The Soldier's Return

by Melvyn Bragg

  He wanted to repeat the phrase back to her but could not. She must know.

  Later in the night, Joe crept into their bed, bringing his train. He clambered over his father, transfixed in profound sleep, and took his usual place alongside his mother. Ellen felt the edges of the train dent her back and her thighs but she wanted no disturbance and so she put up with it.

  When Sam woke, he was alone in the bed, the morning was half gone, his body was damp with sweat and for a few alien moments he had no idea where he was.

  Grace called it ‘the Holy of Holies’. She was slightly discountenanced that her first social invitation into that sacred room had come about because of Sam’s return. Mr Kneale had never organised such an event for her. Still, she wore the ivory necklace. Later, Mr Kneale complimented her on it and reassuringly commended its quality.

  Mr Kneale’s sitting room at the top of the house was loaded with his late wife’s fine furniture – high-polished by Ellen. Its style and age made the furniture in Grace’s front room two floors below – so carefully selected by Leonard’s mother – seem rather lacking. In the clamped, secret chamber of her mind, Grace might have breathed the painful thought that it was in a different class.

  She breasted the way in, heavily pleated black satin blouse displaying its air of pre-war opulence. Joe in his one suit was next, clutching the train. The carriages had been forbidden. Ellen felt awkward: she cleaned the room, laid the fire in the room and served breakfast in the room. It was odd to be off-duty there, odd too to be wearing her good dress inside the house on a Wednesday evening. Sam wore the brown sports jacket and grey flannels he had bought for their honeymoon: the jacket hung rather loosely on him.

  Leonard had ‘slipped up street’ and Grace had no choice but to accept that as a full and sufficient excuse for his absence. On a few seemingly marginal matters Leonard was immovable and his right to ‘slip up street’ was one of them. He had gone to play billiards and it had taken serious persuasion for Ellen to stop Sam joining him. The clincher was that ‘Mr Kneale has laid all this on especially for you.’

  All this was sherry, biscuits and photographs at seven.

  In the week since his return, Sam had seen Mr Kneale three or four times. After their first introduction, the two men had greeted each other in perfectly satisfactory cliches about the unusual good weather, the inconvenience of queues, the scarcity of fresh fruit and, once, had a real conversation on the mooted introduction of the National Health Service which one eminent local doctor had described at a public meeting as the sort of thing Britain had fought the Germans to prevent happening.

  Sam liked the schoolteacher well enough. Mr Kneale was rather short and very round with delicate hands and small feet; his hair was curly and still thick, though grey, and his tortoiseshell spectacles gave his rather bland features some definition. His manner, by contrast, was gentle, almost fluid in his compliant swaying and expressive gesticulating.

  ‘Sherry?’

  There was a mutter of assent. He poured it with extreme care out of a heavy cutglass decanter.

  ‘For you, young man, cherryade.’

  ‘Say “thank you, Mr Kneale”.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Kneale.’

  Mr Kneale patted Joe’s head with a familiar affection not unnoticed by Sam. There had been quite a lot of ‘Mr Kneale this’ and ‘Mr Kneale that’ from Joe over the week, including ‘Mr Kneale knows everything’ and ‘Mr Kneale sometimes tells me stories at bedtime’. Bedtime with Joe was becoming a problem. And Sam was still disconcerted at Joe kissing his photo on the first few nights and saying, ‘Night night, Daddy. God Bless’ to the eager young private spruce in his first uniform.

  Sam had never been keen on sherry.

  Ellen handed out the biscuits and Sam noticed how easily she and Mr Kneale seemed to get on with one another. It was not that there was, or could ever possibly have been, anything between them. But in his acute state of seeing so much twice over, as old and familiar and yet as new and unnerving, Sam registered their collusion and did not know what to make of it. She’s just handing out the biscuits, he told himself!

  Grace led the charge with a compliment on the sherry. Mr Kneale gave easy permission for Joe to chug the train around the fine furniture. Joe was far keener, though, to listen in to the talk, and the comics (confiscated at school) provided by Mr Kneale enabled him to return smartly to the company and eavesdrop.

  The conversation did not flow. After a while, Mr Kneale got out a selection of the photographs he had taken of the town over the years and to begin with all three adult visitors were genuinely absorbed. The town was their home, their life and the source of so many continuing stories.

  Mr Kneale first showed photographs taken a mile to the south of the town at the Roman Cavalry Camp known locally as Old Carlisle. He had labelled various mounds and hummocks of grass as ‘possibly stables’ or ‘could be the kitchens’. His prize exhibits were from the town itself, where a few of the Roman stones and statues were bedded in the walls of the church and other buildings.

  Grace nodded and listened with model attention but eventually her thoughts slipped away, as Leonard had slipped up street. They did not seem up to much, these Romans, she thought, no wonder they had died out, if they had died out, she did not like to ask. She settled back and began a systematic appraisal of the furniture.

  Ellen always enjoyed Mr Kneale’s enthusiasm and she smiled at his knowledge. It sounded funny – although she was sure it shouldn’t – when he spoke of Head Pots and Steelyard Weights, of pagan altars, and showed ugly pictures of what he called Local Celtic Deities. It was difficult to imagine these people so long ago, so foreign, in the town which had mothered and fathered her in a way even Sam could not comprehend, even though he himself had arrived there as a young boy.

  Sam spent little energy on the photographs. He watched Joe, peeping over the comics to observe Mr Kneale, the centre of attention, and when Mr Kneale caught Joe’s gaze and nodded kindly, Sam’s heart prickled at the boy’s instantly affectionate response. He looked at Ellen too, how unrestrained she was in her appreciation, how quick with questions, how flushed when Mr Kneale described them as Very good’ questions or ‘intelligent comments’ or ‘that’s a question that has me stumped, Ellen’. They were so very nice and easy with each other. He began to resent the fluttering of the schoolteacher’s delicate hands.

  It was all opportunity, Sam thought, rather bitterly. He had passed the scholarship for the grammar school and been denied the place because money could not be found for uniforms and books and the other extras. Whereas Ellen never expressed regret about her brief education and relished being just one of the town-girls, over the years Sam had often mourned his lost chance. Especially in the army when he had come across educated men – in the ranks as well as officers -and been dismayed that although he knew he could join in the discussions, words and knowledge so often failed him. He had been imprisoned in ignorance. He had not known, until he met these men, how much he had missed.

  ‘Aerial photography would make all the difference,’ Mr Kneale sighed, shaking his grey curls. It was a full, dramatic sigh, meant to show how much he cared for his art, which indeed he did. ‘We could see the whole camp then, laid like that carpet.’

  Grace smiled and thought the chaise longue could be into three figures. The carpet too was no ordinary carpet. Sam noted that Joe, it seemed automatically, asked what ‘aerial’ meant and Mr Kneale, equally practised, told him.

  ‘For the Crofts, too,’ he continued, ‘aerial photography would be a revelation!’

  The Crofts was the name of a lane at the back of long strips of working gardens leading from High Street. They had been carved out by the Saxons who had settled in the town at least two hundred years before William the Conqueror, Mr Kneale said. That so much of what had been should still today be evident and put to the same use excited Mr Kneale greatly. It left Ellen, for once, a little dubious as the Crofts were so undistinguished, and left Sam rueful that
somewhere he knew so well he knew so little.

  Mr Kneale showed his photographs of the church and here he came as near to anger as he got when he explained how a church built in the twelfth century and outlasting even the ravages of the violent Border Wars, had been razed to the ground utterly to build the present church in 1785. The orders were – not a stone to be reused. ‘Vandalism,’ he exclaimed. ‘As bad as Oliver Cromwell. As bad as Henry VIII, neither of whom – monstrous wreckers of fine buildings -had ruined Wigton. It was,’ he said, rather solemnly, ‘by Wigton hands alone that Wigton’s past had been destroyed.’

  Ellen tried not to smile at the little scowl on his moonish face. Grace tut-tutted sincerely at the terrible waste of it all. Sam remembered the day of their marriage in the church. A day he could see clearly but one which seemed so very distant.

  He was made conscious, by the glance from Ellen, that he had said nothing at all. He stared down at the latest photograph being passed round, which was Mr Kneale’s study of the Parish Pump, now chained in the public park.

  ‘This is a good photo, Mr Kneale. Do you have a special camera?’

  ‘That’s a very good question. You can tell, I suppose, by the shadows.’

  Sam looked again and nodded at the clear shadows.

  ‘Of course I have a little Brownie,’ said Mr Kneale, ‘but this …’ he reached behind him and produced the camera, ‘is the real McCoy.’

  He took the Leica out of its box and passed it to Sam, who handled it with respect.

  ‘Is it German?’

  ‘It is.’ Mr Kneale pursed his lips and nodded gravely. ‘I bought it in 1938 – you can’t get them today of course – but it is German. I can’t deny it.’

  All of them looked at it closely.

  ‘German,’ said Grace, with just a colouring of criticism.

  ‘1938,’ repeated Mr Kneale, grimly, ‘before the war.’

  There was a brief silence.

  ‘It looks very well made,’ said Grace, judiciously. ‘And I’m sure it can’t have been cheap.’

  ‘I did not think of using it for the duration.’

  ‘No point,’ said Sam, easily, and handed it back.

  ‘He has things to stick on it as well, don’t you, Mr Kneale? Nobody else in Wigton has things like Mr Kneale, do they, Mr Kneale?’

  Joe’s remark was quite neutral, but his treble voice and his innocent boast nipped the bud of embarrassment.

  ‘What might they be?’ Sam addressed his question to Joe.

  ‘Show him, Mr Kneale.’

  Joe went and stood by the teacher who, a little bashfully, brought out a wide-angled lens.

  ‘And you should see the equipment he has in the cellar downstairs,’ said Grace, fully restored to pride in her prize tenant.

  ‘My own dark room,’ said Mr Kneale, admitting privilege.

  ‘You let some other people use it,’ said Grace, somehow combining praise for his generosity with criticism at letting other people into her house.

  ‘It’s not a thing you can hog.’

  Sam laughed aloud. Maybe it was the word ‘hog’. He just laughed – and then Joe joined in, and Ellen (who had waited some time for the opportunity). Grace smiled, taking credit. Mr Kneale offered a final glass of sherry, but there were no takers.

  When they left, Mr Kneale held the door open – all but bowed them out, thanking them more than once.

  ‘We should be thanking you,’ said Grace, but Mr Kneale would have none of it and he stood at the top of the stairs as if watching them set out on a long journey, still thanking them and saying they should do it again before too long.

  He was deeply relieved that there was enough time to tidy up and change for bed and listen, as usual, in his dressing-gown, to the nine o’clock news.

  ‘I think 111 have a dekko up street,’ said Sam, when they reached the kitchen. ‘Want to come?’

  I’m not going into a pub on a Wednesday.’

  ‘I can’t seem to get you there any day of the week.’

  ‘You go ahead,’ said Grace, rather unexpectedly. ‘Ellen and me have plenty to talk about.’

  Sam paused, just for a moment hoping that Ellen would change her mind and come with him.

  ‘Enjoy yourself,’ she said, ‘your holiday’s nearly over.’

  ‘Mr Kneale liked the necklace.’ Grace made it plain that the necklace had cleared an important hurdle.

  ‘Can I eat them now?’ Joe looked to Ellen to return to him the two toffees which he had been given and which he had immediately put into his mother’s keeping.

  ‘One,’ she said and handed it over. She smiled at Sam, who seemed to stand uncertainly. ‘Go on then,’ she said, ‘the sooner you’re away the quicker you’ll be back. I’ll read Joe his story.’

  ‘I need to get rid of the taste of that sherry,’ he said.

  ‘It was very good sherry,’ said Grace. ‘And the sheer weight of that decanter!’

  He came back from the pub later than he had intended. The women were in bed. Leonard, alone in the kitchen, offered him a drink of port, a full bottle left over from Christmas. He pointed out that they had not yet enjoyed a welcome-back glass together.

  Leonard was no bother to talk to. Despite coming from a well-off family he had no side and he was quite content with the undemanding occupation of chief clerk in a solicitor’s office. One of his jobs was collecting rents from property which included the cottages in the yard behind the house. Sam was interested and asked about the state and availability of places in the town.

  Very few, said Leonard, pouring another glass apiece, and none of it very attractive. The landlords had done nothing to the buildings for years on end. But the rents were low. New houses? Sam enquired, he had strolled back up to Kirkland – they looked good. Without question, said Leonard, proposing they should finish the bottle, and more to be built with all mod cons. But stiff rents. Bottoms up. Back from the wars. I bet there are some real stories … Muzzy, happy in a fashion, Sam had met three old pals who had been in the RAF, played darts for pints, no good on sherry … The women in India? said Leonard probingly, lowering his voice though Grace was two floors up and battened in sleep, in those saris, bet that was something … Lovely women. Sam nodded and nodded, lovely women, sold you cheroots … The last drop. Jungle Juice, Sam said, that was what we called it. All drink Jungle Juice.

  It was not simple going up steep narrow stairs with arms around each other’s shoulders but they made the attempt.

  Joe was in the bed. Sam picked him up rather roughly and the boy woke up. ‘C’mon.’ Sam’s voice was louder than he intended.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Back to your bed.’

  He went along the short corridor, bouncing Joe a little, wanting the child to be as cheerful as he himself felt.

  ‘Here we are.’

  He dumped the boy on the narrow little camp bed which practically filled the cubby hole.

  ‘I want to sleep with Mammy.’

  ‘This is where you sleep now.’

  Joe sniffed. He did not like the smell that came off his father. ‘Why can’t I sleep with Mammy?’

  ‘Don’t be such a baby.’

  The words were harsh. Joe cringed and lay tactically still.

  ‘We used to sleep in mud, sometimes,’ said Sam, by way of reparation.

  ‘In mud?’ Despite his confusion, Joe was intrigued. ‘Real mud?’

  ‘Real soft brown wet deep dirty sticky mud so we woke up caked!’ He laughed. ‘We looked like chocolate men!’

  ‘Why did you sleep in mud?’

  ‘Because we had to.’

  Believing his father now, and fully awake, Joe grimaced.

  ‘It wasn’t that bad. Looking back, it’s funny!’ He laughed, rather loudly. Joe joined in.

  ‘I’ll sing you a song.’

  ‘No you won’t.’ Ellen was firm, though her voice was soft. ‘You’ll wake up the whole house. Come to bed,’ she said.

  Joe made a move but
Sam put out a rather too heavy hand, pressing him down.

  ‘Joe stops here.’

  ‘Mammy?’

  Ellen tried not to pause.

  ‘Do as your Daddy says. You’re a big boy now. I’ll follow you,’ she said, unobtrusively ushering Sam out of the cubby hole.

  She stayed with Joe until he was settled. By the time she returned to their room, Sam was well away and snoring steadily. Ellen nipped his nose lightly and he turned on his side. The snoring ceased. She waved her hand in front of her face to waft away the breath of him and stared at the blank ceiling for some troubled time before being taken into a shallow doze.

  CHAPTER SIX

  He caught the bus to Carlisle in the late morning. It was almost empty. He sat upstairs, as he had always done as a boy, wanting to see over the hedges. The green mild fields stretched from one horizon to the other, horses, cattle and sheep cropping the new grass, one or two tractors. The eleven totally uneventful miles refreshed him.

  He intended to shop and potter around in Carlisle for an hour or so. His extravagant bet on the Grand National had come off and Lovely Cottage had won. His winnings were, by his lights, big. He wanted to buy something special for Ellen.

  He was soon frazzled. He had not the clothing coupons necessary for the coat he fancied her in. In the shop which sold handbags he lost patience with the la-di-da shop assistant who made such a performance over every one he wanted to look at. The small jewellery shop, so well stocked in the window, was empty when he went inside. The little bell tinkled and grew cold but nobody came. Sam almost tiptoed out. He would let her choose.

  He walked towards the factory and stopped, abruptly, at the sign The Regimental Arms. Set in the old wall of the town, this was the pub they had come to after they had volunteered and signed on. He went inside. Nothing had altered. Iron bow-legged tables, old settles, red and yellow squared lino, fading photographs of local regiments on the walls. The bar was lit up by the sunlight which came through the big windows. Four men were having a quiet drink. He ordered a pint and took it to the corner where they had sat on that winter afternoon years before and where they had drunk until closing time.