by Melvyn Bragg
There were village dances now and then to raise money for the chapel or the school or the Friendly Society or the old people’s fund. Oulton had its own small carnival every summer with the floats on the back of the carts and the silver band brought in from Wigton. There were outings and trips to Port Carlisle to swim in the sea, and in the warm evenings they would play rounders sometimes with the boys. Sundays took care of themselves. There was time for walks and time for reading. She went to Wigton to a newsagent once a fortnight on Friday evenings. For a small charge, she borrowed two books, always novels, which she would more devour than read and, if they captured her, she would close the book only to pause for the aftertaste of it and then open to start it again. On those Fridays she would buy a newspaper, choosing the one with the most photographs.
There she saw the Great World. She saw the aristocracy in full plumage, shiny top hats and smart uniforms for the men, coats and gowns that trailed to the floor, scintillating tiaras and a lushness of jewellery for the women, fine horses, homes like palaces, and she dreamed alongside them. She read of strikes in the London docks and learned of the grievances of angry men and found that she could sympathise with them too. She read of theatres and balls, of Ascot and Henley. There were reports of the doings in Parliament and accounts of events in other countries in the empire, which made her relieved to be English but also jealous of the dramas other people had. The novels brought the world of imagination, the newspapers an equally foreign picture of the world she lived in so marginally. She saw herself as one who only peeped into the country to which she belonged. It passed her by. It was the novels that most often spoke to her condition and circumstances.
These years, before the outbreak of the First World War, were often remembered as a sweet and unrecapturable time of balm, a perpetual summer of content, an apotheosis of the best of country and empire with all the darkness and injustice and cruelty later erased from the picture. It began a romance. It was seen as a time of the gentle greatness of this sceptred island. Lost for ever, it merged into myth. And Grace, too, was to remember it as a haze of happiness and friendliness. It was her youth that was happy and her character that was friendly but the world seemed to reflect her. And there were the scents of love.
She had in her the spoor of her sex without recognising it, hardly acknowledging it, but it was there. As she picked up the looks and the suggestions of two or three of the young men, she felt herself react and began to know that she was desired and that she, too, could desire.
The thicketed winding lane to the tarn and the banks of the slender willow-strewn streams trickling slowly towards the sea became the sets for courting. Boys who at school had been clumsy, snotty-nosed and grubby were now taller, larky and rather attractive in their long trousers and jaunty caps. They made a ritual of it. The girls, three or four of them, would walk down the lane and meet the boys walking up the lane. The boys would pause for a few inarticulate minutes, walk on and then turn back down the lane to meet the girls walking up the lane. That lane became erotic. A conversation would develop, often shy, lumpen, agricultural and expressed in embarrassed fragments but sometimes a sentence would lead to a paragraph. As the weeks went on, they began to regain the easy chatter that had characterised their early childhood, and the purpose emerged.
Very gradually, they began to peel off in pairs. The pairings followed intense discussion in both camps. The boys resorted to a clumsy bashing of each other on the arms or even lightly wrestling with each other as they strove to direct their unbearable lusts into acceptable manoeuvres. There was much talk of who fancied whom and who might be fancied by whom and why this one was a turnip, that one a sleek little calf, the other a foxy thing. At times all the lads swore that none of the girls was worth the treasure of their attention. At times they realised that any girl would do as long as she rid him of this awful sexual ache.
The girls were scarcely more genteel, although they thought they were. They, too, could be savage in their comments. This one was as ugly as a wart, that one as dozy as an old ram, that one with a bit of the tinker about him. None of them was worth the trouble and certainly did not merit the charms and attention of such young women as themselves.
And so they would go to the walk along the banks of the stream only to find that the cluster of boys had taken exactly the same notion save that they were walking on the other side of the stream. For some reason the boys started to throw pebbles into the water, near the edge of the opposite bank where, with luck, they would raise a splash. And the girls, every one of whom had, most likely, that day been in farmyard sluther and field mud, and carried muck-covered piles of wood, or dug-up vegetables, would shriek and scamper away like coy nymphs.
Until, it seemed, one evening, the gavotte was over and all of them had paired off, going their individual ways, finding their own private paths along the sheep tracks and overgrown bridleways, to begin the next stage, most often in profound silence.
At first Grace had her eye on Thomas Pennington. He was the best looker although, unfortunately, he knew it. But, still, there was no denying it. There was a cut about his clothes and his manner that reflected the high status of his family in the village. He tended to find ways to refer to aspects of that superiority, which could be rather embarrassing but, still, what he boasted of was what he had. Grace was attracted to him even though she felt he rather took it for granted that she would be, that any girl would be, that there could well be a queue of girls from Oulton across the marshes to the sea all in a line waiting for Thomas Pennington to say yes. Nevertheless, despite all that, he was the big catch and she knew she had hooked him.
But it was soon clear to Grace, when they peeled off together and walked thigh deep in the tresses of barley, when they stopped for no reason other than to summon up the nerve for a kiss although somebody might be looking, that something was wrong. Grace did not know what was wrong but she knew it was there. He did not seem to feel, she thought. But then, quite soon, she came to the conclusion that feeling was not his strong suit. There was a sense in him that the job had been done and all that remained was to get on with it. She felt like an acquisition – a pleasant and useful one, and quite ornamental, but no more than a necessary addition to the estate of Thomas Pennington. One evening he told her that his mother had said she measured up quite well but needed a bit of reining in and the sooner he did it the better.
She chucked him.
It seemed for a while as if she had missed out. There was not a wide choice in the first place and the good ones and even the good-enough ones had paired up. Thomas was soon snapped up by Marjorie Paisley who had no qualms about chucking Alan King. Alan King was no good for Grace: there was, she told Belle, very little there in the thinking department. She walked alone, which had its own little frisson of pleasure, or with Belle, ever heavier and slower but of whom she never tired.
Frank came out of the blue. Grace thought he was like Baby Bear’s porridge – just right. She set herself at Frank, and a wild Gay Gordons at the Christmas dance in the village hall settled the matter, and publicly.
Frank’s father had a substantial farm down on the plain near the sea. There were two sisters and four brothers and for Frank, the youngest, there was not enough work. He had come to work with his uncle at Oulton. Eventually the ambition was that the home farm would be sufficiently extended by rent or purchase to employ all the brothers.
Grace felt very easy with him. He was tall, loosely built, strong like all the lads but lithe too. He liked horse-riding and exercised the two hunters of Miss Birkett who lived in Oulton Manor. Grace would spot him some early mornings, his flaxen-haired head above the hedge-tops, riding one, leading one, his back straight. Soon they were together. If he took only one of the horses out of an evening, he would turn down a rarely trodden track and meet her and hoist her up behind him and she would clutch him round the waist, the warm body of the horse exciting both of them, and he would look for a stretch of open ground to break into a gallop. Even then
he was steady.
Usually their encounters were more sober. A walk, most of all, walking was the thing – or, rather, strolling. There was no concept of exercise: their days were laden with physical labour. Walking was for companionability or a meditative interval in a life of constant and heavy work.
They were, the village said, ‘a good-looking couple’. Grace, dark, quick; Frank more ambling, blond, freckled, with the aspect of someone who had all the time in the world. Grace appeared to glide or skid over the surface, depending on her mood. Frank seemed hewn out of centuries of agriculture down on the plain next to the marshland and the sea. On the plain the seasons moved through without harm and they had always benefited from them or outwitted them. The soil, they said, was as rich as any in England. The sea brought a tang to the air – the fishermen were good company and good for barter. On the marshes the labourers dug up the peat and fires could burn cheaply the year round. Frank was unshakeable and Grace felt a powerful sense of relief, which she decided was love.
He was amused that she read books she did not have to read. His book days had begun and ended in school. Now he read a few pages of the local newspaper every Friday – concentrating on the market prices for cattle, sheep and pigs and dwelling on any story that was gruesome. She told him he was illiterate, which made him smile and nod in agreement. She could read for both of them, he said.
Sometimes she tried to tease him into a temper. She would be deliberately late just to test him. He would be sitting on the hedge bank, whittling away at a piece of wood or smoking, calm as a pond, and no mention of her lack of punctuality. She would criticise the limited lives and low horizons of the local community and in her criticism become quite cutting about their lack of vim and ‘go’. They were sticks-in-the-mud. Sleepwalkers. Trudging over the land like dumb animals more than people full of life. Farmers were especially hopeless – content to do the same old things year in and year out until Doomsday.
Frank said that could very well be true, it wouldn’t surprise him. So what was he going to do about it? He would give her a kiss. He was unteasable and she did not want to hurt his feelings by provoking his jealousy, which, happily, she knew was there. Soon she gave up her feeble campaign and decided that he was the ‘answer to a maiden’s prayer’. That made him laugh, when she told him. He thought it was ‘about right!’ and that easy unboast made her feel tender to him.
A maiden she was. There was eagerness and lust in both of them but there was compelling restraint. After a few months, they had marriage in view but both of them accepted that it was some years down the line. They had to save, they had to be capable of independence; above all, they had to wait to get older. There would be no risks taken and in the near background for both of them were the strictures of their chapels. But they found ways, and delay and anticipation had their own sexual satisfactions.
One fine autumn evening, when she had been with Frank and ridden the second horse as she had begun to do in the evenings, she came back later than usual and knew as she opened the farm gate that something was wrong, that something terrible, awful, had happened. And she knew it was Belle.
Belle had been in the orchard helping to pick the apples. They had let her go up the ladder to reach the highest ones. Grace used to do that job. She would never allow her sister to do it, however much she pleaded. Taking advantage of Grace’s absence, Belle had wheedled to get her own way and climbed clumsily, heaving her heavy body slowly but excitingly to the very top of the long wooden ladder. There she had reached out and plucked the rose-faced fruits and popped them into the deep pocket on the front of her pinny.
High above the trees, the village, the world of her life, was in view for her as never before, the sun to the west across the sea, shooting sheets of crimson through the low-lying clouds. Belle swayed forward and back in delight. If only Grace could see her, and the store in her pouch grew and she felt the heaviness of it, the achievement of it, and swayed back to seize the scene around her, to take every bit of joy from the miraculous moment. And fell down to the hard ground.
‘She would have felt nothing,’ Sarah repeated, like a constant prayer. ‘Dr Nicholson said that she would have felt nothing at all.’
Grace said, more than once, ‘I should have been there.’ And at night in their bed she keened ‘like a trapped animal’, Wilson said.
The village closed down for the funeral.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
He took in two books of old photographs, which he hoped would catch her attention. One contained about fifty photographs of Wigton in the first half of the twentieth century, the other a bigger area including the town but spread out across the Solway Plain. The photographs were all in black and white, mostly taken by local enthusiasts. There were short explanatory paragraphs attached to each of them.
John sat on the bed alongside her and began with the book on Old Wigton. First he riffled through it to show how much there was and how it was worth a span of attention. Often when he brought her a magazine or a newspaper she would study the first page and then go no further. This time he needed to be cunning. He thought she would love it.
He had not anticipated how much she would love it.
‘Where did you get this?’
‘In Winters. In the shop on the corner.’
‘How can anybody afford to buy this?’
‘It was very reasonable.’
‘It must be worth a fortune. A fortune! It must be! Just look at all those wonderful photographs!’ She put the book on the bed for a moment, overcome. She was weak with the impact of her past: the joy of it, the presence of it, its unexpected entrances into her lonely afternoon.
He said nothing for some moments as she kept glancing at the cover of the book. It was a detailed view of the high street in Wigton on a market day at the beginning of the twentieth century. A single, stately, broad-beamed, open-topped motor-car going down the street of cobbled stones and horse droppings brought to an entranced standstill the market crowd. There were horses and carts, flocks of people around the open-air stalls, awnings shading some of the shops, shops she would have used – Aird’s the ironmonger, John Studholme the boot-, shoe- and clog-maker. There was the Fountain House Inn, and above its door a coloured glass barrel with gas lamps to drum up trade in the evenings. There were dogs and children, men in sober suits, all booted and hatted, women in long dresses and mostly hatted. The street itself had not changed much to the present day.
‘You would think they were alive,’ she said. ‘You just have to wave a wand and they’ll all start walking and talking.’
She made the photograph alive for John as much as for herself. For most others it was a charming record, part of a local pictorial chronicle, one of hundreds like it all over the country in the thriving grip of nostalgia. For Mary, bringing to it her beholder’s share, her place in it, it was not just a history but an autobiography, an anthology evoking sounds and smells as well as sights, of neighbours and friends, of articles bought in those shops and vegetables purchased from the country women who came into the town on the medieval-chartered Tuesday market day. It was a picture from her life and she brimmed with it, too full of it to say anything for a while, too occupied in receiving and sifting the impressions and the detail of an existence from this one black-and-white photograph.
He picked up the book and turned over the pages slowly, sometimes pausing to read the descriptive paragraphs, sometimes not needing to as she supplied her own. ‘That’s the station,’ she said. ‘That was at the bottom of our street.’ ‘That’s the Methodist church,’ said John. ‘Studholmes!’ she said. ‘Look at them! One, two, three, four, five, six men and a boy. In that little shoe shop. Six men and a boy.’ ‘It says that shoes and boots were hand-repaired there and clogs were made. You wore clogs, didn’t you?’ ‘Everybody wore clogs in winter.’ ‘New Street! There’s some big houses in New Street. Double-fronted . . .’ Then, ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘that’s Water Street . . .’ And so it went for a lyrical while, more shops, mo
re streets, more names she knew, a few faces she puzzled over, the several rather grand houses proudly scrutinised . . . until she tired, rested back on her pillow and slept, replete and, John thought, as happy as he had seen her for some time.
He went out to the car to make some calls and check the emails, and read the newspaper. She would rest for an hour or so if she followed her usual pattern. He, too, could do with a nap: the drive that morning, even though he had left at six o’clock to avoid the heavier traffic, had been an unexpected slog. What had happened inside her mind when those images had painted themselves on it? Had they triggered into life areas of meaning that could be fortified by a more systematic employment of old photographs? There was growing evidence that singing old songs learned in childhood and adolescence was not only a help but a therapy and he had stumbled on that with his mother. Singing, anthropologists said, was likely to have been the origin of speech. Could old photographs perform a similar restorative function?
As he sank into a shallow drowse, he thought of Grace. She would have known that town at about the time of the cover photograph. For Mary, the photographs were potent even if they had been taken a few years before she had been born. The town had changed so little until after the Second World War. But Grace could have actually been there; Sarah could have brought her to the market. Perhaps she was the little girl in the white bonnet beside the handsome Victorian street lamp, one of four that guarded the Memorial Fountain. So Mary might just now have seen her ‘own mother’ as a child . . .
John went back in, foolishly, as he later realised, thinking that the mood he had left behind would be waiting for him on his return.
‘Where’ve you been?’ she said.
‘Just outside.’
‘You never come to see us.’
She looked so dramatically pitiful and her statement was so off-truth that he laughed. ‘Your memory’s let you down again.’