by John Harris
At last the superintendent came to a stop with a shrug.
“There’s another sheet like that one, your worships.” he concluded.
“I’ve lived a long time,” Old Boxer pointed out sardonically.
The Mayor sighed for silence, and Ferret-face hushed Old Boxer to quietness. Then the Mayor began to address him in that cold, high voice he read the lesson with at the chapel every weekend.
“Horatio Boxer, we’ve decided that you alone are responsible for leading these two youngsters into wrongdoing. A man of your age and undoubted education ought to be ashamed of himself.” He paused to let this sink in before continuing, “But for you, we’re convinced these two youths wouldn’t have been before the court today.”
Old Boxer snorted angrily. But for the persuasion of the two youths he’d have been sleeping off his lunch-time drinks in the ramshackle sail loft where he lived, instead of scuffling round the woods with a couple of policemen after him.
The Mayor was leaning forward now over the edge of the bench, pointing at him with a pencil, almost enjoying himself. Old Boxer treated him to a scowl in return.
“A man of your intelligence ought to know better,” the Mayor was saying. “Yet you prefer drinking and breaking the law to making an honest living. You’ve a boat-yard that could make money,” he went on. “A business that could thrive–”
“It’s nothing but a set of musty mortgages and bad debts,” Old Boxer snapped back. “It’s the dustbin for all the rubbish in the river.”
“An energetic man could make it work at a profit!”
“All right. You have a go,” Old Boxer countered as rudely as he could. “I’ll sell it to you. Cheap!”
The Mayor went red. “You’re incorrigible!” he snapped.
“And you’re a sanctimonious old ass!” Old Boxer snorted, losing his temper. “Tell me what I’ve got and let’s get on with it.”
While I was still gaping at the way he was flouting authority, I heard Dig mutter something under his breath and felt him tug at my arm. But I hung back, determined to hear the end of the drama.
The Mayor had sat back stiffly in his chair, clutching its arms, taken by surprise at the insult. Then he slapped a hand on to the bench in front of him and glared down.
“You will go to prison–” he said, and old Boxer’s eyebrows shot up.
“Prison?” he yelped. “For a rabbit not worth three-halfpence.”
“–for fourteen days,” concluded the Mayor, and began to scribble something on his charge-sheet.
“Fourteen days?” Old Boxer said in a loud incredulous voice, and the police who’d been watching him ever since he crossed the threshold closed up behind him. “Fourteen days! Why, you smug, self-righteous old sea lawyer!” The police grabbed him by the arms and the Mayor went pink with indignation.
I was enjoying the scene, taking in Dig’s startled face, Pat Fee’s stare and his mother’s working mouth as she watched from the back of the court.
“You pale parasite,” Old Boxer said with vibrant contempt. “You sit there with your silly little chain round your stupid neck and criticise me for leading two youngsters astray. And no one ever overworked his articled clerks more than you do.”
The Mayor seemed to swell with fury, and I found myself praying Old Boxer would put a lashing on his tongue before he brought fresh disasters on himself.
The trouble was done, though, and the Mayor was itching to get his own back.
“Release him,” he said to the policemen, and Old Boxer was allowed to stand in the dock, his thick fingers gripping the rail, his breast heaving at his anger.
“Listen to me, Horatio Boxer,” the Mayor snapped, secure on his raised bench. “You’re a disgrace to the town, a defiant, lying rogue and a persistent drunkard.” He sat back and announced almost as an afterthought, “Ten more days for contempt of court.”
“Contempt!” Old Boxer almost shouted the word. He’d drawn himself upright into a figure of impressive dignity that was incredible considering the state of his clothes. “Contempt it is! Contempt for your psalm-singing, sanctimonious pi-jaw!”
The police had his arms again immediately and were trying to drag him from the dock. But he was strong and had a good grip on the dock rail. He was obviously determined to get in his share of insults before they got him out of the court.
“You, who’ve been moored by your fat behind,” he said coldly, “to an office chair as long as you’ve lived, and voyaged as far as the chapel and there stopped…” The policemen heaved but he clung on tighter. “…you have the impudence to sit in judgement on me!”
Half the court was on its feet now, staring at the commotion. Pat Fee’s eyes were wild and excited.
“Go it, Dad,” he whispered.
“Come along, Jess!” Dig dragged at my hand, but I hung back, eager to see the finish of the contest.
“God, man, you don’t know what living is!”
A policeman brought his fist down on Old Boxer’s fingers, and he was dragged reeling from the dock. The Mayor stared with studied indifference at his charge-sheet, pretending not to notice.
The superintendent suddenly saw me gaping from the back of the court, and he waved a hand wildly to the policeman on the door. “Get the boy outside, you fool!” he snapped.
But he was too late, and I managed to be slow enough to see the scene played out.
The policemen were reinforced now, and Old Boxer was giving ground. But his voice hadn’t decreased in strength, though it was broken and panting as he jerked and heaved at the blue-clad figures around him.
“…I’ve seen finer men than you or me offer their lives to protect just such a pious old fool as you.”
All of this wasn’t strictly true, I suspect, but Old Boxer seemed to be enjoying the thundering broadsides of words and the grandeur of his anger. They had him now at the entrance to the cells, but he gripped the door just long enough to get out his last explosion of contempt for the Mayor.
He hung on long enough to glare at the sergeant who was twisting his fingers one by one from the door and said in a resounding voice across the court. “You, you’ve had no time to see half of what goes on around you.”
Then he was out of sight, but not quite gone. From the back of the court we heard his last withering comment, “Pah, the child of a man…” before a door slammed and the cries became muffled.
The magistrates’ clerk looked up from his book – he’d been studying it all through the commotion as though it hadn’t anything to do with him – and stared at the superintendent.
The Mayor looked down at him and nodded, just as they shoved me outside.
“Next case,” he said, then the door slammed behind me.
Two
Dig was silent on the way back to No 46 Atlantic Street, where we lived, and it was hard to make out exactly what he was thinking.
He stalked gloomily along the vast miles of pavement that fronted the terraced houses of the dock area, a drooping figure with the long face of a horse.
Normally, his thoughts were occupied entirely by the dusty ledgers that lined his office at Wiggins’ boat-yard, and by the articles he sprawled across the cheap foolscap sheets each week for the local paper, his one link with a literary existence he’d always hankered after and never known.
I wasn’t very old, I remember, before I realised that even this one thing he enjoyed sometimes lost its savour for him in a bitter awareness that he couldn’t do it well. His writing reflected that same pathetic inefficiency that was a part of everything he did. Even his ledger-keeping didn’t bring him any satisfaction, for his lack of self-confidence prevented Wiggins’ from promoting him.
As for the articles he wrote in the threadbare kitchen in Atlantic Street, they were out-of-touch and a bit crackpot, set down in a flowing language no one could be bothered to read. I’d known for a long time, and probably so had he, that they were used for the Gazette only as column-fillers.
As he trudged between the scream
ing children who played hopscotch and football on the littered pavements it was obvious that only half his attention was on the process of getting home. The other half seemed to be groping in the dusty recesses of his mind. He was seeking a decision on my future, I knew – almost as if he’d worn a label round his neck.
He covered the long walk from the town centre without a word, his pale face moist with the heat of the day. I followed, watching him carefully, not speaking. We’d never understood each other very well, Dig and I. He’d never done much more than lecture me in an apologetic fashion, even when I was caught with Old Boxer by a Trinity House vessel tied up to one of their buoys way out in the Channel. His anger always seemed to be directed at a spot just beyond me, as though he couldn’t quite come to grips with me – as though he were missing his aim all the time. It was a good job I never took advantage of him; I could have caused him a lot of trouble…
The sun had reached its zenith now and the clouds were skating along the blue highways of the sky at speed before the warm breeze. As I watched them, away I went again after them, as I had in court, soaring over the salty roof-tops so that I barely noticed the moving people who thronged the dirty streets and the noise of the dockyard hooters.
Long before we reached Atlantic Street I was far beyond the dingy district where we lived. It wasn’t a district you could get much kick out of at the best of times. All the pop-shops in the town seemed to be gathered there, all the street-corner beer-offs, and the grey dives where Lascars and Maltese and Negroes and Chinee stokers kipped while ashore. Ship chandlers’ stores rubbed shoulders with shebeens; and boozers with the Missions to Seamen. Children screamed in hordes about the pavement, and slatternly women gossiped in the passage ends. At night it was noisy with courting cats or rattling dust-bins.
The streets and everything in them that lived and died there were shadowed by blank walls beyond which reared the funnels and masts of ships. They were solid-looking and high, far above the houses that quivered to the rumble of lorries and the clatter of sardine-tin trams on the main road as they jolted their passengers over the points and set their heads wobbling in unison until they looked like a lot of roosters with their necks wrung.
But I never noticed them. I rarely did. And that morning I was in a daze. It must have been the chilly court-house that had done it. And besides, past the bare walls and between the iron sheds I could see the river shining in the sun. Through open gateways and down the narrow alleys I kept catching bright tantalising glimpses of its hurrying traffic of small boats and the yachts and launches lying at anchor out towards St Clewes, on the wooded bank of the stream – the fashionable bank.
My mind travelled effortlessly down-river and over a calm sea that was stirred with long quivering feathers of light across its surface as the breeze touched it; far and away past the headland at the river mouth, past the horizon even, beyond sight itself. I’d long since tasted the sea both east and west beyond familiar landmarks, but the feel of it was only an urge to wander farther. Always I wanted more than the narrow pathways of water that surrounded the town. To me, they were only the merest fringes of the greater plains of ocean over the horizon.
The episodes with Pat Fee and Old Boxer that were a constant course of irritation to Dig, and which had reached their culmination in that morning’s proceedings, were merely a makeshift. I was after more than the dockside or even the busy boat-yard where Dig worked. I always had been. As long as I could remember.
The train of thought carried me on suddenly to Old Boxer, who was more to blame than anyone for the love I had for the sea. In those days I’d never met anyone like him. I thought he was God’s gift to small boys. Make no mistake, when he was sober there was something tremendously impressive about him, despite his sagging frame and greying hair. Some odd charm there was that held me tight in spite of his sour tempers and the chilly speechlessness that came on him at times, something that showed through his moodiness and sardonic bitterness in a bright, flashing, unexpected smile or a gesture of tenderness.
It was just such a gesture that had landed him in gaol. Mostly, he’d take no notice of me, staring through me, or even being rude. But occasionally, and that was one of the occasions, he’d treat me as though he couldn’t do enough for me. I’d fished out young lobsters with him, tender as they come, from the rocks round by St Andrew Head. I’d gone egging with him, or trailed a mackerel line from the stern of the old boat he ran. I’d even been with a gun after mallard in the creeks inland. He seemed to like me to go with him, when his temper was good. I was the one who’d persuaded him to go poaching. Pat had just happened to be there at the time.
When he was sober and feeling on top of the world he was as good a companion as anyone my own age, and interested in what I was learning at school. And even on the days when the bitter black temper was on him I always came back for more. While Dig could offer nothing more exciting than a grey life in a drab street or a disinterested account of the business of the boat-yard, Old Boxer could talk in a sailor’s picturesque speech that was flavoured with salty sarcasm of adventures that featured names like San Francisco and New Jersey, names that never failed to make my head whirl, names that spun in my brain as I lay in the park overlooking the bay on a summer evening, staring into the glow of the sky…
I was brought sharply back to reality as we pushed open the door of No 46, with its peeling paint, and Dig spoke to me, “Want to see you, young man,” he said heavily as I hurried inside the house. “Don’t go away yet.”
As I hung my hat in the shabby hall where the skirting-board had warped away from the plaster and left great gaps, I heard a heavy voice calling me from the living-room.
“Come in here,” it said. “Let’s see you while the guilt’s still in your cheeks.”
Ma was downstairs, pottering about the house in her aimless, disinterested fashion.
For years she’d made only spasmodic appearances outside the bedroom, where she spent the better part of her life. She lived upstairs almost entirely, nourishing some private grievance I’d never been able to fathom but which had long since wrecked her marriage and Dig’s happiness. By dramatising some early mistake I’d never discovered, she’d made a vast tragedy of her life, a Wagnerian charade played in the twilight of her own angry mind, with herself as the central unhappy figure.
There was little love lost between Ma and me, and I faced her reluctantly. She’d become gross, and gloomy in the way that old actors – ham actors – grow gloomy. She stared at me out of lustreless yellow eyes from underneath a fringe of blousy hair. Over the years I’d come to realise that the rare occasions when she ventured out of her room invariably meant frustration for me and ridicule for Dig, and I’d acquired the habit of stubborn unfriendliness.
She was pointing to a spot about three feet from her toes, and she fixed me with a dull eye that was ringed with an unhealthy violet.
“Stand there,” she said. “Let your Ma see you in the flush of your crime.”
I stood on the spot she indicated and, aware of the baleful look she was directing at me, I kept my eyes fixed on a point beyond her chair. On the faded wallpaper there, as though in mockery of her, was a photograph of her on her wedding day, young and lovely and radiant, a slender figure in white – though even then seeming to seek the drama of the occasion.
“Don’t look much like a criminal,” she observed. “What happened?”
“They had a fight in court.”
“Did anybody get hurt?” The dull voice seemed to show a spark of interest.
“Not much, Ma.”
“I expect Dig scuttled for safety.”
“No, Ma,” I said, “he helped the bobbies.”
I told the lie without blinking, my face innocent and honest as the new-born day. I’d been telling lies of this sort about Dig as long as I could remember. The embarrassing comments on his gentleness seemed like a challenge.
I couldn’t remember when Ma had said a kind word either to or about him – nothing o
nly bitterness and contempt for his mildness.
“He’s quite brave really,” I blustered on. “P’r’aps you’ve never seen it.”
“And never will,” Ma said, and she heaved herself out of her chair. She was a big woman who’d once been attractive and strong, but through the years since her marriage to Dig she’d allowed herself to grow fat and slothful. Her tall frame had broadened to hugeness so that her clothes hung awkwardly on her.
I watched her as she moved towards the door, hoping she was going back upstairs. Both Dig and I felt the edginess when she left her room. She’d been sulking there with her imaginary illness for fifteen years and we’d got used to the house down-stairs without her. As she reached the door, though, she halted with her hand on the knob and looked back. I stared out of the window, pretending I hadn’t noticed she’d stopped. She swept a lock of untidy hair from her eyes as she spoke.
“Stewin’ in that grubby office among his books till his britches’ behind shines,” she said bitterly. “And home at night over the kitchen table. Words. Words. Words. They only use the rubbish he writes to keep him quiet.”
I stared harder as Ma’s voice grew louder and more incoherent with a passionate outburst of petty temper.
“Clerk. Pah! My father was a master mariner. Captain of a sailing ship he was, with an extra master’s certificate. He brought us things home from abroad. A parrot. A walking-stick made out of a shark’s spine, and sharkskin slippers. And what did I marry?” She snorted. “My God,” she said, “me, who could have picked a sailor like my father! Stuck in that office. Afraid to put his feet on the deck of a boat. Afraid a breath of sea air might blow him away.”
She sniffed, and in her eyes were tears of temper. Then, angry because I didn’t reply, she flung open the door and, as she stalked out, almost bumped into Dig.
“Ha,” she said, and the contempt in her voice drove away the self-pity, “here comes the head of the family. Doing nothing as usual.”
