Pink houses of new estates were spilling into the countryside. Men with black and white poles and notebooks came across the new boulevards into lanes and fields; they set theodolites and dumpy levels pointing in sly angles at distant woods, into and over the Cherry Orchard where the Arlingtons and Lakers lived, invading Brian’s hide-outs, obliterating his short-cuts and concealed tracks towards the Nook.
After the surveyors came the clearance men, groups of pioneer navvies breaking down hedges and making trenches in a straight line out from the boulevard. It was no longer a lonely walk from Radford: trees were ripped out of the soil, ditches dug, and the first markings of a road skirted the Nook by a few hundred yards. Brian walked out with his grandfather one day. “What are they doing all this for?” It was like pictures he had seen of the Great War: an open landscape scored with trenches, stretching over to the black wall of Serpent Wood. “Going to build ’ouses and shops,” Merton told him, sounding as though he didn’t like the idea of it. “What do they want to build ’em just ’ere for, though?”
“Because they’ve got nowhere else to build, I suppose.” He slashed at the remaining twig-sprouts of a bush, as if angry that it had let itself be pulled to ruin so easily. Brian liked the idea of buildings going up: he would see men coming along with machines, trains of lorries bringing bricks and mortar. Instead of woods and fields, houses would appear along new roads, would transform the map in his mind. The idea of it caught at him like fire: “When will they start building then?”
“Not for a long time, Nimrod. They’ve got to finish clearing yet. Then there’s the drains to be put down. It might be a couple o’ years before they get the first one up.” But Merton was wrong. Allotment gardens, football pitch, and wheatfields were soon under the hammers of annihilation. Brian looked one Saturday from the bedroom window to see enormous lorries unloading drainage pipes not far from the Nook. The bricked-out foundations of houses were already visible near the boulevard.
Seaton was able to get a job on a factory site down town. There was even an urgency for overtime, and he would be out of the house for twelve hours in fine weather. On the first day Brian took him a can of tea, saw him among a gang of other men shovelling sand from a lorry. He waved and came over to the fence, wearing a workjacket too big for him, his black hair hidden by a new cap. Having subbed a pound from the gaffer, he was able to push money into Brian’s hand: “Here y’are, my owd flower. Tell yer mam there’ll be a lot more on Friday as well.” He turned back to his work. Brian shouted out a goodbye and walked off, unwilling to look at his father, who, he thought, might for some reason be angry if he did so while he was working. To Brian, he was captured, taken from being king of the house and set among strangers where he seemed insignificant.
Yet it was worth it, everyone agreed, for there was more food in the house. There was also more money, and though it had been supposed up to then that the lack of it had been the cause of all their quarrels, it was soon clear that they went on anyway from force of habit. Seaton was born with his black temper and would die of it, and Vera had never been able to express and defend herself, first against her father, then against her husband. The only thing she could do with any thoroughness was worry, which probably sprang from thinking she hadn’t had the best out of life and never would. If there was nothing tangible to worry about she was bored, so there was always something to be harassed into a problem. The house was too small to keep her busy all the time, and rather than make or repair clothes, she found it easier to buy cheap new ones. Her hands were clumsy and without confidence: patches and rips to be sewn were swiftly bodged, and in spite of washday and family meals, there was still time to worry, often over lesser things of the house that didn’t really matter. Now and again the whole family became embroiled in explosive quarrels about nothing: pots flew and fists struck out, and everyone from mother and father down were isolated by bitterness and misery, until the violence of it, after several hours, thinned itself out into their bloodstreams and brought them happily together again.
By another long bout of saving, this time more open, Brian bought his second book: Les Misérables. He’d heard it as a serial on the wireless, had been enthralled by the grandiose surprises of its plot. “Nineteen years for a loaf of bread!” was a cry rising like a monolith of burning truth from the placid waters and unruffled jungle that hid the murderous go-getters of Treasure Island, and stifled the inane parrot-cry of “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!” Hounded by the police, impervious to bullets at the barricades, carrying a wounded man on his shoulders through the serpentine arteries of the Parisian sewers, Jean Valjean’s life-long fight and death seemed an epic of reality. It was a battle between a common man and the police who would not let him be free because he had once stolen a loaf of bread for the children of his starving sister. And after such terrifying adventures of this man who did not want to be an outlaw, death was the only freedom he was allowed to find by the author of this bitter and sombre book. Good and bad were easily separated. On one side were Thénardier and Inspector Javert — both against a society of equals because Thénardier needed the rich to thieve from, and Javert the poor to persecute. On the other side were Fantine, Gavroche, Jean Valjean, Marius Pontmercy, Cosette — the weak, the young, the revolutionaries — those who could not live with the former in their midst. The barricades were stormed, the insurgents killed, but the novel was read and re-read, and read again.
There was no fight when he brought the book into the house: “Why,” Seaton said with a laugh, “the little bogger’s gone and bought another book. I don’t know. I wish I was as clever as he is. He beats me at being a scholar.” He gave him fourpence to see the film of the book, and made him tell all about it when he came home. The last creditor of the weekend had been fobbed off with a shilling, and Seaton sat by the fire with a basin of warm tea beside him on the hob. Vera switched off the noisy row of a football match and went back to darning a pair of socks. The light was on, and Arthur could be heard up in the garret-bedroom playing with a hammer.
“And when Jean Valjean came back to the bridge to keep his promise,” Brian was saying to his father, “Javert worn’t there any longer. And when he looked over the bridge into the water he saw that Javert (Charles Laughton played ’im) had chucked hissen in and was drowned. That’s where the picture ended, but the book goes on for a long time after that. Shall I tell you ’ow the book ends?”
“’E don’t want to ’ear it,” Vera said, a tone that made Brian uneasy because he couldn’t see whether or not it was meant as a joke: “Do you, dad?”
“Course I do, my lad.” He finished his story, pronouncing the French names in the imitated accents of the radio serial. Margaret stood before him, her long straight hair framing a mischievous laugh. It wasn’t long before her gaze penetrated: “I could die at our Brian saying them funny words.”
“If yer do,” Brian said, “I’ll bash yer.”
“I’ll bash yer back as well, wi’ our dad’s bike pump.” She edged towards the window, to observe in safety his increase of rage. “He thinks ’e can talk French; I can talk it better than ’im.” She gabbled quickly, imitating a foreign language.