A Possible Life Read online

  The bride was blinking, wearing too much make-up, not quite able to believe what she had done, but buoyed by the approval of her parents and old-timers like Geoffrey Talbot. The groom, Nigel or Michael, bespectacled, sweating in his hired suit, was feeling lucky to have even for a day won some approval from his father-in-law. At the same time he was dreading the speech that would be his to make in the marquee on the cropped lawn among the bought-in bedding plants, after which his accountancy exams and married life in Clapham would seem a sweet relief.

  No one seemed to know what Geoffrey was doing there, but a young man was polite enough to speak to him and discovered he was a cousin of the bride’s father … Some childhood holidays … Long ago, Great Yarmouth … He was surprised to have been invited, but, yes, what a lovely day. He’d noticed earlier in church how some old chap was listening to the Test match commentary via an earpiece attached to a radio in the pocket of his morning coat. He chuckled at the thought of John Arlott describing the action at Headingley. Better that, said the young man, than listening to the women in the row in front as they whispered about the bridesmaids and their tangerine taffeta dresses.

  During the first speech, made by a long-standing friend of the bride’s family (commonly known as the Old Bore’s speech) Geoffrey Talbot stood a little apart. He smiled at the attempted witticisms, nodded at the marital advice and raised his glass at the appropriate moment – but all like a man who had studied a book on wedding behaviour. Apart from his brief exchange with the polite young man, he spoke to no one.

  Yet that evening, listening to the wireless in his kitchen, with the window open on to the vegetable garden at the back, in his shirtsleeves with stiff collar and tie abandoned, Geoffrey Talbot was not unhappy. He had found a German station to which he listened frequently in an attempt to make up for the missed lectures and unread books of his youth. He still sometimes dreamed he was resitting his Finals, with better results.

  His salary was enough to live on, and he had invested what remained of his inheritance in wine, so that he had a cellar full of half-bottles of burgundy. He had also had the pleasure of seeing Cowdrey, May and Barrington at the crease. After the wedding he opened some wine to go with the lamb chop and fresh vegetables that it was easily within his power to organise. This is not bad, he thought, as he ate at the table on the small paved area at the back of his cottage, where he barely noticed the sound of traffic from the main road at the front.

  Then, suddenly, at about ten o’clock, when he was clearing up in readiness for bed, a feeling of enormous fatigue came over him – so great that he could walk no further but had to lie down on the sofa in the main room. The strength seemed to drain through his calves and his hands and his back. The millions of instances of lifting, heaving, scraping and hauling he had made in his more than fifty years alive seemed all at once to exact their toll. The efforts of crawling as a baby, of running as a child; of driving, cutting, hooking on the cricket pitch; the pounding of military drill; the reaching, digging, straining and the dragging logs to the furnace, the back-strain of tipping the chute – to say nothing of the hours of running, running through the forests or the everyday lift of boxes or suitcases or books – seemed to have left him with no further power in his body as it was.

  Let someone else live my life for me, Geoffrey thought, with the skin of his cheek against the rough material of the sofa cover. I have loved my life, I have been violently loyal to myself, but now I have lived it long enough.

  His dandruffy jacket over the back of the chair, his battered black shoes on the rug next to him, Geoffrey inhaled the exhausted, dried-rose smell of the old upholstery and closed his eyes.

  He awoke some hours later in the befuddled dark, groped his way upstairs, stripped and climbed into his bed, pulling up the eiderdown over him as the first chill of early morning came into the cottage.

  The next day he felt changed. The ropy veins on the backs of his hands were the same; the ache in his arthritic hip was where it always was and the world came to him through the network of nerves he had relied on since infancy. Yet he sensed a difference – not a medical or morbid change, more the touch of an unsought grace.

  No one at school seemed to notice anything, but Geoffrey, quite happy at the blackboard or on the slow walk to the cricket pitch, with the afternoon sun slanting through the elms and the boys chattering as they ran past him, knew that some subtle rearrangement of particles had taken place within him; he felt with joy and resignation that he was not the same man.

  PART II – THE SECOND SISTER

  1859

  MY FATHER MADE us all sit round the table. ‘Children,’ he says, ‘one of you is going to have to go into the Union house. They’ve offered me that – to take one of you off my hands.’

  We all looked at each other. John was the oldest so he’d be all right, he could work. Meg was the only girl and she was the apple of Pa’s eye. Tom was the baby, he was only two. I reckoned it was between me and Arthur, the third and fourth ones. It was a long evening. I didn’t know whether to speak up for myself or not. Me and Arthur kept staring at each other.

  We were living in two rooms on the first floor of a house in Mason Street. Once we had all four rooms but then we had to let off the bottom two for the rent. Ma and Meg and the baby Tom slept in one room. Me and Arthur shared a bed in the other one. I don’t remember about Pa and John, where they slept. They were out a lot.

  In the morning, Ma said, ‘I’m sorry, Billy, it’s you.’ I knew it would be. The place was called St Joseph-in-the-West, but most people called it the Bastille. I was seven years old and small for my age because we never had enough to eat. I said goodbye to Tom, but he didn’t know what was happening. Meg was crying and making a big to-do. John had gone out with Pa to look for work. Arthur shook me by the hand but he couldn’t look at me.

  My mother put on a bonnet and walked me quickly down Mason Street because she didn’t want people to ask where we was going. It was half an hour to walk there. I’d seen the place once before when we were on our way to see Aunt Annie in Hoxton. It was a big grey building with an iron railing in front of it. Ma pulled the bell and you could hear it ringing inside but half a mile away. We waited and my mother was shivering. After a long time we could hear footsteps inside and then the sound of bolts being drawn. The door opened and a big man in a black hat was standing there.

  ‘My name is Mrs Webb,’ said Ma.

  The man nodded. ‘Leave the child.’

  He pulled me inside. I called after her but the man pulled the door closed. I never saw her again.

  I was in an arched hallway with a brick floor. I turned back to look at the door and felt the man’s hand on my shoulder. I wondered if my mother was still outside. The man pushed me forwards and we went into a wide corridor with no windows.

  We came to a sort of lobby and I was told to sit on a bench outside an office. There was more light here and I could see we were at the junction of two long corridors. I wondered if I’d ever see the outside world again. A man in workhouse grey clothes came and took me down till we came to a wash house with no windows but two gas jets. Here they made me take all my clothes off and put me in some water in a kind of square trough and a man scrubbed me with a brush. Then they cut my hair off and shaved my head. They gave me clothes made from some stiff material that smelled bad and some boots with nails in them that didn’t fit proper. One was bigger than the other. There were blue socks.

  They took me to another room and told me to wait outside. When I got in there I was face to face with the Master. I thought he’d be a swell like the people I’d seen when I’d gone with my father to St James’s Park one time. But he was a rough type with whiskers and small eyes. There was a hot coal fire raging in the grate and he mopped his forehead with a red rag. He said something about believing in God, but Hard Work came first. There was framed pictures with words in them on the wall but I couldn’t read.

  I was shown a bed in a room that was like a barn with wooden rafter
s. You laid down in a sort of hole in the floor in a row like you was being buried except there was nothing on top of you, just a blanket. There was a straw mattress to lie on. Above you was the beams and on the walls there was more writing but it wasn’t in frames, it was printed in big letters. In my room it was all boys, from littl’uns not much more than Tom’s age up to John’s age which was fifteen. There was a trough at one end you could use as a privy but I didn’t want the others to see me. They wanted me to sing a song or say a rhyme or something because that was what new boys did.

  The Master came in and he had a cane so no one moved. His wife, the Matron, she came in too and she had a stick. Mostly the man in charge was a pauper in the workhouse uniform called McInnes and he was given a bit more food to keep order. It was dark when the bell rang in the morning and we all had to get up quick and put our boots on and go to the hall where there was prayers. Then you went to these benches and sat down at a long table for breakfast. And you’d see the girls then, they come in from their corridor, but they were down the other side of the room and you couldn’t talk to them. Breakfast was something in a bowl, they called it ‘skilly’, it was a liquid with oats in it. You just wanted it, you wanted it bad, but there were no spoons or forks. You drank it, then used your hands.

  Us boys went to the classroom to do lessons. The teacher was McInnes. He was the only man in the Union who wasn’t thin. He had a red angry face and he beat you with a stick on the hands. We had no slates to write on. There was a blackboard and sometimes McInnes wrote something on it. ‘What’s that?’ he said and you all looked down because you didn’t want to catch his eye. ‘It’s a four. Say after me. Two and two is?’ That was all we took away from the lesson because that was all he had to give. I never knew for sure if what he’d wrote on the board was a four or a two or anything else. Then he made us sit silent and if anyone said anything he’d get thrashed on the hand. Jimmy Wheeler got his bones broke like that.

  In the afternoon we went to another room where there was piles of rope. You had to unthread the rope and some of it was tarred. It was called picking oakum. When it was in its strands you carried it to the end of the room and it was put in crates they took off each day to the dockyards where they used it to seal the gaps in the timbers of the ships. We did four hours every day and it made your eyes hurt because there wasn’t enough light and your fingers had to be strong. Some of the little boys was crying because it hurt them so much.

  I close my eyes and I’m back in that place. I wasn’t alive, I was only breathing. At night in the bed in the floor I slept. I pulled the blanket right up over my head. I didn’t have thoughts. I didn’t know nothing to think about. And I didn’t dream neither.

  No one came to see me. There was no word from my parents. I began to stop thinking about them so I could get through it.

  I didn’t make friends because no one did much and I was one of the smallest so none of the other boys was interested in me. At dinner one day I saw a girl across the other side of the room, a yellow-haired girl in one of them funny caps they wore. She smiled at me and I didn’t know what to do. I looked out for her after that but we could hardly ever speak. Over the weeks I discovered little things about her. She said she’d never known her father but her mother had took in washing and had lived in a bad way in Poplar. There was too many other children and Alice had a half-sister called Nancy who was in the Union house too.

  I’d been there about two years I think when I saw a strange thing one Sunday morning. We had different clothes on a Sunday. They gave us a black coat you put on over your uniform. I was walking with the other boys through what they called the airing court towards the chapel. I saw men paupers come out of their building which was on the other side. They was being pushed along two-by-two by the Master.

  There was a pale-faced man who looked like he might fall down. I was turning away when I recognised him. It was my father. I called out to him and tried to run across but McInnes slapped me back into line.

  My father saw me. I saw his white face against the grey brick of the airing court behind him. His eyes met mine across that yard but he looked down at his feet.

  He didn’t want to hold my eye. He must have been ashamed of the boots he was wearing. Once he was a shoemaker and he had a good business. He said it was the Crimean War that done for him. When I first heard that word I thought he meant the war was a crime, it was certainly a Crime for us. He was apprentice to his own father before him and went out as a journeyman till he had twelve shillings to start up on his own. The shoes fetched two shillings a pair so he made a profit and he took on other men to work for him. That’s when he took the house in Mason Street, with five children and all. He bought leather on credit. He had twelve skilled men working out for him but they all got the war fever and sailed off to the Crimea to fight. Then the price of leather went up through the roof. I remember this when I was still at home. He was proper knocked over.

  Sunday afternoon was different because the children could go into the women’s room if they had a mother in the Union. There was a reverend come to say grace before dinner which was bread and a slice of cheese and jugs of water. This was the best dinner. There wasn’t much of it but the cheese tasted good and it put you in mind of better things. The reverend went on talking and they just wanted to eat the bread and cheese and get over to the women’s room. One Sunday I persuaded Alice to smuggle me in with her when she went to see her ma. When dinner was over I asked the monitor to go to the privy, which was a cesspit out in the yard. But I hid behind a buttress and when the children went past for the women’s room I slipped in between Alice and Nancy and because I was small no one noticed.

  The door opened on to the women’s room. The children went flying in. It was a madhouse. There were women crying, children cartwheeling, there was sobbing and laughing and jumping and kissing. I never seen Bedlam but it must have been like this. I lost Alice for a minute, then I saw her and ran over and she put her arm round me and whispered to her ma that she was my mother too if anyone asked. We gathered tight to her on the bench and Alice and Nancy rattled off their stories and told her all the things that had happened in the week. She had her arms round them and I held on to her sleeve.

  It began to calm down a bit. The visit was half an hour and you could see the clock on the wall. With ten minutes to go it all changed. A lot of the children stopped talking and just stood with their heads on their mothers’ shoulders. They held on to them without speaking.

  The bell came like a blow. Some of the children started to snivel and cry. The bigger ones took it bravely. You couldn’t hang about because the monitor was shouting at you. Alice and Nancy kissed their ma and turned to go. Their ma took me against her shoulder for a moment and kissed the top of my shaved head.

  * * *

  About once a month we were allowed to go for a walk outside the grounds of the Union house. They picked about twenty boys and twenty girls and you walked in what they called a crocodile. It sounded exciting but it just meant you walked in a line of twos and you weren’t meant to talk.

  One time I got myself with Alice and we managed to say a few words. We came to a sort of park and there was a big clean house with gas lamps outside. We was told to wait outside then ten of us was told we could go indoors.

  I pushed my way to the front and dragged Alice by the hand. I was mighty curious to see inside and I thought I might take something, a gold ornament or the like. I knew how to do it. Once we was inside I lost all thoughts of stealing. It was … I don’t know the word. It was light.

  A lady in fine clothes was smiling at us. She was quite old and not pretty to look at, with grey hair piled up on her head, but she smiled and just kept on smiling. No one did that. She took us into a huge room with a wood floor so polished it was like a mirror and there was other children there, about ten of them in smart clothes. They looked suspicious. There was paper streamers on the walls and the mantel. We was sat down on the floor and the lady played on a piano. Then a ma
id with a white cap came in with trays of cake and drink.

  She put the tray down next to me. I’d never seen cake like this, big pieces with chocolate, ginger and dried fruit. I passed the tray to Alice and she passed it on to Jimmy Wheeler and he passed it on to the children in the fine clothes and they took pieces of cake and they ate it and they edged away probably because we smelled of the Union.

  The tray came back to me and I passed it on, so it did another circle. I was looking at the paintings up on the wall with a cow standing in a river and this thing hanging from the ceiling. It had candles stuck in bits of glass. Everything in the room was light.

  Suddenly the lady stopped playing the piano and came over to where the children was sitting. She took a new tray from the maid with more cakes on it.

  She knelt down and held it out to me. ‘Take some cake,’ she said.

  I didn’t know what to do.

  Alice could see. She spoke up and said, ‘We didn’t know we was to have any, Miss.’

  The lady laughed. ‘Go on. Take some. And then take some ginger wine.’ She handed me a glass. I had never held a glass before.

  We were in that place for more than an hour and when we got outside the others wanted to hear about it. I looked at Alice and she looked back at me. It was too much to tell.

  A little time after this we were given stumps and bats and a ball to play in the yard of the Union house. I think they were given to us by the lady with the piano. They didn’t want us to play cricket too much in case it gave us an appetite but once a week we could have a game. I liked to do batting.

  Some dinner times we had cheese and bread, sometimes meat and potatoes and sometimes what they called broth, which was the worst because it was not much more than warm water. But I grew big enough to go into the men’s section and this was frightening because of the talk and the way they carried on. Forty men in a room, some of them simple-minded with no shame. Then they coughed all night.