New and Collected Stories (34 page)

EX-SERVICEMAN'S COLLECTION

We give good
CASH
for

GAS
-
STOVES MANGLES LEAD

METALS OF ANY DESCRIPTION

RAGS AND BEDSTEADS

EVERYTHING

gratefully received

WE

call back in half an hour

THANK YOU
.

‘A lot o' bleeding good that does us,' Bert said, digging at Dave, whose idea the handbills had been. ‘If we don't start making some money I'm going back to labouring.'

Dave groaned. They had discussed chucking it in before, but he prevailed on optimist Donnie to wield the casting vote that kept them at it. What's up with you? We made ten quid a-piece last week. You can't expect to get a millionaire's whack the first few months can you? Or p'raps you like working for a bleeding gaffer? I don't. I've 'ad enough o' that. You've only got to pull out a fag and you get your cards. Or see whether or not you backed a winner at dinner-time. You can bogger that for a lark. I'm not going to chuck it yet. I'd give it a longer try and see what we can do.' He reached for the map: ‘We'll try Bolsover next week. The trouble with these places near Nottingham is they've allus bin done by some graballing bastard half an hour before; but up there, nobody ever bothers.'

‘Like that place last week,' Bert thought, cheerful at having egged Dave to go on justifying and encouraging for so long – which was one of the few ways he knew of getting him to talk.

‘If we make a living wage,' Donnie put in, ‘what does it matter?'

Dave steered them back to work: “Ark at 'im – bin listening to the Conservatives. Thinks he's got a right to a living wage. Come on, let's stop boggering around, and get cracking.' At which they alighted onto the pavement, took up their particular sacks, and spread in three directions into rainshot streets.

Such free-lance fending had sharpened Donnie's powers of reconnaissance. Each backyard – from dustbin to lavatory, clothes-line to wooden palings – was assessed for articles of value: a thrown-out bicycle, a zinc bathtub on the wall, a sack-covered mangle waiting for washday. He noticed blinds down for a funeral, milk bottles on doorsteps and, on entering a street or terrace, immediately looked for what chimney-stacks sent out no smoke in this land of mineral plenty. Not, of course, that he would walk off with anything that didn't belong to him – his thieving days had ended during the war, when to go on living demanded a definite long spate of thieving – but to remove some backyard eyesore of mildewed pram or stack of scrap copper or ripped up firegrate would be a favour he couldn't be bad tempered enough to deny anyone. Hadn't a woman pleaded with them only the other week to shift stuff they knew they wouldn't get five bob for?

His roped-together mackintosh was darkened by rain. The wind rose, couldn't make up its mind which way to scatter the floods. He'd collected nothing. Locusts and desert, he thought. Every crumb scratched and scraped – and saw himself in the same mind maybe as those poor enormous animals in prehistoric times come to the end of their tether because the sun had dried up the earth – which was better than this wet.

He knocked at a back door and, after a prolonged rattling of bolts and latches it was pulled violently inwards, irritation sounding even in the squeak of its hinges. A tall, thin, middle-aged collier stood there, still in his shirt-sleeves from the night shift. His deep grey eyes flashed:

‘What do yo' want?'

Donnie usually spoke first, making his request against a blank stare. But this time he was stopped dead by abrupt rage in the collier's face as if, should it turn out he had been dragged from his breakfast for nothing, he would swing the hand from behind and wield a pick over Donnie's head, ready to bring down a well-aimed prostrating blow.

‘Any old rags, mate?'

The collier's scarred features took time off to consider. Then: ‘Ar,' he bawled, ‘tek me' – and slammed the door at his face.

He wondered whether his brothers were having better luck. A whippet, entombed in some distant kennel, howled dismally at the general condition of the rheumatic world. Rain belted down, yet the sun shone in Donnie's brain of day-dream and optimism, illuminating the sudden find of lead-rolls outside some half-built church he would never pray in, laughing like mad with his brothers as they set upon the gold-find with axe and crowbar, stuffing sack after sack which would weigh on their shoulderbones till they felt sick with lugging it to the lorry. A raindrop running down to his ear caused him to scrub away the itch of it. He missed half a dozen houses due to his daydream. The collier's rebuff seemed so comic that he thought to tell it later to his brothers for a laugh.

He knocked at another door, and a woman opened it, a cherubic tow-headed kid making an aeroplane out of the collection leaflet. She held an old brass kettle: ‘If you've come for scrap, you can tek this, my lad.'

‘How much do you want for it?' he said, thinking it better than nothing.

‘Nay, lad, I'll tek nowt from thee, seeing as tha's had such a lot to put up with in the war, while many a one was staying at home.'

He looked modestly into the kitchen beyond. ‘That's the way it is.'

‘It's a bleddy shame they don't look after you better when you've been all them miles away fighting for 'em, it is and all.'

‘Well,' Donnie said, ‘as long as they fill their own pockets. I was in a Jap prison camp seven years. I've still got scars all over me, and one of my lungs is gone. I don't like to think about it. There's many a night I wake up all of a groan and sweat. And what did we get when we come back? Twenty-six bob a week. No good to a living soul. But I've got eleven kids now, so I suppose I'm good for something.' He stuffed the kettle into his sack, left his thanks as the door closed. He heard her going through the parlour muttering loudly to the uncomprehending kid: ‘Seven years! Poor bogger. Seven – that's funny, though.'

At the end of the street stood a red-bricked chapel, a body-snatcher guarded by railings and fronted by wide steps leading to the principal door. It was a chapel no longer, but a get-together of shabby drill-hall and dead-beat billiard saloon. Donnie found a nub-end pinned under the crossband of his cigarette case. Maybe they're clearing the place out, he thought, for it looked as if it were about to fall flat on its face. He pushed open a side gate and walked up the entry. The backyard hadn't seen sunshine since its walls were built. Windows were wooden-barred and barbed-wired. Broken bottles spiking the top bricks turned it into a well-defended backyard of the house of God. Donnie noticed a row of dustbins, each caved-in or holed, which several experienced kicks showed to be empty. He grunted at the dampness, a dispiriting waterlogged atmosphere more tied to an outlaw's heart than any other smell and feeling.

He glanced back for a last check-up. Under an awning of corrugated tin stood a canvas kitbag tied at the neck. He went over and, giving it an immediate kick, expected the unresistant cave-in of cardboard and paper, but was not surprised (already suspecting that it looked too good for any old rubbish) when his boot hit against some kind of metal. He thumped it for being so puzzling, closed his fingers over corners of whatever was inside. Undo the string, you silly bogger, and have a look – an irritating and unrewarding job, for his fingernails broke at the first try. He stood back a moment: the cord was knotted and double-knotted, and shrunk and solidified in the damp air.

He was bemused, at what a kitbag meant to many but had never meant to him. Gunner Donnie Hodson – you didn't keep your kitbag long: came on leave one day and never went back – stayed by the fireside in a long paralysis of fear and rage, smoking what fags you could cadge until your mother chucked you out and told you to get some money or clamb. Them was funny times. One day he was at the kitchen table when knocks – back and front – sounded from the wide-awake street. He was hungry for his tea, holding a sharp knife and not knowing whether to cut his throat or a slice of bread. His mother did what was needed of her. Donnie ran up to the attic, coolly setting the skylight down when once on the roof. And there he was, hanging out on the slates like Monday washing, under the summer sky and counting German planes that slid over low and let rip with machine-guns. Shellbursts like dirty wool seemed to be exploding not many feet from his head. The sirens were moaning like a runover cat, and it was hard to imagine anyone in his right mind out on the roof – so the coppers must have thought. But Donnie wasn't in anybody's mind except his own, which turned out to be right enough, and his instinct told him one sure thing, that it was better to risk a bullet from German planes than go back through that skylight and get parcelled off to the army again. ‘What did mam do with them two full cups of tea she'd just poured? Did she sling 'em in the sink before the coppers could see 'em?' – were his sole speculations as shrapnel (from AA shells he would have been firing had he not been where he was) zipped viciously by like petrified dead sparrows onto the slates, breaking some, others ricochetting, one piercing the skylight window that finally stopped the coppers' courage from thinking he was out there.

Looking back on this one uncomfortable glory of his life, he couldn't help but laugh. Nothing from the past was sad, no matter how awful it might have been at the time. Only the present was classifiable into good or putrid, but every incident that he could remember was laughable for the simple reason that it was past, and that he had survived it without mortal damage. While Donnie was sitting on the rooftop with shrapnel and bullets pissing all around, his mother was being questioned by coppers and redcaps, unable to speak out where he was, yet wanting to in order to get him off that dangerous roof.

They got him in the end, cornered as a rat by bigger rats in a cul-de-sac one dark night, a suitcase of plundered whisky at his feet. Dave had got away, rattled his longer legs among streets at different angles to Donnie's, until dark distance drew him into a maw of safety. Donnie was pounced on by a couple of stalwart Specials and manhandled to the police station: ‘We're helping our country' – bump – ‘and trying to do our bit,' – bump – ‘but you blokes are worse than the bloody Germans' – bump-thud. ‘You want bleeding-well exterminating, then maybe we could get this war finished' – crash. No bail (the black eyes and cuts had disappeared by quarter-sessions time). Twenty-two cases to be taken into consideration, sir. Three years, then. And let that be a lesson to you. Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.

That was the only way to get the war over. Go and fight, they had said. What for? Show me what I've got to fight for, and then I'll go. You can't though, can you? There's nobody in this bloody country can show me that. ‘You're a pacifist,' Dave dinned into him. ‘Like me. See?' It was still the middle of the war when they let him out of jail and turned him over to the redcaps, so he hopped it a second time, and uniform number two burst into paraffin-flame from the bedroom grate.

In 1945 the redcaps collared him for the final bout, made him pay for having kept out of the war as successfully as they had by declaring on him a private and spiteful war of their own. Even that terrible time was laughable. He had wakened up one fine day to find himself between the clean sheets of heaven. ‘A mental home,' the man in the next bed grinned. Marvellous. No more bread-and-water, cells, packdrill, kicks and punches and buckets of freezing pond-scum splashing against thin denims. You had to laugh, at what men who should have been your own mates in factory or on building site did to you. You just couldn't help laughing, though you could bet that some bastards had put them up to it as well. Such a grin gave you toothache on the lips. It was funny, too funny even to tell anyone about, and so Donnie had a reputation for being soft, almost daft and, unlike his brothers, slow in ways of self-preservation. He was also reluctant with his speech, dense it was said, often unable to make his opinions fit the subject under discussion, or make them influence it when they did. His family and friends began to think that such attitudes had been there from birth, to be pointed out and taken advantage of.

The rain was a mere drizzle, easier to accept and fight, and he shook himself to regard the actual physical bulk of the kitbag. This one stored rubbish – a useful purpose to what most carried. He searched for another cigarette, but found none. ‘I'll ask Dave to lend me one when I get back. I'd better start moving, or they'll wonder where I've got to.'

He pulled the bag forward, held it from the ground by unyielding strings. It weighed heavy and, replacing it, a piece of cardboard finished its journey and slid onto the stones behind. Torn from a shoebox and crayoned on the white surface, the words he held up were:
TO BE COLLECTED
.

His heart bumped. By who else but him? A find, it looked like. Who'd have thought it in all this drenching rain? It was meant for the scrapman to pick up and relieve whoever had left it of an unwanted rubbish-burden. It felt like old metal against his boot, a mixture of bits and bobs no doubt, that would need sorting but hadn't been considered valuable enough to sell. It was no use sorting it now: he pictured his brothers doing that like vultures later, cursing him, he shouldn't wonder, because the stuff – after his dreams of a unique find – wasn't worth much after all. Still, it was marvellous to get something. He spat on both palms and honed them well, lifted the bag onto his broad shoulders and lugged it out into the street, a miracle that such a light heart supported it.

Most of their time back at the lorry had been spent cursing Donnie – ‘the dilat'ry bastard' – for dawdling, when from their vantage point of the high cab they saw him staggering along the street with what looked like a treasure of a load. Old rags didn't weigh that much, for Donnie was a carthorse, a man of iron never known to flinch or tire under the most back-breaking weights. So what could it be and where had he clicked to be shouldering such heavy responsibility?