A Start in Life Read online

  ‘What is it then?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘Don’t worry. You’ll reach London today, as long as we get there before lighting-up time.’ He was wrestling with the whole headlamp, as if it had threatened to come out and do for him. His two hands gripped it, a sort of spiteful look now on his face.

  ‘Leave it,’ I cried, getting out. ‘Stop it.’

  He fell back with it in his hand and, as if it could still sting, threw it with mighty strength clean over a hedge.

  ‘That wasn’t bloody-well necessary.’

  ‘Didn’t I say I knew about cars? Listen, I was a garage mechanic for three years. All the wires in that lamp had fused. You’d have had a fire on your hands if it’d bin left in. Got a fire extinguisher on board? Of course you bloody-well haven’t. I’m not stupid, so don’t think so.’

  ‘Keep your shirt on,’ I said, beaten for the moment. ‘Let’s get going.’

  True to its promise, there was sun beyond Stamford, and we both became more friendly at the feel of it through the windscreen. ‘I’ll get on with my story,’ said Bill.

  ‘I’m listening,’ I said, skating around a lorry and feeling for a moment as if neither of us would come out of it alive. But Bill hadn’t shown a tremor, seemed to have absolute faith in my ability to get him to London. I began to have faith too, in him, glad now that I’d picked him up, in spite of the terrible (though necessary, I had to suppose) piece of brute surgery on my brand-new second-hand car.

  My name isn’t really Bill Straw,’ he said, ‘but don’t let that bother you. What’s in a name, anyway? I was born in Worksop thirty-seven years ago. My old man was a collier at the pit, and a weedy little get he looked as well, though he was hard enough for the job, but not so hard that he didn’t die of dust on the windpipe when I was ten. I remember going with my mother to the Co-op to get fitted up with a black suit, the first one, and I’d have been proud of it if I hadn’t been up to my neck in salt tears for my father. My two brothers and a sister followed Mother out of that shop like a gaggle of black crows, and next day we went to the cemetery, with fifty-odd colliers who were mates of the old man. It was a sunny day in September, and I remember being shocked and feeling sick because I’d always been told that most people that died, died at the end of winter, and I thought God had done this to my old man out of spite, and from then on I told myself I’d have nothing to do with Him. Kid’s talk, because it don’t matter whether you think about Him or not. Makes no difference, so you might just as well set your brain on to other things if you’ve got any brain at all.

  ‘At school I didn’t sing the hymns, just stood there with my lips firm, and though I got the strap for it I still didn’t sing, not bloody me. I got it again and again, but I never gave in. The teacher complained to my mother about it, and she asked me to be a good lad and do as I was told, if not for her sake, then for my father’s sake. That did it. I was more determined then not to give in, and they could do eff-all about it. It’s no use mincing matters. We starved for the next ten years. The only time I didn’t was when I got sent to an approved school for nicking a bike lamp. I wanted to go round the dark streets at night, and shine it into the sky. I must have been loopy to want to do a thing like that. Anyway, I went into a shop and took it from the counter, but the shopkeeper had a little glass panel in his cubby-hole door so that he could see anybody who came in. I was caught halfway down the street, and the police were called. So for a couple of years I got regular meals, even though they weren’t much cop, and when I came home at fourteen I’d grown tall and well set up. I made up my mind never to be so stupid again as to get sent away.

  ‘I got a job, and for fifty hours a week in a shop took home eleven shillings on Saturday night. I won’t go into whether it was worth it or not, because I’m trying to tell you how I come to be in your car, not complain about my life. Mother took in collier’s washing, and between us we kept the house going. Though I’d vowed never to nick anything again, I got into trouble a few years later. My youngest brother was still at school, and one day he came home with marks all over him where the teacher had pasted him. If we’d got a doctor and a lawyer on to our side we could have had this teacher thrown out on his arse – though I don’t think so, somehow. You see, I don’t believe in justice. I’d known him in my day as being a cruel bastard, but now I saw what he’d done to my own brother. Peter was the youngest of us, who’d hardly known his father, and for this reason we tried to make life easier for him than it was for us. He was also the weakest, and the brightest. A bit cheeky now and again, because perhaps he was spoiled, though he still had a hard enough life. Mother went to see the headmaster, but he shouted at her to leave the education of children to them, and get on with her own work. Something along those lines. You can imagine. Next day I left my job early and waited until that teacher came out of school. I caught him near the gates, and told him I was Peter’s brother. He pushed me aside. In front of a lot of the kids I smashed him in the chops, knocking him against the wall. I hit him twice before he got over the shock and came back at me. I went a bit potty, and in spite of his cracks (he was strong as well) I split his eyes and lips, and made enough of a mess before the police arrived and dragged me clear. You can imagine what happened.

  ‘The magistrate said I was a dangerous creature – that was the word he used – who ought to be put away from decent society – meaning that schoolteacher, I suppose. He said he’d have sent me to prison if I’d been old enough, but that under the circumstances, Borstal would have to do. I said nothing to all this. What was the use? I’d done the best I could to get my brother’s own back, but at the same time I had no use for revenge. My bitterness sank to the bottom like sand in a bucket of water, and I went into Borstal like a saint. I was a good lad, and gave no bother. Once my storm of temper was over I wanted peace to come back on me. I went through it like a zombie, which is the nearest thing to saying that I was let loose on the world, at the end of three years, a reformed character. That Borstal was a tough place, though. You had to fend for yourself, even if you wanted to get through it as easily as you could. But it didn’t seem too hard to me, I must admit. We all boasted as much as our imaginations let us. The stupid ones would claim that their brother was a racing driver or a champion jockey, but I used to entertain them with stories about gangs of young colliers from Worksop and Retford, who’d go to a lonely place in Sherwood Forest on Saturday afternoon to have fights with razors and bottles, just to pass the time, I said. I told them that even though I was young I’d been elected to the ranks of the Worksop Choppers because of my prowess at the pit face (where I’d never worked). They believed me, I don’t know why, and these stories made them wary of me when it came to persecution. They never knew when I wouldn’t go as berserk as a Worksop Chopper, and have at them in such a way that a few would bleed to death before they could overpower me. That didn’t save me from getting mixed up in a few midnight scuffles, but I soon learned that as long as you go on hurting somebody, then they can’t hurt you. If you stop, expect it, get out of the way, jump clear, mate.

  ‘In this frame of mind I came out of Borstal. Being set free made me feel like a piece of straw blown about in the wind. On the way home I stopped in Worksop market and pinched a big tin of pineapple chunks so that we could celebrate. It was a drizzly evening, but I found the house empty, because Mother had gone to see her sister, and had mis-read the date in my letter. I got in by the scullery window, made a good fire and sat down to wait. I looked at the tin of chunks in the middle of the table, my only contribution to the household in three years. To stop myself crying at how hard so many people in the world were done by, I got a tin-opener and took the top right off. They were well-packed, sweet fruit that all of us could enjoy. Pineapple chunks had always been a luxury, even though they did taste like turnips and sugar. I emptied them into a basin and put it in the cupboard. The circular tin-top had come off so neatly it looked like a razor, and I turned it round, running the ball of my thumb along it. I thought:
why don’t I cut my throat so that that will be that? Being nineteen I felt I’d had enough, decided that I was good to no one and no good to myself. It was possible to do it, but when I thought that if I didn’t do it then, I would never do it, I lost heart and didn’t do it. It would make more trouble for my mother and the others, and none for myself. That was what stopped me, not because I hadn’t got the nerve. I wanted to do it because it seemed the only sensible thing. I’d ever thought of, but to be sensible like that you needed to be the most selfish bastard in the world. The others came back an hour later, and they were so happy to see me, you’d have thought all their troubles were over now that I was in the house again.

  ‘It was hard to get a job, just out of Borstal. I tried till my eyes went beady at the newspaper columns, and my legs rickety with walking. What references had I got to flash before their Bible-spiked noses? Still, there are some good souls in the world, and such a person was the rich old man who wanted a bloke to push him about in his wheelchair. When I called at his big house for the job he was sitting in the garden, and one of his servants showed me out there. A gramophone record was playing and I had to stand a couple of minutes till it finished, then, out of the goodness of my heart because he couldn’t reach, and not because I was sucking up to him, I lifted the gramophone head and stopped it. “I’ve had twenty young fellows here so far,” he said, “and I’m tired of it. Any special qualifications?”

  ‘“No sir,” I told him. “I’m fresh out of Borstal.” He was eighty years of age, and so shrunken and small that when he burst out laughing I thought he’d fall to pieces. I hoped he would, then I could blow away the dust and go on with my search. But there was something about him that toned down my hatred, specially when he said: “I’ll take you on, then. When can you start?”

  ‘Because of my shabby clothes I was led off by the butler who showed me a row of uniforms upstairs, and by luck we found one that fitted. It wasn’t the best sort of work, but I got thirty bob a week, as well as my keep, which wasn’t bad at that time of day. For the first time in my life I not only had a room of my own, small as it was, and right under the roof, but also the chauffeur gave me an hour’s driving every afternoon while the old man took his sleep. On my half-day off I went home, and gave all the money I earned to my mother, except a bob or two for fags. It wasn’t the sort of job you could ever boast about in Borstal, but at least it kept me alive, and rigged my brothers and sister in good clothes from time to time.

  ‘The man’s name was Percy Whaplode, and he owned a lot of land with farms on top and endless coalmines underneath. As I pushed him for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon around his garden and park he’d chat to me on the beauties of life, but mostly as if I weren’t there, cataloguing what he was going to miss when his head finally hit the tin lid. Often he really did talk to people he knew, or had known, but who weren’t there, or were no longer there. If they could have heard him they’d have been shocked, I can tell you, and many a time I was so doubled up with trying not to laugh at his fanciful language that I was frozen at the handle and not able to push. Now and again he’d speak to his two sons who’d been killed in the Great War, telling them how they ought to do their lessons, and study well when they got to university. Or he’d tell them, as I pushed him along the path by a stream, how good it would be for him and their mother (already dead) when they got married and had children of their own. Sometimes his stepbrother came to see him from Yorkshire. He was twenty years younger, and always shouted at poor old Percy if he wasn’t able to hear him properly.

  ‘When it rained Percy had to stay inside, and I’d push him for half an hour up and down the ground-floor corridors, because he couldn’t bear to be still. For the rest of the time he got me to read to him, and this was torture at first because he’d curse and shout and all but crack me with his stick if I was too slow or made a mistake. But sometimes he could be patient, and that helped, so that after a month or two I got to be a good reader, since it seemed to rain every other bloody day. All in all, we were quite friendly, and in any case I was forced to take his banter in good part because he was paying me for it. The chauffeur said he hadn’t seen Percy in such frequent good moods for years, and hinted that maybe he’d leave me a few quid in his will if I stuck at it. I took this as a joke, a bloody good one on the chauffeur’s part and a poor one on mine. Money would never come to me like that. I’d either have to earn it, or steal it, and I didn’t yet know which was the harder way.

  ‘I grew to feel at home there, wallowing in the easy hours and comparatively mild work. The housekeeper and the chauffeur were actually quite kind to me, talked to me from time to time like a human being, and fed me like a turkey-cock. My driving lessons went on so well that during my time at that job I was able to get a licence, paid for by the house. The chauffeur took Mr Whaplode for a drive every week around the Dukeries, and it was said that I might one day have a go at this, as if it were the greatest honour I could ever hope for.

  ‘The housekeeper’s name was Audrey Beacon, a plump woman pushing forty who came from some place near Chesterfield. She dressed plain in her job, but was good enough looking for the chauffeur, Fred Cresswell, to claim having had her a time or two, though I didn’t altogether believe him because she’d got the sort of mouth and seemed the kind of person who wouldn’t have let him go so easily. He claimed she wasn’t bad, except that there was a bit too much meat to plough through before you got to it. It took me some time to realize why she was feeding me up so well. One afternoon when I was lounging in the kitchen she came up behind and pressed her topwork into my back. I’d had one or two girls on the tumble, but nothing as grown up as this. She was kissing me at the shoulder blades, even though my shirt was on, and I was burning so much I daren’t turn round. When I did, I looked into her grey eyes, and put my arms about her shoulders. We got to kissing, and before anybody could come in and part us she told me to come to her room that night. I must have looked at her gone out at this, but she said, sharp: “You know where it is, don’t you?”

  ‘To cut a long story short, if she was a meal (and she was, I can tell you) I had a slap-up feed from it, because every time the plate emptied it was filled up again. It went on for months, so as far as that job went there was nothing lacking in it. What more could a young chap want? I had work, money, food, love, and shelter. I swear blind I’ve never had it so good since. And yet, I can’t think now how it was possible, but I got tired of her. From one day to the next I just didn’t go to her room. Something happened to me, and I don’t know what it was. I just closed up against her. I started going to Worksop more often, just to call home for half an hour in the evening. I’d have a pint at some pub, or a cup of tea somewhere, then walk the few miles back and crash into bed. I didn’t even meet another girl. Audrey tried to get me out of my mood, but found it was more solid than that, so she turned against me, and wouldn’t rest till she got me into trouble and saw the back of me.

  ‘This was difficult, because there was nothing in which she could fault me. I was, as they say, a man of sober habits who even, by now, liked walking around the house and looking at Percy’s paintings and sometimes dipping into his library when I got the chance. The old man was fond of dogs, and had a few slouching idly around the house. Now and again a red setter would follow us on our walks. Dogs are only valuable if they’re useful, but I had nothing special against them, even so. For his eighty-first birthday one of his great-grandchildren (no doubt thinking about his position in the will) sent him a Yorkshire terrier. The old man shed tears at this tender thought, and considered the dog to be his greatest treasure. In actual fact it was a bloody nuisance. It ran about and pissed all over everywhere and, worse still, took a strong dislike to me. It’s hard to say why, because I left it alone, and never so much as looked when it barked at me (and backed away) as I walked through the house to collect Percy for his outing.

  ‘One day it snapped at my ankle, and I thought: this has got to stop. I did nothing, but
just walked on. Then I felt a rip at my flesh. Audrey Beacon was on her way by, but the pain was so sharp I let out a bloody good kick. I should have been man enough to ignore it, or just laugh, but I lost control, and the kick got it right on the arse. In fact the dog went skidding three-quarters of the way back up the corridor where it had come from. I suppose this might have been all right, but unluckily it let out a great yelp that echoed through the house. It was quite close to the room Whaplode was in. His deafness came and went, and this time he heard everything as clear as a bell. He called out as if he’d been stabbed, and I went in to see what was the matter. “The dog,” he cried. “What’s happened?”

  ‘I told him that I’d accidently stepped on it in passing, but he didn’t believe me, pulled the bell and went on roaring for the others. He threatened to sack everybody if he didn’t get to the bottom of it, but Audrey Beacon, as cool as a stone at the bottom of a stream, told him all she had seen. So I was ordered off the premises, Percy holding his pet dog, tears in his pot-eyes that didn’t look at me at all. I showed him the teeth marks on my leg and the rip in my trousers, but it made no difference. I walked from the place with four pounds in my pocket, on the lookout for something else to do.

  ‘I picked yesterday’s newspaper out of a litterbox and noticed that the war had started. It didn’t take me long to get a job. Luckily my driving licence came in handy because I got van work taking bread from a bakery to shops in the town. My family never wanted for it, because I dropped three or four prime loaves there every morning on my way by. The trouble was that I didn’t think. It still is, but my experience of the last few years has taught me a lot. The world’s got no use for people who don’t think. If you can’t think, then you can never be like they want you to be, and that’s no good, either for you or them. Maybe I’ll be able to steer a course between the two, and if I can do that, there might be no object to what I can get out of my life – in spite of myself.’