A Start in Life

by Alan Sillitoe

  I had several visits from Bridgitte, who said she was waiting for me, and who pressed a photograph of Smog against the grille so that I could see how tough and well he looked. I had no feeling for her at first because my two eyes were still full of Polly Moggerhanger. I burned for her, saw her as the one great love of my life whom I’d run to as soon as I got out of prison. The fact that she would in no way be waiting for me, that she would laugh at the idea of me even thinking about her, and that it was in other words clearly impossible for us to be together ever again, made her more real to me, brought her so close that at nights I woke up startled, thinking she was in the cell and about to put her hand on to my shoulder. It went on for a long time, till the emotional cost of keeping her in front of me began to wear me out, and she eventually faded with my absolute loss of spirit and energy. This landed me in a state of emptiness I would rather forget about, but when I came out of it, Bridgitte took her place, and never left it.

  There were three men to a cell, sometimes four, and often in the middle of the night I’d feel that I wasn’t able to stretch myself out on the bed. What’s more, I clung to it, as if it were vertical and I was in danger of falling off into oblivion. In order to get the illusion of laying full length and finding more peace, I’d go down on the floor, and it gave me great comfort, even when it was bitterly cold, to press my limbs against the solid concrete, which was the nearest I could get to real earth in that madhouse. I would have given my right arm, and even taken another year of prison, to have been a coalminer for a few hours and gone a thousand feet under into the dark.

  I got messages from William Hay that my station was being taken care of, and when I was released I found that he’d planted beans and potatoes in the garden, rose bushes and sunflowers along the borders and platforms. Bunting was hung across the station entrance saying: WELCOME HOME STATIONMASTER, when my taxi drew up from Huntingborough.

  Wedding bells were ringing from the moon, because while I was inside, Almanack Jack, who stayed on at the station, got married to William Hay’s mother, who heard he was back from his adventure in the Lebanon, and came down to be with him. William lived in the booking office, while his mother and her new husband had taken over the waiting-room. The entrance hall that lay between was a sort of no-man’s-land in which they occasionally fought great fights over such insignificant items as a bucket of coal or a cup of sugar.

  Almanack Jack became a man of many colours, for he smartened himself up at the station, though he still keeps a bushy spade-shaped beard. In an old cupboard he found and commandeered a railway guard’s uniform, which he makes Mrs Straw press and spruce up for him every week, so that with the hat, whistle, and small red flag, he strolls along the platform and on to the rusty railway line, anxiously looking at the fob watch of Clegg’s that I made him a present of. He keeps the business end of the station clean, makes his wife polish the brasses and lamps, sweep the platforms, and wash out the lavatories – though she does it swearing and grumbling. The palings have been reconstituted, and flowerbeds planted with pansies and jillivers. All it needs to make his life complete is to hear an engine whistle, and to see an old locomotive steaming down from the main line. But if ever it does (and it never will) he’d die of a heart attack, because we’ve known for a year or two that poor old Almanack Jack has a dicky ticker.

  The travelling library van comes round once a week and brings him books on astrology, for he spends some of his spare time casting horoscopes for all of us. He says I’ll have a quiet life up to when I’m thirty-five, and then all hell will fly loose, sending me out on the wild again. I’ll believe it when it happens. Not that I have long to wait, because I’ll be at the gates of that age in a couple more years. Bridgitte isn’t pleased by such talk, but doesn’t otherwise mind, because Smog, who is fourteen now, has always been so fond of him.

  Bridgitte and I got married soon after I came out of clink, as if I’d at some time promised faithfully to do just that. Both of us wanted it when it became possible because it seemed the only thing to do. She sold the house in Hampstead (which Dr Anderson, in spite of his addiction to kickshins, had taken care to leave her) for thirty thousand pounds, which, being well invested with her good Dutch sense that had surfaced at last, brings us enough money in to live on modestly. She’s got fuller now, redder in the face, and is no longer the glamorous and flighty au pair girl from the London days of old. But I’ve put weight on too, though not much, because I do plenty of work and walking around the place to keep me fit. She cooks haunches of meat and Dutch butter-dumplings for me and the kids, while Almanac Jack and his wife do their own catering. In summer they build an outdoor fire by the railway line, putting a pot on it like two old gipsies. That’s when they are happiest, and cause least trouble around the place. Bridgitte and I live in the house, which became big enough, since we had more children, only when William and I built two more rooms on the back of it.

  Almanack Jack is also good with Julie and Ray and Jake, because in the morning he wakes them up and gives them breakfast, then takes them down the road to the village school. At first the local children jeered at him, but now they like him because he gives them sweets and brings them on conducted tours of our railway station. At harvest time he used to do a few weeks’ labour with the local farmers, and because he worked well they gave him milk or eggs, and tried to persuade him to stay on longer, or even permanently, but he never would, liking his freedom above all else.

  William came and went, and came back again. Although he still had money his dream of getting into a market garden somewhere in Nottinghamshire, with his mother as his bond-maiden, never came off. He found new strength from somewhere with which to face life, never having been the sort to let death touch him in the form of early retirement.

  A year or two after the Lebanon setback he found himself once more in some shady trade or other, maybe even smuggling, because his obvious prosperity couldn’t have stemmed from honest work. We were out for a drink at the village pub, and I asked how he got such a big car and dressed so well, at which he lost his good humour and told me to mind my own business. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘I shan’t ask you to get me some of the same work.’

  He relaxed, and laughed: ‘Not like last time, eh?’

  ‘Never. I’m set up for life here.’

  ‘Better you than me.’

  It was a warm summer’s evening, and the pub was still empty. ‘I know when I’m well off,’ I said, taking a good drink of my pint.

  ‘Still,’ he said, ‘if ever you do find yourself in need of a bit of employment, let me know. You’re cool. You’ve got nerve, and that’s always a marketable commodity.’

  ‘I’ve not got so much as I once had.’

  He jeered: ‘Just because of a bit of bird?’

  ‘Keep your voice down. I’m known as a respectable house-owner around here.’

  ‘That’s just another part you’re playing,’ he said, ‘and like all the others you play it very well. It’s lasted a long time, this one, but that doesn’t mean it’s permanent.’

  ‘It is as far as I’m concerned.’

  He winked, and lifted his double brandy: ‘You’ve had a good long rest, that’s all. You’ll get back to work soon. Cheers, mate.’

  ‘Cheers,’ I said, smiling.

  My mother and Gilbert Blaskin seemed reasonably happy for a few years. She went to America with him on a lecture tour, and this was a wild time because they played at making each other jealous, and by the time they got back they were in emotional rags and tatters. I don’t know how it came about, because my mother was well over forty, but she produced a baby daughter, and Gilbert thought this the best thing that had ever happened to him – after he got over the shock. They came down in his new Jaguar to see us, staying two nights at the hotel in Huntingborough.

  I’d never got used to the idea that Blaskin was my father, and never would. I’d pumped myself so long with the fabrication that the only shadowy father I’d had was killed in the war that a
ll my pipes and connexions of filial piety had atrophied and finally snapped. And yet here was my real father, coming towards me from his Jaguar and leaving my mother behind to struggle out with her newborn baby. He was tall, his face lined, his eyes slackening down from the fire they used to have. Blaskin dominated the small living-room, until he sat down. We set them a good winter’s meal for that evening, and sitting at the table were me, Bridgitte, Smog, Gilbert, and my mother, five of us surrounding a dumpling soup, and a side of beef, with egg-custard and apple fritters to follow. Gilbert was in a bad frame of mind, as if he’d just been unsuccessfully poisoned and was slowly getting over the illness of it.

  After the meal he rolled a cigar at me across the table. I’d bought a bottle of brandy for the occasion, and poured everyone a shot after the blow-out dinner. The baby was asleep in Julie’s room, but we could make all the noise we liked because my mother said that once Lucy was asleep nothing could wake her – just like I had been in fact, when I was a baby. Gilbert was getting restless under this particular dome of conversation, so he asked whether I ever felt like getting down to any sort of work.

  ‘Not particularly,’ I said. ‘How about you?’

  ‘He does a lot,’ my mother said, ‘and I get bloody bored at times.’

  I watched him looking at her, and he knew I was watching, which encouraged him to think of something rotten to say because of it. ‘You weren’t bored in New York. You just vanished for twelve hours at a time.’

  ‘I couldn’t hang around with your friends, that’s all. They weren’t interested in me, and I wasn’t interested in them. They were all poofs and drug fiends.’

  Bridgitte and I laughed at this, and Smog, who was eight at the time, smiled, which didn’t help to calm things down.

  ‘So you went off to find a real man,’ he sneered.

  ‘No, love,’ she said. ‘I’d got you, so I didn’t need one.’

  She was being sincere (at least I thought she was) but he took it as a slash of sarcasm: ‘And that little Lucy upstairs came out of it, I know.’

  I stood up, ready for a fight. ‘Lay off my mother will you? I thought we were all here to have a good time.’ This stopped him, but it was a very uneasy peace that came out of it.

  They left next morning. A year later they were divorced. My mother wasn’t too upset about it, because she still had a daughter to spend the next twenty years of her life on – unless another unexpected adventure stopped her dead in her tracks. A neighbour’s wife looked after Lucy while my mother went to work again at the factory. Blaskin made her some allowance, thinking perhaps of all the years he hadn’t provided for me, so that she didn’t absolutely need to work. But she used the money to get a flat, take driving lessons, and buy a Mini on the never-never, which means that every month or two she drives down with Lucy to see our mob at Upper Mayhem. Smog is very partial to Lucy, despite the difference in their ages, which pleases me very much.

  The last thing heard of Gilbert Blaskin was that he lived at his Sloane Square flat with Pearl Harby. She’d tried to gas herself while he was married to my mother, but a girlfriend had pulled her head from the oven in time. This attempted suicide so impressed Blaskin that when he heard of it, just after leaving my mother, he went straight back to her, probably in the hope that sooner or later she will do it again, preferably while he is around to watch, so that he can write about it in a novel.

  I wear a waistcoast now, and never go out unless there’s a golden sovereign in one of the pockets. While we till our garden, I love Bridgitte and the children more and more, being linked to them for ever. Smog is a tall, thin, dark boy who’ll need a shave in the next six weeks. He never says much, though we talk now and again about various things. He plays chess at his grammar school in Huntingborough, and collects botanical specimens. For his last birthday I bought him an expensive microscope, and for his twenty-first I’ve promised him ten of the golden sovereigns my grandmother passed on to me. My mother had given me back the twenty-five I’d offered her, since she had never needed them for her honeymoon with Albert in Paris.

  From time to time I find myself getting interested in Almanack Jack’s prophecy that I’ll be on the wild at thirty-five, and though these flashes of interest only show my inborn Blaskinite stupidity (because there needn’t be anything in such crackpot prophecies at all, no more, in fact, than there is ultimately any truth in me), yet it snaps at my neckstrings now and again, because no one, finally, can spend all of his allotted span in an iron lung.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Michael Cullen Novels

  One

  Old lives for new, and new wives for old: it began when I came out of prison and fell into the arms of Bridgitte Appledore, the one-time Dutch au pair girl who became my everloving wife. Our married life in the disused Cambridgeshire railway station of Upper Mayhem lasted through a decade of idleness. We lived on the money of her first psychologist husband, Dr Anderson, bringing up Smog who was the son of the said dead husband and his first wife. Then followed three children of our own, and life at our station dwelling place had been so ordinary that the heavenly years passed too quickly to be appreciated, until that smouldering blond beauty with big breasts and a mouth too small for her heart, who acted but never talked about what went on inside, took the children out one day for a ride in the car while I was still in bed.

  Harwich was two hours away, and none came back, a fact explained by a phone call from Holland next morning. She had, she said between sobs and god-fer-dommering curses, left me, and didn’t know whether she would ever be back. To cover my shock and chagrin I told her she was full of gin, adding that as far as I was concerned she could stay away forever, and that I had always expected her sooner or later to go back to them old ways.

  Grammar is always the first victim of a broken marriage. I knew my accusations to be a lie, which proved I was already halfway back to my old ways of lying, if I still had the backbone for it, which I had doubted till that moment.

  I put in, for good measure, in case she misunderstood, that she was no better than a whore, which was a scandalous assertion because as far as I knew she had been as loyal as a turnip during our marriage. She shouted back, before this accusation was hardly through to the other side of my brain, and not yet fed into the wire, that I wouldn’t have said that to her if Jankie (or some such name. Maybe it was Ankie) had been there, at which I screamed out: ‘Who’s Jankie, you double, treble, quadruple whore’ – to which she retorted: ‘I’m not a horse, you idle sponging no-good coward.’

  ‘I never sponged,’ I bawled. Every word, good or bad (and they were all bad), was a mistake. The only policy was a cool smile and lips well buttoned, but murder smouldered behind my eyes, waiting for the moment when I could pay her out. Silence wasn’t my virtue, and it was too late to learn. ‘You were living in my house!’

  ‘You bought it on money you stole, you gold smuggler, you jailbird. I lived with you ten years in misery, hating every minute, with you hating me, and hating the children, and hating yourself, because prison turned you the bitterest man in the world.’

  I buckled like a straw in the fire, because no man had spent a more contented time, with all the love from Bridgitte I needed, always thinking that no more was possible for her or anyone. I could have sworn to God she had been happy, yet here she was ranting her treacherous version: ‘You thought you had it good, all the looking after, and me happy, but I was hating you, and you with your pervert tricks you made me do and thought I liked.’

  Was my phone tapped? Was some lickspittle from MI5 tuned in to her perorations? And what about at the other end? Could those nice Dutch folks understand her English? I wanted to put the phone down.

  ‘Wait till the children grow up,’ she said, ‘and I get them to know what ape and monkey tricks you’ve been up to, which I’ll tell them if they ask for you and you try to get at me.’

  ‘That’s racism,’ I broke in. ‘Anymore of that and I’ll get onto the Primates Liberation Organizati
on.’

  Nothing would stop her. ‘I didn’t want to live with you, because all the time it was rotten rotten rotten.’ She was weeping again. Her parents were by her side, listening with pious faces, putting calicoed arms over her shoulders, waiting to snatch up the phone and threaten me with instant death by being thrown from the Butter Mountain or drowned in the Great Milk Lake. Better still, they would send her eight upright brothers (and three sisters) to reason with me. ‘You were always looking around,’ she went on, ‘for every chance to get away from me. But you kept me like a dog chained to a post, just like your big, pig-headed father.’

  She was half right, because during my early years at Upper Mayhem, after eighteen months in prison, the same thought nagged at me, so that I wondered, even before going for a drink at the village pub, why I hadn’t slipped my prized transistor radio over my shoulder, or my treasured Japanese zoom lens binoculars. I would almost turn back to get them, but the idea seemed stupid, though it persisted for more than a year, and was finally cured by wise young Bridgitte suggesting that on my strolls I did indeed take my radio, binoculars, bank book, and even her, as well as the children, so that if I didn’t come back it wouldn’t matter, because everything I valued would be crowding unmercifully in on me – so that I couldn’t help but come back, even if only to unload my burdens, by which time I would be too exhausted to care.

  I was rueful yet full of wrath as I put down the phone. She had certainly picked up my language during our time together, so wasn’t completely right when she said I had given her nothing. All I could do after receiving a call for help from my old pal Bill Straw in London was lock up the house for the day and set off to find out why he wanted to see me, and maybe get a sniff of what the future might hold, before Bridgitte recovered from her fit and came back to carry on as before. If it was the end between us, there was nothing I could do, though such finality was hard to believe because in my experience the only final thing was death, and I’d never be ready for that.