The Rise of Henry Morcar (4 page)

It was not school in Annotsfield, however, but out-of-school hours which Morcar remembered all his life. Football, in which his solid vigorous body was more effective in the scrum though less speedy in the field than Charlie's slight frame; cricket, in which Charlie was a really graceful and effective bat and Harry a slow bowler with a sly twist which took many a wicket. At the back of the two Sycamore houses, behind their joint garden, lay a small rough field, reasonably level, which belonged to the Sycamore property and could be entered from either house; the two boys contrived a cricket pitch there and spent hours on it, whole days in the summer holidays, improving their play. Their different talents were admirably complementary, and if they could secure a young Shaw or two to field for them, their happiness was complete. Charlie was a very kind elder brother and took pains to instruct his family in cricket, which Harry entirely approved. If Eric or Hubert or one of the girls played well, Charlie applauded them heartily, crying: “Well done!” even when it was himself they had caught out. Harry thought this very good and right in Charlie.

Winnie would never consent to play cricket; she strolled out sometimes to watch them when her domestic and amatory preoccupations allowed, made a few scathing remarks on their crimson faces, tousled hair and dirty hands and shirts and strolled away again, shedding her brown hair-ribbon as she went. The two boys were not upset by her comments, however; they took them in good part because Winnie, especially after she was removed from school in her middle teens to help her mother in the house, was an invaluable ally and staunch friend. She warned them when Mr. Shaw was in a rage; she secretly repaired damages to their clothes, represented in a favourable light accidents caused by cricket balls to windows or to Mr. Morcar's cherished plants and coaxed money for gingerbeer from her mother's household purse. She egged on Mr. Shaw into buying a bicycle for Charlie, which secured one for Harry too; when her father gave them a dilapidated old shed he had bought at a sale to keep their bicycles in, it was Winnie who furnished it with decrepit but recognisable chairs and found two cushions and urged Harry to beg an old table from his mother, so that it became quite a private room for them, known as the Den. Winnie took care of their precious bats and cricket balls and footballs, preventing the younger Shaws from using and ruining them in their absence; she greased their
skates; in successive stages she fed their goldfish, their mice, their beetles, their canaries. Winnie was a year older than Harry and Charlie. With her bright hazel eyes and unexpectedly dark eyebrows, her small even white teeth, her fresh colour, her dimple, she was considered a pretty girl; her manners were easy and her retorts provocative, and she always had a boy or two on hand. These swelled quite agreeably the concourse of young people always to be found in the Shaw half of the Sycamores.

At times indeed Mr. Shaw burst into a rage and complained that all these many guests were eating him out of hearth and home. Then all the Shaws, the suitors, the friends and Harry dispersed rapidly, so that the stairs and doorways seemed full of flying ankles. Mrs. Shaw was left to soothe her husband, and after they had sat together quietly for a time the temperature seemed to lower; Mrs. Shaw's faded and small but rather sweet voice could be heard mildly singing an old-fashioned ballad—
I Stood on the Bridge at Midnight
or
Juanita
—and the children crept into the room again, taking care to wash and brush rather thoroughly before doing so. Mr. Shaw would be found smoking a cigar and listening to his wife with a great air of benevolence, but this was still unstable, and woe betide any young person, Shaw or other, who then disturbed his mood by untoward speech or action. Morcar was rather apt to incur frowns on these occasions, for he was as clumsy as a young puppy and chairs seemed to fall if he approached within a yard of them.

For some reason, he never told tales at home about Mr. Shaw's rages. The parents of the two families were in a sense quite intimate. Mr. Shaw and Mr. Morcar paced up and down the common back garden on summer evenings discussing textile problems, argued pleasantly about the same topics while Mr. Morcar planted out his seedlings, and went to football matches together in winter. Mrs. Morcar helped Mrs. Shaw to cut out and sew the innumerable garments required by the large Shaw family, and Mrs. Shaw who was an admirable cook assisted her younger neighbour with recipes for baking and preserving. They often visited each other's houses for high tea, on Saturdays and holidays. But Morcar felt that there was not the confidence and approval between the families at the parental level which existed on his own. Mrs. Morcar sometimes murmured darkly that Mrs. Shaw had a good deal to put up with; Mr. Shaw sometimes addressed to Harry sarcastic textile remarks about his father's business which Harry understood perfectly though he pretended not to. Frederick Morcar had recently become a Town Councillor, and Mr. Shaw had a habit of referring to Councillor Morcar with a mock-respectful inflexion which Harry found disagreeable. It was better to ignore
parental comment, which in any case was sure to be incomprehensible, and pretend a respectful affection for one's friend's parents, even if for some reason one did not altogether feel it.

There were times, of course, when owing to family tension it was better to leave the Sycamores behind altogether for an hour or two. In their young days on such occasions Harry and Charlie played at Red Indians, or Boers, or robber chiefs, on the wooded steeps of Hurst Bank. Presently part of the land was devoted to building operations, the lower fringe of trees was cut down and in its place appeared stacks of clean white planks, interlocked to form hollow triangles. These tall stacks could be climbed, Charlie discovered, and the hollow space within formed a completely private retreat, hidden from the eyes of all the world. Winnie, who was let into the secret of these timber nests and sometimes consented to play the chief's wife or captive maiden which such fine lairs seemed to demand, climbed in skilfully without damage to her long ribbed black wool stockings but thought the planks insalubrious and threatened to betray the boys' whereabouts to their mothers if they haunted the Bank too closely.

So then they took out their iron hoops and drove these before them with looped iron rods on long excursions, trotting all the time. The distances they accomplished thus were quite prodigious. Turning from Annotsfield they pressed up the hill through Hurst, came out on the moorland road, bowled along rapidly, with the wind fresh in their faces, between the rough grass and the heather, till they reached the remote Moorcock Inn on the wilds of Marthwaite Moor, then turning to the left they coaxed the hoops over the white sand and dark rock of the narrow winding path towards the bluff of Scape Scar. To keep the hoops erect and turning along the hazards of this path, almost buried beneath overhanging ling and heather, demanded a skill which they were proud to give and an attention which left them little time to observe the landscape, though occasionally they paused and gazed at the various rocky Pennine summits rising about them, sombre beneath the swift grey clouds, with a vague sense of pleasure. From Scape Scar the descent to the Ire Valley was agreeably risky, for the path became so precipitous that the hoops continually threatened to escape and leap down the hillside, to destruction against a jutting rock, burial amidst deep russet bracken, or drowning in the dirty waters of the Ire. They crossed the river by the bridge at Marthwaite and bowled down the busy paved Ire Valley, lined with mills, to Irebridge. Sometimes they went on to Annotsfield, glancing at Mr. Shaw's mill on the way; more often they crossed the Ire again at Irebridge and found themselves at the bottom of Hurst Bank. This hill was a considerable
trial at the end of a long day's run—the boys' faces grew crimson, their foreheads wet and their breath uneven, for the hoops needed innumerable applications of force to drive them up the Bank and it was considered dishonourable to allow them to cease rolling and carry them. But the disadvantage of the severe gradient was outweighed in their minds by the fact that this route enabled them to make a complete circle from the Sycamores without retracing a single yard. When they had topped the worst of the rise they argued agreeably as to which of them felt the hotter: Charlie who was wiry though slight or Harry who looked stronger because more solid.

As they grew older they grew to scorn the hoops, and their excursions shortened because they were not very fond of mere walking, which they found dull, but after the bicycles came they travelled far afield—to Hudley, to Bradford, or over the Pennines into Lancashire. For the longer of these trips they were allowed to be absent all day. The initiative usually came from Charlie. On a bright holiday morning there would come a knock on the back door while the Morcars were at breakfast; a pause followed while the Morcars' maid—like the Shaws they now had only one—climbed the steps from her kitchen in the cellar; then there were sounds of brisk colloquy; then Charlie bounced into the room, his cheeks very pink, his hazel eyes very bright, and twisting his schoolcap in his hands announced breathlessly that his mother wanted to know if Harry could go out for the day with him—Winnie was buttering a teacake for him now. The Morcars smilingly agreed; there came a long five minutes' wait while Mrs. Morcar's slender fingers sliced a teacake too, and a further delay later in the Shaws' kitchen when Winnie, exclaiming: “Wait!” vanished into the cellar and reappeared with some especial delicacy, such as a treacle tart, some ginger snap or a handful of rock buns. Smiling, yet looking apprehensively over her shoulder in case her mother should appear, to the accompaniment of scolding from the Shaws' loud-voiced maid, Winnie swiftly tucked these into neat white paper packages.

“That tart's for dinner, Miss Winnie,” grumbled the maid: “I don't know what Mrs. Shaw will say if you give it those boys.”

“Well, Master Charles has to have some dinner too, doesn't he?” riposted Winnie sharply.

The maid muttered and grumbled and looked askance at Morcar, but was not inhospitable enough to say what was in her mind. “There won't be enough to go round,” she usually ventured.

“Then somebody can go without,” said Winnie tartly, holding out the packets.

Morcar, ashamed, had once attempted to decline the delicacy
and put aside her hand, but at this Winnie's cheeks flamed, her eyes snapped, she scolded him in a voice which rose, and crying: “I suppose you think it isn't good enough for you!” she threw the package down on the kitchen dresser so that it burst and the piece of apple tart within dissolved. Morcar gaped at her, astounded and alarmed, while she stood before him breathing anger.

Suddenly the tension of her slender body relaxed, her very hair seemed to sink to rest about her head. “Well, never mind,” she said in a soothing, calming tone. She snatched a fork from a nearby drawer, and swiftly restored the sticky mess to the semblance of something eatable. In a moment she had tied the parcel round with string and was offering it to Morcar. Colouring and hanging his head, he took it; his fingers touched her warm pulsating palm.

“Come
on,
Morcar!” shouted Charlie.

Winnie followed the boys to the door and watched them as they crammed their parcels into the small black leather pouches attached to the saddles of their machines. Morcar's fingers were clumsy and the pouch would not close.

“Never mind, Harry,” said Winnie again, watching him from the door.

“It's all right,” muttered Morcar, sniffing. His voice, which had recently broken, sounded very gruff—he was profoundly hankful that it did not go off into one of its tiresome squeaks. He mounted and rode off along the asphalt path. There were some tin buckets full of water standing about, containing the Shaws' pots of aspidistras receiving their weekly immersion; on an impulse—for though he understood Winnie's resentment and was sorry to have caused it, he felt a sturdy determination not to be put down more than he deserved—Morcar steered the bicycle skilfully in and out between the buckets so as to weave a well-curved figure eight. At the corner of the house he looked back at Winnie and gave a cheerful grin. She smiled a trifle uncertainly. He touched his cap in cheeky salutation. Winnie frowned, but the dimple in her cheek betrayed her.

Next time the boys set off on a cycling expedition Winnie put their parcels on the dresser, then withdrew to the hearthrug and stood there without a word, her amber lashes resting on her cheeks. After a moment's pause Morcar took up his parcel and muttered: “Thanks.” Winnie said promptly: “You're welcome.”

In Morcar's estimation the matter was now settled and he thought no more of it; it troubled him not at all as he munched Mrs. Shaw's admirable cakes, until one day his mother found some alien crumbs adhering to a small parcel of sewing materials
which he had fetched for her from town and which had of course travelled to the Sycamores in the saddle-pouch. A few questions revealed that her son had been eking out his provisions by accepting additions from the Shaws. A hot flush stained Mrs. Morcar's cheek and she rebuked Harry with real anger. Councillor Morcar chancing to enter the room at the moment, she explained the situation in a rapid flow of speech very unlike her usual reticence. Her husband looked grave.

“You shouldn't have done so, Harry,” he said in his kind if grating tones: “always stand on your own feet, you know.”

“And from the Shaws, of all people!” cried Mrs. Morcar.

“What's wrong with the Shaws?” said Harry with resentment.

“Nothing, love. Charlie's a grand lad,” they said hastily.

It was the very next day that the incident occurred which clarified these parental discontents and made the boys deep friends for life. It was a Saturday in September; the Morcars were at the Shaws' for tea; the meal was over and Winnie and the maid were clearing the heaped table. Councillor Morcar and Mr. Shaw had attended an exciting football match that afternoon, a cuptie in which Annotsfield had gloriously triumphed, and accordingly they were both in an expansive mood. After discussing the match in great detail, they wandered off into business matters and began to tell textile anecdotes in which each mildly boasted of his own skill. In this sort of competition Mr. Shaw was soon far ahead of all rivals and the conversation became a monologue tending always to the glory of John William Shaw. Harry found it tedious, and after a while heard only snatches, replaying the football match to himself during the duller parts. He was suddenly recalled to Mr. Shaw's meaning by a feeling that something uncomfortable was being said. Mrs. Morcar's lips were compressed, Mrs. Shaw looked pink and worried; Mr. Morcar was very busy filling his pipe.