The driver of the furniture van called his mates attention to a heap on the road which, as they drove closer, resolved itself into the body of a man lying in a pool of congealed blood. The road at that point made a deep cut through a flat-topped ridge and the cut was recent and raw with the high banks on each side stabilised by concrete crib walls. The dead man, probably in his early seventies, had fallen from the house above and almost certainly from the open window in the gable end. He had met the rasp of the concrete cribs for much of the way down. The two men had seen their share of accidents and, even before they climbed down, they knew there could be no hope. Not with that degree of injury. Not with a neck bent to that angle. But even then they felt for a pulse, just in case, and, as expected, found none.
Something struck them simultaneously. In spite of the ghastly injuries, the dead man’s face was relatively unmarked and had a look of exultation. As the drivers mate put it, “It looks like the poor bastard’s found his place in paradise.”
The dead man had been, until shortly before this, the owner of Cribben’s Alarms which had earlier been Cribben & Son Locksmiths. He was not the original Cribben nor even a son. The son had been his uncle from whom he, in his turn, had taken over the firm. In the last two decades, electronic alarms and surveillance had come to be a major part of the business hence the name change. From a man and boy operation, the business had expanded almost of its own volition.
He had lived above the workshop and raised three daughters there with his first wife until he lost her to cancer. Some years after her death, he had married again, this time to a much younger woman, to the initial upset of his daughters. But the marriage had worked well until cancer had again intruded. As before, it was brute force treatments, nausea and hair loss, apparent remissions and raised hopes, and the final morphine-cushioned slide to dissolution. But there was no cushion for the hapless sharer in these events.and this time he was on his own, his daughters long married and dispersed.
Tired and disheartened with no sons to follow and no interest from the sons-in-law, he had sold
UP IN THE ROOF Page 2 Thpmas out to an international firm that was buying its way into the country.
And with the firm went the accomodation that he had occupied for so long. The new owners were willing to let him stay on for a month or two but the place held too many memories. Its emptiness was painful. He was not prepared to impose on his daughters. Yet he was also not ready to decide on his future. And he wondered ‘what future?’ Up until then he had been Ken Cribben the locksmith. Now he wasn’t sure who or what he was. The workers who had once sought his direction now managed quite well without him. His daughters didn’t need him either. The world showed itself quite happy to run without his help.
A long-time friend provided a temporary solution, time to get hold of himself. The friend’s son, a geophysicist, and daughter-in-law had bought a house with the thought of doing it up but the offer of a lucrative short-term contract in Bahrein had put their plans on hold. They needed a house-sitter and Ken, under persuasion, had put his furniture in store and moved in.
He had been in the house for a week before he realised why it had seemed familiar. He had been there more than fifty years earlier as an apprentice with his uncle. At that time it had been well outside the town boundaries but, with the years, the housing tracts had flowed around it and surged far beyond. Perhaps what had fooled him most was an earlier attempt to do the place up. Late-fifties plumbing and kitchen units, the vast wood range had been thrown out, wood panelling had given way to plaster-board, and the ceilings had been lowered. The house had been vandalised.
At his first encounter, it had been inhabited by an elderly couple whom he assumed to be care- takers. At that time it was for the most part shut up and little changed from its completion in the late nineteenth century. He had been intrigued by the kitchen built in the days of cheap servants and the set of mechanical bells each one still labelled with the source of its imperious summons. By then the days of servants, at least for that establishment, were long past and most of the estate, which was said to have once been extensive, had been sold, the farm-workers cottages, farm buildings and stables, pulled down or shifted away.
The house was T-shaped with the narrow dropper of the T being the old servants’ quarters and the doors for these opened onto a shallow verandah. They were locked and the keys missing but this proved to be no barrier to an inquisitive locksmith. In the absense of servants, the rooms had been stripped of wall linings to make one large room and had become the house’s midden, a means of putting off decisions on the disposal of worn and unwanted items.
Ken had spent days sorting through the detritus looking for treasure. A good find might have lifted his depression. His family had always been embarrassed by his fossicking when they took loads to the town dump and by his elation at even trivial finds. Anything old fascinated him particularly the ephemera that survived against the odds. Like the forgotten bookmarks in the second-hand books that he insisted on buying. The post-card with Victoria on a penny stamp, the War Cry cutting reporting the then recent meeting of Katherine Booth and President (Teddy) Roosevelt, the notice of a 1931 Communist Party branch meeting, the Great-War-letter-seal in aid of the Naval Dependants Fund, the pressed flowers and four-leaf clovers left there by who-knows- who.
His particular obsession was with the twenties and the first few years of the thirties, the magical years of his father’s and uncle’s young manhood. The unreachable years that fate denied him. When being British meant something. The whole ambience of the period was seared into his soul. And, in his present dark hour, it was Nirvana.
He found nothing of value. At least nothing that he valued. Nothing earlier than the fifties. The older essence of the house was gone unless there was something in the ceiling.
There was a permanent ladder fixed to the verandah wall and a trapdoor suggested a storage space in the ceiling. He climbed the ladder and poked his head through the trap to discover a thick mass of cobwebs. He retreated to get his torch and a long stick. Returning, he found that a wooden walkway with rails on each side led from the trap toward the top of the T and he advanced along it waving his stick. With every few step it collected a thick mat that had to be discarded. The roof ridge over the narrow servants’ quarters was only a foot or so above his head but became higher when he reached the main part of the house. There, the walkway took a turn to the left and a little further on he came to a door. Although it had been obviously long closed, it opened with only slight protest. Light shone now from a dirty window showing still more cobwebs and a room in the gable end.
The room had obviously been a bedroom. The rusted bed frame along with a free-standing wardrobe and a bent-wood chair gave proof of this. It was doubtful that recent owners had even known of its existence. But who had slept there, he wondered? Was it a maid’s room? Some little teen-aged slavey stuck up under the roof? And how long ago would that be?
He received at least a partial answer to that last question the next day when he was cleaning the room. The wall paper, which was brittle and hanging loose in places, came away as he brushed it. It had been hung on layered newspaper rather than scrim and there before his eyes was May Gibbs’ strip of Bib and Bub. The Gum-Nut Babies! Suddenly he was three again, it was 1937, a Saturday morning, and his mother was reading the words for him. It was a moment of pure bliss.
He began to spend time up there reading. He had little else to do. Musty it might be but it was the only room that hadn’t had the heart torn out of it by so-called progress and, like him, its best days were over. Yet it had a feel about it. A good feel that he could not explain. Its only downside was its window which refused to open no matter how hard he tried. Some idiot in the distant past had closed it on wet paint. He had cleaned it on the inside and hosed it it outside so that it gave adequate light but a little fresh air would have helped.
Gradually, he came to know that this had been a boy’s room at first housing a young farm worker and much later a son of the house seeking privacy and escape from a gaggle of sisters. He knew how the room had looked in the time of the son: the very books on the bookshelf, the Wonders of Engineering, Deans Boy’s Annuals and a Chatterbox, presents from aunts, Scouting For Boys, E.E.Nesbit, Captain Marryat, Stevenson, Scott, and the pile of Meccano Magazines: the pictures on the wall, Sir Nigel Gresley’s record-breaker Mallard at speed and the mighty new liner rising on the standing-ways at Cammel-Laird. How he knew all this, he didn’t know.
Sometimes as he was reading, the sounds of household life seemed to intrude from below but when he lifted his head to pay attention, there was nothing to hear. At other times he caught the faint give-away scent of tobacco smoke and the taste of peppermints and knew that the son had been a secret smoker. He experienced some of the son’s alarm and guilt when creaks in the old house suggested that one of his prying sisters was creeping along the walkway to catch him out.
Then, one warm afternoon, he lifted his head not just to know but to finally see. He was reading a Louis L’Amour, found among the junk below, and turned the page to find that the text on the next page was not as expected. Assuming that he had turned two pages, he turned back. But not to the Sacketts. What he now held in his hand was ‘The Children of the New Forest’ and at this time he saw that the room had also changed. It was furnished in a more spartan fashion than it would be for a son of the house and the window, the stuck window, was now open. Through it came a distant and alien chuffa-chuff-chuff-chuff.
He sat for some minutes, unmoving. The shock was too great. He doubted his sanity. This could not happen. But eventually, he forced himself to the window.
The modern suburbs were gone as was the cut through the ridge. There were farm buildings nearby and several cottages and, closer still, what he took to be the stables and coach-house. And away to the right, down on the flat, a contractor’s gang forked stooks from stack to thresher and sewed up bags in a cloud of dust and steam while a traction engine beat out a frenetic time signature..
A waggon passed below him coming from the direction of the stables apparently returning to the thresher. This could not be a dream. Dreams might be convincing at the time but you could never doubt that reality was the real thing. He could actually smell the two Clydesdales, hear the huff of their breath, the ’tsk,tsk’ of the driver, and the unmistakable crunch of iron tyres on gravel. Down by the thresher he could see a second waggon already loaded and moving off.
His attention was drawn to his hands on the window sill and he was surprised to find them young hands. And he realised that he felt young! Even without a mirror his hands were enough evidence to convince him that he was, in fact, young again at least at that particular time and in that particular place.
As pleasing as that was, he couldn’t stay there forever. What would happen when he went back along the walkway and down through the trap? Would there some point at which he switched back? Would he keep his youth or would he return to the downhill slope and irrelevance? Outside the window was certainty, the promise of youth and a new life. The walkway led to uncertainty.
The loaded waggon was now coming up the rise, the horses sweating and straining into their collars, the driver urging and encouraging. What should he do? It was a decision that no-one should ever have to make. To take this opportunity, to grasp the golden time, would mean abandoning his daughters which was a callous choice. Selfish! Yet to all intents, he had lost them already. And just as permanently as he had lost his wives. These days they were completely bound up in their husbands and their own now-adult children. Their need for him was long gone. Their grief could only be short-lived and must come within a few years anyway.
As the loaded waggon passed beneath his window, he chose his moment and jumped.