by David Storey
‘Etty got in Mrs Otterman when she went to fetch the children,’ I said.
‘I told her that she should.’ His tall, suited figure – a large, square, round-featured head – was turned with its back to the empty grate. ‘Now you’re up here,’ he added, ‘we don’t want you spending too much time on your own.’
‘Most of my life I’ve been on my own,’ I said. ‘One way or another.’
‘Along with Bea.’ He rubbed his ample hands together.
‘Without support from anyone.’
‘That’s right.’ His attention drifted to the ceiling: ‘I got it first!’ followed by one of the children’s cries. ‘In their room?’
‘That’s right.’
A barrister, his practice had, in recent years, confined him principally to the north, briefs of astounding insignificance taking him to Manchester and Leeds, to Liverpool and Hull, Beverley and York (Halifax and Bradford – Wakefield, Castleford, Durham and Shipley): ‘Old age,’ he had said when I had chided him for this narrowing of his horizons for, as a younger man, before his marriage, he had travelled as far afield as South Africa and South America (the United States and Russia) representing ‘causes’, a legacy, this, from his years in London, both where he had studied and had met (and married) Etty before, on his father’s death, returning north to take on the family practice. ‘Why,’ I had told him, ‘you are still a child,’ (he was, I’d estimated, in his middle thirties). ‘You don’t shut up shop until you’re dead, and perhaps,’ I’d gone on, ‘not even then. The whole of life before you!’
Despite his upbringing, background and profession, he was chairman of the Ardsley and District Labour Party (dominated until recently by the National Union of Mineworkers), succeeding in the task through what I could only describe as (for a lawyer) a uniquely disingenuous nature (as well as the amount of time he was prepared to put in, together with the quality and quantity of legal advice he freely dispensed), his refusal to acknowledge malice in anyone earning him a reputation for what the Ardsley and District Express – shown to me by Etty, not him – had described as his ‘probitious generosity’: ‘They even have to invent a word to describe him. Or do you think it’s a misprint?’ Etty enquired.
‘I could sell the house,’ he had once remarked when I pointed out the disparity between his own resources and those of the people whom he had chosen to represent. ‘At least, Etty could, for it’s hers, and I haven’t the time. We could live in Second Avenue,’ (a row of, at one time, gas-lit cottages, the most notorious street in the village) ‘but, taking into account the circumstances, I can’t see it would do either us or our critics any good. Those who don’t like me living in The People’s Palace,’ (as the house was now known) ‘would only get something worse for their pains, and both the Party and I would be handicapped for the lack of space. Party walls, to coin a phrase, in Second Avenue, aren’t that thick, and the amount of work I’m obliged to do at home wouldn’t be facilitated by the noise coming through from the other side. When the day comes to hand over our ill-gotten gains they’ll get an idea of how much it costs to keep on a roof so that they can come up here most days and sound off as long and as loud as they like.’
When Etty first introduced him to our house in Belsize Park (as if he not I were its rightful owner: ‘My genial giant,’ she had proudly declared), she had said, ‘He is a liberal of the kind which set the Labour Party on its feet: sentimental and, to the degree that it is often mistaken for passion, loyal to his class in ways of which he is unaware. He wouldn’t turn a hair,’ (indicating, with a swing of her arm – six years out of the Courtauld and still a child – the fourteen rooms of our Victorian mansion) ‘at living here if he felt he could put it to good use. Quite a counterblast,’ she had concluded, ‘to you.’
‘I’ll give them a shock and go up,’ he said. ‘Etty’s not expecting me back so soon.’
‘Why’s that?’ I said.
‘With having you here she’s been on tenterhooks,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d get back early. After all,’ he smiled, ‘we want to do the best by you.’
A further smile from his brown-eyed, round-featured face – the same expansive look with which he had greeted me when I had first arrived – and he was gone. ‘What are you two up to!’ came the cry, followed by (a unified), ‘Daddy!’
The sound of a kiss as he greeted Etty, and of several more as, accompanied by the splashing of water (they were evidently in the bathroom), he lifted each of the children.
‘What are you going to do?’ My father stands in front of the black-leaded range in the living-room of our house at Onasett.
Onasett: Ona’s Headland: His Place: a Viking warlord who cleared a space on the crest of the wooded ridge that projected southward to the river – taken over, subsequently, by Dane and Saxon and, previous to all of them, the Romans who built a side-road, west, from Watling Street, into the Pennine hills – passing to the north of Onasett as the road to Manchester still does (isolating, in the process, the between-the-two-world-wars housing estate of three thousand semi-detached houses – a scree of brick and tile, of hedged lawn and field and tarmac that climbs one side of Ona’s original Sett to the brick-built school and hospital and the stone-built church that form a crustaceous backbone to the ridge).
Our house, in front of whose living-room fire my father stands, lies halfway up the eastward-facing slope (catching in its principal windows the morning sun – and looking out to the higher ridge on which are poised, in silhouette, the principal buildings of the town: the County Hall dome, the Greekporticoed entrance to the Courts of Law, the chisel-roofed tower of the French-Renaissance-styled Town Hall, the dog-toothed spire of the Gothic cathedral – a résumé of an architectural heritage poised, in its totality, as a reciprocal spine to this more imposing ridge on which Ona set his original dwelling).
‘I’ve got a job.’
‘Where?’
My father is in his fiftieth year: small, broad-shouldered, stocky, his eyes are dark, not unlike my own – darkened further, however, in his case, by the dust that never leaves the lids. In the past few years he has risen from an underground maintenance worker to a coal-face foreman: the responsibility, in charge of thirty-five men, has subdued his once ebullient nature: he comes home now too tired to eat, or, if he has eaten, too tired to undress, falling asleep in front of the fire, his eyes, in his exhaustion, half-open (eerily-gleaming beneath the half-closed lids, the mouth ajar, air roaring through his dust-filled nose).
‘At Chamberlains,’ I tell him.
‘You could have gone theer when you wa’re only fifteen,’ he tells me.
I’ve worked, as it is, at Chamberlains for the previous four summers: a contractor and erector of marquees at agricultural shows and weddings.
‘After all this time at school. And now,’ he goes on, ‘you’re geving it up.’
The argument is one of several which have taken place over the previous weeks: ‘All these years’, ‘A lifetime of effort’, ‘What have we done to deserve it?’ ‘Chucking it away.’
It is the week of my first letter to Bea: I am, amidst scenes of industrial dereliction, imagining her caught up in the distractions of a sun-baked beach, wine-laden tables, palm trees, yachts, a waveless sea: “Here I am, reproached by bickering parents, broke, with no prospects whatsoever, ridiculed for what I intend to be (already am). My form-master has written to say, in giving up university, I have let down King Edward’s: ‘All these years of teaching’ etc., in much the same way as my father says, ‘All these years of working down a mine …’”
‘All these years of working down the pit so you can go to King Edward’s and all you do,’ his eyes alight with a vehemence which outshines the glow of the fire behind, ‘is chuck it in our face.’
‘There’s a difference between education, as you would define it, and enlightenment,’ I tell him (a prick at the age of eighteen as I am at sixty-five).
‘Enlightment,’ he says, ‘is not having to do work like an ani
mal in a cave.’
He coughs: a moment later, he retches.
“You’ll be surprised to hear,” I go on in my letter, “I’ve taken a job as a labourer. It won’t leave me any time to paint but will give me enough cash, with overtime, to silence the opposition. I’ve worked at this place over the past four years (since, in fact, the age of thirteen). We travel, seven days a week (double-time on Sundays) to showgrounds across the north of England – and to country houses where, on lawns across which are scattered ancient trees, we erect marquees for society weddings – tents into which the bride and groom occasionally wander and, hand in hand, inspect the coloured awnings, the parquet floor, the boxes and racks arranged with flowers, the metalwork tables and the metalwork chairs, and, once in a while, I hear one or other of the two remark, ‘My darling, this is jolly,’ and, ‘I say, my dear, just look at this,’ and imagine turning up one day at Ardsley Hall and setting up a tent in the grounds for the wedding of Miss Beatrice Corcoran to a man who spends in one evening taking you out what it takes me a month to earn with a fourteen-pound hammer.”
‘I’ll never be a teacher,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll never subvert the most precious thing I have – my individuality – to a common interest. Why should I compromise that to become one of a hundred thousand others – a teacher, a hack, a professional?’
‘Because,’ my father says, ‘everybody does, king or miner, teacher or priest. They have to earn a living. Otherwise,’ he declares, ‘they beg off others.’
‘I’ll work at Chamberlains,’ I tell him.
‘Chamberlains,’ he tells me, ‘employs the riff-raff of the town. They pay a quarter of what you’d earn as a teacher, or in any other job, if it comes to that.’
His face is lined: a file of coal-dust extends laterally beneath the skin where, in the past, a cut has healed.
“The first year I came here, at the age of thirteen, the first to arrive, I sat in the sun. Around me was an ash-filled yard enclosed by low, wooden sheds in which canvas was stored – poles, ropes, stakes, awnings and flooring – and in one of which, on the step of which I was sitting, the canvas was sewn on two rectangular, smooth-surfaced tables, two foot-pedalled sewing-machines attached to the sides. I was joined by a man with a snap-bag on his back who, crouching in the sun beside me, announced that he, too, was applying for a job. He had, he confided, just come out of prison and his application, as a consequence, would be accompanied by one or two lies. He had, in prison, he further confided, acquired a hobby: even as he spoke he was filing at a piece of metal – a ‘connecting-rod’, he told me, of a model locomotive – looking up as the door to the office was finally opened and the figure of a woman could be seen inside.
To my horror, Bea, when I went in, this woman – sitting at a crowded desk – exclaimed, ‘Fenchurch! What on earth are you doing here?’ causing me to blush to the soles of my feet. I then realised – which, my dear Bea, you might have done already – that the celebrated (the redoubtable) Mrs Chamberlain, the school secretary at King Edward’s, and the terror of the Heads of both that school and the High (not to mention the masters and mistresses) was the wife of one of the Chamberlain brothers (three in number, she the spouse of the eldest and the most retired): unknown to me, during the school holidays, she lent a hand in the Chamberlain office – in front of whose desk I was presently standing. ‘Fenchurch!’ she exclaimed – much to the puzzlement of the ex-con beside me, ‘what on earth are you doing here? A pupil of King Edward’s!’
I have been a renegade, Miss Corcoran, all my life – at home, at work, at school, at play: the last in my year at King Edward’s to be made a prefect (a history of beatings lower down the school for misbehaviour), ‘a bolshie-headed bastard’ in the words of the woodwork-master whom I foolishly confronted at fisticuffs when he discovered me writing in the library one lunch-hour when it was out of bounds – and for which, in my last year, not for the first time, I was threatened with expulsion: ‘Don’t you realise, Fenchurch,’ said the Head (the Oxonian classics scholar P.G. ‘Piggy’ Norton) ‘that Mr Barraclough, like you, is a former member of the working-class?’
Dear Bea, with whom I have danced on only one or two occasions and whom, as yet, I have never taken out, to you all this, I know, must sound absurd: reading a letter from someone whom, despite our tête-à-tête at Allgrave, you scarcely know, but – I have to complete this tale in the hope that I may, at the very least, capture your attention when distractions – for you – crowd in on every side. Since you are familiar with the broad-bosomed, tweed-suited Mrs Chamberlain (‘Flossie’ to her intimates, ‘Bloody old Flo’ behind her back), who strides between our schools like a policeman on the beat and talks to masters and mistresses – as well as our respective Heads – as ferociously as she does to the boys and girls (‘What are you doing in the street, boy/girl, without your cap/hat? I shall report you to Mr Norton/Miss Quartermain!’) I feel obliged to complete my account of our interview for, having come upon her in such unfortunate surroundings, I could only confess – as, indeed, I do to you – ‘I’ve come for a job, Mrs Chamberlain,’ to which, on this first occasion, she instantly responded, ‘You’ve been a trouble-maker, Fenchurch, from the start,’ while, to my equally instantaneous response, ‘I have to get a job,’ she roared, ‘Have you taken leave of your senses! Are you aware of the sort of people who work down here?’ gesturing to the sun-lit yard where I could see a group of men assembling, not a minority of whom, in my father’s and no doubt Mrs Chamberlain’s terminology, would have come under the generic heading of riff-raff. Indeed, attracted by her voice (it could, I discovered later, be heard in the street outside) the whole of this group, with their snap-bags and their morning papers, their disreputable and dishevelled dress, turned in our direction.
‘How old are you, Fenchurch?’ she enquired.
‘Thirteen,’ I said.
‘Thirteen what?’
‘Thirteen years,’ I responded.
‘Thirteen years what?’ she further demanded.
‘Thirteen years, Mrs Chamberlain,’ I was reminded.
‘How can you be thirteen, Fenchurch,’ (made to sound like an ecclesiastical sewer) ‘when last year you were in 5b and next year you’ll be in 5 Upper?’ (encyclopaedic recall).
‘I passed the eleven-plus entrance exam when I was only nine,’ I said.
‘It’s not usually taken until you are twelve,’ (further evidence of dissemblement, trouble-making, mischief).
‘They closed the loop-hole,’ I said, ‘the following year. It’s to do with my birthday, and the time of the year, and that I was moved up two classes by mistake at primary school,’ (further evidence of chicanery).
‘We don’t employ boys,’ she said, ‘who are only thirteen. Furthermore, we don’t employ people whose minds will be polluted by all they hear from the workmen, let alone by what they are obliged to see. Wait until Mr Norton hears about this.’
‘Hears about what?’ said a voice behind my back.
Turning, I was confronted by a massive figure: a rock-shaped, square-featured, close-cropped head beamed down at me from the office door.
‘This, Harry,’ Mrs Chamberlain said, ‘is a pupil from King Edward’s who, believe it or not, is applying for a job.’
The square, ruddy-cheeked, blue-eyed face beamed at me more broadly.
‘I was a pupil theer,’ it said, ‘myself.’
‘That is hardly a comparison, Harry,’ Mrs Chamberlain said.
‘I’ll shove him in my gang, Mother,’ the figure replied. ‘What d’ost think to that, then, young ’un? If you find it too rough you’ll be out on your ear. I on’y have rough ’uns in my lot.’
‘This is my son,’ Mrs Chamberlain said. ‘If you’re not up to scratch you’ll be out on your ear,’ showing, in my experience, not only a surprising deference but a not any the less surprising command of colloquialism.
‘What’s thy first name, young ’un?’ the son enquired.
‘Richard,’ I replied.
/> ‘Richard.’ His blue-eyed look went up to the window and the row of curious faces outside. He gave a laugh – not the last I was to hear that day. ‘I’ll call you college-boy,’ he said. ‘Come outside and load a lorry.’
On this last occasion, when I arrived this summer, Mrs Chamberlain said, ‘Do you mean to say, Fenchurch, you’re giving up varsity to work down here? The Wainscliff Prize for English Verse, the Atterton Prize for Art, the Athletics’ Team Representative in the 880 yards, and the First Fifteen at Rugger.’
‘I have to get a job,’ I said.
‘Perversity in your life,’ she said, ‘I have to admit, has never known its limit.’
‘You’ve given up all we’ve done for you,’ my father says and, as my mother intervenes (‘He takes it all for granted. We’ve worked our fingers to the bone’), he adds, ‘They’ll be laughing fit to burst round here. All the neighbours’ lads at fifteen were i’ the mill or down the pit and he ends up at Chamberlains. Nowt but the bloody riff-raff theer.’
Facing me, his back to the fireplace – a glimpse, through the uncurtained windows, of the darkening trees – is Charlie, a figure whom I have, I believe, already addressed as ‘Dad’ – and then, more confusedly, as ‘Harry’. ‘I have to get a job,’ I say, to which he replies, ‘Your royalties are enough to cover your cost of living. On top of which,’ he goes on, ‘you have the Public Lending Right.’
‘I never joined,’ I tell him. ‘I’ve never been a lackey. I’ve never had a penny from anyone I didn’t earn. Have you seen the people who apply? Have you seen the forms you have to fill in?’ I ramble on (‘What’s individuality and independence mean if you’re subsumed by a bureaucratic function?’) to find, or so it seems, the television turned on and Glenda sitting on Charlie’s knee and Etty sitting with her arm around Lottie while I, assuming they had gone to bed, enquire, ‘Have they had their bath?’
‘Charlie wanted to bath them,’ Etty says. ‘He seldom gets the chance.’
‘I could have bathed them both,’ I tell her.