“What are they going to do with it?”
“Shoot it, if they can’t get it up.” The huge grey horse lay neighing and snorting, its unmoving eyes on the men around, sensing itself in an unusual position, yet unable to break through the dim mists covering its brain and gather strength to get up. Foam was like snow on its mouth and no one would go close and try heaving it on its feet. On its forehead was a red sore the size of a florin, a dozen flies buzzing over it. “Does it want some water, grandad?”
“It’s ’ad a drink,” Merton answered brusquely.
“But it’s sweating”—he pointed to glistening enormous flanks: the body twitched, and grey eyes rolled emptily. Farmer Hawkins, a heavily built man wearing a panama hat, pushed his way through the onlookers, demanding: “Ain’t you got the bloody thing up yet?”
Nobody spoke, seemed afraid of him. Merton smoked a pipe some distance off, and Brian stood by his side. Farmer Hawkins cracked a whip over the horse’s head, hoping it would leap up and pull the wagon away. No good: it lay as if dead. He tugged at the harness, but was forced back to his whip, which made red streaks down its flanks. It tried to rise at each crash, but its head fell in a dull half-paralyzed heap. The farmer saw it was useless, threw his whip aside and sent the labourers back to their work. “Got a gun handy, Jack?” he called to Merton. Brian edged closer: its body shimmered with sweat and fatigue, eyes showing grey, tail swishing feebly against attacking flies. Then all movement subsided, and he turned at hearing Ken Arlington shout from the hedge. Brenda’s wild face roamed over the field and stopped at the prostrate horse. “It’s gone mad,” Brian told them. “Grandad’s gone to get a gun.”
“They don’t ’ev ter shoot it just ’cause it’s gone mad,” Brenda said, “do they?”
“Course they do.” Farmer Hawkins cleared them off when Merton came back and they walked to the embankment hoping for trains, Brenda between them. “What’s up?” Brian asked at her silence.
“Nowt,” she answered. Remembering the horse’s face, he wanted to get far away before it was killed. “Why can’t they make horses better when they’re badly, like people?” she cried. “Can’t they get a doctor to it?”
“Don’t be daft,” Ken threw in sharply. “That hoss is too old. It’d be too much bother to try and get it better.” He plucked at blackberries. “Come and eat some o’ these, they’re ever so juicy.” Brian collected a handful and gave some to Brenda. Still eating, they sat on the railway fence. Brenda’s hair blew about: “I hope they don’t kill that ’oss,” she lamented.
They heard a train. Brian leapt from his perch and ran up the green slope, lying flat in deep grass near the top, already feeling a vibration from the approaching train. The others crashed on either side. “I hope it’s an express,” Ken whispered, his voice low as though the driver might hear him. Brian remembered how Bert near New Bridge laid flat on the tracks while a goods train rumbled over him — a daredevil who dared the others to do it as well, though nobody would take his dare. He bet Brian a pound, but Brian said: “Where will you get the pound if I do?” “Rob a meter,” Bert said, but Brian hadn’t done it anyway.
Before the train’s thunder grew too loud for them to hear anything else, a series of sharp echoes fled from the cornfield. Brian felt a pain in his chest, as if the bullet had struck there. He tugged a handful of grass by the roots and chewed it, and when the train screamed by, opened his green mouth to cheer, an arm waving above his head. Engine, wheels, and carriages came to within a few yards, ripping the view into tatters of blue sky and field, each in a decimated second dancing between the carriage-gaps. A column of smoke curled like a black long stocking into the sky, its head quickly dispersing at the shock of finding nothing to keep it in shape.
He followed them down the slope and over the fence. “I want to go away on a train like that some day,” he said, slashing at nettles with a stick.
“Where do you want to go then?” Brenda asked as he drew level. He hadn’t thought about it. “Anywhere. I don’t know.”
“I’d be frightened to go a long way,” she confided. “And trains might crash.”
“Well,” he said, a note of anger in his voice, “I wouldn’t be frightened.”
CHAPTER 11
Seaton was a secretive man, and his dark complexion may have been more than skin deep because of his inability either to read or write. This bred in him — when surrounded as he imagined himself to be by a fair world of literacy — a defensive wish to create his own peculiar brand of pencilled autobiography. He acquired notebooks and filled them with dates and columns of figures, copied monthly calendars on to sheets of cut-out cardboard, on which he starred each dole and signing-on day. In the books he kept accounts of what wages he came by on his short-lived expeditions into the world of employment. A spacious old toffee-tin held bills, lapsed insurance policies, pink forms of one sort or another, fading official letters he had some time received, birth certificates, and two photographs of his dead mother. All these items, as well as each added-up column of wages, were signed by his name in broad rugged handwriting, the only thing that, apart from figures (at which he was remarkably clever and quick), he knew how to write.
This private office, which gave him a sense of still being part of the world when it no longer needed his labour (yet of being master to a tiny and exclusive life of his own), was kept under lock and key with a tool chest he had made himself. Brian watched him saw the remaining hard gut out of half-rotten planks, plane and bevel, sandpaper and mortise-tenon the lid and sides. Within, on hooks or in equal compartments, lay screwdrivers and hammers, gimlets and bradawls, saws and chisels, hinges and brackets and bolts, and bits of shoe-leather (for he was a miser and threw nothing away except cigarette ends), all of them begged or borrowed or stolen, found perhaps but seldom bought. Brian was sometimes around when it was opened, and out came a smell of upholstery and bicycle inner-tubes, tobacco and sweat and leather, and the beginnings of ruts from straightened nails.
Seaton delighted in using his tools, worked with an animal absorption within self-found carefully defined limits of intelligent usefulness. His creative world was the result of necessity finding its own level in a man who might otherwise have made his family suffer too much, and infect them completely with his own melancholia, spite, and despair.
Brian saw him unlock the cupboard on certain evenings, spread papers and notebooks over the table, watched him set out a clear life in dates and figures and signatures with no explanatory prose, in the only way he knew how to record it. These were the times of his greatest contentment, and an aura of calm descended over the house.
Brian copied him, bought a penny notebook, and in awkward, uneven writing put down the names of schools he had been to and the dates at which he had left them, the streets he had lived on for as far back as he could remember. He saw other boys standing at street corners with pencil and paper collecting car numbers, but his own game was part of walking up Denman Street on Sunday morning to buy a sixpenny roast from a cheap butcher’s (pushing up to the counter and always hoping the roast would be bigger than last week’s), stopping on his way back near a corner plastered from top to bottom with cinema billboards: big letters in yellow and black, red and purple and gold, forming titles of adventure and destiny, and names from the brightest of heavens such as Robert Donat and Jack Hulbert, Jean Harlow and Clark Gable. Shopping-bag by the wall, he took out his book and self-consciously gathered on to paper the shining words of poetry around him, imagining the thoughts of passers-by: What’s he doin’, writing in a book like that? — for he would stay a long time laboriously copying and turning pages, while his mother waited at home to get the meat in the oven.