5

In the bar there were a dozen familiar faces, of miners on their way home, in rough clothes, their sugar-bags and crib-tins laid on a page 18 bench. As Rogers took his stand at the bar there was a general gaze that rose and subsided without comment. ‘What! I thought we’d got rid of you!’ a voice called. ‘Come here and I’ll shout you one.’ It was Jimmy Cairns. He turned side-on to Rogers as if unaware he was there, and said to his mate: ‘You know I’ve been a lot of things in my time but I’ve never been a conscientious objector. If there’s another war I think I’ll give it a go…. Well, look who’s here! How are you, Paul my lad! Don, you’ve got another customer!’

‘One without a collar, Paul?’ old Don said with just a little more pep in his voice than usual: he had evidently had one or two with Jimmy too. Always the same, old Don, was what everyone said of him. When he was foreman of the dredge nothing ever got him ruffled. Even if they were repairing a cable by lamplight in drenching rain he had never been known to lose his calm. And now that he had bought the hotel from Jimmy Cairns no one in the bar could ever draw him into an argument. ‘And how are you turning over the money, Don?’ Jimmy asked. ‘Are you making a better first of it than I did?’

‘Oh, can’t growl, Jimmy, can’t growl. Course, mind you, they don’t have to fish me out from under the bar when they clean out in the morning.’

Jimmy laughed and swooped at the bar with one arm. ‘Well, you can’t say they ever did that of me. Though bloody near at times. You know, my lad, you shouldn’t be touching this stuff. If your principles were too high to take you to a war, they should keep you out of the pub, filling some fat publican’s bloody pocket.’

‘Look at the pot on me now Paul,’ old Don said, though he had none.

‘Oh, you want to watch these publicans, they’re sharks. Don’t let John Barleycorn get you, son. It’s been the ruin of many a good man. Look at me.’ He prodded Rogers’s chest. ‘I’ve got principles too. I’m a Communist. But discipline—discipline’s the thing I can’t stomach. I’d be a bad citizen in a socialist state. But I had this pub for three years and I’m still drinking in it. See, Don—there’s a sermon in every soak. And there’s a sermon in me too—how not to be a bloody capitalist!’

A lone drinker along the bar, a battered and wrinkled man of middle age hawked in his throat and said in a sneering tone, ‘Sermons be damned! What do you know of sermons? Beer’s the poor man’s medicine.’ Rogers listened but so far held aloof because he was still picking up the threads of Coal Flat. He didn’t as yet fit in. More quietly the middle-aged man said, ‘It’s a small consolation in a miserable world.’

page 19

‘Now don’t you start your preaching, Herlihy,’ Jimmy’s companion said. He had a soft but deep Clydeside voice.

‘Sermons!’ Jimmy said. ‘I should say I haven’t heard one for so many years I couldn’t count them. Never mind, Herlihy, even if you can only get beer on earth, there’ll be pie in the sky when you die.’

‘Ay,’ Jimmy’s companion said, ‘God created heaven and earth and his priests created sin.’

Don laughed and served another beer. ‘Here, you’ll be offending me,’ he said. ‘I’m a bit of a Bible-banger myself.’

‘Sin’s as old as Adam,’ Herlihy said, unable to resist being drawn out, as he knew they wanted. ‘If there was one thing my education taught me it was that. You ought to know that, lad,’ he said to Rogers. ‘With all the exams you’ve had to pass.’ Rogers looked at him without answering, puzzled that this older man should want to make an ally of him. ‘Sin,’ Herlihy said, as if it was a word only the initiated could understand, and swallowed half a mug, pondering.

Jimmy crossed himself in mockery and said, ‘Your education, Herlihy! Now tell me what did you learn. The seven deadly sins. All the mumbo jumbo and lumber of useless bloody theory that doesn’t add up to a thing. Did they teach you the facts of life? Did you learn the economic set-up?’

‘You turn things into sin,’ Ben Nicholson, Jimmy’s mate, said. ‘You put a false complexion on everything natural and it becomes sin. What is there the church can preach that men can’t handle using their own reason and common sense?’

Jimmy began to intone a garbled mockery of a Catholic mass. Herlihy said, ‘You should know that, young fellah,’ to Rogers. And Rogers, his face bare of that generalized goodwill, stared at him resentfully and said, ‘Don’t try to drag me in on your side, mate. I’m no believer.’ He was hurt at the brazenness of Herlihy’s invitation to desert his friends when he didn’t even know him. Herlihy’s eyes narrowed and lowered; he was obviously more hurt than Rogers, though Rogers couldn’t see why. ‘All education isn’t religious,’ Rogers said, as if to justify himself, though he couldn’t see that he was in any way to blame. Herlihy continued to glower over his beer.

‘Easy does it chaps,’ Don said. ‘This one’s on me. And you too, Mike, just to show there’s no hard feelings.’ Herlihy accepted the beer with a nod and went out to relieve himself. Rogers stared with a puzzled expression at Jimmy. ‘Why did he try and bring me in on his side?’ he muttered. But Jimmy clearly wasn’t interested in the subtleties of the argument. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘Trying to convert page 20 you, I s’pose,’ he said more heartily and laughed. ‘He doesn’t even know me,’ Rogers persisted. Ben Nicholson seemed to understand what he was getting at. ‘Oh, Mike, now,’ he said, ‘you’ve got to make allowances there. He’s a peculiar bugger, and he hasn’t a friend in the town. He must be a very lonely man. You’re a new- comer….D’you understand?’ Rogers was silent, blushing a little. Though he couldn’t see that he and this sour, battered little man had anything in common, he felt now that he had failed him, as if he had brushed past a beggar. ‘You see,’ Ben went on, ‘he’s a well educated fellah, this Mike Herlihy. Perhaps he just wanted to talk to someone educated like yourself.’ Rogers said no more; to continue would be to admit he was better educated, which might be misconstrued.

‘Well and what’s it like to be bawling at kids again?’ Jimmy said. ‘It’s a pretty poor selection of teachers you’ve got up there now. Your head’s a bloody blowhard—what I’ve done for the school, and how the school’s gone ahead since I’ve been here.’

‘Well, if you don’t blow your own trumpet, no one else will,’ Don said. ‘Still, I suppose he’s got his job to do like everyone else.’

‘To bring the kids up to respect the same bloody nobs he crawls after. Tell me, are you still the mutinous young rebel you used to be? The idea of telling the Gover’ment you wouldn’t go away and fight for them. And then you did go. Are you still a Socialist?’

Before Rogers could reply, old Don said, ‘You’re like me aren’t you, Paul? Vote for the ones that’ll look after you.’

Rogers grinned as if old Don was trying to pull his leg. ‘Jimmy, he said proudly, almost rhetorically, ‘my political opinions haven’t changed a bit.’

‘You’re still on our side, are you?’ Jimmy said with slight irony. ‘I’m still a Labour voter. And I haven’t joined your bloody Communist Party yet. Or likely to.’

‘More’s the pity. Oh, you’ll end up like the rest of the teachers, a paid hack worrying about your promotion. One thing about a miner, he’s free. I stayed a miner while I had this pub.’

Ben grinned. ‘They are a pretty conservative lot at the school, aren’t they?’

‘What do you expect?’ Jimmy said. ‘Who have you got? Heath for a start. We know about him. Then there’s this new girl just relieving. I don’t know her name….’

‘Miss Johnson,’ Rogers prompted.

‘She seems a nice sort of girl,’ Ben said.

‘Then there’s Fred Lawson,’ Jimmy said. ‘Quiet chap. You’ll page 21 never get any change out of him. Takes no interest in anything except his back garden.’

‘He’s had a good crop of lettuces,’ Ben said. ‘I envy him. Then there’s Hansen’s wife.’

‘She should have balls,’ Jimmy said. ‘She doesn’t know much about kids, that one. Five on the staff, and you’re the only Socialist there. Hello Mum.’

‘Was that me you were talking about, Jimmy?’ Mrs Palmer said, coming in. She put three plates of meat sandwiches on the bar. ‘If it was, it’s not true. I could prove it…. Only wait till Dad’s not about, that’s the main thing.’ She winked and slung compliments and backchat at the other drinkers. ‘You watch yourself, Paul,’ she said. ‘You’re in bad company. I don’t want anyone to say we got the schoolteacher tight on his first day back here.’

A stocky middle-aged man entered. He had shining pink cheeks and gold-rimmed spectacles under a cropped blaze of silver hair. He came up to the school Rogers was drinking with. Ben didn’t acknowledge him. Jimmy looked quizzically askance at him, as if laughing at him but in a friendly way.

‘Well, well, Paul! So you’re back with us again!’ the stranger said. ‘Of course, I knew you were coming. It’s nice to see you.’

Rogers recognized him as Arthur Henderson, a miner who was something of a public figure in the town. He was nothing important in the union, but he was a church elder, had been on the E.P.S. committee during the war practising civil defence, and was probably on several of the smaller local bodies. He wrote the Coal Flat notes for the Argus.

‘Hullo, Mr Henderson,’ Rogers said, and Arthur Henderson beamed because it wasn’t often anyone outside a meeting called him by his surname with the Mr in front of it. ‘Will you have a beer?’

‘Well, I’ve only time for one,’ he said in a garrulous chatter. ‘My word, I’m running late tonight. I had some business to attend to on my way.’

‘Oh, I know where you’ve been,’ Jimmy said. ‘You looked in at the swimming baths to see some of the girls in their bathing costumes.’

Arthur Henderson bridled as if flattered. ‘No, no,’ he said firmly.

‘Ah, now, don’t come at that,’ Jimmy said. ‘We know all about you.’

‘No, no, Jimmy,’ he said. ‘Seriously now’—and his face seemed to appeal to their sense of justice—‘I just looked in at the library to page 22 get the lists ready. The library van’s due tomorrow, and we change the books.’

Ben eyed him all the time, without hostility, but without speaking. Henderson had clearly brought uneasiness to the group. Jimmy seemed to be watching for an opportunity to banter him again. As if to cover up, Henderson kept talking. ‘Now, Paul, there’s a job for you. Right up your alley. You can look after the library on Tuesday nights. All you’ve got to do is write down the name of the borrower and the date the book’s due back. I’ll mention it to the doctor. He’s the chairman of the library committee.’

Rogers responded eagerly to this tribute to his usefulness. ‘Okay, Mr Henderson,’ he said. ‘I’ll look in tomorrow and you can show me the ropes.’

‘This bugger can’t read,’ Jimmy said. ‘What do you ask him to run the library for? He’s still going to the school. Ask him.’

Henderson swallowed the rest of his glass and gestured mischievously as if to say, ‘No more tomfoolery, now!’—‘I’ll have to go now,’ he said. ‘The missus is waiting.’ He bridled again. ‘Ah, Paul,’ he said in condescending confidence, ‘You wait till you’re married. Then you’ll know all about it.’ He almost shouted, ‘Then all your troubles will come at once! Eh, Jimmy? Eh, Ben?’ All jokes aside again, he said, ‘Right-oh then Paul.’ He pressed his hand on Rogers’s shoulder, as if registering a palm-print. In a sprightly voice, ‘We’ll be seeing you again,’ he said, and went to the bar. ‘May I use your phone please Mrs Palmer—thank you!’

When he had gone, Jimmy and Ben exchanged glances. ‘Now young fullah,’ Jimmy said. ‘You watch yourself tomorrow night. Don’t let him catch you bending!’ He burst into loud laughter. Ben didn’t laugh. Rogers was embarrassed and, rather than pursue the subject, asked no questions. But Jimmy wanted to continue. ‘The village queen,’ he said, smiling now.

‘It’s not natural,’ Ben said, ‘I can’t see the logic of it at all.’

Mrs Palmer came near and leaned across the bar, almost in confidence. ‘It makes you sick,’ she muttered. ‘Of all the damn dirty things. Dad and I stopped going to church because of him being an elder there.’

‘There you go!’ Mike Herlihy called from along the bar. ‘That proves my point. You don’t know what sin is.’

Ben turned round incredulously. ‘Is that all you learnt in your bloody seminary? That that’s sin any boy could tell you that.’

‘There are some things decent people just don’t want to know about,’ Mrs Palmer said.

‘You all pretend you’re so innocent,’ Mike Herlihy said. It page 23 seemed he’d been waiting half an hour for an opportunity like this. ‘Sin is in every man-jack of us. And what you say Henderson does is no better and no worse than what a lot of other people do, not a hundred miles from here either.’

‘Mike Herlihy, you’ve got a dirty mind,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘You stand there and say there’s sin in me. I’m as innocent as anyone in this bar. I’ve never done anything in my life that wasn’t for the best. And you’ve got the damn cheek to compare me with that sexless wonder.’

Don took Mike’s half-full glass. ‘You’ve had enough tonight, I think, Mike.’

‘What are you getting so preachy about anyway?’ Jimmy asked. ‘You chucked it up because John Barleycorn got you. If I ever come to needing a sermon, I’d go to a parson with his proper fancy dress on, not to a bloody renegade priest.’

Mike Herlihy was hurt and morose without his beer. His face was mean and drawn, and Rogers found it repulsive, wondering how on earth this man could have imagined that they should have anything in common. ‘Decent people can get along without your type of sermon,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘Actions speak louder than words.’

‘I didn’t have a vocation,’ Herlihy said. ‘I might have been weak. I might have given up. Discipline,’ he said, mocking Jimmy. ‘Discipline’s the thing I couldn’t stomach. The flesh see.’ He patted his stomach. ‘The flesh—what you buggers can’t see past. I’d have been a bad priest. But at least I know when I’m sinning and that’s more than you do.’

He looked driven, Rogers thought. He must have been. People didn’t usually talk religion in bars, even in mining towns where the range of bar-room topics was greater than in other parts of the country.

‘Well, you can do your sinning somewhere else from now on, Mike,’ Don said, ‘till you like to apologize to my wife for those insulting remarks.’ Mike stared back without submission.

‘You’re welcome to your bloody remorse and guilty conscience,’ Ben said. ‘Self-respect and reason and happiness make for a more upright stand at any time.’

‘Security and bread,’ Jimmy said, as Mike walked out.

‘And beer,’ said old Don filling another round.