with a stench of burning, which proved to be her husband’s best shirt for the morning. ‘And a miracle the house didn’t burn down,’ Mr Griffiths said, suggesting that someone more honourable than Bernie might offer to pay for a new best shirt for the morning out of his own wallet. It drove Bernie mad.
On top of that the winter of 1973 was a hard one, and three or four times the train from the City to Kingston had failed. The first time, Bernie phoned Alice, who went to Morden Underground station to pick him up in their ancient black Austin, the same car they’d had when they first married, a cast-off from Bernie’s brother Tony. It had refused to start again in the car park at Morden, and Alice had had to phone Mrs Griffiths, begging her to give the children something to eat while the garage came out; they didn’t get home until after midnight. So the second time it happened, even though by that time Bernie had bought a new car, the Simca, he only called to say he’d be a bit late, got the Tube to Morden and walked from there. The third and fourth time, too; it seemed to be going on all winter, like the winter.
But by then he’d heard of a new job, a promotion, out of London. That would never have seemed like a recommendation before. ‘Bernard,’ his widowed mother had said, when they’d gone to tell her in St Helier, the ranks of crocuses lining up firmly along the path outside. ‘Bernard. You’ve never lived anywhere but London. You couldn’t stand it for a week.’ She ignored Alice, apart from a savage glance or two; the whole thing, she could see, was the boy’s wife’s idea. In a corner, Bernard’s shy uncle Henry sipped tea from a next-to-best floral cup, not getting involved; he would have to stay and hear the worst of it afterwards. But if it was unfair of anyone to think it couldn’t have been Bernie’s idea, you could see why they believed that. His whole manner – the way he blew his nose, the way he ate with his elbows out, as if always demolishing a pie in a crowded pub, his soft London complexion, even – made it impossible to think of him outside London. But it was only Bernie who wanted to move. Alice had been born near the Scottish borders, and had moved to London at the age Francis was moving to Sheffield, nine, at the war’s end when no one was moving into capital cities. It was Alice, though, who loved London; she dreaded the North’s forgiveness, the way it would look at her when she returned.
But there was no arguing with Bernie and, it was true, the job was a good one. Bernie had been offered the deputy manager-ship of a power plant. It was the best way forward, to take a hands-on, strategic role, Bernie said. He’d left it quite late; but the industry was expanding.
He was like that: he could sell you anything with his enthusiasm. It was for her, however, to sell the move to the children, and she had nothing but her love to draw on there.
Outside the car, the landscape was changing. London had gone on for ever, its red-brick houses and businesses clinging to the edge of the motorway, like small rodents to a balloon suddenly in flight. The soft green of the southern counties, too, had gone, with the cows and sheep, and now harder, more purposeful facts were looming across the landscape. A herd of vast-waisted cooling towers, steaming massively; a terrain untended, brown and barren; one town after another with no name, just a mass of black and brown smoke and soot. It was getting worse; Francis could see that.
He had never thought that his mother would, one night, come into his bedroom and, sitting on the edge of his bed, explain that they might be moving to Sheffield. It was not that he had thought they would go on for ever where they were; it was simply that, at nine, no concept of change had ever entered his head. She had sat there, her face worried, when she’d finished, and he’d wanted to comfort her.
‘It won’t be so bad,’ he said in the end. ‘We’ll all be there.’ He’d wanted to say that they couldn’t make her move anywhere – not quite knowing who ‘they’ might be. But he tried to comfort her and, misunderstanding, her face cleared.
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘I knew you’d be brave about it. And it’ll be exciting – a new school, new friends—’ She hugged him. It was odd; they’d been trying to console each other. Still, he knew that, in her worry for him, she had expressed some of her own; he’d been right, after all, to think of consoling her.
They’d travelled up to Sheffield two or three weeks later. They’d gone by train, an experience so unusual to Francis, who had only ever gone into London by train, a journey of twenty minutes, that he paid no attention to the view outside. He’d taken fascinated pleasure in the toilets, mysteriously labelled WC, the wooden slatted windows with their frank graffiti, the extraordinary act of sitting around a table, the four of them, and a cloth being laid and lunch being served. You could eat soup on a train, which had bewildered him when he had read of it, in Emil and the Detectives. It was all so unlike the rattling compartment train from Kingston to Waterloo when the Lord Mayor’s Show was on. Now, in the Simca with its lack of event, he could start to look, with some apprehension, at his surroundings.
The week in Sheffield they’d spent at a hotel. The Electricity had paid for it – ‘It’s all a treat,’ Bernie had said, once they were settled in the beige rooms, the walls lined with nubbled tweed fabric. ‘Have whatever you like.’
‘That’s nice of them,’ Sandra said.
‘They’re grateful,’ Bernie said.
‘Can I have a glass of wine?’ Sandra said.
‘I don’t see why not,’ Alice said. It was to be their holiday that summer; they weren’t going to have another.
Each day, they took the car the Electricity had provided, and drove out somewhere. Mostly into the countryside. It was different from the countryside in Surrey. There were no hedges, no trees, and the villages were harsh, square and unadorned. Outside, the great expanses of the moors were frightening and ugly; even in bright sun, the black hills with the blaze of purple on their flanks were crude, unfinished. They parked the car and, with a picnic, clambered down into a valley where some terrible catastrophe seemed to have occurred, and about a stream, plummeting and plunging, black rocks were littered, huge and cuboid, just lying there like a set of abandoned giant toys, polystyrene and poised to fall again, without warning. Once they came across a dead sheep, lying there, half in the stream, its mouth open, its fleece filthy and stinking with flies. In Surrey it would have been tidied away. ‘Don’t drink from a stream, ever,’ Alice said. It would never have occurred to Francis even to consider such a thing.
On these outings Sandra, in the back of the Simca with him, was quiet and sullen. She didn’t complain: she followed whatever they were supposed to be doing, from time to time inspecting the sensible shoes she’d been made to bring with open distaste. Francis, as often these days, observed her with covert interest. She was five years older than him. In the room they shared at the hotel, she spent her time writing postcards to her friends, which, when she left them for him to read, proved cryptic or insulting about him in specific terms. Her weariness, never openly stated, only dissipated when they arrived at a market town, and the prospect of shops, on however unambitious a scale, revived her. She bought more postcards; she looked, she said, for presents for her friends, though nothing seemed to fit the bill.
Once they went into the centre of Sheffield, but even for Sandra, Francis could see, this was not a success. It was strange, confusing, and not planned, as London was, to excite. Francis was gripped with the prospect of getting lost; he had no sense of direction or memory for landmarks. They followed Sandra indulgently into one shop after another, and after a couple of hours stopped in municipal gardens by the town hall, an alarming construction like an egg-box.
‘We’ll have to come back here,’ Alice said to Bernie. ‘This is where the education department is. To see about schools.’
Francis’s dad bought him and Sandra a Coke each, and they sat on a bench in the dry city heat. ‘This will have been cleared by bombs,’ Bernie said, ‘these gardens, in the war.
