A Start in Life

by Alan Sillitoe

  What could I say to such a sermon except nod my head? We went into the kitchen, which was warm because of an Aga cooker burning nicely – though the light was a bit dim. Clegg took out a plate of liver from the fridge, threw it into a pan of burning lard. With a tin of beans and a few slices of Miracle Bread, it made a good supper between us. He was disappointed that I didn’t play chess, so we stayed at the table with a game of draughts. But it was too easy for him, and he was bored after an hour of it. When neither of us spoke it was so quiet I thought I was going off my head. So this is what it’s like in the country, I said to myself.

  Next morning I humped trunks and boxes from the attic and lined them up in the hall. It was a hard grind, which went on till after dusk, but I enjoyed it because I wasn’t working for a boss. Clegg gave me the general idea, and I just got on with it. There was a bureau I had to bring down, and in one of the drawers were at least a dozen old-fashioned pocket watches. I looked at them, able to see that the numbering in Roman style was beautifully and thinly marked on their white clock faces. Maybe they were prizes or presents he’d been given in his life. One was a large heavy gold piece, complete with its own chain, and a cover that went over the face to protect it, fastening with a firm-sounding click.

  To see whether its tick was healthy I wound up the top knob, and in my stupidity didn’t give it a few twists but went on till I could turn no more without breaking it. I stood by the open drawer, gazing at the second hand strutting around in its small circle, till I heard the tread of Clegg on his way up. So I put it back and carried on dragging the bureau towards the door. When he went down I wrapped the watch in my handkerchief and put it in my pocket. He’d most likely never think of it again, and it was too good a piece of work to moulder away in that drawer for ever. The only thing was the powerful tick-tock, that I had no way of throttling short of snapping the main spring. Its noise, even from the far-off muffle of my handkerchief, seemed spiked into my veins, and my only hope was that Clegg was too deaf or absent-minded to notice, or that I could make enough noise when near him to drown it.

  ‘I think we’ve just about broken the back of it,’ he said, when we sat in the kitchen with tea, and cup-cakes I’d shopped in the village for.

  ‘I’ll stay here again tonight,’ I said, ‘if you think it’s necessary. Nobody misses me in Nottingham.’

  ‘I suppose you wish you’d never bumped, into me, losing your job, and then your girlfriend.’

  ‘What does it matter?’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s all for the good. I didn’t say that at the actual time but I always think so before a thing happens and after it happens. That’s the way I am. I was born like that.’

  ‘It’s lucky you were. It never was any use crying over spilt milk.’

  ‘You can say that again.’ I said, pouring myself another dose of strong tea. ‘I wasn’t glad at losing my job just because I don’t like work.’

  ‘I can see that,’ he said. ‘I’ll make it right with you before you go. That’s a watch I can hear, ain’t it?’

  I held up my hand: ‘This bobbin-ticker makes more noise than Big Ben. It was the cheapest I could find. I’m glad I got it though. Came out of my first week’s wages.’

  ‘It does make a row.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it was embarrassing when I sat with my girl on the back seat at the pictures. She used to think I couldn’t wait to get her outside in the fields. Put her off a bit, this bloody timebomb.’

  He laughed: ‘It is that all right. Let’s get back to it, shall we?’

  I wondered what he meant by making it right with me. During our short acquaintance we’d become as close as you could get without being related, or so it seemed to me. Due to my short-sighted power game, I’d done him a favour by getting an inflated price for his house, and all that remained was to see whether he appreciated it or not. If he didn’t, at least I had the watch, though I would have regarded it as a shabby substitute for the golden handshake I’d grown day by day to expect.

  I used the bathroom for a wash, and put on my coat. Clegg met me in the hall, and handed me an envelope. ‘Take this, for your trouble. I always repay a kindness, and hope you’ll do the same throughout your life, even when you do have bad luck, which I don’t suppose you will, not very often, at any rate. But don’t get into trouble that’s all I can say. If you help people as much as you’ve helped me you should get on all right. In that envelope you’ll find a note with my address in Leicester on it, so if ever you get that way, come and see me.’

  ‘I’ll be sure to. I was glad to do a bit of work for you.’ After handshakes and a hug on both sides I went quickly along the lane to get a bus, feeling a right bastard with Clegg’s best watch beating time to my heart in the arse-pocket of my trousers. On the top deck I furtively opened the envelope and counted a hundred and fifty pounds in five-pound notes. I could have jumped out of the window for joy, but instead screwed up the paper with his best wishes and address on it, and let that go into the blackness instead. All I can do, when I think back on it, is wonder at the irresponsibility of youth, while knowing for certain that at the actual time I thought about nothing at all.

  In the isolation of my bedroom I took out my savings and totted up the total wealth, which came to the fat fantastic sum of two hundred and sixty pounds. It seemed impossible that I owned such money, and as if in doubt I held all of Clegg’s five-pound notes up to the light to see if the watermark and steel strip were in them. I stowed it back under my mattress, and couldn’t sleep. The moon glowed, so I drew the curtains, and I trembled, all of a sweat, afraid to sleep in case some robbing bastard should shin up the drainpipe, get through the window, flatten me with a bludgeon, and make off with my fortune. If anyone in an area like ours came to know of it, that would have been my fate. I tossed and screwed my face into the pillow, pressing my eyes shut tight in order to blot my heart into sleep.

  Nobody did know of it, except me. The only safe way was to spend it, so next morning I put on my best suit and went to a garage that sold second-hand cars. The manager showed me a Ford Popular only four years old (or so he said) for a hundred and thirty-five pounds, and after a good try-out around the city, then over the Trent as far as Ruddington, I paid spot cash for it. With tax, insurance, and a tank of petrol I still had more than a hundred quid to my name.

  I piloted the car home with a Whiff between my lips, windows wide open even though it was like Siberia. A bus followed me down Ilkeston Road, and I was afraid to go too slow in case it kept right on and flattened me. Fortunately, the traffic lights stopped us both, but I was still fluttering nervously when I pulled up at the kerb outside the house. I ran in for a tin of polish and a rag because there was a touch of rust on the front bumper, and worked till every bit of chrome reflected my happy and grinning face.

  When Mother came in that night she wanted to know: ‘Whose is that car outside?’

  ‘Mine.’

  ‘Don’t be bloody silly,’ she said. ‘I asked you a civilized question: whose is it? If you don’t know, say so.’

  ‘It’s mine,’ I told her. ‘I bought it this morning’ – explaining how I’d got the money from Clegg.

  ‘You are a dark horse,’ she said. ‘Has it got lights?’ I told her it had, and she asked me to take her out in it. We drove to Grandma’s at Beeston. There was a great wind going, and at one place along University Boulevard I felt it bumping the car side-on, as if with a bit more strength it would push us over. Mother enjoyed the ride so much she was singing all the way.

  I bought some drink at a beer-off, and we supped a few pints in Grandma’s warm kitchen. ‘Be careful’, my mother said. ‘Don’t put too much back.’

  ‘I can only drive well if I’m drunk. Otherwise I’m frightened to death.’

  ‘I’ll do the boozing,’ Grandma said. ‘And you do the driving. That’s fair, ain’t it?’ We laughed and stewed over it, and after the booze came tea and sandwiches as part of Grandma’s generous service.

  Halfway through this
we heard a rending of rotten wood, the sound of a thousand twigs biting themselves in half, followed by a dull impacted crunch outside the house. Grandma screamed that hell was coming down on us. My heart almost burst, and I thought a bomb had fallen or a gasometer had gone up. A vision of my crushed and mangled car flipped over my eyes, and I charged like a madman for the scullery door, from which side most of the noise had come.

  People were shouting, cars stopping, lights flashing. I felt the wind licking my face with its cold tongue. I couldn’t get out for a wall of dry and tangled branches held me back. I was frantic, ripped and clawed my way to the garden where the greater part of the trunk had fallen. Much of the tree had smashed on to the wall, spliced halfway down it.

  Mother was by my side. ‘I hope no one was walking along the pavement. If they were, they’ve had it.’

  ‘Sod them,’ I cried, almost in tears. ‘What about my car?’ We pulled at the gate, but due to the buckling of the wall it wouldn’t open. Grandma was laughing behind us. ‘You sound as if you’re off your head,’ I shouted.

  ‘Your grandad’s tree’s gone down at last!’ she said, and went back to laughing so that I could have killed even her when I thought about my car.

  It was buried under the rammel of branches. I held on to the wall to stop the stars going round. People were pulling at brittle wood and taking it back to their houses for kindling. I scrabbled like a maniac to get to the car, and a man said: ‘Look at that greedy sod. Some folks aren’t satisfied till they get the lot.’

  ‘’Appen it’s his car,’ another voice chipped in.

  ‘Serves him right, then. Good job it struck the rich and not the poor.’ But I reached it, and in no time the top was freed. The main weight of the tree had been taken by the wall, and far from the car being a write-off, it now seemed that apart from a couple of bad dints in the roof only one of the front lamps was smashed. Trying to hold back my rage so that all the nosy-parkers shouldn’t have a good show for nothing, I got inside and saw that some split branches had punctured two jagged holes in the roof, as if God had fired two anti-tank shells for spite, vertically down from his stony heaven. I could have cried my heart out at such a disaster on the first day of my owning it, but later on, totting back a half-bottle of Grandma’s Irish whiskey (that I’ll swear blind she brewed herself) I didn’t mind joining in the general laugh though only because I was drunk.

  Next morning I got to work, and wiped up the water that had dripped inside during the night. I hammered the ragged lips of the holes as closed as they could get, then put a crisscross work of stickypaper strips inside and out, and painted them from a tin of enamel I bought at a bucket shop. That made it as watertight as it would ever be again, and with the lamps fixed, the car was once more roadworthy.

  I covered hundreds of miles in the next few days, till I was as good a driver as the rest of them, if not better, judging by the number of near-misses I had due to other people’s carelessness. I went past Cleggy’s house one day and saw a couple of removal vans outside, but didn’t go in to say hello in case he’d missed the pocket-watch, which I now wore proudly from my jacket lapel. I thought that perhaps I’d look him up one day in Leicester (I could get his address from the library) and give it back to him. This good intention agreeably stifled whatever guilt I felt, and even made me feel happy for the next half-mile. After the accident of the tree my car didn’t look as spick and span as it had the morning I bought it, but my affection for it had grown accordingly. Such a vegetable baptism was all it would ever suffer, and I hoped that from now on whoever might be in heaven would look after us. I felt comfortable in it, safe, enclosed, as if it were more of a home than my own room. If I curled up in the back I could even sleep, and in fact often dozed there, parked by some narrow lane of north Notts when I was fagged out from the mental effort of steering it along. I had food in the car, a blanket, fags, tools, maps, and a Thermos filled with tea before setting out. I felt like a gipsy, but always went back home at night, as if I were still tied at the ankle by an invisible rope.

  Driving through town at just gone five one afternoon I saw Miss Bolsover walking towards her bus stop. ‘Gwen,’ I called, using her first name now that we didn’t work together. She heard me, I’m sure, but kept her head up and went right on, her broad arse shaking inside her loose grey coat. A van was hooting for me to get a move on, and she thought this was me also signalling her. So I flicked on my indicators as if I was going into the kerb to stop, but still crawled along it slowly, turned my window to the bottom and called: ‘Miss Bolsover!’

  She came over with a smile: ‘Hello, Michael!’

  ‘I’ll drive you home,’ I said. ‘Get in.’ The car sagged, not that she weighed more than most, but it seemed that the springs weren’t in the best condition. Gwen Bolsover was what might be called a well-built woman of more than thirty, with touching grey hair above her delicate pink ears. Her pear-shaped face was always full of concern for others, and as far as I understood from office gossip she had gone through a succession of boyfriends, all of whom were said to have let her down. Why they had, nobody knew, but that was her claim, and such was the honesty of her face when she said it that no one dreamed of disbelieving her. This fact certainly made men go for her like flies when they heard of it.

  Perfume filled the car, and I had to brace myself so as not to swoon under it because traffic was heavy, and I couldn’t swear while she was in the car in case such words were misunderstood. I had hoped, in my over-optimistic way, that Claudine would be the first to waft perfume and smear lipstick over the upholstery. I’d intended calling on her when the month was up to see if we couldn’t get back to our senses. And now Miss Bolsover had beaten her to it, a free gift suddenly out of nowhere, when she hadn’t been in my mind for weeks. I knew already that you never got what you expected – or even what you deliberately didn’t expect in the hope that you’d get it. That’s why I lived on the minimum of hope and never expected anything. I certainly did as well as anybody else out of this system, and maybe, in some ways, a whole lot better.

  Miss Bolsover asked where I’d got the car, and I told her I’d bought it out of my savings, that I’d been putting money by for exactly this since I was fifteen. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I do admire such steadiness of purpose in a man. And you’re still so young. I wonder what sort of a person you’ll be in ten years’ time? Or in twenty years?’ She lived at Wollaton, and we were already caught in the rush hour to get around Canning Circus. ‘How well you drive,’ she said. ‘It was good of Mr Weekley to give you those driving lessons.’

  ‘I’m not that young,’ I objected, ‘Miss Bolsover. In fact I feel a lot more than twenty-one at times, I can tell you.’ In one sharp turn she fell against me, soft arms and apologies, then asked me where I was working now, and I told her I was fixed up at Steke and Scull’s, the biggest agents in the city, but that for the moment I was at their Loughborough branch. This seemed like a rise indeed, and she congratulated me on it ‘How wonderful for you.’

  ‘It is,’ I said, driving with one hand and taking out a Whiff with the other. I offered her one: ‘Smoke these?’

  Her laugh was loud, head thrown back: ‘Oh goodness, no. Not yet, anyway.’

  I lit up: ‘You know, Weekley gave me the sack, but it was all due to a misunderstanding. I tried to do the firm a favour, and he thought I was, going it for myself.’

  ‘All I know,’ she said, ‘is that he thought you had done something that wasn’t ethical.’

  ‘Whatever that means,’ I said. ‘Maybe he just wanted an excuse to get rid of me.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Michael. He always spoke highly of you.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘he should have realized I was young enough to make mistakes, and not thrown me out like that.’

  ‘It was a pity,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realize you felt so bad about it.’

  ‘I did, and do.’ The fact was that if I’d stayed I could have made a lot more money doing exactly what I’d done with C
legg, but I’d have used my brains and not got found out so easily. To be able to do it, however, one had to work for an estate agent as a cover, and so as to get the necessary information. ‘It was a great shock for me to get thrown out, Miss Bolsover,’ I went on, passing Radford station. ‘Mostly, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t admit it, because I hated losing contact with you. It was the greatest treat in my life, waking up every morning and knowing that when I got to the office I’d be able to see you. Don’t ask me why I’m telling you this. It’s all too late now.’ I looked straight ahead at the road: ‘The reason I tried so hard to bring off that little bit of business for the firm was because I might be given more responsibility, and then you’d perhaps have thought a little better of me, because it seemed that in spite of my feelings you hardly knew I existed.’ The words just tumbled out, without me knowing that they would. I was so controlled by them that I was slightly scared, but took a split-second goz at Miss Bolsover to see if there was any effect.

  She looked in front, nose and mouth set to some thought that I wasn’t party to, as if engrossed by other things entirely. But she was blushing faintly, so I couldn’t be sure of this. In order to make it worse for her I said I was sorry, that I shouldn’t have spoken, but that my heart was so full I hadn’t had much say in the matter.

  ‘You’re a strange boy, Michael.’

  ‘Normal,’ I answered. ‘I can’t imagine anyone not liking you. But it’s more than that with me.’

  I said nothing else because no words came. She gave directions to reach her house, a small bungalow off a by-road near Wollaton. I let her get out by herself, and she stood with the door open. Play at being good-mannered too early on and you’ll never get anywhere. ‘Would you like to come in? We’ll have a cup of tea,’ she said. ‘You’ve been so good, to drive me home.’

  It was windy, and she was standing in it getting red cheeks, so I had to make up my mind. ‘If it’s a quick one,’ I said, ‘because I promised to take Mother to that symphony concert at the Albert Hall.’ The lie was innocent, but I made it to put Miss Bolsover at her ease, knowing she was partial to that form of entertainment.