Her dad was a hawker and they lived in two rooms of a cellar. From drinking tea at her table Brian had only to look up at the grating to see the wheelspokes of her father’s barrow stationed by the kerb. She fed him toasted bread and apple while her mother read the paper in a rocking-chair. A pustule of white light flared and went out. Grey flakes of mantle fell from the gas-bracket on the wall and Brian ran with Mavis through the rain to buy a new one. “Mam said it cost tuppence,” she said when they came out of the shop, “but it on’y cost threeha’pence. I’ll not tell her, and buy a ha’porth o’ tuffeys. And I’ll gi’ you one if you don’t say owt about it.”
On a hot dry day they came to a factory whose coal cellar was close to the pavement. Bending down, he saw a row of oven doors, from which flames bellowed when they were pulled open with long-handled rakes. Gusts of heat forced him back, and a shovel-armed man told him to scram. Brian stood by a hillock of black cobbles, watched the shovel singing them into the coal-hole. Mavis came close, led him forward to see the fires again. He was hypnotized by the round holes of flame.
“That’s ’ospital,” she said into his ear, and the three dreadful syllables reached his brain, bringing back to him the drunken image of old shrill Mrs. Mather, who, so mam had told dad, had been shovelled in there like coal after they had taken the white jug handle from her clenched hand. Mavis pulled him quickly away.
The moonlight barrows moved once more, a pair of collapsible lifeboats swaying down Mount Street towards Chapel Bar, Abb Fowler in front and Vera pushing the pram behind. When a copper stopped Abb to ask where he thought he was going with all that stuff, he said he was changing houses at night because he didn’t want to lose a day’s work. Shuttlecocked Seaton and battledored Vera were gamed from one house to another, because Mount Street also was about to fall before the mangonels of a demolishing council. Need for a bus-station gave slum-dwellers the benefit of new housing estates, though Seaton was having none of this, clung to the town centre because its burrow was familiar and therefore comfortable, and because no long walk was involved to reach the labour exchange on Thursday to draw his dole. Sometimes he was able to get a job, and there would be bacon and tomatoes for dinner (Yorkshire pudding and meat on Sunday) but though he woodbound his muscles to show willing at the hardest labour, the work never lasted and he was back on the eternal life-saving dole, running up bills at food shops that he would never be able to pay, and playing Abb Fowler at draughts, swilling mugs of reboiled tea in move and counter-move until neither had a penny left to put in the gas for light.
In every staging-post of a house they found bugs, tiny oxblood buttons that hid within the interstices of bedticks, or secreted themselves below the saddles of their toes. Cockroaches also fought: black advance-guards of the demolition squads came out in silent, scuttling platoons over the kitchen floor after dark, often encountering lethal powders sprinkled by Vera, and those that succumbed would be swept up by Seaton before he mashed tea in the morning; or they would run into Seaton’s equally fatal hammerblows and be washed up by his wife when she lifted the rug on the unequal battlefield next day.
The demolition of one condemned block took a novel turn: the Albion Yard area, deserted and cordoned off, was to be the target of bombs from buzzing two-winged aeroplanes, the sideshow of a military tattoo whose full glory lay on the city’s outskirts. The bombing was to be on a Sunday afternoon, and Seaton hoisted Brian on to his stocky shoulders so that he felt one with the trams that swayed like pleasure-ships before the council house, ferrying crowds to the bombing; he rocked on his father’s shoulders, gripping the neck of a dad he hated when he did or said something to make his mam cry. But the grim and miserable emotion was kept to the ground as dad swung him up high, an action that split his hate in two upon such kindness. The first intimation of a good deed to him by dad only brought back his mam’s agonized cries as the blood streamed from her face, but his turning head beheld his mother at this moment happy and saying he would be taken to see the bombing if he was a good lad, passing his father a packet of fags from the mantelpiece for a smoke in case they had to wait long before the aircraft played Punch and Judy with the enclave of slums in which they used to live.
Seaton’s body swung as he walked and Brian was often in danger of falling overboard, pitching head first from his lifeboat-dad into the boiling sea of other heads around. Peril came at the quick switch into an unexpected short-cut, and his flailing arms, finding nothing closer, grabbed the black tufts of dad’s short, strong hair. When dad cried out he’d get a pasting if he didn’t stop that bleddy lark, Brian’s instinct was to go forward and bind himself on to dad’s bull neck, a tightened grip that brought forth a half-throttled exclamation from dad below saying that he could bloody-well walk if that was going to be his game; at which a shirt-sleeved tentacle reached up and tried to lift him outwards; but Brian reacted to the danger of his imminent slingdown by clinging tighter in every way so that the well-muscled arm dragged at him in vain. “Come on, my lad, let’s have you down.” And again: “Are you goin’ ter get down or aren’t you?”
“I’ll fall”—his arms bare and the neck slippy with sweat.
“No, you won’t.”
“I will, dad, honest.” They were near the lassoed bomb-target, bustled to the kerb by those who wanted to get near the rope, maybe feel the actual blast and pick up a fallen brick for a souvenir. Mounted policemen pushed back those who infiltrated the brick-strewn neutral ground, and Brian, forgetting to struggle, saw white foam around a horse’s mouth. He asked dad if it were soap.
“Yes,” Seaton told him. Brian bent his head and enquired of the nearest ear: “What do they give it soap for?”
“So’s it’ll bite anybody who tries to get past the coppers.”
“Why does anybody want to get past the coppers?” he whispered.
“Because they want to see the bombs closer.”
“But they’ll get blown up.”
“’Appen they want to. Now come down for a bit, my owd duck, because my showders is aching.”
“Not yet, our dad. Let me stay up some more.”
“No, come down now, then you can go up again when the bombs start dropping.”
“But I want to see the horses bite somebody first.”
“They won’t bite anybody today,” Seaton said. So down he came, jammed among the shoes and trousers of a surging jungle, evading a tiger boot or a lion fist, a random matchstick or hot fagend. Three biplanes dipped their wings from the Trent direction. Brian climbed up to his dad’s shoulders to spot from his fickle control-tower, his hand an unnecessary eyeshade because the sun was behind a snow-mountain cloud silhouetting the yellow planes.
They swung back, flying low in silence, like gliders, because of noise from the mass of people. “They aren’t going very fast, dad,” he complained. “They’re slower than motorcars.”
“That’s because they’re high up, kid,” someone told him.
“They’ll come lower soon,” dad said.
“Will they crash?” Brian asked. “I’ve never seen an aeroplane crash.”
“You will one day,” somebody laughed.
Each plane purred loudly along the rooftops, like a cat at first, then growling like a dog when you try to take its bone away, finally as if a roadmender’s drill were going straight to the heart, so that he felt pinned to the ground. Two black specks, then two more, slid from the rounded belly of each. The gloved wheels beneath seemed to have been put down especially to catch them, but the dots fell through and disappeared into the group of ruined houses.