The Broken Chariot

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘Your accent’s changed,’ Isaac said, though not disapprovingly.

  Herbert found it comforting to use rough speech, while knowing he could go from the hot tap of the local argot to the cold faucet of his school any day of the week. ‘It ’ad to, in the factory.’

  ‘As long as you don’t. At least not radically.’

  He forked up his chips, knife held too close to the blade. ‘I can’t do that.’

  Isaac put on an ironic smile. ‘Your table manners have altered, as well.’

  ‘You do as others do.’

  ‘I know all about that. But keep yourself intact, all the same. Your own soul, I’m talking about.’

  ‘I can’t do owt else, can I?’

  Isaac put tea on the table, and they lit cigarettes. ‘You’ve taken to that factory like a duck to water, Herbert Thurgarton-Strang. Or should I say Bert Gedling to a quart of Shipstone’s ale? It shows you’ve got character. I expect your parents have, too.’

  ‘Don’t mention them.’

  ‘Still like that, is it?’

  He felt no need to be on his guard with Isaac. ‘Nar. I want the credit for myself.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but you’ve got to think of people’s feelings, and write them a letter now and again.’

  He’d sent one since arriving in Nottingham, telling them he was working in Stoke on Trent. Archie had dropped it in a box when he’d gone there to see a girl. ‘Anyway,’ Isaac said, ‘thanks for the sugar. Mine went days ago, with my sweet tooth.’

  Herbert, drained for words due to the intensity of his life, or that’s how he put it to himself, sometimes liked sitting in idleness and silence, and though he did not much care who he really was – whether Bert or Herbert – it brought a sense of peace that was vitally needed if he was to carry on any life at all.

  Isaac took down one of his strangely scripted volumes and read with head going faintly back and forth as if wanting to sing the rhythms, while Herbert in his chair faded around the edges of sleep, visions fastening on to him brought about by Isaac’s mutterings. Maybe Isaac was saying a form of prayer, not the sort they were drummed into mouthing at school, but one which put him into a trance, and brought dreams for Herbert of being back in India and walking behind an elephant, huge plates of grey excrement flopping from between its rear legs, his mother and father laughing from their chairs on the veranda of the bungalow. Where did that come from? The same place as the meteorite nightmare above the jagged skyline of mountains, split in half by a scimitar of lightning. Back at school he was running along a lane in vest and shorts, coming into the gate after a cross-country run. The runner, who was somebody he didn’t know, turned out to be an old man, drooling and dying as he fell into the bracken. You needed a dirk to pin such fuzzy pictures down, because when he tried to re-run them on waking they slipped away like mercury.

  ‘You’re looking a bit serious for a chap of seventeen.’ Isaac broke into his exhaustion. ‘Let me send you back to your digs with a drop of whisky. I’ve got a secret bottle, for times like this.’ He took wet glasses from the sink. ‘I think you must have had a hard week.’

  ‘I suppose they all are in the factory. But I’m used to it by now.’ Nothing easier. An hour or two could go by at his machine and he marvelled that work got done with no variation in the measurements. Had it been sleep? Cleft in two, part of him dreamed, part of him worked. He lived as different a life in those lost periods as he had just now in Isaac’s room, and would never know what was pumped into him because it was impossible to understand. Not that he cared to, for you didn’t poke your nose where it had no use being, and where nothing of interest could be explained even if you took the trouble to wonder.

  Isaac held up his glass. ‘L’chaim!’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Long life, to you. It’s Hebrew.’

  The promise of longevity seemed superfluous to someone who assumed he was going to live forever, or as close as dammit. Nevertheless, Herbert said ‘L’chaim, then,’ and took a fiery swig.

  He thought the sherry in the bottle had gone down by half an inch, but couldn’t be sure, despite the glitter of certainty in Jacko’s eyes as he packed his kit for departure. ‘I wouldn’t say she liked it, but I wish I could have seen her face. Made her look prettier, maybe.’

  ‘She’s a good sort.’ Herbert defended her. ‘And I’ll bet she used to be very good-looking. I like Ma.’

  Jacko stared at him, unbelieving. Such an uncertain end to the Sherry Saga was hardly worth either story or letter, but Herbert noted Mrs Denman’s glare from the window as Jacko, who left the bottle behind, marched smartly away with his bag and case to the station.

  Having much on her mind Mrs Denman hurried to scour the room before Ralph got back, and maybe to work off her indignation at such a vile trick, though perhaps after a sip she assumed the doctored sherry had gone sour of its own chemical will, thinking no evil of Jacko at all. Herbert saw the emptied bottle in the dustbin and, however it was, tore his tale into shreds for fear Mrs Denman would read the papers with disgust on finding them under a shirt in his room.

  Ralph pushed his bike up the steps, through the house and into the shed, limping as if he had worn his arse out on the saddle. He’d probably stood up in the train all the way from Ambleside. Herbert watched him fix the padlocks on his bike with a grin he hadn’t seen before. He couldn’t make it out, but thought he’d know before long. At the welcome home tea they were shown Ralph’s map and the routes he had pedalled with Mary, a maze of pencillings and arrows and circles. Mrs Denman fussed about what a long way it was, and I’ll bet you was tired, and it’s a wonder you didn’t get lost, and I’m sure you both slept like logs at night.

  Herbert’s suspicion that Ralph was keeping something back was confirmed when they were in their beds and before the light was put out. ‘She let me have it.’

  ‘What, yo’? I don’t believe yer.’

  ‘Oh yes, she did. Coming down from Helvellyn. And again near Keswick. And then near Ambleside, and then in the bushes near Langdale youth hostel – after supper.’

  Herbert imagined penpusher Ralph putting a map on the wall and sticking pins in every place he’d had his oats, till it looked like the Lake District was doing to close down with a smallpox epidemic. ‘And you’re still going to marry ’er?’

  ‘More than ever. I told you, we’re in love.’

  She’s probably in the club by now. ‘I’m dead jealous.’

  He pulled off the light. ‘Knew you would be. Good night.’

  There were times when Herbert thought he had landed in as compact a prison as the one at school. He was lucky, but discontented, knowing that his present state would have been less of a prison if he’d been able to write to someone and tell them about it.

  The walls were made of everything well worth describing, which heightened his perceptions and rattled his nerves. He wanted to write something about it, anything. Curiosity was spoon-fed without asking, during every hour but those passed in the dead land of sleep, where too much was minced into his dreams to sort out.

  He also knew that his aching to write to someone was an impulse to betray himself and make a glorious failure out of his enterprise. The scale of the fall was tempting, but a sense of self-preservation veered him from the course of Lucifer hurtling through space, or Phaeton glorying in a smash up of universal proportions.

  The police raid on the pub worried him more than it had at the time. A partial blackout had been useful on getting to Nottingham, but the war was now over and the streets lit – though not as bright as pre-war, Mrs Denman said, what with rationing and call-up still going on.

  The end of the war against Japan in August made him feel still more visible. He couldn’t otherwise explain his anxiety, as if a curtain was slowly lifting between him and the world he had abandoned. To be clawed back into the life of school was such a prospect that he would sooner sling himself into a vat of acid. Here was where he belonged, because
he had made the place his own and was familiar with everyone. There were times when he couldn’t understand how it had been so easy. Maybe he had been to a good school after all, because what other could have trained him to fit in so well? If they caught him he would break out again, just like the chaps in Caged Birds, who had escaped time after time, and hide himself even more where they would never think to look.

  All the same, in spite of his fears, he would not walk the street except openly and with the expected workman swagger. He would go into a pub if he felt like it and have it with Eileen whenever they went out together. To lessen the chances of being found and forced back to school he decided to volunteer for the army a month or two before he was eighteen so that there’d be less questions asked than enrolling under conscription. After all, he told himself with a pride not altogether trusted, he was Thurgarton-Strang, and the longer he was free the less likely was anybody to find him.

  Six

  From the heights above the forest a dusty mist lay like a pancake over a thousand lights trying to pierce but merely glowing through. He walked down the slope from the bus stop with Eileen, and Sheila her workmate, into the sodium atmosphere of frying and candy floss. If there was a place where nobody would be able to pick him out it was among the jam-packed crowds of the Goose Fair, yet in such pushing phalanxes he felt perilously unsafe, couldn’t explain why every glazed look seemed like a threat to his wellbeing. It was illogical, ludicrous even, and he forced a smile of protective inanity back on to his face.

  Eileen on one arm, and Sheila taking the other, he guided them among the roundabouts – wondering what his school chums would say if they saw him now – and pulled them up the steps on to the slowing caterpillar. When the hood went down he’d be able to kiss them both, but would Eileen allow it? Well, she didn’t stab at his bollocks with her elbow, though maybe she was too dim to cotton on to where his hands were straying, and she laughed with the rest of them as long as he let his fingers creep in her direction now and again.

  He threw a penny to a couple of kids who were begging, and bought sailor hats to amuse the girls before pulling them in for a circuit on the ghost train. On coming out, it was as if an invisible cloud of depressing gas flowed between the Saturnalian wailings of delight, and the rhythmical thump of traction engines. He had caught a fit of anxiety full blast, stood as if pinioned by the different coloured lights maggoting at his eyes, and by the people pushing around him, some malign force dividing him more than at any time since running away from school, as if a patient and eagle-eyed Inspector Javert in the crowd had been set on to get him.

  Such paralysis couldn’t be explained, and fear even less. ‘Come on, come on,’ Eileen said, ‘get a move on, slow coach. What are you standing there for as if you’ve lost your way? We want to go on summat else, don’t we, Sheila?’

  One moment lost beyond any hope of getting his senses back into the atmosphere of the fair, the next he felt the usual grin forcing its way on to his face, as if someone pulling strings had him under control. He lifted a wrist to sniff at flesh, as if the swarf smell of the factory might still be there, which it was, in spite of the thorough White Windsor swill he had given himself at the sink. The thrill of being at bay buoyed him all his waking hours. Even when unaware it fuelled his senses and fed his alertness.

  They got into a swingboat and, pinned a moment at the top, Herbert saw the whole area of smoke and lights, the tents for a king and his army celebrating a victory over some nation only a little less barbaric than themselves. Then down went the swingboat, and up again into a whole sky of shrieks which made the scene more eerie. Back on the ground, Sheila jerked forward and was sick. Disgusted, he stepped away rather than ask if she was all right and mop her chalky brow, though not before a splash of vomit spewed over his shoes. To prove she was again ready for anything she led them on a climb up the helter-skelter, and they followed on the sedate corkscrew down. Herbert began to hate such spinning and jolting, but when they’d handed their mats back forced himself to say: ‘Now let’s go on summat else. I can’t have enough fun like this.’

  ‘You’re spending too much munny on us, duck,’ Eileen said.

  ‘That’s all right.’ Thank God it was only once a year. Anyway it was his money to do what he liked with. Did she think he was going to save it up so that they could one day get married? Not with anyone, and certainly not with trash like her – which sentiment shamed him, and he immediately sent it back to where it came from, though she had mentioned too often lately that another of her friends at work had got engaged.

  He occasionally had a horror of sinking among them forever, as if he had lived years in the last three months, school so far away it might never have existed. And suddenly, as they stood at a stall eating brandy snap, he felt he had come out only for a night and would be going back next morning. Such vacillations of mood were alarming, more dangerous than he liked. The screech and rattle of the fair seemed a threat from which he must escape, just as he had from school. He was a caged bird wherever he was.

  Eileen tugged his arm. ‘We ain’t bin on the cakewalk yet.’

  He wanted to say fuck the cakewalk. ‘Let’s go to the pub, and I’ll buy you some drinks.’ Standing erect, the most confident smile irradiated, he put thumbs firmly in the pockets of his waistcoat. ‘I’m parched. I want some ale.’ To be skint for the rest of the week was a small price to pay, and the girls must have read his thoughts, they were good at that, on their own level anyway.

  ‘Only a few more rides,’ Eileen said. ‘We’ll fork out for ’em, won’t we, Sheila?’

  Sheila nodded, but after another go she was sick again, a signal that they’d had enough of roundabouts, so went up Radford Road to the Langham, where the first pint of the evening took Herbert out of his puzzling insecurity and into a roistering Bert whose thoughts were his and nobody else’s.

  ‘I don’t know who this bloke was,’ Archie said as they walked into the canteen, ‘but yesterday he asked about you. He wanted to know how long you’d worked here.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘How would I know? Just a bloke.’

  He kept down the fear that went through him, half forgotten since the Goose Fair, just as lively, however, on coming back at Archie’s revelation. ‘I mean, did he look like Charles Laughton? Was he a beanpole with a mardy face or just stubby and miserable?’

  Archie picked up a dinner from the counter, and laughed. ‘Bit o’ both, I suppose.’

  ‘And what did you tell ’im?’

  ‘I towd ’im the truth.’

  Herbert sorted through the gravy to get at his pasty. ‘That’s all right, then, but what was that?’

  ‘That yer’d started ’ere the same time as me, when we was fourteen.’

  ‘Did ’e say owt?’

  ‘’E just pissed off. He sounded like a copper’s nark. If ’e’d asked owt else I’d a cracked ’is shins wi’ me boots. On the other hand he could have been a chap from the offices wanting to mek sure yer insurance cards was up to press.’

  Herbert pushed the rest of his food away. ‘It tastes like shit.’

  ‘It allus does,’ Archie said, ‘but I enjoy it because I’m hungry. As long as you shake lots o’ pepper on it. Do you know, Bert, the first thing I noticed when I came in this canteen at fourteen was that they had pots o’ pepper on the tables. We’d never ’ad pepper at home. We still don’t. I didn’t know what it tasted like, but I love it now.’ He leaned across the table, voice turned lower. ‘What was ’e after? Did yer do a job? Are you on the run?’

  Herbert smiled. ‘Ar, course I am, from a wicked uncle.’

  ‘Yer can tell me. I shan’t nark, not me. I ’ate coppers.’

  ‘I know yer do. Same ’ere.’ Herbert considered packing up, going to the station and getting on the next train to anywhere – but decided it was safer and more comfortable staying where he was. It wasn’t done to panic, or change plans till you had to. ‘I absconded from school. It was more like a borst
al, though.’

  ‘I thought it was summat like that.’ Archie winked. ‘You’ll be all right with us, Bert. Tek a tip from me. If anybody asks yer owt, just tell lies. That’s number one. Lie till ye’re blue in the face, and they’ll end up believin’ yer. I’ll back yer up if yer need me to, though I don’t expect yer will. People allus want to believe yer, even when they know you’re tellin’ lies, as long as yer go on long enough wi’ a straight face.’

  Herbert pulled the plate towards him, finished every stain and crumb. Work called for all the food he could get. Telling lies was wrong, even cowardly, done only by inferior people who were afraid. So he had been drilled into thinking. He felt uneasy at his ready agreement with Archie, who wasn’t cowardly or inferior at all: Herbert’s life at the moment could be considered one big lie, but it was no more than an actor’s performance on stage who for two hours was entirely in the skin of someone else. And if you do it for two hours, or even for a year, what’s the difference?

  ‘Another thing,’ Archie came back with pudding for them both, ‘why don’t you introduce me to Sheila? The four of us could go out for a drink.’

  Herbert pushed a hand forward for his spoon. ‘Yeh, that’s a good idea. I’ll talk to Eileen, and see what she says.’

  ‘We can go to the White Horse on Saturday night. They’ve got good ale there, and you can sing if you like.’

  People coughed their way to work through the first frosts of October, an enclosing visibility giving Herbert more confidence in his role as a man on the run, except that he would rather die than run. He walked quickly, however, all-round glances keeping watch at every angle, obtuse or acute, thinking that if anyone followed they’d need to be fit to maintain his rapid pace, and that if anybody tried to get him on the street he would kill them as they deserved, using the strength put into his arms by lifting and carrying in the factory, and the survivor’s force grown in him since birth.

  Such reflections, he felt, were risible, knowing that he was often split between desperate speculations and a delightful sense of having no cares in the world, and that at Mrs Denman’s he was one of the family. He was safe, and looked after in a way beyond his experience. How she made any profit on his few pounds bed and board he couldn’t fathom, but Archie said that was her worry, and he should bless his luck at having fallen into such a cushy billet.