A Son of War

by Melvyn Bragg

  Joe stumbled as he stood in the middle of the circle of chairs, but he kept his head enough to make his points although he all but ran out of breath at the end. The vicar was asked to judge and gave it to the scientist but along the way he said that Joe had tried hard and gave him a smile. The boy was well pleased.

  The sense of pleasure buoyed him up to the fish-and-chip shop where he bought his supper, sixpenn’orth with scrams, and took his time wandering down the High Street savouring the long soft chips speckled with the hard chippings of batter. It was a good moment.

  Street lights were on. McQueen stood under the light at the corner of High Street and Market Hill, staring across at the Blackamoor from which he had been barred for life. He took up this position at least once a week.

  McQueen was not right in the head. He had been up in court more than once for beating his mother. In drink he went from silent sullen to yelling violent without warning. He had no friends, not even a dog. He was very thick set, deep black hair heavily oiled, rarely without his old navy blue coat. His face was swollen, the cheeks, the lips, usually a glaze of red on the skin.

  ‘Sam Richardson’s a bastard!’

  Joe, who had crossed the road, stopped and faced McQueen.

  ‘Tell him I said he’s a right bastard.’

  McQueen began to move towards him and Joe turned away.

  ‘Tell him I’ll get him! Tell him I’m waiting for him.’

  Joe moved quickly and went through the door of the pub as if seeking sanctuary.

  It was quiet.

  Sam saw the boy a touch flustered and strolled out of the bar. ‘How did it go?’

  ‘I didn’t win. The scientist won.’

  ‘As long as you did your best.’

  ‘McQueen’s outside.’ Joe dropped his voice and looked at the floor. ‘He said - he called you names. He said he would get you.’

  ‘He’s best ignored, Joe. Just ignore him.’

  ‘But he called you names, Dad.’ He hesitated. ‘I should have had a go at him, shouldn’t I?’

  ‘He’s best ignored.’

  ‘But you would, wouldn’t you? If you’d been me. If he’d said that about Grandad. You’d have had a go at him, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘These things are hard to call, Joe.’

  ‘But you would.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I know you would.’

  Suddenly feeling quite hopeless, Joe went upstairs without first going into the kitchen. He was a coward. He was overwhelmed with grief at the realisation. He was sure his dad could tell. His predominant concern at school now was to avoid Og. He would excuse himself for the lavatory in lessons rather than risk it at playtimes. He would scan the school playing-fields for Og and the sauntering, predatory pack of 3L and tack his way far from them, trying to kid himself that he wanted to play way over there, but knowing, sick to his stomach with it, that his sole purpose was to avoid Og. Even those who thought it had taken guts to fight in the first place could bring no comfort. He knew he was a coward. He was even afraid to be alone in his own house.

  He knelt by his bed and read. It had become his preferred position. That his knees hurt helped somehow. He was reading The Grapes of Wrath and the story almost blotted out everything from his mind save for the small cold certain feeling that he was a permanent coward now, even scared of getting into bed and turning out the light.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  McQueen got on to the bus outside the library in Castle Street. Joe had spotted him from his prime position in the front seat on the upper deck and his stomach had melted at the sight. McQueen had been drinking in Carlisle, the boy could see that - no one could miss the glazed face, the stagger on to the bus and then, to Joe’s alarm, the uneven clump of drunken steps announced his ascent to the upper deck. Joe froze. McQueen must have taken the back seat. Joe forced himself to try to disappear through immobility. Though the bus was quite full he felt that there was nothing and no one between McQueen and himself.

  He should not have gone to the game. Sam had said he would go and watch Carlisle United with Joe and the boy had given up the chance to go up to Highmoor where some of them had made a dirt track for bikes. Then Sam had pulled out at the last minute -something to do with the dog-bus going wrong - and Joe had climbed on to the crowded Carlisle bus before he could reorganise his forces. He had not found anyone to latch on to. It was a cold feeling going through the children’s turnstile knowing that you would meet up with no one you knew on the other side. Somehow he had not been able to lose himself in the game. He had hurried back from the ground, taking the back-alley short-cut his dad had shown him to try to beat the big crowds to the buses. Packed buses, stiff with smoke, stoked up sick. Sick now with McQueen to face as he got off because McQueen would stay on beyond Joe’s stop - he knew that - he lived in the direction of the next town.

  When the conductor came for McQueen’s ticket, he claimed he had lost his return. The conductor was not convinced. McQueen swore he had lost his ticket and when the best he could get was ‘Bad luck’ he swore at the conductor, who said any more of that and he would stop the bus and put McQueen off. All this clearly audible. Many of the men turning round to look on, enjoying it. The fare was handed over with obscure menaces.

  Joe prayed the conductor was not a customer at the Blackamoor, did not know his mam and dad, would not use his name. He handed over the ticket with his face pressed against the side window and escaped with a ‘Thank you.’

  Wigton tugged the bus in faster than Joe wished. He looked out on the darkening fields, counting the horses, envying the security emanating from the electric twinkle of distant farms safe in the deepening twilight.

  The bus stopped on Howrigg Bank and Joe, from his prime position, took in the tight-packed huddle of the town, scanned it, but without the usual lift: the next stop would be Market Hill.

  He could stay on. Go past McQueen’s stop. Say he had fallen asleep. Walk back. He had no money left over. But he was not sure where McQueen did stop, and would the conductor report him for travelling on without a ticket? Or lying?

  Market Hill, into King Street, stop.

  Joe’s body got up and turned and headed down the bus towards McQueen, knowing that however low he hung his head, McQueen would spot him and, with scarcely any effort, bar him from going down the twisting little staircase. He tried to walk steadily and wished now that he had not been at the front, which made him last in the thin queue and easier to pick off.

  ‘Richardson!’

  The boy looked up. McQueen’s face was strained with such violence, the boy felt winded at the mere look of him. He stopped.

  But McQueen said no more. And Joe’s body started again, took him down the twisting little staircase, off the bus, into the blessed air of safety impaled once more on his cowardice, not knowing and not to know for many years, that his father had sought out McQueen and explained that the quarrel was between the two of them, the boy was not part of it and if McQueen ever made the boy part of it again he would come looking for him.

  His mother was behind the public bar - slightly uncomfortable, Joe could tell, confronted by the men-only space. The men in the bar were waiting for Sam to return, to talk of dogs and sport and pick up news from the hound trails.

  Joe would have enjoyed talking his dad through the game. He had concentrated enough to be able to describe it. Sport was how he and his father talked mostly. In sport they talked about heroes, about skills, about groups, about grace and generosity, about greatness, about weakness, about the miraculous, about the mundane, about the ecstasy of triumph and the deep hole of defeat, about being a man, and about their feelings and care and concern and realisation of each other in a way that had no other means to express itself, no other subject as wide and free and democratic and relaxed. Because all they were talking about was sport.

  He took his bike from the back yard and went up to Highmoor to see if they were still on the track. It was beside the big house, in the shadow of the Italiana
te tower, cleverly engineered out of a dumping place long grassed over, more of a scramble course than the rumoured dirt track. Joe took his half-racer boneshaker around the course a couple of times in the failing light but it was limited fun on your own. He pedalled around the big house - now flats - and up and down the avenue but it was as if all boys had been exorcised from the land.

  So he let the bike take over. Took his hands off. It went left. Straight on. Left again. Right. Into a dead end. Start again. Where did it want to go now? Straight on. Right …

  It was freewheeling down Southend into the town, his hands in his pockets, luxuriously carried down the hill, no effort of his, no sweat, magic, the bike perfectly steady, his charge.

  He had six friends at school - Alan, Paul, Edward, George, Malcolm and John. Three of them lived in the old town. His best friend was Alan, who also intertwined through close proximity -Alan’s father had a paper shop just up from the Blackamoor - and at weekends Joe would deliver papers sometimes just to be with Alan who was worked hard.

  Yet he went to knock on Alan’s door with no great confidence. Alan’s parents did not like him. That was clear. He was the boy from the pub who could not be redeemed by however many freely donated paper rounds. The commonness of it, the smell of the bar degraded him just as surely as in the eyes of Diddler and others it enhanced him. And he would answer back.

  He climbed up the grimy back stairs to the flat above the shop with no great confidence.

  Is Alan in? No.

  That would have done. But Alan’s mother took the trouble to tell him that with Paul and Edward he had been invited out to Malcolm’s for some sort of do in the afternoon and they were still there. She thought one or two others might be there too. Joe was certain that she was pleased he had not been invited and her triumph and his jealousy stabbed him, but he said thank you and turned and walked steadily down the stairs.

  That left John who lived just out of the town in a farm cottage down a long rutted lane. He set off at high speed as if he were delivering an emergency telegram.

  John had gone to set snares with his father. He could come in and wait if he wanted. But they would be late back.

  The boy had fought to avoid this but he had to go to Malcolm’s house. Paul was there with Malcolm, and Edward, and most of all Alan - how could Alan have gone without telling him?

  Malcolm had the biggest house. It stood alone in its own grounds just before Greenacres. It was the sort of house in which you felt you had to keep hushed. It overwhelmed Joe. Everything seemed valuable and not to be touched. It made him feel inferior in a way he obscurely resented and it filled him with envy, which was even harder to cope with. He had to repress himself and consequently it was in Malcolm’s house that he tended to knock things over.

  He propped his bike against the low wall of a neighbour’s house and went cautiously to the open wrought-iron gates. The bay-window curtains were drawn but they glowed from the bright inner lights. He knew that room. The big chairs, the big settee, the sideboard, other things he had not registered in school. Things, impressive things, furniture not necessary but important, pictures on the wall, a grandfather clock. They would be playing Monopoly or ludo or pontoon for matches or maybe blow football. He could picture them - Malcolm had a lot of games. There was a big table, his mother put a velvety green cloth on it. They would all be gathered around the table.

  He was utterly incapable of walking along the short drive, knocking on the door and finding a way of asking to be included. He stood there and soaked up what by now he felt deliberately excluded from. He had a terrible anger against Alan. The curtains were a deep wine and the glow was so warm, friends, family, security.

  Now in a racked turbulence of rejection, Joe rejoined his bike and made for Water Street.

  Dan and his sister lived in Water Street. They had come as squatters. They were always in on Saturday nights because that was the night their mother came.

  Joe knew about them in fragments. Information offered by Dan, who was a little younger than he was and, more occasionally, usually as a correction, Marjorie, who was two years adrift. Their father had been in the navy. He had sunk U-boats. He had come back and - then it became even more blurred. But the upshot was - and his mother, who knew, would not help him on this though he had asked her - that Dan and Marjorie now lived in Water Street with their grandmother, and their mother came from another town, nearby, on Saturdays to help with the baking, washing and ironing and to see them because what their grandmother contemptuously referred to as ‘the new fancy man’ had children of his own and did not want them to mix. They were poor.

  They played snakes and ladders. The grandmother sat by the fire, staring, a woman they had to beware of. It was a bare room. The ironing board dominated the place. Dan’s mother, a full woman, ironed with fury, her loose blouse unbuttoned from throat to bra, her breasts swaying as she sped the burning instrument, Joe’s guilty eyes flitting there, once catching the glance of the grandmother, and burying himself back in the game.

  Dan was not greatly enthusiastic about games. Marjorie was tired, she was usually tired, pale, skin tight on her face, always wandering over to her mother, hovering around her - ‘getting under my feet,’ her mother said - and Marjorie would retreat, cowed, hoping nobody had noticed.

  Joe could help, he thought. He wanted to. In the subdued, ill-lit room, he always felt sorry for Dan and Marjorie and he wanted to help them. He did not have to work to impress them like he did with some of the gang. He was never tripped up by feeling inferior: on the contrary, although he could not recognise this, the opposite was the case, the ease of superiority. They would always let him in to play, and when he invited them over to the pub-kitchen they were on holiday. In the cramped space, snakes and ladders, disturbing breasts, a look on Marjorie’s face that moved the boy, Dan pliable, some of the bruises were salved.

  While the water was being boiled for cocoa, he rushed out, slung himself on to the bike, burst into the barrage of noises in the pub, stood at the hatch in the barging corridor and bought three packets of crisps. The rule was he got one free on Saturdays, but he saved that for later. His mother took his money reluctantly. It represented three-tenths of his week’s pocket money, he calculated, and he arrived back with them like a proud hunter with a kill. When his father served him and knew he was visiting Water Street he would sometimes give Joe a bottle of Mackeson milk stout for Dan’s grandmother. She was plainly put out when he reappeared without it and her evident disappointment took the wind out of his pleasure in the gift of crisps.

  By the time he returned home the kitchen in the pub was packed, and much as he wanted to it was impossible for him to have his supper there. He went upstairs fearfully, the potato pie, the crisps, the cup of cocoa, made with milk this time. He knew it would happen again. He tried not to glance towards the loft where the spirit of the blackamoor still roved. He ought to have got over that by now.

  He did not put on the lights in his bedroom because he wanted to keep the curtains open and look out over Market Hill, beyond, to the baths, beyond, to the Tower invisible now but plain in his mind. All these sights were comforts. He ate standing up. Beneath his feet the growl and pulse of the Saturday night came to print its message on his soles and he sought to orchestrate the voices and the noises. But the food came to an end and nothing happened on Market Hill and he had to make for bed, even though the effort was heavy.

  In his prayers his silent voice called on the love of God and feared that he was not good enough to be answered. On his knees he felt that nothing but the fear and love of God possessed him: he was the willing, helpless patient of God, begging for the touch that healed. This abstract but totally fevered passion of terror was primed by Joe’s apprehension about the next morning. The vicar had asked him to train as a server at the altar. This meant going into the Holy of Holies with the vicar, aiding him with the communion wafers and with the water and the wine and learning the responses.

  Much as Joe had longed
for this position, when it arrived he knew from the first instant that he was not up to it. There was that schism of certain alarm which told him he would not be able to cope. No matter he could memorise the responses and had observed the movements of the server several hundred times from the choir stalls, no matter he wanted to serve God and impress the vicar and be there beside the altar where Jesus Christ was most completely present, where the wafer turned into bread, the wine into blood, where every true brave Christian should be - he could not do it. Just as he could never have beaten Og. But how could he refuse?

  At his first rehearsal three weeks before he had forgotten to bring the water with the wine and stumbled over a response he had known by heart, but after the blessing and final prayers in the vicar’s vestry he knew he had been forgiven.

  Not again, though. He could not be forgiven twice. And Joe was absolutely certain that although he could perform the service in his mind without an inch of error, he would surely, certainly, get it wrong for the eight o’clock communion.

  Perhaps it was too much. Too close to the presence, to the burning sun, melting the boy’s confidence, plummeting him to fated failure. For did this not mean he was unworthy, letting God down? As he finished his prayers he saw himself walking up the chancel steps behind the vicar, the few in the cold church kneeling in expectation of their Saviour’s body and blood, his own cold hands numbing on the chalice, his mind suddenly swept of all the forms and words he was commanded to remember.

  ‘Amen,’ he said, loudly, getting off him knees reluctantly after the whispered prayers. Bed could no longer be avoided.

  The fortress did not work. Nor did the multiplications. He went through the week. That could help. Not the school - that took him to Og and his cowardice - but the week of evenings. The baths on Monday - a good night for training, two lengths in 26.5 seconds, coming on - but then the cowardly loitering to make sure he came back with others even though it was the long way round. The Scouts Tuesday in the school hall, a new troop, reviving the old Wigton Scouts, which had collapsed when Mr Barwise had moved out of the town. The new chemistry teacher had set them up. Sometimes they met in his large house where there was a magnificent train-set running all around one room. You sat at the side and worked all the systems. Too busy for sleep. And Alan refusing to stay late to play with the train-set.