by Melvyn Bragg
And, like Ellen, Sam walked along Water Street very deliberately, looking about him, Joe close by his side. It was the second clear warning.
Joe was proud of himself beside his father and excited after the boxing lesson. In his mind he was climbing into the ring, waiting for the bell, putting on the gloves, knocking everyone out, raising his hand in victory, hearing the applause. It had been precious, this intimate attention from his father, this encouragement to be a boxer, the care taken, the focus on him. It carried on from the Carnival. The fear which had grown was overlaid. He wanted to please his Dad. He wanted to show that he was not a cry-baby. He wanted to prove he could stand up for himself.
In the evening after the Salvation Army band had marched back once again without a single convert, Sam and Ellen took Joe for a walk.
They went out towards Carlisle, over Howrigg Bank from which Sam had first seen Wigton on the final leg home. So long ago now, it seemed. They paused to look down on the town and again Sam felt the grip of dismay that his life was bottled up there and as always Ellen felt herself soften into the mould of the place. Joe, who had heard of the stone fight but not been asked to join in, not even to collect up the spent stones of the Church Street gang, had gathered a few for himself and pitched them with determination but little art against the big oak tree in Robinson’s field.
‘Like this,’ said Sam. He took a stone and his arm whiplashed. The small object hurtled through the air and smacked plum in the centre of the trunk. ‘You snap your arm,’ said Sam. He demonstrated. Then he laughed. ‘First it’s one arm and then it’s the other, eh?’ Joe did not quite understand but he understood profoundly that his Daddy was in a very good mood and so was his Mammy and both together and the exhilaration of it acid-burned away some of the stomach lump of fear. He threw again and almost got the trick of it.
Ellen strayed on ahead. They were building more houses here. The town was growing, though not in population, for these too would serve for the decanting of families from the fast nucleus in which Wigton had been concentrated for more than two centuries. Ellen was a little distressed at this loosening, at this dilution, even though it was only a spreading of space. The intense cohabitation would ebb, she sensed, and it was that which had supported her so much.
‘They’ll be a good-looking size,’ said Sam, nodding at the new foundations. Joe was straddled across his shoulders.
‘Shouldn’t we put our names down?’ Ellen’s question came unplanned. She did not even know whether she wanted a house on the very edge of town.
‘There’s no rush, the rents are twice Brindlefield.’
‘You keep saying you’d like a garden.’
‘Let’s talk about it.’
He meant the opposite and walked on.
Before them the rich Solway Plain stretched towards the Borders, deceptively amiable – on this Saturday evening, fine, warm, undisturbed. The biggest intrusion was the double-decker bus panting up the hill. Everywhere Sam looked there was a sense of effortless peace. Farms scattered apparently haphazardly across the Plain. The beasts in the fields moving so slowly. Missing nothing as they chewed up the lush pasture. Hedgerows thickening with fruit and berries.
There were two men out walking their hound dogs and that was all their company until they turned off just before the bridge and strolled down the lane which had been a courting lane to Sam and Ellen; and so it was still to another young blushing couple hopelessly pretending to be interested in what was around them instead of what was in them and written all over them. Joe was looking for rose-hips which could fetch a good price, but it was too early for them to be worth picking. Ellen had brought a tennis ball and they played catch as they walked under the undramatic sky. Joe scampered after the ball like a happy puppy.
They went under the railway line and turned back up a lane which came out near one of the houses which Ellen cleaned. It was a place of some local splendour, defended by worked wrought-iron railings, a place of big rooms, rich objects, untroubled wealth and the kindly hospitality of the two ageing sisters – one a widow, one a spinster – who had been born there. They would have welcomed an unannounced visit by Ellen, whom they cherished, but they would also have been rather surprised had she made the call. It never occurred to Ellen to do so.
At the railway station Sam yielded easily to Joe’s request to climb the steps beside the high sandstone wall and wait to see a train.
The station looked at its best. The gardens were in bloom; and there were six hanging baskets. The platforms had been freshly swept and the sandstone of the classically-inspired main building was picked out in a deep iron ore red as the sunset struck it square on.
They went along the platform which led to Carlisle and walked up the bridge to cross to the main building. Joe lingered on the bridge and let his parents get ahead. While they were walking down the other side, even when they were on the far platform, he was still on the bridge itself, looking up and down the line, watching out for the white puff of smoke, signal of joy, and the unmistakable rhythm which pulsed through the veins.
Straight left. Whiplash with the right arm. Safe up and down Water Street with Mammy and Daddy. Seeing them below. Talking to a man in a dark uniform, an important man.
Three people now, two grown-ups and a girl, near his age, came out of the waiting room anticipating the Carlisle train. The girl stared up at him and then turned her head away, swinging her long plaits. His mother looked up and waved at him and he waved and then his father turned and gave him a thumbs up and Joe knew what he had to do. He had to do. The excitement and fear whipped up an ecstasy in his mind and he had to do it. Looking down at the two of them important on the platform, straight left, his feet were on the outside ledge of the sandstone-built bridge, the ledge below which was a sheer drop on to the shining railway lines. He had seen the big boys do this once when all of them had strayed way out of their territory down from Market Hill to the station to watch the trains. The big boys had gone across the bridge by the ledge, somehow keeping a grip on the perilously narrow ledge which jutted an inch or two from the foot of the bridge and clinging on with their hands to the pocked sandstone top of the bridge, inching across like crabs. He was smaller than they were and he had to reach up for the top to grip and shuffle his hands along and his new sandals still hurt a little, being a little too big, bought for him to grow in to. He felt brave.
His face was very close to a sooty wall. He turned to shout down to them but turned back quickly as the twist in his body had caused a wobble in his feet. A little wave of chill fluttered through his stomach and the palms of his hands, sweating helpfully, seemed stuck. He moved along slowly.
‘Don’t say a word.’ Sam put out his arms to bar Ellen from rushing forward. He spoke quietly.
Ellen stayed where she was, wide-eyed, rooted, mesmerised at the sight of the small body crawling along what seemed the sheer face of the bridge. The sunset was lighting up the reds in the sandstone and in the boy’s red hair, giving him a halo effect. For a moment the boy seemed unreal. It must all be happening to someone else, Ellen thought. That was not Joe, her beloved son, awkwardly, anxiously aping his big heroes and literally one false footstep from certain serious injury. This was not her, not his mother, watching immobile, not saying, not doing anything at all, not even praying, frozen in time and place.
‘Good lad!’ Sam shouted. ‘Don’t look round now. Good lad! You just keep on. You’re a good lad! Don’t look round.’
Three options. Stay. Somehow get onto the line beneath him or go up the steps and along the bridge and grab those hands clinging onto the top of the wall. That would take too long. Best to stay, but he could not stay because Ellen might not be able to tolerate it if he stayed. He began to move forward, calmly, swiftly, his eyes beamed into the back of his son’s head as if by force of gaze alone he could and would pin him and fix him safely on that ledge.
On the other platform, the three passengers who had come out of the small waiting room looked up the t
rack for the imminent train and saw the boy and they too gazed at the spectacle, especially because the boy seemed in some trouble.
Sam eased himself down on to the track. He was about ten yards away from the bridge. He kept talking, not incessantly but regularly. ‘Good lad! Take a rest if you feel like it! Nearly there.’
Joe was barely halfway across and becoming more cautious by the step. The ledge beneath the soles of the sandals seemed to be narrowing. He was cheered by what his Daddy was saying. He could tell from the way he said it that this was what his Daddy wanted him to do. The top of the wall was a bit too high and his hands were scuffed.
As Sam picked his way over the lines, the train from the West puffed steadily around the bend at the bottom of Station Hill. White smoke, perfect little white clouds, piping up towards the darkening blue sky which was now shot with blood red.
Ellen took it in but she did not take her eyes off the boy. About five yards to go. Sam was on the suddenly fatal railway line and the train was headed towards him. Joe was clearly in trouble on the bridge. She scarcely saw Sam. She looked at Joe. At Joe.
Ellen opened her mouth to shout, because of the train, but a sense of greater danger alchemised the shout into a whisper of his name.
Joe began to whimper. He heard the train. He knew he was over the line the train was using. He wanted to go faster so that he was not there when the train pulled in, was not there when the big engine filled the space under the bridge and emerged black and steaming, braking for the platform, shuddering under him. One foot accidentally touched the other and he felt a lurch of terror.
‘Good lad. Nearly there.’
Joe looked round and down and saw his Daddy below but something else, the spin in his head and it was cold on his forehead, sick in his throat, the noise of the train braking hard was a squeal, like a squeal inside him. Sam now in the middle of the line as the fireman saw that it was serious and pulled harder on the brake, leaned back on it, giving it his full weight while the driver hung out one side of the cab and shouted. But the noise drowned his shout – for Sam to get off the line – the people on the platform caught up in it, Ellen dry-lipped, dry-throated, chest tight, so hard to breathe.
Sam was directly underneath him. ‘A bit faster now, Joe,’ he yelled, ignoring the black blunt face of the engine screeching slowly towards him. ‘A little bit faster now, Joe. You can do it. That’s a good lad. You can do it.’
Fear, encouragement, the noise, survival fused in the child and he scuttled the last few feet and found refuge in the corner where the ledge was bigger and where he cowered while Sam leapt on to the platform and up the steps to hand him over the wall and the engine sank hissing to a stop just before the bridge.
Ellen ran to them. The stationmaster went to the train to explain and Joe was in his father’s arms checked from sobbing by the praise.
‘You’re a little warrior! That’s what you are, eh? A real little warrior!’
He carried the boy on to the bridge where Ellen flew into them and claimed him. She almost winded the boy with the first fierce force of the hug she gave him. ‘Don’t do that,’ she said. ‘Don’t do that ever again.’
Joe looked at Sam who was smiling at him and he smiled in return, but Ellen tugged back his attention and looked at him with her full strength.
‘Don’t do that ever again,’ she repeated, only pretending to smile. Joe quailed at the fierceness of her.
‘He did well’
Ellen’s intensity neither lessened nor swerved. ‘Never again,’ she said and lightly but with intention and despite all her better feelings, she cuffed Joe on the back of the head.
It did not hurt. It scarcely registered. He looked out to his father but Sam was not smiling. And back to his mother and she too was unsmiling. They were looking at each other and not at him. He began to cry a little and, when Ellen pressed his face into her shoulder, he sobbed more painfully.
‘Well, I’m proud of him,’ said Sam and he walked ahead, to square things with the stationmaster. Slowly, Ellen followed, feeling so much unravel inside her, a sudden knowledge, in that moment, of what could fall apart.
PART THREE
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Bella’s crying disturbed Joe. He wanted her to stop but he understood her distress.
‘Please, Mr Kettler, don’t, Mr Kettler, please.’
It was mid-afternoon, a drizzly summer afternoon, and Kettler was mellow from the pub, otherwise Bella’s dramatic stand in the corner of the yard, ever-incessant sobbing and the endlessly-repeated pleas might have got on his nerves. Despite his easy manner, the key to his survival, Kettler could be nasty.
‘Go inside if you don’t want to watch, you daft ha’porth.’
‘I’m not daft, Mr Kettler. You daft, Mr Kettler. Please don’t do that. Please don’t.’
Her words sawed through Joe and yet he stayed at his post, helping Kettler, considering it a privilege to be invited to assist.
The big tin bucket was almost full of water. Five kittens, soot-black, splashes of white, only a few hours old, blindly squirmed and pawed and nuzzled each other on the rough tear of blanket. Their two dead siblings lay wet, immobile, dead, on the other side of the bucket. Kettler was doing a publican a favour.
He had taken off his jacket and rolled up the ragged shirt sleeve almost to the shoulder. He picked up one of the tiny kittens pawing for succour, held it firmly and pushed his arm deep down into the bucket. As he held it there he smiled at Joe, an amiable, man-to-man smile, flicking his eyes towards Bella, rolling his eyes a little.
‘Round the bend,’ he said. ‘Doolally.’
Joe smiled complicitly, but the wailing of Bella touched his heart and his mouth was open partly in horror. The kitten came out, drowned dead, smooth-soaked, all cuddliness and charm and life gone in that short time. Kettler chucked it on to the pile.
‘Want a go?’
Joe’s throat panicked. His tongue seemed to slither all around his mouth, out between his lips, down his throat. His face froze in an expression of fear.
Kettler laughed, a little cruelly.
‘Roll your sleeve up,’ he said.
Joe did as he was told.
‘This is the boy for you.’
He picked up the kitten and put it in Joe’s hand, where it felt big, warm, lovely. He looked at it. He wanted it. He wanted to stroke its little furry chest, see its sticky blind eyes open, press it to his face.
‘Please, Mr Kettler. Please, Mr Kettler.’
‘Big daft Bella. Eh Joe? Big daft Bella.’
Joe felt that he had to nod in agreement. The life in the palm of his hand now wriggled a little and he all but dropped it.
‘Now then,’ said Kettler.
He took Joe’s hand in his own and closed his fist over the child’s hand and the kitten and lifted both over the lip of the bucket and held them down. Joe felt the kitten move and then twist and he felt the paws. He tried to let go. Kettler held on tightly, grinning down at the boy, the beer smell coming strongly off him, the purple nose only inches away, the locks of greasy hair dangling down from under the grubby cap. Joe went blank and when Kettler lifted out his arm he was glad that it was over, even though the kitten was dead.
‘Good lad,’ said Kettler. ‘Have a rest.’
‘Joe,’ Bella cried. ‘No, Joe. No, Joe.’
She was banging her back against the wall in the corner furthest from them. No one paid her any heed. Her mother only ever came out to call her in for a meal. Sam and Ellen were at work. The Rooks were away on their week’s holiday to Bridlington.
Joe’s stomach felt queasy with excitement and dread, the sight of the soaked black kittens, the fluffy white patches somehow disappeared in the water, the fur so very thick and smooth, pasty. He glanced at Bella to laugh her away as Kettler did, but he was not successful. Her spiritless black hair, forever lank, had escaped the clasp of her big clip and fallen over her lumpy white face on which the mouth was working away in a torment. Her right han
d churned the hem of her cheap print summer cotton dress and pulled it up, showing the big green knickers which made Joe hot to see and her left hand was clenched into a fist, pounding the air in front of her.
‘Shut up you daft noggin!’ Kettler was becoming irritated and he proceeded quickly with the remaining kittens until there was only one.
‘Your shout,’ he said to Joe. He handed it over.
Once again Joe loved the warm life in his hand. Once again he wanted to pet it and keep it. Could he keep it? The idea flooded his mind with the fullness of it. Everything stopped while he looked at the blind kitten filling his small boy’s hand. If only he could keep it. If only he could keep it.
He looked at Kettler – the mottled and sly old face, broken-veined, world-knowing and cynical – and panted at the courage required to ask.
‘No, Joe. No, Joe. Tell him no, Mr Kettler. Mr Kettler!’
‘Can I keep it?’ Joe whispered, but so low that the words did not come out. He sucked his dry throat and looked straight at Kettler and somehow managed to say, ‘Can I keep it?’
‘Now then.’
‘Can I? Please.’
Kettler shoved his tongue into his cheek so that it bulged as big as a plum. There could be profit in it. Sam was an open-handed type and he could well see a pint or two coming from it. Ellen had no time for him – they were both clear on that – but this could be a difficult one for her, which would do no harm; he would welcome a smile from her, a pleasant word.
‘Oh, now then. I don’t know. What’ll your Mammy and Daddy say?’
Joe looked miserable. How could he know? If only he could stop this panting in his chest.
‘They’ll maybe say they can’t be doing with a kitten. Not everybody likes kittens. They may be mad at poor old Kettler for being soft-hearted.’