David Storey - Saville

‘Of women?’ His father had laughed, gazing at his mother in amazement. ‘If he was frightened of women,’ he said, still laughing, ‘he’d be on his knees afore any man. And he’s never been that. Not as long as I’ve known him.’

His mother nodded but answered nothing back.

In fact, having heard this excuse, his father’s regard for Reagan was momentarily restored: he even went across the backs to talk to him on a Sunday morning after Mrs Reagan and Michael had gone off to church, sitting in the porch and laughing at the various things they read in the paper, occasionally joined by Mr Batty or Mr Stringer and a little later setting off for the Institute in a noisy group.

It was from Mr Reagan that the idea sprang that Colin should sit for the examinations. The opportunity to go to the grammar school in the city came the following year, and if he failed the examination a second opportunity occurred the year after. If he failed again he would go to the secondary-modern school at the other end of the village, from which the pit recruited most of its miners.

‘It’s as Reagan says,’ his father told them. ‘Do you want him to be like me or like Reagan, getting paid for sitting on his backside all day? I know what I’d do.’

‘Mr Reagan works,’ his mother said. ‘Sitting down is a different kind of work, that’s all.’

‘Ah, well,’ his father said. ‘You’re the one that knows about education.’ His mother, unlike his father, had stayed at school until she was fifteen. In a cupboard upstairs was a certificate carefully filled in with copper-plate script testifying to her efficiency at English, nature study and domestic science.

It was his father, however, who set him his homework, coming round the table whenever his mother had suggested some subject he might do, saying, ‘He’ll never learn nought from that,’ taking the pencil and setting his own small, square hand, bruised, its nails blackened with coal, firmly in the middle of the paper and across the top, with much snorting and panting, printing in capital letters the subject of a composition: ‘A FOOTBALL MATCH’, ‘SUNDAY SCHOOL’, ‘A RIDE ON A BUS’. Sometimes he would stand by the chair, waiting for him to start, stooping forward slightly to follow the words as he began, sometimes stepping back, whistling through his teeth until, finally, he called out, ‘If you take all that time to begin, by God, the exam’ll be over before you start.’

‘He has to think it out,’ his mother would tell him. ‘In any case, standing over him won’t be any help.’

‘And what if I don’t stand over him? He’ll never get done at all.’ Yet he would step back then, perhaps pick Steven up, who was walking now and swing him over his head, saying. ‘When you get started we’ll see the sparks fly. You wait, we’ll show them. By God, I’m sure of that.’

Steven had blue eyes, like his father, but his face was like his mother’s, round and smooth, with the same turned-up nose. He had much the same expression as his mother, as if inside there were a shy, almost silent person peering out. He’d begun to speak and his mother, whenever she handed him an object, would repeat its name several times, nodding her head at each one. Occasionally when Steven was out of the house and playing in the yard with the younger children from down the terrace he would talk quite freely, running to and fro on his short, slightly bowed legs, shouting, ‘It’s mine. It’s mine,’ or, to some much older boy, ‘Stop it. Stop it.’

‘Can you say Colin?’ his mother would ask him.

‘Colin,’ he would say, looking up with a frown.

His father usually had to get ready for work as Colin was finishing the essays, looking over his shoulder while he pulled on his trousers or his shirt to see how much of the page he had covered with his slow, careful scrawl, or if he had turned over to the other side. ‘Two sides,’ he’d say. ‘They won’t give any marks for half a dozen lines.’

‘Leave him alone,’ his mother would tell him.

‘Don’t worry,’ his father said. ‘You won’t educate anybody by leaving them alone.’

He’d brought a red pencil home from the pit office to mark the essays and as he waited he would sharpen it impatiently over the fire, turning round then and saying, ‘Are you ready? I’ve to be off to work in half an hour,’ looking over Colin’s shoulder then at the clock to say, ‘I should leave it there, then. End of the sentence will do,’ sitting down in the chair as soon as Colin himself had stood up and adding, ‘Don’t go away. I want you to take notice of these mistakes.’ He screwed up his eyes slightly to read, his mouth pulled down at one side as he puzzled over the spelling, occasionally looking up and saying, ‘How do you spell “fair”, Ellen?’ and when his mother had told him, scarcely looking up from her own tasks, her ironing, or her washing-up, he would say, ‘Isn’t there an “e” in it somewhere?’ adding impatiently when she explained, ‘All right, then. All right. I only asked. I don’t want a lecture.’

‘Do you want to get it right or not?’ she’d ask him.

‘All right, then,’ he would say, pressing the point of his red pencil more firmly into the paper, going carefully over each of the words he had written himself and at the end of each sentence, if he approved of it, giving it a little tick. ‘That’s right. And that’s right,’ he would say to himself.

He took a great pleasure in marking the paper with the red crayon and when he had finished he would write in the space at the bottom some comment he thought appropriate: ‘Excellent’, ‘Could do better’, ‘Attention not on your work’, or, ‘Will have to work harder for examinations’. Beside it he would add some mark out of ten. On principle he never gave him less than three and seldom more than seven. Finally, when all this had been completed, he would draw in a large tick, beginning it at the bottom left-hand corner and stretching it across almost as far as the top right, and beside it printing, with something of a flourish, his full initials, ‘H.R.S.’, Harry Richard Saville.

Later, when he had grown tired of reading Colin’s stories and compositions, he brought home several mathematics books borrowed from a man at work. Inside the front cover of each one was printed in pencil, ‘Sam Turner HIS book’, and beside it, in one or two instances, the figure of a woman which his father had tried unsuccessfully to rub out.

The books dealt with subjects he had scarcely touched on at school, fractions and decimals, figures split up on the page into little parts, and since his father didn’t understand them either he would read the book first himself, sitting in the easy chair by the fire, a piece of paper on his knee, copying out figures over which he coughed and dropped the ash of his cigarette, rubbing them out and groaning, and quite frequently stamping his foot, slamming it against the floor and rubbing his head in exasperation.

‘Here, let me have a look,’ his mother would tell him.

‘Damn it all, woman,’ he would say, covering the book up or snatching it away. ‘Am I supposed to be doing it or aren’t I?’

‘Well, you’re supposed to be,’ she’d say.

‘Well, then let me get on with it and stop shoving in.’

She would go back to her work and he would continue to groan and stamp his feet, finally getting up and coming round the table to set out the figures on the squared colliery paper on which, much earlier, he had drawn out his inventions, scratching his head over each one as if, even as he wrote them, he wondered if they might have any resolution.

He would then copy down the same problem himself and take it back across the table, working it out as quickly as he could, whispering under his breath, rubbing out, groaning, looking up to ask Colin if he had finished and going back to his own with relief when he told him he hadn’t. When he came round to mark the sums he always stood beside him, never asking to sit down, as if at any moment he expected himself to be corrected, stooping over his shoulder or occasionally going back to his own version on the other side of the table to stare down at the figures before coming back yet again to mark down a tick or a cross.