Saville Read online

  ‘His bare hands,’ Stringer would say. ‘It’d take half an army to kill as many as that.’

  ‘Not with a machine gun,’ Batty would tell him, rushing strangely to Bletchley’s defence whenever his figures and exploits were questioned.

  Some Sundays they went walking, usually for about an hour before tea. They spent some time getting ready. His father would clean his own shoes and his mother’s, rubbing at them with a brush and then with a duster as if he wished to rub them away, Colin cleaning his own shoes and Steven’s. Then they got washed and while his mother dressed Steven in a pair of grey shorts and a jacket Colin would put on his suit, his father coming down in his own, his face red and glistening, stooping over him while he inspected his ears and neck and then his hands. There would be several minutes waiting then while his mother went upstairs to get dressed, his father standing in the kitchen in front of the mirror, spreading cream in his hands from a small white bottle then rubbing it on his hair, combing it down with a parting at one side, the fringe neatly turned back on top, calling out over his shoulder, ‘Now, look. Stand still. Keep clean. Don’t move.’

  When finally his mother came down in her best coat, dark brown and hanging almost to her ankles, she would bolt and lock the back door on the inside and put the key in his father’s pocket saying, ‘Have you got your handkerchief? Have you got any money?’ never troubling to look at herself in the mirror at which, although he had repeatedly combed his hair, his father still cast frequent glances. They would then all go through the front door.

  It was the only time the front door was used to come in and go out of and his father, conscious of the windows across the street, would lock it carefully behind him, test it, then put the key in his pocket with the other one. ‘I never know why we lock it,’ he would tell her. ‘What have we to pinch?’

  ‘It’s surprising what people find once they get inside,’ his mother said and, looking up at the windows to make sure that they too were secure, they would set off down the street.

  Colin always walked in front, holding Steven’s hand, his mother following behind with her arm linked in his father’s. Occasionally they would call out, ‘Pick your feet up. Don’t drag them. Take your hands out of your pockets. Your hair needs cutting. No wonder those shoes are worn out,’ or, if they were trying to walk with some care, ‘Come on, now. Walk a bit faster. We’re going to be treading on your heels.’

  Invariably they walked through the village to the Park, his father, whenever they passed someone they recognized, whether he knew them or not, calling out, ‘Afternoon, Jack. Afternoon, Mick,’ the men often glancing across uncertain, nodding their heads. ‘They had that chap up last week for carrying matches,’ he would tell his mother and she would say, ‘That one? I don’t think it can be him. He drives a lorry.’

  ‘No, no,’ he would say. ‘He’s down the pit. I know him well,’ glancing back to make sure but seldom arguing further.

  In the Park they would walk slowly round the paths that took them by the swings and the ornamental pool. Other families, often pushing prams, would be walking up and down or, if the day were dry, sitting on the grass, the men lying back asleep, the women sitting upright, knitting, talking across to one another, the children playing on the swings. ‘No going on swings on Sunday,’ his father said whenever Steven showed signs of wandering in that direction ‘keep to the path and keep your shoes clean.’

  Usually on the way back Steven would ask to be carried, and though he often cried, tugging at his father’s hand and saying, ‘Dad, I want to,’ his father would say, ‘You’re walking. How can you get any exercise if you’re being carried about? And in any case, if I was going to carry you I wouldn’t have put on my suit,’ sometimes taking his hand however so that Steven could swing between him and his mother, Colin himself walking on ahead or, if he were feeling tired, following behind, his father occasionally turning and calling, ‘Come on. Don’t lag,’ and adding to his mother, ‘It’s like trying to drag a horse.’

  Finally, when they reached the house, his father would unlock the door, his mother would go inside before him and, picking up the kettle, would set it on the fire before she removed her coat, his father mending the dying ashes with pieces of coal before he too removed his coat, and turning to the table – which was set already with cups and saucers – he would help to get the tea.

  9

  The air-raids began again the following winter and his grandfather came to live with them. He was a small, slight man with a straight back and thick white hair which, like his father’s, was still cut in a boyish fringe. His eyes too were light blue and the skin around them creased up in a half-smile. ‘This is a big lad you’ve got here, Harry,’ he would say, grasping Colin’s arm, standing him between his knees, feeling his biceps, or, when he had lifted Steven up, he would sing in a light voice, ‘Follow my leader, follow me do: I’ve got a penny here for you.’

  ‘Which pocket is it in?’ Steven would say, feeling round him.

  ‘Nay, Steve,’ he would say. ‘You’re as quick as your dad.’

  He had been living with his father’s brother for some time but now the brother had been called up and he had come to live with them. He had only two teeth, one at the top and one at the bottom, and shortly after he arrived Colin’s mother took him to the dentist.

  ‘Last time I went they near tore my mouth to pieces,’ he said. When he came back he had no teeth at all. ‘They’ll be ready in a fortnight,’ he told Colin’s father. ‘What have I to do till then?’

  ‘You’ll be all right, Dad,’ his father said. ‘We’ll fill you up with beer.’

  ‘Beer,’ he said. ‘Beer did no good to any man. I’ve lived long enough to tell you that.’

  Whenever the air-raid sirens sounded he sat under the table, smoking his pipe. The shelter had been dug up in the back garden and replaced by a metal one, of corrugated iron: each of the houses had one but many of them were full of water and refuse and none of them were used. ‘They’ll not frighten me,’ he said whenever his father tried to coax him out into the cupboard beneath the stairs. ‘I’m not frightened of any bombs.’

  He would sit under the table with his legs stretched out, smoking his pipe, his head stooped forward. Or sometimes, if Colin’s father and his mother tried to coax him out together, he would crouch on all fours or lie on his side with his hands wrapped round one of the legs. ‘You get in,’ he would tell them. ‘I’ll be safe enough here. It’s not me they’re after.’ And later, when he had got his new teeth, he would crouch under the table with his pipe clenched between them as if they had been fixed, perpetually, in a grin.

  The teeth were large and very white and he often sat in the doorway so that he could see Mr Shaw or Mrs Shaw or Mrs Bletchley, smiling whenever they appeared so that they would say, ‘Why, you look twenty years younger, Mr Saville.’

  ‘I don’t know about younger,’ he would say, sitting there again the next day, and the next.

  In the evenings he would take the teeth out and brush them under the tap, then drop them into a jar full of water, taking them up to his room and standing them on a chair facing him by the bed. He slept in the same room that the soldier had slept in and on the same bed, and Steven, who had had the room for a little while, moved in with Colin.

  His grandfather always wore his suit, which was dark blue and slightly too large for him, the sleeves hanging over his hands, the trousers drooping over his ankles. Each evening he hung it up on a coat-hanger, the trousers underneath and the coat on top, sometimes calling to his mother as he got into bed, ‘Ellen. Ellen. Come and hang up my suit,’ standing about impatiently until she had come and hung it up on a hook on the wall.

  ‘It wouldn’t do it any harm to fold it over a chair,’ Colin could hear her say through the wall.

  ‘Nay, I’ve had that over twenty year, Ellen.’

  ‘You bought it two years ago,’ she would tell him.

  ‘No, no,’ he would say. ‘It was longer than that.’
r />   He had a special regard, perhaps because of the suit, for Mr Reagan, and Mr Reagan had a similar regard for him. ‘A good suit is a good suit,’ Mr Reagan would say. ‘And there’s nothing in this world quite with which to compare it.’ And when his grandfather had asked Mr Reagan to inspect his teeth, smiling for him or even, on some occasions, taking them out, Mr Reagan would say, ‘I always say a good set of teeth make up for any deficiency of face. And that, mind you,’ he would add, ‘I’m saying to someone whose face, if you’ll pardon the expression, doesn’t come into that category at all.’ On other occasions, when they had been out for a walk together, to the Institute or down to the allotment to see Colin and his father digging, he would say, ‘There’s many a restraint I’ve to put on the women, Harry, now that your father’s walking through the place.’ And when his father laughed he would add, ‘Oh, now. He’ll be coming back from his walk one of these days a married man.’

  His grandmother had died long before Colin was born and his grandfather had been a widower for many years. ‘He always says twenty years about everything,’ his mother told him, ‘because that’s when his wife died.’

  ‘Aye,’ his grandfather would say. ‘She was a fine woman. They don’t make them like that any more.’

  He saw too, occasionally, at this time his mother’s father and mother. They lived in the next village, four miles away, and on some Saturdays he would go with his mother and Steven on a bus to visit them. They lived in a row of little houses built specially for old people. Each house consisted of a single room from which an alcove opened out on one side, and in which, behind a curtain, stood a metal double bed, and on the other a small alcove which was used as a pantry. A door led directly into the house from a footpath at the front, and at the back a porch led to a lavatory and a tiny walled-in opening in which they kept coal. Sometimes at week-ends his father filled a sack of coal and having roped it to his bike, laying it across the pedals, he and Colin between them would push it the four miles to the next village and tip the coal into the little opening. ‘I get it at reduced rates,’ his father would say. ‘It’s cheaper than them buying it,’ or when they got back, riding on the bike, Colin sitting sideways on the cross-bar between his father’s arms, his father would say, ‘Has your mother told you what her father was when I met her?’

  ‘He was a farmer,’ his mother would say.

  ‘A small-holder, a small-holder,’ his father would tell him, almost shouting. ‘He kept pigs. He was a pig-breeder. You had to be in love, I can tell you, to step inside that house.’

  His father would sit laughing in his chair while his mother complained, then he would add, ‘Ah, lass, you know I love you. I married you all the same.’

  ‘We kept other things as well,’ his mother would tell him, ignoring his father, her face flushing, her eyes large.

  ‘Aye, but pigs is all you smelled!’ His father would lie back in his chair laughing and slapping his knee with his hand or, if he were smoking, sit choking on his cigarette. ‘Pat us me back, pat us me back,’ he would say. ‘I forgive you.’

  His mother’s father and mother were perhaps even older than his grandfather. They were called Swanson; the name was embroidered on a piece of cloth which was framed and hanging over the high mantelpiece of their room: ‘To Edith and Thomas Swanson on their Golden Wedding’, beneath which was the date and, in smaller lettering, ‘From the Old People’s Guild’, the writing itself surrounded by a border of pink flowers and small blue-birds swooping in between.

  Grandfather Swanson would either be sitting by the fire, which was set in a high range on the wall at the level of his knees, or lying on a couch at the back of the room. He very seldom moved when they were there, only his head rising occasionally when they came in, after knocking, and his grandmother had said, ‘Ellen’s come to see us, Tom,’ his dark eyes turning slowly in their direction before his head sank back on the couch or the chair. His grandmother had a small, very round face as if, all the time, she were puffing out her cheeks. They were always bright red, particularly in winter, and her eyes which were greyish were very narrow so that when she smiled they almost disappeared. She often got Colin’s name mixed up with Steven’s and with the name of some other grandson he had never met, so that she would often say, ‘Would you like a sweet, Barry, or an apple?’ then look up when he didn’t answer. ‘Now,’ she would say, the grey eyes shining, ‘I don’t know which one it is.’

  Sometimes his mother came away from his grandmother’s crying. Some time after they had arrived his grandmother would say, ‘You’d think you’d get more help from your own daughters as you grow older,’ and his mother would say, ‘I do help you, Mother. Harry brings you coal, and I come over and do your washing.’ Sometimes, too, his mother would do the cleaning. While his grandfather and his grandmother sat by the fire she would put on an apron she’d brought with her, fill a bucket at the sink in the corner, then scrub the floor. Outside she would scrub the front step and the paving stone below it and scone it with a yellow stone so that when it had dried it glowed a dull yellow. She would do the same with the back door and then make the big double bed with its brass rails and brass head-piece, and clean the small, heavily curtained windows, borrowing a pair of steps from a woman next door. The washing she did in a shed built at the back of the houses. Colin never went there, for his mother, ashamed to be seen working in these conditions, with pumped water and where the washing was beaten against a stone, refused to let him inside. He would play on a piece of bare ground between the shed and the houses while he waited, or sit with his grandmother by the fire. When his mother came in from hanging the clothes up she would say. ‘You can ask Mrs Turner to get them in, Mother, when they’re dry.’

  ‘Oh, we’ll be all right,’ his grandmother would say.

  ‘I’ve to get back for Harry’s supper. He’ll be off to work,’ his mother would add.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ his grandmother said. ‘We’ll manage somehow.’

  And when they got back home and his father could see that she had been crying he said, ‘Take no notice. They’re like that. Just do as you see fit.’

  ‘I never get any thanks. Ever,’ she said.

  ‘Then don’t go expecting any,’ he told her.

  ‘If I did nothing at all she’d have some right to complain.’

  ‘Aye. She’d be in a right mess all right.’ His father would look away, uncomfortable when she cried.

  Sometimes on the bus back the conductor said, ‘Are you all right, love?’ leaning over her, his hand on the back of the seat.

  She would wipe her eyes then blow her nose and try to see the money in her purse.

  ‘People are like that when they grow old,’ she said, and other times she would say, ‘Never expect anything of people then you’ll never get hurt.’

  However, at Christmas or on their birthdays she would take over a present or even a special cake that she had baked herself. ‘There’s a time for forgiving,’ she would say whenever his father complained and he would turn away saying, ‘Let them find out what it’s like on their own. They’ll soon come begging.’ On their birthdays, or sometimes on the Saturdays when she went over, she would cook them a meal, grandfather Swanson lying on the couch gazing at the ceiling, his white hair falling in thin wisps over his cheeks, his grandmother sitting in a rocking chair by the fire saying, ‘Two potatoes will be enough,’ or, ‘If you use all that cabbage, Ellen, we’ll be without for the rest of the week.’

  ‘I’ll buy you some more, Mother,’ his mother would say, ‘before I go.’

  ‘If you have the money you can always manage.’

  Sometimes she stood over the pans with her eyes full of tears, wiping them away on the back of her hand, his grandmother taking no notice.

  ‘I’ve no patience with you, I haven’t,’ his father said when she got back, enraged himself and banging the table with his hand. Yet he would add, ‘No, no, sit down. I’ll make you a pot of tea before I go to work.’

  Grandfath
er Saville had fought in the First World War. He would sit looking at the newspaper through a pair of heavy black-rimmed spectacles perched on the end of his nose, his head held back, studying the pictures but never the text. ‘Look at this, Colin,’ he would tell him, holding the paper up so that he could see the picture of a burnt-out building or a tank with its turret broken open or slumped down in a hole without its tracks. ‘They don’t fight wars now like they used to. In those days it was man to man. Now they think nothing of bombing women and children, or shelling people miles away they never see.’

  In the evenings when Colin was ready for bed and had changed into his pyjamas, and his mother had looked in his ears and at his neck, his grandfather would say, ‘Sit down, lad, for five minutes,’ and when his mother complained, saying, ‘He hasn’t even said his prayers yet, he’s going to be late into bed,’ he would answer, ‘What I have to tell him, Ellen, won’t take more than a nod of your head.’

  Or when he was already in bed and had put out the light his grandfather would come in and say, ‘Are you awake, lad? They’ve sent me up to bed as well. Sitting down there listening to the wireless. They’ll listen to ought, people nowadays. In one ear, out the next.’

  His grandfather had been to Russia. He would sometimes call to Mr Reagan in the street or in the backs saying, ‘Come in, come in. The missis will make us a cup of tea,’ and when Mr Reagan had come in and, carefully easing up his trousers, taken a seat at the table, he would say, ‘Did I tell you the time I was in Russia?’ and when Mr Reagan had answered, ‘Yes, I believe you did,’ he would say. ‘We went in to save the Czar. Would you believe it? A socialist all my life and when they call me up they send me to shoot the workers.’