Key to the Door: A Novel (The Seaton Novels)

by Alan Sillitoe

  It rained the next day and was cold, so that no one knew whether the year was coming or going. A mere drizzle fell by playtime, and Brian pledged his last four marbles against a boy from top class. He knelt, and aimed one at the blue-and-white of the bigger boy some yards away. It seemed a great distance, since he was not sure of his aim and his fingers were cold. He shivered in his jersey: I might hit it—hoping he’d hit something soon, with only four left, because there’d been nineteen in his pockets that morning. The bigger boy was impatient, so that Brian needed an even longer time setting his sights. “Look sharp,” his adversary said. “I want to play Smithy next, after I’ve skint yo’!”

  The playground noise swayed about him: two hundred surging boys watched by a teacher walking up and down under the shed. He’d got his aim, couldn’t miss, drew back an arm to release the marble from between his fingers. A boy from his class walked over the target marble, and when he lifted his foot it was no longer there.

  Brian looked around him up in the air, even felt in his pockets and opened his other hand. Where the marble had rested, the asphalt paving was blank. He could only stare at the boy who had walked over the marble, now at the other end of the playground, and saw that he was limping. He’d walked evenly before, but Brian guessed that the boy’s boots were so full of holes that it had caught in one of them. He watched him lift his foot to see what caused the limp, extract the marble, and glance back to where Brian was standing.

  The bigger boy swung round, demanding: “Ain’t yo’ shot yet?”

  “No,” Brian answered.

  “Well, gerron wi’ it then.” He was tall and truculent, a dash of hair falling into his eyes, and even more holes around his clothes than Brian had in his.

  “The marble’s gone,” Brian informed him. You big-headed bleeder, he swore under his breath. Big-head glared at the blank paving, spun with an accusing war-like snarl: “Yer’ve pinched it.”

  “I ain’t,” Brian denied. “I ain’t a thief, if yo’ are!”

  “Gi’ me that marble.”

  “I ain’t got it, I tell yer.” Big-head edged closer: “I’ll bash yer up if yer don’t gi’ it me. I know yer’ve pinched it. Yer can’t gerraway wi’ that.”

  Brian was about to tell him what happened, but held back. “I ain’t got the marble. It must ’ave rolled somewhere.” But, threatened with a nose-bleeder, he was forced to hand over a marble to Big-head; then went with his last three to play somewhere else.

  In summer and winter, snow and rain and frost, and now again sunshine, Brian set out up the early-morning street with his brother and sister, telling them to hurry, otherwise they’d be late at the dinner-centre. With plimsoll shoes and peacock jerseys, he led them to the long hut beyond the recreation ground where at morning and midday meals were served to those whose fathers were on the dole. They were caught up from warm troughs of sleep by Seaton’s rough voice at seven o’clock: “Come on, Brian. Dinner-centre.”

  “Come on, Arthur and Margaret, Fred,” he said to the bundles beside him in the bed, “dinner-centre.” The bottom room of the house was merely part of the route, though, on his way through, Brian wished they could eat breakfast there, but saw nothing on the table except a mug of tea to be drunk by his father.

  Caution was needed to get his charges over the dangerous boulevard, for often out of the morning mist buses or lorries came rushing by like cliffs, and he had to arrange them level at the lights, wait for red to show, and walk them quickly across in line. Often they were first there and stood near the green-painted iron gates waiting for Miss Braddely. Other children appeared from the mist, shivering and silent, red-faced and still sleepy, and Brian would help carry the crate of cold milk bottles up to the kitchen door when Miss Braddely herself came short-stepping it from a different world from theirs. Brian went in the kitchen and watched her put cocoa on the stove to boil, then saw her work the bread-cutting machine and spread thick butter over each slice. He took Fred and Margaret and Arthur to their places in the hall, sat them quiet while they waited for breakfast to be pushed through the hatch, immersed in the low quiet talking from two dozen other children at the tables. The breakfast, when it did come, was magnificent: three thick half-slices of bread and butter each, and a mug of milky cocoa. There was no breakfast to beat it, as far as Brian knew, except tomatoes and bacon, but that was a dinner.

  At half-past eight they walked back through the rec to school, now very much alive, noticed little bead-like mounds of soil made by worms among the flower-beds, discovered the ground to be less white, though their breaths still turned to vapour, so that Margaret put a piece of stick between her lips and shouted: “Look, our Arthur, I’m smoking! Don’t tell mam I’m smokin’, will yer?”

  Brian met them at half-past twelve and played shepherd again over the much busier boulevard for dinner. As many as two hundred children (who had not bothered to go for breakfast in the morning) milled and played around the dinner-centre door waiting to be let in by fat Miss Harvey. The door opened inwards, and the crush was often so great that even the bulk of Miss Harvey couldn’t stop a dozen children falling into the hall, so that she beat them about the shoulders with a wooden spoon for not showing more restraint. Brian disliked the dinner—cabbage, potatoes, liver, and pudding—and often slid it quietly to his cousin Bert when Miss Harvey wasn’t looking. The meal lacked the clean simplicity of breakfast. Its smells were too diverse and often unidentifiable, and you had to eat whatever of the food you might like in too great a hurry. Often Miss Harvey made them sit quiet and say “grace” before dinners were handed out, a practice that the gentler Miss Braddely forwent in the too-early morning. Afterwards they splayed like confetti out on to the greensward of the rec, and on sunny days Brian fought for the swings or a place on the seesaw, slide, tabletop, or monkey climber, pulling Arthur and Margaret and Fred on after him, and forgetting the world till schooltime at two.

  The second session with Mr. Jones came round, and everything was quiet when he entered the room. “For this lesson I want you to draw a pen-picture of the Old Sea Dog, when he comes to the Admiral Benbow Inn.”

  There was a rustling from every desk, as though a gala of paper-chains had fallen down at Christmas. It’s funny, Brian thought, there ain’t any drawing paper in our books. Anyway, I’d rather do it in pencil because it seems daft to draw a picture with a pen. I suppose that’s what he means, so I’d better get on with it or I wain’t be finished in time. I don’t want his fist flying around me today. A pen-picture’s a picture you draw with a pen, he reasoned, still unsure of what exactly Mr. Jones wanted. What else can it be? Stands to reason. The whole class was engrossed in the exercise, and Brian sketched in the roof of the Admiral Benbow Inn.

  Mr. Jones walked up and down the gangways, watching for signs of progress. The first thing Brian heard was someone being furiously thumped a few desks away. He trembled inwardly. “Idiot! Nincompoop! Fool!” Mr. Jones bellowed with each resounding bat of his hand. “Begin all over again.”

  This made everyone wonder whether he was doing the right thing, and after several similar demonstrations Brian felt Mr. Jones peering over his shoulder. Blows exploded against his back and fell about his ears.

  “This is the limit! Oh, my goodness!” Mr. Jones wailed in mock-despair. “Oh, dear! Would you believe it? This clown has actually drawn a picture! Actually drawn one!”

  With hands bent over his head, he wondered: Why is he hitting me like this? It’s bad enough hitting me, but why is he telling the class I’ve made such a daft mistake? It was hard not to weep at such thoughts, and he was saved from tears only by a surge of hate; he let forth in his mind a stream of awful words he had heard his father use under his breath to his mother. Mr. Jones still hovered, ready to crack him again, while vivid barbed-wire images flashed through Brian’s mind. Why don’t he die? still building a dyke against the tears.

  “You’re supposed to write a description of what the captain looked like. To use words,” Mr. Jones bellowed.
“Do you hear?” Brian said in a low voice that he did hear, and after a parting hit, Mr. Jones went on his way.

  More drawings were discovered, and those who did them paid for their mistake in the same way. Mr. Jones reached his desk clenching and unclenching his burning fists in an effort to cool them, the silent hatred of the class turned against him for the rest of the lesson. “I didn’t know we had so many artists,” he said, grey eyes twinkling in a dangerous good humour. The few clever ones who never made mistakes laughed at his joke, having correctly sensed what they were supposed to.

  “If I had made such a blunder in my class when I was a boy,” Mr. Jones went on, “I’d have been thrashed with the leg of an easel. My schoolmaster used the leg of an old blackboard easel to knock sense into us.” Another joke, though fewer boys laughed than before. Brian’s shoulders still ached. “Daft bastards,” he said under his breath. “It’s nowt to laugh at. I wish old Jones would die, though, that’s all I know. Why don’t he die? Why don’t the old swine die? He must be sixty if he’s a day. But he’ll never retire because he likes hitting kids too much.”

  CHAPTER 9

  One Thursday afternoon Vera said: “Go up Ilkeston Road, Brian, and meet your dad. He’ll be on his way back now from the dole-office. Tell ’im to get five Woodbines and bring ’alf a pound o’ fish for our suppers. Go on, run, he’ll gi’ you ha’penny if you see him.” Brian gathered what brother was available, and did as he was told.

  Vera had been glad to see the back of Seaton that morning. Hunched by the fireplace, sulking because he had no cigarettes and was out of work at thirty-five, he suddenly stood up and took his dole-cards from the cupboard. “I’ll have a walk,” was his way of putting it, “and call in at the dole-office on my way back.”

  So she was shut of him for an hour or two, free from black looks, and filthy talk if she dared give him a black look back. Day in and day out, from dole day to dole day, he sat by the empty fire-grate, fagless and witless, a rotter to everybody that got near him. It worn’t his fault, that much she knew, but he could be better-tempered than he was. Sometimes he would get up from his black despair and send Brian to a wood-yard for a sack of waste, spend a day chopping sticks so that Brian and Fred could hawk them a penny a bucket from door to door. Or he would buy a few pair of shoes from Sneinton Market and set about mending them. Sitting on a box in the backyard, his mouth full of tacks, he hammered new-cut leather on to the last-held shoe. A semicircle of kids stood watching, and Vera swore to God he didn’t know they were there, held fast as he was in his work. The shoes were then sold cheap around the neighbourhood. He paperhanged and whitewashed, dug gardens or pushed loaded barrows, went coal-scraping with Abb Fowler, though such windfalls of work fell rarely in his way. But when the hands were happy and one side of the heart at ease, the other was wary and sly, adept at evading that ubiquitous bogey of the means-test man who docked your dole and sent you on “relief” if you were caught doing work not registered for. Brian and Arthur would meet their father at a whitewashing job, to come home with them, boy-scouting a hundred yards ahead while their father walked behind with the ladders. If Brian saw anyone who might look like the means-test man, he was to nip back and give warning, and when once he did, Seaton dodged into a yard while the means-test man went unsuspecting by. But the dole couldn’t go on forever, Vera thought, and hoped it wouldn’t, for a fifth child was about to join them.

  Seaton enjoyed his two-mile walk to the dole-office—except when it rained. Tar-smells of clear-skied summer or the lung-stinging frost of winter were all the same, pleasant to get out of the house into, from the walls of the house to farther-apart walls of roads and streets which had no roof and let the good sky in on you. It was warm summer, and he stood in the long queue for his dole. Old friends were occasionally missing from the line—having stepped into the aristocrat class because they had got jobs, but Abb Fowler was always there, still the same wide-nosed sandy-haired moonlight-flitter, wearing his cap at a cocky angle, dismayed but unbeaten at being out of work. He carried a ragged copy of the Daily Worker and talked about the war in Abyssinia not long finished, and the war in Spain not long begun. Every Thursday for months he’d thought of volunteering to fight in Spain, but never did. “I’m a Communist, ’Arold,” he would say, “and I don’t mind gettin’ shot at, if you want to know, but not in Spain. It’s the bleeders in this country I want to stand up against a wall.”

  Seaton came home with his thirty-eight shillings and handed them to Vera. He thought of the money she had given him not long ago: ten bob for scrubbing out an office every morning for a week. Further back than that, she had gone with Ada, collecting for an old woman who had died on Ada’s street. At nearly every house they were given a penny or a ha’penny, and at the end of the street they went on into the next, even though the old woman wasn’t so well-known there. Nevertheless, few people would refuse a ha’penny towards a wreath. So off to another street, and then another, the old woman’s name bringing less response on being mentioned after doors had opened to their knock. Ada had the cheek to collect in a pub as well, escaping by the saloon bar door when the publican strode over to throw her out. Fifteen shillings made a magnificent wreath for the dead woman, bigger than she could ever have expected on her meagre pension; and the few shillings made by Vera and Ada spread the tables of each household with a good meal that night. He had to laugh at the thought of it: what a couple o’ boggers they are! And black-haired sway-walking Harold broke into a shilling for a packet of Woodbines and enjoyed his first smoke since yesterday.

  Vera took ten of the thirty-eight shillings to the corner shop, to pay for what food they had fetched on strap during the week. Then she went with Brian up Hyson Green, to cheap shops where she could stock up on tins of milk and packets of margarine, sugar and tea and bread, vegetables and sixpennyworth of meat for a stew that night.

  Job or no job, there was usually a wireless set in the house. Seaton, after drawing his dole the following week, came in smiling broadly: “I’ve got a surprise on its way, my owd duck!”

  “What? Have you won a thousand?”

  “No, nowt like that.”

  “What then?”

  “A man’ll be ’ere in a bit wi’ summat yo’ll like!”

  “And what’s that?”

  “A brand-new wireless!”

  By way of confession he told how, gazing in a shop window on his way back from town, he had spotted a good set that would blow the house apart if turned full on, and that without thinking he had gone in and settled the deposit.

  “You know we can’t afford to pay for a wireless every week,” Vera shouted, but soon smiled and left off taunting his extravagance, knowing they both had to do such things now and again, otherwise put their heads in a gas-oven, or cut their throats with a sardine tin like poor Mr. Kenny up the street.

  They managed the payments for a time, but after a few months of free music and news the set was disconnected and carted back. Then for six bob Seaton bought a wireless that didn’t go, though within a few hours of clever intuitive tinkering a powerful pan-mouthed Gracie Fields blared out over the house and yard. Seaton knew nothing of such machines, yet took it to pieces, tightened a nut here and a valve there, until the electrical maze of wires miraculously “went,” and it stayed on the dresser as a monument to luck and ingenuity.

  On Sunday afternoon, after a pause of nothing from the wireless, a voice would announce: “Foundations of Music”—a title that intrigued Brian because one of his favourite books at school was Foundations of History and somehow he imagined the two same words would generate a similar intensity of interest, but nothing more survived than the title, for his mother would immediately say: “Take that off, Harold, for God’s sake!” and the knob would be swivelled on to the sugary music of Debroy Summers, or the rackety drive of Henry Hall.

  Time and again Vera told herself that she shouldn’t be riled by Seaton’s moods of animal temper, for it only made things twice as bad. But after the dole
money had been spent to the last farthing he would sit by the fire-grate in the small room, head bent low, nothing to say. She would know all he was thinking, that he was cursing his existence, her and the kids, the government, his brothers, her mother and father, anyone and anything that flitted into his mind, and she hated him for letting the lack of a few fags upset them. He looked around the room, from wife to children, and children to mother, until all but Vera went out. Then she would say: “You’re lookin’ black again, aren’t yer? What’s up, ain’t yer got no fags?”

  He glared savagely. “No, and no snap either.” Each tormented mind fed the other in diabolic fashion: “Well,” she said belligerently, “I can’t help that, can I?”

  “Send Brian to borrow a couple o’ bob from your mother,” he suggested, a last desperate remedy he knew she wouldn’t take up. “I can’t”—her voice loud and distressed. “We owe her something from last week.”

  “Them skinny boggers wun’t lend owt.”

  “We wouldn’t need to ask ’em if you went out and earned some money,” she said, near to tears at his and her unjust words. He was dimly aware of many answers to this, but could squeeze only a few words of protest from his locked-in despair: “I’d get wok if I could. I’ve wokked ’arder in my life than anybody’s ever wokked.” He remembered his fruitless expedition of yesterday, returning to a scene that had happened time and time again.