A Son of War

by Melvyn Bragg

  There was a terrible violence in his head. When he heard the preliminary murmurings of disruption from downstairs, he wanted to take a sword and slice them open from head to belly, those who threatened. At the boxing matches in Carlisle he liked the blows to land and growled and yelled in the crowd as deep in it as any, losing his singleness as in the choir but finding blood not peace. His feelings even for the gang could be savage, and he held on as if an unbroken horse were trying to buck him and sometimes he could not hold on and the anger uncoiled would be disproportionate, silencing, puzzling to others and leaving Joe himself dazed.

  All he really knew was that he had to keep it secret, not a hint, not a sign to anyone at any time no matter what, he had to conceal the shame. And all he also knew was that he could not give in. He was beaten, he could see that when, for all his tactics, he was still prey, still defeated; but somehow being beaten had to be got through.

  In this long time, when the wait of a day for the night’s battle could seem like a month and despite all the furies on the surface the depths seemed not to stir but hold a sullen grip on him, there were times of escape, vivid release, a bare intensity of seeing whether a wood or a sky, a candle in the church, stones clear on a river-bed or the face of a girl in the street, to be haunted by him, however hopelessly, it was a mercy.

  But he deserved no mercy, because he lied. He lied about himself and what he did in any and every way to protect the secret of what he feared. His contempt for his courage grew as the months went by. You were not frightened of such insubstantial things. You were not yellow-bellied in front of what could not even be talked about for fear of laughter. But the attacks continued and the chasm in his life was covered over as best he could with a desperation of energy that could see a whole day’s reparation ripped away in moments as what was him left the body, left it petrified, vanishing into the infinite blackness for eternity unless he could be forgiven.

  PART FOUR A FIGHTING

  RETREAT: 1954

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  There were solitary times in the bar, especially through the week, in the midday just after opening time. Sam looked forward to them.

  He liked to lean on the bar, light up, gaze through the window though registering little of the little he saw and drift, no more than that. It was a luxury. Shelves stocked, bottles carried up and wiped, pumps cleaned, long mahogany bar surface and pump handles polished, glasses shining, in autumn and winter a fire. And on his own. Ellen upstairs, cleaning and clearing there as she had done in the pub, she too glad to be alone, working at her own pace, trying to force the flat into a home.

  Perhaps it was an indulgence, adolescent daydreaming he had never had time for as an adolescent. He imagined he could feel his mind soften, become as cloudy and wandering as the smoke from the solid little white cigarette.

  It was remembering. Moments of peace and even happiness in Burma. Ellen’s face when she opened the door to meet him on his return. Joe’s smile of stricken gratitude when they had gone to Snow White and the boy had mouthed all the songs, caught sight of his father’s smile and smiled back that branding smile. Good memories. The final sing-song on a Saturday night, a run of luck at Carlisle Races, Alex and a cigarette under a calm starry sky in the east. Memories now allowed time to breathe, to give his life credit.

  Incidents became moments to be thumbed through, stopping places in an album of a life first memorialised in the slum of Vinegar Hill, wrenched into war, shocked, appalled, riven in Burma, immured once more in the town. But now, his own man, feeling as free and as leisurely as any man in the kingdom these solitary late mornings, cigarette smoke the laurel wreath, these were good times, a settlement made.

  As if at last his past could be easy on him; as if at last clearances could be made; as if at last there was an antidote to the unacknowledged nightmares with which his sleep had battled for years; as if peace had finally come.

  Sam did not feel the guilt of selfishness. He did not feel embarrassed thinking himself over-fortunate. This often brief solitary state was sufficient to itself.

  Out there, he knew, Joe was avoiding him. Almost as tall now, inward, hard to tease out, best left alone, Sam judged, until it was time to talk over which job he would go for. Out there, the deepening strain of Colin and what to do and how much Ellen could accept. Ellen herself he could see trying to plait together the three men, loyalties confused, fears compounded and the only way he could help was to cut through. But that would be too painful for her, he could see the pain in her eyes at the very thought of it. Out there his own confident ambition now the brewery wanted him to move on to a bigger town, a bigger pub, there was a ladder, they said, he could go all the way.

  But by some miracle of detachment or facility for compartmen-talisation the darker picture was not allowed to threaten the sweetness of these passages of solitude. He was in desired isolation, untouched selfness until the first customer came in and he took the empty glass and pulled the first pint of the day.

  ‘Why can’t he get a real job? Everybody else does.’

  Grace looked away afraid, not of the question, but of the urgent pleading behind it. Ellen’s anxiety was disturbing. Still looking away, Grace replied, ‘What brought this on?’

  Ellen would not answer directly. Grace, at bay, found the question shamed her. Her own anxiety was too acute to be disturbed.

  ‘He’s behaving - not himself.’

  Grace would not help her out. Although the doctor had declared her free of the stroke she still acted as though she suffered from it. And though still commanding in her presence and appearance, there was a hesitation that could provoke an unhistorical sympathy towards her.

  ‘He seems to have lost himself, the last year or so, since Sadie.’

  If the lips of Grace could clamp even more tightly, they did. The affair of Colin and Sadie had distressed her - everything about it, the exposure to tittle-tattle, the commonness of the connection, the legitimate foothold Sadie had taken it to give her in uninvited entrances to her house, Colin’s stupidity.

  ‘They were just friends,’ Ellen said, ‘dancing partners.’

  ‘Joe tells me he loved Butlin’s. “I loved it, Aunty Grace,” he said.’

  ‘Because you pay up front he thinks it’s all free. Swimming, roller-skating, the dances, all the games they make them join in, ping-pong. It’s paradise for Joe.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound much of a holiday for you.’

  ‘You always meet up with some nice people. There’s plenty laid on.’

  Grace sensed the conversation was about to return to Colin. 'I’m still sorry about that piano.’ She nodded to the lidded instrument, dead many months.

  ‘You can’t force it.’

  ‘You can,’ Grace said. ‘Sometimes you have to. Being too soft never helped anybody.’

  ‘You think I’ve been too soft on Colin.’

  ‘I think you worry yourself about him too much and he takes advantage.’

  ‘He wouldn’t if I didn’t worry?’

  ‘I don’t know, Ellen.’

  The use of her name revealed to Ellen how serious a matter this was for Grace. The older woman was looking directly at her now, a look that managed to give and ask for sympathy.

  ‘Sam can hardly bring himself to talk to him. I can see that. And even Joe seems to pull back. It hurts Colin. But Joe...'

  Ellen evaded her own line of thought. There was a gap grown between herself and her son, which had begun she knew not when or why and stayed unresponsive to any attempt she made at closing it.

  ‘Joe keeps himself busy,’ Grace said approvingly, with relief. ‘Always on the go.’

  ‘Uncle Leonard doesn’t much care for Colin either, does he?’ said Ellen desperately.

  ‘You’ll have to ask you uncle Leonard about that.’

  ‘I must go round and see Sadie,’ Ellen said, not realising, consciously, that this was a slap in the face. Grace once more turned away.

  She paused briefly outside the
house. The sun sweltered the little town in unaccustomed high heat that even blistered the roads. Ellen stared at the steep pitch of the roof of the Blackamoor. The tiles shimmered. A week before she had been coming across Market Hill and seen Joe, flat on his back, lying on top of the roof and, she would have sworn, slipping down towards the edge and a dead drop on to concrete. The pain in her chest had come like a blow. No one but her was around. Then she had started to run. The pain hurt too much. Stopped. It was true: he was sliding towards the edge. She had heard herself shout, the single syllable of the name, shouted out, and later Joe said that he had indeed been slipping, that he did not know why he had gone on to the front roof anyway, but his hands had started sweating, and he had padded his way back, up to the ledge, levered himself and then down the other side where there was the next-door supporting wall and the roof of the lavatories and a ledge for safety.

  ‘Megaton,’ Mr Kneale read. ‘Megadeath. Fall Out.’

  ‘You'll frighten them all to death,’ said Leonard.

  ‘NATO,’ he continued unrepentantly, ‘Countdown, Deterrent, Thermonuclear. I just need three more to make the set. They all relate to nuclear warfare, you see.’

  'I’m not sure Wigton’s quite ready for nuclear warfare.’ Leonard tapped the ash off his cigarette.

  ‘They might have to be,’ said Mr Kneale grimly. ‘These quizzes are a very useful way to get it across to people, Leonard.’

  ‘If you want war, I rather think military equipment that they know about would stand a better chance.’

  ‘I’ve no doubt.’

  ‘No good having a dud round. Nobody enjoys that.’

  ‘It’s because they’re less familiar. You don’t have to remind me of the past of these men. That list of Wigton men decorated for bravery in the Great War is quite remarkable, Leonard, and - though keep this to yourself, I don’t want it out until I publish - the Prince of Wales himself commented on it. When he went up near the Front. He shook hands with a number of Wigton men.’

  'I had heard he went to see some of the lads.’ Leonard did not always like being tutored by Mr Kneale in the history of his own town.

  ‘We could throw in A-bomb and H-bomb to start with. An easy warm-up.’

  Leonard’s expression did not flicker. ‘That would make nine.’ He glanced at his watch.

  ‘I’ll give you number ten.’ Leonard waited until Mr Kneale’s copperplate had filled in questions eight and nine. ‘Who’ll sort it out?’

  ‘Not a question with any one answer.’

  ‘It should have.’

  ‘That’s as maybe.’

  ‘The Old Man would sort it out if they let him.’

  ‘The tide of time has moved on, Leonard. It waits for no man.’

  ‘This country’s treatment of Churchill has been a total disgrace. It’s been shameful!’

  'I fear he is not the power he was.’

  ‘There’s nobody else. There’s nobody,’ Leonard swept out his right arm in an uncharacteristic theatrical gesture, ‘with Churchill’s command of the situation.’

  ‘Summit meeting,’ Mr Kneale said. ‘That’s another easier one to make up the mix.’

  He wrote it down and looked carefully over his work.

  ‘Local history?’

  ‘All present and correct,’ said Leonard, tapping the writing-pad in front of him. 'It’s surprising how much some of them know. Not so much the history, but the local.’

  ‘The Big Historical Thinkers,’ Mr Kneale said, ‘Big Minds. I confess I haven’t read every word by any means but you can tell a Big Mind - Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee - the problem is they had no knowledge of the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb. They saw history in phases of rising and falling. I doubt if they ever thought in terms of a full stop.’

  ‘The only thing I’d be inclined to hold against Churchill,’ said Leonard, claiming his turn, ‘and I’ll lay long odds it’s more down to his advisers, is that he didn’t root out socialism. I would have liked to see him do that.’

  'It can never be done,’ said Mr Kneale, at his most dogmatic, Leonard thought, and rather pompous with it. ‘This is the age of socialism the world over. We will either destroy mankind with the bombs or we’ll all become socialists.’

  ‘Photo-finish,’ said Leonard.

  ‘Socialism is inevitable. It is the only system of the future.’

  ‘There isn’t a horse born can’t be beat,’ said Leonard.

  ‘These are deep movements in history, Leonard. We may regret them. We cannot fight them.’

  ‘Deep movements can change just like anything else. The tide comes in. The tide goes out …’

  ‘This is the time of the Common Man. The world over, Leonard. Nothing is as strong as an idea whose time has come.’

  ‘Save for the next idea.’

  They stopped rather reluctantly when Sam arrived.

  The lists of questions were examined with the usual care. The new young girl brought them tea and biscuits. The general conversation was much as usual. The men had grown quite close over the quiz. But there was a feeling of heaviness, even of sadness, and when Sam left, Mr Kneale said, thinking of Joe, ‘I fear Sam is a man with a lot on his mind.’

  ‘A man with worries,’ Leonard agreed, thinking of Colin.

  They were in the pub kitchen. Sam had built up the fire although it was late. He wanted to finish his book. He held it up so that Ellen, as she had requested, could see the title. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck.

  ‘Joe thinks the characters here - bums we would call them, laddos, the dregs some would say - are dead ringers for Diddler and Kettler and the others. He can be quite funny about it. He says John Steinbeck must have passed through Wigton at one time or another.’

  ‘He likes reading.’ The approving tone in which this evident truth was fondly delivered jarred with Sam. Reading was his territory. ‘Better than boxing anyway,’ Ellen continued, glancing up from Woman's Illustrated, smiling.

  ‘He likes both!’

  ‘He’s more of a swimmer than a boxer,’ Ellen said.

  ‘And you taught him to swim, I suppose.’

  ‘Just at the start.’ Ellen was puzzled. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing.’ And of course there was nothing, he told himself, nothing at all, nothing of the least consequence, and yet he was jarred.

  ‘We talk quite a bit about the books he reads,’ he said, lungeing in the dark. ‘Don Gamillo, we follow him; Eric Linklater; John Galsworthy: he’s getting hard to keep up with. We talk about them.’ He stopped there, aware that in truth these encounters were far fewer than he desired.

  ‘His eyes can look sore.’

  ‘He handed me Sons and Lovers last week.’

  ‘What’s that about?’

  ‘A soft boy who can’t leave his mam. When I said something of the sort to Joe he just walked away.’ Sam laughed.

  But he had felt obscurely put down, his view so rejected.

  'It was good of Leonard to say he can find him an opening, wasn’t it?’ Ellen had returned to this more than once, nursing the feeling of security for Joe, and the satisfying prospect of comfortable clerking work in Leonard’s office. Suit and tie.

  ‘Better than a garage?’ Sam smiled. One of his regulars who owned a small garage had given Joe a few weeks’ work in the summer holidays. Joe’s hands had been blistered after day one - they had set him to loosen a huge rusted nut off a tractor. The man liked to joke that Joe was a natural and there was an opening for him the moment he left school.

  ‘Not better,’ Ellen emphasised. ‘Not better.’

  The sense of happy relief, completion, sighed off her. Sam could even glimpse the faintest gleam of victory.

  ‘He’s too much on his own,’ he said, abruptly.

  ‘He’s always out doing something or with that gang.’

  'I mean in himself.'

  'I don’t know what that means.’

  Sam shrugged and tried to get into the book. But it was his second r
eading and there was not the hold, not compared with this contest he wanted to pursue.

  ‘Jack Ack said he would teach him the accordion,’ said Ellen.

  ‘When did he say that?’

  ‘Last Saturday. I’ve been saving it up to tell you. He said with Joe’s training under Miss Snaith he would pick it up in a few weeks and then he could play in a band.’

  “Why should he play in a band?’

  ‘He would enjoy it.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I hate to see all Miss Snaith’s teaching wasted.’

  ‘Have you asked him if he wants to learn the accordion?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Well, don’t push it on him.’

  ‘That’s not very helpful.’

  ‘He was miserable enough doing the piano at the last.’

  ‘If he’d had a bit more encouragement.’

  ‘From me, you mean?’

  ‘From you,’ said Ellen, steeling herself to calm as she finally accepted that Sam was battling with his temper. ‘He respects you.’

  ‘I always gave him something when he won a certificate.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘But that wasn’t enough.’

  ‘You did what you could.’

  ‘It wasn’t enough, though, was it?’

  ‘He would probably have stopped anyway. Miss Snaith said that boys often do at that age. But,’ Ellen could not check herself, ‘she said she was particularly sorry about Joe and she wondered if all of us had given him enough encouragement. Including herself, she said.’

  ‘He made his own mind up.’

  ‘He did.’ Suddenly Ellen’s tone was sad. ‘What’s the matter, Sam?’