Nigel Jarrett is a former daily-newspaperman and a double prizewinner: the Rhys Davies Award for short fiction and, in 2016, the inaugural Templar Shorts award. Nigel’s first story collection, Funderland (published by Parthian) was praised by the Guardian, the Independent, the Times, and many others, and was long-listed for the Edge Hill Prize. Templar published Nigel’s third story collection, A Gloucester Trilogy, in 2019. The Dublin Chaffinch Press is publishing his fourth collection, Five Go To Switzerland & Other Stories, in Spring 2021. Based in Monmouthshire, Nigel also writes for the Wales Arts Review, Arts Scene in Wales, Slightly Foxed, Acumen, and several others. He is a regular contributor to Jazz Journal. He is represented in the Library of Wales’s two-volume anthology of 20th- and 21st-century short fiction.
Incident at Loch Ken
At school we had an English teacher called Punch Evans, who it was said had been some kind of Army boxing champion. We never went into the details, never asked him about it—you simply didn’t—though it must have occurred to us that he would have joined the Forces through choice: by that time, there’d been no National Service for decades. Other things had changed too. Punch was one of the few on the staff to wear a gown in class. It was too big for him, or he’d somehow made himself look smaller, because it kept slipping from his shoulders and he’d have to yank it back. He spent a lot of time at the blackboard, writing down lines of poetry, snatches of dialogue from plays, and expressions such as ‘negative capability’, most of which he knew by heart—and tugging at his gown; he would then turn to face us, each time seeming to do so like a man confronting an accuser. His nose was misshapen, so perhaps that was it: he’d spent ages shielding himself as best he could from public gaze, and this was how he’d at last surmounted his embarrassment. It was a decisive moment, slow and deliberate and endlessly repeated.
Once we’d reached the sixth form, Punch started calling us by our first names. There were eleven of us doing English. Our first term was heavy with leaf fall and dark evenings, as if reminders of the gravity of what we’d undertaken. Our set texts were mountainous in their challenge if not in their height as a pile of books, though that was impressive enough when it included Punch’s extra reading.
On the first day of A-level, by way of introduction, Punch announced that he was a Tolstoyan.
‘Anyone know what I mean?’ he asked. ‘Not you, Roberts.’
We sniggered, Punch smiled. Mike Roberts was related to Punch, some kind of second cousin twice removed—far enough, anyway, to make them virtually strangers to each other. We all knew, and Punch knew that we knew. But Mike had little to say about his far distant relative, perhaps as a result of some tacit agreement between them, and Punch rarely called on Mike by name, first or other. When he required a response from one of us and Mike raised his hand, or did a near enough approximation of hand-raising—in truth, the arm speared upwards like a Nazi salute had, in our graduation to the sixth, reduced to a waving finger—Punch would just nod once in Mike’s direction, his raised eyebrows beckoning an answer. It was probably a conscious move: Mike was by far the brightest among us, later the head boy with a place at Cambridge, and already a contributor of essays to the school magazine. If anyone had known what ‘Tolstoyan’ meant, it would have been Mike. Anyway, the best we others could come up with was the facetious, ‘Someone who likes the works of Tolstoy?’. Mike and Punch grinned at each other. Before Mike could reply with a similar interrogative lift to indicate that he might not be correct, Punch told us himself: ‘My attitude to art is moral’. By art, of course, he meant English literature. Freddie Wilson, the joker in our pack destined to work on the Daily Mirror, said he hadn’t realised Tolstoy was English. (Many of our answers to questions were like this. We were thought of as ‘clever’.)
All of us were studying a couple of other subjects, but the teachers for them encouraged few extra-curricular activities. Punch did. During those two years, he organised something once a term: theatre visits, ‘pilgrimages’ to places enshrined in books—Wordsworth’s Tintern was one—and days out at literary festivals. English was not just study for examinations, though that too; it was what he called ‘a preparation for life’: not an original view, the widely-read Mike confided.
In summer, Punch invited us all to the house where he lived with his elderly father. It happened twice—initially at the end of our first year, the second time twelve months later before our exam results were due. There’d also been ad hoc meetings beyond the school day—in the park at weekends, for example. Punch had been at the school for only three years and we were the first of his A-level pupils (‘students’ now) to be accorded the privilege of a visit. Their house stood on its own in our impoverished Valleys town more notable for its serpentine terraces, which struggled up hills before skedaddling down the other side. It was called The Old Manse. In its way it was a throwback to a time of much wider poverty, when as a symbol of its occupant’s high social rank it loomed much larger. Half its encircling trees had been felled. By our time, according to Punch, it had become part of ‘Snobs Row’, though the locals, perhaps knowing the reduced circumstances of those who once lived there, never made an issue of it. His father, in any case, had been a coal miner, like a lot of other older men in the town. In the fireplace was a Davy Lamp sculpted from a huge chunk of coal, presented to him by his collier pals when he retired. We assumed that funds for the house had been inherited or had come from the mother, whoever she’d been. Mike had told us she was dead. There were photographs of her on the sideboard, a refined-looking woman, almost a beauty, and with half a knowing smile, as though a second after the photograph was taken she had erupted with laughter. There was a picture of a young boy and girl too, Punch and his sister.
On that last summer day at The Old Manse the whole class—the ‘scholarship trio’ of me, Mike and Freddie, and eight others—were invited. Punch and his father had supplied what used to be called ‘strong drink’—bottles of beer and cider—suspecting quite rightly that we were used to its taste. Punch had planned a fish ‘n’ chips supper for us all. Freddie, sitting cross-legged in a chair opposite Punch, casually took a cigarette from a metal case in his pocket, tapped the business end on the lid, and lit up with a Zippo, only offering the re-opened case to Punch and his father after doing so. Both declined.
‘Does our Michael smoke?’ the old man asked, the ‘our’ seeming to suggest the familial connection, a reduction of distance, rarely before acknowledged.
‘Mike’s a paragon,’ Freddie said, and, with a glance at Punch: ‘That’s true, isn’t it, Mr Evans?’
Punch didn’t know what to say, and just shrugged his shoulders.
‘You see, Mr Evans,’ Freddie continued, addressing the older man this time, ‘your son has taught us to live by the book. Or should I say “books”? If a book doesn’t teach us a lesson, a lesson to live by, it ain’t much cop. Mike believes in all that stuff. Frankly, to me it makes every book seem like the Holy Bible.’
The old man just nodded, maybe not understanding, amused or confused perhaps by the way Freddie’s final sentences had slipped into the idiomatic, and Punch looked embarrassed at his father’s ignorance. The other boys were outside on the patio, beyond an open French window whose net curtains billowed now and then, the signal of what would soon be a change in the weather. Once or twice, bottles in hand, they would fall silent and look into the room, seeking proof among those sitting inside of an opinion one of them had expressed, a controversial one maybe, now unfettered by classroom constraints and decorum, by a life once disciplined but now floating freely in the inter-regnum between school and university, adolescence and adulthood.
When it was time to eat, Mike laid the long kitchen table while Punch and I drove in his car to town for the food, the individual orders falling into four separate batches. A few of the others got in the back just for the ride. Punch told me it was lucky there was a big table; it had been included in the house sale with a few other sticks of furniture. I was about to say that it was a huge house for three people but stopped myself because I was assuming that Punch had been an only child and now I remembered the photo on the sideboard.
By the time we got back, it was raining heavily under low cloud. Punch’s father was sitting in the middle of the settee with Mike and Freddie seeming to bear down on him on either side. He’d already switched the oven on to warm up the food. Old man Evans, who looked more of a pugilist than his son, was explaining something, to judge by Mike’s and Freddie’s intent looks. The others, those who’d stayed behind, were in separate groups, having their own conversations. I caught the end of what Evans Sr. was telling Mike and Freddie:
‘After that we didn’t see much of Tony or his folks. I don’t know why. It wasn’t our fault.’
Freddie and Mike were each clutching a bottle of lager. There were six empty bottles on the coffee table in front of them. Punch’s father had been drinking too.
‘Come and get it!’ Punch called out, as a few of us slid the fish and chips on to plates.
Punch’s father stood up, unsteady on his feet.
‘You OK, Pop?’ Punch asked.
His father gave a comic salute with his forefinger and hobbled towards the kitchen. We’d already been there for two hours and had drunk a fair amount, coaxed by bravado. Well, our school days were over.
We were half way through our meal when I asked: ‘Who was Tony?’
It was what we all did, what Punch had encouraged us to do: ask questions, get the information flowing, draw conclusions, make up our own minds about T.S. Eliot and stuff.
Mike answered: ‘Mr Evans’s school pal. They were all on a camping holiday in Scotland. Isn’t that right, Mr Evans?’ Was Mike’s formality deliberately increasing the gap between himself and those distant relatives? A few of us glanced from one to another. Drink had confused the Evanses in our understanding.
‘That’s right,’ the old man said. ‘Got into a bit of a scrape did Tony and Richard here.’
Richard ‘Punch’ Evans. We knew his real name, of course. But the informality with which Punch had ushered in the two years of A-level by calling us by our first names had not applied to our dealings with him. He was not Richard; he was still Punch, though we never used that name in front of him either; he was Mr Evans, or Sir. I think he quietly balked at the last as a remnant of a lower school deference he now considered irrelevant. He knew his nickname, of course; the other members of staff probably knew theirs too.
You could almost sense what was imminent, that someone from among those who’d only eavesdropped on Mike, Freddie and Punch’s father ten minutes before, would ask the question. I forget who it was.
‘Scrape?’
Our heads were down, our knives and forks clashing with crockery, and bottles were being emptied, our guzzling heads thrown back. The word seemed to creep to the centre of the table unnoticed, rise a couple of feet and hang there, its question mark flashing.
Old Mr Evans was only too willing to explain: ‘Margaret had died, see. Hole in the heart. We never knew. You didn’t then. We had to get away, to forget. Well, not to forget but you know what I mean. Richard here took it bad, even though he was sixteen. We all did. We went camping by a loch. Richard was pally with Anthony—Tony—so he came along too. Didn’t he, Richard?’
All heads except old Mr Evans’s turned towards Punch for an explanation of this telegraphese.
‘Margaret was my thirteen-year-old sister,’ Punch explained. ‘She had atrial septal defect, or ASD.’
He sounded as though he were apologising to us boys for the ugly expression ‘hole in the heart’ and his father’s statement that he had taken his sister’s death ‘bad’.
But the father, seemingly indignant at the son’s trumping of his description with this technical term, butted in, his voice thinly coated with censure:
‘Richard and Tony went off to explore. An hour later, along comes Tony running towards us. His face was white as a sheet. Hobbling behind him about fifty yards away was Richard here with his face covered in blood. His hands were over his face like as if his head was going to fall off, isn’t it? Never seen so much blood on a young ‘un. Tony was shaking. He told us they’d been attacked, by some gang or other.’
Punch swiped his nose with the ball of his thumb. Was it a signal to make the connection between the incident and what we’d thought was the result of successive batterings in the ring? Would a champion have taken much of a beating?
With his comment on this, one of the others made things worse, as it were: ‘Tell us about boxing for the Army, Punch.’
We all stared at each other. None of us had ever called him Punch in his presence. It was drink unlocking doors. Nor had we questioned him, as I said, about the Forces or his sporting prowess, any more than we’d have asked ‘Drag’ Denison, the French master, how he’d come by his limp, sa boiterie.
Punch was about to speak when his father jumped in first. ‘Richard was never in the Army, never been a soldier,’ he said. ‘Where did you get that? And boxing? You must be daft, the lot of you. Books was all he was interested in.’ Like you bunch, he might have added.
There was an edge to his voice, an all-embracing censure or contempt aimed at his son as much as at us, this crowd of smart-alecs who invaded his privacy. Later, much later, we’d see this as Mike expressed it when he referred to education as ‘the Great Divider’. He meant the gulf that learning, books, opened up between us and people like Punch’s father.
‘Yes—where did you get that idea?’ Punch asked. It was hard to believe he hadn’t known. He wasn’t drinking much, we noticed.
We all shrugged, sensing the need to avoid spoiling our evening. But it was too late, the downpour and early darkness outside seeing to that. We could hear the rain drumming on something metallic beyond the window, some lid or roof. Though we’d finished eating, neither Punch nor his father made any attempt to return to the sitting-room. We’d all stopped drinking too; we’d had enough, and we had to get home, those of us being picked up not wanting to embarrass our parents or whoever it was had arranged to drive there. Some of us lived close enough at a stretch to walk, but we didn’t want to stagger. It was an exaggeration to say that Punch wasn’t drinking much: he’d drunk hardly anything.
Evans Sr. opened another bottle, his sixth or seventh. Its cap bounced on the tiled floor. He was beyond offering us more as the perfect host, or the perfect host’s helper; we could please ourselves. Mike tried to change the subject by mentioning an upcoming TV documentary about Seamus Heaney, which he said would include a criticism of the poet by someone called Paul Danziger. Mike must have seen the look of disdain on the face of Evans Sr., who may not have heard of Heaney, let alone Paul Danziger. (Actually, none of us at that moment had heard of Danziger, and that might have included Punch: Mike was avenues ahead of us all.)
Although it was July, we could have done with the lights on. Punch nor his father made the move. The father had more to say about that Highlands episode, something about the police not doing anything, as if dragging it back to the table after he’d seen it tip-toeing away and looking over the shoulder at us in case of needing to make a bolt for it.
‘I didn’t take to Tony—Anthony,’ he said, uttering the longer form of the name with what sounded like scorn. ‘Margaret didn’t too, the wife neither.’ An emboldened Freddie might have asked at that juncture if Punch’s mother didn’t have a name, or why, despite the family’s dislike of Richard’s pal, they’d gone camping to Scotland. We all seemed captive, Punch as well, himself perhaps wanting something to be said as the last word. He placed his knife and fork on the plate neatly in the position of twenty past four; his father’s remained where they had been set either side of the table mat. Go on, Punch appeared to be saying. Get on with it if you’re going to.
‘We never found out why that bunch of Jocks did it—did we, Richard?’ This said without looking at his son.
‘No, we didn’t,’ Punch confirmed, still self-absorbed, head lowered. ‘It was unprovoked.’
‘Aye,’ his father said. ‘No reason for it whatever.’
After the washing-up, we finally strayed into the sitting-room. Evans Sr. had taken up position in front of the TV. There was some quiz show on; we’d heard its low-volume antiphonies of laughter and applause while the last plates were being dried and put away, but now they were louder. The old man had turned the sound up when he realised we were all returning. He’d also pulled his chair closer to the screen, his head craned forwards into its phosphorescent exclusion zone. He’d done with conversation. We could look at him more closely and relate his peculiarities to the bits and bobs in the room, to the huge room itself even, lit only by the TV’s buzzing source of illumination. It silvered the photograph frames and their commemorations: Mrs Evans, about to chuckle at something that had taken her fancy; sickly Margaret, not knowing how close the end was; and Margaret and Punch, the siblings together with all to live for.
Punch did nothing to suggest that his father had not drawn the evening to a close. It was a bit embarrassing really. Draped across chairs or spread out on the floor, we looked at each other and exchanged small talk. Mike, recalling the evening a few years afterwards, said it had reminded him of of two communities, with Punch ‘shadowed’ in the doorway and maybe hoping—though he must have been confident of our success—that we’d be moving away from the life his father had led, further than he had anyway. Mike had seen what we’d seen: a retired coalminer made faintly embittered, even angry, by consumption of alcohol that now served only to reveal his reduced capacity and what Mike referred to, unfairly in my view, as the ‘qualitative’ difference between us. Being charitable might have led us to think that he’d meant ‘quality of life.’ We seemed to be putting the worst complexion on things: that miner’s lamp made from coal, for example, a symbol of a life petrified in its element.
The Old Manse commanded heights before the land behind heaved itself upwards just once more towards afforestation and spoil tips. We never wondered why the trees surrounding it had been chopped down or why their ugly stumps had been left in the ground for so long – to rot away, perhaps. A drive led to one of the top roads and its light traffic. The valley bottom could be seen much further down, its orange street lamps strung out and blinking through sheets of rain and premature darkness. It would be ever thus: ‘no escape from geography apart from anything else,’ Freddie once said.
My older brother picked us up in his car—me, Mike, and Freddie. As we drove away, I could see Punch silhouetted in an upstairs window and below him the TV flickering its distant semaphore.
‘A hole in the heart,’ Mike said. ‘I swear I never knew.’
‘And that Caledonian caper,’ Freddie said, after a pause for reflection. ‘What the fuck was that all about?’
More of Nigel’s writing can be found through his website, www.NigelJarrett.wordpress.com.