The Stone Book Quartet (12 page)

Grandad leaned on the slopstone and watched William.

‘That’s a Macclesfield dandy. I’ve seen me Grandfather smoke one many a time. But I’ve never seen one not broken sooner or later. It must be his: and in the garden all this while, and not hurt.’

The last of the soil was out of the bowl and William unblocked the stem. He blew it clear. And then he sucked, breathed in. The air rasped through the stem.

William washed his hands. The soap was yellow, bone shaped, sharp with earth. The grit stood out.

Grandad put four potatoes in the oven. ‘We’ll get ourselves fettled while they’re baking,’ he said.

He picked up a torch and went outside. At the end of the house there was a low room built on. Grandad kept rubbish in it. The house was old, and nothing was ever thrown away, because, with so much rubbish over so many years, some of it was always useful.

A jumble of iron and wood lay in a corner. It was the remains of a loom. William could remember when it stood upright and he used to play on it. But all the softwood was worm-eaten, and one day it had collapsed under him.

The iron was newly bright from a saw. It was the iron that Grandad had curved in the swage block to the bellows handle.

‘Catch hold on these,’ Grandad pulled some rags out of a drawer and gave them to William. They were soft and slippery. When he squeezed them they crumpled up small, but sprang open as soon as he let go.

Grandad dismantled what was left of the loom, choosing only the good oak. The rest he smashed to kindling with his boot. ‘I’ve been meaning to rimson this glory-hole for years,’ he said. ‘It’s got you can’t move, there’s that much clutter.’

Grandad and William carried the oak into the house. Grandad brewed the tea, and searched out an empty tobacco tin.

‘Put Grandfather’s pipe in that,’ he said, ‘and pack it round with them rags against it getting broken.’               

‘What must I do with it?’ said William.

‘Keep it,’ said Grandad. ‘You found it: I didn’t. But let it lay there, so as I can see at it a while.’

He opened the oven door and pulled out the potatoes, and he sat with William, and they ate them with salt and drank the tea. The potatoes were burnt black on one side and raw the other. Grandad kept looking at the pipe and shaking his head. He was laughing.

‘And it was in the tater hogg?’ he said.

‘Must’ve been,’ said William.

‘It figures,’ said Grandad.

‘How?’ said William.

‘He was a rum un,’ said Grandad. ‘What you might call a Sunday Saint and a Monday Devil. It was his music, you see. Oh, he was the only best ringer and singer for miles, and he played every instrument he could lay hand to. Sunday at Chapel, regular. But Monday, and he was down your throat before you could open your mouth. Nothing vindictive, though. And I never did hear him swear. Not that he couldn’t. What! He knew the words, right enough. He could’ve sworn tremendous. He could’ve sworn the cross off an ass’s back. But he never did. He never had to. His mind was that quick. And he did love to argue. Choose what you said, he’d put the other side, even when he agreed with you. And another thing: there wasn’t one could take his drink as well as that old youth: there wasn’t!’

Grandad pushed the dishes aside and opened his toolbox. William covered the pipe, closed the lid and put the tin in his pocket, by the key. Grandad set the two lengths of split ash handle on the table and laid the bent iron next to them. He stuck the poker in the fire and wedged it between the bars of the grate. Then he sorted through the loom wood, made a stack of pieces, and marked them off all the same length with a foot rule and a pencil.

When all was tidy he began to work.

He used the table as a bench, and cut the marked oak on the line with a tenon saw. He started each cut by drawing the saw backwards, towards him, three times. Then he was away, cutting true, his hand and thumb clamped to the wood and the table.

‘He used to go busking for beer, round and about!’ Grandad laughed again. ‘Him and old Bob Sumner, Joe Swindells and Tom Wood. They were the Hough Band, of a Sunday, playing hymns. But the rest of the week they called theirselves the Hough Fizzers. And didn’t they pop!’

He had cut the oak into eighteen inch lengths. He fixed the two halves of ash that distance apart, and parallel, and nailed a length of oak across at the bottom of the curve of the handle. Behind it he put another; and so he went on. He worked without waste, and easily. The nails went into the oak and ash without bending.

‘Well, one night, they’d had a right good night round the farms, and they were on their way back from The Bull’s Head at Mottram, very fresh, and they come to a quickthorn hedge, and the other side of it was a potato hogg as belonged to Jesse Leah.

‘Now old Jesse, he’d stuck a twothree pieces of stove pipe through the top, with a little cowl on it, to ventilate the middle of the hogg, you see.

‘Well, just then, up comes the moon behind the hogg and the bit of stove pipe, and Grandfather, he says, “Wait on,” he says. “Some there are going to bed. Let’s give them a tune!” And they serenaded that potato hogg till morning. But Grand mother! Didn’t she give him some stick, at after!’

Grandad turned the whole frame over, picked up the two strips of iron and fitted them. He took a screw, held it in one of the countersunk holes and drove it home. Now, for the first time, Grandad could be seen to be working. He grunted and sweated, and didn’t talk. His grip on the screwdriver made his spark-pocked hand white, and once a screw started to bite he kept it turning without rest until its head was flush with the iron.

But when he stood back, there was a sledge.

He sawed off the ends of the bellows handle that was now two runners level with the end of the iron that shod them.

Grandad left the sledge and came to sit in his chair by the fire. He rubbed his forehead.

‘You mustn’t let them screws stop turning,’ he said, ‘else they’ll stick for evermore, and you’ll not shift them. They’ll shear, first.’

He examined the poker. ‘Keep him that colour,’ he said. He opened the corner cupboard above his chair. It was full of string and rope. He chose a length of rope, sashcord, like the sashcord that held the counterweight of the yard door above the cellar.

Grandad spat on the poker, tested its whiteness with his thumb, pressed it against the upcurve of one of the runners. The wood hissed and smoked, and the poker sank through. When it cooled, Grandad reheated it and pressed again. The room was full of the sweet smell of ash. There was a hole in the curve, like a black-rimmed eye.

Grandad burnt through the other runner, threaded the cord into both eyes, knotted the ends, and the sledge was complete.

‘Is that for me?’ said William, not daring to.

‘Well, it’s not for me!’ said Grandad.

‘For me own? For me very liggy own?’

‘Ay. Get that up Lizzie Leah’s and see what Allmans have to say. Loom and forge.’

Grandad threw the scrap wood on the coals. It sent flames of every colour into the chimney. ‘They’ll take no harm,’ said Grandad. ‘It’s sparks you must watch. Once they set in the thatch the whole roof can fly on fire.’

William leaned over the hearth to look up the chimney. The sparks spiralled and died in the blackness. But there was something bright, reflecting flame.

‘Grandad?’

‘There’s two horse shoes hanging in the chimney.’

‘I know there is,’ said Grandad.

‘But they’re clean. There’s no soot on them.’

‘I know there isn’t.’

William reached into the chimney with his hand.

‘Leave them,’ said Grandad. ‘They’re not for you. Not yet.’

‘What are they?’

‘Me and your Grandma’s wedding.’

‘Up the chimney?’ said William.

‘Of course they’re up the chimney,’ said Grandad. ‘Of course they’re clean. I put them there forty-two years ago, and I clean them of a Sunday. What are you staring like a throttled earwig for?’

‘I didn’t know,’ said William.

‘You didn’t know?’ said Grandad. ‘A high-learnt youth like you didn’t know? Your Grandma and me, we’d have let every stick of furniture go first, and the house, before we’d have parted from them. They’re our wedding. They’re your Father and your Uncles. They’re you. Do you not see? They’re us!

‘Your friends and your neighbours give them to the wedding. No one says. It happens. And it happens as the smith’s at his forge one night, and happens to find the money by the door. And he makes the shoes alone, swage block and anvil: and we put them in the chimney piece. Mind you, I’d know Tommy Latham’s work anywhere. But we don’t let on. It’s all a mystery. Now get up them fields.’

There were voices in the road. William put on his balaclava and mittens.

Grandad lifted the sledge down. ‘She’ll stick a toucher at first,’ he said, ‘while the iron finds a polish. But then she’ll go, with that bevel to her. And at after, all she’ll want is a spot of oil, against rust in summer.

‘I feel the wind’s bristled up,’ he said. ‘I’ll not come out.’

William went down the path from the house: Grandad closed the blackout behind him.

The sledge jerked a little at first, and left stains that showed in the moonlight, but the curved, strong iron, countersunk screwed, rode on the frost better than the tin runners of the broken crate had done. The swage block down in the cellar worked on the hill.

Lizzie Leah’s was crowded. People were coming from both directions along the road. William pulled the sledge up the bottom field. It was heavy, but the rope didn’t cut, and it was all strong and in balance and carried a lot of its own weight.

There were more of the bigger boys at night, and they racketed over the hump. William had to dodge through the gateway between runs. There was the flurried rattle of approach, the gasp in the air and the beat of the landing. William set himself above the hump; but before he could start, a sledge came at him from above, veered to the barbed wire, and the rider skidded off, over the hump and through the gate.

It was Stewart Allman.

They were coming in twos and threes and even in packs; starting together and racing for the gate.

Stewart Allman whistled through his fingers. ‘Wait on!’ he shouted up the hill. ‘We’ve a betty!’

William sat on the sledge, looked over his shoulder, but there was no one coming, so he heeled himself forward.

The sledge moved gently, surely, sensitive to touch. He could steer it, and just as he had felt the road and the bicycle through the slow movement of Grandad’s coat, he felt the hill through the sledge, as if he flowed over it, never left it. There were no jolts. The sledge crushed ruts and ran only on the true hill.

‘Where’ve you got that from?’ said Stewart Allman.

‘Me Grandad,’ said William. ‘He made it.’

‘Let’s have a go,’ said Stewart Allman.

They were walking back. The axle grease on William’s clogs let no snow gather. Now Stewart Allman was trying to keep up.

‘Barley mey fog shot no back bargains,’ said William.

‘I only want a go; just one.’

‘You pull it, then,’ said William, and gave the rope to Stewart Allman.

‘Eh! What’s it made of?’

‘Oak, mostly,’ said William.

‘It weighs a ton,’ said Stewart Allman.

He was out of breath when they reached the middle of the top field.

He lay on the sledge, with the rope tucked under him, and gripped the runners where they curled up at the end of the forge bellows handle. The sledge was longer than he was.

‘Give us a shove.’

But the sledge began to move as soon as Stewart Allman lifted his feet. It didn’t snatch or creak or waver. It moved straight down and across the hill, and so marvellously that it was only when the other sledgers, climbing back, stopped to watch it pass them that William realised how fast it was going.

Stewart Allman made no noise. The sledge hit the hump and reared and stood on end. William heard the runners twang the barbed wire, and the sledge and Stewart Allman disappeared.

William jumped down the field sideways, using his clog irons to grip. He found the sledge. It had snapped the wire. Stewart Allman was in a snow drift.

William grabbed the sledge. ‘You’re not safe!’ he yelled. ‘You might’ve bust this one, too, you daft beggar!’

He ran up the hill, pulling the undamaged sledge. He staggered and ran, angry, unthinking. But he had to stop when he came to the corner post of the top of the field: the top of the top field, where nobody went.

William turned the sledge against the hill, and sat down.

He watched the others. They couldn’t see him by the stump. He watched moon and starlight and shapes gliding. Another cloud was coming from the north, but it was a long way off.

The air raid sirens sounded the alert, village after village, spreading like bonfires. He settled down to watch. As soon as the bombers were heard, the searchlights would be switched on and the guns would start to fire.

They were in Johnny Baguley’s field, less than a mile away.

‘Eh! You! Public Enemy Number One! We’re waiting!’

It was Stewart Allman.

William looked down. The next highest sledge was a long way below him. He could crawl under the fence and down the other side of the hill, but Stewart Allman would know. William would be ambushed.

The field was waiting. Dark patches looking at him. He stood up and tugged the sledge round. As soon as it was in line with the slope it began to move. He shortened the rope.

William sat astride, his heels braced. He let out the rope, lay back, and eased the pressure off his heels. He felt the sledge start, and then he felt no speed, only a rhythm of the hill. The sledge found its own course; a touch corrected it. As he went faster, William used his clogs for balance. The steering moved into his hands and arms, then his shoulders, and then he was going so fast and so true that he could steer with a turn of his head.

The watching groups were a flicker as he passed, and his speed grew on the more trampled snow.

He saw the hump and the gate, but saw nothing to fear. He took in more rope, gripped, and the forge bellows runners breasted the air without shock. He pulled on the rope and kiltered his head to the right. His weight had brought him forward and the curved runners were at his shoulder. Then the trailing corners of the loom iron took the weight, the front of the sledge dropped away, and William was lying back again, coasting along the bottom field.