Brian turned away, because four loud words hammered against the inside of his head—trying to get out. But he couldn’t say it, except to himself, and even then he felt treacherous, as well as foolish. “God paid him out,” they said. “God paid him out for nicking Agger’s best rake.” There ain’t no God. God is a bastard, his father had often roared in response to his mother’s taunt that God would pay him out as well. So maybe there is one. He scraped at the wall of refuse with a piece of stick while Bert sullenly loaded his sack.
And ’appen there ain’t, because where will poor owd Agger be tomorrow when he finds his rake missing? He’ll goo off ’is nut, ’aving to use old ’uns that break easy, and not getting such good stuff to sell. Maybe he’ll think I nicked it. I’d better not go back for a while in case he does. What a bleeding look-out! Where’ll I get wood for the fire? All through our Bert, the loony bastard. And then he went and lost it. I’m sorry for Agger, though, I am. I’m sorry for ’im. Out o’ wok and living off the tips. I don’t know. Nowt but an overcoat and an old pram to his name; and not even his posh rake any more. I’m fed up, I am. God-all-bleedin’-mighty, I’m fed up.
They climbed through the window, too morose to think of safety during the high drop on to the path. “I’m ’ungry,” Bert grumbled, trudging alone. “I ain’t ’ad a bit t’eat since that chocolate.”
A straight road led from Sann-eye to the bright flares of Wollaton Road. Lorries, cars, buses were crotchets along bars of music, drumrolls as they roared by in the distance, loud and frequent because people were going home from work. “I don’t suppose there’ll be any snap at our house,” Brian said, “and that’s a fact.”
“Nor at ourn, either.”
There was a smell of spring, a lightness of moss and grass and fresh nettles that stung their legs when they went too far into the hedge. Westwards the sky had reddened, as if a nightwatchman behind the clouds had lit his fire for the night, sitting there to keep out intruders from what paradise lay beyond; and a glow from it was cast against the sheer grey-plated walls of looming gasometers, making them seem taller as they walked by. Brian felt in his pocket: “I’ve still got that tanner Agger gen me for the wood, so we can get summat to eat. We’ll buy some Nelson Squares and crisps, and stuff our guts on that.”
“Marvellous,” Bert said, putting his arm around Brian’s shoulders, and they walked more quickly.
CHAPTER 6
Brian watched two pigs near the coal heap, nibbling black bits from under the dust. “Grandad, why are the pigs eating coal?”
Merton was mixing bran in a tub near the copperhouse door. “Because they’ve got nowt better to do, Nimrod.”
Brian thought he wasn’t getting the whole story. “Is it because they’re hungry?”
“Pigs is allus ’ungry.”
“But they eat bran, and taters wi’-their-jackets-on.” Merton stirred the soggy mess with a steel scoop. “Ay, they’d eat owt. They’d eat yo’, yer cheeky young bogger, if I served yer up in their trough!” He turned his back on questions and emptied a sack of potatoes into the tub. Brian saw Uncle George wheeling his bike up the path, a tall thin man wearing a cap, a wavy-haired god who worked at the Raleigh.
“Where yer bin, Uncle George?”
“To t’football match.”
“What for?” he asked, thinking: to play, or watch?
“Don’t ask questions,” George told him, putting his bike in the shed, “then you’ll ’ave no lies towd yer!”
With a laugh he followed him into the kitchen, where his grandmother was mixing flour for cakes and bread. “Did yer see owt on the placards?”
George bent to pull off his cycle clips, then looked up with them in his hand. “They’ve captured Addis Ababa. It looks like the Abyssinians is finished.”
His mother tut-tutted in sympathy. “Aren’t them Italians rotters? Fancy gassin’ poor black people as ’ave never done anybody any ’arm.”
“They reckon they were fightin’ wi’ umbrella sticks against machine-guns,” George said.
“Them Italians’ll suffer one day,” she prophesied, spreading jam over a flat sheet of paste. Brian listened with such interest that he unknowingly screwed a button off his shirt. “Now look what yer’ve done!” she cried. “Fancy piggling a button off like that.” He was given the jamjar and spoon, and after scraping sucking licking came the prelude to further questioning:
“Gra’ma?”
“What?”
“Who won the war?”
“Which one?”
He was puzzled. “The war.”
“The last war, do you mean?”
He stood, not knowing what to say, not wanting to be fobbed off with any war. “Was the last war the one where Uncle Oliver was killed?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“Well, who won that war then?”
“Nobody,” she said, taking the sticky jamjar from him. “Now go and wash your ’ands, there’s a good lad.” He walked to the sink, puzzled. For how could nobody win a war? Nobody ever answered his questions, he brooded. Nobody. Nobody wasn’t a word, it was a trick. There couldn’t be a war without somebody winning it. Somebody won; somebody lost. That’s how it was. And, washing hands and face from a bowl that his grandmother filled, he could hear them still talking about the war in Abyssinia.
Doddoe’s spirit passed to his children. Merton saw them once, a straggle-lined caravan coming over the Cherry Orchard, bearing misshapen apple-bosoms grown during a foray into someone’s garden. They kept well clear of his waving stick, knowing who he was and fearing him for that reason. The close-browed demon of bull-Doddoe seemed more desperate in his offspring due to the fact that they often had to find their own food, which meant putting themselves in the way of fences to be climbed, palings and barbed wire having good enough reason for being there: apples, potatoes, cabbages, or perhaps even more luxurious stores.
Sometimes a brace of them visited the Nook, hoping Merton was still at the pit. Mary would bring a jam pasty or piece of bread to the door, making them divide it fairly before they went away, which they did quickly, fearing the sudden expostulating wrath of Merton, regarded as more terrible than that of their father because they were less familiar with it.
While the Doddoes were discouraged from the Nook, Vera’s children were welcomed. For some reason Harold Seaton’s reputation had grown in Merton’s eyes; he was now considered a quiet sort of man who thought a lot of his family and looked after them as best he could, worked hard when there was work to be had, and didn’t throw his wages away on ale while his children marauded for what they could lay their thieving hands on—like the Doddoe tribe, for instance.
On the far side of Cherry Orchard, under the clouds of cloud and trees at the edge of Serpent Wood, were two farm-labourers’ cottages, and Brian was acquainted with only a fraction of the children who spewed occasionally from the doors of both. On Saturday he walked over the open roughs, mesmerized by the long dark strip of forest crossing his horizon, drawn to it more than to the pair of cottages and often mapping it with an explorer’s mind—though rarely going to open country beyond.
A gaggle of girls rose out of a hollow, wearing similar pink frocks and holding up hands made of daisies and buttercups. They came towards him, but stopped at an intervening patch of flowers to kneel and pick them. Brian went closer, paused. One of the girls looked up and said:
“Hello.”
He felt uneasy, thrust hands deep into pockets, dug holes in the turf with his shoecaps. “Hello,” he responded.
“You live at the Mertons’, don’t you?” she said knowingly.
“How do you know?”
“We’ve seen you playing in the yard when we’ve walked past, haven’t we, Fanny? Our Alma’s towd us about you, as well.”
“I’ll help you to pick some flowers,” he said.
She didn’t like his manner, because he hadn’t asked. “If you like. You ’elp our Fanny, ’cause I’ve got a lot already.”
Fanny turned shy, but he ripped up handfuls from the moist grass, throwing them into a heap for her to sort out. “Do you want any clover? I know where there’s a lot.”
“No,” Brenda replied, “I don’t like clover. Fanny don’t either.”
“Hey, our Brenda,” Fanny shouted from a hundred yards. She was all flowers now, yellow and white, a walking cornstack with arms and pockets full. “Let’s go and get some bluebells. I know where there’s ’undreds in our wood.”
Brenda pointed to a distant hedge, and nodded. “We’ll shout Ken and John first.” Cupping hands over her mouth she screamed: “Our Ken! We’re goin’ ter get sum bluebells. Cum on!”
The boys were running up and down over the hollows. “What’s your name then?” Brenda asked. He told her, grudgingly. “Brian Merton?”
“No, Seaton. I don’t live at the Mertons’, I on’y go up there when I’m not at school.”
He was astonished, almost angry, at how much Brenda knew of him: “I knew you didn’t live at the Mertons’. He’s your grandad, ain’t he? I know your grandad, and your gra’ma because sometimes they go out with our mam and dad and the Lakers into Wood’uss, boozing.” They walked towards Ken and John near the cottages. “Your grandad sometimes goes shootin’ and I saw him at the Farm Show last year. Once, when you wasn’t there, I went an errand for him into Woodhouse, and Fanny went with me, didn’t you, Fanny?”
The mute Fanny walking by their side managed a muted affirmative. “He sent us to fetch some fags and a pint of ale.”
The boys came up. “You don’t go to our school, do you,” said Ken Arlington, a statement, not a question.
“I go to one in Nottingham,” Brian said.
“Ours is a rotten school,” Brenda complained. “Miss Barber allus gives us the strap.”
Ken pushed her in the back. “That’s because you’re cheeky.”
“I’m not cheeky,” she shouted.
“Yes, you are. I heard you chelping her off when I walked by your class window one day carrying a case of milk bottles. No wonder you get the strap every day.”
“You’re a liar,” Brenda screamed. “You tell big fibs.”
“I’ll paste yo’,” Ken said, “if you call me a liar.”
“I’ll tell your mam if you do”—which she knew would put a stop to his threats.
“Coward,” he grumbled. At the cottages Brian was fascinated by the waterpump in the Lakers’ backyard. “We don’t have one of them,” he said to Brenda. “We’ve got a well instead.”
“It’s better having a pump,” she claimed.
“Can I have a go on it?”
“No,” she said in a righteous and holy voice, “you mustn’t. It’d be wastin’ water.” They stood aside when Mr. Laker came out of the door carrying a white enamel bowl. A few vigorous ups and downs sent water belching from the iron spour, flooding the bowl he held beneath. “Gerroff an’ play, kidders,” he said. His short hair stuck out like chaff, went suddenly limp under a sluice of water.
Brian set off across the Cherry Orchard. A few hundred yards from the houses he sat down and took out a packet of cigarette-cards: flowers, sorting them into seasons.
Brenda appeared, and he gathered them back into his pocket. “I’ve found some primroses,” she announced, falling beside him. “In the wood.”
“I don’t care.”
“You would if you found them,” she taunted.
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Yes, you would.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” he repeated, “because I don’t like primroses. They mek me sick.”
“No, they don’t. Yes, they do.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do,” she went on with stark uncompromising persistence, almost crying. He turned away. “No, I don’t like them.”
“I’ll bash yer,” she cried, her face red with rage.
“I’ll bash yer back,” he said.
She stood up. “Well, if you don’t like primroses you’re daft, ’cause anybody who don’t like primroses is daft.”
Deadlock. They looked at each other with blank faces.
Then she said: “I love yo’, Brian.”
He was baffled. Love? His mam and dad loved each other: black eyes, split heads, table tipped over, black looks, and no fags for ever and ever. His teacher said that God loved everybody: Italians gassing blackies and mowing ’em down with machine-guns: dole, thunderstorms, school. That picture in his gra’ma’s parlour was about love.
They looked at each other.
“What have we got to do?” he asked.
She glared at him, angry again. “If you don’t like primroses, you’re daft”—and ran back towards the wood.
He gazed across the Cherry Orchard, the Nook chimneys just visible over bushes and trees. Wind bent back the longer patches of grass, and thick clouds lay across the sky. Far away, along Colliers Pad, a man was riding on a bicycle, his figure flickering through gaps in the bushes.
He advanced, but behind outposts. The Cherry Orchard was vast, remote, unfenced, a continental mile from house to house, treeless scrub and rise and dip breaking its green surface against the pillars and towers of Serpent Wood. It stained his unwary slippers or shoes with the juice of cowslip and celandine, hid him, exposed him, made him tired after a while, frightened him, but lured him on, into the wood where each leaf was alive and each stepped-on twig exploded through his vibrant nerves. By the stream bank he pulled smooth pebbles from the sand, loaded his pockets before passing between bushes and tall trunks, sometimes stopping to find a toadstool or an already rifled nest, or to skim his ammunition at a quick unhittable bird.
He crept under a fallen tree. In the wood’s centre, from where no fields could be seen and no sound heard except himself, he pulled his body into the lowest fork of a many-pronged tree, bark dust marking knees and hands, twig stumps scraping his groin as he went up. In a sitting position bushes were surveyed from above while many treetops were at eye-level: green humps and bracken dips of the jungle, his refuge from the punctuating black gulfs of school year and home-life that didn’t bear thinking about at times like these. Sounds came to him, the stream running, a cuckoo’s rhythmic and fluting whistle, a mooing cow from some bordering field. Primroses grew to each side of the track, and where the stream turned into a morass, tree spaces were flecked with bluebells. It was a wet wood after a long winter, soil and fungus smells weighing heavily on the air, though sun in more open spaces had turned the soil a drier colour.
Brian put both hands to his mouth and made a Tarzan call, the mere shadow of an incompetent warbling scream flitting through the trees, to a swift and against the unbridgeable obstacle of distance. He listened to it dying, waited for silence, then shouted what many swear-words he knew, using all the air his lungs could muster to send them far away. He paused between each word until its echo was about to fade, then he let go with another explosive monosyllable, hands cupped in a message to which no answer was expected. When he grew tired of the game he leapt down and set out for midday dinner at the Nook.
In the quiet afternoon he leaned over the pigsty gate, tapping the pink-white pigs with a piece of stick as they gathered at the trough on feeling a human being near. When they grew tired and wandered away he shook the gate latch to see how quickly they would converge again on the trough, and was astonished at the squeals sent forth in protest at his taps. His grandmother called that he was to stop tormenting them, talked for ten minutes about cruelty to dumb animals, saying that God would put him in a big fire when he died, if he wasn’t careful: and as he walked into the garden behind the house, ashamed at having been caught, he imagined a mighty hand catching him up and flinging him into an enormous heap of burning embers. But then he doubled back from this scene of horror, and pictured a skilful escape before events led so far.
Cats made less noise. He sat on a bench under a wooden awning when one came stalking tail up between potatoes, grey-black and mustard and yellow, round face turning left
and right to box a white butterfly, then coming for Brian’s held-out hand. It had grown fat and trusting on a surfeit of cornfield and copperhouse rats, rubbed its flank against him and allowed itself to be lifted to his knees.
When it purred and rattled at its new-found nest, Brian’s knees opened and let it fall. Before it could amble away, he laid it again in the groove between his closed thighs. The cat liked it but, having lost self-confidence and being afraid to purr, preferred to leap down and find a warm patch of soil in the sun. Brian’s hands caught it in mid-air and brought it back.
A few minutes’ stroking of smooth fur raised the rattles of its purring again; then his knees moved a fraction, and the purring stopped abruptly. He knew when an escape was coming because the cat’s back legs stiffened, whereat his arms grew ready to snap out and bring it back.
It took longer to soothe it this time, but Sunday afternoon was endless. His hands played slowly, rhythmically along the length of its soft flanks, backwards and forwards, from the top of its leonine head to the base of its tail, up and down, from the side of its mouth to behind its neck and above the hardly felt ridge of its comfortable backbone, until it purred as loud as if its throat were clogged with marbles.
He prodded it from behind. The indications of its pleasure ceased, but returned after a few seconds in which it sensed that the prod had been nothing more than an accident of nature which had gone away quickly and would probably not return. It did. Annoyed, it leapt from Brian’s knees, but his hand shot out and set it firmly and with some roughness where it had been.
The tail, upright with righteous wrath, waved before his eyes. He took the end and held it still, feeling the force of it trying to free itself and continue its angry swaying. Letting it go, it swung completely to one side. When the back legs stiffened, his hands hovered above the cat’s neck, and as it sprang, a hard grip descended.
It realized eventually that there was no real need to escape, that if it stayed still on the warm knees no harm would come. But the controlling demon of Brian—felt dimly by the cat between escapes—grew tired of waiting for a next attempt, and prodded with such force that it was almost clear before being snatched by hovering hands. Each time it thought to abandon its prison there was an unmistakable warning, but the interval between the jerk in its back legs and the sight of its body in mid-air grew shorter, until the warning jerk became so faint that Brian’s heart almost stopped in an effort to stay aware of it.