David Storey - Saville

He worked with the aid of a miner’s lamp which, like everything else, he had brought with him from the pit. A small, shelllike case, it hung with its pool of yellow light from one of the beams in the ceiling.

With the remaining timber he built four bunks. He built them in pairs, one on top of the other, nailing them together. Across the bed of each bunk he wove the strips of webbing and the bits of conveyor belt, which he cut into strands like thick bandages, nailing them down, so that each bunk looked like a huge, ill-fashioned net.

The last thing he brought home was a tin of grey paint. He painted the bunks with it and the wooden door, which was the last thing he made. It had two bolts on the inside and a lock on the outside. When he had painted it he hung a sign over it which said, ‘Wet Paint. No Entry.’ A week later he took it down and let them look inside.

They went down one afternoon, just after Colin had come home from school and his father had woken from his day-long sleep. The lock too he had brought with him from the colliery and the strange, square, stubby key. ‘Mind the steps,’ he said as they climbed down and he unlocked the door. ‘I’ll just light the lamp.’

Saville stepped into the darkness beyond, feeling with his foot, then went down the steps inside which led into the well of the shelter. For a moment there came the sound of his heavy breathing, then a match was struck. There was a brief glimmer of light, then it went out. ‘God damn and blast,’ he said.

‘Oh, now,’ the mother said. ‘There’s no hurry.’

There was a second flare of light which faded then, after a moment, expanded.

A dull yellow glow lit up the interior of the shelter and Saville said, ‘Watch the steps, then. You can come inside.’

The hole smelled of tar from the wood, of oil, and of the clay. Saville stood in the middle of the pool of light, his head stooped slightly from fear of the ceiling.

Ellen stood with her arms clenched to her, her eyes shining in the light, gazing round.

‘It should be safe,’ she said.

‘As safe as houses,’ Saville said.

‘Yes.’ She gazed up at the bunks.

‘And water-tight,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ She nodded her head.

The lamp swung slowly on the nail which held it to the beam. To Colin his mother and father appeared to be moving, the shadows on their faces swaying in time to the larger shadows which swung behind them on the walls. Their faces dissolved then re-appeared, their eyes glinting with the light one moment then buried in shadow the next.

‘We’ll have the bottom bunks,’ his father said. ‘The lad can have the one up yonder.’

The whole interior rocked to and fro, like a ship, as if they were floating.

‘Let’s hope we won’t have to use it,’ his mother said.

‘Oh, yes,’ Saville said. ‘Well, I suppose we s’ll have to, but let’s hope we don’t.’

As they climbed out he added, ‘I’ll look round for a little stove. We might have to live for days down there, you know.’

‘Mrs Shaw’, his mother said, referring to their neighbour, ‘says they’ll go down the pit if there’s any bombing.’

‘Oh, will they?’ Saville said. ‘And how many can they get down there, and how fast, once it starts?’ And as they came out of the hole and waited for him to extinguish the lamp, he called up, ‘And what if they bomb the shaft, then? How will they get out?’

‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ the mother said.

‘No,’ Saville said. ‘I’m the only one round here who has.’

The day the war started Colin had gone out into the garden in the evening and looked up at the sky. It was grey and cloudy, the sun visible only to the west, above the colliery, through narrow gaps. Behind the clouds, he imagined, aircraft were already waiting. Yet they gave no sign. It was as if the houses, the clouds, the pit, the village had been changed now, re-fashioned, the brick no longer brick, the cloud no longer cloud, merely elements of some new and incomprehensible presence stretching all around.

He watched the sky the next day and the next and yet, despite these changes, nothing happened. It wasn’t until the following spring that anything occurred. Then, at the station less than a mile away, soldiers disembarked from long, blacked-out trains and marched up in small groups to the village. They were tired, some were only half-dressed with overcoats thrown over their vests and shirts. Some had no rifles, others carried packs. When they reached the village they sat down on the pavements, smoking, sitting in the coal-dust, scarcely troubling to look around.

One of them came to stay in the house. He had the only other room, next to the boy’s – a small, cupboard-like space that looked out on to the backs. He was a tall, well-built man like Colin had always imagined soldiers were, towering over his father, standing in front of the fire in his khaki shirt and his rough khaki trousers or, more usually, lying on the bed in his room, staring at the ceiling, smoking, and sometimes singing songs in a light tenor voice.

He brought his rifle with him. It stood leaning by his room door. In the narrow space between the single bed and the wall he laid out his equipment. All of it was tarnished with salt and all the clothes in his pack were damp when he unrolled it.

Most of the space in his pack was taken up by three large tins. Two were full of sugar which he gave to his mother, who put them in the cupboard by the fire to dry. The third was full of medals, metal buttons, and money.

In the evening when the soldier came back from the pub he would sit at the kitchen table and count the money out, arranging it in neat piles, silver and copper-coloured, then laughing, and leaning back and saying, ‘If I was a Jerry I’d be a rich man now.’

He often sat by the fire, gazing at the blaze, and sometimes he would take the boy on his knee and from his breast pocket, where he kept a wallet, take out a photograph of a woman and three children, pointing at each one with his finger, which was thick and nicotine-stained, and tell him their names and what they were doing when he last saw them. He came from some other part of the country and had an accent which at times Colin found hard to understand. ‘Oh, don’t worry about the way I talk, boy,’ the soldier would say, laughing, looking up at Saville. ‘I come from a place where they go about with nothing on.’

He would often go for walks with his father and sometimes his father would take him to look at the shelter, unlocking the door and letting him go inside, lighting the lamp, the soldier gazing round, trying the bunks at his father’s insistence, lying sprawled out, his head cradled in his hands.

‘It’s as safe as houses,’ his father said.

‘More,’ the soldier would say, laughing, ‘if I had a guess.’

When they went for walks the two men would go off down the street with their hands in their pockets, coming back hours later with a bunch of flowers or chewing a piece of grass. ‘Oh, don’t worry about me,’ the soldier would say if they were late and the meal spoilt. ‘By all rights I should be dead, so anything’ll do for me. Just cough it up.’

Each morning he went into the street and with the other soldiers marched up and down. Children followed them on the pavements. On Sundays the soldiers walked in groups in the fields or down the road to the station, where they would sit on a wall by the bridge, gazing at the lines and smoking.

One day the soldier called Colin into his room and from his pack brought out several bullets. There were five of them, fastened together at the base. The cartridges were copper-coloured, the bullets silver. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘You have them. I’ve a lot more here. He brought out several more, laying them on the bed. ‘You can have the gun as well,’ he said. ‘I don’t want it.’