by Sue Gee
All along the street, beneath the bare trees, people were doing their Christmas shopping, children racing about on scooters, every second person on a phone. He passed a gift shop, full of stencilled cushions, distressed chairs, blankets tied up with ribbon. Enamel jugs of holly stood on distressed chests, before rag-rolled walls hung with prints. In truth, the whole thing could have come straight out of Camden Passage. He supposed that retro was where it was at now, wherever you were. A computer shop stood next door, stuffed with smart phones and iPads: straight out of Tottenham Court Road. It was packed. He walked on, past a butcher hung with game – well, that was something he did remember.
What had he expected? That the town would be frozen in time, as he had imagined the Hall? He stopped on the pavement, gazed out at the great ring of hills beyond the town. Snow on the tops, and it was colder here, much colder then Morpeth. He stamped his feet, wondered if Evie could lend him extra socks.
Now then: the school. Might that have gone, too, that shabby old Victorian thing? He looked across the Square, searching for the line of railings, along which many a boy had run many a stick. They were there, but smartened up no end. And beyond them, across the playground, he saw that the old façade had been re-faced: shiny grey oblongs hung over the brick, and a great glass extension jutted out into the playground. A science lab? Probably. He went slowly over the road.
The gates in the railings were padlocked for the holidays. He looked up at the sign which stood next to them.
Kirkhoughton School
Head Teacher Barbara Mason, BA (Hons), Cert. Ed.
Of course: it was a comprehensive now. It was mixed. Even as he realised this, a couple of girls came down the street towards him, scrolling away on their screens. They were out of uniform, but he knew straight away that this was their school.
Well: that was all right, wasn’t it? It looked like a damn good modern school, as good as anything you might find in London and possibly better. Why should he feel such a stab of sadness, that what he had remembered was, like the Hall, now utterly erased? Again he asked himself: what did you expect?
‘Excuse me—’
The girls stopped, looked up from their screens. They were young, they were cool, they were of their time. It just wasn’t his time, that was all.
‘All right?’ asked one of them.
He wasn’t all right, he was still shocked to the core.
‘Are you at school here?’ he asked them, and they nodded. ‘My father,’ he said slowly, ‘My father was Headmaster here. Head Teacher.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ He could see the girl trying to be polite, to take an interest. ‘That must have been a long time ago,’ she said, and then, ‘Sorry, that sounds a bit rude.’
‘Not at all. You’re quite right,’ he said, and then, ‘Everything was a long time ago.’
He sounded an idiot, even to himself. A very foolish, fond old man. ‘Sorry. I’m a bit shaken up.’ He got some kind of a grip, and smiled. ‘Take no notice,’ he told them. ‘I’m fine, really.’
‘No probs,’ said the friend.
‘Happy Christmas,’ he said, turning back to look through the railings.
‘Merry Christmas.’
They were back on their screens, arm in arm.
For a little while he stood looking across at this shiny new building. If he shut his eyes he could half-see the old one, with boys pouring into it, boys pouring out of it, off down the hill to football and cricket, his father as a young teacher bringing up the rear.
‘Sir? Sir, when are we playing Hexham?’
He’d struggled to concentrate, his mind on other things. Was that how it had been?
‘I never thought I’d be Head,’ he said once. ‘There were people much better than me, all lining up for when Straughan retired.’
‘You made a brilliant Head,’ said their mother.
Had Geoffrey disappointed him, choosing the Law? Would he not have wanted him to follow in his footsteps, not those of another man?
He was getting cold again. Just one more thing to revisit, before he had lunch. And he walked up the hill, passing the bus stop at which, he knew, his father must have stood a thousand times, waiting to go back to that moorland cottage.
He walked on, came to the war memorial, right at the top of the Square. Even now, though it was almost Christmas, a couple of scarlet wreaths stood on the plinth. Someone had tucked a sprig of holly beneath the one on the left. He walked slowly round the grey stone obelisk, with the words engraved as they were on almost every such memorial.
To the memory of the men of Kirkhoughton
who gave their lives for their country.
He searched for the names he knew. On one of the three sides dedicated to the First World War he found the one he was looking for.
Capt. Edward Gibson. Fusiliers. The Somme. 1916
There was a window dedicated to this young man in St Mary’s at Hepplewick, rather a lovely thing: had the church not been locked this morning he would have looked at it again for the first time in thirty years. Now, he stood gazing at the lettered name, remembering Mrs Dunn, Miss Renner as she had been once, visiting the Hall with her husband, who had survived this very battle.
‘Miss Renner meant everything to us when we were little. I’m so glad she’s happy now.’
He remembered being a little afraid of her husband, who walked so stiffly, and had that rather strange laugh.
‘You should have seen him before he was married,’ his father had said drily. ‘He’s a new man now.’
And now he, like Emily Renner – Emily Dunn – was gone, as everyone was gone. Geoffrey walked round to the fourth side, looked for the two names he had first seen when he was a boy, and learning about the war in which he, and then Evie, had been born.
Capt. F. C. Embleton. Int. Brigade. Ebro, Spain, 1938
Frank Embleton: at last he thought of him.
‘He made us a quartet. When he was killed—’
His mother had been unable to finish the sentence.
‘My brother. My darling brother. Oh, how I wish you had known him!’
‘The best teacher the school ever had. He was the one who should have been Head.’
‘Everyone loved Frank.’ George spoke so lightly, when he said this, but you knew, though nobody ever said so, that he was the one who had loved him most. Adored him.
Had he really been as wonderful as everyone said he was?
‘Every generation has people like that, and he was ours. In our group of people, he was ours.’
He looked on down the list of names.
Pt. D. Hindmarsh. Fusiliers, 2nd Batt. Dunkirk, 1944
His father’s favourite pupil. You shouldn’t have favourites, but he had.
He’d lost a boy once to TB, it was everywhere, then. It had upset him terribly, his mother had told them once. But when the news came of Donald Hindmarsh – that was the day he could just remember: the library door shut tight, and he and Evie told to shush, and not to dare to knock.
‘He wasn’t very clever, he wasn’t great at sport. He couldn’t do anything, really, but he made us all laugh, and that counted. But that’s not why I liked him so much. He was just a good lad, that was all.’
In front of the memorial, Geoffrey bowed his head. After this horrible morning, it gave him such relief.
He had lunch in a pub in the Shambles, the oldest part of town, and less crowded with shoppers, though there was a little bookshop he liked the look of. In the snug they were playing darts, as his father had said they did in his day, when he and Frank Embleton had a drink here now and then. At least that had survived.
Amazing, what good a piping hot meal could do you. He sat by a proper fire with a pint and vast plate of steak-and-kidney pie. A tree flashed away by the bar, and carols were playing on a loop.
Oh, come, all ye faithful . .
. .
He would not get any more sentimental. He would not. He blew his nose and made further inroads on the pie. Then he sat back for a bit, resting before he resumed the journey, listening to the carols and the thud of the darts.
‘Wha-hay!’
Apart from the flashing lights and the recorded singing – not quite King’s College, Cambridge, but never mind – he thought that perhaps little had changed here in all these years. A pub was a pub, after all. In the old days the bar would have been thick with smoke, of course, as his father had said the staffroom always was. ‘You could hardly see across the room, sometimes.’ Well – that was one thing that had changed for the better. He shut his eyes, let the carols drift over him, felt himself falling asleep.
‘All right?’
He woke with a start, as the barmaid cleared the table.
‘Fine, thanks. Very good pie.’
‘That’s good.’
He looked at his watch: he must get going. He dug out his phone, texted Evie.
Should be there for tea. And then: Oh Evie. Lots to tell, alas. G.
He texted Nina. In a pub in Kirkhoughton. More tonight. Dad. xx
To his surprise, he sent a text to Jo. Wanted to visit Emily Davison’s grave in Morpeth. No time. Hope all well. G.
Emily Davison, one of Jo’s heroines. If you could still call them that. She was a woman after all. Was she a hero now? A brave mad woman, anyway. ‘Deeds, not words’ was inscribed on her gravestone. He thought about that, as he got up to pay, and then he went out into the Shambles and took a quick look at the paperbacks in boxes outside the second-hand shop. One of the boxes was full of old orange Penguins: he riffled through them. Good Lord. Orwell. Down and Out in Paris and London. Keep the Aspidistra Flying. 1984. He pulled out a dog-eared copy of Homage to Catalonia, 75 pence pencilled on to the flyleaf. Well, well, well.
And as he went inside to pay, remembering everything his father had told him about this book, he remembered his first reading of it, when he was fifteen, and falling in love with Diana. He still had that edition at home – the first one, the one Frank Embleton had sent to his father, urging him to read it. Already, he had been on his way to Spain.
He still remembered that cover, that fist smashing into the foreground. Now, the edition he paid for seemed anodyne: a watercolour of soldiers at the window of a train. They were holding up their fists, but they were smiling, might almost have been going on holiday. But he had to have it: it was too much of a coincidence, to find it here, on this momentous day. He leafed through the pages.
I have no particular love for the idealised ‘worker’ as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.
‘Deeds, not words.’
Orwell was one of those rare people for whom both were important. Like Frank Embleton, perhaps.
Geoffrey walked back through the Shambles, and into the Square. A bus rumbled out of it, down the hill, and once more he thought of his father, and those endless journeys, to and from school. He crossed over, just in time to see a traffic warden stick a ticket on his windscreen. God, how had he managed to obliterate all thought of the bloody meter? Very easily, came the answer, and then he made two decisions.
The first was that he wasn’t going to argue, and make a scene. He was too tired: to hell with it. The second, reached as the warden walked away, was that on the way to Evie’s he would try to find Hencote Moor. Was the cottage was still there? The Hall might have been bulldozed and utterly destroyed; up on the moor there might still be something that once had mattered.
He tore off the ticket, got in, got out the map.
Even a few miles out of town he saw that the weather was changing, the sky beginning to darken. Was he mad, to do this? He drove slowly, for a good half hour, Afternoon on Three interrupted now and then by a blast of local traffic news. He banged on the knob, got Penny Gore back again, listened to some Hungarian thing she liked.
The road climbed, climbed further; he scanned it for signs. The Cheviots went on for ever, and how did he really think he was going to find one little bit of them, just because he wanted to? One thing made it easier: the fact that it was winter. Passing the leafless trees, and verges stripped of summer grass and weeds, he could make out a sign or two: Public Footpath. To Hadrian’s Wall. Wark Fell. Probably none of these had been there in his father’s day. Now, Tourist Information wanted to tell you everything, and he was glad of it.
Public Footpath. Hencote Moor. He almost missed it, couldn’t believe it, braked suddenly and was hooted at by a car behind he hadn’t even noticed. He flashed his lights in apology, let it speed past. Then he pulled over, and parked by a ditch.
Three o’clock. It couldn’t take more than half an hour to walk up there, half that time to walk down again. He texted Evie: Stopping at Hencote. Shan’t be long. He got out, locked the car, had a pee behind a bush. Then he wound his scarf round his neck once more, did up every button on his winter coat, and pulled on his gloves. He walked to the foot of the track, he began the climb.
It was incredibly cold. He was stiff and slow, and halfway up, as a wind began to rise, he almost turned back. But the moor stretched away so magnificently, and every now and then a fitful sun made an appearance. He climbed on, breathing hard, stopping when he had to, feeling the misery of the morning slip away. He was up high. Up high was good. And there were the sheep, moving slowly in and out of the browning bracken, stopping to stare at him, as they always did. He greeted them, climbed on, determined to find the place now.
Ten minutes later, there it was, in profile. That must be it. A little grey house miles from anywhere. He stopped to get his breath, take it all in: even from here, he could see there were holes in the roof; a bit further on, he saw the broken windows. Across the grass, a thorn tree was bent almost double: relentless moorland wind would have done that. A tumbledown shed stood beneath it. Slowly he walked on, walked round it all. A sheep bounced away at the back.
He returned to the front, and looked down the hillside. Far below, smoke rose from the chimney of a farm – a good-looking place, with a barn and good outbuildings. It made him think of Mike and Evie’s place. And it made him think that his father would have looked down on this farm every day, would probably have known the farmer, whoever had been there then.
He let quietude sink in. Lapwing were beating their way across the valley; as soon as he heard it, he knew their high sad piping. Other than that, there was nothing: only the wind, the sheep cropping the tough moorland grass, rustling through the bracken. Only the soaring sky.
The sun had gone. He clapped his hands on his arms, feeling the cold bite deeper. He must go. But just for a few minutes longer he’d stay here, in this forgotten place which must once have meant everything: to his father, to his first young wife.
In loving memory of Margaret Coulter, née Ridley . . .
Just once he’d seen her grave, out at Cawbeck.
He turned, now, the cottage behind him, and stood looking out over the leafless trees far below on the road, trying to see the distant town, the school. He could just make it out, standing there where his father must often have stood, looking down on the track where he’d walked day after day in all weathers.
The wind was rising. It felt all at once as if it were blowing right through his life, summoning everything, and he began to think of all the people he’d loved, knowing he was nearing his own end now, bringing them all to mind. His parents. Diana, and George, in quite different ways. Becky. Becky above all. And she was gone: the wind had taken her, as it had taken everyone he’d cared about, except for his children, and grandchildren, and blown them to the farthest reaches of creation. Where were they?
The cold was numbing him. He looked back at the cottage for the last time. He had spent the whole
day looking back, yearning for what could never be recaptured. But still. The historian within him began to stir: he was his father’s son, after all, and how he had admired him. And he knew that in the great hush of the past probably nothing was as you’d imagined it to be; as you had heard, or not heard: there would always be something forgotten, or misremembered, or untold.
The wind moved like music over the moor. It began to snow.