The Pram in the Hall by Lucy Deedes
When I saw the tractor cutting the hedges on the farm, I ran across with a twenty pound note. This was the ritual. He would see me and stop, I would wave the note at him and yell above the engine to ask if he would cut the hedge bordering our garden; he would say he was going to do it anyway and tuck the note away. He was old and creased, melted onto the tractor seat.
This time he stopped the engine and leaned back in the seat and I saw there was to be conversation, not just a swift transaction. He gestured across the field and I followed his gaze towards the ruin of a barn on the side of the hill, its rafters like the hull of an overturned ship.
‘Always wanted to be a painter,’ he said, ‘When I was a boy.’
The barn was magnificent in its starkness, the clouds ballooning behind it.
‘You still could,’ I said, breathless from my run.
‘With these?’ He held out hands like crabs; red, swollen-knuckled and grimed around the nails.
‘I went for a competition once,’ patting down his pockets and tracking down a carton of cigarettes. ‘School put me down for it. Bought a paintbox with the pocket money.’ His hands sketched out a box shape – this long, this high. ‘I can still see it – little squares of colour like flags.’
‘What did you paint?’
‘Holidays, it had to be. Picture of our holiday. Well, we never bloody went anywhere in the summer, nor the rest of the year, come to that. No one goes away when there’s sheep to shear and hay to mow.’
‘So I painted the Sunday School treat. Day at the beach, Margate that year. We went on the bus, that was a treat in itself. Vicar in short trousers, meat paste sandwiches and Ninety-Nines and my brother was sick. Grand day.’
He fixed me with a watery eye. ‘I worked away at that picture, after school. Pencil sketch first, then the colours. Page after page, ripped them out and started again. Boats, children, sandcastles, kites. Couldn’t get it.’
‘Then, I had it!’ he smacked a fist into his open palm with a noise like a rifle. ‘I painted the donkeys. Long line of them there was, tied up to a rail. Heads down, resting a back leg.’ He crooked out an elbow. ‘The saddles never fit and the flies drove them mad and they just carried on, carting children up and down the beach and grown-ups too, who were too bloody heavy and should have known better.’
‘I was never as proud of anything again as that painting. I wrapped it in brown paper and carried it to school; they sent them off and hung them at the big school for the judges.’
‘Did you win?’
‘Not a mention.’
He leaned across and turned on the ignition so his last words were lost as the tractor rocked away down the headland.
Simon says:
This works well as a slice of life, one of those casual conversations one has with people, which reveal more about them than one had expected to hear. I like the sense of continuity here. The narrator and the man on the tractor (which he is ‘melted onto’ – lovely phrase) see each other regularly, they have a ‘ritual’ about him cutting her garden hedge, but rarely exchange more than pleasantries. Then, one day, for no particular reason, he reveals to her his childhood ambition to be a painter. His telling of the story is factual, not manipulative, and all the more powerful for that. How many other people’s creative ambitions got side-lined by the demands of everyday life, the need to pay the bills… or by Cyril Connolly’s ‘sombre enemy of good art… the pram in the hall’, which provides such an apt title for the piece? Another thing I like is that the reader never knows whether the man on the tractor would have been a good painter or not. His one competition entry was greeted by ‘not a mention’. This is a skilful interpretation of the brief which, just for a vivid moment, opens a casement on to another life.