A Man of his Time

by Alan Sillitoe

  Emily followed her out of the house. She loved a funeral. People cried as if they were bursting, but after the misery in church and wailing at the graveside there’d be food and drink, just like a party. She wanted to be there so that she could have a good cry with the rest of them. She loved a good cry, whoever it was had died. And at the feasting afterwards there might be an argument to watch. Somebody was bound to say something somebody didn’t like, and give him a smack in the chops. Even two women might have a go, and while they did she would help herself to more of the drink, and get tipsy, which made her feel as she would like to feel all the time when she was sober. Having a guzzle of Burton’s whisky now and again wasn’t the same – well, it wasn’t enough anyway – because she was sure he put water in it, while keeping his own special bottle locked up where nobody could get at it.

  Ivy was her sister, so she couldn’t let her go to Ernie Guyler’s funeral on her own. In any case she wanted to see what his family was like, because she had never met them. Maybe there’d be a man there who would want to take her out. He might ask her to the pictures or the theatre, and if he tried to do anything to her afterwards she could biff him so hard he’d run away.

  Ivy knew her sister’s thoughts and didn’t much like them, but was glad of her company because she felt there was nothing else to do on the way there except throw herself off a railway bridge when an express train was on its way. She said so as they walked down the lane, but Emily said what would become of Mary Ann if you did anything like that?

  ‘Well, I don’t mean it, do I?’ Burton would be glad, so that was one reason not to do it. She would be dead, so that was another. ‘It’s only what I feel like. Ernie was the man I loved, and now he’s gone. I know I’d been expecting it, and so had he, poor soul, but when it comes it’s still like the end of the world. My heart used to bump when I saw him walking up to the house to call for me.’ She began to weep again. ‘I shall never get over it.’

  Emily took her arm. ‘Don’t cry, duck, or I shall as well, and my frock will get wet.’

  The death of a sweetheart was worse than the death of yourself. No more shilling teas in the Mikado, or walking hand-in-hand to the wood. No more worrying whether your period would start, though he’d always taken good care.

  Back at work, Florence on the next machine commiserated. Ernie Guyler had lived in the same street. A good man, she said, one of the best. He laughed a lot, even in his illness, but you can’t go on being faithful to a memory all your life. You’ve got to go on living.

  ‘Any damned fool knows that.’ Ivy denied that she could forget him. ‘He won’t be out of my mind till the day I die.’

  ‘He will. I know there was no better chap,’ Florence went on, ‘but he’s got to fade.’ Ivy realized how good it was to have such a friend at work, and that life would be unimaginable if there was no factory for her to go to every morning.

  Those employed by Player’s received a tin of fifty cigarettes every month, and because Ivy smoked only a few she handed the rest to her brothers. Burton thought that he could do with one or two as well, but Ivy considered he had been so harsh to her all her life that he didn’t even deserve the skin off her nose, and when she once reminded him of this Burton said: ‘Then why don’t you leave, if you don’t like it here?’

  She had thought of it more times than he could know, but if she did leave where would she go? How could she set herself up on her own with what she earned at Player’s? She would have to find a house – and a mean little one it would be – and buy furniture to put in it.

  Burton noted that she was never short of money to go on trips with friends from work, so knew she wouldn’t leave home where living was cheap. Besides, who but Mary Ann would have such good meals on the table the moment she came in the door? He had her weighed up right enough. She was more than well off, and would stay ‘on the shelf’ like a packet of Mazawattee tea, even if only to spite him.

  If she gave Burton some cheek now and again it was, Ivy told herself, because nobody deserved it more. Years could go by when they hardly spoke to each other, and though she knew her hatred of him troubled the tender heart of Mary Ann, it was his fault because he ought to have known it would be bad for her mother if he gave her anything to hate him for.

  Words from her lips couldn’t say anything good of him, no more than words from his would say anything good about her. They found nothing to say to each other, lived within different worlds in the same house. Ivy’s silent anger became more bitter on Burton not even realizing he was the cause of it, and he never would because he was too set in the ways of long ago. She had her life and wasn’t going to be made miserable by a bully like him. He only wanted to see her having the same hard time as Rebecca and Edith and Sabina. If there was such a place as hell for a woman it was where she was tormented by a tyrannical husband who wouldn’t support either her or the children properly. She would never get into a situation like that merely to amuse Burton.

  Her one chance of happiness was gone because Ernie Guyler – poor soul – had died. She couldn’t marry anyone else, so stayed at home in spite of Burton, and if ever she did leave it would only be when she was good and ready.

  Miss Middleton, a schoolmistress, was shown around the factory by one of the subordinate directors. A party of girls could see how cigarettes were manufactured, and perhaps they would want to work there one day. Ivy was in charge of a dozen women packing the boxes, and when asked how many were completed every day Miss Middleton, looking intently for her answer, smiled before walking on. ‘You can tell what sort she is,’ Florence said to one of the girls, but Ivy didn’t care what sort she was, only knowing that she had been smiled at in a way she never had before, by this self-confident schoolteacher woman.

  Jane Middleton waited for her to come out of work, and took her to a restaurant in town. A case of mutual curiosity, Ivy turned girlish at the notion that a schoolmistress could find her interesting. During the meal Jane told her of a bus holiday through Germany the year before. ‘We were all women, so a very pleasant time was had by all. Frankly, I don’t like men. They’re hopeless. All the best were killed in the war.’ Ivy agreed, thinking of Oliver, but also because she had never had much luck with men either, unless you could count Ernie Guyler, who had died a year ago.

  Jane, also in her middle thirties, a tall red-haired woman, had views which Ivy thought at times a little too close to Burton’s, yet agreed with them because they didn’t sound the same coming from someone to whom she was in thrall. They met every weekend, and went to Jane’s flat in Mapperley. The following year she took Ivy on holiday to Normandy. Burton watched them walking arm-in-arm down the lane, and knew with chagrin that Ivy was as far from getting married as ever.

  Ivy went on her own to see Rebecca and her husband who lived near Lydd in Kent. She was put up on a settee in the parlour of their cottage, and spent most of the time with her sister maligning Burton. She came back and told Brian how marvellous Kent was, promising to take him one day. ‘We’ll go through London, and look at Buckingham Palace, and then see the pretty countryside where hops grow in fields on long poles.’

  She was too busy with Miss Middleton, and would never take him, but the secret dream belonged to him alone, though one dream which became real was staying all weekend at the Burtons’, helping his grandfather in the garden, and running across the Cherry Orchard to make a bow and arrow in Robin’s Wood. When it got cold and dark a warm house was waiting, with something to eat inside. Mary Ann baked cakes, and gave him the large yellow bowl to scrape clean of the batter with a wooden spoon, leaving a few currants to find.

  Burton came in from the garden for breakfast, and Mary Ann put a slice of fat bacon and a fried egg on his plate, the orange yolk neatly centred in a zone of white. Brian had collected eggs from the coop but never seen one cooked. Burton, thinking him hungry, trimmed off the broad white border with his clasp knife, and halved the bread. ‘Eat this.’

  ‘Isn’t it yours, Grandad?’

/>   Spraying vinegar over the yolk, he sensed a possible hurt to Brian’s pride at being given it so off-handedly. ‘I don’t like the white. I never did, Nimrod. Eat it for me.’

  Hungry or not, he did as he was told, watching Burton tackle the heart of the egg, and thinking that one day he would get as many yolks as he could eat.

  A prince at the Burton house, he could be alone yet feel himself one of them. In the darkened kitchen, rain thrashing against the window, Mary Ann told him you never turn a beggar away from the door. If you didn’t have a penny to give there was always a cup of tea. This was the goodness of the Irish coming out in her, his mother Sabina said when he mentioned it. Nor should you ever be unkind to animals, Mary Ann went on, seeing him tormenting the cat unduly. She instilled into him that he must always care, and never – ever – tell lies.

  Burton told him little, but he took in by example and from what others said about his grandfather. He learned to believe in himself, to doubt everything, to work, to stand up straight, never to have hands in his pockets, not to care what anyone said about him, to look on the world with a cold eye, to speak only when spoken to, and when words were fully formed and well-rehearsed, above all to distrust praise or flattery, and stand indifferent in face of denigration. He seemed not to take in any of this, but it went in all the same, the difficulty of merging both sets of precepts apparent only later.

  Thomas expressed himself mainly by the melodious whistling of tunes he heard in pubs and dance halls, or from somebody else’s wireless, which instrument Burton wouldn’t allow in the house, regarding it as an intrusion of unwanted sound, a box of lies that might one day have the cheek to answer him back. Brian wondered how in that case a gramophone had found its way into the parlour. He had heard it played once, when his grandmother put on a Negro spiritual.

  Standing on the table in its immovable wooden casing, a large horn expanding above like the mouth of a giant lily, and a steel handle almost as big as that for winding up a motor car, perhaps it was tolerated because at least it couldn’t talk, and needed work to set it going.

  Thomas could whistle as loud as he cared to in the noisy workshop of the Raleigh, where machinery swamped all human sound. In that place he was little bothered at not having an audience, and produced a concert mainly to entertain himself. Ivy wondered whether he whistled music in his courting, on pushing his handsome and neatly dressed presence onto some tractable woman. He always had one or two going mad about him, she said, but God help any who was daft enough to marry him, because he was as mean as a kidney bean. On the other hand he was more than willing to spend money on women in the hope of getting what he wanted.

  As if unaware of where he was, Thomas set up a piercing whistle in the living room before sitting at table for his dinner. A glance from Burton’s single and therefore more menacing eye broke through to Thomas’s deepest core and immediately squashed his sibilant display. ‘I’m surprised you’ve so much money in your pocket these days,’ Burton said. ‘You haven’t won the pools and not told us, have you?’

  Thomas filled in the Littlewoods coupons every week in the hope of winning a fortune, and then what women he would have! He knew all the teams but couldn’t read, so Ivy had to point out the relevant names. ‘I don’t know why I help him,’ she said, ‘because if he wins he’ll never give me anything.’

  ‘Why is that?’ Thomas asked his father.

  Burton ran a long thin knife up and down the steel for carving the meat. ‘You must swallow at least half a ton of bird seed every week to keep that noise up, and even I know the stuff doesn’t come cheap.’

  Brian considered the remark a fair example of that withering sarcasm Ivy complained about, yet thought his grandfather right in putting a stop to such whistling because, however pleasant the tune, it killed stone-dead what was going on in the mind.

  Thomas ignored the setback to his performance – it was impossible to damage his self-esteem – and during the meal asked Burton if he would like to have his prize horseshoes taken to the Raleigh and dipped in chrome, which would help in their preservation and give them a more handsome appearance.

  Burton was wary. They looked good as they were. He had made them that way. The iron would last forever, as far as he knew. But he thought about it and, sipping his usual coffee after the pudding, took Thomas away from his football coupons and said that he could dip one of the shoes and see how it turned out.

  ‘If you like it,’ Thomas said, ‘I’ll do the others, two at a time though, otherwise I’d get the sack if I was caught dipping them all at once.’

  Burton stood. ‘It sounds a bit like cheating to me.’

  ‘Oh no, we’re allowed to do the odd thing now and again.’

  Brian stayed for Christmas, and money was collected to buy him a trainset. He sat in front of the fire and lifted piece after piece from its box, wondering what it had cost as he slotted the lines together, and laid engine and trucks on the circuit.

  Burton looked from his great height. ‘You’ll be so busy I don’t suppose I’ll have you working in the garden today.’

  ‘There’s nothing to do there, Grandad. Look at all that frost at the window. It’s the middle of winter.’

  ‘You’re winding the engine up wrong.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Give it me.’

  ‘You’ll break it.’

  ‘Not like you, if you don’t do it right.’ He turned the key gently clockwise – Ivy and Emily hoping for something to snap – and passed the toy back.

  Thomas at the mirror had half a dozen goes at getting his tie straight, inflated features holding in the aria of a whistle he wouldn’t dare let rip before reaching the lane.

  ‘All you’ve got to do now,’ Burton said, ‘is take the brake off. I don’t suppose you’ll have your nose in a book today, either.’

  Thomas brought back the first horseshoe from the Raleigh, chromed to a fine shade of silver. Burton saw how good it looked in a beam of January sun. ‘It is beautiful,’ Mary Ann said.

  She was right. ‘Do the others,’ which was more praise from Burton than Thomas could remember.

  Burton handed it to Brian, who took the perfectly shaped horseshoe made by the hands of his grandfather at the forge, turned it around, examined it from all angles, felt the solid weight, held the coolness to his cheek, and counted the nail holes. ‘Why are there seven, Grandad?’

  ‘How many days are there in a week?’

  ‘Seven.’

  ‘That’s why. Four shoes on a horse’s feet, and how many holes does that make?’

  ‘Twenty-eight.’

  ‘That’s for a month, a moon of days.’

  He passed it back. ‘That’s clever.’

  ‘There’s a lot of things you don’t know, Nimrod. Some horseshoes have eight holes, but a horse goes better on seven.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Seven hold just as well as eight, and they don’t weigh as much. It’s easier on the feet, and it won’t go lame so quick.’ He put the shoe in its case on the wall, took down another, and held it before Brian’s eyes. ‘You see this one?’

  He felt the prongs with both hands. It was wide, heavy and flat. ‘What’s special about it?’

  ‘It’s for a carthorse. I made it in Wales.’

  ‘Wales is a long way off.’

  ‘I know it is.’ He took it back. ‘It’s where I worked as a young man.’

  ‘Why did you go there?’

  ‘It was the only place I could get work.’

  The rows of chromed horseshoes hung impressively in their place, and Brian wondered whether all or any would ever be fitted to a horse. ‘No,’ Burton told him. ‘They’re prize ones, and have to stay there. Now pick up that newspaper. I want to hear about Spain, where another damned lot is fighting a war for no good reason as I can see.’

  On Saturday night Mary Ann stood in her slip to wash at a large bowl of water on the living room table, then dressed in a navy-blue skirt and white blouse. Brian stood
at the fence to watch the handsome and stately couple walk down the lane, Mary Ann a few paces behind. When they were out of sight he went into his aunts’ bedroom, attracted by unfamiliar smells of feminine indulgence, of powders and creams and unguents, of bedclothes giving off odours of lavender and clean wind that had swept over the sheets when on the line by the garden of fecund soil and growing vegetables. Such smells came straight out of heaven, if there was such a place, though he hoped there was, yet condemned all his life not to believe it.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Surveyors spread triangulation, marked out roads and gardens. Enormous black sewage pipes you could crawl through were lowered into trenches straight as a die. The foundations of identical houses covered the green acres walked on so many times. Walls and windows were installed, roofs put on. Nottingham was spreading west.

  Mary Ann filled the workmen’s billy-cans with tea at sixpence a time, Brian fetching the empties and taking them back full. Sometimes he forgot who the cans belonged to as he walked among heaps of gravel and stacks of tiles, smells in the air of resin and fresh sawdust.

  He jinked between trucks and concrete mixers, changed the hot cans several times to stop burns, men hurrying up scaffolding with hods of bricks or slates, till someone claimed one of the mashcans, recognition swift to a man with a parched throat. Mary Ann did good business because her tea was sweet and strong, and Brian was glad of a few pennies at the end of the day.

  Old Engine Cottages made space for new dwellings. Burton didn’t want to quit, because the house had mellowed during a century and, in good condition still, could have lasted well into the next. Electricity had been in for a year, and running water laid on, but Farmer Taylor got a good price, and orders came that they had to go.

  Burton was over seventy, as was Mary Ann, who was not sorry to move to a street in Woodhouse, though Burton regretted bulldozers smashing down a place they had lived in so long.

  ‘They should have moved forty years ago,’ Sabina said, ‘then I wouldn’t have had to walk under that dark and muddy bridge when I was a girl.’ Ivy thought Burton would like living in Woodhouse because it was near the beer-off and closer to the pub, but Mary Ann said sharply that he had never been averse to walking a mile or two to get to those places. ‘And he’s never drunk much.’