Key to the Door

by Alan Sillitoe

  Told to go, he walked off alone through the trees, towards the latrine for a drink and a swill, afterwards to the billet to pick up his eating irons for dinner. The latrine was near the beach and a Malay fisherman walked by with a long net-pole on his shoulder, and over the two-mile water he saw a straggle of grey and black ship in Muong Harbour, and beyond that the colourful line of waterfront buildings looking, he thought, like a row of posh kids’ toys on a window-sill. He stood by the barbed wire, hunger and thirst momentarily forgotten, wondering what he was doing inside this fortress, when so many ships were over there, ready to scatter like funnelled and smoking waterbeetles to all parts of the earth. I call myself Communist, and yet I’m slave-laboured into building these sandbag ramparts to keep them out.

  “You’re not a Communist, Brian,” Knotman had said when they got talking politics the other night. “Not from what I know of you, anyway.” “Well, I’m not part of this system, I’ll tell you that.” “I don’t blame you,” Knotman went on, “because I don’t think anybody would be, in their right mind, but most of the world isn’t in its right mind, though I expect it will be one day.” “What do you think I am, then?” Brian asked. “You might be a socialist when you’ve read more and know a bit about it.” “Hitler was a socialist,” Brian laughed, “a national socialist, and I don’t want anything to do with a nut like him.” “He wasn’t a socialist,” Knotman informed him patiently, “he only said he was to deceive the workingman. He was sucking up to big business, and they used him to rob the Jews and stamp on the workingman eventually. They fell for it as well. No, if you’re anything, you’re a socialist-anarchist.” “Maybe,” Brian admitted, but he knew that all men were brothers and that the wealth of the world should be pooled and divided fairly among those who worked, doctors and labourers, architects and mechanics. That’s what those on the other side of the sandbags feel, and even though they might not, as Knotman averred, be true socialists, he was still building up sandbags to keep them out. At least, my eyes have been opened. All I’ve got to do now is learn to see with them, and when one person sees, maybe the next one will as well. “It’s a matter of time,” Knotman said, “before the world unites, not only the workers, either. It’s taking the long way round to get there at the moment,” he laughed, “but that’s a thing that often happens.” “Don’t you think you should do something about it, though, to help it?” Brian persisted. “Yes, but no more than you can without being untrue to yourself. History is on our side, so just bide your time: you won’t even know when to act; the first thing you know, you’ll be acting—and in the right way.” Brian found these words unsatisfactory to his nature, because in the jungle the Communists had acted and he’d seen it with his own eyes, felt their bullets spinning and travelling around him.

  He met Mimi at the Egyptian Café the evening before his train left. They sat by the trellis work, next door to crickets and bullfrogs: “Every café has a café of insects and animals around it,” he laughed, spinning the miniature glass of neat gut-rot round in the palm of his hand. He shivered at the coldness of the meeting, thinking how much better it would have been had they, through some accurate and supersensitive whim, decided half an hour ago to stand each other up—for old times’ sake.

  She wore neither lipstick nor make-up, had her hair tied back to show for the first time how long she’d been letting it grow in the last few weeks. “I didn’t want to come,” she said, “but I couldn’t help it.”

  “Neither could I,” he said. “I feel a rotter, a black-headed no-good bastard.”

  “Why?”—her dark eyes opening wide.

  “Because I’m leaving you when I don’t want to. There’s a boat waiting to take me eight thousand miles and I’m not dead keen on going the same way.”

  “That’s silly.”

  “It isn’t. I don’t want to go. But I’ve got no will-power not to go. I want to stay here with you. But I know I shan’t. I’m going to do something I don’t want to do.”

  “Everybody has to do that sometime or other. It won’t be the first time for you, either. Nor the last.”

  “No,” he said, sending a hot needle of whisky down his throat. “It won’t, now you come to mention it. Far from it. But I’ve never felt it as keen as this on any of the other times.” Insects spun like needlepoints through the doors and lattices of the ramshackle café, gathered in clouds around strings of bare light-bulbs. Tables around them were loaded with drinks and noisy jokes: the café had at least one fight a month, every second pay-day, often being put out of bounds, or closed down for a time. “I’ve got to go soon,” she said softly, hoping he wouldn’t make her stay, “to get the next ferry. I’m supposed to be working, and if I don’t go I’ll lose my job.”

  “I’ll send you them books.” No tremor came into either voice, though he felt a seal of hopelessness pressing against his throat. “That’ll be nice,” she said, “if you mean it.”

  “Of course I do. I’ll write as well—letters now and again on a Woolworth’s writing-pad. Who knows what I’ll do? I might even come back in a year—or ten or fifteen years—walk into the Boston Lights and have a couple of dances with you before you know who I am.”

  “You won’t,” she said.

  “I don’t suppose so.”

  “You’ll never leave England again. You’ll be too busy working, and enjoying yourself.”

  “Well,” he laughed, “you can’t do both.”

  She stood up: “I’ll get a tri-shaw to the ferry.”

  They walked to the door, looked for a moment at the dim lines and lights of the road that penetrated the heart-shaped shadows like spears and arrows denoting love, yet with no initials. He held her hand, kissed her on eyes and lips, felt the kiss returned and her hand go around him. “Goodbye, Mimi. Look after yourself.” She hesitated, then turned back to him: “What you told me the other night, about up in the jungle, you were brave. I understood. It was marvellous. You were right not to shoot at them.”

  He watched her walk to the nearest rickshaw, saw the dim shadow of her light body bend and set itself in the seat. The feet of the man gathered speed between the shafts, soon beyond the range at which Brian, watching from the doorway, could hear. In place of it, another and louder sound, stranger to him yet too real as soon as it was felt, swept over him, a sea from the back of his throat as he turned and walked in the opposite direction.

  All day the train took him through familiar landscapes, leaping at first like a straight-lined arrow between rice fields and by the edges of swamps, then towards mountains, twisting and turning like the illustrations of alternating-current theories on the blackboard at radio school. The beautiful names of the country were lit up in the store-rooms of his memory: KEDAH, KELANTAN, PERAK, TRENG-GANU, PAHANG, SELANGOR, NEGRI SEMBILAN—rhythmed out to the thudding self-assurance of stream-driven wheels, an antidote and agreeable opposite to deep jungle rolling beneath waterclouds on mountain tops, and fortified bungalows on village outskirts. The clean, beautifully rounded train wheels were taking him towards Kuala Lumpur in the evening, the big city from which the sun would sink at half-past seven, just as it had twenty-four hours earlier beyond Pulau Timur, when he had watched it from the billet door before going off to see Mimi.

  The passing jungle absorbed him, made his mind as blank as if he were drinking water from a stream he wasn’t sure he would see again, so that it was only when he turned his eyes back to the carriage and noticed his webbing and pack straps spilling over the rack and swinging from the regular kick of the train that the fact of his having left Mimi for good rushed into him. Now that the journey had begun he couldn’t get out of the country quick enough, yet his goodbye to her numbed him, rendered him unable to dissect to the bare bones an anguish he knew was useless but that stayed much of the journey with him. Towards dusk, however, the previous fire had left little for his pain to grip on, and Mimi was almost as far apart from him as Pauline had been when he had first danced with Mimi at the Boston Lights over a year ago. As
the train drew near to Kuala Lumpur, he felt he had seen the last of her and of Malaya, and sensed the doors of its vivid beauty closing themselves in the immense distance and depth of mountains behind. He sat motionless, apart from the rest of the demob party, gave himself up to the grief of a slow half-swept amputation that grew to hard misery because he did not know to what exactly he was saying goodbye, and hadn’t yet realized the vastness of the other part of his life still to be lived.

  At Kuala Lumpur they gathered their kit to cross the dismal platforms towards the night train for Singapore. A transport sergeant stopped Brian and demanded to know where his rifle was. “I haven’t got one.”

  “Sergeant, when you address me,” came the barked refrain.

  “Sergeant,” he said.

  “No one is allowed to travel on the night train without a rifle,” he stipulated. The group of them stood around, awaiting the issue. “I don’t care whether I get on the train or not,” Brian said. You dead-gut, you gestapo-eyed gett, you flap-mouthed effing scumpot.

  “You what?”—the fierce face was stuck towards him, smelling of sweat and carbolic soap and sucked-out fags. “Listen,” he said, “for your information, the train going down last night got machine-gunned.”

  “We had to hand our rifles in at Kota Libis, sergeant.”

  “They’d no bloody right, then. You’d better wait here till I see what’s to be done with you.” He marched to the head of the platform and conferred with an officer. “We’ll miss the blinding boat now,” Jack cursed. “I can see it.”

  “They can stuff their rifles,” Brian said. “Next time, I turn mine against that fuckpig—if he’s on the train and we get ambushed, he’d better watch out. By Christ, I mean it. Still, if I don’t get him, maybe the bandits will—one of these days.”

  “No such luck,” Kirkby said. “It’s poor bastards like Baker who stop it first. They never get the right ones.”

  “Workers of the world, unite!” Jack shouted. “Let’s get on that bloody train.”

  The sergeant didn’t look like coming back, so Brian loaded his kit aboard, followed by the others. Each secured a bunk, debouched again to besiege an ice-cream trolley for the night’s supplies.

  The train set out, rattling away into the darkness of the wastelands. Brian undressed and climbed into his top bunk, pulling the sheet over him. Some of the others were already asleep, empty ice-cream cartons rolling about the gangway, knocking from side to side like worn-out bobbins at a cotton mill, the ones that had often poured from the backs of lorries on the tips, far away in a half-forgotten world. Sleep seemed impossible, and he lay on his back staring at the ceiling a few inches above his forehead. I’d rather be in bed at home, he thought, with Pauline, and soon will be. I’ll get off the troop-ship in three weeks and get demobbed the next day, will take a flying train down to Nottingham and a taxi to Aspley and—Where will we be that night? Will it be the Barleycorn or the Beacon for a good drink of mild, a laugh and a long talk, a few kisses when we think nobody’s looking?

  I’ll see mam and dad as well. Look, dad, I’m back, I’m out of jail, finished, free, paid-up, and ready for a hard job at the factory. Pauline, go and buy me a couple of pairs of overalls, an old jacket and a mashcan, a good pair of boots to keep the suds and steel-shavings out. What number bus do I need to get there spot on at half-past seven every morning? Don’t try and tell me; I was born knowing it. Do you still work in the same shop, dad, carting steel rammel away on that barrow from them auto machines? Is that big bloke with a cauliflower nose still your shop-steward and does he bring the Worker in still every day? Tell him to put me down for the union as well. It’ll be good to meet my old school pals again, back from their own jail sentences by now, I should think: Jim Skelton and Albert, Colin and Dave. Bert as well, when the loon gets finished with the further three years he had, after all, signed on for. He’d go sometime and see Ada and his uncle Doddoe, get a plate of stew and a slab of cake, and listen to Doddoe’s nostalgic curses as he recounted his new adventures as a gaffer down the newly nationalized pit, or told of hair-raising escapades on his recently acquired high-powered motorbike.

  I’ll bump into other pals as I charge across to the canteen for my dinner. Or maybe I wain’t bother with the canteen but will go home to mam’s, round the corner and up the street, along the yards and clobbering into the back door. “Hey up, mam,” I’ll shout from the lavatories: “’Ave yer mashed?” “Ay, Brian, my owd duck,” she’ll shout: “I ev an’ all.” And at night I’ll get on the bus back to Pauline, out with the charging mass into fog or sleet (or maybe sunshine, if I’m lucky, though Malaya’s spoilt me for life in that way), smelling the fresh warmth of our room a mile before I get to it, the smell of her powder and kisses as I put my arm around her by the door and pinch her in the right places, dodging out of her way before she tries to crack me one. Over my snap I’ll maybe tell her about the paint and wallpaper I’m thinking of buying, because somebody’s got to get the house fixed up now that Mullinder’s a long time gone, and I’ll be just the bloke for that. I remember the cistern in the bathroom was going rusty before I left and I’m sure nobody’s done much to it, so I’ll start on that first. After tea I’ll be out in the dark rain-soaked streets, passing the beer-offs and fish-and-chip shops with a fag at the slope, smarmed up in my best and heading for the pub to play darts and sup pints with Johnny and Ernie and Arthur, Nan and the rest of them. I’ll spend a night or two helping the union, you can bet, because somebody’s got to do it, and I feel I’m just the bloke for a thing like that. I’ll get to know what’s what as well, pull a few more books into the house to see what makes the world tick, maybe read some of those I nicked years ago. I ain’t let the bastards grind me down in the air force, and I wain’t let them get a look in at grinding me down outside; in fact, if I ’ave owt to do with it, the boot’ll be on the other foot.

  His thought swung from this to a vivid and agreeable picture flashed back from the forgotten train journey when he was on his way into Nottingham for his embarkation leave. He stood in the corridor kneeing his pack and kitbag towards the door, and as the train rolled over the Trent, he saw below on its banks a youth and girl casually looking up at the bridge, his arm over her shoulder as if they had left off kissing to see the train over, and would kiss again as soon as it was out of sight.

  While the train rattled him down through Malaya, he couldn’t get to sleep so he thought mainly of Pauline and the long-since-gone aura of their courting days, which he hoped would come back to them a while when he got demobbed and home. A daylight yet dim picture of the Cherry Orchard (now covered in houses, she had written) came back to him, bringing with it a stronger feeling of Pauline than any other scene from Nottingham. He smelt the damp soil and grass blades at the end of a summer day when they had wandered there after meeting at the factory, remembered touching the ground before spreading his mac in one of the hollows for them to lie on when dusk came to hide them from anybody’s view. He smelt her body as he opened her coat, as she lay beneath him, sometimes guiding his hand in the urgency of her desire, and the great feeling of loving completeness with which they went on embracing each other afterwards, and then the smell of smoke commingling from their cigarettes and mixing with the odours of soil and darkness. This vision was strong and weak, came to him like beautiful music pianoed from some distant broadcasting station thousands of miles across the empty and landless ocean, indistinct and varying in loudness, from booming to nothing, but with the thread forever kept whole in the mind that was attuned to it.

  Turning through the jungle, the train sloughed off tunnels like a magic snake and sent its wood-sparks into the limitless air of the tiger-night. His pillow was heavy as lead from sweat, the sheets cold. There seemed to be no ventilation, and he felt as if he were being killed by a nightmare, a storm of past and present rolling loose, unhinged by the transition taking place. He told himself that Malaya was already left behind, that in the morning when it was light he would be off the pe
ninsula and in the catch-net of Singapore. The long dream of sunshine was behind him; jungle mountains were fur-backed sleeping monsters taking their rightful place in the past. He had made his last foray into the jungle—the Malayan jungle, anyway—and sent his final rhythmical morse phrases into the last blood-flecked sunset over Pulau Timur. Yet there was a feeling of heartbreak about leaving it all.

  In the morning, he thought, as he fell off at last towards sleep, the boat will roll from Singapore, and I suppose there’ll be a Highland band playing bagpipes as we draw away. Looking back, and looking forward, he somehow felt he had the key to the door, especially when next year’s birthday seemed already near enough for his hand to reach. (If you lived to be twenty, twenty-one, or twenty-two—or a year older than you were at the moment, till your next birthday, in fact—then you were immortal and indestructible.) And with the key to the door all you need do now, he smiled with an irony that made his heart constrict, was flex your labouring muscles to open it; though I wouldn’t be surprised if that doesn’t take more than half as long again.

  A Biography of Alan Sillitoe by Ruth Fainlight

  Not many of the “Angry Young Men” (a label Alan Sillitoe vigorously rejected but which nonetheless clung to him until the end of his life), could boast of having failed the eleven plus exam not only once, but twice. From early childhood Alan yearned for every sort of knowledge about the world: history, geography, cosmology, biology, topography, and mathematics; to read the best novels and poetry; and learn all the languages, from Classical Greek and Latin to every tongue of modern Europe. But his violent father was illiterate, his mother barely able to read the popular press and when necessary write a simple letter, and he was so cut off from any sort of cultivated environment that, at about the age of ten, trying to teach himself French (unaware books existed that might have helped him), the only method he could devise was to look up each word of a French sentence in a small pocket dictionary. It did not take long for him to realize that something was wrong with his system, but there was no one to ask what he should do instead.