A Start in Life

by Alan Sillitoe

  As I looked at Blaskin’s face I went off into a reverie, thinking that the longer I lived the richer became my past, though sometimes things were too hectic for me to find time to reflect on it, and that was bad, for in those moments I usually committed my most foolish actions, for I forgot to think about my past, which was the only thing to tell me who I was and where I was, and why I was where I was. But while I pondered on my past, there was the added and built-in disadvantage that it didn’t allow me to consider whatever future might be coming to me. So I never had time to think seriously on what I was about to do, and this was not a good thing in someone as witless and reckless as myself. But thinking so much about the past (not being a philosopher, there never seemed much else worth thinking about) should at least – one would imagine – have guided me in a friendly and wise way to formulate some rules of conduct from which I could benefit. You’d have thought so. Perhaps because I never finally trusted the past, it didn’t stand by me to the extent of doing me any good at all.

  So I edged nearer to hear what Gilbert Blaskin was saying to the girl who looked on with such respect as every word came out. She was small and thin, with a pale doe-face and glasses, hair shorter than mine and freckles around the bridge of her nose. The author himself had a double brandy at the elbow, his back nonchalantly to the bar.

  ‘I have an aunt who lives in Knightsbridge,’ he said, ‘but I have to forgive her for that. Otherwise she’s one of those monstrous people you never wish to meet. She helped me when I was young and struggling, when I lived on letters telling me what rubbish I wrote. I ate at least one a day, plain, and stirred the rest into an omelet. No, she couldn’t bear to think of me scrounging. So she helped me, and not long ago I gave her a present to mark the publication of my tenth novel. A little dog, the most disturbed and snappy little brute I could get my hands on, which cost me all of twenty pounds. She loved it, until it started to bark. The trouble was, it didn’t like her, and went on barking. It was hysterical. I called on her after a week, and it was still barking, except when it was eating its steak. I told her to have it put to sleep, but she couldn’t do that, looked at it lovingly. Then it got more hysterical. It was well behaved as far as house-training went, but this continual barking from her favourite chair was having its effect. She dug out a record of Hitler’s speeches, and the ranting of that madman stopped the dog, so that it listened, entranced. After that, whenever it went into a fit of barking she’d put this record on, and right away it was reduced to silent admiration. Of course, where she found that record I’ll never know, but I admire her ingenuity.’

  The girl, whose eyes seemed to get bigger and bigger throughout the story, reached for her shandy, while Blaskin burst into a great peal of horsey laughter, and pulled back his arm so violently that he knocked his double brandy over. ‘Fuck it,’ he said to the girl, wiping the sleeve of his jacket. ‘I’ll never forgive you for that.’

  ‘Let me get you another, Mr Blaskin,’ I said. ‘A double brandy and a pint of bitter,’ I called. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I’m a great admirer of your books. I’ve read every one of them. In one way, they actually stopped me going crazy. I lived in a place called Nottingham, and they inspired me into getting away from it, especially that terrific book you wrote about the man who lived up that way and became a writer. I thought that was great. I felt exactly like he did, in some parts. I can’t tell you what a lot of good it did me to read it.’

  He must have been used to this sort of thing, because he offered me his hand to shake, and said how pleased he was that his work after all was having some effect on people like me. I went on telling him how good his books were, though in fact I’d only read one of them, or tried to, because I couldn’t get more than halfway, and had given it to Claudine for a birthday present, which made her see how different I was from other boyfriends, because none of them had given her a book before. She’d read it to the end and thought it was wonderful.

  I told him I’d seen him in a pub on the A1 road but had been too shy to talk, and he said he remembered the place, being on his way back from Sheffield where he’d been to give a lecture on the modern novel and its place in society. He’d also spent a week cooped up in his flat with dysentery after the meal he’d eaten at the place I’d seen him in.

  ‘It’s a wonder you didn’t get anything worse,’ I said, ‘the things they dish out on the roads in this country,’ and he said how much better it was to be driving around France in the car, and I said I hadn’t had that pleasure yet. He introduced me to his girlfriend, who had lost much of his attention because she idolized him too much to make positive statements of admiration as I did. Her name was Pearl Harby, and I noticed her looking at me with big eyes as well. He didn’t explain who she was or what she did, but in the next opening of his brandy-mouth he wanted to know what I was doing in town.

  ‘I’m a chauffeur,’ I said, ‘or was until tonight. I left the job because the bigshot I drove was in such a hurry to get back from the country today that he told me to go over the speed limit through a built-up area. I thought it was dangerous, because kids were coming out of school. A big argument followed, and when we got back I told him I didn’t want to stay any more.’

  Blaskin laughed: ‘You’re brash, and young, otherwise you’d have found some way out of it. What other jobs have you done?’

  ‘Estate agent, clerk, bouncer at a strip club, garage mechanic, to name a few. I’ve done most things.’

  ‘Can you type, dearest?’ he asked Pearl Harby.

  ‘No, Mr Blaskin.’

  He turned to me. ‘Can you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good speed?’

  ‘Any speed.’

  He ordered more drinks, all round. ‘I want somebody to type my novel. My secretary walked out on me because I was randy and tried to drag her into bed when she brought me my breakfast this morning. My wife left last week so she can’t type it, and the publisher’s clamouring at my shoulders. When can you start?’

  There could only be one answer to that question: ‘Now.’ This pleased him, as it pleased everyone, and when he asked me where I lived I said where my own two feet are touching the ground.

  ‘You lucky bastard,’ he said jovially.

  I stiffened: ‘Nobody ever calls me a bastard and gets away with it’ – my hand gripping the beer mug to rip him open with.

  He laughed: ‘Well, let me be the first. Let’s be jolly and gay. I hate serious people. They take to politics and ruin everything.’ He dipped down and put his arm round Pearl Harby, dragging her close for a big kiss. I couldn’t very well smash the glass into his bald head, so held back till he stood upright again, but by then it was too late. My anger had gone and for the first time in my life I thought what the hell does it matter if someone does call me a bastard? It’s only in fun, and they can never know the truth anyway.

  Most of the people in the room began moving towards the stairs. ‘We’re going up for a poetry reading,’ Gilbert said. ‘Come and listen. There may be a fight – you can’t tell, once poets get together.’

  I pushed down the rest of my beer and joined the crush, making a way through with my suitcase. A girl in front didn’t like this at all, for she glazed me with the fire of her blue eyes and tut-tutted sharply. All I could do was smile, and change it to a flat look when her boyfriend swung round to find out whether I was trying to get off with her. Gilbert and Pearl came up the stairs in the gap I made. ‘What do you carry in that case?’ he asked.

  ‘Ashes,’ I said. ‘Mother, Father, two brothers, a sister, and four cousins.’

  He held me grimly by the shoulder: ‘Listen, you aren’t a writer by any chance, are you?’

  ‘I’ve got more to do with my life.’

  ‘And you haven’t thought of becoming one?’ We were stopped at a small table and had to pay half a crown to get in.

  ‘Forget it,’ I said. He smiled with relief, while I paid all the fares and we passed into a large room with rows of wooden chairs laid ou
t in it.

  He leaned across Pearl Harby: ‘There’s a big attraction tonight, a working-class poet from Leeds.’

  ‘You don’t say?’ I said.

  ‘Ron Delph. The club invited him to read his poems. It’s hard to get poets to read their own work, but we’re hoping things will improve.’

  ‘Does it pay much?’ I said.

  ‘Five pounds, and expenses. Delph won’t live in London. He works in a brewery office, and won’t leave. Here he is!’

  As soon as the name of Delph was mentioned I saw June’s face again while she’d told her story, that flash of it in my driving mirror. I was interested to know what he looked like after her information that he was the one who’d jaggered her with a daughter. He stood up front by a table, stared at everybody for a long two minutes. Then he took a bus or train ticket out of his pocket, and read in a loud monotone something like:

  ‘Freedom is blue

  A white scarf in it:

  In the end it is a woman’s hair.

  In the end, a flag.’

  We enjoyed that, because though it might have been ordinary, he made it sound good. He tore the ticket into quarters, and threw it like confetti towards us. He was tall, had dark flat hair, and looked like a conjuror, because next he took a roll of toilet paper out of a shopping basket, and began undoing it, tearing it off sheet by sheet, and with everyone saying ‘Shit’, which he went on to say about a few hundred times.

  We were held, hypnotized, pushed into silence – except for a few ignorant bastards who let out a giggle now and again, and someone who called: ‘Pull the chain, Ron, pull the chain’ – and nearly stopped the show. The tension was hardly to be borne as he got to the end of the roll, and especially when, with the final tear-off, he didn’t intone the expected word but spelled it slowly, letter by letter, S–H–I–T. A great noise of clapping spread in the room, as if a wooden ship of long ago were grinding itself up a long stretch of seashore rocks.

  His next poem was about a man who accidentally stepped on a butterfly and killed it, and ends in tears of remorse for his savage act. ‘After the last General Election,’ Ron shouted, ‘my mother became Minister of Culture. She changed her name and put in for a new past, then marched down Whitehall to the marital music of a grenade of budgerigards.’

  ‘By God, he’s got talent,’ said Blaskin, lighting a cigarette and resting his head back on fag-smoke air, the schizophrenic’s pillow he always carried about with him.

  ‘But I’m not a poet of the niggling moral doubt,’ Delph shouted, picking a button off his jacket (which I’m sure he’d loosened deliberately hours before) and throwing it into the mouth of someone on the front row who yawned. ‘I’m in it for the quick quid and all expenses paid, and I want everybody to know it. I’m not a death-wish beetle eating away at the fabric of society. I’m just looking for a patron to buy me a coin-op laundry so I can sit in the warmth of it and spread my bed while my living goes on earning itself all around me. So if anybody knows a millionaire with the right incline I’ll note his post-office box in my little black book and—’

  ‘Poems,’ a voice shouted from the back. ‘You’re a self-indulgent prole. Let’s have a poem.’

  Delph stared hard in the man’s direction. ‘I’ll put you on my death list, if you aren’t careful.’ He held us all by sleight of hand and slight of brain, took a pound note from his lapel pocket and passed it to the front row so that it could be certified as real. Taking it back, he held it by the tips of two fingers, as if not wishing to be too much contaminated by it. Then he drew the ashtray to the middle of the table, fished out a box of matches, and lit the banknote, holding it upright so that it burned slowly, shouting a slow incantation before the flame got to his fingers and he let go:

  ‘Smoke is no joke when you choke on it.

  It’s even less funny when you’re burning money.

  The smallest weevil knows that it’s evil.’

  He crumpled the charred paper of the note with an asbestos thumb, then blew the black powder of it towards the audience: ‘Go, little turds, God give thee good passage—’ And for a moment I wished I had stayed at Moggerhanger’s because then he went on to recite a poem called Elegy on the Death of the Pennines, which consisted in reading all the words from a pocket dictionary beginning with P, and this went on for about twenty minutes, so that I began to think I was going crazy, which may have been the effect he was aiming for, because I had a suspicion that under that crackpot flamboyant style was a sly and cunning bastard who had weighed up the balances of every pickled word. One or two people in the audience did in fact break under this sustained barrage and shouted out as if their hearts had cracked, but the teeth and tank tracks of Ron Delph’s subliminal intelligence went on and on to the very end, so that they just had to sit back and sweat it out. Gilbert Blaskin’s shanks began to twitch, and I thought maybe he’s going to split at the fleshpot mouth, and then where will my typing job get to? – but the look on his face was rapt and angelic, and his zipped-up tailor-made boots beat time to that demonic shunting forth of just plain words. I stayed above it all, after that first shiver, sidestepped it, and kept my eyes wide open and my heart well dyked against the waves of pure emotion building up in the room. They were rapt and stoned while I was able to look around me at their ossified faces in the grip of this mad hypnotical impostor.

  It took a few seconds for them to realize that he had finished. They were stunned. From the seabed where he had held them they started to cheer and clap and rave, getting themselves up to some sort of air again. He was sweating, worn out, haggard as he stood like a totem post in front of the table. Blaskin pulled along the row, ran to congratulate him.

  When they stood talking together later, I heard him mentioning manuscripts, and a publisher for them. Delph flipped his ash at random and didn’t seem much interested. A girl with green eyes and yellow hair had an arm through his, and giggled at Blaskin whenever he spoke. Delph patted her on the head, as if to encourage her. ‘My Pandy,’ he said, ‘she perpetually takes the piss out of you metropolitan ponces’ – unable to slip from his groove of the letter P. ‘She’s a proper Persian pussycat is our Pandy, and I’m planning to get my pump into her, aren’t I, pet?’

  ‘Oh,’ she pouted, ‘what a plague you are.’

  ‘It’s just that I’m hungry,’ he said. ‘Let’s pile downstairs for a pint.’ The wave of the audience went with him, and it was my opinion that he wanted a pasting, but to hint as much to anybody else would have got a leg torn from me. So I picked up my case and pushed down after them.

  ‘I don’t write all my poems,’ Ron was saying with a sandwich in his mouth. ‘I find some of ’em, pick ’em up, practice ’em, polish ’em – purloin them from time to time and purvey them to you pansies down South. Pot of port, love?’ he said, at Pandy. ‘Last time I came down I gave a great show. I read a Tube map, pure and simple, name after name, round and round. Went off. I was as cool as a landmine. Burnt my fingers on that map because some ice-cold swine in the audience ups and shouts. “What about copyright? London Transport wrote that poem.” So I read it again, went right back to Cockfosters and crept in little circles till I got to Ealing, and by that time he was on the floor with the rest of ’em frothing to death.’

  ‘Oh, Ron,’ said Pandy, ‘you’re perky tonight.’ He slid another sandwich in his mouth, followed by a pickled onion: ‘I’m still steamed up, the pistons wumphing away. Allus like that after a perf.’

  It became clear to Blaskin that he’d never get a word in edgeways so he said: ‘Let’s be off.’ I picked up my case and went outside into the lamp and starlight. He walked ahead down the alleyway, and Pearl Harby took my arm in hers. She was suspiciously quiet with me, but I didn’t fancy a gang-bang with Gilbert Blaskin. It felt comforting nevertheless, and I was sorry when she let go as we hit the wider spaces of St Martin’s Lane.

  He was rocking a bit, after a few hours on double brandies, and when he swayed at his car door, trying to open it, a poli
ceman who’d watched him from the shadows said: ‘I hope you aren’t going to drive that Jaguar.’ Gilbert swung round, a look on his face as if about to let go a flow of bad language or vomit.

  ‘I’m Mr Blaskin’s chauffeur,’ I said, ‘and I’m taking him home.’ I pulled open the door, and Gilbert, having second thoughts on sending his richest prose against the copper’s clock, bent to get in.

  ‘That’s all right,’ said the policeman, and walked away. Pearl hunched in the back, and soon I was steaming through Trafalgar Square. ‘I thought I’d save you a bit of bother,’ I said.

  He seemed sober enough now: ‘Perhaps it’s just as well. I had a nasty bang a month ago, though it wasn’t my fault. Some unthinking advertising yobbo pulled out too suddenly and I crunched him, spun off, bounced against a lorry, ricocheted into another car, scraped a bus, and hit the back end of a van. Came to rest halfway up a lamp-post. Hardly got scratched. The police were mystified at this, thought I must have been drunk. I enjoyed every minute of it, till I suddenly realized it was real, and that I might actually have been killed.’ He held an arm over to the back seat, and in my mirror I saw Pearl take it with both hands and kiss his fingers passionately, not a word passing between them.

  We went up to his fourth-floor flat near Sloane Square. He switched on a tape of Duke Ellington, but low so that we would be able to hear him talk if he said anything. Standing by the hall door he took off his hat and coat, and invited me to do the same. I was struck by the length of his absolutely bald head, a shining pink up from the palest of eyebrows, over the top and down to the back of his neck. Along the middle of his dome was a neat and curving scar caused, I was to hear later, by a murderous husband who happened to have a cleaver in his hand when catching Gilbert and his wife. The long-healed wound, which I thought must almost have killed him, made his head, especially from the back, look like nothing less than the limb that had got him into such trouble in the first place.