Saville (10 page)

‘How’s thy young ’un going?’ they’d ask him.

‘Oh, fair and away,’ he’d say.

He’d built a cradle for the baby from an orange box and painted it grey, like the bunks in the shelter, with colliery paint. It stood in their bedroom on a wooden chair. The box had been hexagonal in shape and his father had removed three of the sides, the baby lying inside on a pillow and rocked slightly, whenever it cried, from side to side.

It was as if the baby represented a subtraction from his mother’s life, a piece of her that had been taken away, without anything to replace it. She was so much thinner, and gave all her
attention to the child. Sometimes when he went in to see her in the morning she would call out, ‘Is that you, Colin?’ even when she knew they were alone in the house and he would stand at the door waiting until she added, ‘It’s all right now, love. You can come in.’

She would be holding the baby across her shoulder and patting its back. Whenever he looked at it its eyes were closed, its cheeks bloated, its lips pouting slightly and covered in greyish milk.

On Sundays, when she had fed it, he would take it for walks in the pram. ‘We all have to do our bit,’ his father said. Often now his father did the cooking himself, standing at the kitchen table, whistling, his hands covered in flour. ‘I don’t need a book,’ he said whenever his mother opened her cookery book for him on the table. ‘If you haven’t the touch you might as well not try.’ He took as much trouble over the cooking as he had over the shelter and he seldom got anything wrong, laying out the cakes he had made on a tray by the window so that Mrs Shaw or whoever passed by could inspect them. He bought himself a small sewing machine which, like the pram, he had seen advertised in the local paper, and in the evenings, before he went to bed, he would sit by the fire, his head stooped to the light, sewing curtains, his eyes glowing, his heavy fingers drawing out the thread. ‘You get your strength up,’ he said to the mother. ‘I’ll see to this for a while.’

On Sundays, when Colin pushed the pram out, he would walk past Batty’s house and when he whistled Batty would come out, usually with a plank of wood or a piece of metal, and they would put it across the sides of the pram, the baby asleep underneath, and push it down to the Dell.

The pram was a high, carriage-like shape, with a curled handle and with large spoked wheels that overlapped at the sides. When his mother noticed the mud collected on the wheels and discovered where the baby spent its morning, lying beneath the rows of rats and birds outside the hut, she told his father, who, baking at the time, wiped his hands of flour and took him upstairs, looking in his bedroom for his belt.

He seldom beat him, but when he did it was with his belt, laying him over the arm of a chair or over his bed, his father,
afterwards, going out to the lavatories, where he would sit smoking a cigarette, his head in his hand, his mother standing in the kitchen, her hands clenched, gazing at the fire.

The following Sunday she watched him walk off in the opposite direction, towards the centre of the village and, beyond, the colliery and the Park.

Every Sunday his father put on his best suit and walked out in the same direction, past the Park, to the manor house. Here, at the back, an outbuilding had been designated as the headquarters of a local defence volunteer force. The building had stone walls and a padlock on its metal-studded door, and inside there was an old desk and several canvas chairs. In some respects it was a bit like Batty’s hut.

The men assembled here at eleven o’clock just as the bell in the church across the manor grounds was sounding for morning service. Some of the men wore uniforms, but most of them had suits. They marched up and down on the paved yard of the manor, swinging left at each corner and coming to a halt when the sergeant in charge called out. He came in a small army truck which, once they had finished marching, some of the men took turns in driving round the yard, calling out and laughing, crashing the gears.

After a while the man in the truck brought several rifles with him. His father at this time was one of the few men without a uniform, because of his small size, and he would march at the back of the column, the rifle held almost horizontally over his shoulders, his head thrust back, his eyes glaring, his left hand swinging stiffly at his side.

When they had finished drilling they would line up and load the rifles with imaginary bullets and fire them at imaginary targets at the end of the manor yard. Occasionally they would charge across the yard, fling themselves down on a grass bank the other side and fire at the bushes. A piece of hessian and a sack were laid down where his father and another man had to fall because of their best suits, and when they reached it they would pull up the knees of their trousers before getting down.

One Sunday the sergeant brought several bayonets in addition to the rifles, and on each subsequent Sunday the men would attach them to the ends of the rifles and run with them, screaming,
across the yard, and stick them in a sack hanging from the branch of a tree the other side.

Colin, pushing his brother in the pram, occasionally accompanied his father to the manor. He would climb up into the house while the men drilled in the yard. A flight of narrow stone steps led up to the first floor, and from there a broad wooden staircase led up to the floor above. Few of the ceilings of the house remained; birds nested in the rafters; most of the windows had been removed. Through the gaps he could gaze down into the grounds, at the church and the Park, the colliery and the village lying beyond. He could pick out figures moving in the streets or on the colliery heap and, on a clear day, could make out the trees by the river almost two miles away. From below would come the shouts of the sergeant, the screaming of the men as they ran with the bayonets, and the barking of the caretaker’s dog, fastened up at the side of the building.

From the rear windows he could look down on the men in the yard below, sprawled out on the bank if they were firing at the bushes, or marching up and down if the session had just begun, his father, smaller and neater from this perspective, marching stiffly behind.

His face was quite severe when he drilled, his chin tucked in, his chest pulled out, his eyes having a glaring, slightly strained expression. Often when they had left the manor and were walking home, he would say, ‘Come on, come on, now. Pick ’em up. Pick ’em up,’ in much the same manner as the sergeant, marching along, his head erect, his arms swinging, and looking down now and again to make sure that, despite pushing the pram, he kept in step.

One Sunday the men marched through the village. They were joined by a unit from another village and by a band. At first, his father had refused to go because he had no uniform. ‘You go,’ his mother said. ‘It’s the spirit that counts. And in any case, you’ll have a rifle.’

‘You’d think they’d have made one my size by now,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t even mind one a bit bigger.’

Yet he went in the end and on this occasion had been set near the front, the taller men at the rear. At the front itself marched an officer with a cane, an elderly man with silver hair and a row of
coloured ribbons on his chest. His father came only a few steps behind. They marched through the village one way, past the colliery, then the other way, their route the shape of a cross. When they came back once again to the centre, where the road from the station and the south met the road leading to the west and the city, they drew up in a long column, marking time, his father’s knees rising high in the legs of his best trousers but, because of the newness of the cloth, not as high as the rest.

Afterwards, as the men drank outside the pub, his father stood back from the rest, nodding his head but scarcely talking, the men who had joined much later than him leaning in their uniforms against the pub wall, laughing and calling, some already with stripes on their arms.

‘I’m going to have no suit left,’ he said as they walked home. ‘What do you think? I nearly asked that officer for one himself.’

Yet when his uniform finally came he was unable, as a result of a serious accident, to wear it: it hung for a while from a hook on the wall, his father, his legs encased in plaster, gazing at it in frustration from across the room.

He had been coming home from work one morning, while it was still dark, riding down one of the many lanes that led from the pit to the village, when he had seen the lights of two cyclists coming towards him and had already turned tiredly to ride between them before he realized they were the heavily shaded headlights of a car.

He had hit the bonnet in the middle and had been flung over the top of the car, crashing down on the boot before being flung off into the road.

The driver of the car took him to hospital in a near-by village, and a few hours later, after his mother had telephoned the colliery to find out where he was, a policeman came with the news of the accident and she went out again, leaving Steven and himself with Mrs Shaw, to telephone the hospital and find out how seriously he was hurt.

He came home a few days later in an ambulance. He had broken both his legs, an arm, and had damaged several ribs. He seemed, as he got out of the ambulance, more cheerful than he had been
for a long time, particularly since his trouble with his uniform. He was carried in on a stretcher and put straight to bed.

He only stayed there a few days. The plasters on his legs had been made in such a way that they could support his weight: they passed down in iron rings under his feet so that he appeared, suddenly, several inches taller. With the aid of these and a stick he walked down the stairs.

It was his ribs that caused him most discomfort. He would lie in the chair by the fire, holding his chest and groaning, breathing slowly in and out.

‘You don’t have to tell me,’ he said whenever his mother complained. ‘I’m lucky to be alive,’ adding, ‘but then, lying in that bed I might as well be dead.’

Other times he would lie back, his eyes searching the ceiling, wild, half-tormented, and say, ‘The number of times the roof’s broken and I’ve been nearly buried, my back broke and God knows what else, and then when it really comes where am I? On an open road wi’ nothing else in sight.’

The baby was crawling now and he would give it rides on his pot leg like a rocking horse, stooping forward, stiffly, to hold Steven’s hand, bouncing him up and down.

Sometimes too he would stand at the window, balancing on the hoops, staring out at the backs, sometimes holding to a cupboard and hitting the pot on his legs with his stick. He had, over the year, been trying to save ten pounds for a holiday and now it had all gone. He would beat the wall with his fist while his mother looked on, her hands clasped together.

‘The thing to do now is get you better,’ she said. ‘Not complain.’

‘Complain?’ he said. ‘With my life draining away.’

‘It’s not draining away by the sounds of it.’

‘Isn’t it? Isn’t it?’ He would throw the stick on the floor, trying to break it only, a moment later, having to ask her to pick it up because he couldn’t move without it. ‘Last time I broke my leg, you know, I damn near lost my job,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But now there’s a war, and everybody’s wanted.’

‘Everybody’s wanted. And what have I got? Two pot legs.’

Earlier in his life, just before he had got married, he had lost
his job when it was impossible to get a job at all. He had been helping to sink the shaft at the colliery where he now worked when, at the bottom of the shaft, while it was still being dug, he had fallen out of the cage and twisted his leg.

It was only as he cycled home that it had begun to swell, particularly around his ankle. He bandaged it up and went to work for another week, afraid to have his leg examined in case it might be more seriously injured than he thought. At the end of the week he could scarcely bear to put his foot to the ground and it took him almost two hours to push his bike to work. Finally, he collapsed one morning in the lane leading to the pit and lay in the road groaning, his bike fallen over him.

The foreman of the site sent him to hospital on the back of a coal cart. He was in for three weeks.

‘Another day and they’d have had to take off my leg. They couldn’t understand how I’d managed.’

‘How did you manage?’ Colin said. Each day now, when he came home from school, his father would tell him some different incident from this episode, or from others not unlike it.

‘If you had my job you’d know how,’ his father said, laughing. ‘As soon as I came out I went straight back and reported for work. “I thought you were dead, Harry,” the foreman said. “We’ve given your job to another man now.” “What man?” I said. “Why, that man,” he said. “The one that told us you were dead.” Would you believe it? He had him brought up in the cage. An Irishman he was, as big as a house.’

‘What did he say?’ Colin asked him.

‘What could he?’ his father said. ‘“There’s two of you and only one job,” the foreman said. “I’ll give you five minutes to settle it between you.”’ His father paused. ‘We went round the back of the foreman’s hut and after five minutes only one of us came back.’ His eyes lighted, smiling, as he watched his face.

‘And which one was that?’

‘I’m not saying,’ his father said, laughing. ‘But I’ve worked there ever since!’ He burst out laughing once again, with his mother, watching his expression.

His father was always having fights as a young man, and he
was often drunk. He never lost a fight and he was never so drunk as to lose out on any situation.

‘Oh, he was a devil when I met him,’ his mother said. ‘When people heard his name they used to rush in their houses and lock the doors.’

‘How do you mean?’ his father said. ‘I could always look after myself. I mayn’t be very big, but the thing was I could move very fast.’

‘Yes,’ his mother said. ‘Particularly when he saw trouble coming.’

His father would smack his stick on the table, his face reddening. I’ve never run away from nought. Never.’

‘No. No. I know,’ she’d add, leaning down to kiss him.

His father was often angry, but just as easily appeased.