Alexandra Fox - In The Loudness of the Morning

I can see them now, pigtails flying, long wool dresses, white pinafores, black boots buttoned up the front. Turning a long rope they are, twirling it, the girl in the middle holding her skirts together as she jump-hop-jumps to the rhythm, “Michael Carey, from the dairy, ears like bats and divil’s hairy”.

So I pull my cap down tight over curls so red that Satan himself would be ashamed to own them, and sidle past the girls’ playground. I feign I haven’t heard them, and they feign they haven’t seen me, and they only chant the louder. In through the Boys’ door and I’m Mick the Milk, a man at eight years of age, done a man’s job out and home again before they’d woken for their porridge.

I’m sitting now in a kitchen so white that the brightness of it stings my eyes, with a mug of clean, clean pasteurised milk that’s been bounced in the microwave till it’s hot and bubbling. There’s a strip-light that flickers on with a switch, and dry radiator heat. It is good.

But the chimneys are empty of smoke in the village, and the stars overpowered in the night sky, and every smell that was real and true is hidden by chemicals in a spray, and I would give anything, give every one of these last fifty years, just to go back, to be that little boy-man once again.

I could tell you my father’s memories, of milk streaming hot from the cow, choking bristles floating in the cream, his Ma churning, paddling the butter into blocks, marking it with the oakleaf sign. But that was before my time, in the days when Trixie was young and trotted high-headed with the rattling churn-cart, clopping through the silence of the morning, and my Dadda, seven, eight himself, held her firm by the collar. My own time starts when Trixie’s let out into the daisy field, hollowed flanks sagging, belly blown out by rich grass, before the time of the dog-meat man.

Early morning, and these are my memories.

Mid-winter, blackness still unbroken. I’m sleeping, hands clasped tight between my thighs for warmth, dressed in all but my coat and cap, toes freezing through two pair of knitted socks. The blanket’s stiff with frozen breath around my face. Da shakes me. I’m off down the stairs sock-footed, carrying my boots. We coast down the hill, silent for Ma and the girls, then he lets the throttle out and I’m fresh awake in the loudness of the morning.

I’m standing on the side-car step, arms holding tight around the churn, wrapped in a woolly scarf. Dadda’s crouched over the handlebars in a leather driving cap, goggles like wasp eyes.

There must’ve been wet days, days so cold I wanted to stay in my bed, mornings when the chapping of my hands and the cold-sores pained me, but I do not remember them. I’m back on that sidecar and the engine’s going phut-phut-phut and Dadda’s singing Marriot’s hymn. When it comes to the chorus I’m belting out “rolling in fullest pride” and “let there be light” like it was written for me alone. Then we come to the hill dropping down to the village, and Da cuts the engine. We coast down in the silence of the morning, and the village is dark, dark except the windows of the bakehouse glowing red across the road.

We make a race of it, Dadda and me, running to the doorsteps for the jugs, fill them at the churn tap, back to the doorstep and onto the next. Waiting by the side-car for Da to finish filling his, stamping my feet for the cold. Icy mornings, treading carefully as Agag, nailed boots striking sparks.

I remember Dadda standing bare-headed, twisting his cap between his fingers, that deep wet cough. The clouds glowed red from the fires in the town. We lost my Auntie Meghann and three of my cousins in the raid that night.

But what of the summer mornings, blue-white skies, loud with the shout of birdsong? Why are my memories all of winter hardness? Living with my Da through the dark and the cold, working alongside him, he grew me into a man.

Fifteen years old I was finished with the schooling. I’d enough learning to read the Sunday collect, poetry inside me for any man, and quicker at summing in my head than the schoolmaster was. I’ll need a business head upon my shoulders, Dadda says, because the dairy’s growing. The rolling cough in his chest from the mustard gas is growing too, and he spits out often.

Da’s bought a little Singer van, and he and Ma go off to Fordingbridge Market every Wednesday to buy eggs and sell our butter and yellow double-thick cream.

I work the early round alone now in the van. We’re putting the milk into bottles, see, wide-necked, printed in red with “Pennington Hygienic Dairy”, sealed with a cardboard disc. It’s an easy walk to each doorstep, leaving the bottles under the cooling brick, taking the empty ones back home to the farm.

Phyllis and Maisie are working in the dairy. They are land-girls sent from the town, big strapping lasses, each a head taller than me, strong, tough but frightened by the noises of the night. They look at me with strange sly glances and they laugh behind their hands. I do not like it.

Maisie washes the bottles in the scullery. The water’s hot, steaming with the yellow carbolic. Her hands plunge in the water till surely they will redden like a lobster. Phyllis dries and stacks them on the churning rack. I look at Maisie’s hands as she takes them from the water, deep pink, slightly sudsy. She scoops yellow goose-grease from the pot, rubs it through her fingers, into the backs, palms of her hands. There’s better, Mickey, she says, feel how soft. And she strokes down my cheek with her oily fingers.

And I have the feeling then, there right in front of her, that makes me ashamed. And she looks and she knows.

Dadda says the land-girls should get out of their beds, and load the van up for the early round. He says they’re not paid to sleep till breakfast time. But I like to be alone in the morning peace. If the girls came down I would have the turmoil within me and the hubbub without, and I do not wish to climb those narrow stairs to the attic bedroom in the darkness of the night, and enter in their women’s place to waken them.

Friday mornings I’m back down the village to collect the money. I wear a leather bag around my belly, and its pockets jingle with coppers. I walk with a swagger now; I have the power of a man. I can say to one woman it is feckless you are, seven shillings and fourpence owing on the tab. You must have it for me next week or I’ll not deliver to you any more. To another it’s thank-you Mrs. Turner, it’s a fine morning, yes, and would you be needing any butter, fresh laid eggs. At a third house, the curtains are drawn close and I do not lift the knocker on the door, but leave the milk and turn away, for I know the telegram boy was there yesterday and our milk with a good head of cream on top is the only comfort I can give.

I do remember.

Delia in the bottom cottage with the rusted gate that needs lifting. Delia still in her wrapper at past nine in the morning, like no good woman. Delia with her neat pale parted hair who says to me, come on in, Mickey, for a cup of tea, and aren’t you grown into such a fine young man, I don’t know when I’ve ever seen one so big and fine.

And her wrapper falls back away, and I see what I was never meant to see. I see what should be kept for Bob, off at sea these eighteen months. But Delia takes my hand and she makes me touch her. And the shaming is on me again, bigger than before, and I am unstoppable. It’s quick quick and over with that first time, and too much like an animal. And Delia cries hot tears.

It is better then, after. Her body is a prayer, soft pink-white as the clouds of the early dawn, and I touch and learn and wonder at her. She touches me too and the excitement’s back hard and eager, but this time not so quick, and the ending of it the second time is like the shout of birdsong and a dying. She holds me, and I weep too but these are not tears to be ashamed.

Eighteen, and they call me up for my National Service. Posted to Shoeburyness I am, but that is not a chapter in my life, but rather months cut away from it, square like a picture on a television screen.

Jimmy Mace and Eddie Halfpenny and me, all farmers’ sons. We are not frightened by the early hours or by the Sergeant-Major barking loud in the morning parade. Used to hard work, we are, and we find it easy.

I learn to stick my hair flat with Brylcream, grease it down so firm that it’s near a week before the curls begin to crinkle up again. They set me in the Quartermaster’s Stores, wooden racks of woollen jackets, trousers, ranked by their size, pages on pages of numbers, counting, sorting. My lungs fill with the choke of the dust in the hot air, till I cough with it like Dadda and the gas.

Weekend leaves we spend in Southend-on-Sea, Jimmy, Eddie and me, and it is blue and grey-green in the summertime, sky and sea with cockles on the promenade, and sharp grey rain in winter. We shelter in the café with the local girls, drinking tea that’s frothed with milk, milk with no flavour to it, without the sweetness of the good grass.

Then I get the telegram. My Dadda has died and I go home.

There’s a shiny skin risen across the milk in my mug now. I scrape it off with the spoon and take a long draught. It’s cool. Maybe I nodded off for a moment, lost heavy in the ache that is still in my own chest, that I was not there for my Dadda when he coughed those last bloody gouts from the wreck of his lungs.

The funeral day is flashes like postcards in my head, of the oak coffin carried on Martin’s beer-dray, my fine sisters, none with the devil’s hair, but all three red-black, long and curled from the tight papers, and Annie nearly a woman in her sorrow. I see Ma, so white, with the hollows and valleys of her face twisted like they’re inside out, wearing her good black hat and coat. There are flowers heavy with scent and fine loud singing through the morning, for Dadda was well liked for miles about. And I wear my uniform knife-creased and the black armband, and walk in the centre-front behind the dray, for I am the man of the house.

Friday, down in the village with the leather money-bag. I am a boss now, with a herd of Guernseys to oversee, a houseful of women, a spotless dairy and a bottling kitchen, but the customer is the man who drinks the milk and pays for it, and it is proper to exchange respect.

At the gate of the bottom cottage there is Delia, and her Bob back from the sea, a little man, portly, round like a belly-stove and Delia with a rounded belly too and a nose so thin it might cut paper.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Bob says.

“I thank-you.”

“I was so sorry to hear your trouble. Your father was a good man.” says Delia, and from behind her peeps a toddling child on reins, and I bend to her height. She has red hair, sparse and curling, skin clear as my buttermilk, and round pink spectacles tied with ribbon over ears that stick out like bats’ wings. I smile, heart-full, and she pulls her thumb from her mouth and smiles back, and her teeth are tiny, white as seed-pearls although her eyes are asquint. “Yes. … This is my Jenny.”

I take Bob’s money.

I am but twenty years old, short in years but long in experience, for have I not been learning the business at my father’s side since I was eight? I buy in two Jersey heifers in calf to swell the herd, and a Morrison’s milk-float painted jaunty red-and-white with “Pennington Hygienic Dairy”.

And what of Jenny, you might ask. I watch her.

I watch her growing tall, too pale, and her one-two-three dark bullet-headed brothers pulling at her skirts like a tomato-frame to stand against.

I wait in my milk-float one Tuesday morning, early in September, watch her lift that rusted gate. Her hair is scragged back into braids, new satchel banging heavy on her back, face set white as she trudges up the hill. The morning is loud with the rattle of the Corona truck, rag-and-bone man calling, cars crossing fast along the narrow street, dogs barking behind gates. Her socks tumble round her ankles.

I say to her, “Here, Jenny, hen, jump onto the footplate here. I’ll take you up to the school.”

And she stands with her shiny toes solid on the side of the milk float, clinging to the rail, and with a chug-chug-chug of the motor I carry her up the hill, Marriot’s hymn humming underneath my breath.

Thirteen little bottles of milk I deliver to the Infants class, eleven for the older children. I line them in the hearth by the fireguard in the winter term for a warm, in a bath of cool water in the summer so the milk does not curdle. Metal tops we have now, pressed fast with the embossing machine, and the blue tits keep busy in the mornings, pecking holes for the cream.

Jenny is not a happy child. I watch her.

She stands alone at playtime, keeping from the tumble of the boys. She does not join the other girls in their swinging singing skipping games. One lens of her glasses is blank now with sticking plaster for the working of her lazy eye, so maybe she does not see well enough.

But there are bruises, dark and sickly yellow-green upon her arm below the folding of her sleeve, purple shadows underneath her eyes behind the sticky tape. I see it and say nothing, but the skimmed whiteness of her face is working on me.

I am not a violent man. I was brought up fair and just by my father. On occasion he would beat me, but it would be a measured punishment, counted for the crime. And my sisters he never touched.

I go to the bottom cottage and lift the gate to open it. Weeds grow wild in the cracks of the yard, a broken bicycle lies there, rusting tools. And I call Bob out, and I say to him, “Some might say that you’re the cuckold, Robert Eccles, and I’m not saying that. There’s things that should be left between a man and his wife, to tell, or to keep hidden for the peace that’s in it.”

And at the opening of his mouth I give him no time to speak, but carry on.

“But I serve you notice here, that if you touch one hair of that lassie’s head, if you keep her from the warmth of your hearth for the sake of her red hair that’s so like my own, then I will not keep quiet. I will sing it from the rooftops and in the factories and on the farms that Bob Eccles cannot satisfy his wife, that he is not man enough for her, and that she takes another.”

And as I go to leave, I turn back to him.

“I give you warning, Robert Eccles, that I am watching here. … And when, for the sake of the Heavens up above, are you going to fix this blessed gate?”

For I am a mild man, and words my only weapon.

I take myself a wife, from Southend-on-Sea, pink and white as icecream in a silver dish. But there are no children born to us, and she blames me for their lack, for her eyes were ever closed. She leaves, returns to the lights and the loudness of the evenings.

Jenny grows and blossoms, but her red hair is ever wild and she has the wall-eye. She is wed to Nick, a good man with a steady job at the Post Office at Fordingbridge. I watch her over the churchyard wall, and she is right beautiful in her veil.

And so the years pass, and I buy three electric milk floats with quiet motors that putt-putter through the silence of the morning. And we take in two other smaller dairies, and buy in milk from farms and smallholdings hereabouts, until we have thirteen rounds and eight-hundred gallons of milk a day.

So I take Annie’s oldest boy into the business. He has a good head on him but no feeling for the milk. He works office hours, dealing with the ordering and the regulations and the ministry men in their grey suits and Wellingtons. And I wonder at him sitting there with his pages on pages of numbers, counting, sorting. Will not his lungs choke with the dryness of it?

The dustcart comes more often to the village, and the coal lorry less. People walk to the shop for their milk or buy it from the supermarket in plastic bottles. We carry bags of compost on the milk float now, and strawberries in season, medicines from the pharmacy to the old folk who cannot climb the hill. And sometimes I put my old cap on and take a turn myself, for the slowness and the rattle of the float matches my gait, and it amuses me to see the cars in a procession behind, waiting, and the honking of the horns making a hubbub of the morning.

Saturday morning, May-time, and the early sun is summer-bright. There is a boy on a skateboard, racing and jumping, grinding on the kerb; the peak of his cap points backwards, and his wheels clatter loud through the silence of the morning. He grabs at my rail for a tow and I jink from side to side, swinging him, and his laughing face is in my side-mirror, then it is gone, so I turn, look, and he has hit the storm-drain and he’s thrown, hard with a thump of his head upon the pavement, and he lies still.

I kneel, and he is breathing still but his eyes are tight shut. I take off his cap right gently, and his ears spring out like the wings of bats. And I press my hand against the springiness of his hair, his red, red hair, and think of brylcream, how much grease it would take to hold this hair flat down against his head.

A woman runs from the cottage, lifts the heavy gate. I know her. She has the thin nose of her mother and white wire already in the ginger of her hair and a wandering eye.

She stops, looks straight at me, and says, “You. You.”

She holds still the turning of her boy’s head as we wait, and she is hissing at me like a harridan, “Get away from him you filthy old man. What do you think you’re doing touching him like that? Were you trying to kill him?”

I say to her, “Don’t you know who I am?”

“I know you.”

And as we wait together in the silence of the morning for the flashing lights and the loud sirens she breaks my old heart. She had only ever half a life, she tells me, half a family. Dadda called her a bastard, kept her brothers from playing with her, and Ma would say when the drink was on her that it was the babby born when Bob was off at sea that wrecked her marriage, put him hard-fisted against her.

So she lived each day for that moment high on the step of the milk float, when the smiling man with hair as red as her own would carry her off away up the hill. But some mornings he did not come.

Her face is open, wet and turned toward me, and I lay my hand upon her shoulder.

I move to a bungalow in Yeatton, leave Jenny and her boy to their wholeness. Annie’s lad runs the dairy now. He lets the roundsmen go, and sells direct to conglomerates and supermarkets, deals with Brussels and quotas. And one morning I ask my lawyer to call and we talk of long words too, like codicils and covenants and testaments.

I am ever awake in the early morning. I am old now and need little sleep and my bladder wakes me with the full aching of it. There are whirrings all around me, whitenesses of noise, refrigerator motors, boiler striking, stirring, lighting and the slow tick-tocking of the old clock hard against cold white walls.

My head is not quiet for the memories inside of it. Dadda and Ma, sister Annie gone with the cancer at forty-two years, Maisie, Phyllis, Delia and her round Bob, all gone before. They talk and chatter, and the hubbub is within me, unstoppable.

And I would be that boy again, carried through the dark by the phut-phut-phut of his Dadda’s old bike, belting out Marriot’s hymn to the brightness of the stars. And as the far edge of the sky is touched with faintest pink, he’ll cut the engine, and we’ll coast down together, down that long slow hill, like the drift of a breath, in the sudden silence of the morning.