by Melvyn Bragg
He blinked though the gaslight was low and stood quiet.
Sam and Ellen were dancing. Both were humming the tune quietly and they were pressed close together, the rug in front of the fire pulled back, the fire itself just rescued from its embers. They swayed, they clung together.
Joe felt a ripple of cold shiver through him. He walked in and was almost on them before they realised he was there. He pushed his head between their bodies, all but waist high. For a split second he was charged with such warmth, such comfort of smell and closeness and being part of them, his arms feeling still soft with tiredness, reaching out to embrace their thighs. For a moment the three of them melded together and Joe closed his eyes and felt their swaying take him with them and knew the fathomless security of being part of them.
The three of them broke apart.
Sam, benign, leaned down to pick him up, but Joe dodged out of range. He did not want to be grabbed too tightly and squeezed too hard. He did not want the wet bottom of his pyjamas to be discovered. He was now fully alert.
‘You should be in bed,’ said Sam, his geniality a little crushed by Joe’s dodging away.
Joe looked to Ellen.
‘I’ll take you up,’ she said.
‘I bet,’ said Sam, encouragingly, ‘that he could go back up on his own just as easily as he came down on his own. Couldn’t you? You’re not frightened of the dark, are you?’
Joe shook his head. Then he shivered. Ellen tugged him towards the fire.
‘He should be in bed.’
‘Let him warm up.’
Ellen rubbed Joe’s back. Her hand hit on the damp patch at the bottom of his pyjama jacket. Joe tensed. If he was still enough, perhaps she would not notice. Ellen patted him and said nothing.
‘Right.’ Sam sat down at the breakfast table already laid for the next morning and guzzled from the cup of tea Ellen had made.
‘I’ll just take a minute.’
Ellen held out her hand. Joe took it but as he passed Sam, he found himself hoisted, suddenly, but not fiercely, his face rubbed against the roughening bristle on Sam’s cheek, a routine which usually made him scream with affectionate protest.
‘Piss-a-bed!’ said Sam.
He held out in front of him, like an exhibit, the hand which had received the full damp print from Joe’s pyjama bottoms.
Joe looked at his Daddy’s mock – was it mock? – disgusted expression and began to cry.
‘Don’t be a cry baby.’ Sam had promised himself not to use that taunt again. He could see how it hurt.
Joe tried to brake his sobs, to heed that terrible rebuke, but the more he tried to stop, the more convulsive he became, and the more the confusion which had been building up for some time found its release.
Sam was first sympathetic and then, when Joe violently resisted his rather clumsy attempt at a cuddle, annoyed. ‘Give him back to his Mammy! Here.’
He held out the boy and Ellen enfolded him. Out of some raw memory, Sam said, ‘Mammy’s boy. He’s been spoilt!’
‘He has not!’
Ellen tried to soothe Joe, irritated with him for breaking the evening’s spell yet unable to bear the sobs.
Sam tried to shake off the imp which pushed him on. The boy’s sobs disturbed him. The sound was distressing. He had heard it but rarely and in extremis and from gravely stricken men. That anyone should just sob, for no great reason. But he was a child. ‘Quieten down, Joe. You’re all in one piece.’ The effort to speak kindly did not eradicate as much of the roughness of tone as he would have wished.
The boy began to cough, cough and sob and stutter words, red-faced, eyes pools of water, twisting in his mother’s arms. Ellen began to joggle him, as if he were still a baby. Sam watched in dismay.
‘He’s a boy, Ellen. Let him cry it out.’
‘Just, just, there you are, there you are, it’s all right, just, leave us alone, Sam.’
It was as if a flash went across Sam’s mind at these words and he raised his hand in a gesture which made Ellen sway back protectively, out of his reach. Then the hand smacked down flat and hard on the table, lifting the breakfast placings.
Joe was quiet, instantly, a quick scared intake of breath, a transfixed look at his father.
Ellen took him away.
Sam, alone, felt caged. He wanted to charge after them or rush outside but neither course was open. One would cause more uneasy tumult; the other could create a small scandal in the town because he would be spotted. However late, you always were.
It was utterly stupid and inexplicable, he thought, that such a minor exchange, and with the two people he loved beyond all others, should cause so much turbulence. He had hoped he was pulling through that. And the faces of those boys were on his mind again. He thought that they had begun to fade.
He stood up and breathed in deeply and told himself he had taken a pint too many and there was nothing to fuss about.
But Joe’s transfixed look had been no slight exchange. The boy had locked horns. Yet how could he? A boy, his boy, his son – but Sam remembered the look as if he were studying a photograph and he knew that in some part of himself, perhaps only for that moment, Joe had turned.
Ellen changed the sheets and put Joe in his spare pair of pyjamas and then gave in to his pleas to stay until he went to sleep. She lay beside him, outside the blankets, jarred after the upheaval. Until then the night had been so good. Joe asked her to sing and she half murmured, half chanted, ‘I Can’t Begin To Tell You’ and soon both of them slept.
When she found her way back to her own bedroom, cold, and unhappy, Sam was tight-curled, foetal, dead to the world.
CHAPTER NINE
The days were drawing out. After Joe had been put to bed, they went for a walk. Ellen shied away from the more popular routes and steered Sam along the Lowmoor Road and up to Forrester Fold. They took the bridle path across the fields and stopped at an old bench, well placed high on the bank above a deeply-gorged stream.
Sam pulled out a cigarette. Sometimes Ellen disliked the smell but she rarely commented. Now was not the moment. She kept her voice low even though she had scanned the fields to confirm that they were well alone.
It was difficult to know how to begin. She took a deep breath and looked away.
‘Joe,’ she said, and her tone in that one syllable made Sam instantly suspicious.
‘Maybe Joe isn’t as – what is it? As rough? As tough? – as you’d like him to be. But you have to remember that you haven’t been here for him.’
The implication that he had been missed by his son, that his absence had created a gap and a problem for his son, though obvious enough, touched Sam and his resentment subsided.
‘I’m too sharp with him. I know that.’
‘He worships you.’ She turned to him.
The extravagance of phrase was so unexpected that Sam looked fully at Ellen to see if she meant it. His scrutiny was steadily returned.
‘So,’ she said, and paused. ‘So you won’t hit him, will you?’
Sam jerked back his head as if he himself had been hit and his eyes flared in anger. ‘I’ve never laid a hand on him!’
That was true. As a boy, Sam had been hit, deliberately and casually, like every other boy he knew. Men hit boys. Fathers hit sons. Other men felt they, too, could act as the father and deliver a smack or a blow. Sons were supposed to thank their fathers for it, later in life. In Sam’s world of tough physical work it was seen as the short road to discipline, the proven method of control.
‘It’ll do him no good to be wrapped in cotton wool.’
‘I’m not saying he should be wrapped in cotton wool.’
Sam had promised to himself since Joe’s birth that he would never strike the boy. The war had frozen his resolution. He must not think of that: it was a scar he could never pick. But could she not tell? Ellen? He resented her for not understanding, despite the fact that he had never told her of that horror. Once she would have known: just known. Once, a glance would
have done. Her words provoked him terribly.
‘What makes you think I would hit him?’
‘I saw the look on your face the other night.’
Ellen spoke severely. Despite his anger, he rated her guts. Ellen had always had more nerve than anyone else when it came to it.
‘I didn’t touch him.’
‘No.’
‘But you think I was near it?’
‘I don’t know, Sam. I won’t have him hit, that’s all’
‘What’s so special about him?’ Sam could have bitten his tongue, not only at the words but at the jeering sound of them, and yet he could not stop them, hurt and envious at the same time that this boy should be protected from what had bruised his own childhood.
‘Who do you think I am?’ he added, helplessly, thinking, in that moment, who do I think I am?
Ellen chose not to answer. Sam felt slapped down.
‘He’s got to toughen up, Ellen. He’s nearly seven. If I don’t harden him there’s others’ll do it and that’ll be far worse for him. Boys soon know who’s soft. He’s got to stand up for himself.’
‘He can do that. He won’t be a cissy.’
Sam immediately thought of Ian. Why had his parents not yet replied to his letter? He stood up. The discussion was over. ‘We need a place of our own,’ he said, eventually. ‘There’s nothing worth looking at.’
‘We’ll have to take what we can get.’
Ellen stood and they began to walk.
‘We should put our names down for the new houses,’ she said. ‘Just to be on the list.’
‘At the bottom of the list! Leonard says the rents are going to be so high most folk won’t be able to cope.’
‘My wages will come in useful.’
She smiled. He had taken her point about Joe and taken it well. She could tease him a little now.
‘There’s still no need,’ he said, but she had won.
‘It’s given us some savings. What are we going to use for furniture?’
They climbed a stile which marked the outward limit of their walk. Early summer was warming the land and despite a cold snap the fields and hedges, the trees and flowers were thrusting themselves out of the earth, towards the sun, breathing and in turn expelling scents long absent. Across fields strewn with heavy Shire horses and frisky ponies, with stolid beef cattle and pendulous milkers, with the ever-grazing sheep and occasionally a few goats, they saw clearly their own Venetian tower standing on the hill to the south. Once it had boasted a bell, Big Tom, which could be heard ten miles away, but the weight of it had threatened the tower and it had been taken down. Ellen used to love listening to it and she missed its great sounds. It would have been good to hear it now, the familiar sounds trembling in her stomach.
She put her arm around Sam’s waist and looped his arm around her shoulders. Once again she had stubbed against the stranger in him. She had not anticipated this. They walked back through fields and lanes, not reaching the house until it was quite dark, the streets almost empty.
‘There’s very little of any quality at all,’ said Leonard. He took a deep pull of tea. ‘Very little.’
‘We’ll have to start where we can, then.’
‘It’s a country wide problem.’ Leonard kept up with events and on the housing situation he was a town expert. ‘Bad as it is here, it’s far worse where they had the bombing. As you would expect. Over four million came back from the services, Sam. That puts a strain on any system. A lot of them with not a sausage to their name.’
‘The new houses up Howrigg Bank and Kirkland and Brindle-field?’
‘Brindlefield’s more or less reserved for Water Street. Over a hundred and fifteen families there, Sam, living in less than a hundred yards – a miracle in its way – homes chopped up how and which way. It’d never be believed. They’ll be emptying them starting soon. Howrigg Bank seems to be allocated to the lads who were in the RAF, which is an odd business but we can’t seem to do anything about it. Kirkland’s not much more than a twinkle in the planner’s eyes, Sam, but it’ll be hungry hill up there. The rents!’
Leonard put aside his professional character for a moment. ‘You’re very welcome here, you know. Grace,’ he paused and the pause said enough between the two men, ‘is very fond of Ellen and the kiddie.’
As I am, he failed to add and, again unspoken, I value you as an ally.
‘We need a place of our own.’
Ellen had not really risen to the bait when he had suggested this. She had humoured him, he thought. She was well dug in and in no rush to leave. But Sam was determined.
Leonard listed the four places currently available. All were small properties tucked into the centre of the town. Leonard ruled out three for damp. There was one decent house he did not mention because he had decided that Ellen would not be easy there. The house was sound but it was next door to the house of the family of the young ex-soldier just hanged for shooting the sister of his girlfriend by mistake. Leonard excised it.
‘So that leaves Scott’s Yard,’ said Sam.
Tt’s not in the yard itself. There’s a little tunnel affair leads off it and into another small yard with four dwellings. Old Billy Robertson still lives in it since his wife was taken, but one of the daughters is having him. He’s clean and tidy enough, is Billy. There’ll not be much needs doing to it. Six and nine a week.’
‘How many properties does your man have? You must rake in a fortune.’
Leonard was impassive.
What he had not mentioned was the first thing Ellen noticed. That there was only one lavatory and one tap serving the four dwellings.
Billy Robertson was a faded little fellow who had worked for most of his life in the flour mills. His unexpected fleece of white hair seemed like a badge of service. Ellen’s instinct to rush off was ambushed by her manners – the old man had placed three rock buns on the table and the kettle was simmering on the hob. What was an inspection for them was something of a party for Billy and there was nothing to be done but sit and wait for the tea and take a rock bun and talk. Mostly Billy talked, cataloguing his misfortunes in cheerful sentences.
Eventually the house was looked over. The room downstairs would struggle to be half of the size of the kitchen at Grace’s. The extra space for the sink and the gas rings was not much more than a dent in the wall. Upstairs there was the main bedroom. That was it. They would need a sofa bed downstairs. Wardrobe, cupboards and Joe could be upstairs.
Scott’s Yard was off Water Street, which was the main drive for cattle and pigs and horses up and down to the markets and the slaughterhouse. The place on offer was in a tiny sunless space, backed on one side by the high wall of the dirty brick warehouse which held cattle feed, on another by the little used rooms of a failing draper’s shop. The lavatory was next to the tunnel which led through to Scott’s Yard, which held a dozen dwellings of all shapes and sizes. Billy’s house was in moderately good repair.
‘Well,’ said Ellen, as they walked down High Street, That’s easily decided.’
‘It’s the best there is.’
‘Then we’ll have to wait for a better.’
Sam said nothing until they got in and then he asked Ellen to come up to their bedroom to talk things over. His request was made in front of Grace, who was annoyed with him for making her feel an intruder at her own hearth. Ellen could not refuse without seeming to put him down.
He bolted the bedroom door rather deliberately although it was afternoon and Joe was out playing. Ellen sat uncertainly on the side of the bed. Sam stood, his back against the door.
‘This is the only place we get any privacy here.’
‘We do not! We can be in the kitchen any time.’
‘It’s not our kitchen.’
‘You like talking to Leonard.’ Ellen tried to be lighthearted.
‘That’s not the point and you know it.’
‘What’s wrong with here?’ Ellen started, then checked herself. Billy Robertson’s was so cramped and
confined compared with Grace’s house; and it was so beseiged by others. Though less than a couple of hundred yards away it would take her into a different clique, and although she knew them all and had worked with some of them and been at school with some and danced with them and sung in the streets and played, talked with them, they were not her clique. But how could she say all that without seeming spoiled? Women were supposed to follow men when the final decision came. Young couples were supposed to accept whatever was on offer. Being choosy was putting on airs.
‘I couldn’t stand that – privy – only the one.’
‘There’s probably fewer using it than use the one in Grace’s backyard here.’
That was not true. Both of them knew that the spillover -especially the kids from Scott’s Yard which was a nest of big families -would inevitably use ‘their’ lavatory.
‘They’re decent enough people,’ he said.
‘It isn’t the people I’m worried about! There’s very nice people in Water Street.’
‘What is it then?’
Change? Change. Here, with Grace and Leonard in the refuge of her childhood and in the house which had protected Joe when Sam was in the war, she felt safe. Anywhere else and with Sam still far from his old self, was unsure. They had not found each other again, not yet.
‘It’s not like you to be frightened,’ he said.
‘I’m not frightened.’
But she was and he was right and both of them knew it.
‘We’ll not get anything better. Leonard’s given us a leg up for this one as it is.’
‘Why can’t we wait for one of the new houses?’
‘We could be old and grey.’
‘I don’t know what it is, Sam.’
Ellen was not proud of herself. Clammy fear sickened her stomach.
‘You’ll be all right once we’re in.’
‘I don’t want to go, Sam.’
‘I’ve had it here. I want us to get going on our own. This is the best we’ll get.’