Mr Mac and Me (2 page)
Authors: Esther Freud
My name is Thomas Maggs. Although I’m known as Tommy, and Tom is what I tell people if I’m asked. I’m the youngest son of William and Mary Maggs, and the only son surviving. First there was William, but he only lived a day. Then came another William who lasted long enough to see my brother James before they were both struck down by measles. I should add that my sisters started with it. But they’re strong girls. Even now. And it only made them stronger. Mary is in service. Working for the master at Blyfield House. And Ann helps Mother with the inn, washes the tiles on the floor, polishes the tankards, cooks. Although sometimes at night she whispers to me how she dreams of joining Mary and wearing a white apron and eating in the big kitchen twice a day. They were born first, my sisters, before we even had the inn. But I’m forgetting. After James, there was another William, and then another James, who clung on past his first year, and a Thomas, all born before me. But I was determined from the first. Red in the face, and all over too, from the fight of being born. ‘I’m not letting this one go,’ my mother said as the bells tolled for the fishermen from Dunwich. ‘This one’s staying here with me.’
I never asked her if she said the same to those that went before. But she still says it now, reaching for me as I run past. Not that I’m ever caught. Not even with my twisted foot. I run past her, out through the back gate, across the clover field to the river and when my leg gives out I lie down and watch the sky until it’s swallowed me up and I’m flying, floating through the clouds, and I can see the moon, a white shadow against blue, and little trails of birds too busy to look down although if they did they’d laugh to see us, my mother toiling till her hands are raw, and my father, pickled with the drink, slumped in the best chair.
On Sundays before Mother goes into the church she takes a walk around the graveyard. I used to go with her, keeping to the paths, my toes itching to climb on to the graves. Now that I’m thirteen I sit on the wall and watch. Our plot is at the far end by the lane, but instead of heading straight towards it, she follows the path, looking politely at the other headstones, at the angel sitting on the Doys’ family plot, at the Prettyman girl who has a grave all to herself. Our boys are in together. Their names and dates are like the letters and numbers Runnicles makes me copy, winding round each other, crossing over themselves. Sometimes my mother presses flowers into the pot that sits on their grave. Daffodils, or celandines, or if there is nothing else to be found in the garden a cloud of cow parsley from the lane, which smells of summer and everything they’ve missed.
Father doesn’t go near the grave. He goes into the church because he must, he won’t be thrown in with the likes of Buck from Dingle Farm who they say is a cannibal because he sluices out his outhouse on a Sunday. But for all his protestations Father likes the church. He likes the talking before, and the chat after, and Ann looking so pretty in her bonnet in the pew beside, and Mary who gets the afternoon off from her work up at the big house. He likes the folk complaining about the weather, one old girl who looks up at the sky, whatever it’s like, and says when she was a child the warm days lasted all of six months and now, if it wasn’t for the leaves on the trees, you wouldn’t know it was even summer. And it makes me happy to see him there because it’s the one day of the week he doesn’t have a drink, not so much as a thimbleful till after lunch.
Danky comes by with his sister – a smart God-fearing woman who keeps an eye on him – and he tells Father, when he asks, that his own mother may be doing well for ninety, but all day she sits by the fire as miserable as a cat.
The church lies inside the ruins of a larger church that was made from stones brought up from the beach. Sometimes I meet Ellen there – her father is the blacksmith – and we play coppen ball among the ruins. We let the ball land on the graves, and when we find it we read out the names of the people who lie under. Albert Crisp and his devoted wife Ermentruda. That makes us laugh. Robert English. His daughter Florence, sadly taken from us. We’re always hoping for something funny, so we’re careful when we play never to let the ball fly down to the far end of the churchyard, so we don’t have to read the names on the short grey stone beneath my mother’s flowers.
The summer I turned twelve I got myself a job. I’d heard the rope-maker George Allard needed a boy to turn the wheel. And I saw him one morning as I was shifting about down by the harbour, watching old Danky standing on the bridge in his fisherman’s hat and rolled-over boots while two lady painters made a likeness of him in oils. Danky stands there half the day when he isn’t on his boat, and even when he should be on it – the fish aren’t going to catch themselves – and then he takes the money he makes from ‘modelling’, as he calls it, straight into the Bell and drinks it down in beer. If only he’d come into the Blue Anchor, just once in a while to keep my father company, but the fishermen stick to their pub and the farmers to theirs and the truth is there’s not really need in the village for both. ‘You can start next week,’ George Allard told me when I asked after the job. And he promised to pay me a shilling at the end of every month.
These last long years George Allard’s been working for a rope-maker at Lavenham, but now he’s home again and set up on his own – Allard’s Rope, Twine and Norsel Works – using his garden as his walk and, if need be, the path that runs outside the gate and down across the fields to the marsh. My job is to turn the wheel while he teases out the hemp, walking backwards, easing it out slowly from the strick around his waist. ‘Keep your wits about you and you can learn a trade,’ he tells me as he goes, ‘you don’t want to be following your father into the licensing business. No good comes of that. Feeding the devil, that’s the truth.’ And as I turn the wheel he tells me about London and how if there’s a war, we’ll have to stay here on the coast and defend it from the enemy.
‘A war, with who?’ I ask. I’m sleepy from our early start, and he tells me the story of the Battle of Sole Bay, how in the first hours of the morning of the 28th May, a French frigate sailed into Southwold and roused the town with news that a Dutch fleet were little more than two hours away. The town was full of sailors resting while their ships were fitted up, and their commander, the Earl of Sandwich, was in an upstairs room at Sutherland House, too distracted by the charms of a young chambermaid to notice at first the seriousness of the threat. But by dawn, despite the chambermaid, every vessel at anchor on the lee shore had put out to sea and between them, the French and English had seventy-one ships, each with forty guns.
‘On the 28th May?’ My eyes are wide. It is only the middle of June now. But Allard shakes his head. ‘Don’t they teach you anything at that fancy school of yours?’
He gathers up his twine and comes back to where I’m sitting at the wheel. ‘This battle was fought two hundred and fifty years ago.’ He stops, and I stop turning. ‘But that’s not to say it couldn’t happen today. Ships were set on fire, men were thrown into the sea, and the thunder of the guns brought people hurrying from all the villages around to stand in a crowd along the cliff. But as the day went on the news for our side was not good. Not after the French disappeared over the horizon, by accident or design we’ll never know, and soon we heard that the Duke of York’s two ships were destroyed and that Lord Sandwich was last seen leaping into the waves.’ George Allard turns his stormy eyes on me as if he’d been there himself. ‘An order went out that no person was to leave the town. And so they stood all day, the men, women and children of this region, stones in their hands ready to defend the land. But the Dutch never did come ashore. At sunset the battle ended. The Dutch sailed away. And both sides declared victory. But over the weeks that followed, close to two thousand bodies were washed up along the coast. Even Lord Sandwich could only be known by the Star and Garter stitched into his clothes, and to this day if you go into Sutherland House and stand quite still and quiet, you’ll hear the weeping of the little chambermaid who haunts the upstairs rooms.’
George Allard takes a long step back. ‘So keep a watch, my boy, as I have done. Keep your eyes on the horizon and your ear to the ground. It’s our job now. If the enemy is to land anywhere, this is where they’ll land.’ He teases out more hemp and backs towards the gate, and at a nod I start up the wheel, keeping it smooth and regular even as my thoughts are spinning fast. I picture an army docking at the pier. They’ll come across from Holland with felt waistcoats and wooden shoes and as the men and women stream out to defend Southwold, I’ll make a drawing of their boats. My drawings will be needed. Evidence. I may even hand them in to Runnicles, and let him record my findings in his black ledger of facts. And he’ll see that I am useful after all. My name will be there for ever in his diary. Thomas Maggs.
There are two seals who’ve made their home downriver of the ferry. I watch them with their rubbery heads, their small bald eyes blinking, and I think that if I slide into the mudflats by the jetty and slip and roll and flap my arms, surely I’ll soon learn to swim. I ask my sister Ann but she says she has no time for swimming and I daren’t ask Father anything about the sea. He hasn’t set foot on the beach, he says, for twenty years, and if it was up to him he never would again. He says it as if he’s under threat of being forced down there regular to do chores, but it’s Mother and me that goes poltering when the tide is out, catching up the coal to place into a sack, although he’s happy as the rest of them to sit by the smoulders of the fire.
Danky can swim. He didn’t know he could, but one dark morning a storm blew up from nowhere and he was thrown from his fishing boat and tipped into the wash. Dinks and Benny both went down, lost in the waves for ever, but before he knew it Danky was paddling like a dog. In with the tide he came, flapping and heaving up on to the shore, and crawled into the Bell where they pulled off his boots, tipped the water out, and poured warm brandy down his throat until he started raving and they knew he’d be all right.
‘So why did you never learn?’ I ask when I find him on his bench, and he looks at me sideways and mutters, ‘Bad luck to learn. Best to hope you’ll never need to know.’ And when I keep on about the seals he turns to me. ‘Have nothing to do with it,’ he says. ‘If God had wanted us to swim he’d have given us fins. Keep to the spinning, that’s the way.’ And he winks at me and starts in on a song, so low and gravelly I have to bend my ear towards him.
‘In the merry month of June, when all the flowers were in bloom
I took a stroll around my father’s farm.
And I met a pretty miss, and I asked her for a kiss
And to wind up . . . her little ball of yarn.’
Danky grins, and although I’m blushing, I keep my ear bent for more.
‘Oh no, kind sir, says she, you’re a stranger unto me
Perhaps you have some other little charm?
Oh no, my turtle dove, you’re the only one I love
Let me roll up . . . your little ball of yarn.’
Two men come out of the pub. Gory, from Lowestoft, moved into the village not more than five years since. And Tibbles, who mends boats.
‘Sure I took this fair young maid, just to dwell beneath the shade . . .’
‘You coming, Danky?’ they say to him, and he heaves his body up and stamps away with them towards the sea.
In the cellar where the beer is kept there’s a trapdoor. I come across it one evening when father is too unsteady to go down, and a splash of light from the lamp I’m carrying falls across the hinge. I kneel on the cool stone and try to inch it open. But it doesn’t budge so I take the shovel and I ease it up. Inside there are steps. ‘Mam,’ I scream, ‘Mam,’ and she hurries down, her face white, her hands bunched into fists, and when she sees me, standing there, grinning, she cuffs me – once for giving her a fright, and again for sneaking where I shouldn’t.
But it’s too late. I’ve seen them. There are steps leading down from the trapdoor, dug into the earth, and my mother has to tell me, when she has the trapdoor firmly down, how years ago, before the lighthouse, smugglers would watch out for the wrecks and bring the cargo in to land. Smugglers’ tunnels. I’d heard stories, but we have one right under our house. And now I watch from my window for ships, lost and struggling, listing to the side. At night I scour the waves, the silvery tips, hoping for small black vessels heading out to relieve them of their bounty. But all I ever see is the beam from the lighthouse at Southwold, built for the new century, a year before I was born, flashing out over the sea. It’s saved a hundred lives a year, my mother says, but only last winter a Norwegian three-master came ashore at the foot of Gun Hill, and her crew had to be rescued, every last one of them, by breeches-buoy, and the ship broken up where she lay.
All winter I watch, but the boats have charts and navigators now to steer them round the sand banks, whichever way they shift, and although I give thanks for each one that sails away to safety, I keep a special lookout for shadows on the shore and smugglers rowing across the waves to see what they can find.
If I could swim then I could get across the river myself and not wait for the chain ferry that’s always on the other bank when I arrive. Instead I join the people standing in a queue and squeeze myself in beside the wagons, and the cows and sheep. There’s no other way to get to Southwold unless you care to walk the three miles up to Blythburgh where the road crosses the estuary as it narrows, and trek from there around the spit of land, past Bulcamp, where the madhouse is, and on along the road for half the day. There’s no short-cut to be taken without wading through marsh and bog, and I remember Runnicles teaching us how Southwold, long ago, was no more than an island, hemmed in on all sides by river and sea. If only someone had thought to build a bridge, one for people and not just for trains, although there are some who are brave enough to risk the railway line that runs across the Blyth above the harbour. I tried it once. It nearly finished me, for the slats are placed so far apart that you must stretch your body like a crab from one to the next, and if a train is to come, there is no way to save yourself except by leaping over the railing into the water below. I was nearly at the far side when I heard the rumble of the engine, and my arse in the air, my bent foot singing with the pain, I forced myself on, faster than I thought was possible, tears burning in my eyes, only to find as I lay shaking on the other side that the noise was nothing but my own heart beating. I lay on the ground and laughed. And then the train did come, breaking open the day, and I imagined myself beneath it, pressed flat, the breath torn out of me, my foot sliced off. When it had passed I stood and shook myself, and I struggled on to Southwold, where I sat all afternoon in the Sailors’ Reading Room, looking at the models of the ships, copying down the details of the sails, the square sails and mizzen sails, the stay sails and the foretop-gallant sails, until I was calm.