by David Lodge
As they reached the corner of their street, Timothy said: ‘Whatever you do, don’t tell anybody where we got them.’
‘Why?’ said Woppy.
‘So that we can go back and get some more, before he sells out.’
‘I’ve spent all my fireworks money anyway,’ said Drakey.
‘Yes, but it’s ages to Guy Fawkes, and we’ve got pocket money to come,’ argued Timothy.
But when they went back the following Saturday, the shed was locked, and the notice was gone. They peered through the windows, but there was only dusty furniture to be seen.
‘Must have sold out,’ said Drakey. But there was something creepy about the sudden disappearance of the fireworks man, and they hurried away from the shed and never spoke of it again.
Each evening, as soon as he got home from school, Timothy got out the box in which he had put his fireworks and counted them. He took them all out and arranged them, first according to size, then according to type, then according to price. He pored over the brightly coloured labels, studying intently the blurred instructions: hold in a gloved hand, place in earth and stand well back, nail to a wooden post. He handled the fireworks with great care, grudging every grain of gunpowder that leaked out and diminished the glory to come.
‘I wonder you keep those things under your bed,’ said his mother. ‘Remember what happened to the sweets.’
About a year previously, an American relative had sent Timothy a large box of ‘candies’, as she called them. Their bright wrappings and queer names – Oh Henry!, Lifesavers and Baby Ruth – had fascinated him much as the fireworks did; and he was so overwhelmed by the sense of his own wealth amid universal sweet-rationing that he had hoarded them under his bed and ate them sparingly. But they had started to go mouldy, and attracted mice, and his mother threw them away.
‘Mice don’t eat fireworks,’ he said to her, stroking the stick of his largest rocket. But on second thoughts, he asked his mother to keep them for him in a warm, dry cupboard.
‘How d’you know they’ll go off, anyway?’ said his father. ‘Pre-war, aren’t they? Probably dud by now.’
Timothy knew his father was teasing, but he took the warning seriously. ‘We’ll have to try one,’ he said solemnly to Drakey and Woppy. ‘To see if they’re all right. We’d better draw lots.’
‘I don’t mind letting off one of mine,’ said Drakey.
‘No, I want to let off one of mine,’ said Woppy.
In the end, they let off one each. Woppy chose a ‘Red Flare’, and Drakey a ‘Roman Candle’. Timothy couldn’t understand why they didn’t let off the cheapest ones. They went to the bomb-site to let them off. For a few dazzling seconds the piles of rubble, twisted iron, planks and rusty water cisterns were illuminated with garish colour. When it was over they blinked in the dim light of the street-lamps and grinned at each other.
‘Well, they work all right,’ said Drakey.
The other two tried to persuade Timothy to let off one of his. He was tempted, but he knew he would regret it later, and refused. They quarrelled, and Drakey taunted Timothy with being a Catholic like Guy Fawkes. Timothy said that he didn’t care, that you didn’t have to be against Guy Fawkes to have fireworks, and that he wasn’t interested in the Guy part anyway. He went home alone, got out his fireworks, and sat in his bedroom all the evening, counting and arranging them.
Once Drakey and Woppy had broken into their store, they could not restrain themselves till November the Fifth. They started with one firework a night, then it went up to two, then it was three. Drakey had a talent for discovering new and spectacular ways of using them. He would drop a lighted banger into an old water tank and produce an explosion that brought the neighbours to their doors, or he would shoot a ‘Torpedo’ out of a length of drain-pipe. Timothy had a few ideas of his own, but, as he stubbornly refused to use any of his own fireworks, the most he could ask was to be a passive spectator. His turn would come on November the Fifth, when the empty-handed Drakey and Woppy would be glad to watch his display.
On the evening of November 4th, Timothy counted his collection for the last time.
‘You’ll be lost without those things after tomorrow,’ said his mother.
‘I don’t believe he really wants to set them off,’ said his father.
‘’Course I do,’ said Timothy. But he closed the lid of the box with a sigh.
‘I’ll be glad to see the back of them, anyway,’ said his mother. ‘Now, who could that be?’
His father answered the door. The policeman was so big he seemed to fill the entire room. He smiled encouragingly at Timothy, but Timothy just hugged his box to his chest, and looked at his feet.
‘Look, Sergeant,’ said his father, ‘I realise that if these fireworks are really stolen goods—’
‘Not exactly stolen, sir,’ said the policeman. ‘But as good as. This old codger just broke into the storage shed and set up shop.’
‘Well, what I mean is, I know you’re entitled to take them away, but this is a special case. You know what kids are like about fireworks. He’s been looking forward to Guy Fawkes Night for weeks.’
‘I know, sir, I’ve got kids myself. But I’m sorry. This is the only lot we’ve been able to trace. We’ll need them for evidence.’ He turned to Timothy. ‘D’you happen to know, sonny, if any of your friends bought fireworks off the same man?’
Timothy nodded speechlessly, trying not to cry. ‘But I’m the only one that saved them,’ he said; and with the words the tears rolled uncontrollably down his cheeks.
My First Job
You don’t have to be Protestant to have the Protestant ethic, I tell my students, when we come to Weber in my survey course on Sociological Grand Theory. Look at me, I say: Jewish father, Catholic mother – and I develop an allergic rash at the mere mention of the word ‘holiday’, with all its connotations of reckless expenditure of time and money. Accumulate, accumulate! – that’s my motto, whether it’s publications, index cards, or those flimsier bits of paper that promise to pay the bearer so many pounds if he presents them to the Bank of England. Work! Strive! Excel! For the job’s own sake! My students, lolling in their seats, mentally preoccupied with the problem of how to draw the dole and hitch-hike to Greece this summer, grin tolerantly and unbelievingly at me through their beards and fringes. Sometimes, to try and make them understand, I tell them the story of my first job.
Once upon a time, in the olden days, or, to be more precise, in the summer of 1952 (so I begin), at the age of seventeen and three-quarters, I got my first job, selling newspapers and magazines off a little trolley on Waterloo Station. It was a temporary job, to fill in a few weeks between getting my A-level results (which were excellent, I need hardly say) and going to university. There was no real economic need for me to work, and the weekly wage of £3:10s:0d (even allowing for subsequent inflation) made it scarcely worthwhile to travel up daily from my home in Greenwich. It was a matter of principle. My father, who ran his own dressmaking business employing thirty people (which he intended to hand on to me, his only child), was dubious of the point or profit of a university education, and determined that at least I should not loaf idly about the house while I waited to commence it. It was he who spotted the advert in the Evening Standard, phoned up the manager of the shop, and talked him into giving me the job on a temporary basis, without even consulting me. My mother looked at the advertisement. ‘It says, “suitable school-leaver”,’ she observed.
‘Well, he’s left school, hasn’t he?’ demanded my father.
‘“School-leaver” means some no-hope fifteen-year-old from a secondary modern,’ said my mother. ‘It’s a euphemism.’ She was a well-educated woman, my mother. ‘Pays like a euphemism, too,’ she added. Years of marriage to my father had imparted a Jewish edge to her Irish sense of humour.
‘Never mind, it will give him an idea of what the real world is like,’ said my father. ‘Before he buries his head in books for another three years.’
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��It’s true, he ought to give his eyes a rest,’ my mother agreed.
This conversation took place in the kitchen. I overheard it, sitting in the dining room, going through my stamp collection (I was totting up the value of all my stamps in the Stanley Gibbons catalogue: I seemed to be worth thousands, though I had no intention of selling). I was meant to overhear the conversation, and to be ready to give an answer when the substance of it was formally put to me. Diplomatic leaks of this kind oiled the wheels of family life wonderfully.
My father came into the dining room. ‘Oh, there you are,’ he said, affecting surprise. ‘I’ve found a job for you.’
‘What kind of job?’ I enquired coyly. I had already decided to accept it.
The next Monday morning, I presented myself, promptly at 8.30, at the bookstall, a large green island in the middle of Waterloo Station. Waves of office workers arriving on suburban trains surged across the station precinct as if pursued by demons, pausing only to snatch newspapers and magazines from the counters of the shop for the next stage of their journeys by tube or bus. Inside the shop, in a cramped and stuffy little office, seated at a desk heaped with invoices and ringed with the traces of innumerable mugs of tea, was the manager, Mr Hoskyns: a harassed, irascible little man who had evidently suffered a stroke or some kind of palsy, since the right-hand side of his face was paralysed and the corner of his mouth was held up by a little gold hook and chain suspended from his spectacles. Out of the other corner of his mouth he asked me how much change I would give from a ten-shilling note to a customer who had bought three items costing ninepence, two and sixpence, and a penny-ha’penny, respectively. Suppressing an urge to remind him that I had just passed A-level Maths-with-Stats with flying colours, I patiently answered the question, with a speed that seemed to impress him. Then Mr Hoskyns took me outside to where two youths loitered beside three mobile news-stands. These were green-painted wooden barrows, their steeply angled sides fitted with racks for displaying magazines and newspapers.
‘Ray! Mitch! This ’ere’s the new boy. Show ’im the ropes,’ said Mr Hoskyns, and disappeared back into his lair.
Ray was a boy of about my stature, though (I guessed) about a year younger. He was smoking a cigarette which dangled rakishly from his lower lip, and which he occasionally transferred from one side to the other without using his hands, as if to demonstrate that in one respect at least he had an advantage over Mr Hoskyns. He kept his hands plunged into the pockets of an Army Surplus windbreaker, and wore heavy boots protruding from frayed trousers. Mitch (I never did discover whether this was a nickname or a contraction of a real first or second name) was very small and of indeterminate age. He had a dirty, wizened little face like a monkey’s, and bit his nails continuously. He wore a collarless shirt and the jacket and trousers of two different striped suits, of the kind working-class boys often wore for Sunday best in cheap imitation of their fathers; the jacket was brown and the trousers were blue, and both garments were in a state of considerable disrepair. They looked at me in my grey flannels and the grammar school blazer which, on the advice of my mother, I had decided to ‘wear out’ on the job, since I would have no further use for it.
‘Wotcher wanner dead-end job like this for then?’ was Ray’s first utterance.
‘I’m only doing it for a month,’ I said. ‘Just while I’m waiting to go to university.’
‘University? Yer mean, like Oxford and Cambridge? The Boat Race and that?’ (It should be remembered that going to university was a rarer phenomenon in 1952 than it is now.)
‘No, London University. The London School of Economics.’
‘Whaffor?’
‘To get a degree.’
‘What use is that to yer?’
I pondered a short, simple answer to this question. ‘You get a better job in life afterwards,’ I said at length. I didn’t bother to explain that personally I wouldn’t be looking for a job, since a thriving little business was being kept warm for me. Mitch, nibbling at his fingers, stared at me intently, like a savage pigmy surprised by the appearance of a white explorer in the jungle.
Mr Hoskyns popped an angry head round the door. ‘I thought I said, “Show ’im the ropes,” didn’t I?’
The ropes were simple enough. You loaded your trolley with newspapers and magazines, and trundled off to platforms where trains were filling up prior to their departure. There were no kiosks on the actual platforms of Waterloo Station in those days, and we were meant to serve passengers who had passed through the ticket barriers without providing themselves with reading matter. The briskest trade came from the boat trains that connected at Southampton with the transatlantic liners (remember them?), whose passengers always included a quota of Americans anxious to free their pockets of the heavy British change. Next in importance were the expresses to the holiday resorts and county towns of the south-west, especially the all-Pullman Bournemouth Belle, with its pink-shaded table lamps at every curtained window. The late-afternoon and early-evening commuting crowds, cramming themselves back into the same grimy carriages that had disgorged them in the morning, bought little except newspapers from us. Our brief was simply to roam the station in search of custom. When our stocks were low, we pushed our trolleys back to the shop to replenish them. Brenda, a pleasant young married woman with elaborately permed hair, who served behind the counter, would give us the items we asked for and make a note of the quantities.
I did not dislike the work. Railway stations are places of considerable sociological interest. The subtle gradations of the British class-system are displayed there with unparalleled richness and range of illustration. You see every human type, and may eavesdrop on some of the most deeply emotional moments in people’s lives: separations and reunions of spouses and sweethearts, soldiers off to fight in distant wars, families off to start a new life in the Dominions, honeymoon couples off to . . . whatever honeymoon couples did. I had only very hazy ideas about that, having been too busy swotting for my A-levels to spare much time for thinking about sex, much less having any, even the solitary kind. When Ray told me on my second day that I ought to have some copies of the Wanker’s Times on my trolley, I innocently went and asked Brenda for some. The word was new to me. As for the activity to which it referred, my father had effectively warned me off that in his Facts of Life talk when I was fourteen. (This talk was also delivered ostensibly to my mother while I eavesdropped in the dining room. ‘I never wasted my strength when I was a lad, you know what I mean?’ my father loudly declared. ‘I saved it for the right time and place.’ ‘I should think so too,’ said my mother.) Brenda turned brick red, and went off muttering to complain to Mr Hoskyns, who came bouncing out of his office, impassive on one side of his face, angry on the other.
‘What’s the idea, insulting Brenda like that? You’d better wash your mouth out, my lad, or out you go on your arse.’ He checked himself, evidently recognising my bewilderment was genuine. ‘Did Ray put you up to it, then?’ He sniggered, and shook his shoulders in suppressed mirth, making the little golden chain chink faintly. ‘All right, I’ll speak to ’im. But don’t be so simple, another time.’ Across the station’s expanse, lurking beside the Speak Your Weight machine, I could see Ray and Mitch watching this scene with broad grins on their faces, nudging and jostling each other. ‘And by the way,’ Mr Hoskyns threw over his shoulder as he returned to his office, ‘we never send out ’Ealth and Efficiency on the trolleys.’ (Health and Efficiency, I usually have to explain to the children at this point, was one of the very few publications on open sale, in those days, in which one might examine photographs of the naked female form, tastefully disposed among sand dunes, or clasping strategically positioned beach-balls.)
At the end of the day we took our money to be counted by Mr Hoskyns and entered in his ledger. On my first day I took £3:15s:6d, Mitch £5:7s:8d, and Ray £7:0s:1d. It wasn’t really surprising that I lagged behind the other two, because they knew from experience the times and locations of the trains that provided t
he best custom. By the following Friday, the busiest day of the week, I had almost caught up with Mitch – £8:19s:6d to his £9:1s:6d – though Ray had taken £10:15s:9d.
‘What’s the highest amount you’ve ever taken in one day?’ I asked, as we left the shop, pocketing our meager wages, and preparing to join the homegoing crowds. It irked me somewhat that these secondary modern types, even allowing for their greater experience, were able to take more cash than me. It bothered me much more than the practical joke over Health and Efficiency.
‘Ray took eleven parn nineteen ’n’ six one Friday,’ said Mitch. ‘That’s the all-time record.’
Fatal phrase! Like the smell of liquor to an alcoholic. The job was suddenly transformed into a contest – like school, like examinations, except that one’s performance was measured in £sd instead of percentage marks. I set myself to beat Ray’s record the following Friday. I still remember the shocked, unbelieving expressions on Ray’s and Mitch’s faces as Mr Hoskyns called out my total.
‘Twelve pounds eggs-actly! Well done, lad! That’s the best ever, I do believe.’
The following day, Saturday, I noticed that Ray was assiduously working the long lines of holidaymakers queuing for the special trains to the seaside resorts, milking their custom before they ever got to the platforms where Mitch and I plied our trade. When Mr Hoskyns announced the tallies at the end of the day, Ray had taken £12:7s:8d – a new record, and particularly remarkable in being achieved on a Saturday.
Suddenly, we were locked in fierce competition. Economically, it was quite absurd, for we were paid no commission on sales – though Mr Hoskyns certainly was, and manifested understandable pleasure as our daily and weekly takings escalated. At the sound of our trolleys returning in the late afternoon, he would come out of his cubbyhole to greet us with a lopsided smile, his gold chain glinting in the pale sunlight that slanted through the grimy glass of the station roof. The old record of £11:19s:6d soon seemed a negligible sum – something any one of us could achieve effortlessly on a wet Monday or Tuesday. On the third Friday of my employment, we grossed over fifty pounds between us. Ray’s face was white and strained as Mr Hoskyns called out the totals, and Mitch gnawed his fingernails like a starving cannibal reduced to self-consumption. Mitch had taken £14:10s:3d, Ray £18:4s:9d and myself £19:1s:3d.