Saville (12 page)

‘Who?’ his father said. ‘Him or me?’

‘Colin,’ she said.

They had both glanced at him. Then, just as quickly, they looked away.

‘I don’t want to go,’ he said.

‘No,’ his father said. ‘I suppose not. But then, you don’t want to do a lot of things.’

‘It’ll do you a lot of good,’ his mother said. ‘You could go with Ian. I’ll ask his mother.’

Two Sundays later he set off with Bletchley, in his own best suit, which he had scarcely worn since the birth of Steven.

Bletchley was silent for most of the way. There was the soft rubbing of his legs as he walked, the faint drag of one trouser leg against the other. He breathed heavily the whole time, occasionally snorting down his nose as if it were blocked and walking a little distance ahead as if reluctant to be seen with anyone else. In much the same way he walked in the street with his parents.

When, prior to setting off, Colin had appeared on the doorstep, Bletchley had regarded him with a great deal of surprise, his eyes, buried in folds of fat, gazing out at him with a surly distaste. Only as they neared the church, having passed the colliery and started up the slope, past the Park, towards the upper part of the village, did he turn round and say, panting slightly, ‘You believe in God?’

‘Yes,’ he said, nodding his head.

‘What’s He look like?’ Bletchley said, stopping and gazing at him.

In the Park, little more than a field stretching down at the side of the road, Batty was swinging on one of the swings in the recreation ground, pushing himself to and fro with one foot, and kicking Stringer, who was sitting in the next swing, with the other.

‘Like an old man,’ he said.

Bletchley examined him for a moment and said, ‘Have you seen Him?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘If you don’t believe in God they won’t let you in the door.’

‘Yes,’ he said, and added, ‘Well, I’ll tell them I do.’

‘They send you to see the vicar and he gets it out of you.’

Bletchley watched him a moment longer, then turned and, in much the same silence, continued up the slope.

From the swings Stringer had shouted, ‘Where’re you going?’

‘Church,’ he called.

Stringer nodded, glancing at Batty, but added nothing further.

The Sunday School was split into two groups. The Crusaders, who were eleven and over, sat in the church itself behind a row of banners clipped to the end of the pews, each bearing the emblem of a saint or an apostle: a bird for St Francis and a pair of fish with large eye-balls for St Peter. The Juniors met in the Church Hall, a small stone structure to the rear of the church, which at one time had been a barn. The floor was of bare wood and the walls were unplastered. A large fire at one end kept the place heated and throughout the meeting a small woman with red eyes would shovel on pieces of coke, sending up little puffs of smoke, wiping her eyes then her nose on her handkerchief as if she were crying.

The children sat on small wooden chairs arranged in circles. Each circle was supervised by a teacher, a young man or woman, they themselves overlooked by the vicar’s wife, a small, fat woman, in shape not unlike Bletchley himself, her eyes hidden behind a pair of thick glasses. Their own teacher was a man called Mr Morrison. He was tall and thin, with a long thin neck and a long thin face. On either cheek was a clump of bright red spots. He had a prayer book and a Bible which Bletchley, sitting on his right, held for him, handing them to him whenever they were required, his own face serious and extremely grave. They sang a hymn first under the supervision of the vicar’s wife, then they put their hands together and said several prayers, some of which the children knew by heart. They sang another hymn, then they sat down and Mr Morrison told them a story about a man who went fishing.

The teachers in the other groups were telling stories too, some of the children looking across at Colin, others sitting on their hands, gazing at the walls or ceiling.

In the roof were visible the timbers of the barn, old and gnarled as if they’d beer taken straight off a tree, and here and there pieces of string hung down as if at one time they had held decorations. Periodically one or two of the children went out to the lavatory, coming back to sit down again, folding their arms and staring at the roof. Everyone had on their best suit or dress, and clean shoes.

Bletchley listened carefully to Mr Morrison, his head turned stiffly from his tight collar so that he could watch Mr Morrison’s mouth. Whenever Mr Morrison asked a question Bletchley would put up his hand, and though for a while Mr Morrison might ignore it, despite Bletchley whispering, ‘Sir, sir,’ in his ear, in the end he would turn towards him with a slight nod, his eyes avoiding Bletchley altogether, who, in turn, would lower his arm, coughing slightly, and direct the answer specifically at the circle of faces before him.

When Mr Morrison had finished speaking he glanced at his watch and looked over at the vicar’s wife talking to her group by the fire, then took the Bible from Bletchley, opened it at a piece he had already marked, and handed it back to Bletchley to read.

Bletchley stooped forward to read, resting the Bible on his inflamed knees and following the print with his chubby finger. Whenever he faltered on a word he would bow his head several times in rapid succession then, having got it out, would look up at Mr Morrison with a smile.

Finally, at the end of the room, the vicar’s wife stood up. A last hymn was announced, Bletchley wandering round the group sorting out the pages for those who couldn’t read and stabbing his finger at the number. Mr Morrison stood by his seat blowing his nose, dabbing at the spots on his cheek then looking at his handkerchief to see if they had left a mark.

When the piano began to play Bletchley sang with a loud voice, almost shouting, his head turned conspicuously away from the page to indicate that he knew it by heart. Those who couldn’t read and didn’t know the hymn simply stared at the book, occasionally opening their mouths and making a humming sound in time with the music.

At the end of the hymn a moment was allowed for everyone to put down their books. Bletchley had already closed his before the
last verse and had turned, while everyone else was singing, and laid his book on the seat, turning back, still singing, to finish the hymn with his eyes half-closed, gazing vacantly towards the ceiling.

A final prayer was said, the vicar’s wife waiting until everyone had closed their eyes and put their hands together, then a blessing was given and as the woman at the piano began to play a slow tune each child picked up their chair and carried it to the side of the room. Bletchley, with one or two of the older children, had begun to collect the hymn books and the Bibles, the teachers themselves standing together at the end of the room with their backs to the fire, rubbing their hands.

When Colin went out the sun was shining and the wind blowing across the fields towards the church. The children either went and stood in the church porch to wait for their elder brothers and sisters, picking up the piles of confetti dropped there from the weddings the previous day, or ran off down the slope, past the Park, towards the village.

Batty was still sitting on the swings when Colin went past. Stringer was standing behind him, pushing him to and fro.

‘Hey,’ Batty shouted and he went in the gates. One or two children from the Sunday School had already run in before him and were standing by the swings and the roundabout waiting for Batty’s permission to climb on. ‘Hey,’ Batty said. ‘How often you go there?’

‘It’s the first time,’ he said.

‘Who sent you? Your old man?’

‘No,’ he said.

Batty nodded and said, ‘All right, Stringer, catch me,’ and Stringer caught the chains, bringing the swing to a halt.

Batty jumped off and Stringer sat down, taking off one of his boots and pushing his hand inside. The sole of his foot, just below his big toe, was covered in blood.

‘What d’you do, then?’ Batty said. ‘Talk about God?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘My old man’, Batty said, watching him intensely, ‘believes in God.’ He examined him a moment longer then, adding nothing further to confirm this, said to the children waiting the other side. ‘You wanna ride?’

‘Yes,’ they said.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Five minutes.’

Stringer had put back his boot and removed the other one. On a seat the other side of the Park the Keeper, a retired miner with a wooden leg, sat with his leg up on a bench, reading a paper.

‘Hey, Fatty,’ Batty shouted, catching sight of Bletchley in the road. He was walking down the hill with Mr Morrison, carrying his Bible. Beside him walked the woman with the red eyes.

Bletch’ey didn’t look up, his gaze turned towards Mr Morrison and the woman the other side.

‘Hey, Stringer,’ Batty said. ‘You want to bash Fatty Bletchley.’

‘Yes,’ Stringer said, wincing, as he drew on his boot.

Colin’s Sundays now were very full. His father’s uniform had arrived while he still had his legs in pot and though he had conveyed to his mother at the time something of the irony of it appearing when he could no longer wear it – laying it out on the kitchen table and stroking it very much as if it were a dog – now, once again walking freely and with no longer the trace of a limp, he would march through the village on a Sunday morning, in khaki and with the one stripe which, perhaps because of his accident, he had recently been given, Colin walking beside him, or sometimes a little behind, pushing the pram and combining with this duty the two undoubted pleasures of watching his father drilling and exploring the old house. In the afternoons he went to Sunday School and it wasn’t until tea-time that he was ever free.

He took little notice of the baby: it had begun to sit up now, so that when he took it walking, it would invariably be looking round, its blue eyes large, impassive, occasionally waving its arms. In the house it sat on the floor turning over the toys it was given, reaching over, making tentative efforts to move but only in the end falling over, lying on its stomach then and beginning to cry. His mother was now trying to make it hold a spoon, and each morning there was the ceremony of holding it over a pot.

His father, since his return to work, had grown quieter and more detached. In the evenings, though he still went out into the
field to play cricket, he would, more often, sit at the table in the kitchen, drawing.

He had brought home a large pad of squared note-paper, a black pencil, a wooden ruler and a piece of rubber. Whenever he had spread the sheets out on the kitchen table and begun to draw his cheeks would swell out and redden, and no more so than when he had made a mistake and, with his tongue sticking out between his teeth, he rubbed it out, fanning away the crumbs of the rubber with the side of his hand.

At first it was difficult to make out what the subjects of his drawings were. Whenever he had finished for the evening he put them away in a drawer at the end of the table, reminding his mother that no one was to look at them in his absence. After a while, however, when it seemed that the rubbing out had passed its peak and he had begun to write on the drawings, occasionally asking for words to be spelt and sketching large arrows from one side to the other, he told them that the drawings were to do with an invention he had thought up at work. He stood with his head held slightly to one side as he regarded the various sheets, his eyes half-closed, his tongue slowly licking his lower lip: then, having spread out the sheets on the table top, he leaned carefully over them and in the top left-hand corners numbered them from one to six.

The first drawing was of an aeroplane. It was a bomber, standing on the ground, with a single engine drawn in carefully on either wing. Underneath the aeroplane lay a large bomb and beside it, coiled in a heap, a metal chain.

The second drawing was of the same aeroplane taking off. Heavy strokes of the pencil around the edges of the paper indicated it was night, and amongst the pencil strokes several stars and a large crescent moon like a half-closed eye had been carefully interspersed. His father had no particular skill at drawing: one wing of the aircraft rose rather helplessly from the top of the fuselage, despite numerous half-rubbed-out efforts to correct it, and on one of the engines the whirling propeller was almost as large as the wing itself.

In the third drawing a group of aeroplanes were shown flying together. A swastika had been carefully inscribed on each wing, on each fuselage and on each tail. This group was confined
almost exclusively to the right-hand side of the picture and a trail of black dots beyond them suggested that there were still many more to come. To the left of the picture, and by far the largest shape in it, was the bomber. It was flying, as a large, shaded-in arrow indicated, at a height a little above that of the aircraft approaching from the right. The round emblem of the Royal Air Force had been inscribed on its tail, on its fuselage and on both wings, while, from the bottom edge of the paper, the beams of numerous searchlights stood up like blades of grass.

Beneath the aircraft itself was slung the bomb, dangling on the end of the chain, on its side too the round emblem of the Royal Air Force and a message which said in capital letters,
‘THIS IS FOR YOU, ADOLF’.
A series of notes and arrows indicated that it had been lowered to the precise height of the approaching aircraft.

The fourth drawing suffered more than any of the others from corrections, the bomb itself having been drawn in various positions before it had arrived at its final situation almost touching the nose of the nearest aircraft from which the faces of several Germans, each wearing a swastika on his arm, could be seen anxiously peering out.

The fifth drawing was taken up entirely by the subsequent explosion. Flames and jagged pieces of metal had been flung in every direction, while around the edges of the conflagration sections of tails and wings and disembodied pieces of fuselage could be seen falling to the ground. Several notes in the margin confirmed the effectiveness of the explosion, indicating not only the number of aircraft destroyed but the number of enemy airmen killed and the number of bombs exploded in the bomb-bays. The last drawing provided additional confirmation of this for from a clear sky a dozen or more aircraft could be seen hurtling towards the earth, flames licking at every surface, black plumes of smoke spiralling from their shattered frames in an elaborate pattern of swirls, curls and volutes. Flying above, close to the upper edge of the picture, was the solitary bomber responsible for all this destruction, bearing the insignia of the Royal Air Force on its fuselage and tail, the chain still dangling beneath it, while from its cockpit had emerged a hand, as large as the tail-
plane itself, with its forefinger and second finger upraised, amidst numerous erasures, in the signal of the Victory V.