A Man of his Time

by Alan Sillitoe

  Edith thought nobody could be as bad as Burton said. To him everybody was bad, so whoever he said was bad could never be bad to her. ‘He helped me a lot just now.’

  Pleasant, comely, and fair to all men as she was, you couldn’t tell her anything. People went to hell in their own way, and little could be done to stop them, but he didn’t want her to fall under the pall of Doddoe Atkin, since she had already suffered enough. Because Burton had brought the girls up strictly Mary Ann also hoped they’d never marry men who would treat them worse than they thought Burton had.

  Emily was spoiling Douglas with a jam pasty, and not doing much good to her own face either, while Edith sat with a cup of tea and a slice of caraway seed cake, talking about the place she worked at. ‘The doctor’s wife is so mean it’s a wonder I’m not skin and bone. At teatime on Saturday she puts a big cake on the table, after the bread and butter, and her five kids sit too frightened to ask for some. Well, I stand there feeling sorry for the poor little things, because I know that when she locks it back in the cupboard I’m going to help myself. I know where she keeps the key, so I don’t starve. I shouldn’t stay there if I did. She must think a ghost gets in to gobble it down.’

  ‘That’s not honest,’ Mary Ann commented. ‘But you should tell her to feed you properly.’

  At the bridge on her way back, when Edith thought there’d be no option but to push the cot through and spoil her shoes, a voice from the bushes said: ‘Don’t worry, duck. I’m still here. I came back early to help you.’

  He was hard to make out in the half-dark. ‘Doddoe?’

  ‘You weren’t waiting for somebody else, was you? I wondered if your husband might come to meet you. That’s why I hid myself.’

  ‘I haven’t got one.’

  ‘Some rotten swine left you in the lurch, did he?’

  ‘He was killed in the war. He was in the Gunners, as well.’

  ‘A terrible lot of ’em caught it.’ He took hold of the cot. ‘I nearly went west more than once. I had a charmed life, though. Just a few scratches, and not many could say that who was in it from start to finish. Wait here, duck. I’ll get the lad through first.’ He bent down and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Won’t I, Douglas? What a lovely lad you’ve got, Edith. You’ll have to get him out of the cot and make him walk a bit more. Then he can come poaching with me.’

  ‘He bleddy won’t.’

  ‘Go on! He’ll love it.’ He came back to say she would have to ride piggy-back. ‘It’s easier that way, because I’m tired, and you’ll be more comfortable.’

  ‘I think you’re trying it on.’

  ‘I am, duck. I’ve got to confess.’ Even the darkness couldn’t hide the dazzle of his smile, the faint gap between his teeth accentuating what charm he had. Her warm arms went around his neck, and she recalled Burton’s harsh words, which he would have used against any man she mentioned, only wanting to spoil her life. Doddoe had even remembered Douglas’s name. ‘Where do you work?’

  ‘I’m a bricklayer, and I’m earning good money. They’re building a lot of houses fit for heroes.’

  ‘Why do you go poaching?’

  ‘For a bit of sport.’

  ‘It’s not very honest.’

  The word shocked him. ‘Honest? Well, it might not be, but everybody does it around here.’

  ‘My father doesn’t.’

  ‘Burton wouldn’t, would he?’ Setting her down, he offered a Park Drive, but she didn’t smoke. He lit one for himself. ‘Even Shakespeare’s mother got done for poaching.’

  ‘Who’s Shakespeare?’ She recalled Oliver mentioning the name, so she was testing him.

  ‘How the hell do I know? I heard somebody say it in the Jolly Higglers the other night. He might have been a teacher from across the road, showing off. “Shakespeare’s mother was caught poaching,” he said in his posh voice. I heard it as clear as a bell.’

  ‘A likely story.’

  ‘Anyway, duck, I’ve got three rabbits in my pocket, so I’m going to give you one. It’ll make a nice stew for you and young Douglas. Won’t it, you lardy titch?’

  She wanted to say no, but thought what a blessing it would be for the Jacksons, who had little money and could do with some help. Now and again she gave them a pat of butter, some scrag-ends of meat and a few bones, or a cigar for old Jackson which she hoped wouldn’t be missed from the doctor’s leather case.

  The smell of rain on the rabbit’s fur almost made her stomach heave, its body as limp as that of a dead cat. The lane joined the main road. ‘You can leave me now. I’ll be all right from now on.’

  ‘Do I get a kiss, or don’t I?’

  ‘No you don’t, you fawce bogger.’

  He laughed. ‘Well, I’ve enjoyed talking to you. I’ll see you at the bridge next week, in case the tunnel’s still muddy. You never know. I might even be there if it’s as dry as snuff.’

  Burton at dinnertime berated Thomas for having stayed out late the previous night. ‘Two o’clock in the morning’s not good enough.’

  ‘I’m over twenty-one, so I should have the key to the door.’ He dared to answer back, as if surprised at his father’s unworldliness. Earning his own wages from the factory led him to believe he could do as he liked.

  Burton lifted his fist for a solid smack at his son’s head, to let him know his place, as everyone must who was still in the house, but for once he wasn’t quick enough. Thomas, eyes wide open at what he took as an unjustified telling-off, was caught out by an eruption of cock-o’-the-walk confidence born from being hard done by for so long, and at the idea that a man of his age, who worked hard, should not be able to come and go as he pleased as long as he paid his board and no one but himself was harmed by it. He got one in first, and a good one, such a blow at Burton’s chest that at the unexpected ferocity he almost fell to the floor.

  Thomas was more terrified at what he had done than his father was surprised that such a thing could happen. On his feet in a second, and even more enraged at Ivy so openly amused at what she saw as his downfall, Burton picked up the woodsman’s axe and went for his son as if intending to kill him.

  Thomas fled, and Mary Ann – she would, wouldn’t she? – wondered where he had gone, but Burton said that someone like Thomas would always find a bed, probably with a woman, until her husband came back, or she got fed up with him, which in either case couldn’t be for long. ‘So stop worrying.’

  Thomas’s re-entry into the house was negotiated by Mary Ann, and in agreeing to it Burton may have wanted Thomas back so that, Ivy said to Oswald, he could take a stern revenge. Unashamed at his reverse, knowing that hard lessons were often the best, Burton was confident that in any future set-to he would get his blow in first. At the same time he was amused at having a son courageous enough to tackle him, but if he stopped chafing at his lateness it may have been in the hope that one night he wouldn’t come back at all.

  Oliver would never have behaved in such a way, and as for Oswald, he’s married and taking care of Helen who is so weak and delicate you’d think she didn’t have long for this world, though newly-born Howard would no doubt help to keep her in it. Oswald hadn’t stayed on as a blacksmith, won’t work at the colliery as I have to, though nobody can blame him because it’s harder graft than walking along the canal tapping the lock gates now and again to make sure they’re not leaking. Times might be changing, as Mary Ann always claims, but there are fewer and fewer men to do the hardest work.

  When Edith decided to marry Doddoe, Burton said: ‘Don’t do it,’ but she did, because when did they ever not do what you told them not to? You said don’t, and they always did. Even if you’d said do it, hoping they would do the opposite to spite you, they’d have done it anyway, since they had no sense and couldn’t avoid throwing themselves at men with no trade, no dignity, and no brains.

  If his girls blamed him for the rough beds they had to lie on after getting married they were wrong, because only the wicked and the weak held their parents responsible for wha
t happened to them. Even if the parents had done what their children complained about, whoever blamed them would become parents themselves one day, and do even worse to their children, or at least no better.

  He spat in the fire. As for your own kids, it was best never to open your mouth, then you wouldn’t get answers you didn’t like, or they wouldn’t do something to regret. But he was sorry for Edith, helpless under the reign of a brute and a bully such as Doddoe Atkin had always been, boozing what wages he got and never a thought for her or their children. Rebecca’s coalminer in Yorkshire at least provided for his family, though that man Seaton, whom Sabina married last month, was a numbskull as well, an upholsterer only fit to work for his father.

  He pushed the dog from the fire. He wanted his girls to marry men like himself, but there was only one of him, and there were too many of the other sort walking around. In choosing men different to himself the girls found that times hadn’t altered as much as they had hoped. He remembered scorning his father for saying: ‘Men are lightweights these days,’ yet the old man had been right, because men who now worked as little as they could get away with didn’t treat their families well.

  ‘It’s always been like that,’ Mary Ann said, thinking he went on too long about it. ‘At the White Hart I noticed how many used to spend money they should have given to their wives and children. It was sickening. If times don’t change, as you say, it’s only because they’ve always been the same.’

  She went up to bed, so tired that earlier nights were needed. He poked the bars, the top layer of coal falling lower in the grate, then put a bundle of sticks in the oven to be tinder-dry for Mary Ann starting a fire in the morning.

  Soft and idle Thomas, who wasn’t yet in, was only interested in going after women. Well-built and over six feet tall, with short thick wavy hair, he had farseeing blue eyes which even so, Burton was convinced, showed nothing but what was immediately in front, and he came in most nights with lipstick on his collar (which Mary Ann had to wash off) whistling some senseless tune like a love-sick canary.

  Pushed out of the door, the dog sloped off to its kennel across the yard. He came back and drew the rug away from the fire, because dead ash might throw a spark and send the house up in flames while they slept in their beds. You couldn’t be too careful. He turned the lamp out, and felt his way upstairs.

  TWENTY-SIX

  A large red handkerchief covered his left eye, keeping the blood all but invisible. Pain drummed as if the hammers of six smiths beat against the anvil of his head, the rest of his face whitening as he rode his bicycle against the cold east wind. The way seemed endless, and he was tempted to call at Oswald’s house at the top of Radford Bridge Road, for whisky to dull the agony, but he didn’t want Helen to make a fuss at the sight of his wound. She was always so fluttery and nervous, unless too busy burbling over baby Howard, so he pedalled on through Woodhouse, unable to care who looked at him.

  Mary Ann cried out when he stood at the mirror to untie the handkerchief. ‘Ernest!’ – a rare word for the living part of the house.

  He noted it, but excused her, since he felt half-dead from pain and mortification.

  ‘What have you done to yourself?’

  He sat by the fire, deadened flesh and bones coming slowly to life. ‘A piece of steel flew in my eye. Some fool of a striker got the angle wrong, and hit a bit too hard.’ He lowered the handkerchief, to show torn flesh, the eye a circle of blue, dull yellow and red, as if the hammer and not a mere spark had flown at his face.

  ‘Oh, God, you’ve been blinded.’

  ‘Only in one eye.’ He looked around, as if to see all that was visible from the other. ‘It’s lucky I was born with two. I shan’t be eating tonight, but how much whisky’s left? I’d like a pull or two, unless the others have gluttoned it.’

  She fetched the bottle from the parlour. ‘I’ll heat some water, and bathe the wound.’

  ‘If you think it’ll do some good.’

  ‘It looks terrible.’

  ‘I don’t want to be seen by anybody in this state. Hand me the whisky before you get started. It’s giving me gyp.’

  He didn’t complain about the strength, or look for the mark he had mentally put there, but held the bottle to his mouth, which he had never done before. After her gentle dabbing with a swab of clean linen he went upstairs and got into his nightshirt, lay in the dark, sparks bombarding his head as if trying to break through skin and tissue to his brain.

  He set off at five o’clock to do his day’s stint at the pit. Mary Ann asked him not to, but he knew what he was doing: you only stopped when you stopped for good. He felt justified when within a week the swelling around the eye began to diminish, though he saw nothing from it, and didn’t need telling that he never would again. He asked Mary Ann to make two eyepatches. ‘I don’t care to have anybody looking at the mess.’

  ‘What do you need two for?’

  ‘I’ll tell you, only don’t ask again. I want a brown one for everyday, and to go to work in – a piece of strong cloth will do. Then I want the smartest one you can make, from black velvet, for when I get dressed up and go out.’

  The pain was so intense at times that he was unable to be among the family. He took the bottle of whisky into the parlour, drew the curtains, and sat in silence. Mary Ann told the others not to disturb him, or make any noise. On going to see how he was, the only person allowed to, he’d be sitting upright in a chair, glass and bottle before him on the table, the world not so sealed off that he didn’t hear everything said in the living room.

  The throbbing would have given even more gyp had he but let it. Pain burned a cavern in his head, a space which, by an effort, he imagined as four compartments. As if by some trick he prevented his senses from entering more than one, where he would corral the pain and endure it until, like a miracle, it went away sufficiently for him to go back among the family, whom he would astonish or dismay with his knowledge of all they had said in his absence.

  Ivy said, though not in front of Mary Ann, that God had got back at Burton twice in his life: once when He had taken his son, and again when He had put out his eye. What she couldn’t know was that Burton saw just as well with the other, and that with only one eye his hearing became twice as sharp, for he overheard her saying it to Thomas, who told her to keep her thoughts to herself. Burton couldn’t forgive such a depth of malice, which neither he nor anyone else in the family could reach. Had Emily made the statement she would not be responsible, though she wasn’t hard-hearted enough to come up with anything like that. Ivy should have known better because, for all her bitter dislike, she had to go on living with him in the same house.

  Nor was he unaware that she sometimes referred to him as ‘Old Nelson-one-eye’. He heard her, from the bedroom window, say it to Edith while walking in the garden, a remark he found so disrespectful to level at someone who was not only her father but a man who suffered so much that he was unable to go down and give her the smack across the mouth she deserved, or even ever to say anything, for to accept that one of his own flesh and kin could be so uncaring was more than pride would take. Whoever could be so slighting about another’s misfortune would one day suffer for it, and though he might not be alive as a witness, that didn’t lessen his satisfaction at the prospect. He couldn’t kick her out of the house as was deserved because she was, after all, part of the family, who probably thought that, hating him as she did, she had to stay at home for Mary Ann’s sake, while he often assumed that she didn’t clear out because she wanted to go on tormenting him.

  The unease Ivy always felt in his presence was so thick, Burton said to Mary Ann, that you’d need a knife to cut into it. He wondered why no one ever asked her to marry him. She was well liked at work – so it seemed – knew plenty of men, and went out often enough, yet no one would take her on. He didn’t have to think far for the reason. Her tongue was more bitter than a bumboy’s arse, and he couldn’t imagine what had made her that way. He may have brought the girls up too
strictly, but Ivy had been treated no worse than the others.

  Mary Ann said he ought to see a doctor, but he wouldn’t, and went on suffering. In any industrial trouble he walked out with the others, which as a journeyman he wasn’t obliged to do, so was respected at the pit. The union representative said he could get compensation from the colliery owners of a hundred and twenty-five pounds, but the eye would have to be removed by surgery first, and apart from not wanting any part of his flesh interfered with Burton suspected he would be left with an uglier hole than before.

  ‘In any case, it was my fault,’ he said to Mary Ann. ‘I knew that striker was no good, but they were in a hurry for the piece. It was within my rights to say I didn’t want him, but I didn’t. For once in my life I was careless. I kicked him so hard afterwards I’ll bet he didn’t sit down for a week. One eye in my head or not, I got him right where I should have done. And since it was my fault there’s one thing I do know: you have to pay for your mistakes.’

  ‘All the same,’ she said, ‘you ought to put in a claim.’

  ‘I don’t beg for anything.’

  ‘It isn’t begging.’

  ‘I don’t ask, either.’

  And that was that. He had never been to a hospital, and wouldn’t go now. ‘You always come out worse than before you went in,’ he said and, being the man he was, his words were final.

  Ivy was so in love with Ernie Guyler that Burton thought the time of getting shut of her couldn’t be far off. He took more than usual care not to find fault with him when he called. He was distant, but polite and, though not asking him into the house, shook his hand gently, Guyler being so thin he seemed in danger of being blown away by the softest breeze, especially if it had perfume on it.

  He halfway liked Guyler because he was tall and well-dressed: a brown suit with sharply creased trousers, a tie carefully knotted and fixed in place with a pin, a fashionable Fair Isle pullover, a raglan overcoat, brilliantly shining shoes, and a handkerchief in his lapel pocket ironed and folded into shape by a loving mother. His dark hair was brilliantined neatly back, the only fault being that he wore neither hat nor cap, but his gaunt though well-featured face was always pleasant, a half-smile due to sensing perhaps his more than usual impermanence in the world.