The Soldier's Return

by Melvyn Bragg

  On the morning itself he dashed hither and yon like a mad puppy until Ellen leashed him in, scrubbed him down and put a clean shirt on his back. Sam had gone down to the park to help with the trestle tables and to mark up the distances for the sports. Sacks, eggs and spoons had all been assembled and the baking ladies and the committee were working on their quota in their own homes and would bring to the tents food which would be divided into seven hundred free plates for the children and others at Is. 3d. per head for adults.

  ‘Brilliant weather favoured Wigton’s Children’s Carnival,’ said the Cumberland News the following Monday. Crowds collected from all over the county and the narrow streets were crushed with people. Ponies and donkeys for the free rides were drafted in from seaside towns. Mr Hadwyn from Martin’s Bank took the seven hundred new threepenny pieces down to the park in the back of his car, alone. He had considered asking for a policeman to accompany him but then thought that would be far too dramatic.

  The Ismay sisters rode their Penny Farthings as they had done in the last carnival before the war. The regimental bandsmen were dressed in scarlet and gold and their black boots glittered. ‘You could shave in them,’ people said. The brass instruments shone as bright as the sun. They marched in slow time and the precision was a matter of pride all round. Leonard said that nobody else in the world could march like that. The corps of white-dressed, bell-jingling girl dancers followed the regimental band and then came the town band, which halted at set points and played for the girls to dance, taking care not to drown the sweet jingling of the bells. The individual entries followed and the floats and finally seven hundred tidy children, most of them grimacingly self-conscious, were shepherded down the narrow courses of the old market town, in the hope and celebration of peace.

  Joe was electrified with excitement. On the way to the start of the procession, he had eyed every float in wonder. The costumes! The wigwams and huts and cardboard tanks, the caves and jungles they had built on the lorries! He recognised almost everyone – except the Minstrels with banjos from New Street on Sheddy Pape’s lorry – yet they waved at him and he blushed at the honour. He felt altogether strange for a Saturday afternoon: his best shirt, green and white stripes, his best short pants, navy blue (the bottom half of his Sunday suit) with the braces and a new pair of shiny, bright brown sandals which were already hurting his feet. Despite the heat of the day he wore grey woollen stockings up to his knees, carefully folded over a loop of thin white elastic, the same make as that which looped the wrists and ankles of the girl dancers and held the bells. It was more a Sunday than a Saturday outfit and it was an outfit which told him to be on his best behaviour. Life as usual.

  But in the Carnival everybody was unusual, everyone was dressed up as if they were in the pictures. In the grey, rather bleak little Northern town, rationed and drawn and still mourning after the war, this gaiety and colour and the splashes of imagination were like a constellation of rainbows. Joe thought that his head was going to burst just trying to take it all in and when the procession passed the crowds in the street and the people clapped and even cheered, he did not know where to look. It was all so unnaturally magnificent.

  The day flashed by, the day dragged deliciously through a thousand branded moments. The two poles were his mother and father. His father, loved beyond measure as his son had watched and ‘helped’ with the tents, seemed now to be the steadiness at the centre of the tumultuous park, now as crowded as the makeshift town of a medieval army. He was there holding one end of the tape at the finishing line for the sports. He was chatting to the soldiers in the band and now he whistled Joe over and one of the soldiers let him try on his hat and blow in the mouthpiece of the tuba. Other men called out to him and grave messages were quietly exchanged. The night before, risking a lot, Joe had been drawn into a spin of boasting about the number of Japs his father had killed in the war and that was the only anxiety: that one of the boys he had told would walk up to his father and challenge him and he would be found out.

  His mother stuck with the dancers until they did their final performance right down the middle of the big stretch of grass where the sports had been held. This time, both the regimental band and the town band combined and the crowds clapped and clapped as the simple brass and silver sounds spread into the brilliant summer day and the forty girls in white danced in sweet amateur formation on the glossy cropped turf. Ellen walked quietly beside them. She had been in their number before the war, as had so many of the women looking on, and now she had trained a new generation, passing it on. Joe could scarcely bear to look at her, he was so breathless with pride.

  Along with the others he was ushered in for his free tea and the same pink raffle ticket got him his shimmering new threepenny bit. He joined up with his father beyond the swings where the donkeys and ponies were saddled up. There, Sam recognised Ian’s father and put a hand on Joe’s shoulder to indicate that he should stay where he was while he went across to him. They shook hands self-consciously. After remarking on the luck of such a fine day, the older man said: Tt must be a record turn-out.’

  ‘It feels that way,’ Sam replied, trying hard to slough off the sense of awkwardness which had suddenly gripped him.

  ‘I’ve had kiddies here from all art and parts.’

  Tan,’ Sam felt he had to say the name, quickly, but the name stumbled through his lips, ‘said nothing about ponies.’

  ‘I help him out when he’s short-handed. Since he lost his wife a month or two since.’

  The man he was speaking of, a swarthy, thick-set, gypsy-looking fellow with a polka-dot red kerchief around his throat and a broad brimmed brown velvet hat, was leading one of the bigger ponies down towards the fence. Two little girls in white from the dancing were huddled together on the saddle.

  Sam was stuck for words.

  ‘Things working out?’

  ‘Could be worse,’ said Sam.

  Did that seem ungrateful? To the father of Ian?

  Tt isn’t easy for anybody.’ He nodded in the direction of Joe. ‘That yours?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll give him Lightning.’

  Lightning was rather bigger than the other ponies and the only piebald, which gave him flair. His reins were red and there was a red rosette in his mane.

  ‘Come on, young fella-me-lad.’

  Joe obeyed the summons. The day was now spiralling into fantasy. Like a cowboy, he managed to put one foot in the stirrup and then, with a helpful push, he swung into the saddle and the shocking height and the smell of horse invaded him with a wholly new excitement. He turned to his father and grinned as widely as his mouth would go.

  ‘It’s seeing the kiddies’ faces,’ Ian’s father said, only half looking at Sam, ‘seeing them smile.’ He clicked his tongue and led Lightning on the trodden path to the fence.

  After the children had been fed, the tents were open to the adults: Full Tea Is. 3d. – sandwiches, teacake, sausage roll, choice of a cake. Grace had performed miracles of baking and basked through an afternoon of compliments. Ellen did her shift and then took a cup herself when Ruth came in. She got on well with her sister-in-law and starved Ruth loved company. There was not a woman helping in the tent whom Ellen did not know well: some were known to Ruth but Ellen’s unobtrusive inclusiveness was a benison. They unpicked the day with praise. Sadie, who had spent much of the time selling raffle tickets for prizes donated by the shopkeepers, came in to the cry that her feet were killing her and had anybody a dog end? Ellen laughed. The Carnival itself, and Sam nearby and Joe scampering around in pleasure, warmed and reassured her. She began to sing.

  Shaken by the unexpected meeting with Ian’s father, Sam wandered down towards the bowling green and found a patch empty of crowd. He sat against a sycamore and lit up, remembering and remembering again with painful vividness the number of times in this posture leaning against the trunk of a tree he had offered, been offered, a cigarette. By Ian. ‘Seeing the kiddies’ faces.’ The phrase had got to Sam a
nd he drew in deeply and the smoke set off a cannonade of coughing. Tears sprang to his eyes. He looked around furtively. Nobody must assume he was crying: It was just the smoke,’ he said to himself, as if excusing the tears to someone else.

  After the sports had ended, the regimental band gave a last display, marching and counter-marching, drumsticks twirling, the sergeant major hurling his mace into the air, children strutting alongside, memories of setting out for war, of returning, of those who had not returned, all mingled in the crisp harmonies of brass which clarioned across the park. ‘God Save The King’ was played. The men took off their hats or caps and ex-servicemen automatically clicked to attention. The women sang full throatedly and there was one final unbidden cheer.

  The crowds ebbed away through the park gates, back into the town, costumes bedraggled now, some of the floats half dismantled though a few were unblemished, preserved for competition in other carnivals throughout the summer. The scarlet regimental band clambered into a battered bus.

  Sam had asked a few of them to help him take down the tents there and then and to Joe’s dismay the castles of canvas pancaked to the ground in minutes and in no time at all they were packed and stacked in the shelter ready for collecting the next morning.

  Some of the children, like Joe, were still so charged up that they could not bear to leave and as the park resumed its old contour, like a shore restored when the tide goes out, the swings and roundabouts and banana slide made their appeal. The Water Street gang, not great enthusiasts for the park as a rule, decided to stay and dominate proceedings. They hogged the American swing and then when they saw a happy crowd queuing up the steps for the banana slide they abandoned the big plank of swing and hunted across to walk up the front of the slide itself, smear it to speed with the stump of a candle someone had and climb up the stilts to the cabin at the top, thus bypassing the patient crowd on the steps. Soon they drove everyone away.

  Joe felt that he was under examination. Whose side was he on? The scavengers, the terrorists who had made extra profit out of the day by devoting much of it to the collecting of empty lemonade bottles and claiming the halfpenny deposit back on each one and sometimes stealing the empties to have another bite; or the law-abiding, those willing to queue, true to the age and habit of queuing? By temperament, Joe was the latter; by desire and imagination, the former, but he was too small, not ready, and his longing only confused matters. When they laughed, they laughed at him especially, he thought, and sometimes he was right. But Sam and Ellen were nearby and apart from a few shoulderings there was no direct challenge. Until they had grown bored with the easy prey and switched their focus to the river and what could be done to make disturbance there, he felt clouded with misery, the misery that was always at hand.

  Yet, young, out of sight was soon out of mind and there was half an hour at least for the mopping up of the pleasures of the day with other children also nearing euphoric exhaustion. The park keeper asked for volunteers to help pick up the litter and Joe set out eagerly with others, snapping it up with the zeal of terriers in a barn of rats. His father was folding the tents. His mother was wrapping crockery and loading it into the tea chests. His Aunty Ruth and Aunty Sadie were lending a hand with the trestle tables. It was all done calmly, even slowly, as the children snapped across the park sniffing out litter.

  There was a moment, just before they left, when the three of them, Sam, Ellen and Joe, were walking together, the child between the two adults, each holding a hand, as the sun began to colour with blood in its setting and there was the sound of bowls clicking on the green, the crystal chirrup of children’s voices mixed with the bird-songs of evening, and finally the Carnival was over, when they swung him high, high in the air.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ‘Bad?’

  ‘Bad.’

  ‘How bad?’

  ‘Still plastered, Sam. Bad night.’

  Kettler was held upright by leaning hard against the wall of the Vic at the end of Water Street. His rough-skinned, stubbled face with the large purpling nose almost distracting from the pain of the piggy, bloodshot eyes looked so sorry for itself that Sam had to laugh.

  ‘Come on, I’ll get you one.’

  ‘I’m skint, Sam. Not a sausage.’

  Fair warning. Sam nodded. They walked across to the Blue Bell. Kettler took his first few sips of the pint of mild – the cheapest drink -with both hands, carrying the rim of the glass prayerfully to his parched mouth. They took out a set of dominoes and began to play fives and threes, a penny a game, Kettler’s losses on the slate.

  It was the middle of the day. Ellen was out working, Joe at school, the town quiet and lazing in the hot sun, no market or auctions that day, long fatalistic queues on the streets for bread and flour, just rationed, the gutters being swept by Joe Stoddart. Sam was on the two to ten shift.

  They were alone in the bar and the landlord left them to it.

  They were well matched in the game and when that became clear, they gave up and sat back to talk. Sam offered Kettler a cigarette and Kettler, who rarely smoked but never refused any gift, took it gratefully. He smoked rather airily, as if through a cigarette holder. He eased himself in his seat to let the wind go free. The mild was doing the business.

  Kettler’s clothes fell, by a hair, the positive side of rags. He wore, he possessed, nothing that had been bought new: most had not been bought at all but handed on or rescued. His chief need of the day was a large helping of tripe from one of the seven butchers in the town. He alternated. Some of them, at the right time of day, would give it him for nothing. At the end of an afternoon, now and then, he would go to Joseph Johnston’s for a loaf of stale bread which cost him a halfpenny. He might take a slice of cheese with it if he was in funds. Funds were primarily the dole, secondarily the occasional pick and shovel employment (although he claimed a weak back and Dr Dolan would often play along with it). Most of all, though, he scrounged. Bits of easy work on market days with half a crown for his pains, ‘helping out’ here and there – taking a hound dog to the trails, keeping an eye on a pony and trap. Kettler had found many minuscule gaps in the local economy which were made for his always available and always brief attention. Then there was the occasional fiddle.

  He nipped the cigarette halfway down and popped the stump behind his ear. He had pushed back his cap and the surprisingly luxuriant but greasy black hair gave him rather a dashing appearance. He could charm some of the ladies: Ellen was not one of them.

  He sipped carefully now. The pint glass was half empty and there would just be the one. He had no credit in the Blue Bell.

  Kettler let the conversation lapse. It was an effort to talk and he’d got his drink. Besides, listening mostly paid off best. The sun came through the grimy windows throwing small pools of yellow, like doubloons, on the dark stained wooden floor. There was a dog, a collie, curled in front of the empty fire. No sounds came from the streets.

  ‘Where’ll you be going,’ Kettler asked eventually in his broad accent, ‘when they start shifting Water Street to Brindlefield?’

  ‘Haven’t thought. Are you going?’

  ‘Me?’ Kettler revealed his dogged remaining teeth. ‘Up there? That’s for millionaires.’

  ‘We aren’t down for a house.’ Sam smiled. ‘I should never have gone away. I lost my place in the queue.’

  ‘Water Street’ll be dead.’

  ‘There’ll be you and me, Kettler.’

  ‘I’m back off to Vinegar Hill.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘The lads is down there. They have a bit of fun.’

  ‘Vinegar Hill’

  When Sam’s father had brought them inland from the coalfields along the coast, Vinegar Hill was all they could afford. It lay just beyond Water Street, between the Rabbit Warren and narrow defile called the Straits. It was a huddled, in-built, ramshackle, chronically overcrowded little world of its own, with steps up to single rooms occupied by a large family or a survivor from a previous goitred ag
e. There were three patches of ground where a few ponies grazed and junk rusted and often at an open fire the two tinker families who dominated Vinegar Hill would bake hedgehogs and entertain visiting traders with a potion gathered at low cost late at night from the dregs buckets of the pubs. The little thieving there was in a town with little to steal would find its way to Vinegar Hill and work as the world knew it was a word unknown.

  ‘I mind you coming there,’ said Kettler, who was a good dozen years older than Sam. ‘Little bit of a thing. Game enough.’

  ‘So that’s where you’re going.’

  Sam did not want Kettler to say any more. He had not thought of Vinegar Hill for many years. He had stayed there through his schooldays and took it as his home as children do. His mother had contracted TB there and one of his sisters had a scar patch on her lung. His father had fought for years to get out of it and getting out of Vinegar Hill had been the first step up from the Nothing that Grace had so woundingly accused him of being.

  But now, as if he had suddenly come across a hidden waterfall, Vinegar Hill poured into his mind and the torrent spoke of ease: of taking the day as it came; of a calmer pace, your own pace. All the stinks and intolerable crush of the place (which, in truth, as a child, had not struck him as anything but the way life was) dissolved in this selective memory of a place where you lived life on your own terms.

  ‘Ellen would never tolerate it,’ said Kettler, who was wise enough to pick up on Sam’s expression. ‘She’ll want one of them new houses.’

  ‘They all still down at Vinegar Hill? The same lot?’

  ‘You’ll never shift them, Sam.’

  ‘I wonder,’ Sam said, ‘if they ever noticed there was a war on?’

  ‘Diddler,’ Kettler was speaking of a cousin, ‘said things had never been better in the little town. Not in Vinegar Hill.’

  Sam laughed out loud. Threw back his head and laughed and laughed – not wanting, not able to stop himself.