Birthday (20 page)

‘We never go out together,' Jane said when he wouldn't escort her to an Arts Lab. He was unable to understand, he said, how art could be produced in a place which carried out experiments on rats. Only individuals make works of art; and nothing but mechanical contrivances ever came from workshops.

Holding such comments back, or smiling to suggest that they were harmless, maddened her when wanting an honest opinion on some ‘happening'. ‘You're getting to be like your grandfather.' She nodded at the old man's photograph pinned beyond his typewriter. ‘And you're even beginning to dress the same' – seeing him in a suit and tie for a party, rather than jeans that reminded him of overalls at the factory.

She took him to the LSE on the night of a ‘sit-in', where talk of peasant revolutions and working class uprisings seemed a more exciting game to the students than Monopoly or Scrabble. He talked with someone on whom more than twenty thousand pounds of education was being wasted by a shilling copy of
The Little Red Book
. He wanted to know if Brian didn't feel treacherous at having left his working class roots (as if he was an aspidistra!) instead of staying to
politicize
‘the masses' with his superior powers of understanding. Brian wanted to say fuck off and don't be such a daft prick, but politely told him that no rural worker or factory hand with a sense of humour would listen to the exhortations of a Chinese tyrant, and he saw their talk as no more than a middle-class ploy to keep the workers in their place – for which remarks he was called a racist.

As for sex in the sixties, it made little difference to him. From the age of fourteen the commodity had been free enough with what girls he had known, or with women whether married or not, though from the present talk he could well believe that anyone born in that decade (and surely in any other) would have cause to wonder who their real father was.

When Jane shouted, after he'd caught her out in a love affair: ‘My womb is my own. I do what I like with it,' he knew that if such was the case she could use it with man, woman or beast for all he cared, though he had to agree when she added that life was too short to be faithful. If he'd wanted loyalty from a woman he should have stayed with Jenny.

In the words of Tacitus they created a desolation and called it peace, yet often mustered sufficient affection to reopen the campaign, energy bubbling up like water in a desert when they thought the well had been sucked dry. Two intelligent and otherwise tolerant people could have continued living together, but it was a time more than any other when not to nod with the herd was taken as an heretical attack on a person's deepest beliefs, and being in love was not enough.

The spirit of the age decided they had no common ground, though out of pride he preferred to think that with tact, skill in love, and diplomacy, he might have kept the marriage going. In bed they invariably went off like two pieces of dynamite, and no lovemaking had been the same since. After the divorce, when she went back to working on a newspaper, he long recalled (and still did) her short dark hair, lithe almost androgynous body (except when she was pregnant) and sizzling lavatory cleaner wit on which he had sharpened much of his own.

Among people he worked with were those who enjoyed the artful self-indulgence of the decade, until the time of sending their children to schools where ‘doing your own thing' was thought to be more important than spelling or the precision of arithmetic. Some didn't care, while others (who had more money, including himself) found places which still believed in education. Many were later to shake their heads at the increase of single mothers, at so-called football violence, and at unemployed youths ‘shooting up' in underpasses, who were only doing in fact what they themselves had done in their flats and houses.

Meanwhile life in his home town had gone on as it always had. People such as those at Jenny's party lived in the same old way, impervious to influence, sceptical, independent or ignorant (or both), engrossed in themselves and their families, taking no guff from anyone, nor talking it either. They were rowdy, went boozing, worked hard when they had to (and they nearly always had to) but skived when they could get away with it, and turned violent at times out of boredom or lack of excitement, or anger at not being acknowledged as intelligent human beings, or because a worm of unknown compounds was eating at their livers. They were themselves, and if he were to ask Jenny whether she or any of her family had taken drugs she would look at him ‘gone out', too surprised to be offended.

Because such people had always been his inspiration he went on earning, but should his brain turn to wet sand, and no more cheques skim through his letter box in the morning or at midday, he had enough money not to worry about the future, though working as long as he could would enable him to go on feeling younger than his age. As happy as he had ever been after a lifetime of thinking that something was wrong if he wasn't unhappy, he was guarding his time and freedom, having won the long struggle for autonomy.

He slept until Arthur called that supper was ready. ‘So how about coming down, and getting stuck in?' he said at the second knock. ‘The wine'll get cold if you don't.'

Among the spread was a slab of cheddar, cut by wire from a drumlike piece in the local market. Arthur stabbed through the cellophane packet of smoked fish and laid a fillet on each plate.

A bottle of red among the edibles radiated like Eddystone Lighthouse over plates and side plates, glasses, knives and forks, and napkins in metal rings. ‘At least we eat well. I don't know why, but I can't remember what we used to eat as kids.'

Brian forked stuff onto his plate. ‘The smells from the dinner centre come back to me now and again and make my mouth water.'

‘You remember the two women who ran the place?' Arthur laughed as he poured the wine. ‘The big fat one was Miss Carver, and her assistant was little Miss Bradley. Miss Carver used to hit us with a wooden spoon if we didn't keep quiet. I even saw her take a swipe at Miss Bradley when she did something wrong. Another time, she gave her a kiss while she was slicing the bread. You could tell what they were a mile off, but they were guardian angels to us. Sometimes we'd get custard and bananas for dessert, and I remember the hot milky cocoa they used to dish out. I don't see how anybody can have mental troubles if they've gone hungry. If I felt myself going mad all I'd have to do was think about the next meal.'

Brian clinked his brother's glass. ‘I was looking at that family photograph in the bedroom, the one with Tom in it, taken about twenty years ago.'

Arthur found it impossible to mention Tom without laughing. ‘A good thing mam married him though. He looked after her a lot better than Harold ever did.' Chain-smoking Tom, ten years younger, was the bloke she should have had from the beginning. In the war he drove tanks from Chilwell depot to loading ramps at one of the stations, and he'd had a good time taking ATS girls to the pubs in Nottingham, a smart quiff held down under a beret. After demob he never wore a hat again, mindful of his Brylcreemed sculpture to the end.

After his wife died from cancer he met Vera in the lounge of the Boulevard Hotel, and a few Sundays later took her to Skegness in his fifty pound banger. She felt safe with him because he never drove the old Austin faster than forty-five, nor ever did much more on the motorway: ‘I've seen too many pools of blood on the road,' he told her, walking on the sands after a fish and chip dinner. Then he popped the question, and she said yes.

He was thin and above middle height, lantern jawed, blue-eyed and jaunty, cool and dependable. They'd sit holding hands and looking at television, each with a fag on the smoulder, drinking mugs of strong sweet tea. Sometimes they'd go to the pub, and put back shorts or half pints, or both in rotation.

Tom was the caretaker of a large chapel just off Slab Square, a four-roomed flat going with the job. On Saturday night, trying to sleep, Brian would hear gangs of drunks coming out of the pubs, the crash of glass sounding like bars of contemporary music, and curses when they set on each other under the chapel wall four floors below, then the clatter of boots as the shaven headed, earringed posse of Nottingham Lambs fled before the screaming sirens.

On Saturday afternoon Tom checked the heating system of the chapel for Sunday morning, while Vera with bucket and cleaning rags wiped down the pews, helping him to get the work done so that they could go back to their snug living room, to put the kettle on and have a smoke.

‘They were happy enough,' Arthur said. ‘It was a charmed life. A shame Tom had to have that heart attack while he was up a ladder polishing the organ.'

‘He was lucky to go so quick,' Brian said. ‘He was only sixty-odd, but at least he didn't take up space in the hospital for more than a couple of days.'

Tom had been brought up by his mother, no father in the offing, and they had supposed him to be, though without prejudice, a bastard, but he told them the real story when the three brothers took him to the Trip and made him jolly with as much ale as he could sup, plus a neverending supply of fags.

His father Leo had worked at Chilwell factory during the Great War, and on Monday July 1
^st
1918 the sun scorched the vast area of camouflaged roofs. People sweated to meet their quotas, in halls storing seven hundred thousand high explosive shells. Out of ten thousand people hard at work four thousand were women, and between them they filled fifty thousand a day.

Tom's father hadn't been able to sleep the night before. A clear June sky kept the sunshine recorders working as much overtime as the men and women, focussing the sun's rays as it swung overhead from one horizon to the other. Blocks of ice were brought into the factory to cool the TNT, but the weather turned more sultry, and the atmosphere in the powder gallery was so oppressive that some found it hard to breathe.

They had been grumbling about the heat for weeks, and knew the machinery was overworked, but each shift vied with the other to turn out powder and fill more shells. The sticky TNT made the bearings overheat, some had been raised as dust to mix with the air, but work went on because the soldiers in France were suffering far worse.

On the First of July (another one, Arthur said) Leo walked out of the boiler house where he worked on maintenance, hoping for a cooling breeze, recalling how he had said to his mother at breakfast that he'd rather be up the Trent doing a spot of fishing in such weather. Standing on the concrete, he took his watch out at just after seven in the evening.

People in a cinema nearby were watching a film (silent, in those days) about an explosion, when the floor vibrated and dust started to fall from the ceiling. Eight tons of exploding TNT shook the ground as far away as Nottingham, breaking windows for miles around.

Leo took an orange from his pocket, then it vanished from his hand and he was thrown across the path to the laboratory door, too stunned to know how he got there. The whole compound was falling apart, nothing but smoke and wreckage as everyone tried to reach the safety barriers. Unable to stand, a man whose right arm was a bloody mess of rags and bone put his left arm around Leo and dragged him towards safety.

Every kind of vehicle was used for getting the wounded to the hospital, Leo on a cart pulled by a brewery horse, one of a long procession of injured men and women on the road to Nottingham. Pools of blood formed between the cobblestones, groans and screams terrifying the horses as whips cracked to drive them on.

Leo's legs were amputated and he died ten days later, one of four hundred killed and wounded. A week later the plant was turning out shells again.

‘A real killpig,' Arthur said. ‘Tom worked there in the next war, but they didn't fill shells anymore. Even so, he nearly got blown up.'

‘Maybe it runs in the family,' Brian said. On opening his eyes in the morning Tom had a few puffs while pulling on his trousers and shirt. He walked downstairs whistling a tune, and put the fag in his mouth to pull the door open. No sooner had he stepped into the room than a flash and a bang knocked him back, his eyebrows burnt and the fag blown from his lips.

‘It must have been like a bomb going off,' Arthur said. ‘I expect to mam it sounded like the biggest bang since the Blitz. Tom said he got over the shock in a couple of seconds, but mam swore it was at least five minutes before he could speak. She came down in her shimmy, and opened the doors and windows, while Tom went out to give the gas board blokes the worst bollocking they'd ever had. The man who came said it was a miracle he hadn't been killed, seeing as how big the leak was.'

‘But you've got to sympathize,' Arthur went on. ‘These days he would have counselling. Social workers would have been all over him. Any whiff of trouble and they're like flies on raw meat. But some people phone up for them, even if it's only a husband or wife walking out on a marriage. And the social workers think they've got to come in case anybody does themselves in.'

He blew a smoke ring towards the stove. ‘I heard about a bloke who had a car accident, just a bang from somebody coming out of a side road, but he was so upset at his crunched up car he couldn't stop shaking, and took himself to bed with a cup of tea and a hot-water bottle. He wouldn't come down to go to work next morning, so his missis phoned the social services and asked 'em to send some counselling.

‘A young woman came, just off her course. I suppose they told her at head office to go and practise on him. The man's missis sat downstairs waiting, but it seemed to be taking a long time, and when she went up to see how things were going she found 'em in bed together. There was fucking ructions. You could hear her screams all up and down the street, doors banging and cars stopping, even people switching off their tellies to come and see what the fuss was about.'

Brian stopped laughing to refill their glasses. ‘You've got to be exaggerating.'