A Few Words, by Kenneth Ashby
An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.
Herbie Bowden had written the speech on four postcards and learned it by heart, and all through the ham salad he kept his hand in his jacket pocket, holding the cards the way a man on a high ladder holds the rung. Cyril had asked him in March. Herbie had said yes, because you could not say no to your brother, and had not slept properly since.
The upstairs room at the Social Club smelled of beer and wet coats. There were sixty people at the long tables, and every one seemed to have the face of a magistrate. When Uncle Clem rapped his glass and said, ‘And now, our Herbie,’ Herbie stood up so fast that his chair went over behind him, and somebody laughed.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, and his voice came out high and thin, like a boy’s at a school concert. He heard it go up into the corners of the room and die there. His mother had her handkerchief ready, though whether for tears or for embarrassment he could not tell.
He read the first card. It had a joke about kangaroos which had been funny in March. Nobody laughed. He turned to the second card and saw, with a kind of cold calm, that the remaining three were his notes for Thursday’s union meeting, about overtime rates at the yard.
For a moment the room went very far away. Then he looked down the table and saw Cyril watching him with the steady look he had worn when Herbie was nine and lost in a sea fret on Roker sands, and Cyril had found him by shouting his name, over and over, until Herbie walked towards the sound.
Herbie put the cards face down on the tablecloth.
‘I had a speech,’ he said. ‘It’s gone. So I’ll just tell you about our Cyril.’ He told them about the fog: the cold sand under his bare feet, the hiss of the water creeping in, Cyril’s voice coming out of the whiteness like a rope you could hold. When he looked up, his father was blowing his nose and Cyril was staring very hard at the ceiling.
He sat down. His legs were trembling. The clapping went on and on, and Herbie sat inside it like a man in warm rain, not sure whether he had disgraced himself or done the best thing he had ever done. In June the boat would sail, and there would be nobody left to shout his name.
How does the writer show Herbie’s thoughts and feelings about giving the farewell speech?
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You must refer to the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.