Innocence

by Frank White

Genres: Coming of Age; World War II

Synopsis

Two wonderfully evocative short novels from the author of There Was A Time - surely the last novel about the Second World War to have been written by someone who served in it.

Innocence is paired here with a complementary story, A Morse Code Set, first published in 1964 and available recently only as an eBook.

In A Morse Code Set, set in Manchester in 1939, a boy finds his world turned upside down by the outbreak of war. When his own father is called up by the Army and Freddy accepts an offer from the father of one of his friends to repair his beloved morse code set, the youngster sets in motion a potentially tragic turn of events.

In Innocence, young Tony grapples with the consequences of his father leaving his family, and a growing awareness of his own sexuality. The narrative brilliantly conjures a place and time - a Yorkshire village in the 1960s - and is yet quite universal, a story of family, community and heartbreak, of growing up and growing away.

Release date: September 10, 2020

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 352

Sample

An assault by some sort of virus sent me to bed for a week. Under that blank white ceiling, feeling an ache now here now there, I found myself plagued by powerful memories of my early life, sometimes welcome, sometimes not, and this went on for days after I had recovered. It disturbed my routine, caught me unawares, stopped me in my tracks, and I decided that there was only one way to lay these ghosts. For the first time in years I drove the two hundred miles to my old home village, there in the hills, moors and meadows of the West Riding of Yorkshire.

I arrived at the village shortly after noon – time for something to eat – and I drove directly into the car park of the White Hart, the local pub. Just as I was making my way to the dining room, however, I thought of Margaret Connolly. She was one who had come to mind so frequently while I lay sweating in my sickbed. So I went to the bar and bought a sandwich and a drink, just as, in the past, I’d bought the same for myself and the same for Margaret. As we had always done, she and I, I went to sit in the small lounge under the stairs. Already in there were two youngish men smartly dressed in suits but behaving like excited boys, shouting, laughing and hooting. They absorbed the entire room and it was not until they had roared their way out that I was able to think.

It was summer now and the grate in the fireplace was empty, but there I saw Margaret on her eighteenth birthday, sitting on a stool by the hearth, leaning forward towards a blazing fire, warming her hands and knees. Her fair hair was swept back and tied with a ribbon, she was smiling and she was happy. Every few moments she gazed at me with her lovely pale blue eyes and my old affection for her, that old tenderness, took hold of me again. I had watched her eat her sandwich, watched her sip her orange juice. I had watched her face, animated, laughing, as she had told me one of her tales and I had watched it again as, with shadows in her eyes, she told me about something that had upset her – probably about animals because that was a touching preoccupation of hers.

I had a delightful few minutes with Margaret until three young women came into the lounge, noisily, arguing. I finished my sandwich and my half pint of lager and, leaving my car parked where it was, I set off along the lane towards my old home.

After a mile and a half or so I came to the cottage of my old, long-dead friend Hoppalong, there on the right, standing beyond his two old yew trees. I remembered it as being quite tiny – front door, window to the right of it and two windows above. It was tiny no longer. There were extensions to right and left, and all was now under an obviously new Yorkshire stone roof. There were bold red curtains at every window and standing in front of the open door was a red and white pram in which, presumably, a child lay asleep.

A few yards further on began the high wall of Cromford House, at least forty yards of it. At one point I felt impelled to pause, to look at the randomly laid millstone grit stones, and actually to touch some of them because it was here, as a lad, with other local lads, that I had so often climbed to the top and over to get into the orchards.

The wrought-iron gate to Cromford House was closed. Rising out of the rhododendrons just beyond were two poles surmounted by a large brown sign bearing words in gold paint: St. Winifred’s School for girls. This seemed oddly appropriate. Miss Lovatt, sitting there in her big soft chair, listening while I read to her, had always to my mind seemed distinctly girlish, despite her age. Indeed it was a female house. In all my visits I never saw a man about the place, except of course Hoppalong John. So yes, a school for girls seemed right.

The house itself showed no sign of change, though the giant sequoia rising from the lawn seemed to have grown at least ten feet. As I gazed away, in my mind’s eye I saw Hoppalong limping energetically towards me, waving an arm and smiling. The person who had replaced him as gardener here was obviously nothing like as assiduous. The lawn, over which Hoppalong was limping, badly needed cutting.

I didn’t linger there long. A man hovering close to the precincts of a school is nowadays seen as some kind of menace, so I walked on towards my old home.

There it stood, some distance away on the opposite side of the lane, solid, four-square, four bedrooms, late Victorian and plain-faced save for modest decorations, flourishes, at eaves and around the doorway.

Formerly there had been a substantial, well-built greenhouse in the side garden but I was dismayed to find that it had gone. It had been replaced by a double garage, one of whose doors was wide open as if left like that by someone desperate to escape.

There had once been green-painted sash windows. Now there were the white plastic frames of double-glazing, which had completely changed the character of the place.

This house had been in our family for three generations. When my mother died aged seventy-eight in 2010 it was sold to a couple with children.

Our nearest neighbour, two hundred yards further along the lane, had been Swallow’s farmhouse. The land between had been rich meadow about which a herd of cows, heads down, tearing at the grass, had slowly roamed. When, as a boy, I had stood at the kitchen sink washing up after breakfast and looked out of the window I would see half a dozen of those Fresians just beyond the barbed wire, staring at me sadly as if wanting something I couldn’t give. All I could do was smile as if I understood.

Their meadow had now disappeared under a small estate of new detached houses, each of them very pleased with itself, shining with pride under the sun.

The Swallows’ farmhouse, old Yorkshire stone like most of the properties hereabouts, was exactly as I remembered it, L-shaped, retiring, a bit weary. Here, with her parents had lived the friend of my childhood, Emma Sarah whose smiles and lively chatter brightened my young life. We were born in the same year – 1954 – I in the August, she in the September. I sometimes called her Bunny because when she spoke, when she rocked her shoulders and flapped her hands to get the words out, her little nose twitched in the most amusing way. She had a great gift of irrepressible fun. As young children we romped about, tried to fish in the river, made kites and flew them, dashed to one or other of our homes for water or something to eat, and in general had a great time.

I walked on to the other side of the house. It was in the field there that in our early years Emma Sarah and I spent most of our time together. It was now sown with wheat, thirty inches high. Feeling sentimental, I reached over and nipped off two heads. I put them in my pocket as a memento and began to walk back to the village.

Emma Sarah’s mother was Mary Swallow, a laughing, happy, intelligent woman with a great gift for affection. She greeted me with warm smiles, welcomed me into her house and delighted in my friendship with her daughter. She was constructed like a Rembrandt model, shapely but substantial, buoyant and blonde (dyed no doubt). The notable thing about her was her energy. She was never still, busy at her sewing machine, dashing about feeding their flock of chickens, milking their cows, sitting their two farm hands down to a meal and pacing about arguing good humouredly with her husband. ‘Oh come on you silly man,’ she’d say laughing, ‘what’re you talking about?’

She had a peculiar way of using her feet. They flapped like paddles and she often laughed at that. ‘D’you think my father was Donald Duck?’ I was very fond of Mary and the feelings were mutual. It was important to me to please her. She very much liked house plants and the place was full of them, many of them from me. When I could get my hands on some exotic seeds I planted them in two or three pots and presented them to her. Well aware of my liking for chocolate eclairs she always had one or two waiting for me. Yes, Mary Swallow was an admirable woman. But the most obvious thing about her was her profound devotion for her daughter. To keep Emma Sarah happy was almost her reason for living.

Mary was a frequent visitor to our house where she and my mother sat talking for hours, drinking tea and knitting furiously. I remember that they worked together creating two large knitted patchwork bed covers while Emma Sarah lay asleep on our sofa.

Mary’s husband, was Hector Swallow. He farmed about a hundred pastoral acres along the bank of the river, good grazing land, quite flat. In addition to his many cattle, Hector kept about a hundred pigs and a flock of screeching chickens. His stock must have been profitable because the Swallows were clearly well off. Hector drove about in a fine Jaguar car and when not stalking about his fields he dressed well in tweeds and shiny shoes. He was a tall, heavy, noisy man and there was a potent kind of energy about him which, if you stood within a yard of him, wrapped you about and set your nerves tingling. His agile face, with its darting eyes and leather cheeks could sometimes mesmerise you. He had a way of staring intently at you, grinning, showing his big teeth, and sucking out your complete attention. I was never completely at ease with Hector Swallow.

One notable thing about him was his inclination to burst into song. He had a powerful baritone voice that he could give vent to at the drop of a hat. At haymaking time I usually went down to help and I have a clear recollection of him, his long hair fluttering in the wind, and his bronze face as, suddenly putting aside his pitchfork, he stood with arms akimbo and sang into the dusty afternoon …

‘I am the Bandolero, the gallant Bandolero,

I rule the mountains and I claim

What contraband may come my way …’

Emma Sarah danced with amusement. Her mother, tousled and sweating, demolishing a stook, said, ‘Oh pipe down, Hector,’ while Fred, one of Hector’s labourers, used to this sort of thing, went on pitching hay.

‘I am the Bandolero, here in my gay sombrero.

I have a kingdom beneath my sway …’

He stood, arms akimbo, legs apart, bellowing across the fields as if some vast audience was listening enraptured to every note.

I helped out on the farm in other ways. One evening after school when I was about sixteen I was swilling out his yard for him. We were hard up at home at the time – my father had left – and I had gone down to earn a few coppers. I had been there perhaps fifteen minutes when Hector came to stand at his back door, in his shirt sleeves.

‘How you doin’, lad?’

‘OK, Mr Swallow.’

Once again, throwing out his chest, he gave forth …

‘In that quaint old Cornish town …

When suddenly hastening down the lane

A figure I knew I saw quite plain.

With outstretched arms I took her along,

Carried her to the merry throng …’

‘Did you like that?’ he asked.

‘Yes, Mr Swallow. You can let it rip.’

‘Right, well when you’ve done you can have an extra pound.’

By the time I’d finished work it was dark. A half-moon was up and already the wet flagstones of the yard were beginning to shine with incipient ice. I went into the house, into the long lobby, a solid black wedge of darkness, and called out. ‘Mr Swallow!’

At the far end of the lobby a strip of light showed under the parlour door, and there was the sound of voices coming from the television in there. ‘In here!’ he shouted.

He was standing leaning forward in front of the roaring fire, warming his backside. He’d finished for the day and had changed out of his grubby working clothes into thick melton trousers and a knobbly knitted sweater. His face shone – he must just have taken a shave.

Nothing was said for a moment. Mary sat knitting – perhaps another sweater – and Emma Sarah was perched on a leather buffet, with a thumb in her mouth, smiling at me round it. Under the dangling ceiling-light, flashes of reflection came from the glass ornaments on the mantelpiece. The cat sauntered towards me and rubbed its back against my ankle.

Straightening, Hector stared at me. ‘Two pounds there on the sideboard,’ he said.

‘Thanks,’ I said and turned to go.

‘You look frozen,’ he said.

‘No, I’m all right. Just my hands.’

‘Well come and warm ’em.’ He stood aside while I did so.

I was wearing just my school blazer with its fancy badge and those sloppy flannels we all wore in those days, and it was the blazer that drew Hector’s attention.

‘Clever devil, aren’t you, Tony lad?’

I barely heard it. I was wondering how they could afford all the coal that was blazing away on the fire. At home we eked things out these days, lump by lump.

‘What the hell d’you do at that grammar school?’ Hector went on. ‘I was working like hell, here with my father, at your age.’

Mary spoke. ‘Ignore him, Tony.’ Resting her knitting against the arm of the chair, she measured it with a tape measure. ‘How’s your mother?’

‘She’s OK.’

Mary murmured. ‘Mmnnn … I’ll bet she isn’t.’ She looked up at me. ‘I don’t see much of her these days. Tell her to come and have a natter. Will you do that?’

‘Yes.’

‘You and your dad were thick as thieves, weren’t you?’ she went on, trying to capture my gaze.

But I avoided it and didn’t answer. She was delving into a subject I had no heart to talk about. I stepped away from the fire. ‘Thanks for the money Mr Swallow. I’ll get going,’ and I set off across the room.

Emma Sarah, who, already that afternoon, had spent twenty minutes with me, sitting in our kitchen at home, watching me work, with her plump arms resting on the table top, jumped up from her buffet as if to bar my way, saying something I couldn’t make out.

‘Sit down!’ Hector said sharply.

She did so.

‘She pesters the life out of you,’ Hector said to me. For his own reasons he had never been happy about my friendship with his daughter. ‘Why the hell d’you let her?’ But he didn’t give me time to answer. He turned to his wife. ‘What’ve I told you, woman?’

Mary simply laughed. ‘Oh shut up you silly man.’

He glowered at her, opened and closed his mouth once or twice, and then, looking at me, staring at me for a moment, decided not to go on. He picked up the poker and prodded at the fire. ‘Look, lad, if you want to help Fred to fix the wire down the church field at weekend,’ he said, ‘you can earn another bob or two.’

‘Thanks, Mr Swallow.’

He waggled the poker at me. ‘But don’t let my daughter hang about. You got that?’

‘Yes.’

‘And as for your father …! He certainly let you down, didn’t he? Well never mind, lad, never you mind.’ He was obviously trying to show some sympathy. He went on. ‘He let us all down. I thought he was a pal o’ mine. Your father was a sod!’

I could have hit him.

As I opened the door and went out I could feel his insufferable smile burning into my back. From the lobby I heard his voice, serious and insistent, no doubt reverting to the subject he’d felt it wiser to interrupt a moment ago – his daughter and me. Then I heard Mary laugh again, and all the time those voices on the television droned away.

Yes, by that time my father had left and I walked home that evening still stinging that Hector had seen fit to make a point of it. I walked along the moonlit road, past the contorted winter skeletons of Swallows Wood, with the fields stretching down to the river on my right and the rising heap of Bower Hill on my left. Around the dim light from a window of Cromford House, in the distance at the foot of the hill, a frosty halo trembled. A train went by along the line, out of sight but clearly heard, throbbing like a rapid heartbeat into the heavy silence of the evening, and the cry of a sheep on the hill responded to it.

I was a creature of this valley, knew every square inch of it for miles around, and gave no more thought to my place in these landscapes than one of Hector’s cows, ruminating in one of his fields, might have given. At the side of the road here, as I went by, under the hedge, was a patch of horseradish, free to raid; at the top of the hill was my personal rocky hollow, known only to me and to my dear friend Emma Sarah; there across the fields was the river, shallow and wadeable where, if you sat long enough, you could catch a tench or a bream; there, just this side of the village, stood the church, with its steeple probing at the stars, and, behind it, the graveyard where my mother’s parents lay under a patch of gravel and a white stone flowerpot; and there, at the side of the lane, a black cube with another little halo of light in its side, with grey smoke rising from its chimney into the moonlight, sat home.

I discovered my mother, Mother, leaning back in her chair with an open book lying face down on her lap, gazing at nothing, locked inside herself. She had been in this state ever since my father had left.

He was Peter. After obtaining a degree in history from Manchester university he spent some time teaching history in Leeds. It was there that he met Mother. She was a waitress in a restaurant he often visited. They married in 1953 when he was twenty-three and she twenty-two. In the sixties Peter began to write – first a book on George IV and then a novel. It was published and so successful that he was able to give up his teaching and earn a living as a writer. Another novel followed with equal success, and for some years he was in demand as a lecturer and literary figure. Several times, I went with my mother to watch him stand at lecterns, with his head haloed in light, reading to intent audiences in his light, compelling voice. He had thin blonde hair falling over his forehead and as he read, or answered questions, he shifted his weight from foot to foot, gripped with feeling and moved to express it. I sat at the age of about ten, proud but almost disbelieving that it was my father, when he gave an interview on television.

When he was not writing, my father could often be self-preoccupied. I suppose he was usually thinking about his work. He would remain sitting at the table long after meals were finished, when my mother and I had already left the room. I worked with him in the greenhouse while he chatted and smiled at me, but then he would sit on the trough, light a cigarette and withdraw into himself, far away beyond me. I would speak to him but as if into space. Then, after half an hour or so, he’d suddenly come to. ‘Where were we, Tony?’ And it was very often the same during the evening. Realising that he was no longer listening, Mother would suddenly cease to speak, glance at me and put a finger to her lips, ‘Shush.’

But for all that, he was then utterly devoted to my mother – and she to him. There would be spontaneous embraces, kisses and affectionate laughter. I remember trailing behind them as, holding hands, they walked slowly along the promenade at Scarborough, and I remember their bare white feet as they tripped down the beach to paddle together. I have images of them coming home together of an evening, smiling and happy with each other, of them sitting, heads close, arms around each other’s waist, on the bench against the house wall. And in the living room, on the dresser, and still in fact in my mother’s bedroom, many black and white images of their loving warmth were framed in photographs.

From my bedroom, through the wall, I could hear his two finger tapping on his typewriter, and sometimes it very much annoyed me. While he was at it I knew he had gone a long way away from us, just as he went away in his interminable reveries. Yet when he was free he was happy to spend time with me. He was a very useful resource when homework posed problems. He taught me all I know about growing tomatoes. He was keen on orienteering. He had a collection of ordnance survey maps and a brass, prismatic marching compass. On a weekend morning we’d leave the house, occasionally with Mother, always with sandwiches and bottles of mineral water in his old haversack, and, following a precise bearing, make our way to some previously chosen spot on the map. He marched like a soldier. ‘Left, right, left right,’ holding his head up, striding out across field and stream, through flocks of sheep, over fences. We found some interesting places at the end of our marches – a stone circle, a ruined church, a hilltop from where we could see Leeds, and a certain remote field with a spot-height marked on the dry-stone wall. (I was to find my way to that same place three years later.)

I always wanted to take a look into his workplace – the small fourth bedroom over the front door. Many times I got as far as taking hold of the doorknob but then, forbidden always from entering, and dismayed that I’d been forbidden, wondering why, annoyed, went back down the stairs.

But success is fickle. By the late sixties my father’s fortunes had gone through something of a decline. Interest in his books suddenly waned. He wrote a third book and had it rejected, and although royalties from his earlier works came every six months they were nothing like of the order they’d been before. He was still asked to give the occasional lecture and he was able to write articles for magazines, but his income had gone down drastically.

All the same we still went off for a week or fortnight’s summer holiday. My parents liked the sight of water. From the early days I remember long hotel corridors and vast hotel dining rooms where waiters in black and white buzzed about like flocks of magpies, at Bournemouth and Windermere. Then it was boarding houses smelling of cooking cabbage at Scarborough. More recently I remembered, after one of my safaris, crossing a newly shorn field back to the doorway of an isolated and rather dilapidated holiday cottage somewhere in Dorset.

In the good days, Mother, who was not particularly one for buying wardrobesful of new clothes, had preferred to spend money on her home – a grand three-piece suite, good carpets, smart decorations. Now she said to me, ‘Put your feet down off the chair! We’ve got to look after what we’ve got.’

It was only with half a mind that I was aware of this situation. But then, one day Mother greeted me at the door smiling and happy. My father had been given a commission to write another novel.

On a Saturday afternoon in the late summer, Father put his novel aside and came with me to watch the village eleven play Oxspring on the cricket pitch at the edge of the village.

Cricket bored me, as indeed did all sort of games, but Father had been a very keen cricketer himself when younger. Simply to be with him, I had watched matches here in the village, at Headingley, at Old Trafford and once – in very dimly remembered days – at Lord’s, doing my best to stay awake and look eager.

On every fair Sunday in summer even our small village could field two teams – a first and a second. Today the first team was playing a match against Thurgoland, in the next valley. Father and I sat on one of the benches near the pavilion. ‘Well played!’ he called out now and then, or ‘For God’s sake Umpire, that was LBW …’ and so on. As always, I quickly lost interest and spent my time idly watching other spectators who sat on other benches or, as they often did, wandered about talking to one another.

We had not been there long when Hector Swallow, Emma Sarah’s father, came sauntering up, wearing an elegant lightweight linen suit in pale fawn. It reflected the bright sunlight and caught my eye while he was still some distance off. He came to stand over us, looked down at my father with that intent, compelling expression on his face, and said, ‘How you doin’, Peter? Who’s winning?’ Jerking a hand at me, he hustled me aside and sat down between us. ‘How’s Daisy?. . .