A Start in Life

by Alan Sillitoe

  I was wakened by the flat bell ringing, otherwise I might have stayed buried in warm wool till past teatime. I took the deep yellow envelope from the telegraph youth, still too much asleep to wonder what was in it. I dropped it on the table, then fell back on my bed. Half an hour later I got up and opened it on my way to the bathroom. As the piss piped out of me I read: = WILLIAM IN BEIRUT COOP STOP LUNG MOVING STOP ADDRESS FOLLOWING LOVE = LENINGRAD.

  I surprised myself by catching on to it so quickly. Sun was coming in through the toilet window, so maybe that helped. Bill Straw had been caught in Beirut, and the man in the iron lung was being moved in a specially built pantechnicon through the London streets to another lair. Once he was installed, I would hear from them for a further assignment, unless the repercussions of international investigation swept us all into oblivion. I wondered what charge Bill would be on in the Lebanon, whether in fact the police there could fix him on anything at all, and somehow I couldn’t take it as seriously as I would if he’d been grappled at London airport, and thrown into the nick here, where he wouldn’t have got out in less than five years.

  I set a kettle on the galley stove, and stood in my dressing-gown waiting for it to boil. I got the shakes, realizing I’d have to wait weeks for the kettle of news to boil. I’d be the last to get information from Jack Leningrad Inc, though I decided that when next called in for a job I’d threaten to smash that iron lung to bits with a hammer unless they told me all they knew. Worst of all, I had to phone his mother, but I decided to wait a couple of days, or till such time as she began to worry. I saw no point in upsetting her, by telling her immediately. If she asked why Bill hadn’t come back I’d say I didn’t know. And the next time she mentioned it she’d already be half inclined to receive bad news.

  If Bill was really taken in Beirut, he was done for, in which case there was no reason why she shouldn’t know what was what, providing I could put my cowardice at having to spill the news to one side.

  In most parts of me I didn’t believe it had happened, in spite of the fact that I’d been brought up to believe that telegrams didn’t lie. But I knew that this feeling was my loss, since there was no doubt that it had happened. Not only was Bill hooked, but I began to see that maybe the danger would root me out. There’d been nothing but fear since I’d started this job. But if I began to get worried at last, it wasn’t out of fear, only from wondering what it meant. This wasn’t the sort of work for somebody like me, certainly not what I’d come to London for. It was a load on my back, exactly what I’d intended to avoid. I’d been trapped, but how and by whom, that was the question. I sat down to some tea and bread. I was in the middle of a quicksand bog, nobody within ten miles to come and talk to me while I went down. The trouble was I had no impulse to run. Somewhere, way back in the dark, my Achilles tendon had been cut, and I didn’t grieve about that but I didn’t know whether this was going to turn out to my advantage or not. Was it ever better to stay still, or to run? If I didn’t get the impulse to run, then it was obviously better to sit still. When the impulse did come I’d run twice as quick and to a place twice as safe than I would if I set off somewhere without being absolutely impelled. So I made a virtue out of my idleness and sloth. When strength came out of weakness it had the force of self-preservation behind it, and that was what I depended on. There didn’t seem much else at the moment.

  I got dressed and walked into town. On the way I put my three hundred pounds into the bank, which now made six hundred on deposit for a wet and thundery day. I took out half a crown, and flipped it up, heads I would phone Polly, tails I would try Bridgitte. It clattered healthily as it hit the pavement, rolled into a gutter and down a grate, lost for ever. You just had to make your own decisions.

  There was no reply from Bridgitte, so I dialled Polly’s number. ‘Hello?’ said a man’s voice which struck me as strange.

  ‘Is that Polly?’

  ‘Yes, what do you want?’

  ‘I want to speak to Polly.’ Somebody went by the phone booth, with a placard saying ‘The Bomb Also Kills Children’.

  ‘This is Polly. Who is that?’

  ‘Michael.’

  ‘Michael bloody who?’

  ‘From Geneva. Remember?’

  ‘Oh, yes. How stupid. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’ve got a few days off. Can I see you?’

  ‘Come over,’ she said.

  ‘Is that all right?’

  ‘Mum and Dad are in Ostend.’

  ‘As soon as I can, then.’ I put the phone down. Outside, I thought I’d dreamed it, but I knew I never had such dreams. With me, it was either reality or nothing.

  Half an hour later I went up the drive of the Villa Moggerhanger, smelling the luxury of fresh hedges and growing flowers. Grey clouds were flying away from London, racing for the hills and grass. José, the Spaniard, opened the door and welcomed me like an old friend. ‘Mr Moggerhanger is out.’

  ‘I’ve come to see Polly,’ I told him. She was in the garden, so I found her clipping roses from a row of bushes near the back wall. I intended greeting her casually, so as not to alarm her, but she took my hands, hers cold, and I don’t know how it happened but both of us were kissing straight away. ‘I tried to get through to you half a dozen times, but your mother hung up on me. Then I had to do a trip to Paris.’

  ‘I’ve been longing for you,’ she said. ‘I thought it was just going to end like the others, that once you got to know me, as you did in Geneva and on the way back, then you wouldn’t want to see me any more.’

  ‘It’ll take at least a hundred years to get to know you,’ I said. ‘Let’s go up West for lunch.’ I was nervous of hanging around the Moggerhanger lair for too long in case Claud himself should suddenly spring up from the ground. My instinct told me to get out of the place, though I couldn’t see rationally why, since Polly said he was in Ostend – though maybe he’d only gone there for a drink.

  ‘I’d hate that,’ she said. ‘I’m turned off the middle of London. You’ve driven Dad’s Bentley, haven’t you?’ We walked together along the path, and she suddenly threw all the roses she had collected behind a laurel bush.

  ‘Like a dream,’ I said, my arm warm where she went on holding it.

  ‘Let’s go somewhere, then. I’ve got the key to one of Dad’s hideaways in Kent.’

  ‘Why not?’ I said, but playing it cool.

  ‘Sit in the lounge and pour a drink, while I go up and dress.’

  ‘I’ll watch if you like.’

  She kissed me quickly: ‘No, I don’t feel like it now.’ Her bare pale legs went up the stairs, and I unlatched a tin of tomato juice, thinking of William trying to barter his way out of some Lebanese copshop with bars of gold, and of his poor old mother worrying herself daft as she knocked back shorts with her Chesterfield friends, while I’d been talked by feckless Polly into some mad adventure with Moggerhanger’s house on wheels.

  We sat high in the front as I stepped on the power over Hammersmith Bridge and went towards the South Circular, the tape-recorder playing Tales from the Vienna Woods, and me smoking one of the Moggerhanger’s big cigars kept in the glove-box for special friends. Through Clapham a bowser was blocking the road, but there was no way of overtaking. ‘That Cooper just did it,’ Polly said.

  ‘I want to live. I’ll do it in my own good time.’

  ‘The exhaust’s giving me a headache,’ she complained.

  I put on the winkers, swung out, and swept forward. The bowser seemed a mile long, and travelling fast, but I got straight up to fifty, then saw a bus coming full on towards me. It was too late to brake. Headlights flashed me, and I couldn’t go back. The bastard driving the bowser was set on getting me killed, didn’t slow down, or go in even an inch. I supposed he was a good honest worker who thought that rich pigs who drove around in such expensive cars should be put up against a wall and shot – or crumpled to death under a bus.

  Polly clutched me, and I thought what a wonderful way to die, but by twelve inches, a si
ngle foot and no more, I was in front of the bowser and just about safe, trembling in every inside limb, my tongue hollow, Polly half fainting against her seat, wondering how other people could be so rotten.

  The road was empty up ahead, and I left the bowser behind, until at a traffic light on stop he drew in between me and the kerb. I leaned across Polly and wound down the window: ‘Are you trying to kill me then, mate?’ I said in my best Nottingham accent.

  He wore a cap, and his broad face grinned: ‘Yes.’

  ‘Better luck next time, then,’ and I shot forward as the lights changed to yellow. ‘His eggs were fried too hard for breakfast.’

  ‘I was scared to death,’ she said.

  ‘That’s his idea of a joke. I grew up with people like that. Worked with them – for a little while. He just wanted to see if I’d lose my nerve and pull back. I could have done, but didn’t. Still, it’s not often we get a thrill like that, is it, love?’

  She held my arm: ‘Take care, though.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do anything else with you in the car. Myself I don’t care about. I’m neither here nor there. Easy come, easy go. I’ve had a good time up to now, and if the Big Door suddenly fell on me I might have time for a grin before the blackout made a fossil of it.’ This was the last thing I felt, but I needed to say it in case she’d seen how frightened I’d been when the bus nearly got me. ‘I think you must have had a fairly awful life to get into that state,’ she said. ‘Are you still on that gold-smuggling job?’

  We were on a dual carriageway, traffic thinner: ‘I gave it up.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘My best friend got caught. So now I’m going straight, waiting to meet an honest girl to keep me on the right path.’

  ‘That’s not me, then,’ she laughed, and I was surprised when, instead of saying how good it would be for me to give it up, she said I shouldn’t really weaken and pull out just because my best friend had been caught, that now was the time to go on, because maybe no one else would be pulled in for a long time, like it was always safest to travel by plane just after a big air disaster. I hadn’t lost my nerve overtaking a petrol lorry – and she did admire me for it, after all – so why lose it at something far less dangerous? For my part, it was all talk, because I never seriously intended resigning my lucrative position, and as far as not losing my nerve between the lorry and the bus, once I got there I had no option but to go on and get out of the trap. I hadn’t lost my nerve, not totally, but all my fibres had melted, and my bones had been under the hammer, I knew that now, a handshake with my final moment that hadn’t been final after all. Polly was out on a limb. She wasn’t in my guts. I was sailing towards trees and hills, sorry the sea was but forty miles off, otherwise I’d have driven on as far as I could get around the world. ‘You don’t know me,’ I said. ‘I give nothing up. That’s what makes me stupid, and lets me, live high. I had a chip on my shoulder but it turned into a bird and it wasn’t a budgerigar, either. Nor a vulture, come to that. Just a kite to keep me a few inches off mother earth.’

  ‘You’re so funny,’ she said, ‘have you read any good books lately?’

  ‘I thought it would come to this,’ I laughed, taking her hand. ‘Ever since I told you I loved you.’ We went through a traffic jam in Tonbridge with the windows down and the radio sending out Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. I forgot for a while the sort of car I was in, but realized it when I saw the other faces looking at me. ‘When do we get to this place in the country?’

  She leaned over and kissed me on the mouth: ‘Don’t lose patience. That would be even worse than losing your nerve. Another half-hour.

  ‘I feel like an unlucky pilgrim, caught in the trap of England’s arterial lanes. We’ll get a dose of arterial sclerosis if we’re not careful. All those other screw drivers seem to have it already.’ In my right mind I might have sung a song to them, but with Polly by my side an obsession kept twisting in my trousers, and the smell of summer grass didn’t calm it beyond noticing. Where be ye, my love? She was by my side, but sitting apart and not sweetly under me, looking ahead at the green tunnel and tarmac track. ‘It’s a change from the lake,’ I said.

  She guided me on to a minor road, then along an unpaved track. ‘Dad’s never been here by Bentley. He usually comes in the Land Rover.’

  The wheels sank into a rut. ‘It’s understandable.’ Grey clouds made it feel like rain through the open windows. The soil on the track had been churned by tractors, and when I went too fast on what seemed a level place I hit a water-filled rut and red slosh flew as high as the windscreen, while bushes on both sides scraped the windows and paintwork. ‘You should have told me,’ I said, ‘and we could have left the car by the road.’ Even Moggerhanger didn’t deserve this done to his car, though it was too late now, as we went into another dip. ‘Much farther?’

  ‘Not much.’ A tractor came round the bend, a man perched on top wearing a cap and khaki raincoat, and having the smallest possible stump of fag between his lips. I crushed in the brakes, waited for the small smash, the sort that hurts no one and does no damage, until you try to stand up, when you fall down before you’ve had time to realize that forty blood vessels are ruptured, or the car itself drops to pieces bit by bit in the weeks that follow and you never know what was the cause of it. But I slithered up to the tractor and stopped a few inches short. The man took off his cap, and smiled: ‘Hello, Miss Moggerhanger! Is your father coming today?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Bill. Everything all right at the house?’

  ‘Well, it’s still there,’ he said, as I began to back away. He turned into a field and left the track free, so on I went, splashing over the humps and hollows till I came to an asphalted space in front of a plain two-storeyed brick cottage. The garden was fenced off with white palings, and had a bird bath in the middle of the lawn. At the front door Polly felt in her handbag for the key. It wouldn’t fit in the lock. ‘Let me try,’ I said, but it was soon plain that she had brought the wrong one. ‘Never mind,’ I said, calmly, boiling with rage at such a mistake, ‘we’ll get in somehow.’

  ‘Oh,’ she cried, tearfully, ‘how stupid I am.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, my arm around her. ‘We’ll find a hotel somewhere. Everything turns out all right, as long as you never think you’ve made a mistake.’ She laughed at this piece of suicidal wisdom, and I tried to lift up the front windows.

  ‘I don’t think it’ll be much use. Dad always locks up when we leave, and he really knows how to do it.’

  ‘Even he can slip up. Let’s go to the back.’ It was raining again, and through the windows it looked very comfortable. A cat sat on a soaking mat by the back door, flanked by half a dozen empty milk bottles. It got up and rubbed itself against Polly’s ankle, as if happy that somebody had come back at last to feed it. The door was locked and bolted from the inside, so I tried the windows. Unless I broke a pane, nothing would come of that. ‘There’s a skylight window,’ she called out.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ I said, ‘I didn’t bring my wings with me. However, I’ll get up that drainpipe that leads to the apex of the roof, and slide down to it from the top. Do you dare me to try?’

  The cat was cradled in her bosom, and I wanted to belt its earhole out of it. ‘No,’ she said, ‘because I know you’ll try.’

  I went back to the car for a jack-knife, and opened it. ‘If I fall,’ I said, putting it between my teeth, ‘I’ll have no roof to my mouth.’

  ‘Nor your head. But please don’t do it.’

  ‘I’m obsessed by it, I’ve got to do it now, but if I fall it’ll be your fault. You’ll have to push me in a wheelchair for the rest of our lives.’

  ‘Oh goody!’ she said, as I went up a few notches. I needed to be drunk to do this well, but there was no booze in the car. It seemed as if I was a born steeplejack, because my arms had been so strengthened by William’s briefcase training. The one spoiling item was rain spitting all over me that made the drainpipe and its supports more slippery
than it need have been. I straddled the roof and shuffled myself along.

  Polly shouted from below: ‘That window may be locked as well!’ I suppose she wanted me to have a fit and fall, but I’d assumed it would be locked, anyway, which was why I had the jack-knife. The big danger was in sliding halfway down the slope of the wet roof to get to the window. I might lose control and plummet to my doom. It would have been better thatched, but Moggerhanger was always practical, preferred to see rain sliding plainly down his slates, rather than getting mushed up in thatch, where he couldn’t keep an eye on it. That stretch of slate glistened, and I couldn’t see much to grip on after I’d started the slide. Polly stood out in the back garden for a full view of me against the sky, and I could see her down in the weeds and rotten cabbages.

  ‘Can you get it open?’ she called, seeing that I hadn’t yet reached it. I lay flat on the roof, my shoes splayed outwards and arms full length. I could feel the rain on my neck, and I seemed stuck like this for ages, lacking the cool courage and trust to let go. My shoes began sliding, and I pressed them with all force so as to slow down. This helped, for I hit the sill of the skylight, went over it, and stopped.

  I was safe, but only by my nails slotted between wood and wood. Cows were moaning from fields round about, a long low gut-stirring complaint saying that I shouldn’t be where I was and that if I fell it would serve me right. I was in such a plight that I actually had time to wonder why I was there, and secondly how I’d ever get back to earth if I didn’t succeed in breaking in through the window. The only way down was as a human bomb of flesh and blood, to bounce at the earth like a sack of apples and oranges. Be brave, I said, and imagine how cool you’d be if there was only a twelve-inch drop beyond that drainpipe. So I calmed myself, and, hanging with one hand took the clasp knife from my teeth and dug it in the crack of the skylight. To my relief, it was loose, and after some probing I yanked it up and let it fall on my fingers – which cracked them, but I gripped by both hands and drew myself to the ample opening. The skylight frame rested on my head, then my shoulders, till I was out of the rain and able to look into the attic room below. How, though, was I actually to get into it? My scalp itched, and sweat blended with the raindrops, but it was advisable to get in feet first. Luckily there was a bed underneath, with a mattress laid across the frame. I slithered on to it like a crocodile, rolling into a ball as I landed, but spraining my ankle as it hit the end of the bed. I spun about and cursed at the fiery ache, feeling alone in the world, forgetting everything but that torment. Yet I was inside, and stood to celebrate the fact. I held on to the bed and rolled my foot around, then walked to the door, noticing on my way that half a dozen expensive shotguns were laid along a rack by the far wall.