Late Night on Watling Street

by Bill Naughton

  “But Maggie—”

  “Out—” she said. “You might have taken her in, but you’re not taking me in.”

  “I’m going,” I said.

  “Then get gone,” she said.

  She opened the door.

  “Maggie,” I said, “it’s pourin’ down!”

  “Yes,” she said, “an’ you can get out in it.”

  “But I’ve no mac,” I said.

  “A smart fella like you doesn’t need one” she said, seeing me off the doorstep.

  “But Maggie,” I said, “I’d have sworn you liked a smart boy.”

  “I do,” said Maggie, holding the door open long enough to tell me, “but there’s one thing lets you down, mister— you’re too bloody smart!” And with that she slammed the door in my face.

  On that four-mile hoof back to town, along the cold wet streets, with the water seeping right into my patent leather shoes, and the rain taking the shape out of my barrelled jacket, I was able to weigh up her words over and over again, and realize for the first time in my life, how being right smart can not only get you in—but can also get you flung out.

  Away from Home

  Nine Irish acres of Mayo* soil, stony and scattered—that was little enough on which to feed our family of hungry youngsters, so that every year at harvest time my father went across to England to hire himself out to farmers, leaving my mother and us children, with the help of a neighbourly hand, to bring in our own sparse enough crops.

  At fifteen when I was big and strong, and could handle the scythe well, I asked could I go across with him, but he shook his head against the thought: “The land, please God, will one day be yours,” he told me, “so don’t be leaving it, for fear your heart would be unsettled by strange places, or your mind distracted by foolish talk.”

  In the wet harvest weeks of that same year he was forced to seek work in a town. He got a job in Birmingham, and now that I could take care of our own place, he stuck to it during the winter months. He worked in a special part of the factory where batteries were made, and he often joked that the name for it was the “Dead House”. He told how every worker was taken great care of, being given two full pints of milk every day. The wages were high, and over the years he saved enough to pay the passage to America of my young brother Michael and my three sisters. “Work hard and live steady,” he invoked each one of them “and send back home what money ye can spare—that the house that gave ye birth never fall to the stranger’s name, or the soil of your own blood be ploughed by the intruder’s hand.” Every Christmas then, my father, God rest his soul, came home for ten days, wearing a decent serge suit and tan boots, with the silver watchchain across his lean stomach.

  Then one November day in Birmingham he became sick, and heedless of doctor’s orders he hastened home to Cloonabeg. Eleven days in bed at home with us and then he died. “That’s the peaceful death, agraw,” sighed old Bid Moore when she came in to lay him out, “departing in the selfsame bed in which your mother bore you, fifty-three years ago.”

  I was twenty-six at the time, lean and tall, and I had the serious ways that often fall to the eldest child. Left at home now were my mother and sister Una. Una was twenty-one, a frail and pretty girl, spending most of her time dressing a doll and talking and singing away to herself the livelong day. She was what we Irish call “innocent”—and so everyone gave her the respect and affection that is due to the pure of heart, who, it is said, can see that to which we others are blind.

  The matchmakers of the village—my uncle Pat and Kate Clancy—had an eye on me. They knew every single man and woman for miles around, and nothing the pair of them liked better than thinking up matches between this one and that; and, to give them their due, they were very skilled at it. A young woman called Delia Dunleavy was home on a visit after some years in service over in America, and I only got the wind of things when my uncle brought the two of us together after late Mass one Sunday. She was a goodlooking woman, and the match was made—she would bring two hundred pounds into our house—and her people came over and drank whisky with us, though Delia and myself kept well out of each other’s way.

  She had a fine pair of arms in those days, and she was a great one for going round the house with her sleeves up, singing away over every job. She and my mother got along fine, and that was a blessing. Two sons and a daughter were born to us, the Lord be thanked, in the first five years of married life. But there were two very bad harvests, our fine cow died, the mare lamed herself crossing a ditch and lost her foal, so when June came round I saw there was nothing for it, but pack my father’s bag and go over to England the way he had done before me. Delia herself drove me to the station in the ass-cart, and with quivering lip and full eye she saw me off.

  The weather was good, work plentiful, and I earned well, so that every Saturday afternoon I could go to the Post Office and send money home. At the end of September, though, I was greatly relieved in heart to be at Liverpool, standing at the dock and facing westwards to home, for the loneliness had been sore within me those weeks.

  I had a few hours to spare before the boat sailed, and I was sitting there watching everything going on around, when who should I see but a man called Tigue from the next village to us at home. Soon the pair of us were standing together at the bar in a place called O’Connors’ free house.

  “Arra, why go back to the ridges at this time of the year?” he asked me over a pint of stout. “I’ll get you a job alongside me at the docks, and you can go home at Christmastime, your two pockets loaded.”

  Such a thought was very far from my mind, until after we had drunk a few pints. Then the idea somehow glowed in my head—I remember it well—and Liverpool seemed a wonderful place to stay compared with the outlandish cottage in Cloonabeg, with only women and children around, and no man to have a word with. So I stayed.

  I got in by luck at the lodging house of Mrs Brannon in Scotland Road. The district was said to have a low reputation, but that house was more respectable then a bishop’s palace. She saw that every lodger went to Mass, that he joined the Knights of Columbus, and that he sent money home to Ireland. Amongst the half-dozen or so lodgers Mrs Brannon was known as the “Mother Superior” on account of her strictness and propriety. I liked it that way, for in Cloonabeg we are reared with a distaste for the coarse word or gesture. For though we are said to be hardy people we are not ones for roughing it like townie Irishmen and that sort.

  There was a young woman called Marie, who waited table on us. She had come, I heard, as a child refugee from Belgium in 1915, and had stayed on with Mrs Brannon after, though she had people of her own in Brussels. She was a pious woman and a hard worker, and though I noticed her pleasant face, yet I never spoke to her alone or looked closely at her, for I had been brought up the way not to look lightly on that which is not mine.

  One day down at the docks I had the misfortune to slip from a gangplank with a sack of flour, and though I was not hurt badly, yet I had to go to bed and rest. I was taken care of well, Marie bringing in my meals on a tray; and though I was at first ashamed for her to see me in bed, yet I soon got used to it. She came into me one Friday afternoon —I remember that well too—with some tea and hot cakes. Her face was sweet and fresh, and she was wearing a white blouse. I kept silent until she would have the tray set, and I was about to speak to her when she turned suddenly. She put one hand on my hair, and the other round my neck, and on my mouth she pressed a good hard kiss. And then went out of the room without a word. Suffused with shame at the feelings in me I felt the sweat pour out, and I had to lie back on the pillow and try to say my prayers. The tea was cold when I tasted it.

  Next day I was up, and back to work on Monday. But the thought of the kiss never left me. I grew cranky, for it was like sickness. Then one Sunday morning I found myself coming out from Mass beside her. “Isn’t it today you take the afternoon off?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Will you come over to Wallasey with me?” I said.<
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  “’T will be a breath of air for you.” “I’d like it very much,” she said.

  “I’ll see you down by the ferry at three,” I said. Then suddenly I added: “I’m sorry to be talking so boldy to you, Marie.”

  To be going out with Marie that way, walking together along the seafront, made me feel like a lad instead of a man of thirty. But I was a man, and I had the needs of one and not those of a lad. I stayed on at Mrs Brannon’s over the Christmas, without ever a thought of home, though I sent the weekly two or three pounds, for I rarely drank. In April Marie told me of the way things were with her. I had feared it, though it came as a shock when I knew. I was greatly troubled, but Marie was not the least so.

  “We’ll take comfortable rooms,” she said, “and furnish them—for I have money saved. And we’ll be able to live simply, and you can still send something to Ireland.”

  “But what of Mrs Brannon?” I asked. “What will she say? And the Belgian priest—Father Gosselet?”

  Marie gave a shrug of the shoulder: “Things are what they are,” she said.

  And that was how it began. Marie found rooms in a decent house at the top of Islington, and we settled in.

  To me it seemed the strangest step a man could take, but Marie urged me along. I thought that I’d be ashamed to face the light of day again, but I got used to it all. I never saw anything so bright and spotless as the home she made. And better meals no man ever had, except she was not free enough with the potatoes for my taste. And in September our son was born.

  Sean grew to be a treasure and comfort to me from the first months. He brought me up, I always felt, into fatherhood. In Ireland the peasant child seems wholly of the mother, and the father seldom gets beyond a feeling of his children being a responsibility, a natural one, all part, like himself, of an ancient tradition. But over the hours with Sean the father in me was brought out, and going through the games and songs of my own childhood it seemed I passed it on to him, and became a new man myself. A man grows used to a woman, but never to a child in that same way, for the woman changes but little, whilst the child changes from day to day, and so is ever new and interesting. So when the time came for us to part it was Sean was the wrench and not Marie.

  An uncle of hers came over and pleaded for her to go back with him. She had not heeded to relatives before, but now, after reaching thirty, she felt somehow insecure. And when she asked me, I said that perhaps she ought to. Sean was five years old at the time, and she took him with her.

  I kept the flat, preferring to be alone there in the evenings and cook my own meal rather than be in strange lodgings. The nights were long, very long, but I got used to them. I used to imagine Sean in the strange country, and often I’d try to think of any little toy he would like. Marie wrote seldom, for though at first she was unhappy she soon settled down, and after a year she wrote to say she was married. Then her letters stopped, but I continued to send small presents to Sean. I imagined him growing, and tried to keep pace with him in my imagination. Every week the money and letter went home to Ireland, but I had no thought of going back.

  It was during the big dock strike that I decided to visit Marie and Sean. If I spend only an hour with him, I thought, it will make me right. So I packed my bag and went off as soon as I could. It was a bright morning when I arrived at the city of Brussels. I had a piece of paper with the address written on, and I showed it to people who told me the way. It was in a district called Molenbeek they lived.

  A small clean house it was. I stood at the door, and before knocking I listened to the sound of voices. After I knocked the door opened and there before me was Marie. We looked blankly at each other for a minute. She was stouter, and looked well, but very different. And when she spoke it was in a language I couldn’t understand. I put out my hand to her.

  “’Marie,” I said, “I’m glad to see you. But I called just to see Sean for an hour—if you’d let me.”

  “Sean…?” she said, her face white.

  Then I heard a voice, and a small plump man came to the door. Marie spoke to him. I heard the word “Sean”. Then he grabbed my hand and pulled me into the house. He sat me on a chair, hurried to a cupboard and brought out a bottle and glasses. A little girl came into the room and clung to Marie, watching me at the same time. Marie went out for a moment and I could smell coffee.

  “Is Sean at school?” I asked the husband.

  He went running for Marie. And he spoke to her in an agitated way, then spoke to me, but I couldn’t understand.

  “What is it, Marie?” I asked. “Where’s Sean?”

  She came up to my chair: “He’s dead. He died three years ago.”

  I felt a great deal being taken from me at that moment, and I hadn’t the power to speak.

  “He was ill for only a short time,” said Marie. “He died, from meningitis. I wanted to tell you, but when the toys kept coming I didn’t know how.”

  I could see the husband watching me, and suddenly he came over and put his arms round my shoulders and began to talk fast, and then he burst into tears. And it was he who tried hard to hold me back when I left the house a minute later.

  I didn’t need to think of what to do next, for my instinct told me that the only thing was to go back to Cloonabeg, back to the stony Mayo soil. And I went. I sent no word, so that I had the long soothing walk across the fields from the station in the late evening. And the first to see me was Una.

  “Dominic’s here!” she called into the house, “Dominic’s home!” And up she came to meet me as though I had been gone only that morning. Then I saw Delia standing wide-eyed at the door. She wiped her hands on the pinafore and came over to me: “My heart rejoices to see you,” she said with dignity, and she gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and wrung my hand. Then out hobbled my mother: “So you’re home at last, asthore,” she chuckled, and hugged me in her two thin arms. And then round the door I saw the three tall figures grouped sheepishly. “Arra, bad cess to the three of you,” called my mother, “will you go and welcome your father home to Ireland!”

  Work brought life to me. In the plough and the hoe, the spade and fork, I found myself again. And the land, too, slowly recovered from the long neglect—for no woman can handle the earth. And so I settled there. And the only way I was different from the next man was in the habit I got of going for a quiet stroll alone at the dusk or every day. I’d walk alone to the little cairn at the top of the old hill, where the rough heap of stones marks the bygone graves of infants of the poor. In past years the little souls would be buried there at night. And I’d stand there and remember Sean.

  And strange enough I found over the years that the grief of heart slowly changed itself to a comfort. I saw my children, that had lived, grow up and be lost to me, meaning little more to a father than would the stranger met along the road—whilst the child Sean stayed always with me, the memory of his bright laughter and talk nourishing my lonely ageing soul as he himself had long ago.

  The Tell-tale Clock

  Alf Treddle was a bantam-weight fellow of twenty-four, from Bury, Lanes (noted for cowheel and black puddings), and he was courting strong with Kitty Dean, a well-made girl of nineteen, who lived in a roadside cottage just outside Dunstable.

  The two places being about a hundred and fifty miles apart made it that the lovers couldn’t see each other as often as they wanted, but for all that they didn’t do too badly. Alf was a lorry driver, doing trunk work at nights— that is, he drove from Bury to London one night, slept during the day whilst his load was delivered, and a new one loaded up, and drove back to Bury the next night. This “long distance” courting, as it was called, was fairly common amongst men in Alf’s job, and also amongst girls like Kitty, who lived outside a town and on one of the main trunk roads. Some drivers liked to have a girl at either end of the run, but not Alf. He just stuck to Kitty. And he managed to see her three evenings a week for a proper courting bout, and three mornings for a wave or perhaps a hug. The mornings would be around five
o’clock, when Alf would slow down as he approached Kitty’s home and honk out a little low love note on his driving-horn. Most times she would come to the upstairs window in her nightdress, open it, and wave, and fling out kisses. They didn’t like to draw anyone’s attention at that early hour, so they did their lovemaking from a distance and by mime. Alf would pretend hugging and kissing and so on, and they would smile a great deal at each other. On some mornings, especially in summer, Kitty would already be waiting for him, and she would run out and meet him, and they would have a few minutes in his cab.

  But in the evenings Alf would pick her up and take her for a short run up the road. There was a handy parking spot, and then the lovers would go for their favourite stroll through a wood. It was cheap courting, and it suited Alf, because he was saving up to get married. He was an old-fashioned chap in many ways and he liked to do things right. Sometimes when they were doing their courting on the old fallen elm tree, or in Alf’s cab when it was raining, Kitty had a way of coming over hot-blooded, and after a bit, Alf would say in husky though firm voice: “Come on, Kitty love, let’s get a move on before we do summat we’d be sorry for.” Reluctantly Kitty would let herself be led off, and Alf would start talking about marriage, to make up for things. Finally, when he had seen her back home, after their two hours together, he would hurry back to his cab, and drive steadily through the night, making up for lost time by having only a quick cup of tea in place of a meal.

  One evening Kitty was waiting when Alf drove up and greeted her with a doleful smile.

  “What’s up, Chick?” she asked.

  “It’s all up,” groaned Alf. “They’ve planted a tell-tale clock on every wagon.”

  “What the heck’s a tell-tale clock?” asked Kitty.

  “This—” Alf pointed a thumb over his head. “Inside that clock there’s a wax strip that covers every minute of the day and night. It records every time your wheels stopped and for how long. It’s all there for the transport boss to read when he takes the strip out. It’ll put the kybosh on our courting.”