by Melvyn Bragg
Joe nodded, needing the favour.
I’d better put my glad rags on or your mother’ll be on the warpath.’
This time the smile was conspiratorial. He put the blue accounts book into the drawer beside the till. For a few moments Joe was alone in the bar, behind the counter where the men, only men, stood. Even though he was in the over-large dressing-gown his aunt Grace had bought for him through the club, he felt goose-pimply. The excitement of the preparations for the dance agitated him. The poster was on the wall, next to the poster advertising the films at the Wigton Palace. ‘Don’t Miss the Grand BATTLE OF BRITAIN DANCE', it read, ‘in the Market Hall, Wigton on Friday 19 September. Dancing 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. to the Penrith Melody Makers. Tickets 3/6 each (Strictly Limited).’ He knew about the Battle of Britain: the new history teacher had been a pilot in the war.
He went upstairs where the women were transforming themselves. The traffic on the little landing, between the bathroom and his mammy’s bedroom, was urgent and he was called on - zips to be slashed shut, stockings judged straight for seams, perfume dabbed, sniffed, dabbed more, fasten the buckle on my shoe, where’s my purse, we’ll miss the buffet, off we go, off we go, and then there was only his mammy and how could he tell her?
‘How do I look, then?’
She sensed he wanted something but her own preoccupation could give him only this gesture - a mark of equals, even collaborators. Joe saw his mother: long black hair, long red sheath dress, long gloves, lips red, eyes shining dark, smiling, smiling so radiantly …
‘Like a film star.’
‘Don’t be silly, Joe.’ Her tone was firm, even chiding.
But she was. And how could he even begin to understand what he wanted to say? Stay, he wanted to say. Why, though? Why that? Stay, he ached to say. How could a thirteen-year-old boy say that? Please don’t leave me alone, he wanted to say. Please. He shivered.
‘Bed for you,’ she said, and shouted downstairs that she would just be a minute and took him into the bedroom. But her appetite for this grand dance - very few she could get to since the pub - was so keen that she could not stay through his prayers and after a quick hug she floated down the stairs. He switched off the light and went to his window, which looked out over Market Hill. As they tippled out on to the pavement they shouted, ‘Bye, Joe,’ ‘Night, Joe,’ but the shouts went into the pub. They did not look up. He watched until they were well out of sight and then he went across the dark room and put on the light.
Next to his bedroom was an equal room to which entry could be gained only by going through Joe’s room. Colin had taken that, but after a few weeks Ellen had yielded to Sam’s sullen objection and levered him back across the hill to a fatalistic Grace, an openly disgruntled Leonard. Colin’s consolation had been the run of the upper half of the old stables in which he bred budgerigars. Now and then in the early days they had experimented with a paying lodger, but although the money had been welcome, Ellen had never settled to it and Sam’s jealousy, never well concealed, had aborted that. So, like the parlour, it was clean and neat and unoccupied.
Joe had a compulsion to look in. He tried to resist. He knew it was silly. Nobody could have slipped in unnoticed. But the instant the compulsion reared, he knew he had to follow.
He opened the door quietly and felt around the corner to put on the light before he walked in. Narrow bed like his own. Small wardrobe. Rug on lino red and yellow squares. Bare chair next to bed. A big cardboard box in which there were the old curtains that might come in handy. He stared carefully and then, as if sleepwalking, went across and looked under the bed.
He went through the same procedure in the parlour, in his parents’ bedroom and finally the bathroom. He stood on the landing and listened hard but no sound came from the pub below nor any from the yard. He stood until the silence and the cold together penetrated him and then he went to kneel beside the bed and say his prayers.
‘Our Father’ always began them, the words deep grooved in his mind, the clench of the prayer which Our Saviour Christ had taught us was used to comfort, but this time the sound interfered. His speaking aloud of the words disturbed the meaning of it. Perhaps he might forget them. ‘For ever and ever, Amen’ was gasped. ‘Lighten our darkness we beseech thee O Lord and by Thy great mercy defend us from all the perils and dangers …’ The words were bruised by the silence. The silence rejected them. The silence closed in. ‘Please bless …’ The list was galloped in a whisper. Light off. Bed. Burrowed. Eyes tight shut. Knees up like in gym: ‘Make yourself as small as possible.’ Sleep would rescue.
If parallel lines met only in infinity, where was that? He saw the black universe, small stars set like miniature peep-holes, those two tracks, white railway lines speeding past the indifferent stars, on and on and on. But where was infinity? If he kept watching them travel through the pinprick-flecked blackness he would fall asleep. It had helped before.
God had infinite mercy. God had infinite patience. God had infinite love for all men. Even sinners. Even fibbers like him. God had infinite wisdom. The lines sped through the darkness but they would not converge.
He tried the fortress. It was in a desert in a Western. He built it three walls deep. There were no rocks so the walls had to be wood. There was a wide ditch ringing the outer wall, full of sharpened stakes, razored to slice off limbs. Between the outer stockade and the middle stockade was an even wider, deeper ditch crossed only by planks easily hoisted up like so many slices of a drawbridge. The final wall was the highest, the strongest, impossible to scale. Fire arrows were one of the big dangers. A well had been sunk in the middle of the fort. The fort had been built around the well. From there, a system of buckets on a ceaselessly moving chain would carry the saving water to wherever it was needed. Sufficient ammunition was another problem … It was not working. The details were in place but there was that agitation in his mind, which did not allow him to believe in them.
He began to do multiplication tables beyond twelve.
There was dread.
He heard his breath and was alarmed by it.
They would be dancing now. He had won a competition with his mother in the Market Hall. In a Dance For All The Family on the early evening before the carnival. They had won the quickstep and been runners-up in the valeta. Ellen had not entered for any more. She would have liked him to learn to play popular tunes and dance music, but Miss Snaith was strict and pointed out that dance music did not get you through exams.
Colin would be dancing with Sadie. He whirled her about the floor, he swung her and rhythmed her. Ellen half proud, half fearful that Colin and Sadie might get themselves talked about. Sometimes Colin would get Joe in the back yard and teach him his own fancy steps, which he said he had patented.
Joe had seen Sam and Ellen dancing in the kitchen at Christmas when, instead of Christmas dinner with just the three of them, people had stayed on after two thirty closing time and it had ended up with dancing. His daddy was not as good as Colin but at the same time he was better, Joe thought.
They would be dancing now. He concentrated. He could see them. They would be doing a slow foxtrot. Being close together. What was a slow foxtrot tune? Didn’t matter. He could see them clearly. He pushed his legs down the bed. It was cold. He folded them back into his chest. They were clapping the band. The dance had finished. They were walking to the chairs along the wall. Everybody was leaving the dance floor. Everybody was leaving. Seventeen times seventeen. Parallel. Fire arrows. Everybody was leaving and, and, he heard a whisper, maybe his: and, and …
There was nothing.
Was he breathing?
In the corner at the far edge of the window he saw a small dim blotch of light, somewhere between white and grey, trembling just a little, hovering, waiting? It was him, the light was him. He knew it for truth and his mind ebbed all away. Everything left it. There was no him in the bed. The light looked on what remained and saw just a thing. The light was him. If it went away he would be, no, he would not be, be n
o more, be left a thing. He looked at it. His mouth opened. Short, quiet, most quiet, sighs of air came into his mouth and soundlessly, secretively, he pushed them back out.
He had to get the light back into himself. He just had to. But it stayed there and he, transfixed by it, lay there. Such a terror clouded over him but he held his look at it. It had to come back into him. He was only fear. Where would the light go?
What happened he did not know. He could not cry out. He waited. He just waited as the terror froze him. He was a silent terrified scream in the dark.
He found that he had rolled out of bed and dropped on to the floor. He crawled to the door; a hand reached up and opened it.
On the landing, his mouth wide open. Down the first flight of seven steps he crawled, a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. Eleven steps to the gate. He pulled his body up and like a very old and ailing man he worked his way down them and into the pub, the floor cold on his feet, some light in the bar and the Darts Room from the street-light on Market Hill. He stood beside the inner door. There was the picture of the little black boy. He heard his screams but could not join in.
In the Darts Room he knelt on a chair and looked through the window at Market Hill, so much of the territory of his short life. He saw nothing but the blackness beyond the weak yellow single streetlight glow and no one went by. He was cold now. His head felt so strange, so unlike him, unlike anything, only fear, nothing else, fear, fear, but he could not cry.
When he heard them coming home, he moved, though sluggishly, up the stairs, stayed on the landing.
The door opened, bringing back life, and the boy slumped. He wanted to run down but what could he say? What could he tell them? Their voices were unafraid. He dare not lean forward in case they saw him but their voices were so warm that he wanted to cry but you didn’t.
When he heard his mammy say that she was going straight to bed he turned and made himself go back into his bedroom. He did not look in the corner. He waited for her to come in, and when she did, he pretended that he was fast asleep. She looked at him for a moment or two. He was too old to kiss.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
‘I feel bad about it now,’ she said.
‘No need.’
But he kept his back to her. They were alone in the bar mid-morning pre-opening time. Sam was at the sink rinsing some newly washed spirit measures. Ellen stood beside the pumps, like a plaintiff.
‘I didn’t really take in that it was a Saturday.’
‘Why should that bother you?’
Ellen knew very well that he needed her to wash the glasses on Saturday of all nights yet she found not sarcasm in Sam’s reply but a scrupulous attempt to let her believe her life was just as normal as that of everyone else who could take a Saturday afternoon and evening off.
‘Joe’s looking forward to it.’
‘There you are, then.’
He turned round and any residual resentment dissolved at the sight of her. She could still move him to the heart of himself, at unlikely times these days - now, flushed in her anxiety at letting him down and yet holding on to this small proof of normality that the pub had taken from her.
‘We’ll manage fine. Alfreida’ll help in the bar, Joyce is coming to do the Singing Room.’
’I never thought,’ she said, but in the saying there was the nod, the acknowledgement that he understood the reason behind it all, and through that understanding truly understood her.
‘Bad enough we take shifts for holidays.’
Ellen for a week to Ayr Butlin’s with Joe, Sam unsuccessfully attempting a three-day break at Morecambe: back after two, Joe bribed into agreement with a yellow polo-necked sweater. Their first and last attempt.
He was wearing the sweater when he came into the bar.
‘Did you tidy up all the crates in the back cellar?’
‘Yes.’
‘Here, then.’
Sam fished out two half-crowns and watched with interest as his son’s face brimmed full of gratitude, lined with an innocent lust for the heavy coins.
‘Thanks, Dad. Thanks.’
Dad now. Quite suddenly. Dad. Long trousers now. And, in public, Mam - Sam enjoyed the boy’s pleasure and thought, How simple it is sometimes.
‘Away, then. They’ll go without you.’
The bus would leave from outside the church at eleven sharp to allow for a full afternoon, even though the trip to Blackpool was targeted on the evening, for the Illuminations.
‘Look after your mam, now,’ Sam said, as he stood on the steps.
Joe linked arms with his mother by way of an answer. Ellen felt good. Joe on her arm in that terrible yellow polo-neck but so pleased with it she said nothing.
Pleased with Sam most of all. She had seen him harden. In the first years the battle to make it a friendly house had put Sam at odds with some of the tougher men in the town and there had been times when she herself had felt the echo of it, when a walk upstreet was a small demonstration of courage and a Saturday night could be nothing but watching the fuse burn towards the explosive. It was worse, she thought, that he had bound himself never to fight. She had hated it when he had been in those few fights before the war and she would hate it again but the effort to bottle up his temper took a lot out of him, she thought, and then his anger turned on her, on Joe, on himself. But the pub meant independence and for that he would endure what came. Yet it had hardened him so his gentleness just now was not only warming in itself but a reminder of what had been, or what always would be, perhaps, a break in the clouds.
‘All aboard the Skylark! Roll or bowl a ball!’ Colin had nominated himself the life and soul of the bus. ‘Joe’ll sit next to me,’ he announced.
Ellen was relieved to see him in such form. He had found himself a blazer - he was good at winkling out bargains, doing swaps - and this, together with his new cleanly parted, smartly Brylcreemed, unquiffed hair-cut, helped him cut something of a dash, especially among the older ladies. He helped them clamber into the coach, raincoated, scarfed, hatted, gloved, slung with sandwiches and cake and flasks, hard-saved money in the pocket marked for presents, which would be rock mostly, pink-sheathed pure white centre with BLACKPOOL stamped through in red.
Before the engine had turned the singing began.
Colin made Joe laugh with his imitation of the Goons. The boy had not met any other adult as addicted as everybody at school. Colin specialised in Eccles.
First they drove along the Front, a flourish to set the tone. Past the great music halls and theatres housing the stars that packed in thousands every day.
‘This is where all the big nobs hang out,’ Colin shouted, and in the general excitement no one offered an objection, though Ellen winced and felt the restrained cringe of others.
The bus was parked with military instructions. It would remain at this spot and no other, open from nine o’clock and no sooner, depart at ten o’clock and no later.
Ellen had persuaded Ruth to come on the trip. She was still very shaky after being jilted, even though it was almost a year ago. Ellen knew how devoted and loyal Ruth had been to him, how she had put up with evasions and prevarications that she herself could not have tolerated for five minutes, how love had conjured this dear middling-aged stable responsible woman into a young girl. Sometimes she could scarcely bear to look at Ruth’s expression, the hurt of it, the sense of loss, not 'last chance’ - Ruth would not think like that - but ‘What did I do wrong? Does this make me worthless?’ She would stick with Ruth for the day.
They decided to make for the Golden Sands. The day was cold and overcast but it was not raining - that counted as a blessing and they were well wrapped up. Others made for the gigantic funfairs. A select number strolled up the Front, taking in the good sea air, making for the genteel village of St Anne’s, which stood demure and cottage-tasteful outside the gut release, the panic scream of pleasure and the Gothic lust for numbing sensation that was Blackpool at its most seductive.
Colin and Sadie were mad to
go to the Tower Ballroom, the tea-time dance to the music of Reginald Dixon who was on the wireless every week. The dance floor was the finest in the world, Colin said, big as a football pitch so that at tea-time, not as crowded as the evenings, you could really show off your paces. But the doors did not open until three thirty and they joined Ruth and Ellen and Joe down on the sands to fill in time.
There was a group of Wigton Labour Party people and one of them had brought some stumps, a bat and a ball. They set up for beach cricket on the hard high sands. Colin and Joe joined in and Sadie, when she saw that some of the Labour women were game, took off her unsuitable shoes and stockings and coat and joined in.
Ellen and Ruth sat it out. Ruth was too burdened to be able to lift her spirits. They sat apart, guarding the picnics, their glances and their conversation roving over the piers, the donkey rides, the few bold bathers in the pewter sea, blue-skinned children absorbed in sandcastles.
Colin’s voice dominated but Ellen had long decided to force herself to ignore it. He was managing, Sam paid him well enough for the little he did. There were usually a couple of other bit-jobs on the go. Grace gave him roof and board. Ellen found that she was keeping an eye on Colin every bit as much as Joe.
She liked the Labour Party people. When they had asked if they could use the kitchen for their weekly committee meeting, Sam had refused. No politics, no religion. But one of the women who had got the Party going during the war was someone Ellen had worked with at the factory. She had challenged Sam. What was he scared of? They were nice people. They did not drink - so he could not be said to be after profit. They just wanted a convenient place for an early hour on Mondays to talk matters over - no speeches, no propaganda. He was supposed to be independent. She would take care of it, make them tea, they would be no trouble.
Sam agreed despite his better judgement - not just to please Ellen but to prove that indeed he was independent.
Joe sometimes had his supper while the meetings were going on. They never seemed to mind. Now she saw them easy with him and he responding like an eager puppy darting after the ball across the sands in his yellow polo-neck, always at full tilt.
