A Short Story by John Waddington-Feather

The Carollers   It was a seasonal event, like a dawn chorus in spring, except this was an evening chorus in winter.  It was the season of carol-singing down Garlic Lane, filling the dark lane and the mean terrace streets which ran off it with song.  It began the week before Christmas and ended on Christmas Eve, when Trinity Church Choir carrying jam-jar lanterns went singing round the parish.  What we earned carolling was very welcome in those austere years of the late 1940s.  We didn’t get pocket money, Alfred and me, because our mother worked in the mill and money was scarce, even with the bit of war pension she had after dad had been killed at Arnhem.  We had none of the luxuries kids take for granted today and even the money we earned carol-singing didn’t go far; but it went far enough to buy us fish and chips at Barraclough’s Fish Shop on a cold wintry night – and that was luxury indeed.  There was a collection of streets named after birds and known locally as T’Bird Cage.  You didn’t do too badly at the top end nearest Bradford Road, which was the better end where homes bordered on the middle-class.  You were given threepenny bits there or even sixpences at times; but at the other end of T’Bird Cage, the slummy end near Garlic Lane, they gave only pennies or halfpence - if you were lucky. Otherwise, they bawled through closed doors at you to go away before they set the dog on you.  You didn’t hang about for the dog was already snarling and scratching the other side of the door, desperate to get at you.  Dogs played a large part in boyhood life down Garlic Lane.  Most folks had a dog, usually a well bred mongrel descended for generations from dogs which roamed loose down the lane.  But we didn’t have a dog at our house, and Alfred and I were dead scared of them.  Even now I can’t stand the brutes when they come lolloping up and sniffing all over you.   They weren’t what you’d call musical but the Garlic Lane dogs always joined in the carol-singing.  As soon as you began singing the first few notes of “Once in Royal David’s city” the dogs would begin howling till they were told to shut up.  Sometimes they let them go on howling and by the end of the carol you knew you weren’t going to get anything there and moved on.   Dogs were a menace and so was Bully Bates, the school bully, who couldn’t sing for toffee.  He was howled at by dogs from one end of Garlic Lane to the other, and told to bugger off at every other house, but hat didn’t stop him carolling for he was as short of cash as the rest of us.  He was a couple of years older than me and nearly twice as big, and if he happened to be out carol-singing the same night as ourselves and told us to get off his pitch, we did - pronto.  I’ll never forget the last time he gave us the push.  He’d been told to bugger off all down the street except at one house.  They gave him threepence on condition he went into the next street. You couldn’t blame them. His voice really was awful.  He was tone deaf but loud.  You could hear Bully Bates bawling the other side of the playground at school, sounding just like a foghorn with a sore throat!  We’d only just started our carolling round that night when we bumped into him in Wren Street looking pretty forlorn.  It was a miserably dank Pennine night when the cold seeped through your clothes and shoes chilling you to the bone, nipping your ears inside your balaclava helmet.  Bully Bates was stamping his feet and beating his sides vigorously to get warm when we appeared.  He glared when he saw us and said, “Push off somewhere else, you two.” - and we duly pushed off.  We traipsed back crestfallen down the lane, when Alfred suggested we try the posh end of the parish over the railway footbridge; so we trailed alongside the church, past some hen-pens to the railway which was the demarcation line between the mean working-class homes of Garlic lane and the well built middle-class houses of Showfield lived in by bank managers, doctors, accountants and the like.  But our hearts sank when we crossed the bridge.  There were carols being sung outside every house it seemed.  We were at a loss.  Should we go home penniless?  We’d been out an hour with nothing to show for it; less than even Bully Bates.  I don’t know what made our Alfred think of it, but he said we should try the really big houses at Utworth where the mill-masters and foundry owners lived.  He had a pal in his class called John Greenwood whose granddad lived there, one of the biggest mill-owners in Yorkshire, Sir Abe Illingworth.  Being young, we couldn’t understand why John Greenwood should be living down our street with his aunt working in the mill and his uncle in the foundry when he was related to the richest man in town.  It became clear one night after hearing my mam and grannie talking about Sir Abe, when they thought I wasn’t listening.  John Greenwood was ‘illegitimate’ they said.  A lot suddenly fell into place when I looked up the word in the dictionary.  It accounted for all those sudden silences when I was present and John Greenwood and his mam were mentioned.  His dad and mam weren’t married and they were both dead.  His mam had died before the war and his dad, Sir Abe’s only child, had been killed as a fighter pilot. Mr and Mrs Gibson were his aunt and uncle and were childless, and they’d adopted him from birth.  Anyhow, that night we decided to capitalise on knowing John Greenwood.  His rich granddad would pay us well – and he did.  We were too young to be put off by Sir Abe’s title and grand house.  We were more scared by the thought there might be dogs guarding the place and running free – rotweilers and alsations – but the thought of missing our fish and chips and the empty rumbling in our stomachs drove us on.  We walked some distance along the main road before turning up Black Lane.  By that time, we were in the suburbs of the town and the lane had farmland running along one side of it.  The noise of the town had disappeared by the time we were halfway up the lane, where the houses got posher and posher.  Right at the top, standing square in its own grounds, sat Illingworth House, Sir Abe’s family home.  At the entrance was a pair of huge wrought-iron gates with the Illingworth crest on them, and they opened into a long drive that swung through banks of rhododendrons before opening onto a huge manicured lawn with a fountain in the middle. As we turned a corner, suddenly in front of us were the house and its entrance.  My heart sank when I looked up at the porch and the four Doric Pillars holding it up.  I’d have turned back but our Alfred was already singing through the brass letterbox.  He’d a fine strong treble voice and sang solos at Church, and it must have reached the ears of Sir Abe, for the door opened so suddenly Alfred fell inside.  To our surprise, before us stood Henry Johnson who sang in Trinity Church Choir.  I never knew he worked at Illingworth House where he was butler to Sir Abe.  I was relieved to see him; even more relieved there were no dogs inside or outside the great house.  “Come inside,” he said with a smile.  “Sir Abe wants to hear you sing some more.  We’ve never had carol-singers before and he’s taken with your singing.”  We stepped inside and gaped.  The corridor we were in seemed to go on for ever.  Everything about the place was monumental and we passed row on row of family portraits on the way to the drawing room.  Eventually, the butler stopped at a heavy mahogany door and tapped lightly.  Someone the other side bade us enter and inside stood a tall gaunt white-haired man with a clipped military moustache looking down at us.  He’d a lined craggy face but his blue eyes twinkled pleasantly and he smiled.  “We’ve never had carollers here before,” he said examining us closely.  “What brought you here?”  He spoke in an educated manner but with a heavy Yorkshire accent.   “We’re friends of John Greenwood, sir.  He lives down our street,” I began feebly.  “Oh, so it’s our John, is it?  I might have guessed.  Are there any more of you?” said Sir Abe, sticking his thumbs inside his waistcoat pockets and standing with his feet well braced apart.  “There’s only me an’ my brother, sir.  We come up here, ‘cos we were pushed off our pitch down Garlic lane,” I replied and went on to tell him the whole story of Bully Bates.  When I’d done he raised his bushy eyebrows and his face softened.  “Well, let’s hear what you’ve got to sing,” he said, moving to a grand piano the other side of the room, and I noticed there was a portrait of a man in RAF uniform on it.  John Greenwood’s dad I guessed.  Alfred and I sang like angels that night as the old man accompanied us, stopping occasionally to sip his whisky.  We went through our repertoire when he asked us to sing “Silent night, Holy night” which we did; and as we sang his lip quivered and tears came into his eyes.  I’d never seen a grown man cry before.  There was an awkward silence when we’d done, as the old man wiped his eyes and blew his nose.  Then he returned to his chair near the blazing fire. “That was grand,” he said softly, “real grand.” Then he glanced at the photograph of the airman on the piano, and added, “My son used to sing it like you lads.  He’d a fine voice.”  He paused again and said, “You know, the first time I heard that carol it was sung in German, a long time ago, one Christmas during the First War in the trenches.”  I said the vicar, a padre in the Second World War, had told us about it in church and how the German and English troops had left their trenches to exchange Christmas presents and play football.  That truce might have developed into peace, he said, but the generals stopped it and the war continued.  Sir Abe asked his butler to bring in some mince pies and lemonade while he replenished his glass.  The mince pies were a real treat in 1946 and we tucked into them like heroes as the old man chatted to us about school and his grandson, whom he was very proud of.  “You should have brought him along,” he said.  “He’s a good voice.”  Only later did we find out why John wasn’t allowed to visit his granddad except on certain days.  His uncle was very jealous of him and didn’t get on with Sir Abe.  There’d been bad blood between them in the past.  When we left, Sir Abe went with us as far as the gate and Henry Johnson took us home to explain why we were late.  But the biggest surprise that night came as we said goodbye, when Sir Abe took out his wallet and gave us a fiver each!  The next day we told Bully Bates and asked how much he’d earned.  “Threepence,” he mumbled.  Just enough to buy a bag of chips.  His voice broke during the year and he never carolled again, so we went back to our old patch the following Christmas.  Our mam stood in awe of Sir Abe and couldn’t really handle the fact we’d been at the great house.  In fact she told us off for going, so we never went there except when Sir Abe invited the church choir to sing for him, and afterwards treated the boys to mince pies and lemonade like he’d given us and something stronger for the men.  And for a year or two after, until John Greenwood’s voice broke, he always asked his grandson to sing the first verse solo of “Silent Night, Holy Night”, weeping quietly as he had done the night my brother and I sang it.                                                                           John Waddington-Feather ©   (Based on characters and locations in the novel “Chance- Child (part 2)” by John Waddington-Feather, published by Feather Books.  For more details see this website.