So Farmer Metcalf, intending his daughter for Higher Things, but scarcely consulting her own inclinations, sent her to the St Gunnhilda School for Girls (more exclusive by far than the Gildsey High School for Girls), firmly believing his outlay and his efforts must have results. Just as his neighbour, Henry Crick, a humble lock-keeper, seeing his younger child, without any paternal effort or outlay, win a scholarship to Gildsey Grammar School (for Boys) and begin to immerse himself in history books, drew the converse conclusion that his son must have a vision which he lacked, and began consciously and apologetically to see to it that this son should not soil his hands on sluice engines.
Yet Henry Crick once had a wife whom Harold Metcalf might have doted on for a daughter …
And so it was on the little four-carriage train that called at Hockwell Station (not a stone’s throw from Jack Parr’s signal-box and level-crossing) and went on via Newhithe to Gildsey, that Mary and I got to know each other. That, to the accompaniment of clacking bogie-wheels and passing steam-puffs, irrepressible symptoms began to appear and steps were taken, tacit or overt, to relieve them.
Yet for a long time, even before these hesitant but tell-tale traits broke surface, your history-teacher-to-be was in love with Mary Metcalf. For a long time the very feelings that drew him towards her placed her also, in his eyes, at an impossible distance, and made him melancholy and mute.
He is timid, he is shy – this fledgling adolescent. He has a sorrowful streak. He believes he is fated to yearn from afar. And why is he these things? Why sad? Why this gap between him and the world (which, for better or worse, he attempts to fill with books)? And why, even when he cannot deny certain distinct signs – that Mary Metcalf, it
seems, might have feelings about him too (because his reticence and plaintiveness have not failed to lend him an air of mystery, and Mary cannot resist a mystery) – can he scarcely believe that it can really be happening? That this unattainable girl—? That he—?
Because his mother is not long dead. Because she died when he was nine years old. Mary’s mother is dead too, but Mary cannot be said to miss her, never having known her. Whereas this son of a lock-keeper has not yet got over missing his mother.
So even more, perhaps, than Farmer Metcalf, Tom Crick has turned Mary – in spite of the facts – into an untouchable madonna (that red sacred heart, emblem of the blessed St Gunnhilda, that burns so tantalizingly, so ambiguously, on the breast pocket of her school blazer). Yet he knows – he has evidence – that Mary Metcalf is no demure convent girl. And Mary Metcalf knows that although Tom Crick has a Platonic disposition and a brainy head …
Thus the Great Eastern Railway which brought these two young people into twice-daily contact – she in a rust-red uniform, he in inky black – is to be held responsible for loosening inhibitions which, without its nudging and jostling, might have stuck fast, and for a merging of destinies which might otherwise never have occurred. For while the shadow of the engine – westward-slanting in the morning, eastward-slanting in the evening – rippled over the beet fields, the unattainable was attained. Certain notions were gradually (and not unpainfully) dissolved, certain advances made and, less falteringly, encouraged, and, at last (but this was the work of two years’ railway travel), an undeniable intimacy mutually – but always circumspectly – achieved.
And why were we so circumspect, beyond the normal discretion in such cases, on these schoolward and homeward journeys? Why did we choose our carriage and compartment with care and last-minute changes (which no
doubt earned us more attention)? Why did we sometimes, on the return journey, deliberately miss the ten-past-four from Gildsey and pick up the next train from Newhithe, thereby not only avoiding the usual carriage-loads of passengers but allowing various fondnesses to occur on the walk from Gildsey, across the mud-grey Ouse, past the decaying lighter wharves of Newhithe, along the tree-screened fringes of celery and onion fields?
Because on that four-ten train might be Freddie Parr and Peter Baine and Shirley Alford, not to mention other contemporaries from Hockwell and Apton, pupils, for the most part, at the Gildsey Secondary School (blue uniform) and the Gildsey High School (dark brown and green uniform).
But Freddie Parr above all. There was no suppressing Freddie Parr. Freddie lacked subtlety, had a crude tongue. Freddie was often drunk at four-thirty in the afternoon on secret supplies of whisky stolen from his father, who in turn procured it, by nefarious means, from an American air base. Freddie, at sixteen, had the mind of an advanced roué and a complex about the size of his penis – which was average. I might have been intimidated by Freddie Parr were it not that I knew, at least, that I could swim and he could not – a distinct failing in a watery region. But there remained Freddie’s leering eye, and his talent for gossip. For, no doubting it, Freddie would have hastened to tell my brother how Mary and I always sat together (and not just that) on the Gildsey train. Because, by the summer of 1943, it was a well-known fact (how well I knew it) that Dick Crick often took solitary evening walks along the banks of the Hockwell Lode in the direction of Polt Fen Farm.
Freddie would gladly have implanted in Dick’s mind the seeds of revenge for the thwarted designs that he, Freddie, had on Mary; were it not that he feared that Dick might suspect him; that he spurned the ignominious role of pander; and were it not that he stood in awe, in any case, of
my brother. Because Dick Crick, it was generally rumoured – even his own brother was unable to refute it – possessed a penis of fabulous dimensions. And had it not been my opinion that even if Dick had had a penis like a marrow he would not have known how to use it; had I not innocently believed that brothers, after all, are brothers; had Freddie Parr not curbed his tongue; and had I not wanted to keep Mary so much that instead of taking jealous exception, I myself had already pandered to her fascination with Dick (for she couldn’t resist a mystery), not least with his much wondered-at parts – I might have been afraid of my brother.
As afraid before as I was after that day we pulled Freddie from the river with a new bruise and an old bruise on his head …
But in the school holidays, when the Great Eastern Railway no longer provided us with a travelling rendezvous, we would meet in the late afternoon by the stump of the old windmill, near the poplar spinney, by the bend in the Lode, out of sight of the farmhouse of Polt Fen Farm.
Why here? And why at this particular hour?
Because it was here that one day in August 1942 (defeat in the desert; the U-boat stranglehold) we first explored, tentatively but collaboratively, what we called then simply ‘holes’ and ‘things’.
Hesitantly, but at Mary’s free invitation, I put the tip of my index finger into the mouth of Mary’s hole, and was surprised to discover what an inadequate word was ‘hole’ for what I encountered. For Mary’s hole had folds and protuberances, and, so it seemed to me, its false and its genuine entrances, and – as I found the true entrance – it revealed the power of changing its configuration and texture at my touch, of suggesting a moist labyrinth of inwardly twisting, secret passages. The dark curled hairs – only recently sprouted – between Mary’s thighs, on which
at that moment broad Fen sunlight was genially smiling, had, on close inspection, a coppery sheen. I dipped one finger, up to the first, the second knuckle into Mary’s hole; then a second finger alongside it. This was possible, indeed necessary, because Mary’s hole began to reveal a further power to suck, to ingest; a voracity which made me momentarily hold back. And yet the chief and most wondrous power of Mary’s hole was its capacity to send waves of sensation not only all over Mary’s body, but all over mine; and this not by some process of mental association but by a direct electric current which flowed up my arm, flushed my face, and gathered in the part of me to which Mary was simultaneously applying her hand.
For just as inexorably as I explored Mary’s hole, Mary explored my thing. Indeed, she was the bolder of the two of us. It was she whose fingers first got the itch and were at work before I dared, and only then at her prompting – her grabbing and guiding of my hand, her pulling up and pulling down of clothing – to use mine.
Mary itched. And this itch of Mary’s was the itch of curiosity. In her fifteen-year-old body curiosity tickled and chafed, making her fidgety and roving-eyed. Curiosity drove her, beyond all restraint, to want to touch, witness, experience whatever was unknown and hidden from her. Do not smirk, children. Curiosity, which, with other things, distinguishes us from the animals, is an ingredient of love. Is a vital force. Curiosity, which bogs us down in arduous meditations and can lead to the writing of history books, will also, on occasion, as on that afternoon by the Hockwell Lode, reveal to us that which we seldom glimpse unscathed – for it appears more often (dead bodies, boat-hooks) dressed in terror: the Here and Now.
When I had finished exploring Mary’s hole, Mary continued our homage to curiosity by verbal means. She spoke of hymens and of her monthly bleedings. She was proud of her bleedings. She wanted to show me when she
bled. She wanted me to see. And it was as she spoke of these mysteries, and of others, while the sun still shone on coppery hairs, that I thought (so too perhaps did Mary): everything is open, everything is plain; there are no secrets, here, now, in this nothing-landscape. Us Fenlanders do not try to hide – since we know God is watching.
Within the windmill by the Hockwell Lode curiosity and innocence held hands. And explored holes. Within its stunted, wooden walls we first used those magic, those spell-binding words which make the empty world seem full, just as surely as a thing fits inside a hole: I love – I love – Love, love … And perhaps the windmill itself, empty and abandoned since steam and diesel power encroached, and the Leem Drainage Board in its wisdom reviewed its pumping system, found in our presence a new-found windmill-purpose.
But this was when Mary was fifteen, and so was I. This was in prehistorical, pubescent times, when we drifted instinctively, without the need for prior arrangement, to our meeting-place. How had it arisen that in the space of a year our encounters were now a matter of appointment and calculation; that during the summer months we would meet to love each other (and sometimes merely to talk) only between the hours of three and five-thirty in the afternoon?
For two reasons. Because between the hours of three and five-thirty, at least, Dick would still be at work on the dredger, watching the dripping silt of the Ouse disgorge itself from the river-bed. Thus, needing time to ride home and eat his supper, he could not – for want of a better phrase – go awooing along the Hockwell Lode till seven at the earliest. At six-thirty every evening Mary ate her own supper at Polt Fen Farm, under the austere eye of her father, who daily shook his head (having given up remonstrating) over his reprobate daughter; and thus
would not be free to present herself to be wooed till nearer seven-thirty. By which time I would be hard at my history books.
Secondly: to avoid Freddie Parr. For though Freddie Parr, a pupil at the Gildsey Secondary School, had, like ourselves, the freedom of the summer days, he would be engaged most weekday afternoons on certain business for his father, signalman and guardian of the Hockwell level-crossing, for which Freddie earned good pocket-money; thus gaining an advantage over us neighbouring children whose own pocket-money (with the exception of Mary’s – till her father stopped it) was negligible, and thus acquiring a small-time monopoly in various black-market goods, ranging from Lucky Strikes to condoms.
At two-thirty or so Freddie would set out from Hockwell with one, sometimes two sacks under his arm. Forsaking his bicycle – because he would never know that on his return his sacks might not be heavily and bulkily laden – he would walk by road and field in the direction of Wash Fen Mere, and, in particular, in the direction of the marsh-hut occupied in the summer months by Bill Clay, whose age no one knew.
No one knew either what it was that Bill Clay and Jack Parr had in common; unless it was something that had stemmed from some favour in the past. Unless Jack Parr, who was a superstitious man, more superstitious even than my father, had once as a boy – long before he became a trainee signalman – made visits to the old fowler (he was old even then) and had been prepared, as few were, to sip his lethal poppy tea and listen to his half-comprehensible yarns. Yet everyone knew that Jack Parr’s present dealings with Bill Clay were of a more material kind. That Jack Parr, renowned for his ability to pass clandestine messages up and down the lines of the Great Eastern Railway and thus obtain from near and far all sorts of unauthorized consignments, to which the company guards turned a blind eye, merely kept Bill supplied with certain articles
hard to come by in these belligerent times. And that the sacks which Freddie Parr carried to Wash Fen Mere were not always empty but sometimes contained canisters of gunpowder and bottles of rum and whisky.
Bill Clay still shot duck during the winter floods on Wash Fen Mere. In the summer, when there were no big flights, he grew torpid like the Mere itself which became in places little more than a stagnant bog, and contented himself with eeling and setting springes in the reed beds. Bill Clay sent his winter bags of fowl legitimately to market but his summer bags were sold locally and without licence to all comers – much to the irritation of the inspectors of the Ministry of Food. An official was duly sent from the food office in Gildsey to appeal to Bill’s patriotic instinct and sense of fair play in these days of rationing; to be met by the 6-bore barrel of Bill’s punt-gun, a muzzle-loader for which supplies of gunpowder were essential.
It was for these same illicit summer fowl that Freddie Parr brought his sacks. Indeed Jack Parr was Bill Clay’s chief customer. Within hours of Freddie’s return with his haul, the sack or sacks of birds would be on their way by the evening train to a station on the Mildenhall line. Here (guard and station-master taking their share) they would be collected by a jeep of the United States Air Force, whose driver would convey them to certain officers at the nearby base, who took solace in having their orderlies serve up for them what they regarded as the traditional fare of the region before they took off on their insane daylight missions, to be killed – or live for another feast. In return for these regular banquets, the officers were prepared to pay at a good American rate; and back up the line every week, dispatched by the selfsame corporal in his jeep, would come sometimes foodstuffs, sometimes tobacco, but always, and most importantly for Jack Parr, several bottles of Old Grand-dad Kentucky bourbon.