A Start in Life

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘I suppose somebody should have told my mother that children were born from my father’s penis that in a moment of dark confusion got mixed up in her womb – and not in heaven. But they didn’t, and my ideal life went on for a few years more. My hair grew in dark ringlets down my back, and in looks I seemed to satisfy them as well, though they found me a bit quiet, which they put down to intelligence, and the much hoped-for fact that still waters run deep. But I only remember feeling sly and miserable, because though children can’t tell you what they feel they certainly know enough about what they feel to be able to remember it when they’re grown up. Being the apple of their eye they didn’t let me play with other girls on the street, thinking they were too rough for me and that they might initiate me into games of doctors and nurses, so I was reduced to dismembering my dolls with a kitchen knife when my mother’s back was turned, or cutting their hair with scissors as if they’d been found in some sort of unmentionable collaboration with a dirty hooligan down the street, or I’d make a hole between their legs and stick spent matches there. In actual fact, my mother was bored with looking after me, after she had lost her enthusiasm for petting and spoiling, so she was only too glad to see that I was pensively playing on my own for an hour. When my father came home he would slobber all over me for half a minute, then rush out to his railwayman’s club to play darts.

  ‘A few years went by before my mother realized that it would be impossible for her to have another child, and then a year or two more passed before they began to regret that they hadn’t had the sense to wish for a son first, since now it was too late to have one. They seemed to think, then, that their wish for a girl – me – had been the prime cause of the first child being a girl, and because of this their attitude began to change. I was at school, so at least I had another form of life to cushion the shock of it. But still, it was hard. I’m not blaming my patents, because I think those who blame parents for things they think were done against them as children are being a bit unrealistic. All you can do is state the case. Maybe I’m only saying this because I’ve got a seven-year-old daughter now.

  ‘Anyway, whereas before they loaded me with all the feminine things at a time when I wanted to know something about what boys had to do with the world, they now took everything like that away and brought me guns, Meccano outfits, chemistry sets. This might not ordinarily have been much of a shock to me, but the fact was that I’d actually been so weighed down with little-girl things from birth that I’d long since given in and grown to like it. I was a little girl, and that was that. My father would now teach me how to shoot a pop-gun. Once, he came proudly home from the club with a great parcel in his arms, which turned out to be an electric train set he’d won in a raffle. He set it up for me, and played with it for more than an hour while his supper got cold, and I sat boggle-eyed and not understanding a thing.

  ‘My parents were so selfish and gentle that they were totally ignorant. But when my father tried to dress me up in a cowboy suit, my mother drew the line, and at last got a glimmer of what confusion was being spread in me. So she went out next day and came home with the largest doll I had ever seen. I was eight, and didn’t like dolls all that much, anyway, as I’d often said, and when I pushed it aside in disgust so that it fell off the table and cracked its skull, she was so chagrined that she smacked my face for the first time in my life. All I could do was go back into my corner, and indulge in the age-old consolation of playing with myself, which I did, for at least by doing that I could see I was definitely and for ever a girl.

  ‘Though my parents may not have realized it, I already knew about the facts of life, because at school we talked on this topic continually. In fact I remember feeling that because my knowledge was so much more recent than any similar knowledge my parents could have had, mine was so much more accurate, while theirs must be right out of date. The fact that my nose was always up in the air because of this made them lose hope of their little girl ever growing up into a beautiful-dutiful daughter. From time to time they tried by an act of kindness to do something about it, but one or other of them usually ended up by cuffing me or pushing me aside in a despair that I knew wasn’t genuine.

  ‘In spite of this, and maybe because of it, I did well at school. From first to last I was top of the class, and though they made a show of being glad, this also puzzled them. Up to the age of ten my father had helped with my homework, but after that it became too complicated and I was left to deal with such mysteries on my own, which I was capable of solving. But my mother thought I was only doing it to spite my father, so as to make trouble between them. This wouldn’t have been difficult at the best of times, but they stood together by saying how ungrateful I was at them sweating blood half their lives to give me the ideal conditions in which to enjoy and take advantage of my education. It was awful, really. I hardly understood what they were saying. Going to sleep at night I’d made up stories to myself saying I hadn’t been born to them at all, but that gipsies had sold me to them as a baby, and that my real carefree wild parents were at that moment bending over a smoking fire in the mountainous part of some Balkan country waiting for the supper pot to boil so that they could feed themselves and the numerous children scattered around in the darkness who were all my real brothers and sisters. I even spread this story at school, not from spite, but because I wanted to appear different to the rest of the them. I didn’t hate my mother and father, I swear I didn’t, but to me they were more like other children than parents, whom I would try to fight on equal terms. I went so suddenly between love and hate when I got to the age of thirteen that in calm moments I’d picture myself running away from home. Neither of them thought twice about knocking me about, and a time of violent rows began that lasted till I was seventeen.

  ‘They used to take me to spend my holidays with an aunt at Southport, so that they could go off for a fortnight’s peace at Bridlington. It was lucky I liked my aunt, who was my mother’s elder sister and therefore a very different person. She managed a hotel, and never lost her temper with other people, not because she held herself in, but because she was altogether more good-natured and easy. She’d been a keen reader all her life, and every time I came home I brought a few books from her library. This annoyed my parents who thought they were losing the control over me that they didn’t know they no longer had. My room acquired these, and other books, because I’d gone by scholarship to the grammar school. They were proud of me for having done this, and when my father told me so in one of his rare bouts of confidence I was filled with happiness. The trouble was, if it can be called trouble since it is so normal, that we were a close group most of the time, and there was enough love floating around to keep us human, but not enough to keep us warm.

  ‘So you can see how uneventful my childhood was, and you can’t get nearer to perfection than that. This isn’t as sarky as you think, but the certain fact is that, being so perfect, it had to have the right sort of ending. My father accused me of becoming a precocious schoolgirl, though God knows where he picked up the phrase. I think he was the saddest person I’ve ever known. He had no idea how sad and ordinary his life was. He had given everything up to the purpose of rearing me, and that should have soothed him, but as an ideal it had cracked quite early on, and from that point he had nothing else in life – except my mother. And a man who has nothing except a wife can only make everybody’s existence a misery he comes into contact with. I’d never seen a man so trapped, yet I couldn’t feel sorry for him, because I happened to be his daughter.

  ‘Even now, when I can at least begin to have some respect for his crushed life, there’s nothing I can do for him. Whenever we meet he asks me continually when I’m going to mend my ways and settle down with a suitable husband or job. He says his friends are always asking about me, wondering what I’m up to, but I tell him to drop dead or wrap up because I can’t be bothered to try and break through the knot that ties him to wife-job-house-club. If only he was happy in it, I wouldn’t mind him getting at me. But
he’s not. He sees me, only a woman, doing some of the things he’s often dreamed of imagining himself doing, such as lighting off to London and working there, living in my own room, sometimes with men, now and again with another woman, having a child and not caring that I wasn’t married. A life of freedom is no more marvellous than a life of slavery, I sometimes think, but at least I don’t feel that society is forcing me to live in the way it wants me to live.

  ‘At eighteen I went off to London, already pregnant, and became an unmarried mother. It’s about the easiest status for a girl to acquire in life. I fell in love with a boy I’d known at school, a dark-eyed secretive bastard who wrote poetry, and could talk his head off without giving anything away. But he was so handsome that nothing could keep me from him, and though my dear father shouted and bullied me for staying out late, my hours actually got later and later. I’d started a temporary office job, and was doing a secretarial course in the evening, which my parents wanted me to take in order to get on and become self-supporting. But because of it I was able to stay out late and be much of the time with him. We’d go to the cinema to see French films, or up on the moors so that he could read his poems to me. I tell you, it was a dream life, and I lapped it up because I was not only getting what I wanted but was doing what my parents had forbidden me to do. Something to hurt them with was handed to me on a platter. I could hardly believe it. My mother, in awful and mysterious tones, had warned me never to let boys and men do anything to me. She never really said why, but I don’t think it would have made much difference, anyway. So behind a sheep-wall and in the balmy air of summer, my flooded membranes tingled under Ron Delph. We couldn’t be kept apart, but by the time autumn came (it always does) Ron began to see that I was only one of many.

  ‘I don’t want to say that I got jilted or let down, because I was cooling off from him as well. His poems were all about me “giving myself” to him, and him “taking me”. They were like apples that went rotten after they’d fallen from the tree – meaning him. After our first big quarrel, full of heartlessness and spite on both sides, I woke up next morning and spewed into the bathtub. A girl at work laughed and said maybe I was preggers. What could I do but search out Ron Delph and tell him? He went almost crazy from fear and rage but I had no idea of getting him to marry me, because I couldn’t think of a worse fate for either of us. I only wanted to talk to him about it and maybe get a bit of advice. But even that was beyond his intellectual capabilities. We were in a pub, and after half a pint of beer he went out to the gents, and didn’t come back. I’m learning fast, I thought.

  ‘Only anger stopped me from the pouring tears. I wandered around in the rain, stunned that my first love had done such a thing. But after a cup of coffee it no longer had the power to devour me. I actually began to feel happy. A sense of lightness came up in me and pushed all gloom away, and it seemed wonderful to be living. I wished Ron hadn’t run like that from the pub, and then if the evening had been warm and dry we might have gone up on the moors and laid down together, because that’s what this feeling made me want to do. I didn’t hold anything against him, because my love was coming back strong, and I thought that perhaps the same true feeling was happening to him too. But I couldn’t be sure, and wanted to find out. Knowing where he lived, I went there. I suppose it’s crack-handed to talk about the turning points of one’s life, but be that as it damn-well may, this turned out to be one of them. Ron Delph was enough of a poet to know that I might consider going to his house when I got over the shock of his vanishing trick, so his obvious ploy was not to show up there himself. In my mind he’d gone home to his mother as fast as he could, and she’d hidden him in the farthest attic or coal cellar. But no such luck, for by the time I got to the door I felt like rooting him out from wherever he was, and giving him a good scratch across the eyes.

  ‘His mother stared, and asked what I wanted. The house was a semi-detached villa with three steps leading up to the front door, the sort of place where, if you want to be on a level with the people inside, you have to go round the back, up the entry and through the dustbins. She was a small woman, and pretty at the age of forty so that I had to ask if she was Ron Delph’s mother before I believed her. From all his lies I expected a bleak six-footer dressed in a sugar bag with a face like a rusty frying-pan, because he’d told me terrifying stories about her wild temper, and of nervous breakdowns which she’d had from the age of twenty-six. When he was four she’d throttled a live chicken in front of him – that was one of his tales, but to look at her now I knew she’d never done any such thing. I realized all this in a flash, and saw how things would improve if I went away. But I’d asked for him, and it was too late to back out now. “Whatever do you want,” she said, “with my son?”

  ‘“We’ve been seeing each other for the last four months,” I told her, “and I wondered if he was at home.”

  ‘“Well he isn’t, you fast young madam, having the nerve to come knocking at the door for him! I always thought this would happen, him being out at all hours and never telling me where he’s off or what he’s up to.”

  ‘A man’s voice called from inside: “Who’s that, Alice?” I felt as I’d always felt at the bottom of my spine, that I lived nowhere and belonged nowhere, was always set on the doorstep between house and street, and that in this home town at any rate there was no hope of ever getting to any fireside where I could really feel safe from the elements. I didn’t even belong to myself, never mind to a house, and I knew that I didn’t deserve to because all my life I’d not only had it too easy in being cradled with every comfort, but that at the same time I’d been trying too hard to get myself into something that didn’t exist. I wasn’t one person, I was two, if not three or four, and nobody in their right minds would want such a disturbing gang at their fireside.

  ‘I was set on a quiet getaway, but in answer to the man’s question she called back: “Oh it’s just some young trollop calling for our Ron.”

  ‘The street was dark behind me, but one or two people were walking by. “Is it?” I shouted. “Well, your darling son Ron has been getting off with me, and he’s been up me a few dozen times. He’s got me pregnant, and that’s why I’m here. I’m going home now to tell my parents, and they’ll be back in the morning with my six brothers to settle you lot.”

  ‘I was shouting and crying, then felt a sharp pain across my face where she’d hit me: “I’ll teach you to show us up in front of the neighbours. If our Ron’s got you pregnant you’ll have to prove it.”

  ‘I broke free, and walked off. It happened that I wasn’t even pregnant. We started going with each other again, and then I was, beyond any doubt. So I took my fifty pounds of savings from the post office, and packed a suitcase, leaving the house early one morning without saying goodbye, and not even telling Ron what I intended to do, because I didn’t really know myself.

  ‘That was seven years ago, and as for my work in London, we’ll leave that for another time. I’ve just been to see my parents, and I spent all my money there. They would have given me my train fare but I preferred to be independent, and have the fun of hitch-hiking. I do it now and again for kicks. Not that my life can be called dull, but as I said, that part will have to wait till we meet again. It’s rare, I suppose, but so far in my life I’ve never bumped into anyone I’ve not seen again. It’s impossible for me to lose track of anybody, even if I want to.’

  ‘It’s taking us so strenuously long to get down this London road,’ said Bill Straw, ‘that I vote we stop for a drink at the next inn that’s still pumping.’

  ‘That’s a bright idea,’ said June. ‘I could do with cheering up after my sad tale. That’s the first time I’ve told it in a long while.’

  ‘It almost brought tears to my eyes,’ said Bill.

  ‘It’s all very well,’ I said, ‘but if I get drunk I shan’t be able to drive, and I want to reach my destination in one piece.’

  ‘That’ll be a miracle, in any case,’ Bill said, ‘in this crumbling hear
se.’ He was right, perhaps, because in the middle of June’s story, part of the exhaust pipe had snapped away, a great sudden clatter that sent the chill of disaster up my spine and left haloes of sparks on the road behind. But Bill’s suggestion of a drink was pleasant nevertheless, and I felt that one or two would do none of us any harm. Besides, it was so near midday closing time that there’d be no opportunity for tanking up later.

  The brakes were failing, so as soon as Bill yelled that there was a snug pub to port, I dropped the gears one by one and gently trod the pedals so as to slow down in good time. Even so, I swerved too quickly into the parking lot and bumped into the far wall, jerking the three of us at the neck and bringing grumbles of protest.

  It was a place where they served luncheons, and as we disembarked from the car a well-dressed middle-aged man came out of the dining-room door and spewed all over the gravel.

  ‘Good home cooking,’ said Bill. ‘Still, the whisky can’t be off. I’d rather die in there than on the road.’

  ‘It bodes no good though,’ I said, and while arguing, we watched the man, pale and harrowed, walk unsteadily to his car and get in, then fall asleep over the wheel.

  ‘I expect he’ll run some kid down on a pedestrian crossing before the day is out,’ June said with disgust. I liked the moral tone she was taking, because she’d be a safeguard against me having more than one drink. Bill wasn’t with us, and when we went in he was already at the bar.

  ‘I’ve ordered,’ he said, ‘so get your wallet out.’ Three double whiskies came up. ‘I’ll get your bottle now, sir,’ the publican said, sliding away to his secret and extensive cellars.

  ‘What bottle?’ I said, expecting the worst.