JOSIAH PYKE AND THE BATTLE AHEAD

More about Josiah's childhood and a decision

There’s probably nothing nicer than this, thought Josiah, aged ten, exactly ten, than sitting in a cottage front room like this, all safe and cosy and in the early autumn like it is, but with the sun still streaming down from a blue sky and the window open and the smell of flowers on the breeze blowing in…

He might have thought honeysuckle, but he didn’t know what they were called, just that he loved the smell as the flowers as they cascaded by the open window and winked at him.

He’d never known a time like this. Mildred Haystack (he thought of her as an old woman, the old woman in his head though she was only fifty-something, but he was ten and fifty-something was dreadfully old) had treated him as if he was the most special person in the world.

The truth is she was being ordinary, and nobody had ever been ordinary to him before. At school teachers weren’t because they had thirty odd kids at the time and he was only one of them and you can’t ever hope to be ordinary to so many at the same time. Sometimes, when he’d been feeling ill or vulnerable or down in the dumps he’d tried walking round the playground at playtime with this teacher, even holding her hand, but that hadn’t been ordinary either. It had been comfortable, true, but false, like the Hitler-style moustache on a picture of his father was false when that picture appeared pinned to the church notice board.

It might have told him that some people didn’t like his father. But he hadn’t seen it for above a moment before his father had torn it down and assumed that he’d drawn that moustache himself and marched him home and caned him for the insolence. And he hadn’t known then, and didn’t know now, what a Hitler-moustache looked like. Who was Hitler anyway?

Home hadn’t been ordinary, not in the way this old woman was ordinary, offering him fizzy pop to drink, another apple to eat when the first one was gone, did he want the television on, there were interesting things on the television even in daylight, and did he want her to walk him back home?

Did he want her to walk him back home?

To a brutal father who hid behind a kind of faith that no deity, if there ever was a deity, would recognise? To a mother with her nasty medicine and fondness for gin which he had to go to the village shop in Henstooth to collect for her (and she wasn’t supposed to send him, not by law, and the shopkeeper wasn’t allowed to let him buy it, not by that same law with him being only ten and pasty and vulnerable, but both did.)

So did he want her to walk him back home?

The whole idea brought tears to his eyes, then made him cry good and proper, then made him start shivering and shaking like small boys never do, not even on their tenth birthday when all of nature says they should be glad to be alive. And the tears flowed like steams of pain, and his throat caught and his weeping cracked.

“Then you can stay with me,” Mildred Haystack had said.

And the shivering and shaking had heaved itself to a wet-eyed standstill and he had looked at her with eyes that seemed so big in a pasty face that looked so crumpled.

“Really?” he had asked, wanting to believe her but somehow knowing that life wasn’t like that, not even on your birthday.

“Though people might have something to say about it,” she told him, trying to be honest but not wanting to hurt his feelings any more. “There are people who stick their noses into other folks’ business and cause all sorts of mischief,” she added, holding his face with her eyes so that he knew she was being serious.

He knew about people. He knew about that sort of people. The Bishop was one. The Bishop was constantly arguing with his dad, and when they weren't arguing they were tackling dad’s bottle of Malt whiskey and laughing about silly things they got up to when they were boys and did Satan’s work behind the bike shed, only to pray for forgiveness and a clean slate before they earned a dog collar.

And there was that limping social worker who had come round one day and suggested that the vicar had been reported for abusing his boy with unnecessary violence and he was sorry, but he had to enquire, he had to follow it up even though he was talking to a vicar and suspected it was all rubbish, and dad had preached a sermon about love and suffer all the little children to come unto me at him at him, and he had eventually gone away shaking his head.

So Josiah knew about people.

“They might say it’s not right for a single lady to care for a boy in her home,” she suggested, “they might take you back to your mum and dad anyway, and there might not be anything I can do to stop them. They might have … authority … on their side, and what can an old lady like me do about authority? Authority always wins.”

He didn’t know what to say to that because he didn’t know much about Authority, but he did remember how once, a year or maybe two ago, a moustachioed man he half recognised, with a gammy leg and an awkward limp had spoken to him, Josiah, in the Headteacher’s office and asked him about bruises and had eventually limped away, apparently satisfied that Authority could be happy because his father was the vicar and very scared of God.

“But we can try,” smiled Mildred Haystack, “they didn’t want me to use my garden as a cemetery, but I won out in the end and that’s where my dear dead husbands are buried. “I don’t mind a battle if you don’t.”

He shook his head. “No,” he mumbled, “A battle. I don’t mind.”

“You haven’t asked me why,” murmured Mildred.

“Why?” he asked.

“Why I’m saying these things. Why I’ll take care of you rather than send you home. Why I like you.”

He hadn’t asked her, but couldn’t see the point because she didn’t like him, not really, nobody did. Nobody ever had. People didn’t like boys like him, not even on their birthday, when they suddenly arrived at being ten.

“I’ll tell you anyway,” she said confidentially. “I’m doing this because last time I buried a husband in this garden, out there where the honeysuckle grows and shades his grave, last time I wanted to say goodbye to the man I loved more than I loved life itself, I called on the vicar, the man of God whose job it is to care for the weak and the grieving, and he didn’t answer his door straight away.”

Josiah nodded.

“Do you want to know why he didn’t answer the door straight away?” asked Mildred, her face suddenly sad and her eyes moist like his.

He nodded.

“He didn’t answer the door straight away because he was too busy hitting his son with a stick and inflicting the sort of pain on someone weak and vulnerable that goes against the grain. I told him so, and then I arranged to have a civil funeral for my lost love. I wasn’t having any b*****d like that interfering with the restful eternal sleep of a gentle man like my Bernie, even though he was a vicar and a man of God.”

Josiah knew. Of course he knew.

“So that’s why we’ll fight the good fight,” she sighed, “and win or lose the battle ahead, we’ll go as far as we can. I can’t have you going back to that evil man, and anyway you’ve given me the gin, haven’t you? And, you know, I’ve got a little bit of a soft spot for a drop of gin now and again!”

© Peter Rogerson 07.03.18