David Storey - Saville

He came from a large family farther along the terrace: there were seven brothers, all with red hair. ‘Our kids’ll bash you,’ Batty would say whenever his authority was questioned and he would indicate the windows of his crowded home.

The centre of Batty’s life was the hut he had built in the Dell, half a mile away. It stood between the high, fenced walls of the gasworks on one side and the sewage beds on the other.

After the birth of the baby Colin spent a lot of his time in the hut. He would go down there after school, or in the dinner hour. Sometimes, getting up early and hearing his mother feeding the baby in the bedroom, he would get dressed and go out, taking a piece of bread with him. His mother would sometimes call out and when he went in she would be sitting up in bed, the baby held over her shoulder. She would ask him if he would like some tea, straighten his tie with her one free hand and look at his ears and neck. His father worked mornings now and got up like Mr Shaw next door, though an hour sooner because of the ride. Sometimes when he came home from school he found his mother in bed, white-faced, her cheeks sunken, his father busy in the kitchen with a brush, or washing-up.

‘It’s all this getting up at night to feed him,’ he would say. ‘She’ll be all right once he settles.’

‘Can I go out?’ he would ask him.

‘Yes,’ he’d say. ‘Just clear this bit up first.’

In the hut, when Batty wasn’t there, he usually found Stringer. He was Batty’s deputy: he was small and squat with black hair, and whenever they were alone he would sit in the armchair normally reserved for Batty and bite his nails, gazing with an abstracted look at the glow of an old oil lamp, which stood on a table immediately inside the door and, on hearing the slightest noise outside, rushing for his gun which he always brought with him.

It was an air-gun Batty himself had given him and which, once he was in the hut, he fired at anything that moved. One night by mistake he had fired at his own father, who had come to fetch him, a man as squat and as black as Stringer himself. Mr Stringer had taken the gun from his son, bent it in two, first one way then the other, then finally wrenched the halves apart. The next day, however, Batty had provided Stringer with another. ‘I’m glad he broke it,’ Stringer said. ‘That o’d ’un wasn’t any good.’ Outside the door he would hang up the birds he had shot, their feet strung up to a rafter, the blood collecting in beads around their beaks and eyes.

Stringer didn’t like the hut a great deal. But for Batty he would gladly have moved it to another spot. There was always the smell of the gasworks lying there, mingling with the smell of the sewage pens. ‘The pong’s all right,’ Batty told him whenever he complained. ‘I picked it because of that. It’s a good defence.’ Beyond the sewage pens were the swamps. Tall reeds obliterated the view in every direction. If anyone entered they had to walk on the piles of bricks and sods of earth that at some time in the past Batty had placed there. Amongst the bulrushes were still, brown pools about which Batty had invented stories. Into them bodies had fallen never to be retrieved. They had no bottoms. They opened out directly into the centre of the earth. It was here that Stringer hunted for rats, hanging them up by their tails along with the birds he had shot.

Once or twice, when Stringer was busy elsewhere, Colin would be left on his own in the hut. He would light the lamp and sit in Batty’s chair, the door barred, one of the windows which were normally shuttered open so that he could see anyone approaching along the path.

There was a small stove in the hut on which Batty made cocoa or cooked chips in a broken pan. On the walls hung bows and arrows, the arrows tipped with rusty wire. There was also a cupboard which Batty kept locked and inside which he kept his secret possessions – a rope with a noose on the end, a tin called his ‘In-it’ tin, for no one knew what was inside, and a hammer.

It gave Colin a dull ache to sit alone in the hut, looking round at the wooden walls and the weapons, listening anxiously for any sound or signal from outside. Often he was glad even to see Stringer.

‘What do you come down here for?’ Stringer would ask him: there were two or three years difference between their ages.

‘To look after it,’ he would tell him.

‘I mean,’ Stringer would say, ‘why do you come so much?’

‘I don’t mind,’ he said.

‘Not even the pong?’

‘No,’ he said.

Sometimes he would add, ‘In any case, there might be an attack.’

‘Aye,’ Stringer would say, looking at him slyly.

An attack was what Batty most longed for. It was in anticipation of an attack that all his weapons and the various booby traps outside had been prepared. The latter were a series of deep holes covered by grass that they had to walk around when they arrived.

The attack too would bring a light to Stringer’s eyes and invariably, when it was mentioned, he would check his gun, pushing in a pellet if by some rare chance it was unloaded, and go to the window, narrowing his eyes to peer out. A pair of binoculars, another of Batty’s possessions, facilitated his watch.

Yet the attacks never came; the only intruders who approached the hut were miners from the Club and Institute who came to relieve themselves behind the wall as they struggled home at night.

His father was a little sceptical of the time he spent with Batty. ‘Nearly all their lads have been in prison,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to get mixed up with that. What do you do in that hut, anyway?’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Play around.’

‘If he asks you to go thieving you better tell me straight away.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘We’ve enough worries with your mother being unwell, without us adding another.’

Yet in the evening his father would go into the field at the back of the house with Batty’s father and some of his sons, and sometimes Stringer’s father and Mr Shaw, and play cricket. The women would come out into the yards to watch, their arms folded under their aprons.

The men would set up two sticks for a wicket, Batty’s father – who was tall like Batty and almost completely bald – swearing at his sons whenever he was out, his own father laughing, standing with his hands on his hips, his head thrust back, or sometimes bowling, running up with a slow, stiff stride and flicking the ball out of the back of his hand. Whenever one of the men hit the ball towards the houses they would call out, as if a tree were falling, and if a window were broken they would run off and hide behind the fences and in the doorways before coming back, laughing, to hand out the money. Later, as the sun set, they would lie in the grass by the worn wicket, talking, their wives calling from the doorsteps as it grew dark.

‘Toil and trouble,’ his father would say, getting up, although his mother never called him. ‘Come on, Colin,’ he would tell him. ‘Time for bed.’

‘How’s thy young ’un going?’ they’d ask him.

‘Oh, fair and away,’ he’d say.

He’d built a cradle for the baby from an orange box and painted it grey, like the bunks in the shelter, with colliery paint. It stood in their bedroom on a wooden chair. The box had been hexagonal in shape and his father had removed three of the sides, the baby lying inside on a pillow and rocked slightly, whenever it cried, from side to side.

It was as if the baby represented a subtraction from his mother’s life, a piece of her that had been taken away, without anything to replace it. She was so much thinner, and gave all her attention to the child. Sometimes when he went in to see her in the morning she would call out, ‘Is that you, Colin?’ even when she knew they were alone in the house and he would stand at the door waiting until she added, ‘It’s all right now, love. You can come in.’