On a cold Saturday afternoon in June, the orphans came to the park as they did most Saturday afternoons. The boys had cropped hair. The girls’ cut was matchingly severe. There was a cheapness and uniformity about the drab clothes that further distanced them and they tended not to mix. After the first flush of arrival they moved in rather a desultory, dutiful fashion between the banana slide, the swings, the roundabout and the long plank of the American swing. They were always under the supervision of two nuns who escorted the crestfallen crocodile through the town, one leading, one following.
On a Saturday afternoon in June, even a cold one, the serious bowling men were out for a league game in full white force on the lovingly mown green and the two tennis courts, again sporting white, boasted their usual patient Saturday queue. The putting green had just been established. It was not a great draw. Few wanted to waste their money on it. The orphans had no money.
Over the summer weeks, Joe had struck up a friendship with two of the orphans. Both were older than he was. Xavier was as tall as Speed, black-haired, gaunt, big-knuckled; Billy was more Joe’s height but broader, very white-faced, a gap between his front teeth. Both were passionate in their friendship for Joe who was deeply attuned to them, to the unimaginable idea of being orphaned, to the longing for escape and normality.
Since his grandfather and his aunt Ruth had moved into Wigton a few months earlier - following the death of their employer, Miss Jennings, and their subsequent eviction from the tied cottage - Joe had acquired status. His grandfather was employed part time in the park and he was given part payment in a minute but rent-free cottage a few yards from the main park gates, a cottage left over from humbler days before the road to the park had become lined with the detached villas of the town’s top drawer. Ruth, to her relief, had been helped by Ellen to find cleaning jobs, including two in Park Road itself. She also went in for lemonade at weekends. This base made the park - which lay perfectly placed between Greenacres and the town - more than just a playground for Joe. It was owned.
He had taken the orphans to meet his aunty Ruth and they had shared a free bottle of dandelion and burdock and a dainty cake each. Joe had felt royal.
The best thing of all was to commandeer the long plank American swing. Settle one of the three of them alone in the middle and have the other boys at each end push it so high that it bucked and the boy sitting had to duck deep to avoid crushing his skull against a crossbar. Unfortunately the swing was near the neat beehive-shaped shelter from which the nuns ran the operation and at the first sign of high bucking one of them would stand up and windscreen-wiper wave and they would have to slow down immediately. The next best thing was to skin the banana slide with candle grease and dare each other to zip down: if you did not jump off with fine judgement you would certainly overshoot and land splat on tarmac. That depended on candles for the greasing and although Billy usually managed to nick a stump of candle, being an altar boy, he had failed to strike lucky on this day. So they settled for spinning the roundabout as fast as they possibly could and jumping on and off it when it was at the highest speed they could manage.
It had limited appeal.
They went into the long grass near the river, looking for sweet dockings to eat. Finding a few of the elephant-eared leaves, the three boys sat on the riverbank and chewed contentedly.
This is our last Saturday,’ said Xavier, casually.
‘The boys are being shifted,’ Billy explained. ‘The girls are staying put.’
‘We’re being sent to Lancashire. All fathers. No nuns.’
‘So you won’t be here again?’
Billy shook his head and continued to disturb the surface of the water with the small stones he always seemed to have in his pockets.
‘Maybe it’ll be better,’ said Xavier. ‘Without the nuns.’
Neither boy showed emotion but Joe felt the looming loss.
‘Come to our house for your tea,’ he suggested, out of nowhere.
‘What’ll your mammy say?’
‘She knows,’ he lied. ‘I said. Come on.’
Obediently, his two friends stood up.
It was a simple matter to drift past the nuns in the shelter and then run across the two fields that took them to the new estate.
No one was in.
‘They’ll be upstreet,’ Joe said.
Ellen had done the usual Saturday morning baking for the week and there were a dozen teacakes. The boys limited themselves to two each but they did use up all the jam. Neither Xavier nor Billy was keen on scones but the thinly layered currant squares went down well, the whole tray. They took only one slice each of the plate cake. Perhaps Joe ought not to have cut it with the short blade of his pocket knife. He offered to put the kettle on but Xavier sensed the probable consequences and they settled for diluted orange, finishing off the half-bottle which with reasonable economy would have seen Joe through another week.
They ate on the hoof. Neither the gaunt Xavier nor the ivory-faced Billy could get enough of walking up and down the stairs and, best of all, going into Joe’s room, sitting on the bed, just looking around at the bare walls and then bouncing up and down and then jumping up and down on the bed.
The boxing gloves were greeted with delighted disbelief and Xavier’s proposal that each of them should wear one and they should all fight each other on the bed while they were finishing the juicy slices of rhubarb plate cake was adopted enthusiastically. Billy suggested they did war-whoops at the same time.
This was how Ellen found them.
Silence came down like the Iron Curtain.
‘Are these the friends you told me about?’
‘Yes.’ The three of them were in a line in the kitchen stoically awaiting execution.
I’m pleased to meet you,’ said Ellen.
Joe, after a moment to let it register, beamed proudly. Xavier and Billy looked at the ground. The iron fist would surely follow.
‘Have you had enough to eat?’
‘Yes, thank you, missis, thank you,’ said Xavier, without a compass in this new sea.
‘I got some sweets with the last of the coupons. Joe won’t mind, will you, Joe?’
He shook his head as his mother produced the white bag full of aniseed balls. When Xavier and Billy were encouraged to take two each and Joe saw them light up, it was almost true that he did not mind.
‘We'll have to go,’ said Xavier, ‘they’ll have set off by now.’
‘We’ll get belted,’ said Billy.
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Ellen, touched by the awful loneliness of the boys. The terrible ease with which a little common generosity could provoke such a longing of trust in their expression.
‘Doesn’t matter, missis, who comes back with us. Father Doyle’ll belt us for going off.’
‘He belts Xavier all the time,’ said Billy. ‘He hates Xavier.’
‘We’re going into Lancashire,’ the older one said. ‘It’ll be better down there.’
‘I’m sure Father Doyle,’ whom Ellen saw in the street, a dumpy cheery man of God, much respected and not only by the Catholics, ‘doesn’t hate you.’
‘He likes to belt me,’ said Xavier bleakly, and Ellen pulled back from what she did not want to know.
Joe ran back to the park with them but the rest of the orphans had already marched off. They went up through Ma Powell’s field and fled down the street but no sign. They had been well and truly left behind.
Outside St Cuthbert’s, in the East End of the town, into which Joe strayed very little, the three of them paused for a moment, the briefest moment.
Perhaps the boys wanted to say, ‘Thanks,’ or express their envy of such a house or their deeper envy of such a mother, or just hold, for a few seconds more, hold the freedom of that short time, when they had been for tea in a normal home with a boy they had met in the park, not even a Catholic. And Joe wanted to say, ‘Goodbye,’ and also some sort of thanks for the unexpected and raw company of boys without parents for the intensity of the friendship.
But words failed them all and after the smallest acknowledgement, Xavier and Billy walked steadily through the black gates towards their certain beating.