Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘I feel awful about it.’

  Ellen had ushered Joe upstairs. They stood on the landing.

  ‘Your dad and me thought of giving up our bed,’ she said.

  Joe was impatient. The Saturday evening hubbub was building up and Natasha was abandoned for the second time; he had seen the worry in her when he had been called out of the kitchen.

  ‘It’s terrible.’ Ellen’s distressed tone commanded Joe’s full attention. He looked closely at his mother. Her eyes were strained as if threatening tears. ‘Your own son comes to see you with his new wife and you can’t put them up. What sort of life is that?’

  ‘It’s fine. Honestly. Natasha doesn’t mind.’

  ‘How could we put you in the two single rooms?’

  ‘You couldn’t. We understand.’

  ‘But, Joe,’ she said and reached out to touch his arm as if pleading with him, a gesture he had never before encountered, a gesture which moved him to stillness, to hope it would pass, ‘we ought to be able to put up you and your wife and maybe all four of us spend the evening together.’

  ‘You will. We will. We’re here for a few days.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  His eagerness to assuage her pain was the reassurance she had sought.

  ‘Of course we will.’

  ‘There’s a lot to catch up on,’ he said.

  ‘There is. I’ll follow you down. You go back to Natasha.’

  ‘She’s been looking forward to this.’

  ‘Yes. You go to her now. You go.’

  And still obedient to the commands of childhood, he went down the stairs. Ellen took a few deep breaths. In the bathroom she splashed water on her face. In the mirror she told herself not to be a fool. In her heart she could not stop the burn – of shame? Of loss? It was too hard to distinguish.

  Joe and Natasha set off soon afterwards, another journey, this time by car, driven by Joe’s Uncle Leonard, now retired, a wise man who saw they needed some peace and saw that they had it as he motored with exemplary caution out of the town, south, and into the hills, to the pitch-black village of Caldbeck in which they had rented a terraced cottage for the week. Joe’s polite invitation to stay for a cup of tea was as politely refused and Leonard drove back even more slowly, wanting to draw every nuance possible from their meeting. She was, he thought, difficult to weigh up.

  Though Joe lit the fire, already laid, and brought down a side light from the bedroom to replace the glare of the central bulb, though stores had been brought up earlier in the day from Wigton and half a dozen bottles of beer were part of the reception committee, though the radio played Chopin and the room was a haven, Natasha felt depressed. ‘I may have caught a cold,’ she said, ‘what do you say? Nursing? I may be nursing a cold.’

  She slept badly and was troubled by dreams and felt out of the reach of Joseph. She tried to find her bearings, with a husband becoming strange to her in this place.

  Natasha awoke to the sounds of ducks. She stretched out her hands; his side of the bed was already cold. She felt heavy-limbed but the bustle of sounds coming up the stairs levered her out of bed. She parted the curtains and saw, across the little path which ran by a fast stream, the village duck pond and two small children dressed, she assumed, for church, a boy and a girl, carefully feeding morsels of bread to the strutting, quacking colony of Caldbeck ducks. The boy was nervous; the girl – it must have been his sister – far bolder, taking him by the hand, leading him towards the fat and noisy ducks. Natasha looked on until the father arrival in a dark coat and dark hat and called for the children who came, the boy running, the girl dragging, and went across to a further road which, Natasha guessed, would take them to the tinny peal of the church bell. She wove happy threads of domestic contentment around them. Soon the ducks ceased to quack. A lady sped down the last lap of the hill guiding her bicycle with one hand, the other holding onto her hat. Natasha’s eyes pricked and she felt a rise of enveloping unaccountable happiness as the darkness began to lift. Joseph called for her.

  ‘Thought you’d never get up,’ he said and the sight of him blew away any remaining shadows. White shirtsleeves rolled up above the elbow, smuts of coal on his forearms from where he had re-laid and relit the fire, face smiling and ruddy from the fresh air in the handkerchief back garden, hair flopping over his brow, and accent, she noticed, rather broader and warmer. ‘Boiled eggs. Toast. Marmalade. You won’t want cornflakes. Water on the go for tea. Would madam come this way?’

  Still in her black dressing gown, Natasha edged her way around the cluttered furniture in what in daylight seemed an even smaller room than she remembered, and through to a yet smaller space, the kitchen, which with the recently added bathroom constituted the whole of the ground floor.

  The table was laid. Joe held out a chair for her and then put a white paper napkin across her knees.

  ‘I do hope the eggs – farmyard fresh and brown to boot – are to madam’s liking,’ he said. ‘Perhaps a little harder on account of the wait while madam proceeded at her leisure down the grand staircase. Shall I butter your toast?’

  ‘There are ducks,’ she said, ‘out there.’

  ‘I’m very pleased they turned up, madam. Quite expensive, ducks, especially Caldbeck ducks, and not always reliable, but I did want you to start your day with a Cumbrian duck. I owe them half a loaf of bread.’

  ‘It looks a very pretty village – from the window.’

  ‘Positioned for the purpose,’ he said. ‘Caldbeck is, in my view, the gem of the Northern fells. Once a thriving town, with several grand houses, not least the vicarage, formerly a house for lepers. When we take the air – after madam has performed her toilet, or rather concluded her toilet – she will see the village set in a bowl of hills, an unpoetic soul would call it a pudding basin with Caldbeck happily settled in the bottom of the bowl.’

  ‘What else?’ She could not resist his delight in showing and telling her of this place.

  ‘Cald-beck, you ask? Beck is a local word for stream. Cald must mean cold, the Scots, our deadly neighbours, pronounce cold as cald and so do we Cumbrians and moreover it is true, the water is cold, pure from the hills.’

  ‘Joseph!’

  ‘Did you call me?’ He held his toast as if it were a baton, waiting to beat out the decisive chord. But Natasha just shook her head. She loved it when he played the fool.

  ‘I thought it would be like Wigan,’ she said, ‘that smoke, those terraced houses.’

  ‘Knock not Wigan,’ said Joe. ‘Wigan works for the world we live in.’

  They strolled alongside the river which went past the east end of the church. There was sun, weak but sufficient to give Natasha a holiday feeling. She held his arm rather tightly and she could feel a physical uncoiling of tensions in her stomach on this placid early spring Sunday morning, buds just beginning to show, Joseph earthed.

  ‘It is not England here,’ she said, ‘the mountains are like a fortress.’

  ‘That’s what we all like to think,’ he said, as he stopped to scoop a few smooth pebbles out of the shallow sparkling stream. ‘But it only works for some of the time.’

  ‘It’s like Provence,’ she said, ‘where the peasants never want to leave.’

  ‘You’ve caught it on a good day,’ said Joseph, selecting the smoothest of the pebbles. ‘Our biggest export is people.’

  ‘I’ll give you Jean Giono’s novels,’ she said. ‘You’ll see. He is the great novelist of Provence.’

  ‘Of the peasants?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Like us peasants?’

  ‘Yes.’ She smiled and he acknowledged the tease.

  He skimmed a stone across the surface of the water.

  ‘Two,’ he said, ‘not much cop.’ He tried again. The stone plopped. ‘You try.’

  ‘I can’t throw stones.’

  ‘We used to fight with stones like these when we were kids,’ Joe said. ‘One gang on one bank, another on the other. We would agree a time for a stone
fight and turn up and just pelt each other.’ He smiled. ‘That’s where I got this.’ He pointed to the small scar trace beside his left eye.

  ‘Fight with stones?’

  For a moment Joe felt foolishly heroic. Natasha shook her head.

  ‘We used to bike here from Wigton and go up into these woods,’ he waved towards the adjacent hillside, ‘the trees were so bushy and close together we could go from tree to tree.’

  ‘Like monkeys?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you had battles there as well?’

  ‘We built stockades, yes. You would use branches as lances and dig pits and put pointed sticks in them.’

  ‘To maim your friends?’

  ‘We didn’t think of it like that.’

  ‘I suppose you did bare-fist fighting?’

  ‘We did. I did. I wasn’t very good at it. I didn’t like it.’

  ‘Why did you do it?’

  ‘You did.’ Joe slung another pebble at the water. A flash of memory, of the sickening fear of bare-fist fights came over him. ‘You just did.’

  ‘For honour?’

  ‘That’s laying it on a bit thick.’

  ‘It was,’ said Natasha, thoughtfully. ‘It was for honour. Wasn’t it? Just as you were disappointed with yourself when you did not hit Robert after he had insulted you.’

  ‘I should have clocked him one, yes.’

  ‘Clocked?’

  ‘Hit.’

  ‘Why?’

  He stopped. He did not want to be reminded of Robert. Even retrospective jealousy was disturbing.

  ‘We are in Sicily,’ said Natasha. ‘Honour.’

  ‘Corsica!’ Joe said. ‘The Corsican Brothers.’

  ‘I begin to understand. There is no café in Caldbeck of course.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘And if there were, women would be banned.’

  ‘Come on!’

  ‘Ceaseless childbearing and the church and enslaved to the house.’

  ‘Tradition.’

  ‘While the men drink in the pubs.’

  ‘Or work in the fields or work in the mines.’

  ‘But later they drink in the pubs.’

  ‘Some of them. There are many nonconformist teetotallers in these fells.’

  ‘I am trying,’ said Natasha sternly, ‘to build up a picture of your background. This is important for our future.’

  ‘Then we’d best go to Wigton immediately!’

  They laughed, and after Joe had made a quick survey, they kissed each other, in public, far too closely, Joe thought, and at far too great a length for a Caldbeck Sunday morning.

  ‘First we must pay the ducks,’ said Natasha.

  They went to Wigton three times.

  Natasha’s memories of Wigton from that visit were as of a triptych. The single figure of Joseph dominated one panel; the single figure of Sam the other; and between them, like a crowd moving in procession towards a shrine, the faces and voices of her new husband’s old home. It was not unlike a Breughel, she thought.

  Once in the town Joseph was like a hound off a leash. He took her into Church Street and pointed out the marvel of a street shaped like a crooked leg and little yards and even smaller alleys off; the pig market in the middle of it where they had stolen in to play hounds and hares and the runnels down to the High Street where they had hidden when the Chair-leg Gang swept down from Bridlefield, running hard and looking for a fight; the slaughterhouse where he had watched the sudden sickening buckle of knees as the gun to the head was fired, and the West Cumberland Farmers’ Warehouse out of which came a smell of grain so thick it could have been eaten. And above Eddie Bell’s father’s shop Eddie had made a gym, he had weights and chest expanders and photographs of Mr Universe papering the wall; Blob lived in this house, Mazza in that, next to Mr Routledge who had led the union at the factory and then notoriously, unforgivably, switched to the management, and Peter Donnelly who had to sleep with all the windows open because of his TB had set up as a photographer at the top of those stone stairs. This was just part of what he told her about one street.

  He took her to the bottom of Meeting House Lane to see the Salvation Army Hall whose youth club he had patronised, as he had those of the Methodists, for the table tennis; the Roman Catholics, for the dances; and of course his own church, the Church of England, for the Anglican Young People’s Association and the socials. Also in Meeting House Lane under one of the many arches that led off the two main streets was the Palace Picture House in which he had seen hundreds of films.

  She was marched the length of slumland Water Street whose heroes and villains and crowded histories of war and peace were unrolled, a scroll of battle and survival. He took her along the Crofts which dated, he told her proudly, from the eighth century and squirrelled her around the wriggling tentacles which stretched out from Market Hill, Birdcage Walk, down Burnfoot, up Plaskett’s Lane, and wove her back to the network behind the Parish Rooms. He did not go into the churches and the many chapels but pointed them out, insisting she be impressed by their number and variety.

  It was something of a fever, she thought, and puzzled over its intensity. What she saw was a plain little town, not flattered by the drizzle, a place of little colour and animation, dead on the first day they visited, admittedly a Sunday, Natasha thought at first that the deadness revealed its true character.

  Until the next day when, shyly, he led her into a yard off Water Street. The cloud was high, light pearl grey, the yard small, empty and surely condemned, Natasha thought, as they emerged into it through a short tunnel. It was, she thought, a pitiful hovel. She felt love for the small boy who had lived in this awful place. Joseph had told her with some regret that it was about to be demolished.

  ‘Four houses,’ he announced, looking at her proudly, she thought, and a little fiercely, ‘one up, one down, one wash house and one shared WC over there.’ He let it sink in for a while. He had discovered that she was as impressed and intrigued by the context of his past as he had been with hers. This both moved and surprised him. Her sense of the equality of their lives had never struck him so strongly and he was grateful. He had never been ashamed of his past but he had never thought he could boast about it. Natasha licensed him to do so and he leaped at the chance. And this hovel, as he saw it through her eyes, this sanctuary as he himself remembered it from the time his father had returned from the war, this place now abandoned was not to be hidden away.

  ‘There was a man called Kettler lived in that house,’ he pointed. ‘He lived on tripe and beer and never did a day’s work. He cadged and odd-jobbed at the cattle and pig auctions and once he drowned some kittens just there. I saved one!’

  Natasha smiled.

  ‘There was a girl lived next to us who loved that kitten but I rationed her helpings with it. Why was I so mean? I went to see her with Mam and the cat just before she died. She was only about eight. In a sanatorium. She had TB. There was an epidemic of TB in Wigton just after the war. My mother had it. And though I didn’t find this out until I had glandular fever, they told me at the hospital that I’d had it, in 1945. It can’t have been much of a dose. My mother never told me and I can’t remember a thing about it. But I can remember,’ rather reluctantly, ‘that WC stank. My mother used to try to keep it fresh. But it stank. There was another girl . . . she went to Germany with her mother. The town was made up of yards like this. We thought they were just great.’ He looked around and she lost him for a few moments. The eye of love, she thought.

  ‘I used to have a dream,’ he said. ‘There was this girl buried in a field I used to play in. It was the girl with TB. I was convinced, in the dream, that I’d murdered her and one day she would be dug up.’

  So much had happened here, she thought, so much had happened to Joseph here in this yard and in these mean streets and lanes and insignificant alleyways, so much that mattered so deeply to him . . .

  He was infused by it, drunk on it, she thought. Yet it was not just this pl
ace, it was in Joseph himself. He had been just as swept up in France, she thought, though she had feared at first that he was merely over-impressed. He had been overwhelmed by the BBC, though that could have been no more than that he was suffering from a kind of vertigo having been rocketed beyond all expectation. And here, in Wigton, though fiercer, it was the same and she saw that he had the energy and the capacity to embrace whatever appealed strongly to him, an unembarrassed love for what moved him, a love, she thought, unafraid to express itself. This she had never before encountered. His almost shameless, certainly reckless, but wholly genuine embrace of life both puzzled and beguiled her.

  ‘He’s very loyal,’ said Sam.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  Sam smiled and let it drift. Both of them knew the answer. Joe had gone to spend time with Alan, his oldest friend, to whom Natasha had already been introduced. Ellen was making afternoon tea – lunch was impossible with the pub’s opening hours. She had shooed away Natasha’s offer of help and Sam was taking her for a walk ‘around the Backs’ – along Tenter’s Row, over the hill called Stoneybanks to the Swimming Baths, and back up a small hill into Proctor’s Row against St Mary’s Church.

  Sam strolled where Joseph had marched. Sam was thoughtful and measured in contrast to Joseph’s gleam-eyed championing. Three times they were passed by men with dogs; on each occasion Sam was warmly greeted and Natasha was swiftly, slyly, appraised.