Coronation (11 page)

The owner of the voice was extraordinarily tall with an absolutely bald skull, the most astonishing shade of pink. His face seemed to have both the colour and texture of old, weathered parchment but containing most young-looking and piercingly light-coloured blue eyes surrounded by hundreds of fine, tiny wrinkles. His eyebrows were tufted snow-white and aggressive, and he had a moustache still faintly yellow.

‘Well now,’ said the gentleman, ‘that’s most kind and polite of you, my boy. Thank you.’ And thereupon, with an athletic ease and grace he took the chair opposite.

Johnny for the moment experienced such a giddiness of relief that he thought almost that he was fainting. Although he didn’t have eyes in the back of his head, he knew, he just
knew
that behind him and across the aisle Granny had half risen from her seat to come over and carry out her threat. Now it was too late. Major Clagg was safe.

That was a meal that was never to be forgotten. The menu itself was an introduction to a whole new world, a world in which one had a choice. Potage (whatever that was), grapefruit or tomato juice, announced the soup-flecked, gravy-spotted menu card. Fried fillet of plaice, sauce something-or-other, a real foreign word. And then once again one could linger and dally and debate and make up one’s mind between steak and kidney pie or roast pork with apple sauce. However was one to decide upon one or the other of these? Cheese and biscuits or a sweet! Ice-cream or apple tart!

And every time the used plate was whisked away and a clean plate set before. Clean knives and forks. Waiters who regarded and addressed him not as a child but as a man. What an adventure!

Even though he could see the trays approaching from afar as the attendants worked their way down the tables, the moment of decision for the main course still caught him undecided and unprepared. And when the server with the steak and kidney pie with the dark, flaky crust came to the table Johnny craved it, and yet across the aisle slices of white pork with brown, crispy crackling were being served. The waiter stood there with his spoon and fork poised and Johnny found himself speechless and looking up helplessly into his face.

The man had children of his own; he understood the problem. ‘Can’t make up your mind, eh?’ he said. Johnny could only nod. ‘Have a bit of both, then.’ Before Johnny could reply he spooned out a generous portion of steak, crust and kidney, straightened up to murmur something to his colleague, and in the next instant there was a slice of crackling pork and apple sauce on the plate.

Behind the backs of the waiters the family was out of sight and out of range of this marvel. No Granny to veto, no mother to fuss, no sister to be kept quiet. And then to cap the rightness of it all, the old gent opposite said to the attendant, ‘Hm, that looks good. I wonder if I might do the same?’

After the main course there came a pause which permitted the meal to settle into place, shaken down nicely from side to side by the swaying of the train. Outside the windows, grimed with coal dust and rain, the twilight was at hand and lights were coming on in the houses, neons blinked in the towns through which they roared, and the headlamps of cars on the roads that sometimes paralleled the track were like the shafts of searchlights.

Yet, oddly, with his new-found freedom which would so soon end Johnny had not yet lost himself in those dreams of grandeur which the adventure had promised. For one thing there had not been time. So much had been happening too quickly. Like many of the diners, he had been caught up by the rhythm of the ballet of the waiters, the sinuosity with which they avoided contact with one another as they glided to and fro, their narrow escapes from collision, clash and disaster, one tray high, one tray low, as they passed each other, accompanied by the music of the wheels over the rails and the shrieks and wails of the locomotive.

And, truth to tell too, there had been something else occupying Johnny’s mind. It was the precious badge in his pocket which he could feel firm against his leg. He was experiencing an overwhelming desire to look upon it again and here was his chance, away from his family. Also he found himself entertaining half a wish to show it off before the old gentleman with the tufted eyebrows.

Therefore, he slowly withdrew it from his pocket, holding it in his lap for a moment. Warmth and perspiration had dulled it somewhat and he took his napkin and polished it furiously until it shone again in the lamplight of the restaurant car. Then he put it on the table-cloth beside his plate and looked down, entranced by the beauty and content of it. The regimental badge, insignia of rank, courage and gallantry, lost from the cap of a proud officer, presented to him by a demigod on a white horse because for one moment their eyes had met in a thrall and there had been an understanding, was his.

Old Tufted Eyebrows, too, was staring down at the shining metal and beneath the bald, pink skull there raced a thousand memories. ‘Where did you get that, boy?’ he rumbled.

Johnny took his gaze from the glittering talisman and looked into the piercing, bright blue eyes of the old gentleman.

‘A gentleman – an officer gave it to me, sir.’

‘Hm,’ said the old gentleman, ‘that’s very strange. I can’t think of an officer who would part with a thing like that. Are you sure? Do you know what that is?’

Johnny replied, ‘Yes, sir. It’s the badge of the Royal Wessex. I know them all.’ And then as understanding of what the old gentleman was driving at dawned on him, ‘Oh, it wasn’t one of
them
that gave it to me. It was another, but I don’t know what
he
was. He was on a white horse and wore a black uniform and there was a white feather in his cocked hat.’

And when he saw how interested the old gentleman was, and the light in his young blue eyes, the story fairly tumbled out of Johnny: the expedition to the Coronation, the false tickets, their attempts to see at least something, his own love for soldiers and his wish to become one, the affair at the barricade, and the plumed, mounted officer who had upheld the policeman in his duty and then so strangely reached into his pocket and presented him with the badge.

His companion listened to the narrative and seemed not at all surprised at it, merely nodding in agreement and saying, ‘That might be Archie.’ For he was a man of imagination who always saw things in pictures when stories were told to him, and in his mind he was seeing his friend, one of the Assistant Commissioners, as he noticed the glittering object lying in the street after the legions had passed and pocketed it in order to restore it to its regiment.

He saw the eyes of the child wide upon him and corrected, or rather explained himself better. ‘I mean Sir Archibald Green, an Assistant Police Commissioner. Did you notice the number of stripes on his sleeve?’

‘Four,’ replied Johnny.

The old gentleman nodded. ‘Well observed. He always rides about on occasions like this getting his nose into everything. That’s why things run as smoothly as they do, I imagine.’ He picked up the badge and held it in his palm for a moment. Colour came into his face and a certain odd mistiness to his eyes as though he were undergoing some strong emotional turmoil within himself; which indeed he was, namely that of unexpectedly encountering an old and cherished friend under extraordinary circumstances.

‘I was with them when I was a young man,’ he said. He sighed. ‘I miss them.’

Johnny Clagg looked from the insignia reposing in the brown, veined hand to the blue eyes of the tall man. He understood that he and the ‘they’ represented by the badge had at one time meant a great deal to one another.

‘Was there a lot of fighting?’ Johnny asked. ‘I want to be an officer when I grow up.’

Then came an interruption in the shape of the nagging voice of Granny Bonner, ‘Johnny, is that you doing all that talking? Be quiet, you’re disturbing the gentleman at his dinner.’

Johnny flushed and turned around to endure the steel-rimmed, spectacled look. Tufted Eyebrows, too, looked across to the table from whence the admonition had come.

Will Clagg, leaning backwards and turning around, took up the refrain. ‘I hope he’s not bothering you,’ he said. ‘He’s a bit of a talker, that one, when he gets going.’

‘No, no, no,’ replied the gentleman, ‘not at all. We have something in common and are having a most delightful chat.’

For the second time that day Johnny Clagg felt his heart filled to overflowing. He seemed to have entered into a new world, one in which important grown-ups bothered with small boys and their needs.

Satisfied, Clagg returned his attention to his own table; communications were cut; Johnny was once more safe and secure with his new friend. ‘Will I be able to be an officer one day?’ he asked again of the tall man opposite who still held his badge in the hollow of his hand.

The gentleman looked across at the boy separated from him by no more than a foot or so, and at the same time by a gulf so wide that at one time he would have said it never could be bridged.

In the moment of the small exchange with the group at the other table, the boy had become identified, labelled, classified. There was Mum and Dad, Granny and little sister, and the boy himself, stout oak for the ribs of the gallant ship that was England, but never before material for the quarter-deck.

In his own time, the gentleman remembered, chances for the son of such a family becoming an officer were one in ten million, or perhaps even no chance at all. Yet equally the chances were that in his day he never would have found himself sitting in a railway restaurant car opposite a dirty but endearing small boy who had produced from a grimy pocket the badge of the regiment that had once been his own, and with all the fervour and ambition of youth had demanded to know whether one day he might become an officer of this famous fighting unit.

Yet he knew that his times were no more. Often he had regretted it; now he was pleased. A half a century had elapsed since he, a gentleman, had been made an officer as well. How old could this boy be? Eleven? Twelve? A decade might see him turned into an officer and a gentleman.

That impassable gulf now seemed no wider than the eighteen inches or so of table that separated him from the boy, and the old man’s heart was gladdened that this was so. Along with so many millions of others that day, his spirit had been uplifted by the surge of feeling that had swept the country for the Queen who had been crowned. And it was now almost in the name of this young person that he replied to Johnny Clagg, ‘Yes, indeed. I believe that you will be, if you wish it strongly enough.’

‘Oh, but I do,’ said Johnny.

‘Then you must never relent,’ said the gentleman, and then repeated four times solemnly, ‘Never, never, never, never. The wish must always be with you battering at the gates like an army that doesn’t know the meaning of defeat. Against such an attack every defence must fail. Do you not agree?’

The glory of being talked to like a man! ‘Yes, sir,’ said Johnny.

The gentleman nodded his head reflectively. ‘Yes, your ambition must always be kept alive within you; the last thing you think about at night before going to sleep, the first thing when you awaken in the morning. Then you will succeed. Luck plays a part, of course, but then you have already been touched by luck.’ He sighed, replaced the regimental badge on the table and with the point of one finger edged it towards the boy, but his gaze still rested upon it.

For all of his happiness at what seemed like a prophecy, a forecast already almost fulfilled, once more something of the emotions experienced by the gentleman communicated itself to the boy.

The waiter came scribbling bills. The gentleman reached into his wallet, paid, and the waiter passed on. Johnny Clagg edged the badge back across the median line of the table into the gentleman’s territory. He could not for the life of him understand why he was doing it, or why he was saying, ‘Would you like to have it, sir?’ He only knew that he must.

The gentleman stiffened and looked at the boy with what might have been taken as an expression of horrified severity, but only because he was so shaken by the gesture. What had led that child to something so generous, loving and touching? He picked up the regimental badge, weighed it in his palm for a moment, and the mistiness was in his eyes again. ‘Thank you, no,’ he said. ‘Yet I think that this is perhaps the finest gift ever offered to me. No, no, keep it, and some day wear it.’ And then he arose from the table to his full and grandiose height, and yet not quite as tall; it was as if he had aged just a little. His last words were, ‘Keep it polished, lad,’ and he turned and walked away.

Granny Bonner called over from the other table, ‘Have you wiped your mouth, Johnny?’

*

None of them had ever dined in a restaurant car before and they were all on edge not to show it and to orient themselves as to how this might differ from tea at the café to which they sometimes treated themselves on a Sunday afternoon. Violet and Gwendoline had the window-seats, Will Clagg sat opposite Granny on the aisle, his back to the engine. As father of the family and organiser of the treat he had gathered to himself all of the literature on the table, the menu and the folder, which was a combination wine-list and prose paean describing the virtues of British Railways.

Granny’s small eyes were darting hither and thither, taking in the table set-up, the fish forks and knives by the side of the plate, the paper napkins which grew out of the glasses, and she remained unsubdued. ‘Waste, that’s what I call it,’ she muttered, ‘after all the money we’ve squandered.’