Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Except for Jack, of course. Tommy recalled, with a queer shudder of appalled nostalgia, how the Warren family’s Christmas ritual had been that first year after Jack was gone. The family had gathered in the front room, just as they’d done for as long as anybody could remember. Tommy’s mam had leadenly retrieved the fancy China piss-pot — easily a foot across, having been manufactured in a time of bigger arses — from its perch atop that old glass-fronted cabinet they used to have. While Frank and Walt and Lou and Tommy had looked on, their mam had filled the guzunder up to its rim with a grotesque and undiscriminating mix of spirits; drainings from the staggeringly varied complement of bottles to be found around their heavy-drinking household. Brimming with a shimmering pale-gold aggregate of whiskey, gin, rum, vodka, brandy and possibly turpentine for all that anybody knew, the glazed white chalice, hopefully unused, had been solemnly passed around the family circle, this accomplished only with both hands and some degree of difficulty. It was obviously impossible to drink from a receptacle that had quite clearly never been designed with that function in mind, at least without a certain drenching of the shirtfront, and this spillage had been worse with every circuit of the front room and of the increasingly incapable and uncoordinated individuals gathered there. On all the previous occasions when this ritual had been enacted there had been a kind of glory in its wretchedness: it had been somehow comical, and brave, and as if they were proud of being the uproarious and filthy monsters that their betters saw them as. There’d been a kind of horrid grandeur to it, but not after Jack was gone. That had been proof that they weren’t mighty and immortal ogres after all, invincible in their inebriation. They’d just been a crew of vomiting and tearful drunks who’d lost their brother; lost their son. Tom couldn’t now remember if they’d bothered with the Christmas ritual after that unhappy year of victory.

Across the Wellingborough Road, St. Edmund’s clock struck twice for two and must have scared a roosting bird awake and into some state of activity, at least to judge from the plump tear of pigeon muck that silently dropped from the mists above him, splattering his mac’s lapel with liquid chalk and caviar in its descent. Tom growled and swore and fished out his clean hanky from the pocket with no matches, fags or chocolate bars, wiping the white smear hurriedly away until only a faint damp stain remained. Making a mental note that he must have it washed before he blew his nose on it again, he shoved the used rag back into his coat.

Of course, all that post-war exhilaration hadn’t lasted. Not that things had gone bad, not at all. Times had just changed, the way they always did. First Walt had met a little beauty and got married, which had prompted their mam’s laying down the law to Tom and Frank at the reception, shouting at them over all the noise that Uncle Johnny’s band were making at the dancehall there in Gold Street, telling them they’d better find themselves a pair of girls or else. Frank, wry and wiry with his line of saucy banter, had been quicker off the mark than Tommy in responding to their mother’s ultimatum. He’d gone out and found a ginger lass as near the knuckle as what he was and they’d wed in 1950, which had just left Tom to bear the brunt of their mam’s grunted disapproval.

Tommy could remember seeking refuge and advice during that period with his big little sister, popping up to see Lou and her husband Albert and their children out in Duston at the least excuse. As always Lou had been a darling, bringing him a cup of tea in her nice, airy little front room, listening to his troubles with her head on one side like a soft toy of an owl. “Your trouble is, bruv, that you’re backward coming forward. I’m not saying as you should be a smooth talker like our Walt, or else a dirty little bugger like our Frank, but you should put yourself about, or else the girls won’t know you’re there. It’s no good waiting for them to find you, that’s not what girls are like. I mean, you’re a good-looking chap, you’re always dressed a treat. You’re even a good dancer. I can’t see as anything’s the matter with you.” Lou’s voice, low and chuckling, had a lovely croak to it, almost a buzz or hum that, with his sister’s compact shape, made Tommy think of beehives, honey, and, continuing with the association, Sunday teatime. She could always be relied upon to set you straight and have a laugh while she were doing it. Tom sometimes saw in Lou a glimpse of what their mam must have been like when she were young, before she lost her first child to diphtheria and started getting bitter, back before she were a deathmonger.

The only incident Tom could recall relating to his mother’s trade in birth and death concerned an isolated morning in his childhood which had nonetheless left an impression. Mr. Partridge, a big, portly chap who’d lived only a few doors from their house in Green Street, had passed on but was too fat to get out through the door of the front bedroom where he’d died. Tommy had watched from down the Elephant Lane end of Green Street while his mam had stood there in the road directing the removal of the house’s upstairs window and the lowering of an immense and almost purple Mr. Partridge, with a winch and trestle, down into the horse-drawn hearse that waited patiently below. Of course, with all the Co-op funeral schemes they had these days there weren’t much work for deathmongers about. Tom’s mam had packed it in, the end of 1945. With Jack gone, he supposed she’d had enough of death by then, and with the National Health on the horizon, then perhaps she’d reckoned that the birth end of the racket would be gone too, before long.

These days, most women having a first child would come and have it here, in hospital. There were still midwives, naturally, for later children or for people stuck out in the country, but these were all midwives working for the National Health. They weren’t freelancers like his mam, and no one called them deathmongers these days. Tom thought it was a good thing, by and large. He was a modern bloke, and he for one was glad that his wife was just now having her child delivered in a modern ward, with proper doctors gathered round, not in a dark back bedroom with some cackling old horror like his mam bent over her. Doreen had enough reservations about Tommy’s mam as things stood, and if May had stuck her nose into the birth of their first child then that would have put the tin hat on the occasion good and proper. Tommy shivered, even thinking of it, though that might have just been the November night.

It was Doreen who’d rescued Tommy from his bachelor state and his mam’s approbation. That had been a bit of luck, his finding her. It was just like his Lou had said, he was too reticent with girls and couldn’t turn the charm on like their Walt or Frank. Tom’s only hope had been to find somebody even shyer than what he was, and in Doreen that’s just what he’d found, his perfect complement. His other half. Like Tom, she wasn’t shy as in the sense of cowardly or weak. There was a backbone under her reserve; she just preferred a quiet life without a lot of fuss, the same as he did. She, like him and every other bloke who’d seen the inside of a trench, preferred to keep her head down and get on with things, to not attract attention. It was something of a marvel that he’d spotted her at all, stood shrinking back behind her louder, gigglier mates from work, as if for fear that anyone should see how beautiful she was, with her big watery blue eyes, her slightly long face and her bark-brown hair curled up into a wave. With her theatre glow, that mistiness she had about her like a lobby card. He’d told her, soon after they’d met, that she looked like a film star. She’d just pursed her lips into a little smile and tutted, telling him he shouldn’t be so soft.