Tollesbury Time Forever (15 page)

Neither a sound nor a smell was present. Movement ceased and the light was still. It was just me and W.G. and this earth of ours, this earth that had both spawned and sustained us.

Phew! What a wonder is life, what a veritable conundrum is the mind and what a suspension of belief is required to even make sense of any of it! At that moment, I believed not that the sun rotated around the earth but that the heavens themselves were in thrall to me and this strange boy. We were, at that moment, the axis upon which the whole world turned.

“Best you come with me, Mister,” said W.G. finally. “Best you come with me.”

He led. I followed.

And you know what it’s like when you’re stressed and you’re down and the world is too big? What do you need at those times? What do you most require? I always thought I needed a woman to hold me, to tell me she understood, to make me understand that the confusion I felt was nothing but a phase in the miraculous turning of my days. For that was love to me - the compassion that one has for another in those darkest seconds, the drawing of breath, the tolerance and the moment of sympathy that is followed so swiftly maybe by a spark of humour or a burst of affection. But it wasn’t love I needed.

Light up my days and banish the fractious winds of gloom that do infuse my depression.

In that moment, when I was pulled along by that angry boy known as W.G., I suffered an enlightenment. Suffered indeed! For it is not the glow of love that breaks the darkness, but movement itself. Keep on keeping on, my hero once said. Keep on keeping on.

And off to work we go…

When troubles look big, you have to go small. And thus I found myself peering through a dirty window, W.G. whispering in my ear.

“Tell me what you see,” he murmured, simmering with a rage unshackled, a rage unbound. “Tell me what you see.”

I saw red bleeding into orange and orange fading into white. And then the perfect darkness of silhouettes stamped themselves onto the scene. All black upon white, just like the pictures I once made in infant school where the teacher had shown us how to carve shapes in halved potatoes before dipping them gloriously in whatever colour we chose. Then bang, bang, bang onto the pristine white of the paper - a cross, a smiley face, an indeterminate splodge.

Dead bird swinging in the black of night…

Through the small pane of glass I saw the shapes of several small beds, each one topped by an unmoving bundle - surely that of a sleeping child; they must have been the children that had worked so hard that evening to help me understand FRUGALITY. They deserved their rest no doubt.
As I gazed upon the scene, the glass of the window began to mist up, giving the impression that the sleeping children were being engulfed in an unholy smoke. It was W.G. standing beside me. As my breathing had slowed, so his had increased. I was at peace - he clearly was not.

Take these sunken eyes and learn to see. All your life,

You were only waiting for this moment to be free.

W.G. led me down an incline that fell steeply from the back of the barn in which the children slept. He moved in a clumsy, heavy footed fashion, leaning forward as he walked, his head bowed and his arms swinging more than perhaps they ought. There was an aura of determination about him, a determination that could clearly be employed either for good or for bad - as things stood, my senses having been suitably heightened, it seemed this boy was capable of anything.

At the bottom of the incline, the field levelled out. By the time I caught up with W.G. he had already begun to add some sticks to a burned pile of wood that scarred the grass. Blankets lay folded neatly nearby along with a pan and a wooden plate. W.G. had placed the ball and his crude bat between them. This, evidently, was home for him. He poked at the pile until smoke sneaked from beneath it and tainted the air. What had ignited it, I knew not; maybe it was the anger that seethed within him so vehemently. Seeing the sparks grow into flame, I felt the cold for the first time and sat by the burgeoning fire. It was an orange crackle fire that somehow warmed me from the inside. It was magnificent.

Leaving the fire for a moment, W.G. brought his blankets over to where I sat, handing me one and keeping the other. He set about the task of covering himself with an earnestness that befitted his serious nature. With his body thus covered and just his head visible, it was so clear to me that he was indeed just a small boy. In such a short space of time I had already begun to view him as so much more. I sat closer to the fire and wrapped the blanket about my shoulders, wondering just what was going to happen next. I didn’t have to wonder long.

“Those children, all asleep, the boys and girls, together in the barn,” muttered W.G...

I turned to face him. He was lying on his side and seemed to be speaking as much to the cold grass as to me.

“I saw them,” I replied. The grass answered with more dignity than I. It said nothing at all.

Flames flickered. The sky breathed. And the earth turned ever so slowly.

“They have it all,” W.G. continued. “The Walrus looks after them. He keeps them warm. He makes sure they don’t get hurt. He makes them laugh and when they cry, he tells them everything will be all right.”

I listened to his words and tried so hard to say the right thing. When I think too much, all I can ever express is the obvious.

Sometimes I think too much, some people say so. Other people say no, no; the fact is, you don’t think as much as you should.

Hmm.

“Why don’t you stay in the barn with them; let The Walrus look after you too. Surely it’s better than being down here all on your own?”

The fire crackled and popped.

“There’s a little one there now,” continued W.G. almost as if I hadn’t said a word. “He hasn’t been there long. He can’t even walk, just crawls around. They have to feed him because he doesn’t even know how to use a spoon like I do. And when they tickle him he laughs. It’s just a laugh but they all go mad saying how great he is.”

All this said in a monotone voice directed just at me and the world.

“I’ve seen him up close. He’s nothing special. His eyes aren’t even right but none of them says it to him. And The Walrus picks him up sometimes and dances with him and tells all the others to be quiet when this little one is trying to sleep. Sometimes The Walrus even sleeps on the floor next to him like he’s the little one’s dog or something.”

W.G. just stared ahead, maybe just waiting for sleep to take him. He sounded so bewildered, so utterly unable to comprehend how things were.

“Why don’t you just stay up there in the barn with the others?” I ventured, again doing my best to offer some kind of succour. “The other children could be your friend and The Walrus could look after you too. There would be a bed for you to sleep in, I’m sure. He is nice, The Walrus. He would do for you what he does for the others. Then you would be happy.”

W.G. sat up so quickly that even the flames backed off a little.

“Why would I ever do that? He’s not my dad is he? My dad left me when I was a baby, just left me. He may as well have left me in this field as anywhere else. He wasn’t there to listen to me crying or to clap his hands when I did good things. When I was scared, I stayed scared and when I was angry, I stayed angry. And that little one, he is the worst of the lot.”

I was becoming weary now and decided to lay myself down upon the grass to sleep. I covered myself with the blanket as best I could and let the fire run its course. The night was dark except for the dwindling flames. The birds slept in their nests and the foxes slept in their holes. And I was just too tired to make the connections.

As sleep finally began to overwhelm me, W.G. spoke again, one final time. He had shuffled over to where I lay and whispered into my ear in a voice so much deeper and more coarse than befitted a boy of his age.

“That little one,” he said, “that little one’s going to get it.”

In 1836, the Marylebone Cricket Club, better known as the MCC - that crotchety old magistrate of my wonderful game, was one year away from the fiftieth anniversary of its formation. To put that into context, the Football Association still had to wait another twenty seven years to be formed, with the Rugby Football Union coming into being another eight years after that, in 1871.

Cricket itself had long been a gambling game, with various land owners pitting their best fellows against one another, and sometimes even deigning to compete themselves. To see the middle-classes, as they would come to be known, throwing themselves about in attempts to catch the ball or charging up and down the wicket foregoing all attempts to retain their decorum, would be a pastime much enjoyed by your average plebeian.

Ah, cricket! I do believe you are my finest friend! That feeling of hitting the ball so sweetly off the middle of the bat must surely have heralded a perfect sense of enjoyment whether that ball was struck either by a young farmer in the early nineteenth century or by one of the modern day twenty-twenty dynamos. And to catch a catch in the deep - the anticipation as the ball drops from the sky and the relief when it is pouched - well that is a pleasure of life indeed.

Such were my thoughts as I greeted the day at the foot of the incline. I was somewhat stiff and damp, but refreshed nonetheless.

W.G. lay in the exact same position as last I saw him. He looked intense even whilst in sleep. There was a pain that crept from the frown lines upon his forehead like smoke smouldering from the embers of a fire that will never burn out, a pain that seemed desperate to leave its source without waking it. When pain is scared, there really is a problem.

I surveyed the field around me and ambled up the hill to where the barn was, seeing as I approached that the land to the
right of the building levelled out over quite a considerable area. And when I see a large expanse of grass, I hear the sounds of the finest music never written - the metronomic sound of bat on ball, the percussive clapping of gentle people and the deep woodwind section comprised entirely of my own sighs. Such an overture will turn a field into a pitch in an instant. And that was when I saw a way into W.G.

Gock-pause-thwack…

“I have an idea, W.G.” I said to the boy when he finally awoke.

I had returned to the foot of the incline following my ramblings and had waited for over an hour for him to awake. By the expression on his startled face, I may have been a little too eager and a little too close. He did not reply, but merely rubbed his eyes and looked around as if to remind himself that he was still on this earth. He seemed disappointed when he realised he still was.

“W.G. I have an idea,” I repeated.

He nodded, more forlornly than I may have hoped, giving me consent to continue. By now, he had shuffled over to a tree and had his back against it. He just stared at me, blankly.

“Well, when you were hitting that ball against the side of the barn yesterday, that was really good. I mean you never missed and that stick you were using wasn’t even that wide and certainly not as big as a real bat.”

I could hear myself sounding patronising and forced myself to slow down so as to be able to choose my words with more thought.

“Do the other children ever play with you?” I asked.

I watched as he breathed deeply. He made as if to stand. The anger that had been less prevalent upon his waking was surely rising to the surface again. I felt I was about to lose him.

“Will you let me play with you, W.G? A game of cricket on the field up there, just me and you. What do you think?”

The sun edged up into the sky and the birds began their whitterings.

“Play with you?” asked W.G. “Hitting the ball?”

“Yes, yes. Cricket. We could have a game of cricket. What do you think?”

W.G. sat back now and stroked his hair slowly.

“I never played with no-one else. Cricket is what they do in the town I heard. I ain’t never played no cricket. Just hit a ball against a wall is all I do.”

“I will show you, W.G. I will show you!”

Looking at his changing countenance, I could tell that my enthusiasm was clearly beginning to reach him. I wondered how many times anybody had ever given him the idea that he felt needed, let alone begged him to play with them. I don’t know what I would have done had he declined my offer.

“I will be back for you later,” I said, getting to my feet. “Where will you be?”

“At the barn with the others or down here,” replied W.G. as he pulled his braces over his shoulders. “Only places I go - up there with them or down here on my own.”

I let the moment pass and headed to the barn.

The Walrus was out the front, near where the FRUGALITY play had been conducted. He was sitting on the grass, cross-legged, whittling on a stick. He greeted me warmly when I approached.

“Hello, my friend. And how are we today?” He looked up at me, continuing to work away on the piece of wood in his hand.

“I’m good, thank you,” I replied, eager to get the pleasantries out of the way. “I wonder if I could ask you a favour?”

He stopped his whittling. “Ask away, young man. Ask away”

“Well, I don’t suppose you have any shears? Garden shears really but anything like that. It’s just I need to borrow them if you have. If that’s alright of course?”