Brian saw him unlock the cupboard on certain evenings, spread papers and notebooks over the table, watched him set out a clear life in dates and figures and signatures with no explanatory prose, in the only way he knew how to record it. These were the times of his greatest contentment, and an aura of calm descended over the house.
Brian copied him, bought a penny notebook, and in awkward, uneven writing put down the names of schools he had been to and the dates at which he had left them, the streets he had lived on for as far back as he could remember. He saw other boys standing at street corners with pencil and paper collecting car numbers, but his own game was part of walking up Denman Street on Sunday morning to buy a sixpenny roast from a cheap butcher’s (pushing up to the counter and always hoping the roast would be bigger than last week’s), stopping on his way back near a corner plastered from top to bottom with cinema billboards: big letters in yellow and black, red and purple and gold, forming titles of adventure and destiny, and names from the brightest of heavens such as Robert Donat and Jack Hulbert, Jean Harlow and Clark Gable. Shopping-bag by the wall, he took out his book and self-consciously gathered on to paper the shining words of poetry around him, imagining the thoughts of passers-by: What’s he doin’, writing in a book like that?—for he would stay a long time laboriously copying and turning pages, while his mother waited at home to get the meat in the oven.
The game came to an end one evening when he opened his grandmother’s Evening Post and discovered two long columns on the inside page already filled with words he had so arduously hunted for and copied down. In one way it was like finding a goldmine, corn in Egypt that dazzled his eyes as he strove to take in such a fabulous concentration of titles. Though they lacked the colour and layout that went right into him at the hoardings, his game was finished.
At the beginning of September, time threw in its reserves of frost and fog to break down the year’s resistance, and he wore a coat, began in the chill and darkness of evening to anticipate Goose Fair and Bonfire Night and Christmas parties at school. Rain came, cold and persistent, drainpipes and gutters working overtime to wash away the dead from a battlefield of leaves and matchsticks. Houses grew farther apart in the misty odours of each earlier dusk, became more compatible for Knock-a-door and Spirit-tap and Dustbinlidder in the form of Brian, Ted Newton, and Jim Skelton, moving like wraiths from lit-up lamp to lamp in laughing agony at the distraught tormented who opened his or her door after mysterious noises, to see—their eyes still blind from an electric-lit room—nothing.
Brian with handbat played rounders, sent a tennis-ball smacking from wall to wall and corner to corner in half-darkness, sometimes cracking a window and bringing an irate man in shirtsleeves shaking a fist into an empty street threatening to have the shadows “sommonsed.” Those for the leap in Leapfrog sang as they went for the leap:
“Rum-stick-a-bum
Here I come
With my finger up my bum!”
A game of snobs went on across the pavement, or marbles in the gutter, and in the middle of the street a solid bundle of bellicose kids split into a dozen fragments when a car came by, or slowly dispersed when haggard mothers from doorsteps called them in one by one for tea or bed.
On Saturday morning a scraping of pennies and ha’pennies sometimes succeeded in mounting to threepence, the price of a matinée seat at the pictures. Brian collected rags and iron from the tips, cadged a rabbit skin from his grandmother, a stray beer-bottle from Merton, and traipsed them in a sack to junkyards on Alfreton Road. When Seaton did a paper-hanging job he was able to take Fred and Margaret to the flickerdrome as well. They stood hand in hand, an hour before time, in a long queue of shouting and restless children. Ice-cream barrows attracted knots of them by the kerb, and Fred absent-mindedly kicked the wheelspokes of one before he thought to slide his ha’penny on to the cool-looking lead-covered tub, then came back crying because his ice-cream had thrown itself from the cornet-mouth and was melting on the pavement as if it couldn’t disappear fast enough. Brian tried to pacify him, but a hard fist screwed towards weeping eyes, and the mouth beneath wailed: “I want another cornet!” at which Brian tried threats: “If you don’t be quiet I wain’t tek yer into the pictures at all.”
“I want another cornet,” Fred wept, and Brian had no staying power before tears. Weeping seemed the greatest disaster that could ever happen, much greater than what had caused it, which should already have been forgotten. Tears, more than faith, should move mountains—but what a pity they were shed so easily—as Fred went on roaring and everyone turned to look.
Margaret tut-tutted, as she had heard her mother do many times: “I’n’t ’e a mardy-arse?”
Brian relented. Had it been anyone else crying, he would have felt anger against him, but for his own brother he mellowed, became soft and almost afraid for them both. “I’ll buy you a cornet,” he said, and pushed a ha’penny into his hand so that Fred stopped the tap as if by magic. “Don’t let it fall out this time,” Margaret shouted at the stolid back of his head by the ice-cream barrow.
Cars and buses catapulted down the cobbled road, dodged by Brian to reach the paper shop and buy a “Joker” comic. He stood on the pavement reading the latest machinations of Chang the Hatchet Man, immediately drawn into a strange landscape, himself an unseen spectator standing by a broad riverbank, watching a junk loaded with dynamite carried by the current towards a dam, by which it would explode and bury both valley and distant plain in water. He was filled with admiration for such grandiose ideas of destruction, looking upon Chang with some sympathy, almost as if he was some long-lost great-uncle a few times removed, roaming the wastes of China. He knew Chang was a villain, and that three English youths standing hopelessly by the riverbank would have saved the dam if they could, but Chang was greater than these, the brigand who had set the junk in motion from further upstream, and was the real hero of the piece. The junk exploded, a thousand fragments suspended in mid-air till next week—and even this didn’t make him aware of Chang’s creator, of the fact that Chang was no more than a few pen marks on paper, lit into something bigger than real by the escape lanes of imagination.
He looked up to see the queue moving, and asked for three threepennies at the cashbox. The musty, scent-smelling cinema was already half full, and he led them to the front row; Margaret wanted to sit farther back but stayed with them because her mother had drummed it into her that she mustn’t leave Brian at any time: “You might get run over or talked to by a dirty old man if you don’t come home with the others.” Brian found it easy to imagine a bull double-decker grinding on its brakes, its meat-chopping radiator smeared with blood and bone and gristle as the bus capsized by the barber’s to a grinding of tin, a tinkle of glass, and a thump of fifty people and shopping baskets hitting the kerb. But a dirty old man—what did he want with little girls? Anyway, if I caught a dirty old man doing owt to Margaret I’d rush him and kill him.
Red lights dimmed from the fourpenny backs, bringing a tide of darkness and increased cheering towards the screen, a black-out of noise that went on and on. A length of boarding ran under the screen and the manager beat an iron bar against it, creating gunshots of rapid fire. Brian folded his ears in, one flap over the other and his flat hand over that, while more shots ricochetted as far as the balcony even when the cheering and booing had stopped.
“All right,” shouted the demoniac manager, a little man become giant-sized in the silence. “It won’t start until I can hear a pin drop.” Even those in for the first time knew better than to create more noise by laughing at his joke, one that Brian disliked and distrusted because at school old gett-faced Jones used the same catch to get you quiet before hymn-singing and prayers, different in that the stick he held was always still swinging from action before he got to the “pin-dropping” smirk.
At the consenting flash of the manager’s torch the Three Stooges came like jumping-jacks on to the screen, and pure untrammelled laughter grew like fireworks. At the end of the
serial, when Jungle Jim was one side-stroke away from the scissor-jaws of a faster crocodile, all exits burst open and Brian kept Margaret and Fred before him, arms held out to stop them being wedged too tight in the flood. Fred shot out first, his mouth fixed in a Tarzan scream, until Margaret told him to stop it or she would thump him.
Brian led them running home because of a thin drizzle falling. The electric light was already on, and Vera was cutting doorsteps of bread, pasting them with margarine and plum jam. Seaton sat by the fire smoking a cigarette, cup of tea on the hob. “It was ever so good at the pictures, our dad,” Margaret said, and he pulled her to him with a laugh, covering her rain-cold cheek with loud kisses: “I love my little gel, I do an’ all!” He listened absorbed to her rehashed tale of Buck Jones and Jungle Jim. Brian bit his way through a doorstep. “The Three Stooges was best because there was women in the other pictures. I’ve never seen a big picture wi’out a woman in it.”
“And you wain’t, neether,” said Vera, setting up a line of cups and mugs for tea; “the men like to see ’em too much.”
“Yo’ll see enough o’ women some day, Brian,” Seaton said with a laugh.
As Vera drew curtains across the window, the urgent voice of a vendor shouting “Special” electrified the room. They could hear people buying papers, and the clink of money given in change when the newsman stopped under the window. Brian was afraid, feeling the blowing-up of bombs and black death and screams of gun-and-bayonet war, whenever he heard anyone shouting “Special,” because his mother once told him that Specials meant war. Vera broke the silence: “Shall I go and get one?”
“I shouldn’t bother,” Seaton answered. “I expect it’s on’y summat about Spain, and we’ll get it on the wireless soon.” When the man’s voice had gone Brian said: “A man came round to gran’ma’s sellin’ Old Moore’s Almanacks for tuppence, and when she bought one off ’im I read in that there’d be a big war soon.”
“There wain’t,” his mother scoffed, spreading more bread, “don’t yo’ bother. An’ if there is, yo’ wain’t be called up.”
“I ’ope not: I’m frightened o’ wars.”
Seaton grunted: it was a difficult sound to tolerate—an employment of bitter sarcasm while everyone knew him to be feeling fine. “It’s no worse in a war than it is now. You get boggered from pillar to post and get nowt to eat, just the same.” He pulled Margaret on to his knee with a laugh, a revolution in mood: “Come on, my curly-headed baby, tell me some more about what was on the pictures, then I’ll let you sup some o’ my tea.”
They looked into the deep black canyon between the canal locks, a fan-down shine of water fitfully seen by cloud-belaboured moonlight, like a coal-hole dug so deep that water had filled it, glinting like boot-polish. A few yards away, up and over the bridge parapet, cars and buses roared into the city from a wilderness of fields and woods, and headlit javelins of opposite desires left the huge illuminated rag-patch of town for Brian knew not where.
They were alone, sidetracked beyond lights and out of notice. Bert kicked the pram: “I’d like to chuck that in as well, but I’d get a pasting if I went ’ome without it. Our Midge is on’y four and mam pushes her up to t’ clinic every week to get her leg seen to.” He flashed his torch, a flat model for one-and-fourpence bought from money cajoled with the Guy in town. His fingers gripped it, pressed—and light came again from the one eye of Polyphemus bulging white out of the top.
Brian drew back from a twelve-foot fall into bottomless water, not only cold but wet as well, heavy on your clothes, and nothing to grip down there but smooth walls when and if you surfaced. “Come on then, let’s get the Guy Fawkes. Yo’ tek one arm; I’ll tek the other; and we’ll let go.” He looked over again: “It wain’t ’alf splash.”
“It’s a crying shame”—Bert shook his head. “It’d burn well if we took it ’ome and saved it for the bonfire.” Brian hated a change of mind. It made him uneasy—because his own unsure mind was inclined to follow every switch. A simple decision often meant hard work, and to break it, an extravagant waste of spirit. The decision to buy torches with the Guy Fawkes money had been easy to make, but both were now guilty at not splitting the three bob between their families for food, and needed to get rid of the Guy to prove, when recriminations flew at their faces, that it had been stolen from them by bigger boys before they could earn a penny. “It might not sink, for all we know,” Brian said. “And when a copper comes along in the morning it’ll look like a man who’s chucked ’issen in. Then the copper’ll sling his hat and coat off and goo in as well.”
That decided it. “P’raps he’ll drown if he does,” Bert said. “Yer never know. Not all coppers can swim.”
“Coppers don’t drown, though,” Brian said with conviction, fastening the Guy’s coat as if it were a paralyzed and much loved brother in danger of catching pneumonia. “If a copper dived in, he’d get out. We wouldn’t, but he would.”
“He might not”—Bert held the agreeable vision for as long as he could make it last—“he might get cramp. It’s cold enough for cramp, if you ask me. Once you get cramp, you’re a gonner. A lad at Poor Boys’ Camp got it in his leg last year, and he went under twice before anybody could get to him. He didn’t die, though.”
Brian caught on to his vision. “Well, if a copper got cramp and I was near, I wouldn’t help him to get out.” The Guy lay between them, flat like some derelict drunk, a sackbag arm across button eyes, as if not wanting to see what the world had in store for him next. One leg was akimbo and Bert kicked it straight. “Even if I’d got a lifebelt I’d chuck ’im a brick. Coppers is bastards. I was down town last week and opened a car door for a bloke. A copper cum up and batted my tab. He said I’d gent sent to borstal if I didn’t clear off. I worn’t bothering nobody.”
Brian flashed his torch, revelled in the magic of it. “Rotten bogger.”
“All coppers are like that.”
“I don’t know why they have coppers,” Brian said. “They’re worse than schoolteachers.”
“No difference,” Bert said, lighting his nub-end in the darkness. “It’s all part of the gov’ment. They’re all conservatives, as well. I know that for a fact, because dad towd me. Conservative”—he was proud of such a posh formidable word—“if ever yer vote conservative, dad said, I’ll smash yer brains out. And ’e showed me ’is big screwed-up fist to prove it. Then on Saturday night I seed him thumping a bloke outside a pub, and I suppose it was because dad ’ad got to know he’d voted conservative. He bashes mam sometimes, though, but I don’t know what for, because she don’t vote conservative.”
“Millionaires vote conservative. John Player and the bloke who owns Raleigh.”
“Well, I wouldn’t. Even if I’d got ten trillion pound notes I’d still vote red for Labour.”
“Me as well,” Brian said. “Shall we chuck the Guy in the locks then, like ’e was a copper?” And an idea came quickly. “Let’s get a couple o’ bricks and fasten ’em inside, so’s he’ll sink right to the bottom.”
“Nobody’ll think it’s somebody drowned,” Bert objected. “It wain’t be seen.”
Brian’s face exploded into a laugh, the force of a decision that took no deciding, happiness giving character to his face unseen in the darkness. “It’ll mek a big splash, though,” he managed to say at last, and Bert, relaxed and disarmed, knew that it would.
Labour, Brian repeated, bending to pull up his share of a huge stone. Labour—the word had a stern ring about it, like the hard labour they gave you in court. Perhaps this was soft labour since everybody voted for it. Or like Manual Labour, the Spaniard fighting in Madrid: cloth-cap, rifle, and a thin cigar. His father was Labour, red Labour, and so was everybody else he knew (except old Jones, the headmaster at school: you could tell a mile off that he wasn’t), though that didn’t make the word and meaning of it more acceptable. The stones were tied and centred into place, and he hooked his fingers around an arm and a leg. “We’ll count three,” Bert said. “Soft,
though.”
“Back then,” Brian responded, feeling the straw-like texture of the Guy. Conservative—it was an official word to be distrusted, hated in fact. If a van stopped near you in the street at election time and some fist shot out and thrust into your hand a bunch of blue streamers, you didn’t stop to wonder why you’d been daft enough to accept them but threw them down immediately and kicked them to bits with your shoes—or else. Even being Labour like your father and street and suburb, you risked being battered to the pavement following the eruption of a gang of red streamers like a steam-engine out of the nearest corner. You might hold your breath long enough, though, hang on to the blue streamers and pin them to the door of someone you did not like, someone who had once sent too readily for the police when you played loudly on the nearby cobbles.
The final draw-back, then a masterly satisfying swing of the stone-bellied straw corpse into the air and over the welcoming water. Labour was the best thing—and if Brian ever felt distrust for that sympathetic organization it was only because all big names seemed like devil’s threats to hold his soul in thrall—and he wasn’t sure enough of his soul yet to trust it with such things.
It was late enough for a traffic lull along the nearby big road; a rough silence reigned between the corridor of its lights, and among the distant railway yards. The Guy, leaving their lunging arms, spent a glorious moment of freedom suspended in black harmless air, then, a straw-emasculated monster, it descended while Bert and Brian held their breath with anticipated delight.
It hit the water with a justified explosion, a reverberating thump creating havocs of sound in the canyon of the deep lock, while Bert and Brian embraced with roars of delight—and then set to pushing the now empty pram back along the towpath, their newly bought flash-lamps making spaces of clear light before them.