A Man of his Time

by Alan Sillitoe

  Burton disliked so many people crowding close. In the back yard you heard the noise of neighbours shouting and clattering about. Women screamed at kids, and kept the wireless on. Trains shunted along the railway night and day.

  A year later, after the war had started, they moved to Radford Boulevard, further into the city. The nearest pub was the Gregory Hotel a hundred yards away, though Burton had little to spend from the old age pension. It helped that Thomas and Ivy paid their board, and Emily made up the rations to five. Burton being a sparse eater unlike – he remarked – that glutton Thomas, meant that sufficient was usually on the table, though not as much as in the days of autumn pig-killing when legs of pork, flitches of salted bacon, and strings of sausages swung in the pantry.

  Burton and Mary Ann lived in a comfortable though at times spartan way. If Emily or Ivy or Thomas said or did something annoying, Burton might now hold back his response for fear of upsetting Mary Ann. Ivy was encouraged by Jane Middleton to buy a wireless on hire purchase, so Burton enjoyed music now and again, and listened to the nine o’clock news, but it was sparingly used, and never too loud.

  Mary Ann had the Evening Post delivered, and sometimes stood on the front step looking for the paperboy. Brian’s brother Arthur put it into her hands for a fortnight, when standing in for a pal on holiday. In cold weather Burton took it in to Mary Ann by the fire, so that she could read aloud what might inform him about the war. They also learned in this way of the prison sentences on Edith’s sons, who had deserted from the army and taken to robbing shops and offices. He pitied Edith for having had such lawless children by Doddoe Atkin, though Tommy Jackson’s son Douglas was also in jail. ‘Idleness is the greatest cause of misery in the world,’ he said.

  Standing on the front step, chin up, staring right and left at people and traffic, he saw Brian walking along the boulevard, a girl holding his arm. He beckoned. ‘How are you getting on, Nimrod?’

  The name embarrassed him, having been at work for two years, and no longer a kid. But he had to lead Pauline forward for his grandfather’s inspection.

  Burton noted her brown hair, fringed at the front and long behind, took in a good figure through the open coat, and with knowing eyes reached for her hand. He smiled. ‘How are you, then?’

  Brian expected her to curtsey, so smarmily did she speak. ‘I’m very well, thank you.’

  She could have sworn Burton winked. He was well aware that Brian, from his expression, and from hers also, was getting all that a young man wanted. ‘Is he a good lad to you?’

  ‘He’s got to be, hasn’t he?’ Brian noted that she seemed about to bite off her tongue at having to add: ‘Well, he’s all right, most of the time.’

  ‘Tell him to bring you to the Gregory Hotel one evening so that I can buy you a drink. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, my girl?’

  ‘I’d love it.’

  You bloody would, Brian said to himself.

  Burton took her hand again, as if he couldn’t feel it often enough, wanting her to know she could come for a stroll and take a chance with him any time she liked. ‘But don’t let me stop you going where you want to go.’

  ‘Your grandad’s nice,’ she said, on their way to the cinema. ‘And handsome.’

  ‘I suppose he is. I can see him running me off if I’m not careful. He’s a dirty old man.’

  ‘I’ll bet he was a dirty young one, as well,’ she said. ‘He must have been a smasher. He’s got such warm hands.’

  ‘Aren’t mine warm?’

  ‘Not like his are.’

  He pulled her along. ‘Come on, or we won’t get there before the picture starts.’

  ‘Of course we shall,’ she said in a tone that riled him. He was aware that if he turned Burton would still be looking at her.

  Tall, white-haired, and seventy-five, a black velvet patch over his dead eye giving a raffish and predatory look, Burton seemed charged with energy as he walked towards the Gregory Hotel. Still unable to sit in the house for long, he walked a mile to the Crown, and to call on Oswald and Helen. Or he strode uphill through Canning Circus and down into the city.

  When he took Mary Ann out she noticed his eye wandering towards any personable woman in the pub or on the street, unnoticed by whoever he was observing, though she also could pick out a well-dressed woman, knowing that Burton would never fail to do likewise till the day he died.

  He could be taken, by his marching stride, for an old soldier, by those who didn’t know him, a comparison he would have scorned. In the coldest weather he carried a coat over his right arm for smartness rather than utility. Many old men younger than himself ought to stand straight and put another inch or two on their height to give more dignity. As for a walking stick, it was only all right to carry one if you didn’t need to. They should at least close their mouths and hide the rotten teeth. Looking so dead on their feet would make the young dread what they might one day come to, instead of showing a person to respect. If a lifetime’s work had broken them they should try not to appear so gormless. It cost nothing to be smart.

  No one was more surprised than Burton when Thomas said he had fallen in love with the woman of his life. ‘It’s about time,’ he said to Mary Ann.

  Thomas must have realized that at forty it was now or never, and decided it had to be now. He sang Drink To Me Only in a fine tenor voice at the church hall reception, his wife Grace looking on as if she had found the perfect husband.

  Poor woman, Burton thought, listening to a song whose message of sincerity his son would never live up to. Grace was a tall thin woman far too good for him, which Thomas was never to realize, not having cared about anyone from the day he was born. Grace expected much, after the courting of such an insincere cavalier. Thomas had pursued her because she seemed unattainable, and now that he had her she would need a lot of looking after. She should have had more sense than to deliver herself into his hands, Burton said to Mary Ann. ‘He could charm himself into the bedroom of the Queen of Sheba.’

  ‘Which was much like you and me when I put myself into your hands,’ Mary Ann responded.

  He didn’t indicate whether or not this had occurred to him, and went on to say that Oswald had made a better job of married life than Thomas ever would, because Oswald was closer to being a son of his as any man could get. Thus Burton, who had never bothered about knowing himself – who needed to, if you were yourself? – speculated about Thomas, who had lived in the same house for so long, and yet was right.

  Thomas rented a house across the boulevard, as if he couldn’t bear to be far from a father he feared so much, though Mary Ann hoped to have a grandchild close now that Brian was working in a factory and too busy going after the girls to come and see them.

  Thomas walked into the house at least once a day, till Burton wondered whether he thought he still lived there, and that Grace was his kept woman across the road. He looked smarter in his Home Guard uniform than most spare-time soldiers, no doubt in order to get off more easily with the women, whether married or not. ‘I suppose you fancy yourself in that khaki suit?’

  Thomas’s smile showed white and perfect teeth as he reached for the tea Mary Ann poured from her best pewter pot. ‘I like being in the Home Guard. It’s interesting, and fills my spare time. I’m doing something for my country.’ The tea went like a scalding sword into his throat, as if someone might take it away if he didn’t hide it quickly enough. ‘Anyway, when I’m in uniform I’m not wearing out my own clothes.’

  He ignored Burton’s contemptuous grunt at such a notion of economy. ‘You earn enough to buy your own.’

  Thomas could only smile, even now wary of ‘answering back’. ‘Our company CO likes us to look smart when we’re on parade. His name’s Captain Dyslin, a man of about fifty, though he doesn’t look anywhere near it. He was in the South Wales Borderers in the last war.’

  From the cul-de-sac of his thoughts Burton recalled a name already heard, and wanted more information but couldn’t ask directly. ‘That’s a
rare name for a Nottingham man.’

  ‘He’s Welsh.’ Thomas pushed his cup forward for his mother to fill again. She did. ‘A tall smart man, wears a little moustache. He saw me in a pub the other day and treated me to a pint.’

  Burton by the fire folded sheets of newspaper into spills for lighting cigarettes, wondering how Dyslin, if it was him, came to be in Nottingham, and why he’d had the effrontery to hobnob with his half-brother. Perhaps it’s somebody else, because there must be more than one Dyslin in the world.

  Thomas adjusted a cap Burton thought only fit to carry a pennyworth of chips in. ‘I must be going. Captain Dyslin shouts at us if we’re late on parade. He likes to keep us in line. He can be a real tyrant. Shoulders back, stomach in, chest out! But I sometimes think he’s laughing inside when he goes on a bit too long like that.’

  The sirens howled their warning message but Burton did not vary his walk, and ignored a warden shouting from the factory gate that he should get into an air-raid shelter. He considered himself too old to die young, though not too old to go on living.

  He wouldn’t have bothered to hide at any time in his life. If you were to die there was nothing to be done, though better of course to stay alive, the bonus of a year or two extra not to be turned down. There had been times when he hadn’t cared to go on living, while knowing there was no cure for life this side of the grave, and that the grave was no cure at all. His snort on turning towards home was meant for all those in the world who had allowed the war to come about.

  Anti-aircraft guns unloaded their crackerbarrels at German bombers, shrapnel falling like hard peas on roofs and along empty streets, sounds regarded as merely another manifestation of Old Nick trying to reap him in. A blackout curtain was drawn over the district, except for stars between moving cloud, but he used the kerb and lamp-posts as markers, instinct and local knowledge showing the way to his doorstep.

  Mary Ann stood waiting, shaking with fear, had visions of him being killed or injured. ‘I’d have sent Thomas to look for you, but he’s gone on Home Guard duty.’

  He gave a dry laugh on following her inside. ‘You don’t think a fool like him would have found me?’

  ‘You might have got lost. You can’t see a hand before you in this blackout,’ she said in the kitchen. ‘I told you not to leave the house.’

  A warm hand touched her cheek. ‘Don’t make a fuss. You know I’ll be all right.’

  ‘But the sirens go nearly every night, and give me a pain in the stomach.’ The finned shoulders of a bomb crumped into earth not far away. ‘It’s worse than the last war with the zeppelins,’ she said, a gap in the clatter of gunfire. ‘I never thought we’d have to put up with this again in our lives.’

  He took off his jacket. ‘Neither did I.’

  ‘Don’t you think we’d be better off in the cellar?’

  ‘You can go down if you like. Where are the others?’

  ’emily’s in bed.’

  ‘Leave her there. She sleeps like a stone.’

  ‘And Ivy’s staying at Miss Middleton’s.’

  ‘She should be safe enough there. They only bomb poor areas like this. Put the kettle on, and take a hot water bottle when you go down. A blanket as well, or you’ll start shivering.’

  ‘Won’t you come with me?’

  If a bomb hit the house it wouldn’t matter whether they were in the cellar or not, and if they got buried together what more could they want? ‘I’ll look in later.’

  Every gun-sound came like a clap of the direst thunderbolt, then a barrage from the naval guns behind Robin’s Wood opened up, dozens of shells one after the other, then many all at once, an unbearable noise for a poor soul like Mary Ann, who trembled at every rattle of distant thunder, which he didn’t expect she would mind now, though as far as he knew she was in the safest place of the house.

  The cellar was swept and cleaned, and a few of Mary Ann’s selfmade rugs spread on the floor. He had whitewashed the walls to make it much like another room, and hammered up a wooden bench for whoever wanted to sit down, glad he’d kept sufficient tools from his work at the pit to do that and other jobs about the house. The trouble was that at night the cellar could be as cold as an igloo, and staying there long brought pains around the lower part of his back. Mary Ann called it lumbago, and he let her rub the aches with lotion now and again.

  When Jane Middleton, asked into the house one evening by Mary Ann, heard the mention of lumbago, she looked up through her fancy rimless glasses and, ignoring a signal from Ivy, piped up: ‘Lumbago is a painful complaint in the muscles of the lower part of the back, or so I understand, and has something to do with rheumatism.’

  As if he didn’t know, but there was nothing he could say in reply, even supposing he cared to, which he didn’t, only thinking Miss Hoity-Toity should have been left out on the pavement to wait for Ivy. There was no woman he wouldn’t be polite to, and try to get something out of (even now, if they’d have him) but if Jane Middleton had any liking for a person such as Ivy she wasn’t the sort he wanted to know.

  He supposed his lumbago to have started on the first night of air-raid warnings, when Mary Ann asked him in a way he couldn’t refuse to come with her to the cellar because she was afraid to be on her own. Sitting erect in the same position for an hour, the best way he knew of keeping the mind empty so that time would go more quickly, a stabbing cut across the small of his lumbar parts, and from then on it came back if he sat too long. Nothing had ever been wrong with his body, and though such a complaint wouldn’t kill him, Mary Ann said he should go to the doctor, a suggestion – all it dared be – receiving such a sceptical grunt it wasn’t mentioned again.

  A couple of bombs from the direction of Old Engine Cottages shook the house. Had he been in the cellar with Mary Ann they wouldn’t have heard themselves speak. Pot dogs rattled on the shelf as if wanting to leap off and hide under the table. Oliver’s photograph looked down, seeming to wonder about noises he had briefly heard in his days as a soldier.

  He put on his jacket and walked through the scullery, out the back door. At the end of the small garden was the lavatory, and even though it was the flushing sort he put the usual two-gallon tin of creosote by the pan. He never pulled the chain after a piss because it was a waste of water. The toilet roll on the wall was only for Mary Ann – though he was sure Ivy used it – while he and Emily used newspaper cut into squares. Though it meant black arses it was good enough for them.

  Vibrations underfoot and an orange glow over the yards meant more bombs. The noise of guns itched his ears, and he sniffed smoke. A terrified moggie leapt over the wall into the next garden, hoping for safety. Shrapnel pinked, one piece missing his boots by inches. The sky was lighter towards town, as if the whole lot was going up. Aeroplanes flew low again and again, engines droning unevenly between the gunfire.

  He thought of Edith and her family in the Meadows, where a lot of the bombs must be falling, hoping they’d be neither killed nor maimed. Rebecca had moved to Kent, and there’d been a danger last year that the Germans might land, though she would have given them what-for if they had. Luckily they were frightened of a drop of water.

  In many years he hadn’t thought about Alma, or the child she’d had the cheek to call Oliver. He went to the grave every week but without seeing her, nor anywhere on the street either, and he wondered whether she was curious about him. Perhaps she lived in a different part of town, but if she wanted to find him she knew where to look, and if she didn’t then she didn’t want to find him. He only hoped she was safe.

  The windows rattled. Another bomb, and close this time. He went inside at more peppering of shrapnel, careful not to let the bulb glow, though it seemed the Germans had all the light they wanted. He put a half-filled kettle on the few embers, thrifty as ever with the gas. When it boiled he spooned tea into the pot and filled it. Mary Ann would like a cup, and he could do with one as well. Such flame and smoke outside parched the gorge. He opened the parlour cabinet to get the best
cups, supposing that if the house were to go up they might as well drink in style.

  Sugar was short, but a full spoon went in for Mary Ann’s sweet tooth. He had stopped using it when rationing began, able to take it or leave it, not mattering to him, and so all the more for the others. Even Ivy didn’t refuse his share. He opened the cellar door with his boot, and went carefully down the darkened narrow steps carrying the first tea he had mashed in his life.

  He thought Mary Ann was asleep, leaning against the wall, hands by her side, till realizing nobody could be with such noise, except Emily upstairs who must have imagined in her weird dreams that it was Bonfire Night.

  Her lips were slightly open, as if expecting something to be put between them, though he couldn’t think what that might be. The pale forehead was luminous with a fear tightly locked in. She waited for the bombing to stop and the war to be over, like everybody else, he supposed, yet feared that every second would be her last. Poor woman! In the dim light were the features of the girl he had married, enough beauty still there for him to touch her lips with his.

  She opened her eyes. ‘You kissed me, Ernest!’ – something only done in bed.

  Better to grow old like Darby and Joan than Punch and Judy. In such light she hadn’t seen the smile. ‘With this lot going on you never know when it’s time to say goodbye. Here, I made a pot of tea.’

  She sipped, and with the other hand reached for his. An explosion made the house shudder as if it would crumble, smashing them and all their tranklements to smithereens, but she was less frightened now.

  His tea went down scalding hot as he sat by her, head bent from the low ceiling of the cellar. She felt his warm face: ‘Oliver would have been fifty if he’d lived.’