A Little, Aloud

by Angela Macmillan

  While Alfred was undressing in his bedroom, he heard his mother moving around the kitchen. She filled the kettle and put it on the stove. She moved a chair. And as he listened there was no shame in him, just wonder and a kind of admiration of her strength and repose. He could still see Sam Carr nodding his head encouragingly to her; he could hear her talking simply and earnestly, and as he sat on his bed he felt a pride in her strength. ‘She certainly was smooth,’ he thought. ‘Gee, I’d like to tell her she sounded swell.’

  And at last he got up and went along to the kitchen, and when he was at the door he saw his mother pouring herself a cup of tea. He watched and he didn’t move. Her face, as she sat there, was a frightened, broken face utterly unlike the face of the woman who had been so assured a little while ago in the drugstore. When she reached out and lifted the kettle to pour hot water in her cup, her hand trembled and the water splashed on the stove. Leaning back in the chair, she sighed and lifted the cup to her lips, and her lips were groping loosely as if they would never reach the cup. She swallowed the hot tea eagerly, and then she straightened up in relief, though her hand holding the cup still trembled. She looked very old.

  It seemed to Alfred that this was the way it had been every time he had been in trouble before, that this trembling had really been in her as she hurried out half-dressed to the drugstore. He understood why she had sat alone in the kitchen the night his young sister had kept repeating doggedly that she was getting married. Now he felt all that his mother had been thinking of as they walked along the street together a little while ago. He watched his mother, and he never spoke, but at that moment his youth seemed to be over; he knew all the years of her life by the way her hand trembled as she raised the cup to her lips. It seemed to him that this was the first time he had ever looked upon his mother.

  THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS

  Robert Hayden

  Sundays too my father got up early

  and put his clothes on in the blueback cold,

  then with cracked hands that ached

  from labor in the weekday weather made

  banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

  I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

  When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

  and slowly I would rise and dress,

  fearing the chronic angers of that house,

  Speaking indifferently to him,

  who had driven out the cold

  and polished my good shoes as well.

  What did I know, what did I know

  of love’s austere and lonely offices?

  READING NOTES

  In a group of carers, this story and poem prompted thoughtful discussion about the idea of unconditional love: people were interested in the lengths that a parent might be prepared to go to to protect their child. One woman wondered what it must be like to be the mother of a serious offender, given what it cost the mother in the story to stand up for the son she already knew to be guilty and weak. In the story, Alfred discovers things about his mother that he had never realised: the group were divided in their sympathy for him.

  The line ‘love’s austere and lonely offices’ from Robert Hayden’s poem will often make people think about and recall things their parents did for them, which they had not properly understood until they were grown up with children of their own. The poem provokes a wide range of talking points, from fathers who find it difficult to show love, to the delight and hard work involved in a coal fire.

  Father and Son

  POWDER

  Tobias Wolff

  (approximate reading time 9 minutes)

  Just before Christmas my father took me skiing at Mount Baker. He’d had to fight for the privilege of my company, because my mother was still angry with him for sneaking me into a nightclub during his last visit, to see Thelonious Monk.

  He wouldn’t give up. He promised, hand on heart, to take good care of me and have me home for dinner on Christmas Eve, and she relented. But as we were checking out of the lodge that morning it began to snow, and in this snow he observed some rare quality that made it necessary for us to get in one last run. We got in several last runs. He was indifferent to my fretting. Snow whirled around us in bitter, blinding squalls, hissing like sand, and still we skied. As the lift bore us to the peak yet again, my father looked at his watch and said, ‘Criminey. This’ll have to be a fast one.’

  By now I couldn’t see the trail. There was no point in trying. I stuck to him like white on rice and did what he did and somehow made it to the bottom without sailing off a cliff. We returned our skis and my father put chains on the Austin-Healey while I swayed from foot to foot, clapping my mittens and wishing I were home. I could see everything. The green tablecloth, the plates with the holly pattern, the red candles waiting to be lit.

  We passed a diner on our way out. ‘You want some soup?’ my father asked. I shook my head. ‘Buck up,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you there. Right, doctor?’

  I was supposed to say, ‘Right, doctor,’ but I didn’t say anything.

  A state trooper waved us down outside the resort. A pair of sawhorses were blocking the road. The trooper came up to our car and bent down to my father’s window. His face was bleached by the cold. Snowflakes clung to his eyebrows and to the fur trim of his jacket and cap.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ my father said.

  The trooper told him. The road was closed. It might get cleared, it might not. Storm took everyone by surprise. So much, so fast. Hard to get people moving. Christmas Eve. What can you do?

  My father said, ‘Look. We’re talking about five, six inches. I’ve taken this car through worse than that.’

  The trooper straightened up, boots creaking. His face was out of sight but I could hear him. ‘The road is closed.’

  My father sat with both hands on the wheel, rubbing the wood with his thumbs. He looked at the barricade for a long time. He seemed to be trying to master the idea of it. Then he thanked the trooper, and with a weird, old-maidy show of caution turned the car around. ‘Your mother will never forgive me for this,’ he said.

  ‘We should have left before,’ I said. ‘Doctor.’

  He didn’t speak to me again until we were both in a booth at the diner, waiting for our burgers. ‘She won’t forgive me,’ he said. ‘Do you understand? Never.’

  ‘I guess,’ I said, but no guesswork was required; she wouldn’t forgive him.

  ‘I can’t let that happen.’ He bent toward me. ‘I’ll tell you what I want. I want us all to be together again. Is that what you want?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He bumped my chin with his knuckles. ‘That’s all I needed to hear.’

  When we finished eating he went to the pay phone in the back of the diner, then joined me in the booth again. I figured he’d called my mother, but he didn’t give a report. He sipped at his coffee and stared out the window at the empty road. ‘Come on,’ he said, though not to me. A little while later he said it again. When the trooper’s car went past, lights flashing, he got up and dropped some money on the check. ‘Okay. Vamanos.’

  The wind had died. The snow was falling straight down, less of it now and lighter. We drove away from the resort, right up to the barricade. ‘Move it,’ my father told me. When I looked at him he said, ‘What are you waiting for?’ I got out and dragged one of the sawhorses aside, then put it back after he drove through. He pushed the door open for me, ‘Now you’re an accomplice,’ he said. ‘We go down together.’ He put the car into gear and gave me a look. ‘Joke, son.’

  Down the first long stretch I watched the road behind us, to see if the trooper was on our tail. The barricade vanished. Then there was nothing but snow: snow on the road, snow kicking up from the chains, snow on the trees, snow in the sky; and our trail in the snow. Then I faced forward and had a shock. The lay of the road behind us had been marked by our own tracks, but there were no tracks ahead of us. My father was breaking virgin snow between a line of tall trees. He was humming
‘Stars Fell on Alabama.’ I felt snow brush along the floorboards under my feet. To keep my hands from shaking I clamped them between my knees.

  My father grunted in a thoughtful way and said, ‘Don’t ever try this yourself.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘That’s what you say now, but someday you’ll get your license and then you’ll think you can do anything. Only you won’t be able to do this. You need, I don’t know – a certain instinct.’

  ‘Maybe I have it.’

  ‘You don’t. You have your strong points, but not this. I only mention it because I don’t want you to get the idea this is something just anybody can do. I’m a great driver. That’s not a virtue, okay? It’s just a fact, and one you should be aware of. Of course you have to give the old heap some credit, too. There aren’t many cars I’d try this with. Listen!’

  I did listen. I heard the slap of the chains, the stiff, jerky rasp of the wipers, the purr of the engine. It really did purr. The old heap was almost new. My father couldn’t afford it, and kept promising to sell it, but here it was.

  I said, ‘Where do you think that policeman went to?’

  ‘Are you warm enough?’ He reached over and cranked up the blower. Then he turned off the wipers. We didn’t need them. The clouds had brightened. A few sparse, feathery flakes drifted into our slipstream and were swept away. We left the trees and entered a broad field of snow that ran level for a while and then tilted sharply downward. Orange stakes had been planted at intervals in two parallel lines and my father steered a course between them, though they were far enough apart to leave considerable doubt in my mind as to exactly where the road lay. He was humming again, doing little scat riffs around the melody.

  ‘Okay then. What are my strong points?’

  ‘Don’t get me started,’ he said. ‘It’d take all day.’

  ‘Oh, right. Name one.’

  ‘Easy. You always think ahead.’

  True. I always thought ahead. I was a boy who kept his clothes on numbered hangers to ensure proper rotation. I bothered my teachers for homework assignments far ahead of their due dates so I could draw up schedules. I thought ahead, and that was why I knew that there would be other troopers waiting for us at the end of our ride, if we even got there. What I did not know was that my father would wheedle and plead his way past them – he didn’t sing ‘O Tannenbaum’ but just about – and get me home for dinner, buying a little more time before my mother decided to make the split final. I knew we’d get caught; I was resigned to it. And maybe for this reason I stopped moping and began to enjoy myself.

  Why not? This was one for the books. Like being in a speedboat, only better. You can’t go downhill in a boat. And it was all ours. And it kept coming, the laden trees, the unbroken surface of snow, the sudden white vistas. Here and there I saw hints of the road, ditches, fences, stakes, but not so many that I could have found my way. But then I didn’t have to. My father was driving. My father in his forty-eighth year, rumpled, kind, bankrupt of honor, flushed with certainty. He was a great driver. All persuasion, no coercion. Such subtlety at the wheel, such tactful pedalwork. I actually trusted him. And the best was yet to come – switchbacks and hairpins impossible to describe. Except maybe to say this: if you haven’t driven fresh powder, you haven’t driven.

  DIGGING

  Seamus Heaney

  Between my finger and my thumb

  The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

  Under my window, a clean rasping sound

  When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

  My father, digging. I look down

  Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

  Bends low, comes up twenty years away

  Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

  Where he was digging.

  The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

  Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

  He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

  To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

  Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

  By God, the old man could handle a spade.

  Just like his old man.

  My grandfather cut more turf in a day

  Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

  Once I carried him milk in a bottle

  Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

  To drink it, then fell to right away

  Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

  Over his shoulder, going down and down

  For the good turf. Digging.

  The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

  Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

  Through living roots awaken in my head.

  But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

  Between my finger and my thumb

  The squat pen rests.

  I’ll dig with it.

  READING NOTES

  ‘Powder is a very short story but it is deep and intense,’ remarked a member of an ex-offenders’ reading group. Indeed the group went on to talk at length about some of the issues it raised. They wanted to know more of the family’s story before and after the slice given by Tobias Wolff. The relationship between the boy and his father felt real and the group looked closely for the parts in the story that backed up their feeling. There were lots of questions to explore: who was the more responsible of the two? What made the boy the sort of boy ‘who kept his clothes on numbered hangers to ensure proper rotation’? Have your feelings for the father changed by the end of the story? What does the final paragraph make you feel and what does ‘bankrupt of honor’ mean?

  Seamus Heaney’s poem always moves people and affirms loving relationships. You don’t have to have had the same experience yourself. ‘The poem,’ one man said, ‘makes you feel the pride and the love and the strength of these three men. You have it as if it were yours.’ They group went on to talk of potato growing, and memories of grandfathers and what the poet is digging with his pen at the end.

  Real Gold

  SILAS MARNER

  (EXTRACT FROM PART I, CHAPTER 12)

  George Eliot

  (approximate reading time 14 minutes)

  Silas Marner, a weaver, has been forced to leave his hometown and religious community after being wrongly accused of theft and betrayed by his best friend. Marner suffers from a form of epilepsy which causes him to experience cataleptic fits from time to time. In his anger, bitterness and loss of faith in everything he once held dear, he now lives alone, taking pleasure only in the gold he is accumulating. One evening, he returns to his house and is devastated to discover his precious hoard has been stolen from its hiding place.

  Molly Farren is secretly married to the local squire’s son with whom she has a baby daughter. She is an opium addict and as our extract opens she is attempting to walk to the squire’s New Year party through the snow, carrying her baby . . .

  She had set out at an early hour, but had lingered on the road, inclined by her indolence to believe that if she waited under a warm shed the snow would cease to fall. She had waited longer than she knew, and now that she found herself belated in the snow-hidden ruggedness of the long lanes, even the animation of a vindictive purpose could not keep her spirit from failing. It was seven o’clock, and by this time she was not very far from Raveloe, but she was not familiar enough with those monotonous lanes to know how near she was to her journey’s end. She needed comfort, and she knew but one comforter – the familiar demon in her bosom; but she hesitated a moment, after drawing out the black remnant, before she raised it to her lips. In that moment the mother’s love pleaded for painful consciousness rather than oblivion – pleaded to be left in aching weariness, rather than to have the encircling arms benumbed so that they could not feel the dear burden. In another moment Molly had flung something away, but it was not the black remnant – it was an empty phial. And she walked on again under the breaking cloud, from which there came now and then
the light of a quickly veiled star, for a freezing wind had sprung up since the snowing had ceased. But she walked always more and more drowsily, and clutched more and more automatically the sleeping child at her bosom.

  Slowly the demon was working his will, and cold and weariness were his helpers. Soon she felt nothing but a supreme immediate longing that curtained of all futurity – the longing to lie down and sleep. She had arrived at a spot where her footsteps were no longer checked by a hedgerow, and she had wandered vaguely, unable to distinguish any objects, notwithstanding the wide whiteness around her, and the growing starlight. She sank down against a straggling furze bush, an easy pillow enough; and the bed of snow, too, was soft. She did not feel that the bed was cold, and did not heed whether the child would wake and cry for her. But her arms had not yet relaxed their instinctive clutch; and the little one slumbered on as gently as if it had been rocked in a lace-trimmed cradle.

  But the complete torpor came at last: the fingers lost their tension, the arms unbent; then the little head fell away from the bosom, and the blue eyes opened wide on the cold starlight. At first there was a little peevish cry of ‘mammy’, and an effort to regain the pillowing arm and bosom; but mammy’s ear was deaf, and the pillow seemed to be slipping away backward. Suddenly, as the child rolled downward on its mother’s knees, all wet with snow, its eyes were caught by a bright glancing light on the white ground, and, with the ready transition of infancy, it was immediately absorbed in watching the bright living thing running towards it, yet never arriving. That bright living thing must be caught; and in an instant the child had slipped on all-fours, and held out one little hand to catch the gleam. But the gleam would not be caught in that way, and now the head was held up to see where the cunning gleam came from. It came from a very bright place; and the little one, rising on its legs, toddled through the snow, the old grimy shawl in which it was wrapped trailing behind it, and the queer little bonnet dangling at its back – toddled on to the open door of Silas Marner’s cottage, and right up to the warm hearth, where there was a bright fire of logs and sticks, which had thoroughly warmed the old sack (Silas’s greatcoat) spread out on the bricks to dry. The little one, accustomed to be left to itself for long hours without notice from its mother, squatted down on the sack, and spread its tiny hands towards the blaze, in perfect contentment, gurgling and making many inarticulate communications to the cheerful fire, like a new-hatched gosling beginning to find itself comfortable. But presently the warmth had a lulling effect, and the little golden head sank down on the old sack, and the blue eyes were veiled by their delicate half-transparent lids.