A Start in Life

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘Don’t get gloomy, comrade. If that car of ours breaks down far from civilization we’ll want something to keep us warm and happy. Cheers!’

  ‘Cheers!’ June said, turning on her stool to look at a middle-aged man sitting over a brandy glass in the corner.

  ‘Do you know him?’ I asked. He had a thin bony face and a high pink bald head, wore a cravat instead of a tie, and hadn’t shaved for a couple of days.

  ‘It’s a writer,’ she told me, ‘called Gilbert Blaskin.’

  ‘Go over and say hello.’

  ‘I don’t know him that much.’ She turned back to the bar, and swung down the firewater in one gulp of her beautiful throat.

  ‘I’ve heard of his books,’ I said. ‘I even read one, but I don’t remember anything about it. It’s the first time I’ve seen a real writer, even from a distance.’

  ‘Don’t stare at him,’ she said, as if having a reason for not meeting him now, ‘or you’ll embarrass him. He’s very sensitive.’

  ‘Poor bloke! I suppose that’s what comes of being an author.’

  The publican put a bottle of White Horse before me, then two packets of Whiffs and a consignment of Player’s. ‘Make it three more doubles as well,’ Bill cried, sliding his glass over like a lord.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the publican said, with such obsequiousness that I wanted to put my boot into his lardy face for hating us so much after he’d said it. It helped me to pay up with a smile, treating June and Bill, my boon and travelling companions. There was nothing else to do, since I had money and they had none. I could hardly have walked out when we had grown so friendly with our story-telling in the car, and in any case I didn’t want to.

  ‘Drink up,’ I said, ‘and have another. I’ll order this time,’ but when I did the three glasses put before us came with no ‘yes sir’ for me.

  ‘You don’t have the personal presence yet to get that,’ said Bill, who noticed everything. I blushed at hearing this in front of June, and cursed Bill for an inaccurate and bloody liar, feeling I would certainly have got that sort of treatment if he hadn’t been there.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said gruffly, ‘out of this clip joint.’ Bill saw a one-armed bandit by the door and, going over to the publican, asked for ten bob’s worth of sixpences, nodding across at me. I paid, and stood behind him as he almost pulled his arm off, but without getting anything back. When he’d wasted half I asked him to let me have a go, and held out my hand for some sixpences, but he told me to push off and get my own, which I did, and at the first pull I heard a dozen tinkle down into the space-mouth below.

  ‘You see?’ I said jubilantly.

  He pushed me aside, trembling with greed: ‘I’ll get that fucking jackpot yet.’ But he lost every last sixpence in the next half-hour, and just as I was getting into my stride to do the same, and we’d knocked back a few more doubles, the publican bawled that it was time to close the pumps, making us feel like real bloody mugs.

  That short stay at the pub cost me the best part of five quid, so I was glad to get out of it and back on the road, even though thick clouds were belting across the woods and steeples and it was starting to rain. June regretted not having got a lift in Gilbert Blaskin’s Jaguar as she huddled in the back expecting the worst, but Bill and I felt quite cheerful at such a mild attack of weather. I felt a bit drunk, with a rubber face, and steel arms broken in six places, but once we got going it didn’t seem much of a disadvantage. In fact we were all so tight that the car went better than before. The only letdown was when I nerved myself at last to switch on the windscreen wipers. They both shot sideways out of the car’s path and were never seen again. Bill made me stop while he crawled around in the wet for a long search, promising he’d be able to fix them back. ‘You know,’ he said, buttoning his saturated coat when he got in beside me, ‘I’m beginning to think that this vehicle isn’t roadworthy.’

  ‘Don’t be pessimistic,’ I said, when it started like a dream. Rain drummed down. I was driving on the ocean bed, and expected to see herrings and goldfish making boggle-faces at me. In spite of being drunk I was afraid to go faster than thirty miles an hour, and even twenty at times, so that lorry drivers hooted and cursed as they swung out to overtake. I was sweating with the work of it, a fanatical stare of concentration baking my stomach as we jogged along. By some incredible scissor-feat of the body, Bill managed to transfer himself into the back without knocking my driving arm, murmuring that he was going to make a party of it. June was nervous, but joined me and Bill in smoking a Whiff so that, what with their frequent swigs of whisky, the place stank worse than a pub on Saturday night. I suddenly realized that their lives were in my hands, so my stone-cold soberness came back quicker than it would normally have done.

  I passed the map over my shoulder to Bill and asked him to find out where we were, but he laughed, wound down the window, and threw it outside. It must have opened and got laid by the wind across some unlucky bastard’s windscreen, because the scream of two or three hooters broke into me. I didn’t mind that so much, but when Bill tried to get the window back up it wouldn’t come, and gusts of rain ran around the inside of the car and sprayed us all. He and June (I could see them in my mirror) had their arms around each other, and started to sing ‘Oh it ain’t gonna rain no more, no more’. I wanted to get back there and throttle them, but couldn’t see out of the car behind me and so was afraid to pull up in case a lorry trampled us all to death. Apart from my wonky brakes, oil and water made the road as slippery as a frozen lake. Rain made it so dark that cars coming by had their headlights on, but I couldn’t do the same because I didn’t have any lights left. I thought of getting into a lay-by and stopping this mad journey, but I didn’t want to hear Bill’s scorn that I was yellow and had no guts. As long as they were happy I didn’t mind going on. June had the goodness of heart to light a cigar for me now and again, to lean over and put it like a kiss between my lips.

  The rain eased down and normal daylight came back. This seemed to depress those in the back, so they dozed for a few miles. I pulled in and wiped the windscreen with a sheet of newspaper. Now I could see again. A bit of sun shone on their angel faces, and I felt I was driving the Lazaretto express as I got nearer to London. My recent fling with tender Miss Bolsover seemed years away, and my concern at having left Claudine in the lurch had turned into mild curiosity when I wondered what she’d do now I had well and truly gone.

  I felt myself falling towards the middle of the road, though it was obvious to my senses, lost in sentimental recollection, that I was still in the car. Bill woke with a great shout, and June screamed, as a noise of scraping metal seemed about to cleft the car in twain, and dig all our graves before we could slump into them. An overtaking van braked and swerved, got safely by, and went on without stopping to see what peril we were in. My head hit the windscreen but did not break it. I applied all my skill to stop the car. The front right wheel had fallen off, we discovered, on getting out.

  Bill scratched his head. ‘That’s rough. Are you a member of the AA?’

  ‘You know I’m bloody-well not.’

  ‘It’s not so obvious,’ he retorted. ‘Your badge might have fallen off. Everything else has. I can’t imagine when this car last had a service. The next one will be a church service.’

  ‘You’re too bloody funny. What are we going to do now?’

  ‘Get the wheel back on, then continue our journey. The first thing is to find it.’ This was done in a few minutes, and while June was stationed to warn other cars of our obstruction, Bill got tools from the boot and lifted the car up. All the nuts had vanished from the wheel, so he took a nut from the other three to fix on the erring one. The thread of the bolts was a bit raddled, but he did not consider this to be dangerous. In less than half an hour we climbed back in and set off. ‘That was a close call,’ he said, tilting his head to get the full benefit of the whisky bottle.

  I laughed hysterically. ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘The wheels are all righ
t now. I suppose the roof will blow off next time.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I reassured him. The wheel had buckled slightly when it flew off, so it wasn’t easy to steer. Sometimes I had to use all my strength to keep the car on the proper side of the road. Nothing had gone right on this trip, I brooded, fighting for my life and dreading another phase of rain. The sky in front was dark enough to promise it. When Bill came out of his drunken doze I asked if he knew a garage in London where I might have my car repaired.

  ‘Get rid of it.’

  ‘How much do you think I’d make if I sold it?’

  ‘At a rough guess,’ he said, ‘fifty bob.’

  ‘You’re cracked,’ I told him, feeling that my sense of humour was no longer to be trusted.

  Bill slung the empty whisky bottle through the open window. ‘Take my advice. Abandon it at the first Tube station we come to. Park it somewhere, and finish your journey by public transport. You can always go back for it at a later date, if you’re still hankering for a final ride of death.’

  ‘I’m coming to the conclusion that I definitely don’t like the way you talk,’ I said. ‘It’s not that I mind pessimism as a line of patter, but with you it’s pure malice. What’s more you try to pass it off as humour, and that’s the dirtiest trick of all.’

  ‘I’m only trying to keep your spirits up.’

  ‘The car goes better when you stay quiet,’ I said, pressing the horn at a van too close in overtaking, and finding as I spoke that Fate must have cut its throat while I wasn’t looking.

  ‘Do you want to drive for a while?’

  ‘Not me,’ he said quickly. ‘It knows you best. A machine is human enough to know its own master, and you’re it, in this special case. Might kick me in the guts if I have a go.’

  ‘Can you drive?’ I asked June.

  ‘Yes, but you have to ride this one, and I’ve left my saddle at home.’ So, clapped-out as I was, I was on my own, and had to stick it out, which I began to think might be possible since we were only twenty miles from the middle of London. As the afternoon grew dim beyond Hertford, I knew I’d just about get there before I was called on to use my non-existent lighting system. Orange sodiums already canopied the road at intervals, though it wasn’t officially lighting-up time. It turned dark blue and smoky, as if snow were going to pour down. I felt cut off from where I’d come from, and where I was going to (wherever that was), and also from Bill and June who appeared to be snogging in the back. I was more on my own than I’d ever been, fighting my lone and maybe losing fight to keep the car going and on the road. It didn’t feel good being the one person between my friends and injury. All that stuff was so much crap, I thought, about responsibility bringing out the best in people. Certainly, one slip and we’d have been under the wheels of an articulated dragon coming in the opposite direction.

  Traffic was thickening by the minute, and at the next box of lights a London swine wheeled down his window and called across at me that I should buy a new car. I was too done-for to respond, but Bill, straight from a refreshing doze against June’s precious bosom, poked his nut out of the gaping windowless window and shouted in his best, vicious jailbird’s voice that if the other bloke didn’t stop his feeble insults he’d take him and his instalment-plan tin-lizzie to pieces and pelt him with the rusty bits after he’d been tied to a traffic light with a fanbelt. The trouble about insulting somebody in a car is that you can’t see how big they are, though it was certain that no person could be bigger than Bill Straw’s big mouth.

  The lamps were still on blood-red stop, so this chap swings his door open and comes over, aiming a punch at Bill that Bill dodges so that it grazes June. The light changed to amber so I shot forward as fast as my battered car would go, swinging across to the inner lane so as to put a line of protective traffic between me and the hefty swine now set to get my liver. This was a feat in itself, but soon his souped-up Zodiac came gliding sideways on, so close I felt a bump as he got me at the place where my fender should have been. ‘Let’s stop and fight it out,’ said Bill. ‘There’s a razor in my bag. I’ll cut him in bits.’

  ‘Maybe he’s got one too,’ I said. ‘It looks as if his boulder-head has been in a few avalanches.’ A wide front view with flashing headlights filled my mirror, and he then swung to get me in the flank. Bill mumbled something about having seen that face before, but couldn’t think where or who it belonged to. When I caught a glimpse of it looking at me, it seemed the sort that never forgot the face it looked at. My steering was so erratic that maybe he thought me a skilful manoeuvrer against his attacks – if a trifle reckless. But I hit the high kerb, and one of my wheel hubs spun along the gutter. It was the last I had, and made me want to get out and kill him. Several glimpses showed him as well dressed and about fifty, with a huge red-stoned ring on a finger of his hand that gripped the wheel. ‘I’ll know him if I ever meet up with him,’ I said. ‘I’ll never forget that face.’ He tailed me again, came close for another bumper-knock, trying to open my car like a sardine tin but do no damage to his own. He cruised alongside for a few seconds, and Bill also got a good look at him. As the thump tore against my front wing June said: ‘Bill’s fainted – or he’s seen a ghost. He’s as white as a sheet. If we can’t rustle up some smelling salts or another flush of whisky he’ll pass into the eternal fields.’

  ‘I know who it is,’ he croaked. ‘Why didn’t I guess sooner?’

  I made a suicide dive to get back at him, feeling my car so battered that I’d nothing left to loose. ‘Who? For Christ sake, tell me!’

  A police car with wailing sirens and a blue light flashing pushed by us both, and my attacker slowed down in front as if steel wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

  ‘It’s Claud Moggerhanger. I sold a brand-new car to him for fifty forged quid a few years back. What a nut I am, getting on the wrong side of him. I’ll never open my big mouth again.’

  I thought he was going to burst out crying. ‘Not in this car you won’t, anyway. Just call next time he comes close and say you’ll apologize. Maybe he’ll let up.’

  My engine started to bang like a machine gun that shot nuts and bolts, and I thought the end was close, even without Claud Moggerhanger. Strangely enough, it picked up speed and whizzed its howitzer way towards Hendon. As I crossed the North Circular I hoped vindictive Claud would veer off east or west, but he didn’t, and came in for another bang just beyond. It was like a dogfight, but he missed. Thinking he’d done the worst, and leaving my engine to do the rest, he turned off before me.

  I reached the traffic island in Hendon, and instead of going round it to the middle of London, I took a wild swing to the left, pulling up to the kerb as soon as I could without killing us all. When the car was still, and a reasonable silence reigned, and before anybody could comment on our miraculous deliverance, the engine dropped out.

  ‘We just made it,’ said Bill, opening the left-hand door, which also fell off. ‘It was exciting while it lasted, though.’

  I sat with my head in my hands, over the steering wheel, reflecting ruefully (that’s the only phrase I can use) on the fact that I’d bought the car especially to come to London in, and that such a simple journey had cost me a hundred and forty quid. At that price I could have hired a Rolls-Royce and chauffeur and eaten caviar and drunk champagne all the way down, and still stayed the night in Claridges or wherever the best doss-house was. ‘I thought I’d never see my little girl again,’ said June, pulling her valise out.

  ‘Come on, love,’ said Bill, ‘we’d better get going. I expect Michael’s going to stay here a while and make arrangements to have his car reconditioned.’

  ‘Go away,’ I said. ‘Vanish.’ It started to pour with rain, heavy drops drumming on the roof, homely and comforting now that the car had stopped, streams of water going down the perspex windscreen.

  ‘We can’t vanish,’ Bill said, ‘without the Tube fare.’ I gave him a ten-bob note. ‘What about a quid for a cup of coffee?’

  ‘Perish,�
�� I told him.

  ‘A right bloody comrade you are,’ he threw at me. ‘Come on, June. You can see me any night of the week at the Clover Leaf if you want to. Maybe I’ll buy you a drink.’ They ran along the road towards the Tube station, and fifteen minutes later, by which time I’d been able to recover from the awful fact of having to abandon my first and beloved car, I took up my suitcase and went in the same direction. A coat collar didn’t help against the blinding rain, and my legs were weak and wobbly, like a sailor just on shore after years at sea. I’d had a few months with a car, and was now back as a normal member of society, a bloke in the descending piss lugging his suitcase towards the Tube station, standing at the ticket box and asking for a one-way fare to King’s Cross. As the train rattled south I laughed at having done that simple journey so perilously, crossed that no-man’s-land after a red sky in the morning, all hundred and twenty-five miles of it.

  Part Three

  A catchy tune was playing all over London, and I don’t remember the name of it any more, not even the tune itself. Sometimes it half comes back to me, but before it can turn fully on, I blot out my mind and fight shy of it, as if I really don’t want to remember. It was a gay, jumpy, tuneful, deathlike-trancelike tune which seemed to be everywhere, livening up the wet winter, and giving people a reason for thinking they were alive. But conductors and window-cleaners whistled it, hummed it, thrummed it on their bells and buckets as if determined to prove themselves made of flesh and blood. I first heard it on the Tube train from Hendon to King’s Cross. A long-haired youth had a transistor radio, and it broke into my speculation as to what I should do now that I had reached the smoke.

  In spite of losing my car, things weren’t as bad as they might have been. I had a hundred pounds in my pocket, and supposed most people came to London with less in their wallets than that. It felt like a fortune that would never run out, to be lived on in affluence for endless weeks. I found a hotel beyond the station, that was full of old ladies and foreign students, where I could get a decent bed and breakfast for thirty bob a night. My name was Donald Charles Cresswell, and I gave my address in the book as 11 Stoneygate Street, Leicester. Why, I don’t know, because I didn’t even feel I was doing it till I had (which is always the case), though I considered only a minute later that it might one day come in useful.