by William King
‘“Never. No never”.’
‘“I’ll bet ye the big people,”’ pointing up the hill towards Healys’ mansion, “I’ll bet ye oul Matty with his orchard and his pear trees won’t have as good as them this year.”’
‘“No, he won’t.”’
Then, to fall in with his high spirits, we would bite into the crab apples and suffer the bitter juices while we chewed, and tried to swallow.
Occasionally, our mother, if she were slackening her grim hold on life, stood at the door and looked at us all, shaking her head and grinning.
‘Mammy, come here and see the lovely apples,’ was enough to send her back into the house, muttering that she had more to do than listen to nonsense.
‘“We’ll make money out of them this year, ye’ll see. People in town make lovely apple pies out of them.”’
‘“We will, Da, we’ll make money out of them this year.”’
M.J. is doing another take-off. ‘“That crab tree. D’ye see the shelter it gives to the house. Wouldn’t a fella pay any money for shelter like that?”’
‘“Oh, he would. Great shelter.”’
‘The trouble was,’ says M.J., ‘he believed they were apples.’
5
FOR A FEW DAYS I learn the different Tube lines, take in the cold glances of the teeming masses, laze around Piccadilly and Trafalgar Square, throw scraps to the pigeons, and take stock of red buses, Buckingham Palace, and policemen on horseback. Delighting in the sweet taste of freedom, I scramble to the shops on Charing Cross Road for books that are banned at home: Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Catcher in the Rye. One wet afternoon I sidle off to see Sophia Loren in a long-running film called Two Women showing in a small cinema off Leicester Square. And all the while M.J. is coming and going from the house, leaving messages for Vera that he won’t be in for his dinner. When he does turn up, he devours his steak, or bacon and cabbage, wipes the plate clean with a crust of bread, then out the door again. I become accustomed to the heavy throb of the jeep pulling up in front of the garage in the small hours of the morning. Even when he is on time for the evening meal, he has to answer phone calls from subcontractors about prices for roofing or bricks in Finchley or Milton Keynes. Rolled up maps and drawings lie on the hallstand and on armchairs.
Once or twice I wake to the sound of muffled voices, and after a moment, make out Bonnie’s stifled laugh. In the morning they have gone, and through the half-open door of his bedroom, I notice the black dress she had worn when she collected me at Euston; nylons are draped across the back of a chair.
Towards the end of the week, I am ready to begin. ‘And I’ll move out tomorrow so that I’ll be near the pick-up point,’ I tell him while he gulps down his breakfast.
‘But I can run you there.’
‘Ah, no. Easier if I stay at The Highway.’
‘That place can be a rough house at times. Will you be able to sleep?’
‘No bother.’
‘Come here for the weekends. You’ll have a bit of peace. They can be noisy bastards.’
‘Right so.’
‘I’ll get Sandra the barmaid to make your dinner every evening.’
Despite his protest, I feel he is relieved. He would be saved the bother of driving me to Kilburn in the mornings when he needed to be out at Dunstable or High Wycombe. And Bonnie wouldn’t have to suppress her giggles when they returned late at night.
Soon after five o’clock the following Monday morning we drive in the jeep to Camden Town. At Swiss Cottage, the traffic gets heavy: in black Vauxhalls with gleaming fenders, solemn-faced men in stiff collars and ties hold a firm grip on the world.
Camden Town is a cattle fair. The footpaths swarm with men in baggy trousers, and shirts hanging loose: they are slamming the doors of trucks, rushing across the street, shouting – it’s uncanny to hear Irish accents in these foreign streets.
Red hairs stand out on the back of M.J.’s powerful forearm when he points towards a convoy of lorries parked on one side of Mornington Crescent: ‘Green Murphy,’ he says, ‘and over there towards the Kentish Town Road, Pateen Lowry’s gang from Connemara.’ He steers towards a kerb and parks.
Men are spilling out of cafés, mixing with those who are standing in a ragged line. Some are slouching against the front of the Westminster Bank and Dolphin’s Hardware. Many are over six feet tall; they walk with long loping strides and give the impression of untamed energy. Others leaf through the Daily Mirror and keep a baleful eye on the world. ‘The same every morning,’ M.J. says. ‘Close on three hundred men; you wouldn’t be long saving hay in the Hill Field with a few of them lads.’
One or two, wearing creased shirts and loose ties, shout to get into the fucken trucks, that they have to go out to Leighton Buzzard. The men have a ruffled look: dried clay on their turned-down wellingtons or hobnailed boots. A thickset man is walking up and down inspecting a queue of men; he looks mostly at their shoes; every now and then, he lifts his cap and wipes his bald crown with a piece of navy cloth.
‘I’ve to check these fellas,’ M.J. says and hops out. ‘Stay as you are ’til we’re ready to go.’
Across the street is a line of trucks with Galvin Construction on the driver’s door; some of these M.J. had bought from the army. A man sidles up to him, rubbing his hands: ‘Any chance of the start, M.J.?’
‘Where were you until now?’ He is hurrying away so that the man has to follow.
‘Wimpy. Up near Manchester. A bypass job.’
M.J. studies him. ‘You were with us last year; you let us down.’ He begins to move off again.
‘The oul lad died, M.J. I had to go back home.’
M.J. hesitates. ‘Hop on one of the wagons. Report to Batt Muldoon.’
‘You’re a dacent man, M.J.’
‘Dacent my arse. If you let me down again, you’re finished.’ He turns back, makes a pistol with his hand, and cocks it towards the man.
They both grin. ‘Thanks, oul stock.’ The man rubs his mouth in a shy gesture, and like many men who are self-conscious about their height, walks with a slight stoop to the nearest army truck where others are sitting in two rows. Down the road, boys are jumping in the air and kicking around a paper football, jostling each other for possession.
‘Come on here,’ M.J. shouts. ‘I’ll give you plenty to tire you out behind the mixer.’ They desert the ball like schoolboys and climb into one of the trucks. Above the thud of their boots, a big red-faced man with a head of black hair shouts abuse at them. Did they think they had all the fucken day? Such a crowd of lazy fuckers he’d never met in all his life.
M.J. returns.
‘Who’s your man?’ I ask.
He follows my gaze.
‘That’s the one and only Batt Muldoon – Horse Muldoon, as he’s known all over London.’
The smile fades. ‘There’s trouble at Reading. Some hothead floored a ganger. I’ll have to get out there. Will you go with Jody to Stevenage? You’ll see how they lay the cables.’ Already he is striding along the footpath where a sandy-haired man in a lumberjacket stands near the door of a Transit. I get out of the jeep and follow.
Jody’s casual smile and easy manner is a contrast to the commotion. His handshake – a surprising gesture of courtesy – is at odds with the rough-and-tumble, the shifting of gears, the smoke and the heavy smell of diesel as the trucks pass.
‘So you’re goin’ to study engineering.’ He is keeping a peeled eye on the trucks.
‘That’s my plan.’
‘You’ll have it made.’
A muffled rise and fall of voices comes from the back of the van. ‘The trade is booming now. London needs flats and houses, and Paddy is the man to build them.’ He has to raise his voice to be heard. ‘Will you join the firm when you qualify?’
‘Yeah. That’s probably what I’ll do.’
We drive behind Horse Muldoon and slow down again after a few hundred yards on the Inverness Road where another group of men st
ands waiting. Horse hops out of the wagon and, shouting at the top of his voice, bundles the men into the back, his arms raised like a demented herdsman. He whips a newspaper out of a young fellow’s back pocket: ‘Is it for readin’ the fucken newspapers you came to England, lad? Into the fucken truck or you’ll find yourself back in the bog, or up to your arsehole in rushes.’ He keeps on roaring as they clamber into the wagon, like cattle for the market. ‘We’ve trenches to dig out in fucken Stevenage.’ He looks over towards us, winks at Jody and lopes up to the van, wiping perspiration from his glistening forehead with the sleeve of his jacket. ‘You’ve a helper today, Jody.’
‘M.J.’s brother, Tommy. Here for the summer.’
His mood softens. ‘Ah, good man. Learning the ropes, boy.’ Yellowed buckteeth show when he grins, and the smell of stale sweat reaches me when he leans into the van. But I am forgotten while they talk about shuttering and sub-stations and a new dumper that should have been delivered the day before. Jody goes to check with another foreman about the cable-pull at Stevenage. The cable-pull, as I later learn, is a special event requiring extra help: men enticed the night before by the sight of a roll of notes appearing out of Horse Muldoon’s pocket in The Highway.
Two red-haired youths are jumping to tip a barber’s pole down the street, but when they spot Horse getting into the wagon, they run to him. Above the sound of the engine, one of the youths calls out in a pleading tone, ‘Mr Muldoon, give us the start. We only came over yesterday.’
With one arm resting across the open window, Horse looks back at them: ‘Hah, only yesterday.’ An ugly grimace shows on his face.
‘Mr Muldoon, give us the start. We’re from Tourmakeady.’
‘Hop up so, lads,’ says Horse, but the wagon is gaining speed. The youths break into a trot. One of them manages to get a hand on the tailgate and tries to gain a foothold, but he slips and falls, tearing the knee of his trousers. The other youth goes back and drags him along. A milk van ahead has slowed them down, so they catch up. Again they try to climb the tailgate, but fail.
‘Yerra lads,’ shouts Horse, ‘ye’er not able for this work. Too much cabbage water in Tourmakeady.’
Those in the back guffaw, someone flicks a cigarette butt that barely misses one of the youths. Horse’s arm disappears inside the cab, comes into view again as he throws a few copper coins in the air and drives off.
Blood oozes from the youth’s knee; downcast, he limps to the footpath and rests against the wall. The other youth stands glaring after the wagon.
When Jody returns, I tell him what has happened. ‘That’s Horse.’ He shakes his head and turns on the ignition. ‘Don’t worry about them. They’ll get taken on by some subbie, if they’re any good. No shortage of work in this town.’
At Stevenage we stop behind the other wagons and I take in a sight that is to become commonplace that first summer in London. All along Albert Grove is a mound of earth, and beside it a trench that stretches to the top of the road and disappears around the corner. Doors and tailgates rattle, and, with a thud of shovels and pickaxes on the mustard clay, the crew set to work.
Horse resumes his shouting: ‘Am I payin’ you to scratch your arses? Down there, boy, and start diggin’,’ he bellows as he strides towards a giant spool of cable.
Jody rummages in a shelf beside the steering column, throwing aside screwdrivers, pieces of wire and a torch. Eventually his groping fingers find a bulky notebook that hits off the gear lever as he draws it from the pile. A sheaf of ten-pound notes spills onto the floor. He looks at me for a second and gathers up the fallout. ‘I’ve to see this gaffer from the borough council. I’ll be back in a while. There’s a park near here if you want to stretch your legs.’ He nods in the direction of a bald man in a tweed jacket and well-pressed flannel trousers, who is leaning over the edge of the trench, making sure to pick his steps as he does an inspection. Every few yards he stretches a metal measuring tape across the top of the trench.
Jody ambles towards him; they shake hands and speak for a while, looking down at the trench, before they cross the road to a green Vauxhall where the bald man lays out a map on the car.
Farther up the road, two men are straining to unwind cable from the spool on a wooden stand. Grunting and swearing, the trenchers pull the leaden cable like a tug-of-war team, one behind the other.
‘Pull you fuckers!’ Horse roars. He pushes aside a youth and, with a lot of bluster about what he wouldn’t do if he was ten years younger, joins the team of trenchers. ‘Look, that’s how you pull. Use your fucken legs, boy; take the strain!’
I get out of the van for a closer look. The men heave the cable as far as a sub-station and then a man in navy dungarees connects the end with another cable by means of a metal sleeve that screws one section into the other.
Ahead of the spool, in a haze of sunshine, a line of men, some stripped to the waist, are digging into the earth. Every time they raise a pickaxe, the muscles ripple in their backs and then slacken when the pickaxe comes down with a dull sound. Close by, a man is knocking chunks out of the concrete with a jackhammer so that the hedges and the rows of maples are covered in a chalky dust and the mannerly neighbourhood is now a harsh mixture of grating sounds above the steady beat of the generator.
Self-conscious about idling in the face of their backbreaking work, I hurry up the road as if with a purpose. A ganger is marking with chalk the amount each man has to dig that day. I take a side road to the left, leaving behind the rattle of the jackhammer, and the swearing of the men.
‘Who’s he?’ someone asks.
‘Who?’
‘The young lad with Jody.’
‘Galvin’s brother. He’s in some college.’
‘Out of our fucken sweat, I suppose.’
The thumping and the banter of the men fade as I go deeper into the estate with its prim box hedges and manicured gardens. A man in a straw hat is talking to his marmalade cat. Next door another man is reversing a gleaming Austin Cambridge out of his driveway. Wearing a floral apron and bed slippers, a woman calls to him: ‘Don’t forget the chutney from Bateman’s, Philip.’
‘No, dear.’
‘And the mint sauce.’
‘See you, love.’ ‘Philip’ waves and returns to his driving. She throws me a suspicious glance and, when she closes the door, the drop leaf falls with a hostile clatter.
The road leads to a public park, where a man is running a mower over a bowling green, leaving uniform swathes on the trimmed surface behind him. Mindful of the hum of the mower and the scent of fresh grass, I sit on a bench and open one of my banned books, which I had hidden from the men, and read until the sun is high in the sky. In the distance, men in whites are standing on a clubhouse veranda; some are resting on deckchairs and sipping out of teacups. I mark my book and return to the trenchers.
‘Pull, Leitrim! Fuck it, you’re leavin’ it all to me,’ I hear Horse long before I get back.
‘I’m pullin’.’
‘Yes, too much fucken pullin’ and too much thinkin’ about them whores over in Richmond Street.’
The coarse snort when he laughs shows that Horse is in control. They pull with all their might, knowing that his word determines whether they can buy steaks and pints when they hop off the lorries at Kilburn High Road later on.
A smell of cooking is heavy in the air. A youth with a long-handled fork is turning sausages and chops. The frying pan – the sawn-off base of a tar barrel – rests on a brazier.
Clouds of smoke and dust have formed a haze above the men in the trenches. They are silent now, saving their strength for the work ahead as the sun beats down: dark patches of sweat stain the armpits of those who have kept on their shirts. Shovels of earth rise from the trench. ‘Dig deep and throw it well back,’ the ganger barks as he paces by the growing mound of earth.
Above the digging, and the creaking of the spool releasing its cable, a door slams across the road and a woman with a Helen Shapiro beehive trips down the driveway; h
er head in the air, she is dangling a coloured umbrella.
‘Look,’ says one of the lads who is guiding the cable out of the spool. Heads appear above the trench. ‘A fine bit of stuff.’ He does a curving motion with his hands to describe her figure and struts in imitation of her walk. The men guffaw: ‘She wouldn’t let you sniff it, boy.’ But he pretends to go after her, unaware that Horse is stealing up behind him. One of the men tries to gain his attention by coughing, but the youth is too absorbed in his act to notice.
Horse grabs him by the hair. ‘You want a ride, is that it? Go after her then. Go on. Can’t you see you’re holdin’ up the work because of your dick.’
‘But Batt ….’ Wriggling like a fish at the end of a line, the youth catches hold of Horse’s arm.
‘No fucken excuses,’ Horse snarls, swollen veins on his bull neck. ‘Now fuck off outa here,’ he gives him a kick up the backside, ‘and don’t look for work in this outfit again.’
One of the men has jumped out of the trench and is helping to get the spool moving, and, like fearstruck pupils, the rest bend over the cable, hauling it back and laying it on the track at their feet.
A safe distance away, the youth seems on the edge of bursting into tears, but he still puts on a face-saving act, and mutters about what his brothers won’t do to Horse in the Crown that night. In a helpless rage, he whips his jacket off a load of shuttering planks and makes off down the road. When he is well away, he turns and shouts: ‘You’re only a fucken Roscommon gorilla – Galvin’s fucken gorilla.’ But Horse is now taken up with the cable-pull, watching the men straining and sweating and putting in an extra effort so that they too aren’t given a kick up the backside, and have to make their own way to Camden Town. ‘Jaysus,’ Horse is shouting, ‘is that all you’ve done since we started? Pull it. Come on, pull it.’ The absurd grin on his face and the derisive snort are signals that his appetite for cruelty has now spent itself. He stands talking to one of the gangers and then lopes across the road, the pick-up dipping to one side when he throws himself into the driving seat.