Life Without Armour

by Sillitoe, Alan;

  The sky, by day or night, became as important as the earth’s surface, and knowing what was in it widened my angle of sight. Most of my life I had glanced little above the treetops or eaves of houses, but now everything to be seen on looking upwards had a name. The glow of the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, took four and a half light years, travelling at 186,000 miles per second, to reach the earth, a fact which put our planet earth in its place, and the people who lived on it even more so, which might have been a depressing realization had it not also been so marvellous as to open my mind to all kinds of cosmic speculations.

  At RAF Snitterfield, near Stratford-upon-Avon, I flew at night for an hour on ‘circuits and bumps’ (take-off and landing practice) in an Airspeed Oxford trainer. One such aircraft had crashed just short of the runway a few days before, killing both pilots, its sombre wreckage glowing in the lights every time we took off. Once our plane was airborne its manoeuvres were occasionally such that the dazzling multi-coloured pattern of the aerodrome lights seemed half the time to be in the sky, and when I finally stepped out on to the dispersal point a reflected glitter of the same design appeared above my head, suggesting that my senses still had some way to spin before the usual equilibrium came back.

  I went on a two-hour ‘hedge hopping’ exercise across the fen country, also in an Oxford, and spent much time looking between the pilots’ shoulders, ostensibly to consult the map but also at approaching embankments, farmhouses and telegraph poles, wondering whether to duck or where I would run should we hit something. Visiting Shakespeare’s birthplace came as an anticlimax, especially as I had so far been no closer to his works than the prose rehashes of Charles and Mary Lamb.

  At sixteen I obtained my ‘release’ from Toone’s plywood mill and became a capstan lathe operator at Firman’s small factory in the Meadows district, a two-mile bus ride and one-mile trek from home. The forty people who worked there started at eight in the morning, and I was glad to be back on a five-day week.

  No longer a plain labourer, but a capstan lathe operator turning out objects for Rolls-Royce engines, I became familiar with the micrometer and depth gauge, since everything had to be correct to within a few thousandths of an inch. Working at top speed on piece work, my wages soon reached four pounds a week, which allowed me to save from the ten shillings my mother handed back. The repetitious sweat of producing over a thousand brass nuts a day did not worry me, because for one thing I was making it pay and, once accustomed to the process, could dream my way from morning till evening as if I were two people.

  After a few months Bert Firman, who owned the place but came in full-time like any other workman, offered me an extra ten shillings a week to get there an hour earlier and sweep the place clean. This meant leaving home at half past six, but I accepted gladly, and the old school Bible was soon interleaved with pound notes. My mother told me later that she had found the hideaway and, taking one or two out on Monday morning if she had no cash, put them back by the weekend so that I wouldn’t know. But one week, being suspicious because they weren’t in the right page place, I pencilled an asterisk faintly on each note, and on finding one that was clean didn’t put the reason down to the influence of the Holy Scriptures. Why she should have been so short of funds by Monday was hard to imagine, because my father’s and my wages ought to have lasted the week. Though Peggy had joined the Women’s Land Army, so there was nothing more from her, Pearl had started work and brought money in.

  While giving most of my earnings to the house, I never thought I had decent enough clothes to wear. Fortunately, attending all possible parades at the ATC, much of my spare time was spent in uniform. My mother provided me with overalls, for which extra clothing coupons were given anyway, but otherwise she bought me a suit from a pawnshop, whose pinstripes were almost brushed into extinction. A secondhand overcoat soon became too short, and was passed on to Brian, and for a while an ATC anti-gas cape covered me when it rained. I did not complain, because my mother had few enough clothes of her own, and was genuinely too hard up to supply my proper needs as well as those of three younger children whose priorities no one could question, though they weren’t exactly well dressed, either.

  A dance at the ATC headquarters went on every Saturday night for about a year, and with a quiff in my hair as dashing as that of King George, and smart to the extent of a tie-pin showing at the opening of my buttoned waistcoat, I must have gone around the floor in waltz or foxtrot time much like a sailor after six months at sea.

  Selecting my partners and the type of dance with care, I met a girl who interested me because she did not work in a factory. She was rather short, and very quiet, with hungry little features, and hair worn in a roll at the forehead and then a short way down her back. Grey eyes, the liveliest of her advantages, suggested that if she did have something to say – and she did, was the implication, lots – no one roundabout would be flattered by her opinions, so why waste what was better kept to herself?

  I assiduously courted her but, though seeming to like my attentions, and accepting me as her ‘young man’, as if I would do until someone better swanned along, she was meagre with any favours beyond the customary good-night snogging. There was little fondness between us, but a mutual fascination at each other’s strangeness kept the friendship going. On my part I began to mistake it for love, because the aim of getting into her cunt became my main object in life. We went cycling once into Leicestershire, and I thought my chance had come at last when we lay down to rest on a hillside near the village of Gotham, but it hadn’t. Another time we walked from where she lived into the pocket of countryside around Top Valley Farm, but that was no good, either. She was the first girl I took formally out to lunch, instead of informally into a pub, which she would not have countenanced, and I telephoned the office where she worked twice a week from a public box near the factory to say how much I loved her.

  After the weekly hop ended at eleven I walked her home, which was even further out of my way, and we spent an hour kissing, with me trying to get as far with her as I had with my previous girlfriend, who had been callously given up for this fruitless pursuit. Further along the wall her slightly more attractive sister was being fucked silly by a friend of mine, but it was my bad luck to be lumbered with the one who was so hard to get, and I never reached my goal, for she always slipped into the house and left me – high, but dry – cursing myself for a fool on the five-mile traipse home.

  During the week at my lathe hope revived, only to be put down once more. She must have become frightened when she almost let me ‘get there’, and told her sister to say that she didn’t want me to see her again. I responded with a long and fervent letter, not one to give up easily, which she must have destroyed without reading. My self-esteem was damaged beyond repair, for a couple of days, and then I met a girl who enjoyed fucking with a steadiness of purpose that fully satisfied me until after joining the air force a couple of years later. Her widowed mother, in her fifties and somewhat deaf, had an Indian man for a boyfriend, and while they were banging around on the bed upstairs, my girlfriend and I were similarly at it, making hearthrug pie in the living room.

  Chapter Fifteen

  By the age of sixteen part of me was in every respect a fully integrated workman. If I wanted to come in late at night, or in early morning, when all others in the house were asleep, I had only to prise open the scullery window, find the key just inside, and let myself in by the back door, the only stipulation being that I lock up after me. So although by no means twenty-one, the key to the door was already in my pocket.

  There would be new experiences, of course, the more the better (the more the merrier, also), and while there was a vast quantity to learn I seemed adult to myself, and imagined that other people thought so too. If a strong doubt lingered it was only because the officers of the cadet force led a life I knew little about.

  I cared for no man, and cared not whether he cared not for me as I stood before the lathe with sleeves rolled up and, a thousand times a da
y – though the magic of turning out each separate object never left me – released the bar an inch towards my middle, spun back the turret, pushed in the chamfer tool, forced the drill, suitably cooled by a constant jet from the sud pipe, and worked the two cutting blades forward and back till the simple brass hexagonal nut fell into my right hand and was thrown into a tin, another item for the engine of a Lancaster bomber.

  We worked hard in that factory, day in and day out, week after week, all through the war: youths like myself, women and girls, and the three men kept out of the Forces as toolsetters. One of the women, tall and thin, her hair entirely grey, had lost her sergeant husband in a bombing raid over Germany. Scanning other faces that breach the wall of memory, who was that tall fair woman with laughing eyes called Meg who came in every day from Edwinstowe? Then there was the slim dark-haired woman of impeccable but tragic aspect, or so it seemed to me, who sat on her high stool before a miniature lathe making I don’t know what superfine object. I only ever viewed her from a distance, and never knew her name, for she always sat with the women, mostly listening to their talk. Someone remarked that she was Portuguese, but it occurs to me now that she may have been a Jewish refugee.

  My ambition was to become a competent navigator in one of those aircraft whose engines we were helping to make, and join the flow of hundreds that set off night after night to pour forth the Wrath of God on Nazi Germany which, having sown the wind, was having the misfortune to reap the whirlwind with little or no sympathy for its ordeal. The irony of one day destroying those objects of art and architecture so meticulously detailed in the guidebooks which I frequently looked at, did not occur to me, and if it did I would not have worried much, knowing by now that war was war, that it was them or us, imbued as I was with the absolute confidence of being on the right side.

  My only anxiety was that I might not be able to get into the air force, or any military service at all, because young men’s names could be picked out of a hat, compelling them to work in the coalmines as ‘Bevin Boys’. Such a fate, if it came up for me, was the only one which could turn me into a deserter. We dreaded, but mostly loathed, the name of Ernest Bevin.

  My lathe was converted to produce a different engine part, but the customary blueprint was missing. ‘Rolls-Royce haven’t sent one,’ Bert Firman said. ‘Or maybe they forgot, and it’ll come next week. But as we know the measurements we can make do without.’

  Taking the piece home, with a micrometer and depth gauge, I cleared the table in the kitchen, and went back in the morning with the drawing done to scale on fine graph paper. The job was simple, but perhaps as a result of this Bert said I ought not to join up but stay on for a few years at his factory and become a qualified mechanical engineer. It would mean going to school on a few evenings of the week for a year or so, but such a course would put me in a reserved occupation, thus keeping me out of the Forces. Though flattered by his plan, I had no difficulty in turning it down.

  Looking up from the factory entrance in my dinner hour during June 1944, at khaki railway carriages on the embankment marked with large red crosses carrying wounded back from Normandy, it seemed that the war might still have years to run. In the next few months, however, the strength of the West Nottingham squadrons of the ATC fell by half, as if people thought the war was as good as over. I felt it could take an age to push through such a large country as France, as had been the case in the Great War, and then Japan would have to be defeated. Either I knew more history than most, or I had not yet realized the effect of the armoured column and the firepower of ground-attack aircraft in modern war. Perhaps my imagination refused to picture a less structured life after a war which was so much part of my existence that I did not want it to end.

  The total time spent at camps and on training courses during my time with the ATC came to over three months’ full-time service. I flew in many different types of aircraft, the smell of pear drops, rexine and high octane fuel combining to sicken when the circuits and bumps went on too long. As the number of cadets decreased there was less competition for the few flights available. Warrant Officer Rome, a Canadian, took me up in a Dakota from Syerston and let me work the controls. On another flight I did the navigation, mainly by pointing at relevant features on the ground and comparing them to the map. More exciting were the training flights, also in Dakotas, in which tightly packed bales of hay were pushed out of the wide side door on to marked dropping zones, either practising for action in the Balkans or for supplying food to the starving in areas liberated from the Germans.

  Circuits and bumps in Hamilcar gliders hauled by a Halifax bomber gave better thrills than any apparent fairground peril. When I turned my head from a safety-belted stance behind the pilot we seemed to be inside a long wooden shed. Dropping its tow rope, the enormous contraption went gracefully like a bird to the start of the runway when, as if halted by an invisible hand, it plummeted 800 feet, and on reaching ground trundled almost silently along the grass until it stopped.

  Crates of Short Lee Enfield rifles sent to the squadron were unpacked and de-greased, and used for the kind of arms drill which sent a different percussionist clatter through the wooden floor of the establishment. A two-two calibre rifle range was fitted out in an underground hall at the local gasworks, and other NCOs and myself spent an hour on Sunday morning improving our marksmanship, lying down and letting go on rapid fire, the walls echoing the noise tenfold, till we came back into daylight with ears ringing and eyes sore from the tang of cordite.

  Because of my seniority I felt obliged to acquiesce when volunteers were called for, as when one of the officers decided that the squadron should form a concert party. We concocted short dramatic or funny sketches and, after entertaining the other cadets on a couple of Saturday nights, took our skills to a local prison serving temporarily as a borstal. Whether the brown-coated inmates thought much of the performance was hard to say, but they appreciated the packets of cigarettes our officer told us to have with us and surreptitiously give away.

  While standing at the lathe my mind was lively with fantasies, re-enacting flights made under blue sky and above cumulus cloud-fields, and then being told on the radio telephone, after the pilot had mysteriously lost consciousness, to bring the kite in on my own. Or I would stow away in a Lancaster and, a gunner being wounded, take over his station and shoot down a German night-fighter. More often there was a lascivious reappraisal of sexual encounters from the recent past, and revelling in others yet to come with my present girl. To cool down I might tax my memory with facts that had been learned, or run through what had still to be mastered in the aviation syllabus.

  Such maggoty and fevered musings, pegged within brackets of three years back and the future only as far in front as the next weekend or stint at camp, were fuelled by the mechanical and not unpleasing repetition of work, as if to keep me sufficiently content not to bear animus against the lathe itself.

  My girlfriend worked in a netting factory and sat in line all day talking with other women. She had a firm and slender body, and a pale oval face with grey eyes that had a slight upward slant suggesting something oriental in her background, though she was absolutely English. I never wore uniform when meeting her, or talked about anything to do with the cadet force, because she thought I had succumbed to a life distasteful to her and unsuitable for me, that such interests could not really be part of me, and that I was in some way ‘putting it on’. She would have been more sympathetic had I donned a uniform of plain khaki, or a matelot’s rig, but perhaps most of all she didn’t like that part of my life from which she had chosen in any case to be excluded. It never became a real issue between us, since she saw how useless it would be to try and deflect me from it, due to my way of totally ignoring criticism or disapproval, while barely even noticing that I had done so.

  What we talked about I’ll never know, but we made love whenever we could, and once fucked five times in twenty-four hours. Silence seemed not to bother her, perhaps because it was a state in which she sa
w no possibility of conflict, and in any case it didn’t worry me. At the cinema we were too absorbed to talk, and it wasn’t possible to do so in pubs jumping with noise and too packed anyway to find a seat. Nevertheless, the nights we spent together were precious, and we loved on terms that were comfortably established, such regularity freeing me from wasting time going after other girls.

  We went swimming in the Trent beneath Clifton Grove and, coming out of the Eastertime water trembling with cold, found warmth in each other’s arms. Later there was an ample tea for ninepence at a cottage in the village. I took her rowing, or by bus to Hucknall for a walk up Misk Hill. Ordinary excursions pleased her, but she was uneasy when, as with my former girlfriend, I invited her to lunch in a restaurant, sensing a ruse to extend the limits of her social experience.

  Earning as much as five pounds a week, and sometimes more, provided sufficient overflow for acquiring a secondhand bicycle. Arthur Shelton and I rode to Derby or Newark, and one Easter to the Lincolnshire coast, where we shivered all night in a concrete pillbox, before cycling back through seventy miles of rain.

  Some of the past was already attractive to recall, or it provided a good enough reason for the destination of Worksop by bicycle, and cut out any uneasiness at knocking without notice on the back door of Mrs Cutts, who had looked after me so well as an evacuee five years before. There was hardly any traffic on the road, and in my solitary way through Mansfield with neither town plan nor signposts I went too far west through Pleasley and the Langwiths before regaining the Worksop road, consoling myself with the thought that even the best navigators get lost.