A Start in Life

by Alan Sillitoe

  I was going to tell him the truth, I swear I was, when the door snapped open, and a revolver shot spattered across the room. I felt it sizzle past my head, a lurch of hot wind that sent a scorching breath at my ear. It must have disconnected some line of the iron lung’s communications system, because the man inside was shouting, and no sounds came out.

  Claud Moggerhanger stood at the closed door, while Kenny Dukes, gripping a huge cosh, and Slasher with hands in pockets obviously holding down some threatening weapon, rushed across to the iron lung. Slasher took whatever it was from his pocket and tackled Stanley, who was struggling with a gun. They went down at my feet, and I stepped back so that they wouldn’t dirty my boots or crease my trousers. They fought like lions and I was pleasantly surprised to see that Stanley had a lot of strength and courage in him. They rolled over, blood spurting between them, because Slasher had his blade out and was managing to weave it from time to time.

  The table capsized, and forty-seven bars of gold slewed across the floor. Kenny Dukes was getting to work on the equipment of the iron lung, and a loudspeaker had come on again because Leningrad was waving his arms about inside, yelling at him to stop. But Kenny worked like an expert demolition man wanting to prove to a new employer how efficient he was at smashing iron lungs. Under the tangle of splintered equipment Jack Leningrad was firing a revolver across the room at Moggerhanger, and Claud was dodging about the floor with the agility of a man in his prime.

  Screams and shots were pitching all over the place, and Stanley who seemed to be bleeding in several places at once was pleading for mercy from Slasher, but just as it seemed that Slasher was seriously thinking about it Stanley got in a kick that sent him flying across the room. Windows that had been painted over with thick black lacquer were shattered by bullets, and the whole tangle of iron lung was on the floor with the man buried in it, and Kenny Dukes still bashing away at the wreckage from above.

  I lay on the floor, watching the gold, waiting my chance, and while the chaos was sweeping round me I stuffed another couple of bars in my pouches. Moggerhanger’s hand jabbed into the air when one of Leningrad’s last bullets clipped him, and for a moment he was too dazed to guard the door. With all the jack-rabbit strength in my legs I leapt out of the room, leaving yells of murder, and the heartening sound of more breaking glass behind me. My briefcase was in the vestibule and I grabbed it in a last inspired frenzy of possessiveness – before getting clear of the place for the last time.

  Rather than fumble with the lift, I ran down the stairs, calming myself before reaching the exit. I walked into the street, buttoning my coat as I went up by Harrod’s and on to Brompton Road. People passed me, noticing nothing unusual, but I was bewildered, not knowing to which point of the compass I should flee. I had a vision of Upper Mayhem station, of William Hay with his boots off mashing tea in the booking office, then with his feet propped up and a novel bent back in his hands. But to go there would betray him, for I knew they’d trace me soon enough. The wild woods and open fields didn’t appeal to me, either, and neither did I care to head for Nottingham because that would bring trouble on my mother. The one person who could help was my grandmother. She’d defend me against all the gangsters of heaven and hell, never let them get near me. But my grandmother was dead, so no help could be expected from that quarter. The fine day had turned to drizzle and low cloud. At last I got a taxi and sat inside.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘London airport,’ I said, not thinking about it. My instinct took over, though by now I was beginning to hate its guts. I felt cut off from the roots of my intuition, and that being the case, because it definitely seemed so, I sensed a sort of resurgence coming out of the shock and panic, a hope that once more my organism would reform and provide me with the ability to grapple at the unexpected. I didn’t want to think. If you think, I told myself as the taxi made a fair lick west along Cromwell Road, you cut yourself off from luck and the benefit of action.

  There was still time to get the Geneva plane, and I had the ticket in my pocket, as well as five bars of gold that would see me right for a year or two. I was already planning my future. I’d sell the gold, open an account with the money in Zurich, buy a few old clothes and a rucksack, call myself a student of languages, then hole up in some quiet town and wait for what came my way. I’d grow a moustache and a beard, and as long as I paid my bills and lived an uneventful life no one would bother me. With only five bars of gold Brazil was out, for a bit of travel there would eat up most of it. In any case I’d feel safer not too far from Moggerhanger’s claws than I would if I were to drop myself conspicuously in some such exotic place. Later I’d get in touch with Bridgitte, though not for a while. As for Polly, it seemed as if she was out of my life for ever.

  I sat back calmly as we reached a bit of green on the edge of London, smoked a cigar, and checked my ticket. It was real. My brain settled itself into accepting this new and unexpected future. I certainly hated Moggerhanger’s guts, and couldn’t wait to get a good distance between us. The last information I’d passed on had set him working so hastily to get Pindarry and Cottapilly cooked that he’d nearly caused a bullet to be put through my own head. His sense of loyalty was even worse than mine, so we should never have met, and all I could want in my eternal hopefulness was that he’d now be glad to see the back of me.

  I dropped a fiver to the taxi man and hurried in to have my ticket checked. There was exactly enough time. It was a quiet day in the Airline Transit Camp, and I walked calmly into the departure hall with ticket and passport ready. The idea of saying goodbye to the island for a long time boosted my spirit because the morass would be behind me and emptiness in front, just as it had been when I’d set out from Nottingham and tried my luck down the Great North Road. Perhaps someone like me needed this shot-launch into the wide-open spaces every few years.

  My ticket was clipped, and I walked across the space to show my passport with a smile. The customs man was watching me, but I went by him without trouble into the waiting-room. A sudden great hunger scooped a hollow in my stomach, and I stood looking at the cafeteria counter, wondering, whether to knock down a couple of double brandies and a few cream cakes before my number was called, or whether to sit calmly and contemplate the last of England from the plate-glass windows beyond which a misty rain smoked across the runways. I felt a pang at leaving Polly, though I couldn’t believe I’d absolutely seen the last of her, hoping that at some future time kind Fate would enable us to meet again. Then there was Bridgitte and Smog, who in some ways I thought more softly on, and I wondered how the three of us would ever meet. I saw matronly Bridgitte in ten years’ time travelling with a sixteen-year-old youth through a north Italian town, the pair of them getting off a bus in some sunny and dusty piazza. I would be lazily painting at an easel on which a few pigeons rested. I’d go over to them, and Smog would be very protective to Bridgitte and wonder who the hell I thought I was, trying to get off with her, but Bridgitte would recognize me, and I’d invite them back to my simple room, by which time Smog would have remembered me perfectly and with great affection.

  I asked for a cup of coffee, when a hand rested on my shoulder. The long pale face of a customs man said: ‘Will you come with me, sir?’

  No one was to call me that again for a long time. We went back to the passport counter. He asked, now with two more customs men looking on, how much money I was taking out of the country. I told him, and was asked to open my wallet. With the legal amount of currency I had nothing to fear. I stepped out of my existence so as to watch myself being calm, smile, open my briefcase. I expected to be released, as William had been on one of his former forays, and was already congratulating myself on the fact that this little interview did not matter because I wouldn’t be coming through here again.

  ‘Would you follow me, please?’

  I walked into another room, out of the gaze of honest or lucky people who were asked no questions at all. Two policemen were waiting, as well as a lamp-post of a
plain-clothes detective whom I recognized as none other than Chief Inspector Lantorn. ‘Take off your overcoat.’

  I knew that it was all finished. Lantorn himself lifted out the five bars of gold, and I was cautioned that anything I said might be used as evidence against me, while the customs men outlined the laws under which I was charged.

  On my way to the police station I knew that Moggerhanger had arranged for me to be picked up at the same time as he’d mentioned Cottapilly and Pindarry. When he threw out his net, he cast it wide.

  My legs trembled, but I had no wish to sit down. They offered it, but I still stood up, as if I didn’t want to be obliged to them for anything. Lantorn pushed me on to a bench. My iron lung was also smashed, and the light that flooded in frightened me so that I could hardly breathe. I wondered when Moggerhanger’s lung would smash, and smiled at the possibility of helping to bring it about. But in spite of everything I couldn’t think of what he’d done to deserve it, because with Inspector Lantorn gripping my arm as we went to another part of the police station, how could I prove Moggerhanger to have done anything wrong at all? If he’d thought there was any good chance of my doing so, he wouldn’t have had me picked up with such alacrity.

  Epilogue

  Moggerhanger had used me to bust Jack Leningrad, knowing that when I was in the hands of the police there’d be nothing else I could do but talk, in the hope of getting as little prison as possible. I didn’t accede to Moggerhanger’s wishes out of weakness, but from a position of strength, because having decided what my policy was to be, I stuck to it so that Moggerhanger got the best results as far as he was concerned. So did Lantorn, for this became one of his celebrated cases Moggerhanger had confidently fed me into the police machine like a spanner, and I didn’t disappoint anyone, so that any other case against him simply came to pieces in Lantorn’s hands.

  I was so busy saving my neck that I hadn’t the time or emotional energy to brood about the way Moggerhanger had used me, but in the months before my downfall he must have had a huge diagram on his wall, with a series of pins labelled Cullen that he moved from place to place until I was sucked into the final trap he had laid for me. It had been so well plotted that if I didn’t hate him so much I would have admired him. There were a hundred places where his assumptions could have gone wrong, but such was his knowledge of human nature in general, and of mine in particular, that I had chosen exactly the right turning at every fork of the way, simply because he took care to make sure that I’d see each decision to my own advantage. He’d laid such a string of traps that after the first few I ceased to think or take any precautions.

  I admitted carrying gold for Jack Leningrad Limited, but pleaded ignorance regarding the seriousness of what I was doing. Smut and Bunt the solicitors helped me, and it wasn’t till afterwards that I found out who paid them. They got an expert barrister of the old school to stand up and say I was a ‘man of good character though in many respects naïve, who has never been in any sort of trouble before’. They could say that again, and again, and I smiled inwardly to hear it, though it didn’t stop the judge from yapping out that he would have given me more than eighteen months but for the fact that I’d been such a fool.

  At the moment of being caught I’d expected ten years, but between then and the trial I became more optimistic and saw myself getting less and less, being so puffed with hope and the barrister’s claptrap that I thought I’d get off with no more than a fat fine.

  But no man is a real man, or a hero, unless he’s been in prison, and I was about to qualify for that honour. I had lots to think about, including the surprise of seeing my mother appear in court to testify what a loyal and loving son I’d always been. An even greater shock was to hear Gilbert Blaskin, described as a well-known author from the best of families, say what a good character I was, in such a way that I began to believe it myself. I seemed to have lived in a different world till then, been in fact one of the few saints in it to hear some people talk, though I was dropped abruptly back on to the scruffy earth when the verdict of eighteen months was announced from the mealy-mouthed old bastard stuck up on high. I was in such a state of rage and despair for the next few weeks that when I came out of it I was quite used to the conditions of prison. It was like a new country that I had learned to live in during a dream.

  One day I had visitors, so stopped my sweeping-up to get marched off and see who they were. Beyond the double thickness of wire-meshed glass I saw my mother and Gilbert Blaskin. I leaned forward, but said nothing. They peered through the glass, and I wondered why they looked at me. For some minutes I couldn’t understand why they were there together. People were shouting and making signs all along the line on either side of me, and when my mother opened her mouth I realized that though she was talking I couldn’t hear a word. Gilbert smiled and lifted a hand, not even bothering to try. I smiled, put my head closer, and sneezed.

  They wanted to tell me something, but I didn’t see what could be of sufficient importance to break through the overwhelming fact of me being locked away from them like a monkey on a wet day. Blaskin wore a trilby hat, looked healthier than I’d ever seen him. My mother also had a hat on, and seemed by her looks and figure to match well by the side of Blaskin. She had gained a little stoutness.

  Her voice broke faintly through, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. The visit was going on too long. I could understand why she had come, but not Blaskin. He leaned as far forward as possible, put both hands to his mouth and bellowed. From the look on his face, and the anxiety on my mother’s, I tried to hear the words because it seemed particularly important to them both. I didn’t get it, so he made one more attempt. I conquered my stupidity by a force of will that in the outside world wouldn’t have needed any will at all. The words came as if from the bottom of the sea: ‘We got married last week!’

  It was a blow under the heart, but maybe I needed it, because it knew where to go and went straight there. I said it aloud, repeating it, and though they couldn’t hear they read my lips, and both laughed and waved and kissed and held hands against the glass so that there could be no mistake. They even showed me the ring. I heard later how Gilbert had gone to Nottingham, after my last call at his flat near Sloane Square, and found my mother, wooing her till she’d agreed to marry him. After their visit I began to notice my surroundings, and to accustom myself to the new world, so maybe it did me some good after all.

  One day as I was walking round the exercise yard a face floated by that I knew very well, and recognized as that of Stanley. ‘Oh,’ he said, when we talked later, ‘they brought me here from the Scrubs.’

  ‘So I see. If they want you to nark on me, I don’t know anything.’

  His face was fatter, and two of his front teeth were missing. A smile made him appear sadder than when I’d last seen him. ‘I say,’ he sneered, ‘we have lost our good-natured trust, haven’t we?’

  ‘If you get like that with me, you’re going to perish while you’re here, make no mistake.’ This calmed him, so I cooled off as well. ‘They caught me at the airport, in case you didn’t know. I was trying to get the five bars to Geneva, but that bastard Moggerhanger had them waiting for me. And I suppose you were the one who told Moggerhanger to get your own back, because I know you blamed Cottapilly and Pindarry’s capture on me, not to mention Ramage, but how could that have been possible when I’d got nothing to gain by it, and in any case went out and got bodged straight away? I wanted to get that gold to Geneva for the good of the firm, and a lot of bloody good my great sense of duty did me. I even got there in time for the plane we had planned for. That’s why I ran out of the flat so suddenly. I’d seen that Moggerhanger was hit, so I was sure our side had the upper hand. And look where it got us. We’re all in the bloody iron lung now.’ I don’t know whose good books I expected this virtuous testimony to go into, so I laughed and ended it.

  Over the days and weeks I got the rest of the story out of him, of how, as anyone ought to have known but me, Jack Lenin
grad wasn’t paralysed, and conducted operations from his iron lung to fool everybody. It was full of radio and electronic devices which, unfortunately, hadn’t warned him of Moggerhanger’s last great break-in. Maybe it had and he was too busy with me to notice it. The battle had gone on after I left, and Stanley made a fighting retreat with Jack Leningrad out of the building, leaving all the files and some stocks of gold in the hands of Moggerhanger, who must have been satisfied at the way the day finished up. The police arrived to find the flat empty, for Moggerhanger had two estate cars waiting outside into which he piled all the clues and every scrap of loot.

  Stanley and Jack Leningrad found a hiding-place in Highgate, but the police surrounded it an hour later. Nevertheless, they escaped the net, and Stanley broke into a car. No sooner was it started than they were topped and tailed by the blue flashing light. Stanley was captured, but Jack Leningrad got away, and now, months later, nothing had been seen of him, and it was assumed he’d gone to Canada. For the man in the iron lung was agile and elusive once outside his trappings – though they had served him well for a long time. It looked as if he’d live to do more work in one guise or another.

  The unluckiest person of all was Stanley, who got sent down for four years. I did my best to keep out of his way, but one day he came at me from behind and tried to stun me with his clenched fist. It was a hammer-thump, but it didn’t work, because I was able to turn and strike him back, not once, but too many times. I was disciplined for it, and lost my remission, which was why I had to serve every hour of eighteen months. This exploit made me more respected among the roughs of the place, for what that was worth, which wasn’t much.