by Melvyn Bragg
‘A few of the lads is on that,’ he said. ‘I suspect the influence of the ladies. You won’t be wanting a ticket, Sam, you never did.’
‘I’ll be round for the winnings after the race.’
‘Well,’ Henry secured his brown trilby which had become a little rakish, ‘I’ll be on my travels. Time and Tide, Sam, the old proverb. Ellen’s been looking very good, Sam. She’s a smasher. She makes old Eves’ shop glow like a Christmas tree. Lucky man.’ Although it was a compliment, Sam would rather not have heard it.
Sam decided not to visit his father that day. The old man worked as a gardener in a big house a few miles away and Sam had looked forward to the walk, but a sudden mood came on him which made him want to avoid any more intimacy. First though he had to buy the stamps.
‘Penny stamps is now a penny ha’penny,’ said Albert, behind the counter. Sam and Albert had been at school together, only two years apart. Albert had greeted him as if he had been coming in every day uninterruptedly since war broke out.
Sam pulled out the extra four pence and slid the stamps into his inside pocket.
‘Mother well, Albert?’
‘A miracle for her age. Very demanding.’
Albert looked away, distracted, as he always had been but by what no one had ever found out. His eyes had failed the medical. His glasses were as thick as bottle bottoms.
Just along the street was the George Moore Memorial Fountain which had replaced the Parish Pump in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It was thirty-three feet high, as all Wigton children were told, and topped by a cross. At its base there was a platform stepping up to four bronze panels – North, South, East, West – and then the spire. Drinking fountains were furnished on all four sides but recently they had been barred off by grim iron railings which were redeemed by four elaborate gas lamps, night sentries to the memory of the wife of George Moore.
As ever was, the men were there, killing time, loitering, pushed out or glad to be out of cramped houses, leaning against the railings, watching and marking the town go by and now and then squirting out a spit, sometimes hitting one of the dogs which lurched all about. They knew Sam and nodded or greeted him – unexcitedly – most of them remarking on how well he looked, as if he had come back from a holiday. Their indifference to his war made him smile to himself. There was a kind of settlement in it, perhaps even a wisdom.
This was the fulcrum of the town. He took his place. To the west was the sea and under the sea the coalmines in which his father had once worked: some of his family still worked there now. To the east was Carlisle where he had gone to volunteer what seemed a lifetime ago – and from there, east to service in North Africa, east to India, east again to Burma.
Ahead of him was High Street. He had walked it thousands of times, still jewelled with small useful shops, many of them with workshops behind making boots, making clocks and watches, hutching, baking bread and cakes. Still there. Untouched though the world had gone mad: their complete survival made him smile. As he had done so often as a young man, skint, watching the world go by for his entertainment, he leaned his back against the railings among the poor-suited, mostly unskilled, usually broke, often eccentric and curious men long of the town who gave the place its character.
Sam offered cigarettes freely. He knew it was expected of him. The Salvation Army had not yet stopped dishing out free rations to ex-servicemen. He looked up at the bronze panels which, as he remembered from having it drummed into him at school, represented the Four Acts of Mercy.
Beautifully draped, graceful and serene women and children more handsome and certainly plumper than almost anyone in the town, represented Visiting the Afflicted, Instructing the Ignorant, Feeding the Hungry and Clothing the Naked. They moved him not at all – that was not what it was like. Suffering, Hunger, Affliction, Nakedness were not like that. He had seen it real. He remembered their teacher, Miss Steel, had insisted that these figures were real. In the morning after their official expedition to the fountain she had asked the children to bring at least twopence to school to contribute to an appeal she ran for orphaned African babies. Those who could not afford it were shamed.
Halfway through his second cigarette, he moved off. No one took much notice – and again he felt as though he were going head on into a force, a high wind which made him want to bend his head and butt his way through. Yet the day was calm and warm, High Street quiet enough, with a few cattle being driven down the cowpat-splattered street to the railway station for shipment, fresh from the small Friday auction. Only one car on the street, parked outside the Lion and Lamb. He even knew who it belonged to.
The curious sensation persisted, as if he were walking waist deep in the sea, pushing against a tide, even a hint of panic in his breath. Hello Sam, yes, grand, glad to be back, lovely day… it never changes, the town … but in some way he could not define, it had. Or he had? Why did what was so familiar suddenly flip over into what seemed new? ‘How do, Sam?’
He began to feel claustrophobic. Just a street in a small Northern market town. Hello Sam, Hiya Sam, lovely day. He saw nobody from the war. Some at work – the non-Burma lads – or didn’t make it back. He would soon find out, Leonard would give him the list. He walked faster, past the Anglican church, past the Girls’ Grammar School, forcing the pace over yet another of the streams which trickled through the town, heading south towards Longthwaite and open land, unbuttoning his collar, loosening the tie, taking off his jacket, faster up the hill, lovely day, it never changes, the town, hounding himself out of it and then – a vale of calm – nothing but fields, friendly lush fields with sheep and cattle grazing lazily as ever, rooted there. English fields free from war for more than three hundred years, stunning and soothing him with the power of their peace.
He wiped the sweat from his brow and gave the town a brief, almost furtive backward glance before moving on.
The fountain, memorial to one woman, there forever planted, part of what the town was. On the outskirts in the new cemetery the memorial to the First World War with the name ‘Richardson’ inscribed two times. What would there be for those who had not come back this time? Again he shook his head with that sharp movement which sought to shake off unwelcome thoughts as if they were raindrops. But it was not so easy. A nice tan? Lovely day? Yes, I’ll take a fag off you, Sam, smoke it later, stick it behind the ear. No bunting. The German conflict had ended almost a year ago now. The war had gone cold.
Just as well, he reasoned, as he went through the kissing gate that led into the well-walked common land which wended by the river along the edge of the town. For many generations these fields had been a lure for children’s play, for the saunterings of courtship and the placid strolls of the old. Budding, some trees greening, the fields had the deep security of familiarity and yet to Sam a friction of unease. The place looked not as once it had been. Yet surely it was exactly the same. It must be the peace which was unsettling.
He found a willow in a shaded place and sat against it, a few feet from the river. Through the water, clear and cold from the fells which rose up a few miles to the south, he saw a large school of minnows, darting and switching in impeccable, well-drilled formation.
No bunting. Better like that. But what would be their memorial, those who had not returned from Burma, from what was called the Forgotten Army? Men, he could let his mind whisper it now he was alone and unconstrained, men who had some of them been heroes and died to keep such bedded peace as this, in fields like these, to be passed on to their children. Who would build a fountain for them? His head jolted back at the ‘image’ of a child. It banged against the tree.
CHAPTER FOUR
He had put the pad in one of the capacious side pockets of his suit, the envelopes in the other, not thinking he would have time to write the letters on this first day but instinctively sensing that the right moment might come at any time. He had written during the campaign to the relations of everyone he knew, but that was not enough for close friends.
Sam put his cigarettes beside him, closed his eyes and in a moment he was many thousands of miles away. The run of the small stream was the drum of monsoon. The hedgerow fencing the quiet fields, the trees planted for shade, grass ready to grow yet another intricate carpet sweet with meadow flowers whose names promised comfort – all became jungle to be hacked through, dense with the dread experienced by those men he had heard of who had been driven crazy when left alone even for an hour in that alien, fearful place. A place of ambush, bullet and shell expected at every step, until the fear was sharpened into an alert tension so highly strung it sang in your mind and became a terrible joy.
He opened his eyes and looked at the peace and heard such stillness, hardly a bird call. The soft gurgle of the stream was the loudest sound. He began to write. He would not have admitted it, but part of the reason for his urgency was an apprehension, growing almost daily since he had landed back in England, that Burma would ambush him, shell him down, take him back there and abandon him unless he beat it down.
The letters, he hoped, would draw a line.
They were already written in his head. He had only to copy them down. On the long journey back, thinking about them, he had worked them out. He wrote steadily, giving to each one the two or three sides of paper he had decided was the least he could do. He paused only to drag himself out of the atmosphere they evoked so powerfully.
Those he wrote about had been in his section. One had led him. The others he had led. His section had been one of those right at the front, no shield, no advance force in front of them, they were the advance force. Sections were made up of ten men, led by a corporal: three sections to a platoon, three platoons to a company, four companies to a battalion and so up to the regiment and on to the Allied army in Burma described by Churchill (Sam had written it down) as ‘an army the like of which had not been seen since Xerxes crossed the Hellespont’. He intended to look up Xerxes and Hellespont. But however grand the names, it always came back to the section.
It was those ten men multiplied who had met the full fury of the Japanese army bayonet to bayonet. More than twenty men had passed through that section in Sam’s time.
Sam would stop now and then to brush aside memories too savage to be sent into any of these homes. That ambush when almost a third of the company had been slaughtered was just a long scream of shock and blood, spilled guts, helplessness, confusion, retreat, bodies left for ever to rot away in what had seemed a quiet patch of jungle. Yoke and Buster, two of the nicest lads you could meet, dead within a foot of each other, both bayoneted, clearly one had come to help the other. He said nothing of the malaria or the dysentery or the pains of terrible diarrhoea or the emaciation and exhaustion. His stories were drawn from another truth, that despite the punishments and wounds of battle, the tattered uniforms, the sores and private agonies unspoken, these men were a disciplined army, prepared to fight, ready to die for each other and also, though this was never boasted, mostly ignored and sometimes mocked, for their country. However deeply buried and cynically dismissed their cause was, they had volunteered to serve it.
He did not write of the puddle of brains seeping out of the skull of Andy, who had been less than a yard away when he had caught it. He blocked out the final crescendo of martial curses when one hardened miner, caught too far forward, surrounded by the Japanese, had decided to take as many as he could with him rather than surrender and die Tojo’s way. After two days of being holed up, he had gone out to bury the man’s body and found him already buried up to his neck, the head crawling with maggots. One of Tojo’s ways. And what did you say of Alan, who had gone to clear a nest of enemy machine-gunners whose bullets hit his body so hard, so many, so fast, that it stuttered and jived for what seemed like minutes on end until it folded like a jackknife?
What he wrote was, ‘Conditions were sometimes very bad but he never complained. He made a joke of it and helped us all along.’ He wrote, ‘Things could get very rough but he would always be relied on to see any bright side.’ In every letter, true or not, he wrote, ‘He always spoke warmly of his home and his family and missed them a lot. There was never any doubt where his feelings lay and he wanted to get home and see you all again but it was not to be.’
Once or twice he introduced some of the new words they had picked up out there – char for tea and dekko for have a look, pani for water and doolally for mad, believing that this would make it more convincing. Perhaps also it revealed his own still undigested and puzzled wonder that it had all happened so far away in so foreign a place.
The last letter of all was the hardest, as he had known it would be. As soon as they invited him he would have to face Ian’s parents.
When he finished he felt stiff. Almost two hours had gone by. His packet of cigarettes was empty. The heat had gone out of the sun and he shivered. He put on the stamps very carefully and precisely so that the perforations ran along the edges of the envelope. He looked around. It was somehow miraculous that these fields, this clear brook, this deep silence had remained undisturbed. Miraculous and, for a dazed few moments, inexplicable.
He would post the letters on his way to pick up Ellen at Eves’ the Chemist.
He stood up and felt giddy as the blood seemed to drain out of him. He steadied himself for a while. This, he thought, was how very old and exhausted and sick people felt. Then he began to walk almost reluctantly back into the town.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘Did you ever go out to a pub on your own?’
‘What?’
‘Or with Sadie? Just the two of you?’
‘Why are you asking?’ Ellen had been slowly drowning into sleep. Now she was fully alert but she kept still.
‘I was just thinking about what you did. They called the King’s Arms “the cock-loft”. Did you know that?’
‘They said all sorts of things.’
‘Wigton was very crowded, though, wasn’t it? People coming from far and near. At night’
‘Who’ve you been talking to?’ ‘Henry Allen.’
‘Henry makes half of it up. He was the same at school.’
‘Well, did you?’
‘No I didn’t and you needn’t have asked.’
‘I know.’
‘You’re tired.’
‘I know but I’m wide awake as well. Not even once? It would be understandable. You and Sadie?’
‘Sadie went. A lot of women did. If they could do men’s jobs they could go into a pub – that was the way they saw it. There was no harm in it, Sam.’
‘Why didn’t you go then?’
‘I didn’t fancy it. I didn’t like leaving Joe.’
‘Joe?’
‘And I knew you wouldn’t like it. Got the answer you want?’
Sam nodded. That was fair. He was propped up against the pillows, smoking, the window open on the spring night. Ellen was deep under the blankets, only part of her face visible. Joe had been in their bed a couple of hours before when they had come up but he had been easy to carry out, bonelessly soft with sleep, to the cubby hole along the corridor which Ellen had turned into a bedroom. As long as he could keep the train with him – the satchel had slipped to a poor second – he seemed content. Despite Grace’s reservations, Ellen had insisted that the gaslight in the corridor be kept on, throughout the night, for a few days at least.
‘You need sleep.’
‘I know.’
How could you ache with tiredness and be so alert? He had known the answer not long ago. Fear and duty fast locked. But here, he was at home, in his own bed, with his wife, his son asleep, the town pacifically unconscious in the dark, no terror in the silence, no alarm in a sound, any sound.
The candle fluttered, the long yellow flame licked out towards him. He stubbed out the cigarette in the saucer which held it.
‘Goodnight,’ Ellen said, hoping to encourage him.
She snuggled herself deeper into the bed. He watched her settle down. ‘I want you to give up that job at Eves’.’
Ellen waited for more to be said. There was no more.
‘Why?’
He could not or he would not articulate the jealous truth.
‘There’s no need now. Ill have a wage coming in soon.’
‘I like working there.’
‘I saw that when I picked you up.’
‘What do you mean?’
He had no answer. What had he seen in the shop? Ellen, happy, bright-eyed, lovely, quick, pleasant, independent, in charge, behind the counter, darting to fulfil the requests, fast with figures. And available for just anyone and everyone to admire.
‘You could be back in time for Joe.’ Sam’s tone was critical.
‘He thought you might pick him up at school this afternoon,’ she retaliated. ‘He’d got his pals together to meet his dad.’
Ellen sat up. She had vowed not to tell him that. Joe’s upset had been smoothed over.
‘I was …’ Writing letters.
‘I’ll give up the cleaning jobs. Two days at Mr Eves’ pays as much as all the cleaning.’
‘Why do you want to cling to it?’
‘It takes me out of myself. I meet everybody.’
Sam turned away, already exhausted by their brief argument. It was so complicated.
‘Why can’t you just do it? Just give it up.’
‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow. It’s nearly one o’clock, Sam.’
She knew what his fears were. It was difficult to find the right words. Expressions of love and affection were hard to dig out. In their near silent love-making, in the complexion of everyday loyalties, in glance and in small gesture, she knew that Sam was aware of her deepest feelings as she was of his. Or had been. That had been the character of their bond before he went away. Tonight it was not there.
Ellen was not over-anxious. It would take time. They had time. ‘You’re tired, Sam,’ she said, eventually. She leaned over and kissed him quickly on the mouth. T’ve missed you terribly,’ she said.