The Northern Clemency

‘No, love,’ Alice said. Her own worry disappeared in her love for her son. He worried about these things, as she did. Once, on an aeroplane, she had found her own nervousness about flying vanished as she did her duty and comforted him. ‘They won’t lose it, and if they did steal it, they wouldn’t get far on the proceeds. Do you think they’d get much for Sandra? She’s up there with them, keeping an eye on things.’

‘I wouldn’t give you two hundred quid for Sandra,’ Bernie said, concentrating on the road. ‘Maybe if she’d had a wash first. What do you reckon, son?’

‘I don’t know where you go to buy and sell people,’ Francis said. ‘There aren’t people shops, are there?’

She hadn’t told Francis they were going to move to Sheffield until it was certain. She wasn’t sure, herself, how it had happened. Bernie had worked for the Electricity Board for years, the only member of his fast-talking family not to make money in irregular, unpredictable ways. They were at the outer edges of respectability, in most cases only having their churchgoing to take the edge off their quickness. Alice had first met Bernie at church, him and his family in their Sunday best. If it had been a deft illusion, it hadn’t been a long-lasting one; you couldn’t be surprised with Bernie – he was as open to view as an Ordnance Survey map. His family were proud of him and his proper job, his steadily rising salary, at head office, and Bernie paid back their pride by not renouncing his own quick ways, his broad mother’s broad manners.

But in the last couple of years, the job, London, had worn away at him. The series of strikes – every power-cut had driven him to a personal sense of grievance. ‘Don’t say that,’ Alice had said, the first time the house had gone dark, the television fading slowest, giving out a couple more seconds of ghostly blue light before the four of them were in pitch darkness, Bernie swearing.

‘Don’t say what?’ Bernie said, almost shouting.

‘You know what you said,’ Alice said.

‘I can’t think of a better word for them,’ Bernie said, getting up and groping for the fucking candles.

Though the power-cuts, random and savage, affected and infuriated every adult in the country – not the children, who across the nation took to it with delight, like camping, and in later years were to ask their parents when the power-cuts would start again, as if it were a traditional, seasonal thing – they affected Bernie worst. In part, it was the way neighbours, like the Griffithses, or the regular commuters on Bernie’s train would inquire pointedly when Bernie and his colleagues were going to get a grip on the situation. Everyone had a story of the power coming on and sparking up an abandoned iron, still plugged in, in the middle of the night, waking up Mrs Griffiths, as it happened, with a stench of burning, which proved to be her husband’s best shirt for the morning. ‘And a miracle the house didn’t burn down,’ Mr Griffiths said, suggesting that someone more honourable than Bernie might offer to pay for a new best shirt for the morning out of his own wallet. It drove Bernie mad.

On top of that the winter of 1973 was a hard one, and three or four times the train from the City to Kingston had failed. The first time, Bernie phoned Alice, who went to Morden Underground station to pick him up in their ancient black Austin, the same car they’d had when they first married, a cast-off from Bernie’s brother Tony. It had refused to start again in the car park at Morden, and Alice had had to phone Mrs Griffiths, begging her to give the children something to eat while the garage came out; they didn’t get home until after midnight. So the second time it happened, even though by that time Bernie had bought a new car, the Simca, he only called to say he’d be a bit late, got the Tube to Morden and walked from there. The third and fourth time, too; it seemed to be going on all winter, like the winter.

But by then he’d heard of a new job, a promotion, out of London. That would never have seemed like a recommendation before. ‘Bernard,’ his widowed mother had said, when they’d gone to tell her in St Helier, the ranks of crocuses lining up firmly along the path outside. ‘Bernard. You’ve never lived anywhere but London. You couldn’t stand it for a week.’ She ignored Alice, apart from a savage glance or two; the whole thing, she could see, was the boy’s wife’s idea. In a corner, Bernard’s shy uncle Henry sipped tea from a next-to-best floral cup, not getting involved; he would have to stay and hear the worst of it afterwards. But if it was unfair of anyone to think it couldn’t have been Bernie’s idea, you could see why they believed that. His whole manner – the way he blew his nose, the way he ate with his elbows out, as if always demolishing a pie in a crowded pub, his soft London complexion, even – made it impossible to think of him outside London. But it was only Bernie who wanted to move. Alice had been born near the Scottish borders, and had moved to London at the age Francis was moving to Sheffield, nine, at the war’s end when no one was moving into capital cities. It was Alice, though, who loved London; she dreaded the North’s forgiveness, the way it would look at her when she returned.

But there was no arguing with Bernie and, it was true, the job was a good one. Bernie had been offered the deputy manager-ship of a power plant. It was the best way forward, to take a hands-on, strategic role, Bernie said. He’d left it quite late; but the industry was expanding.

He was like that: he could sell you anything with his enthusiasm. It was for her, however, to sell the move to the children, and she had nothing but her love to draw on there.

Outside the car, the landscape was changing. London had gone on for ever, its red-brick houses and businesses clinging to the edge of the motorway, like small rodents to a balloon suddenly in flight. The soft green of the southern counties, too, had gone, with the cows and sheep, and now harder, more purposeful facts were looming across the landscape. A herd of vast-waisted cooling towers, steaming massively; a terrain untended, brown and barren; one town after another with no name, just a mass of black and brown smoke and soot. It was getting worse; Francis could see that.

He had never thought that his mother would, one night, come into his bedroom and, sitting on the edge of his bed, explain that they might be moving to Sheffield. It was not that he had thought they would go on for ever where they were; it was simply that, at nine, no concept of change had ever entered his head. She had sat there, her face worried, when she’d finished, and he’d wanted to comfort her.

‘It won’t be so bad,’ he said in the end. ‘We’ll all be there.’ He’d wanted to say that they couldn’t make her move anywhere – not quite knowing who ‘they’ might be. But he tried to comfort her and, misunderstanding, her face cleared.

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘I knew you’d be brave about it. And it’ll be exciting – a new school, new friends—’ She hugged him. It was odd; they’d been trying to console each other. Still, he knew that, in her worry for him, she had expressed some of her own; he’d been right, after all, to think of consoling her.

They’d travelled up to Sheffield two or three weeks later. They’d gone by train, an experience so unusual to Francis, who had only ever gone into London by train, a journey of twenty minutes, that he paid no attention to the view outside. He’d taken fascinated pleasure in the toilets, mysteriously labelled WC, the wooden slatted windows with their frank graffiti, the extraordinary act of sitting around a table, the four of them, and a cloth being laid and lunch being served. You could eat soup on a train, which had bewildered him when he had read of it, in Emil and the Detectives. It was all so unlike the rattling compartment train from Kingston to Waterloo when the Lord Mayor’s Show was on. Now, in the Simca with its lack of event, he could start to look, with some apprehension, at his surroundings.

The week in Sheffield they’d spent at a hotel. The Electricity had paid for it – ‘It’s all a treat,’ Bernie had said, once they were settled in the beige rooms, the walls lined with nubbled tweed fabric. ‘Have whatever you like.’

‘That’s nice of them,’ Sandra said.

‘They’re grateful,’ Bernie said.

‘Can I have a glass of wine?’ Sandra said.

‘I don’t see why not,’ Alice said. It was to be their holiday that summer; they weren’t going to have another.

Each day, they took the car the Electricity had provided, and drove out somewhere. Mostly into the countryside. It was different from the countryside in Surrey. There were no hedges, no trees, and the villages were harsh, square and unadorned. Outside, the great expanses of the moors were frightening and ugly; even in bright sun, the black hills with the blaze of purple on their flanks were crude, unfinished. They parked the car and, with a picnic, clambered down into a valley where some terrible catastrophe seemed to have occurred, and about a stream, plummeting and plunging, black rocks were littered, huge and cuboid, just lying there like a set of abandoned giant toys, polystyrene and poised to fall again, without warning. Once they came across a dead sheep, lying there, half in the stream, its mouth open, its fleece filthy and stinking with flies. In Surrey it would have been tidied away. ‘Don’t drink from a stream, ever,’ Alice said. It would never have occurred to Francis even to consider such a thing.

On these outings Sandra, in the back of the Simca with him, was quiet and sullen. She didn’t complain: she followed whatever they were supposed to be doing, from time to time inspecting the sensible shoes she’d been made to bring with open distaste. Francis, as often these days, observed her with covert interest. She was five years older than him. In the room they shared at the hotel, she spent her time writing postcards to her friends, which, when she left them for him to read, proved cryptic or insulting about him in specific terms. Her weariness, never openly stated, only dissipated when they arrived at a market town, and the prospect of shops, on however unambitious a scale, revived her. She bought more postcards; she looked, she said, for presents for her friends, though nothing seemed to fit the bill.

Once they went into the centre of Sheffield, but even for Sandra, Francis could see, this was not a success. It was strange, confusing, and not planned, as London was, to excite. Francis was gripped with the prospect of getting lost; he had no sense of direction or memory for landmarks. They followed Sandra indulgently into one shop after another, and after a couple of hours stopped in municipal gardens by the town hall, an alarming construction like an egg-box.

‘We’ll have to come back here,’ Alice said to Bernie. ‘This is where the education department is. To see about schools.’

Francis’s dad bought him and Sandra a Coke each, and they sat on a bench in the dry city heat. ‘This will have been cleared by bombs,’ Bernie said, ‘these gardens, in the war. See where the old buildings stop and the new ones start? They’ll have been bombed during the war because of the steel, see?’ Francis looked around and it was right: a ripped-out space had been created, a kind of shapeless acreage, and into it, dropped in as exactly as false teeth, were new and extravagant buildings, the egg-box, a building with brass globes protruding from its top floor, others whose smoked mirrors for windows made no allowances towards the church-like blackened solemnity of the old town hall, a figure poised heroically above the entrance like Eros.

Two boys his own age had sat on a bench directly opposite theirs. It was term-time, Francis knew that, but they had not been taken out of school for a week because their families were moving – a licensed absence that had nevertheless caused him unspoken worry in the course of the week, even while clambering over Burbage Rocks, in case an inspector should materialize from behind a dry-stone wall. These were real truants, their hands dirty, and Francis looked at them in the way he would have studied photographs of Victorian murderers, possessors of a remote experience that would never be his. He sucked at his Coke, and lazily, one of the boys pulled out a packet of cigarettes, offering the other boy one. He felt childish with his fizzy drink and already the object of contempt. Their conversation drifted over with its incomprehensible freight of words – ‘Waggy nit,’ one said, and ‘Scoile,’ the other said; a long story began, about Castle Market – the Cattle Market, did they mean? Why didn’t they say ‘the’? ‘Mardy’, ‘gennel’; one punched the other, hard, and the other said, ‘Geeyour.’ Francis tried not to look at them. He feared their retribution, or their mockery; he feared the idea that his father would take it upon himself to say something to them, something inflammatory and adult, and Sheffield would turn upon them.

His parents had planned to spend the next day going round and finding a new house to buy. Although Francis had inspected the pile of agent’s particulars in his parents’ hotel bedroom with fervour and wonderment at the sums – £16,000 – involved, he and Sandra were to entertain themselves for most of the day. His ideas of entertainment were few, and he knew they were not allowed to stay in their room, the cleaners demanding access every morning after breakfast. But his mother had done a little research, and had discovered that a public library was to be found in a Victorian villa at Broomhill, only three hundred yards away. They were to spend the morning there, and find their own way back to the hotel, where they could order lunch themselves as a special treat. Of course, they could not take anything out of the library, not having an address, but if Francis wanted a book to read – there was no suggestion that Sandra was likely to share in this desire – there was a bookshop, only fifty yards further on, where he could buy something. Alice gave him two pound notes, an unheard-of advance on pocket money, and, it seemed, not even an advance: she did it when Sandra and his father could not see, a little squeeze of the hand pressing the money into his fist.

The library filled the morning, but it was short. He sat under the wooden bookshelves that, even in the children’s section, bore the intimidating municipal heading ‘Novels’. It took him a moment to recognize some familiar and favourite books there, and it was a surprise to discover that he had been reading ‘novels’ when he thought he had been reading Enid Blyton, or a book about Uncle, the millionaire elephant in a city of skyscrapers, Beaver Hateman at his heels. Chairs were supplied and, greedily taking five books with him, head down and not acknowledging the look of the librarian, whether approving or sour, he went to sit. At first he could hear his sister: she was talking to someone downstairs, in her ‘mature’ voice, as he called it; maturity, much evoked, had become her favourite virtue, and whenever she thought of it her voice dragged and drawled to the point of a groan. ‘No, we’re moving up here in a few months’ time. Yes, from London. We thought it best to sample the local amenities. I do hope you don’t mind us coming in – my brother’s the real reader in the family…’

And then the voice somehow faded away. The old library, in Kingston, he’d been going to since he was four, and had read every book in their children’s section, except the I-books, which he didn’t like, when people told you a story and said I. Here, there were so many new and different books, and what his sister’s voice had faded into was a book, a little childish but funny, about a bushranger called Midnite, and ‘bushranger’ was the Australian word for ‘highwayman’, with a cat called Khat, and, look, Queen Victoria, and—

It was quite short, and he had almost finished it by the time his sister, hot and bored, came to fetch him. She had left the library to explore the little parade of shops. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Time for lunch.’ He followed her, the last five pages abandoned; perhaps he could come back later. And perhaps he could keep the two pounds – you could spend it on books in London, too.

‘We’ve found a house,’ Bernie said, coming into the hotel dining room while they were still eating their lunch. He was glowing with relief and satisfaction. The dining room, hung with velvet wallpaper and dark curtains, had been daytime dingy, and the children had been talking in whispers, not daring to bicker, but there was Francis’s dad, as if he hadn’t noticed anything. ‘You’ll like it, kids.’

‘I’ve found a book,’ Francis wanted to say to complete everyone’s happiness. ‘I’ve found lots of books.’

‘It’s nice,’ Alice said, sitting down in a flop and looking first, with concern, at Francis. She had something to console him with. ‘You’ll like it.’

‘My name is—’

She began to write. But the paper was resting on the lawn. Her pen tore through the paper on the y of ‘my’, and then she was writing on grass through torn paper. Jane was lying on her stomach in a secret part of the garden. She cocked her head and listened. She kicked her heels up, bouncing them against her bum. There was nobody about.

She took the paper and, rolling over, sat up to write properly. At the end of August, the grass was dry and brown, crackling like a fire. Under her legs, it was itchy with gorse droppings, and she could feel a holly leaf or two. The holly tree in the far corner was constantly shedding leaves. Nowhere in the garden was ever completely free of them. She folded the paper, and wrote: ‘My name is Fanny.’

Jane paused. For as long as she could remember, her name had really been Fanny. Her paper-name, the name of the heroine of her book when it should be written. Now she was fourteen, it was time to write it.

It was a great shame, really, that it was the end of August. She’d let so much of the summer holiday go by without writing anything. Now that she had written four words, she regretted it had taken so long. Until now, it had been a running, contiguous commentary in her head, a third voice putting her smallest actions into a sort of prose – Jane left the house, shutting the door behind her. In the garden there were birds singing. Her mood was black – but now she was writing something.

She had switched on the lawn-sprinkler. The wet earth started to smell dense and delicious in the dry heat. The holly tree dripped with a tropical rhythm, irregular, on to the patio. The lawn-spray flung lazily in this direction with a hiss on each revolution, never quite reaching the little nest. A trickle of sweat, like a darting insect, slipped in a tickle from her armpit down her side; she could smell her own faint metallic odour. She was narrating in her head; she turned and began to write again.

‘My name is Fanny. I was born an orphan in the year 1863. My mother’…

It was a hundred years before her own birth. Her eyes filled with the sadness that by now Fanny was certainly dead. But she was Fanny, sweating in a sleeveless dress and no knickers in a patch of a Sheffield garden. Presently, as the cool wave of water in air, a jet of perfumed rain, swept over her head, she was lost in the thrill of authorship.

The garden was not squarely established but, like the whole estate, carved out of country and annexed in opportunistic ways. It swelled at the far corner to take in the substantial holly tree. (‘A hundred years old,’ Jane’s mother said reverently. She had always wanted to live in an old house, with character.) Elsewhere it wavered about in odd directions, claiming and abjuring patches of land. If the features of the garden seemed deceptively aged, like the trees, that was because the gardens had fenced-in patches of country. A moorland tussock, three feet square, brought in, surrounded by a lawn and a garden wall, like a rockery. The patchy lawn, the spindles of trees on the streets, rooted in squares of earth like tea-bags: those told the age of the development more clearly.

You could nest in the roots of the old holly tree where you were invisible from the house. For Jane’s less secret withdrawals, she went to read somewhere she could be discovered. You could sometimes hear a human noise beyond the garden and, in a series of corrections, understand that it was not, after all, one of the neighbours on either side at their pleasure, or a walker hugging the shore of the development before heading off into the wild heather of the country but the child’s-dismay-call made by a sheep, sheltering from the wind beyond the dry-stone wall.

But there was another better gift from the moor, which no one, Jane believed, knew about: three thick gorse bushes, brilliant banana-yellow blossom and always quick to slash at your arms. From the open lawn, it looked as if they went right up to the wall, but if you got down on your belly and wriggled through, a little space of secret untended grass opened up. You could sit there and watch, unnoticed. Her father was always talking about clearing the gorse bushes but he wouldn’t get round to it. Perhaps he was fond of them too. Here she had pressed down a space, clearing it of holly leaves and gorse twigs.

Another hiding-place had been the garden of the house opposite, empty for four months now. All summer it had been the province of her brother after nightfall; there he prowled and roamed, his girls coming to him eagerly. In the daytime, it had been hers. After four months of neglect, it had developed in unexpected, luxuriant ways. At first it was like a room enclosed, left tidy by the owners to await their return, and Jane ventured into it with a sense of intrusion. But quickly it began to grow and dissolve. An inoffensive small plant, a few shoots above the ground, had exploded, leaping through the trellised fence, a few more inches and a few more shoots every day. One day, all at once, a single slap of colour was there: a poppy had burst open, and then, for weeks, there was a relay of flowers, each lasting a day or two. Of course, her mother worked in a shop full of flowers, so they were not strange to Jane; but to watch them work their own stubborn magic, budding and bursting, fading and moulting on the stem, rather than dying, yellow and sour, in someone’s vase was new to her.

For weeks, the garden expanded along its permitted limits, and only the plants that Mr Watson, a gardener as draconian as Jane’s father, had admitted to his garden developed, stretching in their new freedom. But then the weeds started: the perfect lawn was scattered with constellations of daisies and, quite soon, dandelions. There were butterflies now and when, once, it rained overnight in torrents, the garden was filled with snails, come out to drink and feed. Best of all was a marvellous new plant, embracing and winding itself round anything, a fence, a post, running itself through other plants, with the most beautiful flowers like trumpets, like lilies, like the flowers of heaven. Jane had never had a favourite flower before, and whenever the craze for quizzes had arisen among the girls, she’d always replied, ‘Roses,’ when asked, a choice she knew was limp and conventional, as well as probably untrue. But now she really did have a favourite flower.

It was a shock to discover, when she asked her father, discreetly, that it was a garden pest called bindweed. Then he explained the complex and violent steps needed to eradicate it. Jane listened, but it seemed a little sad to her to remove a plant so beautiful, to prefer, as her father did, a border of squat green-tongued plants that would never flower or get anywhere much in life. Jane promised herself, when she grew up, a garden with nothing but bindweed, a dense bower of strangling vines and trumpeting innocent flowers.

Her garden visits were over now. A couple of days ago one of those neighbours had rapped at the window as she had been going in – slipping in, she had thought, unobserved as a mouse in the middle of the day. It had been embarrassing enough to see the neighbour at her mother’s party; that hiding-place was now closed to her, and the garden went its way in peace.

She smoothed the paper: she started to write again. Something caught her eye. From here, she could not be seen from the house, if she kept low, but she could see anyone standing near the windows. There was a movement in Daniel’s bedroom. Daniel was supposed to have gone swimming in the open-air pool at Hathersage; he couldn’t have got there and back so quickly. The figure moved again, and it wasn’t Daniel. The day was bright, and in the dimness of the house, Jane could see only the outline of a figure, its shape and gestures. It moved again: a hand travelled towards the face, then paused in mid-air, shifted, went downwards, as if it was going through something on Daniel’s ‘desk’.