The Pipe

My father loved his pipe and I was filled with horror when I
accidentally dropped it in the fire one cold spring morning when I was
eight years old and staying away from school because my shoes were at
the cobbler's. This all happened in the nineteen thirties, in
Birkenhead, but it haunts me still.
The pipe was father's one luxury and looking at it gave him the kind
of pleasure others might draw from contemplating their shining motor
cars. The curved black stem was joined to the neck by a silver band,
and the hallmark had been rubbed to an illegible smudge by the
continual stroking of his thumb as he puffed dreamily away, lying back
in the old Windsor armchair with his stockinged feet resting on the
brass fender. Sometimes he would fill a little scent bottle of mine
with heavenly blue smoke that waved and flowed like lovely tattered
banners, and when he felt that our cat, Snuff, had spent long enough on
his lap he would direct a little jet of smoke among her silver
whiskers, whereupon she would unhook her claws from his corduroy
trousers and spring to the floor with a cross little sneeze.
I felt very grown up on that particular morning. Mam often took me
with her when she went out cleaning offices and pubs, but because I had
no shoes on this day she had given me instructions to make the
porridge. I'd placed the porridge pan on the hob over the fire and was
waiting for the mixture to start bubbling when I noticed Daddy's pipe
lying in a saucer on the hearth. It looked like some small sleeping
animal with an exceedingly smooth coat and I picked it up and started
stroking the bowl. It was so smooth and I was holding it so lightly -
as if I might hurt it - that it slipped from my fingers.
I remember pushing out a hand and overturning the pan, which instantly
became the centre of my attention. This was the first time Mam had
trusted me with such important work and it seemed as if the result
would be disaster. I grabbed the handle and righted the pan and saw the
the thick tawny porridge mixture was still miraculously all in place;
and in that instant, as relief started to roll over me, a new panic
struck. The pipe - where was Daddy's pipe? Then I saw it and gave a
scream. It lay in the middle of the fierce red coals, brilliantly set
in a blaze of flames. I struggled to grasp it with the fire tongs and
only succeeded in pushing it deeper into the coals. It seemed that more
than a pipe was being consumed under my eyes. It was as though I had
cast Daddy himself into the burning fiery furnace.

I could smell my pinafore scorching and feel the sweat running down my
face and arms. Spilt coals were spitting and smoking angrily on the
blue glazed tiles inside the fender and I saw the flames leaping and
licking at the pipe.
Father grasped what had happened as soon as he came into the room. He
lifted me from the hearth rug, set me in the Windsor chair, took a
swift and wincing look at my hands, and sprang up to fetch butter for
the burns. I remember Mam, who came in as he was smearing it on, saying
it was the last scrap of butter in the house and Daddy saying, "Then we
must eat dripping."
Only when my sobbing had subsided and I was holding my hands tightly
bunched under my armpits did Daddy go to the fire. He speared gently
among the coals and finally held up the poker with a sad greyish ring
dangling from the end - the silver band. I will never forget what he
said then, as he gazed at the remains of his old friend: "I've been
setting fire to thee for nigh on seven years, but it takes a little
lass to make it burn right."
"However will you manage without your pipe?" asked Mam with tears in
her eyes. And turning to me she said, "Your father will die without his
pipe."
"No, I won't," he said, with a glance at my stricken face. "The breath
I save from all that puffing will make me live longer."
He took me out that morning and I sat astride his shoulders wearing
the red plush bedroom slippers I'd been given for Christmas. Daddy was
a brisk walker and sitting on his shoulders, jerking to the rhythm of
his stride, was like occupying a ship's crow's nest in a half gale. It
enabled me to see my surroundings from a fresh angle. I saw broad
unbroken stretches of the rippling gold and purple river, the ferries
and pilot boats darting up, down and across to the heaped-up city on
the far bank, jib cranes like tall starved birds, seagulls dive-bombing
the Manx packet for the kippers she was landing at St. George's stage,
and best of all a grand white ship like a wedding cake coming into
view.
Daddy was as enchanted as me. "Look at her. Doesn't she make you want
to cry? Isn't she the loveliest thing you ever saw? And she's full of
millionaires with silk hats living in state cabins with velvet curtains
and her hold's jammed with great brass-bound trunks bursting with gold.
Oh, Maggie, and she's touched at Valparaiso and Madagascar and Rio and
Martinique. And she's proud, she's proud."

But it was a cold morning and the river borne wind knifed cruelly at
my blistered fingers and I began to sob quietly. He lowered me to the
ground and stared anxiously into my face. "What is it, sweetheart?" he
asked.
Silently I held out my hands and a look of desolation came over his
face. He was twenty-eight years old but at that moment he was an old
man.
"Where are your mittens?" he asked.
I couldn't speak, not because I'd lost my mittens and was afraid to
own up, but because I'd spoilt his enjoyment of the ship.
"Oh, my little Eskimo girl," he said, opening his coat and folding it
about me, so that I was in a kind of tent. "You're an absolute chick.
No bigger than a pint pot. A little Eskimo getting the frost
bite."
We were standing at a tram stop and I remember the people in the queue
staring curiously at this big sad faced man hugging a sobbing child in
the chill of morning.
"Let me get up again," I whispered. My fingers were smarting just as
keenly in the warm folds of Daddy's clothing. Perhaps if the wind
numbed them enough they would lose all feeling.
He hoisted me back. "We'll soon be at Grandma's," he said. "She knows
how to make fingers better. She knows magic."
"Look, she's coming in!" I cried, and fleetingly lost all memory of
pain. "Look at the tugs running up and down!"
"She's going to tie up," he said. "Oh , she's a proud one. If only we
could build a few more like her."
"Did you build her, Daddy?"
"No. I haven't put a hammer to a rivet in two year. The day they
commission another like her they'll be dancing in the streets."
A clock was chiming eight as we arrived at Grandma's cottage opposite
the gates of the shipyard and Daddy stopped in the act of lifting the
knocker. "This 'll never do. I'm late already. How are your fingers,
Maggie?"
"Not bad, Daddy." They were hurting so badly that it didn't matter to
me what happened.
"Well, look, Maggie I'll just slip into the yard and see if I can get
took on and then I'll take you to your Grandma's. It will be an
education to you. I want you to remember this, always.
There must have been five hundred men lined up in that shipyard,
shuffling on the oily cobbles in the long deep shadow of a great
skeletal keel. I'm tempted to say the men looked like the remnants of a
defeated army, but to my eye they were just a lot of gentlemen waiting
anxiously and impatiently for something to happen - a pub to open, a
tram to rattle up, the gate to open at the football ground.
We waited in a single ragged line until two men came from a small door
in vast shed and faced us. One wore clean white overalls and had a
jovial red face. The other, in a black suit and a bowler, had a
bloodless, brooding face and carried a clipboard. Their names were Mr
Pell and Mr Thayer. Both of them stared at me, perched up there on
Daddy's shoulders, Mr Pell with an oafish grin and Mr Thayer with a
disapproval as cold as the wind. Then Mr Thayer said in a sharp Welsh
voice, "I would like to know why a child is in the yard."
Daddy said something so quietly that even I could not catch it. Mr
Thayer handed the clipboard to Mr Pell and came up to us. He looked at
me with strangely dead black eyes, then lowered them to meet Daddy's,
and I noticed faint green patches, like moss, on the dome of his
bowler.
"It's really no use coming here if you make the excuse of having a
child if you're offered work," he said.
"She'll go to my mother's, sir, if I'm offered work. She lives just
outside the gates."
"Why didn't you leave her there before you came here?"
"I wanted her to see it, sir. To remember it."
"That's a funny thing to say."
"Yes, sir, it's a funny world."
"How long have you been coming here?"
"I was apprenticed here when I was fourteen, sir. I never missed a
shift in ten years and then I got laid off nineteen months ago. I've
been here on the stand every weekday since."
"How many times have you been given work?"
"I don't know about work, sir. I was taken on the day the Empress of
India was launched to pick up bits of paper and paint lavatories for
the big wigs. That's the only day's work I've been given."

"There are men on the stand, mister, who've been with us for more than
thirty years. Do you suppose I'm happy about that?" He gave me an
unfathomable look, then turned to Mr Pell and said, "See what you can
do for this chap." Then he strode away into the shed.
Mr Pell watched him go and then turned to the line of men. "After that
touching little scene perhaps we can stop playing hearts and flowers
and give some men some work. Right, I need two men today."
He made a big display of studying his clipboard and then looked up at
Daddy to say, "I've got nothing for you today, Moran. Nothing for
riveters. Nothing that you'd call work, seeing how particular you are
about painting and tidying."
"I'm not particular, Charlie," said Daddy. "I'd paint the river and
tidy the sky."
"And that's all the work you'll ever get if it's up to me," said Mr
Pell
I felt Daddy's body stiffen and I threw my arms about his neck as he
took a stride forward. Then, remembering me, he stopped. Mr Pell, who
had stepped back, called out, "Jack Barnett ... Harry Stringer ...
follow me. The rest of you can go."

Grandma bandaged my fingers and made me chew an aspirin with a mint
imperial. Now Daddy and I were sitting on her sofa, eating toast and
jellied dripping.
"Well, who got took on in the end?" she asked.
"Jack Barnett and Harry Stringer. It was the old pals' act, as per
usual."
"So that's what they were at. I couldn't make it out. Sending him pint
upon pint and both with big families with no rags to their backs.
"What are you talking about, Ma?"
"Charlie Pell, in the Market Inn." Grandma paid a call at the Market
Inn every night, to get her medicine, she told me. For many years I
believed a pub was a cosy kind of hospital.
"I never heard of Pell buying anybody a drink," said Daddy.
"Nothing was too good for his lordship."
"So that's the way to do it," said Dad. "But I wouldn't stoop."
"And then you wonder why you don't get work. And whatever possessed
you to take the child to the yard?
"To show her."

Grandma paused to think about that. "You make too much of that lass,
Peter. It doesn't do to make too much of them and there'll soon be
another."
"How can you make too much of your child?" he asked wonderingly. "What
is there but to love our children?"
The wind had dropped when we left and the sun was warm. The bandages
chafed my fingers and when we had turned the corner Daddy unwound them
and put them in his pocket.
"Grandma's magic didn't work," I said. "Is there any magic, real
magic?"
"If you look for it. Come on, let's go and see."
You had to queue up for magic. We were soon standing in a long line of
men outside a yellow brick bundling near the town hall. We shuffled
slowly up three flights of stairs and finally reached a spacious office
where the queue divided into three. At the top of the room men in dark
suits asked endless questions behind a wire grill.
Daddy's turn came at last and from my crow's nest I gazed down at a
sallow bald head apparently ravaged by mole hills.
"Do you know it's an offence to keep a child from school?" asked the
bald man.
"What's this - the dole office or the school inspector's?" said Daddy.
"Can't you see she's got no shoes to her feet?"
"Did you report for work this morning?
"Yes."
"Where?"
"Shipyard."
"How many did they take on?"
"Seven."
"Who was doing the hiring?"
"Mr Thayer and Pell."
"Was it raining?"
I felt Daddy start violently. "What sort of question is that?"
"How do I know if you went to the yard? Somebody could have told you
what happened. We get too many welfare scroungers."
"What did you say, laddie?"
The dole clerk's hand went into a drawer and he passed a few coins
over the counter.
"Oh, Maggie," said Daddy when we got outside. "Marry money. Get your
hooks into a man with brass. Somebody to look after your body as well
as your soul. There are people on that ship who don't live in the same
universe. Get some man who can wrap you in furs and have you waited on
hand and foot - so you can snap your fingers at the little Pells and
dole clerks.
He was swinging along with an aggressive swiftness. Suddenly he
stopped and turned back and went up to a shop window. "Genuine
reductions," said a card. "Hats, gloves, scarves, hosiery."
He put a hand in his pocket. Looking down I saw the coins shining in
his palm. Together with Mam's few coppers from charring, this had to
keep us for a week. His hand closed about the money and went back
towards his pocket. We were moving away from the shop when the
strangest thing happened. Three vibrant hoops sounded from the river -
three rich and arrogant trombonings - and Daddy started dancing on the
pavement, rocking me wildly, making me laugh and squeal, making
passers-by laugh, laughing himself the loudest of all.
"The pride of her!" he roared. "The damnable pigheaded pride! Remember
that, Maggie, I want you to remember that."
He turned and strode into the shop and demanded to see mittens,
laughing and pirouetting over the sober grey carpet as the elderly
woman assistant nervously emptied drawer upon drawer onto the glass
counter. I chose brown lambs wool decorated with primroses, and as we
left Daddy stood in the doorway and said in a fierce voice, "Now you're
sure you can guarantee them for magic, Miss?"
I went back on his shoulder and he danced to the railway station,
where an ancient woman in black rags reigned over crammed wicker
baskets of flowers of every scent and hue. He bought a posy of violets
for Mam and I clutched them in my mittened hand. My pain had vanished
as if by magic.
Daddy walked more slowly now, more consideringly. We drew level with a
tobacconist shop and I said, "Stop, Daddy, stop!" He cast a furtive
glance at the window and lengthened his stride. a
"Taroo, taroo!" I piped in imitation of the ship, and he
stopped.
"Just one look," I said coaxingly.
Inside the tobacconist's he lingered by the glass cases where the new
pipes hung. I knew exactly how he felt.

A quiet voice spoke behind us. "I've a nice clay church warden,
slightly chipped. Sixpence to you."
Daddy turned to the shopkeeper and took the pipe. He cradled the
fragile bowl in his palm and ran a finger down the long slender tip.
"I'll take it," he whispered. We left the shop almost on tiptoe.
At our gate I scrambled down from Daddy's shoulders as if he were a
tree and rushed into the house, thrusting up one mittened hand for Mam
to admire, waving her violets in the other, shouting, "And you'll never
guess what Daddy's got! You'll never guess!"
Daddy came in and drew the pipe from his pocket as she watched with
parted lips. They exchanged a look I could not fathom and she pressed
the flowers to her cheek. Then Daddy was sitting in his chair and
putting the church warden to his lips.
Mam put a hand on his shoulder. "But you've no tobacco in it," she
said, crying and laughing.
"Don't worry," he said. "There'll be another day for tobacco."
The cat sprang onto his lap. She would not be dismissed with a puff of
smoke today.