Blackberry Wine

16

Pog Hill, Summer 1976

KIRBY CENTRAL WENT IN LATE AUGUST. JAY WAS THERE WHEN they closed it, hiding in a tall clump of seedy willowherb, and when they had gone – taking with them the levers, light signals and anything which might otherwise be stolen – he crept up the steps and peered in through the window. Train registers and route diagrams had been left in the box, though the lever frame gaped emptily, and it looked strangely inhabited, as if the signalman had just stepped out and might return at any moment. Jay reckoned there was plenty of usable glass left, if Joe and he came to fetch it.

‘Don’t bother, lad,’ Joe said when he reported this. ‘I’ll already have me hands full this autumn.’

Jay needed no explanation for his words. Since the beginning of August Joe had become more and more concerned about the fate of his allotment. He rarely spoke about it openly, but he would sometimes stop working and gaze at his trees, as if measuring the time they had left. Sometimes he lingered to touch the smooth bark of an apple or a plum tree and spoke – to Jay, to himself – in a low voice. He always referred to them by name, as if they were people.

‘Mirabelle. Doin well, int she? That’s a French plum, a yeller gage, a goodun for jam or wine or just for eatin. She likes it here on the bank, it’s nicely drained and sunny.’ He paused. ‘Too late to move t’old girl, though,’ he said regretfully. ‘She’d never survive. Yer sink yer roots deep, thinkin yer goin to stay for ever, and this is what happens. The buggers.’

It was the closest he had come in weeks to mentioning the allotment problem.

‘Tryin to knock down Pog Hill Lane now, anall.’ Joe’s voice was louder now, and Jay realized that this was the first time he had ever seen him close to anger. ‘Pog Hill Lane, that’s bin standin for a hundred year-a-more, that were built when there were still a pit down Nether Edge, and navvies workin down at canal side.’

Jay stared at him.

‘Knock down Pog Hill Lane?’ he asked. ‘You mean the houses?’ Joe nodded.

‘Got a letter int post tother day,’ he told him shortly. ‘Buggers reckon we’re not safe any more. Goin to condemn em all. All t’row.’ His face was grim in its amusement. ‘Condemned. After all this time. Thirty-nine years I’ve bin here, since Nether Edge and Upper Kirby shut down. Bought me own pit house offat council anall. Didn’t trust em, even then-’ He broke off, holding up his reduced left hand in a mocking three-fingered salute. ‘How much more do they want, eh? I left me fingers down that pit. I near as buggery left me life. You’d think that’d be worth somethin. You’d think they’d remember summat like that!’

Jay gaped at him. This was a Joe he had never seen before. Awe, and a kind of fear, kept him silent. Then Joe stopped as abruptly as he had begun, bending solicitously over a newly grafted branch to examine the healing joint.

‘I thought it was during the war,’ said Jay at last.

‘What?’

Gaudy red cotton joined the new graft to the branch. On it Joe had smeared some kind of resin, which gave out a pungent sappy scent. He nodded to himself, as if satisfied with the tree’s progress.

‘You told me you’d lost your fingers in Dieppe,’ insisted Jay. ‘During the war.’

‘Aye. Well.’ Joe was unembarrassed. ‘It were a kind of war down there any road. Lost em when I were sixteen – crushed between two trucks back in 1931. Wouldn’t take me in the Army after that, so I signed up as a Bevan boy. We had three cave-ins that year. Seven men trapped underground when a tunnel collapsed. Not even grown men, some of em – boys my age and younger; you could go underground at fourteen on a man’s wage. Worked double shifts for a week tryin to get em out. We could hear em behind the cave-in, yellin and cryin, but every time we tried to get to em another bit of the tunnel came down on us. We were workin in darkness because of the gas, knee-deep in slurry. We were soaked an half suffocated, an we all knew the roof could fall in again any minute, but we never stopped tryin. Not till at last the bosses came and closed down the shaft altogether.’ He looked at Jay with unexpected vehemence, his eyes dark with ancient rage. ‘So don’t go tellin me I never went to war, lad,’ he snapped. ‘I know as much about war – what war means – as any o them lads in France.’

Jay stared at him, unsure of what to say. Joe looked off into the middle distance, hearing the cries and pleading of young men long dead from the quiet scar of Nether Edge. Jay shivered.

‘So what will you do now?’

Joe looked at him closely, as if checking for any sign of condemnation. Then he relaxed and gave his old rueful smile, at the same time digging in his pocket to produce a grubby packet of Jelly Babies. He chose one for himself, then held out the packet to Jay.

‘I’ll do what I’ve allus done, lad,’ he declared. ‘I’ll bloody well fight for what’s mine. I’ll not let em get away with it. Pog Hill’s mine, an I’ll not be moved onto some poxy estate by them or anyone.’ He bit off the head of his Jelly Baby with relish and chose another from the packet.

‘But what can you do?’ protested Jay. ‘There’ll be eviction orders. They’ll cut off your gas and electricity. Can’t you-’

Joe looked at him.

‘There’s allus somethin you can do, lad,’ he said softly. ‘I reckon maybe it’s time to find out what really works. Time to bring out sandbags and batten down hatches. Time to fatten up t’black cockerel, like they do in Haiti.’ He winked hugely, as if to share a mysterious joke.

Jay glanced around at the allotment. He looked at the charms nailed to the wall and tied onto the tree branches, the signs laid out in broken glass on the ground and chalked onto flower pots and he felt a sudden, terrible hopelessness. It all looked so fragile, so touchingly doomed. He saw the houses then, those blackened, mean little terraces, with their crooked pointing and outside toilets and windows sheeted over with plastic. Washing hanging on a single line five or six houses down. A couple of kids playing in the gutter in front. And Joe – sweet old crazy Joe, with his dreams and his travels and his chatto and his millions of seeds and his cellar full of bottles – preparing himself for a war he could never hope to win, armed only with everyday magic and a few quarts of home-brewed wine.

‘Don’t take on, lad,’ urged Joe. ‘We’ll be reight, you’ll see. There’s more than one trick up me sleeve, as them buggers from council’ll find out.’

But his words sounded hollow. For all his talk it was really just bravado. There was nothing he could do. Of course Jay pretended, for his sake, to believe him. He gathered herbs on the railway embankment. He sewed dried leaves into red sachets. He repeated strange words and made ritual gestures in imitation of his. They had to seal the perimeter, as Joe called it, twice a day. This involved walking around the property – up the railway embankment and round the allotment, past Pog Hill box, which Joe counted as his, then into Pog Hill Lane and through the ginnel which linked Joe’s house to his neigh-hour’s, past the front door and back over the wall to the other side – carrying a red candle and burning bay leaves steeped in scented oil while they solemnly incanted a string of incomprehensible phrases, which Joe claimed were Latin. From what Joe said, this ritual was supposed to shield the house and its grounds from unwanted influences, deliver protection and affirm his ownership of the territory, and as the holidays came to an end it increased daily in length and complexity, growing from a three-minute dash around the garden to a solemn procession lasting fifteen minutes or more. In other circumstances Jay might have enjoyed these daily ceremonies, but whereas last year there had been an element of mockery in everything Joe said, now the old man had less time for jokes. Jay guessed that behind this screen of unconcern his anxiety was growing. He spoke increasingly about his travels, recounted past adventures and planned future expeditions, announced his immediate decision to leave Pog Hill Lane for his château in France, then in the same breath swore he’d never leave his old home unless they carried him out feet first. He worked frantically in the garden. Autumn came early that year and there was fruit to be harvested; jams, wine, preserves, pickles to be made; potatoes and turnips to be dug and stored, as well as the increasing demands of Joe’s magical barrier, which now took thirty minutes to complete and involved much gesticulating and scattering of powders, as well as preparation of scented oils and herbal mixtures. There was a haunted look to Joe now, a stretched look to his features, a glittery brightness in his eyes, which came of sleeplessness – or drink. For he was drinking far more now than he had ever done, not just wine or nettle beer but spirits, too, the potato vodka from the pot-still in the cellar, last year’s liqueurs from his downstairs store. Jay wondered whether, at this pace, Joe would survive the winter at all.

‘I’ll be reight,’ Joe told him when he voiced his concern. ‘It just needs a bit more work, that’s all. Come winter I’ll be reight again, I promise.’ He stood up, hands in the small of his back, and stretched. ‘That’s better.’ He grinned then, and for a moment he was almost the old Joe, eyes brimming with laughter under his greasy pit cap. ‘I’ve looked after mesself for a few years before you came along, lad. It’d take a sight more than a few council monkeys to get the better of me.’ And he immediately launched into a long, absurd story from his travelling days about a man trying to sell cheap trinkets to a tribe of Amazonian Indians.

‘And the chief of the tribe – Chief Mungawomba, his name were – handed back the stuff and said – I’d been teachin him English in me free time – “Tha can keep thi beads, mate, but I’d be really grateful if tha could fix me toaster.” ’

They both laughed, and for a time the unease was forgotten, or at least dismissed. Jay wanted to believe Pog Hill was safe. On some days he looked at the arcane jumble of the allotment and the back garden and he almost did believe it. Joe seemed so sure, so permanent. Surely he would be there for ever.