by Melvyn Bragg
‘He’s getting more like Sam,’ said Ruth.
Ellen turned away from Joe, not wanting to be thought possessive.
'I’m sorry the colouring’s going,’ Ellen said, as a compliment.
Joe’s hair, once deep copper like that of Ruth and Sam, had dwindled to sandy.
'I’m not!’ Ruth grimaced as she pushed both hands into the biblical bounty of dark coppery hair. Ellen merely smiled. Ruth had always and sincerely disliked her best feature. Loosened, glossy, it fell fully halfway down her back. And her white, lightly freckled face was framed, its beauty revealed. But it was scarcely ever released from the rather old-fashioned pinioned pouch that locked it away. How could the man - whom Ellen had met twice, briefly, and tried very hard to like - any man, turn away from someone like Ruth whose modesty-bound outer loveliness was matched by such a clear inner spirit?
As always when they were alone, Ruth ran from what she feared might be imminent sympathy. ‘He’ll be taller than Sam.’
‘Not as broad.’
'I don’t know.’ Ruth considered, carefully. ‘Sam was thinner than that at Joe’s age. We weren’t spoiled for food. Dad got Sam hired with Mr Dixon after he left school which was a shame anyway. He was well known to be a very mean old man, Dixon. Dad shouldn’t have put Sam there. I remember we got word once - about a year in - that Sam wasn’t well and I went to see him. They’d put him up in the dirty loft over the horses. He shared it with an old labourer who was half deaf. Dixon was feeding him on not much more than bread and water twice a day. That’s true. Maybe a bit of raw turnip. He thought Sam was faking. He was near starvation. You couldn’t have nipped a pinch of flesh between your finger and thumb. After that I used to save up bits and sneak away after school. Just to feed him. Dixon was a bad man.’
‘He’s never gone into that.’
‘Some things are too hard to talk about,’ said Ruth innocently. ‘You know Dad was always hardest on Sam.’
He’s not easy on you, Ellen did not say. ‘Why?’
‘Because, I think, Sam was the only one Dad could take it out on after he came back from the war,’ said Ruth. ‘Sam would be about five. Then all of us coming in a rush and Mam never well. When I got old enough to see it, it would break my heart. Sam idolised him. He was desperate. He tried so hard to please Father. But nothing he could do was right.’ Her voice sounded as lonely as the cries of the gulls and suddenly, vividly, Ellen saw her husband as that desperate boy.
A few weak and beggarly chutes of sun slanted through the clouds and the cricketers pulled stumps to walk down to the sea.
They joined forces for the picnic. Joe’s gluttony - Ellen’s word -devoured nine quartered sandwiches. Unchastened, Colin boasted twelve. At three fifteen, Sadie threw an excited fit and hauled him away to the Tower Ballroom.
‘He’ll be too fat to bop.’
‘Shut your cake-hole, woman,’ he said cheerfully, stuffing his own.
‘Save a quickstep for me,’ said Ellen.
‘I’ll dance with Joe,’ Ruth said, which made Joe grin at Colin.
‘He thinks he’s won the pools.’ Colin’s riposte was a challenge.
‘He’s my dancing partner!’ Sadie declared, and smiled all her teeth. ‘Lovely sandwiches, thank you all,’ she said. ‘Come on, Colin! We’ll miss something!’
The two of them hurried along the uncrowded beach, up the stairs and on to the front where Sadie’s shoes and stockings were rapidly restored. Then they ran, like children, Ellen thought, ran towards Blackpool’s high imitation of the Eiffel Tower where a middle-aged man on an organ that rose from beneath the floor would - with his back to his acolytes - draw Sadie and Colin and hundreds like them into the drilled elegancies of ballroom dances still kin to those that had swept the Strausses to success in Vienna. Ellen found that she was looking until they disappeared into the distance and into the crowd, maternal in her feelings both for her old, rough, fast friend, who made so much out of the bare pickings, and her half-brother, who preyed on her and always would, wishing them luck on the dance floor, that it might transform them into the fantasies of themselves they loved.
Ellen and Ruth and Joe missed the ballroom, sidelined by the rowing boats in a small lagoon high on the beach. ‘We can dance any time,’ Ellen said.
But not, Joe thought, in the best ballroom in the world.
‘What do you think?’
Joe was unaccustomed to being asked his opinion. It took him no time to divine that Ellen and Ruth were attracted to the larky novelty of the dumpy little boats.
‘The boats,’ he surrendered. Once installed, especially when given a chance to row, he did not entirely regret the decision although the vision of the ballroom clung on. Colin would boast about it.
The Illuminations came on at six o’clock and everyone cheered. A number of them had arranged to meet under the Tower, which was suddenly shot with lights, electrified into ten thousand coloured bulbs fitting its long and slender form like a spangled sheath dress. The length of the Golden Mile the lights came on, yellow, blue, red, orange, green, white, indigo, violet, with one throw of the switch, SHAZAM, Joe thought, it was all a marvel. They practically rushed from the foot of the Tower to rake their eyes up and down its illuminated splendour then spread their gaze down the promenade, the strings of bulbs, loop after loop of multi-coloured lights, magical pathways that made the sunset seem ordinary.
Behind the promenade, in the funfairs, Switch and Switch Again and the Big Dipper (Biggest in Britain) and the Big Wheel (Biggest in Britain) and the Rollercoaster (Second Biggest in the World) suddenly flashed from dusk into glamour as the enchantment and sorcery of thousands of simple coloured lights clustered in mass formations turned into wheels and waterfalls, outlined horses, picked out signs, neckerchiefed lamp-posts, ran across spindly bridges built for the occasion, modelled giant swans, elephants, flamingos, leopards. Bulbs so dull by day possessed form and beauty in the night.
Finally the trams were all lit up and the drab workaday became jewel-encrusted, floating along the promenade as if bidden from the other side of the moon. A world so strange to the bleak fall-out of war, a world of colour and light delight, lightening the heart, lightening the northern darkness, illuminating lives long starved of innocent cause for wonder.
Joe followed Ellen in wonder. She had no filters, no scepticism, no envies or doubts or defences. That which was wonderful opened her heart. Joe had seen, though only remotely registered, when she had been transfixed by the magnificence of a sunset over the sea at Silloth, or the way the birds sat like crotchets on the telegraph wire as she looked out of the window of the Darts Room on a dead afternoon, or at the gallantry of someone coping with adversity, or the quality of a voice heard singing on the wireless. From scores of everyday things Ellen could pluck out wonder which only lately had she begun to share with her son. It was like a stream re-emerging way down the track after being forced underground, in Ellen’s case by the war which had capped elation and threatened delight. But the growing peace had allowed it to surface and although it would never catch up that waste of life, of years, and somehow be shy as if it were too trivial a thing it had found its way back and at Blackpool Illuminations it sprang to new life.
No illuminated site was considered too simple to pass by without receiving its due. These were hours of high appreciation. Joe was in a daze of the marvellous, which anointed him with the glories of pleasure manufactured to perfection. Blackpool was a glittering beacon in the darkness of the battered island, a dazzle of technicolour and warmth, privileging those who came from the black and white fastnesses of an exhausted land.
Colin claimed him once again for the bus, hinting that he would reward Joe with a surreptitious puff. He raced through cigarettes. Joe had not yet got the hang of them, but he knew he ought to try.
There was a cheer as the bus set off and necks were twisted and craned for the last look at the lights, which too soon fell away into a mere cluster, a diminished spectacle, finally no mo
re than a glow, already thought of with nostalgia as they followed the weak twin yellow beams of headlights cutting a route through night to the north. For a while there was only talk.
‘Did you see the boxing booth?’ Colin was pleased when Joe shook his head. He looked around and offered the boy a drag. Joe took it, fumbled it, coughed violently.
‘Too much sea air!’ Colin announced. ‘He’ll be all right, Ellen. Leave him to me.’
Joe subsided, his face wet with tears which he wiped on his yellow sleeve.
‘That’s your first and last drag,’ Colin whispered. ‘You’ll get me roasted alive.’ He took a deep pull on the cigarette and attempted smoke rings with some success. ‘Five pounds if you went three rounds. Two if you went two. I fancied my chances I can tell you. Even with this.’ He banged his chest. ‘I could’ve taken one or two of them to five rounds. Not the two big fellas. A good big ‘un can always lick a good little ‘un, but never been beat at my own weight…’He glanced at Joe and assumed a hard-man stare borrowed from cowboy films. ‘You’ve got to be able to stand up for yourself,’ he said. Tm a bit worried about your dad sometimes. He never raises a fist. I can see his point, Joe. But it wouldn’t do me. I’d be in there. Left, left, jab, right, bang, out!’
The blow at his father jarred the boy but he held his tongue. Plenty of men had told him that they admired Sam for the way he dealt with trouble, the only way, they said, the best way. But something in Joe still wanted to see him fight, to clear the place, just as Colin always said he would if he had been the landlord. He tried not to think on it because it was inconceivable that his dad could be scared. Joe scarcely used the boxing gloves these days although in the gym at school, when there was a bit of boxing, he could still shine, a performance that maintained his reputation as a fighter despite his own spectacled apprehension.
‘He’s a git!’ Colin nodded to indicate the Labour Party man who had walked past them in the aisle. His voice was quiet but vicious.
‘Why?’
‘Never mind. He’s a git! He’s on the list.’
‘Come on!’ said Sadie. ‘I’ll sit next to my dancing partner.’
‘You just want the fags.’
‘Take no notice of him, Joe.’
‘Didn’t we fly on that floor?’
‘That floor …’ Sadie took her time. ‘Was. Perfection. That’s what that floor was.’
‘We had a great time in the boats,’ said Joe sturdily.
‘Boats!’
‘All change, Joe. And I will have a fag seeing you ask so politely.’
Sadie had been sitting next to the Labour man dubbed ‘git’. He offered Joe a toffee, a creamy whirl, a luxury item.
The singing began and the old simple counting songs were first up. That was always the order. ‘One Man Went to Mow’, ‘This Old Man’, ‘Ten Green Bottles’. Then the jolly war songs - ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’, ‘Tipperary’, ‘Goodbye Dolly’, ‘You Are My Sunshine’ -and on to the present with ‘I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen’, ‘Rose of Tralee’, and of course ‘Galway Bay’. There were always Scottish airs - ‘Loch Lomond’, ‘Speed Bonny Boat’, ‘By Yon Bonny Banks’ - all word perfect, in precise unison, full-throated. On to the very latest with ‘There’s Always Room At Our House’, 'I'm Yours’, ‘Walking My Baby Back Home’ (Colin’s voice rose to a howl here), ‘Auf Wiedersehen, Sweetheart’, ‘Sugarbush’ (Sadie in the lead), and Guy Mitchell, Frankie Laine, Doris Day … Then back to the old; to marching songs, ballads, lullabies, hymns, comic songs, dancing songs, love songs by the score and always enough who knew all the words.
Ellen felt herself being carried away on the tide of it, and once she had checked Joe and seen him as immersed as anyone, she let herself go into this ocean of sound and song. There was nothing in the world but these notes and words as if the bus fell away and they were gliding independently on the stream of singing. Ellen felt that she disappeared in the voices and she wanted to, finding a curious joy in being indissolubly part of the sound, which overwhelmed all thought and was the only sensation. She was ringed with clarity. A source of joy was tapped by this unison of voices. It was a time suspended as if it were above the rest of life, life as it could be, in common, simple, undivided, thrilling. And when it petered out and finally trickled to an end, she was sad, though that sadness itself was a heightened sadness, a sweet sadness, a sadness superior to most of life.
People began to doze, voices were dropped and the drone of the engine was heard.
The collection for the driver had been taken in Blackpool. Presents were clutched. Out of the bus outside the church on to the empty streets.
Sam was waiting. Joe wanted to stay up for a while but Ellen sent him straight to bed so that he would be able to get to Sung Eucharist in the morning. Sam wandered upstairs with him while Ellen put on the kettle.
The game of cricket. The boat. And the Illuminations! The elephants. The trams. The Tower … Joe pulled off his clothes anyhow, but slowly, glad that his dad had come into his bedroom.
‘Colin saw a boxing booth.’
‘That’s where some of the best lads get their training.’
‘He said he would knock people out in here,’ Joe was yawning now, ‘if he was you.’
‘Did he now?’
‘When there was trouble. Was there trouble tonight?’
‘No.’
Joe calculated that if he could get into bed while his dad was still there, then he would be safe. But what about his prayers? He would say them in bed. Just this time. But his dad had not to go until he was in his pyjamas and best of all in the bed itself.
‘Do you think he could beat you?’
‘What do you think?’
‘He’s got this chest.’ Joe banged his own pyjama-buttoned chest. ‘Otherwise I suppose he could.’
Sam smiled. ‘So it was a good day.’
‘It was great.’
He got into bed. Sam was smiling down on him. Joe did not understand why but he felt calmed by it. ‘Mind the bugs...'
‘Don’t bite.’
‘Night, old son.’
‘Night, Dad.’
The light clicked off. Joe waited and then put the door ajar to let in the light from the landing. Then he started his prayers. It had only come back once in the last week. He prayed.
‘Was it all right?’
‘Just over a pound down on last week. Absence of star attraction,’ Sam said.
‘Drink your tea.’ But she was pleased.
‘He seems to have enjoyed it.’
‘He did.’ Ellen paused. ‘Sometimes you can see them growing away from you.’
‘I don’t think that’ll be his problem.’
‘I wish Colin wouldn’t egg him on to smoke.’
Sam’s amiable, sleepy, affectionate mood changed, but he tried to conceal it. He was convinced beyond doubt now that Colin was pinching cigarettes. But he knew the stakes. Ellen had put so much into the pub despite herself. He owed her a debt.
‘Bedtime,’ he said. ‘No rest for the wicked.’
He would be safe tonight, Joe thought. The relief of security surged through his mind. He would be safe. No need for a fortress. He strove to keep awake just a touch longer to enjoy the victory. It was warm inside his bed now. They were coming upstairs. The coloured lights danced.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
‘You’ll go to 3L,’ said the headmaster. ‘Tomorrow. For the day.’
The Latin mistress who was also his form teacher looked a little disappointed. She had hoped for a caning. Richardson’s chatter, his coarse accent - no worse than others but it grated on her - his seemingly constant attempts to make what she considered vulgar jokes had unsettled her for long enough. None of her punishments worked. This, she conceded, when the boy, his face smarting, had left the room, might just pull him up short.
‘They lost out on discipline in the war,’ said the headmaster. ‘Stroppy little beggars. We’ll try 3L for a start. See how he survives there.’
At which point he waved a bored hand and the self-consciously over-plump Latin mistress immediately retreated, trailing with her the brilliant classics First from Manchester and wondering how she had landed up at this undistinguished school in the back of beyond.
Joe walked the rest of the day inside a strait jacket of humiliation. He was certain that everyone knew, every smile a jeering smile or a pitying smile, every turn away a cut, his public hauling into the Head’s office regarded with voyeuristic glee, the wounds plain.
He felt dishonoured. No matter that he summoned up his own furious dislike of the Latin teacher, her snobbery which he could not fathom but felt like a lash of disapproval, and her sarcasm before which he was helpless, even her pronunciation of his name. ‘Richardson,’ she said, separating the syllables, breaking it up, ‘Rich-ard-son,’ destroying it in front of everyone as if his very name was a mockery and he tried to grin and bear it, trapped in a rage that he dare not release.
Joe considered faking an illness, manufacturing an accident, or, for a few minutes, simple truancy, but on the next day he went to school as usual - looking unconcerned or so he hoped - but after assembly his face burned as 3A filed off in one direction and he tagged after the file of 3L boys.
He had no friends in 3L. On the whole 3L kept to itself. People repeated a year in 3L. The two girls in the school who were known for absolute certainty to be prepared to go all the way were in 3L. 3L boys were caned in morning assembly. There were some very big lads in that class, several of them farmers’ sons, whose fathers resented their absence - especially in haytime and harvest - colluded with their truancy and forbade them to play sports which would waste Saturdays. 3L stuck together and stood apart from the grammar school’s public-school aspirations. 3L was hard.
Yet Joe’s first impression was of comforting similarity. Boys on one side of the room. Girls on the other. Parallel rows of desks and yet the demarcation as clear and straight as the parting in a man’s hair. All green-blazered. Girls green-skirted. Boys grey-flannelled. No short trousers and Joe felt a pang of gratitude that he had grown into his just in time. All wearing the green, navy and white school tie. Reassured, took out his glasses, still a little ashamed. Silence when the history teacher, Mr Braddock, walked in. One of Joe’s favourite lessons. Perhaps even a sympathetic glance from Mr Braddock who could, at the end of a week, be persuaded to tell you about the RAF in the war. Joe had already done the lessons in 3A so he cruised. The same with maths in the next lesson where, unfortunately, he knew too many answers.
