Saville

1

Towards the end of the third decade of the present century a coal haulier’s cart, pulled by a large, dirt-grey horse, came into the narrow streets of the village of Saxton, a small mining community in the low hill-land of south Yorkshire. By the side of the haulier sat a dark-haired woman with phlegmatic features and dark-brown eyes. She wore a long reddish coat which covered the whole of her, except for her ankles, and a small, smooth-crowned hat which fitted her head rather like a shell and beneath which her hair showed in a single, upturned curl. In her arms, wrapped in a grey blanket, sat a child, scarcely more than a year old, with fair hair and light-blue eyes, who, as the cart pulled into a street several hundred yards from the village centre, where the houses gave way to farm fields, gazed about it in a blinded fashion, its attention suddenly distracted from the swaying of the horse in front.

On the back of the cart were piled numerous items of household furniture; numerous that is in the context of the cart, for it was plainly not designed to carry such a multifarious cargo. There were a square wooden table with four wooden chairs, two upholstered chairs in a dilapidated condition, a double bed with wooden headboards and a metal-sprung base, various pots and pans and boxes, a cupboard, a chest of drawers and a tall, brown-painted wardrobe, the door of which was lined with a narrow mirror.

Riding uncomfortably on top of this load was a small, fair-haired man with light-blue eyes. He wore a loose, unbuttoned jacket, a collarless shirt and, unlike the woman, was gazing around him with evident pleasure. As the cart came to a turning of small terrace houses leading directly towards the fields he called out to the driver, who, clicking his tongue, turned the horse and, to the fair-haired man’s instructions, pulled up finally outside a small, stone-built house, the centre one of a terrace of five. A door and a window occupied the ground-floor of the building, and two single windows the first-floor, the roof itself topped by large, uneven stone-slab slates.

The fair-haired man sprang down; he opened the tiny gate that led across a garden scarcely six feet broad and, taking a key from his jacket pocket, unlocked the dull brown door and disappeared inside. A few moments later he came out again; he signalled to the cart and after a moment’s hesitation the child was lifted down. No sooner was it on its feet, however, than it set off with unsteady steps, not towards the open gate, but away from it, back along the street the way they’d come.

‘Nay, Andrew,’ the man called and, after helping down the woman, he turned and went after the baby, finally catching him up in his hands and laughing. ‘And where’s thy off to, then?’ he said, delighted with the child’s robustness. ‘Off back home, then, are you?’ turning the baby’s head towards the house. ‘This is thy home from now on,’ he added. ‘This is where thy’s barn to live,’ and called to the woman who stood apprehensively now at the open gate, ‘Here, then, Ellen, you can take him in.’

The furniture was lifted down, and the haulier and the fair-haired man carried it inside: the bed, in pieces, was set down in the tiny room at the front upstairs; a cot, little more than a mattress in a wooden box, was set beside it – with that and the wardrobe there was scarcely any space to move at all. The chest of drawers was squeezed into one of the two rooms overlooking the rear of the house: one room was scarcely the width of a cupboard, the other was square-shaped, its narrow window looking down on to the communal backs and, beyond those, the strips of garden exclusive to each house, which ran down to the fenced field and were enclosed by the houses the other side.

The remainder of the furniture was set in the kitchen and the front room downstairs.

‘Well, fancy we mu’n celebrate,’ the fair-haired man said when the job was done. He hunted through the various boxes and produced finally three cups; from a shopping bag he took out a bottle. He looked round for somewhere to remove the top and finally edged it off against the square-shaped sink which stood beneath a single tap in the corner of the kitchen. A high, mantelshelfed cooking range and a pair of inset cupboards occupied the remainder of the wall.

‘None for me,’ the mother said, still holding the baby to her and looking round at the room. ‘I can’t stomach beer.’

‘Just what you want after a job like this.’ The fair-haired man drank his undismayed.

‘Well, here’s to it, Mr Saville,’ the haulier said. ‘Good luck and happiness in your new home.’ He raised his cup to the dark-haired woman, who, until now, had removed neither her coat nor her hat, and added, ‘May all your troubles be little ones.’

The woman glanced away; the fair-haired man had laughed. ‘Aye, here’s to it,’ he said, quickly filling his cup again and offering the remainder to the driver.

Finally, when the cart had gone, the front door was closed and Saville and his wife began to arrange the furniture in the tiny room. A fire was lit, they made some tea and sat looking at the bare interior of the kitchen; the stains and the smells of the previous tenant were evident all around. The woodwork of the back door, which opened directly to the yard, was scratched through to the other side. There were cavities in the floorboards beneath which were visible odd pieces of paper and items of refuse which finally, disbelieving, Saville got down on his knees to examine.

‘Would you believe it? They’ve shoved their tea-leaves down here, tha knows.’

The baby had wandered off upstairs, they heard its steps on the floor above.

‘You’ll have to watch it,’ the mother said. ‘It’s not used to stairs.’ Previously they’d lived in a room in a flat: it was the first home they had had entirely to themselves.

‘I s’ll have to make a gate,’ the father said, yet going to the stairs and looking up them proudly. ‘Well, this is a grand place. We’ll soon have it in shape,’ he added, seeing through the kitchen door his wife’s despairing glance and, with something of a laugh, going quickly to her and endeavouring to hold her.

‘No,’ she said, holding to the chair in which she was sitting, her gaze turned disconsolately towards the fire. ‘No hot water but what we heat, and the lavatory across the yard.’

‘It could have been worse. We could have been sharing it,’ the father said.

‘Yes,’ she said with no belief. ‘I suppose so,’ and adding, rising to her feet, ‘We’d better start.’

‘Nay, we can leave it for one day at least,’ her husband said.

‘I couldn’t leave it. I couldn’t bear to sleep here, let alone cook and eat, with all this dirt around.’

So, on that first day, the Savilles cleaned the house: they worked into the night; the gas flare from their lamps spread out into the yard long after the houses on either side were dark. The baby slept in its cot upstairs, undisturbed by the scrubbing and brushing. Towards dawn the man slept for two hours then, finally, as the light broke, he got up for work.

‘I shall see you this afternoon,’ he said, standing at the door. ‘I’ll come back on the bike: I’ll bring the last things over.’ He gazed in a moment at the room in which the fire still burned, then, turning, set off across the yard. His wife watched him: on parting at the door she’d kissed his cheek and now, in the faint light spreading directly over the field before them, and over the houses opposite, the isolation of her new home was suddenly apparent. She called after the man and he, turning finally at the end of the deserted yard to glance back, waved cheerily as if this were for him the beginning of but one of many similar departures and disappeared, still waving, towards the road outside.

The woman stood alone for a while. With the door closed, the fire still glowing, she gazed round her at the room: there was nothing there to reassure her, simply the table, the four chairs, a cupboard and the pots they’d mounded in the sink for washing. She sank down finally by the hearth and cried.

The Savilles had been married eighteen months when they came to Saxton. Before that they had shared a room in a flat with another couple. Then, finally, had come the chance of a farm-labourer’s cottage in a neighbouring village: an old man had lived there, a widower, and it was the smell of his dog and his cat they were most aware of in the days following their arrival, and the odour of the food he’d pushed down beneath the floor.

Not having had time to prepare the house they spent the first few days scrubbing the floors, washing down the walls and woodwork, and filling in the holes which the dog, with its scratching, had dug in the various doors and the plaster. They repaired the ceilings, and replaced the crumbled boards in the floor; finally they distempered the walls, painted the outside woodwork and, in the evenings, when Saville had slept from his morning shift, at a colliery some six miles distance, he dug the garden, turning over the thickly matted weeds between the narrow barrier of fences.

Later, in the evenings, he would take the child out and sit in the yard: he had built a wooden bench from disproportionate bits of timber, and here, the child on his knee, he would smoke his pipe, the baby snatching at the clouds of smoke, Saville wafting them away and laughing.

Soon there was a routine in the mother’s care of the house: on Mondays she did the washing, on Tuesdays completed the drying and started the ironing. On Wednesdays she did her midweek shopping, finished the ironing and, if she had time baked bread – large, tea-cake-shaped loaves which fitted one to each shelf in the tiny oven, and smaller, oblong-shaped loaves, the dough of which she raised in a large porcelain bowl in front of the fire. The boy, sitting in his chair or on the floor, would watch her, eager at times to use the dough himself, watching her drawing it out and shaping it in the tins or on the black, greased oven-plates, occasionally, if a fragment were over, rolling a piece himself and laying it on grease-proof paper, first in the hearth, where the flames shone and flickered on its surface, then sliding it beside the tins inside the oven and waiting impatiently, while his mother adjusted the tiny, chromium ventilator and stoked the fire; then, finally looking at the clock on the tall mantelshelf, she’d stoop to the door, a piece of hessian in her hand and, if the bread were ready, lift his out first. ‘There, what do you think of that?’ she’d ask him absent-mindedly, her attention solely on the loaves and the tea-cakes she’d baked herself. Yet there was an alertness in her son which belied his age, even a dexterity with his tiny hands so that at times, although she helped him, she would be astonished at the way he took the bread and was able to connect the various stages – the mixing, the leavening, the shaping out, the final raising and then the sliding of the plates and tins inside the oven. ‘He mu’n be a baker,’ Saville would say, coming home to see the tiny, irregular-shaped loaf the boy had baked himself, breaking a piece off, at Andrew’s insistence, putting on jam and then, watched raptly by his son, chewing it carefully and with evident pleasure: ‘Nay, I mu’n come to this house again. They know how to treat a hungry man.’

On Thursdays she cleaned the house upstairs, first the front bedroom, the only room apart from the kitchen to have linoleum on the floor, which she washed and polished, then the two rear rooms and finally the stairs. On Fridays she swept and cleaned the kitchen, washing the floor, and swept out and scrubbed the tiny room at the front: here the two easy chairs stood before an empty, black-enamelled fireplace. This she polished as she did the black enamel on the stove in the kitchen: on Friday evening the house smelted of polish and the gas light glowed, flaring, against all the shiny surfaces. Saville, taking the baby, would bath him in front of the fire, laying out sheets of paper and standing the metal tub in front of the hearth. Andrew would flap his arms and shout, the water would hiss against the coal, the mother would call at the damage done to her recently polished floor. Saville himself would laugh, sometimes singing, leaning back on his heels as he knelt to the tub, the child finally gazing up at him with a look of wonder, his pale eyes bright, transfixed, as his father, his face flushed, his teeth gleaming in the light from the fire, sang long and lustily for his amusement.

‘By go, just see his little legs, Ellen,’ he’d say as he stood the child in the bowl, feeling the mound of muscle and fat, his own hand, gnarled and knotted and stained beneath the skin with tiny filaments of coal, incongruous against the smoothness and pinkness of Andrew’s flesh. He’d lift him, still wet, above him in the air, the child’s arms and legs flung out, dangling below him, calling, shrieking as he shook him by the fire, the flames sizzling once again, and the mother shouting, ‘Wash him, for goodness’ sake, without all that mess.’

Ellen frequently went back to visit her parents. They lived in a village four miles away, their house one of a pair, backing on to a paddock in which they kept geese and hens and, in sheds, at the farthest end, a number of pigs. She would take the boy with her, preparing him thoroughly for the journey, in his best clothes, his face bright and gleaming, his hair brushed neatly and parted at the side. He would sit beside her in the bus, gazing out at the fields with the same look of perplexity which characterized his features whenever his mother chastised his father, his expression vaguely disconcerted, yet as if in a curious way their quarrel had scarcely anything to do with him at all.

Mrs Saville’s mother was a small woman; she had had seven children in all, two of whom had died, and had long since relinquished her domestic responsibilities to these surviving offspring, one of whom visited her almost every day. So it was, whenever Ellen brought Andrew, she was obliged at some point of her visit to pull on an apron, roll up her sleeves and wash a floor, or clean the windows, wash the clothes, or prepare a meal. Her father, a tall, silent man who had been out of work for much of his later life, and who scratched a living from the weed-strewn acres at the back of the house, would leave the women of the house to their own devices, for, despite her good intentions, quarrels were frequently the outcome of Ellen’s visits home. The keynote of her mother’s resentment was her marriage to Saville – Ellen herself being the youngest of her mother’s children and destined traditionally for several years at least to combine the services of a daughter and a domestic servant; an expectation which had been terminated by her marriage and further compounded by the birth of Andrew.

The boy would sit between the warring women, immaculate in his child’s suit, with his gleaming hair and bright, robust face, open, frank and blue-eyed, vaguely aware of the animosity that passed between the adult figures and relating it conceivably to the animosity of a not dissimilar nature, a rancour and a bitterness, that passed between his mother and father at home, and which, usually, had preceded if not occasioned this visit to his round-faced, red-cheeked, dark-eyed grandmother. His playing in the dust of the yard at the back of the house was rigidly supervised by his mother. Occasionally, if he were allowed into the paddock at the back of the house, it was with instructions never to let go of his grandfather’s hand – an injunction which the tall, elderly man with large, soft brown eyes and an almost inaudible voice, so self-effacing was his manner, adhered to as conscientiously and as unremittingly as Andrew did himself. ‘Sithee, then, what dost think to Jackie?’ he would say, holding him to the pigs’ pen and, if he couldn’t see through the wooden lathes, lifting him to the top of the wall to peer over: the mud and the mess there would fascinate them both, and they would still be gazing at the pink and whitish bodies splashing through it when Ellen’s voice would call from the house, ‘Dad, bring him away from there.’

‘Nay, muck never did no man any harm,’ the old man would say when they got back to the house.

‘No,’ Ellen would say with the same vehemence as she did at home. ‘You don’t have to wash and clean him.’

‘Nay, I’ve washed and cleaned seven of them. And thy’s been one of them.’

‘Who have you washed and cleaned?’ the little old grandmother would say and the father would turn away, silent, leaving these squabbles as he always did to the peculiar moralizing passion of the women.

Yet Andrew enjoyed these visits to his grandparents’ house. For one thing, he enjoyed being out of his home: even going into the village with his mother he appreciated, as well as those longer journeys with his father that took him to the Park, on the slope that overlooked the village, or even farther afield than that where, some two miles away, the river came round in a vast dark curve from the distant towns.

On the journey back from his grandparents’ house his mother would frequently set him on her knee, so that his head was raised to the bus window and he gazed out at the fields from between her arms – a gesture she seldom made on their journey to the house when her thoughts, seemingly, were on the chastisement that lay ahead. ‘Well, then, there’s a horse,’ she would say to him on the journey back, pointing out objects that caught her attention as if the relief of going home, and the peculiar victory she had won – for survival in her family atmosphere was sufficient of a victory to satisfy Ellen – were scarcely more than she could bear. These moments of companionability were the deepest that Andrew and his mother shared, as if he himself were both a trophy and a burden, she the successful recipient and the suffering host.

2

When Andrew was three the Savilles moved house. They moved up the street to one of the miners’ houses which had a lower rent. As it was, their first cottage was old, and despite their renovations water came in through the roof in winter and soaked in in huge patches through the walls. Shortly after they left the four other tenants of the block moved out and the terrace was demolished, the stone taken away in carts and the timber burnt. A little later the miners’ row was extended to take in the newer ground.

Shortly after they moved Andrew ran away from home. Saville, coming in from work, was met by his wife at the door. Pale, almost speechless, she came out with him to search the streets, he wheeling his bike beside her. At odd corners she would wait and Saville would pedal off, looking in yards, in odd fields and alleys; finally, as they were returning to the house, the boy appeared, escorted by a neighbour. He had been found several miles away, walking steadily along the road to a neighbouring village: he was quiet and composed: Ellen sat with him by the fire; he scarcely seemed conscious of having gone away.

Perhaps the warmth that greeted his return persuaded him to leave again: he was brought back a second time from the pit by Mr Shaw, a miner who lived in the house next door. Saville saw him carrying Andrew along the street, the boy’s face pale, earnest, gazing steadily before him, uncertain of the other man’s grasp.

‘Why, where’s he been?’ Saville asked him.

‘We found him in the engine-house, curled up by the boiler,’ Shaw had said. ‘How he got in we’ll never know. The engine-man found him, tha knows, by chance.’

Finally on a third occasion, he was spotted by a tradesman on the same road leading out of the village.

‘But where were you going?’ Saville asked him.

‘I don’t know,’ the boy had said.

‘Aren’t you happy here?’ he said.

‘Yes.’ Andrew nodded.

‘Don’t you know it’s dangerous?’

He shook his head.

‘I shall have to smack you. You’ll have to know it’s wrong,’ he said.

Andrew stayed home. It was almost a year before he began to wander off again, his eyes wide, startled, whenever he was brought back, the blueness burning so that, having beaten him, Saville would go to the lavatory outside and sit on the scat, smoking, his hands shaking, like on those first occasions in his marriage when he had quarrelled with his wife.

She too seemed numbed. There was almost a ritual now; the boy’s wildness a quiet, almost a systematic thing, so that the father no longer felt alarmed or frightened by his going, as if he sensed the boy’s immunity to danger in much the same way that he sensed his own down the pit, a carelessness, almost an indifference. He spent longer hours in bed; he bought a dog. He would take the dog up to a deserted colliery to the south of the village where the small black and white animal ran to and fro amongst the overgrown pit-heaps chasing rabbits or digging at their burrows.

Andrew started school. He was as much trouble there as he was at home. One day, coming home from one of his walks, Saville saw his son in the road ahead. He was, perhaps because of his mother’s close attention, curiously well-mannered; the trouble came from these almost inadvertent gestures, the same absent-minded movement which, at school, might result in the knocking over of a desk, or the breaking of a window, and which at home led to his constant wanderings off.

He was kicking a stone in the middle of the road, and as Saville began to catch him up the stone flew up, glancing off another boy’s head, the boy himself stooping down and crying. Saville saw the look of consternation on Andrew’s face, the rigidity which gripped his body, a helplessness which overcame him whenever he discovered he’d done something wrong. A moment later he’d crossed the road but the boy, his hands clutched against his face, ran off, crying. For a while Andrew watched him, disconsolate, standing in the road; then, with strange, stiff gestures, his face flushed, he stepped back on the pavement and with the same strange, stiff strides, set off towards the house.

He wondered even then why he hadn’t intervened, and wondered what it was that held him back, as appalled by this as he was by Andrew’s grief, that strange remorse which gripped them both, the son walking on ahead, unknowing, the father walking on behind, half-raging. When he finally reached the house he saw Andrew playing in the yard, on his own, digging at the soil between his feet, his face red, glistening, as if recently he’d been crying.

One morning he came home from work to find the boy was ill.

His wife was three months’ pregnant. Saville stayed home that night to nurse them both. In the morning his wife was feeling better. Andrew, however, had a hacking cough, slow, half-delirious, fevered.

‘Don’t worry, it’ll soon pass,’ he told his wife, and gave the boy a powder, going to bed himself in the afternoon, ready to go to work that evening.

When he got up the boy was worse.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘If he doesn’t get better I s’ll fetch the doctor.’ He gave Andrew another powder now to sweat it out: he put another blanket on the bed. ‘Will you be all right on your own?’ he asked his wife.

‘I don’t know,’ she said and shook her head. She was pale, sick herself, moving round the house in a daze, unsure of what was happening.

‘I can’t miss another night,’ he said. ‘There’ll be all hell to pay, I can tell you.’

‘We’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘You go. I can always ask Mrs Shaw.’

‘Nay,’ he said, determined. ‘I’m damned if I can’t look after my own.’

He stayed at home. In the night the boy got worse. He started crying out and then, a little later, could scarcely catch his breath, his body arched, rising in its struggle.

Saville got out his bike and set off in the night to fetch the doctor.

The one he called at in the village was already out. He was given the address of a young doctor who was setting up in practice. The doctor was even younger than himself and had no car: he got out his bike and cycled back with him.

Ellen was sitting by the fire in the kitchen when they reached the house.

‘How is he? How’s he been?’ he said, surprised to find her out of bed.

‘He’s just the same,’ she said looking up, still dazed, her face paler than before.

He saw she was heating milk on the fire.

‘Which way up is it?’ the doctor asked.

They followed him up, putting on the light.

For a while he stooped over Andrew, half-crouched, running his hands across his chest.

‘How long is it since you looked at him?’ he said.

‘Ten minutes. Maybe less,’ his wife had said.

‘There’s nothing I can do,’ the doctor said, and a moment later, still gazing at them, he added, ‘It seems I’ve come too late. I’m sorry.’

‘Why? What’s the matter with him?’ Saville said.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid he’s dead.’

Even then Saville doubted what the doctor said. He stepped past him, looking down, gazing at the boy. His night-shirt had been drawn up above his legs. His head had sunk back against the pillows, his eyes half-open.

‘I’m sorry,’ the doctor said again.

‘Nay, he’s never gone,’ he said.

‘I should come down,’ the doctor said.

‘Nay, he’s never gone,’ he said, his wife standing back, her eyes blank, vacant. ‘He’s never gone,’ he said, gazing at the shadow beneath the half-shut eyes.

‘I should come down,’ the doctor said again, turning to his wife and taking her arm.

At the door, downstairs, he said, ‘No fee. No charge,’ fastening his bag on to the rack behind the saddle.

A few days later, when the boy was buried, his wife went back to her parents. Saville fended for himself, cooking his own meals, cleaning up the house, cycling to work. When his wife came back a week later she was silent. He helped more in the house, leaving a little later for work and, by cycling harder, getting home a little sooner, cooking, cleaning, helping with the washing. His wife was no longer sick each morning, yet it was as if the pregnancy had fatally weakened her. In the evenings when he left she would be lying prostrate by the fire, exhausted, pale, her dark eyes lifeless, dazed. He asked Shaw’s wife to keep an eye on her. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll sit by her.’ Sometimes too, on a morning, she cooked his breakfast. ‘She’ll soon be over the worst of it,’ she said.

His own life in some strange way was cancelled out. He got rid of Andrew’s toys, unable to bear the sight of anything that reminded him of the boy and of what they might have done together. Weeds grew in the garden and the holes that the boy had dug there he filled in. Occasionally he set off for walks but seldom got beyond the end of the street. Soon he was falling asleep at work, and was called up by the manager.

He almost gave up work. He felt ashamed, denying what he was, unable to break the hold, the feeling of contempt. He talked to his wife but saw there a distress he didn’t know how to approach, blank, blinded, uncomplaining. In the mornings when he went to bed he would find the pillow damp from her crying, and when he got up in the afternoon he would find her wandering, lifeless, round the house, a duster in her hand, a broom, unable to put it to any use.

‘Nay, we s’ll have to do summat,’ he said. ‘It can’t go on. It can’t. I s’ll kill myself. I shall. Nowt that happens could be worse than this.’

One morning he came home later than usual, unlocking the back door with his key to find the fire already lit, his wife kneeling in front of it, her head bowed, stiffened.

Only as he neared her did he see the knife, the blade gleaming in the light, and only as he caught her hand did he stop the movement. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Whatever,’ taking her against him, feeling the resignation. ‘Nay, for God’s sake,’ he said, his hand still on her. ‘What is it? Whatever are you doing, then?’

She cried against him and he felt his own grief breaking, pouring out, a sudden devastation, calling out, unable to see or hear. ‘Whatever shall we do?’ he asked her. ‘That’s no way out. We’ve got another one to think of now,’ he said.

‘Why did he go? Why did he go?’ she asked him.

‘Nay, let’s think of the other one,’ he said.

‘Why did he die?’

‘Nay, we mu’n never think of that,’ he said.

Some nights now, before he left for work, he prayed with her. The first time he’d seen her had been in a church, with a friend of hers, standing in the porch after an evening service. It had been raining and he’d had an umbrella, borrowed from his father, and he went up and offered it to her, taking her home that evening, and taking her out again a week later. To begin with all their meetings had started at the church. But for the wedding, and the funeral, they had never been again. Now, however, before he left for work he knelt with her by the fire, prayed ‘Our Father’, and then, on her behalf, prayed for the new baby. ‘May it be a good child, may it live and not die,’ he said, while at the back of his mind he prayed, unknown to her, ‘Give us something back. For Christ’s sake, give me something back,’ taking it with him as he cycled through the dark, looking back at the village, at the coke ovens glowing, wondering how she was, if she were sleeping, whether it might be a boy or, better still, a girl. And though all his new hope was on the baby, he felt the dead weight of the other pulling at his back.

Shortly before the child was born his wife went to a hospital in a near-by town. On two afternoons a week he caught a bus there, taking her fruit, or a change of clothing, sitting on the upper deck, smoking, anxious, yet somehow relieved she was away and he helpless now to intervene. It was two weeks before the child was born, a boy, and when she came back he’d been almost six weeks on his own, his meals occasionally cooked by Mrs Shaw.

The boy was dark-haired, with dark eyes, like his wife, but with something of his own features, the broad face and the wide mouth, a little larger at birth than Andrew.

It was a strange child. His wife gave it all her attention. It never cried. Its silence astonished him, its gravity, an almost melancholic thing. After the noise and spirit of the other child, its quietness frightened him.

‘Do you think it’ll be all right?’ he said.

‘Why not?’ she asked him. She’d seemed confident about it from the start, from the moment he first saw them both together. It was as if her grief had come out of her and was now lying there, to hold. He would watch the baby with a smile, not sure what it represented, half-afraid, reluctant to hold it unless his wife were willing, she suddenly amused by his uncertainty, restored, almost contemptuous of the way he drew back, letting her the whole time go before him. ‘No, no, you see to it,’ he’d say whenever she suggested he should feed or change it, which he’d done often with the other boy.

They called it Colin. It was the name of her mother’s father, the only member of her family she’d ever admired, a sailor, who was seldom home and who, whenever he returned, was always giving her sweets. Her memories of him were very faint, but for his uniform, the sweets, and the beard which covered her face whenever he embraced her. She had a yellowed photograph of him which she kept with one of her parents and one of their marriage in a folder in the wardrobe by the bed.

He felt a little helpless with the boy, and only relieved when he could make him laugh, or turn and move at some distraction. In the summer he would sit over him in the garden and wave a leaf to and fro above the pram, the tiny hand reaching up and snatching, the face smiling, the look half-curious, aroused. It scarcely seemed a child. The only time it cried was when she lifted it from the bath, beside the fire, suckling it then, the sobs dying down, shuddering through its shoulders, its tiny hands clutching, reaching out.

‘That’ll be a strange ’un, then,’ he said. ‘That’s soon contented.’

‘Yes,’ she said, gazing down, stroking its head.

‘Can’t make head nor tail of it,’ he said.

It was like a part of her, never leaving, growing, so that he saw the quietness growing in her, a calmness, the other women in the street peering down, uncertain, as bemused by the child’s passivity as he was himself.

‘It’s as good as gold. A little angel,’ Mrs Shaw told him, flushing, smiling, whenever she was allowed to pick him up.

‘See, he’ll go to anybody, then,’ he told her.

‘If he’ll come to me, he’ll come to anybody, then,’ she said, and laughed.

When it was walking it seldom left the garden, and then only if he called it from the field, or from a neighbouring yard, shouting across the backs as it forced its way between the fence, coming over, blindly, taking his hand while whoever it was he was talking to would gaze down at it, smiling, and shake their heads.

‘He’s going to be a boxer, then,’ they said, looking at his hands, his arms. He had the same muscular confidence as Saville himself, his limbs already thickening out. ‘Aye, he s’ll soon have you down, Harry,’ they told him and laughed whenever, for their amusement, he got the boy to skip about.

Usually he was shy and wouldn’t be moved, standing by the father’s side and gazing up at the other men with a slight frown, his brows knitted, his eyes dark and listening.

‘Here, do you want half-a-crown, then, Colin?’ they’d ask him and laugh when he refused to put his hand out. ‘He’ll not be bought off,’ they told Saville. ‘A dark horse. We’d better all watch out.’

He took the boy for walks like he’d taken Andrew, sometimes carrying him on his back, but more often walking. He sometimes took him out of the village, to the north and east, beyond the farm fields, to where the road led down towards the river. Its water was dark, its surface flecked by wads of foam and broken up here and there by clumps of timber. Barges passed bearing bales of wool, red and orange, blue and yellow, the bright colours glowing out against the darkness of the bank. There was a coal-slip farther up where the lorries from the colliery tipped their loads, the black dust sliding down the shute into the holds of the barges waiting in the stream below. A small tug with a red funnel pulled each of the barges off, a long slow train that swung from bank to bank, the men calling at the rudders, the bright funnel visible miles away, across the fields, unsupported, and belching out black clouds of smoke.

He bought another dog when the first dog died, and in the evenings, before he went to work, he would take it and the boy with him to the old colliery site at the farthest end of the village. He’d come here often before, on his own, and now he would lie in the grass and watch the boy digging with a stick, or following the dog about aimlessly, calling after it, ‘Billy! Billy!’ falling down, then coming back to tell him it had gone.

‘Nay, it’ll soon come back,’ he said. ‘It knows where its dinner comes from. Just you see,’ laughing when the dog reappeared, its snout muddied from digging at the holes. ‘You’ll see, one of these days it’ll catch us both a rabbit.’

It was as if, looking back, Andrew’s death and the boy’s birth were part of the same event, the paying off of a debt, the receipt of a sudden, bewitching recompense. As time passed he never quite got used to it, sensing in his wife an almost mystical interpretation of what had happened, as if she saw the two boys as elements of the same being, Andrew the transgressed, the new boy a figure of atonement: the same element and spirit was in them both, like a rod put in the fire and brought out cleansed and glistening. Almost for these reasons he would attack the boy, half-joking, afraid of him being moulded, afraid of the way he cancelled the first child out. He would fight him on their walks, at the colliery site, rolling on his back while the boy grappled with his arms and legs, aroused, half-laughing, the dog barking at their heels. ‘Nay, you s’ll half-kill me,’ he said panting, the boy moving round, out of reach, his arms extended, before he made another attack. He would laugh at the boy’s strength and the strange ferocity that drove him. ‘Nay, half a chance,’ he’d tell him, rolling off, the dog barking, the boy jumping at his legs, bouncing on him, up and down, laughing. He came to a strange life the moment he was roused, so that at times it was as if Andrew were there again, calling out and shouting, the mood passing into that even stranger silence when, walking back, he’d glance down to see the face quite still and calm, the dark eyes abstracted, solemn, shadowed by a frown.

3

The summer after the boy had started school they went away on holiday.

Colin had never seen the sea before; Saville had told him, during the weeks before they left, about its blueness, its size; about the sand, the gulls, the boats; about light-houses, even about smugglers. He’d heard about a lodging from a man at work; his wife had written; they’d sent a deposit. The day they left he got up early to find the boy already in the kitchen, cleaning his shoes, his clothes laid out on a chair by the empty grate, the two suitcases which they’d packed the night before already standing by the door.

‘You’re up early,’ he said. ‘Do you think they’ve got the train out yet? Yon engine, I think’ll be having its breakfast.’

The boy had scarcely smiled; already there was that dull, almost sombre earnestness about him, melancholic, contained, as if it were some battle they were about to fight.

‘Could you do mine up as well?’ the father asked him.

Saville got his own shoes out, then got the breakfast, his wife still making the beds upstairs.

Later, when they set off, the boy had tried to lift the cases.

‘Nay, you’ll not shift those,’ the father said. From the moment the boy had finished the shoes he’d been finding jobs, clearing the grate, emptying the ashes, helping to finish the washing-up, following his mother round as she inspected all the rooms, turning off the gas, checking the taps, making sure the window catches had been fastened tightly. They bolted and locked the back door then carried the cases to the front. Saville had set them in the garden, the patch of ground between the front door and the gate, and as he locked the door and tested it, and looked up at the windows, the boy had lifted first one case then the other then, finally, gasping, had put them down.

‘Better let me carry those,’ Saville said. He’d laughed. He gave his wife the key. ‘Though I don’t know why we’re locking up. There’s nought in there to pinch.’

Even then, with nothing to do but follow them, the boy’s mood had scarcely changed; he held his mother’s hand, looking over at his father, waiting impatiently, half-turned, while Saville rested, or switched the cases, trying one in one hand then the other.

‘We’ve enough in here for a couple of months,’ he told her. ‘I mu’n have got a handcart if I’d known they were as heavy as this.’

It was still early. The streets were empty; the sky overhead was dark and grey. Earlier, looking out of the window, he’d said, ‘Sithee, when it sees we’re off on holiday, it’ll start to brighten.’ Yet, though they were now in the street and moving down, slowly, towards the station, it showed no sign of changing: if anything, the clouds had thickened.

‘I should say no more about the weather,’ his wife had said. ‘The more you talk about the sun the less we’ll see.’

‘Don’t worry. When it sees us on our way it’ll start to brighten.’ He glanced over at the boy. ‘It likes to see people enjoying themselves,’ he added.

At the end of each street Saville rested; at one point he lit a cigarette but soon abandoned it. Occasionally, as they passed the houses, they saw people stirring, curtains being drawn, fires lit; one or two people came to the doors.

‘Off away, then, Harry?’

‘Aye, Saville said. ‘I think for good.’

‘Weight thy’s carrying tha mu’n be a month in travelling.’

‘A month I should think’, Saville said, ‘at least.’

A milkman came down the street with a horse and cart; he brought the jugs from each of the doorsteps to the back of the cart and ladled the milk out from the shiny, oval can. At the back of the cart hung a row of scoops, some with long handles, some like metal jugs.

He called and waved.

‘I could do with that this morning,’ Saville said.

He gestured at the cart.

‘How far are you going?’ the milkman said.

‘Down to the station.’

‘I’ll give you a lift,’ he said, ‘if you like.’

His wife wasn’t certain; she looked at the cans of milk; there was scarcely any room inside.

‘Thy mu’n take the cases,’ Saville said. ‘We can easy walk.’

‘I’ll take you all, old lad,’ the milkman said. ‘I won’t be a jiffy.’

He wore a black bowler hat and brown smock; they waited while he finished at the doors.

‘Off to the coast, then, are you?’ he asked them as he came back down the street.

‘That’s where we’re off,’ Saville said, looking at the boy.

‘First time, is it?’ the milkman said.

‘That’s right. First time.’

‘I wish I wa’ going with you.’

The milkman had red cheeks; his eyes, light blue, gazed out at them from under the brim of his hat.

‘Jump in,’ he said. ‘I’ll load your cases.’

His wife climbed up first, holding on to the flat, curved spar that served as a mudguard. She stood on one side, Saville on the other.

The boy, when the milkman lifted him in last, stood at the front, where the reins came into the cart over a metal bar.

The two cases, finally, were set in the middle, up-ended between the tall cans of milk.

‘Now, then,’ he said. ‘We’ll see if she can shift us.’

He took the reins, clicked his tongue, and the brown horse, darker even than the milkman’s smock, started forward.

‘Not too good weather yet,’ the milkman said. He gestured overhead.

‘It’ll start to brighten,’ Saville said. ‘I’ve not known one day it’s shone the day we left.’

‘Start black: end bright. Best way to go about it,’ the milkman said.

The horse clattered through the village. The cart, like a see-saw, swayed to and fro.

‘They mu’n be wondering where I’ve got to.’ The milkman gestured back. ‘Usually on time, tha knows, within a couple of minutes.’

‘It was good of you to bother,’ Saville said.

‘Nay, I wish I wa’ coming with you. What’s a hoss for if it can’t be used?’

Colin clung to the metal bar in front; it was looped and curved: the reins came through a narrow eyelet. His head was scarcely higher than the horse’s back.

Saville saw the way the boy’s legs had tensed, the whiteness of his knuckles as he clutched the bar. He glanced over at his wife. She was standing sideways, pale-faced, her eyes wide, half-startled, clutching to the wooden rail with one hand and to the side of the cart with the other; she had on a hat the same colour as her coat, reddish brown, brimless, sweeping down below her ears.

The last of the houses gave way to fields; Saville could smell the freshness of the air. A lark was singing: he could see its dark speck against the cloud. Behind them the colliery chimney filtered out a stream of smoke, thin, blackish; there were sheep in one of the fields, and cattle. In another, by itself, stood a horse. He pointed it out, calling to the boy.

Colin nodded. He stood by the milkman’s much larger figure, looking round, not releasing the metal rail, his head twisted: Saville could see the redness of his cheeks, the same sombre, startled look that had overcome him as he was lifted in the cart.

‘Thy mu’n say goodbye to them, tha knows,’ he said. ‘Tell ’em we’re off on holiday.’

The milkman laughed.

‘They’ll have seen nothing as strange,’ he added to his wife. ‘Off on holiday on the back of a milkman’s cart.’

The road dipped down to the station; the single track divided and went off in two deep cuttings across the fields.

The milkman turned the cart into the station yard; he got down first, helping Mrs Saville then the boy, then taking the cases as Saville held them out.

Saville got down himself. He dusted his coat.

‘That’s been very good of you,’ his wife had said.

‘Aye, it’s helped us a lot. I don’t know how long it’d have taken me to carry that lot.’ Saville gestured back the way they’d come. ‘We’d be still up yonder, I should think, for one thing; and for another, my arms might have easily dropped off after all that carrying.’ He glanced over at the boy: he was gazing at the horse, then at the cart.

‘Well, I wish you a good holiday, then,’ the milkman said. He climbed into the cart and took the reins. ‘Get back to me round afore they’ve noticed.’

‘It’s been very good of you,’ his wife had said again.

They watched him turn the cart: he waved; the horse trotted out to the road then disappeared across the bridge.

‘Well, that was a damn good turn. I suppose we shall have to wait though. It’s put us thirty minutes early,’ Saville said.

He took the cases over to the booking-hall. There was no one there. The bare wooden floor was dusty.

A planked walk took them through to a metal bridge: as they crossed over it they could see the rails below. A flight of stone steps, steep and narrow, took them down to the platform the other side.

He set the two cases down by a wooden seat.

‘I’ll go back up’, he said, ‘and get the tickets.’

Looking back from the booking-hall, he could see his wife and the boy standing by the cases; after one or two moments his wife sat down. The boy wandered over to the edge of the platform; he gazed down at the single track, looked up briefly towards the booking-hall, then turned and crossed the platform.

A goods train came slowly through the station; the bridge for a moment was hidden by smoke. The station itself had vanished; when the smoke had cleared his wife and the boy were standing at the edge of the platform watching the row of wagons pass.

The booking-clerk came through from an office at the rear: Saville paid for the tickets and, having re-crossed the bridge, went down the narrow steps and joined them.

The town had been built in the angle of a shallow bay. To the north, overlooking the houses, stood a ruined castle. It had been built on a peninsula of ochreish-looking rock which swung round, like a long arm, above the red-tiled roofs of the town itself; all that remained of the castle was a long, sprawling wall, and the dismembered section of a large, square-shaped keep. Around the foot of the headland formed by this peninsula ran a wide road, below which the sea boiled and frothed; even in calm weather it came up against the wall below the road in a heavy swell, following its sharply curved contour round to the shelter of the harbour on one side and to a broader, somewhat deeper bay to the north.

When the tide was out there were wide, sandy beaches. The house where they were staying lay to the south of the castle, near the harbour; from the upper windows they could see into the bay: they could see the white, glistening pleasure-boats as they churned in and out on their trips along the coast, and the fishing-smacks that lay in droves against the harbour wall, one fastened to another, and the crowds of people on the beach itself.

Saville had worked two weeks’ overtime for his two weeks’ holiday; instead of an eight-hour shift each day he’d worked sixteen hours, coming home exhausted to snatch a few hours’ sleep. He still felt the tiredness now, an emptiness, as if his limbs and his mind had been hollowed out: it was a hulk that he took down to the beach each morning; it was a hulk that was slowly filled with the smell of the sea, with the smell of the fish on the harbour quay, of the sand. Even the sun, once they’d got there, had begun to shine. He felt a new life opening out before him, full of change; it was inconceivable to him now that he’d ever work beneath the ground again.

He watched the boy; he would sit with his wife, in deck-chairs, the boy digging at their feet, immersed in the sand, wading in the sea, bringing his bucket back, afraid at times of the waves which, away from the protection of the harbour, crashed up against the beach.

There were donkeys on the sand; a man came round each morning and gave a Punch and Judy Show; there was a roundabout cranked by hand. They went on one of the pleasure-boats; it was like setting out to sea, clearing the headland, turning along the coast – the town now, with its castle, little more than a cluster of rocks at the water’s edge, the tall cliffs beyond like the shallow bank at the edge of a lake.

There was an orchestra aboard; a man in a sailor’s hat sang songs. The boy watched it all with wonder. There was a sudden alertness about him: when he got up on a morning Saville always found him waiting, sitting in the narrow hall downstairs where, beneath a hat-stand, his bucket and spade were kept – gazing through to the dining-room, anxious for his breakfast, or already at the door, the spade in his hand, ready to be off.

‘Nay, you mu’n hold on for some of us old ’uns,’ he told him. They would go down to the harbour before his wife was up; the trawlers would come in, unloading fish, seagulls drifting over in vast clouds above their decks, screeching, swooping to the water. The boy, in watching, would grow quite still: it was like some cupboard door that had suddenly been opened, a curtain drawn aside to reveal things he’d never encountered or ever imagined could exist before. On the beach, the first morning, the boy had gazed at the sea, abstracted, half in fear, reluctant to go near it, watching it fold over in waves against the shore, the white spume, the suction of the water against the sand; and had finally gone down with Saville, holding tightly to his hand, gasping as he felt his bare foot against the cold, stepping back, laughing, half-amazed, as he saw the children splashing through the waves. Its vastness had amazed him, the lightness, the buoyancy of the boats, the hugeness of the cliffs that towered above it.

Then, almost overnight, the mystery had vanished; he would dig at the sand with scarcely a look towards the sea, gouging out a hole, building a castle wall, building turrets, Saville stooping to the hole beside him, the boy running off to the water’s edge, collecting water in his bucket, running back undisturbed, the waves pounding beyond him.

Yet, as though within himself, Saville sensed a new life spreading through the boy, slow, half-thoughtful, confusing, drawing him to the vastness of the sea, as if, in some strange way, their life in the past had been cancelled out, the smallness, the tiny house, the tower of the colliery belching out its smoke and steam. Now there was nothing to contain them: they could grow as large and be as unpredictable as they liked, eat what they wanted, sleep only when they were tired, stand in the sea, dig the beach, ride on donkeys, sail on the water. There was nothing now to hold them back: they were free at last.

His wife too, he noticed, had something of the boy’s nature; he’d never seen her out of the context of the home before. Now, seeing them together in a fresh place, without any associations, he saw how alike they were, the slowness, the heaviness, the strange, scarcely imagined inner life they both possessed, so that at times it was as if, casually, they shared the same expression, the same mood, the same slow look, the same transformation from a dull, brooding, almost melancholic awareness to a lighter, brighter, more accessible, scarcely conscious expectancy and alertness. He would see her laughing along the beach, running with the boy, or holding his hand as they stepped across the waves, running back from the larger ones, screaming, the boy and she joined in a way he knew he could never share himself. His own approaches to the boy were always sharp and heavy, sideways, almost ponderous, speculative, afraid that the boy himself might not react; he entrusted his loneliness to the boy, looking to him to give him something of a link beyond himself. The blackness of the mine had always brought him back; now, with the sea, he felt them all advancing, in lightness, almost gentle.

His wife had bought a hat; it had a broad brim, bevelled, sweeping down across her eyes. It was made of straw; a broad pink ribbon was fastened round the crown, its ends fluttering out across the brim. She would walk in the sea with the wind tugging at the ribbon, holding one end of her light-coloured dress, her other hand holding the boy’s, walking to and fro in front of the spot where they had their deckchairs. She was like a girl, or a woman just grown, light, uncaring; he scarcely recognized her from a distance. The other men, he noticed, watched her too; it was as if she were taller, slimmer, unconscious now of the things that lay behind them, careless, untouched. He couldn’t relate her in any way to the woman that he knew.

A war was imminent. There were men in uniform lying on the beach, or walking on the promenade above. One of them he recognized one morning, a man from the village. He had a sergeant’s stripes and had called out to them as they went to the beach, coming over, nodding, leaning on the rail, the boy and his wife going on down to the beach below.

‘Why don’t you join up?’ the man had said. He had a broad figure, and since he’d last seen him as a miner in the village, he’d grown a short moustache. ‘If you join now you’ll get preferment. I could get you your stripes within a month.’

‘Will we join in the war do you think?’ he said. Until then, glimpsed vaguely in the papers, he’d scarcely any notion of what the war might mean.

‘We’ll be in it, in the thick of it in no time,’ the miner said. ‘If you join up now you’ll have a choice, of what you do and where you’re sent. If you wait till you’re called up they’ll send you wherever they want to. Join up now and the world’s your ticket.’ He slapped his back.

Saville gazed down at the figure of his wife; she was stooping to a chair, unfolding its legs, propping it against the sand. The boy was helping her with another; they seemed contained, one unit, bound up in themselves, with no need of anyone else. The soldier’s offer sent a dull surge along his arms and legs; he felt a slow heat inside his chest: it was a glimpse of a horizon like the one before him, open, fathomless, full of light.

He saw his wife look up; uncertain for a moment where he was, she scanned the row of figures leaning on the rail, her gaze finally pausing as she came to his. He saw her wave, the face lit-up, smiling.

‘Nay, I mu’n stay where I am,’ he said. He looked at the soldier. ‘They’ll be needing miners. To dig coal. They can’t fight wars without,’ he added.

‘Take it or leave it,’ the soldier said. ‘But if you decided now I could fix it up.’

Saville glanced back towards his wife; she was sitting in the chair, opening a paper. He could see the word ‘War’ emblazoned in the headline; she turned it over and read inside.

‘Nay, I better stay.’ He gestured to the sands. ‘I’ve got a lad.’

‘So have I. They’ll be all right at home,’ the soldier said.

‘Nay, I mu’n stay with them, I suppose,’ he said.

He saw the glow in the soldier’s eyes; there was a boldness there that frightened him, a certainty of where he was going and who he was. It filled him with dismay. He felt it was cowardice that held him back.

He gazed over at his wife.

‘Think it over,’ the soldier said. ‘I’ll be down again tomorrow.’

When he went back to the chairs he felt the warmth of the holiday drain away, the coldness and the dampness of the colliery coming back.

‘What did he want?’ his wife had said.

‘Oh, nothing,’ he said. He shook his head.

‘He seemed improved a lot’, she said, ‘since we last knew him. Do you remember that slouch he had? And the way he never washed.’

‘It’s done a lot for him, I suppose,’ he said.

He gazed over at the sea; he felt cut off. The boy dug at his hole; his wife, reading the paper, sat beside him.

They didn’t go down to the same beach again: each morning they took a bus round the promontory of the castle and found a spot in the bay to the north; the wind was slightly fresher here, the sand less crowded. There were still the donkeys, and the Punch and Judy, and the roundabout, and they could still see the boats sailing from the harbour. Above them, more sternly, loomed the castle; it was all a good preparation, he felt, for going back.

4

Shortly after returning from the holiday, Colin came home from school one afternoon and found his father digging at the end of the garden. Saville had cut off the grass into neat sods which he had rolled up and stacked to one side. Underneath, in the grey soil, he had begun to dig a hole.

It was quite large, the sides measured out with pieces of string fastened to pegs in the ground. The soil he threw carefully away from the sides of the hole, mounding it up in smooth piles, occasionally climbing out of the hole to shovel back the edge.

A little lower down the soil had turned to clay. It was pale yellow and came out in great clods which Saville slapped down on the pile with a great deal of groaning, shaking the spade from side to side to loosen its hold. Sometimes, his face red and streaming, he climbed out to slide the clay off with his foot. As the hole grew deeper the clay darkened. It was occasionally flecked with orange and stuck to the father’s boots and his clothes. Now when he came home from school in the afternoon all he would see were his father’s head and shoulders, occasionally stooping and disappearing, the spade flying up behind him in the air.

Later there would be nothing there at all. He only knew if his father were in the hole when a piece of clay came flying out, landing sometimes on the pile, sometimes on the beds of cabbages and peas the other side. When he stood at the edge and looked down his father would be an almost diminutive figure stooping to the spade, pushing it in with his foot, forcing down the handle, tugging it free then flinging up the clay above his head. His face would be crimson, his eyes shrunken, and every few minutes he would wipe the sleeve of his shirt against his forehead. A little ladder had been propped up against the side to enable him to climb in and out.

Sometimes when he looked in he would find his father resting on the spade, leaning back against the side of the hole, smoking, his eyes fixed on the bottom or the opposite side as if, despite its depth and width, he were planning some further extension. ‘When it comes it’ll come,’ he would say whenever a neighbour leaned over the fence or came, smiling, to examine the hole, peering down on to the top of his head.

The neighbour would look up then, at his own garden, at his house, and nod, frowning.

The sides of the hole were very clean and neat, the separate blows of the spade clearly imprinted. At the bottom pools of water had formed and the clay itself had turned to a dull crimson.

In the end, the hole itself had got too deep: he had to shout for someone to come and help him over the edge from the top of the ladder.

The next morning he brought home several pieces of wood from work. They were long and flat. He wheeled them home roped to his bike. With them, too, he brought strips of conveyor belt, pieces of webbing and piles of nails which, the moment he came in, he unloaded from his pockets on to the table. They lay there amongst the cups and plates, glistening, the fresh smell of wood and rubber mingling with the more familiar smell of coal from his clothes and the even more familiar smell of cooking.

‘You’ve never walked all that way?’ the mother said.

‘I have,’ Saville said, sitting down at the table, his eyes reddened and still black with dust. ‘It’s surprising what you see when you’re not riding. I must have pushed that lot up every hill in sight.’ He indicated the pile of wood which he’d stacked up in the yard outside. ‘I go like the wind down the other side.’

An image of his father came to Colin’s mind, of him pushing the bike up the winding lanes that lay between the village and the colliery, and of him sitting astride the wood strapped to the cross-bar and riding down the other side, his flat cap pulled over his eyes, his short legs dangling above the roadway, his coat tails flapping out behind. He could even imagine the sound of the wind in his father’s ears, and the soft hissing of the tyres under their heavy load.

‘I’ll break my neck one morning,’ Saville said, laughing, his mouth red and glistening as he lay back. ‘I s’ll. Don’t any of you be surprised.’

He brought the wood home each morning, staining it with creosote then nailing it together.

He built four walls, kneeling on the timber as he hammered the pieces together, the sole of his boots turned up, the studs shining, the nails hanging from his mouth like teeth.

Sometimes he hit his thumb, which was thick and curled, and for a while he would lean on his heels, his head turned up, his eyes closed, his mouth full of nails, grimacing.

When he had built the walls he lowered them into the hole, the two long walls held in by the shorter ends. Then he nailed several beams across the top to fasten them together.

In the mornings now he brought back other shapes roped to his bike. There were pieces of tarpaulin, black and smelling of tar, and bricks.

He brought the bricks in a pannier fastened to the back of his saddle, in his knapsack and, once or twice, in his overcoat pockets until they tore at the weight. In the evenings, when he set off for his night shift, he would string his knapsack with his tin of food and his bottle of tea over one shoulder and an empty knapsack for the bricks over the other, setting off with a wave, his red light visible to Colin and his mother long after he himself had disappeared.

He built a roof over the hole, wedging the wooden beams into the earth on either side, and across them nailing planks of wood.

Over the planks he laid the tarpaulin, tacking it down and covering it with blocks of clay. Over the clay he threw the grey soil and on top the grass sods, yellowing now, which had originally covered the spot. ‘It’ll be invisible from the air,’ he said, ‘don’t worry,’ as if, when the bombing started, this was the one place where the enemy would come and look.

He built a flight of steps down one side of the hole, each step supported by a wedge of timber and neatly paved with bricks. Inside the hole itself he laid a floor of bricks, mixing the cement and the mortar in the street outside and carrying it in buckets through the house along a line of newspapers laid down from the front door to the back, disappearing down the steps into the hole from where, reddened and sweating, he would emerge a little later, hurrying back.

He worked with the aid of a miner’s lamp which, like everything else, he had brought with him from the pit. A small, shelllike case, it hung with its pool of yellow light from one of the beams in the ceiling.

With the remaining timber he built four bunks. He built them in pairs, one on top of the other, nailing them together. Across the bed of each bunk he wove the strips of webbing and the bits of conveyor belt, which he cut into strands like thick bandages, nailing them down, so that each bunk looked like a huge, ill-fashioned net.

The last thing he brought home was a tin of grey paint. He painted the bunks with it and the wooden door, which was the last thing he made. It had two bolts on the inside and a lock on the outside. When he had painted it he hung a sign over it which said, ‘Wet Paint. No Entry.’ A week later he took it down and let them look inside.

They went down one afternoon, just after Colin had come home from school and his father had woken from his day-long sleep. The lock too he had brought with him from the colliery and the strange, square, stubby key. ‘Mind the steps,’ he said as they climbed down and he unlocked the door. ‘I’ll just light the lamp.’

Saville stepped into the darkness beyond, feeling with his foot, then went down the steps inside which led into the well of the shelter. For a moment there came the sound of his heavy breathing, then a match was struck. There was a brief glimmer of light, then it went out. ‘God damn and blast,’ he said.

‘Oh, now,’ the mother said. ‘There’s no hurry.’

There was a second flare of light which faded then, after a moment, expanded.

A dull yellow glow lit up the interior of the shelter and Saville said, ‘Watch the steps, then. You can come inside.’

The hole smelled of tar from the wood, of oil, and of the clay. Saville stood in the middle of the pool of light, his head stooped slightly from fear of the ceiling.

Ellen stood with her arms clenched to her, her eyes shining in the light, gazing round.

‘It should be safe,’ she said.

‘As safe as houses,’ Saville said.

‘Yes.’ She gazed up at the bunks.

‘And water-tight,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ She nodded her head.

The lamp swung slowly on the nail which held it to the beam. To Colin his mother and father appeared to be moving, the shadows on their faces swaying in time to the larger shadows which swung behind them on the walls. Their faces dissolved then re-appeared, their eyes glinting with the light one moment then buried in shadow the next.

‘We’ll have the bottom bunks,’ his father said. ‘The lad can have the one up yonder.’

The whole interior rocked to and fro, like a ship, as if they were floating.

‘Let’s hope we won’t have to use it,’ his mother said.

‘Oh, yes,’ Saville said. ‘Well, I suppose we s’ll have to, but let’s hope we don’t.’

As they climbed out he added, ‘I’ll look round for a little stove. We might have to live for days down there, you know.’

‘Mrs Shaw’, his mother said, referring to their neighbour, ‘says they’ll go down the pit if there’s any bombing.’

‘Oh, will they?’ Saville said. ‘And how many can they get down there, and how fast, once it starts?’ And as they came out of the hole and waited for him to extinguish the lamp, he called up, ‘And what if they bomb the shaft, then? How will they get out?’

‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ the mother said.

‘No,’ Saville said. ‘I’m the only one round here who has.’

The day the war started Colin had gone out into the garden in the evening and looked up at the sky. It was grey and cloudy, the sun visible only to the west, above the colliery, through narrow gaps. Behind the clouds, he imagined, aircraft were already waiting. Yet they gave no sign. It was as if the houses, the clouds, the pit, the village had been changed now, re-fashioned, the brick no longer brick, the cloud no longer cloud, merely elements of some new and incomprehensible presence stretching all around.

He watched the sky the next day and the next and yet, despite these changes, nothing happened. It wasn’t until the following spring that anything occurred. Then, at the station less than a mile away, soldiers disembarked from long, blacked-out trains and marched up in small groups to the village. They were tired, some were only half-dressed with overcoats thrown over their vests and shirts. Some had no rifles, others carried packs. When they reached the village they sat down on the pavements, smoking, sitting in the coal-dust, scarcely troubling to look around.

One of them came to stay in the house. He had the only other room, next to the boy’s – a small, cupboard-like space that looked out on to the backs. He was a tall, well-built man like Colin had always imagined soldiers were, towering over his father, standing in front of the fire in his khaki shirt and his rough khaki trousers or, more usually, lying on the bed in his room, staring at the ceiling, smoking, and sometimes singing songs in a light tenor voice.

He brought his rifle with him. It stood leaning by his room door. In the narrow space between the single bed and the wall he laid out his equipment. All of it was tarnished with salt and all the clothes in his pack were damp when he unrolled it.

Most of the space in his pack was taken up by three large tins. Two were full of sugar which he gave to his mother, who put them in the cupboard by the fire to dry. The third was full of medals, metal buttons, and money.

In the evening when the soldier came back from the pub he would sit at the kitchen table and count the money out, arranging it in neat piles, silver and copper-coloured, then laughing, and leaning back and saying, ‘If I was a Jerry I’d be a rich man now.’

He often sat by the fire, gazing at the blaze, and sometimes he would take the boy on his knee and from his breast pocket, where he kept a wallet, take out a photograph of a woman and three children, pointing at each one with his finger, which was thick and nicotine-stained, and tell him their names and what they were doing when he last saw them. He came from some other part of the country and had an accent which at times Colin found hard to understand. ‘Oh, don’t worry about the way I talk, boy,’ the soldier would say, laughing, looking up at Saville. ‘I come from a place where they go about with nothing on.’

He would often go for walks with his father and sometimes his father would take him to look at the shelter, unlocking the door and letting him go inside, lighting the lamp, the soldier gazing round, trying the bunks at his father’s insistence, lying sprawled out, his head cradled in his hands.

‘It’s as safe as houses,’ his father said.

‘More,’ the soldier would say, laughing, ‘if I had a guess.’

When they went for walks the two men would go off down the street with their hands in their pockets, coming back hours later with a bunch of flowers or chewing a piece of grass. ‘Oh, don’t worry about me,’ the soldier would say if they were late and the meal spoilt. ‘By all rights I should be dead, so anything’ll do for me. Just cough it up.’

Each morning he went into the street and with the other soldiers marched up and down. Children followed them on the pavements. On Sundays the soldiers walked in groups in the fields or down the road to the station, where they would sit on a wall by the bridge, gazing at the lines and smoking.

One day the soldier called Colin into his room and from his pack brought out several bullets. There were five of them, fastened together at the base. The cartridges were copper-coloured, the bullets silver. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘You have them. I’ve a lot more here. He brought out several more, laying them on the bed. ‘You can have the gun as well,’ he said. ‘I don’t want it.’

He reached across for it by the door, pulled back the bolt and showed him how to slip in the bullets. ‘There now,’ he said. ‘You can shoot anybody you want.’

He laughed, watching Colin hold it, unaccustomed to the weight.

‘Nay, don’t point it at me,’ he said. ‘I’m your friend.’

When he went down his mother stood back across the kitchen, one hand raised to her cheek frowning.

‘You’ve never given him that?’ she said.

‘I have,’ the soldier said. ‘Why not? I don’t want it.’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to see when his father comes.’

And his father too, when he came, looked at it and, in much the same manner, said, ‘You can’t give it away, can you?’ the soldier laughing and nodding his head.

‘I’ve lost it,’ he said. ‘It’s yours.’

‘Well,’ his father said. ‘I’ll put it away. It’s no good for Colin.’ Yet, although he locked it in the wardrobe in their bedroom, on an evening he would take it out, after the soldier had gone, and ram the bolt to and fro, put in and take out the bullets, and sight it at various objects outside the window. In the end, however, he gave it to the police and said that he had found it under a hedge.

‘Don’t you want to fight?’ he would ask the soldier, frowning.

‘I have been fighting,’ the soldier said.

‘But to fight again,’ his father said.

‘What for?’ the soldier asked him. He would lie back easily in a chair or stand in his stockinged feet in front of the fire, smiling down at his father and nodding his head.

‘To defend your country,’ his father said. ‘To defend freedom. To keep your wife and children from being captured.’

‘Nay, it’ll not make much difference,’ the soldier said. ‘Whoever’s here we’ll live much the same, one way or another. There’ll be the rich and the poor, and one or two lucky ones’, he went on, ‘between.’

‘Nay, I can’t make any sense of it,’ his father would say, rubbing his head, shy in the face of the soldier, suddenly uncertain. ‘Don’t you believe in anything?’

‘Not you could put your finger on,’ the soldier would say, smiling and lighting – if he hadn’t got one lit already – another cigarette.

‘He was nearly drowned. In the sea,’ his father said when the soldier had gone. ‘They picked him up in a small boat as he was going under for the third time,’ he added.

‘For the third tin, more likely,’ his mother said. ‘With all that sugar it’s a wonder he came up at all.’

‘Still, he’s given it all away,’ his father said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m not surprised. Nearly everything he’s got is stolen.’

Yet long after the soldier had gone they continued to use the sugar, to sweeten tea and finally to make some jam.

When he left, marching off to the station in a long column, his father went with him, walking along the side of the road, across the fields. When he came back he sat by the fire, looking up at the buttons and the medals the soldier had left on the shelf. Then, after a while, he went up to the soldier’s room and tidied up the bed.

One evening, a short while later, Colin woke to the sound of the sirens and lay for a moment listening for the roar of planes and the crashing of bombs. But beyond the wailing there was no other noise at all.

Then he heard his father’s feet pounding on the stairs.

‘Come on, lad,’ his father said. ‘We’re all ready.’

‘Are they the sirens?’ he said.

‘They are.’

‘Have they started bombing?’

‘Nay, if we wait to see we’ll never get there at all,’ his father said.

His mother was already wrapped in her coat and had his own coat ready.

‘Come on. Come on.’ His father danced at the door. He’d already switched off the light and, in the silence as the sirens faded, other voices could be heard along the terrace.

‘Nay, we’ll wrap up warm,’ his mother said. ‘They’ll give us a minute, surely, before they start.’

‘A minute?’ His father had lit the lamp at the door, shielding one side with his hand. ‘They don’t give any minutes. Don’t worry. It’ll be down on our heads before we can start.’

They went out across the garden in single file, his father waiting impatiently while his mother locked the door. ‘We’d look well sitting there,’ she said, ‘and the entire house burgled.’

‘Burgled?’ his father said. ‘You think they’ll have time for that?’

‘I can’t hear any planes.’

‘You won’t hear them. Don’t worry. Not till they’re overhead.’ Grumbling, he led the way across the yard, the lamp lighting up the ground around his feet. ‘They’ll all be coming in now,’ he said. ‘Now they see what it’s all about.’

A voice had called across the backs and he’d paused, holding up the lamp.

‘What is it?’ he said.

‘Can you take our lads?’ a man had said.

‘Aye,’ his father said. ‘They’ll be safe with me.’

A small knot of figures emerged from the darkness, stumbling over the fences that separated the yards. They were four brothers, older than Colin, from a family farther down the terrace. Behind them came the figure of their father.

‘How many have you got room for, Harry?’ the man had said.

‘Oh,’ his father said. ‘We’ll squash a few in.’ He looked up at the sky. ‘We better be getting in,’ he added.

‘Can you take the missus?’ the man had said.

‘Oh, you’ll be all right with us,’ Saville said. ‘There’s room for you as well.’

They collected, then, around the steps, Saville fumbling in his pocket then stooping to the lamp and taking out his key.

Across the yard other figures had begun to converge on the shelter: Colin could make them out, vaguely, silhouetted against the sky, climbing fences, calling out in low voices towards the houses.

‘Mind the steps,’ his father said. ‘I’ll just unlock it.’

‘Which way will they come?’ someone said and the heads turned up towards the sky.

‘They could come any way,’ Saville said. He was at the bottom of the steps, below them, his figure stooped to the door, the lamp lighting up his face. The lock clicked, then the bolt was drawn back. ‘I’ll go in first,’ he added, ‘and light the other lamp.’

He opened the door, paused, then stepped inside.

‘Women and children first,’ a man had called behind.

From below them came a splash. It was followed a moment later by Saville’s shout, then the light inside the shelter was suddenly extinguished.

‘God damn and blast,’ the father said.

The splashing continued a little longer then, as someone switched on a torch, Saville re-appeared at the door below, his hair matted to his skull, his clothes clinging to his body.

‘The place is flooded,’ he said. In his hand he still held the miner’s lamp.

‘What’s that, Harry?’ someone said.

‘The shelter,’ he said.

‘You’re flooded out?’ he said.

‘It’s all that rain we’ve had,’ he said. ‘I should have watched it.’

‘Well, then,’ the mother said. ‘We better get back to the house.’

‘It’s catch us death of cold in theer, or a bomb under t’kitchen table,’ someone said and somewhere, at the back of the crowd, someone else had laughed.

Colin followed his father back to the house. ‘I can’t understand it,’ Saville said. ‘It shouldn’t have been flooded.’ He stood shivering, his teeth chattering, as he waited for his mother to unlock the door. ‘Come on, come on,’ he said. ‘Can’t you open it any faster?’

‘I can’t see,’ she said.

‘Where’s the lamp?’ he said, then realized he was holding it, sodden, in his hand.

Across the backs other voices were calling out and in a doorway someone else had begun to laugh.

‘Well, that was a quick raid,’ the mother said. ‘Let’s hope the all-clear goes soon.’

‘That water,’ Saville said. ‘I can’t understand it.’

‘All that work,’ the mother said. ‘For nothing.’

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Saville said. ‘We’ll be as safe as houses.’

‘Where? In here?’

‘No.’ He shook his head, shivering, and pointed towards the shelter. ‘When I’ve drained it.’

‘Drained it?’ she said. ‘Tonight?’

‘Not tonight,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow.’

‘It’ll be too late tomorrow.’

Saville shook his head, standing in his wet pants and vest before the fire. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘There’ll be no bombing tonight. I’ll have it drained by the time it starts.’

A few days later he brought a pump home from work. It was shaped rather like a pudding basin, and was made of heavy metal. Colin could only lift it with his father’s help. From one end ran a metal tube perhaps a yard long. It was this his father rested in the water. Then, panting, his face flushing at the exertion, he worked a little handle at the side. It was made of wood and as he jerked it to and fro there was a sucking noise inside the metal basin and out of a long rubber hose attached to the other side emerged a jet of water.

It came out in little spasms and starts, draining off across the garden.

His father worked it for an hour.

‘Is it empty, then?’ his mother said when they went in.

‘Empty?’ His father sat at the table, spreading out his arms. ‘It hasn’t shifted an inch.’

‘I told you buckets would do it faster.’

‘Buckets,’ he said and banged the table with his fist.

At the end of the week, however, Colin was helping to carry the buckets himself, his father kneeling by the door and stooping inside the shelter to fill them and he carrying them, half-spilling, across the yard to empty in the drain the other side. ‘Don’t empty them in the garden,’ his father said the first time he did so. ‘It’ll drain straight back. God damn and blast, it’ll be weeks before we’ve finished.’

The next raid, when the sirens went, they spent in a cupboard beneath the stairs. As on the previous raid they heard no sound at all. After a while his father got up to go to work. ‘No,’ he said, ‘don’t come out. You wait there until you hear the all-clear,’ shutting the door quietly and moving on tiptoe across the kitchen, breathing heavily as he wheeled his bike out into the yard. They heard the rasp of the tyres on the ashes, then the sound of his boot as he pushed himself off. Then, for a while, they sat in silence.

At last the mother got up. ‘Well, then,’ she said. ‘I’m not waiting here any longer,’ opening the cupboard door but turning back when he followed her and adding. ‘No, you stay there, Colin. I’ll tell you when to come out.’

He sat alone then with the lamp re-trimmed, heating up the tiny space, staring at the white walls of the cupboard, the odd boxes, the spare tyre from his father’s bike, the ribbed, zinc tub out of the top of which poked the week’s washing.

Outside he could hear his mother moving about, lighting the gas and, a little later, catching her foot against a chair.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she said through the door.

‘Yes,’ he said.

He heard the clinking of the cups and the water being poured into the pot.

When his mother opened the door he said, ‘Can I come out?’ before taking the cup.

‘No, you better stay there,’ she said. ‘If anything happens I can rush inside.’

When the door had closed again he watched the steam rising from the cup in the lamplight and saw the waves of heat distorting the shape of the tyre as they came out of the little holes round the top of the lamp.

When the all-clear sounded his mother opened the door. She stood listening, her head to one side, gazing at the ceiling, then said, ‘Well, then, it should be all right.’ He climbed back up to bed with the smell of the washing still about him, and the smell of the burning oil from the lamp.

Eventually they dispensed with the cupboard. When the sirens sounded he would go down to the kitchen and sit with his mother and with his father if he were home from work, the door of the cupboard open and sometimes the lamp lit in readiness inside.

Finally, when the bombing started in earnest, his father would take him out on to the step to watch.

The planes came from the east, flying high above the houses, with just the dull throbbing of their engines to indicate their passage, like some low moaning inside the head. Almost every night the sky to the west would be lit by flames, silhouetting the houses of the village, lifeless but for the odd whispered cries from the other doors and windows. It was as if the horizon burned, a dull, aching redness flung against the sky. Across it, intermittently, waved the beams of searchlights and occasionally came the crackle of gunfire, like some vague tapping overhead.

One day his father took Colin with him on a bus to the city. It took them almost an hour to get there, making detours up narrow lanes to tiny farms and hamlets, the bus cresting a hill finally to reveal the city still some distance off perched on a steep and rocky outcrop, its various spires and towers shining in the sun.

Only when they’d passed through the suburbs and crossed the river did they see the damage. The factories were still there, the mill chimneys: it was the houses alone that had been hit, street after street of rubble, the bus occasionally brought to a halt while gangs of men dug with shovels or signalled it through some narrow gap.

Smoke rose from the debris: small crowds of people stood about gazing at the fractured beams and the guttered windows of what had once been their homes.

In the centre of the city the cathedral and the old brick buildings surrounding it were still intact. The tall, black spire stood at the very summit of the escarpment, open on every side. Only its stonework, however, had been chipped, the soot-encrusted surface laid open to the yellowish texture underneath. It was as if it suffered from some huge infection, yellow spots gaping from the black. Some of its windows had been broken. Inside several women were picking up the glass

‘That’ll never be hit,’ his father said. ‘It’s as safe as houses. They need have no worry over that.’

Colin followed his father through the crowds. Saville stopping here and there, before a guttered shop or house, talking to the people, nodding his head, his small, stocky figure swelling with indignation.

‘By God, when it comes to bombing women and children it’s come to something. It has that.’

‘Ah, well, there’s no providence in bombs, one way or another,’ a man had said. He had, it seemed, been bombed out already. ‘The place they put me in got bombed out the night I was sent. They’re chasing me from one hole to another.’

When they reached home his father sat at the table, drinking his tea, describing what he had seen to his mother. ‘One row of houses we saw: perfect. Not a stick out of place. The only thing was that not one of them had a window. Blast: it had removed every bit of glass.’

‘They say there are ten thousand homeless,’ his mother said.

‘More,’ Saville said, ‘if I had a guess.’

Sometimes, on a morning, Colin would tie a magnet to a piece of string and pull it through the gutters of the village. He seldom found anything but old bolts and nails. Once, however, he picked up a piece of greyish metal, torn at the edges, like paper, and slightly burned. He put it in a box, along with the war medals, the foreign coins, the cartridges, and the.303 bullets.

5

There were two parts to the village. The older part stood on a ridge a little to the north. It was made up of several old stone houses, still inhabited, an old manor house, deserted and falling into ruin, and the stone church which had once belonged to the manor. Two or three old farms stood here, back to back, their fields stretching out on every side, a system of mud lanes joining them together.

The more recent part of the village fell away on the lower ground to the south. At its centre stood the colliery with its twin headgears and its dykes and pyramids of slag, the terraced streets built for the miners strewn out on three sides like the spokes of a wheel: on the fourth side the slag ran off towards the country, the grey mounds of ash and rubble tumbling down finally at the edges of the nearest wood, one arm running off at the side of a little wagon track before it petered out amongst the fields.

The streets were numbered from one to five: they started with First Avenue, which stood in the shadow of the colliery, and ran round through ninety degrees to Fifth Avenue; here the streets had been named after trees, Beech, Holly, Laburnum, Willow. Once he had collected all the names and numbers in a book, along with the numbers of several cars which he had seen passing through the village on their way to the town, and the numbers of several railway engines he had seen passing through the station on the road to the south. Between the village and the station were strung out the various amenities of the village itself, the shops, a prefabricated Catholic Church, a Wesleyan Chapel, a greyhound track and, in a dip in the road, a small gas-works and a string of sewage beds. They stood amidst marshes and pools of stagnant water and the place was known locally as the Dell.

The surrounding countryside was given over entirely to farms, their hedged fields strewn out to the near, hilly horizon where, beyond a frieze of woodland or the silhouette of the fields themselves, a cloud of smoke or the tip of a slag heap would betray the presence of the other collieries stretching all around.

Shortly after the bombing began his mother went away to hospital and he went to sleep at Mrs Shaw’s house next door. She had no children and her husband worked in the colliery in the village. The house was cleaner and neater than their own, and his bedroom had linoleum on the floor. On all the walls, on the stairs as well as in the rooms, were hung pieces of brass, small reliefs and plates, and medallions with figures. Almost every day Mrs Shaw cleaned them with a rag, breathing on them, or rubbing on a white liquid from a tin, the brasses laid out around her, on a table, in neat rows. At lunch-time he stayed at school for dinner and at tea-time he would go back to see his father, who had usually just got out of bed. He would be getting ready to go and see his mother on his way to work, getting his things together, the fire unlit, the place itself untidy, the sink full of plates and pans he had never washed, the curtains in most of the rooms still drawn. ‘I’ll be glad when she’s back,’ his father would say. ‘How are you liking Mrs Shaw’s?’

‘Can’t I stay here?’ he asked him.

‘Nay,’ his father said. ‘You can’t sleep in the house by yourself.’

‘I wouldn’t mind.’

His father looked down at him then with a half-smile. His face was grey, his eyes reddened.

‘You’re better off where you are, Colin,’ he said. ‘Your mother’ll be back home before long, then we’ll be all right.’

He would dress for work then and wheel his bike out into the yard.

‘Come on, then, out you come,’ he would say. ‘I mu’n lock the door.’

Sometimes Colin stood in the yard holding the bike while his father locked the door, turning the key then stooping down to fasten on his cycle clips, folding his trousers round the tops of his boots. Sometimes too, as he waited, he pumped up the air in the tyres, his father waiting then, groaning, and saying, ‘Come on. Come on. I’ll be here all night. You need a drop of meat in that arm.’

Usually he went out into the street to watch him cycle off. His father wore a long overcoat, his flat cap pulled well down over his eyes. In the pannier behind the seat he would put the parcel he had made up to take to his mother, some fruit or a change of clothes which he’d carefully washed and ironed himself. ‘You be a good lad, now,’ he would say. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘Good night, Dad,’ he would tell him.

‘Good night, lad,’ his father would say and push off his bike with one foot, riding on the pedal then, as it gained momentum, lifting his leg over the seat.

Mrs Shaw was a tall, thin woman. She had a large jaw and large, staring eyes, dark and full of liquid. Her cheek-bones stuck out sharply on either side. She had little to do with the other neighbours. Often she would stand with her arms folded beneath her apron staring out into the street.

Her husband was a small man with light, gingerish hair and a freckled face. He went to work early in the morning and came back home while Colin was still at school. At night he would come into his room, sometimes with a book, and tell him a story, his wife listening to the radio downstairs. Often, however, as he listened to Mr Shaw reading Colin would begin to cry, covering his face with his hands.

‘Why, what is it?’ Mr Shaw would say. ‘What’s the matter?’

He would shake his head.

‘Your mother will soon be back,’ Mr Shaw would say. ‘And what will your dad say when I tell him you’ve been roaring?’

‘I don’t know,’ he’d say and shake his head.

‘“Why,” he’ll say. “Not my lad, surely?”’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Well, then,’ Mr Shaw would say, and add, ‘Shall I fetch you up a chocolate?’

Sometimes he would accept one and, after Mr Shaw had gone, kissing him good night, he would lie sucking it in the darkness, the taste of the sweet and of the salt from his crying inextricably mixed up inside his mouth.

Before he went to school each morning Mrs Shaw would brush his hair. She would look in his ears in much the same fashion as his father would look at his bike when he couldn’t find what was wrong with it. Sometimes she would take him back to the sink in the kitchen and wash his ears again, pushing his head forward and rubbing round the back of his neck. ‘You’ll never get clean,’ she said. ‘You’d think you worked down a pit yourself.’

At the end of the week, on the Friday evening, she set out a bath in front of the fire. Around it she lay down sheets of newspaper to collect the drips.

‘I don’t think he wants to get in it,’ Mr Shaw said the first time it appeared.

‘I’ve changed the sheets,’ she said. ‘He’ll have to.’

‘I want to get bathed at home,’ he said.

‘Nay, this is your home,’ she said. ‘And your dad’s gone to work in any case and locked the door.’

‘I’ll get bathed tomorrow night, then,’ he said.

‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘I’ve changed the sheets and I’m not getting the old ones out of the wash.’

Her eyes expanded, her cheek bones flushing.

‘Now don’t be such a silly,’ she said.

In the end he got undressed and got into the bath. Mr Shaw had gone into the other room.

He sat perfectly still in the water, his toes curled up against the zinc bottom.

‘Well, then,’ Mrs Shaw said. ‘You better stand up. You’ll never get washed cramped up like that.’

She’d already washed his face and neck, his back and his shoulders.

‘I can wash myself,’ he said.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen it. Black ring left everywhere you’ve been.’ She put her hand under his arm. ‘Now, then. Up you get.’

He stood gazing down at the fire as she washed him. It was full of pieces of coal that had already caught alight.

‘Well, then. That wasn’t so bad,’ she said when she’d finished.

She knelt back on her heels by the bath, the apron damp between her knees.

‘You can get out now’, she said, ‘and dry yourself.’

‘Stand on the paper,’ she added, and gave him the towel.

He rubbed himself up and down, turned to the fire.

‘Now then. You see, that’s not dry,’ she said.

She took the towel from him and rubbed him, his body shaking at the force. She held him with one hand and rubbed him with the other.

‘Getting into dry pyjamas you want to be dry all over.’

Mr Shaw came in and picked up the bath. He opened the back door and carried it outside, emptying it down the grate.

Then he came in and picked up the damp sheets of paper, putting the bath away beneath the sink.

‘Now then, he looks as bright as a new pin,’ his wife said.

Mr Shaw nodded, gazing down at him.

‘Would you like a chocolate?’ he said.

He went up to bed and lay down in the clean sheets. They were like strips of ice. No matter how tightly he curled they burned him all over.

Sometimes at night, when he couldn’t sleep, he got out of bed and looked down into the garden next door, at the shelter, its black square mound at the end of the garden, at the rows of vegetables covered now, since his father’s absence, in weeds. It was all changed, as if it had been set down in a different place entirely. In the early mornings he could hear Mr Shaw get up and plod his way through the house, sometimes one of the brasses jangling as he caught it with his arm, his boots finally beating out across the yard and fading with the sound of other boots towards the colliery.

Each morning his father came in the kitchen, just back from work, ducking his head awkwardly in the doorway and smiling, Mrs Shaw sometimes offering him a cup of tea which he always refused. ‘Nay, you’re doing enough for me,’ he’d say. ‘I don’t want to put you to any more trouble.’

‘Ah, yes,’ she’d say as if she understood.

‘And how is he, then?’ he would ask, standing still in the doorway, his cap in his hand.

‘Oh, he’s no trouble at all,’ she said.

‘Is he eating, then?’

‘More than enough.’

‘See, Colin,’ his father would add. ‘I’ve fetched thee some chocolate.’ He would step in and lay it on the table, stepping back to the door.

‘Well, then,’ Mrs Shaw would say. ‘Aren’t you going to say thank you?’

‘Yes,’ he’d say and looking up he would see his father smiling, nodding his head.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘Oh, that’s all right, then,’ his father would add, flushing.

He preferred in the end not to see his father at all, or to go into the house next door when he knew he could see him alone. Yet, whenever he looked in the house before going to school, he would find his father already asleep, lying in a chair, the fire unlit, full of dead ashes, the curtains drawn, the pots from the meals still unwashed on the table.

It was as if everything had moved away. At school he found himself suddenly cut off.

One day he had begun to cry, covering his face with his hand.

‘Why, Colin. What is it?’ the teacher asked him.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘Now then,’ she said. ‘It can’t be that bad, surely.’

‘No,’ he said.

She held his head a moment against her smock.

He smelled the chalk there, and the dust from the cloth she used to clean the board.

‘Well then,’ she said. ‘Are you feeling better?’

‘Yes,’ he said, afraid to look up and see the other children.

Finally she took him to the teachers’ room. He sat there on a chair by the window, the book she had given him open on his knee.

He stared out at the colliery which backed on to the school across a lane. A column of white steam, thicker than a cloud, coiled slowly in the air. A little engine pulled a line of trucks in and out of the yard.

Every now and then another teacher came in, collected a book, glancing at him, smiling, then going out and closing the door. He sat quite still, watching the engine, looking up, flushing, whenever anyone came in to find him there.

Eventually the teacher came back and filled up a kettle, setting it on a gas ring by the door. ‘Are you all right?’ she said.

‘Yes.’ He nodded his head.

‘Well, then,’ she said. ‘You better run along. In five minutes it’ll be time for play.’

One morning he saw his father standing by the school railings, gripping the spikes and gazing over at the children.

The yard was full, everyone waiting to go in. When he ran over he saw his eyes lighten, their blueness suddenly blazing then, just as quickly, fading away.

He seemed shy to find him there, like picking out a stranger.

‘I came looking for you,’ he said. ‘I might not see you tonight when I get back. I’m going to see your mother early.’

‘Can I come?’ he said.

‘They won’t let children in the hospital,’ he said. ‘Otherwise you could. Don’t worry.’

‘When shall I see you?’ he said.

‘I’ll look in tomorrow morning. You’ll be all right.’

‘All right,’ he said.

His father gazed over the railings a little longer.

‘Shall I give you a kiss?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ he said, and put up his face, holding the railings.

His father leaned down, stooping over.

‘You’ll be all right, then, won’t you?’ he said.

‘Yes.’ He nodded.

Though his father had washed, the coal-dust was still imprinted round his eyes.

‘Well, then,’ his father said. ‘I’ll be off.’

He turned away and walked down the road to where his cycle was propped up at the kerb. At the corner, where it turned off between the school and the pit yard, he waved, his hand touching the neb of his flat cap before his bike swung away.

When he came home at tea-time Mrs Shaw was standing in the door, her arms folded beneath her apron, gazing down the street. His tea was already on the table. There was a piece of cake beside his plate.

‘Now, then,’ she said. ‘I bet you’re hungry.’

He ate all the tea she put before him. Some of it was sandwiches with meat inside. It was like setting out on a journey: he felt he might as well get all he could inside.

‘Would you like another piece of cake?’ she said and brought the tin out from the pantry, lifting the cake out on to a plate and cutting off another slice, and raking all the crumbs together with the knife.

As he ate it Mr Shaw came down. He had just got out of bed: his braces hung round his trousers and he hadn’t tucked in the tail of his shirt. His hair stood up around his head like grass.

‘Well, then, he’s eaten all that, has he?’ he said. ‘When we take them off we’ll find his boots are full of bread.’

Mrs Shaw came in later to tuck him into bed. ‘Well, then, sleep tight,’ she said and kissed him. It was the first time she had tried and he saw her eyes close as she stooped towards him. ‘Well, then,’ she said, tucking in the sheets.

For some time he lay awake, listening for sounds of his father next door. But, as on every other night, it was silent. Vague voices came through the wall from the house the other side.

In the morning he heard Mr Shaw going to work, the kettle being filled in the kitchen below as he made some tea.

He heard his boots finally clack out across the yard and some time later the pit hooter. It would be another two hours or more before his father came home from work. He imagined him coming out of the cage, blackened, crossing the yard to give in his lamp, going to the locker, washing, putting on his coat, getting his bike from the rack; then he tried to imagine the ride back through the lightening countryside, the hills, up some of which his father pushed the bike, the bends, the level-crossing which occurred at some point on the route, the bridge across a railway.

He fell asleep, saw, vaguely, his mother lying in a bed, unfamiliar, her face round and curiously shining, like glass; then found himself riding his father’s bike, flying across the hedges and walls that blocked his path.

It was Mrs Shaw’s movements on the stairs that finally woke him and he immediately sat up, listening for any sounds next door.

When he went down Mrs Shaw was lighting the fire.

She was kneeling by the grate and looked up, her long face half-hidden by her shoulder.

‘Well, then, we’ll soon have this lit and breakfast on,’ she said.

‘Has my dad come back?’ he asked her.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so. Would you like me to take you to school?’

‘No,’ he said, and shook his head

He went out into the garden. It was still early, the sun scarcely risen: long shadows ran out from the edge of the terrace.

He played in Mrs Shaw’s garden, emptied the bucket of ashes and filled it up with coal, looking back at his house, at the window of his bedroom. He looked over at the shelter, at the weed-covered vegetables: it looked more abandoned and neglected now than ever, something he had left behind a long time ago.

He climbed over the fence eventually and knocked on the back door. He tried the handle then went to the window and looked inside. The curtains were still drawn as his father had left them.

He walked down through the other yards, past kitchen windows where other women were lighting fires and cooking breakfast, and round into the street the other side. He walked down to the corner; he looked down the lane that led out towards the fields and along which his father normally returned.

He sat down finally and waited, saw the newspaper boy go by, then the milkman with his horse and trap.

‘Now, then, lad,’ he said. ‘You’re up early. Any news from your dad?’

He shook his head.

As the milkman neared the other end of the street Mrs Shaw came to the door and called him.

‘I wondered where you were,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t find you in the yard.’

She watched him, waiting, while he washed his hands.

He saw his father as he was setting off for school. He was pushing his bike along the lane that led into the village. His head was bowed so that only the top of his cap was visible, and he was pushing the bike as if he had walked a long way, his short legs thrust out behind him, his arms straight and stiff.

He had to call out and run to him before he looked up.

‘I’m just off to school,’ he said.

‘Aye,’ his father said. ‘I was hoping to catch you. How have you been?’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I’m all right.’

His father’s eyes were red, the lashes coated with black, his cheeks drawn in as if he had nipped them inside. ‘I called in to see your mother on my way from work.’

‘Is she all right?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Champion.’ He stared at him a minute longer. ‘You better get off to school.’

He stooped down then, as if reminded, and kissed his cheek.

‘Will I see you tonight?’ he said.

‘Aye, well,’ he said. ‘You’ll be all right with Mrs Shaw. I might have to go off to the hospital again when I’ve had a bath.’

‘Can I come with you?’

‘Nay, what’ll they think at school? Any road, they won’t let you take children.’ He looked away, across the fields, the way he’d come. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be all right at school.’

‘Can’t I come to the door?’

‘Nay, they won’t let you past the gate, you see.’

He put his foot on the pedal and began to push the bike along.

‘Now, you be a good lad,’ he added.

At school the teacher sat him by her desk, giving him special tasks. He got out the paper, gave out the books, collected the pencils and rulers. In the playground he stood by the fence, gazing out over the colliery to the rows of chimneys beyond. At tea-time he ran all the way home but his father had already left.

His mother was away for six weeks. In the end he decided she wasn’t coming back and at night, in bed, he tried to invent a life for himself with Mrs Shaw. One day he offered to clean her brasses and she sat by him at the table, anxiously watching each one, taking it from him when he had finished and polishing it a little harder herself. He dug Mr Shaw’s garden and planted some seeds, gazing over at his own garden, at the house now almost always silent, his father at the hospital nearly all the time. At school the other children told him his mother was dying and once an older boy told him she was dead, watching his expression, stooping down to look into his eyes.

When, finally, they went to fetch his mother he felt frozen all over. It was as if everything had been numbed. He sat with his hands clenched on his knees, staring out of the bus window, past his father’s shoulder. He couldn’t remember what his mother looked like, or what kind of person she was.

He had on his suit, and before they had left his father had washed him. He had tidied the house, pushing most of the rubbish into piles, setting a chair in front of it. He had put on his own suit and his cheeks were bright red where he had shaved.

‘Ah, we’ll be all right now, when we have her back,’ he said.

Colin nodded, gazing at the fields. In one some pit ponies had been let out to graze, their heads still blinkered against the light. ‘See, now,’ his father said. ‘They’ve been let up on holiday,’ turning in his seat to watch them pass.

At the hospital he waited in a small lodge at the gates. Wooden chairs were set against a wall and behind a glass shutter in the wall a man in uniform sat reading a newspaper, occasionally looking out into the drive.

He didn’t see his mother come down the drive. A door at the end of the room opened and she appeared wearing her coat, her cheeks flushed, her eyes shining, almost shy, as if she had been away on holiday. In her arms she carried a bundle wrapped up in a white shawl.

‘Oh, now,’ she said, ‘and how are you, Colin?’ turning to his father who put down the case he was carrying.

She stooped down then and said, ‘Now then, love. Have you missed me?’

He nodded his head and as she leant against him he began to cry.

‘Now then, I’m coming home. We’ll be all right.’

‘Yes,’ he said, hiding his face against her arm.

‘Are you having a taxi?’ the man in the uniform said. He had come out from behind the glass partition and stood with his newspaper in his hand by the door.

‘Aye,’ his father said. ‘Ring us a taxi, will you?’

He was smiling, almost laughing, nodding his head as he gazed at the man.

‘Here, now,’ his mother said. ‘Have a look at him if you like.’

‘Yes,’ he said, and looked down at a tiny face sticking out at one end of the bundle.

It was sleeping, its eyes closed, a tiny fist clenched by its cheek, the thumb nail showing, almost white.

‘What shall we call him?’ his mother said

‘I don’t know.’ He shook his head, gazing at the face.

‘We’ve thought of Steven. But you choose one. We’ll think of one when we get home.’

When the taxi came his mother’s case was put into the boot and the driver held the rear door for her to climb in with the baby. Colin sat beside her and his father got in front with the driver.

‘Where to?’ the driver said.

‘The bus stop,’ his father said.

‘Nay,’ the driver said. ‘That’s less than two hundred yards.’

‘I can’t afford any more,’ his father said. ‘It’s six miles to where we live.’

The driver looked up a moment, his eyes closed, and said, ‘I can do that for ten bob.’

‘Ten bob,’ his father said. ‘Do you know how many hours I work for that?’

They got out at the bus stop and the driver stayed behind the wheel. They had to get the case out themselves; Colin held the door for his mother.

‘We ought to have paid it,’ she said. ‘This once.’

‘I would have done,’ he said. ‘I didn’t like him, that’s all. I’m damned if I’m going to pay all that to somebody like him. I’ll walk back if you like and get another.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘We’ll get the bus.’

She held the baby to her, occasionally looking down into its face, shielded by a fold of the shawl.

‘We should have had that ambulance,’ his father said. ‘I pay all that every week into the Hospital Fund and we can’t even get an ambulance.’

‘Oh, you don’t know,’ his mother said. ‘I’ve been looking forward to the ride.’

In the bus he sat behind his mother and father, his mother’s case in the locker by the door.

Occasionally they turned round to glance at him. ‘Are you all right?’ his father said.

He nodded, his hands clenched in his pockets.

‘You ask Mrs Shaw: he’s been a good lad while you’ve been away,’ he said.

The other passengers in the bus turned round to smile, stooping down whenever they got off to look under the fold of the shawl.

‘He’s a lovely one,’ the woman said. ‘What is he, then, a girl or a boy?’

‘A boy,’ his father told them, looking down at the face himself.

‘He makes enough row, I suppose, for a lad.’

‘Oh, enough’, his father said, ‘to be going on with.’

When they reached the village his father sprang off the bus, whistling, lifting down the case, calling out to the conductress and looking round.

As they walked down the street the women came to the doors and his mother stopped, pulling back the shawl from the baby’s face.

‘He’s after his dinner,’ the women said. ‘We better not keep him.’

‘Aye, another bloody mouth,’ his father said.

Colin walked behind them to the door, carrying the case, setting it down when they stopped, looking off down the street, still feeling strange at having his best suit on on a week-day.

At the door his father said, ‘You mu’n never mind the mess,’ putting the key in the lock. ‘Just sit yourself down and I’ll make some tea.’

He put the kettle on the fire which he had stoked up before they left. On the table he began to get out the pots and the teapot.

‘I can’t tell you,’ his mother said. ‘It’s so good to be back.’

She sat gazing round at the kitchen, her eyes shining, her cheeks still flushed.

‘I better get this seen to,’ she said, talking to the baby, making sounds into its face then taking off its shawl. Its legs were tiny and curled up, red like its face from crying. ‘Now then, what do you think to your new home?’ she asked it.

Its colour deepened and it cried more loudly, its face disappearing in folds and wrinkles. His father had taken it from her while his mother took off her coat. She sat down then by the fire and took the baby back, calling to it, and began to unfasten her dress.

‘Here,’ his father said, ‘run down to the shops and fetch us some cigarettes.’

‘He doesn’t have to go,’ his mother said.

‘Nay,’ he said. ‘I’ve run out and I’m dying for a smoke. You can buy a bar of chocolate for yourself.’

Colin went out with the half-crown his father had given him clutched in his hand. It was still hot from his father’s pocket.

It was almost lunch-time. The street was deserted. From the colliery came the soft panting of the winding engine and the voice of a tradesman calling from a cart.

His shoes squeaked in the silence and in the window of the shop at the next corner he caught a glimpse of his figure, the dark suit, its trousers ending at his knees, his stockings pulled up beneath his knee-caps and folded over, his neatly brushed hair.

‘How’s it feel, then, to have a baby in the house?’ the man in the shop had said. He was cutting up a piece of cheese with a wire, his tongue sticking out between his teeth.

‘Thy’ll have to teach it a trick or two. How to stand up and brush its hair.’

‘Yes,’ he said, taking the cigarettes.

‘Nay, have it on me,’ the man said as he made to pay for the chocolate. ‘It’s not every day it happens.’

He walked back slowly along the street, eating the chocolate, then putting most of it away in his pocket. He wondered if they would want him back so soon and for a while stood on the kerb kicking his shoe in the dust.

From the school he heard the bell ring for lunch and a moment later, from behind the houses, came the roar of voices of those children who were going home.

He waited until they crossed the end of the street, running and shouting, then he went on towards his door.

Mrs Shaw was leaving the house as he entered.

‘You must be feeling proud,’ she said. ‘A lad like that in the family.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

His father was in the kitchen, pouring out some tea.

‘It’ll make all his waiting seem worthwhile,’ Mrs Shaw said from the door.

‘It will that.’ His father nodded.

She ruffled his hair and said, ‘We’ll miss having you, I can tell you. It’s been like having one of your own.’

‘Aye,’ his father said. ‘We’re very grateful to you.’

‘What with the garden dug and him cleaning my brasses.’

His father nodded, laughing.

‘He can get stuck into our garden now,’ he said. ‘These last few weeks it’s gone to ruin.’

‘Ah, well,’ she said. ‘You’re all back now, thank God, and a re-united family.’

‘Aye,’ his father said. ‘We’ve a lot to thank Him for.’

When Mrs Shaw had gone his father put one of the cups of tea on a saucer with a biscuit and went to the stairs.

‘I’ll just take this up,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll see what we have for dinner.’

‘Is my mother coming down?’ he said.

‘Aye,’ his father said. ‘When she’s finished.’

He sat in the kitchen, gazing out at the overgrown garden and the shelter. Overhead he heard his father’s steps then his voice followed by his mother’s.

At the colliery a buzzer sounded.

He put the cigarettes on the table. At the end of the garden, between it and the back yards of the next street, was a narrow field. It opened out on one side on to farm fields and at the other was enclosed by the converging houses. Several children were playing, waiting for their dinners, jumping in and out of a hole.

When he went out he shouted to them, trying to avoid the patches of clay and soil either side of the path.

‘Hey,’ he said from the fence. ‘We’ve got a baby.’

‘What’s that?’ they said.

He indicated the house behind.

‘What is it?’ they said.

‘A boy.’

They jumped back into the hole, disappearing a moment then suddenly climbing out, running off down the field then back again, their arms stretched out. Every now and again they made a stuttering noise in their throats.

He stood watching them for a while, holding the railings.

Then, his hands in his pockets, he turned back to the house.

Across the yards a woman was hanging out washing. She stood on her toes, reaching up to the line.

‘Is you mother back?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said and nodded.

‘What colour’s its eyes?’

‘Blue,’ he said.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Just like his father’s.’

When he went in his father was stoking up the fire.

‘Now, then, let’s see about some dinner,’ he said, stooping down and setting the pans against the flames.