A Man of his Time

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘I expect they did.’ Oswald saw him throw it down. ‘But that’s what you get, buying something like that from a shop.’

  ‘Can’t you wait for your dinner?’ Burton said. ‘It’ll be on the table, unless it starts to thunder and Mary Ann’s hiding under the stairs.’ Rain spat at the end of the railway tunnel, as if the exploding tons of TNT had drawn in clouds to make a storm.

  Bread, slices of bacon, and a dish of kidney beans were laid before them. ‘I thought I heard thunder not long since,’ Mary Ann said.

  Thomas told her about the disaster.

  ‘All those poor souls dead or maimed,’ she said.

  Burton also regretted their injuries. Unable to say so, he resented not being thought capable of such feeling. You couldn’t object to that, either, because it was worse for them than for him if they didn’t understand. ‘Eat your dinners,’ though it was hardly necessary to tell them.

  Mary Ann sat with them for the main dish, at Burton’s request. ‘It’s Sabina I worry about,’ she said. ‘I can’t get her out of my mind. We haven’t heard a word in months.’

  He cut into the scrag-end of mutton she’d been able to get from the butcher’s. A penny stamp cost nothing, and he was angry that Sabina hadn’t written. What had he made her go to school for if she couldn’t write a letter now and again? It was to annoy him, he knew, but she should realize it was Mary Ann who would suffer. ‘She’ll be back one day, but I won’t have her in the house, after the way she’s behaved.’

  Mary Ann got up from the table, thinking it no privilege to sit with him if that was how he saw the matter. ‘I’d never turn one of my own children away from the door.’

  She was too soft-hearted, but she was his wife, and he had to take note of what she said now and again. He knew she knew that he did, and she knew also that he knew that he did. You couldn’t be closer to someone than that, except when in bed at night or on Sunday afternoon, and even then it wasn’t the same as knowing each other’s mind. That was how they lived, no gainsaying it, though it didn’t hurt to remind yourself that you must be careful what you said to questions you didn’t want to answer. Life was difficult without having to give yourself away in talk, though keeping your trap shut wasn’t hard, because he’d been used to it since birth. The youngest of ten, he’d had to let others do the talking before he dared open his mouth, and even then he might get a blow for his trouble, so after a while he had taken care not to. But whatever Mary Ann said about Sabina, he would never have her back in the house.

  Frost was white on the ground, and on the bare twigs of the hedges, the garden derelict except for a few forlorn sprouts among the milky furrows. Sunday afternoon, he gazed over the fence onto the lane. Emily was in the parlour staring at the cat, Mary Ann was dozing by the fire, and Ivy had gone walking with Ernie Guyler, her latest boyfriend, while Oswald and Thomas were in Nottingham chasing the girls.

  Everybody swore that times were changing, though if it was true he would do all he could to slow them down as the best way of caring for his family. They were changing because of a war he would have nothing to do with. Let people do their worst if they were mad enough. King and Country was a curse too many were afflicted with because they were too soft to know who they were unless they had such a thing to believe in.

  Blistered ice covered the puddles, the lane empty, hedges so bare you could see across the fields as far as the bridge. Even a train along the embankment seemed slower because of the cold. He shivered in his jacket, a bitter start to the year. Changing times would make no difference to him. Old men were happy for their sons to go for soldiers, while women in factories made uniforms and guns to put into their hands. They would fight till the last man was dead, or so exhausted as to be useless. It didn’t bear thinking about.

  The government’s taken my pigs, but even if they hadn’t there’d be little enough to put in their bellies. Food’s rationed, and Mary Ann queued for an hour to get a pound of sugar, but just as she reached the door the shopkeeper said there was no more left, and slammed the door in her face. I wish I had been there. They’re even selling horsemeat, but I’d rather eat vegetables and bread than the flesh of beasts I’ve worked with all my life. He had ringed another bull last month, and Lord Middleton had sent him back with a leg of beef, which fed them for a while. Middleton might have thought it useful to keep him strong in case more such work was needed, but it was good of him all the same.

  Someone came from under the bridge and walked slowly up the lane, avoiding ice and puddles, no coat on by the look of it, only a frock to keep out the cold, a jersey to the waist that didn’t match. He supposed her a girl from Woodhouse taking the short cut to Aspley. Parents sent their children unprovided into any weather. You saw them every day, battered shoes keeping out neither rain nor snow. Wages from the factories were spent in pubs, with no thought for their children. Those who’d had barely a living wage before the war had been attentive to their families, but a lot now lived as if tomorrow never came, and if that was the change they had in mind he couldn’t think it was for the better.

  She stayed to the nearside of the lane, a sly little cat, walking slowly as if not wanting to be seen. Wondering who she was made him forget the cold. When she stopped by the leaning fence he could see only the top of her head.

  ‘Dad, I’m badly. I think I’ve got tonsillitis. Can I come home?’

  His limbs momentarily shook, though not from the cold. I won’t have her in the house. I’ll talk to her, then she can go back to where she came from. ‘Stand across the lane, where I can see you.’

  Sabina came close, bare arms folded, bluish features raddled with unhappiness. Snatched to the very middle, her shoes weren’t fit for the feet of a tramp, though a slip of blue ribbon hung limp from her hair. The day wasn’t even good for a dog to be out in.

  She was flushed with illness, but through it all looked at him unafraid, eyes similar to his own, wanting to rush away from his brutal unfeeling look, should have thrown herself at a train or died of cold under a hedge. He would never take her in. If only he had been in the garden and Mary Ann at the door.

  He read her easily because she was his own flesh. Neither she nor the others know me – observed her a few moments longer. ‘Come into the house, and get yourself something to eat. You look as though you could do with it.’

  She followed by the silent pigsty and into the large kitchen smelling of cinnamon and baked bread, thyme and curry, cleanliness and comfort, and the strong tea Emily had made, a medley of odours that must have been there even before she was born.

  He closed the door and told her to sit by the fire. ‘Not too close, or you’ll get chilblains,’ stood away from the table for a better look. He spat at the bars, its familiar sizzle part of the welcome she hadn’t dared expect. ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘To Skegness. I worked in a hotel, but they treated me worse than a slave. I stuck it as long as I could, then ran away.’ Tears smeared her cheeks, pride scorched at having pleaded to be taken in, but weeping with relief at not being turned away as she had dreaded. ‘I was going to get a job filling shells at Chilwell, and go into lodgings, but Leah didn’t want to.’

  ‘She had some sense.’ He spat at the bars again, always embarrassed by tears. ‘You aren’t having a baby, are you?’

  ‘Oh, nothing like that.’

  ‘Mary Ann will be in soon, to give you a meal.’

  Emily took her cold hands and brought them back to warmth. ‘It’s lovely to see you, duck. You’ll be all right now you’ve come home.’

  ‘We’ll have to get you some proper clothes.’ He came back from the pantry with two buckets and the yoke. More water was necessary if Sabina was to have the bath she needed. And he might as well do something as stand idle, carry in tomorrow’s coal, chop up a log or two of wood, make sure the house was comfortable now that a bird had flown back to the nest. ‘Your mother will put you in the bath later, and scrub some of that muck off you.’

  When the door closed on
him Emily poured her a cup of tea, lifted a fresh loaf from the panchion, took the sharpest knife, and drew it through the bread towards her chest, a thick slice falling onto the table. She spread it copiously with margarine, spooned almost half a pot of homemade damson jam onto it, and looked with such pleasure at Sabina eating that she might have been her only daughter instead of a sister.

  The war had to end sometime, and now it had. As with everything all you had to do was wait, but it had been like watching the hour hand of the clock go round, never seeming to move. The Armistice was signed, and you could buy meat, butter and sugar again, but the feeling was as if you had climbed out of a darkened room through a window onto a street hardly recognized.

  The postman had delivered a small packet containing a large bronze medallion. The name OLIVER BURTON was engraved above a lion’s head watched over by Britannia with a wreath in her hand. The accompanying paper, from Buckingham Palace said: ‘I join with my grateful people in sending you this memorial of a brave life given for others in the Great War’ – signed in facsimile by the King.

  ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ a rare occasion when Burton didn’t curb his language before Mary Ann, ‘the King can kiss my arse, and should have kept his trinket.’ He wanted to throw it into the heat, but Mary Ann set it like a holy medal on the parlour shelf, giving it pride and sorrow of place among horse brasses and other ornaments. Burton would rather it had been nearer the fire, and used as a target to spit at.

  Boots firmly on the pedals of Oswald’s tall pushbike, he pumped his well-balanced upright way towards Woodhouse, speed as easily come by as fire in the forge on pressing the bellows as a child. The ratio of energy to distance made it much better than walking.

  Every car, lorry and motorbike seemed to have come back from France. Enough buses had taken the place of horsedrawn brakes and charabancs to have an effect on the farrier’s trade. Only a fool wouldn’t see the way things were going.

  Oswald had bought the bike for six pounds on the instalment plan, and paid most of it off, so Burton wondered about getting one himself, and was trying it out. The Co-op van went by, on its way to take the weekly order up the lane to Mary Ann, and by the time he reached the bridge it passed him on the way back.

  A single morning glory in all its freshness guarded the wall of the house, a five-petal hand against the bricks. He leaned the bike by the old deal table under the tree and took off his clips, saw a clutch of dockweed sprouting, his ever-active fingers putting the leaves together, and yanking them clear by the single root, annoyed that neither of his sons had remedied the excrescence. He hurled the leaves in a bunch over the fence of the pigsty, smiling at two young porkers rousting themselves as if it was birthday time.

  As always on greeting Mary Ann he took off his cap. Now in his fifties, his white head was almost shaved after yesterday’s visit to the barber’s. Emily on the floor violently stirred Yorkshire pudding batter around a large yellow bowl, the only thing she was good at. He bent down, and said in a lugubrious tone close to her ear: ‘Not so much elbow grease, or it’ll all go to froth.’

  In her fright the spoon went handle-first into the yellowish mess. ‘Now see what you’ve done,’ he said.

  ‘You made me do it, our dad.’

  Mary Ann took the spoon out and gave her a clean one. ‘Don’t tease her.’

  He set his lunch tin on the dresser. ‘That’s all she’s good for.’

  ‘No it isn’t. She’s a good help to me.’ When his jacket was on the back of the door and he sat at the table Mary Ann laid out his bottle and glass, with a piece of bacon and bread. She frowned at him shaking such a quantity of salt over his plate from a large pewter pot. ‘You look tired.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘But trade’s getting bad.’

  She ignored that for the moment. ‘I’ve made a blackberry and rhubarb pie.’ Thomas put his lunch tin on the table before washing his hands. ‘Take that thing off,’ Burton said.

  ‘It isn’t harming anybody.’

  ‘It’s too close to my arm.’

  He put it on the sideboard.

  Mary Ann pushed a couple of sticks between the bars, giving the fire new life. ‘Why is it bad?’

  He wiped beer froth from his small white moustache. ‘There’s so many motors that nobody needs horseshoes. Or they soon won’t want enough to keep three of us in work. They even make them by machine at a shilling each. I won’t compete with that.’

  She knew him well enough to think for him, to feel whatever disturbance tormented him, guess the anguish that wouldn’t come from his lips. It was conduct never to be judged. ‘What shall you do, then?’

  Thomas drank from a large cup of tea, and Burton nodded in his direction. ‘He’ll have to get a job elsewhere, for a start.’

  He had longed for the day when he would no longer be under his father’s gaze. ‘It won’t bother me.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it will.’ None of his sons had valued the good trade he had given them. Blacksmiths who took on different work were given the best of jobs.

  ‘I’ll go to the Raleigh,’ Thomas said. ‘They’re turning out all the bikes they can. Motorbikes as well.’

  Those, too, had robbed him of trade. Oswald joined them at table. ‘Where have you been?’ Burton asked, though he knew well enough. ‘You shouldn’t keep your mother waiting.’

  ‘I was talking to Helen.’

  Burton had seen them walking by the canal, Oswald introducing him to a dark-haired girl with a face too troubled by what she saw of the world, and by much that was uncertain in herself. He hoped Oswald would be able to take care of her, not sure whether he’d be lucky with her in the long run. ‘She’s a Roman Catholic,’ Oswald said, which none of the family saw as an issue between such a handsome man and so goodlooking a girl.

  ‘You’ll have to get a job, as well,’ Burton told him, ‘when we close up.’

  ‘I’ve been expecting it. I heard they’ll want a man to look after the canal locks between here and Trowell. There’s a house to go with it, so I might apply. As a blacksmith I’ve got a good chance, and if I get it I’ll ask Helen to marry me.’

  Thomas pushed his cup aside to be refilled. ‘Do you think she’ll say yes?’

  He smiled. ‘I have high hopes.’

  His smile reminded Mary Ann of Oliver’s. ‘She’s a lovely girl.’

  Burton emitted a rare grunt of approval: someone whose children would carry on his name. He stooped to unlace his boots. ‘I’ll close the place early next year, and see what I can get for it. Morgan said the other day they need blacksmiths at Wollaton pit for shoeing ponies and other work, and the pay he mentioned seemed about right. Then there’s extra jobs I can do at the farms between here and Ilkeston, so we’ll be all right for money. I’ll keep what tools I need.’ It was a step down, to be a journeyman again, yet the thought gave some pleasure because it would be like his younger days.

  Ivy, home from the cigarette factory, came out of the scullery with a tray of washed crockery. ‘I shall be going to put flowers on Oliver’s grave tomorrow morning.’ They were laid there every week, and would be while the forlorn portrait looked down from the wall.

  ‘Take the clippers,’ Burton said, ‘and cut the grass. It needed doing last time I was there. I want to see it neat and tidy.’

  They sat, seven when Sabina came in and took off her coat, a different girl, Burton thought, to the wounded sparrow pleading to be let into the house a couple of years ago. She was late, but he made no remark, knowing that she too would no doubt be getting married soon.

  ‘Why don’t you come with me and Emily tomorrow?’ Ivy said to her father.

  He cut into his meat. ‘I only go on my own. You should know that by now.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  He answered the knock, and a tall man in his thirties, spare, upright, unflinching eyes – something of the soldier about him – announced: ‘My name is Albert Beardmore, late South Nottinghamshire Hussars. I was with your son Oliver when h
e had the accident.’

  Burton stepped aside: ‘Mary Ann!’ – and invited the ex-soldier to sit at the parlour table. ‘Your Oliver wasn’t killed “while following his calling”, as was written in the newspapers,’ Beardmore said.

  Burton put a hand on Mary Ann’s shoulder, hoping she would stop crying and listen. ‘I never believed it.’

  ‘We got the horse off a train at Hungerford, and it was as wild a devil as I ever saw. We called for a drink at a pub, and Jenny the barmaid, as was found, put whisky in the horse’s water. She did it without thinking, but the horse was already mad. The man who brought it from Marlborough said as much, so Jenny just got a ticking-off. I know all about it from her side. When I went back after the Armistice we got married, because we’d been writing to each other all during the war. We still talk about what a fine lad Oliver was. He was going to teach me to read and write, but another pal did it afterwards. I’m sure Jenny would have married Oliver like a shot though, if he hadn’t been killed. But we’ve got three kids now, and live near Oxford. I’m in charge of some stables. This is the first time I’ve found the opportunity to look you up. I knew you’d want to know what really happened. The regiment lost sixty men killed altogether, as well as a lot wounded. I count myself lucky to have come through without a scratch.’

  Burton refilled his glass. ‘And all this was known about his death at the time?’

  ‘They didn’t want to tell you the truth, I can’t think why. But I got into trouble as well. We shouldn’t have stopped at the pub, but you know what soldiers are. Not that I think it would have made much difference with a horse like that, though I’ll regret to my dying day what happened.’

  Burton wore his navy-blue suit, a button-sized chrysanthemum in his lapel, the tip of a white handkerchief pointing from the opposite top pocket, a polished watch chain across his waistcoat, and a large flat cap in his hand. People at the cemetery were in twos and threes, but he stood alone, looked at the rectangular tombstone, a marble scroll at the head. The two prongs of an embossed horseshoe pointed down, and though unable to read, he knew the words well enough: