N - One Key At A Time

I was going back to the village where I was born and my guts where
knotted with anxiety. I had been away for more than ten years with
little contact. And they where not ten years in which I had been stored
in a box. They were hectic years, full of learning and work and play.
There was more play, in fact, than either learning or work. To be
clear, the distinction was wholly fused into one. There were women,
which would not have been well though of in my village. Worse, there
was drink, which was heard of in my village but though a crime one
removed from the slaughter of the first born.
I had done both, and more, and the results proved our puritans village
elders to be full of wisdom. I brought back a son, but no wife, mother
or money. The things I did bring were unlikely to be welcome: an
education, a thirst to teach, more ideals than a soldier before he
turns mercenary, and the son, Joseph, five years and four months, with
no mother, and not a note about him to my own.

The darkness that cloaked the train's passage had concerned me. We
could see nothing of the valley, or tell how, or if, the world outside
had changed. Joseph wanted to open the carriage window and let cinders
in his hair but I would not let him. I had dressed him in the best
clothes a teacher's wage could muster and did not wish him to meet his
grandparents with soot on his collar. I told him instead of the first
time I had ridden a train, when I left the village ten years ago, about
the smell of smoke that gripped your lungs almost as tightly as
excitement gripped my belly. We were going fast, I told him, one
hundred miles an hour or more. But through the reflected darkness we
could not tell if we were moving a hundred miles or none. I felt like a
traitor, sneaking back undercover.

But as the great engine gasped over the brow of the hill, my fears
dissolved in the amber station lights. The exact same crowd had seen me
off, murmuring in the evening light of that long August day a world
ago. A murmuring that stopped as I arrived with my child in my
hand.
'How you've changed,' said a woman in the crowd, who looked like my
mother, but older and sadder. She stepped forward to embrace me and the
trance was broken. They all clustered around. All except my father,
lent against the ticket booth, chewing tobacco. With the faintest of
nods he met my eye, and I swear there was a twinkle there.
All my family and old friends where there, some changed, some much the
same. There were men and women together who would not stand in the same
room when I left, and others who were close as shadows, now standing at
opposite sides of the circle. And there were children. Soft, fluffy
children with puppy fat like seals that ran crazily across the platform
and tugged at Joseph's clothes. Where did all these little knees and
fingers come from? There had not seemed enough passion in our village
to make one baby when I left. But ten years are long enough to brew a
passion I suppose.
My mother's were arms locked around my neck tight and wiry as a monkey,
swinging as I turned to shake hands and receive pecks. The things she
whispered to me. All those precious nothings saved up that she could
not write them in letters, that she could not afford in
telegrams.
'My beautiful boy, a grown man - and my grown man's beautiful boy. You
haven't changed at all underneath the curls and beard. The same eyes,
oh, the same eyes lurk beneath. And the child has the same eyes, the
very same eyes.' And they're all off, clucking like chicken frightening
a fox, and the fox is my child.
A new voice, and an old one, with the same sacred eyes, sliced through
their chatter as butter slices through a wire. Before I see her, I knew
she was unchanged. That is the same voice that said to me once, 'think
of me your sweet sister never born.' But what a sister; one that steals
kisses for too long, who visits a man in the night, who runs to a
station to wave red lace at a departing train. A sister who, ten years
later, welcomes me with a kiss that turns the welcoming committee to
stone, as she takes my hand and lays it on her fat belly. It seemed
we'd all been fertile.
'And what have you brought back adventurer,' she asked. It was the
question they had all been thinking I suppose, since they saw the
porter unload my bags. I should say bag. The very rucksack I departed
with, the one my father brought back from some war. This time, no
clothes, or sandwiches for an army. Instead a heavy machine, a silver
arm poking through the canvas.
'You'll see, my Rosie,' I told my sister, and was about to return for
another taste of her. But an arm was placed on her shoulder across her
breast. A rough hand dressed in coarse linen.
'Good to see you again John,' he said. The last time Tom spoke to me,
the implication was it would be quite the opposite. Still, he extended
his hand anyway and held it firmly and looked right deep into my eyes.
'Why, you're back.' But it was a question, to which I had no reply for
him.
'Tell us what's in the bag Uncle John,' cried a child from down around
my ankles. I called to Joseph and we lifted it between us, refusing all
offers of help. It was the homecoming I had imagined in my most selfish
dreams. I had done nothing save to be gone, and now treated as a king
through the simple act of returning. Underneath the skin of any teacher
I believe a showman, or a show off, swims. There was I, marching down
the high street, with my boy, carrying a bag that called like the
Piper. People ran from their doors into the street to string along
behind our band. By the time we reached my mother's house, it seemed
the whole village was caught in our net.

It hadn't changed. Trapped between two identical houses, caked with
grimness and finished with a chimney that coughed smoke over the
washing, it threatened to bring me down. I had to get inside before the
thin ghost of a boy, waving from the bedroom window, scarred me away.
The living room smelt still of last Friday's fish, and all the other
Fridays the house has ever seen. Mother could never persuade the smell
to leave. Like my father, already in residence in the threadbare
armchair two feet from the fire. Having done his duty, the paper was
already up and twitching, and he gave not an inch to the aunties,
cousins, hangers on that shuffled into the room, not much different
from the cattle even now shuffling onto the late train for the
city.
I cleared a space on the table, heave my rucksack up and ease the
contents out. There were whispers and ahs. Even in the gloom of that
house, the machine glistened.
'This,' I told them, 'is the typewriter. Machine of tomorrow. Now, I
need paper mother.'
Mother clattered around in desks and drawers until she handed me a few
yellow scraps, already scribbled on. I recognise the writing as my
own.
'I'll not be needing those no longer,' she said. I fed them into the
machine, took off my jacket and rolled the sleeves up to the arms.
'Now,' I said, 'a demonstration.' Trying to conjure as much drama as I
could, I began to type.
THERE IS NO PLACE LIKE HOME. GOD SAVE THE KI
The leavers entangled, and while I fought to free them, I asked the
crowd, 'what do you think?'
'What's it for?' calls a little girl from the corner.
'For anything you may wish to write.'
'But I have my chalks,' she replied, 'mummy, will the man take my
chalks away?'
'No, no. This machine make it easier - a bill of materials, a receipt
for your best hat, a letter to a loved one.'
'It's true,' spoke up my mother. 'While he was away my John used this
machine for every word he sent me.'
'Look, see the letters, how neat and well formed, neat as the words in
the Bible. Come here Joseph, show them how easy it is.'
I pulled him from the grasp of his newfound friends and sat him on a
pile of books on the chair. 'Watch.' Joseph struck out as we had
agreed.
MY NSME IS JOESPH.
'See how easy it is? You press the keys here and words are printed
here.'
'You press one key at a time?' asked Tom.
'Yes.'
'But I can write whole words with my pen. I've no need for a fancy
machine. You've got a nerve coming here to show us what we can do
already. Fancy suit and fancy machine but that's all they are, a
fancy.'
'Now now,' said my mother, 'no need for that. It's too late for all
this talk. My son is tired of your babbling now, time to go, time to
go.' And she shooed them out into the night, running around after the
little ones, giving their hands to parents.
When she finally closed the door and lent back against it panting, she
said, 'John take no notice of them. They've bitter tongues wagged by
empty heads. We're glad to see you back - both of you. And both of us
too.' She nodded to the snoring mass by the fire.

My parents had taken a lodger in my old bedroom, but he was relegated
to the attic so that Joseph and I could have the room. It was still as
dank and cold as I remembered, even in the gathering spring. That any
man would pay for that room, in comparison to the warmth and welcome of
our city apartment, made me shiver. He clanked around above us all
night. I had seem but an outline of his jaw, but that was enough to
wonder how desperate my parents must be to take a stranger under their
room, and let him prowl past my mother's bed at night.

I awoke to opera waltzing through the window. The words were clear but
not in a language I recognised. The voice was familiar as soup. Joseph,
at the end of the bed, lay comatose from the evening's excitement, so I
crept out, pulled on my shirt and coat and slipped through the back
door and into the next. Rosie was pinning washing while she sang. The
strength of her voice caught the sheets and turned them into sails. She
had not heard me, and I stood transfixed by the sadness of words I
couldn't understand. Finally I could not hold myself any longer and
moved to place my arms around her. She did not skip a note, as I felt
the baby rising and falling in time and looked for her husband's shape
inside. When she finished she turned to me, tears guttering her
cheeks.
'The old minister played his gramophone while I cleaned. The most sad
sound in the world don't you think John.'
'The saddest is the breaking of your tears upon the ground.'
'If only he could see me now, and know what his gramophone has done to
me.'
'Strange that you fear what a minister might think, and not for your
husband.'
'He knows me too well to fear.'
'There was fear in his eyes last night.'
She laid her pegs gently on the ground. 'Come John, take your sister
for her morning constitution.'
We walked arm in arm away from the empty high street, across Billard's
Bridge and onto the enclosed lanes that took few horses down to the
village. It was a private place. In our youth, it was well know for the
meetings of children becoming adults. The high hedges, topped with
birches, created a tunnel immune from the seasons and unspied from the
village. We walked in silence.
There was a place we used to go to, though a scramble in the hedge,
across the roots of the trees and down a sheer cliff to the pool we
called Babbler. It was not as easy I remembered, but the last time I
was leaner than string. Now I carried ten years of school dinners
around my bones. Rosie sprung ahead of me, leaping between trunks and
boulders as she had done a decade ago. By the time I arrived at
Babbler, her dress and petticoat were already discarded on the
rocks.
'Come on John,' she waved, but I was beset by modesty.
'But what if Tom?'
'If Tom should be taken ill from the hills, should he creep down this
path with his mistress, I would tell him this: His Rosie may bathe in
the same water as her brother should she choose.' And she stood out of
the water, laughing. 'Do we have any secrets left between us
John?'
Childbirth had taken nothing from her. She was still shaped as a
statue, and as smooth. I fumbled out of my clothes, trying to hide my
embarrassment, and into to the cold water which soon took it
away.
Lying back in the pitch water, a shade darker than the devil, we used
to say we were nothing but reflections of the trees. I would choose an
oak or a birch, one with high branches and a sturdy trunk. Rosie would
always plump for a rambling hawthorn, a scribble of branches to go wild
in a storm.
'Can you do this in your city?' she called, paddling gently below the
waterline.
'There are public baths,' I tell her, 'boiling with bodies. Impossible
to dive it is, for fear of landing in a bucket of skin.'
'Do you miss diving?'
'I do?'
She swam over to me. 'Do you miss our contests?'
'I miss the prize more.' She flipped over, dove under the surface. 'I'm
sorry I shouldn't?' but she was gone, Babbler mirrored over, not a
trace of bubbles. I counted twenty, thirty, forty seconds.
Then she exploded from the water behind me, screaming with laughter,
sending me scattering into the shallows. I thrashed about in the mud,
felt her hand on my leg, winding me onto my front. She was standing
half out of the water. I stopped protesting and let her look over
me.
'Why did you come back John?'
'To teach.'
'We have a teacher.'
'A teacher of history and nonsense, a bully. A man with his life
dedicated to keeping the village the same.'
'Your father taught us well.'
'My father wanted me to work the hills, marry a village girl and
provide him grandchildren.'
'And what is so wrong with a life like that?'
'I don't know Rosie, what is wrong with that life?'
She slapped my knee, not the slap of a mother wishing to sting a
child's leg, but the anger of a woman abandoned. I held her
wrist.
'Tell me what's wrong Rosie.'
She was close to me on the ground then, caught off balance, struggling
to remain dignified.
'You can't stay here,' she hissed. She was barely above me. I could
hear the drum in her chest.
She pulled away. It was an undignified dismount but I let her go,
rested in the mud, staring through branches at the sky. Her dress stuck
to wet skin as she pulled it on, I heard it tear, and a curse. She came
back to me.
'Will you lay there all day?'
'Maybe until the leaves fall, and Babbler freezes over.'
'Why did you come back John?'
'Not to haunt you.'
'Why then?'
'Because this, this wide sky, these green trees, those dark hills,
they'll not be here forever. They've machines that can milk cows twenty
times faster than a man does. Machines to plant crops and to harvest
them. Machines Rosie, not hands. All this will change, and if we can't
change too?' I shook my head.
It always was this way, Rosie thinking about tomorrow and me thinking
about the day after that. All the learning and working and waiting and
relinquishing, hadn't changed either one of us.

The enclosure of my mother's breakfast held no appeal, so I dressed and
followed the stream upwards. I felt like the salmon I that have read
about, gasping their last breath to return somewhere they have never
known. As children, my father forbade me to climb higher than the
Babbler mouth. He could not see me from the dusty office where he
huddled over his books, and, even if he could, he would not have
looked. But I knew that, through some parental sense, the colour of mud
on my boots perhaps, he would know. I never dared go further than this
place, where the Babbler falls from the earth. In all this space the
boy was captive.

When I reached the source, I kept climbing. At first the ground was
thick with marsh reeds, marking out the water underfoot, but they
petered out to scrub, which bared to jagged rock. The city has no place
for rock, and I was out of practice. Coming over the ridge that I had
only seen before from below, I rested my hands on my knees, breathing
roughly.
'Come to change the guard?'
Tom, balanced on an outcrop, broke bread between his massive hands, and
did not offer any to me.
'You won't change a thing,' he said and shook and pushed his crook into
a crack. The staff was calved with heads of rams, horns woven. Good
solid animals, who served their masters and did not complain when
sudden frost claimed them on the high slopes.
'You don't understand Tom. You can't pretend the outside world doesn't
exist anymore. It's too close. When that crook was carved, the next
town was a week's herd away. On the train the city is an evening's
ride. Soon, they'll have machines that will herd the sheep for you. And
what will you do then?'
'Guess I'll herd the damn machines. Always need to herd
something.'
'Will they Tom? What if there's no need? What will you do then? And
Rosie? And the bundle on the wing?'
'I'll tell you this John, and nobody else in this village will, because
every boy an girl that's had a sniff of that schoolroom has too much
nod to your father. But I'm not afraid of you. Nobody wants you here.
All your ideas, all your words. Don't need them. Don't need your city.
Don't need much beside these sheep and these hills. And nobody but God
will take them from us.'
'God's hand, or man's hand, you won't keep these hills.'
'We'll see John.'
Reflected across his eyes, the mountains rose and fell above the fields
and forest that picked out my childhood. Could he not see that they
changed? The leaves budded and bloomed and fell away as autumn
parchment. The streams cut their ways into rivers and rocks slipped and
scared the landscape. The birds flocked to one copse or another while
clouds rolled endlessly overhead. Could he not see that change was not
a part of the landscape, but was the very landscape itself?
He said not a word. I gathered my breath, rose, and turned to see the
world through my own eyes.
'She'll make a fine mother,' I said and left him there, for the wind to
snatch his reply into the heavens.

The weather was closing in. By the time the grass had turned from
brittle moorland to fertile grazing, I could feel the first chattering
of rain on my back. The village had no charm to loose in the rain;
muddy tracks turned to rivers, children floating sticks along the
gullies. I walked up the back alley to my mother's house, and heard
Joseph squealing with delight in the yard next-door.
Inside, Rosie, washing forgotten and dampening, chased him into a
corner. The boy was stuttering with giggles, bouncing on his holed
souls, happier than his mother ever was. Rosie, apron twisting and
skirts kicked-up, bundled him up in an excited ball and swung him
around.
'Oh, John! Your mother said I could take him.'
'Are you being a good boy for Auntie Rosemary?'
'Yes sir.'
'Don't make me an aunt.'
'And what else would my sister be to my son,' I asked her.
'You mother said, your father wants to see you. He's in the
schoolhouse.'

I know the smell of this room, furniture wax, leather and the fear of a
boy about to be canned. He said once, 'John, I cannot be any less
strict with my own son.' Maybe he was a little more. My palms itch at
the thought of facing him. But we are equals now, almost.
'Close the door,' he says, and I am nine again, standing in front of
the oak desk, hands outstretched, grubby soft flesh up.
He looks up from reading, coughs. No build up to his argument. 'They're
stubborn men John. The women too. Fools the lot of them.'
'Are they fools, to fear the unknown? To think that their whole
existence might be gone, not so long from now?'
'They're afraid because they don't understand. All these books, not a
single one read by any hand but mine, or maybe a few by your filthy
paws.'
'They don't believe that anything in there will help them, and nor do
I. These books are an archive. It's all past.'
'Ha! These are the words of great, ancient men, whose wisdom will never
be forgotten.'
'But you think Latin and a Bible are all they need.'
'If only they we capable of understanding it.'
'But they are capable. We can teach them to type. We can teach them to
work looms. Help them to make something of this village.'
'No, John. Those are not the education they need. They are generations
of sheepherders. They are eight-in-line farmers and pig-swillers. Give
them machines and you give them power they cannot control.'
'Then you will run this village into the slurry.'
'What did you hope to achieve here John? Bring the city with you? If
they wanted the city, they would move there. Would they not?'
He snapped the book shut, obscuring himself in dust.

My mother did not understand why we must go back to the city with such
haste. 'It's only been a day since you arrived,' she fussed. She filled
my pack with produce, because the city cannot provide, and begged me to
take the morning train. But, as I explained to Joseph while buttoning
him back into his suit, if we did not leave quickly we might not be
able to leave at all. What I meant by that was my father reigned over
the minds of my village, and to stay would mean first compromise, then
acceptance, then becoming him myself. Disappointment washed across me,
all the colours melting into ruddy brown. Rosie was gone, the train
punctual. I wrote a note for my father, 'please try,' left it on the
typewriter, and walked away from my mother's house. We would not be
coming back.

On the platform I listened for footsteps, but the carriages pulled in,
and without ceremony, we boarded. A red flag, and lurch into motion. I
watched Joseph watching shapes flash by in the mirrored glass. He
smiled more now. I thought about how I could return to the school and
ask the headmaster to have me back. There were other schools in other
cities too. Joseph asked to eat, and I unloaded the rucksack. It was
then I found it, paper wrapped around an apple, signed by Rosie. A
single typed letter X.

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