The Complete Pratt (48 page)

‘He comes out next year.’ said Auntie Doris in a near-whisper, after she’d returned with their drinks.

‘But you wrote to me from Rangoon,’ he said.

Auntie Doris shook her head.

‘I forwarded them to a friend in Rangoon,’ she said. ‘He sent them on.’

The penny dropped.

‘I know who it was,’ he said. ‘Geoffrey Porringer.’

‘Speaking about me?’

Henry looked up, to see Geoffrey Porringer standing over him, immaculate in evening dress.

‘You remember Henry, Geoffrey,’ said Auntie Doris.

‘Oh yes,’ said Geoffrey Porringer. ‘I remember Henry.’

‘Good do?’ said Auntie Doris.

‘No!’ said Geoffrey Porringer. ‘These dos are all the same. Be with you in two shakes.’

Henry’s mind reeled as he looked at Auntie Doris. Suddenly it was all obvious to him. Coming upon Geoffrey Porringer at Cap Ferrat. All the Canadian stamps. She’d probably even spent the night with him in Bruton, when she’d taken him to Dalton and Geoffrey had taken his brat to Bruton. He felt ashamed of his naivety. How they must have laughed at him. He recalled buying coasters with him in Sheffield, and his cheeks burned. How they must have hooted.

‘I’m sorry, darling,’ said Auntie Doris. ‘We didn’t want you to know, my love.’

‘I bought coasters for you.’

‘They’re very nice. Very suitable.’

His head was beginning to swim. Another thought hurled itself at him.

‘What’ll you do when he comes out of prison?’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ said Auntie Doris. ‘I just don’t know, Henry.’

‘You’ve got to go back to him,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to, Auntie Doris.’

‘I never knew you liked him so much,’ said Auntie Doris. ‘He never knew you did.’

Did I? Or am I solely inspired by loathing for Geoffrey Porringer?

‘A refill, young feller-me-lad?’ said Geoffrey Porringer, returning in shirt-sleeves.

Henry shook his head. The clicking of dominoes continued.
The
dour barman looked pointedly as his watch. Geoffrey Porringer brought drinks for himself and Auntie Doris.

‘Come on,’ said Geoffrey Porringer thickly, and Henry realised that he was drunk as well. ‘Smile. It may never happen.’

‘It has happened,’ said Henry.

Oh no. He had written, in a letter, that he had prayed for a cure for Geoffrey Porringer’s blackheads. Oh God. He hoped she hadn’t shown the letter to…no he didn’t. He hoped she had shown it.

He smiled.

‘That’s better,’ said Geoffrey Porringer. ‘No need to take it too hard. Life, eh? I mean, let’s be brutally honest. What did Teddy ever do for you?’

‘Geoffrey!’ said Auntie Doris.

‘He took me into his home and treated me as his son, to the best of his abilities,’ said Henry.

‘Only because he felt guilty because he thought he caused your father’s death when he sacked him,’ said Geoffrey Porringer.

‘Geoffrey,’ hissed Auntie Doris, who always made things worse by protesting about them. ‘He doesn’t know his father hanged himself.’

IT WAS THURSDAY,
September 3rd 1953. The weather was cool and showery. Henry was on his way to join the Royal Corps of Signals at Catterick, sick at heart, sick at the grim prospect, sick at the interference with his freedom just when he was on the verge of manhood, sick at the waste of his childhood. It was the only youth he would ever have. It was gone.

The train clattered across the flat farming country of central Yorkshire. It was full of raw, clumsy, nervous young men. Henry read the newspaper frantically, in an attempt to take his mind off his worries. ‘West to Russia: Talk it over.’ ‘Oil hopes are brighter.’ ‘Her baby born on platform four.’ His had been a fragmented childhood, and he didn’t know that an obsessive reading of newspapers in times of crisis, inherited from his father, was linking this, its last day, to the day when he was born. ‘Dulles gives Mao two warnings.’ ‘Dustman dies in shrubbery.’ ‘Across Canada by tandem.’

The local train from Darlington crept closer and closer to the eastern edge of the Pennines, the backbone of England. ‘Anti-burglar grille stolen.’ ‘More tinned milk is withdrawn.’ He’d spent so much time being reluctant to escape from wombs. He hadn’t realised that all the wombs and all the births had taken place within the protection of the great superwomb of youth. It was from this that he was now finally, at last, irrevocably to be born. ‘Anna, the stay-put char, is back.’ ‘Feud splits a sleepy village.’ ‘Italy is a wonderful country, but it’s no place to have an accident.’ Italy. Lampo. Dalton. Paul. Diana. Lorna. Too many memories, too many partings, close your mind to all that. ‘Mormon (he had 21 children) dies at 83.’ ‘When the army says “report”, the pianist must change his tune.’ Army. There’s no escape even in the newspaper.

The line was among the hills now. Cows chewed peacefully,
infuriatingly
unaware that this was a special day for anybody.

They were slowing down. There was a mass collection of scanty belongings, and then they were streaming onto the platform of Richmond station, a tidal wave of stick-out ears

Step out of the womb, Henry. It may not be as bad as you think.

The wind was cold. He moved slowly, in short steps, with the sluggish human tide.

Be brave, Henry Be positive. You have made so many disastrous starts, but you are older and wiser now.

Show them, Henry.

‘You! What do you think you’re doing?’

The words seemed far away, so that he only heard them a few seconds after they had been spoken.

‘Oh sorry, were you speaking to me?’ he said. ‘I didn’t hear you. I was thinking.’

He found that he was staring at a bull-like neck, in the middle of the station forecourt. He raised his eyes to the face, and suppressed a shudder.

‘You were what????’ bawled the massive sergeant. ‘You were thinking? You’re in the army now, laddie. What’s your name?’

Here we go.

‘Pratt.’

‘Pratt. You know what you are, Pratt? You’re a short fat blob of rancid turbot droppings. What are you?’

Henry stood as proud and erect as he could. He looked the sergeant straight in the face. He was unaware of the cold wind, the damp station forecourt, the waiting trucks.

‘I’m a man, sergeant,’ he said.

Pratt of the Argus

The second Henry Pratt novel

For
all the journalists of the provincial press, and especially for my ex-colleagues on the
Sheffield Star
. They were kinder to me than I deserved, and, in gratitude for that, are spared from these pages, where all the characters are totally imaginary, as indeed is the town of Thurmarsh.

HENRY PRATT STARED
in disbelief at the first word that he had ever had in print. It was ‘Thives’.

The full story read, ‘Thives who last night broke into the Blurton Road home of Mrs Emily Braithwaite (73) stole a coat, a colander and a jam jar containing £5 in threepenny bits.’

Henry was twenty years old, pale, rather short, somewhat podgy. He had just completed his first day as a reporter on the
Thurmarsh Evening Argus
, and was sitting with three of his new colleagues at a corner table in the back bar of the Lord Nelson, a brown, masculine pub, tucked away in Leatherbottlers’ Row. The back bar was a dark and secret room, popular with barristers, police officers and criminals. It smelt of carbolic and male intrigue. No jukeboxes or fruit machines disturbed the concentration of the drinkers. Trams could be heard clanking along Albion Street, and two elderly ham sandwiches were curling together for comfort in a glass case on the bar counter. You wouldn’t have been able to find a slice of quiche this side of Alsace-Lorraine. It was Monday, January 16th, 1956.

He glanced through the paper, pretending that he was interested in it all, not just the one paragraph that he had written. Employment in Thurmarsh had reached a record level, with only 0.3 per cent out of work. Lieutenant-Colonel Nasser was claiming fresh powers for six years under a new constitution in Egypt. King Hussein had pledged Jordan to the cause of Arab unity. Henry didn’t fool Neil Mallet. ‘Never mind,’ said Neil, his round, smooth, incipiently freckled face breaking into a brief, friendly smile. ‘I didn’t set the world alight on my first day, and look at me now. Half the West Riding hangs on my words.’ Neil Mallet, a bachelor, of Pitlochry Drive, Thurmarsh Lane Bottom, wrote a weekly opinion column under the pen-name of ‘Thurmarshian’.

Ted Plunkett raised his bushy black eyebrows that might have been purpose-built for sarcasm and said, ‘It’s true, Henry. From Barnsley to Dronfield, from Penistone to Maltby they’re agog for
his
smug, reactionary views.’ He turned to Neil. ‘Murderers sent to the gallows by judges who’ve just read your virulent prose are the only people who hang on your words.’

Neil Mallet smiled benevolently. Henry’s heart sank. He couldn’t cope with Ted Plunkett. Were the doubters right? Was he unsuited to the hard world of journalism?

He might not have been so overawed if he’d known that Ted wrote the Kiddies Club column. The kiddies were known as the Argusnauts and did good deeds. Ted was known as Uncle Jason.

Henry replied to Neil, as if Ted hadn’t spoken. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but a misprint in my first word! Are they trying to tell me something?’ He’d often found self-deprecation useful. At school he’d become a stand-up comedian, Henry ‘Ee by gum I am daft’ Pratt, in order to mock himself before others did. But now it was his ambition to become Henry ‘I was the first British journalist to enter the seething hell-hole that was Dien Bien Phu’ Pratt, and he sensed that self-deprecation would no longer be useful to him. He ploughed on through the paper. A floating elevator costing £300,000 had been kept idle in Hull docks for three months because of a dispute over manning levels. 100 shivering people had queued all night to book summer coach holidays to Torquay. Eggs were down to 3s. 9d. a dozen. Would he ever write exciting stories like those?

‘Same again?’ said the third of his new colleagues, Colin Edgeley, who was writing a novel, had lost two front teeth in a fight, and had kept the gap as a badge of courage.

Henry ought to be getting back for his tea, but how could he, on his first day? One thing he wasn’t going to become was Henry ‘I’m not stopping. I’ve gorra get back for my tea’ Pratt.

Helen Cornish, general reporter and women’s page, breezed in with Ben Watkinson, the football correspondent. Ben was tall and thin and grizzled. Helen wasn’t. She said, ‘Room for a little one?’ and sat beside Henry on the bench seat. Their thighs were touching. He grew excited. She was fair-haired, with pearly grey eyes and pert, delicate lips. Already he found her so attractive that even the sight of the words ‘By Helen Cornish’ under the headline ‘What the stars wear next to their skin’ had given him an erection. He wondered what Helen wore next to her skin. This was
ridiculous
. Ben’s left hand had just brushed her right knee. They were probably married. Women did sometimes marry the most unsuitable men. And didn’t he have his childhood sweetheart, Lorna Arrow, whose existence had nourished him through two years in the army? He hadn’t clung to the thought of her throughout that business in Germany in order to abandon her now. He met Ted’s deep, dark, troubled eyes and had an uneasy feeling that Ted could read his thoughts.

They drank halves, which in Thurmarsh were referred to as glasses. You drank more that way, because the beer kept fresher. Henry tried to say, ‘No thanks, Ben. I said I’d be back for my tea,’ but the words wouldn’t come.

Neil had been to London and seen
Waiting for Godot
. Henry said, ‘Oh,
I’ve
seen that,’ and Neil said, ‘What did you think of it?’ Henry wanted to say, ‘Magnificent! I think Beckett’s a giant, sweeping theatrical realism under the carpets of the bourgeoisie,’ but he was frightened of sounding pretentious so he said, ‘I quite liked it.’ ‘I thought it was magnificent,’ said Neil. ‘Beckett’s a giant, emptying the fag-ends of realism into the overflowing dustbins of the middle classes.’ Ted raised his bushy eyebrows. ‘Go to London a lot, do you?’ he asked Henry.

Fleet Street was their magnet. At forty, Ben knew he’d never make it. At thirty-four, Neil suspected he wouldn’t. At twenty-seven, Ted still hoped. At twenty-four, Colin had few doubts. At twenty-two, Helen had no doubts at all.

Henry bought his round, fighting his way through a burst of dutiful laughter at a joke cracked by Chief Superintendent Ron Ratchett. Helen was on gin and orange. He longed to kiss her slightly sticky tongue. No! Think of Friday night. Think of Lorna.

‘Do you have any good contacts, Henry?’ asked Ted.

‘Contacts?’ he said, puzzled.

‘People you know whom you can use to get stories off,’ explained Ted, as to a rather dim Argusnaut.

‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Yes. I see. No. Well, I’ve been away, in the army.’

‘Which Thurmarsh United player broke his leg in three places?’ said Ben, and although it was apropos of absolutely nothing, nobody seemed surprised.

Henry knew the answer, but kept silent. He sensed that Helen despised sport.