by David Storey
Batty was still sitting on the swings when Colin went past. Stringer was standing behind him, pushing him to and fro.
‘Hey,’ Batty shouted and he went in the gates. One or two children from the Sunday School had already run in before him and were standing by the swings and the roundabout waiting for Batty’s permission to climb on. ‘Hey,’ Batty said. ‘How often you go there?’
‘It’s the first time,’ he said.
‘Who sent you? Your old man?’
‘No,’ he said.
Batty nodded and said, ‘All right, Stringer, catch me,’ and Stringer caught the chains, bringing the swing to a halt.
Batty jumped off and Stringer sat down, taking off one of his boots and pushing his hand inside. The sole of his foot, just below his big toe, was covered in blood.
‘What d’you do, then?’ Batty said. ‘Talk about God?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘My old man’, Batty said, watching him intensely, ‘believes in God.’ He examined him a moment longer then, adding nothing further to confirm this, said to the children waiting the other side. ‘You wanna ride?’
‘Yes,’ they said.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Five minutes.’
Stringer had put back his boot and removed the other one. On a seat the other side of the Park the Keeper, a retired miner with a wooden leg, sat with his leg up on a bench, reading a paper.
‘Hey, Fatty,’ Batty shouted, catching sight of Bletchley in the road. He was walking down the hill with Mr Morrison, carrying his Bible. Beside him walked the woman with the red eyes.
Bletch’ey didn’t look up, his gaze turned towards Mr Morrison and the woman the other side.
‘Hey, Stringer,’ Batty said. ‘You want to bash Fatty Bletchley.’
‘Yes,’ Stringer said, wincing, as he drew on his boot.
Colin’s Sundays now were very full. His father’s uniform had arrived while he still had his legs in pot and though he had conveyed to his mother at the time something of the irony of it appearing when he could no longer wear it – laying it out on the kitchen table and stroking it very much as if it were a dog – now, once again walking freely and with no longer the trace of a limp, he would march through the village on a Sunday morning, in khaki and with the one stripe which, perhaps because of his accident, he had recently been given, Colin walking beside him, or sometimes a little behind, pushing the pram and combining with this duty the two undoubted pleasures of watching his father drilling and exploring the old house. In the afternoons he went to Sunday School and it wasn’t until tea-time that he was ever free.
He took little notice of the baby: it had begun to sit up now, so that when he took it walking, it would invariably be looking round, its blue eyes large, impassive, occasionally waving its arms. In the house it sat on the floor turning over the toys it was given, reaching over, making tentative efforts to move but only in the end falling over, lying on its stomach then and beginning to cry. His mother was now trying to make it hold a spoon, and each morning there was the ceremony of holding it over a pot.
His father, since his return to work, had grown quieter and more detached. In the evenings, though he still went out into the field to play cricket, he would, more often, sit at the table in the kitchen, drawing.
He had brought home a large pad of squared note-paper, a black pencil, a wooden ruler and a piece of rubber. Whenever he had spread the sheets out on the kitchen table and begun to draw his cheeks would swell out and redden, and no more so than when he had made a mistake and, with his tongue sticking out between his teeth, he rubbed it out, fanning away the crumbs of the rubber with the side of his hand.
At first it was difficult to make out what the subjects of his drawings were. Whenever he had finished for the evening he put them away in a drawer at the end of the table, reminding his mother that no one was to look at them in his absence. After a while, however, when it seemed that the rubbing out had passed its peak and he had begun to write on the drawings, occasionally asking for words to be spelt and sketching large arrows from one side to the other, he told them that the drawings were to do with an invention he had thought up at work. He stood with his head held slightly to one side as he regarded the various sheets, his eyes half-closed, his tongue slowly licking his lower lip: then, having spread out the sheets on the table top, he leaned carefully over them and in the top left-hand corners numbered them from one to six.
The first drawing was of an aeroplane. It was a bomber, standing on the ground, with a single engine drawn in carefully on either wing. Underneath the aeroplane lay a large bomb and beside it, coiled in a heap, a metal chain.
The second drawing was of the same aeroplane taking off. Heavy strokes of the pencil around the edges of the paper indicated it was night, and amongst the pencil strokes several stars and a large crescent moon like a half-closed eye had been carefully interspersed. His father had no particular skill at drawing: one wing of the aircraft rose rather helplessly from the top of the fuselage, despite numerous half-rubbed-out efforts to correct it, and on one of the engines the whirling propeller was almost as large as the wing itself.
In the third drawing a group of aeroplanes were shown flying together. A swastika had been carefully inscribed on each wing, on each fuselage and on each tail. This group was confined almost exclusively to the right-hand side of the picture and a trail of black dots beyond them suggested that there were still many more to come. To the left of the picture, and by far the largest shape in it, was the bomber. It was flying, as a large, shaded-in arrow indicated, at a height a little above that of the aircraft approaching from the right. The round emblem of the Royal Air Force had been inscribed on its tail, on its fuselage and on both wings, while, from the bottom edge of the paper, the beams of numerous searchlights stood up like blades of grass.
Beneath the aircraft itself was slung the bomb, dangling on the end of the chain, on its side too the round emblem of the Royal Air Force and a message which said in capital letters, ‘THIS IS FOR YOU, ADOLF’. A series of notes and arrows indicated that it had been lowered to the precise height of the approaching aircraft.
The fourth drawing suffered more than any of the others from corrections, the bomb itself having been drawn in various positions before it had arrived at its final situation almost touching the nose of the nearest aircraft from which the faces of several Germans, each wearing a swastika on his arm, could be seen anxiously peering out.
The fifth drawing was taken up entirely by the subsequent explosion. Flames and jagged pieces of metal had been flung in every direction, while around the edges of the conflagration sections of tails and wings and disembodied pieces of fuselage could be seen falling to the ground. Several notes in the margin confirmed the effectiveness of the explosion, indicating not only the number of aircraft destroyed but the number of enemy airmen killed and the number of bombs exploded in the bomb-bays. The last drawing provided additional confirmation of this for from a clear sky a dozen or more aircraft could be seen hurtling towards the earth, flames licking at every surface, black plumes of smoke spiralling from their shattered frames in an elaborate pattern of swirls, curls and volutes. Flying above, close to the upper edge of the picture, was the solitary bomber responsible for all this destruction, bearing the insignia of the Royal Air Force on its fuselage and tail, the chain still dangling beneath it, while from its cockpit had emerged a hand, as large as the tail-plane itself, with its forefinger and second finger upraised, amidst numerous erasures, in the signal of the Victory V.
His father sent off the drawings in a brown envelope with the address printed in the same black crayon on both sides. At the top of the envelope he wrote the word ‘Private’ then, shortly before he took it into the village to post, he crossed it out and wrote instead ‘Of Utmost Concern’, practising the words first on a piece of paper.
A little later, when he had given up hope of any reply and had begun to copy out the drawings again with a bigger bomb and even more aircraft
falling, the envelope already prepared and marked in red ink ‘Urgent!!’, he received a letter with an official address printed across the top and a typed message underneath indicating that the drawings were receiving attention.
For several days running he took the letter to work, bringing it back each morning a little dirtier and more heavily creased, in the evenings taking it along the backs with various copies of the drawings, stopping at the doors and explaining to Mr Shaw, to Mr Stringer, to Mr Reagan and Mr Bletchley, and even on one occasion to Mr Batty, the principles on which his invention worked. The following week he brought home a fresh pad of paper from the pit office and began to draw a second invention, suspending in this instance not one bomb but several beneath the aircraft, at varying height, like bait swinging from a row of hooks.
The culmination of this design was a drawing which occupied the entire surface of the kitchen table. Several squared sheets had been glued end to end, their edges crinkly and embellished with thumb prints, and on the single sheet, with a great deal of groaning, his face flushed, his tongue almost permanently protruding, he drew a flotilla of aircraft with an assortment of bombs strung out beneath them, some of the bombs, because of their size, carried by two or more aircraft with ‘THIS IS FOR YOU, FRITZ’ printed on the side.
After he had posted it, folded in a neat parcel and sealed with red wax, he turned his attention to several other designs which this recognition of his efforts had suddenly encouraged. As time passed and no news of his inventions reached the papers, these grew in complexity and profusion, culminating in the design for a bullet which, according to his calculations, could be fired round corners. It was shaped like a ball and was flung out of a grooved barrel in such a way that it curved in flight, eventually, if it was provided with sufficient velocity, returning to the point at which it had started.
‘Won’t it kill’, his mother said, ‘the person who fires it?’
‘How can it?’ he said, irritated whenever he had to explain his inventions unduly. ‘There’s bound to be something in the way. And in any case, you can shorten the range by reducing the size of the cartridge.’
‘I see,’ she said, nodding her head and gazing down at the numerous figures, firing round house corners, that his father had drawn.
Occasionally, as the flow of inventions faltered, he would get up from the table, put his pencil down, stretch for a while before the fire, his head back, his hands clenched into fists above his head, then, making sure that his work things were ready for the evening, his shirt warming in the hearth beside his socks and his boots, his trousers and his coat hanging on a nail beside them, he would wander out on to the doorstep and light a cigarette.
From there it was only a few steps down the garden to the field where the men were playing football. And there, by the fence, he would stand smoking, his hands in his pockets, occasionally calling out, finally glancing back at the house and climbing the fence and offering a kick at the ball as it came in his direction.
Within a short while he would be standing in the centre of the field, waving his arms, calling, the cigarette still in his mouth until that moment when, laughing, the ball at his feet, he flung the cigarette out, running one way then another towards the nearest goal, shooting then calling out, ‘Goal! Goal! What did I tell you?’ His legs were slightly bowed when he ran, and they kicked out wildly whenever he lost control or the ball was taken from him, his voice calling ‘Foul! Foul!’ distinguishable from all the rest by its tone of belligerence and complaint.
Later, as it grew dark, the men would crouch down in the middle of the field. Finally, when the light faded, all that was visible was the glow from their cigarettes and the occasional flare of a match. The low murmur of their voices came through the quietness. His mother would go on to the step and call into the darkness, scarcely loud enough to hear, ‘Harry. Harry. You’ll be late for work.’
He would come in complaining, his eyes still dazed from the darkness, his elbows and knees stained green, his figure stooping impatiently by the fire as he drew on his work clothes and fastened his boots: ‘I must be a madman, going to work at this time,’ taking his bottle of tea and his tin of sandwiches which his mother had already packed in his knapsack and getting out his bike, feeling the tyres, switching on the dynamo for his lights, then calling out to the men still gathered in the darkness as he rode away.
8
Mr Reagan’s son Michael had joined Bletchley and Colin at Sunday School. He was a tall boy with a long thin face and a long thin nose. His eyes were pale blue like Mr Reagan’s. When Bletchley and he walked down the road together people laughed, the one so fat, the other so thin, Reagan apparently unnoticing but Bletchley himself walking more quickly, his knees reddening as his agitation grew. When they returned from Sunday School Reagan walked on one side of Mr Morrison and Bletchley on the other, the woman with reddened eyes walking slightly ahead or behind.
On the third Sunday Reagan brought his violin. It was at the invitation of the vicar’s wife, who announced the presence of the instrument at the beginning of the service, Reagan stepping out from behind his chair with the case so that the vicar’s wife could hold it up. The violin itself was like a large shiny nut, reddish brown, lying in a bed of green baize. He had, the previous two weeks, been practising a hymn tune and when the last hymn was announced he went to stand by the piano and took the violin out.
The children watched him in silence. He folded a white handkerchief beneath his chin, bending his head towards it to keep it in place, then sliding in the violin.
Bletchley stared across at him intensely. He had, on the way to Sunday School, kicked the case at one point, saying, ‘The vicar’ll take it off you. They don’t let you have things like that inside.’
‘Mrs Andrews asked me to bring it,’ Reagan said, mentioning the vicar’s wife.
‘She’s not the vicar,’ Bletchley said. ‘In any case, if she doesn’t do what she’s told he knocks her about.’
Now, however, Bletchley regarded him with a smile. He winced, screwing up his eyes, glanced at Mr Morrison, and winced again, gazing at the roof.
Reagan’s eyes expanded as he played, squinting slightly as he tried to watch the bow crossing the strings, pausing, his body shuddering, his eyes closing whenever his notes failed to correspond with those from the piano, the sound fading when the children, and Bletchley in particular, began to sing.
Bletchley sang with his eyes closed, turned in the direction of the violin, his head raised as if he were addressing Reagan directly.
When they walked home after the service he kicked the case again. ‘You’ll be getting it broken, bringing it out like this,’ he said. ‘In any case, I bet you can’t play the piano.’
‘No,’ Reagan said.
‘My cousin can,’ Bletchley said.
A few days later Colin noticed Bletchley and Reagan playing in the field at the back of the house. Reagan was carrying Bletchley on his back, his thin figure stooped under the load, his head bent almost double. Bletchley was hitting his legs with a stick, saying, ‘Go on, boy! Go on!’ and clicking his tongue. They wandered round a hole, the sides of which had fallen in.
A little later Mr Reagan appeared in his garden. He had just returned from work and was in fact wearing his yellow gloves and his bowler hat, his jacket alone unbuttoned as an indication that he had, at least, arrived home. ‘Hey,’ he shouted, and when Bletchley looked up added, ‘Get off his back.’
‘What?’ Bletchley said.
‘Get off his back,’ Mr Reagan shouted.
Bletchley got down. He stood for a moment gazing across at Mr Reagan.
‘Michael,’ Mr Reagan shouted. ‘Get on his back.’
Reagan had stooped down to rub his legs, inflamed from Bletchley’s stick.
‘Get on his back,’ Mr Reagan shouted.
Bletchley stood still, frozen, his eyes never leaving Mr Reagan as Regan himself grasped his shoulder and tried, unsuccessfully, to climb on his back.
�
��Get down,’ Mr Reagan shouted, waving his arm.
‘What?’ Bletchley said.
‘Bend down.’
Bletchley stooped slightly, his eyes still fixed on Mr Reagan, and Reagan himself slowly clawed his way on to Bletchley’s back. Bletchley stood swaying for a moment, his hands clamped behind him on Reagan’s legs.
‘Give him the stick,’ Mr Reagan shouted and when Bletchley did so he shouted again, ‘Start walking.’
Bletchley stumbled, hoisted the weight on his back and, his legs trembling as he struggled to keep his balance, began to walk round in circles.
‘Hit him,’ Mr Reagan said.
Reagan had looked up, his eyes wide and staring as when he had played the violin.
‘Hit him.’
Reagan did so, fanning the stick beneath him at Bletchley’s legs.
‘Ow,’ Bletchley said, screwing up his face.
‘Faster,’ Mr Reagan shouted.
‘I can’t,’ Bletchley said, beginning to cry.
‘Faster. Or I’ll come out there myself.’
Bletchley tried to run, his cheeks trembling, his knees rubbing together.
‘Ow,’ he said each time Mr Reagan called out, his shouts growing louder as he tried to attract the attention of someone in his house.
‘Faster,’ Mr Reagan said, his face inflamed now as when he watched the cricket, his thumbs tucked into his waistcoat pockets. ‘Faster, or I’ll fan you myself.’
Bletchley had fallen.
He gave a loud groan and collapsed on his side, his eyes closed, his mouth open.
He lay moaning for a while, clutching his ankle, Reagan standing over him scratching his head. ‘Oh,’ Bletchley said. ‘I’ve broken my ankle.’
‘I’ll break the other one if I catch you again,’ Mr Reagan said. ‘Get up now, or I’ll lift you myself.’
Bletchley stood up. He groaned again, his eyes closed, his face turned up. ‘I’m going home,’ he said, adding something which Mr Reagan couldn’t hear, glancing round however in case he had been mistaken and with several groans and grimaces limping his way back to his fence, his arms flung out either side to retain his balance.