Rufus keeps a journal the way he keeps the barometer: every day, whether or not anything has happened. It is a private book, set down in fountain pen at the kitchen table, and more candid than he is aloud — about the work, the weather, his father, and nearly everything else.
Wednesday, 23rd September 1953
Equinox. Glass at 29.8 and steady, a west wind, and the kind of mild grey morning that lies to you about the evening. By the time I came up the lane tonight it was properly cold: the first night this year I have wanted the fire for its own sake and not for company.
The swallows have gone. Twenty-two of them on the wire by the gate yesterday morning; none tonight. I never see them leave. I only ever see that they have left, which I suspect is how most things happen to me.
A long day at Chadderton. Last week’s figures were better than anyone expected, which means a great many men will now expect them every week. I was congratulated in the corridor by a man who told me in March that the thing would never run. I thanked him. One learns.
Letter from Mother. Sugar comes off the ration on Saturday, and she proposes to mark it with a fruitcake “the like of which this family has not seen since 1939.” I am to fetch it on Saturday morning on the Thunderbird, which is a responsibility I rank somewhere above the delta. I read the letter aloud to Charlie. He has not left the kitchen door since.
Penny at six, wet through, returning a pen she maintains she never took. It was not my pen. It was a better one. I have decided not to raise this. She left a sketch on the back of an envelope: the lane, the cottage, and a small cross in the top field marked here be dragons. After she had gone I went up with the torch. Sheep.
Why did I go up with the torch? I have been asking myself that for an hour, and the pipe has gone out twice.
Before the frosts:
The fallen length of wall in the top field (eleven yards, near enough).
The chimney on the east side, which smokes.
Find out what Penny meant.
Friday, 25th September 1953
Rain. The delta. Bed at ten.
Saturday, 26th September 1953
Part I
Sugar off the ration. A great day for the nation and a disastrous one for Charlie’s figure.
Rode to Oldham first thing for Mother’s cake. She had wrapped it in greaseproof paper, a tea towel and, I suspect, a short prayer, and it came home over the tops on the carrier at a steady twenty-five with the dog’s hopes riding on every bend. Father walked me to the gate and said of the Thunderbird what he has said every time since I bought her: “She’ll be the death of thee, or the making.” He has not yet said which.
Glass 29.5 by eleven and still falling. I told Penny at eight, before I set off, that we should have rain by the afternoon. She said the parish hall had a roof. It began at three and has not stopped.
She came in at four, soaked, and kicked her boots off by the hearth as though they had offended her. “Positively atrocious,” she said, and then, before she had even untied her scarf: “What is this one? A very expensive tin opener?”
It is a stress-relief recess for a high-load spar fitting. I have been drawing it for six weeks. I told her so. She said I had spilled tea on the margin. It is an ink stain, it dates from 1944, and I told her that too, though I cannot think why I expected it to help.
I had poured the second mug four minutes before she came in. I will not set down here how I arrived at four minutes, because I set it down aloud, and once was enough.
Charlie slept through all of this until I touched the lid of the cake tin, when he came to life like a Merlin on a cold morning (one cough, then all of him at once) and sat down between us. Penny gave him a corner. He ate it without troubling his teeth. Three years of bed and board, and he throws me over for a sultana.
Part II
At some point the fitting was abandoned. I notice that I cannot say when. I have a clear recollection of Penny on the hearthrug, explaining to the dog the errors in the Ordnance Survey sheet for this parish, and none whatever of deciding to stop work. This is unlike me.
She made supper. She knows the larder better than I do: the white bloomer from the baker (white bread again, after all these years, and it tastes of 1938), the last of the week’s Cheddar, and the sweet pickle. She buttered to the edges, which is most of a week’s butter and very nearly a declaration of war. She said I build a sandwich like a bridge. I said a bridge is a perfectly good thing to build a sandwich like.
She asked if I wanted mustard. I said no.
When the rain cleared we took Charlie up the top path. Everything smelled of wet bracken. Penny says the path is wrong: the tithe map of 1840 puts the boundary a quarter of a mile east, and the village simply wore a new way into the hill because it was quicker. I said that was engineering. She said it was a nightmare. I said something about nothing staying rigid, however carefully you map it, which I should like back.
Charlie came out of the bracken with a stick the size of a pit prop, took her feet from under her on the wet stone by the stile, and I caught her.
That is all that happened. I write it down so that I remember it accurately and do not, in a week, improve it.
(Later.) She said the reflexes were good for something other than catching drawing pens. I have been thinking about that for longer than it deserves.
(Later still.) Half a cake remains. The dog is asleep on the hearthrug with the look of a man who has done well out of the day.