At Hawthorn Time (11 page)

There was a railway track on the other side of the allotments: he could feel it like a ley line, a change in the way the light and the wind were organised. Jack hadn’t been on a train since he was a child, and he wondered if he would again one day – if he’d ever need to get somewhere faster than he could walk. It seemed unlikely. Even so, he liked railways: the desecration their coming had once threatened was for the most part long healed, and like many motorways, their margins buzzed with life and formed corridors along which that life could travel. Abandoned lines quickly returned to nature, or formed their own layer in the palimpsest of paths and routes that crossed the country, joining places whose significance was passing out of common memory.

He threaded his way through the allotment plots to find only a line of scrub and a chain-link fence between himself and the track. Throwing his pack over, he swung himself down onto the ballast, the pale stones radiating heat so that walking on them was warmer than walking beside the track. The line wouldn’t take him all the way to Lodeshill, he knew, but he’d walk it a little way. There wasn’t that much further to go.

His mind, having always had a lyrical bent and being ready again to find its voice, gave him rough iambs that matched his footfall on the stones, a song that might later find its way into one of his notebooks or might simply vanish, the evanescent narrative we each trail behind us like the faint disturbance of air from a sparrow’s wing as it flies: barely felt, touching little, and soon lost:

O see the crow there as he unseats him

from the railway bank and hoists himself up

by the sheer incredulous power of

his ratcheting wings and then flap, flap, flap
,

a caw for me as he cranks overhead

and lugs himself to the ash where he sits

and hunches and brags to himself in beady silhouette.

I used to know him –

Why do I think now of how a struck flame

feels in the hand, how the massed black feathers

in the roost shield the flock there from the wind?

O but a winter night is long for every living creature

to withstand . . .

The air had become heavy, distances appearing flat, and he could smell on the wind that the weather was changing.

12

Milkwort, cranesbill. Pedunculate oaks – first flower tassels. Spring weather: sunshine and showers.

Chris left after lunch on Sunday, and as soon as he had gone Howard got on the road and headed west along the Boundway. He’d had word a few days before, through a fellow enthusiast, of an old electrical shop in Wales that had closed; the grandson had discovered the stockroom stacked with returns and unclaimed repairs going back three generations. The chap who’d put Howard on to it collected gramophones, not radios, so had been happy to pass on the tip. Howard was hoping for some lead solder, at least; you couldn’t buy it any more, so places like this were useful sources. He wondered who else would turn up.

Many of the other collectors he knew were real nostalgia buffs; some were into all things wartime, some still considered the 1950s a kind of golden age. One chap had been in the army, Royal Signals; he’d got into radios that way. Another – a big-time collector who’d turned his house into a virtual museum – had worked for the BBC all his life. Howard was the only one he knew of whose route into vintage wirelesses had been via the music industry. Not that he’d ever been an actual musician, but working for bands was how he’d first learned about audio. Not long after his O levels a lad called Len who he’d known a bit at school had asked him to drive a van for him for a week. He was in a band: some crap name Howard couldn’t even remember any more. Howard had spent six months with them: Harlow, Oxford, Windsor, Basingstoke. He would set up the speakers, ensure the amps and the guitar pedals were working. There wasn’t any money in it, not really, but it was easy, and more than that he enjoyed it, liked walking into a venue carrying the stuff, liked being able to see what went on behind the scenes. Something about belonging: about having a backstage pass, going through a door where others couldn’t. Pathetic, really.

The band split, predictably enough; they owed him money, so Howard had taken the old Morris as payment and gone to work for another lot. By late ’73 he had a decent van and was roadying for a band called Burning Rubber, who had an actual album out and a single that was getting some serious airtime. He could set up in under half an hour if he had to, he knew his way around a lighting rig and he’d learned how to tune guitars, too. He’d loved being on the road, travelling from place to place like some kind of vagabond; but even then he could see that you couldn’t spend your entire life like that. The older roadies he knew were pretty sad, on the whole, with their tics and scars, and the stupid sobriquets they insisted on. Sometimes he’d found himself looking at them and wondering why they hadn’t just . . . you know, got a life.

One night he met Kitty at a gig in Luton, or was it Bedford? It was hard to remember now. She’d been dragged there by a couple of friends; they were giggly, excited about meeting the band. She kept herself apart a bit, seemed to be taking everything in. He’d admired that, for some reason.

They started to go out together; he was proud to have her with him, she was different from the other girls he’d been with. It bothered him a bit that she wasn’t into music; not just the music he liked, but any music at all. But it wasn’t the most important thing in the world – in fact, it was something he’d probably grow out of himself one day, he’d thought, and anyway, no relationship was perfect. The important thing was that she told him there was more to him than roadying, that there were things he could achieve. He was still only twenty-two, and he knew she was right.

Before long he’d chucked the roadying in, found a semi in Wood Green with a big parking apron and Talling’s Vans – later Talent Haulage – was born. Settling down felt right; it was what people did – although for a while he’d considered having a go at lighting, or even sound engineering. He missed having a stake in that world, being a bit different to everyone else. Why it should have mattered he couldn’t really have said.

They got married in 1980, and Chris had come along a year later; once Jenny was born they’d moved to Finchley, where they’d stayed. It was a suburban existence, full of the ordinary pressures and triumphs, but it was a long time before he had stopped following Burning Rubber in the music papers and admitted to himself he was a man who owned a fleet of vans and nothing more.

Then one day, when Chris was still a toddler, he’d bought his first vintage wireless – more by accident than design. He was passing an antiques shop on Essex Road on the way to a pub, and outside on the pavement was a hatstand hung with gas masks, a mannequin in a 1940s dress and, on a chair, an Ekco SH25 with its iconic fretwork grille showing the silhouette of a tree on a riverbank. Incongruously, it was playing ‘Sunshine of Your Love’, and he’d been stopped in his tracks by the contrast between the wartime set and the sixties anthem coming out of it, and the vast gulf – far more than twenty-five years, it seemed – that separated them. He’d paid way over the odds for the radio, he knew now, but it hadn’t seemed like much at the time for a fully functioning slice of history.

When he got it home he’d taken it apart straight away to have a look at how it was wired. It was so simple, so intelligible. He went back to the shop the next day and asked the owner where she had got it. She put him in touch with a restorer in Kentish Town, and not long afterwards he went to his first swap meet. It was a small world, but that just helped make it navigable. He had seen immediately that it was something he could belong to.

Howard made good time, beating the satnav’s estimation by nearly twenty minutes. When he got out of the car jackdaws jinked and quacked above the narrow streets, and the Welsh air, washed by showers, smelled sweet.

He found the old electrical shop with some difficulty; he hadn’t realised that the premises had already been sold, its signage and facade replaced with a new plate-glass window framed in red. Howard wondered what it was going to be: a pizza place? a mobile phone shop? There was no way to tell. Kitty often talked about how towns all looked the same these days, the same shops everywhere. But you couldn’t hold back progress, and anyway, it was what people wanted.

Tinny music filtered out though the door, which had been propped open. The floor had been taken back to bare screed and a man in overalls was replastering one of the walls. Howard knocked on the glass frontage and stepped inside.

Grubby marks on the walls spoke of shelves packed closely together, and without the new plate-glass front it had probably been very dim. Without acknowledging him, the workman yelled ‘Gary!
Gaaaaary!
’ towards the back of the empty shop. Howard glanced again at his sheet of notepaper before folding it up and returning it to his pocket.

A big man bustled in through a doorway from which the door had been removed and left leaning against a wall. ‘Mr Williams?’ said Howard, taking the initiative and holding out his hand. ‘I’m Howard Talling. I’ve come to take a look at your old radios.’

The man shook his hand warmly. ‘Call me Gary,’ he said. ‘Oh, we’ve got a treat for you here. Follow me.’

Howard rather doubted it, and in any case it didn’t do to look too keen. ‘Let’s hope so,’ he said, following him towards the back of the shop. ‘I don’t want to get your hopes up, though. Many of these old sets are quite common.’

‘Oh yes, well, you take a look and tell me what you think.’

Howard had expected a dim stockroom somewhere behind the counter, so when they had gone through the door at the back of the shop he was surprised to be directed upstairs. ‘I’ll leave you to it, then,’ Gary said. ‘I’ll be down here, in the kitchen. I’ve got a brew on if you want.’

‘Oh – very kind, but I won’t,’ said Howard, starting up the wooden stairs. ‘It’s all . . . safe up here, I suppose?’

‘Oh yes, quite safe. You’ll be fine.’

The stairs were narrow and dusty and marked here and there with paint. Each tread had a tidemark of old varnish worn away by feet to leave a rough half-moon. At the top was a landing of bare boards with a small lavatory leading off it, and three doors with iron doorknobs. He chose one at random.

The room had free-standing wooden shelves against three walls, one set in front of a sash window which had been painted out. The other wall, still hung with faded floral paper peeling gently from the top, had a chimney breast and a small fireplace with an iron grate. Howard looked around and found the old-fashioned light switch; a bare bulb illuminated the room.

One of the sets of shelves was almost empty, although the pattern of dust showed where objects had been removed. Howard guessed it was where the gramophones and radiograms had been stored. The other two sets were neatly stacked: there were small cardboard boxes of the type once used to hold screws, a wooden crate full of batteries and coils of wire, a cardboard box full of components and perhaps two dozen old radios, a couple still in their original, flyblown boxes. Already Howard could see a post-war Little Maestro, a blue Dansette Gem and a couple of early-sixties transistors; they were no good to him, but if he could pick them up at a decent price he could probably sell or trade them. And on the next shelf up was the familiar rounded back of what was surely a Philco People’s Set. He got his pocket camera out, switched on the flash and began photographing the shelves. It was important to have a record before he started moving everything around.

He came downstairs an hour later to find Gary watching TV on a laptop in the shop’s kitchen. He closed the lid down when Howard came in.

‘Want to wash up?’

‘Please.’ Howard smiled and made for the sink with its two tin taps and sliver of cracked soap. The water was icy cold.

He dried his hands on his handkerchief and got out his notebook.

‘Well, I told you it was worth the trip, eh?’ said Gary, nodding eagerly at him. Howard consulted his notes more thoroughly than was strictly required. He’d sorted the wirelesses into two groups and made a third pile of parts and other bits and pieces that he could make use of. Most of the sets were so obscure that only a collector would know their market value; three, though, were well known enough that Gary could have an idea of what they were worth. Trying to stiff him on them could be a mistake; he might as well give him a good price and hope to get away with the rest.