The Peppered Moth Read Free Page A

unlike his wife, he could sing. He liked to raise his voice in chapel, and he attended the choral society’s weekly meetings to sing the praises of the Lord. He cared nothing for the Lord, for he was not a religious man, but he liked the sound of the singing. Every Christmas, he sang his way through the bass parts of
The Messiah,
assuring Breaseborough that the Saviour’s yoke was easy and his burden light, bellowing forth the Hallelujah Chorus, and chanting to the gates to lift up their heads.
Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting portals!
    He was not allowed to sing at home.
    He had a mildly sadistic nature, though he would have been astonished had anyone tried to tell him so, for his sadism took the socially acceptable form of pinching his elder daughter’s cheeks until tears came into her eyes, and of burning the back of her hand with a teaspoon hot from his tea. He also described with too much relish the deaths of cats and dogs in the burning fiery furnace of the Destructor at the Electrical Works, and the injuries sustained by miners down the pit. But he never hit anyone. Ellen Bawtry would not have put up with being hit. Mr Bawtry was not a violent or a drinking man, unlike many of the men of the families whose clogs tramped their way each dawn to Bednerby Main. The Bawtrys were a cut above that kind of thing. They were overground, not underground people, and meant to stay that way. Ellen Bawtry considered herself lucky in Bert Bawtry. And, all things considered, she was. She had married late, and cautiously, and she was satisfied with what she had got.
    Ellen and Bert Bawtry were not bad people or bad parents. They tried. They were respectable. They did not hurt their children, but they did not indulge or pet them. Their normal mode was repressive. The normal mode of Breaseborough was repressive, and Ellen and Bert were not innovative. They went along with it. Their children, when small, were afraid of them. Most children, in those days, were afraid of their parents.
    It is not pleasant to use this tone about Bert and Ellen Bawtry. They cannot help their stony lives. But if we were to find another tone, the heart might break. And then where would we be? What good would
that
do, Ellen Bawtry herself would be the first to ask.
    We might find ourselves obliged to weep. We might not be able to stop weeping. And what
would
be the point of
that
?
     
    Bessie sat under the table, Dora sucked her thumb as she slept in her cradle, Ellen Bawtry hooked and pulled at her length of brown sacking, and Bert Bawtry read the racing results, then a motorcycle magazine. He did not gamble himself, except for an annual flutter on the legendary St Leger, but he liked to know what was what. He liked the names of the horses, and something of spirit in him liked it when one won against the odds. A disagreeable smell of boiled meat issued mournfully from the blackened kitchen range. The Bawtrys, in these prewar years, did not go hungry. They did not eat well, but they ate a lot. Both Bert and Ellen were stout, as people of their age were in those days.
    Prospects for young Bessie, with her refined nature and her great expectations, did not seem too good on that October evening long ago. It seemed that nothing would ever change. It seemed she would never get out of here.
    It was lucky, really, that Mrs Bawtry did not let Bessie play on the street. It was more dangerous out there than any of them knew, than any of them could have known.
    Against known dangers, Ellen Bawtry warned and protected her daughters. The world beyond the wooden cave was full of menace. Steep steps, runaway horses, spiked railings, epidemics of whooping cough and measles and diphtheria. The gormless gaslighter, the loiterer on the corner, the cracks in the pavement, the poisonous coloured icing on those gross Whitsuntide buns. Glucose, germs, splinters. Boiled sweets. The very earth was mined. Beneath the streets, a mile down, toiled the