She spoke at last, her heavy jaw moving slowly, firm determination in her small, deep-set eyes. ‘I’ve come to see about that gun yer’ve got.’
‘Gun?’ Fred said, standing up with a shock at the word. We ain’t got no gun ‘ere. What do you think this is? Cammell Laird’s?’
He could never understand why people lost their tempers so quickly. Perhaps it was the ‘Cammell Laird’s’ that upset her, which was the name of a big gun factory in the Meadows.
Still not moving from the corner, she brandished her fist: ‘Yo’ ’ev less o’ yer cheek, yer young bleeder. I got shot today with an air-gun, and I’m going to find out oo it was as done it.’
Fred faced her with a look of outraged innocence, afraid of the ructions that would ensue if the old man came back and caught them in the house. He had only gone up the street for a haircut. ‘You’re not the on’y one as got shot,’ he said, as if it was the worst thing that could happen, and that such attacks should be ruthlessly put down. ‘Mrs Morris got hit as well, I heard, only an hour ago, just up the street as she was turning the corner on to Ilkeston Road. She was telling mam about it when she went out to get something for dad’s tea. That’s why I got mad at your mester just now, thinking I’d done it. I’ve never seen an air-gun in our house in my life. Dad wouldn’t have one in the place.’
He saw her eyes changing their mind. She was almost convinced. ‘Well, all right, then,’ she said. Bull added: ‘I told you they hadn’t done it.’ She turned on him: ‘Yo’ shut yer gap. I ain’t found ‘em yet, and I wain’t rest tell I do.’
As they turned to leave, the tread of boots sounded behind the stairfoot door, and the loud rending voice of a laughing maniac filled the kitchen with a derisive cackle. Everyone looked across the room, waited with frozen expressions for some extraordinary event.
The door was kicked open, and Arthur was framed in the open space, standing with legs apart on the bottom step, a loaded air-rifle pointing at the Bulls.
Fred stared at the apparition. Shades of purple crept over Mrs Bull’s face. Mr Bull trembled, afraid of being ordered by his wife to tackle him. ‘That’s it,’ she screamed. ‘He’s got it, the brazen bleeder. He’s the one that shot me.’
Arthur’s face was fixed into firm lines to stop himself laughing. ‘Get out,’ he cried, ‘or you’ll get another, in yer fat guts this time.’
She raved about going to the police and having him sent to Lincoln, shouting that it should be against the law to have air-guns. Then she turned on her husband: ‘Go on! What are yer standin’ there for? ‘It ‘im, ‘it ‘im!’
Arthur shouted, between his laughs; ‘Go on, scoot, get out.’ Bull did not move, as if his feet had been driven into the floor with Rawlplugs. Mrs Bull did not want shooting a second time, so she said they’d better go, adding that they’d be back soon with a copper. ‘You wain’t prove owt if you bring a copper,’ Arthur said. ‘Nobody’ll find this gun, I’ll tell yer that.’
They moved back, through the scullery and towards the backyard, followed by Arthur. Fred saw the old man walking down the yard with his head freshly shaved, a look of rage on his face as though he’d been cheated of a year’s bonus at the factory. He met the Bulls before they reached the gate. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘what are yo’ pair doin’ ‘ere?’
Arthur said they had barged into the house and started shouting something about him having an air-gun.
‘Oh, did they?’ the old man said, turning to Mr Bull. They were the same height, but Seaton was broader and had a bigger, more determined head. ‘I thought I towd yer never to cum into my ‘ouse agen?’ he said, lifting his fist.
Doors were opening. People came out to watch.
‘You’re a lot of bloody rogues and thieves,’ Mrs Bull screamed at the Seatons. It was an even bigger row than the empty-bellied, pre-war battles. Feuds merged, suppressed ones became public, and Mrs Robin fainted, sending her husband in for whisky, a good excuse for him to stay out of the fight because he was a man who sent his sons to join the Scouts and always voted.
Liberal, a traitor to the solid block of anarchistic Labour in the street. Mrs Bull threatened to smack Fred in the chops when he told her that this was what came of spreading slander about Arthur carrying-on with married women. She retorted that whatever people said about her, she wasn’t a gossiper, and that was a fact. The dusk became deeper, faces indistinct. Everyone was shouting that they’d drop everyone else. Mrs Robin had been revived by the whisky but was sent back into a dead faint by the heavy curses bandied about. Someone from the scuffle gratuitously called her a bag of bones and she came to in time to see Arthur thumping Mr Bull all the way up the yard. ‘You’re a bastard,’ he said, knotting his fist. ‘You gossipin’ lot.’
‘I’m not a bastard,’ Bull retorted.
‘Y’are.’
‘’M not.’
Then a big thump, like the climax of a firework display, and Mrs Robin fainted again.
Crowds dispersed, doors slammed. It was completely dark, and the old man went back into the house to mash some tea, muttering: ‘That’ll settle ‘em. That’ll settle ‘em.’
A policeman came to ask whether they had an air-gun. He searched for it on Arthur’s invitation, but found nothing. Arthur had even got rid of the black pock-marked shell-shocked poodle from the bedroom shelf, burying both dog and gun beneath a heap of coal under the stairs. They denied everything to the policeman, who saw no more than a neighbours’ quarrel, saying merely that they should stop making trouble in the yard. Even the evidence of Mrs Bull’s bruise had gone down to the point where it might have been caused by a smack from her husband’s fist. This appearance of the law satisfied Mrs Bull’s pride, and Arthur heard no more of her gossip.
She went on standing at the yard-end, however, but placed herself a little way into the street, where the line of fire from Arthur’s window was interrupted by two lavatories. She still stood out of the way, even when Arthur left to do his fifteen days.
9
July, August, and summer skies, lay over the city, above rows of houses in the western suburbs, backyards burned by the sun with running tar-sores whose antiseptic smell blended with that of dustbins overdue for emptying, drying paint even drier on front doors, rusting knockers and letter-boxes, and withering flowers on windowsills, a summer blue sky up to which smoke from factory-chimneys coiled blackly.
Arthur sweated at his lathe, worked at the same fast pace as in winter to keep the graph-line of his earnings level. Life went on like an assegai into the blue, with dim memories of the dole and school-days behind, and a dimmer feeling of death in front, a present life punctuated by meetings with Brenda on certain beautiful evenings when the streets were warm and noisy and the clouds did a moonlight-flit over the rooftops. They made love in parlour or bedroom and felt the ocean of suburb falling asleep outside their minuscular coracle of untouchable hope and bliss. From his own bed one night, when the blankets were thrown to the floor before falling asleep, he heard a dustbin lid rattled against the backyard paving, disturbed by some cat on a nocturnal prowl for food, and he remembered Fred taking him by the hand to the dinner-centre when he was six; and the assegai into the blue was only tipped with death when newspaper headlines rammed the word war with a nail-punch into the staring sockets of his eyes. The best hours to remember were those when he made love with Brenda, yearning to stay in her bed and never leave it, to keep his arms around her body and lie there in comfort until morning. But midnight was his deadline, otherwise he would be seen by Jack as he came in cold and ill-tempered from the night-shift. It must be good to live all the time with a woman, he thought, and sleep in a bed with her that belonged to both of you, that no one could turn you out of it if they caught you there.
The future meant things, both good and bad, to look forward to, like the coming of summer (good); military training at the end of August (purgat’ry); Goose Fair in October (smashin’); Bonfire Night (good if you didn’t get blown to bits); and Christmas at Christmas. Th
en the new year swung its fist and dragged you blindfolded and by the neck-scruff on to the high crest of another wave. Living in a town and working in a factory, only a calendar gave any real indication of passing time, for it was difficult to follow the changing seasons. As spring merged into summer or autumn became winter Arthur glimpsed the transitional mechanisms of each season only at the weekend, on Saturday or Sunday when he straddled his bike and rode along the canal bank into the country to fish. On long summer evenings he sat on the front doorstep with a penknife and a piece of wood, carving the replica of a fish for his float, with a cigarette burning uselessly away on the step by his side, while he held the half-shaped fish lightwards to gauge the proportions of head, body, and tail. Later he would colour it with intricate designs, grey and red, orange for its eyes, and a belly of duck-egg blue, a strange fish that he hoped would attract live counterparts to a baited hook. And sitting on the canal bank below Hemlock Stone and the Bramcote Hills he cast out his line over the narrow sleeve of still water, with elderberry leaves bending across from the opposite bank and white cloud-edges moving above green branches. It was a quiet and passionless place to be, where few people passed, hemmed in by steep bush-covered banks of a cutting against which, by the towpath, lay his bicycle. There was no sign of the city. It lay four miles over the hills, yet distant enough when measured by silence and peace as he sat with a cigarette between his fingers watching the float near the far bank, concentric rings of water that snapped around it, and water-beetles skating gracefully like tiny rowing boats between broad-leaved water-lilies. In the khaki side-pack of his army days were sandwiches, and a flask of tea and a bottle of ale for late afternoon, sufficient until the deep shade darkened and grew chill, when he would tie his rods to the cross-bar and race home against the advancing minutes of lighting-up time. So passed many Sundays of his summer, a bejewelled and multicoloured season of the year whose borders were blacked by sleepy afternoons in the factory when he forced a rapid pace at his lathe, driving his muscles away from their natural desire for sleep. The rest was a brief glimpse of sky at midday and evening, a prison-like system pleasant enough because he could be happy in knowing that by this work he never had to worry where the next meal, pint, smoke, or suit of clothes was coming from.
At times he remembered how at eighteen-and-a-bit he had been clapped into khaki, how he had walked into the stores wearing collar-and-tie and sportscoat and had been spawned out at the other end a fully-fledged swaddie, battledress over his sportscoat and shoulders burdened by strange equipment. While polishing his webbing-buckles he thought about the way his cousins had lived during the war: tall, grinning army deserters caught time and time again by Redcaps or police, but always escaping, on the run, in hiding, living with whores, thieving for food and money because they had neither ration-books nor employment cards. A shaky game, and Arthur sometimes wondered why they had kept at bay so long, why they hadn’t gone overseas to get killed and end it all. But they had been right, he knew that, because they were still here, alive, at work, earning a good living in spite of the army. He remembered Dave telling his father during the war: ‘I was on the dole eighteen months ago, same as yo’, Harold. We all had a struggle to keep alive, and now they want to call us up. My mother had fourteen to drag up, with Doddoe only at work now and again. Then one night I broke into the back door of a shop because we’d got nowt t’eat. When I got back that night — I shall never forget it, Harold — we had the best meal we’d ever had in our lives. I was fifteen at the time, and I broke into a shop every week for a couple of months, but one night the bastards got me. And do you know what I got for it? I know you do, Uncle Harold, but I’m just tellin’ yer. Three years in Borstal. And then when I came out the war’d started and I got called up. Do yer think I’m going ter fight for them bastards, do yer?’
Arthur remembered Dave’s face: thin and half starved, red and wind beaten after riding a stolen bike the seventy-odd miles from Manchester, over the Pennines on nothing to eat, to get away from the Redcaps. It was Thursday, and the week’s rations were collected on Friday, so there was only bread and jam and tea in the house. Seaton offered to put him up for a week. He stayed for three. One afternoon, when he was out, the police came for him, and while they were looking around the house Arthur got a wink from his father and so walked out of the house. He met Dave coming down the street whistling a song, his long legs pedalling a stolen bike. The sirens had just gone, and while Arthur was telling Dave not to come back to the house, white shell-puffs filled the sky and the stick-like shadow of a Jerry plane slid over the rooftops like a coffin. Arthur could have laughed. There was a war on then, and they were fighting the Jerries, and Churchill spoke after the nine o’clock news and told you what you were fighting for, as if it mattered. For what could you do? he thought. Do what Dave had done to get out of the army? No, all that was left to you in the world was cunning. Nothing more. Knuckle under for two years and then think yourself lucky you were out. He had begun to polish his boots, and, when the sergeant passed and saw everything all of a shine and glitter, so neat and tidy, he said that Arthur would make a good soldier. Cunning, he thought. You bastards won’t get me down. The return of Ada’s three sons after their short terms of army service at the beginning of the war had been witnessed and remembered by him: the burning of uniforms and equipment in the bedroom grate, smoke coming from chimney-pots not normally used.
Because Arthur was tall they put him in the military police, gave him a whistle and red cap and stood him up like a pit-prop to check the passes of the lucky ones as they went out on pass or leave. He was a Redcap. What irony! It was the joke of the family. But he fretted all the time. He was paid five bob a day, and thought bitterly of the two pounds earned at his lathe. But let them start a war, he thought, and see what a bad soldier I can be. ‘Them at the top’ must know that nobody would fight, and he supposed that because of this they weren’t so anxious to rely on them in another war. In the army it was: ‘F— you, Jack, I’m all right.’ Out of the army it was ‘Every man for himself.’ It amounted to the same thing. Opinions didn’t matter. Intelligent co-operation meant falling for a slip-knot, getting yourself caught in a half-nelson, though he knew a way to get free from both. The only peace you got was when you were away from it all, sitting on the osier-lined banks of a canal waiting for fish to bite, or lying in bed with a woman you loved.
They were angling for another war now, with the Russians this time. But they did go as far as to promise that it would be a short one, a few big flashes and it would all be over. What a lark! We’d be fighting side by side with the Germans that had been bombing us in the last war. What did they take us for? Bloody fools, but one of these days they’d be wrong. They think they’ve settled our hashes with their insurance cards and television sets, but I’ll be one of them to turn round on ‘em and let them see how wrong they are. When I’m on my fifteen-days’ training and I lay on my guts behind a sandbag shooting at a target board I know whose faces I’ve got in my sights every time the new rifle cracks off. Yes. The bastards that put the gun into my hands. I make up a quick picture of their stupid four-eyed faces that blink as they read big books and papers on how to get blokes into khaki and fight battles in a war that they’ll never be in — and then I let fly at them. Crack-crack-crack-crack-crack-crack. Other faces as well: the snot-gobbling gett that teks my income tax, the swivel-eyed swine that collects our rent, the big-headed bastard that gets my goat when he asks me to go to union meetings or sign a paper against what’s happening in Kenya. As if I cared!
He remembered his father digging up the back garden to plant an Anderson Shelter, Arthur stumbling into the hole and getting a clout for doing so. And later the family sat on the planks inside, coughing from the damp moist soil, scratching their scabied bodies, and listening to the weird-sounding hollowness of the naval guns behind Beechdale woods, his white-faced father rushing in at midnight, a teapot in one hand and half a dozen cups strung along the fingers of the other, having b
raved falling shrapnel to mash, back just in time to escape the Jerry plane that sprayed the factory with its machine-guns. In the long high-pitched whistle of a bomb the whole world was caught and suspended so that you just wondered, wondered, wondered, keeping quite still during the whistle, not breathing, not moving a finger, your eyes open wide, until the explosion on the railway yards or on a pack of houses in the next street made you glad to be still alive.
And when he came to think of it, Ada’s sons had not done too badly. At the end of the war they were rounded up for the last time and dumped in the glass-house. Dave was sent to the BLA six months before demob. The war was over, and in Berlin he met Arthur’s sister, Margaret, who worked as a waitress with the NAAFI, and they walked arm in arm along the Unter Den Linden, pointing out the ruins, talking of old times, drinking strong beer, and laughing at the thought that they of all people should meet among the smashed streets of Berlin, of all places.
Dave was on his demob leave in forty-five, just back from Germany, and Arthur bumped into him one Saturday night near the Horse and Groom. Dave was dressed in smart, spotless khaki, and above the pocket of his battledress were five campaign ribbons. ‘I didn’t know they gave you medals for being in the glass-house,’ Arthur laughed. Dave told him how Ada and the others had painted: ‘Welcome Home Dave’ on the air-raid shelter, and hung flags from the bedroom window as if he were a hero, and added: ‘I bought these ribbons from the Army Stores. They only cost half a crown, and they look nice for my demob leave. So long, Arthur. I’ve got a nobble on inside.’
Saying goodbye to Brenda did not give Arthur much pleasure. After a subdued bus-ride to Wollaton village they walked down Bramcote Lane arm-in-arm. Wheatfields, some already close-cropped, ran before a range of low scrub-patched hills. Odours of wheat chaff in the air caused Arthur to reminisce: ‘I used to come up here blackberryin’, when I was a young ‘un. Once with my cousin Bert we met some kids who’d already bin blackberryin’, and Bert took theirn off ‘em. I didn’t want to, but Bert said it would save us hours o’ searchin’.’