by Melvyn Bragg
Why could he not help reconstruct parts of her memory? Surely that would be a possible cure. In the next generation or so, John thought, you would have much of your life captured on a small disk – photographs, films, sounds, interviews. People could stock up memory banks for old age. They could plan to replace what Nature threatened to take away – as they did in other ways. Meanwhile he could make a start. He could conjure up Grace and slip in slivers from her life. It was Grace she most wanted. But he could also bring back their mid-century town.
On his walks through the town he had passed the Congregational church, sold off now. It was a bold sandstone building a few yards down from the Anglican church, from which it had seceded. John’s father had preferred the Congregational church, if pressed. He respected the views of others, but he had no views on religion save that it was not for him.
In the basement of that church was a space in which an occasional blameless night life went on. There were plays on a stage big enough to take the town’s silver band; there were socials and suppers and it could be hired by any party for a meeting. Most of all there was dancing. John just had to walk past the church, which stood alone now at the end of a demolished street, Water Street, once the pulsating slum of the town, to tingle at those memories of dancing.
Everybody had wanted to dance and the catalogue of their dances was as long as your arm. In twos, in threes, in fours, in groups and in the whole slam-bang gang of them, there were dances to fit every combination, save one. One alone was never seen but for the random intrusion by the rather unbalanced lady who lived in a fine house nearby. She would be drawn in by the sound of the band now and then and waltz for a while by herself, at the edge of the stage, before departing with dignity. Otherwise, the single dancer was an unknown species in the basement of the Congregational church.
So he decided. He was at the research stage in the next of his series of biographies of medieval figures in English life; other obligations in London could be managed. He would shore up the ruins of her mind with material from a past she loved. He would try to take her back to the time when the three of them, three generations, were almost together, and to a boy sitting at a table with Grace, a woman he would not be allowed to know.
Love was what she needed. But he thought it could be grounded in giving her access to that time in her life when the whole of her existence was in harmony with the place and the society in which she lived. To help her be again as she had been at her finest in the place and time that inhabited her. He wanted that. He would describe it. He would try to give it back to her, and take her there.
CHAPTER FOUR
Wilson and Sarah went to fetch Grace. His big shire horses were not right for the job so Wilson borrowed a horse from his neighbour. Sarah had scrubbed out the old high-sided cart used for anything too heavy to carry by hand. They lashed a short plank across the front to make a seat and left the farm in the hands of Jacob, their eldest son, who had come from his own smaller holding nearby to give them the time.
It was rare that the two of them trotted out along the lanes on a bright summer’s morning and, true to character, they made the best of it. Like Wilson, Sarah was approaching her sixties but good stock, frugal living, plain food, constant exertion and, Sarah would add, the will of God had kept her hardy, alert and little affected by the tightening grip and barnacles of age. For Wilson, it was a good opportunity to look over the hedges and into the fields, to assess the size of the herds, the quality of the beef, the quantity of milk in the swollen udders.
At first Sarah picked out the buildings, approving the stone-built farmhouses of which their own was a modest example, frowning at the derelict barns, shaking her head at the hovels. But soon she switched her gaze to the landscape and quietly savoured the unaccustomed liberty, this holiday. She had a fine view of the mountains that fortressed the lakes to the south. She had visited the Lake District once when she was much younger and still she thought of it as an enchanted land and still she spoke of it with happiness.
Wilson took his time going through Wigton. It was not a market day but the town was still busy and he took advantage of the trip to leave his pocket watch at the jeweller’s to be mended. Sarah bought a few sweets for the children and stocked up on the larger quantities of flour, salt, sugar and pepper, which were more expensive in the village. Economy was a creed, austerity a commandment.
Sarah was a true-hearted and faithful member of the Primitive Methodist chapel in their village, which sat on the first shelf above the richly earthed Solway Plain as it began its rise from the sea to the mountains that formed the centre of the county. The community, a few hundred strong, was nearly self-sufficient, as indeed Wilson and Sarah Carrick were, but Wigton was always there for the bigger items – farm implements, saddlery, hardware. The Primitive Methodist chapel was the only place of worship. This was rather unusual in that area and at that time when religious buildings, especially nonconformist chapels, forested the rural landscape. Wilson tried to attend twice on Sundays but when, rarely, he failed to make it, he felt no guilt. He was his own man.
As a boy of twelve, alongside other boys and girls in the village, he had taken a pledge in that chapel that he would never touch alcohol and he had kept his word. ‘John Barleycorn is dead,’ he sang lustily, in the sing-songs at the chapel youth club. He would smoke a pipe of black twist most evenings and ignore the suggestions of Sarah that it would choke the lot of them and such foul manure was best left outside. He worked steadily every day and did everything that had to be done to keep his small farm productive and clean.
He kept hens and ducks for their eggs and reared two pigs for butchering at the year end. He butchered them himself in a lean-to shed he had built against the barn. The hams hung from the cruel black iron hooks in the kitchen where the fire was rarely allowed to go out. These would meat them through the year. He was a good shot, and rabbits were brought home to provide variety, though he used his gun sparingly. All their vegetables were grown in his garden. The cows provided the milk and so the cheese and the butter. The orchard produced fruit, which was stored or made into jam. The hedgerows were full of herbs that Sarah knew how to employ. It was said of Wilson Carrick that he could spot a nail on a road and find a use for it.
Sarah had been brought up in a large family of girls and their mother had made clothes and repaired clothes and eventually, in the parlour of the cottage, set up what could be called a shop. Sarah herself made most of the clothes her family wore and had the same unspoken pride in it as she had in baking her own bread and scones and cakes.
The boys gathered twigs and fallen boughs throughout the year to stack for the fire, although coal was cheap and Sarah would not stint on a good fire. It paid its way, she said. It warmed the house through and kept off the chill that came in from the sea and the damp from the frequent rain. Cold and wet, she knew, could steadily rot a building or a pair of lungs. The weather was friend and enemy, the daily deciding presence, and it was no good praying about it, she thought. God had better things to do.
What might seem a stern sub-stratum of life gave the Carrick family and others like them a sense of themselves, which they knew was hard-earned. Storms from the Atlantic could test them but they could look after themselves, they believed, and that independence need bow to no one. They were deeply anchored.
Their oldest son was settled on his small farm; the second had joined the Army and was serving in the Ashanti war; one daughter had gone into service on a small manor near the county town of Carlisle, fifteen miles away, and then there had been Ruth. And now Ruth was gone there were her children.
There they were, stood outside the cottage, the two boys, one of them holding Belle by the hand. Mrs Harrison cradled Grace and declared that she didn’t want to part with her, that she was good enough to eat. It was a full-sun midday and the cottage seemed picturesque and innocent. A few pieces of furniture and the small heaps of cutlery, kitchenware and bowls were soon shifted into the wagon. Sarah gave Mrs Harrison
much of the furniture and Wilson insisted that she took a pound ‘for your trouble’. Other children, bare-footed, and more neighbours came to wave them off, handkerchiefs flagging their departure as if they were leaving harbour for a long sea voyage. ‘Come back to see us, won’t you?’ called Mrs Harrison, as the cart drew away.
The boys soon settled: there was always plenty of work on the farm. There was plenty to eat. The school was nearby, just a few minutes’ walk. They made new friends. They were well shod and clothed. The chapel was much livelier than their Anglican parish church. Their grandparents were always there for them.
Belle was more difficult. Even as a three-year-old she was already too big. There was something dull in the eyes, something laggard in the movements. The excruciatingly slow and painful birth had perhaps caused her damage, Sarah thought, but no matter, she was willing and biddable. She would need to be more closely looked after than the others.
Grace became their joy. No one could see Grace and not smile. Wilson loved to dandle her on his knee. Later, Sarah could not resist letting her run her finger around the bowl in which she had made the mix for ginger snaps or rock buns, and she laughed when the young child sucked hard at her finger to make sure she got the full goodness of it.
This time James said he wanted to talk to Wilson before he saw his children. Wilson took him into the outhouse where he did the carpentry. James tried to come through every fortnight, on a Saturday for convenience, catching a morning train from Whitehaven to Wigton. From there he walked the two miles out to Oulton where Wilson and Sarah lived.
After Ruth’s death he had found work in west Cumberland and eventually landed up in the coalfield. Hundreds of small mines, mainly coal but some iron ore, were furnishing a sultan’s wealth for the local aristocratic family, who owned the land and all that lay beneath it. They also furnished jobs, by the thousand, mostly claimed by men coming in like James from the near-starvation wages of the countryside. However cheaply thrown up the brick-built miners’ homes were, they were sounder than the weeping poverty of clay daubin rural cottages; however hard and dangerous the work, the pay was better. And there was a boldness among some of the men that James admired, a determination to improve their lot in life. He had found his niche.
‘Well, then,’ said Wilson.
‘The work’s good,’ he said. ‘I wish I hadn’t been so obstinate about it before. Most of the men are good men. Some bastards – sorry, but . . . Money’s steady.’ He offered Wilson a cigarette even though he knew it would be refused. James was a whipcord of a man, Irish-blue eyes, anger rarely too far away from him, but the sense, mostly, to douse it before it fired. He took a deep pull on the cigarette.
‘I told you I’d got lodgings. She lost her man, there was some compensation but very little. There are two girls . . . Well, Wilson, I’ve asked her to marry me and she’s agreed. It’ll be very quiet.’
‘If you’re both suited . . .’
‘We are. Well enough.’
‘I’m pleased for you. So will Sarah be. It’s not good for a man to be alone.’
‘I wondered about the boys . . . Belle’s too . . . young, and Grace? Still a baby . . .’
‘You have to tell the boys,’ said Wilson. ‘They’re your sons and they’re getting to be men now.’ He saw James’s hesitation. ‘Sarah can be with you when you do it.’
‘Shall I ask them to the wedding?’
Wilson paused. ‘Do you want to . . . ?’
‘The beggar is, I do and I don’t.’
‘What about your new wife?’
‘I think she’d be for it . . .’ James dropped the cigarette to the floor and ground it out with the heel of his boot. He kept his head down. ‘I think she’d want to keep them.’
‘Why not? You’d all be together. Belle and Grace could stay with us.’
‘I’ve seen them here.’ James was unmistakably relieved. His new wife did not want the girls. He said, sadly, eagerly, ‘They’re very settled here.’ He searched the older man’s face for permission to leave them behind.
‘It’s not easy for you, is it? . . .’ said Wilson. ‘You’re a good man, James. Whatever you do will be right. You take your time.’ They shook hands with an uncharacteristic formality.
The boys went to the wedding, travelling unaccompanied on the train. They stayed overnight and came back fizzing with chatter about the great city, the fires at the pit heads, the black-faced men in the streets, the crowded harbour, the warren of lanes, the size of it . . . Later in the year, James, the eldest, went to live with his father and soon found work in the mines as a pony-boy. Tom was to try it for a few weeks but came back to the country and went to work on his uncle’s farm.
When Grace reached her fifth birthday, there were only four of them in the house and she was already, her grand-father said indulgently, ‘wild as any creature’. She started school, for which on her first day she wore her new red clogs.
CHAPTER FIVE
The boy and his mother set off just after seven on a winter evening that suited the look and the mood of the post-war town. Three years after the victory over Germany, the town remained immured and frozen in the consequences of that mid-century maelstrom. Though the blackout blinds had been removed it still seemed like blackout. The council-house yard in which they lived was pitch and they needed the small torch. The streets were ill lit by gas lamps at thrifty intervals, the pools of dark predominating on the windows of the locked and bolted shops. Above them, in the flats, the owners showed their presence by the dim yellow glow of gaslight through the curtains. The fragile little globes of the mantles plopped into a feeble flame all over the town and yet the impression was of overwhelming darkness, the gas subdued as if in sorrow.
They walked quickly. Mary, a bonny young woman in her late twenties, the luxuriant black hair, the fine skin, the body lean from work and the prescriptive diet of rationing. The boy aged eight, in short pants, allowed his Sunday suit for this occasion, hair plastered flat with water and a stiff comb, grey socks up to the knees, shoes shining. He was excited and Mary had to step out to keep up with him.
The lure was the hand-painted poster stuck outside the Spanish fish-and-chip shop alongside the much bigger poster advertising the three films coming to the Palace Cinema that week. It read ‘Pea and Pie Supper – bring your own knife and fork. Proceeds to the Social Fund. Adults one shilling. Children and others threepence. Dancing to the “Two Wigton Mashers”. All welcome at the Wigton Congregational Church Hall. 7.00 p.m. Tuesday 10th.’
Like the prey to a hawk, like the fox scent to a hound, this poster, once John had confirmed that his mother would take him to it, inflamed the small boy’s desire. ‘Dancing’! And out late! With a band! Few aristocratic private parties or courtly levées or gatherings of swells in legendary hotels or the massed horsy packs at county hunt balls had been as passionately anticipated as this. With a Pea and Pie Supper thrown in! His mother let him carry the knives and forks.
They went up Water Street, only lately cleared of the tuberculosis epidemic that had crept through its damp congested slum of dwellings. Council rehousing was under way, with the radical luxury of indoor bathrooms, spacious bedrooms and gardens; it was a dramatic transformation. Even so there were tears in the eyes of the Water Street crowd and a persistent regret among the older ones that this slum was to be erased. It was a sewer of disease, this street that had been proudly theirs, but it had also been a pump of life, a place of intense neighbourliness in the centre of the town, with its cow-cack-splattered road as the cattle were herded down to station on market day, with its screaming pig auction and its fearful reputation. Even Mary, who ‘liked the people but not the street’ felt, on this cold evening, the draining away of something she could not articulate, some ancient spirit of survival gone, a dauntless people . . . Half evacuated, Water Street looked touchingly romantic in the gaslight.
The Congregational church was at the end of the street and Mary saw two shadows turning to go down the steps to the
basement. Other members of the committee, early as she was, to help out. While they set up the trestle tables and heated the food, John and two other children chalked the floor and made slides and skidded on it on dusters to make it fit for dancing.
The women talked ceaselessly as they laid the table, walking to and fro. A two-bar electric fire made a doomed attempt to warm the room. Most of the women kept on their coats; only a few removed their hats. Generally they were better spoken than their men, especially in public. John, and all his friends, liked to hear and speak their own Wigton dialect, seamed, though at the time he did not know it, with Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon and Romany but all of it claimed as ‘Wigton’ by those in the town who prided themselves that their own patter was ‘a language that the strangers do not know’. Later, long after he had left the town, he could still call up those old words, a warm history on his mid-century tongue, now banished to self-conscious silence.
‘Laal’ was little, ‘gaan yam’, going home, ‘laik’ was play, ‘beck’ was stream; in their hundreds the Celtic and Norse words strode out in a much-loved march from the past. There was the biblical ‘thee and thine’, Romany ‘chavvas and morts’ and words brought back like presents by men who had served in India: ‘parnee’ for rain, ‘gadji’ for man. It was the common tongue in the rougher part of town, stigmatised as vulgar by outsiders and those who thought they were above it or feared its taint. It was a language of the included. It was tribal, a proud mark of difference: theirs; and his. Then.
The men had now arrived. Every man wore a suit, often the same style as those made in Savile Row, and something of the same cut. Tight ties, polished shoes, hair usually stiffened into obedience by Brylcreem. Most of them would have served in the war or done their two years of National Service in a vast armed force that still considered itself the policeman of an empire that was beginning to break apart. Drill, combat, order, orders and military consciousness were in the men. Even here at the Pea and Pie Supper. It was as if scenes like these were the final salutes to the wounding adventure of a world-wide empire governed by a small island located, as an early pope had said ‘at the uttermost end of the earth’.