Mother’s Boy, page 9
The two of them looked across to the children’s section, where Charles seemed to be making a pile from which to select his difficult final choice. He would never be like his cousins. She had to accept and embrace that. He would always be different, and less trouble in some ways and far more of a worry in others. He would, she realised, probably never be like everyone else, never be normal, and the butcher’s boy would probably not be the last to be maddened by his brilliance.
SUNDAY SCHOOL PICNIC – 1927
Life, Charles was coming to see, rarely offered her pleasures unmixed. The delicious pudding would be preceded by tubey pig’s liver, the history lesson followed by a maths test, blackberries had savage thorns and Christmas carols were full of stabby little reminders of the horrors of Good Friday. Sunday school picnics were no exception. It was a treat to have a day out with his mother and he always enjoyed a trip in one of Sam Prout’s charabancs. It was funny, too, seeing men and women he usually saw being all respectable in church becoming ever more unbuttoned on a beach. The picnics were always wild feasts, in their way, because all the women made a bit too much, thinking all the others might be stingy, but somehow it all went, even the tongue sandwiches and the seedcake, which were nobody’s first choices.
There were games and competitions and relentless urging to join in, however, so that his eager anticipation was shot through with dread. He still couldn’t catch and didn’t think he ever would; his eyesight was all wrong for that. And he hated football and rugby and cricket because he was always too busy worrying his glasses would be sent flying and trampled to be able to care much about chasing a ball or scoring or avoiding being offside. He knew the rules, however, better than anyone, so he could understand what other boys were talking about and could always keep score in his head or act as a referee.
In the classroom Charles felt safe, happy even, depending on the subject. He had a reputation as a swot – he knew this because it was often what boys said before they thumped him. He wasn’t especially clever – really clever children didn’t have to work so hard – but he paid close attention. You were never asked anything in a test you hadn’t already been told; the trick was to pay attention and he had discovered he was naturally attentive. Most boys were as easily distracted as puppies. If one looked out of the window at something happening below the school in the Willy Gardens, they all did. If one farted, all laughed. Charles, by contrast, found it very hard not to stick with the lesson in progress. He never gave up; Mother said his middle name was Relentless. Words held his attention like so many fish-hooks. If they were being told a story from the Bible or from history, he found he became quite unaware of anything else in the room. Maths held his attention out of simple necessity. Maths was nothing but instructions and rules, and if you didn’t listen carefully, it was like walking through a strange place in a blindfold.
Girls were easily distracted, too, but seemed to have a better system in place for sharing information. He was used to being roughly accosted by other boys demanding answers or help and to having everyone around him copy off him during tests. At least while boys wanted something, they were less likely to thump him. He had only once made the mistake of writing wrong answers to a test on purpose then speedily correcting them all at the last minute before handing it in.
When they went to Polzeath, the picnic always happened on and below the same cluster of huge rocks on the left side of the enormous beach, not too far from the road for the unloading of baskets and handy for when anybody needed the public conveniences across the way. Anyone who had established themselves on the rocks already tended to melt away as the Sunday school group represented quite an invasion.
Although it was called the Sunday school picnic, it was actually the reverse of Sunday school. Miss Bracewell, the vicar’s daughter who took Sunday school, was present but strangely eclipsed for the day. The unmarried daughter of the family, she was rumoured to have lost a fiancé in the war but she never seemed that bothered by it. (She was often referred to, he had noticed, as ‘Poor Miss Bracewell’.) She lived with her widowed father, which might have been tiresome, but they had a cook and a maid, so she wasn’t his slave.
On Sundays, she drew children from their parents into the parish room after the first hymn and returned them just in time for them to file up to the altar to be blessed by her father. It was an interval apart from the church service, apart from the rest of their weekday lives, with no punishment or rewards, during which she was in charge. The instruction was nominally about God and goodness but because it took them away from church, and because it involved a woman without children taking them away from their parents, it could feel like a holiday from all that. Miss Bracewell was very direct and kept her language very plain. When she spoke you felt her words were like a well-chosen tool or a blade whereas when her father spoke, in what Mother called his ‘pulpit voice’, you felt his words were a screen he hid behind.
On the Sunday school picnic, however, it was Mr Bracewell who took over, noisily umpiring a game of rounders before lunch. Rounders, like cricket, might have been designed to humiliate Charles, since he invariably missed the ball when asked to hit it and failed to catch it when fielding.
Mother understood, he knew. ‘But you still have to play,’ she said. ‘Everybody does.’
The handful of fathers who came joined in, getting competitive and shouty, like Mr Bracewell. The mothers busied themselves combining all the picnics into one huge feast across the rocks, which they then had to defend against seagulls and dogs, of course. Charles asked in vain to be allowed to keep score instead. He got through the batting with three humiliating failures to hit the ball, provoking yelps of incredulity from Mr Bracewell and groans from his teammates, then took himself off to a safely distant position when it was his turn to field.
Joe Luke was on his team, scored triumphantly in bat, of course, and was loud among the groaners when Charles failed to hit the tennis ball. Charles passed him on his way out to field and he surprised him by saying, ‘Don’t worry. Any come out this way, I’ll catch them for you,’ in a voice that was almost considerate.
‘Thanks,’ Charles told him but didn’t risk saying more since they never spoke as a rule.
Since the Day of the Glasses, as Charles thought of it, Joe had never hit him again, although cronies of his did things like trip Charles up or send his books flying to curry favour. Joe was popular because he was big for his age and athletic, and because his father ran a thriving business and was a town councillor. Joe was good at mental arithmetic but his attention often wandered in classes and it amused Charles to help him out by occasionally whispering the right answer to him or by letting him copy his test responses. The terrible matter of his being upbraided in front of customers and made to pay the optician’s bill from his pocket money lay unacknowledged between them and Charles could never decide if it was an unexploded bomb or a still-wrapped present.
Polzeath beach at low tide seemed especially huge and it was hard to stay focused on the game when there were so many people and dogs to catch his eye. The receding tide had left hard little ridges in the sand like the furrows in a field and it was tricky to see how breaking waves could leave behind an effect so delicate and regular. He was examining them and enjoying the feel of the ridges under the arches of his bare feet when a tennis ball smacked down in a sandy pool beside him and he became aware of shouting.
‘Charles! Quick!’ Joe Luke yelled, and held out his hands. Horrified, Charles grabbed the ball and threw it his way. For once his throw did not go way off-beam or land pathetically short and Joe was able to catch it and hurl it back to the centre of the game. He turned back immediately after. ‘See?’ he said. ‘Not that hard.’ And to Charles’s amazement he winked. The vicar blew his whistle soon after that, ending the game and summoning them all to eat.
Almost more than the rounders match, Charles hated the moment at the end of every Sunday school picnic when the vicar climbed up on to a rock, big, black shoes slithering on the seaweed, and thumped his fist on the lid of a cake tin for attention. He loved attention, Charles realised. He could never say as much to Mother, who had unquestioning respect for the Church and its officers, but watching Mr Bracewell now, red faced and a bit sweaty, beaming around him, Charles understood that when he read lessons or conducted services, a part of him was showing off and enjoying it.
‘The time has come,’ he boomed. ‘Gather round, children.’
‘Go on, Charles,’ Mother said. ‘Don’t want to miss out.’
Charles reluctantly got to his feet, instinctively taking off his glasses and folding them away into their case. Other children had none of his fastidiousness and were already clustering in tightly around the vicar’s boulder, some of them knee deep in a rockpool to do so. At ten, Charles had started to dislike being called a child, lumped in with other children as though they were all the same age, though he knew this was unreasonable, that there was no other word to describe them. He stood towards the back of the crowd, embarrassed, avoiding looking at Mother, whom he suspected disliked this ritual of the vicar’s as much as he did but would never have said so.
‘Did you all have a good lunch?’ Mr Bracewell called out.
‘Yes!’ everyone shouted.
‘Oh. So you’ve no room for toffees?’
‘Yes!’ everyone shouted, and ‘Toffees!’ Everyone except Charles.
‘Ready?’ Mr Bracewell called, lifting the lid off the tin and drawing out the moment before he was no longer the centre of greedy attention but merely the vicar again. ‘Steady?’ He shifted awkwardly, clearly nervous of losing his balance.
Joe Luke, Charles noticed, had also positioned himself on the edge of the group, as though too old for such things now. His eyes caught Charles’s and for a second Charles fancied they understood one another.
‘Toffees!’ shouted Mr Bracewell, and hurled the contents of his tin into the air so vigorously that he did finally lose his footing and had to drop awkwardly to his knees to steady himself. A swarm of brightly wrapped toffees flew up around him, a sort of riot broke out as fists lunged and palms swiped and children shoved each other aside so as to capture as many toffees as possible. The children in the rock pool were snatching sweets from under the weeds and water. The bigger, fiercer children, the hungriest too, perhaps, were scrabbling up the most as usual. Joe Luke had a fistful, Charles saw. Parents were cheering and laughing. Several of the smaller children were loudly in tears, either from hurt or simple disappointment.
‘Well, get in there, Charles!’ he heard Mother shout.
It was surprising how long it took for every toffee in the tin to be retrieved. Charles liked toffees, especially the ones made with dark treacle or the ones flavoured with peppermint oil, but he could not bear being made a spectacle of or being made to fight for food.
There was one, red-wrapped toffee that had landed between his feet. He saw another boy, Jim Garth, a rough, weasel-featured lad who often had ringworm, see it at the same moment and lunge for it. Charles shocked himself by speedily stamping on it and simultaneously snatching up one of the dark ones he liked, which Slow Eunice had dropped from her hoard as she lurched in another direction.
The charabancs would not leave for home until four so there were still at least two hours to use up. Charles wandered back to the picnic rocks where Mother was chatting with Miss Bracewell. They had both tweaked up their summer dresses a little so as to enjoy the sun on their legs, he noticed. Mother’s legs were strong and sturdy (‘I’m good in a high wind,’ she liked to say) whereas Miss Bracewell’s were as thin as a wading bird’s. Though with the knees the right way round. He knew he ought to offer Mother his spare toffee but guiltily kept it in the pocket of his shorts.
‘Have you eaten enough, Charles?’ Miss Bracewell asked. ‘We saw you didn’t get many toffees.’
‘He’s too polite,’ Mother said.
‘Well, that’s no fault.’ Miss Bracewell lowered her sunglasses and looked at him with an interest he rarely saw in grown-ups.
‘Take an apple,’ Mother said. ‘Lighten our load. And take one for a friend.’
‘Thank you,’ Charles said and took two red apples from the cloth-lined basket beside them.
‘Are you going for a paddle?’ she asked. ‘You look a bit hot.’
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Or maybe I’ll walk round the headland to St Noddy.’
‘Oh, that would be lovely,’ Miss Bracewell said, then sighed, ‘but it’s so good just lolling.’
‘Isn’t it?’
The two of them chuckled and Charles sensed he had interrupted a conversation they would take up once he was gone. He already had his costume on under his shorts but picked up his rolled towel.
‘We’ve been plotting, Charles,’ Miss Bracewell said. ‘How would you like to come to me for piano lessons?’
‘But . . . we don’t have a piano,’ he told her.
‘You can practise on the church one,’ Mother said, ‘when there’s no one in there, of course. Seems your legs are still a bit short for the organ.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s quite a long way to the pedals,’ Miss Bracewell added.
‘Yes, please. But how will we . . .?’ He faltered. It was bad manners to discuss money in public.
‘We’ve come to a ladies’ agreement,’ Mother said.
‘And in return I want you to join the choir.’
‘All right.’
‘Charles,’ said Mother, ‘you’re meant to say thank you. We don’t all sing in the choir.’
‘I was listening in as we sang in the charabanc on the way here and you’ve a nice true treble,’ Miss Bracewell put in kindly.
They’d sung all the way from Launceston to Polzeath and would sing all the way back. ‘Green Grow the Rushes, O’, ‘Early One Morning’ and ‘Blow Away the Morning Dew’. On the way home ‘Trelawny’ and ‘Lamorna’ would be sung because they were Cornish and it was a tradition. ‘Lamorna’ could get a bit rude.
‘Thank you,’ he told her. ‘That would be lovely.’
He put his glasses back on as he walked away towards the shoreline. When he wore them he felt the glasses were all people saw and not the awkward boy behind them. He had never felt like this on the beach before, but this year he was acutely aware of bosoms and bulges, of muscles and hair; it was all at once fascinating and appalling, and what he really wanted was to be alone in a quiet graveyard with a book.
The nice librarian had introduced him to Robert Louis Stevenson and he had devoured Treasure Island and Kidnapped, thrilled by the way they had young boys swept up in dangerous adult goings-on. Now he was reading Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The librarian said it was ‘for grown-ups really’ and it did suggest darkly adult things he couldn’t quite grasp, but it was compelling all the same. But Mother said they were not to bring library books to the beach as sand would get in them and possibly traces of picnic.
‘You’ll just have to talk to people, Charles,’ she said in the teasing, slightly mischievous way she sometimes had.
Sometimes he felt she knew him too well. Other boys had fathers and brothers and sisters, which meant that their mothers’ attention was divided several ways, so giving them more privacy. He had no one but Mother and she had no one but him, unless you counted the aunts and uncles and cousins. Sometimes it was a bit much.
So he had no book, just his glasses and a tightly furled beach towel amidst all these noisily happy, half-naked people. Disappearing out into the sea was a way of hiding, of course, or becoming just a bobbing head with no body, at least, but he had yet to learn to swim, to his shame, and could only look with envy at the boys diving through the waves or confidently swimming out on wooden surfboards.
The water was cold but deliciously so, breaking around his bare feet and splashing his calves. For a while he enjoyed standing there with the foam licking around him as he gazed at the breaking waves and beyond them across the mouth of the bay to Trevose Head and its lighthouse, but then he worried people would think him odd for just standing and not swimming so he started to walk parallel to the shore as though on his way to meet somebody. A yellow dog ran in front of him and launched itself into the water close enough to splash him.
‘Charlie?’
It was Joe Luke. Nobody called him Charlie apart from Aunt Maggie. Joe was the sort to shorten everybody’s name instinctively. If they spoke at school he called him Charlie Boy as a piece of mockery. Charles glanced around but saw none of Joe’s usual cronies. In fact few of them had come on the outing as their parents were largely Methodists. Joe stood up. His costume did not look home-made, unlike Charles’s, and had a striped navy-blue and red top. He was so much bigger than Charles, although they were nearly the same age. He even had muscles from carrying carcasses for his father. Charles often looked at the photographs his mother had of handsome Uncle Stanley, who died before he was born, and of his father, whom Charles sometimes worried he was forgetting. They were both big, handsome men – at least Father had been before the war got him. Charles wouldn’t have minded taking after either of them but at the moment he seemed to have hatched from an egg.
‘Aren’t you coming in?’ Joe called, as Charles feared he would.
‘Isn’t it cold?’
‘Not really. It’s lovely. Come on.’
‘I was going to walk round the headland.’
‘So? Swim first, then walk.’
Joe had walked out of the surf to join him. He seemed to radiate heat even though he was wet through.
‘Aren’t you cold by now?’ Charles tried in faint hope, for Joe’s teeth were chattering slightly.
‘Nah. Anyway, it always feels warmer if you come out then go back in again. Come on. Get your togs off.’
One of the reasons Charles hadn’t rushed to paddle properly was his costume. It was navy blue and in two pieces, like most people’s, but Mother had knitted it to save money, reusing the wool from something else, and it was baggy on his thin frame, even when dry. She said it left room for growth and would do until he started to grow in earnest, but he had a horror of the trunks sliding down with the weight of water in them as their drawstring was untrustworthy and never seemed to sit above his hips as it should. Joe’s costume had a smart white belt you could be sure would never let him down.
