Love on the Dole

by Walter Greenwood

  He snivelled, blew his nose on a corner of the oil and paint daubed newspaper he was using. He still was catching his breath in sobs. This to happen when he wished to identify himself with the boys! His impulse was to steal away, run off and never return. He felt abysmally lonely and miserable. He remembered Helen: instantly he yearned for her soothing company. But even she he had alienated: ‘Aw, girls mek me sick!’ What a fool he had made of himself in his vain impatience.

  ‘Eh, ‘Any. … A’ y’ there?’ a shouted interrogation. Jack Lindsay.

  ‘Aye,’ Harry muttered, sniffing.

  ‘Aach, what’re y’ shrikeing for, man. Come on. Come out’v it.’ He kicked the privy door: ‘Open door and let’s in.’ Reluctantly, Harry slipped the catch. Jack entered, grinning, lit the fag end of a cigarette and offered Harry a puff. Grateful, Harry accepted; he translated the gesture as symbolic of comradeship.

  ‘Ah wasn’t shrikein’ because Ah was feared,’ he mumbled in an attempt to excuse his tears and screams: ‘It ‘urt.’

  Jack made a grimace, leant against the wood partition, crossed his legs and said: They’ll leave y’ alone, now. Y’ll be one ‘v us. Y’ve all got t’ g’ through it when y’ first come. … Hey! Save us a draw: that’s th’ on’y tab end Ah’ve got’

  Harry’s spirits revived: ‘Y’ll be one of us!’ The phrase warmed him. Suddenly, his apprenticeship assumed an aspect of maturity. He felt profoundly grateful to Jack. He passed the cigarette-end back to him: ‘Ah’ll gie y’ packet o’ week-end. Jack.’

  The deep note of the siren. Countershafts began to revolve. Beneath his feet he felt the reverberations of the drop hammers: his ears caught the distant muffled ‘tat-tat-tat-tat-tat’ of the pneumatic riveters.

  ‘Aw,’ said Jack, deprecatingly: ‘Ah don’t want y’ cigs. … Come on, let’s get out o’ here.’ He led the way, Harry, with an uncertain access of self-confidence and with a sheepish grin on his face following.

  CHAPTER 7 - SATURDAY

  TEN bob a week: ten bob every Saturday! ‘Seven and a tanner more’n Price paid me!’ A stimulating experience.

  Ah, and Saturday. Saturday, free! The day had a peculiar atmosphere; an air all its own. It pervaded everywhere, communicated itself to everybody.

  The birth of noon blazoned forth by fanfares, as it were, blaring dissonances on all the mill and factory sirens: an exuberant tumult of sound that shouted: ‘Work’s done until Monday! Hurrah!’ At Price and Jones’s he would have had a nine-hour stretch ahead of him. Phew! And Blimey!

  Noon.

  The great exodus from Marlowe’s began. Twelve thousand boys and men surging through the gates, a black, agitated river of humanity breaking into a hundred tiny streamlets and scurrying off in all directions. Lines of empty stationary tramcars and fleets of charabancs; corporation buses, push and motor bikes: mad rushes, pushings, shovings, cursing, jangling of tram bell, honkings of motor horns: ‘Gerrout of it, y’ dreamy-eyed sod, y’ … ‘ changings of gears, rattlings of tramcar wheels, clouds of pungent exhaust: ‘What a bloody stink …’ ragged boys calling the midday sporting newspaper: ‘One o’clock. … One o’clock edition,’ football and racing talk. Everybody all smiles on account of wages in pockets and because they wouldn’t see any more machinery until Monday morning.

  There’d be a flutter on the two-thirty, football match this afternoon, the public house tonight and a long morning in bed tomorrow with the missis. No sirens; no alarm clocks; no Blind Joe to rouse one with his eight-foot pole tipped with a bunch of wires. Luxury! All smiles and good nature.

  Harry, among the twelve thousand, dirty faced and jingling his money, swaggered home, walking with the rest of the street-corner boys. This Saturday feeling was intoxicating. He was happy, contented, oh, and the future! A delightful closed book full of promise whose very mystery enhanced its charm. It justified, fully, his choice of occupation. There was something indefinable about Marlowe’s, something great and glorious, something imminent, but, as yet, just out of reach. Optimism told him to rest content, assured him that joys undreamt of were in store. And who can question optimism? It seduces. Anticipation filled him with unwonted buoyancy, with sensations of reckless abandon.

  Affluence entered his life. This day, Saturday, became one to live for. When at Price and Jones’s earning a half-crown a week his personal share of the money amounted to a solitary penny. His mother now gave him a shilling. Added to this were the coppers he received of the men for services rendered, brewing their tea, taking their bets to Sam Grundy’s back entry and fetching home the winnings.

  The winnings!

  Who ever could forget yesterday? Yesterday, the occasion of Billy Higgs’ winning five pounds odd as a consequence of a shilling wager, a ‘double’. Yesterday Harry had fetched Billy the

  winnings. This morning Billy had given him a half-crown!

  Phew! As he handed the money over to Billy, Harry had gazed upon him awed, watching him, with forced nonchalance, stuff the money into his pockets under the cynosure of envious eyes. What a moment for Billy: how everybody crowded round to offer congratulations, pushing Harry aside as though he had not taken the bet, as though he hadn’t drawn the winnings, as though part of the transaction’s glory wasn’t his. Even Billy admitted it: ‘You’ve fetched me luck, son,’ he had said. Harry swelled with pride and importance, and, for a moment, visualized himself as a kind of infallible luck charm with queues and queues of men ranged in front of him begging, imploring him to take their bets thereby to exert his magical influence upon them. Of course, it was silly.

  Ah, wait until he was as old as Billy Higgs; wait until he was twenty years of age and winning over five pounds for a shilling.

  Though he wasn’t complaining now. The half-crown which Billy had given him was in his pockets, plus the other half-crown he had earned for brewing tea and what not Then there was the shilling he would receive of his mother. Six shillings! More than twice as much as Price gave him for a week’s work. There was not sufficient air to breathe.

  Hanky Park shed its dreariness; its grimy stuffy houses took on cheerful aspects; the acrid, pervasive stench of the rubber proofing works became imperceptible. Over all was an air of well-being for the day was Saturday. Pay day.

  No scratching and scraping today; kitchen table littered with groceries; sugar in buff bags; fresh brown crusted loaves; butter and bacon in greaseproof paper; an amorphous, white-papered parcel, bloodstained, the Sunday joint; tin of salmon for tomorrow’s tea; string bag full of vegetables; bunch of rhubarb with the appropriate custard powder alongside. Ma rushing about, now to the slopstone, now to the cupboard stowing things away, now to the frying-pan on the fire where the dinner was frizzling, now impatiently lifting the cat out of the way with her toe as it, the cat, clawed the table leg, miaowing, licking its lips and sniffing the Sunday joint, hungrily: ‘Get out o’ my way, cat. Ain’t y’ ne’er had enough?’

  After handing his wages over and receiving his spending money, he, while waiting dinner, sauntered, unwashed, to Mr Hulkington’s, the grocer’s corner shop where swarms of noisy children were spending Saturday halfpennies. He purchased two penn’ worth of Woodbines, then stood with the rest of the boys on the kerb, hands in pockets jingling his money.

  This was life! Nothing else was to be desired than to stand here smoking, spitting manfully, chatting wisely on racing and forking out threepence for a communal wager: ‘Ah tell y’, lads, the — thing’s a dead cert, a dead — cert,’ said Bill Simmons, adding, confidentially: ‘Ar owld man (father) heard it from another bloke whose sister-in-law’s one o’ Sam Grundy’s whores. He wouldn’t tell her that i’ he hadn’t heard summat good, him bein’ a bookie. Anyway, Ah’m havin’ thippence on it. Wha’ d’y say?’

  They handed their threepences over. Bill departed and returned a moment later from Grundy’s back entry all smiles: ‘It’s on,’ he said. But, like most ‘dead certs’, the information rarely proved profitable. Still, it gave one something of a thrill; inflat
ed one with the anticipation of success, caused one to expand and to respond to the entertaining bustle of Hanky Park of a Saturday noon.

  Harry surveyed it with complacence.

  Crowds of shabby mill girls clattering home, arms linked, four and five abreast. There would be a metamorphosis wrought in their appearances after tea; arrayed in their cheap, gaudy finery in readiness for dancing, nobody would recognize them as the same girls. Tom Hare, naturally, had to observe, aloud, on their anatomies: he was a disgusting fellow.

  He turned from him to watch the women scurrying from Price and Jones’s loaded with redeemed pledges. Mrs Nattle, pushing with great dignity, a perambulator piled with bundles, three of Mrs Cranford’s children at her heels carrying the superflux. Mrs Dorbell, withered and threadbare, shuffling out of her stricken home talking to herself as she walked. Drawing alongside Harry she stopped, suddenly, and, interrupting her own conversation, exclaimed: ‘Eee! Ah’ve come out bout (without) me baskit!’ she about faced, shuffled into the house to reappear with an old basket on the crook of her arm. She trudged away talking to the pavement.

  Two handcarts, with attendants, stood in the middle of the street, the one selling cooked ribs, the other fish, and around the last swarmed nearly every cat in the neighbourhood, stalking, fawning round the fishmonger and his conveyance, tails in air or sitting on their backsides waiting the trimmings which he flung to them whenever he made a sale.

  A second-hand clothes dealer crying his trade, stopping by Blind Joe Riley who was standing puffing his pipe on his doorstep : ‘Any ole clo’es, mate?’

  ‘Aye, lad, all on ‘em,’ replied Joe, and went on puffing.

  Clothing-club collectors and insurance men, afoot or riding into the street on bicycles, knocking briskly upon the open doors, poking their heads within and shouting the name of the company or firm whom they represented.

  ‘Prudential, Mrs Jike.’

  ‘Good Samaritan, Mrs Bull.’ (The Good Samaritan was a clothing club owned by Mr Alderman Ezekiah Grumpole, a fat and greasy citizen who, also, was a money-lender.) The collectors withdrew their heads from the doorways, flourished pen or pencil in a businesslike manner, then beamed upon the tribes of dirty children standing or lying about the pavements, all of whom would have breathed more freely had they blown their noses. Afterwards, the hopeful collectors whistled or hummed tunes and surveyed the grey skies with such unconcern as suggested that the collection of money was the last thing in their minds.

  ‘Call next week, lad,’ from stout Mrs Bull, the local, uncertified midwife and layer out of the dead. She sat at her kitchen table, jug and glass at hand: ‘Call next week, lad. Ah broke teetotal last night,’ with assurance: ‘Ah’ll have it for y’ when y’ call agen. Mrs Cranford’s expectin’ o’ Tuesday, an’ owld Jack Tuttle won’t last week out. Eigh, igh, ho, hum! Poooor owld Jack,’ a guzzle at the glass.

  ‘But y’ missed payin’ last week, y’ know, Mrs Bull,’ plaintively, from the collector, scowling at the snotty-nosed children standing on the kerb endeavouring to ring the bell on his bicycle.

  ‘Aaach. … Get away wi’ y’,’ loudly, so that Mrs Cake, Mrs Bull’s mortal enemy standing on her doorstep across the street waiting the collector, heard every word. Mrs Cake curled her lip, shrugged her shoulders and displayed her payment book conspicuously as she heard Mrs Bull exclaim: ‘Tell owld Grumpole t’ put me i’ court,’ louder, as she glimpsed, through the window, Mrs Cake’s contemptuous expression: ‘An’ y’ can tell her wi’ lum - ba - go across street wot thinks she’s a lady that we ain’t all married to ‘usbands wots lets wife wear the trousers.’

  ‘Aye, it’s all right, Mrs Bull,’ sulkily, from the collector: ‘But y’ get me in trouble keep missin’ like this.’

  ‘Aach, trouble, eh? Tha’ll thrive on it when tha gets as owld as me.’

  The collector turned, grumbling, pushed his bike across the street, removed the scowl from his face to smile, unctuously, upon Mrs Cake, who, lips pursed, eyes a-glitter, handed over her book and money: ‘Some folks,’ she cried, loudly, staring at Mrs Bull’s open front door: ‘Some folks as could be named ain’t got principle of a louse,’ to the street, generally, as she received her book of the collector who prepared to ride away: ‘Fair play, that’s my motto. Owe nowt t’ nobody an’ stare everybody in face!’

  ‘Willage blacksmith!’ jeeringly from Mrs Bull who laughed, hugely, into her glass. Mrs Cake slammed the door and retired to the kitchen where to express herself irritably on her husband and children.

  At the street corner Jack Lindsay chuckled and pointed to one of the houses. The boys turned to see tiny Mrs Jike, accordion under her arm, disappear into the home of Mr and Mrs Alfred Scodger. Grins broke on their faces. ‘Now for it,’ said Jack.

  Presently, from the Scodger abode, came the concerted cacophony of accordion and trombone. As an accordionist Mrs Jike was as ungifted a performer as Mrs Scodger was upon the trombone, nevertheless, between them, they managed to provide musical accompaniment to the hymn singing at the spiritualists’ mission situated over the coal yard at the far end of the street.

  The noise of the music attracted the children: congregating round the door and under the window, some, more curious than the rest, muscled themselves on to the sill to peer through and to feed their gazes on the strange spectacle of the two musicians, tiny Mrs Jike stretching and pressing her instrument, buxom Mrs Scodger, puffing, pushing and pulling on the brass, between them managing to arouse the suspicion in a chance auditor that the tune they were playing was ‘Whiter than the Snow’, a hymn of which the mission was inordinately fond. Though not Mr Alfred Scodger, the unmuscular blacksmith.

  Disturbed from his after-dinner nap, the peeping children saw him appear in the threshold of the door dividing the two rooms: his face, enormously moustached, wore an expression of indignant protestation: his sparse hair bristled wryly as one just risen from bed or sofa; he held his rusty billycock in his hand, his coat was on his arm and his boots were unlaced, the tongues protruding like those of rude boys making faces at the teacher behind his back: ‘ ‘Ere!’ he cried, elevating his brows and holding out the hand carrying the billycock.

  The music ceased: Mrs Scodger lowered her chin and frowned at the blacksmith over her spectacles. She jerked her thumb, rudely, towards the room at the back and replied, peremptorily: ‘Kitchen,’ adding, imperiously: ‘An’ tek them there Sunday clo’es off. You ain’t goin’ out o’ this house till I’m ready to’ go wi’ y’,’ Mrs Jike watched, patiently, resting her instrument in her lap, fingers still engaged to the stops.

  ‘ ‘Ere!’ repeated Mr Scodger, more indignant than before.

  ‘You heard me …’

  He stared at her, indecisively, but, as he saw her knee commence to bob up and down beating time, and as she nodded to Mrs Jike and then raised her instrument to her lips, he, with a sudden blaze of revolt, stamped to the front door, opened it, turned upon his wife who had lowered her instrument and now was gaping at him incredulously, turned upon her and exclaimed angrily: ‘Sick an’ tired of it, Ah am. … If you think Ah’m gonna spend me Sat’day afternoon listenin’ t’ that there - ‘ stabbing the air with his forefinger in the direction of the trombone - ‘that there thing, you’re - you’re. Oh, Yaah.’ He stamped out, slamming the door, taking good care to hurry off down the street. Mrs Scodger, when she found herself able to believe her ears, hurried to the door and fulfilled the expectations of the boys at the street corner by shouting out, loudly, and, at the same time, shaking the trombone as she would have a club: ‘ALFRED SCODGER!’ But Alfred, though he heard, did not heed.

  Instantly, Bill Simmons, Sam Hardie, Tom Hare and Harry, at the instigation of Jack Lindsay who beat time with his hands, exclaiming: ‘All together boys,’ commenced to sing, in harmony, a vulgar parody of the mission’s favourite hymn.

  Universal laughter; grinning neighbours, accustomed to the boys’ irreverence, came to stand on their doorsteps. And Tom Hare, who was an expert, made
a very loud and extremely rude noise with his mouth which caused still more mirth. It embarrassed Mrs Scodger, who, red in the face, retired, muttering, whilst Alfred, trembling with emotion, passed through the open doors of the Duke of Gloucester public-house, where, leaning against the bar, Harry saw Ned Narkey, mug raised to his mouth. Phoo! The way he could guzzle beer! At half-past two he would go reeling down the street to his digs, sleep off his drunkenness in readiness for evening. Harry thought him a fool; wondered how long Ned’s army money would last at this rate. Everybody knew how he was spending it on women (he’d the nerve to invite Sal go dancing with him! Harry had heard it from Helen who had heard it of Sal herself. The impudence of Narkey, classing Sal with those women with whom he associated! It filled him with unease to think of her even speaking to him). Narkey. Harry regretted Ned’s muscularity; nobody could gainsay his striking appearance: either in his workaday apparel or his flashy week-end clothes his figure rendered him conspicuous. He’d be all right if he wasn’t so overbearing, so downright, so ostentatiously vain. He thought every girl in the place had only to see him, to fall in love with him. Although Harry did not know it his lip was curling as he stared at Ned’s broad back, so engrossed was he in telling himself how much he disliked Narkey.

  He dismissed the thought from his mind, stretched, yawned, and, seeing Larry Meath passing on the other side, rucksack on his back, cried, warmly: ‘Aye, aye, Larry,’ and grinned.

  ‘Hallo, Harry. Still like the job?’

  ‘Not half,’ Harry answered; ‘It’s great’

  Larry smiled, nodded and turned the corner.

  Bill Simmons, throwing away the end of his cigarette, spat and said, as he stared after Larry: ‘He’s a queer bloke, if y’ like. I seen him up Clifton way when I was out ferritin’ wi’ Jerry Higgs, y’ know, along cut bank. Aye, an’ there he was, large as life, lyin’ on his belly in grass watchin’ birds through them there glasses o’ his,’ curling his lip: ‘Fancy a - feller seein’ owt in watchin’ bloody birds. He’s barmy, if y’ ask me.’