The Beacon (9 page)

It was one of the first warm days of April when the green shoots of wheat were spiking through and the yard had dried out after the months of mud. She had hung out a line of washing. The kettle was on ready for when the men came in for breakfast. She was putting out some scraps of bacon rind and crumbs
from the board and, as she did so, noticing the touch of sun on her face. The tractor pulling the trailer was turning into the gate and she watched it, her father glancing round to check the distance from the post, though he knew it by feel, could have turned in blind and never made a mistake. The trailer was loaded with bales of wire because they were repairing the fences after winter.

May watched as the machine stopped and then shuddered as her father switched off the engine. He waved to her and began to climb down, but instead of jumping to the ground from the metal step, as usual, he hesitated for a second and then fell.

She hesitated, thinking he had twisted his ankle on the step or missed his footing, thinking those things at the same time as knowing that he had not, that the way he had fallen and the way he lay was because of something else.

She knew that he was dead before she knelt down to him, but by then two of the other men had come into the yard and May stood up and started shouting.

It was all pointless, everything that happened then was quite pointless, but it had to be gone through, the telephoning, the doctor, the ambulance and covering him with an old coat and rubbing his hands and talking to him. He was dead. He had been dead as he fell, they said, and May had known it.

But she had stayed there with him until the end, watched him go, out of the gate and turning into the lane for the last time, the awkward turn which he had made on bringing the tractor in. The last time. She had talked to the men and to the doctor and still lingered outside, putting off the moment when she had to go in and tell her mother, the moment when everything would change and the future she had always dreaded would begin.

S
HE DID
as she had been told and drank the small second glass of brandy and then no more, sitting at the kitchen table in the house full of silence and remembering that last time and how she had felt the tightening of the threads that bound her here.

Tonight, she felt the freeing of them. Bertha was gone. May knew that it would take her a long time to grow used to her absence and to the empty time she would have to fill. After her father’s death they had gone on for a while as before, the men doing the same work, the tractors turning in and out of the yard, the animals in the stalls and sties, chickens still pecking about the grass behind the house. Then, one by one, things had been let go. The cattle first, then the pigs. It was three years before the sheep were sold off after a particularly hard winter. The chickens remained a
while longer, and the geese had only gone the previous spring. One of the men had left the day of John Prime’s funeral, two others had lasted only a year more.

That funeral had been the hardest day of May’s life. She had not realised how much she needed her father’s presence to make life at the Beacon bearable until she had watched the coffin being lowered into the ground. She had loved him and looked to him for comfort and strength and the occasional word of praise. Gratitude did not need to be spoken, she knew he was grateful to her.

The short drive back to the house with Colin and Janet had been made in silence, but then the place was full, John Prime had been well respected and everyone expected a wake, people coming from some distance. For an hour or so the Beacon had been full of warmth and large bodies and strong voices, glasses raised and plates emptied of food.

There had never been a party at the Beacon before, and to her shame she had even enjoyed it and been proud for her father. Colin had worn a stiff suit and looked uncomfortable. Joe Jory, who owned no suit, had draped his cap with black ribbon and made a bow of black ribbon into some manner of a tie. And Bertha had sat in state in the front room and received
everyone, gracious as a queen, dabbing her eyes with a folded handkerchief. But what May never knew was that Bertha’s grief, though formally expressed, was sharp and bitter. She had been married to a man she had loved and respected and now her future, like May’s, was stretched bleakly before her.

Perhaps if she and May had spoken about him, if they had spoken about anything more than trivial things, they would have found out at least this about one another, that there had been such love.

Life changed. Life stayed the same. Bertha Prime retreated back into herself. The animals went. The men left. May spent more and more time alone. The house seemed emptier than it had ever done before and few people called. May went to see Colin and Berenice because they preferred it that way round and Frank remained in London.

Yet May was not unhappy. She liked life to be even and uneventful, she needed the routine of days and to know that it would be winter and spring, that it would be dark early and late and then light in the mornings with the long-drawn-out summer evenings. She looked for the return of the swallows and house martins and swifts to their nests and the frogs crossing the yard on their way to the pond and waited for the berries to ripen and the nuts and leaves to fall, feeling
each small repeated change as her security.

Even Bertha’s demands were regular and formed the backbone of May’s routine. She had to take her early-morning tea and get her up, wash her, help her to dress and to her chair and later to make lunch and settle her for her afternoon rest. Make tea. Settle her for the night.

Nothing disturbed the tenor of their days or the quiet in which they passed them.

W
HEN
J
OE
Jory told his wife that she should telephone the girl who came in part-time to help in the florist’s and tell her that she was needed today, at once, Berenice did as he said out of astonishment because such a thing had never happened before. He had nothing to do with the shop. He never came to it. The girl had arrived within twenty minutes, and Berenice and Joe Jory had left in silence, walked to the van and driven home, and until they were inside he had told her nothing, other than to reassure her that there had been neither an accident nor a death.

All the way home he had wondered how he could protect her, even while he knew he could not spare her. He could only nurse her as the blows fell. Colin would find out, if he had not already done so, but Colin was strong and he had Janet.

And then there was May.

The rain had stopped and a weak sun was shining onto the back of the house. Joe Jory opened the door and set a chair there. Then he handed the newspaper to Berenice and went quietly away, to potter about in his den within earshot, not able to bear to watch her face as she read.

It took her a long time to read it, mainly because she had to keep going back to the beginning, and to the headline and to the photographs, trying to take in what exactly had happened, what Frank had said. But in the end, when she had read it all the way through slowly twice, she let the paper fall onto her lap.

Sensing a change in the quality of the silence, Joe Jory came out of his den, pulled another chair beside hers and took hold of her hand. She turned to look at him. Her face had changed. She had aged, somehow, in those fifteen minutes, had lost the bloom of innocence which had always been such a delight to him. Her eyes were wary.

‘But it isn’t true,’ she said, ‘none of this is true. All this. All this Frank has written in his book . . . if he has written these things.’

‘Oh, he’s written them all right. He has written them.’

She looked down at the paper. ‘
The Cupboard Under the Stairs
,’ she read. ‘He’s written a book about us called that?’

‘Yes.’

‘“The Story of One Boy’s Brutal Childhood.”’

‘Yes.’

‘But . . .’ She looked down again. At Frank’s photograph and at the picture of the cover of the book he had written, and at the two photographs of them all, and of the Beacon. They took up a whole page of the paper.

‘But . . . it isn’t true. What Frank says about us . . . about . . . our home. These terrible things he says about himself. None of these things are true.’

‘No.’

She shook her head. ‘How can this be happening? How can my brother have written these things? How can he have done this?’

Joe Jory stroked the back of her hand. There was nothing at all that he could say to help her or to change any of it.

‘Why has he done this? Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? It’s
why
?’

‘Yes.’

She sat with the sun on her face, feeling her husband’s thumb rubbing the back of her hand, the newspaper on her knee, and she could not make sense
of any of it. But at last she said, ‘A newspaper isn’t enough to go by, do you understand me? I have to read the book, don’t I? I have to read Frank’s whole book.’

Three days later, Joe Jory brought it back home with him, having driven over ninety miles to the nearest city with a bookshop. He had kept it in its paper in the old string bag he used for shopping and looked neither at it nor inside it all the way back. It was not for him to do that, it was for Berenice.

It was late afternoon when he walked into the house and by then she had spoken twice to Colin and once to Janet. But they were certain that as yet May did not know anything at all.

The book Frank Prime had written told the story of his unhappy, lonely and abused childhood at a farm called the Beacon and of the misery almost day and night of his life there until he fled the place. It blamed his misery not only on his parents, John and Bertha Prime, but on his siblings too, either because they were party to the infliction of Frank’s suffering, or because they shared in his torments and did nothing.

Everyone was named and there were so many details of dates and times and places and of what he
had to endure that it must, surely, be truth rather than fiction, for who would make up such stories?

There is a cupboard beneath the stairs at the Beacon and I cannot now go into any house which has a similar cupboard or think of that particular one without pain and a return of the memories and the nightmares. I have given my book its title because that cupboard symbolises everything that was bad about my boyhood, sums up every tiny cruelty, stands for every fear.

It is a large cupboard because the Beacon is a large farmhouse and it has a few bits and pieces at the back – as I dare say every cupboard under the stairs does – the leg of a broken chair, a stock of brandy, an ancient leather suitcase, some bits of wrapping paper. It has a sloping ceiling of course, and the ceiling comes right down to the small angular space at the very back into which I used to crawl and where I sat for so many hours, pressed against the plaster and smelling the dirt and dust. I do not remember when I was first pushed into the cupboard but I cannot have been more than a toddler, a little boy of barely two, and I know that it was not part of some childish game. It was my father, John Prime, that huge man with the raw red hands, who put me in there, for some babyish mis-behaviour, and dropped the latch. If I cried about
anything or made some little complaint, I was put into the dark there. Why? Why me? None of the others was ever pushed into that cupboard. Colin was not a bad boy, as bad boys go, but he was up to far more mischief about the place than me and he was told off, but only lightly, only in a jokey tone. He was never punished as I was punished.

I can never forgive my parents for what they did to me. I am a man who is terrified of the dark so that I can barely go out on winter evenings and I have slept with a lamp on beside my bed for years. Imagine what that did for my marriage – though my wife, Elsa, was very understanding. I never told Elsa the half of it.

I cannot forgive my father or my mother, Bertha, for colluding with him – for she never protested, never tried to protect her little boy.

But what about my brother and sisters? Surely they would have tried to stop it happening and to let me out of that dark and dreadful hole? No. Instead, they pushed me back inside it and even shut me in there when my parents were not around, threatening me with dreadful horrors if I managed to escape of my own accord. But it was the things May told me, things about what lived and breathed inside the cupboard under the stairs, that were the worst of it, monstrous, evil, lurid, hideous creatures and spirits. These creatures insinuated themselves into my mind and
burrowed their way down into my subconscious and fed on my imagination. I can conjure them up now. I can smell and feel and hear them and I am still afraid, though I know they do not exist and were only the awful fantasies invented by May.

The cupboard under the stairs is not the worst of it, not by a long way, but let it stand for everything they did to me through those years of my growing up. John and Bertha, Colin and Berenice and May took away the innocence and the happiness, the peace of mind and the whole childhood of their own brother Frank and, now that Frank is a grown man, he cannot forgive them.

I dedicate this book to every boy who was ever made to suffer in the cupboard under the stairs.