A Start in Life

by Alan Sillitoe

  My room was the smallest space I’d ever been in on which a door had closed. There was a bed, built-in wardrobe, chair and small table, and above in the ceiling was screwed a one-candlepower bulb. It really made you feel welcome, but I was in such high fettle at being in the big town at last that after a wash and brush up I went down the stairs whistling the same one-eyed tune I’d already heard with such scorn.

  The counter clerk asked what time I’d be back as I handed him the key and I said: ‘Why, will I get locked out?’ and he stared at me as if I wasn’t playing the game by popping that uncivilized question.

  ‘No sir, but if you come in past midnight you’ll have to ring the bell.’

  I thanked him very much, and stepped into the burnt air. A woman asked me to go with her but she didn’t look much good, and I thought I ought to be a bit wary of these London tarts in case she had the shirt off my back and gave me a dose of the Baffin Land clap. It was only yesterday that I’d been to bed with Claudine first and Miss Bolsover second, and that would have to last me for a while, if I weren’t to call myself greedy. Also I was flayed out with tiredness, and reckoned only on a short walk in the surrounding streets before going back to my matchbox for a hard-earned kip.

  I said goodnight to her and wandered till I came to a place to eat. A cat slept in the window, but the meal was good enough, considering the price. While I got stuck into my stew, an old grey-bearded ragbag came in selling almanacks, and I bought one, giving him half a crown and telling him to keep the change. His brown eyes glinted out of all that bush: ‘Thank you, sir!’ he said, with the heaviest sarcasm I’d ever heard.

  I could have kicked myself that such goodness of heart had been spurned by the bug-eaten old bastard, but by the time I was ready to throw a sharp crust of bread in his face the door rattled and he’d gone. As I chewed through my minced-up mutton and cat I wondered where he’d come from, and a low feeling gripped me when I thought maybe he left Nottingham forty years ago full of hope and promise. Perhaps he’d worked well at a good steady job, but then he’d felt the strain and taken to having a few drinks now and again. He’d got into bad company, overspent, embezzled, been sent to prison. Then his wife left him, his kids grew up not knowing him and disappeared, and he’d gone from one job to another, bad to worse, beer to meths, sleeping under bridges and on waste-grounds, walking the streets with a sandwich board on him, and finally he’d taken to pubs and cafés selling almanacks so that he was known to everyone, a bit contemptuously, as Almanack Jack. I shook off the black mood and ordered coffee, the best part of the meal, and from a good long swig I looked up to witness the return of Almanack Jack.

  There were three other people in the place, but as luck would have it, he shuffled up to me: ‘You look as if you could do with a bit of advice, hearty.’

  I held out my hand: ‘Going to read my palm?’ He stood by my table, tall and hefty, and not at all as old as I’d thought him at first sight. ‘Sit down, and have a cup of something.’

  ‘Tea,’ he said, ‘and a piece of bread and butter,’ when the waiter came over. He stank rotten, so I lit a cigarette. ‘You’re too generous,’ he added.

  ‘How else can you live?’

  He sat down and faced me. ‘I’ve known lots of people who know how. In this piece of bread you can see the greatness of God. It gives power to nature. There’s no other way I can put it.’

  ‘I don’t believe in God.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ he said, ‘but I believe in the power of bread, and that’s the same thing, as far as I’m concerned. I like to feel the greatness of God in my belly.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I said. Hoping he was a vegetarian, I added: ‘You can have a piece of meat as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘I’ll dwell on that,’ he answered. ‘Meat is the Devil, and bread is God. But since man is compounded of God and the Devil at the same time, and I don’t deny my truly human nature, then I’ll take you up on your kind offer.’ He snapped his fingers for the waiter with such experienced aplomb that I began to see a reason for his looking so healthy, and well built. He ordered stew and rice, and when the waiter brought it I asked for another coffee.

  ‘I don’t suppose you get much of a living flogging almanacks.’

  He smothered his volcano with salt: ‘Enough. How much do you think a man needs if he isn’t God?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ I said, lighting my last Whiff.

  He looked ruefully as I crunched the packet up. ‘You can live on much less than you think,’ he said. ‘I buy my almanacks at fourpence each, and mean people give me a tanner, while others pay a shilling. Occasionally I get half a crown. I have been known to get a pound from someone who mistakenly feels sorry for me.’

  ‘You seem to have got yourself a nice little corner,’ I said, realizing that he was no fool, because the longer he talked the more the educated edge to his voice came through. His beard was not so much grey, as reddish-ginger, and it was obvious that in fact he couldn’t be a day over forty-five.

  ‘Not that it adds up to what a young fellow like you might call a good wage, but it gets me a room and a few simple eatables.’

  ‘Don’t you feel a bit of a shitbag though,’ I said, ‘not doing a hard day’s work? You’re living and scrounging on the backs of those who sweat their guts out, and that’s the truth.’ A piece of stew got tangled in his beard, and I wanted to pick it off and eat it rather than see it go to waste by falling on to the floor as he shook his head violently from side to side. I felt that he had no right to waste even that much food, the idle bastard. Then he gripped it in the pincers of a piece of bread and put it into his mouth.

  ‘You think that, do you? And why not? If you didn’t I wouldn’t be eating this meal at the moment, and that would never do. My existence like this is only possible because people like you believe in doing a fair day’s work. That’s putting it mildly, though. You see, ninety per cent of people are of such low intelligence and intellectual perception that they’d go crazy if they had no work to do. Let me show you the system, dreary and accurate though it may be. The vast teeming majority couldn’t exist without work. Their spirits would shrivel up, their bodies would perish. You need vision to be idle. But at the same time they want to hear that one golden day in the future they’ll only have to do ten hours’ work a week – but that right now civilization will go under if they don’t pull their weight.

  ‘It certainly will when they only work ten hours a week, and thank God I won’t be here to see it, because it won’t happen for another three hundred years. The first government that allows it will have revolution on its hands in five minutes. Oh, no, the longer and harder they work the better. That’s what people want, though you’ve got to tell them they don’t want it and that it’s a bore just so that they’ll go on doing it. God dreads idleness, you goddam bet he does, and with good reason. He’d better, otherwise the world will be full of Nimrods shooting up arrows to drag him down from his golden fur-lined palace. And it’s not only factory, farm, and office slaves who must sweat to keep alive. No, it’s also doctors, artists, lawyers who wither if they don’t get enough to do. You have to have a particular, peculiar, God-given bent to exist without work. I’m a great benefactor of humanity, because though I’m often a bastard in my behaviour I’ve never been as much of a bastard to actually deprive anyone of work by joining the task force myself. I deliberately abstain in a great spirit of self-sacrifice, even at the risk of destroying my own character. It’s an experiment I’ve been carrying on for a few years now, though not for so long that I can see how it’s going to end or who is going to get the ultimate good from it. Oh no, don’t think my life’s an easy one, though I suppose I like it, otherwise I’d change it.

  ‘If those who felt like me (and there are quite a few of us) suddenly decided to demand jobs, the social structure would collapse. Maybe that would be no bad thing according to certain people, but I’m no revolutionary. If ever any government threatened me with work I’d put on my dar
k glasses, take up my stick and kidnap a dog, tie a label on me saying “Blinded by Work”, and tap my way to the nearest seaport so as to make my getaway to foreign parts. I’ve no desire to take any man’s job, which is most likely his only reason for being on this earth at all. And if you’re appalled at the unparalleled extent of my self-sacrifice, maybe you’d like to make amends by buying me a cup of that marvellous Turkish coffee they sell here.’

  ‘How could anybody refuse after that little talk?’

  ‘People do,’ he said. ‘They’re vicious at times. Don’t think I made my decision to run this kind of life lightly. I didn’t. I was forty, in the prime of life, with a wife, two kids, a big flat, a mistress, two cars, a country cottage, as well as being near the top of my job in textile designing. It was a very comfortable and satisfying existence for the type of person I was then. I didn’t even feel that because things were so perfect there was nothing left in life for me. My decision to turn the other cheek wasn’t that shallow. But immediately I made up my mind, from one minute to the next, that the present life was no good for me, then I was a different person, and it was no longer satisfying, but a torment until I began to change it. The only thing I regret was not doing it the easy way by making the break clean enough. I was a liberal-humanitarian, so I did it by stages, thinking that this would be more effective, and that it wouldn’t allow me to change my mind, and that it would cause less pain all round. I wasn’t very strong-willed, you might say. My faith at the beginning wasn’t too strong. It had to develop, through the fire. So within the space of a few months my domiciles had come under the hammer, my wife was in a looney-bin, my children were in care, my mistress was having psychoanalysis, my job was filled by one of the hungry generation with sharper teeth than ever before, and I was in hospital with double pneumonia. But I knew that when the dust settled everybody concerned would be able to live the life they’d always wanted to lead.

  ‘It’s always better to act. Never stifle what you feel to be a fundamental impulse. If it causes chaos, so much the better, because maybe the right sort of order and happiness will arise from it. It can never come out of anything else, and that’s a fact, my friend. You look young and inexperienced enough to believe all I’m saying and maybe to benefit by it At least you deserve to, because I’m enjoying this coffee, even the mud at the bottom. Will you be in here to eat tomorrow night? If you are I’ll buy you a meal.’

  ‘God knows where I’ll be. I’ve got to start looking for a room in the morning.’ I felt at the bottom of a pit, dying from lack of sleep, so I paid my bill and trudged back to the hotel.

  I must have got to sleep because it was suddenly morning, and when I looked at the fine-faced ticker-watch nicked from Clegg, it was nine o’clock. I dressed, dragged a razor over me, and went downstairs for breakfast.

  It was a good meal, and I stuffed everything into me within reach, so as to get my money’s worth, and to save buying much for a midday meal. I shared a table with a melancholic blond Scandinavian from a town called Swedenborg who said he was writing articles on London vice dens. He had no appetite, so it was double toast and butter for me. He grumbled at not being able to work, because at each vice den he succumbed to much that was offered, which meant that he didn’t get back till dawn and had no time to crank up his typewriter and compose his piece. I couldn’t spend much sympathy with him, but wished him better luck, lit up a Whiff, and went out.

  It was a raw morning, and though it was foul I liked it because it was in London. At the nearest newsagent’s I bought a street atlas and a copy of the local paper, two pieces of literature to see me through the day. It felt good to have my legs working again, and I was determined to walk them back into shape, for they’d grown soft in the glorious weeks of having a car. At Russell Square the ache was so sharp at my calves that I considered jumping a Tube to Soho, but gritted my toes and traipsed on, pausing now and again for a flip at the map. The girls looked lovely in their muffed-up coats, and fine sharp noses turned in the air. My eyes said good morning to each one passing, but a frosty nip was darted back as if even their cunts were cold.

  The smell of the city was like Brilliantine and smoke, chicken and iron filings, and I fed on it as I walked along, even smiling at the curses of a taxi driver when I nipped too sharply on to a pedestrian crossing. You couldn’t take your rights too much for granted here, I thought, and was even glad of such cold comfort, for my backbone was made of optimism. Two million people were in their factories, shops, and offices, all endowed with the heavenly privilege of work, as Almanack Jack might have put it, and here was I for the moment at least cast in the mould of idleness that only their massive labour made possible. The very idea of it made me want to stop at the nearest bar for a cup of coffee, but what I wanted most was a piss due to the monstrous amount of tea I had put back at breakfast. I didn’t know a soul in London, and that as much as anything made me love it. With so much money I felt like a prince. I’d saved up to squander it in just this way, and to worry about it seemed more unnecessary than ever as I found a place on Tottenham Court Road to unload those pots of tea in.

  That first day I walked and re-walked the whole middle area of London, and by the end of it, when I headed back in the direction of the hotel, I knew that it wasn’t as big as I’d always heard it was. The next day I did the City, and for a fortnight, till my money was near enough done for, I got familiar with most of the sprawl. At first the far-off places were known only from the Tube scheme. If I was at Bond Street and wanted to go to Hampstead I looked at the underground map and said to myself: ‘I’ll get on the Central Line to Tottenham Court Road, then turn left on the Northern Line, and go up until I see Hampstead on the station label.’ Often I’d fiddle my way down by bus until, eventually, if some foreigner (or even Londoner) stopped me in the street and asked where a certain place was I’d be able to tell them in five cases out of ten. This made me feel good, and was all very well but, as the dough ran low, it didn’t tell me how I’d latch on to any more. Not that I was obsessed by this, because I felt if it came to the worst I’d be able to do something like Almanack Jack, or get a job for a week or two, until something more money-like came along. What it would be I had no idea, and didn’t much care, because exploring this gigantic and continuous prairie of buildings during the day, and wandering around the West End like the Phantom of the Opera until late at night, didn’t leave much time or energy for serious speculation. In other words I was living the full life because I felt no real connexion to what went on around me. If I had, or began to, I should become buried in it and wouldn’t be able to see anything at all. Which was why I clung as long as possible to my arduous free wandering.

  Opening my map one day near Leicester Square I saw a good-looking blonde girl coming down the street. As if puzzled and halfway lost I spoke when she drew level, asking if she could kindly direct me to Adam Street. ‘Unfortunately not,’ she said. ‘I’m not familiar too much with London because I come from Holland.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I replied, ‘but I thought you might have been able to tell me. You look like a typical London girl to me. I’m a stranger here as well, because I’m from Nottingham. I’m studying there at the university, doing English Literature. Watch out, or that car will take your arse off. Pardon me, it’s only a colloquial expression. I’ll explain it to you if you come and have a cup of coffee. I’m down here for a few weeks, staying at a hotel, but my mother is coming to see me tomorrow to make sure I’m not getting into mischief. It’s going to be a bore showing her around, but she insists on keeping me under her thumb, so what can I do?’ Just when she was beginning to find my gamut had a bit of a hook to it, she noticed that we were standing outside a strip club with framed photos hung up of bare women whose faces you couldn’t see for their breasts. From the pious distaste on her face she might have thought I’d try to drag her inside, drug her, and rumble her off to a miners’ club in Sheffield. So I put on an honest, half-bewildered expression, folded my map, and took her by the elbow.


  A few minutes later we were sitting in the Swiss Centre having cakes and coffee. ‘You a student, then?’ I asked. She wore a nice white blouse with a brooch at the neck, looked icy and demure, the last person it seemed possible to go to bed with, so why the hell had I picked her? She blushed, though I didn’t know why, and said: ‘I’m working in this London, as an au pair girl. But I’m also studying to make my English fluent.’

  ‘That’s hardly necessary,’ I told her. ‘Your vocabulary dazzles me. It scintillates.’ My only chance of maintaining hold of her was to keep the talkpot boiling with words that she understood but hardly knew the meaning of. If it was English she wanted, English she would get, and since I was born talking the lingo, who could give it to her better than old Jack Spice? I said how perfectly good her English was, while at the same time using words in such a way that she thought she’d never heard them before. ‘My family dwell in a mansion-hall near Nottingham,’ I went on, ‘a place my mother had me in, with its own hallelujah-garden where an old monk chapel once stood, and where we used to see silent films as kids. A private tutor taught me, up to the year of twelve, and then I was sent to a boarding college, though I kicked up the hot dust of hell because I didn’t want to be pitched out like that. But our family is bound by the steelropes of tradition. That’s England all over, and also what’s wrong with it. There was no gainsaying them. Yet it had its advantages, because me and my three brothers, as we came of age at fourteen, were taught to drive in a dual-controlled Rolls-Royce in the private grounds, which was a useful experience. That training Rolls has been in our family for generations.