Saville Page 11

  ‘I’ll give you a leathering myself’, Mr Reagan said to Reagan, ‘if I catch you again. If he hits you with a stick hit him back.’

  ‘Yes, Dad,’ Reagan said.

  Bletchley was attempting to lift his legs over the fence farther down the field retaining at the same time all the effects of his injury, his groans and sighs, his tortured expression, limping up his garden to his door. ‘Mam! Mam!’ he shouted as he neared it, ‘Mam!’ almost screaming and, as the door opened, collapsing on the step.

  And yet, after that, it was unusual to see Bletchley and Reagan apart. They went to school together each morning, walking at the same slow pace, each wearing an identical satchel in which they carried an apple, a bottle of ink, which often got broken, and a pen. Occasionally their respective mothers stood talking in the street, or passed across the fronts of the houses to one another’s doors. Finally, a little later, the two women began to go to church together, attending the Sunday morning service, occasionally accompanied by Mr Bletchley dressed in a brown suit, and a little later by Bletchley himself and Reagan. Mr Reagan could occasionally be heard shouting to them from the bedroom as they passed the door.

  ‘They’ve gone to church, Harry,’ he would say, coming across the backs to where his father sat at the back door reading the paper. ‘She has that lad kneeling down every night by the bed.’

  ‘Kneeling?’ his father said.

  ‘Praying.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ his father said. ‘Praying never did any harm.’

  ‘Nor any good,’ Mr Reagan said. ‘She’s going to make him as silly as she is.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ his father said again, still gazing at the paper and, in this instance at least, refusing to be disturbed. ‘You can never tell.’

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ Mr Reagan said. ‘The same happens whether you do or you don’t.’

  On Sundays Mr Reagan wore his suit without the jacket, the waistcoat unbuttoned save for the bottom, a stiff collar and around it the tie of his old school. A thin gold chain ran from the top button of his waistcoat to the top pocket on the left hand side. ‘Though it’s fastened to nought but a lump of stone,’ his father said. ‘I know that for a fact.’

  Since his disappointment over getting a job at the local pit his regard for Mr Reagan had slightly faded.

  ‘Oh, Reagan’s all right,’ he’d say. ‘But if he’s got all these complaints why doesn’t he do something about it?’

  ‘He’s frightened of his wife,’ his mother said. ‘In fact, he’s frightened of women in general.’

  ‘Of women?’ His father had laughed, gazing at his mother in amazement. ‘If he was frightened of women,’ he said, still laughing, ‘he’d be on his knees afore any man. And he’s never been that. Not as long as I’ve known him.’

  His mother nodded but answered nothing back.

  In fact, having heard this excuse, his father’s regard for Reagan was momentarily restored: he even went across the backs to talk to him on a Sunday morning after Mrs Reagan and Michael had gone off to church, sitting in the porch and laughing at the various things they read in the paper, occasionally joined by Mr Batty or Mr Stringer and a little later setting off for the Institute in a noisy group.

  It was from Mr Reagan that the idea sprang that Colin should sit for the examinations. The opportunity to go to the grammar school in the city came the following year, and if he failed the examination a second opportunity occurred the year after. If he failed again he would go to the secondary-modern school at the other end of the village, from which the pit recruited most of its miners.

  ‘It’s as Reagan says,’ his father told them. ‘Do you want him to be like me or like Reagan, getting paid for sitting on his backside all day? I know what I’d do.’

  ‘Mr Reagan works,’ his mother said. ‘Sitting down is a different kind of work, that’s all.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ his father said. ‘You’re the one that knows about education.’ His mother, unlike his father, had stayed at school until she was fifteen. In a cupboard upstairs was a certificate carefully filled in with copper-plate script testifying to her efficiency at English, nature study and domestic science.

  It was his father, however, who set him his homework, coming round the table whenever his mother had suggested some subject he might do, saying, ‘He’ll never learn nought from that,’ taking the pencil and setting his own small, square hand, bruised, its nails blackened with coal, firmly in the middle of the paper and across the top, with much snorting and panting, printing in capital letters the subject of a composition: ‘A FOOTBALL MATCH’, ‘SUNDAY SCHOOL’, ‘A RIDE ON A BUS’. Sometimes he would stand by the chair, waiting for him to start, stooping forward slightly to follow the words as he began, sometimes stepping back, whistling through his teeth until, finally, he called out, ‘If you take all that time to begin, by God, the exam’ll be over before you start.’

  ‘He has to think it out,’ his mother would tell him. ‘In any case, standing over him won’t be any help.’

  ‘And what if I don’t stand over him? He’ll never get done at all.’ Yet he would step back then, perhaps pick Steven up, who was walking now and swing him over his head, saying. ‘When you get started we’ll see the sparks fly. You wait, we’ll show them. By God, I’m sure of that.’

  Steven had blue eyes, like his father, but his face was like his mother’s, round and smooth, with the same turned-up nose. He had much the same expression as his mother, as if inside there were a shy, almost silent person peering out. He’d begun to speak and his mother, whenever she handed him an object, would repeat its name several times, nodding her head at each one. Occasionally when Steven was out of the house and playing in the yard with the younger children from down the terrace he would talk quite freely, running to and fro on his short, slightly bowed legs, shouting, ‘It’s mine. It’s mine,’ or, to some much older boy, ‘Stop it. Stop it.’

  ‘Can you say Colin?’ his mother would ask him.

  ‘Colin,’ he would say, looking up with a frown.

  His father usually had to get ready for work as Colin was finishing the essays, looking over his shoulder while he pulled on his trousers or his shirt to see how much of the page he had covered with his slow, careful scrawl, or if he had turned over to the other side. ‘Two sides,’ he’d say. ‘They won’t give any marks for half a dozen lines.’

  ‘Leave him alone,’ his mother would tell him.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ his father said. ‘You won’t educate anybody by leaving them alone.’

  He’d brought a red pencil home from the pit office to mark the essays and as he waited he would sharpen it impatiently over the fire, turning round then and saying, ‘Are you ready? I’ve to be off to work in half an hour,’ looking over Colin’s shoulder then at the clock to say, ‘I should leave it there, then. End of the sentence will do,’ sitting down in the chair as soon as Colin himself had stood up and adding, ‘Don’t go away. I want you to take notice of these mistakes.’ He screwed up his eyes slightly to read, his mouth pulled down at one side as he puzzled over the spelling, occasionally looking up and saying, ‘How do you spell “fair”, Ellen?’ and when his mother had told him, scarcely looking up from her own tasks, her ironing, or her washing-up, he would say, ‘Isn’t there an “e” in it somewhere?’ adding impatiently when she explained, ‘All right, then. All right. I only asked. I don’t want a lecture.’

  ‘Do you want to get it right or not?’ she’d ask him.

  ‘All right, then,’ he would say, pressing the point of his red pencil more firmly into the paper, going carefully over each of the words he had written himself and at the end of each sentence, if he approved of it, giving it a little tick. ‘That’s right. And that’s right,’ he would say to himself.

  He took a great pleasure in marking the paper with the red crayon and when he had finished he would write in the space at the bottom some comment he thought appropriate: ‘Excellent’, ‘Could do better’, ‘Attention not on your work’, or,
‘Will have to work harder for examinations’. Beside it he would add some mark out of ten. On principle he never gave him less than three and seldom more than seven. Finally, when all this had been completed, he would draw in a large tick, beginning it at the bottom left-hand corner and stretching it across almost as far as the top right, and beside it printing, with something of a flourish, his full initials, ‘H.R.S.’, Harry Richard Saville.

  Later, when he had grown tired of reading Colin’s stories and compositions, he brought home several mathematics books borrowed from a man at work. Inside the front cover of each one was printed in pencil, ‘Sam Turner HIS book’, and beside it, in one or two instances, the figure of a woman which his father had tried unsuccessfully to rub out.

  The books dealt with subjects he had scarcely touched on at school, fractions and decimals, figures split up on the page into little parts, and since his father didn’t understand them either he would read the book first himself, sitting in the easy chair by the fire, a piece of paper on his knee, copying out figures over which he coughed and dropped the ash of his cigarette, rubbing them out and groaning, and quite frequently stamping his foot, slamming it against the floor and rubbing his head in exasperation.

  ‘Here, let me have a look,’ his mother would tell him.

  ‘Damn it all, woman,’ he would say, covering the book up or snatching it away. ‘Am I supposed to be doing it or aren’t I?’

  ‘Well, you’re supposed to be,’ she’d say.

  ‘Well, then let me get on with it and stop shoving in.’

  She would go back to her work and he would continue to groan and stamp his feet, finally getting up and coming round the table to set out the figures on the squared colliery paper on which, much earlier, he had drawn out his inventions, scratching his head over each one as if, even as he wrote them, he wondered if they might have any resolution.

  He would then copy down the same problem himself and take it back across the table, working it out as quickly as he could, whispering under his breath, rubbing out, groaning, looking up to ask Colin if he had finished and going back to his own with relief when he told him he hadn’t. When he came round to mark the sums he always stood beside him, never asking to sit down, as if at any moment he expected himself to be corrected, stooping over his shoulder or occasionally going back to his own version on the other side of the table to stare down at the figures before coming back yet again to mark down a tick or a cross.

  As the problems increased in complexity and his father’s patience slowly ran out, and as Colin’s own tiredness after a day at school grew more apparent, his mother would begin to complain. Often when he had gone to bed, the problems, still unsolved, racing round his head, he would hear their voices raised in the kitchen, his father saying, ‘Nay, I won’t bother, then. We’ll send him down the pit like all the rest. After all, why should he be different?’

  And when he came down in the morning his mother would be saying as soon as his father came in from work, ‘There’s no reason at all why he should go down the pit.’

  ‘And where else will he go in this place, then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she would say as he clattered about the kitchen, taking off his boots, picking up his red pencil and beginning again with the problems where he had left off the night before, even occasionally bringing out the solution from his waistcoat pocket, written down for him by someone at work. ‘It’s no good forcing him’, she would add, ‘into something he can’t do.’

  ‘He can do them,’ he would say. ‘The reason he doesn’t do them is because you’re for ever hanging over him.’

  ‘He can’t do them’, she said, ‘because he’s tired,’ picking up Steven, who invariably cried when they quarrelled, pulling at his mother’s skirt and asking to be lifted.

  ‘It’s better that he’s tired now than he should have my job and be tired like I am, later.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you should give him time and not press him.’

  ‘Press him,’ he would say, stamping his stockinged feet and, getting no effect from that, banging his fist on the table so that all the cups and saucers rattled. ‘I’m damned’, he would add, ‘if I’m going to be beat by a decimal point and a couple of fractions.’

  In the mornings too when Colin came down his father would look up from his breakfast, the pit dirt still black on his lashes, and say, ‘What’s two point five multiplied by seven? Quick now, in your head,’ gazing at him with his pale-blue eyes, black-rimmed, then glancing quickly down and saying, ‘That’s right,’ when he had answered and adding, ‘How do you spell “geography”? Quick, now. Isn’t it with a “j”?’ shaking his head in frustration if his mother corrected him and saying, ‘I was only testing him out,’ beating the table in rage.

  In the end his father was quickly distracted. On the road leading out of the village to the south, past the Institute and the Dell, a field had been divided up into allotments. Each plot of land was twenty or thirty yards square and in the evenings and on Sunday mornings the men would go down there, carrying their spades and forks, to turn over the hard, tufted turf of what had once been a cow pasture. His father had been given a plot close to the road so that as the men came into the field or left he could always call out to them and frequently, having carried the spade down for him, Colin would be left digging on his own while his father sat in the hedge bottom smoking and talking to Mr Stringer or Mr Batty or Mr Shaw. ‘Nay, dig a straight line,’ he would call out and add to the men, ‘The war’ll be ovver afore we’ve grown ought here.’

  He bought plants on the way home from work and set them out in neat rows; cabbages with pale-green leaves on yellow stalks, cauliflowers and sprouts. While Colin dug back the grass on one side, turning it over and breaking it up in the earth, his father would rake out the rows, sifting the soil and drawing the stones and larger pieces away. Crouching down at the end of each row he would take out the gaily coloured packets of seed from his waistcoat pocket, tearing off a corner and tapping a few of the seeds into his hand. With his fist clenched he would waft them out on to the soil like a man shaking dice, crouching down or stooping, and covering the seeds up with the edge of his boot as soon as they were scattered. When he had reached the end of the row he would look for a stick, pierce the empty packet, and set it in the ground. In this way he planted carrots and beetroot, while peas and beans he carried in large packets in his coat, sticking his finger in the soil if it was soft and setting one bean or one pea at the bottom of each hole. Finally, when all the seeds were planted, he cut sticks out from the hedge at the end of the allotment and set them over the rows like a net, occasionally breaking off to cross over to where Colin was digging and say, ‘Here, let’s have a go: we’ll be here till midnight,’ digging in the spade and turning over the heavy sods. ‘You’d have thought they’d have ploughed it over for us, for a start. It’s like trying to dig a mountain.’

  With the proximity of the Institute many of the men spent their time there, bringing their tools down in the early morning only, once the Institute was open, to disappear up the road, coming back at lunch-time to retrieve their spades or forks or, in the case of Batty’s father, lying down on the grass mounds between the plots to sleep, his mouth wide open, snoring, his arms stretched out at his sides.

  ‘I don’t mind drinking,’ his father would say. ‘But I don’t go for a man who doesn’t know when he’s had a drop.’ Yet whenever he spoke to Mr Batty he would stand by him, looking up almost shyly at his red face, saying, ‘That’s right, Trevor, lad,’ laughing with his hands held to his side.

  His father took a great deal of trouble with the allotment. He paid the same sort of attention to it that he did to his sewing, or to the cooking when his mother was ill. Whenever the milkman’s cart had passed the door and left some manure in the street, he would say, ‘Up you get and let’s have it in,’ and in the evening Colin would carry it in a bucket to the allotment and spread it over the rows, his father wandering off to one of the other plots to t
alk to Mr Batty or Mr Shaw, and adding, ‘You might pull out a few of those weeds while you’re at it. I don’t know. They come up as soon as you look.’

  Though he hadn’t troubled to take a plot himself Mr Reagan often came down on a Sunday or, extending his stroll beyond the Institute, on an evening, carrying the cane which he always affected whenever he intended going beyond the end of the street or the colliery yard and, standing by the hedge in his bowler, leaning on his stick, he would say, ‘No, no, I won’t come in,’ indicating his shoes which were always shiny, and adding, ‘I wouldn’t like to put the old lady to any great trouble cleaning these.’

  If he had arrived unobserved he would call over the hedge to his father, laying the leaves aside with his cane, saying, ‘Why, Harry, that’s a fine job you’re making there,’ or, later in the year, when the beetroot had come up in dark clumps above the soil, and the carrots were shining bright orange beneath the ferny leaves, he would call, ‘Why, Harry, that’s a very fine showing you have there,’ adding, if his father took one out of the soil to show him, ‘Why, Harry, I wouldn’t mind having a few of those on the table tomorrow lunch-time,’ shaking his head in surprise whenever his father pulled a few out. ‘Why, Harry, that’s very decent of you. That’s very decent of you, indeed,’ leaning over the hedge to take them or coming to the gap, holding them well away from his suit, by the tip of their leaves, as he walked away.

  ‘Aye, well, we can’t eat them all ourselves, can we?’ his father would say and invariably would also pull up a few vegetables for Mrs Bletchley next door.

  A little while earlier Mr Bletchley had been called up. Unlike the men who worked in the mine his job had no priority and in fact, shortly after he left, from the same station, carrying a little suitcase and with Bletchley on one side and Mrs Bletchley on the other, both crying, a woman in faded blue overalls took over his job of carrying the long pole between the trucks and, after a brief visit home, in uniform, looking strangely tanned and contented, Mr Bletchley wasn’t seen again. The only contact they had with him was through Bletchley himself, who, on the way to school with Reagan, would describe the number of men his father had killed the previous week, the number he had captured, and the extent of the terrain which Mr Bletchley personally had overrun. ‘How many has he killed?’ Batty would ask him and when he’d been told would gaze at Bletchley with a slightly dazed expression, saying, ‘What’s he do it with?’