The Soldier's Return

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘Just as well the evacuees is gone back,’ Sadie chattered on. ‘I miss them, mind. Poor little mites. Remember when we all went down to meet them off the train? I think they thought they’d been sent to jail. How many more threepences would that have been?’

  The noise of the machine was continuous as Ellen pedalled steadily and scrutinised the columns of stitching which suddenly marched onto the cotton.

  ‘It was happier then in some ways, wasn’t it?’ said Sadie. ‘I know it’s a funny thing to say but there was more life about. And the rationing is worse now – how can that be? Things is scarcer all round. How do they manage that?’

  Ellen had brought Joe with her. He was out playing on Market Hill so she felt he was safe. She could even hear the shouts now and then, ringing across the space as the children flocked and switched direction like swallows practising for migration.

  Sadie began to sing again.

  Ellen finished some intricate manoeuvring around the sleeves and held up the dress to the light.

  ‘Lizzie will be one happy little lass,’ said Sadie.

  Ellen nodded and then, as from nowhere, she heard her voice say, ‘I can’t make him out any more, Sadie.’ She held the dress still. It was a shield between her face and her friend. ‘I don’t know what it is he wants.’

  Sadie looked at the white dress in silence. There was a catch in Ellen’s voice which she had never heard before, not even that time when letters had not come for weeks during the war.

  ‘It wasn’t better for everybody in the war,’ said Ellen and she lowered the dress and Sadie could see the strain of holding back tears. ‘I missed him all the time, you know.’ Ellen nodded rather rapidly, as if blinking. ‘I don’t know how I managed to hold it all in.’

  In the dying light of evening the silence between them seemed infinitely deep.

  ‘My big mouth,’ said Sadie, quietly.

  ‘So,’ said Ellen, ‘there we are. Just the hem to finish off.’

  The machine drummed into the silence.

  Sadie took the dresses to her place to iron them. Ellen was disinclined to go back home just yet and went to the upstairs room to look out of the window. Grace and Leonard had gone for a drive in the car, second hand, which Leonard had finally negotiated. The lodgers were quiet or out. There was a stillness in the large gloomy house which felt heavy, pressing down on her.

  She could have cut out her tongue for being so unguarded with Sadie, although she was certain that Sadie would not gossip about her. Sadie had a terrible, grateful loyalty to Ellen, who had friends all over the town and yet stuck by Sadie, who was not much sought out. But it was an awful thing, Ellen thought, to give in like that and discuss personal matters.

  Ellen tried to concentrate on what was disturbing her but her mind seemed unwilling or unable to grapple with it. Her attention would be caught by something going on outside the window, by a flurry of memories, and images, fugitive, irrelevant. The more she attempted to compose her thoughts, the more discordant they became. When she tried to shepherd them, they scattered. Standing lonely and still at the window, she thought she would burst with the difficulty of it.

  What was she to do? It was as it always had been – accept and carry on. Sam now turned his back on her in bed, not out of anger and not out of distaste, but from a weariness, a consuming innerness which could radiate from him like a warning – keep out. Joe, who had idolised the photograph of his father in uniform and clearly loved him, was also at odds with him, straining his patience and using her as a refuge and an ally too often. She would see obstinacy in the boys eyes and the fierceness, normally held well in check by Sam, and they disturbed her. However skilfully she tried to chivvy things along, there was no getting at the root of it. And Joe, she was convinced, was still being bullied and Sam was still determined that the boy fight his own battles.

  She ought not to feel like this. Not at all. Sam had survived. He had returned. The pain of continuous worry which had had to be endured, a rope twisted tight around her head and tightened with every grave news bulletin, every sight of the boy on the post-office bicycle who brought the telegram of death, had gone. She could still be taken by surprise at the lightness, the freedom. What were these murmurings of unease compared with that? What did it matter that she could no longer float into that inner dream which had given her a curious comfort? They were the lucky ones, weren’t they? Between them they earned enough money. They had their own house – even if she did not feel settled there, but it was a whole house when so many lodged or lived in or shared. It was ungrateful to feel unhappy and yet the unhappiness was intensifying.

  Why had she wanted to talk about it?

  She saw Joe looking across at the window and she stepped forward so that she could be seen and waved at him. He stared at her for a few moments and then gave a brief wave in return as if the contact barely mattered to him. His pretence tugged at her heart. It seemed he needed her to be there for him now much more than at any time since he was a baby.

  ‘I was hoping I’d catch you,’ said Mr Kneale. Ellen was startled. T’ve been looking at you for a while.’ His solemn round features mooned into a smile. ‘You were in another world, a world of your own.’

  ‘I must be getting old.’

  ‘Not a bit of it.’ Mr Kneale was earnest. ‘You never change.’

  ‘Away with you.’ Ellen folded her arms. There was a pause which was not quite comfortable.

  ‘Will Sam be coming down?’

  She shook her head. He was on the two to ten shift. She and Joe had left the house before he had got up and not been back.

  ‘It was just something we were talking about the other day. Last Saturday when he came down to see me.’

  Ellen nodded as if she knew about it.

  ‘Perhaps photography might be an option.’ Ellen waited. ‘He could use the dark room, until he got started. I know we have two professionals in the town as it is, but where there’s two there’s usually room for a third. And it’s much more the sort of business the British Legion would look kindly on than being a bookmaker. I’m afraid he was disappointed when I gave him that piece of advice, but I stand by it. Do you think he might like photography?’

  ‘He’s never talked about it.’

  ‘Some young men could think it was a bit routine. Portraits and weddings. But there is a call for it.’

  ‘I can’t see Sam being very good at weddings.’

  ‘It does take a knack, yes. It must be very difficult for these young men. That’s why I’m in favour of the British Legion’s scheme. By all means give them a loan to start up for themselves. What better investment in these post-war years than to invest in the youth of the country?’

  He sounded a little Churchillian, which was intended.

  Ellen worked it out.

  ‘Don’t misunderstand me,’ said Mr Kneale. ‘There’s nothing at all wrong with being a bookmaker. But a photographer is more likely to attract the Legion.’

  ‘I’ll pass it on.’

  ‘There would be no charge for the dark room. I emphasise that. Not until he found his feet.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, Mr Kneale.’

  ‘We have to help these young lads back from the war. I’m taking an interest in the war, in the campaign in the East, you know. Terrible stories are coming out. Terrible stories.’

  ‘What sort of stories?’

  ‘I don’t know whether I should repeat them.’ Mr Kneale shook his head, upset at man’s inhumanity to man. ‘Atrocious is all I’d care to say at the moment. What these young men went through.’

  Ellen felt herself blush at the shame of not understanding enough.

  ‘I’ve been talking to some of them. Just to get a feel of the subject, you know. We’ll have to wait a while for the official accounts but I think of myself as stealing rather a march, talking to the men on the ground. I think they like to have somebody to talk to about it. Sam’s good at describing conditions but you feel he’s still keeping a lot to h
imself. These things can’t be rushed. Well now. I just wanted to suggest photography. And if he cares to pursue it, tell him I’d be glad to take it further.’

  He smiled at the young woman shadowed against the window.

  ‘I’m very glad to see you and Joe, you know. We got to be quite a little family, didn’t we? Give him this.’

  He handed Ellen a short stick of barleysugar.

  ‘Thank you. He’ll thank you himself when he sees you.’

  ‘I’m not much of a sweets man. I dare say if I didn’t feel you had to use up the coupons I wouldn’t bother at all. Well now. I’d better be off about my business.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this British Legion scheme?’ she said as soon as Sam came in from work, despite having schooled herself to keep it until after he had eaten his meal.

  ‘You’ve been talking to Mr Kneale.’

  ‘He just came out with it. He says you might think of photography. You can use his dark room he said, no charge until you get on your feet.’

  ‘What would I look like taking photographs at weddings?’

  The question, and more the tone, spelled out the flat impossibility of such a project. Ellen wished that she had not leapt in. She had wanted to express in some way the warm feelings stirred by Mr Kneale’s words about what the soldiers had gone through. Now the room was charged with tension, which more and more frequently characterised their moments together.

  But she was not so easily quelled. She poured out a cup of tea for both of them and sat with him at the table, although she had eaten earlier with Joe. ‘Mr Kneale said you talked to him about the war.’

  ‘I wish to God I’d never opened my mouth!’

  He crashed the cup down on the saucer and in the small still room the sound was fierce. Ellen’s glance fled upstairs and Sam caught it.

  ‘He’ll be all right.’ The tinge of bitterness was unmistakable.

  Ellen had not planned it like this. She wanted to employ the mood of tenderness which had filled her in the hours since her meeting with Mr Kneale. The thoughtful words of the schoolteacher had made her feel ashamed of the shortcomings of her own sympathy and she wanted Sam to know that.

  ‘It was interesting,’ she said, rather dry-throated, ignoring the jibe, what Mr Kneale said about the war. He’s making a study of it.’

  ‘I wish he’d make his study somewhere else.’ Sam’s manners coarsened as if to emphasise the trapped strength of his feelings. He bent the blade of his knife into the plate, scooped up a few peas and put them straight into his mouth. Ellen remembered how rough his manners had been when first they met, how Grace had sniffed at the commonness of his ways, how obstinately Sam had stuck to them until he had tired of it and, overnight it seemed, taken on the manners of Grace and Leonard. Now he glowered, in the gaslit kitchen, a fury in him, fists holding the knife and fork upright.

  ‘I would like to know.’

  ‘What would you like to know?’

  ‘What happened.’ Ellen would not be browbeaten. She had seen Sam’s temper erupt and although he had never threatened to hit her, here was no place for a coward.

  ‘I’d like to know what happened,’ she repeated. ‘What you were going through all that time.’

  Sam glared at her as if she had grossly insulted him. His grip on the knife and fork tightened. The room seemed airless, contracting, everything being sucked in to the sudden rush of violence which was pressing him.

  ‘Whenever you want,’ she said.

  Instead of flinching, she sought out his eyes with her own and looked steadily at him. His anger was savage. The eyes seemed to have lost shades of blueness and paled. By his eyes she did not know him. But she held his gaze and even when she felt herself being physically drained away, a sense so palpable that her hands gripped the edge of the table as if to prevent herself being pulled down an abyss, even then she did not look away.

  ‘Some time,’ he said. ‘Not yet.’

  He leaned back in his chair and put down his knife and fork. He had scarcely begun and yet he would eat no more. He saw that Ellen’s hand was shaking a little as she lifted her cup to take a sip of tea. In the yard the lavatory door banged as someone left it. Sam took out a cigarette and went across to the mantelpiece to get a match. When he turned, he saw the broken train. He felt weak, even as if he might pass out and fall down. He steadied himself.

  ‘I must fix that train,’ he said. ‘It’s a small enough job.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ‘I suggested they should get in touch with you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They needed somebody.’

  And it might help take you out of yourself, she thought. ‘Wherell they get the tents?’

  ‘George Harrison has the details.’ She paused. ‘I thought you might enjoy it.’

  He did. The tents were rented at nominal cost from the regiment in Carlisle. Tommy Miller went down in his cart with Sam and a couple of others. There were three tents. Two, very large, for the children’s free teas: one, smaller, for the distribution of the threepenny bits and the prizes and rosettes from the sports. It would be a big day.

  For two weeks in late summer before the Carnival, the shopkeepers cleared their windows and put in displays. Not necessarily and not often of the goods they sold, but Displays, works of art, some of them, Mr Kneale said. In Parks’ shoeshop there was a grotto – it must have taken weeks – the rocks skilfully fashioned from cardboard and embellished with real moss and pebbles beside water made from Cellophane paper and somehow manufactured from the real thing were mini-trees. Toy sheep grazed everywhere. How clever, people said – you could never have told those rocks were cardboard. Mr Snaith displayed the liner he had made and also laid out examples of his watch and clockmaking craft – the innards as well as the finished articles. What skill, they said, all so very small and marvellous.

  George Johnston devoted one of his two large windows to a history of Wigton – photographs, old maps, posters, bills of sale, sports teams. Nobody would have thought, they said, there was so much history to such a little town. In the saddle shop there was a spectacular collection of horse brasses, polished clear as mirrors and reckoned to be worth a small fortune. Grace looked appraisingly, as did the lads from Vinegar Hill. Most impressive of all (it was agreed) was the Snow White and Seven Dwarfs in Robinson’s the Bakery. How Polly had managed to get all the material. And they were all the spitting image. With the faces made out of icing. Sadie made a point of seeing it every day – the work that went into it! The work!

  With forty-eight shops entered, for a shilling you could buy a card and judge the Displays. The first three got certificates and small cash prizes and seven others received certificates only. The bulk of the entry money went into the Carnival Fund. Every fine night – and the weather was holding up – couples and families walked the trafficless evening streets, studying the windows, the artefacts and the fantasies, consulting with each other now and then, taking their time. Joe had done the rounds with Ellen and grown bored after half an hour, but she kept him in tow as she did when she took him to Carlisle for a treat and some window-shopping first to make the most of the time.

  Joe wanted to be in the park to watch its transformation entirely under the direction of his father, or so it seemed to Joe, who circled him now shyly, now proudly, unable either way to come to terms with this man, who was organising the raising of those great romantic khaki tents which, he was told, had been on battlefields all over–Africa, India, Burma, deserts, mountains – all over the world.

  First they were spread out on the fresh-cut, sweet-stinking grass like gigantic cowpats dropped from the Milky Way. Then, under Sam’s unfussy direction, the volunteers began to burrow and peg and fasten and hammer until the spread of khaki rose steepling from the ground and where there had been nothing there was a barn of shelter. The sudden coolness and eerie emptiness of the new space sucked in the little boys, who buzzed around the poles like wasps trapped in a jam jar. When the men were
gone some of the older, bolder boys used the guy ropes to scale up to the roof of a tent and then they slid down on their bums, yelling. As soon as an adult appeared, they scarpered. The three tents were stately and grand as liners, moored in the quiet park.

  Joe was in a flux of all but uncontainable excitement. There was so much going on and nothing must be missed. Should he go and take advantage of his mother teaching the Carnival Dance to mingle with the chirruping chorus of excited town-girls skipping in unison in rehearsal down a back lane? Or be near his father in the park and again and again enjoy the heady unadmitted superiority of seeing his own father at the heart of things? Both, both. And then scud around the town up the alleys into the yards where the floats were being dressed; shooed away as secrecy was preserved but catching enough glimpses behind high doors, over walls, in open sheds, of the invention and beautiful decoration going into the floats. The Carnival Queen and her attendants had been chosen two weeks before and there was for the first time – though not without some raised eyebrows – a Labour Party float. They put up the bunting, made out of pre-war flags, in all the streets – Water Street most decorated of all – and the boys were allowed to help, sometimes even being permitted to climb a ladder.

  Joe stood outside the Congregational hall at the end of his street and the sound of the silver band in rehearsal slithered down his nerves and seemed to possess him, stun him to stillness and prime gunpowder in all his limbs. There was an army band coming to lead the parade and his father had told him stories of boy buglers and drummers leading men into war and Joe’s dreams went to war with marching music. In all this time he managed to avoid Speed and the others and suffered nothing but the occasional knuckle on the arm. He had begun to nest inside a group of his own in the street and although most of them were girls it afforded a measure of security.