Tom All Alone (5) (i)

      As Tom got older, they would sometimes find different things to do in the evenings.  Mum might sit him on her lap in the back room, and they'd try to do the Picture Crossword in the Evening News.  He soon got very good at being able to put words to the pictures and fit them in the grid.  He had an eye for words - their shapes and sounds and spellings.  He knew that 'cough' sounded like 'coff', 'rough' like 'ruff', 'bough' like 'bow' (as in 'bow down', not like in 'bow and arrow'), and he knew what those words meant.  One day, dad came home with an old tape recorder he'd bought cheap from someone at the pub.  Tom would sit at it and recite nursery rhymes he'd learnt - recording them and playing them back, watching the funny little lights on the front move wider apart as the sounds got louder.

      He learned to play card games, too.  Sometimes, during the quieter evenings of winter, he'd go downstairs to nan's and play 'Pairs' with her on her big wooden table, using an old finger-worn pack of cards that she kept in her darning box.  The cards were so used and creased that it was easy to remember them from their backs, but he was usually good at remembering where certain cards were, anyway. 

      He liked it in her back room - she called it her 'parlour' - because it was cosy and filled with lots of things.  Its window overlooked the back yard and the next house, so the light was dull during the day -  even in summer - giving the old furniture a bulky look and making the room seem cramped.  But after dark, when she'd lit her fire and put the lamps on, and the light glinted and flashed on a thousand shiny surfaces, the room took on a magical quality - like a cave stuffed with exotic treasures.  She didn't have a television, so the couch and armchair faced the fire - the armchair close enough to it for nan's feet to rest on the hearth when she stretched her legs out.  The table was behind the couch, on the window wall, and she kept it covered with a starched white cloth, fluted at the corners.  She kept a silver cruet set on it always, shaped like three acorns on an oak leaf: salt, pepper, mustard. 

      Beside the table, in the corner by the door, her wireless set stood on a small table of its own - it's muffled, humming tones giving a permanent background sound in the room whatever the time of year.  The set always fascinated him, in its big wooden cabinet, with its glowing glass panel showing words he'd never seen before.  The names of places around the world, she told him, and their wavelengths.  Russell had tried to explain radio waves to him, and how they couldn't be seen like waves in the river or the sea, but it never made sense to him.  Like those names: Luxembourg, Paris, Munchen, Hilversum, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Oslo.  Russell had a map of the world sellotaped on the bedroom wall, but it was too high up for Tom to see and try to find those places.  He just knew some of the shapes, and especially Britain with its sticking-out foot and head turned backwards, and Italy that looked like a boot.  If he turned the tuning knob, he could hear these strange whining and wailing sounds, and voices speaking in languages he didn't understand, and orchestral music fading in and out, like some of the old records mum and dad had upstairs.  Classical music, they called it.  Sometimes there'd be something more like Russell's music, with pop groups.  But nan always liked it kept on the one station, which was all talking, and where she listened to The Archers every afternoon after her lunch.

      Behind the armchair, an old mahogany sideboard ran along the back wall, jungled along the top with pots and jugs of African violets, poinsettias, tradescantias, coleuses, gloxinias, spider plants, maiden's-hair ferns and azaleas - their fire-lit shadows forming spooky, twirling arabesques on the parchment-brown wallpaper behind.  On one side of the fireplace stood a Victorian bureau, its shelves laden with brass trinkets, coloured vases and ceramic ornaments of birds and animals, which seemed to move in the flickering light.  On the other side was a 'tallboy' as nan called it, on top of which sat a large Victorian bracket clock with a silver candlestick on either side - all prizes granddad had won in sculling races on the Thames when he was a younger man, before he went off to France to fight in the Great War.  Beside them, a silver frame held a photograph of him at the time - proud and noble-looking in his buttoned-up collar and Sunday best, a Byronic wave to his hair, his sideburns accentuating the squareness of his jaw and the keenness of his eyes; his large white hands grasping at the waistcoat, where a watch chain looped; his feet standing firm at twenty-past seven.

      When they'd played all their games and the cards had been put away, nan would go out to her scullery and put a saucepan of milk on the stove for cocoa.  Then they'd sit by the fire and drink it, sometimes with a slice of her home-made caraway seed cake.  Staring down into the flames, she would then often tell stories about her life.  About her childhood in a Sussex village - her parents and brothers and sisters, all in the tiny tied cottage on the estate where her father was the gardener.  About her growing up and going into service in the manor house there as soon as she was old enough, making pennies to help out at home.  Tom had a favourite story, too.

      "Tell me about the woman who came from Canada, nan."

      He could see the sparkle come into her eyes at the memory.

      "Changed my life at the time, she did," she said.  "Almost changed everyone's lives, too.  Your mum's, and your uncle Reg's and auntie Eleanor's.  Yours and Russell's, too.  Things would've all been different."

      The woman was a sister of the lady at the Manor.  She'd emigrated to Canada with her husband and settled on the prairies of Saskatchewan.  She'd met nan on that visit and had been taken by her scrupulous efficiency and good nature, and the spark of her wit. Nan, too, had been taken by the woman's strength of character, her seeming exotic nature, her strange way of speaking. She told nan stories about life on the prairies, which sparked her sense of adventure and possibility.  She wondered at the names of some of the places the woman knew.  Fort Qu'Appelle, Moose Jaw, Indian Head, Medicine Hat - names which in themselves fired her imagination.  Who could live in places like that?  Poetic names that meant so much more to her, somehow, than the names of the places she knew: Dorking, Guildford, Horsham, Crawley, Worthing.  Names that said nothing, whereas these names conjured pictures to dream about.

      "She saw something in me," nan said.  "Something she liked.  And she knew we were struggling at home with all those mouths to feed on dad's tiny wages."

      On the final day of her visit, the woman - Mrs Boxall - invited nan to come out there to work on the ranch, if she so wished.  She'd pay her passage.  She'd leave it with her to think about.

      Nan had gone home and thought about it, and talked about it with her parents.  They would be sad to see her go.  But it was a chance none of them had ever had before, or were ever likely to.  The chance of a whole lifetime for someone from a family who'd hardly ever set foot outside of the village, let alone the country.

(continued)  https://www.abctales.com/story/harryc/tom-tom-turnaround-5-ii