Birthday (28 page)

‘In London we get the Euro elections soon,' Brian said, ‘but I won't vote, for the same reason.'

‘I never will again, not for anybody,' Arthur said. ‘I can't stand Blair and Cook and Robertson yammering about NATO winning the war when they've never heard the whistle of a bomb. The fuckpigs started it in my name, and spout about how right they are, but I just want to live in peace and have a good time like everybody else, as far as fucking miseries like that will let me. All the rest is propaganda.'

A bottle of supermarket Bordeaux stood by the usual lavish supper when Brian came down from an hour's sleep. ‘I phoned Derek and Eileen,' Arthur said, ‘and they're picking us up in an hour to go to The Five Ways for a drink. Meanwhile, eat some of this. You must be clambed after driving up from London.' He loaded both plates. ‘I heard a few rumbles of thunder while you were upstairs, but it might blow over.'

As if to deny it, a clatter sounded from close by. ‘I didn't hear a thing. I go right down, and wake up as if there's a clock inside me.'

‘I wish I could. The doctor offered me some tablets, but I didn't bother. It's better than a few months ago, but I don't sleep in the afternoon in case it stops me getting under at night. I sometimes read till one o'clock.' The window was covered by a flash, and the rooftops seemed to explode. ‘At least there's nothing lethal at the end of it, like on those Serbs and refugees.'

Brian took a swig of wine, rain as if driving against the house from all directions, ripples of light cutting out the battleship grey sky, followed by shattering blows of thunder. Arthur went upstairs to make sure every window was shut.

‘It's going like the First Day of the Somme,' Brian said.

Sulphur tanged the air, and a flash and immediate blast put the lights out. ‘That's done it.' Arthur walked through the gloom and took out a packet of candles from the cabinet to put into holders, but a minute later the lights came on. ‘On the Somme every flash could have had your number on it. At least we've got a million to one chance. Let God do His worst, is what I say. Come on, we're nearly at the end of the bottle. We'll split what's left.'

Slaps and hugs over, they got into the car, and Derek drove them to The Five Ways. The storm had grumbled its way north but the streets were still empty, so that in ten minutes they were in their favourite music-free drinking place close to the City Hospital – where many in the family had died, though if any recalled sad times (and Brian knew they did) none mentioned them.

The appetizing smell of freshly drawn ale greeted them at the entrance to the lounge, Derek doing a quick march to a table for four. ‘They must have kept it for us,' Arthur said.

Young men and women, maybe nurses who worked at the hospital and lived close, talked and drank at tables not packed against one another. The publican, a slim man in his fifties, dressed in a suit and wearing glasses, thin hair combed back, came to offer his hand to Brian, which he shook as if they were old friends, though he hadn't been in for weeks, while the barmaid pumped up pints of Mansfield and fixed the shandy for Eileen.

Built in the early thirties, some of the rooms were under a preservation order so couldn't be altered, the walls of the room covered with drawings of past customers, done by local artists. Such faces were dead and gone, but alive in their small frames and looking (if they could) at what was now poignantly missed.

‘There was a lot of protest when the company said it was going to make alterations,' the publican said, ‘and now they can't do it, which makes me happy as well as the clientele. It would have been a shame to tart up a nice place like this.'

Arthur was telling a story about Stan the shop steward at a factory he once worked at. ‘He was red hot, old Stan was, always calling meetings. Anything wrong, or supposed to be, and he'd go from one machine to another getting us to drop tools and gather around him for a half-hour talk. He called the gaffers blind, and we cheered him all the way. The management didn't know what to do about it. They were going off their heads, specially if he got us to drop tools when there was a rush order on, which there nearly always was. They didn't know what to do. Stan was a real demon, and there was hardly ever a dull day.

‘Well, I suppose the gaffers put their heads together at the board meeting, or they must have had a bottle of whisky on the table that day, because one of the directors had a brainwave. They decided to promote Stan, and the next Monday morning he turns up, not at half past seven, but at half past nine. He was wearing a suit, with a collar and tie. The little white tip of an ironed handkerchief peeked out of his lapel pocket, his thick fair hair went back in waves, and his shoes shone like black glass. He walked across the shop floor with his nose in the air and a clipboard under his arm, not saying a word to any of us. We couldn't believe it. The cunning bastards had found him a job in the office, and doubled his wages. He got a salary now. In other words, they bought him off, and it paid 'em to do it.

‘But it was no job at all. He'd got nothing to do. They sat him at a desk and gave him a writing pad, a box of paperclips and a set of coloured biros. Maybe they told an office tart to sit on his knee now and again, but all the time they must have been laughing at him behind his back. They'd post something on the sly to a branch in Birmingham, and send him in the company car to fetch it back, saying it was urgent, just to make him think he was useful and might get promoted one day. Or they sent him to a firm as their representative, telling him to collect some obsolete spare parts in the boot.

‘We teased him unmercifully whenever he had to walk through the shop. “Hey up, Stan! How are you?” we'd shout. “Have they put your rate up lately? Where are you going, then, Stan? Are you going to buy the directors' condoms? When are you coming back to work with us? We ain't had a meeting for a while. We're just longing to down tools.”

‘He didn't know where to put his face. We ragged him so much he got to be the fastest walker in the factory. Not that we could blame him. I suppose most of the others would have fallen for it as well.'

Derek took a long drink. ‘So what happens to a bloke like that?'

‘Wait till I tell you. Every story has an ending. The firm went bankrupt six months later, and Stan was out on his arse. He got no golden handshake, either. Firms were closing down all over the place in Thatcher's time. I got another job, and so did a lot of the others, but Stan was known as a firebrand, and one of the blokes. I met on the street told me he'd seen him drawing the dole. Stan didn't know where to put his face. He was counting his money as he walked to where he'd parked his car.

‘He wasn't on the dole for long, though. I was in town one day and saw him coming down the steps of the council house with a briefcase under his arm, dressed even smarter than when he'd worked in the factory office. I waved to him, and he waved back, but he didn't stop to talk. I haven't seen him since. He'll probably be Lord Mayor one day, as long as he's not Labour. Come on, sup up. I get thirsty talking so much.' No second telling, since no jar had far to go, and he stood up to go for their refills.

‘He doesn't seem too bad now,' Eileen said.

Derek passed the cigars. ‘He's getting over it, but there's still a fair way to go.'

‘You wouldn't know, though.' Brian puffed on his cigar. ‘None of us would show what was going on inside.'

‘That's the best way.'

‘I'm not sure about that,' Eileen said.

Derek smoothed the froth from his moustache. ‘That's Arthur's way, and it's working. They don't need to send him a social worker for counselling.'

‘Not unless she's got good tits and nice legs,' Brian said, creating sufficient laughter for Arthur to think what a merry lot they were as he laid the jars down: ‘I bought four packets of pork scratchings, so get stuck in. I saw 'em behind the bar, and remembered how mam used to love 'em, but I can't eat 'em in case they break my teeth.'

Brian put one in his mouth, and softened it with a gulp of beer. ‘I haven't tasted them for donkey's years.'

‘My dad took 'em down the pit in his lunch box,' Eileen said. ‘He said they made him work better.'

‘They used to be spread out on a big tray,' Brian recalled, ‘at La Roche's the pork butchers on Ilkeston Road. Mam often sent me to get some, and told me not to eat any on the way back, but I could never resist a pick.'

Arthur lifted his jar. ‘Let's drink to her.' Glasses were emptied and taken by Derek for another filling.

‘I remember when I went with her in the ambulance, after she had that last heart attack,' Arthur said, when Derek came back. ‘I was sitting holding her hand because she was frightened. Well, who wouldn't be? But the ambulance bloke told me to get away from her, and sit on the other side, because it was against regulations. My fucking blood went up. He was a big bloke and thought he could put one over on me, but I told him to shut his trap or I'd punch his head in. I stayed where I was. He could see I was doing her some good, but he wanted to show his authority.

‘After I'd seen mam tucked up in bed I went outside looking for that ambulance man. I was going to give him a right fucking pasting, but luckily for him I couldn't find him. He'd probably gone on another trip to try barking at somebody who'd cringe and do what he said. I'd been going to smash him in the ambulance, but didn't want to upset mam. If I had knocked him about a bit they'd have needed an ambulance for him.'

‘The world's full of 'em,' Derek said. ‘Somebody's got to keep 'em in their place, or the scabby Hitlers would be all over us.'

Eileen turned to Brian. ‘How long are you up for this time?'

‘Until Sunday morning. Then I'll slide back to London.' He would bypass the Smoke and head for France on the Shuttle, go travelling for as long as he could stand being by himself. Or maybe he'd put it off till Arthur was right again. They'd go together, and what a trip that would be! ‘I'll see you and Derek before I go. Tomorrow I'm taking Arthur to Matlock. It's our favourite run.'

‘And on the way back,' Arthur said, ‘we'll call and see how Jenny is.'

The waiter came in and laid platters of food on each table, legs of chicken, small sandwiches, meat balls, bits of kebab. ‘What's all this?' Derek wanted to know.

‘It's from a wedding party in the back room,' the publican said. ‘There was too much food, and all this is the leftovers. They told us to spread it among the clients.'

Hands went out, picking things to eat. ‘It looks good,' Eileen said. ‘I wish I was hungry, that's all.'

‘If you don't eat it it's going in the bin, and it'll be a shame if it does.'

‘Who do we have to thank for it?'

‘It was the bridegroom's idea. Here he is.'

A slim six foot man in his early twenties, with short fair hair, grey eyes, and wearing a T-shirt and jeans, stood smiling at the door, to be thanked and shaken hands with by everyone in the room, congratulated, wished happiness and a long life.

‘It was time for me to get spliced,' he said, ‘because she's five months pregnant. So eat the grub up if you can. It was too much for us. If we sent it to Yugoslavia it'd be rancid before it got there. I'll get back to my wife now though, because she's a bit tired. It's time to take her home and tuck her up.'

‘Which is where we ought to go.' Eileen stood. ‘I'm starting to yawn.'

‘You aren't five months pregnant, are you, duck?'

She turned to Derek and kissed him. ‘I sometimes wish I could be, but I've got to drive you lot home, and it's lucky I have, otherwise who knows where we'd end up?'

Pot after pot of tea at Arthur's kept them talking till the middle of the night, and Eileen knew that when they left Arthur would have no trouble falling asleep. If it meant that Brian wouldn't get his wake-up mug of coffee at eight o'clock he would surely look on it as the best news of the day, as would the rest of them when they heard about it.

A Biography of Alan Sillitoe by Ruth Fainlight

Not many of the “Angry Young Men” (a label Alan Sillitoe vigorously rejected but which nonetheless clung to him until the end of his life), could boast of having failed the eleven plus exam not only once, but twice. From early childhood Alan yearned for every sort of knowledge about the world: history, geography, cosmology, biology, topography, and mathematics; to read the best novels and poetry; and learn all the languages, from Classical Greek and Latin to every tongue of modern Europe. But his violent father was illiterate, his mother barely able to read the popular press and when necessary write a simple letter, and he was so cut off from any sort of cultivated environment that, at about the age of ten, trying to teach himself French (unaware books existed that might have helped him), the only method he could devise was to look up each word of a French sentence in a small pocket dictionary. It did not take long for him to realize that something was wrong with his system, but there was no one to ask what he should do instead.

So, like all his schoolmates, he left school at fourteen and went to work in a local factory. Alan never presented himself as a misunderstood sensitive being, and always insisted that he had a wonderful time chasing girls and going with workmates to the lively Nottingham pubs. He also joined the Air Training Corps (ATC) where he absorbed information so quickly that by the age of seventeen he was working as an air traffic controller at a nearby airfield. World War II was still being fought, and his ambition was to become a pilot and go to the Far East, but before that could be realized it was VE Day. As soon as possible he volunteered for the Royal Air Force. It was too late to become a pilot or a navigator, but he got as far as Malaya, where as a radio operator he spent long nights in a hut at the edge of the jungle.