A Start in Life

by Alan Sillitoe

  “‘I left it by the Austin.”

  ‘He laughed: “I hope you haven’t seen the last of it. Ask Johnny Spode.” Johnny had vanished, and never came back. I found my coat stuffed under a bush, the money ripped out, so that I was practically penniless once more. If I had suddenly been able to get my hands on the thieving bastard I’d have choked the shit out of him. It’s all right robbing the rich, but when one working bloke robs another it makes high treason look like a parking offence. I was reduced to washing up in cafés, which kept me so broke that a fortnight later I went to the garage in Bermondsey to see if they needed another car. I’d have sold them a Rolls-Royce for twenty quid if they’d said yes, but the place was derelict and boarded up, so I’d only wasted my bus fare.

  ‘To deaden the long drag back I bought a newspaper, sat up front on the top deck to get the feel of being on my own while I read it. At one piece of news my head rattled. I pulled the paper on to my knee before I could fix it firm enough for reading, not knowing whether to laugh or get off the bus and run for my life in case the coppers had already got the hint to come after me. Johnny Spode had been charged with trying to pass false fivers at a pub in the East End, and I knew of course they could only be those Claud Moggerhanger had given me for the stolen Jaguar, and that I’d stitched into a secret pocket of my working jacket, and that Johnny had nicked from me. He’d been remanded in custody, which meant they were trying to make him squeal where he’d got them, I hoped it was the last of the bunch they’d found him with, for then he might argue his way out of it by saying some toff whose name he couldn’t remember and whose face was covered with smallpox had given it him for cleaning his car. In which case it could be I was in no danger at all.

  ‘I didn’t believe it, not on your life. It was better to be on the safe side, and flee. I got to my room and packed my small case, then spent my last few bob on a packet of fags and a bus ride to the south-west. This only took me twelve miles but soon I got a lift in a car going to Salisbury, which was lucky for it was starting to rain. My exhaustion, my downhearted ruin seemed certain and complete. My only need was sleep, but the chap driving wanted to know why I was heading for Salisbury.

  ‘“Going to see the Cathedral?” he asked, “or have you got friends there? Myself, I’m off to Dorchester, to look at a house I’m hoping to buy. What’s your work?”

  ‘I told him I was a gardener who’d heard there was work at Salisbury, and so I was on my way to find it. I didn’t spin any hard-luck yarn, though when he set me down in the middle of the town he opened his wallet and gave me ten bob. My thanks were never more sincere, at that time, and maybe it was an omen of good luck, because I stayed two years in Salisbury. Nobody bothered me during all that while, and I was known by a few people well, and many people slightly, and they saw me only as a quiet person who’d come down from the North. I gave out that I had worked as a miner since I was fourteen but that now, nearly twenty years later, having been menaced by a soot-kiss of silicosis, I had to get out of such drudgery. What’s more, my widowed mother had died, and being the only child of an only child, there was nothing in the line of duty to keep me in the North Pole of Nottinghamshire.

  ‘I worked as a van driver and odd-job man for a market gardener, so that I was soon seen to be getting my health back, much to everyone’s touching concern. I lodged with a widow who had a moonshine face, and who (so it was said to me later in the pub) had been married for a fortnight fifteen years ago to a man gone into the Merchant Navy at the beginning of the war. Before the end of it he had just vanished, so after a while I shared her bed at night because, believe me, there was still a lovely amount of juice in her.

  ‘But one morning, for no other reason than waking up with a headache (or it may have been stomach ache, I forget, and in any case, it doesn’t matter which it was) I kissed her goodbye as I always did on going to work, and came back an hour later when I knew she’d be out shopping. I had forty quid put by, as well as a watch and a small radio, and with my suitcase and overcoat I walked to the station and took the mile-a-minute train to London. I wondered whether I hadn’t done the wrong thing when I saw the desert of Surbiton out of the window, but stepping from the train at Waterloo, I walked along the Thames to Hungerford Bridge through the air of summer dust and smoke that made me shout with happiness. I crossed the footbridge, sweating over my case, though it wasn’t that heavy, and stood looking at the green water oiling its way against the supports below, and passenger boats loaded with people setting off downstream for Greenwich. The line of the shore pressed itself into me, and I was disturbed from looking at it by the whole bridge shuddering as a train punched out of Charing Cross. I was so happy I dropped a shilling in an old man’s cap who was playing a tin whistle. The city seemed made for me, a land of treasure I’d never felt so close to before.

  ‘When you feel like this on coming to town there’s only one sort of life you can lead, and that is a life of crime. I own up to it Knocking around Soho I heard of a garage that took stolen cars, and I lost no time in selling a few I found by the roadside – usually cars of the medium-expensive kind – and this time I got a better price for them, I might tell you. As is only right and proper, one thing led to another, and I began to help in robberies, usually as the driver of a getaway car. In this I was expert because I’d studied the map and was familiar with much of London. I could do a zig-zag course with such speed and skill that I’d throw anybody off the scent. To bring my story right up to press I was one of the four who did a job that netted eight thousand pounds. The trouble was that I got caught, while the others didn’t. We were getting away, but the cops were closing in because we had a radio with their wave length on it and could hear them yapping to each other. So I let the others out, and set off towards Croydon on my own. I was nabbed, and the beak gave me five years. I’ve just finished four of them, and got out yesterday, heading for London now so that I can claim my two thousand pounds. Don’t tell me it’s hopeless and that I won’t find it, because I know I will. I could have got off with a lot less than five years if I’d given the other three away and put the police on the trail of the loot, but I didn’t. I held out and said I’d done nothing except steal sixty-two cars, and finally that was all they could get me for.’

  The end of Bill Straw’s story brought us north of Biggies wade. Rain was coming through the roof, and the South wasn’t living up to its promise. With so much damage done to the car, I was driving on borrowed time. Both of us felt it. The engine was coughing like a man in the last stages of TB and it was Bill Straw’s opinion that, as the car seemed to need not only a new body but also a new engine, I might be wise after all to abandon ship and leave it by the roadside to rot. ‘It doesn’t sound good,’ he said, ‘so you might as well cut your losses. Anyway, let’s have our dinner and give it time to cool down. A bag of damp hay might encourage it. Do it the world of good, and we’d benefit by something to eat as well – at least I would. Can’t seem to live on fags like you do.’

  ‘You’re always on about food,’ I told him, ‘when you’re not running down my car, or boasting about your past exploits.’

  ‘You should feel privileged,’ he said, ‘to be driving me to London. I’ll be a rich man when I get there, and then I’ll pay you back tenfold for all you might still spend on me.’ I had a strange feeling when he said this, not at all distrustful of him, as if he really might turn up in the future and demonstrate some blinding shaft of truth out of all the lies he’d been telling.

  I parked as far as I could from the lorries, and followed Bill in. He stood at the counter, eyes turned up to the menu as if it was the light from heaven. ‘What’ll you have?’

  ‘I’ve already decided,’ he said. ‘It don’t take me long to make up my mind when it comes to food.’

  ‘I like a man of decision and character,’ I said, in a sarcastic way which finally annoyed him.

  ‘You’re getting a bit too bloody familiar. If you want to eat alone, you can. If you want to drive on yo
ur own, you can do that as well, but you’ll end up walking to London with that wreck on your back.’ He laughed so loud at this that the girl behind the counter asked him what he wanted. He rattled off a poem to the empty stomach: ‘Tomato soup, my lovely, then liver, sausages, onions and mashed spuds. Then steamed pudding and custard, a couple of them jam tarts, a mug of tea, four slices of bread and butter, twenty fags and a knife, fork, and spoon.’

  ‘Steady on,’ I said, ‘I’ll be bankrupt.’ He didn’t hear me.

  ‘Is that all then?’ the girl asked.

  ‘Except for a bit of you,’ he said, jutting his scruffy, but confident face over the counter. She blushed at this, stepped back and smiled: ‘Cheeky devil! I’ll call you when it’s ready.’ She turned to me: ‘What about you, then?’

  ‘Beans on toast and a mug of tea.’

  ‘You won’t carry that car far on that!’ Bill laughed.

  ‘You’re getting a bit too bloody familiar as well,’ I snapped, paying out the best part of a quid on his monumental scoff. ‘Nothing’s gone right since I picked you up.’

  We walked to a table and sat down in silence. A slim, dark-haired woman of about twenty-five was at the other end of it. The fact that she looked bored with her solitude made her more fascinating than she might have been if seated in a convivial atmosphere such as the midst of a gay family gathering. But in any case I was halfway struck by her as she smoked a tipped cigarette over the remains of an apple pie – while I waited for sufficient wit and perhaps courage before opening my mouth to say something. I knew I had to speak before the food came, because it would be bad manners to talk on a full mouth.

  Bill Straw must have had similar ideas, for he opened with: ‘Will you pass the sauce, duck? I must have a lick of something or I shall die. That dinner I ordered’s taking ages.’ She slid the half-filled bottle along, smiling at his common and slimy wit. He took the newspaper out of my pocket and offered it to her: ‘Like to read this while you’re waiting?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ he said, drinking the sauce to the bottom. ‘It’s full of lies. Do you want a lift to London, with me?’

  I hoped she’d get up and kick him in the shins, but she didn’t: ‘I am going that way,’ she said with what could only have been a smile of gratitude. ‘Is it in a lorry?’

  ‘Car. We’ve come from Grantham. I don’t know why the mean bleeders don’t put sugar on the table. I could have a dip if they did. That sauce just set me going.’ When the waitress arrived she set each plate before him so that most of the table was covered. ‘Will you join me?’ he offered. I might have said the same, but what can you do with beans on toast?

  ‘I’ve eaten already.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Of course. I set out from Leeds, and so far I’ve made good time.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ladling the soup into his lantern-chops, ‘we’ll get you there in a couple of hours, more or less, if we all get out and push. My name’s Bill Straw. What’s yours?’

  ‘June. Do you live in London?’

  He didn’t answer till the soup was gone, then stabbed his finger towards me. ‘He does, I don’t.’ The further he got into his meal, the more clipped his answers were, though he still left space between his lips for questions to get out: ‘Are your parents alive?’

  Her eyebrows wrinkled with surprise. ‘What do you want to know for?’

  ‘Just wondered, love.’ It was hard to say whether he was the greatest card of them all, or just plain stupid. He took life too easy for a wise man, it seemed to me, and that might be dangerous if we got too close, so I thought it would be best to avoid him when our mutual journey was over. ‘You live in London?’ he asked her.

  ‘When I can.’

  ‘That’s a funny answer’ – onions streaming out of his mouth.

  ‘It’s expensive. Makes it hard. But I like it there. Life’s interesting.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Hey,’ she cried, ‘who are you, anyway? You’re so genuine you act like a plain-clothes man.’ It was something I’d never have thought about.

  ‘That’s a lark, for somebody like me. The best joke I’ve heard in ten years. I just wanted to know what you did.’

  ‘I work,’ she said. ‘What’s your sweat, then?’

  ‘Painter and decorator. I’m fed up with Notts, so I’m going down south. Left my wife and kids in Mansfield yesterday. Spent last night with my girlfriend in Nottingham and now I’m off to fresh fields and pastures new. Where will I be tonight then, eh?’ he ended with a leer. She said nothing to this, as if to show that he had gone too far. He accepted it, but only because he could then devote complete attention to his meal, which he gobbled so that anyone would have thought he’d fallen in love with that now, in his flippant, one-sided way.

  I don’t know what sort of car she imagined we had, but when she saw it she didn’t show too much interest at getting in. Bill said he’d better fill the radiator now, which would save us doing it during the next three miles. Still, she put her small valise in the back, and got in when I held the front seat forward. ‘It don’t look up to much,’ said Bill, ‘but it pulls itself along all right. Slow but sure.’

  I turned on the ignition. ‘Let’s go.’ Nothing happened, so Bill leapt out and flung the bonnet up, taking a piece of rag from his pocket to dry the contacts, which he thought might have got wet from the water he’d splashed too freely when filling the radiator.

  June drew her coat around her in the back as if sitting in a refrigerator. ‘Shall we give it a push? The road slopes a bit here.’

  Bill’s trick worked, and the engine coughed into life. ‘Push the choke in as soon as we get going,’ he said, ‘or it might stall.’

  ‘Whose car is it?’ she asked, when we were trundling along at a fair forty.

  ‘Mine,’ I said, before Bill could put his false spoke in. ‘Or my brother’s, I should say. He lent it to me to go to London for a holiday. I work for an estate agent in Nottingham, and I’ve been so bored the last few weeks that I thought I needed a break.’ Every hundred yards a noise went out of the exhaust pipe as sharp as a pistol shot, shattering the nerves of any car or lorry driver who happened to be nearby.

  ‘The engine’s bunged up,’ said Bill. ‘It sounds as though we’re armed to the teeth. Anyway, you can tell me your life story now. I’ve told mine.’

  ‘I can’t talk while I’m driving. It puts me off.’

  ‘That’s a bloody fine get out, ain’t it? I was looking forward to it.’

  ‘Some other time. What about June?’

  She said nothing. Bill, who had managed to forget her existence for a few minutes, passed her a lighted cigarette: ‘All for one, and one for all. It’s sheer communism in this car, ain’t it, Michael?’

  ‘Seems like it,’ I said. ‘What’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is yours, but I’m the only one that’s got something.’

  ‘Don’t be like that. You’d be back there in the mud, trying to start this box if it weren’t for me. We all earn our keep. Eh, duck?’ he called significantly to June.

  She stirred. ‘Oh, well, I suppose I’d better tell you all about myself, if that’s the way it is.’

  ‘If that’s the way you want to pay,’ he said in a mocking and disappointed tone. ‘But no lies, you know. This is a game of truth. The pot on the bloody fire, love.’

  ‘I never lie,’ she said. ‘I don’t see any point in it, especially in front of strangers.’

  ‘I thought we were friends?’ said Bill.

  ‘You can take your choice,’ she laughed.

  ‘All right, as long as the miles roll by under this fusillade of shots. I’ll have to interrupt you now and again to tank up that thirsty radiator. You’re a real sport,’ he went on, licking his chops, inside as it were, ‘to join in our fun and games.’

  ‘You think so?’ she said, in such a tone that I knew she wasn’t joining in anything at all, though only time would
prove whether Bill or I was right. There was a strong whiff of petrol in the car, but the others didn’t say anything, so I decided to go until they did. Not that I doubted my nose, but I just didn’t see how it could be dangerous. In any case, I had always found the smell of petrol rather agreeable to the senses whenever I was beginning to be just a little bit tired.

  ‘I had a perfect childhood,’ June began. ‘You see, when my parents got married they wanted a girl, and I was a girl. Even they couldn’t mistake that. They were as happy as they could be that things had begun so well. At the time I didn’t realize this, and though they told me as, soon as they thought I was able to understand, it wasn’t till I was sixteen and began to have a mind of my own that I realized what a responsibility had been put on to my shoulders, especially since, after having me, my mother wasn’t able to produce any more. What had kicked off for them as a blessing ended up for me as a curse.

  ‘I was a girl, and therefore they indulged me in everything that had to do with girlishness – though you’ve got to remember I’m talking from hindsight and not so much from what I felt at the time. I was up to my neck – unwillingly – in dolls’ houses, dolls, ballet clothes, sewing machines, and embroidery sets. Whatever I wanted, I had, providing it was just just the thing for a little girl, the girl of their dreams. They weren’t very well-off, mind you. My father was a booking clerk at the railway station, but in providing so well for me they acted as if they were thanking God for having sent me in the first place. It was an act of worship. God’s altar was little me.