David Storey - Saville

His father, finally, with Reagan’s help, had got a job at the local pit. The move, however, wasn’t a happy one. Now that he found himself working amongst the village men he began to feel uneasy, exposed. Promoted to a deputy, and responsible for an entire face during each of his shifts, he was earning less now than he had, with overtime, as a miner, less even than the men he superintended. He came home from each shift more exhausted than when he’d had a six-mile cycle ride at the end of his work. He would lie in the kitchen, his head sunk down in the corner of a chair, his arms splayed out, his mouth open, his eyes still dark with dust, groaning in his sleep, his mother afraid to disturb him, Steven and Richard creeping cautiously about the house, his mother calling, with a peculiar despair, whenever they made a sound.

The house, too, in some way suffered. It was as if the substance of the pit were brought home each day: some part of it was emptied out, the dust, the darkness, a blackness descending on the house, his father’s exhausted figure slumped there as its pivot, his mother and his brothers and himself moving furtively around. There was little communication between them now, the silences broken by his mother’s calls, his father’s exhausted breathing, deepening finally to a snore, by the odd whisper of his brothers, as, solemnly, their eyes wide, they crept cautiously to the stairs or through the door, their voices, in sudden relief, calling in the yard outside.

‘Nay, what do I care what he does?’ his father said when, later that year, they discussed his prospects of taking a scholarship. ‘He’s to stay on another year if he wants to go to college.’

‘He can go to college next year,’ his mother said. ‘To train as a teacher. It’s for the university that he has to stay on another year,’ she added.

‘Whichever’s quickest road to get him working,’ his father said. ‘As long as he doesn’t go near that pit.’

Gannen came one evening to see his parents. He offered to go down to the bus stop to meet him, having worked out the probable time of the master’s arrival, but his father had added, ‘It’s not royalty we’re expecting. Just let him come like anybody else.’

‘Nobody ever does come,’ his mother had said. ‘If people did come more often perhaps it wouldn’t seem such a terrible mess.’

‘Mess? What mess?’ his father said, looking round at the bare floor, the chairs from which the springs protruded, the faded cloth on the table, the soot-stained walls. ‘He’s not coming to inspect us, you know. He’s coming to give advice.’

Yet, when Gannen came, it was his mother who had answered the door, his father standing in the kitchen, his head inclined to catch his introduction, going out finally to the front room where Gannen had been installed. The room, if anything, was barer than the kitchen. After sitting in its draughts and relative coldness for several minutes it was Gannen himself who had suggested they might move through to the kitchen. ‘Oh, let’s sit in the living-room,’ he said, bestowing on it a title which reassured his mother, for she quickly led the way, holding back the door. ‘Oh, you needn’t turf those out for me,’ Gannen said when she began to usher Steven and Richard into the room they’d just vacated.

Gannen sat down heavily, his large figure seemingly pinioned in the chair, his arms spread out over the protruding springs. ‘I didn’t know there were two other Savilles at home,’ he said. ‘More recruits for the First Team,’ he added, glancing at Colin.

‘Oh, they’ve plenty of muscle on, if nothing else,’ his father said, flushing now and sitting on an upright chair beside the table.

His mother made some tea. It was only as Gannen was leaving, however, an hour later, that his father had said, ‘Well, then, Mr Gannen. What do you really think?’

‘I think Colin should go to university,’ the master said. He stood in the doorway leading to the street, gazing back into the lighted passage.

‘Aye,’ his father said, his look abstracted, as if in fact the master himself weren’t there at all and he was listening to some voice in another room.

‘If there’s anything I can do’, Gannen said, ‘just let me know.’ He leant back in the passage to shake his mother’s then his father’s hand.

‘I’ll walk down to the stop with you, if you like. I’ll show him the way,’ Colin added to his father.

‘If it’s no trouble,’ Gannen said, pausing now on the step outside, and evidently pleased at the thought of having some company. ‘It took me quite a while to find, in any case,’ he added.

It was already dark. A yellow moon hung over the colliery, outlining the heap against a bank of cloud. They walked in silence for a while. The air was misty. Their feet echoed between the houses.

‘Do you think they’ll let you go, then?’ Gannen said.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve no idea.’

‘I realize the difficulties, of course,’ the master said as if, already, he sensed he’d failed. ‘They’ve done well getting you as far as they have,’ he added.

Other figures, shrouded against the sharpness of the air, passed by them beneath the lamps.

‘Ideally, what would you like to be?’ the master said.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. He added, ‘A poet.’

Gannen smiled. A moment later he looked across. ‘And have you written any poetry?’

‘Not much.’

‘But some.’

‘A little.’

‘You don’t look like a poet,’ he said, something of his classroom manner returning. ‘Poets I always thought were rather delicate chaps. At least, the poets I knew always were. I never had much time for them myself.’ Then, as if he suspected he might have been too hard, he added, ‘It seemed to me, and invariably proved to be the case, that it was a stage they went through. Most of them were decent chaps. They soon settled down to teaching, in one form or another, like everyone else.’ He laughed. His voice rang out clearly in the village street. ‘In any case, there’s not much money attached to that. It’s scarcely a profession. What would you do to earn an income?’

‘In the end I’d teach,’ he said.

‘Do you compose poetry in the rugger scrum?’ he said, pleased with this confession.

‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s not much time for that.’

‘I’ve noticed a certain dilatoriness at times, I must confess,’ the master said, looking up and adding, ‘Oh, this is the stop is it? I wouldn’t have known,’ pointing down the street the way they’d come. ‘I got off down there before, I think.’

When the bus finally came Gannen put out his hand. ‘I hope you’ll point out the advantages to your parents,’ he said, ‘ without mentioning the poetry. I’d just stick to the professional aspects, if I were you,’ not looking back as he stepped aboard the bus, making his way to the front downstairs and sitting in his seat as if he had forgotten about his visit already.

He played regularly in the First Fifteen that year, represented the school at athletics, and forwent his Easter on the farm to study for the June examinations. It was one of the happiest periods of his life. Even the football he found absorbing, encouraged by the girls who came to watch, Audrey and Marion, and the quiet-faced Margaret, who invariably stood at the edge of their noisy crowd. Even the two afternoons of training he’d begun to enjoy, Gannen instructing the forwards, and Carter, the physical training master, the backs. The forwards played amongst themselves, scrumming with the Second Fifteen, breaking, practising rushes, line-outs, pushing for what seemed hours against the metal scrum-machine, Gannen calling, ‘Lower, lower: back straight: thrusting upwards,’ pushing his muscular arm between the bodies, pressing heads, lifting kicking feet into correct positions, while, from across the field, would come Carter’s cries, Stafford distributing the ball or, later, with one other boy, practising place kicks against the distant posts.