Out Of The Winter Gardens

by David Rees

  David Rees lives in Exeter and until recently taught at Exeter University. He is now a freelance writer. He has written several novels, most of them about young people, including In The Tent and best-selling The Milkman’s On His Way, both of which have a gay teenager as the central character. In 1978 his novel The Exeter Blitz was awarded the Carnegie Medal, and in 1980 he was given The Other Award for his historical novel, The Green Bough of Liberty. In 1982 and 1983 he lived in San Francisco, and was Visiting Professor at San José State University; the diary he kept of his California life, A Better Class of Blond, is to be published by the Olive Press in 1985.

  Out of the Winter Gardens

  David Rees

  Olive Press

  First published in Great Britain in 1984 by

  The Olive Press, 30 Pembroke Road, London, E17

  © 1984 The Olive Press

  Text and cover design by David Williams

  Cover photograph by Ian David Baker

  Photoset by A.K.M. Associates (U.K.) Ltd.,

  Ajmal House, Hayes Road, Southall, Greater London.

  Printed in Great Britain by Photobooks (Bristol) Limited

  ISBN 0-946889-03-1

  Trade distribution in Scotland, North of England,

  Midlands, North Wales and Ireland by

  Scottish and Northern Book Distribution,

  4th floor, 18 Granby Row, Manchester 1 (061-228 3903)

  and 48a, Hamilton Place, Edinburgh 3 (031-225 4950)

  Trade distribution in South and

  South West of England and South Wales by

  GMP Publishers Limited, PO Box 247,

  London N15 (01-800 5861)

  For Marian Robinson

  To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

  R.L. Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque

  Author’s Note

  Alresford is a real place, but I have taken a few liberties with its geography and its history for the purposes of this story. The River Itchen is not so close to the railway line as I have suggested, and the fulling mill is not a derelict ruin, but a rather beautiful private house. The Mid-Hants Railway—the “Watercress Line”— was closed to passenger traffic in 1973, but the stretch between Medstead and Four Marks, Ropley, and Alresford has been re-opened in recent years as a tourist attraction.

  The Winter Gardens in Bournemouth is a real concert hall, but the orchestra in this story is not meant to bear any resemblance to any actual orchestra, nor is the harpist, Adrian, a portrait of a real person, living or dead.

  Table of Contents

  1. Some kind of ceremony

  2. The Lambeth Walk

  3. Fights and friendships

  4. Fear of flying

  5. Amsterdam

  6. A family reunion

  7. Embracing the world

  1. Some kind of ceremony

  In the school holidays I could never sleep through the noise of the eight o’clock train leaving Alresford Station. The first slow puffs of smoke—yes, it was a steam train, on an old line that had been re-opened— were accompanied by tremendous wheezings like a gigantic bellows gasping for air, and they always interrupted my dreams. Often I would lazily lift a corner of the curtain and catch a glimpse of thin smoke scribbled like words over the town and the green hills beyond. The engine was a big toy engine with a tall chimney-stack, and it pulled two ancient coaches, relics of the London and South-Western Railway Company. I used to watch it slowly straining along the line, until it was swallowed in the cutting, smoke billowing out in a ribbon. There its noise changed, and as it speeded up a little, it sounded like some underground animal chittering and burrowing its way through the earth. The white ribbon still fluffed out, and as the train was invisible the fields looked as if they were on fire. It was too far off to see when it came out of the other end of the cutting, but I could still hear it, snorting and sniffling down the track to Itchen Abbas and Winchester.

  My mother and I shared a windy house called Tralee, high up on a hill, with my Aunt Bridie and my cousin Nic. My Uncle John was dead and my father left home when I was so young that I had almost no memory of him. I don’t know why he left: Mum just got so embarrassed when I asked questions about it that I stopped asking.

  Nic, an absent-minded and unpunctual boy, at the age of twelve—I’m four years older than he is—made an arrangement with the engine-driver that the eight o’clock train would not leave Alresford during term-time until he was safely on it. (We both went to the same school in Winchester.) How he managed to do this we were never quite sure, but he had a mania for railways and perhaps the engine-driver liked him for his enthusiasm. I say the engine-driver, for there was only one, Mr Bowles, a local Alresford man whom my aunt knew slightly. And there was only one train: when it had discharged Nic and me and the other passengers at Winchester, it waited while Mr Bowles had his breakfast, then it trundled back through Itchen Abbas and Alresford to Ropley, Medstead and Four Marks, and Alton. At Alton Mr Bowles had his elevenses; the train ate coal and drank some water, then they both travelled down to Winchester, just in time for lunch. And so on, and so on, all day. My cousin’s arrangement worked very well until school broke up for Easter. He forgot to tell Mr Bowles, and on the first day of the holidays (it was, unluckily, April Fool’s Day) the eight o’clock train sat in Alresford Station, spluttering and chortling for twenty minutes. Eventually Mr Bowles concluded that Nic and I must be ill—though on previous occasions of sickness my aunt had always run down to tell him—and set off, after the commuters had grumbled to him that they would be late for work. One of them, Colonel Ramsbottom, an important personage on the Winchester City Council, complained to the authorities, and the result of this was the eight o’clock train left, next term, on the dot.

  During the summer holidays Nic could spend all the time he wanted—except when he was required to eat or wash up the dishes, or when it was raining—indulging in his passion for railways. I was getting somewhat old for this kind of thing, but I have to admit that I, too, liked railways, and, even at sixteen, I was willing to accompany him on his expeditions, if I had nothing better to occupy myself with. Alresford Station had enormous sidings, all connected up by an elaborate system of points to the main track, and on the rails— rust-stained, with weeds growing between the sleepers —were dozens of old goods trucks. Some of these had been used to carry produce, some to transport cattle, and two were foreign: Roma Termini was painted in faded white on one, and on the other, Conseil Supérieur de Chemins de Fer. How railway wagons from Italy and France had ended up at sleepy old Alresford was a mystery we never fathomed.

  Though Mr Bowles was the only engine-driver, there were in fact two engines. The second of these usually spent its days in the sidings at Alresford doing nothing, but sometimes it would have its fire lit, and it would burble quietly to itself while it waited for Mr Bowles. After he had had his elevenses at Alton there was usually a good hour and a quarter before he was due to leave on his lunch-time run, so, if the second engine was smoking away, he would come down specially to give it a little practice, presumably to see if it was still in working order. (It was even older than the first engine.) This practice involved shunting the trucks about, and required some highly elaborate manoeuvres on Mr Bowles’s part, backing the engine up and down the lines and crossing it over the spider’s web of points. The trucks were not always coupled together, and, when this was the case, one tap of the engine cannoned the first truck into the second, which then knocked the third, and so on, down the line, until they were all on the move. This produced a very satisfying clonk-clonk-clonk-clonk noise, and the sight was a bit like an extremely long worm that had got something into its digestive system which it didn’t approve of. The engine then snor
ted down a different track until it passed beyond the last wagon; it would then go into reverse and bang all the trucks back again towards the station. Sometimes it uttered the strangest noises, gurgles of delight accompanied by a rapid spurting of tiny white puffs from its chimney, or long sighs as if its intestines were shuddering with convulsions, though the only visible sign of distress was a thin jet of grey smoke dribbling vertically upwards. What the point of all this was we could never find out; and Mr Bowles, a man of few words, was unhelpful: “Shunting practice,” he said. Obviously it was, but why? It always ended up with the trucks being moved to the furthest possible position from where they were to start with; if they were on the thirteenth siding, right on the edge of the embankment, they arrived at last on track number two, next to the main track, and there they waited until the next shunting practice, perhaps a week or a fortnight later.

  We usually watched these operations from the level point where the cutting sloped steeply down and started to turn itself into an embankment. There was an old shed here, black with tar and the grime of ages, in which various railway tools were kept, such as the enormous spanner-thing the plate-layer used for tightening up bolts on the rails. We would sit with our backs propped comfortably against the shed wall, watching the trucks being propelled towards us, or lie on the ground, our eyes an inch or two from the rail as the big iron wheels rolled slowly by, the sleepers giving under their weight. I often wondered what it would be like to be tied hand and foot to the track with an express train thundering nearer and nearer: would it be a clean cut or a horrible squelchy mess?

  Mr Bowles often let Nic travel with him in the cab of his engine. I went once, but I felt that I was doing something rather childish, and, besides, the cab was very dirty. There were certain sorts of dirt I had no objection to—garden earth for instance—but industrial grime like coal dust got into all the creases and lines of my hands so that when I touched anything shivers went up and down my skin. Then there was the shunting itself. Though it was a nice idea being in a powerful machine that banged a host of smaller objects out of its way, I could not see ahead of us at all, so that the moment of impact invariably took me by surprise and I lost my balance or fell against one sooty thing after another.

  When Mr Bowles asked us one day if we would like to go down to Winchester on the twelve fifteen, I declined the invitation. Aunt Bridie made some sandwiches for Nic to take with him, as the train was not due to return to Alresford till three twenty. “Why don’t you go too, Michael?” she asked. “I can easily butter some more bread.”

  “I told you, I don’t want to.”

  “Oh, leave him alone, Mum,” Nic said as he put his food in a plastic bag.

  “I wish you boys were better friends,” Aunt Bridie said, when he had gone. “I suppose you’ve had a quarrel.”

  “We never quarrel! I just don’t like going in the cab of the engine, that’s all. Why doesn’t anyone around here believe me?”

  “Well, you’ll have to amuse yourself after lunch. Nora and I are going to the shops.”

  When we had eaten I went out to find something to do, thinking I would get to the railway eventually, and watch my cousin’s triumphant return to Alresford from the vantage point of the black shed. On the other side of the track was a wide lazy stream that wound its way through flat meadows and marshy land where reeds rustled and bullrushes grew immensely tall. Willows wept into the water, their long fronds trailing in the mud, and a row of silky poplars grew on the bank. When I was Nic’s age I’d found this a good place for catching tiddlers, but now it was just pleasant to loaf around and enjoy the peace and quiet, or watch the shallows where there might be a trout, a flick of greeny-grey as it darted downstream. Higher up, near the watercress beds, a derelict old fulling mill straddled the river. Its windows were nailed over with wood, and moss and weeds grew in the roof. The thatch had rotted so badly that the top of one of the walls stood open to the sky. I spent much of my time that afternoon trying to break in, but the Itchen Conservancy had made too good a job of their boarding up. My mother had been in there once when she was a young girl; she said it was damp and very dark inside, and the sound of water racing under the mill was magnified into a cascade that roared like Niagara. I tried at last to climb on to the roof, thinking I might get down the chimney, which was very wide and old-fashioned, but nearly six feet tall though I was and standing on a large water-butt, I was just too short to reach the top of the wall. I gave up, and made my way back to the railway, relieving the irritation of my failure by skimming stones over the stream.

  I crossed the track and settled myself down against the shed wall. I was just wondering whether to be really infantile and pick a blade of grass, the sort you cup into your hands and blow on through your thumbs to produce an exceptionally hideous shriek, when I saw someone walking along by the stream, a kid about the same age as me, wearing a dark raincoat and Wellington boots. I took little notice of him until he came right up on to the railway line. He didn’t come by the obvious route past me, where it was flat and there was an outline of a path, but he poked himself through the wire fence about ten yards off and clambered up the embankment. He looked at me and I looked at him; he glanced back the way he’d come as if someone was following him, and up the line at the station: then he bent down, picked up a large stone, put it on the rail, and ran off down the other side of the embankment into the bushes.

  I sat still for some moments, astonished. My first thought was that it was such a pointless thing to do. Then I felt indignant: he obviously imagined I was of so little account that it didn’t matter that I’d seen him. It was only then that I thought of the train. My cousin was on that train; supposing it was derailed! I got to my feet, walked down the line, and picked up the stone. It was really big—heavy and jagged. I threw it down the embankment in the direction the boy had gone. It had just left my hand when I saw his face peering out of a clump of broom. The stone went wide of him, and landed with a splosh in some mud, but he probably thought I had thrown it at him deliberately. I tried to affect a great deal of nonchalance and strolled away, hands in pockets, singing “Oh, Mister Porter, what shall I do?” then sat down again, keeping a wary eye on the bushes. All was still.

  I was just beginning to think he had gone when there was a sudden violent movement in the undergrowth, and I tensed, fearing a stone might come flying at me. He climbed up the embankment, looked at me again, and placed on the line—yes, it was!—the very same stone. Then, as before, he ran back down into the broom bushes. He’s a stark staring loony, I told myself. The three twenty would soon be here; any minute now it would be leaving Itchen Abbas. There was only one thing to do. I sauntered back, singing the same words, picked up the stone, turned, and gently dropped it down the other side of the embankment. This time he started up the slope before I had moved off, so I went at a quicker pace than before, though nothing so fast that it could be called a run. It’s like being part of some kind of ceremony, I thought.

  “Oi! Oi, you!”

  I stopped. “What do you want?”

  He was standing in the middle of the track. “What’s your name?”

  “Maurice,” I said, after some moments wondering if I should reply.

  He came towards me until he was quite close. I could see his face properly now and I wasn’t at all reassured. It was a fat, red, ugly face with mean, brown eyes. He looked rough as well as mad. He hadn’t a shirt on under his raincoat, just a vest, grimy at the neck. “Maurice what?”

  “Maurice Bartlett.” (This was a real name; Maurice Bartlett was someone I’d met when we were on holiday in Scotland last summer.)

  He was silent, staring. Nothing he could sneer about in that name; it wasn’t funny or cissy, and it didn’t rhyme with anything soppy.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Mind your own business.”

  “You’re a liar.”

  “What?”

  “You calling me a liar?” I did not answer. “I said are you calli
ng me a liar?”

  “No.”

  “Well then.”

  This wasn’t getting us very far, I thought. At least he hadn’t hit me: he was strong and well-built. I started to walk away.

  “Oi! How old are you?”

  “Sixteen,” I said, wearily.

  “You’re a bleeding liar. You ain’t sixteen.”

  “How old am I then?”

  “Four.”

  He slithered down the embankment, looking for the stone. It had rolled into a dense patch of brushwood, and he had some difficulty finding it; the ground was wet and slimy too, but this did not deter him. I watched him wrestle with prickly hawthorns and blackberries, and once he skidded on the mud and nearly fell over. What was so special about this stone that he had to retrieve it, when there were a dozen others equally large that would serve his purpose?

  He emerged from the bushes, the front of his raincoat ripped, chalky mud on his hands. He held the stone under one arm. He was at a disadvantage down there, I thought; the embankment was steeper and less easy to climb on that side: when he neared the top I could push him back, no problem. I tried to make up my mind whether to do this or not, as he puffed and panted, clutching tussocks of grass and unsafe twigs. Or I could pick up handfuls of grit from the railway line and pelt him with them. But I did neither.

  “Oi, give us some help, can’t you?”

  I laughed. “I’d be an accessory after the fact,” I said. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you being rude? ’Cos if you are . . He clenched his free hand in what he presumably felt was a menacing gesture, but down there he merely looked comic and insignificant, and I laughed again. “You’ll get a bunch of fives in a minute, mate,” he said.