Reading by Lightning (25 page)

Uncle Hugh came down from Liverpool and he and Aunt Lucy went to the solicitor's. Eighty pounds to each of you, Aunt Lucy said when she came home. Everyone was amazed at what you can put aside by asking the butcher for bones and buying your smalls at the open market. I sat at the dining-room table in one of Lois's old jumpers, afraid to meet Aunt
Lucy's eyes now that I had the money to buy my passage home. Then she put a hand on my shoulder. I'll write to your dad, love, she said. And we'll see what's to be done.

In July a letter came from my dad to me, saying,
Your Aunt Lucy asked if you would like to stay in Oldham and go to school with Madeleine. The money from your nana and granddad will pay for your uniform and books and keep you in pocket money. We know you will help out to pay for your board, you've always been a good worker.
Although I had not dared to pray for this to happen, I did pray then. I went outside and looked out over Oldham Edge and said a two-word prayer: thank you.

And so I was set the task of discovering how to live with a new family. They made no efforts to explain themselves (because of course everyone was the same, and when I wasn't the same they turned their eyes tactfully away). Manners, I had to learn. And the art of conversation. And tenderness. Aunt Lucy would sit on the bed brushing Lois's hair, chatting all the while, and then reach for me. (How were my mother and I with each other? I couldn't recall, those times were blank.)

That summer George was off in Dorset with his professor, Dr. Acworth — off
digging,
as they put it, at Charmouth, on the sea. (There's a tip off Middleton Road, said Uncle Stanley. If he's that desperate to dig.) Six or eight times a day I walked by his open doorway. I was allowed to go in; one of our chores (which Lois and Madeleine loathed) was to run a feather duster over his shelves. I stood in his room and thought of him sinking into waxy dreams in that bed, his long legs folded like a grasshopper's. Cautiously I opened cupboards and drawers, but most of his private things were gone. It was only on the open shelves that you could see George, and I stood and looked hungrily at the junk piled there, trying to guess what George would have to say about everything, the starfish that would
not be just a starfish, the arrows with some sort of skin on them, the etching of a gigantic flea, all hairy legs and tiny praying head.

Meanwhile Lois was busy. When her exams were over she took a job on High Street as a telephonist — she'd had enough of school for the moment. She spent her pay on having her hair done, she bought smart new frocks and scented hand cream, she grew more beautiful by the day. She scarcely spoke to me. I didn't take this as a personal slight: she was like an athlete training to be the fastest runner in the world, her focus was absolute. The object of this unswerving ambition was
Archie,
an ordinary young man with a smile that hinted of nothing beyond it. Jolly good, he said, and A wee bit nippy out. But he drove a little green roadster, he had the Greek symbol of a posh school woven into his tie and apparently he had better vowels than the rest of them. At times I thought Lois was having us all on, but she gave no sign of this.

All through August, Aunt Lucy made Madeleine sit with me in the afternoons and go through her Third Form textbooks: algebra, geometry, French, English grammar. When it got close to September she went to see the headmaster at Ward Street Grammar School, and then I was taken to the school to be tested, in through the massive central doors of a red-brick building. Someone called a proctor, an extraordinarily tall girl with glasses that magnified one eye beyond the size of the other, took me into an empty classroom. You may sit where you fancy, she said, as though this was a significant concession, and handed me a booklet of foolscap and a slate on which was printed:

Discuss the British Empire's contribution to world civilization through her colonies.

Then she left and closed the door behind her. This question had been generously designed for me, with an eye to the debates that must take place nightly at tea all over the colonies. It required me to write about Canada, a notion that had become more and more flimsy as the months went by. After the first day, my Sheffield relatives had never asked, and home had shrunk in my mind to a miniature farm built for children, or a tiny sepia photograph in a leaflet from the Ministry of Agriculture. I stared at the question on the slate and a drift of debris floated into the examination room (chicken droppings lying like manna in the dust, the flat, wrinkled stream of cream shooting out from the spout of the cream separator. The image of my mother flinging potato peelings from an enamel basin into the pigpen. The pig with its two front feet in the trough, munching on something hideous, the red afterbirth of a calf). All of it too squalid to conjure up in words.

I sat wretchedly fixed on the word
colonies
for a long time and finally I dipped my pen into the bottle of ink Madeleine had lent me and began to write:

Near my home in Canada is a Hutterite colony, where we take our oats to be milled. Everyone in this colony dresses the same, mainly in black, and the women wear head scarves of dotted fabric.

But I knew as I wrote that my admission into Ward Street Grammar School was doomed with this tack. I struggled to recall a map in the Grade Eight history text at the Nebo School — the head of Queen Victoria floating off the coast of England, with black arrows reaching like octopus legs from her neck to various corners of the Empire. Afraid to cross out what I'd written, I attempted a segue:

The colonists who came from England to the Canadian prairies in 1903 were not so sensibly dressed for the perils that lay ahead.

I was still on the follies of the Barr Colonists when the tall girl came back and asked me to surrender my booklet and led me from the room.

Why they accepted me into the Fourth Form I never understood. I can only assume that the master who read my essay was some sort of anarchist. Whatever the reason, Ward Street Grammar School, with its polished wood floors and high windows, with its gowned masters and piles of poetry books bound in red cloth like hymnals, was one of those extravagant gifts life gives you sometimes, the first token of which (the harbinger of joys to come, I wanted to call it as I read
Macbeth
the first week) was the uniform, radiating so much promise simply hanging from a hook in Aunt Lucy's spare room that even now when I stand in a dry goods store and finger a bolt of merino in that particular shade of dark blue, I feel a throb of pleasure move down the back of my legs.

Leon Blum?
said George. Who's the bloke who wrote you this?

Just a friend, I said. A boy from Montreal. Our banker's son.

Lily has a beau, said Lois. She's a dark horse, that girl. She's been here more than a year and this is the first we've heard of him.

He's not my beau, I said. I might have wanted Lois and Madeleine to believe that he was, but not George.

Lily's friend is a Marxist, said George, looking up from the letter. That's what this is all about, and shame on you lot for your ignorance.

He's a
banker's
son, said Madeleine. He won't be a Marxist.

Most Marxists
are
bankers' sons, said George. That, or landless gentry.

What are you doing? I cried, for he had pulled a little notebook out of his pocket and was beginning to copy Russell's address off the envelope.

I just want to see if any of the lads here know him. There's a Marxist group meets in Bardsley's. In the bookshop. Monty's been.

How could they possibly know him, all the way over here? cried Lois. Oh, you are a git.

He's going to write to him, said Madeleine. That's why he's copying the address. Lily, stop him. He's going to take your boyfriend on as one of his pen pals.

Don't, I said to George, and put out my hand for the letter. George scribbled fast and then popped his notebook into a pocket and folded up the letter and gave it back. Don't write to him, I said.

It's nothing to do with you if I do, he said.

It's everything to do with her, you cretin, cried Lois. Madeleine grabbed him and I helped her and we pulled him down onto the floor. I could smell his scalp and his shirt, which was not as fresh as it might had been. While he writhed on the carpet we took the notebook from his pocket and ripped the address out of it.

George was home for his autumn half-term (which was the week after ours) and the whole house woke up. Even when he just sat in the parlour reading, he had the knack of turning everyone into more of what they naturally were — he refined their essence, you might say, making Uncle Stanley darker and more terse, filling Madeleine with gentle mischief, turning Aunt Lucy into an exact younger version of her mother, all songs and sighs. Or maybe it was just me he changed: he turned me into someone who breathed through her pores, who watched. Watched him especially. Standing in the front hall fiddling with the strap of my satchel, I watched him sunk in a parlour chair reading, irritation with the argument of his book playing across his pale face, his middle finger pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

On Saturday night Archie came to pick Lois up and carry her away in his little roadster, and the rest of us — Madeleine, George, George's friend Monty, Jenny from next door and me — went to the pictures on Horsedge Street. Afterwards we
tried to go into the Hartford Arms, and the proprietor called across the bar, Oy! Come back when those lasses are grown, so then we walked back home and George picked up two big bottles of Uncle Stanley's stout and we went out through the garden and onto Oldham Edge, where we passed the bottles of sour and yeasty stout back and forth. Below us lay the tangled yellow-green strands of the streets of Oldham, and the dark bulk of the mill where Uncle Stanley worked, looming like a parliament over the town.

It's
ever
so bright here compared to home, I said, hearing how English I sounded.

Oh, it was dark here once, said George. Back when hyenas roamed the moors.

Hyenas? I laughed.

He started to answer but Monty was beside me and I couldn't hear him for Monty growling and pretending to pounce on my neck.

Leave Lily be, Jenny cried. She flung her arm around my shoulders, and her hip bumped against mine. She lifted up her voice and sang out over the hills,

A north country maid up to London had strayed Although with her nature it did not agree. So she wept and she sighed and bitterly she cried, How I wish once again in the North I could be.

Up
to London? I asked. Instead of answering she launched into the refrain.
For the oak and the ash and the bonny ivy tree . . .
And while she sent the words out over the Edge in her raw, melancholy voice, we followed the wandering brow of the hill away from the town. It had been a cloudy day, and soon the sky was dark above us, and the lights of Oldham just a pool twinkling distantly below, the stars fallen into the valley, the constellations of the street lights disintegrating.
Off somewhere on the dark slopes sheep bells clanged. The moor was full of movement and shadows, a darkness made up of things, not the absence of things that made up the bare darkness of the prairies. My dad would know this. He must have walked like this when he was young, with stout or cider singing in his head, not exactly here maybe, but on paths very like it through the rough gorse. A north country lad. They think of themselves as
northerners,
I marvelled.

Jenny's song trailed off. We tramped on in single file, no one talking or laughing now. Oldham had entirely fallen away — we were trekking through a vast wilderness, we would come soon to the end of the footpaths and the end of man-made light. We'd been brought together with no common language but with a brave common purpose, with George as our leader. He walked nimbly through the gorse, his head bent like a crane's. He took us up and down along the Edge, holding back bushes to let us pass through. I'd managed to shake Monty off and I fell in behind George, and where the path rose steeply, he turned to take my hand. His fingers were thin and cold, they telegraphed urgency. I scrambled after him; light and joyous and sure-footed.
Oh, the oak and the ash and the bonny ivy tree,
I sang in my heart as the fog gathered in my hair.