‘We’ll have the whole day at the match, shall we?’ he said. ‘We’ll get our money’s worth, shall we?’
His voice was flat, he could not even begin to clown.
Next morning, however, he was more himself. He liked going to new places; he never minded being innocent, not knowing his way about. ‘Fancy!’ he said, as he paid for us both and we pushed through the turnstiles. ‘So that’s where they play, is it?’ But he was looking at the practice nets. He was quite unembarrassed as I led him to seats on the popular side, just by the edge of the sight-screen.
Soon I had no time to attend to my father. I was immersed, tense with the breathtaking freshness of the first minutes of play. The wickets gleamed in the sun, the bail flashed, the batsmen played cautious strokes; I swallowed with excitement at each ball. I was a passionate partisan. Leicestershire were playing Sussex. For years I thought I remembered each detail of that day; I should have said that my father and I had watched the first balls of the Leicestershire innings. But my memory happened to have tricked me. Long afterwards I looked up the score. The match had begun on the Thursday, and Sussex had made over two hundred, and got two of our wickets for a few that night. Friday was washed out by rain, and we actually saw (despite my false remembrance) Leicestershire continue their innings.
All my heart was set on their getting a big score. And I was passionately partisan among the Leicestershire side itself. I had to find a hero. I had not so much choice as I should have had, if I had been luckier in my county; and I did not glow with many dashing vicarious triumphs. My hero was C J B Wood. Even I, in disloyal moments, admitted that he was not so spectacular as Jessop or Tyldesley. But, I told myself, he was much sounder. In actual fact, my hero did not often let me down. On the occasions when he failed completely, I wanted to cry.
That morning he cost me a gasp of fright. He kept playing – I think it must have been Relf – with an awkward-looking, clumsy, stumbling shot that usually patted the ball safely to mid-off. But once, as he did so, the ball found the edge of the bat and flew knee-high between first and second slip. It was four all the way. People round me clapped and said fatuously: ‘Pretty shot.’ I was contemptuous of them and concerned for my hero, who was thoughtfully slapping the pitch with the back of his bat.
After a quarter of an hour I could relax a little. My father was watching with mild blue-eyed interest. Seeing that I was not leaning forward with such desperate concentration, he began asking questions.
‘Lewis,’ he said, ‘do they have to be very strong to play this game?’
‘Some batsmen’, I said confidently, having read a lot of misleading books, ‘score all their runs by wristwork.’ I demonstrated the principle of the leg-glance.
‘Just turn their wrists, do they?’ said my father. He studied the players in the field. ‘But they seem to be pretty big chaps, most of these? Do they have to be big chaps?’
‘Quaife is ever such a little man. Quaife of Warwickshire.’
‘How little is he? Is he shorter than me?’
‘Oh yes.’
I was not sure of the facts, but I knew that somehow the answer would please my father. He received it with obvious satisfaction.
He pursued his chain of thought.
‘How old do they go on playing?’
‘Very old,’ I said.
‘Older than me?’
My father was forty-five. I assured him that W G Grace went on playing till he was fifty-eight. My father smiled reflectively.
‘How old can they be when they play for the first time? Who is the oldest man to play here for the first time?’
For all my Wisden, it was beyond me to tell him the record age of a first appearance in first-class cricket. I could only give my father general encouragement.
He was given to romantic daydreams, and that morning he was indulging one of them. He was dreaming that all of a sudden he had become miraculously skilled at cricket; he was brought into the middle, everyone acclaimed him, he won instantaneous fame. It would not have done for the dream to be absolutely fantastic. It had to take him as he was, forty-five years old and five feet four in height. He would not imagine himself taken back to youth and transformed into a man strong, tall and glorious. No, he accepted himself in the flesh, He grinned at himself – and then dreamed about all that could happen.
For the same reason he read all the travel books he could lay his hands on. He went down the road to the library and came home with a new book about the headwaters of the Amazon. In his imagination he was still middle-aged, still uncomfortably short in the leg, but he was also paddling up the rainforests where no white man had ever been.
I used, both at that age and when I was a little older, to pretend to myself that he read these books for the sake of knowledge. I liked to pretend that he was very learned about the tropics. But I knew it was not true. It hurt me, it hurt me with bitter twisted indignation, to hear Aunt Milly accuse him of being ineffectual, or my mother of being superstitious and a snob. It roused me to blind, savage, tearful love. It was a long time before I could harden myself to hear such things from her. Yet I could think them to myself and not be hurt at all.
My father treated me to gingerbeer and a pork pie in the lunch interval, and later we had some tea. Otherwise there was nothing to occupy him, after his romantic speculations had died down. He sat there patiently, peering at the game, not understanding it, not seeing the ball. I was not to know that he had a duty to perform.
After the last over the crowd round us drifted over the ground.
‘Let’s wait until they’ve gone,’ said my father.
So we sat on the emptying ground. The pavilion windows glinted in the evening sun, and the scoreboard threw a shadow halfway to the wicket.
‘Lena thinks there’s something I ought to tell you,’ said my father.
I stared at him.
‘I didn’t want to tell you before. I was afraid it might spoil your day.’
He looked at me, and added: ‘You see, Lewis, it isn’t very good news.’
‘Oh!’ I cried.
My father pushed up his spectacles.
‘Things aren’t going very well at Myrtle Road. That’s the trouble,’ he said. ‘I can’t say things are going as we should like.’
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Milly says that it’s my fault,’ said my father uncomplainingly. ‘But I don’t know about that.’
He began to talk about ‘bigger people turning out a cheaper line’. Then he saw that he was puzzling me. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid we may be done for. I may have to file my petition.’
The phrase sounded ominous, deadly ominous, to me, but I did not understand.
‘That means’, said my father, ‘that I’m afraid we shan’t have much money to spare. I don’t like to think that I can’t find you a sovereign now and then, Lewis. I should like to give you a few sovereigns when you get a bit older.’
For a time, that explanation took the edge off my fears. But my father sat there without speaking again. The seats round us were all empty, we were alone on that side of the ground; scraps of paper blew along the grass. My father pulled his bowler hat down over his ears. At last he said, unwillingly: ‘I suppose we’ve got to go home sometime.’
The gates of the ground stood wide open, and we walked along the road, under the chestnut trees. Trains kept passing us, but my father was not inclined to take one. He was quiet, except that once he remarked: ‘The trouble is, Lena takes it all to heart.’
He said it as though he was asking me for support.
As soon as he got inside the house and saw my mother, he said: ‘Well, I’ve seen my first match! There can’t be many people who haven’t seen a cricket match until they’re forty-five–’
‘Bertie,’ said my mother in a cold angry voice. Usually she let him display his simplicity, pretend to be simpler than he was. That night she could not bear it.
‘You’d better have your supper,’ she said. ‘I expect Lewis can do with it.’
‘I expect he can,’ said my father. Nine times out of ten, for he never got tired of the same repartee, he would have said, ‘I expect I can too.’ But he felt the weight of my mother’s suffering.
We sat round the table in the kitchen. There was cold meat, cheese, a bowl of tinned pears, jam tarts, and a jug of cream.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve had much to eat all day,’ said my mother. ‘You’ll want something now.’
My father munched away. I was ashamed to be so hungry, in sight of my mother’s face that night, but I was famished. My mother said she had eaten, but it was more likely that she had no appetite for food. From the back kitchen (the house sprawled about without any plan) came the singing of a kettle on the stove.
‘I’ll have a cup of tea with you,’ said my mother. Neither of them had spoken since we began the meal.
As my father pushed up his moustache and took his first sip of tea, he remarked, as though casually: ‘I did what you told me, Lena.’
‘What, Bertie?’
‘I told Lewis that we’re worried about Myrtle Road.’
‘Worried,’ said my mother. ‘I hope you told him more than that.’
‘I did what you told me.’
‘I’d have kept it from you if I could,’ my mother said to me. ‘But I wasn’t going to have you hear it first from Aunt Milly or someone else. If you’ve got to hear it, I couldn’t abide it coming from anybody else. It had to be from us.’
She had spoken with affection, but most of all with shame and bitter pride.
Yet she had not given up all hope. She was too active for that. The late sun streamed across the kitchen, and a patch of light, reflected from my mother’s cup of tea, danced on the wall. She was sitting half-in, half-out of the shadow, and she seldom looked at my father as she spoke. She spoke in a tight voice, higher than usual but unbroken,
Most of it swept round me. All I gathered was the sound of calamity, pain, disgrace, threats to the three of us. The word ‘petition’ kept hissing in the room, and she spoke of someone called the ‘receiver’. ‘How long can we leave it before he’s called in?’ asked my mother urgently. My father did not know; he was not struggling as she was, he could not take her lead.
She still had plans for raising money. She was ready to borrow from the doctor, to sell her ‘bits of jewellery’, to go to a moneylender. But she did not know enough. She had the spirit and the wits, but she had never had the chance to pick up the knowledge. Despite her courage, she was helpless and tied.
It seemed that Aunt Milly had offered help, had been the only relative to offer practical help. ‘We’re always being beholden to her,’ said my mother. I was baffled, since I was used to taking it for granted that Aunt Milly was a natural enemy.
My father shook his head, He looked cowed, miserable, but calm.
‘It’s no good, Lena. It’ll only make things worse.’
‘You always give up,’ cried my mother. ‘You always have.’
‘It’s no good going on,’ he said with a kind of obstinacy.
‘You can say that,’ she said with contempt. ‘How do you think I’m going to live?’
‘You needn’t worry about that, Lena,’ said my father, in a furtive attempt to console her. ‘I ought to be able to find a job if you give me a bit of time. I’ll bring home enough to keep you and Lewis.’
‘Do you think that is worrying me?’ my mother cried out.
‘It’s been worrying me,’ said my father.
‘We shall make do somehow. I’m not afraid of that,’ said my mother. ‘But I shall be ashamed to let people see me in the streets. I shan’t be able to hold up my head.’
She spoke with an anguish that overawed my father. He sat humbly by, not daring to console her.
Watching their faces in the darkening kitchen, I craved for a distress that would equal my mother’s. I was on the point of acting one, of imitating her suffering, so that she would forget it all and speak to me.
That night, when I went to bed, I took the family dictionary with me. It was not long since I had discovered it, and already I liked not having to be importunate. Now I had a serious use for the dictionary. It was a time not to worry my mother: I had to be independent of her. Through the tiny window of the attic a stretch of sky shone faintly as I entered the room. I could see a few faint stars in the clear night. There was no other light in the attic, except a candle by my bed. I lit it, and before I undressed held the dictionary a foot away, found the word ‘petition’, tried to make sense of what the book said.
The breeze blew the candle wax into a runnel down one side, and I moulded it between my fingers. I repeated the definitions to myself, and compared them with what I remembered my father saying, but I was left more perplexed.
It was still the month of July when I knew that the trouble had swept upon us. My father’s hours became more irregular; sometimes he stayed in the house in the morning and sometimes both he and my mother were out all day. It was on one of these occasions that Aunt Milly found me alone in the garden.
‘I came to see what they were doing with you,’ she said.
I had been playing French cricket with some of the neighbouring children. Now I was sitting in the deckchair under my favourite apple tree. My aunt looked down at me critically.
‘I hope they leave you something to eat,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said, resenting her kindness. Then I offered her my chair: my mother had strong views on etiquette, some of them invented by herself. Aunt Milly rebuffed me.
‘I’m old enough to stand,’ she said. She stared at me with an expression that made me uncomfortable.
‘Have they told you the news?’ she asked.
I prevaricated. She cross-questioned me. I said, feeling wretched, that I knew there was trouble with my father’s business.
‘I don’t believe you know. No wonder everything goes wrong in this house,’ said Aunt Milly. ‘I suppose I oughtn’t to tell you, but it’s better for you to hear it straight out.’
I wanted to beg her not to tell me; I looked up at her with fear and hatred.
Aunt Milly said firmly: ‘Your father has gone bankrupt.’
I was silent. Aunt Milly stood, large, formidable, noisy, in the middle of the garden. In the sunlight her hair took on a sandy sheen. A bee buzzed among the flowers.