If Only They Could Talk Read online

  “Always keep it in your breast pocket, son,” Father said to him. “It will keep you safe from sniper fire. It’s made from heavy gauge silver, strong enough to stop a bullet.”

  Rupert had never been much of a writer, preferring sport and the sciences when he was at school. But he wrote to us every week whilst he was in Italy until one day the letters stopped.

  Two weeks later I heard Mother break down in uncon­trollable floods of tears. I rushed to find out what had hap­pened only to find that she’d received a telegram from the war office. Rupert had been killed at Monte Cassino.

  Father didn’t say anything, he just went to his study and smoked his pipe. Later that evening as I laid in bed I could hear him sobbing his heart out. I cuddled up to Edward and clutched my old school blazer to my chest. It didn’t fit me any more and Mother had bought me a new one the previ­ous August. Of course my original blazer had first belonged to Rupert. It still had his ink stain on the pocket where his inkbottle once leaked and more importantly it still smelt of him. I started crying as well as I vowed that I would keep Rupert’s blazer forever.

  Later we discovered that Rupert had died whilst charging a German pillbox armed only with a wooden gun. Father was disgusted.

  “It wasn’t even as though he had something to protect himself with,” he said when he found out. Then looking at me he added, “Miles, it’s all down to you now, son. The future of the company is in your hands.”

  Eventually the army sent Rupert’s possessions back to us. There wasn’t much. There were his dog tags, his razor and the letters that Mother had sent to him. There was also the hipflask. It may have kept Father safe back in 1918 but its value as a good luck charm appeared to have ended with the end of the Great War.

  Rupert is buried in Monte Cassino War Cemetery along with 4,000 other Commonwealth soldiers who gave their lives during the Italian Campaign. One day when I am older I hope to go and visit his grave.

  Father says that he won’t ever go because he doesn’t like pasta. But the real reason is because he’d be too upset.

  Father had always been proud of his medals and always wore them at army reunions and on Armistice Day. After Rupert’s death, however, he threw them into a drawer along with the failed good luck charm. He never wore the medals again and I never saw them or the hipflask until I rediscov­ered them whilst clearing out his study after his death.

  Chapter 7

  “These must be granddad’s medals,” commented Nigel. “I’d heard he’d won the DSO but I’ve never seen his medals before.”

  “They must be worth quite a bit and to think that they were just thrown into a drawer,” replied Molly.

  “I think that it is going to be very difficult for me to send these to auction,” Nigel continued. “They are part of our family history after all.”

  Despite this they decided to place them on the auction pile. This made sense since it would be from this pile that he and Emma would eventually choose the things they were going to keep.

  “What about the battered old hipflask?” asked Molly.

  “Well it’s hallmarked, so it’s silver. I doubt if anyone will want to use it as a hipflask anymore, but it’ll be worth quite a bit as scrap,” and with that Nigel added it to the auction pile.

  They carried on drawer by drawer sorting things out. One of the drawers contained a thick pile of papers, documents, old letters, Aunt Sarah’s ballet certificates from when she’d been a young girl, notebooks containing homework, and a ticket for a school dance dated December 1944.

  “Now I wonder why he kept this,” said a bemused Nigel.

  *******

  In October 1944, my grandfather passed away, which meant that Father was now company Chairman as well as Managing Director. Granny moved in with us taking Rupert’s old room and we sold their house in Spencer Street in order to pay the death duties.

  Grandfather had been a fine Victorian gentleman born in 1865. He was the second generation of Goodyears to run the company, being the son of Benjamin Goodyear who had founded the brewery back in 1862.

  I had never been that close to my grandfather. He was of that generation who believed that children should be seen and not heard. He was also of the opinion that the world started to go downhill with the invention of the internal combus­tion engine. In fact, our brewery was the last of the three in Chesterfield to introduce lorries thanks to his intransigence.

  “The horse-drawn dray is the best way to distribute beer,” he used to say. “The slow speed of the horse helps to preserve the flavour of the ale. It’s far better than shaking it all to kingdom come on the back of a lorry travelling at speed. Also it helps keep beer local, since with a horse-drawn dray you can’t deliver to any pubs that are more than ten miles from the brewery. Who knows where we’ll get to by using lorries? We’ll probably end up with the whole country get­ting their beer from one big brewery in Burton-upon-Trent.”

  In many ways Grandfather was eventually proven right. However, that didn’t stop Father from introducing lorries as soon as he became Managing Director in 1930.

  A month before he died my grandfather asked if he could see me. It was a surprise as the two of us had never had a conversation in private before. He was suffering from lung cancer and must have realised that he didn’t have long to live.

  “Miles,” he said to me, “I’ve almost run my race.”

  “Don’t be silly, Grandfather,” I replied. “You’ve got years left yet.”

  “If only that were true,” he continued with tears in his eyes. “I know you were the spare rather than the heir. But with Rupert’s death, the future of the company is now in your hands and I wanted to tell you that I have total confi­dence in you. Do you know why?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s because you’re a Goodyear. It doesn’t matter that you weren’t the first-born or that you were never destined to run the company. You are my grandson and you have the Goodyear will to succeed. When my father founded the company everybody said that he’d be bankrupt within a year. After all, when he bought the brewery it had already gone into liquidation on two previous occasions. My father had absolutely no experience of brewing. He was a carpenter by trade and he kept his carpentry tools just in case he ever needed to go back to his old profession. Later on though they served to remind him of his humble beginnings and of the life he’d left behind, the life he never wanted to go back to again. He presented them to me on my 21st birthday and now I want to give them to you. I’d originally planned to give them to your father, but I’ve spoken to him and he’s happy for me to pass them on to you. Think of it as a symbol of my confidence in you, Miles.”

  With that he presented me with the fitted case full of my great-grandfather’s tools.

  “Look after them, Miles, and promise me that you will pass them on to your son or grandson in due course.”

  I promised him that I would do just that and took the case full of tools back to my room where I stored them under my bed. It was the last time I ever saw the old man alive.

  I was a lot closer to my grandmother than I ever was to my grandfather, even though she was a little batty. She used to call me Yards when I was little, saying that she wouldn’t call me Miles because I wasn’t big enough yet. She used to buy me Old Fashioned Humbugs and Pear Drops from the local sweet shop and then eat most of them herself.

  I liked Granny, but that still didn’t stop me from resent­ing her when she moved into Rupert’s room. I knew that he was never going to come home again, but that was no excuse for not keeping his room just as it had been before he went to war. The wallpaper he had chosen, the one with racing cars on it, was replaced with paper with pink roses on it, and all his toys, including his Hornby train set, were put in the attic.

  However, family matters were the last things on my mind as I was about to start sixth form. I was far more concerned whether my friend Sprout would be allowed to continue at the Grammar School or not. It wouldn’t be the same if there were just Her
man and I from now on.

  I was fearing the worst, but my fears proved to be unfounded as all three of us returned to the upper school in September 1944.

  I liked being a sixth former. You got to wear a sixth form tie rather than a house tie and you didn’t have to go out­side during break time. Instead we patrolled the corridors wearing our house prefects’ badges looking for any mem­bers of the lower school trying to escape from the cold out­side. They were unceremoniously thrown out whenever we caught them.

  Of course, our newfound powers meant that we no longer had time to climb onto the roof of the bike shed in order to grab a fleeting glance at the high school girls in their gym kits. But we didn’t mind because now we were allowed to mix with the girls, albeit only at organised social occasions and even then only when teachers were present. The first of these events was the joint grammar schools’ Christmas dance in December 1944.

  Sprout, Herman and I were looking forward to this major social occasion although none of us knew how to dance. I was so keen to learn that I even let my sister give me a few lessons. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have let her teach me anything. But she was quite good at dancing, having been to dance classes in the Market Hall. I needed to impress the girls and stand out from the other boys. So I thought, what the heck, and let her have a go at teaching me.

  As it turned out my sister was not a very good teacher. The classes in the Market Hall didn’t have many boys in them and as a consequence she had always danced the male role. This meant that whilst she was excellent at dancing with other girls she was absolutely useless at dancing with boys.

  Still it didn’t really matter as the school had arranged for a dance practice to take place on the Thursday before the ball. This was great news for us boys as it meant that we now had two opportunities to grope members of the opposite sex rather than just the one.

  The night of the practice was a terrifying affair for those of us who’d never been to a dance before. We all huddled together in one corner of the school hall, nervously crack­ing jokes and wondering which girls we would get to dance with.

  Finally the girls arrived, accompanied by three teachers who were there to protect them from any inappropriate touching.

  Most of the girls knew how to dance and were under instructions to teach the boys. None of us had a clue what to do, including myself, despite my sister’s best intentions.

  “Right everybody,” said one of the mistresses from St Helena’s who I later discovered was called Miss Goodwin.

  She looked like a real dragon, dressed in a tweed twinset and a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, which hung from a chain around her neck.

  “God,” I whispered under my breath, “and I thought Ratty Owen, the chemistry master was scary, but he looks like a pussy cat compared to her.”

  “The first thing you need to know about a dance,” she continued, “is that you gentlemen, and I use that expression loosely, have to ask a lady to dance. Do not merely hang around in groups discussing the latest cricket scores other­wise nothing will happen. Please remember that you have to ask them. They will not ask you.”

  I wanted to tell her that we were unlikely to be discussing cricket in the first week of December. But I had no desire to feel the wrath of her tongue and so I decided to keep quiet about it. However, I had taken her point on board.

  “Well get on with it then,” she shouted at us.

  With that we all began to saunter over towards the girls who were standing on the other side of the hall. I’d already spotted Sarah and was determined to ask her to dance. It was three years since the unfortunate incident with the beret and although I’d seen her a few times since, I’d been too embarrassed to talk to her.

  Tonight was the night this was going to change. I made my way over to her, eagerly anticipating holding her close, her heaving bosom pressed tightly to my chest.

  “Faint heart never won fair maiden,” I said to myself as I approached her. “After all she’s probably forgotten all about my clumsy actions when I was fourteen.”

  “Please may I have the pleasure of this dance?” I asked her.

  It was a line I’d been practicing since I’d seen Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier in Pride and Prejudice at the Regal. Her reply was brief and to the point.

  “No,” she said.

  It wasn’t the reply I’d been expecting and I was dumb­founded. To make matters worse, Sprout unceremoniously pushed me aside and asked her to dance.

  She looked at me, shrugged and said to Sprout, “Okay, then! Why not?”

  It wasn’t fair! I’d been looking forward to dancing with Sarah for weeks.

  The problem was that I had no alternative plan.

  As there were more boys than girls it was soon clear that I would be left without a partner; not even a fat girl or a girl with acne, or even a fat girl with acne.

  To make matters worse Miss Goodwin came up to me and asked, “Haven’t you got a partner, boy? What? Are you too scared to ask? Never mind, you can dance with me.”

  I wanted to shout out, “Noooooo!” But I knew that would do no good and so I just prepared myself to be humiliated.

  The first dance was a waltz and we were dancing to a band drawn from the two schools. They obviously had never played together before as they kept on making mistakes, which didn’t endear them to Miss Goodwin. She kept on shouting out one, two, three, whenever they lost the beat.

  That wasn’t all she shouted out as we waltzed across the dance floor.

  “Boy, your hand is supposed to be just below her shoul­der blade not on her backside,” was one of many comments she made as we stumbled across the floor. She was far more interested in spotting the transgressions of others than she was in teaching me to dance.

  My friends all thought that it was highly amusing and I could see them laughing at me over Miss Goodwin’s shoul­der. Sprout and Sarah thought it was particularly funny and I could see them giggling every time we danced passed them.

  At the end of the first waltz, Miss Goodwin announced that we should keep the same partners for the rest of the night being as though this was only a practice. I was abso­lutely horrified but in no position to object.

  We danced the quickstep and the foxtrot and although I say it myself I was beginning to get the hang of it. My sister’s efforts had not been in vain after all. That was not the case for Sprout though who kept on treading on Sarah’s feet. You could see she was getting more and more annoyed with him as the night went on.

  Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the night was over and we headed for home.

  “I didn’t know it was grab a granny night,” said Sprout as we walked down Glumangate. “Have you arranged to see her again? It’s a match made in heaven, she won’t even need to change her initials when the two of you get married.”

  “Bugger off,” I replied still annoyed with the events of that evening.

  I was virtually home by that stage and as a result my suf­fering for that day was nearly at an end. However, it came as no surprise that the micky-taking by my classmates was to continue unabated right until the Christmas break.

  When the night of the actual dance came around it was a grand affair. We were wearing suits rather than school uni­forms. Some of us were even wearing dinner suits. All the girls were wearing their best evening dresses. They looked so grown up, totally unrecognisable from the girls in school uniforms of the previous week.

  The hall was decorated ready for Christmas and the school had even rented a glitter ball for the night.

  Unlike at the practice, we now had the opportunity to ask as many girls for a dance as we wanted and I was determined to make the most of it. That said I had no desire to be the first on the floor and so I held back to see what the others did.

  Everybody else had the same idea, but fortunately the teachers had a plan in order to counter such an eventual­ity. Froggy Philips and Miss Goodwin were the first on the floor, closely followed by some of the other teachers. The e
ffect was similar to a cork being let out of a bottle, as pretty soon the dance floor was full.

  I wanted to join in, but there was no way that I was going to ask Sarah again so I asked Margaret Bishop, a girl with mousy hair, glasses and a tooth brace. There was absolutely no chance that Margaret would refuse to dance with me as two days earlier her friend Olivia had approached me out­side the school gate and had said to me, “Miles Goodyear, this is your lucky day because my mate fancies you.”

  At the time I was quite flattered until I saw what her mate looked like. Still, beggars can’t be choosers and the two of us were soon doing the quickstep together. She didn’t even mind that my right hand had slipped down and was grab­bing her arse. Well, that was until Miss Goodwin danced past us and slapped my wrist without even breaking stride.

  Looking around I noticed that Sprout looked crestfallen as it had been his turn to be rejected by Sarah this time. It seemed that she had no desire to have her feet trampled on again.

  However, he quickly put his disappointment behind him as he found himself another partner in Georgina Nicholls, a plain girl with lank ginger hair. Meanwhile Herman was dancing with the Amazonian girl with the big tits that he had spotted three years earlier from the roof of the bike shed.

  “Bloody hell,” I thought to myself, “He must fancy her after all. I assumed he was only joking when he said he was going to marry her.”

  At the end of the first dance, I thanked Margaret and decided to sit the next one out. She was obviously disap­pointed, hoping that we might have continued and perhaps even gone on to become boyfriend and girlfriend. But I wasn’t interested and I went and stood by myself watching Sprout and Herman.

  Suddenly, I felt a tap on my shoulder.