was ashamed at having failed in his work, though knew he hadn’t deserved such a knocking-about either.
Thinking it better to do himself in rather than go back, he walked and ran through the streets and across fields, bitterness and anger holding the pain down, no one wondering why he moved with such speed and purpose. Beyond Old Engine Cottages and into the scrubland of the Cherry Orchard, he slowed down but kept on.
In Robin’s Wood he pushed through the undergrowth and stopped on seeing an older boy on his belly drinking from the brook. Ernest drew some into his stomach as well, splashed his head to cool the pain.
‘What’s up, surry?’ He was a farm youth, smart in his smock and leggings.
‘Nothing.’
‘Somebody been knocking you about, have they? Lost your tongue, eh? Well, next time somebody hits you, hit the devil back.’
The wood was peaceful, but he couldn’t stay, walked on, along a bridlepath to the canal, not much caring where he was going, ran across the lock gates for fear he would fall if he went too slowly. Maybe someone on the puffballs of cloud looked down at him running in his working clothes, exhausted, scruffy, his heart breaking.
Darkness chased him home, everyone gathering for supper. George was washed, and smoking his pipe, silent on their mother asking Ernest how he had got his bruises. He said nothing, so was told to wash himself and sit at the table to eat. It wouldn’t happen again. But it did, often enough, till he was fourteen when, as tall as George, he picked up a hammer and told him to do no more.
Now he could more than hold his own with George, who had turned him into as hard a man as himself, which was something to thank him for. George could still be surly and distant, but believed you had to help one another in the same family, it was human nature, if you didn’t you went under, like many who trod the smooth cobbles to the workhouse with their wives and children, too downhearted to look back.
Passengers getting on and off looked as if they had clinker sandwiches for their dinners every day. Dirty cottages, as dreary as he’d ever seen, squatted between heaps of slag and refuse, and if this was what people called the Black Country, he thought, they could shove it up their backsides; he was glad when the last of Birmingham went, and green fields turned up again.
A middle-aged grey-bearded titchbum of a chap came on board with two workmen in their aprons. Titchbum, who wore a pepper- and-salt suit, waistcoat, cravat, and watch chain with two sovereigns dangling, stabbed the air with opinionated snuff-stained fingers, pontificating thick and fast to the others about some poor bloke called Disraeli, for reasons Ernest couldn’t fathom. Then he went on about the price he could get for a bag of nails at his workshop, the other two men nodding like a couple of donkeys at the Goose Fair.
Titchbum ran out of topics, and turned to Ernest. ‘Where are you going, then?’
Ernest waited till asked again, Titchbum adding ‘sir’ as politeness called for, hardly a gold-plated sir, but Ernest told him: ‘Wales,’ and resumed his looking out of the window.
‘I expect you heard the first time.’ Titchbum’s finger came towards him. ‘Some people don’t know their place,’ he said to his companions. ‘Not like when I was young. And why might you be going to Wales?’
A word not spoken was a word saved, which might later be used with more effect on somebody else, if you were in the mood to let it. One of the few luxuries in life was the right to be silent, and you couldn’t let anybody take it away.
Titchbum’s friends looked at Ernest as if, since they had to truckle to their gaffer, so ought he. ‘I suppose he’s lost his tongue.’ Titchbum had a dry annoying I’m-the-cock-of-the-walk laugh. ‘Like a lot of young men who don’t have one to lose.’
Titchbum’s finger came too close. Words could be stopped from invading the mind, but the finger in his direction was different. Titchbum, as a ‘self-made man’ too much like Ernest’s father to tolerate for long, made him wonder why the fool had taken against him.
‘He must be a country bumpkin.’ Titchbum couldn’t leave well alone, as if he’d got worms, or a canker was eating his stomach. Maybe he’d drunk too much whisky with his breakfast, in which case Ernest would have understood, and ignored him.
‘I’d be quiet, if I was you.’ One of his men had caught Ernest’s stare. ‘He doesn’t work at our place.’
‘Neither will you, for much longer, if you don’t keep your opinion to yourself. Somebody like him doesn’t know when one of his betters is talking to him. I only asked a civil question.’
Ernest got up, fingers spread against the ceiling to steady himself. Titchbum couldn’t have realized his height, and remained sitting as a graven fist came close to his face. ‘Leave me alone, or I’ll throw you off the train.’
He sat to look at a pair of fine cavalry mounts running across a field – a tall trooper standing with a saddle over his arm.
‘It’s Droitwich in a minute,’ Titchbum said. ‘We get off there.’
At least one of them deserved a pasting, though none was worth hanging for. He laid a red-spotted handkerchief across his knees, opened a clasp knife, took cheese, bread, and two hard-boiled eggs from a paper bag, thanking his mother for a hungry man’s banquet, while the train rattled, and puffed its constant whistle. He could talk to other men in the pub for hours and not feel hungry, but on his own he ate as if reluctant to waste time, however much there was to spare in a train. A man who came in at Droitwich tipped his cap and wished him good morning. He received a nod in response; and then silence to Shrub Hill station in Worcester.
George had drilled in the procedure to get to the Great Western depot on Foregate Street. ‘You should be able to keep everything in your noddle and find the way, but be careful not to get drunk on Lea and Perrins Sauce! If you do, and you’re lost, don’t be too proud to ask. I know what you’re like. You’re a stuck-up young bogger. People enjoy it if you ask directions. Gives ’em a chance to do a good turn. So if you aren’t sure, open your haybox.’
Every landmark stood out as clear as the items of steel his father sent him to get from the wholesale merchants as a boy, and woe betide him if he came back with measurements that didn’t tally. He scoffed at George doubting his ability to keep all instructions in mind. George said that Ernest, being so tall, found it hard to see the ground when walking, yet always avoided treading in horse and dog muck. ‘I can’t think how you do it.’ Ernest did, had trained himself to notice what was everywhere with little or no swivel of the eyes.
After the church his usual striding walk carried him up Shrub Hill, across the canal, and forking left into a road called Lowesmoor. No station was hard to find, coal in the nose and smoke above the sheds, always a flow of traffic towards it, shunting noises to pull you the right way, a jumble of carriages and carts on getting there. The smile wasn’t entirely hidden by his moustache: George didn’t know everything, was a bit of an old man at times, too set at forty in the path of their father, something to pity him for.
His throat was as dry as the day, so he ordered a fourpenny pint in the crowded taproom of the Star Hotel, an elbow at ninety degrees so as not to be put off his drink by a nudge from the dinnertime riff-raff who, he supposed, were common labourers from some building job. Near enough to the wall clock, he took out his watch and reminded himself not to be late for the half-past two to Pontypool. The taste of his ale was swill compared to the Nottingham stuff, but he pushed his tankard forward for refilling, which would last him until Wales, where George had promised a very fine bitter – though we’ll see how right he is.
He settled himself into a window seat looking left, as know-all George had advised. When a woman who was sixty if she was a day pushed into the crowded carriage carrying a large basket with a lid, he stood to put it on the rack for her. ‘Are you going far?’
The