After a round of pubs in the evening they ended at the Railway Club drinking with Ada and Ralph. It was a long low hall with rows of tables like a soldiers’ mess, with a bar and stage at one end. Housey-housey was in progress. Arthur, Sam, Bert, and Dave bought cards and watched their counters. Near the climax of the game a man wearing a cap suddenly jumped up and screamed with all his might as if he had been stabbed: ‘HOUSEY!’ Sam shuddered with fright; the others groaned at their bad luck. ‘Christ!’ Ada exclaimed, ‘I only wanted two to win.’ ‘I only wanted one,’ Arthur said. ‘What a shame,’ she said. ‘You’d ‘ave won a bottle of whisky.’ At ten-thirty the Tribe streamed out, over the railway bridge, and home. Overcoats were piled in heaps on the kitchen table, and the hall racks were so overloaded that they collapsed. Beer for grown-ups, orangeade for children, with sixteen the dividing age, and Jane discriminating at the parlour bar. Beatty, tall and noisy, sat with Colin on the settee; Eileen, Frances, June, and Alma took chairs by the window and were trying to start an opposition song to annoy the others; Arthur, Sam, Bert, and Dave dominated the space around the fire; Ralph, Jim, and Ada stood by the door; Annie and Bertha were giving out meat sandwiches; Frank, Beatty’s twenty-two-year-old son by her first husband, was persuading his fiancee to be sick outside and get it over with; Harry and Eunice, and a girl in khaki, occupied the settee; and various children were hanging on to table-legs for safety. Alma, a girl of fifteen with chestnut hair, wearing a low-necked cotton dress that showed the white skin of plump round breasts, was fair game for Bert who forced her into a kiss beneath the mistletoe. She ran out of the house when he tried to make her kiss Sam. Balloons exploded; coloured streamers floated from the ceiling, Bert pushing his way around the room with an uplifted cigarette. Above the uproar Jane’s voice was heard saying to Jim: ‘I don’t believe it. It ain’t true. You want to mind what you’re saying you dirty bleeder’ — in a voice of hard belligerence. Bert succeeded in getting Annie and Bertha kissed by Sam under the mistletoe, and Bertha asked Sam afterwards if he would write to her from Africa. ‘And give my love to your girl, won’t you?’ she said, the slight cast in her left eye glazed by too much drink. ‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘I will.’ Ada asked if he had enjoyed his Christmas. ‘Very much,’ he answered solemnly. ‘And will you tell Johnny all about us when you get back?’ she wanted to know. Sam said he would. ‘I wish Johnny was here. He’s a good lad to me,’ Ada said. ‘I’ve never known him to say a bad word to me. I remember one day a man in Waterway Street said sommat to me that worn’t nice and Johnny chased him all the way down the street. The man ran into his house and locked it but that didn’t stop our Johnny. He ran agen it wi’ his shoulder until the man had to open it for fear it’d be broke down, and then Johnny chased him round and round the table till he caught him and thumped him against the wall. The man was allus as nice as pie to me after that.’ She passed Sam a glass of beer, and kissed him beneath the mistletoe, so that Beatty cried out: ‘Well, that’s not the first time she’s bin kissed by a black man, I’ll bet.’ Someone suggested that Ralph would be jealous. ‘Jealous be boggered,’ she said. ‘Sam’s like my own son.’ The girls squealed when more balloons exploded. ‘Do you like England then?’ Jane asked Sam. She had been out of the room for a few minutes. ‘I like it very much,’ Sam stammered. She threw her arms around him and kissed him, turning her back on the rabid face of her husband near the door. Two girls went home, several children were taken to bed by Frances and Eileen. Frank at last took his fiancee out to be sick. Eunice left with Harry. Annie and Bertha put on their coats and went home. Jane and Jim sat on the sofa with empty glasses, Jane sullen, Jim subdued. Sam announced that he would go to bed. ‘Because I want to be up early in the morning to catch my train.’ He stood up and took his webbing belt from the chair. The room went suddenly quiet. Jane was standing up, staring at Jim with tight, angry lips. ‘You aren’t going to say that about me,’ she cried loudly. Arthur saw a beer-glass in her hand. ‘What did he say, then?’ Ada asked of everybody. Jane did not reply, but struck her husband on his forehead with the glass, leaving a deep half-inch split in his skin. Blood oozed and fell down his face, gathering speed until it dropped on to the rug. He stood like a statue and made no sound. The glass fell from her hand. ‘You aren’t going to accuse me of that,’ she said again, her lips trembling. ‘Why did you hit me?’ Jim asked at last, with a dazed cry of shock and regret in his voice. ‘Because you want to be careful what you say,’ she cried, drawing back at the sight of so much blood. ‘What did I say?’ he pleaded. ‘Tell me, somebody, what did I say?’ ‘It serves you right,’ she said. Dave led him to a chair. Arthur went into the scullery and held a clean handkerchief under the running tap. Sam still stood, but seemed about to faint. The cold water ran over Arthur’s hand and woke him up. He pressed the cold wet handkerchief to Jim’s head, feeling strangely and joyfully alive, as if he had been living in a soulless vacuum since his fight with the swaddies. He told himself that he had been without life since then, that now he was awake once more, ready to tackle all obstacles, to break any man, or woman, that came for him, to turn on the whole world if it bothered him too much, and blow it to pieces. The crack of the glass on Jim’s forehead echoed and re-echoed through his mind.
15
Once a rebel, always a rebel. You can’t help being one. You can’t deny that. And it’s best to be a rebel so as to show ‘em it don’t pay to try to do you down. Factories and labour exchanges and insurance offices keep us alive and kicking — so they say — but they’re booby-traps and will suck you under like sinking-sands if you aren’t careful. Factories sweat you to death, labour exchanges talk you to death, insurance and income tax offices milk money from your wage packets and rob you to death. And if you’re still left with a tiny bit of life in your guts after all this boggering about, the army calls you up and you get shot to death. And if you’re clever enough to stay out of the army you get bombed to death. Ay, by God, it’s a hard life if you don’t weaken, if you don’t stop that bastard government from grinding your face in the muck, though there ain’t much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow their four-eyed clocks to bits.
They shout at you from soapboxes: ‘Vote for me, and this and that,’ but it amounts to the same in the end whatever you vote for because it means a government that puts stamps all over your phizzog until you can’t see a hand before you, and what’s more makes you buy ‘em so’s they can keep on doing it. They’ve got you by the guts, by backbone and skull, until they think you’ll come whenever they whistle.
But listen, this lathe is my everlasting pal because it gets me thinking, and that’s their big mistake because I know I’m not the only one. One day they’ll bark and we won’t run into a pen like sheep. One day they’ll flash their lamps and clap their hands and say: ‘Come on, lads. Line-up and get your money. We won’t let you starve.’ But maybe some of us will want to starve, and that’ll be where the trouble’ll start. Perhaps some’ll want to play football, or go fishing up Grantham Cut. That big fat-bellied union ponce’ll ask us not to muck things up. Sir Harold Bladdertab’ll promise us a bigger bonus when things get put right. Chief Inspector Popcorn will say: ‘Let’s have no trouble, no hanging around the gates there.’ Blokes with suits and bowler hats will say: ‘These chaps have got their television sets, enough to live on, council houses, beer and pools — some have even got cars. We’ve made them happy. What’s wrong? Is that a machine-gun I hear starting up or a car backfiring?’
Der-der-der-der-der-der-der-der-der-der-der-der-der. I hope I’m not here to see it, but I know I will be. I’m a bloody billy-goat trying to screw the world, and no wonder I am, because it’s trying to do the same to me.
Arthur became Doreen’s young man. There was something of sweetness in it, and if he was not pursuing his rebellion against the rules of love, or distilling them with rules of war, there was still the vast crushing power of government against which to lean his white-skinned bony shoulder, a thousand
of its laws to be ignored and therefore broken. Every man was his own enemy, and only on these conditions of fighting could you come to terms with yourself, and the only tolerable rule that would serve as a weapon was cunning, not a quiet snivelling cunning — which was worse than being dead — but the broad-fisted exuberant cunning of a man who worked all day in a factory and was left with fourteen quid a week to squander as best he could at the weekend, caught up in his isolation and these half-conscious clamped-in policies for living that cried for exit.
Violent dialogues flayed themselves to death in his mind as he went on serving a life’s penance at the lathe. The scarlet gash in Jim’s forehead and the tight-lipped frightened face of Jane at Christmas had showed him, as it were, through an open chink of light, that a man could rarely play for safety if he was to win in the end (at the same time thinking that if any woman had bashed him as Jane had bashed Jim he would have thumped her back). To win meant to survive; to survive with some life left in you meant to win. And to live with his feet on the ground did not demand, he realized fully for the first time, that he go against his own strong grain of recklessness — such as striving to kick down his enemies crawling like ants over the capital letter G of Government — but also accepting some of the sweet and agreeable things of life — as he had done in the past but in a harder way — before Government destroyed him, or the good things turned sour on him.
On a fine Sunday at the beginning of March, with sun shining on ground that had recently felt the cold touch of snow, the air smelling cool and fresh, he met Doreen on the outskirts of the housing estate. Few people were about because it was still too soon after dinner. Arthur wore a suit, collar, and tie, black shoes, and Doreen, who was waiting for him and keeping an eye on the bus stop from which he would walk, wore a light-brown coat with the Sunday additions of stockings, elegant shoes and a green jersey within.
He walked across the road, tall and thin, with short fair hair combed neatly back, one hand in his trouser pocket. They agreed to go for a walk, Doreen wanting to go into the city, Arthur into the country. ‘I’m cooped up in a factory all week,’ he argued, ‘and Sunday is the only time I’ve got to get out a bit. I hate the town, anyway.’
She saw a vague plot in this, to get her among isolated fields, but gave in to him. As they walked Arthur reflected on the uniqueness of his goings-out with Doreen, on the absence of danger that had tangibly surrounded him when he formerly met Brenda or Winnie. Each outing now was no longer an expedition on which every corner had to be turned with care, every pub considered for the ease of tactical retreat in case of ambush, every step along dark streets with his arm around Brenda taken with trepidation. He missed these things with Doreen, so much so that when out with her he felt a tug of excitement at the heart on approaching a corner, and conversation would lapse for a few minutes until they had turned it and he saw with a strange feeling of frustration mixed with relief that an avenue of safety lay before him.
The day seemed timeless, was handsome with its rare high clouds. Lime trees were coming to life by the laneside, tiny erectile buds emerging to enjoy the spring and shining like emeralds, fresh enough to quench one’s thirst. Looking back from the lane, the last houses of the estate appeared drab and haphazard, as if sprinkled over the earth from a madman’s lap.
She held his arm, and they walked to where the bridle path divided by Strelley church, one way forking through fields to Ilkeston, the other for pit-shafts of Kimberly and Eastwood. Arthur was happy in the country. He remembered his grandfather who had been a blacksmith, and had a house and forge at Wollaton village. Fred had often taken him there, and its memory was a fixed picture in Arthur’s mind. The building — you had drawn your own water from a well, dug your own potatoes out of the garden, taken eggs from the chicken run to fry with bacon off your own side of pig hanging salted from a hook in the pantry — had long ago been destroyed to make room for advancing armies of new pink houses, flowing over the fields like red ink on green blotting paper.
They walked slowly towards Ilkeston along a narrow stony path with a low fence on one side and a privet hedge on the other, talking little, taking the fork toward Trowel when the track widened. Arthur, after a lifetime of wandering on summer nights after school and work, knew every path and field in the country. They came to a house, a window of which showed chocolate and lemonade for sale. He had called there before, had tackled the stony path on his bicycle, enjoyed the jolts and skids on his way to do some fishing in the Erewash Canal, had often screeched-on his brakes and drawn in at the same window to buy something to eat.
Doreen chewed a bar of chocolate and drank a bottle of lemonade. The woman of the house remembered Arthur, and asked slyly: ‘You aren’t going fishing today?’ — searching in the window for his particular brand of chocolate.
‘That bar with the nuts and raisins in, duck,’ he stipulated. ‘You’ll like this sort,’ he said, turning to Doreen. ‘Not today,’ he answered the woman. ‘I’m courtin’ now, can’t you see?’ He hugged Doreen around the waist to prove it.
‘Courtin’?’ the woman exclaimed. ‘Oh well, the fishes can rest in peace from now on.’
He paid her, and she shut the window. ‘There’ll still be time for fishin’, I expect,’ he said.
They came to a swing-bridge over a stream, and stood against the rail. ‘I know a short cut back to the estate from here,’ he said. ‘We needn’t bother wi’ a bus.’ His arm was around her, and they looked down at the dark-green rushes only a few feet away. It was hardly a stream, but an aborted branch-line of the nearby canal. The water was very still and shallow, and reflected the clouds. They stood in silence, no one else in sight. His arm moved over her back, and rested on the warm nape of her neck. He tried to kiss her. She pulled her face away.
‘Nobody’s lookin’.’ He held her fast round the waist, and was cast into sad reflection by staring at the water below, a rippleless surface where minnows swam gracefully in calm transparent silence. White and blue sky made islands on it, so that the descent into its hollows seemed deep and fathomless, and fishes swam over enormous gulfs and chasms of cobalt blue. Arthur’s eyes were fixed into the beautiful earth-bowl of the depthless water, trying to explore each pool and shallow until, as well as an external silence there was a silence within himself that no particle of his mind or body wanted to break. Their faces could not be seen in the water, but were united with the shadows of the fish that flitted among upright reeds and spreading lilies, drawn to water as if they belonged there, as if the fang-like claws of the world would come unstuck from their flesh if they descended into its imaginary depths, as if they had known it before as a refuge and wanted to return to it, their ghosts already there, treading the calm unfurrowed depths and beckoning them to follow.
But there was no question of following. You were dragged down sooner or later whether you liked it or not. A ripple appeared in the middle of the water, expanded in concentric rings, and burst by a timeless force of power. Each line vanished into the reed-grass near the bank.
‘I feel tired,’ she said, breaking the silence.
‘Come on, Doreen.’ He took her arm and led her on to a footpath. They followed his short cut towards home, and came to the loneliest place of the afternoon where, drawn by a deathly and irresistible passion, they lay down together in the bottom of a hedge.
After a bout of Saturday-night pictures he said he wanted a pint before going back to her house. It was raining, he said, and so reason enough for them to get a bit of shelter in a pub. She suggested they take a bus, which would keep them dry, but he replied that he could not stand queues of any sort. ‘I’ve never queued in my life,’ he said, ‘and I’m not going to start now.’
‘You on’y queue for five minutes,’ she said, piqued.
‘It’s too long. Besides, I said I wanted a pint, didn’t I?’
‘What do you want a pint for?’ she asked, pulling up her collar to avoid the cold needles of rain. ‘Let’s go back to my house where it’s war
m. Mam’ll have some supper for us.’
He felt a hard stubborn force of resistance against her. ‘I want a pint,’ he maintained, ‘and I see nowt wrong wi’ that.’
‘Well I do,’ she said. ‘You drink too much.’
‘No I don’t. I don’t drink half enough since I met you. So don’t try and stop me having a pint when I want one.’
The smoke and noise of the pub assailed them. ‘Only one, then,’ she said as they went in.
‘You have something as well,’ he offered.
She agreed to a shandy, but refused to sit at a table, saying that he would stay till closing time if she did. ‘Are you trying to keep me in check?’ he laughed. ‘We aren’t married yet, you know.’
‘No, nor even engaged,’ she said ironically.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’ve on’y known each other for a few months.’
‘And do you call that courting?’ she said, pulling a face. ‘Some people might, but I don’t.’
‘Not like the last fortnight?’ he suggested.
‘Pig,’ she cried, ‘always throwing it in my face.’
He laughed softly and grinned, looking at her: ‘Well, you know I like to see you arguing and telling me off.’