It was mincemeat, and he sat on grandad’s chair to eat it. A steel-blue flash across the window robbed one bite of its sweetness. “It started thunderin’ when I was comin’ over the fields.” He noticed the tremor in her hands, filled with knives and forks. She’s frightened as well, a fact that reduced his own fear.
Heavy boots sounded on gravel and cinders outside, and a tall man in a raincoat passed the rain-spitted window. The door burst open and Merton pushed his bike into the parlour.
“You’re back early, aren’t you?” his wife said. He took off his coat. “There’s a storm comin’ up, Mary”—dividing the embers and placing a log on the low fire. “There’s nowt to do at pit so they sent us ’ome.”
The storm roared as if threatening the house. Mary took steel knives and forks from the table to put them back in the drawer.
“What are you doin’?” Merton wanted to know, changing his boots by the fire. “We ain’t ’ad tea yet.”
She wavered, unable to stand up to him: “You know I don’t like to see steel on the table during a storm. It might get struck.”
He let out a terrific “Ha!” like a bullet: “You’d take ’em off the table just because it’s lightning?” he shouted. Brain drew back: what’s he getting on to me for as well? Merton jumped up, so that Brian almost lost his fear of the storm in wondering what he was up to. “I’ll show you there’s no bloody need to be frightened at a bit o’ lightning.” He scooped a bundle of knives and forks, flung open the window, and held them outside, waiting for a flash of lightning while Brian and his grandmother froze by the table.
Had Merton been at work, Mary would have taken an oil lamp on the stairs, where lightning was invisible and thunder muffled. For whenever the faintest flicker of lightning carved up dark and distant clouds like a Sunday joint, she would say to whoever was in the house: “It’s a bit black over Nottingham,” knowing that soon the storm would turn its deluge towards Wollaton. The children had been made to sit countless times on the stairs when they were young, and Vera never forgot the hours spent under the dim oil lamp that created shadows of merged and huddled forms on the landing walls. Not until the last low rumble of thunder had died away would she tentatively open the stairfoot door and motion her children back into the kitchen.
A sudden fleet of hailstones bullied the geraniums, sang against Merton’s cutlery, and bounced into the house. “Here it comes!” he cried, so that Brian, kept quiet by fear at the time, remembered the joy in his grandfather’s voice. A sheet of blue light covered the window. I heard it, Brain said to himself. I heard it sizzle — shielding his face and looking through splayed fingers. He’s dead. The dark kitchen was lit up, and immediately a thousand guns of thunder rolled over the house.
Merton slammed the window and turned round. “You see? There’s nowt to be frightened on.” Brian took his hands down: It ain’t touched him.
“God’ll repay you for such things,” Mary said, “and for frightening poor little Brian like that.”
“Go on,” he scoffed, slinging the cutlery back on the table as if contemptuous at its inability to kill him. “Old Nimrod ain’t frightened, are yer?”
Brian breathed hard; the circus act had seemed as much directed against him as his grandmother. “No, grandad. Course I ain’t.”
Grandad wasn’t won over by this. He sat by the fire, an image of the inside storm, while hailstones and rain torrents outside fought hand over fist to get down eaving and drainpipe into the safety of waterbutts placed around the house, a swishing and scrambling that discouraged Brian from talking for fear he wouldn’t be heard. Hailstones smacked against the window-panes, zigzagged down the chimney and died in the fire, or ricochetted so quickly from the fireback that they didn’t melt until hitting the hearthrug.
Knives and forks stayed on the table, but Mary wouldn’t touch them while lightning flashed. She lit the lamp and fetched tea food from the pantry, so superstitious that she did everything as if God were watching her: never threw bread on the fire (which was feeding the devil), never ill-treated a dumb animal, never turned a beggar away from the door. Even forty years with Merton had kept these principles alive, and they were so strongly instilled into her eight children that their children would also live by them.
Brian left his chair and went to Merton. “Grandad?”
“What’s up, Nimrod?”
“What meks lightnin’ an’ thunder?”
“Nay, I don’t know.” Merton was puzzled, forced to give something thought that he had taken for granted these last sixty years. Then his stern face changed to mischief and enlightenment. “It’s like this,” he said, leaning forward: “as far as I can mek out, God asks Sent Paul to get ’im a load o’ coal up from’t pit in ’ell, an’ Paul gets wagons loaded up wi’ some o’ the best. Then ’e ’itches up ponies and trundles it up to ’eaven where God is. Well,” his eyes flashed with inspiration, “when Paul unloads the coal it meks a noise, an’ that’s when it thunders.”
Brian’s laugh was belief and doubt. “It i’n’t,” he said.
Merton grinned. “Yo’ ask yer gra’ma, an’ see whether it’s true or not. Hey, Mary, ain’t that right?”
Salmon, pickled cucumber, bread already buttered, were spread on a white cloth, and they drew chairs in to eat. “That’s right,” she said, amused at such blasphemy since it put Merton in a good temper. Brian leaned across the table: “Hey, grandad, well, what about lightning?”
A forkful of cucumber was speared before the answer came: “That’s when they open the furnaces of ’ell, to see’f fires is still goin’, an’ if they need some more coal.” He grinned at his easy victory. “Look, old Nimrod don’t believe a thing I tell ’im. I don’t know, I can see nobody’ll ever be able to tell ’im owt wi’out he looks at ’em in that funny way, enough to call ’em a liar!”
Sun glistened on the wet slate wash-house roof across the yard. “He only believes what his mother tells him, don’t you, Brian?” Mary said. He shook his head, mouth full, at the sight of a hedge dripping with fresh rain. One line of hedge turned into another, bordering unused forgotten pathways, trodden deep between house-wall and pigeon coops, where you stood and could see nothing, yet heard the throaty warbling like water going through a broken-down whistle from perches beyond hexagonal-holed wire. The front door of the house faced away from the lane, over a garden into which Brian went after exploring the suburbs of inhabited hedgerows. He saw the well, conventional and frightening, a fairy-book piece of architecture on a low hill. He wanted to touch the wooden triangular roof and turn the chain-laden roller of wood, to sit on the circular low brick wall and let down the bucket for filling. But he was afraid. When he said: “I’m going out now, gra’ma,” she said, looking up from her pastry board: “Don’t go near the well then, will you?” He was eager to be off but asked: “Why, gra’ma?” “Because you’ll get drowned,” she told him ominously. Sometimes he saw Uncle George coming from it with a yoke across his shoulders, walking down the slope with two lead-heavy buckets. “When can I fetch water from the well, Uncle George?”
“Soon,” Uncle George told him, and went on to the house.
“Soon,” he discovered over square-wheeled months, was a misfit, a no-good word, a trick to fob him off with because it wasn’t a definite length of time like a minute, hour, week, or even year, but was whatever of those divisions he or she who said “soon” wanted it to be. So from now on, he told himself, whenever anyone says I can do something “soon,” I’ll say to them, yes, I know all about that, you bleddy liar, but when, when, when? “Hey, gra’ma, can I sleep here tonight?” he asked, bursting back into the house.