A Man of his Time

by Alan Sillitoe

  She had no patience with people who didn’t talk, or couldn’t talk, or who wouldn’t. You never knew what they would do next, so they weren’t to be trusted. The less they talked the more miserable they looked, and the more threatening they could be. Often they only talked when they wanted something, and if that something they wanted was yours they would have it off you before you knew what was happening. If you had a bit more than them they broke the Commandment. And if they didn’t covet they complained, which was worse.

  Oliver looked at her, smiled as if knowing he owned not only her but the whole world and the air everyone breathed. ‘Don’t get your leggings dirty.’

  He measured his paces one-two-three, footstepped them back again, and flattened himself on the earth to see how much his body covered. He ran to a hillock, and when he got to the top jumped up and down as if to make it lower.

  ‘Have this slice of cake, my pretty little duck. You must be hungry after so much travelling around.’ She offered a corner as if to a prize budgerigar, but he took the slice and went back to chuff-chuffing around the slope like a train. When he fell with a bump she waited for the howling indicated by his face, but the features straightened before reaching her. He drank too much for his throat. ‘My nose is fizzy.’

  ‘I might not know who your father is, but you’re the spitten image of your mother.’ Children took in everything, even at his age, so she must stop saying such things in case he later asked questions his mother wouldn’t want to answer.

  The gate clicked, and she saw Alma coming along the path.

  ‘Coo-ee, Oliver!’ She picked him up, though he was beginning to weigh a ton. Lydia knew from the glow in her eyes that she had passed her test.

  ‘I said everything right, would you believe it? I got a teaching post. Mr Walker congratulated me on the impression I made.’ She wheeled Oliver around in a half-dance until out of breath. ‘Oh, I’m so glad.’

  ‘If you are, then I am. But you must have some tea and a sandwich.’

  Having run from the house too nervous to eat, saying there wasn’t time, she had been half an hour early for the appointment. She steadied herself to sit, as if all strength had been used up in a life that might now be passing. ‘The only thing is I must work in Newark for a year, and I won’t like being separated from my little bundle of shame!’

  Lydia frowned. ‘Newark’s only twenty miles away, and Oliver will be as right as rain with me. Won’t you, Little Nollie? He’ll soon be a big Nollie, then I can set him on at the lace. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ She held him so that Alma could eat, then he ran back to his hillock.

  ‘It’s going to be a struggle.’

  ‘When wasn’t it?’

  ‘But I shall miss him.’

  ‘I know you will, but take it in your stride, and when you look back on it it won’t have seemed too long. You’ll see him every weekend, and he’ll be safe with me, won’t you,’ she called, ‘while your mother knocks some knowledge into all those ragamuffins?’

  Sensing a cloud over the otherwise clear landscape, a tear ran down his cheek, which he caught on his tongue, and smiled at the taste of salt. Alma fastened the top on the flask. ‘I could turn it down.’

  ‘And disappoint Mr Walker? I wouldn’t let you. Not now you’ve come this far.’

  ‘I thought about it on my way here.’

  Lydia stretched. ‘My old bones get worse and worse. When you see what most women have to put up with we should consider ourselves lucky. We’d better go, though. It gets cold at dusk.’

  They must work at the lace until midnight, to make up for the day’s absence, and Alma thought, holding the gate for them to pass through, that compared to such drudgery her time in Newark couldn’t come too soon.

  ‘What’s all this about?’ Burton had to ask, at Edith in her mother’s arms. He might have guessed, but didn’t want to. Her bitter and desperate keening filled the kitchen, while two-year-old Douglas boxed the dog on the rug, an innocent with no notion of the disaster.

  ‘It’s Tommy,’ Mary Ann said. ‘She got the telegram, and came straight here to tell me.’

  ‘The bloody bastards!’ Edith didn’t need to explain who they were. Nobody could at such a time. ‘They’ve gone and killed him.’ She picked up Douglas who, at the bang of her heart and the hard grip, began to howl.

  Burton had noted more houses with blinds drawn on his way from work, meaning that someone in the family had been killed in action. Mary Ann read in the newspaper that the government disliked the custom of drawing blinds. It wasn’t good for the national spirit. People saw how many there were. They talked, and grumbled. They might no longer believe in what the country was supposed to be fighting for. Drawn blinds indicated a plague of misery, and he wondered that people put up with it. Thousands of young men were now called up whether they wanted to go or not, and there soon wouldn’t be enough wood to make crutches for the cripples to go around begging their bread. Wars kept the rich rich, and nobody but the poor ever paid for them.

  He took off his cap, and smoothed the peak before hanging it up. He had even told Edith that he liked Tommy, which made her a little fonder of him, though not by much. He had respected him because he was a smartly dressed hardworking warehouseman at the bike factory, nothing wrong with him as the man for Edith, so he felt pity and anger at his death. She put Douglas close to the dog, and went into the parlour, banging the door behind her.

  ‘I’ll go and keep her company,’ Mary Ann said.

  Burton knew how terrible it was for his daughter, who’d expected to pass a lifetime with the man she loved, and now he was dead, a gunner blown to pieces, as like as not, and for no reason he could fathom, no home burial for him, to see his face and say goodbye. ‘Leave her.’ He sat at the table. ‘The poor girl needs to be by herself a bit.’

  Everyone hungry, they wanted food. Mary Ann, hair grey yet eyes as blue and bright as ever, couldn’t face another’s suffering. Her heart broke every day at the slightest upset, such tender feelings did she have. ‘Sit down and eat with me,’ he said.

  She couldn’t recall when he had last allowed that, perhaps at Matlock when there had been someone else to serve. Did he intend her to think of that happy time? ‘Leave Edith alone,’ he said. ‘Take her dinner in later. She’ll eat it then, I know. She’s one of us. She’s got to go on living, to take care of her lad.’

  He lifted Douglas to his knee, the blank pale face wary, and at his squirming Burton put him down to go on tormenting the dog. ‘Edith will mend,’ he said. ‘It’ll take a while, but she will. She’s young, and she’ll get married again.’

  He laid a choice slice of meat on Mary Ann’s plate, took up the boat of mint sauce, spooned out potatoes, forked a boiled onion and some cauliflower. ‘It’s all from the garden,’ she remarked.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I grow it for you,’ glad at her beginning to eat. A tender nugget sent down on his fork to Douglas was clutched as if by right, but while making burbling noises at his good fortune the dog swallowed the meat, and would have dozed by the fire to digest it had not Burton shifted it away with his boot.

  Only women can comfort women, were better at it than he could be. Mary Ann finished her food and went into the parlour, while he sat making a box of spills out of an old newspaper – all they were fit for – a mindless job, but Edith’s fate didn’t give him the peace to enjoy it. He would willingly put her grief on his shoulders, but grief wasn’t transferable from the one who was stricken. To tolerate its pangs and let no one know his torment was the least he could do for his tall and one-time rebellious daughter, now bowed down in the certainty that she would never see Tommy Jackson again.

  Mary Ann came back, and he asked how she was.

  ‘She’s crying her heart out,’ as was she. ‘The poor girl’s broken by it. But she’s eating her dinner.’

  ‘I knew she would.’ A blacksmith’s daughter would get over it. His heart was breaking with hers, but a broken heart would always mend, if you lived
long enough in hope. And if you didn’t live long enough you took your broken heart to the grave and had it mended there. He well knew there was no other way.

  Sabina had never been so late. He didn’t like her being out after ten o’clock. She wasn’t old enough to look after herself, if any young woman ever had been. Soldiers crowded the pubs before going to France, got drunk and hardly knew what they were doing when they came onto the street. Or perhaps they did. It didn’t bear thinking about. Women made guns and shells in the factories for men to kill each other, earning more money than men ever had. They could even afford to get drunk, a cheerful lot, except those who’d had people close to them killed, and they were either glad of alcohol, or so mixed up with the others you didn’t notice them.

  Thinking of Alma, he wondered whether the child was boy or girl, what she was doing and where she lived. He wanted to see her but wouldn’t enquire at the Sunday School in case Mary Ann heard of it, not caring to jeopardize himself in her eyes anymore. Alma must have left the district, otherwise he would have seen her, though if he did she would ignore him, and who could blame her?

  Mary Ann seemed reconciled to the war going on forever. Victories reported in the newspapers were all of them disasters. He’d heard a drunken soldier on leave from the trenches say they were no more than bloodbaths, and to no purpose.

  There were fewer at table these days, with Oliver dead and Edith gone, and now Rebecca had married a miner who lived in Yorkshire, a man who didn’t have to go in the army because the government needed the coal. On the other hand he was a loudmouth who spent every night in the boozer getting kay-lied, as if being well paid entitled him to it.

  The gate rattled, the dog barked from its kennel, and Sabina came in, looking too pretty for her own good.

  ‘Where have you been till this time of night?’

  ‘I went down town, with two other girls.’ She trembled, yet happy that time had been forgotten.

  ‘Did you see the town hall clock?’

  ‘It was foggy.’

  He had seen stars glistening, on his way across the yard. ‘Don’t chelp me.’

  She was defiant for the first time, not knowing or caring where it came from. ‘I’m fifteen, and I’m earning my own living,’ she said through her tears, ‘so I’ve got a right to stay out a bit later.’

  His smack across the head couldn’t be avoided. ‘Don’t come in so late again. Now get to bed.’

  ‘You aren’t going to hit me anymore.’

  Another flat-hander was once too often. She worked fifty hours a week, so he had no right to knock her about just for being in town with a couple of workmates. They’d had a tripe supper, and walked around the market square. She had kissed one of the youths, but what harm was there in that?

  Much of the night she was trying to get the blankets from Emily who, in the sort of sleep a zeppelin couldn’t disturb, worked her hands like a machine to drag them back. Finally snug among her sisters, she knew she had to go. She folded a few clothes into a bag and went from the house before Burton got up.

  The terror of the dark assailed her at the railway bridge, and tears, rage, exhaustion and hunger drove her from one wall to another, arms held out so as not to scrape herself against the cold stones, but she got through, and walked confidently up the lane.

  ‘You shouldn’t have hit her,’ Mary Ann said, ‘no matter what she’d done.’

  ‘She said she’d been with two girls, but how was I to know if it was true?’ He had never put it beyond his high-spirited daughters to tell lies, knowing where such a trait had come from. ‘It wasn’t that so much’ – he pulled on his boots and sat down for breakfast – ‘but she had to cheek me back.’

  ‘I expect she was frightened.’

  ‘So she should have been. She’s got too much lip. I don’t want her getting into trouble. I know what girls are like.’

  ‘I’m sure you do.’

  The bait wasn’t taken. ‘I’ve seen them walking around with soldiers. Some were painted up to the eyebrows. They couldn’t have been older than fourteen.’

  ‘Our girls are sensible enough not to get into trouble.’

  The expected grunt of disbelief was not long in coming, as if he doubted that any young woman had ever been able to take care of herself in that way. He drank the strong tea she poured. ‘The only girl I knew who never got into trouble was you.’

  ‘And look where it got me,’ the smile suggesting that in spite of everything, and whatever his faults, she would never stop loving him.

  He sent a half-smile in return. ‘That was because Mrs Lewin kept such a tight rein on you.’

  ‘What a fine thing to say. You don’t give me credit for anything.’

  He put on his jacket and took up his lunch tin. ‘I give you credit for everything, just as you deserve.’ He looked pleased with himself for saying so. ‘I can’t think of anybody else I’d need to give it to.’

  ‘It’s nice to hear it from your lips now and again. But I’m worried to death about Sabina.’

  He turned from the open door. ‘You think I’m not? But worry won’t help.’

  ‘She’s silly enough to sleep under a hedge.’

  ‘The weather’s still warm.’

  ‘But it’s cold at night. I can’t think where she’ll go.’

  ‘She’ll be back before long. The silly little devil will soon realize home’s the best place. I’ll call at the mill on my way to work, and ask what she thinks she’s up to.’

  ‘Don’t hit her when you see her.’

  He would lose an hour’s work, the mill a fair detour from his route to the forge. ‘I shan’t, though she deserves it, a girl of her age running off without telling anyone.’

  He hurried, not pleased at getting so much trouble from his feckless daughter, crossed to the Board School at Radford Bridge, where he had sent his children, then on by the station. Beyond the Jolly Higglers he noted that the pork butcher’s window didn’t display its customary abundance of food.

  The tall brick façade of the mill, with its square tower, was on war work like every place, hundreds of women and girls turning out uniforms when the machines, he thought, would be better used putting proper clothes on people’s backs.

  Beyond the gate, at a wide doorway half-blocked by enormous square baskets on wheels, a man who wanted to know Burton’s business was ignored. He went two at a time up the stone steps, avoiding a man coming down with a bale of khaki cloth, and found Luke the foreman looking through order sheets in his cubby hole of an office.

  ‘I think I know why you’re here.’ Luke, acquainted with Burton from when he had come to see about Rebecca and Edith starting work, was a deformed man in his fifties, lame since birth, and with the firm all his life. Burton looked at the neat and tidy girls tending their machines in the long lit-up room, preferring those who were handsome to the merely pretty ones. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Look for yourself,’ Luke said. ‘She came in first thing this morning and collected what money was owed. Then she left with a girl called Leah Allsop. They went off arm-in-arm, laughing at what they’d done.’

  At least she wasn’t on her own, though that needn’t bode well, either. ‘Where to?’

  ‘I’ve no way of knowing. It was none of my business.’

  ‘It was your business. They were young girls. You should have asked them.’ He gave a last look at the rows of women, nodded to Luke, and went out onto the road. Mary Ann would have to be satisfied with that, and so would he. He had done all he could. Looking north, east, south and west, he had no idea of telling which way the daft girl had gone.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Clydesdale shivered, nervousness in its eyes, warning Burton to be careful. Shoes had to be put on, and he wouldn’t let Thomas or Oswald do it. The July day was no help, an empty milky sky with a sun that had burned for weeks. Nor was a bump in the air, telling that something like a bomb had gone off in the direction of Beeston, an ominous rumble and shake of the earth that sent the hors
e rearing.

  Letting the foot go he jumped to one side and snatched at the reins. Hooves struck the ground with such a scrape he thought the horse might fall. Then it would take some getting back on its feet, and serve it right. Strength was needed to stop it going on hind legs, and he held firm as it kicked from behind. If it didn’t stop he knew the exact spot in the ribcase where a solid punch would knock it to the ground. Even the strongest had their weaknesses, and a horse was no exception. ‘You’re all right now, so don’t give me any more trouble. It was an explosion by the sound of it, but Old Nick’s not coming for you yet, nor for me, either. Just hold still while I get these shoes on.’

  ‘It was a big one,’ Oswald said from the door. ‘I felt the ground move. You did a good job with the horse though.’

  He was glad neither of his sons had tried to help. ‘Yes, but next time don’t even stand at the door. Another face might upset it more, especially a long one like yours!’

  On the way home they waited to cross Derby Road. Carts and wagons, and sometimes a motor lorry, carried wounded and bleeding victims into the city, many to die before reaching the hospital. A man told Burton that the shell-filling factory at Chilwell had gone up, hundreds killed and injured. A slaughterhouse. It didn’t bear thinking about. As bad as in France.

  Groans and screams came from the wagons, and Thomas went pale at blood painting its way onto the road. Nor was Oswald willing to look, Burton thinking them too much like their mother, which would do them no good. Smoke from the explosion floating up the hill scraped his throat. ‘It’s all part of this damned war,’ he said.

  Thomas stopped his whistling. ‘None of our family works there, anyway.’

  Burton wondered where Sabina was, and hoped none of his acquaintances or their family had been at Chilwell that day, glad when a gap in the traffic allowed them to cross. ‘You work where you can, when you want bread for your children,’ he said.

  Thomas, ever hungry, bought a sausage pasty from a shop in Woodhouse, but after a bite slung it to a mongrel nosing along the gutter. ‘It tastes as if they filled it with shit.’