The Solider's Home: a moving war-time drama

by George Costigan

  One more stop.

  She is completely engaged…

  The bus, my bus is slowing. Children rise all around me. Some look at me. Some choose to wait, politely for me to rise, thank them and go ahead of them. I don’t. Puzzled, they move past.

  The bus stops.

  School.

  Get up and off. Your body knows.

  What are you doing?

  The woman read on, oblivious of the earthquake around her.

  The bus emptied of its children.

  The bus moved indifferently on. Taking its drama with it.

  Enid Makin watched children on the pavement staring at her.

  In genuine amazement.

  There’s another then. Never inspired amazement before.

  A smile began. A grin. They’ll tell on me… ‘Naughty’ is not something I’ve ever indulged in, either. How I wish I’d poked a face at them. Stuck out my tongue.

  Still the blessed woman read. And perhaps she too had missed her stop, so engrossed was she. In my prose, in my story-telling… One side of her brain flashed she could catch a bus back, or a taxi and easily make her first lesson. A different side wondered where this bus went, beyond Worsley. I catch it every day of my working life, it says Leigh on the front.

  One of Dad’s favourite jokes – ‘Says India on the tyres but it’s not going there…’

  What if this woman is going to Leigh?

  The woman turned another page briskly. O. That flick of that page. I know that! She’s ‘in’. Where was she, page 200? Mum’s first stroke?

  Just one smile and I’ll get off and taxi back. No, I won’t.

  Should I lean over and tell her there’s three more by that author?

  God, this is so – heck! – exciting!

  The woman looked up, checked where the bus was, Walkden village, and Enid heated inside at something in the settling of her shoulders as she plunged back in…

  I am wilfully going to miss a class. A day of firsts, then.

  I do not quite believe this is me and yet I will honour it.

  Her mind ran through a Kaleidoscope of excuses, and being a teaching ‘lifer’ she had heard so very many.

  She resolved to tell her Head, Rob, nothing but the truth. He would believe her, and if she chose to ask it, she knew he would be discreet. He might even embroider. Enid did not know. Sitting on a bus going she knew not how far, she knew not for what precise reason.

  Exciting. Have to pay the extra fare when I get off. Like a naughty school-child.

  Little Hulton. Four Lane Ends. Where was this woman leading her? Another page flicked quickly. Where was she going at this hour?

  Her reader seemed to be as engaged reading as she had been writing it.

  She was watching a woman read.

  What for, exactly? At any second this book will surely be closed, marked and closed, and the woman and Enid would get off, and she would be faced with a bizarre journey back, to a bizarre situation.

  How quietly thrilling. To A Bizarre Situation. Completely new…

  Sure enough, the woman tucked her ticket into their book, closed it, rose and Enid followed her. And, shot for a sheep as for a lamb, having alighted, and not offered to pay the extra fare, she now followed this magnetic woman. Round a couple of corners – God, I feel like a private detective. Hilarious, Enid. Miss Marple Lives – and she was going into a hospital.

  A nurse? She was a nurse? Starting a shift at 9? A Doctor? Wouldn’t a doctor have a car? Snob Enid. She’s visiting a sick relative.

  She let the woman go, and loved her.

  And in this wonderous dancing swirl, thought, ‘Well, I might never know sex, but right now, I don’t mind.’

  On the bus back there was a Scottish man. Or was he a Scotsman? An open question in English grammar. Except in this case he was a broadcast. In a Scots accent. Talking far too much. And too loud. Seeking and needing attention and as he performed, oblivious to the lack of interest he was garnering, Enid wanted to gently strangle him. Another first. This entire morning was full of them. And Enid wanted peace to think her new thoughts. Examine them. And still he over-articulated on. She had no sympathy with his bad leg. He possibly got it, broke it, tripping down a manhole he hadn’t seen – too occupied revelling in the endless din he made. Ostensibly he was talking to an acquaintance – a relative? – across the aisle, but as she noticeably avoided eye-contact – as did almost everyone else – so he rattled, endlessly self-assured, onwards. And then, the person sitting next to him engaged him with a question and he lowered his voice; and Enid almost laughed as suddenly she wanted to hear what he had to say!

  Her stop. School, from the other direction. She alighted. An hour and more late.

  As with the children at Friday’s bus-stop, and the vicar, and even the bore on the bus, Enid listened not to what, but rather to how, Rob spoke. She absorbed his care, his assumption she was ‘obviously not perhaps feeling herself ’ today. His eyes as always were kind though he looked a good deal more tired than – well – Enid could not remember when she and Rob last sat down and talked face-to-face, when she had last had a chance such as this to study his face. Truth was, as she surprised him by interrupting his flow to say, ‘We don’t really talk, do we, Head?’ He blinked. ‘I am your Head of English, and a metronomic successful dinosaur. No need to talk with me.’ The Head sat back. ‘I take nor intend insult. I am neither drunk, nor ill, sire,’ she added, ‘nor am I insane, but this is me resigning, Rob.’ There was a tiny beat, before, ‘I should say my resigning because resigning is a gerund; and a gerund is partly noun and therefore requires the possessive pronoun “my” not the personal pronoun, “me”. But, in this case, there is a comma after me in the phrase ‘this is me, resigning.’

  82

  06.37. FIRST LIGHT, ALMOST. I am here. I am on this first Thursday train leaving Manchester Piccadilly for London Euston. A tube across the capital to Victoria, then a Southern train down to the coast. Hovercraft. Train three, Calais to my beloved Paris – metro – blow Paris a fleeting kiss this time, and catch the last Thursday train from Gare d’Austerlitz to arrive near midnight in Figeac. To be met and driven to Somewhere Else. And at the end of this teeming hectic day, to be asleep and to dream in France. Breathe country air all day Friday. And Saturday – begin. New life. House-hunting. O Excitement. O foot-drumming, toe-curling excitement. Come on train, time to leave.

  Don’t let it stop, this will. This new will. Stay this ‘me’ since Monday and the bus. Going forward.

  I am tired of being Miss Makin. I shall become Enid as I travel. Voyage. Enid of the South. Enid De La Sud. Buying one-way tickets! I have never done that before. And yes, of course I will return, but, o please God, it’s then I shall buy return tickets!

  In the luggage rack over my head the same square-cornered tan leather suitcase (Mum’s) I took to University.

  (God, Enid, your clothes aren’t that different.)

  The last time I took a serious train. That one had been a steam train. 1952. ‘When we had railways.’ Dad. This one seemed formed from moulded plastic. But still, the self-same serious excitement only Adventure generates. Thirty years of service after…

  That was a whistle. Some shouting. 06.40.

  O! I’m briefly a child again. Stay there, Enid. And, well done, you.

  The train moved. No steam, just a considerable jolt, which struck Enid as exactly what had been required. O heck – but goody!

  ‘Au revoir, Manchester?’ I don’t know.

  Good. Good that you don’t know, Enid.

  She settled deeper into her seat, didn’t care for the rigid arm-rest, laid her ticket ready on the table. Bottle of water. Sandwiches and fruit and no appetite of any kind! Time. Space. To myself. Good. Journeys are good for thought. Made for thought.

  I was fourteen when my excellent report, (Lord, what a swot I was – and have stayed?) my regular-as-clockwork excellent report, invited my parents – a direct comment from The Head – to consider now the thought
of my eventually going to University. And, much more important by far, the change that letter sparked in post-war Dad.

  Round another dinner-table the report was passed, read. And he spoke. Father spoke. He wasn’t a mute but this was him beginning something.

  ‘Think high, Enid.’

  We, his women, had blinked. ‘You want Oxford?’

  A silence he took for assent.

  ‘Start there, then – and when they say ‘yis’ – then we’ll fret about the how.’

  She and her mother, Enid viscerally recalled, had held their breath. And as he settled to eat, so they ate too. Chewed.

  Tasted.

  Suburbs. Back-to-back Lowry terraces; or I should say Coronation Street? Longsight. How did that get named? Perhaps it had a marvellous view at one time. Hard to believe today. Literally wall-to-wall suburbanity. That’s not a real word. And? Who’s to care? Or mark it with a red pencil?

  I took the Saturday job, on the markets and I contributed. And apart from the years at University, when I scrimped as they did, I always have. Contributed. Till I took over.

  Why am I thinking of this? Oh yes! Dad’s recovery. One week after they both went to the Legion for the first time without Ted, I came home from extra cramming for my Higher C’s, and found a piano taking up one wall of the living room. And Mother, with a huge smile in her silent eyes mouthing, ‘Don’t ask.’

  I said, ‘He can’t play.’ And she whispered, ‘He bloody will.’ And he did.

  Taught himself to play that ever-so-slightly out-of-tune piano. Dad. It was painful in one sense and in a larger one, sweeter than everything Mozart ever managed.

  Not a sheet of music ever appeared. ‘Pit frigged me lungs, not me ears.’

  Heaton Chapel station

  And after a year and more of practice he fashioned the bottom of a shoe box to lay just above the keys so he couldn’t see them, and he learned to play that way too. And, never ever never to forget, arriving home early that Friday winter evening from my first thrilling term at Uni, bursting to tell them anything and everything, and Mother, a light glittering from her soul saying, ‘Leave your bag there and keep your coat on, clever-clogs.’

  I sipped lemonade at The Legion – no wine there – with nobody telling me a thing until, after a second Guinness, Patrick, my dad, to applause and o so tangible warmth, sat at the piano and played and played until all the world’s favourite songs had been sung to the rafters and my clinging to Mother’s arm as we cried.

  ‘Soppy dates,’ Dad said, wiping his cheeks.

  Stockport.

  Stopping here. Don’t want a companion, I don’t want to have to talk. Happy to think, please.

  Good. No-one’s joined me.

  Three years later, hurrying towards my Masters, Mabel had her second stroke and that one took her. Hanky, quickly please.

  I came home. And I sat to write a eulogy for her. For her funeral service. All the time thinking I can’t read this, I’ll just blub – but who else could, who else should? And, I had written what became the first chapter of the book that woman on the bus was reading before father pointed out it was only supposed to last five minutes. I was bitten.

  No, kissed. Kissed by the bug of expression. It gave me a release for the grief and the loss, yes, but also the place to spend private energies.

  Poynton.

  Lovely. That canal. Parts of Cheshire truly are lovely. ‘Old money, Enid.’

  Life with Dad with Mum cold in the ground. ‘I miss being a miner, Enid.’

  I don’t believe I did more than physically turn my body toward him. Inviting him to elaborate.

  ‘It’s daily facing the possibility of death. With other men…’

  ‘Like the War?’

  ‘Nothing like the war. I’ll never tell you about that, Enid.’

  ‘I know, Dadda.’

  A deep silence. Then I added, ‘And that’s fine…’

  And he said, ‘And I miss the doing something I could do.’

  I started teaching and I took over the house, basically. He washed and cooked a little, less as time and events eroded him and I worked and paid the bills. He also swore more, without Mabel. Apologised less, certainly.

  I had a birthday and I don’t recall which one, but I must have glanced at the newspaper column telling you who shares that date, because this I do recall.

  Lady Jane Grey, poor doomed soul. Lillie Langtry.

  Art Tatum. A pianist. I bought a long-player which Dad listened to a lot and finally pronounced, ‘Too bloody brilliant by half.’ After he’d nodded along a fair bit looking at the cover, at the grinning black face.

  And, a happy birthday to the new member of parliament for Finchley. A woman. Margaret Thatcher. It didn’t even say which party she represented. And, for reason as shallow as a shared moment in calendar time, I became ‘fond’ of her, or more correctly, if this isn’t a linguistic contradiction – and I don’t care any longer if it is – vaguely interested in her. I never held any truck with astrology, so no fleeting wonder about shared characteristics; no interest in horoscopes, that thin end of some supposedly mighty cosmic wedge. Was I seriously to consider of a humanity divided into a dozen archetypes? I sound like Edmund in ‘Lear’. What did he say? ‘Fut, I should have been as I am had the something something star twinkled on my nativity…’ Quite.

  And I was always fond of that passage in Conan Doyle where Watson lists all the things Holmes has no interest in at all.

  ‘You tell me, Watson, the earth orbits the sun and the moon orbits us (a sad paraphrase but it is forty years since I read it…) but it’s of neither use nor interest to me. How many steps are there on the staircase up to this room?’ And Watson, of course, hadn’t noticed.

  Nothing proves anything, except – some say – mathematics. Which I imagine is what explains the bizarre (to me) passion it can engender. It offers an absolute. I’m with Sherlock Holmes, then. So what? Pass me my violin.

  I like this mood.

  Prestbury.

  Slowing down now for Macclesfield. ‘High Tory Territory.’

  After Mabel passed, it, Dadda’s language did change. Sharply. On certain subjects. Made me wonder if, at times, and in some ways, Mabel had constricted him. What was certain was he made no concession to any sensibilities I might or might not have. Or be supposed to have. And in the privacy of his home I pretended no sensibilities. Offered him no sense of being offended, I hope.

  It was language after all, Anglo-Saxon and undeniably rich and rhythmic. How he referred to the good burghers of Macclesfield for instance, ‘A Festering Bunch of High Tory Twats,’ had an iambic lilt. The language of the pits?

  I would never have allowed a dot of it in any student’s work, of course. Disaster guaranteed in an examination paper.

  Macclesfield station coming into slowing focus.

  I feel sad and released at the same time!

  Because look at what had become my raison d’etre.

  Results. Quantifiable success. No longer, as I once so fervently hoped (and believed my duty to be), to fill the hearts and heads of the young with the sublime purity of the possibility of the written word. And to engender a passion for that and to encourage them to revel in it and express themselves. No. I became what I am – I was – a hugely successful exam-passer. There’s a truly vile phrase. Enough. I resigned. I have resigned. I heard myself say it, heard myself mean it. And now, right now, I am training towards something I don’t know. Scared but proud. Like the last time I did this. When I went up to University.

  ‘bye Macclesfield.

  Next stop London, and no-one to disturb me. Good. Good. Where was I?

  I didn’t read the content of Mrs. Thatcher’s maiden speech, but I noted the event of it, and, how odd some humours are, I hoped it had gone well for her. My fellow Libran. My fellow 13th Octoberian. There can’t be such a word. There is now. I just this second assembled it.

  Shakespeare added six hundred words and more to the language.

 
Where was I?

  I wasn’t anywhere. I was doodling with memory. And suddenly racing, hurrying south of Macclesfield. Hurrah.

  Dreaming of Oxford.

  Where her heart was set. Ever since her father had said ‘think high’ – oh but she had.

  The spires, cloisters, chapels, the squares, the gardens, light falling through plane trees, willows draped in the Isis river – the average length of a punt; Enid lived off finite information.

  Before she sat her ‘A’ levels, she had read the prospectuses from St. Hugh’s, Somerville college and her favourite, her choice, St. Hilda’s. Where she would devour written culture, bloom herself in the sumptuous gardens, and leave book-bloated and with the world at her literary feet. She would lodge in the room once the accommodation of Edith Russell and breathe the same air as Cecil Woodham-Smith. ‘The Great Hunger’, her book, had been left by Enid’s bedside when she was 13. Enid, used only to fictional narrative was, as her father intended, appalled. ‘The English won’t ever be teaching you that tale, girl…’

  Oxford loomed. Its bells boomed in her heart.

  She would make friends there. Boom. Love even. Boom! Argue about books! O boom on you big bells.

  Enid knew what a fairy-story was and indulged in hers for its most potent currency – hope. What ending is better than a fairytale ending? Er – plenty, she thought. The Brothers Grimm were aptly named…

  Dreams of Oxford.

  The Headmaster wrote a letter to Patrick, suggesting a meeting, at his and Mabel’s earliest convenience. Perhaps an evening after school?

  The following Friday the family were sipping tea from china cups before a plate of Garibaldi biscuits and listening to The Head singing their daughter’s academic and behavioural praises. And explaining options and possibilities for Enid, as he was in no doubt whatsoever she was University material. Both parents blushed and so did their daughter when Mabel said, ‘Well, we’re sure we don’t know where she got it from…’ The Head responded with, ‘Mrs Makin, ours not to reason why. The issue here is the sky is the limit for Enid, academically. And how can we help her reach it?’