The Likes of Us (4 page)

One Of The Virtues

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The watch belonged to my grandfather and it hung on a hook by the head of his bed where he had lain for many long weeks. The face was marked off in Roman numerals, the most elegant figures I had ever seen. The case was of gold, heavy and beautifully chased; and the chain was of gold too, and wonderfully rich and smooth in the hand. The mechanism, when you held the watch to your ear, gave such a deep, steady ticking that you could not imagine it ever going wrong. It was altogether a most magnificent watch and when I sat with my grandfather in the late afternoon, after school, I could not keep my eyes away from it, dreaming that someday I too might own such a watch.

It was almost a ritual for me to sit with my grandfather for a little while after tea. My mother said he was old and drawing near his time, and it seemed to me that he must be an incredible age. He liked me to read to him from the evening paper while he lay there, his long hands, soft and white now from disuse and fined down to skin and bone by illness and age, fluttering restlessly about over the sheets, like a blind man reading braille. He had never been much of a reader himself and it was too much of an effort for him now – possibly because he had had so little education, no one believed in it more, and he was always eager for news of my progress it school. The day I brought home the news of my success in the County Minor Scholarship examination he sent out for half an ounce of twist and found the strength to sit up in bed for a smoke.

‘Grammar School next, then, Will?' he said, pleased as Punch.

‘Then college,' I said, seeing the path straight before me. ‘Then I shall be a doctor.'

‘Aye, that he will, I've no doubt,' my grandfather said. ‘But he'll need plenty a' patience afore that day. Patience an' hard work, Will lad.'

Though, as I have said, he had little book-learning, I thought sometimes as I sat with my grandfather that he must be one of the wisest men in Yorkshire; and these two qualities – patience and the ability to work hard – were the cornerstones of his philosophy of life.

‘Yes, Grandad,' I told him. ‘I can wait.'

‘Aye, Will, that's t'way to do it. That's t'way to get on, lad.'

The smoke was irritating his throat and he laid aside the pipe with a sigh that seemed to me to contain regret for all the bygone pleasures of a lifetime and he fidgeted with the sheets. ‘It must be gettin' on, Will…'

I took down the watch and gave it to him. He gazed at it for some moments, winding it up a few turns. When he passed it back to me I held it, feeling the weight of it.

‘I reckon he'll be after a watch like that hisself, one day, eh, Will?'

I smiled shyly, for I had not meant to covet the watch so openly. ‘Someday, Grandad,' I said. I could never really imagine the day such a watch could be mine.

‘That watch wa' gin' me for fifty year o' service wi' my firm,' my grandfather said. “A token of appreciation”, they said... It's theer, in t'back, for you to see…'

I opened the back and looked at the inscription there: ‘For loyal service…'

Fifty years... My grandfather had been a blacksmith. It was hard now to believe that these pale, almost transparent hands had held the giant tongs or directed the hammer in its mighty downward swing. Fifty years... Five times my own age. And the watch, prize of hard work and loyalty, hung, proudly cherished, at the head of the bed in which he was resting out his days. I think my grandfather spoke to me as he did partly because of the great difference in our ages and partly because of my father. My mother never spoke of my father and it was my grandfather who cut away some of the mystery with which my mother's silence had shrouded him. My father, Grandfather told me, had been a promising young man cursed with a weakness. Impatience was his weakness: he was impatient to make money, to be a success, to impress his friends; and he lacked the perseverance to approach success steadily. One after the other he abandoned his projects, and he and my mother were often unsure of their next meal. Then at last, while I was still learning to walk, my father, reviling the lack of opportunity in the mother country, set off for the other side of the world and was never heard of again. All this my grandfather told me, not with bitterness or anger, for I gathered he had liked my father, but with sorrow that a good man should have gone astray for want of what, to my grandfather, was a simple virtue, and brought such a hard life to my mother, Grandfather's daughter.

So my grandfather drifted to the end; and remembering those restless fingers I believe he came as near to losing his patience then as at any time in his long life.

One evening at the height of summer, as I prepared to leave him for the night, he put out his hand and touched mine. ‘Thank y', lad,' he said in a voice grown very tired and weak. ‘An' he'll not forget what I've told him?'

I was suddenly very moved; a lump came into my throat. ‘No, Grandad,' I told him, ‘I'll not forget.'

He gently patted my bind, then looked away and closed his eyes. The next morning my mother told me that he had died in his sleep.

They laid him out in the damp mustiness of his own front room, among the tasselled chairback covers and the lustres under their thin glass domes; and they let me see him for a moment. I did not stay long with him. He looked little different from the scores of times I had seen him during his illness, except that his fretting hands were still, beneath the sheet, and his hair and moustache had the inhuman antiseptic cleanliness of death. Afterwards, in the quiet of my own room, I cried a little, remembering that I should see him no more, and that I had talked with him and read to him for the last time.

After the funeral the family descended upon us in force for the reading of the will. There was not much to quarrel about: my grandfather had never made much money, and what little he left had been saved slowly, thriftily over the years. It was divided fairly evenly along with the value of the house, the only condition being that the house was not to be sold, but that my mother was to be allowed to live in it and take part of her livelihood from Grandfather's smallholding (which she had in fact managed during his illness) for as long as she liked, or until she married again, which was not likely, since no one knew whether my father was alive or dead.

It was when they reached the personal effects that we got a surprise, for my grandfather had left his watch to me!

‘Why your Will?' my Uncle Henry asked in surly tones. ‘I've two lads o' me own and both older than Will.'

‘An'
neither of
'em ever seemed to know their grandfather was poorly,' my mother retorted, sharp as a knife.

‘Young an' old don't mix,' Uncle Henry muttered, and my mother, thoroughly ruffled, snapped back, ‘Well Will an' his grandfather mixed very nicely, and your father was right glad of his company when there wasn't so much of anybody else's.'

This shot got home on Uncle Henry, who had been a poor sick-visitor. It never took my family long to work up a row and listening from the kitchen through the partly open door, I waited for some real north-country family sparring. But my Uncle John, Grandfather's eldest son, and a fair man, chipped in and put a stop to it. ‘Now that's enough,' he rumbled in his deep voice. ‘We'll have no wranglin' wi' the old man hardly in his coffin.' There was a short pause and I could imagine him looking round at everyone. ‘I'd a fancy for that watch meself, but me father knew what he was about an' if he chose to leave it young Will, then I'm not goin' to argue about it.' And that was the end of it; the watch was mine.

The house seemed very strange without my grandfather and during the half-hour after tea, when it had been my custom to sit with him, I felt for a long time greatly at a loss. The watch had a lot to do with this feeling. I still admired it in the late afternoon but now it hung by the mantelshelf in the kitchen where I had persuaded my mother to let it be. My grandfather and his watch had always been inseparable in my mind, and to see the watch without at the same time seeing him was to feel keenly the awful finality of his going. The new position of the watch was in the nature of a compromise between my mother and me. While it was officially mine, it was being held in trust by my mother until she considered me old enough and careful enough to look after it. She was all for putting it away till that time, but I protested so strongly that she finally agreed to keep it in the kitchen where I could see it all the time, taking care, however, to have it away in a drawer when any of the family were expected, because, she said, there was no point in ‘rubbing it in'.

The holidays came to an end and it was time for me to start my first term at the Grammar School in Cressley. A host of new excitements came to fill my days. I was cast into the melting pot of the first form and I had to work for my position in that new fraternity along with twenty-odd other boys from all parts of the town. Friendships were made in those first weeks which would last into adult life. One formed first opinions about one's fellows, and one had one's own label stuck on according to the first impression made. For first impressions seemed vital, and it looked as though the boy who was lucky or clever enough to assert himself favourably at the start would have an advantage for the rest of his schooldays.

There are many ways in which a boy – or a man – may try to establish himself with his fellows. One or two of my classmates grovelled at everyone's feet, while others took the opposite line and tried systematically to beat the form into submission, starting with the smallest boy and working up till they met their match. Others charmed everyone by their skill at sports, and others by simply being themselves and seeming hardly to make any effort at all. I have never made friends easily and I was soon branded as aloof. For a time I did little more than get on speaking terms with my fellows.

One of our number was the youngest son of a well-to-do local tradesman and he had a brother who was a prefect in the sixth. His way of asserting himself was to parade his possessions before our envious eyes; and while these tactics did not win him popularity they gained him a certain following and made him one of the most discussed members of the form. Crawley's bicycle was brand new and had a three-speed gear, and oil-bath gearcase, a speedometer, and other desirable refinements. Crawley's fountain pen matched his propelling pencil and had a gold nib. His football boots were of the best hide and his gym slippers were reinforced with rubber across the toes. Everything, in fact, that Crawley had was better than ours. Until he brought the watch.

He flashed it on his wrist with arrogant pride, making a great show of
looking at the time. His eldest brother had brought it from abroad. He'd even smuggled it through the customs especially for him. Oh, yes, said Crawley, it had a sweep secondhand and luminous figures, and wasn't it absolutely the finest watch we had ever seen? But I was thinking of my grandfather's watch: my watch now. There had never been a watch to compare with that. With heart-thumping excitement I found myself cutting in on Crawley's self-satisfied eulogy.

‘I've seen a better watch than that.'

‘Gerraway!'

‘Yes I have,' I insisted. ‘It was my grandfather's. He left it to me when he died.'

‘Well show us it,' Crawley said.

‘I haven't got it here.'

‘You haven't got it at all,' Crawley said. ‘You can't show us it to prove it.'

I could have knocked the sneer from his hateful face in rage that he could doubt the worth of the watch for which my grandfather had worked fifty years.

‘I'll bring it this afternoon,' I said; ‘then you'll see!'

The hand of friendship was extended tentatively in my direction several times that morning. I should not be alone in my pleasure at seeing Crawley taken down a peg. As the clock moved with maddening slowness to half-past twelve I thought with grim glee of how in one move I would settle Crawley's boasting and assert myself with my fellows. On the bus going home, however, I began to wonder how on earth I was going to persuade my mother to let me take the watch out of doors. But I had forgotten that day was Monday, washing day, when my mother put my grandfather's watch in a drawer, away from the steam. I had only to wait for her to step outside for a moment and I could slip the watch into my pocket. She would not miss it before I came home for tea. And if she did, it would be too late.

I was too eager and excited to wait for the return bus and after dinner I got my bike out of the shed. My mother watched me from the kitchen doorway and I could imagine her keen eyes piercing the cloth of my blazer to where the watch rested guiltily in my pocket.

‘Are you going on your bike, then, Will?'

I said, ‘Yes, Mother,' and, feeling uncomfortable under that direct gaze, began to wheel the bike across the yard.

‘I thought you said it needed mending or something before you rode it again...?'

‘It's only a little thing,' I told her. ‘It'll be all right.'

I waved good-bye and pedalled out into the street while she watched me, a little doubtfully, I thought. Once out of sight of the house I put all my strength on the pedals and rode like the wind. My grandfather's house was in one of the older parts of the town and my way led through a maze of steep cobbled streets between long rows of houses. I kept up my speed, excitement coursing through me as I thought of the watch and revelled in my hatred of Crawley. Then from an entry between two terraces of houses a mongrel puppy darted into the street. I pulled at my back brake. The cable snapped with a click – that was what I had intended to fix. I jammed on the front brake with the puppy cowering foolishly in my path. The bike jarred to a standstill, the back end swinging as though catapulted over the pivot of the stationary front wheel, and I went over the handlebars.