Breaktime

by Aidan Chambers

  On Richmond hill there lived a lass

  More bright than May day morn

  Ho ho

  RICHMOND, Yorks. Pop. 46,500. Ec Wed. Md Sat. Situated on hill-top dominated by 11th Cent. castle, now ruined, built cl075, commanding superb view across R. Swale. Walls 11th Cent. but most surviving military structure 12th Cent. Castle originally entered from town through gate-tower, converted late 12th Cent. into base for 100ft high stone keep, still standing. At S.W. corner remains of original hall containing domestic quarters. Legend claims Robin Hood held captive in Robin Hood Tower in N.E. wall; also that King Arthur’s Knights lie sleeping beneath the castle, waiting for the time when a brave man awakens them to save the world from disaster.

  Town built round one of the largest and finest market squares in Britain, continental European in feeling. Narrow alleyways lead off; locally called ‘Wynds’. Also: Georgian theatre, in use, dating from 1788. Green Howards’ Regimental Museum in crypt of Holy Trinity Church standing in centre of market square, unique example of church with shops beneath. Baden-Powell, founder of Boy Scouts, once lived in tower in S.W. corner of castle.

  Apart from historical and legendary associations, this attractive little town possesses considerable architectural beauty and great scenic beauty. Visit recommended.

  Bus Stop

  Ditto descended into the market square. The bus journey had been an experience. Insignificant, commonplace, undramatic perhaps, but an experience: his reason for journeying.

  And what was the nature of this experience, this bus journey? He contemplated the question quarter-mindedly as, hitching his pack on to his shoulders, arranging straps and frame comfortably, he plodded off, boots cobblestone-ringing, into Walter Willson’s, there to buy a can of McEwan’s Export pale ale, before making for the castle, where he proposed finding a sunny, sheltered corner which offered a view up the river. There he could sit and enjoy his meal.

  Nature of bus experience1: consoling, comforting, contenting. Vehicle warm. Motion tranquillizing. Moving view—seen from his snug seat—of passingly pretty interest despite having seen it many times before. The whole provocative of piquant thoughts and sensational images. Unhurried, unworried. Cocooned irresponsibility.

  Is that why so many people like travelling?

  Maybe, he supposed, his mind turning to thought of his mother’s always perfectly made (just moistly right) tomato and egg sandwiches and wedge of apple pie. And the McEwan’s, for which his thirsting tastebuds goosepimpled. One thing about a bus trip, it coated your mouth with dehydrated diesel oil.

  He sought out his favourite spot in the castle, where the southwest wall breaks from Scolland’s Hall into a tumbling defile, a rift in the defences that slips dizzily to the road and river a hundred feet and maybe more below. There is a ledge wide enough to sit on and stick out your feet, where you are hidden from treading tourists unless they brave the edge. There today the sun shone uncooled by a breeze, and from there the broad sweep of the river and its vee-shaped valley can be seen stretching away up the dale. So there he sat, bum cushioned on folloped groundsheet, back pillowed by pack placed against Scotland’s ruined stones.

  Sandwiches, pie and beer he set safely firm on the ground, in reach of his right hand.

  Quiet.

  But a quiet made of surging Swale, fast, full from rain in the hills; a lark ascended, singing; wind soughing in trees furring valley sides, new green blinking in the breeze, sun-flashed. Blue sky. White flock clouds islanded. Grey stone.

  An active peace.

  Suntillating

  No sooner had I enjoyed my small repast and had settled myself to a sunbathed repose than I was discovered by a youth perhaps a year or maybe two older than myself.

  Description of intruder: Tall, well-built, mongrel-handsome. Dressed in regulation jeans, dungaree shirt washed to faded pale blue, open to fourth button, revealing hairless tanned chest, muscled. Hair brown, thick, long, tending to curls, casually (but carefully) arranged. Eyes blue, alert; nose narrow, straight; mouth thick-lipped, wide, smiling. Teeth white, sound, attractively irregular. Donkey jacket slung over shoulder perhaps a touch too self-consciously nonchalant. No other portables.

  ‘Watcher,’ he said, sitting himself crosslegged at my in-castle side with athletic, look-no-hands smoothness.

  Nature of remark: Friendly, inviting conversation, in Geordie (i.e. Tyneside) accent.

  For an irritated moment, I resented this disruption of my cosy, somnolent pleasure. But I reminded myself of my resolve, of the very purpose of my adventure. Here was an opportunity of precisely the kind I wanted, an opportunity for new experience, for something to happen, and it was being offered to me unlooked for.

  I shifted my slumping torso into a more welcomingly attentive, upsitting posture.

  ‘Watcher,’ I replied, assuming as nearly as I could my new companion’s tone and inflexion, as a deliberate means of ingratiation.

  ‘You haven’t seen my mate, have you?’ he said. His eyes were searching me out.

  ‘Who’s your mate?’ I asked.

  ‘You don’t know my mate?’ he said, surprised. ‘I thowt everybody knew my mate.’

  ‘I’m not from Richmond,’ I said, apologetic.

  He regarded my cushioning backpack. ‘No, ’course. Sorry,’ he said without sorrow.

  (I remarked to myself again how not knowing what people without reason expect you to know at once lowers your stature in their eyes. Lowers their interest in you anyway.)

  ‘Mind you,’ I said, unable to prevent myself attempting further ingratiation, ‘I can’t see much from here and there’s been nobody in sight while I’ve been here. And I’ve been here about half an hour.’

  ‘He’s not been then,’ said my companion. ‘Just like him. “Meet me in the Castle about twelve,” he says when I saw him this morning. “We’ll go for a drink.” We never go into the Castle for a drink so naturally I come here. But he’ll be there already, propping up the bar. Impatient swine.’

  He laughed.

  Nature of laugh: Indulgent chortle, not irritated.

  Comment seemed inappropriate; I smiled to show willing.

  ‘I don’t know why I bother with him,’ he went on. ‘Take last night for instance. Meet him half-seven at the billiards, he tells me. “We’ll have a bit of a game and a bit of a giggle with the lads,” he says. I get there at quarter to eight—I knew he wouldn’t be there before then no matter what—and I wait around like a spare part till nine. Then he strolls in, grinning like a ninny, and I can see straightaway that the smile is all show. Really he’s got a right beat on, so I don’t say owt to upset him, and he just picks up a cue and knocks hell out of the balls for twenty minutes before he says a word. And then he doesn’t say much more than “Buy us a pint, kiddo.” I could have thumped him.’

  He repeated his former laugh.

  This time a remark seemed necessary to maintain the conversation.

  ‘Then why didn’t you?’ I asked, affecting genuine interest.

  ‘I have before now, I can tell you,’ he said, giving me a glance.

  Nature of glance: Collusive, implying that this confession was just between ourselves and that I would understand what others might not.

  ‘I had a go at him just a few nights back. He’d messed me about all day. We ended up in a pub in Catterick. I was in a right mood by then and he started playing up. Having a go at me, you know, in front of a gang of soldier boys that were boozing in there. He gets ower big for his boots at times like that, shows off a bit. So he’s giving me some stick, taking the piss like. Well, I’ve had enough like, and a pint or two, and all of a sudden me stomach hits me eyes and I grabs him and waltzes him out the back into the car park and gives him a right leathering. He’s smaller and thinner than me so he didn’t stand much chance with me losing me rag, you know, I’m pretty bloody when I’m in a paddy, but by god he still managed to bend me nose about and make me pant. He’s game all right. I think he wanted a fight, mind, and he kn
ew I’d not damage him too bad, us being mates, you know, so he went prodding on till I lost me blob. He knew I would. He knows my limits, like. Same as I know his. And if you can’t have a good scrap with your best mate who can you have one with? You know what I mean, I expect.’

  Morgan.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a grand day for the race,’ he said.

  ‘Which race?’ I said.

  ‘The human race,’ he said, and laughed.

  ‘It is,’ I said, smiling through his mockery. ‘So why didn’t you thump him last night?’

  ‘Wouldn’t have been right.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, he has this father, you know. Anywhere for a big apple he is, a right crawler. They don’t get on. Always rowing. And I could tell they’d had a set-to last night before he came to the billiards. So I laid off. But I was still fed-up with him all the same.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go and join him in the pub then, if you know that’s where he’ll be?’

  ‘No fear! Last night was last night. This morning’s different. You can’t be giving in all the time. He can stew in there. After a bit he’ll feel guilty and come looking, all apologetic and smarmy and trying to make out it’s all my fault. “Why, Jacky,” he’ll say, surprise surprise. “What you doing here? I thought we said we’d meet in the pub, man. I’ve been waiting half an hour, till I got worried about you and thought I’d better look for you out here. I’m sorry, mate.” Like that, you know. But he doesn’t fool me.’

  ‘You known him long?’

  ‘About six months. He picked me up one day when I was hitching from Scotch Corner toward Brough. I was making for Liverpool, as a matter of fact. But he brought me here and we hit it off that well we started knocking about together. I stayed on here, got a job labouring for a builder doing some work round Easby Abbey, down the river, you know.’

  ‘You got digs to stay in or what?’

  ‘No, no. I’ve got a room at my mate’s house.’

  He seemed surprised I had not understood his domestic arrangements without asking. At which my courage failed me to inquire further. Nor could I have done. For at that moment a shadow fell across us. There standing in the eye of the sun on the wall behind us was a youth who could be no other than Jacky’s mate.

  Description of Jacky’s mate: Please enter below your preferences for Jacky’s mate’s appearance and features. Note well: he must, of course, be handsome (in your eyes if in no one else’s) and he must for the sake of this narrative be about eighteen. Jacky has also said that his mate is shorter than he; but then Jacky is over six feet tall and heavyish, so there is plenty of room left for your own imagination and predilections:

  Proposal

  ‘I’m sorry, mate. I’ve been waiting for half an hour, till I got worried about you and thought I’d better look you out. I thought we said we’d meet in the pub, man? What are you doing hiding here?’

  ‘What did I tell you?’ said Jacky to me but squinting up at his mate, his eyes dazzled by the haloing sun.

  ‘Like that, is it?’ said Jacky’s mate, smiling.

  Nature of smile: Acidly competitive, inviting tart rejoinder.

  He jumped down from the wall and sat on the sloping bank facing us, his hands bracing his body upright. A puff of wind, it seemed, might send him scudding down into the valley deep at our feet, like a child skidding down a helter-skelter.

  ‘This is my mate Robby,’ said Jack to me, but still looking at his friend. ‘The one I was telling you about.’

  ‘Been telling you about me, has he?’ said Robby, glancing at each of us in turn like a cat eyeing two neatly cornered mice.

  ‘The purr you hear,’ said Jack, looking at me this time, ‘is not Robby’s laugh. He has a laugh like a ball of wool.’

  ‘What fun! A new friend!’ said Robby with monotone sarcasm.

  ‘You had a bad night,’ said Jack.

  ‘And a worse morning,’ said Robby. ‘But entertain me. Tell me about your—cough cough—friend. What’s his name? Introduce me, social moron.’

  There was at this point within me an irresistible rise of gall with the attendant side-effect of spontaneous anger. At such moments I have no courage nor any restraint. I merely react. Is that what wins V.C.s? Unthinking, unwishing, I said:

  ‘Why don’t you get stuffed.’

  There was between my two companions that satisfyingly shocked hiatus which succeeds such unexpected outbursts from an apparently mild-tempered and disadvantaged stranger.

  Then Robby rolled on to his side, beat upon the turf with an excited fist, giggled with unnecessary exaggeration, and gasped:

  ‘Great! Marvellous! Terrific! Isn’t he beautiful! Hasn’t he just drummed us, Jacky!’

  While this demonstration was in stagey progress, Jack, grinning but not smiling, leaned towards me and muttered:

  ‘Go steady, kiddo.’

  ‘I’m going nowhere,’ I said in matching reply, ‘till I’m ready.’

  ‘Here, I say, you two,’ said Robby, pushing himself up and climbing across us into the eye of the sun again. ‘Let’s go to the pub. We’ll have a pint. I’ll treat you. How about it, drummer boy? You game?’

  ‘If your mate is,’ I said.

  ‘Sure he is, aren’t you, Jacky? Nobody ever heard Jacky Thompson turn down a free pint.’

  Jack stood up, as smoothly as he had sat down, Arab-fashion, and somehow unexpectedly graceful given his size and solidity.

  ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘come on, kiddo.’

  Pubtalk

  ‘Politics,’ said Robby when the pints were ringing a table in the corner of the Bishop Blaize, ‘now there’s a subject to keep off in a pub. Sex and religion being the other two.’

  ‘Nowt much else to talk about,’ said Jack, raising his glass.

  ‘Sport maybe, if you like that sort of thing. But you’re not going to start on all that again, are you?’

  ‘I’ve a question to put to our new friend.’

  ‘Look out, kiddo. Trouble.’

  ‘Kiddo can look after himself all right,’ said Robby. ‘So much is known.’

  Jack sucked at his beer. ‘A nice drop that Camerons,’ he said. ‘Good enough to curl your toenails.’

  ‘I take it you’re on the right side,’ said Robby, ignoring Jack. ‘Roughly anyway.’

  ‘Is there ever a right side?’ I said. ‘Rough or otherwise.’

  ‘An intellectual!’ said Robby and honked a laugh that drew staring glances from other parts of the room.

  ‘Listen who’s talking,’ said Jack. ‘Karl Marx resurrected.’ He stood, drained his glass, belched. ‘My round,’ he said and went, casual, to the bar.

  ‘No more for me,’ I called to his back.

  He flapped a dismissive hand.

  ‘Of course there’s right sides and wrong sides,’ said Robby in an indivisible tone.

  Indivisible: Because earnest, unwilling to banter, arrogantly assuming authority.

  But then, I thought, he’s been like that all the time, despite appearances to the contrary. There’s a manic note in his emotional coloratura. A result of his running battles with his father? And does like always attract like so surely as this? If so, then Jacky is in the deep end with his father too! Must find out.

  ‘You can’t opt out of commitment,’ Robby was saying. ‘Either you’re for or against. There are no fences left to sit on. Not any more.’

  ‘Only slogans to rant?’

  ‘You have terminal apathy and gangrenous cynicism.’

  ‘Don’t mistake healthy scepticism for pusillanimous indifference.’

  ‘Nor your epigrams for truth.’

  ‘I wish they had Newcastle Exhibition here,’ said Jacky returning triple-glass-handed. ‘Right nectar that stuff is.’

  He sat down, shaking slopped beer from his hand.

  ‘Unlike this beer,’ said Robby, sipping delicately from his brimming pint, ‘kiddo here is all head.’

  ‘O, aye?’
said Jack, ‘a bit frothy, is he? And how should he be?’

  ‘You know the trouble with intellectuals?’ asked Robby.

  ‘You tell me, clever lad,’ said Jack.

  ‘They are so busy sorting out all sides of the argument they never get round to doing anything.’

  Jack raised his glass to me in salutation, winked, lifted his eyebrows, and sank his pint in one unbreathing swallow.

  ‘Consider Jack the dripper,’ said Robby. ‘He doesn’t think too much, but he knows where he stands. Knows what it’s all about. Don’t you?’

  ‘If you say so,’ said Jack putting down his glass. He belched again without restraint, wiped his mouth with the flat of his hand and said, ‘I could go a nice pork pie, I know that. How about you?’

  ‘See what I mean?’ said Robby. He tossed a fifty pence piece among the beer glasses and swill. ‘Here, I’ll stand you.’

  ‘Not for me, thanks,’ I said. ‘I had something in the castle.’

  ‘Not our Jack, I hope,’ said Robby.

  ‘Lay off, eh?’ said Jack, and went off to the bar again.

  ‘How did you meet him?’ I asked.

  Robby eyed me in sharp, askance amusement for a moment.

  ‘He got fed-up of home,’ he said, ‘and decided to have a breather for a while. See some places, you know. His dad gives him hell. Always nagging at him . . .’

  Bingo.

  ‘. . . Used to thump him about till Jack got too big and might thump him back. His mother tried to interfere once and he gave her a going over as well. Very pretty. You’d think Jack would be the aggressive sort after all that, but he isn’t. As placid as flat beer, aren’t you, Thompson?’

  Jack returned with two cylinders of pork pie clasped in one hand and a brimming pint in the other. ‘Talking about me behind my back, are you?’ he said, sitting.

  ‘He’s telling me about your father,’ I said. ‘Fathers interest me.’

  ‘Nowt much to tell. He’s all right really, the old sod.’

  ‘See?’ said Robby to me. ‘He’s not just placid, he knows where he stands. His father brings him up by hand and our hero, here, leaves home to taste the delights of travel. Ah, you might think, a classic case of filial rejection. But you’d be wrong. Our hero has every intention of returning, actually and metaphorically, to the familial hearth, there to resume his hard-won place. As soon as he’s bored with the pleasures of the wide world, home he’ll scarper and take up life where it left him off. He’s just having a holiday, aren’t you, Jacky lad? All this is just excursion. Knows his roots, does our Jacky, and he’ll be happy enough to go back to the ground where he was planted.’