by Melvyn Bragg
And yet, on that night at this Pea and Pie Supper, there was perhaps a moment before the world turned. The British, they thought – when they gave it a thought, which was not often – had won. In that bleak, cold basement they didn’t talk about it but it was in them. They had shown who they were. They had shown what they were made of. They had stood up for what they thought was right against a Great Evil when the Russians had joined the Nazis, when France had been overrun and surrendered and much of the rest of Europe had either sided with the Fascists or backed off, when the Americans had stood aside and Hitler was set to snuff out everything that was in his way.
They alone, and for a time crucially, had stood up to the evil bullies. The skill and courage of the pilots, the intrepid expense of treasure, had held the bridge. Others had piled in afterwards, and the British part had diminished, but when it mattered most it was just them – them alone – the British or, as some would think at the time, the English.
So in that wintry austerity was a stubborn will; in the small commons and deprivation, independence. When the trestle tables were cleared away and the last plate washed, hearts could be whole again, better for the victory and better still for for treating it modestly.
Dancing was announced.
Mr Ismay did the honours. Mr Ismay worked in the accountant’s office at the factory. He lodged in a house in Church Street. He was a bachelor and a Temperance man, unmatched, it was locally thought, in all the county in his ability to organise any ‘do’ or, once organised, ‘get things going’. He was the master of the town’s ceremonies. You knew it had begun when Johnnie Ismay stood on the platform, clapped his hands for silence, got it, thanked all who had to be thanked – never forgot a name – and commanded everyone to have a good time. He always wore a pin-stripe three-piece suit and a stiff detachable white collar. He parted his brilliantined black hair down the middle, exposing an undeviating thin white line of skin. There were those who said he could have been prime minister.
John knew that for dancing he had to look at the Studholme boys and copy them. Queenie’s boys. There were only three of them there that night, one in his last year at school, one well into his apprenticeship, the other on leave from his National Service. All suited. Queenie never took off her coat. Her husband, a machinist at the factory, rarely came along. He was a pigeon man and he pottered about in his allotment at all hours.
Mary loved watching those boys dance. Dancing defined them. They wanted to be Fred Astaire. They bounded lightly through Three Drops of Brandy and the Dashing White Sergeant, setting John an example and giving him tips. They whirled and whooped the Gay Gordons round the room, which was losing the final pockets of its chilly gloom and warming by the minute with the rising body heat. The Canadian Three Step and the Military Two Step rattled along with parade-ground finesse and the room was alive with the joy of it.
You went across the room for your partner after Mr Ismay announced the dance – say, the St Bernard’s Waltz. You said, ‘May I have this dance?’ or even ‘the pleasure of this dance’. The woman or the girl always said yes and you went on to the floor together and waited for the band to strike up. After the final chord you escorted your partner back to her seat and said, ‘Thank you very much,’ or God help you.
John liked dancing with his mother well enough but she kept him right a bit too strictly while other women and especially the girls would encourage him to give it more vim. There were three girls just a bit older than him there that night. He partnered all three and fell for one, though he knew and mourned in advance that she was too old for him. When with the girls he would snatch a glance at his mother, to see her chatting to her partner, or smiling, laughing – glamorous, he thought, dead smart.
She would remember such dances when they talked years later in the home. And most of all she remembered the band and dancing the Valeta.
The band, the Two Wigton Mashers, took its name from a song of the town buried in the pubs of antiquity. It echoed the Victorian music halls and had to be sung by two men, preferably a little tight but essentially men of a certain age who had style.
Oh we are the two Wigton mashers
We often go out on the mash
We wear our tall hats
We’ve no shirts on our backs
And it’s seldom we have any cash . . .
We’ve only just turned fifty-seven
But we’re handsome, light-hearted and bold
Singing ‘tra-la-la-la-la’
As we walk down the street
For pride and perfection we never can be beat
The ladies declare that we are a treat
The two Wigton mashers from down Water Street.
Oh we dance and we sing
And we don’t care a jot
We’re a jolly fine lot
We’re all right, when we’re tight
And we’re jolly good company . . .
There were several jaunty, self-mocking verses. Tommy Jackson, the drummer, part of a big family in the town, a family that crowded into a minute cottage in one of the yards that pocked the place, had seen the commercial possibilities in the title. He not only played the drums, he also did the posters for the Picture Palace; thirteen a week, each one hand-painted in appropriate colours. He washed windows, worked at the sawmill, smoked like a stove and read up on local history. He had been a conscientious objector and sent to the mines for the duration of the war. He provided a good beat.
The melody and the drama was delivered by Fred Ingrams, a six-foot-two ginger-haired former guardsman from down south who had come to Wigton to find work. He had been a bandsman, and could he play the trumpet! Double fingering, triple fingering, any tune you wanted he would catch in a moment and off he’d go, the trumpet calling out to the troops, summoning the game and the lame, its brass perfection ringing with magisterial exhilaration in the heads of the lucky dancers.
John knew even then that his mother liked the Valeta best.
The way it was done in Wigton followed, it was thought, the old Spanish method. Couples circled the room with men in the inner circle, their backs to the centre, and women in the outside circle facing them. The men stepped to the side with their left foot, the women to the right with their right foot; they then stepped back and swung the other leg across and repeated it and repeated again until the music changed and they offered their arms to the partner opposite. Then they waltzed around the room twice until the circle formed again.
For Mary, John would come to think, the glory was the communion of the two circles, and its imitative, gentle parody of distant, unattainable privilege taken over here by ordinary people and made into their own with a smile at the ease of it.
These working men unselfconsciously put hand on hip and swung their legs in an elegant arc as if showing off a well-bred leg. The women, some still in their coats, were mirrored in them and held hands with each other as did the men. They were linked, all together, all equal, all now sharing the restrained high style, the distinction of those born to such displays. Something inexpressible in Mary was made deeply happy by this simple circling, hands held, the perfect form, the globe, the common bond.
Then they would break into twos for the Waltz. Triple time. John had read later that the Viennese Waltz, which lay behind the Valeta, had swept into Europe in a musical and erotic frenzy. The first performance of the Waltz had been encored eighteen times. The youth at the courtly ballrooms of the Hapsburg Empire could not believe the sexual power of the musical rhapsody conjured up by the Strauss family, the furious gliding whirl of the dance itself, a dervish of movement to a severe geometric pattern, but primitive in its call. He saw the dance as the first Viennese unleashing of the unconscious.
For the first time in accepted mass public display, men could press themselves against women’s breasts, women feel the thighs of the young bucks who seized them by the waist. And better! The Church was scandalised and set about banning it. Parents were shocked but envious and soon broke ranks. The madness of
formal music ripped up the old manners of formal dancing. Wigton had caught this cultural epidemic and danced with a spin, a speed and a style to outgun all the hussars in the Hapsburg Empire.
The Valeta would always be at the end of the evening, at about nine. Outside were the remains of the dead. In that small town alone a long list had been added to the First World War memorial. But in the dance were new seeds now, ready. Promises of a new world, even of a paradise on earth.
Johnnie Ismay made the announcement: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the Valeta.’ He stressed the last two syllables. The e was drawn out as long as he could stretch it, giving it the full flavour of its foreignness, Johnnie thought, while the ‘ta’ snapped a command, like a click of the heels Valeee-ta! Begin!
The circles formed on the floor. Everybody was on their feet. Fred Ingrams picked up his trumpet and wetted his lips. Tommy Jackson nodded.
And they danced, this dance appropriated from the chandelier-slung ballrooms and gilded courts of Europe. Here in the bare Congregational Hall in Water Street, England, they danced. And how well and passionately they danced! Formal, at first not missing a beat, then with their hearts pounding, free spirits, soaring through just being there, that night, together – being what they were. Unbridled, they danced the Valeta!
Afterwards they stood calmly unmoving and sang ‘God Save the King’.
CHAPTER SIX
‘I liked Tommy Jackson. He was a conscientious objector,’ said Mary, as if he had not told her as much a few minutes before. But this was what he wanted. He put his notes on the bedside table.
‘There were some of the men very nasty with him. They could be very nasty, some of them. He was only a little fella. None of the Jacksons were big. I was in the same class as one of his sisters. Elsie had far too many . . . A lot of them did then . . . There wasn’t enough food to go round . . . They had to go without many a time . . .’
She leaned back on the propped-up pillows and gazed at the ceiling and dozed. John had to restrain himself from applause. Early days but maybe it was working . . . He waited. He had learned to school his impatience. It was curious that whereas in London he was often full of agitation, which marred the activity, here he found patience. Time was increasingly precious. He could wholly appreciate now the words of those poets who wrote of Time with such awe and helpless sadness. Underlying everything was the pendulum, steady as sunrise-sunset, every day a counted loss . . . so why was there this ease, this calm, this new sense between them sometimes in his mother’s small bedroom, why this impressive non-pressure of time? He let her doze a while.
But the value of such a moment made it too good to squander. The quest now was not only to find the truth in a grain of sand but to see all of life in the moment, even in its going, in its rapid downward stream through the hour-glass.
‘Queenie Studholme seemed to rule the roost at those dances,’ he said.
She came back to the present.
‘Queenie did. She ruled the roost. Some of her boys went to Australia. They were all good dancers you know, her boys . . . and she turned them out smart.’
Already she was tiring but perhaps he could keep it in play just a little longer. Why? Was this her form of a crossword? The nearest he could bring her to be more of herself? How could he really know? Yet he wanted to drag it out.
‘Everybody said that Johnnie Ismay was a good man at running things.’
‘When am I going home?’
He braced himself for the lies to come. ‘When you’re well enough.’
‘I want to go back to my own house.’
It had been sold.
‘It’s still there whenever you’re ready.’
‘Is it still there?’
She looked at him as he remembered her look from the beginning of their life together. The look said: Are you telling the truth? The look said: I don’t believe you are telling the truth. The look said: Tell the truth.
John felt the childhood panic in his throat. But he was older now: he could lie better.
‘When you can walk properly. When they get you walking. You have to stay here until they get that all sorted out. Then you can go.’
She forced him to hold her look just for another moment or so but the pure searching skewered him. She saw that and turned away.
He made a final attempt: ‘Do you remember when we all joined hands and danced the Valeta?’
‘Does nobody want me?’ she said, still turned away, and then she turned back to look straight at him. ‘Does nobody want me?’
The county that had nurtured the daffodils famously celebrated in Wordsworth’s poem had taken up daffodils as a tourist attraction. They were planted in tens of hundreds of thousands alongside the motorways, on the run in to the towns and villages that had close connections with the poet. They were by the lakes, beneath the trees, and in every spare bed in every Cumbrian municipal garden.
The public turned official policy into a private craze and the bulbs were scattered in hedgerows and woodland, at the rim of fields and down farm lanes, in private gardens and window boxes and lavishly in cemeteries.
Mary was ecstatic about daffodils. They besieged the home. They filled the vases in her bedroom and in the communal sitting room. They filled her with a delight that John could scarcely fathom, only observe and feel her pleasure smile deeply on him. And, having wrapped her up almost to mummification, he took her out in the car, daffodil hunting.
There was never far to go. He pointed the car down the coast road and slipped into the medieval fortified villages, which now basked in the riches of the Solway farmland, and there they found daffodils in multitudes, as if the sea had swept in across the beaches and deposited a golden harvest of its own to add to the celebration.
They went on the main road to Wigton, which was massed with daffodils on either side, rank on rank like an imperial army on parade, row on deep row, the green and the yellow, swinging in the breeze under the long, high sandstone walls of the railway station, on parade to receive the inspectors in motor-cars who sped past like royalty taking the salute.
He took her beside the nearest park, and up to the foothills of the northern fells and into those embedded hill villages alongside the streams and the waterfalls where, quite suddenly and surprisingly clustered on a verge or on the back of a ditch, clutches of daffodils grew under those racing clouds as if they had been poured down from the sky itself, showered golden on the bare fell lands, radiant for those spring weeks, laughing at the slate bleakness of the place, trumpeting happiness.
And everywhere Mary went in wonder. ‘Oh, look!’ she said. ‘Oh, look at them! Aren’t they beautiful? Look how many! And more! Aren’t they just beautiful?’ John drove carefully and slowly and often he would turn and drive back so that she could see again, be utterly absorbed again and exclaim in rapture again and be taken out of herself by the beauty of the daffodils.
Sometimes when she was fast asleep, curled up in the bed, her face grave and even severe, he would hear the words of a song. ‘Where do you go to my lovely, when you’re alone in your bed? Would you tell me the thoughts that surround you, I want to look inside your head.’
Where did she go? Was he watching the closing down of a machine? Long service, worn out, resisting in parts, in others broken and frayed, silted up, chokingly webbed in the intricate threads of ageing, a Gulliver tied down by hundreds of Lilliputians, a body less and less fit for the physical purpose of life, waiting for the final mechanical failure?
And was this sleep a dreamless deadness? She never mentioned her dreams. She never talked of a nightmare. Was she lucky in that or did the forgetfulness strike so deeply that the unconscious regurgitation of the day which flashed up on the screens of sleep was also beyond memory? But did they occur? Soon the neuro-scientists would know. Perhaps they did already. A machine would have been invented that could measure and image the nightmare as it happened, if it happened. Why was it painful not to know it was happening? Because it could mean she had lost a substa
ntial part of being human?
Or was there something outside the machine, once held to be true, and for so long, by so many of genius and understanding: a spirit, a soul? John wanted there to be a mind as well as a brain, a spirit as well as a substance – something other. Just as he wanted there to be free will despite the battalions of researchers advancing remorselessly to demolish that essential human craving. All life would be explained, he had read, by chemistry. John admired the truth-seeking of such people. He just wondered, was that the sum of it? Astonishing, given the attacks on ‘the soul’ over the last two hundred years and given his own scepticism, there was still this niggle that said: But is that all? Can we be sure we are on the road to knowing everything?
It was puzzling to have such a magnificent, even freakish, physical entity as the brain – with more movements in the synapses than atoms in the universe, with a memory store now, through its technological servants, reaching galactic proportions, an intelligence building more intelligence. But with no purpose . . . ? A brain as much a miracle of accidental development as the earth itself. A brain built to survive on the savannah, and now just a few thousand years later able to probe deep space inside and outside the mind itself. Innate curiosity was solving old mysteries by the day and turning them into new marvels, which soon became commonplace. Was that not enough? Should ‘the other’, the soul, not be let fall away like the launching capsule of a space rocket?
When he thought about this, John acknowledged that he still trailed behind him stories from his past and the past he had studied in his past. He recognised the force of reason and, like so many others, he had reasoned away God in his adolescence. A personal God? How vain and impossible to think that. An all-powerful God? Meaningless or mad. A God of goodness? Look around. A resurrection? Matter forbade it.