knotting together every thread of gossip, gone it seemed with desperate inevitability from childbearing to elder with no intermediate breath, the calendar, the chronicle, the keepers of the secret history, the furies of moral certainty taking their revenge on life.

  She let him see the account books, which were hopelessly kept but easy to read - turnover small, profit slight. All the beer had to be purchased from the one brewery at Workington, twenty miles away, and for that the tenant got a contract that could be terminated only if the tenant broke the law or by mutual agreement. In brief, provided you bought your beer at the one brewery and kept the law, you were independent, your own boss. You were your own man. Under no authority. Liberated from service.

  That, that above all things.

  On his way out he offered to pay for the stout.

  Mrs Hewson paused, so that the pause was noticed. ‘I’ll let you have that one, Sam,’ she said. ‘I’ve just got a feeling.’

  To make up, he asked for twenty cigarettes. 'I'm out,’ she said. ‘There’s a shortage again. That’s another thing. Never any warning either.’

  The street was like a release from the tomb.

  He waited a few nights.

  Joe was reading the Wizard. Sam also read the comic. His initial pretence had been so that he could talk to Joe about the adventures of the fabulous men in the stories - especially the super-athletic Wilson, at least a hundred and fifty years old, who came out of a deep sleep in a cave in Scotland to boggle at the world and break records wearing black long Johns. And Alf Tupper, the Tough of the Track, the ordinary lad, the welder, self-coached, who beat the privileged and then ate fish and chips. In truth he admitted to a mild addiction, as loyal to the Wizard and the Rover as to many of the story-tellers recommended by Willie Carrick on his less regular visits to the library.

  Like Joe, he raced up and down the columns of tight small print, pulled in week after week by the high adverse odds, the apparent certainty of failure, the cunning and the courage of the last minute, the clean-cut honour of the home-grown heroes, the satisfying fiction of another victory of the right and the good. He read the comic after Joe and they would chat over the stories.

  He turned on the wireless for Take It From Here. Ellen came in from the kitchen to join them. It was still light but the evening hue infiltrated the room, enclosing the three of them, positioned attentively around the brown mahogany cabinet, like ‘millions’, Ellen had heard, all over the country, millions and millions waiting as they were to be entertained and laugh together and talk it over the next day. Both Ellen and Sam felt an extra lift in the eager laughter of Joe. They joined in: ‘Ooh, Ron,’ they said, in unison.

  The next half hour was cocoa and bed for the boy with Ellen back for her own special programme, Family Favourites, which Sam stayed in for, unusually, and laboured through Hornblower who was usually a fast read. Another half-hour’s break, when Ellen went upstairs to make sure that Joe was asleep and not reading, and then she made them both a cup of tea while Sam waited for his favourite programme, Much Binding In The Marsh. Ellen usually drifted out soon after it began.

  She came back into the room a few minutes after he had turned the wireless off. What she wanted to say was that the evening had been so like evenings she had hoped for. The tranquillity, the three of them. Sharing the jokes on the wireless. Sam quietly teasing Joe. The three of them quietly doing what she imagined millions of others were quietly doing, no more no less, and joined to them all through the songs, the laughs. Sam in one of his up times, no diving down into himself where she could not reach, not for weeks now, and Joe surely less scared of him, less clinging to her, this big new house becoming their home, even so far out, a place to start afresh. Yet little of this was transmitted in the few commonplaces she offered. The saying of it would have spoiled it, she thought, even if she had the habit of turning such feelings into words.

  Sam closed the book.

  'I’m going to take the Blackamoor,’ he said.

  Ellen tilted her head to one side and her black hair swung free and softly across her face. She smiled. There was no sign that the words had registered. He thought - How lovely you look.

  ‘I’ve thought it through. I could build it up. God knows, there’s scope.’

  And, still, for another moment or so, it did not dawn.

  'Leonard’ll be one reference: I’ve written to Colonel Oliphant for the other. He was a good officer. He should be OK.’

  ‘Take the pub?’

  ‘The Blackamoor.’

  ‘Why are you doing this, Sam?’

  Her expression, her postures, her tone, it seemed to her that her entire personality experienced a change.

  ‘I’ve no future in the factory now.’

  'It’s steady. Isn’t it? We manage.’

  'I want to be my own boss, Ellen.’ The well-rehearsed explanation was offered as a mutter.

  ‘But I don’t like pubs. I’ve never liked them. I hate men in drink. I don’t like drink.’

  ‘I won’t drink on my own premises.’

  ‘Not you.’ She looked at him in a sort of wonder that he could have engineered such a shock. ‘You’ve settled it, then.’

  ‘It’s still to be tied up.’ He paused. ‘But yes.’

  Ellen nodded, repetitively, as if she were bowing again and again to a household altar, distracted, locked in the shock of it. ‘It’s settled then. That’s it?’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about it before the paperwork.’ Sam’s lame half-truth sounded more like a non-truth than he would have wished.

  ‘What about all this?’ She made a small, sweeping, rather hopeless gesture with her left hand.

  ‘There’s plenty of room there.’

  ‘So you’ve been round the house part as well?’

  ‘Mrs Hewson says you’re welcome any time.’

  ‘Who else knows about it?’

  ‘Leonard. I told him after work. He’ll have told Grace.’

  ‘And who’ll Mrs Hewson not have told?’

  ‘It’s not settled, Ellen. It’s really not. Not till it’s signed.’

  ‘But you can’t wait.’

  ‘No.’ Sam found the firmness he felt. 'I can’t wait. I could build it up. I could make a go of it. I know I could.’

  ‘So I’ll have to give up the canteen?’

  He did not reply.

  ‘We were doing so well here, Sam. We were. It was working out, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it working out?’

  'I know.’ The discomfort he felt at her ill-disguised plea was physical. ‘But it could work out again. And you’ll be back in the middle of the town.’

  Sam had rather calculatingly thought of that as a clincher. She seemed utterly unimpressed.

  ‘It’ll be no good for Joe,’ she said, quietly.

  ‘Why's that?’

  She could not find the answer.

  ‘He’ll enjoy it. Plenty to do.’

  'I have to say yes this time, haven’t I, Sam?’

  He had calculated and, uneasily, banked on this too. Following her opposition to his going to Australia after he came back from the war, her implacable rootedness and her victory, she could not again pit her will against his.

  She got up abruptly and went into the kitchen. He heard the back door open. He followed. She was standing on the apron of grass before the vegetable garden. The sky was crystal, northern stars glittering high in the dark blue-black summer heavens.

  ‘We had to learn the names of some of the stars when we were in the Guides,’ she said. 'I remember the Great Bear - there it is - because the last two stars on the pan-handle point to the North Star. The North Star always seemed a friendly one, as if it was our own. Then there was a W over the other side, what the
y called the Warrior, three stars for his belt, two stars at the shoulders…those two I think at the bottom of his legs. I used to look for that when you were away,’ she added, very quietly, ‘and keep my fingers crossed. I’ll go.’ She glanced around, taken by a rush of fondness for this place, her small territory of grass, Sam’s well drilled vegetable garden. She breathed very deeply through her nose and let out the breath carefully through her mouth. ‘But there’s no garden at the Blackamoor, is there, Sam? There’s no garden there.’

  She turned away because she did not want him to see the quick tears which had come to her eyes, but he had heard them in her voice and he let her go in and be alone for a while.

  'I’m sure you understand that it wasn’t easy in the war for her either,’ Mr Kneale, anxious to help, was very careful. Sam had never confided in him before. Neither he nor Sam quite realised how it had happened but they were in Grace’s kitchen the day before the move into the pub and Sam had intimated disquiet about Ellen despite the brave face put on it. ‘She probably felt very calm in Greenacres. And a pub’s no haven of calm, Sam.’

  Sam listened hard.

  'I think she’s worrying over whether she can cope.’ They had no cups of tea between them to give the conversation a little help. Sam felt that he was being taught. Yet in this instance he did not mind it.

  ‘The women took a lot on in the war, you know,’ Mr Kneale went on. ‘So did the kiddies. They must have wondered whether you were dead or alive every other minute. In some way. Not to talk about but those things go deep, Sam. We know that. I often looked at the children at school and I could see it on their faces. Will my dad be shot? Will he come back? Worry’s a destructive thing, Sam.’ The schoolteacher was moved by his own recollection. ‘I can see Ellen here, in this room, night after night, listening to the news. What she was listening for, Sam, was to find out about you. Night after night. And the boy. He had to be told that you were alive. Just that, you see. But it was a fundamental matter, Sam, and a matter that she had to cope with every day, wondering whether you were alive and keeping the boy reassured when she had nothing at all in the way of evidence. It’s a funny way for a young woman to manage, year in, year out. We know the horrors of war, we know something about the men - but the women and children waiting and listening out, Sam, helpless and just listening out, with no power to act, none at all, that’s another story. When you go through these events they can come back at you in unexpected ways. But she’ll be fine, Sam, she'll be fine. You’ll see.’