David Storey - Saville

‘Is she not coming again?’ she said.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Nay, love,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t cry.’

‘I love her though,’ he said.

‘Nay, love, there are plenty more in the sea,’ she said. ‘There’s not just one person you can love and nobody else.’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, and added, ‘With me, though, I think there is. Just one that I shall ever love,’ he said.

‘Nay, love,’ she said, setting the cup on the floor and sitting on the bed.

His brothers, a moment later, could be heard quarrelling in the room below.

‘You’ll be all right in a couple of days,’ his mother said. ‘Just think of the future, and hold to that.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘You’ll find time heals all wounds, love,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said again and covered his eyes.

‘Is there anything else I can get?’ she said.

‘No.’ He turned aside.

‘Well, then. I’ll go and sort those two out,’ she said.

She got up from the bed. The door was closed.

He lay with his head to the wall, curled up in the narrow space, his arms folded.

His mother’s voice came through the floor from the room below.

The school stood on the outskirts of a village, a large, sprawling, one-storeyed building, red-brick, with tall, metal-framed windows and green-painted doors. A playground surrounded it on three sides, the fourth separated from the main road, which led from the village, by a strip of lawn. Flowers grew in a diamond-shaped bed immediately below the headmaster’s window.

Behind the school an expanse of heathland led away to rows of small terrace houses set at the crest of a hill. A colliery with three massive headgears occupied a deep hollow, also lined with terrace houses, immediately below the school.

Mr Corcoran, the headmaster, was a short, squat figure with close-cropped hair and a heavy, bulbous brow, who, on Colin’s first morning, had called him to his study and said, ‘We don’t teach poetry here. Just matter-of-fact English. They can pick up poetry on their own. We provide them with the tools: their own inclinations provide the rest. We’re like the smithy, if you like, to the pit down there. We provide the means: they’ve got to dig the coal themselves.’

He had no class of his own. On the teachers’ rota he was listed as a ‘supernumerary’, and went from class to class as required. The children he taught the most were in the lower end of the school; it was as unlike King Edward’s as any school he could imagine.

The boys reminded him of Batty and Stringer; the girls were more docile, cantankerous occasionally, like those he had followed round the Park years before with Bletchley. They had no interest, either boys or girls, in anything he had to tell them, accepting a certain amount of work with an air of resignation, leaning on their desks, writing words they could neither understand nor spell.

He was surprised to find Stephens also teaching at the school, the boy with the misshapen back whom he had invariably sat behind at school, and who had once, perhaps out of sympathy, offered to sell him one of any number of stolen pens. He came to the school each day on a motor-bike with a sidecar, his hunched figure clad in leathers, brown and creased, and cracked in huge weals across his back, his head protected by a leather helmet and his face covered with a scarf and goggles. Occasionally he gave Colin lifts to the bus stop in the village.

‘You’ve got to realize these are the working class,’ Stephens said as he went with him one evening to the motor-bike parked at the back of the school. ‘Anything we may have learnt at King Edward’s is of no relevance whatsoever here.’ He waved a leather-clad arm at the sooted windows. One or two boys who had stayed behind were playing football in the yard. Piles of coke were stacked up against the walls. Stephens removed loose pieces from around the wheels of the bike. ‘What might engage them’, he added, ‘is beyond my comprehension. Nothing we’ve learnt, however, either at school or college can be related to anything we encounter here.’

He checked various parts of the bike itself, stepping vigorously on the starter, then swung his small body across the seat. He clipped the strap of his helmet beneath his chin and waited for Colin to climb on behind. His voice droned on through the roar of the engine. Colin couldn’t hear. He held to Stephens’s waist as the bike turned across the yard, narrowly avoiding the boys playing there, and into the road outside.

Occasionally Stephens turned his head: he was still talking, his scarf, which normally covered his face, lowered round his neck. No word came to Colin at all above the rattle of the engine.

They descended quickly towards the pit, and the bus stops which stood, beside concrete barriers, at the colliery entrance. It was here that his father had worked some four years previously.

He got off the bike and put up the foot-rests. Stephens, his head bowed, examined them a moment before setting off.

‘You have to realize’, he added, throttling back the engine and evidently continuing the conversation he’d been engaged with during the descent from the school, ‘that the working class is a relatively recent phenomenon. Two centuries ago, or even less, the thought of large numbers of men gathered together in towns, or in villages, like this, and vast working places, for instance, like this pit, would have been unthinkable. In my view, the working class, as distinct from the peasant class, will soon disappear, replaced by technicians of one sort or another. And all the revolutionary fervour we at one time associated with the class will have disappeared for good. That’s my estimation of the situation.’ He glanced over to the rows of miners waiting at the stops. ‘The working class, I’m afraid, is a temporary phenomenon; and our job, unfortunately, is to distract and, if possible, entertain that temporary phenomenon until it, of its own volition, disappears.’

He revved the engine. The miners looked across at the strange figure, diminutive and misshapen, sprawled on top of the bike.

‘It’s what we’ve been trained to do. And what we’re paid to do. But one can’t help thinking at the same time that it’s a bit of a dead loss. What’s it all add up to? A few more colliers down the pit, a few more split skulls, a few more broken arms, a few more bodies carried out.’

He nodded his head, anxious now for some reply.

‘I don’t see them all like that, I suppose,’ Colin said. ‘As members of a class.’

‘But they’re members of a class before they’re anything ,’ Stephens said. ‘They think, they feel, they diminish, they destroy, they prevaricate, they breed , they interject, they do and are everything first and foremost as members of a class. They are the working class. I mean,’ he added, glancing at Colin slyly from beneath the leather helmet, ‘don’t tell me you see them as human beings!’ He laughed, revving the engine. ‘Good God, they’re as devoid of sensibility as the coal they’ll hew in a few years’ time, as thick as the pit-props in that colliery yonder.’ He laughed again, his teeth showing freshly above the scarf. Then, with a nod, he pulled the scarf up. ‘See you,’ he said through the material and, glancing behind him, turned the bike in the road and set off in the opposite direction.

Colin crossed to the queue of miners and stood there, the only one in clean clothes, waiting for the bus to arrive.

Somebody spat in the road. A man at the front of the queue had laughed. A cloud of cigarette smoke drifted above the heads.

He kept his hands in his pockets and tapped with the toe of his shoe against the piles of dust.