by Melvyn Bragg
‘Has it?’ She rather brightened up. ‘It does, now and then. It’s a terrible thing growing old. Never grow old. There’s nothing to be said for growing old.’
‘I’m already old enough.’
‘Are you? How old are you, then?’
‘Seventy-one.’
‘Are you seventy-one? Oh dear. What does that make me?’
‘Ninety-two.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Ninety-two.’
‘I’m not going to be ninety-two. No. I don’t want to be ninety-two. And I don’t want to be a hundred. It’s just a number. All the fuss they make! Ninety-two? No!’
‘What age do you want to be, then?’
Mary took her time: by now the self-pity was gone and most likely erased. Such erasure could be counted a blessing, just as the everyday delight in the repeated everyday event could be a new pleasure. The lengths of absence might be compensated for by the intense present. Living just for the moment, John had read, is the purest state; it is that which mystics and meditators seek, and which, on a less elevated level, people feel they can experience by gazing at the sea, or a landscape, or the sky, or a work of art, or just being ‘in the moment’. The present is always contrasted favourably with the pull and the laments from the past and the anxieties over the future. The present was the time of life and Mary had that.
But, he thought, at far too great a cost.
‘Eighty-two,’ she said. ‘I’ll be eighty-two.’
‘That means you were eleven when I was born.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘Never mind. Eighty-two it is.’
‘Or seventy-two?’
‘I don’t think you’d get away with that.’
‘You’re right!’ She waved her forefinger at him. ‘I’ll stick to eighty-two.’
He went to sit beside her as he had done and picked up the book of Wigton and the Solway Plain, which included not only photographs of Wigton but also of Silloth and the scattering of north plain coastal and marshland villages, including Oulton.
‘Is there a dance on tonight?’
‘I expect so. Somewhere or other.’
‘I was thinking of going.’
‘How would you get there?’
‘Bike. What do you expect? Me and your dad had a tandem. It was the worst thing we ever did . . .’
‘I could take you in my car,’ said John.
‘Have you got a car?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very posh. I’m not so sure about that. Where’s the dance?’
‘Oulton.’
‘Is it far?’
‘Twenty minutes. In the car.’
‘Is it a dressy do?’
‘Not very.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ she said. ‘I loved a dance. I loved a dance.’
‘You did . . .’
Again she leaned back into the pillow and closed her eyes and, in an instant, left him.
He waited a while . . . Then she woke up.
He picked up the Wigton book and once more they riffled through it, but briefly and without the former energy.
‘There were some funny people in Wigton,’ she said.
‘How “funny”? Made you laugh or made you worried?’
She frowned as she tried to sort it out. Finally, ‘Kettler was funny,’ she said, ‘but he could be nasty at times. He was at my school.’
‘Do you remember the prodded rug?’
‘I like prodded rugs.’
‘Kettler and the prodded rug. And the raffle. Do you . . .’ Was it a spur, a help to use this word? ‘. . . do you remember?’
John knew that Mary loved stories about Wigton. The place, the community, the people had grafted themselves on to her mind from childhood and with increasing intensity when she found that she had no ‘real’ parents, no family of her own save the town.
‘Kettler . . .’ She nodded. So he told her what she knew and had forgotten about Kettler.
When he had left school Kettler had worked in the coal mines a few miles from Wigton and from there gone on to the land as a labourer and had eventually been netted for the war, though not without two years of a masterful evasive strategy. He’d landed up in uniform, which he hated, in the Army, which he hated, in France, which he hated, and in battle, which he hated. When he came back he settled in Wigton, signed on for the dole, vowed to dedicate himself to drink and work as little as possible within the bounds of survival. He gathered around him a small but loyal posse of equally dedicated men, one of whom, Diddler, had inherited a couple of houses, better described as hovels, from a father who was a rag-and-bone, scrap-iron, move-anything merchant. Diddler’s father, his flat cart and his grey pony combed the streets and the countryside daily and he had snapped up or, some said, just snaffled enough to invest in the hovels. Kettler had a room in one of them and promised to pay the rent one day.
His clothes were cast-offs. His food was the stale bread at the end of the day from John Johnston’s bakery and bits of old meat from one of the butchers, Isaac Toppin. For both men he did a little fetching and carrying. He was always available, outside opening hours, for fetching and carrying, and the tanners and the bobs added up. Sometimes he would sub-contract to a needy boy for a promise or a penny. The big pay days were Tuesdays and Thursdays, market days, when he would stalk the auction rings from the early morning and be first in the queue to drive cattle and sheep through the town down to the railway station for export to Carlisle and beyond, or help load a truck, swill down a pen, generally make himself indispensable.
On those days the drinking money mounted up. A little more came from dominoes, which he played ceaselessly, a penny a drop, and the pennies could soon add up to a pint. He had never been known to refuse a drink. His beer was mild, the cheapest, with a half of porter if he was in funds. His great nose was ripe, corrugated, textured, pimpled and coloured beyond the dreams of Rembrandt. He managed to spend considerable time propping up a wall, usually a pub wall, in the high street or in King Street, closely observing the world going by.
He was a man to whom local legends attached themselves. To Kettler anything that was in open country was common property. Rivers were never private. Fields of turnips and potatoes were studied for their peak pinching time. There had been the matter of the rustling of sheep out in the fells. Mostly, though, tales of Kettler were exchanged to make you smile. He and his friend Diddler had dressed up for a Wigton carnival as a circus ringmaster and a wild bear. They had got hold of a bearskin and Kettler had borrowed a chain and padlock from the blacksmith. He had also, it was agreed, rather skilfully begged or borrowed an assortment of garments that made him look like a passable ringmaster. With a top hat – and a whip.
On the march through the town they were placed behind the band and Diddler had a great time rushing at the crowds, especially the children, growling and clawing the air and panting his beer-thickened breath all over them. Kettler with the whip tried in vain to keep him in order. The top hat was taken off more than it was kept on and held out for contributions, which some of the holiday crowd felt obliged to make.
When the carnival reached the middle of the town, it had swung off west at the fountain to go down a road of bungalows to the park, recently opened, built about half a mile from the old town centre. That was where the sports were held and the floats and the costumes judged. Kettler and Diddler wanted none of that. The fountain was a large memorial to the wife of a local man who, generations before, had gone to London, found it paved with gold, come back, restored a castle and, on the death of his wife, commissioned a central monument in the town to her memory. Cattle drank from it. Four gas lamps embellished it. Kettler and his friends adopted it as the forum for their daily chronicling of the town. Black railings protected it and it was to these railings that Kettler padlocked his good friend Diddler while he strolled across to the Kings Arms.
The howls of the bear were heard throughout the streets. The railings all but yielded to Diddler’s fi
ght for freedom. When asked in the pub why he had padlocked his friend, Kettler said, ‘Bears dissent drink.’ It became a catchphrase and for years Diddler dragged it round the pubs like a tin can tied to a dog’s tail. ‘Bears dissent drink, Diddler, remember?’
‘Kettler and Diddler would go into the pubs on a Saturday night. With this prodded rug.’ John told his mother the story, as she had once told stories to him.
‘It was a very fine prodded rug. They held a raffle for it. Tickets threepence each, six tickets for a shilling and round the pubs they went on Saturday night. Everybody joined in.’ She was intent – was she? ‘There were about fourteen pubs in those days. Before then, before the war – I think Dad said there were twenty-nine. And the rug-raffle thrived. Every Sunday and Monday people would say, ‘Who won it?’ ‘Oh,’ Kettler would say, ‘a couple from Carlisle.’ The next week, ‘Who won it?’ ‘Oh, a lad from Fletchertown, I forget his name.’ And again ‘Who won it . . . ?’ They kept it going for about a month and then people started to notice that it was always the same prodded rug, a fine rug, and they began to say it was strange that no one they knew ever won it. People were getting very upset and just at that moment Kettler announced, in the bar of the Lion and Lamb, that they were out of prodded rugs and there would be no more raffles. ‘All over!’
Mary said, to be helpful, ‘Kettler would torture things – at school. Frogs.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ said John. And he laughed. Sometimes what else could you do?
As he drove south he thought the fact that Mary could live more fully in the past than the present was no surprise. Time purged away the sores and diseases and impurities and left those photographs, serene and assured. And that was the time of her youth, her command of her world.
He would be like that, as he, and increasing millions, flowed in a mass slow motion towards an ever-receding death date. He would see the photographs again. He would want his own, a purged past of his own.
He was not alone. The past was already in so many ways far more attractive than the future for so many people now. ‘As is, as was and ever shall be’ seemed well ahead of ‘As might be different’. And he was part of that.
What sort of life was it for her? That was what mattered. Who could bear it? But perhaps the photographs could not only help her but change her. Would it be possible to restore what seemed to have gone? They restored the body with surgery. The brain was part of the body. Or was it better to talk? Not a talking cure to release tension and barriers and liberate her from the past but a talking cure with a more modest aim, to be a reminder, to give her back more of her past. Or was it best left undisturbed? Would Grace’s story console or upset her?
CHAPTER TWELVE
When war was declared, it changed all the world, Grace thought, except Oulton.
Some months before it started Mr Walker had given a passionate sermon, declaring that ‘we’ – the English, he meant – should never fight against the Germans because we were Germans and any clash would provoke Armageddon, or be Cain and Abel revisited. Mr Walker had a bigger agenda – his pacifism – but he had not quite the nerve to deliver it and the German issue was the nearest he could get.
He had spent a year studying in Germany and come back with a conviction that the culture and the history of that country were to be admired and copied. He brought back German words that sounded English – especially local dialect English. He gave examples of hymns they had in common. He kept referring to Martin Luther and what we owed to his ‘great courage’ and the Protestant Reformation, which had revealed that the true path to God was through faith and not through wealthy churches and ‘corrupt illegal popes and cardinals and priests’. The greater struggle, he declared, was the fight for souls, and in that the German people, especially the Lutherans, whom he had met, were allies; the Methodists were their brothers. He was a fine figure in a pulpit, the minister. A strong face, thinning sandy hair, a leanness that worried some of the women, but a strength that showed itself when he helped at haymaking or harvest.
His voice and his manner in the pulpit were poles apart from the rather shy man about the village. The German sermon impressed even those it puzzled. For some weeks the congregation rather expected the course of events to follow Mr Walker’s injunction. For not only did he bring them news from the outer world, he was a man of great biblical learning, and in some ways, and most importantly to the enthusiasts, he could get carried away by the spirit. The congregation could see the spirit in the more ecstatic hymns or towards the end of one of his apocalyptic sermons when, in measured tones but fiercely, he called down wrath and damnation on all who did not tread in the true path of the Lord. To be zealous was proof of godliness. The apostle in his passion was to be respected. Grace was impressed. The Lord was speaking through him.
Even when the war began and the propaganda portrayed the Germans as rapists and savages, Mr Walker held on for a while. But gradually he let it go. He knew from his prayers that he was right; he knew that there would be Armageddon and the world would change for ever. But although God was with him, Oulton was not. The men went off to fight. The country cheered their departure. The country believed it was fighting in a righteous cause. We were bound to win. God was on our side.
Yet even as the first grim reports came in, Grace thought over what the minister had said. She did not enter into his passion but he had made her realise that much more was at stake than just another foray across the sea with jolly songs – ‘Goodbye, Dolly, I must leave you, though it breaks my heart to go . . .’ Enormous forces were at work if only she could grasp them. She respected the minister.
She would linger at the graves of Belle and their mother after chapel, not only to think more on them, but in the expectation that the minister, the last to leave the chapel, would come across to talk to her. He could talk effortlessly, like no one else she had ever known. He could move from the war into a conversation about ideas and subjects Grace had never thought of or about books he had loaned her. He made everything into a conversation just between the two of them, quietly provoking her responses, often helping her along with them, teaching and nourishing her.
She came to cherish these encounters and the other times she could share his company – after a choir practice or after the Sunday school in which she taught. In these conversations she caught herself in moments of an elevated contentment unlike anything else that was happening to her, as if the branches of the trees above her in a forest had suddenly cleared and given her a glimpse of a light she had not known was there. It gave strength to her sense of independence. Mr Walker was aware of this and suffered a great happiness in that knowledge.
Grace became increasingly restless. Out there was the Great War, fought on land and sea and in the air. Dramatic accounts of heroism and courage came back to a troubled country. And where was she when Armageddon was heaving into full view? Stuck. Stuck in the same village doing the same things with the same people in the same way: stuck. A few regulations and directions from central government on how farmers could farm more efficiently. Little to worry about. No connection with the daily remaking of the world. Stuck.
The focus of her restlessness became Frank. It was unfair and she tried to dislodge it but it would not go. They were now in the phase of serious courting, which meant that they were cultivating some of the ordering of married life without sharing a house or a bed. It was noted approvingly that they had ‘settled down’. They were a ‘fine young couple’. Certain dashing signs – like the galloping of the hunters – had lost their shine for Grace and also, she suspected, for Frank. Nowadays he just wanted to exercise the horses briskly and be done with it. He gave Grace the impression that he was happy to go briskly about all his business and be done with it until . . .
Would it be much different when they married? Would it be any different at all? And this play of anticipation was becoming wearisome. They plodded along, Grace thought, plodded down the lanes and plodded alongside the river. She did her best to throw off
the restlessness and told herself that she was ungrateful and foolish and that everything came to those who waited. But her patience was wearing her out.
Why did he not volunteer?
That could be at the heart of it, she thought.
She knew that farming was considered to be an essential job and in the national interest. Like coal-mining it was protected from the increasingly frantic men-raids by the leaders of the armed forces. Bodies were needed by the tens of thousands. White feathers became a fashion, taunting young men with the accusation of cowardice. ‘Pals’ brigades called on the close friendships of young men, ‘pals’ in industries and small towns, and used them to recruit en masse. In peacetime the upper-class generals ‘beat up’, that is herded up, pheasants in order to slaughter them; now they ‘beat up’ young men and again for slaughter. She knew that Frank and his kind were doing as much for the war effort as half the men in France . . . but. The dreaded reports came back, the drumbeats of patriotism grew louder, spread further, struck deeper. Even at the outer edge of her country, Grace felt drawn towards its centre. The pulse of war began to throb inside her, like the beginning of a fever.
And what was she doing? The work, as the minister had pointed out, of immemorial women since biblical times. She stayed at home and minded the men. Elsewhere, though, she read that young women like her were now employed in factories, they were demanding the right to vote: they were throwing off that biblical yoke. They were liberating themselves. Grace wanted to be liberated too. As the first year of bright-eyed conflict plunged into an inferno of slaughter and fear, her dissatisfaction with herself, with Frank, and with the life she led grew until it was painful It became too much to hold in.
‘Why don’t you join up?’
‘So that’s what it’s been about,’ said Frank.
They were walking on the path by the stream. Late Saturday afternoon. Just before Frank would go back home for what was left of the weekend.