The Lewis Man (7 page)

He never referred to any of us by name. You were ‘boy’, or ‘you, girl’, and he was always using words we didn’t understand. Like ‘comestibles’ when he meant ‘sweeties’.

I met him for the first time that day when the people who had brought us there took us into his office. He was all sweetness and light and full of assurances about how well we would be looked after here. Well, these people were barely out the door when we discovered what being well looked after actually meant. But first he delivered a short lecture.

We stood trembling on the linoleum in front of his big, polished desk, and he positioned himself, arms folded, on the other side of it, tall square windows rising to the ceiling behind him.

‘First things first. You will refer to me at all times as sir. Is that understood?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, and when Peter said nothing I dunted him with my elbow.

He glared at me. ‘What?’

I nodded towards Mr Anderson. ‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

It took him a moment or two to understand. Then he smiled. ‘Yes, sir.’

Mr Anderson gave him a long, cold look. ‘We have no time for Catholics here. The Church of Rome is not welcome. You will not be invited to join us in hymn singing or bible reading, and will stay in the dorm until morning prayers are over. Don’t bother settling yourselves in, because with luck you won’t be staying.’ He leaned forward, then, knuckles on the desk in front of him, glowing white in the gloom. ‘But for as long as you are here, be aware that there is only one rule.’ He paused for emphasis and enunciated each word. ‘Do. What. You. Are. Told.’ He stood up again. ‘If you break that rule you will suffer the consequences. Do you understand?’

Peter glanced at me for confirmation, and I gave him an almost imperceptible nod. ‘Yes, sir,’ we said in unison. We were nearly telepathic sometimes, Peter and me. As long as I did the thinking for both of us.

We were marched, then, along to Matron’s room. She was an unmarried woman I think, in her middle years. I always remember her downturned mouth, and those shadowed eyes that seemed opaque somehow. You never knew what she was thinking, and her mood was always characterized by that sullen mouth. Even when she smiled, which was hardly ever.

We had to stand for ages in front of her desk while she opened a file on each of us and then told us to undress. It didn’t seem to bother Peter. But I was embarrassed, and afraid I would get a hard-on. Not that there was anything remotely sexual about Matron. But you never knew when that damn thing would pop up on you.

She examined us both, I suppose for identifying marks, then went carefully through our hair searching for nits. Apparently she didn’t find any, but told us that our hair was too long and that it would have to be shorn.

And then it was our teeth. Jaws prised apart, and stubby fingers that tasted bitter, like antiseptic, thrust in our mouths to poke around. As if we were animals being sized up for market.

I remember clearly the walk along to the bathroom. Stark naked, holding our folded clothes in front of us, prodded from the rear to hurry us along. I don’t know where the other children were that day. At school probably. But I am glad there was no one there to see us. It was humiliating.

About six inches of lukewarm water were poured into a large zinc tub, and we sat in it together to work up a lather with rough lumps of carbolic soap and wash ourselves thoroughly under Matron’s watchful eye. It was the last time at The Dean that I shared a bath with just one other person. Weekly bath night, it turned out, consisted of four to a bath, always in the same six inches of scummy water. So this was luxury.

The boys’ dormitory occupied the first floor of the east wing. Rows of beds along facing walls of a long room. Tall arched windows stood at each end, and shorter rectangular windows lined the outside wall. In later days it was filled with spring sunshine, warm and bright, but today it breathed gloom and depression. Peter and I were given beds side by side at the far end of the dorm. I had noticed, as we passed among them, that all the neatly made-up beds had small canvas sacks placed at the end of them, and when we reached ours I saw two empty sacks draped over our solitary case. There were no bedside cabinets, drawers or cupboards. We were, I soon found out, discouraged from accumulating personal belongings. And connections to the past were frowned upon.

Mr Anderson came in behind us. ‘You can empty your case and place your belongings in the sacks provided,’ he said. ‘They will remain at all times at the foot of your beds. Understood?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Everything in the case had been systematically folded by somebody. I carefully separated my clothes from Peter’s, and filled both our sacks. He sat for a while on the edge of his bed flicking through the only thing that remained of our father. A collection he had begun before the war of cigarette packets. Like a stamp album. Except that in place of the stamps, he had cut out the fronts of dozens of different cigarette packets and pasted them into the pages. Some of them had exotic names like
Joystick
or
Passing Cloud
or
Juleps
. All with colourful graphic illustrations, heads of young men and women seen puffing ecstatically at the tobacco-filled tubes that would later kill them.

Peter never tired of looking at them. I suppose the album was mine, really. But I was happy to let him have it. I never asked him, but it was as if those cigarette packets gave him a direct connection in some way to our father.

I felt a much stronger connection with our mother. And the ring she had given me was the symbolic memento of her that I guarded with my life. Not even Peter knew I had it. He couldn’t be trusted with a secret. He was just as likely to open his mouth and blab to anyone. So I kept it hidden in a rolled-up pair of socks. It was just the sort of thing, I suspected, that would be confiscated or stolen.

The dining hall was on the ground floor, and that’s when we met most of the other kids for the first time, after they got back from school. There were probably fifty or more of us at that time. Boys in the east wing, girls in the west. Of course we were a curiosity. Naïve newcomers. The others were blasé, experienced Dean kids. We were wet behind the ears, and worst of all, Catholics. I don’t know how, but they all seemed to know that, and it separated us from the crowd. Nobody wanted to talk to us. Except for Catherine.

She was a real tomboy back then. Brown hair cut short, a white blouse beneath a dark-green pullover, a pleated grey skirt above grey socks gathered around her ankles, and heavy black shoes. I suppose I must have been about fifteen at that time, and she would have been a year or so younger than me, but I recall noticing that she already had sizeable breasts stretching her blouse. Though there really was nothing feminine about her. She liked to swear, and had the cheekiest grin I ever saw, and never took lip off anyone, even the bigger boys.

We were supposed to wear ties for going to school, but I noticed that first night that she had already discarded hers, and at the open neck of her blouse I saw a small Saint Christopher medallion hanging on a silver chain.

‘You’re papes, right?’ she said, straight off.

‘Catholics,’ I corrected her.

‘That’s what I said. Papes. I’m Catherine. Come on, I’ll show you how this all works.’

And we followed her to a table to retrieve wooden trays and queue up at the kitchen to be served our evening meal.

Catherine lowered her voice. ‘The food’s shit. But don’t worry about it. I’ve got an aunt somewhere that sends me food parcels. Keeps her from feeling guilty, I suppose. A lot of the kids aren’t really orphans. Just from broken homes. Quite a few get food parcels. Got to get through them fast, though, before the fuckers in here confiscate them.’ She grinned conspiratorially and lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Midnight feasts up on the roof.’

She was right about the food. Catherine steered us to a table, and we sat among the hubbub of raised voices echoing around the high ceiling of the great hall, slurping at thin, flavourless vegetable soup and picking at green potatoes and tough meat swimming in grease. I found myself sinking into a depression. But Catherine just grinned.

‘Don’t worry about it. I’m a pape, too. They don’t like Catholics here, so we won’t be staying long.’ An echo of Mr Anderson’s words from earlier. ‘The priests’ll be here for us any day now.’

I don’t know how long she had been deluding herself with that thought, but it would be another year before the incident on the bridge finally brought a visit from the priest.

They didn’t like papes at school either. The school in the village was an austere grey granite and sandstone building pierced by tall arched windows set in stone dormers. Carved in the wall below the tower that held the bell which called us to lessons was a stone crest of the school board above a kindly lady in robes teaching a young student the wonders of the world. The student had short hair, and wore a skirt, and made me think of Catherine. Although I guess it was supposed to be a boy from classical times. It bore the date of 1875.

Being Catholics, we weren’t allowed in to morning assembly, which was a Protestant affair. Not that I cared a hoot about missing the God stuff. I didn’t find God till much later in my life. Strangely enough, a Protestant God. But we had to stand outside in the playground, in all weathers, until it was over. There was many a time that we would be let in, finally, soaked to the skin, to sit chittering at our desks in ice-cold classrooms. It’s a wonder we didn’t catch our deaths.

To make it worse, we were Dean kids. Which set us apart again. At the end of the school day, when all the other kids were free to escape into open streets, and homes with parents and siblings, we were made to line up in pairs, and suffer the barracking and catcalls of the others. Then we were marched back up the hill to The Dean where we had to sit in silence for the next two hours doing our homework. Freedom came only at mealtimes, and in the short periods of free time before we were forced early to bed in cold, dark dorms.

During the winter months, those ‘free’ periods were filled with Mr Anderson’s Highland dancing classes. Unlikely though it seemed, dancing was his passion, and he wanted us all perfectly drilled in the
pas-de-bas
and
drops of brandy
by the time the Christmas party came around.

In the summer months it was too light to sleep. By the time June came around, it stayed light until almost eleven, and restless soul that I was, I couldn’t lie awake in my bed with the thought of a whole world of adventure out there.

I discovered very early a back staircase leading from the ground floor of the east wing down into the cellars. From there I was able to unbolt a door at the rear of the building, and escape out into the falling dusk. If I sprinted, I could very quickly reach the cover of shadows beneath the trees that lined the park. From there I was free to go where I would. Not that I ever went far. I was always alone. Peter never had trouble getting off to sleep, and if any of the others were ever aware of me leaving they gave no sign of it.

My solitary adventures, however, came to an abrupt end on the third or fourth outing. That was the night I discovered the cemetery.

It must have been quite late, because dusk had given way to darkness by the time I slipped out of the dormitory. I stopped at the door, listening to the breathing of the other boys. Someone was snoring gently, like a purring cat. And one of the younger ones was talking to himself. A voice unbroken, expressing hidden fears.

I could feel the cold of the stone steps rising as I descended into darkness. The cellar had a damp, sour smell, a place mired in shadow. I was always afraid to linger, and I never did know what it was they kept down there. The bolt protested a little as I eased it back across the door, and I was out. A quick glance in each direction, then legs pounding across asphalt to the trees. Usually I would head up over the hill, then down again towards the village. Street lights reflected on the water there, where the wheels of ten or more mills had once turned. Silent now. Abandoned. Lights twinkling in a few of the windows of the tenements built for the millworkers, trees and houses rising steeply on either side below the bridge that spanned the river a hundred feet above it.

But tonight, in search of something different, I turned the other way instead, and soon discovered a metal gate in the high wall that bounded the east side of the garden. I’d had no idea that there was a cemetery there, hidden as it was from the view of The Dean by tall trees. As I opened the gate I felt a little like Alice passing from one side of the looking glass to the other, except that I was passing from the world of the living into the world of the dead.

Avenues of tombstones led away left and right, almost lost in the shadow of willows that seemed to weep for those who had gone before. Immediately to my left lay Frances Jeffrey, who had died on 26 January 1850, at the age of seventy-seven. I don’t know why, but those names are etched as clearly in my mind as they were in the stone that they lay beneath. Daniel John Cumming, his wife Elizabeth and their son Alan. How strangely comforting, it seemed to me, that they should all be together in death as they had been in life. I envied them. My father’s bones lay at the bottom of an ocean, and I had no idea where my mother was buried.

One whole length of wall had tombstones set into it, with well-kept oblongs of grass in front of them, and ferns growing around the foot of the wall.

I am amazed that I was not afraid. A cemetery at night. A young lad in the dark. And yet, I must have felt that I had much more to fear from the living than from the dead. And I’m sure I was right.

I wandered off along a chalk path, headstones and crosses huddled darkly on either side. It was a clear sky and the moon was up, so I could see without difficulty. I was following the curve of the path around to the south when a noise made me stop in my tracks. It would be hard now to say what it was I heard. It was more like a thud that I felt. And then somewhere away to my left a rustling among the grass. Someone coughed.