Patrick Parker's Progress

MAVIS CHEEK

Patrick Parker's Progress

F
aber
and
faber

First published in 2004 by Faber and Faber Limited 3 Queen Square London
wcin 3au
This pape
rback edition published in 2005
by Faber and Faber Limited Printed in E
ngland by Mackays of Chatham, pl
c

All rights reserved © Mavis Cheek, 2004

The right of Mavis Cheek to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similiar condition including this condition being
imposed on the subsequent purch
aser.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN
0-571-21448-7

2468
10
97531

Sixteen years on - for Bella again, with love.

'...
so from
this bridg
e, a geologist of the centuries
will succeed in recreating our contemporary world.'

Mayakovsku

Begin, small boy, to know your mother with a smile (Ten lunar months have brought your mother long discomfort) Begin, small boy: him who for this parent has not smiled No god invites to table, nor goddess to bed. Virgil, Eclogue IV

According to Isambard, Ellen (Hulme) appears to have been a lively young lady
...
who indulged in the 'shocking habit of
...
quizzing
...'
him.

Angus Buchanan,
Brunel

...
He evidently considered himself sufficiently well supplied against disaster to ask Mary Horsley to marry him
...
without talents, she constituted no threat to his ego
...

Adrian Vaughan,
Isambard Kingdom
Brunel
: Knight Errant

...
I wish you were my obedient servant. I should begin with a little flogging.

Isambard Kingdom
Brunel
's reply to John Scott Russell, naval architect and shipbuilder, September
1855

The reputation of Isambard Kingdom
Brunel
is unassailable.
Observer,
10
March
2002

The Clifton Suspension Bridge (Egyptian in style) is my first love, my darling
...

Isambard Kingdom Brunel

Postcard of
Brunel
's Royal Albert Bridge over the Tamar sent by Patrick Parke
r to Florence Parker and dated 11
April 1954.

Now here's a beauty, Mother! Aud liked it. But she called it 'lacy looking'. I ask you!
Px

Postcard of
Brunel
's Royal Albert Bridge over the Tamar sent by Patrick Parker to Audrey Wapshott, 12 November 1961.

Here's one for your album Aud! I wish I could show it to you. What do you think of it? Yours, Patrick.

ONE

PATRICK

Patrick is Born

It was Han engineers who advanced the suspension bridge into the form we recognise today
...
More than
a
third of the Empire's economic output was made up of luxury goods
to be
transported west.
As
a result, canals were developed and fibre towropes refined to consistent qualities and strengths. These cables could, in turn, be used in suspension bridges: lightweight, economic, and without the large foundation forces associated with the arched alternatives
...
Matthew Wells,
30
Bridges

November 1940. Coventry burns. The hospital in which Florence and George Parker's baby might have been born is no more than melted rubble. The house to which Florence and George Parker would have returned with their baby sits in the row of smoking artisans' dwellings, like a blackened tooth stump. The railway station where George Parker (excused service duties, flat feet) collects tickets is twisted like a handful of grotesque barley
-
sugars. If you wish to travel north after the night of the fourteenth of November, you must travel from Tile Hill. If you want to travel south you must go from Brandon Street.

Miraculously on the night of the fourteenth of November the Parkers have no need of this information for they have already done their travelling. On that dreadful, scorching night, the fourteenth of November 1940, the Parkers - miraculously - are not there. At the exact moment that the devastation of Coventry takes place, Florence, after nearly twelve hours of labour - is brought to bed of a fine baby boy in her friend Dolly's house in south-west London. He is a little early, it is true. But he is nevertheless perfect, perfect.

Florence Parker and Dorothy Wapshott were in service together before their marriages and are close as sisters. Closer, some might say, though Dorothy, at thirty-five, is seven years younger than her friend. The visit to London was a little pre-Christmas treat for

Florence, who is somewhat dazed to find herself expecting at all, given her age, and not a little embarrassed, but it is wartime and strange things are happening everywhere. Now she is even more dazed to find herself far from home with a new and perfect, perfect baby in her arms.

Long, long after this day they will talk in awed tones about the strangeness of fate. Why should Florence choose that day to visit and not another? Why did the baby choose that afternoon to arrive early? If he had come the day before, then
...
They speak of this in whispers and they shudder down the years. One more quirk of fate bringeth forth a miracle. Florence feels that God has not let her down, despite her shame in front of Him for her obvious dip into carnal sin. The baby is destined, quite clearly, for greatness.

George, father of the baby, though left behind in Coventry has also escaped the inferno. He is surprised, and pleased, to be summoned. It is not customary for his wife to want him for anything much. But summoned he is by Florence's shrieking to Dolly and Dolly haring off up the road clutching her pinny about her to the undertaker's on Brokesley Street (the nearest telephone) and ringing the station. George is therefore halfway between Coventry and King's Cross when the sirens wail and the terror starts and he knows nothing of it. He has swapped his ticket duties with Arthur Crow, his friend. Something about which Molly Crow might have had something to say now that her husband lies a crisp corpse on the bumpy, bubbling asphalt of Station Road. Only Molly, too, is dead. Five orphans, five more orphans, to add to the toll of that night. But the baby born of Florence Parker is quite, quite safe and has both parents alive and sound in wind and limb.

There is rare black humour when George finally returns to Coventry after a twenty-four-hour visit to London. He slipped and slid and did very little sleeping on the unyielding Rexine-covered settee provided for him by Dorothy overnight and he is not up to much excitement as a result - but he gets some anyway. For as he turns the corner of Lamb Street, Lilly Willis of the little General Stores passes out when she sees him. One minute George is walking along and smiling at her, the next she is stretched out cold and white on the cobbles. When she is brought round she says, faintly, that she thought he was dead, the ticket booth having caught it. To which, with unaccustomed humour, George replies that he certainly came close to thinking death was preferable once or twice in the night because of that dratted settee - but though weak, he points out, he is alive . . . 'Very much so,' he says, which makes Lilly regain her colour, and add a little more to it. Blushing becomes Lilly though she does it seldom. She has an old head on her young shoulders.

To Lilly's questions about mother and baby, George is positive. Both are doing well, he says, and Florence seems to be in her element. Lilly sniffs. Not like George's wife to be in her element over anything, she thinks. But Florence, to Lilly's grim amusement, has apparently forgiven the carnal act that brought about the child, taken to motherhood like a duck to water, and the baby has taken to its mother like a - like a - duckling. Lilly asks who the baby favours and George says, somewhat mournfully Lilly thinks, that the baby -apparently - takes after Florence's side of the family. Entirely. The baby is Florence to the spit was what Dolly said. Women always stick together, was what George thought, and he could only nod, look at his child, and agree. All the same, he thought he saw something of himself in there. The long, sensitive fingers, if nothing else. George may collect tickets for a living but he is good with his hands, too. Creative.

'It's a miracle -' Lilly shudders - 'that Flo was off out of it.' What she really thinks is that the real miracle is how
George
was off out of it.

According to George, the miracle of being off out of it is what Florence does nothing but repeat to the baby in her arms. That he is a little miracle. That he will go far. That he was destined. That he is her little angel risen from the ashes. That he will really
be
someone - do something - one day. He'll probably end up making cars like the rest of them, thinks Lilly, but she wouldn't say so. It has not been her happiness to have children and she is aware that she can sometimes sound sour. The old head on young shoulders is quite a wise one.

'Oh,' says Lilly, 'It's a he, then?' And George agrees that it is.

'And what colour hair has he got?'

But George shakes his head. He hasn't actually held the baby, or got very close, buried as the infant remained in his wife's pillows and bedjacket and bosom and armpits.

'There doesn't seem to be a lot of it,' he says cautiously. 'Yet.'

'And a name?'

'We have called him Patrick,' he says. 'Not Pat and not Paddy - but Patrick.'

'That's nice
’
says Lilly.

'Can't stand the name myself
’
says George. 'I wanted William.'

'He'd be called Willy then and you wouldn't like that
’
says Lilly who likes to look on the bright side and cheer people up.

'Nothing wrong with Willy is there?' asks George, gone sly all of a sudden.

Lilly simpers. The colour has returned even more strongly to her cheeks. She may be an old head on a young body but she still knows how to colour up fetchingly like a girl. She turns back towards her shop. George follows. They go in and Lilly snags the lock and turns the card at the window to 'Closed'. George runs his hands through his hair as prelude to pushing open the door that divides the shop from Lilly's living quarters. 'Go on then,' she says. And he does.

Now that Lilly has recovered from her faint, George and she go up the stairs to Lilly's bedroom, as they have been doing every Wednesday half-day closing for several years. Ever since, in fact, George and Florence were wed. After the wedding night Florence said that once was quite enough for her. And she turned a blind eye. Around the same time, Lilly's new young husband Alfred Willis lost his bits in a weaving accident, and she had already got the taste for it was how she put it to George. It is a suitable arrangement all round. If the community knows, the community says nothing and does not condemn. It is a friendly part of Coventry. Or it was. The General Stores, Willis's, round the corner from Chapel Street, has been saved, along with a couple of houses either side - while, all around, the rest of the street stands smouldering and blistered. George refers to this as he follows Lilly up the now oddly sloping stairs.

'It's a miracle,' he says, looking lugubriously at her ascending bottom.

'Swings and roundabouts,' says Lilly the pragmatist.

George puts his hand out to pat the bottom, thinks better of it and removes it. He is still not quite sure how to approach touching a woman in broad daylight and with her clothes on. Somehow the body takes over once the lights are out, the curtains are drawn and the sheets are pulled over their heads.

Lilly is brisk and friendly and sweet-smelling of Parma violets during the experience. She keeps herself, as George says to himself, nice. Not too fancy but nicely turned out. She paints her nails, even her toenails, and she unashamedly wears lipstick. He likes that sort of thing though he feels slightly bashful about it. And she is cheerful afterwards. When it is over she smiles and sings as she dresses and smiles at him as if they have shared a good joke and her voice is softer, sweeter somehow. The change in her voice reflects how his body feels. Kind and gentle and good.

He would like to ask Lilly what she thinks about it all - the act, the afterwards - but he never does. He wouldn't know how to begin the sentence and he is afraid she will laugh. He can hear her saying in response 'Oh George, what
do
you mean?' if he should say, 'Now then, Lilly - don't you feel this is unsatisfactory?' But he knows what she would say. 'What can we do?' And he would not have an answer.