by Melvyn Bragg
By the time they got to Longtown the pubs were open and Sam went into three of them. Speed was not allowed in and stood outside, on his guard. There were always tramps passing through was the gist of it. Maybe one or two that morning? A fumbled, more willing than convincing consensus. But maybe.
Sam brought Speed a packet of crisps and a bottle of dandelion and burdock out of the last pub.
They stood at the central crossroads of the ill-reputed brawling Border town, outside the Graham Arms Hotel, scanning the broad streets. Sam checked the timetable. There was a bus up to Gretna Green in twenty minutes. If Jackie was sticking to the main roads -and Sam suspected he would in the early days - then even by hard walking he could not have got much further.
They found the fish and chip shop and stoked up.
On the road to Gretna Green the darkness began to gather. ‘You take that side, I’ll take this,’ Sam said to the boy, who then glued his face to the window. This time they had to travel downstairs and Speed understood why.
When he saw the stone ‘Welcome to Scotland’, the boy cheered. He was still nursing the bottle of dandelion and burdock.
Gretna Green was dark and empty. This time Sam ignored the pubs and searched out the police station.
Speed stood in a state of full readiness as Sam, after no little persistence, extracted from the duty desk that there were two or three tramps in the area all heading north. The young policeman on the duty desk had no further details beyond their being tramps. He had no idea where they might be sleeping. There was one in a cell.
Speed slid along with them and looked blankly at the heap of multi-coated, ragged, greasy hair tangled, bearded, sack-strewn stinking man. It was not his father. But, Sam thought and feared that the boy thought, he could have been.
It was too late and too dark to do more. They caught the next bus back to Carlisle and by a whisker the late Saturday-night bus back to Wigton. Speed slumped asleep on Sam’s shoulder. Sam put his arm around the boy to keep him steady.
He got up at five on the Sunday morning and went down to Grace’s for his bike. The rain was merely a drizzle and he had an old but effective cycling cape which he had bought before the war. Ellen had made up sandwiches and a flask that fitted in his saddlebag.
He was well into Scotland by mid-morning and now and then people coming out of church tried to be helpful. In the early afternoon he caught up with him. Jackie was sat leaning against a gate and when Sam slewed across the road to him, he said, ‘You old bugger. I knew it would be you.’
Sam squatted down beside him and brought out the sandwiches. He had asked Ellen to cater for two. Jackie stuffed his face.
‘I’ll miss that feed,’ he said. ‘Three times a day. Top calibre.’
‘You could go back.’
‘No, Sam.’ He accepted the cigarette. They lit up. ‘They’d marked me down for the duration, see. I heard a doctor. “He’s here for the duration.” Well, Sam,’ he sucked in so hard that his cheeks hollowed, ‘that’s when I had to get out. See my drift?’
‘They told me they thought you were on the mend.’
‘That’s what they tell you, Sam. They tell that to every poor bugger.’
‘What about Annie?’
Jackie paused. When he spoke the almost staccato nervousness was absent. The pitch of his voice dropped.
‘Isn’t she great, eh, Sam? Isn’t she?’ He stopped, but it was not a pause. He had no more words.
‘I’ll tell her you said that.’
Jackie nodded and stubbed out the cigarette, put it behind his ear. ‘People can be decent,’ he said. ‘A cup of water, a bit of bread. I got a fresh scone this morning.’
Sam smiled at Jackie’s perkiness. He had come to draw the war-shot man back into a world still in touch with his old life. Yet Jackie’s new life had an attraction and for a few moments Sam could sense the pull of it. He sensed that it might be Jackie’s only way to live a life he could respect himself for. Yet for all that he had to try to prise him out of it.
It’ll be rough, Jackie.’
‘You talk about rough after what we went through with them Japs?’
‘We had to do that. That was a war.’
'I can’t be in that spot for the duration, Sam. Anyway, the Japs was coming into the ward at night.’
‘They can help you in there.’
‘You have to keep moving, Sam. That was it: keep moving or the Japs’ll have you for breakfast. Tojo’s way. The little buggers are still after me, Sam.’ He grinned, suddenly reassuring Sam. ‘Daft, isn’t it? That’s why they locked us up.’
‘Where you headed?’
‘Loch Lomond,’ said Jackie, promptly. ‘I’ve always fancied Loch Lomond. “You take the high road and I’ll take the low road.” Loch Lomond. I’ll be all right when I get myself there. I can make do on very little, Sam. Bred to it.’ And again, there was the utterly sane, almost boyish grin. He could only be in his early thirties, Sam thought.
‘The boys?’ Sam felt it was a dirty trick but it came out all the same.
Jackie simply shook his head. But the question prompted him to retrieve the butt from behind his ear and lean over for a light.
‘What do I say to Annie?’
‘Tell her. Tell her I’ll manage, Sam. And tell her I’ll get word to her, when I can.’
‘You won’t come back with me?’
‘You know the answer to that, Sam.’ He drew deeply on the stub.
Sam saw Jackie and thousands like him, squatted against a tree or a rock in their sweat-starched uniforms, swept up in the flood of war, walking into lead and fire, kill or be killed, almighty confusion about cause and purpose reduced to the single act of smoking a cigarette before the next order, which could be the last order. In that moment, he was amazed not that Jackie was doing this but that many more of those thousands were not with him, walking without order, walking neither into fire nor lead, but going back beyond civilised war to the scavenging of times past.
They talked for a while longer and then Jackie declared that he would be on his way. Sam gave him the rest of the sandwiches and the cigarettes and the two pounds he had brought for an emergency. Jackie accepted it all with uncluttered gratitude.
For a few minutes, Sam watched the slight figure walk away. Rather jaunty, a pack over his right shoulder, the coat still respectable enough, almost like a normal man it seemed to Sam, out for a stroll in the country on this cheerless late winter day, almost free.
Jackie did not look back.
Sam cycled home at a steady pace, dying for a cigarette, already dreading the meetings with Annie and Speed.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Soon after Alistair had been sent to Borstal, Speed, at Joe’s urging, went down to Greenacres. A few days earlier Joe and his parents had taken advantage of a fine dry spring evening to go and look over the property.
The first dozen houses were well begun, including theirs. Joe had looked at the piles of sand, the scaffolding and the barrows lying about and saw it as a great playground. Speed had to be introduced to this. He had exaggerated its attractions quite a lot. Speed was bored in minutes. They wandered across the empty distant fields on which people of Wigton would be resettled, taking the great majority out of the bounds of the town in which its inhabitants had been secure for centuries. When they came to the railway line they encountered a gang from Western Bank. They had a big mongrel dog, which was unwearyingly chasing sticks.
At first Joe feared there might be a fight, partly because of Speed’s moods these days. His daddy had muttered something about Speed going through the mill but Joe had not really understood. He did appreciate Speed’s temper, though. But the moment passed and they set about conquering a particularly big and difficult beech tree. Joe was soon stuck about a third the way up. By then, Speed was making for the crow’s nest.
One of the boys had stayed on the ground and threw sticks for the dog, threw one on to the lines even though he could see the train coming around the corner u
nder the little bridge. He yelled, which alerted the other boys but not the dog, which dashed alongside the track and went for its stick, saw the train on him and sank flat, snaked out into a stretch. The boys shouted at the driver and he waved back. He had not seen the dog. When the train had gone past, the dog stood up, bit on to the stick and trotted back with it.
‘I could do that,’ Speed said, and saw that they doubted him.
One of the boys climbed up on to the bridge on the lookout for a train. Joe felt electric with fear and excitement because - unlike the others who doubted - he knew that Speed would do this.
When, finally, the boy signalled that a train was on its way, Speed went to the spot he had chosen, nearer the bridge than the dog had been so that there would be no chance of the driver spotting him and stopping the train.
Joe trailed behind him. One of the gang held the dog by the collar. The others were ready to run.
When the noise was loud and the train certain, Speed slid himself between the rails and stretched like the dog, put his arms flat out, pressed his face down between two sleepers. When the train came near and nearer and then went over him, Joe was so bottled up with his frenzy of alarm and thrill that he swayed on his feet, his stomach churning to the beat from the track, stared at the big wheels piston forward, squinted to see Speed and tensed his thighs hard. The steam flowed back like a heroic plume, the wheels outcharioted those vehicles of war, the carriages drew by in superior splendour and there were kindly passengers who waved at the little boy so intently watching the train go by.
Speed waited, to be sure, and then he got up and walked back towards them, hands hanging by his side, white fists fiercely clenched.
‘See?’ he said, and walked on and when Joe joined him - walking proudly behind him, squire to the knight - he knew absolutely that Speed might still be a sort of friend to him and would always be a hero, but it would never be the same. Something else had happened, something unmistakable. He knew and felt but could not explain it. Speed had passed over into legend.
There were times when Ellen felt an all but unendurable revulsion in cleaning the common lavatory in their yard and this was one of them. She had volunteered for the job soon after their arrival, volunteered without telling anyone but the message was soon out and the others left her to it.
One reason for doing it in the first weeks after they had moved in was to assuage the guilt that came from her deep dislike of the rundown, poverty-struck, dead end little yard. Other people had to put up with it, what was so special about her?, and at least it was a house, one-up, one-down never mind, it was their house, many couples were still in rooms or with their family, Sam was pleased enough, Joe never complained, it must be a terrible sort of snobbery on her part, lady of the manor after living in Grace’s mansion, a sort of showing-off, the lavatory would be the punishment.
By now, after several months, she longed for somebody else to take a turn, just now and then would do, to untie her from the daily obligation, the bracing of the stomach muscles, the attempt to minimise breathing, the bad thoughts provoked by the bad smells and sights and the whole doing of it, just the doing of it. Her life. There she was, Ellen Richardson, cleaning up other people’s sh—. She could not bear the word.
And this was one of the worst days. The heavy rain had driven in under the door, somebody had left the paper on the floor and it was sodden, Kettler had too obviously been … Ellen wanted to be sick and stepped outside to breathe the less ripe air in the well of the claustrophobic yard. Bella at the window, a tender tearful wave, she looked ghostly now. Kettler’s broken window still stuffed with brown paper after weeks. Her own home, in truth, a woeful little thing, bare accommodation. The sooner the new house in Greenacres was built the better. She breathed as deeply as she could but the pain in her stomach did not ease. It felt as though she herself had to go.
She walked, unsteadily, across the yard to get paper for lining the seat. Another shower began and the rain was welcome: she held up her face to it for a moment or two as if seeking a sign, a help - until, conscious that it might seem a pose, she hurried on.
She bolted herself into what Kettler called the Winston Churchill. She felt better at first but something was not right. It was dragging out of her. It was thick gouts of darkest blood.
The miscarriage extended over four days. It was not difficult to hide it from Sam. She told him she was ill and he enquired no further and was solicitous. Her severe paleness and her unusual tearfulness worried him, but she would say nothing.
He had been so violently against having another child when she had suggested it, just after the war. It all went back to Burma, she thought, and Alex’s letter has confirmed that. Ellen knew, beyond any doubt, that the war marched on and on inside his skull, on many a night and in the full daylight too. So she never told him about the miscarriage. She told no one. But she remembered the date of it. She would not let that pass. And she dreamed, sometimes, about the child who never formed.
Joe ran everywhere. To school, to choir practice, even to church in his Sunday suit, to the Cubs, to Vinegar Hill, to the baths, to his piano lessons. He ran to the Show Fields, to the park, to Market Hill, to the shops, to the library, to his friends, sometimes humming, sometimes agitated, set up games after school, chasing games in and out the labyrinth of alleyways, got into fights and was caned more at school, but Miss Snaith told Ellen that she was entering him for an examination. Sam smiled at the domestic wildness of the boy and encouraged more exploits with the gloves on, while Ellen waited patiently and the boy flew like a shuttle between these two strong people, warp and woof, male and female, parents, power, fear, love, and Colin who paraded and teased him until the boy was all but maddened by it. ‘Sam’s lad.’ ‘Ellen’s boy.’ ‘What’s your hurry?’ the men would say, those who leaned against the Fountain and chronicled the town. ‘Where’s the fire?’ He ignored them all.
He ran.
PART TWO
GREENACRES: 1948
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
They had been there just five months and already it was more than half furnished. Ellen was quite pleased. Their bedroom and Joe’s were done. The third bedroom was useful for storage and earned its keep that way. The sitting room still waited for its three-piece suite but the old sofa bed and the chairs, a side table from Grace and another table and chair bought in the weekly auction in the market hall made it presentable. The kitchen was basic, there was too much lino wherever you looked, the walls were bare, the stair-carpet was a poor thing, the curtains could not disguise what they were - quickly run up stop-gaps made from cheap recycled material. But it was on its way, Ellen thought, and when Sam left for work and later Joe for school, she enjoyed the eerie sense of newness as she cleaned the big council house, which stood at the end of the first row built on the rawly excavated Greenacres. Throughout the day there was the noise of building. At night, if she listened intently, she could hear the lonely call of the trains passing by.
The house included an indoor bathroom and lavatory. In the early days Ellen, when securely alone in the house, was drawn to that room as if under the compulsion of hypnosis. She folded her arms, stood in the middle of the small room, hummed to herself and devoured its cleanliness, its purity, its blessed hygiene. Now and then, feeling foolish, she would pull the chain just for the sake of it and listen with intense pleasure to the whoosh of scentless, effortless water. The satisfaction was visceral It was silly to have any qualms at all about a move that had so conclusively ended what had become a miserable burden.
Nevertheless, she was always eager to go back into the town.
Sam had dug up the short front garden to make a lawn for the look of the thing. On the back garden he had less frivolous designs and a good two thirds were already spaded into an allotment. Ellen had to argue hard to preserve an apron of peaceful grass for the washing line against his ranks of thrusting vegetables. Poultry, to Sam’s annoyance, were not permitted. He thought of keeping a pig, just to test them.
Sam had taken a fancy to walking to the factory by way of the park and then the river, following its smooth wending through the couple of fields, looking for trout, basking for a few moments in the slow seasonal inchings of each morning change now that he had settled for the day shift, recovering some of the best of that lost young time before the war. It was a glimpse of liberty before he punched his card into the clock at the factory gate and accepted incarceration for a weekly wage.
Ellen could have biked into the town, often did, but on fine days it suited her better to walk. To gaze rather ungratefully, she would have admitted, on the large detached private homes and bungalows along the West Road, with their wooded gardens and wrought-iron gates with names, every one, not a number in sight. This for her was a dreamtime and as the river took Sam back to those flickering jewelled-framed pleasures snatched from the past, so Ellen’s houses gently buffed forbidden fantasies of the future.
Joe had a pass for the service bus for which a new stop had been instituted at the entrance to Greenacres. The bus took him to Market Hill where there might be time for a biscuit and a perfunctory look at Blackie, now lodged permanently with Grace after several unsuccessful attempts to settle her on the new estate. She was a town cat, Leonard said.