A Son of War

by Melvyn Bragg

  They were never out of each other’s lives. Morning, noon, night. Times of retreat were rare. Such intense cohabitation made demands they had not bargained for. Every hour was intertwined. Love was stretched too thin to cope. Disagreement had a multitude of opportunities. And yet, in that intensity, a new reliance slowly accreted, a proven sense of the two of them. Where nothing could be long disguised or ever hidden, they knew each other as deeply as any other knowing. Empathy became necessity. Tolerance had to find new limits. No mood could be consumed in secret, no slight concealed. The intensity of consistent partnership in all things on all days grafted new roles on to the boy-girl, lovers, man-wife, parents’ roles they already had.

  Joe ran between the two of them in a suppressed panic in those first raw, effortful, tiring weeks. The newness, the liberties, the privileges teased him into small pleasures and vanities alike. He had the run of a man’s world, the secret world of men, men who exchanged a word with him now. Yet outside - in the choir, the Cubs, the baths - he looked for more than he had ever done, the last to leave, organising any game to linger on.

  For a while at school he could not keep a straight line on the page. Unless he concentrated flat out, his handwriting would start at the top of the page by abutting the margin on the left-hand side of the paper and then leave it, each line starting further and further away from the margin, each line shorter, a wasted blank space revealed, shaming him. He could not seem to help himself.

  Half the time, Mr Brown said, he wasn’t there. Mr Brown said this in a kindly manner, but the boy felt guilty because it was true. He was drugged by fantasies of escape.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Joe came in past bedtime. He had been at the swimming gala in the under tens squadron team. They had only come third, which was a better way of saying they had come last. He did not want his father to ask him the result so he slipped past the side door of the bar. The kitchen was already full. Ellen came out of the bar and went into the galley while Joe sat on a stool in front of the fire. A lady who had begun to come regularly, a wealthy lady, his mother said, who wore strong makeup and glittering jewellery, asked him easy questions about school. The lady told him the fire would dry his hair and took his soggy towel to give it a quick rub and he felt calmer.

  One or two goodnights accompanied Ellen and himself as she emerged with the warmed-up pie and a cup of cocoa and they went upstairs.

  She watched as he stripped and stepped into the striped pyjamas.

  ‘Clean your teeth, say your prayers, sleep tight.’ Ellen laid the lightest of kisses on his forehead. There was no time for anything else.

  He was allowed to have the wireless to himself on Saturdays. It was tuned to the Light Programme. He stuffed up the pillow and sat in bed with the pie and the cocoa and a copy of the Wizard as the noise of the pub swelled beneath him. He read rapidly and gobbled the pie.

  He knelt by the bed. Our Father. God Bless Mammy and Daddy and Colin and Uncle Leonard and Aunty Grace. Please make me better. For Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.

  Bed. Dark. The noise growing. A funny sound? The little black boy. Say it often enough and he will go away, his daddy had told him when he had winkled out of him the root of his fear of the loft. But he was there, the little blackamoor. Joe had heard him call out. He had heard him cry.

  He woke up to a sound that combined the loud scrape and crash of furniture, the high fearful yelling of women and the jabber of oaths, warnings, threats full-throated from men. For moments he did not know what was happening. An intensifying of the noise, his father’s voice? His mother’s? Zipped out of bed on to the landing, leaning over the banisters, saw a mélée crammed in the narrow passage that separated the Darts Room and the Singing Room from the bar and the kitchen, men, jammed together, a sudden gap when a scuffle became a blow and cleared space for the fight.

  His daddy not fighting. His daddy doing what? Smiling! Putting his back to the fighting men and pushing, others pushing, with their backs, the fighters shoved towards the front door, women looking out of the kitchen, not his mother, two men helping his daddy to push, ‘Heave!’ his daddy said, ‘heave!’ and smiling when there was this fight and Joe’s stomach churning, his mind dizzy, sick. Why was his daddy not fighting?

  Then the pack of men were outside, quite suddenly, and his daddy slammed the bolt in the door and slapped men on the back and said very loudly, 'It’s all over, ladies and gentlemen. It’s all over. As you were.’ He went to the Singing Room and right away Jack Ack squeezed out ‘Rose of Tralee’. ‘As you were.’

  Joe raced back into his room to look out of the window and into the street where four men were fighting. Right across the street, seen clearly by the light at the bottom of Market Hill. Other men formed a circle, which elasticated around the fighting. One of them was down. The other kicked him! Joe gasped. Another was just hitting his opponent again and again. 'It’s over! Break it up!’ someone cried out. 'It’s over! Break it up!’ But the man kicking and the man hitting did not stop until they all ran away, over Market Hill, down Burnfoot, into Tenters, and Joe saw the policeman and pulled back from the window.

  He was beside himself. His arms tingled, his whole body flinched and struck, was in the fight, winner, loser, in the fight. Feelings boiled in him. He boxed and bashed and bashed the pillow.

  ‘Time, gentlemen, please. Time, please.’

  Joe darted back on to the landing, excited, full of dread, but no more fights. He had watched them leave the pub before on noisy nights when he could not sleep and this appeared to be no different. Yet it must be. There had been a fight! He peered over the banisters weighing up the departing customers: who would cause trouble next? Why had his daddy not fought?

  Then they were all gone and he saw his mother at last. Safe! She did not look up. She was busy, emptying ashtrays, collecting glasses, washing up, tidying the chairs, sorting out the main things while Sam counted the takings and entered them in the book, and the helpers with Colin and Jack Ack went into the kitchen where they were allowed by law to be given a drink by the landlord.

  Jack Ack told them how it had started, in the Singing Room, when one of the Milburn brothers had sworn at Freddie Johnston, which began the fight, and the other Milburn had joined in and Freddie’s mate, Arthur, so fast, said Jack Ack, chairs picked up, women screaming, glasses knocked off the tables, at each other like fighting cocks.

  In the corridor, Sadie said, the Milburns had ganged up against Freddie, which was not fair. But the Milburns, they had been up at court three weeks before for fighting each other at the dance! Each other!

  I was at the door seeing they got out, said Colin. Arthur had a swing at me but I just ducked and I didn’t retaliate. You want them out when they start trouble, he said, best for me to keep out of it with my temper!

  Yes, said Patricia, who served in the Darts Room and was shaken though a touch thrilled. You can’t afford trouble. It puts everybody in the wrong mood.

  The fight went round and round again and Alec, who helped out with the clearing afterwards for the free drink, reported what he had seen through the bar window, the man on the ground, the kicking, the policeman coming, round and round it went, reshaped, touched up, packaged for future use.

  Sam knew it was a big test. He took his time with the money. Pennies in neat piles of twelve. Bobs in twenties. Half-crowns in eights. Halfpennies, sixpences, threepenny bits, two-bob bits, even the few farthings still knocking about, all carefully stacked, little chimneys of cash.

  Trouble bred trouble. Fighting pubs drew in fighting men. He had been lucky tonight. It had not spread. One bad customer drove out half a dozen good men. And a landlord who fought back was penalised. It was unfair but there it was. His licence would be taken away by the police. He had heard that from all the landlords who had been helpful to him.

  He would ban the four men for two months. That would be seen as harsh. The men would want to come back, they might plead, they might threaten, they would blame each other, they would s
wear it would never happen again, they could turn nasty, they could turn on Sam when they came, as they would, as they did, the two Milburns together, the others singly, at a quiet time to make their case, but he had to stick to his word. Two months. And not be drawn in himself. Much as they might like that. Much as he might feel goaded to. Not to join in. That was another test.

  It would not be the end of the fights. Some men in drink, too much drink the one night of the week, too much erupting out of poor diet and the abrupt escalation of expectation and power in alcohol, some men in drink in the town would always be on the lookout for a fight. But not in the Blackamoor. Whatever it cost him to clear it out.

  Because he had seen Ellen’s face. This was not what he had promised her. This was not a life for her.

  Sam knew where she was now. He had spotted the boy wide-eyed at the top of the stairs, shimmering with excitement and fright. Ellen would be up there now, in that dour little parlour most likely, pretending to tidy something, or in the bathroom, listening out for him and feeling, Sam knew, in her heart, at war with him for bringing them down to this.

  PART THREE

  THE BLACKAMOOR

  1 9 5 2

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Joe finished some minutes after the whistle was blown and all the others had left the pool. The superintendent, the team trainer, had suggested he build up his stamina and so he allowed him to complete the eighty-eight lengths in the twenty yard pool. The boy hauled himself out of the shallow end steeped in glowing weariness. It was always good to swim a mile.

  He ambled to his cubicle and locked the door carefully before he took off his trunks and wrung them out. He hated being seen naked. Then he dried himself, not too effectively, and pulled on clothes damp already from the moisture in the baths, further dampened by his water-filmed body. By the time he was ready the last cubicle door had long banged shut and the lights were going out. He walked to the reception area vaguely scrubbing his sodden hair with the thin sodden towel. The cocoa machine was broken.

  A penny bought a bright white squirt of Brylcreem, which he kneaded into his soaking head before taking out the tooth-gapped comb. He could linger for a few minutes. The superintendent would be checking the boiler and the slipper baths. Joe knew the routine well. He was a regular. The winter season ticket, which had been bought for his birthday, was already near earning its keep after just two weeks.

  The boy stepped back through the swing doors and looked at the pool, now almost still, a mysterious blue-green translucence under the single remaining light, empty of bounced shouts and splash. He shivered. He had raced its lengths, illicitly gone up to the balcony and swung across one of the rafters to drop into the deep end, played endless games of tiggy on long holiday mornings with the pool in possession of no more than half a dozen of them. He loved the sense of speed from the crawl, the thrash of the blind backstroke, the swanning neck of the breaststroke. But more than anything he loved long solitary swimming, length after length, the water cradling him, bearing him up, helping him through, the buoyancy allowing him to sink into something like a trance, self-hypnotised by the lap and stroke and watery ease. He would come out of those aimless reveries as slowly as if he were coming out of an anaesthetic.

  His bike was propped around the corner of the small neat sandstone building given to the people of Wigton by its greatest benefactor Mr Banks, whom his uncle Leonard always said had been bankrupted and driven to an early death by the greedy tradespeople. He had to decide which way to go home. Past mid-September, not full dark even though it was almost eight o’clock, but dark enough for the lights to be on along the low track that led past Vinegar Hill. The shorter way, the high road up an unlit hill and down past the gasometer had become a challenge: Joe did not know why. Lately he had begun to duck it and he did so again.

  Even on the lit track he was glad when he got to Vinegar Hill and saw people. He knew them. The men came in the pub.

  When he got to the Blackamoor he lifted the bike, which was rather too big for him, and carried it up the steps, through the inner door with its stained-glass picture of the little black boy, through the passage and into the back yard where he parked it under the open shed. There was a small outhouse, which used to serve but was now being converted into a ladies’. Way overdue, his mother had said, never reconciled to the flock of female bladders bursting up the stairs and into her bathroom. Joe no less pleased. There was no knowing when they would turn up. When he was having a bath he had not to lock the door. They would come right in, some of them, and just whip up their dresses, tug down their knickers, do their business, chat away, sometimes smoke a full cigarette.

  The pub was filling up. Joe was now an expert on the tides of its trade. Friday night had become more popular. Jack Ack filled the Singing Room.

  Ellen came out of the bar to get his supper. The boy said he would take it upstairs. Sometimes there was no one in the kitchen who wanted to talk to him. Potato pie, slice of apple cake, cup of cocoa. She would come up later if she could manage it. There was an air about her, a lightness, the smile: it was the dance later that night, Joe remembered, the big dance. They walked from the larder through the kitchen together and somebody said he could be her boyfriend. She laughed at that. He was as tall as Ellen now. He tried to put the dance out of his mind.

  The narrow bedroom was cold. He put on his specs and wrapped the heavy dressing-gown over his pyjamas. He puffed up the pillow to make a back rest. Diddler had traded in a maroon and cream plastic battery wireless, which Sam had handed on to him and he found Radio Luxembourg to catch Ma and Pa Kettle and with luck his latest favourite singers: Johnny Ray, Mario Lanza and Frankie Laine, Guy Mitchell, Jo Stafford, Doris Day. He was halfway through ‘The Fifth Form At St Dominic’s’ but he did not want to rush it. He had missed the library earlier in the evening and he had nothing to go on to.

  His mother managed to find time to come up to say goodnight but she did not tell him to turn off the light. He was allowed to be later on a Friday. She did tell him that a mixed group had come in from Carlisle - ‘a bit boozy’ - and she warned him that if he had not been to the bathroom and brushed his teeth then the sooner the better. She still had that excited look, which made him jealous. He had nosed into their bedroom. Her long red dance dress was hanging up behind the door and on the bed were her long gloves and the shiny little black bag. The dresses of the two women who helped in the pub were hanging behind the bathroom door.

  Joe read and listened to the wireless and alerted himself more deeply to downstairs. As the ten o’clock curfew began to speed towards the drinkers, the noise thickened, to cram it all in, let loose the hound of alcohol, crush the flying moments into a fist of pleasure. Joe had seen the Milburns in the Darts Room. They had not caused trouble for more than a year, since they had last been banned and given a final chance. But who could tell? Sam had barred only five men permanently - too lenient, some thought: some of the others barred for a limited period had sulked off to other pubs; the dog-men kept their trouble elsewhere, needing the buses to the trails.

  Joe was worried about the Carlisle party. It was always a gamble when people came from another town. He went out and stood on the small landing when Joseph Gilbert, who really could sing, started his Frankie Laine routine with ‘Jezebel'. The boy looked down at the milling in the narrow corridor, the flitting from room to room, and tried to work out patterns of eruption depending on who went where, what expressions Margaret and Alfreida, the waitresses, were wearing, whether a voice was raised raw and sudden and unmissable in its baying violence. Everybody said his dad had cleaned up the place, fine pub now, but that had made it much busier and then you never knew, Colin said.

  ‘Time, gentlemen, please. Time, please. Time, ladies and gentlemen, please.’

  With remarkable dispatch, the pub’s customers decanted into the dark chill street and Joe went down. Sometimes he was allowed to help with the checking up. Ellen, generous through her own impending treat, nodded Joe through the g
ate at the bottom of the stairs and he went behind the bar where Sam was at the till. The others were skimming away the worst and most obvious damage - the full cleanup was in the mornings - with extra speed, full focused on the dance.

  How could he tell them? Could he say he was ill? That was not true. There was no other excuse that would do.

  Sam let him pile up the pennies in little towers of twelve, the halfpennies also - twenty-four was too unstable. Shillings and sixpences and florins in tens, threepences and half-crowns in eights. It was a good bet at weekends that you would find a silver farthing palmed off as a sixpence or an Irish two-bob bit. Joe got much satisfaction from this counting up. He liked to see the towers grow, many and orderly. He liked the feel of importance, all this money, this wealth of coins, commanded into numbers and additions by his fingers. He liked the praise for the speed and accuracy he brought to it.

  Sam did the notes, checked the cigarettes and tobacco, and when all was counted and bagged up, he did the books. He entered the takings every night, and every night compared them with previous weeks and months and years. It was a story of getting better. Joe looked on, earnestly impressed at these columns of pounds, shillings and pence, and was warmed by his father’s satisfaction that the pub was thriving.

  ‘You can come to the bank with me tomorrow morning,’ Sam said, ‘before the matinee.’