Martin Nugent had only felt the full force of his fear after the event. Once the trembling caught up with him, his employer had made him sit in front of the large pub hearth. Despite it being a mild September day, the logs had been made up and the fire lit in Martin’s honour.
‘That will warm you through,’ the
landlord had said to the shaking boy, ‘It will take away the deep chill of the
water,’ he had added.
There had been quite a hubbub in the
bar of the Boat Inn, Jackfield. This had included lively discussions of
Martin’s brave actions. Whilst there had been some condemnation of the young
ruffian whose life Martin had saved, any criticism had been tempered by a sense
of overwhelming relief amongst the drinkers, many of whom had witnessed the
rescue for themselves.
Despite the noise around him, Martin
had found himself almost dozing off in the single wooden chair at the fireside,
though as potboy he was hazily conscious that he should be dispensing beer to
the unexpected crowd. It made him think how quickly the news had spread in this
little hamlet by the Severn. That made him picture in turn the few houses of
the nearby village. He thought of how the dark and brooding river seemed
entirely to define its inhabitants whose livelihoods connected them all to its
currents.
Without the river there would have
been no China works, and no returning workers destined to quench their thirst
at the pub nearest the ferry crossing, and so no job for him. And Martin was
glad of his job. It had felt like such a piece of luck when his uncle had
mentioned casually on a day visit to his Birmingham relatives that ‘young
Martin’ might do a lot worse than try his luck as pot boy. There was work to be
had, he reckoned, at more than one of the expanding hostelries close to the
factory where he himself had risen to become a skilled craftsman. Born with a
slight limp, Martin knew that even in the enlightened times of the 1840s he
would never be seen as robust enough to be taken on at the pottery. He knew
also that his father had long given up hope that he might find himself a place
as cabin boy, working alongside him on one of the merchant ships voyaging to
the new world to trade goods. Martin had never been able to tell him how glad
he was that his somewhat unusual appearance had meant he need never set foot on
a boat. For ever since he had been a baby, Martin’s recurring nightmare had
been one of falling from a rolling, reeling deck to be pitched into a
tempestuous, swirling, pit of water. Then he had dreamed of himself flailing,
unable to raise his head high enough to make out land, or to scream for help,
and hearing no sound beyond that of the swelling water as he felt himself
gripped by the current and shoved against his will downwards into darkness.
Martin knew he had been a disappointment to his sailor father. How then could
he ever have told him how much he dreaded being close to water, let alone being
on it?
No,
he had been relieved when his father had allowed him to follow his uncle’s suggestion
to seek his fortune elsewhere. And whilst the Boat Inn was a humble kind of
place right next to the river ferry, the landlord had at least been willing to
give him a trial for a week or two in return for regular food and a place to
doss down in the loft above the bar. Despite his misgivings about the
fast-flowing channel outside the place, Martin had been keen to please his
employer, for he did not want to return to Birmingham. The landlord had already
spoken about training him up to help him with managing the beer kegs in due
course, so he had been able to report to his uncle that he now had ‘prospects’
of making his way in the public house trade.
Martin was a quick learner, amenable
with the customers and observant of their ways. He understood the unspoken
pecking order of the men as they presented themselves at the bar. Drowsing in
his chair now, he could recollect the stream of faces that had been passing
through the bar on the men’s way home from Coalport. He pictured the children
with them, left outside to lark about after their day at the factory whilst
their fathers tried to swill away the smell and taste of the paint leads. Then
Martin relived the moment when he had heard the desperate shout. It turned out
that one of the children, who had been throwing twigs into the stream to race
them down the river towards the next bend, had leant too far forward and
somehow lost his balance, then his foothold, and slipped with brutal suddenness
into the river.
The boy’s father had been out of the
pub in a moment, as if sensing his boy was in danger, and running towards the
bank shouting. ‘Son, son’ was all he had screamed. Martin was fast behind him
too. His limp had not deterred him, and he had reached the bank alongside all
the other adults anxiously peering into the river. Martin recalled now the
silence that had fallen on them all as each scanned the murky water in hopes of
seeing the child. It had been Martin who had found him though. He had not been
staring across the wide channel, but downstream and towards the nearside bank
as he calculated how far in the boy might have fallen and how likely it was
that the current had pushed him in towards the near river edge. He did not see
much, just a streak of blond, but it was enough to galvanise him, rushing him
along the bank and then, oh so foolishly, leaping into the water to raise the
boy’s head upwards to the air with no thought of the danger he was placing
himself in. Only the quick thinking of the other men who had commandeered a
fisherman’s net, saved him and the boy from drowning, pulling them both back in
to shore and manhandling them out of the water. They managed it just in time
before the weeds waving in the water could extend their grasp to clutch Martin
and the boy into an icy embrace from which there would have been no
release.
Yes, that was how events had
unfolded, Martin thought before he fell asleep in his chair, waking only much
later after the customers had departed, to be helped up the stairs to his straw
bed by the landlord who had told him again how well he had acted earlier in
saving the young boy’s life.
It was only in the days to come that
Martin had come to realise that his sleep was no longer troubled by the
recurrent nightmare of drowning. He had even found himself contentedly watching
the ferry boat coming and going from the Boat Inn side of the river to the
towpath side on which many of its customers lived. It was as if his childhood
terrors had been lain to rest and so he might finally dare to make his own way
in the world, without feeling himself always destined to fail. Not long
afterwards, the landlord had recommended him to an old pal of his who was
looking for a steady worker to help him to run a public house in Ludlow. The
job was a better paid one and Martin was eager to accept the opportunity, if
sad to leave the place where he felt he had found his feet so to
speak.
A few days before he was due to
depart for his new job, Martin had found himself serving an old man who had
wondered into the bar at a quiet hour and who seemed a little out of place
because he was not one of the regulars. Martin had handed him his beer in the
small tankard he had requested before inviting him to take his ease on one of
the benches placed around the edge of the bar space. Martin had thought it an
act of kindness to pass a few remarks with the customer by way of being
hospitable whilst the man drank his beer slowly. After some time, the visitor
had produced an old-fashioned clay pipe from the inner recesses of his
well-worn jacket and puffed on it for a while. Then the visitor had stood up
and made his way towards the door, seemingly deep in thought and sighing deeply
as he lifted the latch. Martin had thought that he was about to leave without
further conversation, and he was surprised when the man turned back for a
moment towards him, scrutinising him closely, before speaking, falteringly at
first, and then with certainty, ‘You do remind me of my father long gone. Yes,
you have his look.’
Then the man paused before slowly,
placing his pipe back in the deep spaces of his jacket before he spoke again.
‘That was a terrible night for us all when the ferry went down in ‘77…
Twenty-eight souls ripped from this world there were when it capsized. I grieve
for my father still and for my brother who was on his way home from the factory
with him … only eight he was. Ah well, I best be walking on now. I come
over from time to time, you know, to remember them where it
happened’.
As the old man turned as if to undo
the door, Martin found himself desperately wanting to show interest in the old
man’s tragedy, but unsure of what to say. He was about to blurt out some
sympathetic enquiry about how far the man had travelled that day, when the
departing customer turned back from the door for a moment to look directly at
him.
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