Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Her husband Tom died two years after that, and that took all the wind out of May’s sails. Their daughter Lou was grown and married now, and May had grandchildren, two little girls. May wasn’t a deathmonger anymore. All that she asked for was a peaceful life, after the upsets and the scares she’d had. It didn’t seem much, though that was before they started talking of another war.

Aspidery piano music picked its way in cold mist from the Abington Street library to the workhouse in the Wellingborough Road. His feet like ice inside his work boots, Tommy Warren took a last pull on his Kensitas then flicked the glowing dog-end to the ground, a tiny fireball tumbling away in marbled dark, smashed into sparks on frosted paving stones.

The distant, tinkling notes were creeping from Carnegie Hall above the library and out through this November night, their sound a string of icicles. Its source was Mad Marie, marathon concert pianist, booked at the hall that evening, giving one of her recitals which might last for hours. Days. Tom was surprised that he could hear her right up here outside St. Edmund’s Hospital, the former workhouse, where he stood while waiting for his wife Doreen, somewhere inside the institution, to give birth to their first child. Though faint and unidentifiable, the veering tune was audible despite the distance and the muffling fog.

There wasn’t much traffic to speak of in the Wellingborough Road that time of night … it was about one in the morning as he reckoned it … so it was very quiet, but Tommy still couldn’t make out which number Mad Marie was at that moment grinding through. It might have been “Roll Out The Barrel” or conceivably “Men Of The North, Rejoice”. Considering how late it was, Tommy supposed that Mad Marie could well be suffering from lack of sleep, swinging from one piece to the other without any real idea what she was playing, or of which town she was in.

It all reminded him of something, standing here in swirling blackness listening to an old song come from far away, but he was too preoccupied just now to think what it might be. All that was on his mind was Doreen, back there in the hospital behind him, halfway through a labour that looked set to carry on for ages yet, like Mad Marie and whatever the racket was that she was bashing out. Tom doubted that it had been music swelling his wife’s belly for these last few months, though from the bagpipe skirl that Doreen had been making when he heard her some ten minutes back, it might as well have been. The row Doreen had made was probably more tuneful than the swerving jangle Mad Marie was currently accomplishing, but it made Tommy wonder what kind of a melody had been composed inside his wife during her pregnancy, a soppy ballad or a stirring march: “We’ll Gather Lilacs” or “The British Grenadiers”? A girl or boy? He didn’t mind as long as it weren’t one of Mad Marie’s bizarre improvisations, where nobody had the first idea what it was meant to be. As long as it weren’t the men of the north rolling out barrels, or the British Grenadiers gathering lilacs. Just as long as it weren’t a conundrum. There’d been far too many of them in the Warrens and the Vernalls as it was, across the years, a great deal more than their fair share. Just this once, couldn’t him and Doreen have a normal kid who wasn’t mad or talented or both? And if there were a certain number of such problem children to be divvied out by fate, couldn’t some other family somewhere take their turn at shouldering the burden? People who had ordinary relatives just weren’t pulling their weight, as far as Tommy was concerned.

A solitary big grey car shoving piss-puddle headlight beams before it surfaced briefly from the big grey cloud beneath which all Northampton seemed to be submerged, and then was gone again. Tom thought it might have been a Humber Hawk, but wasn’t sure. He didn’t really know much about motors, except to his way of mind there were too many of the things about these days, and he could only see it getting worse. The horse and cart was on its way out, and it wasn’t coming back. Where Tommy worked in Phipps’s brewery at Earl’s Barton they still kept the old drays, all the great big shire mares steaming, snorting — more like sweaty railway engines than they were like animals. But then you’d got the bigger companies like Watney’s, they’d got lorries now and were delivering right across the country, whereas Phipps’s was still local. Tom could see them getting squeezed out given ten more years of it, if they weren’t careful. There might not be much of work or horseflesh by then to be found around Earl’s Barton. Tom supposed it wasn’t what you’d call the best or most secure of times for him and Doreen to have brought a kid into the world.

He screwed his Brylcreemed head round to regard the workhouse forecourt he was standing in and thought that, to be fair, it was a long shot from the worst of times as well. The war was finished, even if there was still rationing, and in the eight years since VE Day there’d been hopeful signs that England was back on the up again. They’d voted Winnie Churchill out, almost before the bombs had finished dropping, so Clem Atlee could get on with putting everything to rights. Granted, at present they’d got Churchill back again, saying as how he wanted to de-nationalise the steelworks and the railways and all that, but in them years after the war there’d been a lot of good work done for once, so things could never be rolled back the way they’d been. They’d got the National Health now, National Insurance, all of that, and kids could go to school for nothing until they were, what, seventeen or eighteen? Or longer, if they passed exams.

It wasn’t like when Tommy had won his mathematics scholarship and could have theoretically gone to the Grammar School, except that Tommy’s mam and dad, old Tom and May, could never have afforded it. Not with the books, the uniform, the kit, and most especially the big gap in the family income that Tom’s staying on at school would have entailed. He’d had to leave at thirteen, get a job, start bringing a pay packet home with him on Friday night. Not that he’d ever for a minute been resentful, or had even idly wondered what life might have been like if he’d taken up the scholarship. Tommy’s first duty had been to his family, so he’d done what he had to and got on with it. No, he weren’t brooding over his lost chances. He was just glad that things would be better for his little lad. Or lass. You never knew, although if he were honest Tom was hoping it would be a boy.

He paced a little, up and down outside the hospital, and stamped his feet to make sure that the blood was circulating. Every breath became an Indian smoke-signal on meeting the chill air, and just across the street the black bulk of St. Edmund’s Church thrust up like a ghost story from the fog. The tilting headstones in its walled yard poked above the mist, stone bed-boards in an outdoor dormitory, with damp and silvery eiderdowns of vapour spread between them. The tall midnight yews were line-posts where the wringing grey sheets of cold haze had been hung out to dry. No moon, no stars. From the direction of town centre came a faltering refrain that sounded like a Varsity Rag waved at an Old Bull and Bush.

The reason he’d prefer a boy was that his brothers and his sister all had boys already that would carry on the name. His older little sister Lou, six years his senior and nearly a foot his junior, had got two girls as well, but her and her chap Albert had produced a youngest boy, it must be getting on twelve year ago. Their Walt, Tom’s younger brother and the pride of the black market, he’d got married not long after the war’s end and had two lads already. Even young Frank, he’d beat Tommy to the altar and had had a son only the year before. If Tommy, who was after all the eldest brother, hadn’t had a kid of some kind by the age of forty, then he’d never hear the last of it from May, his mam. May Minnie Warren, leathery old so-and-so who’d got a voice like a dockworker’s fist, with which she’d no doubt pummel Tom to death if him and Doreen didn’t get a shift on and extend the Warren line. Tommy was frightened of his mam, but so was everyone.