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RED-EYED SANDHOPPER

These little animals live between the tidemarks, chiefly under stones and in the rotting seaweed at the top of the beach. They are white with bright-red eyes and five pairs of legs. Score 10 points for a bleary-eyed sandhopper.

Jack has escaped early to buy a newspaper. With this end in mind he has made his way to the promenade in holiday mood. The sun is still a bit fitful but the air is fresh. He is easily tempted by the sea and so wanders over the tram tracks and pink tarmac to the edge of the promenade, takes a deep breath and gazes over the railings. The run-up to the annual Wakes Week holiday has been hectic. The weaving shed where Jack is foreman has been buzzing with talk of closure. Jack has spent the last week sorting out one problem after another, reorganising shifts, dealing with strike threats and all the while continuing the daily struggle to keep output steady. Jack takes another deep breath and, determined to relax, gazes out to the horizon. The tide is coming in and the remaining strip of sand is empty save for a single figure, shoes in hand, making its way painfully over sand hard rippled by the tide. It’s Dougie.

‘Mornin’, Dougie! Up an’ at it already?’ Jack shouts.

The figure looks up and glares. Dougie Fairbrother is knee high to a grasshopper and walks like he’s fighting a gale. When he comes within hailing distance he yells, ‘What time is it, Jack?’

‘Just comin’ up to twenty past.’

‘What?’ Receiving no immediate reply, he adds, ‘Twenty past what?’

‘Seven.’

‘That means I’ve been on this friggin’ beach for the best part of two bloody hours,’ Dougie says as he makes his way slowly up the concrete steps that separate the beach from the prom. Jack shakes his head. He has known Dougie Fairbrother all his life. Jack was the first person Dougie went to when his wife walked out and it was Jack who got him sorted out with a solicitor. Dougie has developed a fair thirst since his divorce back in the spring. It’s eight in the morning and he’s still drunk from the night before. When Dougie finally reaches the top of the steps he stops to catch his breath. Dougie has worked in the weaving shed since he was fourteen, that’s the best part of twenty years filling his lungs with lint and dust.

While he is puffing and blowing Jack remarks, ‘Aye, well, they say there’s no rest for the wicked. What happened to lying in bed, Dougie? I thought your lad had booked a double room.’

‘He did. But it’s otherwise occupied at the moment. The little bastard has got a lass from over yonder in with him.’

Jack follows the direction of Dougie’s thumb and sees a strip joint on the corner opposite with all the hatches battened down. ‘Who’s he got in there?’ he asks, hard pushed to hide his incredulity.

‘One of the strippers. I didn’t stop long enough to get her name and there were no bloody point asking Doug. Pound to a penny he wouldn’t know.’

‘So where did you sleep?’

‘I kipped down in the Residents’ Lounge. I was OK till the cleaners turned up at six and threw me out. I’ve been hanging around here on the off chance one of the lads turned up. I’m chilled to the bloody bone and gasping for a drink. They won’t open the hotel doors before nine at the earliest.’

Jack puts his hand in his pocket and gives Dougie half a crown. ‘That’ll be enough to get you a pot of tea and some breakfast.’

Dougie brightens immediately and says, ‘Thanks, Jack. E-e, but you should have come with us last night. We had a grand time. It was a good do.’

‘Looks like it,’ replies Jack.

Dougie blinks his bloodshot eyes and rubs a calloused hand over his sickly face. ‘We started off at Yates’s but, God help us, we ended up at the King o’ Clubs.’

‘I’m surprised you went back there. I thought you’d been thrown out last time,’ Jack says as they cross the tramlines.

‘We were. It was Tapper’s fault. We sat through this load o’ guff about how we were going to see amazing things. Some tart wi’ her own version of ping-pong, half a dozen Egyptian dancers, that sort of thing. We’d gone in to see Sheba, the star of the show. She was billed as “six foot of exotic woman, naked as God intended, from the distant reaches of deepest Africa”. Tapper jumped up halfway through the spiel and yelled, “Well, bloody bring her out! I’ve summat here from Blackburn waiting for her!” It took three of us, mind, but we managed to get Tapper to sit down again and button his flies. Nowt would have come of it if some lard-arse next to us hadn’t said summat smart. Tapper only got to throw three or four punches before we were out on our ears. Never a dull moment wi’ Tapper.’

That much is true. Eddie Tapworth is the best tackler in the cotton shed. A giant of a man, he is built for the heavy job of lifting beams. He can keep his looms running all day. He’s not one of those tacklers who hang around making the weavers wait while they sort out a trapped or broken shuttle, or grumbling at Jack to chase up a shortage of spindles from the spinning rooms. Tapper sets to and does it himself. He could replace the used shuttles and put a fresh cop in faster than you could draw breath. He is one of the few tacklers who can reckon how much the shaft speed will increase when the leather drive belts from the looms shrink in the heat. If all the tacklers were as capable as Tapper, the foreman’s job would be a damn sight easier. When he’s sober, Jack has a good deal of time for Eddie Tapworth. But drunk it’s another matter. A few pints and Tapper would fight his own shadow if it followed him.

‘We’re off to the Winter Gardens tomorrow night,’ Dougie continues. ‘You’d like. It’s Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen. Why don’t you come?’

Jack rubs the angle of his jaw and shakes his head. ‘No, I’m not that bothered, Dougie.’

‘Come on! You’ve not lost your taste for jazz! I’ve known a time when I couldn’t get you to play a waltz straight without jazzing it up. We lost work for the band because of it. You were Blackburn’s answer to Jack Teagarden.’

Jack’s expression is transformed by the memory. Laughter rumbles from deep in his chest while his grey eyes all but disappear above the curve of his cheekbones. He and Dougie got up to all sorts in the band before the war. He played trombone to Dougie’s trumpet. Jack had started off as bandleader – top hat, silk scarf, the lot. But it hadn’t taken long to sort out that it was the players who were getting all the girls. The bloke with the trombone in particular. Eddie Cummings couldn’t shift for skirt. When Jack promoted Eddie to bandleader and borrowed his trombone, things started looking up. Jack’s broad shoulders and ability to charm make him popular even now with the women. He may be in his late thirties but he takes care of himself. His blond hair is cut by the best barber in town and combed back into a series of shiny Brylcreemed tramlines.

‘No, I’ll give it a miss, Dougie. Kenny Ball’s a bit tame for me. I like the proper stuff – I saw Count Basie at the Tower a couple of years back. Cost an arm and a leg to get in, but it was worth every penny. Kenny Ball is just an amateur in comparison. I listened to a fair bit of jazz in Crete during the war.’

‘We were damn lucky to get Vera Lynn where I was stationed. Wasn’t it Crete where you met that bloke… the one that…?’

‘Yes. Nibs turned up one day with a gramophone and half a dozen jazz records. He’d brought them over from Greece. Got them from a black GI who was being posted back home. Only the Yanks would think to take a gramophone to war. I couldn’t get enough of it. The first time I heard Meade Lux Lewis playing “Honky Tonk Train Blues” I cracked out laughing.’

‘Aye, well, Kenny Ball’s the best Blackpool can come up with. You sure you won’t come?’

‘No, I’ll give it a miss. I promised to see Tom Bell tomorrow night.’

‘What? The Union bloke? Now isn’t that a surprise!’

‘Oh, it’s nothing serious. He just wants a chat.’

‘Chat my arse. He’ll have summat up his sleeve. I bet he’s got wind of Fosters’ offer.’

‘You haven’t said anything, have you, Dougie? Nobody is supposed to know. I haven’t even told Ruth. I’m still thinking about it.’

‘Why haven’t you told Ruth? I’d have thought you’d have wanted to shout it from the rooftops. Bloody hell, Jack, they’ve offered you the top job. Manager of Prospect Mill. What’s there to think about? It’ll more than double your pay packet overnight. Get her told.’

‘She’s been distracted with Beth. And anyway I haven’t said I’ll take the job.’

‘Then you want your bumps feeling, Jack. You should have bitten their hand off the minute it was offered. They should have made you up to manager years ago. You know more about cotton than all the Foster brothers put together.’

‘It’ll mean sitting behind a desk all day.’

‘You won’t catch Ruth complaining about that. I remember when we were kids on Bird Street. She had some fancy ideas even then. We used to tease the life out of her, but she’d never change her tune. She was going to get married, live in a beautiful house and have two children – a boy and a girl.’

‘That’s Ruth. Always knows exactly what she wants. But I still think I’d rather be busy in the weaving shed than sitting by myself in an office pushing papers around. I’ll get round to telling her. I’ve got other things on my mind at the moment.’

‘Anything you want to talk about?’

Jack shakes his head. ‘No, no. It’s something and nothing. Not worth bothering with.’

‘Well, think on. There’ll be merry hell to pay if she finds out you’ve been keeping secrets.’

Jack looks at his feet and moves his hand unconsciously up to the inside pocket of his jacket where he has hidden the letter. There are enough secrets in there to keep him busy for a fair bit and then some.

‘Anyway, how is she?’

Jack looks confused; his mind has been elsewhere. ‘Who?’

‘Your Ruth.’

Jack shakes his head. ‘She’s jiggered after all the upset with Beth. She didn’t want to come away for fear that Beth wouldn’t be up to it. We ended up having a barney about it. Ruth needs a holiday more than any of us. Still, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. The first thing she did when we got to the hotel was to set to and clean the washbasin.’

‘But Beth’s goin’ to be OK?’

‘Oh aye. Give her time, she’ll pull round. She’s a right little fighter.’

‘And how’s your Helen?’

Jack smiles. ‘Still pushing to leave school this summer. It’s the usual do – she’s sixteen going on twenty-five.’

‘They’re all the same. Our Doug is only a year older and he thinks he knows it all. Never satisfied. “He wants jam on it” as my old dad used to say. Talking of which, just take a look at this.’ Dougie reaches into his pocket and pulls out a square of fabric and hands it to Jack.

‘Where did you get this?’ Jack asks, turning the square over and back.

‘One of the lads from Whittaker’s. Says this is what they’re turning out nowadays.’

‘Are you sure Whittaker’s are weaving this?’

‘It’s right what I tell you. Look at the state of it. Lowest possible thread count and sized to glory.’

Jack runs his thumbnail across the surface of the dry, brittle fabric and a small cloud of white powder rises. ‘It must be hell to weave. There’s no movement in it, no give.’

‘There’s more elastic in a tart’s knickers.’

‘I can’t believe Whittaker’s are using such poor-quality cotton staple that they’ve had to glue it together. They never used to use anything less than Egyptian or Sea Island cotton.’

‘Times have changed, Jack. You know that as well as I do. There’s no pride left in the business.’

Dougie and Jack reach the pavement where they part, Dougie for breakfast at the nearest café, and Jack for a Daily Herald and twenty Senior Service.

On the way back from the newsagent’s Jack finds a bench on the prom, sits down and reaches for his cigarettes. The pack of untipped cigarettes is embossed in the centre with a picture of a brawny sailor. Jack runs his thumb over the familiar relief as he pushes open the pack and lights his first cigarette of the day. Smoking is barely tolerated at home. Jack may smoke in the backyard or, if it is raining, in the scullery. Tab ends to be disposed of directly into the ash bin. There isn’t an ashtray in the house and Ruth refuses to buy one. Numberless though her household duties may be, emptying ashtrays is not one of them. Alcohol is subject to similar restrictions. The single bottle of sherry is brought out every Christmas and returned untouched to the darkest recesses of the sideboard every New Year. Ruth is running a house, not a public bar. She is teetotal, has been since the Temperance Society marched down Bird Street with their banners flying.

Jack sighs and opens the paper, but he’s too distracted by memories of his friend to read. Nibs was barely five foot six, thin as a rake. He seemed to be in a permanent sweat. His skin shone like it was newly oiled and he couldn’t speak without using his hands to illustrate his point. He looked like a windmill in a gale when he got upset. He had run a pet shop in London before the war. A typical Cockney – loads of patter and plenty of old buck when things weren’t going his way. But he loved animals. It didn’t matter where they were, there’d be some mangy mongrel or moth-eaten cat at his heels. In Heraklion Nibs had put his hand halfway down an Alsatian’s throat to pull out a sliver of bone that was blocking the dog’s wind-pipe. The dog had promptly vomited and then nipped Nibs on the ankle as he was walking away. He’d always taken in strays and the fact that he was in the middle of a war didn’t make any difference. He argued that there wasn’t much to choose between dogs and men. ‘Sometimes, even with the best will in the world, you can’t save them and there’s no point in even trying. It’s kinder to have done and put them out of their bloody misery.’ The memory is a bitter one, considering how things turned out. Jack shakes himself and rubs his hand across his forehead as if to wipe away the memory. He lights another cigarette and stares out across the empty sands, a look of hopelessness on his face.

It is Gunner, the hotel dog, who finally rouses him. The dog wanders up out of nowhere and lodges his chin firmly on Jack’s knee. Gunner is a Lakeland terrier, his coat a scrunch of grey and brown wire wool. One eye is dimmed with a cataract but the other is bright and what’s left of his docked tail is permanently erect. Man and dog sit in companionable silence for a few minutes. The breeze freshens, shifting grains of sand across the pink flagstones and rippling the bunting tied to the promenade railings. Jack has spent Wakes Week at the Belvedere Hotel every year since the war and, as a result, is regarded as family by Gunner. Blackpool at the height of the holiday season might disturb and overexcite any ordinary dog, but Gunner is an old hand. It has been a long trip for Gunner from ‘unofficial South Lancs Regimental mascot’ to Mine Host at the Belvedere Hotel. The dog is subject to the unwelcome attention of passing children and his sleep is disturbed nightly by hotel guests in various states of inebriation gaining rowdy entry to the hotel lobby. Jack tickles the dog’s left ear before taking a last drag and flicking his cigarette over the promenade railings. Standing up, he proceeds to fold the newspaper into three and, putting it under his arm, heads back to the hotel. Gunner meanwhile continues his route march along the prom in search of last night’s chip papers.

‘Looks as if it’s going to be another hot one, Ruth,’ Jack says when he sees his wife in the lobby. His glance strays to Beth, who is already wriggling with the itchiness of her vest, liberty bodice and wool jumper. ‘Hasn’t she got a summer dress to wear?’

‘Not today,’ Ruth replies firmly. ‘It could turn cold again; the wind’s got a nip to it.’

‘Give over. I’ve been out there. It’s not cold, it’s fresh. It’ll do her good to get some sunshine.’

Beth runs up to her father and wraps her arms round his legs.

‘E-yo-yo, Sputnik!’

Jack bends down to pick Beth up. He puts his arm carefully round the back of her legs and lifts her gently. Beth might be fragile but the spell in hospital hasn’t curbed any of her curiosity. She spots the letter in his inside jacket pocket in a flash. ‘What’s this?’ she asks, her fingers closing round the corner of the letter.

‘Never mind that. Are you ready for your breakfast? Plenty of porridge, that’s what you need. It’ll make your hair curl,’ Jack says as he strokes back a fine brown strand that has escaped from her ribbon. ‘I’ll just nip upstairs and change my jacket – it’s too hot for tweed,’ he continues, turning to Ruth.

‘I’ll come with you,’ she replies. ‘I’ve left my scarf on the dressing table.’

‘No, you’re all right. I can pick it up at the same time.’

Once in the room, Jack reaches inside his jacket. The beige satin lining whispers conspiratorially against the thick envelope as he slides it out. He has had the letter for the best part of a week now and keeping it hidden is proving stressful. If he were at home there’d be no problem. Jack could have hidden it in his worksheets and textile patterns. As long as they’re neatly stacked Ruth never bothers with them; she’s no interest in loom specifications and the like. But here in Blackpool there’s nowhere safe to keep the letter. Not in the suitcase. Dear God, not in there. She’s in that case half a dozen times a day, pulling out fresh clothes for the girls and rearranging everything. She has a system. Everything in its place and a place for everything. At night she goes through all Jack’s clothes looking for loose buttons and dirty handkerchiefs. She empties the contents of his pockets on to a brass tray on the dressing table and puts his wallet on top. Finally she brushes down his jacket and, resisting the lure of the hotel wardrobe, hangs it up behind the door. As a result of her efficiency Jack has been driven to distraction – forever moving the letter from jacket to trousers as the situation demands. He had been keeping it in his shirt pocket until he noticed her eyeing him suspiciously at breakfast yesterday. Discretion being the better part of valour, he had retired to the toilet and moved it to his jacket pocket where he’d reckoned it was safe enough for a while. Now he takes the letter, folds it in half, pushes it in the back pocket of his trousers and does up the button. Manoeuvre completed, Jack takes off his jacket, collects Ruth’s scarf from the dressing table and locks the door behind him.