Lost in the Flames Page 3

  ‘Quiet!’ said Norman and the dogs cut their noise instantly and settled down again beside his chair.

  ‘Webster, have you always lived your life in a state of such constant bloody confusion?’ laughed Brailes, and Webster’s other elbow jerked back and sent his fork in the same direction as the spoon and the dogs were off again.

  ‘You’re lucky Mr Brailes is of such a naturally charitable disposition,’ murmured Norman.

  Webster looked distraught.

  ‘Just pulling your leg, Webster,’ said Norman.

  ‘Come on, Webster, get that down you,’ said Brailes, placing a bottle of ale on the table beside him, then an unwanted onion, and Mrs Brailes ladled out another bowl of soup.

  ‘Parsnip,’ she said, then added rather unnecessarily, ‘Not swede.’

  ‘Hedging tomorrow, then, lads,’ said Brailes, ignoring his wife’s sudden verbosity.

  ‘I’ve sharpened up the bill-hook and the slasher,’ said Webster eagerly. He was several years younger than Norman, not quite out of his teens, and having fallen out with his family in Suffolk was eager to please his new boss.

  ‘We’ll get plenty of firewood out of those hedges in the bottom fields. They’ve been left too long,’ said Brailes. ‘You two can take half a cartload each for your fires. The cottages will be cold now.’

  ‘They certainly are,’ said Norman.

  ‘Coalman’s coming on Wednesday,’ continued Brailes. ‘You can have a sack each.’

  He was generous like that, Mr Brailes, thought Norman. A good sort, not like some of the people you meet.

  ‘Marvellous soup, Mrs B,’ said Webster. ‘Is there cabbage in here as well?’

  She smiled at him almost maternally. She had no children of her own.

  ‘No, Webster dear. Only parsnip.’

  ‘I have to see someone about a pig in the morning,’ said Brailes, breaking a momentary silence. ‘Alfred Arbuckle, lives just up the hill there. Norman, come with me. I’d like your opinion. You can have a bit of a lie-in. We’ll leave at eight.’

  Brailes saw the look on Webster’s face.

  ‘Don’t worry, Webster, you can come too. We’ll only be away an hour – you can clean out the hens and do the hedging when we get back.’

  ‘Pork,’ said Mrs Brailes, as she placed a plate in front of each of the men.

  They ate, talking occasionally about the ailments of the animals and the difficulties caused by the recent deterioration in the weather, then Norman and Webster left together to return to their cottages.

  ‘Fancy another beer?’ asked Webster.

  ‘Yes, but I don’t fancy the walk,’ said Norman. The pub was half a mile away across frozen fields, or a mile by road. ‘I’m dog-tired already. I want my bed.’

  Inside his cottage, Norman lit the fire. The logs he had cut from the tree that had come down in the copse behind the house were too long to fit in the grate so he propped one end up on the firedogs to burn and the other end would do for tomorrow. The dogs stretched out on the threadbare rug by the fire and Norman sank himself down into a tatty armchair that Brailes had dredged out of the back of a barn for him. The pigeons had stained the top of it white with their droppings, and its insides had sheltered whole generations of mice, but it was generously proportioned and comfortable and gave off a less powerful smell than most of the people who had ever sat in it. Norman removed his boots and placed them by the fire to dry out so they could get wet again in the morning. They were the ones his father had passed down to him a dozen years before – size 12 Victorian-style ankle boots, tough brown leather that in their early days chaffed the skin off their wearer’s heels and bunions, but were now shaped to Norman’s feet like well-polished gloves. When Norman left County Durham, his mother had jokingly called him Noah, taking things away with him in pairs – two dogs, two boots, twin memories of two half-brothers lost to the great farms of Canada and Australia, two broad shoulders to carry the weight of the world, and the chips that life had taken out of each of them. Norman’s earliest concrete memory, at five years old, was of a brown-clod November field beneath a mizzling sky, lashed to a plough and set on his way with a swipe of a stick across the horse’s rump. The horse’s tail swished and little Norman craned his head sideways in a vain attempt to see what lay ahead as the plough surfed wildly across the ground, gouging an irregular furrow from one end of the field to the other as his father, whom he only knew as Mr Bainbridge, rushed along beside him in his chaffing leather boots, shouting encouragement and advice to his five-year-old son, then turning the horse at the far end and setting him off again in the opposite direction. Norman and the horse did four lengths of the field before Mr Bainbridge tired of running and pulled the horse to a halt. He was grinning from ear to ear and took his son’s head in his hands, shook him tenderly, then untied the ropes and hugged him to his chest.

  ‘Well done, my lad, well done! You’re a proper farmer now. I’m proud of you. Dead proud!’

  They had gone back to the village and Mr Bainbridge left him at the gate of his grandmother’s house, then went back up to Black Hill Farm, the largest in the area and soon to be transferred by inheritance into Mr Bainbridge’s tutelage. He had grown up there and learned his trade for years so that he could in turn pass the farm on to Norman one day, despite the complications in his relationship with Norman’s mother, Mary Miller. She was younger than Bainbridge, barely into adulthood, when she took the job at Black Hill Farm, but she had heard of the possibilities offered by quiet bedrooms at the end of long corridors and she made it her business to find herself alone with John Bainbridge in one of them one day. The encounter was more extended and pleasurable than she had been led to believe, and it became a regular part of her week until the inevitable happened. She christened the inevitability Norman.

  ‘You can’t marry her,’ said Bainbridge’s mother, ‘in circumstances such as these. She’ll stay at home and bring the child up there.’

  ‘But I must marry her,’ he said. ‘For the sake of our child.’

  But John Bainbridge wavered and his mother’s wishes prevailed.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mary, our child will be fine,’ he promised, ‘and one day we’ll all be together.’

  But the temporary life they created set too hard in its mould and there was no breaking it. Mary’s father passed away within two years from pneumonia and a sense of disgrace, and shortly after they had buried him Mary left for Newcastle.

  ‘Newcastle?’ said John Bainbridge. ‘You must be mad.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said, but she was gone and she married a ship-builder and gave Norman two half-brothers he rarely saw. Norman’s upbringing was left to his grandmother, John Bainbridge visiting weekly and providing sufficient funds to see to Norman’s well-being and training him on his farm for when he would take it on for himself.

  ‘That’s my lad over there,’ he would say to anyone who would listen. ‘Dead proud of him, I am. Dead proud.’

  But then, when Norman was thirteen, John Bainbridge was late for an appointment of little consequence and he slipped beneath a bus as he ran to jump on. Gone at thirty-five, too young or too careless to have made a formal will, and with him went Norman’s only hope of a comfortable life, Black Hill Farm ending up in the hands of a Bainbridge cousin. Norman worked Black Hill Farm for another dozen years until he woke up one day and declared that he was off down south to make a new life for himself, away from the bastard taunts and the injustice.

  He arrived in North Oxfordshire and met Mr Brailes at the Banbury cattle market. Brailes liked the look of the strong young northerner and discerned within minutes that Norman knew his sheep from his goats, his animal husbandry from his labourer’s tasks.

  ‘You’ll do for me,’ bellowed Brailes. ‘A fair wage, free food and lodging, and a cracking little farm, out by Chipping Norton.’

  ‘Right, then,’ said Norman.

  ‘The contract’s dawn till dusk,’ added Brailes, a little more quietly. ‘Three hundred and sixty-f
our days a year. Christmas Day’s a holiday.’

  ‘You’ll have to take my dogs as well.’

  ‘Working dogs?’

  ‘Border collies. I’ve trained them well.’

  ‘No wife?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t worry. We’ll find you one soon enough.’

  ‘Right, then,’ said Norman, and he followed Brailes over to a pen to assess the merits of an Aberdeen Angus.

  ***

  From the top-floor dormer window Jacob could see Brailes’ van trawling out of the farm gate and up the snow-covered lane past the railway bridge before it passed out of sight along the Churchill Road and then into view again down the hill towards the Arbuckles’ house, Mill View Cottage, three storeys of pale Cotswold stone. Brailes pulled the van over by the low stone wall that kept Alfred’s pigs penned inside the orchard. Jacob heard Alfred calling the men over and watched him lean over the wall and whack the roof of the sty with a hoe, then the pigs emerging, rooting around beneath the trees. Jacob hurried down the stairs, grabbing Vera’s hand and hauling her down after him.

  ‘You can come too, William,’ he said. ‘If you want.’

  The three of them gathered in the porch, three heads poking around the doorframe, listening to the men discussing their business.

  ‘What do you reckon, Norman?’ Brailes was saying.

  Norman had got into the pen and was sizing up the animals.

  ‘You want a male, right? That looks a good ’un. He’ll do the job.’

  ‘Disraeli it is, then,’ said Alfred.

  Norman cast him a quizzical look.

  ‘Names them all after prime ministers,’ said Brailes.

  ‘Bloody healthy set of bollocks on him, that’s for sure,’ said Norman. ‘Disraeli will give you a whole Cabinet of little politicians.’

  Then he turned and met the eyes of Vera.

  ‘Apologies,’ Norman said, touching his cap, ‘for my rudimentary use of language just now. I had no idea a lady was present.’

  Jacob and William stood giggling behind their sister.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Vera. ‘I’ve heard far worse than that. Father’s always cursing about something or other,’ and she took the enamel bowl that she was holding into the garden and began scrubbing furiously with a brush. Norman watched for a moment as her hand sped back and forth in a frozen blur, the skin mottling orange and blue in the cold.

  ‘You’ll be needing some gloves,’ said Norman.

  Vera smiled and took this coincidence as a happy omen.

  ‘Come see my birds, mister?’ said Jacob.

  ‘Happy to,’ said Norman, and he followed the boy round to the out-house door.

  ‘Eric and Penelope,’ Jacob said. ‘My lovely birds.’

  ‘Very nice,’ said Norman. ‘They’d make a lovely pie.’

  Jacob glared at him. ‘I thought you were a nice man.’

  ‘I am, but you’ve got to eat.’

  ‘Well you can’t eat Eric and Penelope.’

  ‘I was just pulling your leg, son.’

  ‘That’s all right, then. I only just got them back, you know. Bloody

  William set them out of the cage, said they’d gone forever, up into the blue, he said. But they came back. Didn’t you, my dears?’ He cooed at them. ‘They were in the elm and I left the cage door open all night and in the morning they were back home. Isn’t that a miracle, mister, a little miracle?’

  ‘I’ll say it is,’ said Norman, smiling at the boy. ‘They must like you.’

  ‘Oh, they do, mister, they do.’

  When they got back to the farm, Norman and Brailes and Webster set off to do the hedging, taking the long walk down past the copse to the bottom field where the brook ran beneath the abandoned mill-house, inhabited now by rats and bats and owls. They stopped in mid-morning to drink the sweet milky tea that Mrs Brailes had prepared for them in the thermos, the hot liquid slipping down their gullets as vapour spilled from their mouths in the icy air. Brailes went back to the farm, leaving Norman and Webster to hack at the hawthorn until the sun was setting over Kingham and the first flakes of snow drifted in on an easterly wind. They had cut the hedge back by three feet, opening up the ditch and laying bare the runs in the adjacent bank.

  Norman prodded Webster in the ribs and nodded towards the runs.

  ‘We’ll be back for those later,’ he winked.

  ‘For what?’ said Webster.

  ‘Hares, lad. Hares.’

  They loaded the branches onto the wagon and Norman slapped the horse and took the reins and led it back up the hill towards the farm as blasts from the Bliss Mill chimney echoed around the valley to signal the end of the tweed-workers’ day.

  That night Webster persuaded Norman up the hill into town and into the nearest pub. They sat side by side on a pine settle, worn to a grubby patina by centuries of use, and felt the fire warm their feet through the soles of their boots. It was just a week until Christmas and little bursts of seasonal music started up, a violin and an accordion, and Norman recognised Alfred Arbuckle as he ran his bow across the strings. An argument flared up in another room, voices in strident discord about a motor car, but they subsided almost as soon as they had started and peace and music broke out again. Norman went to the bar and positioned himself next to Alfred.

  ‘What can I get you, sir?’ Norman asked.

  ‘I’ve had a skinful already,’ said Alfred. ‘But if you insist.’

  Norman paid for the drinks and Alfred sat down next to Webster on the settle.

  ‘You lads not from round here, then?’ he asked.

  ‘No, sir,’ said Webster, looking into his pint.

  Norman shook his head.

  ‘Family?’ asked Alfred.

  ‘Nothing to speak of,’ said Norman. ‘Him neither.’

  He looked at Webster. Webster shook his head in glum confirmation.

  ‘Right, you’d both best come to ours for Christmas lunch, then. I’ve two sons of my own and I wouldn’t want them alone on Christmas Day either. Brailes won’t mind. Be at the house at noon.’

  Alfred drained his glass, slapped each of them on the back as if banging out a rhythm on a favourite pair of drums, picked up his violin – a gift from a tramp who had called by for soup once a week and left the thing on the doorstep when he took himself off to die – and stumbled out into a street that was thickening again with snow.

  CHRISTMAS 1934

  At dusk on Christmas Eve, Norman took Webster down to the newly-cut hedge by the brook in the bottom field and showed him how to lay out the hare traps and the valley bottom rang with the piercing shrieks of trapped creatures in the night. Norman rose early to knock on Webster’s door and they set off with the dogs across the snowy fields to the brook where the hares had scuffed up the ground as they struggled to be free. Norman snapped their necks and held them up for Webster.

  ‘One for Brailes, one for the Arbuckles,’ said Norman. ‘We can hardly go empty-handed.’

  Back at the cottage, Norman bathed and dressed himself with unusual care, knotting and re-knotting his tie and ordering his hair with a brush instead of his hand, then polishing and re-polishing his boots. He looked at himself in the dark speckled glass of the hall mirror, adjusted his cap, called the dogs, and shut the door behind him. Webster was already waiting outside.

  ‘Bloody hell, Webster, you can’t go like that,’ said Norman. ‘Look at your boots. They’re bloody filthy. They’ll think we’re a couple of tramps.’

  They went back into Norman’s cottage.

  ‘Here, give those to me. And fill this up with eggs. Brailes won’t mind.’

  Webster took the pail across to the chicken sheds in his socks while Norman brushed away the mud from his boots and daubed on the polish and brushed them until they shone like his own. Webster came back with the eggs and put on the dry socks that Norman offered him, then his shiny boots, and attempted to knot the tie that Norman gave him.

  ‘No, not like that, lad. Didn�
�t your mother teach you anything?’

  Norman knotted Webster’s tie, then wrapped a dozen eggs in newspaper and picked up the gifts he had prepared for Vera and her brothers at dawn. They left half a pail of eggs and a large hare on Brailes’ doorstep with a Christmas note, then set off up the lane through the snow with the dogs. Long icicles hung from the gutters of Mill View Cottage as Alfred welcomed Norman and Webster into the house and they all stood around in front of the fire sipping sherry from Edwardian glasses etched with leaves. Webster fidgeted as he spoke. Norman spoke little and of serious things – agricultural matters – while Alfred held forth on developments at the tweed mill, the state of his pigs and chickens, and the relative quality of the beers produced by the Hitchman and Hook Norton breweries, the latter subject accompanied by multiple tastings of several of the local brews. Vera sipped her sherry and listened to the men while Jacob and William sneaked into the kitchen to fill their thimble-sized glasses from various bottles of ale until their mother brought this sport to a sudden end and set them instead upon the vegetables with knives.

  At the table in the dining room Vera found herself next to Norman and occasionally their elbows brushed against each other as they ate and she noticed the large protruding knuckles of his giant hands as he cut the food on his plate. She listened to the sound of him chewing like a ruminating goat, then drinking down his beer, then a clearing of his throat and the burr of his voice as he spoke to Jacob sitting opposite about the essentials of tractor maintenance, the correct dosage of worm pills for sheep (four) and lambs (two), and about Roker Park in Sunderland and the derby games against Newcastle United and how the Mackems had stuffed the Magpies 5-0 in 1930. Webster listened mostly in silence, occasionally laughing nervously at a minor joke that someone had made.

  ‘Webster,’ said Elizabeth, after she had been studying him for a while. ‘Haven’t you a given name?’

  ‘Yes, but everyone just calls me Webster, always have. Always will, I expect.’

  ‘Even your family? Your mother and father?’