Saville (7 page)

Outside he could hear his mother moving about, lighting the gas and, a little later, catching her foot against a chair.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she said through the door.

‘Yes,’ he said.

He heard the clinking of the cups and the water being poured into the pot.

When his mother opened the door he said, ‘Can I come out?’ before taking the cup.

‘No, you better stay there,’ she said. ‘If anything happens I can rush inside.’

When the door had closed again he watched the steam rising from the cup in the lamplight and saw the waves of heat distorting
the shape of the tyre as they came out of the little holes round the top of the lamp.

When the all-clear sounded his mother opened the door. She stood listening, her head to one side, gazing at the ceiling, then said, ‘Well, then, it should be all right.’ He climbed back up to bed with the smell of the washing still about him, and the smell of the burning oil from the lamp.

Eventually they dispensed with the cupboard. When the sirens sounded he would go down to the kitchen and sit with his mother and with his father if he were home from work, the door of the cupboard open and sometimes the lamp lit in readiness inside.

Finally, when the bombing started in earnest, his father would take him out on to the step to watch.

The planes came from the east, flying high above the houses, with just the dull throbbing of their engines to indicate their passage, like some low moaning inside the head. Almost every night the sky to the west would be lit by flames, silhouetting the houses of the village, lifeless but for the odd whispered cries from the other doors and windows. It was as if the horizon burned, a dull, aching redness flung against the sky. Across it, intermittently, waved the beams of searchlights and occasionally came the crackle of gunfire, like some vague tapping overhead.

One day his father took Colin with him on a bus to the city. It took them almost an hour to get there, making detours up narrow lanes to tiny farms and hamlets, the bus cresting a hill finally to reveal the city still some distance off perched on a steep and rocky outcrop, its various spires and towers shining in the sun.

Only when they’d passed through the suburbs and crossed the river did they see the damage. The factories were still there, the mill chimneys: it was the houses alone that had been hit, street after street of rubble, the bus occasionally brought to a halt while gangs of men dug with shovels or signalled it through some narrow gap.

Smoke rose from the debris: small crowds of people stood about gazing at the fractured beams and the guttered windows of what had once been their homes.

In the centre of the city the cathedral and the old brick buildings surrounding it were still intact. The tall, black spire stood at the very summit of the escarpment, open on every side. Only its stonework, however, had been chipped, the soot-encrusted surface laid open to the yellowish texture underneath. It was as if it suffered from some huge infection, yellow spots gaping from the black. Some of its windows had been broken. Inside several women were picking up the glass

‘That’ll never be hit,’ his father said. ‘It’s as safe as houses. They need have no worry over that.’

Colin followed his father through the crowds. Saville stopping here and there, before a guttered shop or house, talking to the people, nodding his head, his small, stocky figure swelling with indignation.

‘By God, when it comes to bombing women and children it’s come to something. It has that.’

‘Ah, well, there’s no providence in bombs, one way or another,’ a man had said. He had, it seemed, been bombed out already. ‘The place they put me in got bombed out the night I was sent. They’re chasing me from one hole to another.’

When they reached home his father sat at the table, drinking his tea, describing what he had seen to his mother. ‘One row of houses we saw: perfect. Not a stick out of place. The only thing was that not one of them had a window. Blast: it had removed every bit of glass.’

‘They say there are ten thousand homeless,’ his mother said.

‘More,’ Saville said, ‘if I had a guess.’

Sometimes, on a morning, Colin would tie a magnet to a piece of string and pull it through the gutters of the village. He seldom found anything but old bolts and nails. Once, however, he picked up a piece of greyish metal, torn at the edges, like paper, and slightly burned. He put it in a box, along with the war medals, the foreign coins, the cartridges, and the .303 bullets.

There were two parts to the village. The older part stood on a ridge a little to the north. It was made up of several old stone houses, still inhabited, an old manor house, deserted and falling into ruin, and the stone church which had once belonged to the manor. Two or three old farms stood here, back to back, their fields stretching out on every side, a system of mud lanes joining them together.

The more recent part of the village fell away on the lower ground to the south. At its centre stood the colliery with its twin headgears and its dykes and pyramids of slag, the terraced streets built for the miners strewn out on three sides like the spokes of a wheel: on the fourth side the slag ran off towards the country, the grey mounds of ash and rubble tumbling down finally at the edges of the nearest wood, one arm running off at the side of a little wagon track before it petered out amongst the fields.

The streets were numbered from one to five: they started with First Avenue, which stood in the shadow of the colliery, and ran round through ninety degrees to Fifth Avenue; here the streets had been named after trees, Beech, Holly, Laburnum, Willow. Once he had collected all the names and numbers in a book, along with the numbers of several cars which he had seen passing through the village on their way to the town, and the numbers of several railway engines he had seen passing through the station on the road to the south. Between the village and the station were strung out the various amenities of the village itself, the shops, a prefabricated Catholic Church, a Wesleyan Chapel, a greyhound track and, in a dip in the road, a small gas-works and a string of sewage beds. They stood amidst marshes and pools of stagnant water and the place was known locally as the Dell.

The surrounding countryside was given over entirely to farms, their hedged fields strewn out to the near, hilly horizon where, beyond a frieze of woodland or the silhouette of the fields themselves, a cloud of smoke or the tip of a slag heap would betray the presence of the other collieries stretching all around.

*

Shortly after the bombing began his mother went away to hospital and he went to sleep at Mrs Shaw’s house next door. She had no children and her husband worked in the colliery in the village. The house was cleaner and neater than their own, and his bedroom had linoleum on the floor. On all the walls, on the stairs as well as in the rooms, were hung pieces of brass, small reliefs and plates, and medallions with figures. Almost every day Mrs Shaw cleaned them with a rag, breathing on them, or rubbing on a white liquid from a tin, the brasses laid out around her, on a table, in neat rows. At lunch-time he stayed at school for dinner and at tea-time he would go back to see his father, who had usually just got out of bed. He would be getting ready to go and see his mother on his way to work, getting his things together, the fire unlit, the place itself untidy, the sink full of plates and pans he had never washed, the curtains in most of the rooms still drawn. ‘I’ll be glad when she’s back,’ his father would say. ‘How are you liking Mrs Shaw’s?’

‘Can’t I stay here?’ he asked him.

‘Nay,’ his father said. ‘You can’t sleep in the house by yourself.’

‘I wouldn’t mind.’

His father looked down at him then with a half-smile. His face was grey, his eyes reddened.

‘You’re better off where you are, Colin,’ he said. ‘Your mother’ll be back home before long, then we’ll be all right.’

He would dress for work then and wheel his bike out into the yard.

‘Come on, then, out you come,’ he would say. ‘I mu’n lock the door.’

Sometimes Colin stood in the yard holding the bike while his father locked the door, turning the key then stooping down to fasten on his cycle clips, folding his trousers round the tops of his boots. Sometimes too, as he waited, he pumped up the air in the tyres, his father waiting then, groaning, and saying, ‘Come on. Come on. I’ll be here all night. You need a drop of meat in that arm.’

Usually he went out into the street to watch him cycle off. His father wore a long overcoat, his flat cap pulled well down over his eyes. In the pannier behind the seat he would put the parcel he
had made up to take to his mother, some fruit or a change of clothes which he’d carefully washed and ironed himself. ‘You be a good lad, now,’ he would say. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘Good night, Dad,’ he would tell him.

‘Good night, lad,’ his father would say and push off his bike with one foot, riding on the pedal then, as it gained momentum, lifting his leg over the seat.

Mrs Shaw was a tall, thin woman. She had a large jaw and large, staring eyes, dark and full of liquid. Her cheek-bones stuck out sharply on either side. She had little to do with the other neighbours. Often she would stand with her arms folded beneath her apron staring out into the street.

Her husband was a small man with light, gingerish hair and a freckled face. He went to work early in the morning and came back home while Colin was still at school. At night he would come into his room, sometimes with a book, and tell him a story, his wife listening to the radio downstairs. Often, however, as he listened to Mr Shaw reading Colin would begin to cry, covering his face with his hands.

‘Why, what is it?’ Mr Shaw would say. ‘What’s the matter?’

He would shake his head.

‘Your mother will soon be back,’ Mr Shaw would say. ‘And what will your dad say when I tell him you’ve been roaring?’

‘I don’t know,’ he’d say and shake his head.

‘“Why,” he’ll say. “Not my lad, surely?”’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Well, then,’ Mr Shaw would say, and add, ‘Shall I fetch you up a chocolate?’

Sometimes he would accept one and, after Mr Shaw had gone, kissing him good night, he would lie sucking it in the darkness, the taste of the sweet and of the salt from his crying inextricably mixed up inside his mouth.

Before he went to school each morning Mrs Shaw would brush his hair. She would look in his ears in much the same fashion as his father would look at his bike when he couldn’t find what was wrong with it. Sometimes she would take him back to the sink in the kitchen and wash his ears again, pushing his head forward and rubbing round the back of his neck. ‘You’ll never get clean,’ she said. ‘You’d think you worked down a pit yourself.’

At the end of the week, on the Friday evening, she set out a bath in front of the fire. Around it she lay down sheets of newspaper to collect the drips.

‘I don’t think he wants to get in it,’ Mr Shaw said the first time it appeared.

‘I’ve changed the sheets,’ she said. ‘He’ll have to.’

‘I want to get bathed at home,’ he said.

‘Nay, this is your home,’ she said. ‘And your dad’s gone to work in any case and locked the door.’

‘I’ll get bathed tomorrow night, then,’ he said.

‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘I’ve changed the sheets and I’m not getting the old ones out of the wash.’

Her eyes expanded, her cheek bones flushing.

‘Now don’t be such a silly,’ she said.

In the end he got undressed and got into the bath. Mr Shaw had gone into the other room.

He sat perfectly still in the water, his toes curled up against the zinc bottom.

‘Well, then,’ Mrs Shaw said. ‘You better stand up. You’ll never get washed cramped up like that.’

She’d already washed his face and neck, his back and his shoulders.

‘I can wash myself,’ he said.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen it. Black ring left everywhere you’ve been.’ She put her hand under his arm. ‘Now, then. Up you get.’

He stood gazing down at the fire as she washed him. It was full of pieces of coal that had already caught alight.

‘Well, then. That wasn’t so bad,’ she said when she’d finished.

She knelt back on her heels by the bath, the apron damp between her knees.

‘You can get out now’, she said, ‘and dry yourself.’

‘Stand on the paper,’ she added, and gave him the towel.

He rubbed himself up and down, turned to the fire.

‘Now then. You see, that’s not dry,’ she said.

She took the towel from him and rubbed him, his body shaking at the force. She held him with one hand and rubbed him with the other.

‘Getting into dry pyjamas you want to be dry all over.’

Mr Shaw came in and picked up the bath. He opened the back door and carried it outside, emptying it down the grate.

Then he came in and picked up the damp sheets of paper, putting the bath away beneath the sink.

‘Now then, he looks as bright as a new pin,’ his wife said.

Mr Shaw nodded, gazing down at him.

‘Would you like a chocolate?’ he said.

He went up to bed and lay down in the clean sheets. They were like strips of ice. No matter how tightly he curled they burned him all over.

Sometimes at night, when he couldn’t sleep, he got out of bed and looked down into the garden next door, at the shelter, its black square mound at the end of the garden, at the rows of vegetables covered now, since his father’s absence, in weeds. It was all changed, as if it had been set down in a different place entirely. In the early mornings he could hear Mr Shaw get up and plod his way through the house, sometimes one of the brasses jangling as he caught it with his arm, his boots finally beating out across the yard and fading with the sound of other boots towards the colliery.

Each morning his father came in the kitchen, just back from work, ducking his head awkwardly in the doorway and smiling, Mrs Shaw sometimes offering him a cup of tea which he always refused. ‘Nay, you’re doing enough for me,’ he’d say. ‘I don’t want to put you to any more trouble.’

‘Ah, yes,’ she’d say as if she understood.