Key to the Door

by Alan Sillitoe

  In every staging-post of a house they found bugs, tiny oxblood buttons that hid within the interstices of bedticks, or secreted themselves below the saddles of their toes. Cockroaches also fought: black advance-guards of the demolition squads came out in silent, scuttling platoons over the kitchen floor after dark, often encountering lethal powders sprinkled by Vera, and those that succumbed would be swept up by Seaton before he mashed tea in the morning; or they would run into Seaton’s equally fatal hammerblows and be washed up by his wife when she lifted the rug on the unequal battlefield next day.

  The demolition of one condemned block took a novel turn: the Albion Yard area, deserted and cordoned off, was to be the target of bombs from buzzing two-winged aeroplanes, the sideshow of a military tattoo whose full glory lay on the city’s outskirts. The bombing was to be on a Sunday afternoon, and Seaton hoisted Brian on to his stocky shoulders so that he felt one with the trams that swayed like pleasure-ships before the council house, ferrying crowds to the bombing; he rocked on his father’s shoulders, gripping the neck of a dad he hated when he did or said something to make his mam cry. But the grim and miserable emotion was kept to the ground as dad swung him up high, an action that split his hate in two upon such kindness. The first intimation of a good deed to him by dad only brought back his mam’s agonized cries as the blood streamed from her face, but his turning head beheld his mother at this moment happy and saying he would be taken to see the bombing if he was a good lad, passing his father a packet of fags from the mantelpiece for a smoke in case they had to wait long before the aircraft played Punch and Judy with the enclave of slums in which they used to live.

  Seaton’s body swung as he walked and Brian was often in danger of falling overboard, pitching head first from his lifeboat-dad into the boiling sea of other heads around. Peril came at the quick switch into an unexpected short-cut, and his flailing arms, finding nothing closer, grabbed the black tufts of dad’s short, strong hair. When dad cried out he’d get a pasting if he didn’t stop that bleddy lark, Brian’s instinct was to go forward and bind himself on to dad’s bull neck, a tightened grip that brought forth a half-throttled exclamation from dad below saying that he could bloody-well walk if that was going to be his game; at which a shirt-sleeved tentacle reached up and tried to lift him outwards; but Brian reacted to the danger of his imminent slingdown by clinging tighter in every way so that the well-muscled arm dragged at him in vain. “Come on, my lad, let’s have you down.” And again: “Are you goin’ ter get down or aren’t you?”

  “I’ll fall”—his arms bare and the neck slippy with sweat.

  “No, you won’t.”

  “I will, dad, honest.” They were near the lassoed bomb-target, bustled to the kerb by those who wanted to get near the rope, maybe feel the actual blast and pick up a fallen brick for a souvenir. Mounted policemen pushed back those who infiltrated the brick-strewn neutral ground, and Brian, forgetting to struggle, saw white foam around a horse’s mouth. He asked dad if it were soap.

  “Yes,” Seaton told him. Brian bent his head and enquired of the nearest ear: “What do they give it soap for?”

  “So’s it’ll bite anybody who tries to get past the coppers.”

  “Why does anybody want to get past the coppers?” he whispered.

  “Because they want to see the bombs closer.”

  “But they’ll get blown up.”

  “’Appen they want to. Now come down for a bit, my owd duck, because my showders is aching.”

  “Not yet, our dad. Let me stay up some more.”

  “No, come down now, then you can go up again when the bombs start dropping.”

  “But I want to see the horses bite somebody first.”

  “They won’t bite anybody today,” Seaton said. So down he came, jammed among the shoes and trousers of a surging jungle, evading a tiger boot or a lion fist, a random matchstick or hot fagend. Three biplanes dipped their wings from the Trent direction. Brian climbed up to his dad’s shoulders to spot from his fickle control-tower, his hand an unnecessary eyeshade because the sun was behind a snow-mountain cloud silhouetting the yellow planes.

  They swung back, flying low in silence, like gliders, because of noise from the mass of people. “They aren’t going very fast, dad,” he complained. “They’re slower than motorcars.”

  “That’s because they’re high up, kid,” someone told him.

  “They’ll come lower soon,” dad said.

  “Will they crash?” Brian asked. “I’ve never seen an aeroplane crash.”

  “You will one day,” somebody laughed.

  Each plane purred loudly along the rooftops, like a cat at first, then growling like a dog when you try to take its bone away, finally as if a roadmender’s drill were going straight to the heart, so that he felt pinned to the ground. Two black specks, then two more, slid from the rounded belly of each. The gloved wheels beneath seemed to have been put down especially to catch them, but the dots fell through and disappeared into the group of ruined houses.

  “Now for it,” somebody announced, and an enormous cracking sound, a million twig-power went six times into the sky—followed by the muffled noise of collapsing walls somewhere in the broken and derelict maze.

  A policeman’s horse reared up, tried to climb an invisible stairway leading from the explosions, then saw sense and merely stood nodding its head and foaming. A bleak scream came from some woman at the back of the crowd and Brian saw her led away by men in black and white uniforms. “Is she frightened, dad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m not, are you?”

  “No.” But Seaton lifted him down, dragged him roughly out of the crush.

  “Is that the end, dad?”

  “Stop asking bleddy questions, will yer?” Brian caught his mood, and the bomb that had lodged itself inside his chest suddenly burst, scattering more blind havoc in him than the actual grenades sent from the flight of planes. “Stop cryin’, will yer?” Seaton tugged at him angrily. “Come on, if you stop cryin’ I’ll buy you an ice-cream cornet.”

  “I don’t want one,” he roared, thereby creating a big puzzle, its depth measurable only by Seaton’s inability to solve it. “Then what do you want?”

  And without giving the question any thought, he answered: “Nowt”—and went on crying till he stopped.

  On a wet afternoon two tall men wearing raincoats and nicky hats knocked at the front door. Vera led them into the room where Seaton sat. Brian, sprawled on the floor playing with a box of dominoes, noticed that she was almost in tears, something that never failed to touch off the sea-controlling springs at the back of his own heart. She stood with folded arms, and the two men stayed by the door. “They’ve come for you, Harold,” she said. He turned his head and looked up from the fireplace.

  “We don’t want any trouble,” one of the men said, seeing desperation in his ashy face.

  He looked at them for some time. “You’ll have to keep me,” he remarked at last, forcing a smile.

  “We know all about that.”

  Seaton hadn’t moved from his chair. “And my family as well you’ll have to keep.”

  “That’s nothing to do with us,” he was told.

  Vera unfolded her arms, ran a finger along one of her eyes. “Shall I get you your coat, duck?”

  “Aye, you might as well,” he answered, standing up. “I’m going on holiday, and I suppose I’ll see a lot of my pals there as well.” This witticism amused him, and he laughed, his face relaxed. The two men said nothing. “Got a car?” Seaton asked them.

  “No,” one said, “it’s not far; we’ll walk you down.”

  “Well, I don’t suppose it matters if the neighbours guess what’s going on. It might ’ave been them if they did but know it. If I’d ’ad a job to wok at I wouldn’t a done this. But when yer kids ain’t got no grub, what else can you do?” He’d run up too many food bills at too many shops. It’s a big country, he thought. There’s grub in the shops for everybody, so why ain
’t there wok? I don’t know, it beats me, it does.

  Vera came back with his coat. “Will you want your mac as well?”

  “No,” he said, “keep it. You’ll have to pawn it when you get short.” Brian felt himself lifted from the dominoes and kissed; then quickly put down. “Don’t let the kids get at my tools, Vera, will you?”

  “No,” she said, “they’ll be all right.”

  A watch was looked at, and Seaton realized aloud that he’d better go. “I’ll see you in a couple o’ months then. It’s nowt to worry about, duck. I’ll be all right, and you’ll be all right. They’ve got to keep you all, so they’ll be the losers in the end.”

  “Come on, young man,” the eldest said. “We haven’t got all day. We’re busy.”

  “I expect you are,” Seaton said.

  Brian was too involved in his collapsing line of dominoes to wonder what was going on, and his mother must have been crying for some time before he joined in, without knowing why. Not that she knew why she was crying, because, as Seaton had truthfully said, none of them would starve while he was in Lincoln; and it would be as much of a holiday for her as it would be for him, and this thought lifted her from despair as she set the table and put on the kettle to boil and sat wondering however she’d come to marry a bloody fool who got himself sent to jail—and was a rotter to her in the bargain. She could hardly believe it had happened like it had, and that she was in such a fine bleddy mess; and it was impossible not to spend the next hour brooding on it, going back over the last few years and picking them to pieces as if they were the components of a complex lock that, once opened, might solve something.

  CHAPTER 2

  Merton had scratched his head. He drew back at the sound of some far-flung twig or half-hearted gate rattling from outside, hoping to hear the door-latch lift and Vera make her way across the kitchen to say she was sorry for being late.

  Which is too much to expect, he thought, from any man’s daughter since the war. Leaves made a noise like the erratic beginning of a rainstorm: October: if she comes in wet she’ll get my fist, he promised himself, turning back to the fire, and no mistake; I can’t have her getting her death o’ cold and then not being fit for wok; she manages to get enough time off as it is. But he knew it wouldn’t rain because he hadn’t yet noticed the pause between the end of leaves falling and the commencing tread of mute cats running lightfoot through them; so he swung a watch from his waistcoat pocket in pursuance of another reason to be angry, and saw with satisfying indignation that it was eleven o’clock. What a bloody time to be coming home, and me having to get up at five in the morning because they’re bringing a dozen ponies up from the Deep Main. They’ll be hell to pay getting ’em out of the skips—and all of ’em to be shod before they’re turned loose by the tip-field. Allus the same when you want an early night.

  He spat forcefully at the fire-bars and his spit didn’t sizzle with the alacrity to which he was accusomed, thereby reinforcing his often-said conviction that nothing in life could be relied on. By God she’ll get the stick when she comes in for keeping me up like this. Yellow flames from a darkening unstable fire-bed blazed full-tilt upwards, and with the self-made poker he pushed a lump of prime pit coal into the last effort of the inferno. God bugger it, there was no doubt about using the stick, and he turned, while thrusting back his watch, to make sure it still leaned by the pantry door. It was bad luck for Vera—the last of Merton’s brood young enough to be disciplined in this way—because she shared his anger with the dogs now barking in the yard, was the wall to his violent and frequent upstarts of passion, which usually—though not always—coincided with signs of defiance in what animals or humans happened to be under his control; and whereas the dogs would lick his hand a few hours after one of his uncouth godlike flings of rage, Vera took days before she could force herself into the kitchen for a meal. Such domineering reached beyond the borderline of family, for Merton was recognized as the mainstaying blacksmith of the pit he worked at, where, no matter how obstinate or too-happy the horses and ponies became, they were soon broken into docility by his strong will; hence shoes hammered on to tranquil hoofs by Merton only loosened when nails could no longer support the thinning metal. A lit pipe signalled a good job done, and no chafing butty or gaffer begrudged him the loud smack their horses got on the arse as an indication that it should be taken clip-clop back to its shafts outside the shed door; they’d better not, either, because that was the on’y way to deal with ’em; a clout for the hoss so’s the rest on ’em would do as they was towd.

  Vera’s footsteps came quickly up the path, crunching lightly on cinders as she crossed the yard. By God, he told himself, straightening up against the chair-back to make sure he was hearing right, if she brings trouble to this house by her running around with lads, she’ll be out of that front gate and on the road for good and all with every tat she’s got. The leaves had stopped racing, and both dogs whined in a duet as she passed the kennel: about time, he muttered, but I’ll teach her to stay out so long at the tuppenny hop, when she should a bin in at half-past nine. I’ll put a bloody stop to this—his mental peroration cut off by the rattling door-latch.

  She had been to the Empire, was still happy at remembering the antic-clowns and unclean jokes and the pink ribald heads shaking with laughter as seen from a front seat of the fourpenny gods. Her new scarf had slid from the rail, and after the last curtain had dropped and closed (she was half-sick from the heat and cigar smoke that rose through the show from pit to sweating ceiling), she had wheeled down the slippery steps with Beatty and Ben and Jack and invaded the deserted dress-circle to get it back. A tripe-and-onion supper revived all four, piled them, after custard pies to follow, on to the last tram that rattled its way towards Radford. Beatty and Jack were jettisoned into the darkness of Salisbury Street, and Vera began to wonder whatever in the world her father would say at her getting home so late. She already pictured herself trying to borrow the fare to Skegness so as to find a living-in job at some boarding-house, chucked out of the Nook with a heavy heart and a light bag holding her belongings, with Merton’s words that she could bloody-well stay out for good stinging one ear, while the fact that she wouldn’t be able to get a job now at Skeggy because the season had long since finished made an ironic tune in the other. Well, perhaps he would already have gone to bed and locked the door on her. She hoped so, for then enough sleep could be had in the wash-house curled up on sacks next to a still warm copper, and by tomorrow he may have forgotten how mad he’d been. Ructions, she thought, that’s what I’m sure it’ll be; even though I’ve been working seven years I can’t do a thing right as far as the old man’s concerned. One bleddy row after another just because I come home late; and I don’t suppose it’ll alter a deal either until I’m married; and then I wain’t be able to go out alone at night at all, with some big husband bullying at me for his supper.

  She ignored the silent Ben beside her and ruminated on her previous runnings-away from home, and twice she came back because she’d lost her living-in job at the end of a season and couldn’t earn enough at shop or factory to pay for her board. There wouldn’t be a third time, her father had promised, which she knew to be true: “And you wouldn’t be sitting at this table now,” he’d bellowed, “if your soft-hearted mother hadn’t let you in last night when you called up to the bedroom winder and asked if she’d have you back. Next time it’ll be ME you’ll have to ask, and I’ll say NO.”

  Still, it might not be so late, she thought, Ben having set out for Wollaton—morosely because she’d refused to descend to the canal bank with him. Turning down the lane towards Engine Town, she was terrified at the twig-shadows, and leaves rustling like the thin pages of a hundred well-hidden Bibles caught in the wind, and stepped softly into the pitch-blackness wondering: Shall I be murdered? Is there a man behind that tree? as she did on every dark night coming back to the Nook. I’ll run by it anyway, and walk when I come to the lit-up houses, because if anybody stops me there I can kno
ck at a door for help. In the split-running of terror she laughed, remembering the man dressed up as Charlie Chaplin, and imitating the leg-work of a dancer on reaching the long railway tunnel, hardly knowing she was under it until a goods train came out of the fields like a cannonade of coronation guns and made her run with all speed to the other side with coat open and mud splashing her ankles, afraid the train might weigh too heavily on its sleepers and crash through underneath, or that some unknown evil would stifle her in the complete silence of its noise.

  With no breath left, she walked along the sunken lane, elderberry and privet hedges shaking softly above, black night split only by a melancholy old man’s whistle from the distant train.

  She patted the dogs before the kitchen door, as if thankful for the happiness they must feel for her safe return. The latch gave easily into a safe refuge, and the suspended oil-lamp in the corner dazzled as she took off her coat. She saw her father sitting by the fire, legs stretched out towards the hearth, his long lean body stiffening. “Wheer yer bin?”

  He’s mad, right enough. So what shall I say? His “wheer yer bin?” turned the first spoke of the same old wheel, with every question and answer fore-ordained towards some violent erratic blow. “Out,” she replied, pouring a cup of tea at the table.

  “If yer don’t answer me you’ll get a stick across yer back.”

  She was unable to meet the glare of such grey eyes. His clipped white hair, lined and tanned face, and white moustache above thin lips, made up a visage from which all her misery emanated. “I’ve been to the Empire,” she admitted.