A Son of War

by Melvyn Bragg

  Mrs Hewson held a silver threepence just out of reach and Joe had to wait until she was ready.

  ‘They call it the Blackamoor,’ she said, ‘because of a little black lad - about your age he would be when they brought him over. They called all little black slave lads blackamoors in those days. They brought him over to be a potboy. In those days children had to work,’ she said, regretfully, ‘and they used to catch them abroad because they could get such a lot of work out of them. This was a long time ago. You listen. And there was some of the Wigton men - weavers - that just tormented that lad. They wouldn’t let him alone. However willing he was never quick enough for them. They made the poor lad’s life a misery. He was far from home as it was. Bad enough.’ She paused between each sentence now. ‘Anyway, those stables kept horses in those days, Joe, they did when Mr Hewson came in, but I wanted no horses - and one wet night, a bad night, a fella came on a black stallion, a terrible size and temper on it, and what those men did was lock that little black lad in the stable with that stallion. Well, he was scared out of his wits. He screamed and he shouted but they just laughed and he must have agitated that stallion because there was a great kicking and squealing from the horse and more and more screams from the boy and it had kicked him dead. There was quite a fuss about it at the time.’ The longest pause. ‘Mr Hewson always said the little blackamoor won’t leave this place. He says he used to hear him running about up under the roof at night.’ A final pause. ‘This threepence is for you, Joe. Don’t spend it all at once.’

  As she told the story, Joe felt himself going numb. Mrs Hewson’s face was large, and so white. Her layers of heavy clothing were drenched in the perfumes of ale. She was a small woman but she bore down on the boy and emphasised the terrible story with significant nods, a hammer driving in a nail.

  Poor little boy, Joe thought. Poor little boy. In the dark on his own with that black horse. Poor little boy.

  He could hear his screams.

  She had frightened the boy, she could see that. Mrs Hewson felt a glow of satisfaction. She enjoyed frightening children.

  They had to take possession the same day as Mrs Hewson left. Sam opened up the pub. Tommy Miller with his horse and cart did the moving for them, helped by Ellen.

  After two big loads there was a last trip, late in the afternoon. Ellen had hiked to and fro to speed things up but this time she walked down to Greenacres. Joe had asked to play on her bike as he did increasingly in preparation for the great ninth birthday bike of his own.

  She walked the town gauntlet - ‘Moving in, Ellen, eh?’, ‘I’ll be down there’, and worst, most stigmatising of all, ‘One of the toffs now, Ellen, eh?’, ‘Going up in the world, eh?’ - everyone, intolerably, knowing, everyone, intolerably, noticing, free to comment, to single out, transformed into an exception however much she could protest that they would stand to earn less than their combined wage and for many more hours’ work, and what work! Skivvying, constant serving, perpetual clearing up. She would not complain and smiled at the sometimes innocent taunts but ‘going up in the world’ - did people really believe that?

  The only good thing so far was that Colin had mucked in to help Sam and she could see that there would be plenty of jobs for him to do, just across the road from Grace’s house. She could keep an eye on him.

  As she came down to Greenacres on the fine September day she tried to block out the feelings she had for their council house. It was curious. It was not so much what the place had been for the three of them, as what it could have been. But how could she regret, and so acutely, what had not happened? It was tiring. The only thing was to do the next thing.

  They took the mirror, this time, and the wireless, the two little rugs and the side table and the few small ornaments. Tommy Miller had advised that these best things make up a load of their own. ‘Have a lift back, Ellen.’

  Tommy sat on the edge of the cart, in the old fashion. Ellen would have to sit on the cart itself or take the other front corner, legs dangling, hands gripping the rim of the cart to steady herself.

  ‘We’ll look like a pair of tinkers, Tommy.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with tinkers, Ellen.’

  His response was serious. Tommy met up with tinkers in one of his other manifestations as a horse-dealer. He knew their language and enjoyed their peculiarities as much as they enjoyed engaging with a teetotal Salvation Army bandsman which was another of Tommy’s lives. He and Ellen had been in the same class at school together, right through.

  ‘Get up,’ he said. ‘Save your legs.’

  It was a kind invitation, which forbade refusal.

  Tommy clicked his tongue and the piebald mare trotted smoothly down the West Road, passing the fine houses in their own wooded gardens with a flick of its mane, and Ellen half listening to Tommy’s observations.

  So this was it.

  The horse slowed down to a walk up the hill and Tommy kept it to a walk even when they were back on the flat, passing Wigton Hall. Ellen had schemed to get off the cart before the Fountain but when the time came she could think of no good excuse so she went back into the old town as so many women must have done over the centuries, perched on a cart, accompanied by a few possessions, not a little afraid of what they might find, powerless before an unwanted life decided for them by their men.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Ellen took him for his eye-test the day after Bella’s funeral, upset and somehow hurt at the meagre turnout in the Primitive Methodist chapel. She had decided against taking Joe with her. Apart from anything else, one morning off school was enough.

  They had to go to Carlisle. Joe could not shake off the conviction that the test was directly connected with the stone fight and neither could Ellen. Mr Brown, a new maths teacher at the school that autumn term, had noticed Joe’s difficulty at not being able to see the numbers on the blackboard clearly and he said the problem must have been there for a while.

  The waiting-room was so cram-full that they had to stand for the first hour. The only speech in the claustrophobic silence was the occasional ‘When can we go home?’ of a child or the hushed whisper of a parent. Everyone wore bulky coats. The weather had turned savage.

  Joe’s eyes were soused in a gooey liquid and swam in semi-blindness. Their weakness was not in question. Wear in the classroom and when reading but not absolutely essential when playing. Joe grasped at that.

  Specs would not only alter the way he would see. They would -and more importantly - alter the way he would be seen. Though only nine he had no doubts on that. Specs meant that you could be called ‘Speccy’ or ‘Four Eyes’ or ‘Goggles’. Specs meant that you were one of those - like the over-fat, the over-spotty, the incontinent nose dripper, the dwarfish - someone to be picked on. Specs meant that you would certainly be taunted, most days, especially by those older boys who liked an easy fight. Specs meant that you got nasty little welts on either side of the top of your nose and behind your ears - he had seen them, he would inherit them, they marked you out even when you took your specs off. Specs meant girls laughed at you, the pretty girls, the girls you wanted to go with. Specs meant that all sorts of ambitions were snuffed out. Could you imagine Tarzan in specs, or Denis Compton in specs, or Stanley Matthews or Wilson of the Wizard, or Joe Louis in specs - how could he be world champion now? - or Freddie Mills, or Captain Marvel? His intimations of a spectacled future were furious and dark. Specs shut you out. And you were always frightened to break them.

  'It’ll not be so bad,’ Ellen said, rather distantly, to cheer him up as the bus came back into Wigton.

  But it would. He knew it would. It would be worse than bad.

  ‘You’ll get used to them.’

  Specs just ruined the whole of your life. Did nobody understand?

  What was the point of that?

  Poor Bella, Ellen thought, as the bus pulled up the hill into the town. The girl had preyed on her mind since the cold funeral. Poor Bella, so few to mourn her.

  Sam felt that he had co
me into his own. He could do this job. He would never break the law so he could never be fired. The business would be as good as he was, no better, no worse, and that suited him. Everything needed cleaning up. Dirt had become institutionalised in gluey patches of leaking grime under unmoved benches. Stains looked like tattoos. Curtains were heavier with dust than material The rubbish in the cellar had to be waded through. Lino curled and frayed and ripped.

  The brewery sent a cellarman to teach Sam about tapping barrels, keeping the beer cool and settling the ale, cleaning the pumps and drawing a pint. Speaking as a connoisseur he said that he had never come across cellars in such a bad state.

  After he had sorted out the mess, Sam enjoyed the cellar work. He would go down every morning after he had carried up the crates of bottled beer and done his other jobs. He transformed the place. He drew clear water through the pipes, which he had severed from the barrels and settled in buckets of water, until it came translucent through the pumps. Pull after pull. And if the cloudy water did not quite hit the peak of translucence, Sam went down to the cellar and refilled the buckets with clear water. The improvement in the beer was noticed within days.

  There was a bonus in the sense of leisure about the hours. He did not have to clock on. Ever again. In theory he need not get up until after eight, even after nine o’clock, and once or twice he lay in bed that long just for the hell of it. There were the two or three hours clear in the afternoon, especially on weekdays, when midday trade was light, and in those afternoons he could stroll around the town, or read a little, put on a couple of bets personally, drop into the Legion for a few frames of snooker, feel as free as a man of means. The evening work was no bother, not only because the place got busier but because company found him, conversation came to the pub, the pub was its refuge and much of the talk was of sport. Men who followed it in detail talked about it at length, examined it ruminatively, took serious issue, exercised hypotheses, used it as the infinitely flexible currency of communication.

  Sam soon knew what he wanted the pub to be distinguished for. There would be darts teams - which Mrs Hewson had let go - and the dominoes would go on. But all the top pubs had an extra dimension. The Vaults was the pub for the pigeon men. The King’s Arms was where the football lads met since they had once played in the field behind the pub. The Lion and Lamb was famous for its Sunday quiz and its connection with Carlisle United Supporters Club. The Rugby lads went to the Kildare. Since motorbike scrambling had come in, the Vic had taken that following. The farmers favoured both the Crown and the Crown and Mitre, especially on market days. The Blackamoor, Sam decided, would be the pub for hound-dogs.

  These were a craze in a town always dog mad. Hound-dogs -derived from foxhounds but bred for speed - competed for prize money on roughly circular courses through the countryside, generally about eight miles in all, following a strong trail of paraffin and aniseed. It was called the poor man’s horse-racing. The dogs were not expensive to keep. The difficulty lay in getting to the meetings, which were held usually in the fells all over the county, sometimes two or three nights a week, as well as on Saturdays. What was needed was a supporters’ club, Sam thought, and a regular supply of private buses. He set himself to sort that out. And he might start a Sunday quiz - the town could surely support two.

  Through the pub, he found a much darker side of the town. There were the frugal and the unsettled and the rejected, coming in for warmth, often literally, and as time went on, offering confidences, confessing failures, revealing unfulfilled ambitions, and the more Sam and Ellen were trusted, the more lives were uncovered before them. They became secular confessors.

  For Sam the pub would serve. It could be a world. It was world enough. It would take care of Ellen and Joe. It would make sure that his father got a regular free drink. Colin had shown willing: for Ellen’s sake there might be a chance for him. He could master it, make the work work for him. He had felt the glove fitted from that first encounter with Mrs Hewson and every day confirmed it.

  Only Ellen could undermine it and he watched her carefully. He knew that she would not set out to thwart him but there was no doubt that her dislike of the idea of a pub was real. He was asking a lot.

  Ellen saw that this was his deal. In years not old, just entering his fourth decade, she knew, she could see it in every move he made, that this was his destination. This was the man she had married before the war but it was also someone else, forever that distance apart, forever following his own drum not so much unwilling as unable to share everything as once they had so long ago, in another life.

  The pub depressed her. She was young. She wanted the normal things - dances, evenings, the same rhythm as others. But now she was a landlady. The word made her cringe. Every association of the word made her cringe despite her respect for at least three of the landladies in the town. But they were on a bigger scale than she was, she thought, and older, more capable of standing up to the job. For the first time in her life she feared she might not be up to a task and the feeling was a clammy morning sickness, a burden.

  But it had to be borne. Sam had called on her loyalty. The best had to be made of a bad job. Private reservations had to be excised. They were a luxury. At times she thought she would weep all day but she stayed dry-eyed and the tears only stained her mind. It taxed her, though, this doing against her will, and Joe was sidelined, left to shift for himself, given the odd treat where there had been attention, Sam too withdrew from the boy, locked into a new and demanding life.

  Ellen found that work helped numb feeling. Cleaning was imperative, cleaning downstairs, on the stairs, in the flat, wanting but having to wait for new wallpaper, new lino, new paint, cleaning a grease-coated stove, a brown-stained sink, opening hours, midday, then tidy up, shop for tea, opening hours again, she had to learn to do the bar while Sam went out to see to the buses for the hounds or take a break, learn the prices, pull a pint. Men were different in a pub: a pub was the extension of their house yet it was her home, especially the kitchen, where they could be having supper, her and Joe, and people would just come in with a drink, for the fire and the company. All the settlement of family at Greenacres blown away, blown far away, never to be lived again. The pub, her home, known as the House. Sam kept a good House.

  She paid Sadie to help with the cleaning every morning and that was a blessing. Sadie loved the excitement of the newness. Sadie found Jack Ackerman, Jack Ack, to play the accordion on Friday night and Saturday night. Jack could accompany anything. Never had a lesson. All the old songs. And the new - ‘Galway Bay’, of course, and ‘Woody Woodpecker’, 'I'm Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover’; give Jack Ack a couple of lines and he could vamp his way through. Sadie herself was better than the wireless, Ellen thought. Scarcely a film star moved or an American singer sang a note without a salty report from Sadie. ‘Air freshener,’ she cried in those first few days, ‘give us bags of air freshener and we’ll make this pub into a holiday camp, Ellen - just you wait and see, like Mr Asquith said.’

  Colin was found jobs. Sam paid him a few bob even though he could have done the jobs himself. Ellen saw that as an act of love for her. Colin felt that at last Sam respected him. He bloomed, Ellen reported to Grace, who pleased Ellen by agreeing that she could see it. It would be the making of him. He got himself a crew-cut, which Ellen said did not suit him at all but it was part of a new start, and she could understand that.

  The first months were dirty, tiring daily drudgery and the only way to get through was to chatter to Sadie and think about something else all the time. Sam took on the cleaning of the outside lavatories, for which Ellen was grateful. He would try to avoid asking her to serve in the pub at midday through the week - except for the ten minutes he took for his dinner. He tried as best he could to ease the bruise of the disappointment she tried to conceal and ignore.

  The curious thing was that Ellen became as big an attraction as Sam. Her admonishments to young men that they were wasting their money on a second pint and should save up in
stead; her warm welcoming of the Salvation Army selling War Cry and the Tower on Saturday nights; the pleasant women friends she asked in to help serve in the Singing Room and the Darts Room at weekends; above all, the deep and deepening knowledge she held, and the quiet passion she had for all the doings of the town, brought in its own number who would say not, 'I'm off to Sam’s House,’ or even ‘the Blackamoor’, but ‘off to talk to Ellen’. And as time went on, these conversations, this court of contact, become a balm.

  Sam and Ellen flared up with each other still, but now there was the distorting pressure of others. A confrontation had to be instantly defused when a customer called and the anger of personal passion was immediately masked by a necessary politeness, an imperative sense of privacy, which exacerbated the anger, shovelled insult on it by demeaning it.

  There were glimpses. There were moments. Ellen would see Sam, standing at an empty bar in the first opening hour of many a weekday. He would be studying form in the paper or doing his books, smoking a cigarette, the hair still deep copper, something about the confidence of the posture that still moved her, the completion of his appearance by the spirally smoke from the cigarette curling around the motes of dust, the sureness of the man, the man who had gone away and come back half known. And Sam found that in the busy evenings towards closing time when the orders showered in, he would be on the lookout for a smile - not directed towards him, just a real smile that would open up to him the girl he had met when she was very young, the young woman he had craved throughout the war. It gave him a chime of pleasure - that there could be happiness for her here, and in that happiness he could see what he loved.