by David Storey
‘No.’
‘Is Matt?’
‘No.’
‘Is there anyone to play with?’
‘Me.’
‘Can we go out?’
‘We might.’
‘When?’
‘You’ve only just arrived.’
‘Daddy Albert takes me out.’
‘Where?’
‘All over.’
‘So do I.’
‘You don’t.’
‘I do.’
‘You don’t,’ (her movements unabating).
While, in a sunlit bedroom, looking out to the English Channel, the possibility, in two or three hours’ time, of an airship overhead …
A policewoman is standing by my shoulder: she has got on, I am told, at the previous stop (on her way home, I suspect, from duty), her cap at an angle on her coiffured head (the conductor standing behind her): a jowelled jaw, a smear of colouring on each high-boned cheek. ‘Your noise is disturbing the passengers,’ she says (from ‘Happy Land!’ to ‘Do you love me?’).
The engine of the bus, the driver gazing backwards, his head craned down as might a child’s in looking through its legs, indicates, with its idling speed, that we are standing at a stop: Thrallstone Park, adjacent to the tinier enclave of Onasett Park, its gates, removed at the beginning of the war, represented by no more than a pair of decapitated pillars (entrance to the architecturally venerated and historically renowned – eighteenth-century ‘grand domestic’ – Thrallstone House: burnt down and replaced by a comprehensive school – ‘impersonal puberty’ – erection): beyond, undulating furrowed slopes, scattered here and there with ancient trees, rise to the prominence of Scone Hill, a castle mound, obscured by shrubs which, in their outline against a low, cloud-suspended sky, indicate its man-made profile. ‘I’ve done some of my best pictures,’ I indicate the motte, ‘from there.’
‘As well,’ she adds, ‘as the dishevelment of your dress.’
‘Dress.’ I pause. ‘I’m wearing trousers.’
‘Precisely.’
The woman in the adjoining seat has disappeared.
‘A fit,’ I announce, ‘of absent-mindedness, which,’ I go on, ‘is the consequence,’ (perhaps unwisely revealing this to her), ‘of recent medical attention, supervised, I hasten to add, by one of the most resourceful practitioners of mental welfare in the land, not merely the youngest ever to hold the prestigious post of Longcroft Professor at the North London Royal, but a doctor chosen by the wife of H. L. Richards when the poet came over from America to escape the pressures of recognition symptomatic of the insecurities of, and therefore endemic to, that land where – and this, at the time, was widely known – he had been what, in this country, we describe as “sectioned” for behaviour which might, legitimately, be described as manic – and therefore, in my view, he and his wife – albeit his fourth – to be respected.’
In parenthesis I add, ‘I am,’ and proceed to make adjustments. ‘The medical treatment, to which I referred a moment ago, has, I’m afraid, left me what, in the old days, was described as absent-minded, to a degree,’ I continue, ‘not normally associated with a man of my years, in the full flow of his manhood, so to speak, and at the very peak – or would be – of his sexual powers, transposed, in my case – from circumstance, I hasten to add, should you be free, rather than disposition – from the libidinal to the creative. I have come,’ I produce my sketchbook, ‘to draw.’
‘Where are you getting off?’ she enquires.
‘Spinney Moor.’
‘The stop after this,’ the conductor declares at her shoulder.
The bus is rung off.
Subliminally, I must have been aware of it for some time: we are passing between two hills, the one on the left crowned by the vegetated summit of Scone Hill, the one on the right characterised by the red brick and red-tiled roofs of Onasett itself: between the two, the bus cresting a conjunctive ridge, is revealed a vista of the River Lin; specifically, its upper valley, a tree – and grass-strewn fissure, irregularly obtruded upon by industrial and domestic buildings (the fistulaed intrusion of mill chimneys, the darkened profile of a village) which, against the lowering sky, is sombrely enclosed by wooded hills, their arhythmic undulations fractured further by the profile of a cliff, a ragged edge of blackened rock known as Walton Top.
Houses – the estate is flanked by private dwellings – converge upon the road: hidden, halfway up the slope to my right, is the house in Manor Road where I spent, other than for a few weeks, the first two decades of my life.
‘Spinney Moor,’ the policewoman says, stepping aside to let me pass.
Nothing is lost: everything is forgiven: ‘I have made,’ I tell her, ‘restitution. I have given up my health, wealth and creativity for those I love.’
‘It’s not a difficult decision,’ Maidstone says, ‘disassembling your life. What was characterised by dissonance will be done away with, in all likelihood, for good.’ (‘And by “good”,’ he had gone on to announce, ‘I infer a moral imperative, not merely an infinitude of time.’) ‘A wholly felicitous re-arrangement will have been achieved which will astonish as much as it will enhance, facilitate as much as be a cause for wonder.’
The bus comes to a halt and the uniformed figure (a smell of perfume evident at the door) waits, having stepped aside as, encumbered by my slippers as much as by the sketchbook, I descend to the pavement.
‘I have stepped down here,’ I tell her, ‘on many occasions, not least in my childhood, returning from school and, subsequent to that, in my youth, from college. The Linfield School of Art, though “art”, in my case, at that time, was something of a misnomer. “Applied technology”, in this instance, might have been better: printing, pottery, lithography, etching, as well as a cursory stab at carving. If that’s the metaphor. I have, as a consequence of, rather than despite a lifetime of effort, disabused myself of the idea that I could equal the passion, the vigour and the dexterity of – let’s choose a minor figure – Cellini – and have reconciled myself to the pleasure of doing what I can, as opposed to what I can’t but hope to.’
‘Which way,’ she says, ‘are you going?’
‘There is, I take it, no law that prohibits me from walking along this road and talking to you, for instance, about things that count. Experience, after all, without exclusion, is tantamount to the religious, and returns us, if unaware, to the source from which we came.’
The bus has departed: two other figures, having descended, are glancing back as they cross the road to the eponymously named Spinney Moor Avenue to see what conclusions the uniformed figure beside me might have drawn, and what actions will flow as a consequence.
‘I was going to see the old homestead,’ I suddenly confide, ‘and draw, on the way, a couple of sketches,’ opening my book at a random page: blank. ‘I drew a tree this morning,’ I add, finding the image (a trunk, bereft of leaves as well as branches) which, on closer inspection, looks like a mutilated penis. ‘Then again, I thought I’d walk to the golf-course which has a hill at the centre from where there is a view of Onasett to the north and the Lin to the south, winding into, or, rather, out of the Pennine hills, from where, via the Aire and Calder valleys, it finds its way to the Humber and, from there, of course, the North Sea.’
She is in two minds: one inclines her (her eyes stark behind a pair of glasses – unnoticed, previously, on the bus) to take me with her, across the road, and wait for a bus in the opposite direction which will take me back to town (there to be lost: out of her jurisdiction); the other inclines her, since she is homeward bound – at the end, presumably, of an exhausting shift – to leave me where I am and hope a passing vehicle – conceivably the returning bus – will knock me down.
‘Where is the old homestead?’ she enquires.
‘Manor Road,’ I say. ‘Or was.’
‘I’m going to Manor Road.’ She takes my arm.
‘I should say, the golf-course, in that case,’ I tell her. ‘Nothing persona
l,’ I go on, ‘merely a desire to re-acquaint myself with the totality of the landscape before, as it were, I descend to detail, you, no doubt, identifying “home” as a place to return to as opposed to one from which to depart.’
The day is bright (as if in response to my arrival, the clouds have broken): it is not unlike other days in the past when I have alighted at this spot, an invigorating breeze blowing from the north (from, in reality, the direction of the estate itself, rising up the slope before us) and which a smell of coal smoke in no way invalidates – the smoke, I recall, of the fires of home. Leaving the wall of the park, the road winds off along the southern fringe of the estate itself while, directly opposite, stands the hulk, like a chapel, of the Carlton Cinema – now given over, I noticed, to ‘Bowls’ (the word ‘Cancelled’ plastered over it, the more challenging, ‘Scheduled for Demolition’ in its place).
A line of shops (their windows blown out by a land-mine during the war) stand adjacent to the bus-stop on the other side – at which, I notice, a number of people have gathered, curious as to the outcome of this encounter.
‘I’ve often thought, since the advent of women in the Force, in numbers large enough to be noticed, that a trouser-suit would be both more appropriate and more prudent. Policewomen’s legs, in my view,’ her hand still on my arm, ‘are no match for the black-stockinged calves – and occasional thighs – of the Salvation Army, whose members are conceivably attracted to the movement by this feature alone.’
I know no other way of explaining it, for it enables them, with the greatest possible decorum, and seemingly the highest motives, to display themselves in a way which, otherwise, would be vulgarly attractive to the opposite sex. Perhaps it is a bonus, if not an appropriate reward for the otherwise thankless task of being a Salvationist in an age when their function is largely duplicated by the social services, if not by the wider echelons of the welfare state itself. I could have added – a certain stockiness evident in her build – that criticism of this nature did not apply to someone as attractive as herself, more a rule pertinent to the Force as a whole. If, for instance, there were a suggestion box, it might have been brought to the notice of her superintendent. It might influence not only the direction but the vigour of any subsequent recruitment drive and, as a result, have a beneficial effect not only on public support but the alacrity with which she and members of her sex were able to pursue and detain criminals.
‘I offer the suggestion, of course,’ I add, ‘as a tentative outsider, one whose days of impropriety, to say the least, where women are concerned, are long since over. My wife is married to a man who, having served as a parliamentary private secretary in the Ministry of Health, is destined, so I am told, to be promoted to the very highest echelons of the Home Office. Thank you,’ I conclude, ‘for your advice, and thank you, too, for all your help,’ setting off, having disengaged my arm, not up Spinney Moor Avenue (to the home I have left), but along the road, bounded by private houses – detached and semidetached – flanking the estate (red roofs glowing in the light of a setting sun, or magenta in a rising one) – following, in effect, the route of the bus, to my left the houses replaced by a stretch of grass across which stands a Wesleyan chapel – of contemporary construction halfway between domestic-functional institutional-informal, and beside which a pair of gates opens on to a tarmac drive (motor-cars a precedent to worship) which runs in a direct line to a clump of coniferous and deciduous trees: amongst their foliage and beyond their silhouette can be seen the Georgian roofs and chimneys of Onasett Hall – built by and lived in by the (celebrated) first member of parliament for Linfield, ‘Jack the Democrat’ Thornton, a man whose library was said to be ‘the most inclusive in the North of England’ (and who drowned in the Lin – which runs a few hundred yards behind the house – endeavouring, during a winter flood, to rescue his son, who drowned with him, a child of seven). ‘Jack’ had witnessed – and participated in – the storming of the Bastille and had brought back with him a handkerchief soaked in the blood of Marie Antoinette, a dark-stained item of cloth which, on view for many years in his library, was now in the town museum – the old Mechanics’ Institute in North Parade – a testament – yet one more (along with myself) – to the longevity of the egalitarian aspirations of this industrial town.
The Hall is currently the headquarters of the Onasett Golf Club (a populist stronghold, vide Jack, as opposed to the more selective Cawthorne Club on the opposite edge of town), whose course extends around but principally to the rear of the house itself, retaining much of its original park – oak and beech and chestnut – and which falls, in an irregularly descending slope, not only to the banks of the Lin but to the parallel canal and railway (traversing the Pennines to Liverpool): a broad perspective of the hills is visible from the Georgian windows, along with the V-shaped gorge through which the Lin descends to its flat, alluvial valley.
I enter between the permanently open gates – for the fences and the walls on either side have been removed, the former for scrap during the Second World War, and never replaced, the latter having succumbed to wind and weather, and the said democratisation of the club which – principle apart – having fallen on hard times in recent years, has reduced its membership requirements, in the shape of its fees, to a level compatible with the economic resources, not of the freeholders whose houses flank the rolling, smooth green acres of its course, but of the not always employed, or employable, denizens of the estate: the house through which Bentham, Gladstone and Disraeli, Wordsworth, Turner, Dickens and Shaftesbury were said, from time to time, to have strolled, echoes now to the weekend carousing of ‘the lads from Onasett’ – snatches of whose refrains, I am told, can be heard as far away as the fifteenth tee, not to mention the nearest houses.
A path, to my left, leads around the rear of the Wesleyan chapel – a buff-coloured structure with pale ‘Onasett’ sandstone inset around its tall, leaded windows – and follows the line of the back gardens of the houses flanking the road: hawthorn and elderberry shrubs and a variety of fruit trees divide the gardens from the uniformly-furrowed slope of the course itself whose steeply-ascending central hill – my slippers soaked with dew if not overnight rain – I slowly climb.
A solitary figure, wielding a golf club, traverses the slope: with a distant cry of ‘Fore!’, a ball, a luminescent yellow, bounces across my path. Behind me, the gardens and the houses bordering the road come fully into view, a bus, like the one from which I have descended, visible above the roofs: ahead, a fringe of trees outlines the summit of the hill – beech, hornbeam, conifer, sycamore and lime – their branches silhouetted against an increasingly lightening sky.
As well as the uppers, the soles of my slippers take in the damp: I am, after all, still in my ‘house’, the interior that the exterior of my existence has now become, no less a room, the hill, than Etty’s kitchen, or the scullery of the house whose roof – I glance behind me once again – must surely be coming into view on the opposing slope: a phalanx of inverted v-shaped wedges.
‘Does God exist?’ I ask Etty on the morning of the day she arrives to drive me up from London – from our house, mine and Vivienne’s in Taravara Road, adding, ‘I mean for you and Charlie?’ and when, suspecting this merely to be a device to distract her (she is packing my case on the bed), she doesn’t respond, I recklessly plunge on, ‘Does the question still exist or, in this age of molecular obsession, is it not so much done away with as superseded? Is the real, for your generation, only that which can come apart?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she blithely replies and it is, to say the least, a truism of the time I’ve lived in that ‘God’ and ‘eternity’ have become ‘definitions’ that ‘beg the question’, inviting derision to the same degree they parody a good intention.
‘There is no such thing, of course, as objectivity,’ I tell her. ‘It’s part of the apparatus with which, through insecurity, we seek to surround ourselves. Is the whole of our existence to be shorn of purpose? How can we ar
rest it? If two thousand years of appealing to a divine presence has failed, to whom may we appeal? Why,’ I tell her, ‘ourselves! We will be objective, even if that objectivity is threatened by all those things which seek to do it down!’
‘Isn’t that your illness?’ she (calmly) enquires, securing the strap of the suitcase (the sound of our neighbours comes through the party wall of this pokey room at the back of the house). When I don’t reply, she quietly continues, ‘After all, your illness, as Maidstone and others have often said, has a spiritual, not to say a moral dimension, as well as,’ she goes on, ‘a medical one. Each of which,’ (trying the weight of the case), ‘has its relevance yet, at the end of the day,’ (testing the weight of the case again), ‘I thought you attached more importance to the chemical. I thought,’ she concluded, ‘you thought it was a biological problem.’
The house is small: the homogeneous appearance of the district – one-storeyed terraced dwellings with rarely more than four or five rooms – each with a correspondingly tiny yard at the back – is reinforced not merely by the common source of the street-names: Corunna, Blenheim, Trafalgar, Taravara (a corruption of Talavera) – but by the convergence of several railway lines which, with their arches and brick embankments, create the impression, as Vivienne remarked, when she first arrived, ‘of living inside a castle’ (an effect enhanced by the numerous bridges – low, brick-built, round-arched – lacking only, it appears, a portcullis).
‘I like living in a castle,’ I told her, for the area, unlike most I have lived in in London, did have an air – if a peculiar one – of containment – conveyed not merely by the mellow, ochreish brick and large-windowed façades (relieved here and there by stucco – invariably painted cream or white) and the ‘butterfly’ roofs, the gutter running centrally down the middle, but by the nature and ancestry of the people who lived there. Though the houses were not infrequently described, in house agents’ literature, as ‘artisan dwellings’ – which may have been true of some – the majority, clearly, were of working-class origin, the domesticated working class of the middle and late nineteenth century: service workers as much as labourers: clerks, drivers, bus and coach attendants, shop assistants and what might have been described as ‘the lower commercial orders’, the owners of the small businesses located in the yards and alleyways fringing the parapet-like railway embankments across which the steam locomotives hauled their trucks and coaches day and night. Even now, in the early hours, the house shuddered to the diesel locomotives drawing long lines of oil-containers, cement trucks or gantried wagons containing cars, as well as the isolated, single-trucked cargoes of atomic waste. It was the descendants of this nineteenth-century labouring class who still occupied many of the houses – now council-owned – half of them only private dwellings.