David Storey - Saville

‘So have I. They’ll be all right at home,’ the soldier said.

‘Nay, I mu’n stay with them, I suppose,’ he said.

He saw the glow in the soldier’s eyes; there was a boldness there that frightened him, a certainty of where he was going and who he was. It filled him with dismay. He felt it was cowardice that held him back.

He gazed over at his wife.

‘Think it over,’ the soldier said. ‘I’ll be down again tomorrow.’

When he went back to the chairs he felt the warmth of the holiday drain away, the coldness and the dampness of the colliery coming back.

‘What did he want?’ his wife had said.

‘Oh, nothing,’ he said. He shook his head.

‘He seemed improved a lot’, she said, ‘since we last knew him. Do you remember that slouch he had? And the way he never washed.’

‘It’s done a lot for him, I suppose,’ he said.

He gazed over at the sea; he felt cut off. The boy dug at his hole; his wife, reading the paper, sat beside him.

They didn’t go down to the same beach again: each morning they took a bus round the promontory of the castle and found a spot in the bay to the north; the wind was slightly fresher here, the sand less crowded. There were still the donkeys, and the Punch and Judy, and the roundabout, and they could still see the boats sailing from the harbour. Above them, more sternly, loomed the castle; it was all a good preparation, he felt, for going back.

Shortly after returning from the holiday, Colin came home from school one afternoon and found his father digging at the end of the garden. Saville had cut off the grass into neat sods which he had rolled up and stacked to one side. Underneath, in the grey soil, he had begun to dig a hole.

It was quite large, the sides measured out with pieces of string fastened to pegs in the ground. The soil he threw carefully away from the sides of the hole, mounding it up in smooth piles, occasionally climbing out of the hole to shovel back the edge.

A little lower down the soil had turned to clay. It was pale yellow and came out in great clods which Saville slapped down on the pile with a great deal of groaning, shaking the spade from side to side to loosen its hold. Sometimes, his face red and streaming, he climbed out to slide the clay off with his foot. As the hole grew deeper the clay darkened. It was occasionally flecked with orange and stuck to the father’s boots and his clothes. Now when he came home from school in the afternoon all he would see were his father’s head and shoulders, occasionally stooping and disappearing, the spade flying up behind him in the air.

Later there would be nothing there at all. He only knew if his father were in the hole when a piece of clay came flying out, landing sometimes on the pile, sometimes on the beds of cabbages and peas the other side. When he stood at the edge and looked down his father would be an almost diminutive figure stooping to the spade, pushing it in with his foot, forcing down the handle, tugging it free then flinging up the clay above his head. His face would be crimson, his eyes shrunken, and every few minutes he would wipe the sleeve of his shirt against his forehead. A little ladder had been propped up against the side to enable him to climb in and out.

Sometimes when he looked in he would find his father resting on the spade, leaning back against the side of the hole, smoking, his eyes fixed on the bottom or the opposite side as if, despite its depth and width, he were planning some further extension. ‘When it comes it’ll come,’ he would say whenever a neighbour leaned over the fence or came, smiling, to examine the hole, peering down on to the top of his head.

The neighbour would look up then, at his own garden, at his house, and nod, frowning.

The sides of the hole were very clean and neat, the separate blows of the spade clearly imprinted. At the bottom pools of water had formed and the clay itself had turned to a dull crimson.

In the end, the hole itself had got too deep: he had to shout for someone to come and help him over the edge from the top of the ladder.

The next morning he brought home several pieces of wood from work. They were long and flat. He wheeled them home roped to his bike. With them, too, he brought strips of conveyor belt, pieces of webbing and piles of nails which, the moment he came in, he unloaded from his pockets on to the table. They lay there amongst the cups and plates, glistening, the fresh smell of wood and rubber mingling with the more familiar smell of coal from his clothes and the even more familiar smell of cooking.

‘You’ve never walked all that way?’ the mother said.

‘I have,’ Saville said, sitting down at the table, his eyes reddened and still black with dust. ‘It’s surprising what you see when you’re not riding. I must have pushed that lot up every hill in sight.’ He indicated the pile of wood which he’d stacked up in the yard outside. ‘I go like the wind down the other side.’

An image of his father came to Colin’s mind, of him pushing the bike up the winding lanes that lay between the village and the colliery, and of him sitting astride the wood strapped to the cross-bar and riding down the other side, his flat cap pulled over his eyes, his short legs dangling above the roadway, his coat tails flapping out behind. He could even imagine the sound of the wind in his father’s ears, and the soft hissing of the tyres under their heavy load.

‘I’ll break my neck one morning,’ Saville said, laughing, his mouth red and glistening as he lay back. ‘I s’ll. Don’t any of you be surprised.’

He brought the wood home each morning, staining it with creosote then nailing it together.

He built four walls, kneeling on the timber as he hammered the pieces together, the sole of his boots turned up, the studs shining, the nails hanging from his mouth like teeth.

Sometimes he hit his thumb, which was thick and curled, and for a while he would lean on his heels, his head turned up, his eyes closed, his mouth full of nails, grimacing.

When he had built the walls he lowered them into the hole, the two long walls held in by the shorter ends. Then he nailed several beams across the top to fasten them together.

In the mornings now he brought back other shapes roped to his bike. There were pieces of tarpaulin, black and smelling of tar, and bricks.

He brought the bricks in a pannier fastened to the back of his saddle, in his knapsack and, once or twice, in his overcoat pockets until they tore at the weight. In the evenings, when he set off for his night shift, he would string his knapsack with his tin of food and his bottle of tea over one shoulder and an empty knapsack for the bricks over the other, setting off with a wave, his red light visible to Colin and his mother long after he himself had disappeared.

He built a roof over the hole, wedging the wooden beams into the earth on either side, and across them nailing planks of wood.

Over the planks he laid the tarpaulin, tacking it down and covering it with blocks of clay. Over the clay he threw the grey soil and on top the grass sods, yellowing now, which had originally covered the spot. ‘It’ll be invisible from the air,’ he said, ‘don’t worry,’ as if, when the bombing started, this was the one place where the enemy would come and look.

He built a flight of steps down one side of the hole, each step supported by a wedge of timber and neatly paved with bricks. Inside the hole itself he laid a floor of bricks, mixing the cement and the mortar in the street outside and carrying it in buckets through the house along a line of newspapers laid down from the front door to the back, disappearing down the steps into the hole from where, reddened and sweating, he would emerge a little later, hurrying back.