A Son of War

by Melvyn Bragg

  Playtime was miserable. Avoiding his class. Avoiding anybody who might comment. Unable to bring himself to join the mafia of 3L who as usual hung around the lavatories.

  In geography he became cocky. There was no doubt that Annie Fleming, one of those who went all the way, was giving him some sort of look that made him uneasily excited. When Mr Williams in physics said he was a ‘bit of a boffin’, she leered a smile of such invitation that Joe’s head turned.

  The chief dunce was a boy nicknamed Og. He was picked on by Mr Williams, and however the boy tried to swat away the hornet, it stung and stung again and poisoned him in murderous embarrassment. It was all the worse, somehow, because Og was big. Tall as Mr Williams. It was all the worse because he looked like a man.

  When Mr Williams left, a little early as usual, anxious to beat everyone to the staffroom before they ambled across the playing-fields to the canteen, Joe used the slack time to secure Annie’s attention by making chimpanzee noises and scratching his armpits with his hands, grunting ‘Og, Og, Ug, Og, Ug, Ug.’

  They were waiting for him at the end of the corridor.

  ‘After dinner,’ said William, Og’s friend. ‘At the lavatories.’

  Joe squared himself up to show courage but he walked alone to the canteen increasingly oppressed. Og was well known as a fighter.

  In the canteen he went to his 3A table and was unusually silent. Nor did he have a great appetite. The other boys ignored him until they caught a whiff of the fight.

  Then he was plagued by their questions, by their warnings, by their advice, most of all by their advice.

  They followed him back across the two rugby pitches and went behind the old Victorian sandstone school to the boys’ lavatories.

  3L was already in place. Og had taken off his jacket.

  Joe did the same although the effort nearly exhausted him. The walk across from the canteen had exhausted him. The prospect of what would inevitably happen exhausted him. He felt weak from his guts to his fists. He was frightened. It was not a new sensation. He had been frightened in the other, few, fights he had had over the last three or four years but somehow there had been enough skill and nous and he had just about escaped shame and concealed his fear. Not this time. He knew that. Og had fists knuckled and boned to hurt as he had been hurt, not just by Mr Williams and other teachers who dumped on him but by all the others, a history. Fighting was getting his own back. Joe was markedly smaller and lighter but so what? He had a bit of a reputation. They were the same age. Fists up. A sort of ring was formed by the boys.

  It started slowly. Og was surprised by Joe’s form. The straight left, the stepping in, stepping out. The looking like a real boxer. And when Og swung and Joe backed off, dodged, ducked even, and appreciative murmurs grew from 3A, there were moments when there was strength in the fists and he could look Og in the eye and think he could land a real one until Og caught him on the side of the eye, so hard that Joe almost toppled over. He got back his balance and straight left, step aside, straight left again, but his head felt numb. And suddenly he didn’t want to hit Og at all. That heavy angry face, the expression of assassin was not to be hit. Was he caving in? Some such cowardice. Or the loss of all lust for this. Og caught him again and again Joe stumbled but did not fall. Now his nose was bleeding. He began to back off The squiring circle of schoolboys went into many shapes to keep the two enclosed, funnelling them towards the main school building as Joe retreated, his fists now putty, his mind a daze, backing off, anything to avoid another bone-knuckled blow, this time on his forehead, and another which caught his shoulder and knocked him down. He had to get up. Og was not finished. He began a two-fisted pummelling.

  It was Mr Braddock who stopped it.

  He made them shake hands.

  He took Joe into the lavatories and watched while he splashed hand scoops of cold water over his face, soaking his shirt, blood-wet already. He used his own handkerchief to staunch the nosebleed. He took Joe back to 3L and waited until the French teacher turned up and had a word with her.

  Joe tried to look at nobody.

  In the afternoon playtime, Og came across to him and said, ‘Don’t think it’s over, pal. I’m after you.’

  Joe nodded. He understood.

  Colin was flattered that Sam had come up to the loft. He took the proffered cigarette with a certain swagger. He knew how impressive his budgerigars were.

  He had turned the big loft space into three large floor to roof cages, wire-meshed doors connecting them, a job well done so that he could walk among the brilliantly coloured birds with ease and they had space. He had manufactured perches out of cadged scraps of wood, water trays out of cut-down tins. He had cuttlefish bone wedged in the wire so that they could keep their beaks sharp. There were almost sixty birds now, the biggest collection in Wigton, and the care of them, breeding from them, watching over them, was his principal occupation.

  Sam took a good look. They were very beautiful Blues and yellows - bright, fast, subtle variations in the colours, quick nervous hop, flight from perch to perch. A dash and dazzle in the dark loft. Travellers used to sleep here, their horses stabled below, rough floorboards, untreated bare stone walls, the roof gloomily exposed. Now a dazzle and display of these pretty creatures flitting, chirruping, such brilliance in the colours. Colin picked one up, plucked it from the perch firmly but so that it nested in his slack fist, showed it off to Sam.

  ‘Lovely little things.’ Sam took the pulsing little bird, slashed gaudy yellow and white, a feathered quivering life in his strong hand making the hand itself alive. ‘Lovely little things. You’ve done well here, Colin.’

  Colin preened himself. ‘I’ll be the biggest breeder in Wigton this time round,’ he said. ‘And the best, Sam. See them?’ He pointed to a smaller cage at the back of the loft where two blues were isolated. ‘They’ll come up with winners. Champions. Best of breed. Dead certainties.’

  He let his eyes travel across to the rosettes pinned on the inner door of the loft, the door once used to fork out the hay. Rosettes and certificates were brass drawing-pinned, a proud collage, but without as yet the centrepiece of ‘First’ or ‘Champion’.

  Sam let him rabbit on, partly because he so rarely saw this aspect of Colin. True enthusiasm based on real achievement. There was a naivete about him in this context which reminded Sam of young soldiers when first they came into his section in Burma, found their experience fell far short of that of the men who had been marinated so long in intense and savage conflict, and were exposed as innocents where previously they had felt worldly-wise. Something of that in Colin here; a touching lack of those idle boasts which - in Sam’s reckoning - disfigured so much of his daily behaviour. And the vulnerability linked him with Ellen - not because she was in any comparable way vulnerable, Sam thought, but because he saw a deeper kinship between the two in the unaffected passion of this half-brother.

  But even so he would not be diverted from his purpose.

  ‘I seem to have none left,’ he said, as he opened again the pre-prepared packet of Capstan Full Strength.

  ‘Have one of mine.’ Colin dived eagerly into his pocket and pulled out an identical packet.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Sam lit up and held out the flame for Colin who came close, his hands cupped.

  Both men drew deeply.

  ‘That’s why I always have time for the Sally Army.’ Sam smiled. ‘They would always have a cup of tea and a fag. I’ve seen a man die happy with a fag.’

  Colin nodded and drew deeply once more although the direct gaze of Sam was beginning to disconcert him.

  ‘A friend of mine - he was a schoolteacher - was once arguing with somebody who said that fags were a terrible drug and so on, and he said back, “Nothing you enjoy can do you harm.”‘ One of Alex’s best, he thought.

  'I couldn’t care less, me,’ Colin said, alert now, trapped in the headlights. ‘If I enjoy a thing, that’s it …’

  Sam said nothing for a while. He nicked his ci
garette and put the stump in his pocket.

  Colin waited, his anxiety unconcealed.

  ‘Well, I’ll be off. Lovely little things, Colin. You do well with them.’ He looked once more at this aerial garden of lightness, dash, little splashes of harmless pleasure.

  Then he went to the corner where the ladder led down to the stable. He put his foot on the rung and then spoke as if to no one. ‘Funny thing about Capstan Full Strength, Colin,’ he said. ‘They seem to fly off the shelves of their own free will these days.’ He smiled. ‘Sometimes I think it must be those budgies of yours.’

  He held the younger man’s fearful look for a few moments, in breath-drawn silence, and then, quietly, he climbed down the ladder.

  Sam turned up at Grace’s house just before eleven on the Saturday morning as had become routine. Earlier he had carried the wooden crates of beer up from the cellar - with Joe’s help - cleaned the pumps, swilled out the men’s lavatory and set the bar before going upstreet to Martin’s Bank with the Monday to Friday takings. A few street conversations, a feeling of leisure, and down to the big house on Market Hill for the quiz questions.

  Mr Kneale did the history and the general knowledge. Leonard did local. Sam himself tackled sport. The three men met over a pot of tea and Ellen used the meeting to encourage Joe to go over and do his half-hour piano practice before or after his usual stint at the baths. It had become a good time.

  The Sunday quiz was a success. It started at twelve thirty and took up about three-quarters of an hour. Leonard was the quizmaster, which was a rather sly manoeuvre on Sam’s part because Leonard had not been suited that the Labour Party was allowed its meetings in the Blackamoor kitchen. He was strictly no politics no religion in pubs and he wanted no Big Brother around, he said, when he was taking a drink. For a while he had withdrawn his custom, which had upset Ellen. However, the ousting of the Labour Party in the recent election had sweetened his temper and the loss of the previous quizmaster had given Sam a genuine opening. Leonard had taken the olive branch with some relief, not least for Ellen’s sake, and perhaps a little pleased that Grace could not condemn him as he was going into a pub for the purpose of education.

  They went through the questions as always with the intention of weeding out the really hard ones, but they rarely did. Mr Kneale believed that, in principle, there had to be questions that might not find an answer. He said it kept up standards. The others let him prevail. Mr Kneale never came to the quiz, much as he longed to; but it would never do, he said, for a Wigton schoolteacher to go into a Wigton pub.

  On this Saturday, he was unusually agitated and hurried them through the questions.

  ‘All done?’

  ‘More stinkers than usual,’ Leonard said. He looked at Sam but Sam preferred to keep the peace. Besides, part of his mind was locked into the piano upstairs, now being played with a verve that made him smile.

  ‘Did you see this?’ Mr Kneale, unable to contain himself any longer, spread out the Cumberland News. ‘This.’ He pointed. It read:

  Wigton Corporal

  He saved a bridge in Korea

  One of the United Nations’ Forces’ most important supply bridges over the Imjin River in Korea might have been destroyed by floods recently but for the efforts of a 22-year-old Wigton corporal of the Royal Engineers. The corporal, Frank Hollick, of Cross Keys, High Street, Wigton, spent a hectic forty-eight hours in torrential rain with his mates in a successful bid to save the bridge … Frank and his men had been ordered to keep the bridge intact. Often during the two days and nights that followed, Frank was lowered to within a few feet of the raging torrent precariously balanced on ‘shear-water’ and placed explosive charges amongst the debris which jammed the supports.

  Scrambling to the top of the bridge for safety he waited for the time-fuse to detonate the charge and then clambered down after each explosion to dislodge the smaller debris by hand. Almost without sleep Frank and his men did great work. Had the debris been allowed to accumulate, the terrific pressure would almost certainly have snapped the concrete supports. Frank is a builder by trade, serving his time with his stepfather (Mr Robert Pattinson) before being called up for National Service. His stepfather commented, It’s just the sort of thing he would enjoy.’

  ‘Didn’t he get a county trial?’ said Sam. ‘Good prop-forward.’ ‘The sort of thing he would enjoy’ - Sam liked that.

  ‘I know them well,’ said Leonard. ‘Nice family.’

  ‘I think it’s a considerable achievement.’ Mr Kneale was disappointed: he had hoped for more excitement. ‘A considerable achievement,’ he re-emphasised in the schoolmasterly manner he tried to put off outside hours, ‘both for that young man and for Wigton. And moreover,’ he took a sip of tea, hoping that such an emphatic break in the sentence would intensify interest, ‘it gave me an idea.’

  He paused and looked at the two men who, outside his days in the grammar school and apart from the few fellow enthusiasts for photography, were becoming his firmest acquaintances, men in whom he could confide. He let the pause lengthen. The phrase ‘immortal longings’ was not one he could offer up, but in his solitary hours under the roof of the high house with a view so regularly photographed, he had slowly concluded that his life must be marked out in some way. No children. No wife. No true intimacy. But a powerful adoptive love of the little plain town into which he had meandered and stuck in his teaching career. His projected book on the veterans of Burma had failed when he finally realised that there would never be enough material. His fascination with war - from which his age had excluded him - had battened on to A-bombs and now H-bombs until even Leonard was beginning to shrink away - Mr Kneale saw that - from this dogged cherubim, personification of the Apocalypse.

  ‘ “Wigton Men at war”,’ he announced. ‘That would be the title. There’s plenty from the First World War, a considerable proportion with medals for their bravery. We know something about the Second from Sam and his friends and that was just Burma - there’s the whole European and African dimension. And now we have our young men on National Service, still in the wars. My guess is that I would find Wigton men at war for centuries. That could be the prologue. And then with National Service, of course, they will be at war - whatever that turns out to be - for centuries to come. That’s the epilogue. And the idea,’ he smiled, ‘the idea,’ he repeated, ‘the thesis which may come as a shock is that war is what makes this country what it is and always has been, it puts the Great into it. We are a country made for war and made by war, however hard that is on some, and that is always what we will depend on. Wigton men at war. The Ordinary Man. Heroism. Duty. Patriotism. All the great things that will never fade.’

  ‘Now then,’ Leonard sucked in his cheeks, ‘there’s plenty to go at there all right.’

  ‘Sam?’

  ‘Good idea.’ Sam hoped his tone was convincing. Then ‘Very good,’ he added, more loudly.

  It was nearing half eleven opening time, and the excuse released Sam. He would not stand up, he thought, to any cross-questioning by Mr Kneale. As he came into the cool early autumn air and made for the pub, standing so solid before him in sandstone, the deep front like a stage on which it was set, he felt relief in heading for this homely business, this place of arrival, a base far from war.

  But when he opened the pub and stood behind the newly polished mahogany bar, Mr Kneale’s heavy words evaporated as he thought of the young lad swinging down from the bridge thousands of miles away in a fight not of his making but one he would see through. He had seen the angry swollen seething of an eastern river and he could imagine the dark, the thin safety rope threatening to catch on the uprights, and the undeterred obedience to this order that the bridge remain intact. As it did. He hoped Joe would do something like that one day. And that it would be ‘the sort of thing he would enjoy’.

  The bar door opened and Sam turned, took a bright sheer pint glass and began to pull the dark mix of ale and porter.

  ‘There’s been worse days, Sam,’
Diddler said.

  ‘Plenty.’

  Diddler’s first sup half emptied the glass, and, as always, ‘A good pint, Sam,’ he said. ‘Sign of a good house, so it is.’

  At the Anglican Young People’s Association they had done Four Men In A Balloon. Who should be thrown out? Who was most important? The doctor, the teacher, the scientist or the vicar. Joe had been given the vicar the week before. The responsibility had weighed on him.

  He was intimidated by his real vicar because the man did not like him. He never said so but Joe could tell and it bothered him. He would chuck a kind remark to other choirboys or give them a hello by name or even a compliment now and then but Joe might not have existed. Yet he worshipped God and Jesus Christ through this man whose authority was not lightly worn, whose sermons could be threatening and always freighted with names Joe did not know or complex sentences he could not comprehend. The vicar had such a graceful voice, as good as the wireless, and when he spoke the communion ‘Take, eat, in remembrance of me,’ Joe bred goose-bumps. When the AYPA decided on a balloon debate, he had volunteered eagerly, but drawing the vicar had spoiled it.

  The vicar might not turn up. Most times he did not. That would be a big help. And yet the boy wanted the vicar to hear what he had to say - that without the vicar nobody would be able to get to know God and be saved so there would be no eternal life for anyone, and compared with eternal life what was the use of a doctor, a teacher or a scientist? Vicars healed the soul and taught the word of God and knew everything, so they were all the other three wrapped up in one. Without vicars, life was useless. You were allowed three minutes. The vicar came.