Book One
One
It was a cold place, that police-court, with the cold of an old man’s bones. There was a musty chill over the whole building, the chill of time, of tremendous age.
Shafts of dusty sunlight streamed through the brine-splashed windows and fell in square patches on the cold green paint opposite. A couple of banners and a ship’s crest nearby caught the splash of gold. High on the wall, over the magistrates’ bench, one of Nelson’s captains, whose name I can’t remember, stared bleakly over his nose from his gilt frame.
Down in the well of the court there was a gloom where the sun never reached. The stone floor was covered with strips of rush matting to deaden the sound of heels, and the oak of the furnishings was smeared where hundreds of fingers had gripped it during hundreds of petty sessions. In the public gallery, which was the dignified name given to the three or four raised benches at the back of the court, there was an uninterested group of spectators – a snuffle-nosed old man who’d come in for a rest as a change from the reading-room of the public library, I suspect; a hawk-nosed battleaxe in uniform who represented some women’s organisation, and a Salvation Army official complete with bus conductor’s cap and red sea-jersey.
There was a lot of whispering between the sergeant and the policeman on the door before we were shepherded inside. The chill of the place struck you as soon as you left the passage where the defendants and witnesses were waiting in whispering groups, apprehensive and afraid because they didn’t know what was coming. Only the old hands who’d been there before showed no nervousness and lounged outside in the fresh air, smoking and even chatting with the bobby on the steps.
At the other side of the heavy oak door, where we’d heard muffled voices for an hour past, the solicitors were collecting sheaves of papers or leaning across their table to whisper with their clerks. The police superintendent just below the magistrates’ high throne ran a podgy finger round the collar of his tunic, and made himself comfortable. Just above him, to his left, the Mayor and the other magistrates sat, bored and uninterested. It had been an unentertaining morning, full of paternity orders, dockside drunks and backyard squabbles. I’d been outside talking to them for an hour, so I knew.
The Mayor fiddled with his case-sheet as the door closed behind us, leaned his cheek on a fat hand and sighed out loud as he eased his behind.
“Call the next case,” the magistrates’ clerk said. He was a little chap, with a ferret-face and a neck as stringy as an old tomcat’s. His voice was like drawing a file across the corner of an anvil. The superintendent waited for a signal from him, then tugged down his well-filled tunic and stood up, rattling a sheet of paper.
“Your worships,” he said, and he seemed to be speaking to somebody in the next street, “one of the defendants in this case is a boy of fifteen. Normally, of course, he’d come before the juvenile court, but in the circumstances that exist it’s been decided to bring him before the bench today with the other two defendants.”
The magistrates concurred, nodding to the superintendent with about as much interest as if he’d been talking to himself, and he turned towards the well of the court again.
“Patrick Fee, Jess Ferigo, Horatio James Boxer,” he declaimed, reading from his charge-sheet.
The old man from the library stirred as we were pushed forward and manoeuvred by bored policemen into the dock, two youngsters and a great raw lurcher of a man in a shabby suit.
Old Boxer stood leaning on the rails, resting his weight on his hands. His hat was stuffed all-ways into his pocket, and he eyed the court with an air of defiance. He’d been handsome once, but the years and the rum that even there in the police-court betrayed its presence in his breath had left their mark on him. His grizzled hair still clustered in small curls above his ears, but his heavy figure was flabby and his face had a ravaged look about it. He seemed to me like some heroic ruin, some crumbling monument. There was the same sense of decaying grandeur about his craggy features.
He wore an air of false good humour that admitted a fair cop and didn’t give a damn about it, a suggestion of indifference that the look in his flickering eyes made into nonsense. He was trying to give himself Dutch courage by an act of contempt for everything that was taking place around him.
Pat Fee’s attitude had the same suggestion of carelessness, but his aged eyes showed none of Old Boxer’s uneasiness. He was a sharp customer of eighteen then, was Pat, who’d already got the shady tricks of half a dozen trades at his finger-tips, and there was a cocksure boldness in the tilt of his head that indicated self-confidence far more than Old Boxer’s studied calm.
I must have seemed a child by contrast with him.
While I waited for the fun to begin, I studied the pale face of the Mayor, whom I’d seen somewhere before wearing a red cloak and a fur Sunday-go-to-meeting hat. The magistrates’ clerk just below him was reading the charge against us and the plump red-faced police superintendent, who’d whispered outside to me that there was nothing to be afraid of, was waiting for him to finish, fidgeting with his papers as he leaned against the bench. Farther down the court was an array of bobbies, curiously human without their helmets, and, near them, my father, Dig Ferigo. He looked slight alongside the policemen, and shy and stooping, screwing at his hat with worried fingers. He was an accounts clerk at Wiggins’ boat-yard down by the river, where he worried into their proper places all the red and black figures that made everybody else but him go cross-eyed.
‘Is the boy’s father in court?” the magistrates’ clerk demanded suddenly, lifting his ferret-face from his papers, and as Dig half rose, embarrassed and unhappy, a solicitor jumped to his feet, energetic and efficient, as confident as Dig was self-conscious and unsure. Dig was paying him the best part of his savings for it, so he wasn’t doing it for fun.
“He is, your worships!”
“And what’s the plea?”
“May it please your worships, my client pleads not guilty.”
I gathered from this they were trying to make out I hadn’t been poaching when I was caught with Old Boxer and Pat. But that was nonsense, of course. I’d not only been poaching but I’d been the one who banged the life out of the furry body they found in Old Boxer’s pocket.
The superintendent broke into my thoughts as he began to read a summary of the evidence against us, and suddenly, so unexpectedly it made me jump, Old Boxer began to speak. His manner was aggressive as usual.
“Yes, I am Horatio Boxer,” he said. His tone indicated he wasn’t in the habit of answering questions about himself.
Ferret-face scowled at him. “Don’t be insolent,” he snapped venomously. “Do you plead guilty or not guilty?”
Old Boxer stared at him as though he were something unpleasant. “That’s for you to decide. You brought me here.”
Ferret-face went puce. He knew Old Boxer was taking the mike out of him. “Be quiet! Do you plead guilty or not guilty, Boxer,” he snapped, his voice sharp with anger. “You must know.”
But Old Boxer obviously intended to keep him waiting as long as possible. “I only know,” he said, “that all this is a lot of damn’ nonsense.” He spoke as though he were more used to giving orders than receiving them.
“If you don’t behave we’ll have you taken below,” the magistrates’ clerk almost shouted, looking as though he’d like to throw the inkwell at him. “Now, do you plead guilty or not guilty?”
“Pah, it was no bigger than a backyard rat!”
“You plead guilty,” Ferret-face snapped sourly and with an air of finality, and he signed hurriedly to the superintendent to carry on before there were any more interruptions.
I felt an elbow dig into my ribs and turned to see Pat Fee winking. There was nothing in Pat of his Ma, a prematurely old woman who kept a sailors’ lodging-house near the docks. But from his father, who was Irish, a greaser on a coasting freighter, he’d inherited a glib sauciness that made him indifferent to his position in the dock. He was a sly bit of goods, was Pat, sharper even than his father, and he’d no fears of the police-court. I envied him. He reckoned on more than holding his own.
“The old lady’s brought Katie’s new shoes with ’er,” he whispered, indicating his mother in the public gallery. “Bang they go to Levy’s pop-shop if there’s a fine.” He grinned and I felt vaguely ashamed at being concerned in any lark that might jeopardise anything that belonged to Katie Fee. She was a nice kid, serious and dark, and always friendly in a grave way that never let you pull her leg. She’d been waiting outside the police-court for her mother as I arrived, silent and preoccupied, apparently prepared to kill time to the last trump if necessary…
The case dragged wearily along, through all sorts of byways that didn’t seem to have anything to do with it at all. Questions kept popping out at me from nowhere and old Ferret-face kept getting mad at us. Old Boxer deliberately baited him, and was warned a couple of times for it by the Mayor.
“One more interruption from you, Boxer,” he was told sourly, “and we’ll put you away to cool your heels for a while. Perhaps you’d listen then to some of the things we’re trying to say to you.”
“God forbid,” Old Boxer murmured.
I don’t know whether the Mayor heard or not. I think he did, although he pretended not to and signed to Ferret-face to carry on. But Ferret-face was having a worse time of it than he was, and I reckon he’d just as soon have left it to the Mayor. Old Boxer was more than a match for him – even though he kept a wary eye on the Mayor and didn’t get into trouble again. But I could see he was fed up with the whole affair and was getting ready to throw his hand in.
He seemed to lose all interest in the arguing, and began to glower boldly at the old battleaxe from the women’s organisation in such an aggressive way that she blushed. Pat was counting the knobs of plaster that ran round the room high up near the ceiling. I did the same for a while, bored with the wordy wrestling, then I began to stare at the clouds that hurried past outside the windows, obscuring the sunny blue of the sky from time to time. The police-court was stuffy and smelt strongly of carbolic soap that seemed to stick, sharp and acid, in my throat. I was itching, and had been for half an hour, to be outside where the wind blew the spray over the blunt bows of the ferry on the river to St Clewes and across the shipping crowding the estuary.
I could see sparrows fighting and twittering in the eaves of the building opposite, and a few cold-eyed, yellow-beaked gulls goose-stepping along the lichen-covered roofs. Before you could say Jack Robinson I was out of the drab court-room and miles away where the sun glinted on the oil-slicked water of the river. I was never behind the door when they handed out the ability to daydream. I could see ships on pond-calm seas that shimmered in a brassy glare, and waving palm fronds and foreign ports with names that made your head ring – Pernambuco, Port o’ Spain, Singapore…
“Boy! Wake up, boy!”
An acid voice whirled in space, focused suddenly and stretched in a vast shout in front of me. I started and straightened up in a noisy shuffle.
“What’s the matter? Asleep or something?” Ferret-face was scowling at me as though he’d have liked to box my ears.
“No.” I was hardly able to make the word come from my stiff lips.
“Say ‘sir’,” the superintendent prompted.
“Sir,” I repeated dutifully.
“Then pay attention!” Ferret-face was wagging a pencil at me. “This is no place to go moonstruck, is it?”
“No.”
“Sir!’’
“Sir.”
“Now! Were you with Horatio Boxer and Patrick Fee on the day in question?”
As Ferret-face leaned forward suddenly and peered at me, I tried to make my clumsy thoughts function. I hadn’t heard half of what had gone before and I could see Pat grinning alongside me.
“Come now! Answer me quickly! Were you with the other defendants on the day in question?”
“I – I dunno,” I said. “What day was that?”
“Ach!” The magistrates’ clerk slammed a hand down on his ledger with a gesture of annoyance. “You haven’t been listening to a word that’s been said! Now, have you?”
“No, sir.” My guilt seemed enormous.
Up popped the solicitor from his bench, brisk as a jack-in-a-box. “May it please your worships, the boy’s probably frightened a little by his surroundings. After all, this isn’t a juvenile court.” He coughed deprecatingly and the Mayor nodded sympathetically.
The magistrates’ clerk took the hint, left me gratefully alone and rounded on Pat:
“Take that grin off your face! This is a court of law and a serious business!”
Pat’s face became an austere mask.
I tried hard to concentrate. I’d long ago admitted all my guilt in the affair to Dig, and all this performance seemed to have broken away from reality. I began to study the superintendent, deciding I’d be safe if I kept my eye on him. I was determined Ferret-face shouldn’t catch me again.
Then I noticed the superintendent didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. First he poked out an ear and pulled at his long nose. Then he fiddled with his papers, shoved his hands in his pockets and sat quietly for a while. Eventually, however, I noticed in fascination, his hands reappeared and he used them to stroke his hair, smooth the creases out of his tunic and ease his collar. I watched, spellbound, until finally he appeared to stare at his hands in distaste, as though wondering what to do next with them, and shoved them under his broad behind and sat on them to keep them still.
I fought hard against boredom. The superintendent helped a lot, but I gradually lost interest once more. All this arguing seemed unnecessary. I’d been through it all before with Dig.
The minutes slid by in unhurried monotony, with my mind anywhere but on the avalanche of words, then suddenly I realised the Mayor was speaking and started to attention.
“We shall bind the two younger defendants over for six months in five pounds,” he was saying. “We’ll deal with the defendant Boxer in a moment.”
I saw a stir in the public benches and caught a glimpse of Pat Fee’s mother half-rising to her feet, then a sharp “Pay attention” made me realise Ferret-face hadn’t missed anything. He still desired me inside the orbit of his ministrations.
He stood up on his raised dais and pointed a pencil at us, wagging it with every word he spoke.
“You are bound over in the sum of five pounds,” he said in a nasal monotonous voice, “to be of good behaviour for six months, and that you appear at this court for conviction and sentence if-called-upon-at-any-time-within-that-six-months.”
He seemed to lose interest towards the end and babbled the last few words in a meaningless jumble. A policeman with a fair moustache took my arm and piloted me gently from the dock. Then, as I moved towards Dig, I heard the superintendent reading out Old Boxer’s record, a lengthy recital of wrongdoing that seemed to feature drunkenness rather than criminality.
Old Boxer listened intently, almost as though he were anxious that none of his misdeeds should be omitted. He was deliberately making a farce of the proceedings with an attitude of studied carelessness that didn’t seem quite genuine.
At last the superintendent came to a stop with a shrug.
“There’s another sheet like that one, your worships.” he concluded.
“I’ve lived a long time,” Old Boxer pointed out sardonically.
The Mayor sighed for silence, and Ferret-face hushed Old Boxer to quietness. Then the Mayor began to address him in that cold, high voice he read the lesson with at the chapel every weekend.
“Horatio Boxer, we’ve decided that you alone are responsible for leading these two youngsters into wrongdoing. A man of your age and undoubted education ought to be ashamed of himself.” He paused to let this sink in before continuing, “But for you, we’re convinced these two youths wouldn’t have been before the court today.”
Old Boxer snorted angrily. But for the persuasion of the two youths he’d have been sleeping off his lunch-time drinks in the ramshackle sail loft where he lived, instead of scuffling round the woods with a couple of policemen after him.
The Mayor was leaning forward now over the edge of the bench, pointing at him with a pencil, almost enjoying himself. Old Boxer treated him to a scowl in return.
“A man of your intelligence ought to know better,” the Mayor was saying. “Yet you prefer drinking and breaking the law to making an honest living. You’ve a boat-yard that could make money,” he went on. “A business that could thrive–”
“It’s nothing but a set of musty mortgages and bad debts,” Old Boxer snapped back. “It’s the dustbin for all the rubbish in the river.”
“An energetic man could make it work at a profit!”
“All right. You have a go,” Old Boxer countered as rudely as he could. “I’ll sell it to you. Cheap!”
The Mayor went red. “You’re incorrigible!” he snapped.
“And you’re a sanctimonious old ass!” Old Boxer snorted, losing his temper. “Tell me what I’ve got and let’s get on with it.”
While I was still gaping at the way he was flouting authority, I heard Dig mutter something under his breath and felt him tug at my arm. But I hung back, determined to hear the end of the drama.
The Mayor had sat back stiffly in his chair, clutching its arms, taken by surprise at the insult. Then he slapped a hand on to the bench in front of him and glared down.
“You will go to prison–” he said, and old Boxer’s eyebrows shot up.
“Prison?” he yelped. “For a rabbit not worth three-halfpence.”
“–for fourteen days,” concluded the Mayor, and began to scribble something on his charge-sheet.
“Fourteen days?” Old Boxer said in a loud incredulous voice, and the police who’d been watching him ever since he crossed the threshold closed up behind him. “Fourteen days! Why, you smug, self-righteous old sea lawyer!” The police grabbed him by the arms and the Mayor went pink with indignation.
I was enjoying the scene, taking in Dig’s startled face, Pat Fee’s stare and his mother’s working mouth as she watched from the back of the court.
“You pale parasite,” Old Boxer said with vibrant contempt. “You sit there with your silly little chain round your stupid neck and criticise me for leading two youngsters astray. And no one ever overworked his articled clerks more than you do.”
The Mayor seemed to swell with fury, and I found myself praying Old Boxer would put a lashing on his tongue before he brought fresh disasters on himself.
The trouble was done, though, and the Mayor was itching to get his own back.
“Release him,” he said to the policemen, and Old Boxer was allowed to stand in the dock, his thick fingers gripping the rail, his breast heaving at his anger.
“Listen to me, Horatio Boxer,” the Mayor snapped, secure on his raised bench. “You’re a disgrace to the town, a defiant, lying rogue and a persistent drunkard.” He sat back and announced almost as an afterthought, “Ten more days for contempt of court.”
“Contempt!” Old Boxer almost shouted the word. He’d drawn himself upright into a figure of impressive dignity that was incredible considering the state of his clothes. “Contempt it is! Contempt for your psalm-singing, sanctimonious pi-jaw!”
The police had his arms again immediately and were trying to drag him from the dock. But he was strong and had a good grip on the dock rail. He was obviously determined to get in his share of insults before they got him out of the court.
“You, who’ve been moored by your fat behind,” he said coldly, “to an office chair as long as you’ve lived, and voyaged as far as the chapel and there stopped…” The policemen heaved but he clung on tighter. “…you have the impudence to sit in judgement on me!”
Half the court was on its feet now, staring at the commotion. Pat Fee’s eyes were wild and excited.
“Go it, Dad,” he whispered.
“Come along, Jess!” Dig dragged at my hand, but I hung back, eager to see the finish of the contest.
“God, man, you don’t know what living is!”
A policeman brought his fist down on Old Boxer’s fingers, and he was dragged reeling from the dock. The Mayor stared with studied indifference at his charge-sheet, pretending not to notice.
The superintendent suddenly saw me gaping from the back of the court, and he waved a hand wildly to the policeman on the door. “Get the boy outside, you fool!” he snapped.
But he was too late, and I managed to be slow enough to see the scene played out.
The policemen were reinforced now, and Old Boxer was giving ground. But his voice hadn’t decreased in strength, though it was broken and panting as he jerked and heaved at the blue-clad figures around him.
“…I’ve seen finer men than you or me offer their lives to protect just such a pious old fool as you.”
All of this wasn’t strictly true, I suspect, but Old Boxer seemed to be enjoying the thundering broadsides of words and the grandeur of his anger. They had him now at the entrance to the cells, but he gripped the door just long enough to get out his last explosion of contempt for the Mayor.
He hung on long enough to glare at the sergeant who was twisting his fingers one by one from the door and said in a resounding voice across the court. “You, you’ve had no time to see half of what goes on around you.”
Then he was out of sight, but not quite gone. From the back of the court we heard his last withering comment, “Pah, the child of a man…” before a door slammed and the cries became muffled.
The magistrates’ clerk looked up from his book – he’d been studying it all through the commotion as though it hadn’t anything to do with him – and stared at the superintendent.
The Mayor looked down at him and nodded, just as they shoved me outside.
“Next case,” he said, then the door slammed behind me.
Two
Dig was silent on the way back to No 46 Atlantic Street, where we lived, and it was hard to make out exactly what he was thinking.
He stalked gloomily along the vast miles of pavement that fronted the terraced houses of the dock area, a drooping figure with the long face of a horse.
Normally, his thoughts were occupied entirely by the dusty ledgers that lined his office at Wiggins’ boat-yard, and by the articles he sprawled across the cheap foolscap sheets each week for the local paper, his one link with a literary existence he’d always hankered after and never known.
I wasn’t very old, I remember, before I realised that even this one thing he enjoyed sometimes lost its savour for him in a bitter awareness that he couldn’t do it well. His writing reflected that same pathetic inefficiency that was a part of everything he did. Even his ledger-keeping didn’t bring him any satisfaction, for his lack of self-confidence prevented Wiggins’ from promoting him.
As for the articles he wrote in the threadbare kitchen in Atlantic Street, they were out-of-touch and a bit crackpot, set down in a flowing language no one could be bothered to read. I’d known for a long time, and probably so had he, that they were used for the Gazette only as column-fillers.
As he trudged between the screaming children who played hopscotch and football on the littered pavements it was obvious that only half his attention was on the process of getting home. The other half seemed to be groping in the dusty recesses of his mind. He was seeking a decision on my future, I knew – almost as if he’d worn a label round his neck.
He covered the long walk from the town centre without a word, his pale face moist with the heat of the day. I followed, watching him carefully, not speaking. We’d never understood each other very well, Dig and I. He’d never done much more than lecture me in an apologetic fashion, even when I was caught with Old Boxer by a Trinity House vessel tied up to one of their buoys way out in the Channel. His anger always seemed to be directed at a spot just beyond me, as though he couldn’t quite come to grips with me – as though he were missing his aim all the time. It was a good job I never took advantage of him; I could have caused him a lot of trouble…
The sun had reached its zenith now and the clouds were skating along the blue highways of the sky at speed before the warm breeze. As I watched them, away I went again after them, as I had in court, soaring over the salty roof-tops so that I barely noticed the moving people who thronged the dirty streets and the noise of the dockyard hooters.
Long before we reached Atlantic Street I was far beyond the dingy district where we lived. It wasn’t a district you could get much kick out of at the best of times. All the pop-shops in the town seemed to be gathered there, all the street-corner beer-offs, and the grey dives where Lascars and Maltese and Negroes and Chinee stokers kipped while ashore. Ship chandlers’ stores rubbed shoulders with shebeens; and boozers with the Missions to Seamen. Children screamed in hordes about the pavement, and slatternly women gossiped in the passage ends. At night it was noisy with courting cats or rattling dust-bins.
The streets and everything in them that lived and died there were shadowed by blank walls beyond which reared the funnels and masts of ships. They were solid-looking and high, far above the houses that quivered to the rumble of lorries and the clatter of sardine-tin trams on the main road as they jolted their passengers over the points and set their heads wobbling in unison until they looked like a lot of roosters with their necks wrung.
But I never noticed them. I rarely did. And that morning I was in a daze. It must have been the chilly court-house that had done it. And besides, past the bare walls and between the iron sheds I could see the river shining in the sun. Through open gateways and down the narrow alleys I kept catching bright tantalising glimpses of its hurrying traffic of small boats and the yachts and launches lying at anchor out towards St Clewes, on the wooded bank of the stream – the fashionable bank.
My mind travelled effortlessly down-river and over a calm sea that was stirred with long quivering feathers of light across its surface as the breeze touched it; far and away past the headland at the river mouth, past the horizon even, beyond sight itself. I’d long since tasted the sea both east and west beyond familiar landmarks, but the feel of it was only an urge to wander farther. Always I wanted more than the narrow pathways of water that surrounded the town. To me, they were only the merest fringes of the greater plains of ocean over the horizon.
The episodes with Pat Fee and Old Boxer that were a constant course of irritation to Dig, and which had reached their culmination in that morning’s proceedings, were merely a makeshift. I was after more than the dockside or even the busy boat-yard where Dig worked. I always had been. As long as I could remember.
The train of thought carried me on suddenly to Old Boxer, who was more to blame than anyone for the love I had for the sea. In those days I’d never met anyone like him. I thought he was God’s gift to small boys. Make no mistake, when he was sober there was something tremendously impressive about him, despite his sagging frame and greying hair. Some odd charm there was that held me tight in spite of his sour tempers and the chilly speechlessness that came on him at times, something that showed through his moodiness and sardonic bitterness in a bright, flashing, unexpected smile or a gesture of tenderness.
It was just such a gesture that had landed him in gaol. Mostly, he’d take no notice of me, staring through me, or even being rude. But occasionally, and that was one of the occasions, he’d treat me as though he couldn’t do enough for me. I’d fished out young lobsters with him, tender as they come, from the rocks round by St Andrew Head. I’d gone egging with him, or trailed a mackerel line from the stern of the old boat he ran. I’d even been with a gun after mallard in the creeks inland. He seemed to like me to go with him, when his temper was good. I was the one who’d persuaded him to go poaching. Pat had just happened to be there at the time.
When he was sober and feeling on top of the world he was as good a companion as anyone my own age, and interested in what I was learning at school. And even on the days when the bitter black temper was on him I always came back for more. While Dig could offer nothing more exciting than a grey life in a drab street or a disinterested account of the business of the boat-yard, Old Boxer could talk in a sailor’s picturesque speech that was flavoured with salty sarcasm of adventures that featured names like San Francisco and New Jersey, names that never failed to make my head whirl, names that spun in my brain as I lay in the park overlooking the bay on a summer evening, staring into the glow of the sky…
I was brought sharply back to reality as we pushed open the door of No 46, with its peeling paint, and Dig spoke to me, “Want to see you, young man,” he said heavily as I hurried inside the house. “Don’t go away yet.”
As I hung my hat in the shabby hall where the skirting-board had warped away from the plaster and left great gaps, I heard a heavy voice calling me from the living-room.
“Come in here,” it said. “Let’s see you while the guilt’s still in your cheeks.”
Ma was downstairs, pottering about the house in her aimless, disinterested fashion.
For years she’d made only spasmodic appearances outside the bedroom, where she spent the better part of her life. She lived upstairs almost entirely, nourishing some private grievance I’d never been able to fathom but which had long since wrecked her marriage and Dig’s happiness. By dramatising some early mistake I’d never discovered, she’d made a vast tragedy of her life, a Wagnerian charade played in the twilight of her own angry mind, with herself as the central unhappy figure.
There was little love lost between Ma and me, and I faced her reluctantly. She’d become gross, and gloomy in the way that old actors – ham actors – grow gloomy. She stared at me out of lustreless yellow eyes from underneath a fringe of blousy hair. Over the years I’d come to realise that the rare occasions when she ventured out of her room invariably meant frustration for me and ridicule for Dig, and I’d acquired the habit of stubborn unfriendliness.
She was pointing to a spot about three feet from her toes, and she fixed me with a dull eye that was ringed with an unhealthy violet.
“Stand there,” she said. “Let your Ma see you in the flush of your crime.”
I stood on the spot she indicated and, aware of the baleful look she was directing at me, I kept my eyes fixed on a point beyond her chair. On the faded wallpaper there, as though in mockery of her, was a photograph of her on her wedding day, young and lovely and radiant, a slender figure in white – though even then seeming to seek the drama of the occasion.
“Don’t look much like a criminal,” she observed. “What happened?”
“They had a fight in court.”
“Did anybody get hurt?” The dull voice seemed to show a spark of interest.
“Not much, Ma.”
“I expect Dig scuttled for safety.”
“No, Ma,” I said, “he helped the bobbies.”
I told the lie without blinking, my face innocent and honest as the new-born day. I’d been telling lies of this sort about Dig as long as I could remember. The embarrassing comments on his gentleness seemed like a challenge.
I couldn’t remember when Ma had said a kind word either to or about him – nothing only bitterness and contempt for his mildness.
“He’s quite brave really,” I blustered on. “P’r’aps you’ve never seen it.”
“And never will,” Ma said, and she heaved herself out of her chair. She was a big woman who’d once been attractive and strong, but through the years since her marriage to Dig she’d allowed herself to grow fat and slothful. Her tall frame had broadened to hugeness so that her clothes hung awkwardly on her.
I watched her as she moved towards the door, hoping she was going back upstairs. Both Dig and I felt the edginess when she left her room. She’d been sulking there with her imaginary illness for fifteen years and we’d got used to the house down-stairs without her. As she reached the door, though, she halted with her hand on the knob and looked back. I stared out of the window, pretending I hadn’t noticed she’d stopped. She swept a lock of untidy hair from her eyes as she spoke.
“Stewin’ in that grubby office among his books till his britches’ behind shines,” she said bitterly. “And home at night over the kitchen table. Words. Words. Words. They only use the rubbish he writes to keep him quiet.”
I stared harder as Ma’s voice grew louder and more incoherent with a passionate outburst of petty temper.
“Clerk. Pah! My father was a master mariner. Captain of a sailing ship he was, with an extra master’s certificate. He brought us things home from abroad. A parrot. A walking-stick made out of a shark’s spine, and sharkskin slippers. And what did I marry?” She snorted. “My God,” she said, “me, who could have picked a sailor like my father! Stuck in that office. Afraid to put his feet on the deck of a boat. Afraid a breath of sea air might blow him away.”
She sniffed, and in her eyes were tears of temper. Then, angry because I didn’t reply, she flung open the door and, as she stalked out, almost bumped into Dig.
“Ha,” she said, and the contempt in her voice drove away the self-pity, “here comes the head of the family. Doing nothing as usual.”
Dig watched her sweep out of the door, ridiculous in a foolish masquerade of dignity, his eyes unhappy and hurt.
He’d been looking after Ma ever since she’d begun to imagine she was ailing; doing the housework, cooking the meals and trying in addition to earn his living and scrape a bit of pleasure from words written on cheap lined notepaper.
“What brings your Ma downstairs?” he queried, shaking his head like a boxer fighting off the shock of a blow.
“Awkwardness,” I wanted to say. But he never blamed Ma – never once all the time I knew him – so I kept the words in my throat and said nothing.
“P’r’aps there’s something she wants,” he suggested.
“No, I don’t think so,” I said, and there was a strained silence.
Dig stared at me for a moment, then, almost instinctively, he picked up a book from the sideboard, a leatherette-backed volume given away with nine companions in a newspaper publicity campaign. He fingered it gently, lovingly, speaking to me over the top of it, as though most of his mental concentration was on the book.
Only half of his apologetic mumble reached me.
“…time you started work,” I heard, and my eyebrows shot up.
“Work?” I said, startled.
Dig had moved towards the window so that the sunshine that edged over the tall, blank wall of a warehouse opposite fell across his thin, sensitive face.
“Yes, Jess,” he said, and his eyes were still on the book, as though he were unable to look me in the face.
“I hoped,” he was saying, “you’d continue your studies a bit longer, but it seems you don’t like school and you’re always with that Boxer chap.”
“I needn’t be,” I pointed out.
“I know you needn’t,” Dig said, turning over the pages of the book. “But you are. He encourages you.”
I stubbed my toe in the carpet, playing with the frayed edges round a worn patch. “Seems to like me to go with him,” I admitted. “Says I’m the best deck-hand he’s ever had.”
“Because you’re the cheapest, I expect,” Dig commented.
He glanced shyly at me over the top of the book as though half afraid of defiance, then he slapped it to with a bang that stirred the dust in its leaves, and tossed it on to the table.
“Jess,” he said with an unusual briskness, “I’m not much of a one for telling a story, but it’s time you knew a bit about Old Boxer. You’ll have heard it all before, I expect – or at least his version.” Already his eyes were on the bookshelf again, and his fingers were touching another volume. “Boxer’s a good-for-nothing,” he said.
He paused, as though wondering if the word were too strong. “Such a shame,” he commented thoughtfully. “He’s a lot of good in him if he’d only give people a chance to find it.”
It was just like Dig to say that. He was generous as they come, and full-hearted, for he’d always disliked and been a little afraid of Old Boxer. The old man, huge, shabby, imperious for all his meagre station in life, had always been rude to him. Adventurous as a backyard fowl, he’d called him more than once to his face.
Dig frowned at the threadbare carpet that showed the paper underneath in parts and took the book he was fingering from the shelf. He fiddled with the fly-leaf for a while before continuing.
“I suppose,” he said, “you couldn’t hardly call me a success. Mind, I’ve not gone backwards like he has. I was born around here and I was brought up here. And there are worse places in the town to live in than this. After all, it is a house. It isn’t an old barn like he’s got, with the rain coming through the roof and rats making love of a night underneath the floor-boards. Old Boxer’s been used to better than that, you know, Jess. You can tell that. He wasn’t brought up in a two-by-four a stone’s throw from the docks.”
It was true enough what Dig said, and it was generous of him to say it the way he did. Anybody else but Dig would have accused Old Boxer of putting on airs and graces. In fact, everybody I’d ever heard talk about him did. But they were wrong and Dig was right. The airs and graces Old Boxer wore were bred in him. He’d been used to them all his life, and it was because they were so natural to him that they made everybody detest him – even people like the Mayor, whom he’d treated with a cold contempt that seemed to suggest he was only a piffling little solicitor.
“He’s not made much of his life,” Dig went on, interrupting my thoughts, “going down the nick the way he has. Boozing and that. Wasting his money. Letting that boat-yard go to rack and ruin. Mind you,” he added, half embarrassed, “give him his due: give him the occasion and he’d come up to it, I’ll bet.”
I waited in silence as he paused. The leaves of the book whispered as they were turned over idly, then Dig put the volume aside with a gesture of futility.
“But why can’t he always come up to it?” he asked.
He looked again at me. His lecture was not having much effect and he must have realised he was drifting away from his original subject.
“You’re fifteen now.” He seemed as he spoke to be bustling himself back to earth. “It’s time you left school and made something of yourself. It’s hard lines, Jess,” he observed, and I had a feeling he was sorrier about it than I was. Perhaps he’d had hopes for my future that wouldn’t ever reach fruition. “You’ll have to start work on Monday. I’ve got you a job on the newspaper.”
“On the newspaper?” I was aware of a feeling of bitter disappointment.
The worst I’d expected was a summons to the boat-yard, and the sunshine and the smell of the river and new wood. Where I could watch the tugs plying between the ship-yards and the river mouth, and bear the boom of their sirens as they butted and tugged the great vessels upstream to the repair yards, grey and rusty and weatherbeaten, steam trailing away in feathers from their hulls down the wind.
“Yes, Jess,” Dig said, and his face was in shadow as the sun sank beneath the great grey wall opposite that brought evening to Atlantic Street before its time. “It’s better to learn that trade than the boat-yard. There’s nothing much doing there just now. And they say newspapers are always the last to feel a slump and the first to notice an improvement. I’d like to see you secure.” He stared again at me over the top of the book, aware that something was wrong. He seemed to be trying to convince himself he was right in his decision and was seeking confirmation from me. “Don’t you want to or something?”
“Dunno.” The problem seemed to be far too big for me just then. I’d never thought much of earning my living. Money hardly had any meaning for me. I was decently clothed, well fed and all my amusements seemed to cost me nothing.
“Had you a fancy for something else?” Dig watched me anxiously as though afraid his fumbling might turn me against him. “I managed to use a bit of influence for you. They think highly of me, you know.”
His lie didn’t deceive me any more than it did him. I knew as well as he did that he had no influence at the newspaper at all. But, I suppose, in choosing a career for me he’d hoped I might take up where he left off and carve out a living for myself as a journalist or something.
He’d persevered for a long time trying to interest me in it, and to a certain extent he’d succeeded. I knew all the words even if I couldn’t string them together in the flowing manner Dig fancied. But I often wrote other people’s letters because I could do it quicker than they could, and could think of things to say when they’d chew a pencil to splinters trying to sort out something interesting.
But that was only because Dig had taught me the know-how and the minute he let up on me I always dashed off to the river and borrowed a dinghy or bummed a lift on the ferry that ran over to St Clewes. I’d even worked the beaches with Old Boxer during the summer or taken holiday-makers up-river…
I saw the look of disappointment on Dig’s face as I frowned. He must have seen I didn’t want to work indoors.
“Good openings, Jess,” he said cheerfully – more cheerfully than he felt, I knew. “Make something of yourself. Nothing blind-alley about it. And jobs aren’t easy to get these days. What do you think? What’s your idea?”
I was silent. I was awed by this tremendous decision that confronted me. There seemed to be only one career I could think of that I’d ever seriously considered.
“Wun’t mind being a sailor,” I said, and Dig whirled and stared at me.
“What?” he said, and his eyes were startled and hurt.
“You know,” I said. “Go to sea.”
Dig turned on his heel suddenly, more quickly than I’d ever remembered, and stared through the window across the drab little street.
“I’d just as soon you went to the Devil,” he snapped.
