II
I was born Robert Borrows in Bracebridge, Brownheath, West Yorkshire, late one August Sixshiftday afternoon in the seventy-sixth year of the third great cycle of our Ages of Industry, the only son and second child of a lower master of the Lesser Guild of Toolmakers. Bracebridge was then a middle-sized town which lay on the banks of the River Withy. It was prosperous in its own way, and perhaps indistinguishable from many another northern factory town to the eyes of those who glimpsed it from the carriages of the expresses which swept through our station without stopping, although, at least in one respect, it was unusual. Derbyshire might have its coalfields and Lancashire might have its mills, Dudley might swarm with factories and Oxford with cape-flapping dons, but for this particular corner of England it was aether which governed our lives, and the one inescapable fact that would strike anyone who visited Bracebridge at that time was the sound, or rather the non-sound, which pervaded it. It was a sensation which passed into all of us who lived there and became part of the rhythm and the substance of our lives.
SHOOM BOOM SHOOM BOOM.
It was the sound of the aether engines.
The water wheels that had driven Bracebridge’s first aether engines up on Rainharrow had long been still; their wheels and pistons had rusted, their catchpools lay empty, the shattered windows of their drive houses stared down at the factories that had sprawled in their place. Down in the valley, there was always smoke and sound and furnace glow. Inside the floors of Mawdingly & Clawtson, dervish governors spun, pulleys hissed and chains clattered. Driven down from Engine Floor three hundred feet into the earth, pristine as a jewel yet thick as a ship’s mast and ten times as heavy, a great vertical axle turned, bearing force to Central Floor far below where the ears and lungs of those who laboured there were continually flayed by the deep, demented beat of the triple arms of the aether engines which they and this factory—all of Bracebridge, in one way or another—existed to serve.
Fanning out from the riven rock, the three steel and granite pistons bellowed back and forth—SHOOM BOOM SHOOM BOOM—drawing out the aether. Connected to those pistons and thin as spiderweb, skeins of engine silk carried the substance to the surface. There, the energy was dissipated in the cloudy waters of the first of many quickening pools, then stirred and filtered until the final vials were packed in lead-lined chests and borne on slow trains west and east and north but predominantly south across England, there to be put to any of ten thousand possible uses, the benefits of which, it always struck me, Bracebridge itself seemed surprisingly bereft.
Of course, it used to be said that we all took aether for granted then, but in Bracebridge it was working of aether that we took for granted; the slam of iron and the howl of shift sirens and the clump of men’s boots and the grind of engines and soot on the washing and, beyond all that, beyond everything, the subterranean pounding of those engines. It compacted the flour in the larder and tilted the flagstones in the hall. It cracked flowerpots and crazed pottery. It shifted dust into seashore patterns and danced rainbows on the fat globules in the cream. It secretly rearranged the porcelain dogs on the mantelpiece until they crashed to the hearth. SHOOM BOOM SHOOM BOOM. We carried the sound of those engines in our blood. Even when we left Bracebridge, it came with us.
The house in which I lived, the third in the terrace along Brickyard Row, with a steep drop through scratchy copses of birch into lowtown and with many other Rows and Backs and Ways slanting up Coney Mound behind, had stood for most of the Third Age of Industry by the time my parents moved in. Bracebridge then was at the height of a new surge of expansion, and such terraces, facing each other across yards and alleys and the corrugated roofs of outside toilets, had been deemed the most efficient method of housing the workers who were needed to service the new, subterranean engines that were then being built to mine the deep-set aether seams. Apart from my own small upper space, there were two main rooms on each of the two floors, although the house always seemed more complicated than that, riddled with odd corners and alcoves and bits of cupboard and crisscrossings of chimney. The core, from which rose most of the heat, smell and noise which fogged my attic, was the kitchen, which was dominated in turn by the black iron range. Above it were generally strung clots of rag, shoes dangling by their laces, sage and sallow, bits of fat and ham, sagging bladders of waterapples, wet coats and anything else in need of drying, whilst the oak table glowered at it from its own darker corner; a rival, lesser, deity.
Upstairs lay the front bedroom which my parents occupied, and my elder sister Beth’s single back room. The rear of the house was north-facing, the narrow windows admitting views only of walls and dustbins and back alleys. I was lucky, really, with my little attic at the front. It was my own private territory. Lives were pressed close together in Brickyard Row. The walls were thin, their bricks porous to smoke, smells, voices. Somewhere, there would always be a baby crying; somewhere else, a man shouting, or a woman crying.
Like so many other couples who lived along Coney Mound in the compressed lower layers of the great human pyramid of rank which still dominates England—above the poor guildless marts but precious little else—my parents had struggled though years of duty and routine. An old photograph hung above the mantelpiece in the front parlour, taken on the day of their wedding. It was so blotched by smoke and damp as to look as if they were standing underwater; and they really did both seem to be holding their breath as they posed stiffly under the branches of a beech tree beside St Wilfred’s. But that was all a long time ago; before Beth, before me. My father had no moustache then, and the saucy tilt to his elbow and the way he had his hand around my mother’s waist suggested a whole life a-waiting. My mother wore a lanternflower wreath and a dress of fine lace which billowed to the grass in foamy waves. A truly handsome couple, both still looking too young to be married even to my immature eyes, they had met at Mawdingly & Clawtson, the big aether factory on Withybrook Road around which all of Bracebridge revolved. My mother had moved to Bracebridge from the failing family farm out on Brownheath, and my father had followed his own father into the Third Lower Chapter of the Lesser Toolmakers’ Guild. They had crossed paths many times, if my mother was to be believed, before they really noticed each other, or locked eyes, in my father’s dreamier version, across the benches of the factory paintshop as he made his way through there on some errand, and fallen instantly in love.
Ridiculous though it is, I still prefer my father’s tale. I can still see my mother working on the fine relays amid all the other young women in that long dim room, dipping her brushes into the aether-laden pots, her hair drawn up and head bowed as she traced the skeins and scrolls that would ultimately convey a guildsman’s will into some tool or engine. For my father, swinging in through the doors from the roar of the foundry across the yard, it must have been like stepping into a cool garden. And my mother was delicate then, perhaps even beautiful, with her lustrous dark hair, her soft blue eyes, her white skin and that small, elegant body with those fine nervous hands. Aside from the use of her family’s guild connections, she had probably got her job in the painting room because she looked as if she could perform such an exacting task, but in fact she tended to be clumsy, making quick, brittle movements that her mind only seemed to learn about after her limbs had accomplished them. As children, Beth and I both learned to keep well away from her flying elbows. But in every sense, amid the aether drippings of her ruined brushes as the light faded into evening, my mother would have shone out.
So my parents met, they courted, they married at Midsummer, and the shifterms and the years flew by. At the time I first remember them both, they still looked far too young to be who they already were, and partly, in the stoop of their backs and the greying of my mother’s hair, much too old. Bracebridge and the huge downward pressure of England’s great human pyramid had wearied them both. My father was an inconstant man, prone to anger and enthusiasms, to interests and projects started and then abandoned in favour of something else. Once he found his ambition thwarted within the tight, secret structures of the Lesser Toolmakers’ Guild, he wore out the energy and intelligence which had probably first attracted my mother to him. More days than not he would call in at the Bacton Arms on his way home from Mawdingly & Clawtson for a swift half which easily became several long pints, and on Tenshift and Halfshiftday and feastdays he would roll up the street, crashing into the house and swaying up the stairs, laughingly circling my mother as she lay in bed and did her best to ignore him, making jokes about what some friend for the evening had done or said before he flared into spite and finally retreated to spend the night before the stove, staring into the firegrate’s glow as the alcohol seeped out of him. On ordinary nights, though, they would talk to each other as they prepared for bed in croaks and cries and calls like two keelies calling across the marshes; all those sentences married couples never finish. My father would hook his trousers by their braces across the back of his chair; then yawn and stretch and scratch himself through his vest before climbing between the sheets.
I can see them now. The oil lantern on the dresser which my father’s brought up from downstairs is still glowing, its flame clawing the air. My mother is slower to get to bed, wandering about barefoot, pulling and tugging at her hair with her big silver brush, then catching her outline in the faded looking glass and staring frozen for a moment as if surprised to find herself here. My father slaps his pillow, turns over, hugs himself, muttering. My mother puts down the brush and lifts her night-gown from its hook to shrug it over herself in grey waves before wriggling from her underthings, dragging them out from beneath the hem. Finally, she hoods the lantern and climbs into bed.
There they lie, two figures half buried in the dark of their blankets and the weight of their days, people who had once held hands, taken springtime walks, sheltered laughing under bandstands from the rain. It all seems quiet now; the families are strung weary and complete along Brickyard Row, safe in their beds as the stars shine down on the roofs and a new moon rises over the backs of the houses. No dogs are barking. The yards are empty. The last train has long gone by. A dense, fizzing silence falls in snowy waves. Then, as my father grunts and sniffs and begins to snore, a deeper sound becomes apparent. And my mother lies there, flat and still, her eyes glittering from her pillow as she stares at the ceiling, the finger of her left hand rubbing the scar on the palm of the other to that endless, inescapable rhythm.
SHOOM BOOM SHOOM BOOM.