Late Night on Watling Street

by Bill Naughton

  The way he said it caught my interest, for his usual rough voice became gentle. “Your whose?” I asked, thinking over his words.

  “Our Mary’s,” he said, “my sister.”

  “Ee, Tom,” I said, “I never knew you had one!”

  “I never liked bringing her up,” he said. “Not in this place with all that dirty talk going on. Would you bring a sister of yours up with a chap like Dirty Ernie around?”

  “No I wouldn’t,” I said.

  The way Tom spoke about Mary got me very interested in her. She was nearly seventeen, and she worked in a chemist shop.

  “When her’s going off to work of a morning,” Tom told me, “our Mary is nicer dressed than many a wench is on a Sermons Sunday. She wears a tailor-made navy blue costume—”

  “A what?” I said. I’d heard him, but I wanted to hear him again.

  “A tailor-made navy blue costume,” said Tom. “She wears a white blouse. She has a silver brooch where it fastens at her neck-hole. And when it’s raining she wears a posh raincoat over the top with a tight belt. But if tha’s got the idea in thy head that our Mary’s a swank—get it out! It’s just that she knows how to look nice without swanking.”

  I found the one thing I looked forward to every morning was Tom talking about Mary in the evening. Some evenings he would go on for half an hour or more about her, and other evenings he wouldn’t mention her. If Dirty Ernie was singing he wouldn’t mention her, and if one of the other lads came up he would shut up at once about her. I got that I couldn’t stop thinking about Mary.

  I couldn’t get the weekends over fast enough, until Monday evening came and Tom would tell me all that Mary had been up to. In time I got that I could ask little questions about her, but I hadn’t to be forward in them.

  “What colour of hair has she? I’ve never took much notice. I know it’s full of glints when she’s just washed it. Sometimes she lets me dry it for her, and many a time I’ve brushed it for her. It comes through your fingers just like silk.” And Tom’s hands moved as though they were stroking silk. In between our chats we had to run to our machines. In a way I liked the interruptions, because it became a bit too much just to listen. I liked to run away for a minute and think of her. Then one evening Tom suddenly gave me a shock.

  “I was talking about you to our Mary last night, Bill,” he said. “An’ she began asking me all about you, what you looked like an’ that. So I told her. And what do you think she said to me?”

  It had made me feel a bit sick just hearing him tell me about Mary talking about me. But I was able to say, “What did she say, Tom?”

  Tom looked up from straightening the hanks of yarn. “She said, ‘Will you put me a good word in with Bill?’”

  I could hardly believe it. I’d never known any wish in all my life come true, and here was one I’d never dared hope for—given to me without any prayers or anything. I wanted to do something for Tom. I felt very happy.

  But a minute later, as I was sorting out the wet yarn, I saw my hands. The fingers were all shrunk and shiny from the caustic water. In the gloss of the smoothing pole I imagined my face, pale and pimply. Then I thought of my Sunday suit hanging up behind the bedroom door at home—the sleeves short, the seat shiny, the jacket tight. I knew I didn’t have a chance with Mary. I felt very miserable.

  But in bed that night I saw it all in a new light. Out of my overtime I’d be able to order one of those fifty shilling suits, made-to-measure. My mother would help me to get a new pair of shoes. And if I rubbed my hands with olive oil and sugar they’d come up nice.

  I told my mother next morning. “I’ve been thinkin’ I could do with a new suit, Mam.”

  She nodded: “Yes, you could,” she said. “It would be nice.”

  “But I don’t want one from the Scotsman, Mam,” I said. “His only fit where they touch. I’d like a proper cash-down suit. Will you be something towards it?”

  “I’d be a pound,” she said, “or maybe thirty shillings.”

  I gave her a kiss. “Thanks, Mam,” I said. “I’ll get measured next Saturday afternoon.” I took my snap-basket and I had a good look at myself in the big overmantel mirror. I wasn’t so bad after all.

  Tom began to talk about Mary again that evening. “Our Mary was goin’ to a dance last Saturday night,” he said, “an’ there were only her and me in the house. She was giving herself a bit of a bath at the back kitchen sink, and I was in the front place dozin’ in front of the fire. I must have dozed off, because when I woke up, there she was standin’ in front of me. She’d this black silky frock on, an’ her hair done up an’ everything. ‘How do I look, Tom?’ she says. ‘Not too bad,’ I says, ‘I wish Old Bill were here to see you.’ ‘Yes, I wish he was,’ she says. Tha’d have fell in love with her, Bill. I nearly did, an’ I’m her brother! She’d some perfume on, you see, and smelt just like one of these posh women you sometimes sit next to on the tram.”

  We ran to our machines, and back again to the pole, straightening out the hanks of yarn.

  “She puts her best coat on over her shoulders an’ sits beside me. The next thing I hears a car come chugging up the street an’ stop outside our front door. ‘Who’s that?’ I says, as this chap in the car blows his horn. ‘Don’t you go to that door,’ says our Mary, let him wait.’ An’ she sits down in that chair, Bill, did our Mary, an’ blow me if she’d budge. She wouldn’t answer the door for a honk. I could hardly abide it, hearin’ that engine runnin’, an’ the petrol wastin’. Then he must have got out, because there’s a knock on the door. ‘Gimme a kiss, Mary, afore you go,’ I says. Just out of devilment she gave me a kiss on the end of my conk, an’ do you know, Bill, it never stopped ticklin’ all night long!”

  A few days later Tom was laid off work with the ‘flu. Whilst he was away I got my new suit. It was a real beauty, broad in the shoulder and made me look older and bigger. Some nights, before going to bed, I would try it on. I used to put a white piece of tissue paper across my chest to make it look like a posh shirt, then, holding a candle in either hand. I’d stare at myself in the looking-glass in the bedroom. I used to practise new smiles and serious expressions, and I’d say in a posh voice: “I’m very pleased to meet you, Mary. Tom has told me about you.”

  It was one Monday that Tom came back to work. As soon as I saw him the one thought on my mind was Mary. I wanted to go and ask him about her at once. But I had to go all through the day, working beside him on the machines, and listening to talk I had no interest in, hoping all the time he’d let slip some word about her, until evening came. There was the usual singing bout, and after this the quiet period, during which you could only hear the whirring clank of the machines and the lads’ clogs as they ran to feed them.

  About nine o’clock I was getting desperate over Mary, and Tom hadn’t spoken of her. I daren’t mention her, because I knew he didn’t like me to bring up her name, and I might spoil my chances with her if I did. I gave Tom a cigarette, lit it for him, and chatted more warmly than ever; went silent, tried everything but still he did not bring up Mary.

  When it was going up to ten o’clock, with the time to talk about her going less and less, and every tactic of mine to draw him out had failed, I could stand the strain no longer, and, trying to sound at ease, I said:

  “Oh, Tom, how’s your Mary going on?”

  I’d timed it for just before the machine needed changing, so that there’d be a few seconds break.

  “Our who?” said Tom.

  “You know,” I said, “your sister Mary.”

  Tom took the fag-end out of his mouth, dropped it on the wet concrete floor, put his clog-iron on it, and said to me:

  “I’ve got no sister.”

  I couldn’t properly make out the meaning of what he had said. It was so unexpected that it didn’t make sense at first. But almost at once I was able to sense that something you always meet up with in the truth.

  “You what—Tom?” I said.

  ‘I’ve getten no sis
ter,” said Tom.

  For a second I didn’t know what to say or do. I was ashamed for fear I should give away all it meant to me. My machine grunted and went quiet, the cogs rolling over at ease, and I ran to it and began to strip the wet finished yarn from the rollers, and then I ran round and fed it with the shovels of new yarn. I mustn’t have been as quick as usual, or perhaps my mind wasn’t on my work, because when the steel rollers began to turn, I still had my hands on the yarn, smoothing it out. I saw my hand carried along to where the big rollers joined together, and I suddenly snatched it away as I felt a tight close nip. I saw the yarn being pulled round, and heard the groaning of the strands as the tension was put on, and the yarn was flattened between the rollers. Another half-second, I thought, and my hand would have been crunched in amongst that lot. But even that thought didn’t bring me round properly. All the grinding and groaning of the roller seemed to be going on inside a haze, whilst close and near, just under my shirt, a keen sick pain was fastening itself to me.

  I went back to the sorting pole and began to sort out the yarn. Tom’s shoulder was close to mine, and I heard him say:

  “I’ve got me Dad an’ four brothers. An’ a right mucky gang they are, with no woman around. I’ve no mother, no sister.” He stopped sorting the yarn, and turned his face to me: “I don’t know what came over me to keep talkin’ away like that about our Mary. It wasn’t cod, Bill——” That tender tone in Tom’s voice was more than I could stand, and this time I didn’t let him finish, but I burst out singing The German Clockmaker, singing it as loud as I could. Dirty Ernie looked up from the whizz: “Hy mate,” he yelled, “you’re in good fettle tonight. Have you had your birdseed?” And I yelled back at him: “Aye, I have that an’ all!”

  Boozer’s Labourer

  At sixteen I got a job as the full-time barman, living in, at a fair-sized pub called The Mailbag Hotel.

  “It’s the meanest kip on earth,” the outgoing barman told me. “But if you’re smart you’ll be able to make some bunce on the side.”

  It was certainly a mean kip.

  There were four of us in the lower staff: Fanny, Polly, Hilda and me; and at breakfast Hilda used to sneak into the family dining room when the Shoutworth twins had gone to school—to see if they had left any toast. Sometimes we got a slice or two to share amongst us (they always gave me the biggest piece), though again she’d come back with a dropped face and sigh: “Eaten the bloody lot!”

  Apart from fetching twelve buckets of coal, chopping firewood, lighting five fires, cleaning the whole bar, taps, glasses and all, and doing the big door plates, I had to wash and polish thirty-one brass spittoons every morning. (Somebody had pinched one, and I often prayed that he’d come back and pinch the lot.) I hated that job worse than anything—except washing the dogs. I suppose that I did get used to the spittoons, in a bitter begrudging fashion, but the dogs I never got used to.

  They were four soft slippery spaniels, with flopping ears and melancholy faces, and the way their backs sagged right down when I was scrubbing them made me nervous that they might suddenly collapse in the middle. But worse than that was the heartrending atmosphere they created, for though they never barked, growled or bit, they completely unnerved me by their looks of ghastly misery.

  “Don’t stare at me like that!” I used to scream at them when I could no longer stand it. “I don’t want to wash you! I hate washing you!” And like as not I’d burst out crying, and sit me down on the floor while the four of them gathered round and watched me, joining in now and again with plaintive moans.

  At night too. I often had a bit of a weep when I was all alone and watching the trams from the window of my dark room.

  The D tram went to Debmoor Hill, where my girl Sally lived. Night after night I’d watch those trams go sailing by, and when the very last D had gone I’d go into my bed at the Mailbag and have a good scrike on my hard little pillow.

  Shoutworth, the landlord, was a purple-faced geezer of nineteen stone or thereabouts, with a pair of piggy eyes that put the fear of kingdom come in me—right from the very first day when he had bellowed:

  “D’you call that brass polished, boy? Give me the flannel and paste, and I’ll show you what a finished tap should look like.”

  He fair made the pub shudder with the weight he put on that tap—though I had to admit that I’d never seen brass gleam so brilliant in all my life. As try as I might I couldn’t get the others to approach it in brightness, though come to that I had ten to clean to his one, and I was only nine stone to his nineteen.

  He had what Fanny called “elaphantisis of the legs”— and according to the gossip she was in a position to know— that kept him stuck supping whisky on his stool for most of the opening hours. And it may have been this weighing-down disease that gave him a curious notion about the speed normal human beings should move at, especially barmen.

  “Bring down two soups,” he would suddenly bawl at me around midday and the bar quiet. “You can have your own dinner while cook is pouring them out.”

  Cook was a flurried little soul, and there would be a stack of steak puddings that had collapsed in her shaky fingers, hidden away in some corner of the oven for my dinner, and I had to scoff them standing on my toes, and then flash down with the soups. If he chanced to send me up for another order I might get a slab of collapsed suet pudding, and if not I got none.

  Of course, like a lad will, I had a few dodgy strokes of getting my own back. One was a practice of nipping along the counter of the public bar and filling all the pint pots without any charge—whenever old Shoutworth used to shuffle to the Gents. About forty navvies would have their eyes pinned on him, waiting for him to rise, and the very moment he did make a move they would drain their pots, and I’d fill them on the house.

  Another habit I took up was that of swigging brandy of an afternoon. When the pub shut at three o’clock I had the job of cleaning all the mirrors and pictures, and I can tell you that there is something depressing about cleaning enormous Victorian overmantels in a closed public house on a sunny afternoon. One occasion I smuggled a bottle of Martell’s three-star cognac into the Commerical Room, and before setting into the work I sat down for twenty minutes, during which I meditated upon eternity and drank a pint mug of brandy. The liquor so charged me with energy that I dispensed with the usual stepladder, and taking a short run across the room I leapt clean on the mantelpiece. Unfortunately, when leaning back to clean the bronze eagle on the top, I fell backwards and knocked myself dateless. A fearful thundering in my ears awoke me, and when I rushed to the front door the forty navvies were hammering away with horny fists, because opening time was ten minutes overdue.

  My life, I realized, could not go on like this: meeting Sally but one night in seven and grizzling the other six; having to pack away a dozen smashed steak puddings in a minute-and-a-quarter, knocking myself senseless and all that caper. However, I did not plan anything, but allowed events to happen in their own way, as is my custom. And they happened all right.

  Christmas Eve with the Mailbag rampacked, when ten minutes to closing time the bottled beer ran out and I had to scoot down the cellar for more. Now when I found myself down there, all alone in the quiet of the cellar, and heard the milling of happy feet over my head, a sudden stroke of pure misery entered me.

  “You must have a drink!” I gasped, at the same time looking thirstily around the place. Nothing but cases of bottles with tight and deep-buried corks I saw—and I had no opener—until I spotted a crate of “Jumbo” Guinness in the corner. These were whacking big bottles that customers took home—they held five glassfuls, and the big cork could be removed by the bare hand. “Just the job,” I groaned, and in a jiff I had a cork off and the bottle to my lips.

  I had one good long sup and that was enough—I was satisfied. But then I realized with dismay that there was nothing I could do with the rest of the stout, no place to get rid of it, and that when Shoutworth came down to check up my theft would be discovered. �
�You’ll have to guzzle the lot, mate,” I told myself, “and put the bottle amongst the empties.”

  I was in such a panic about being missed in the bar that I had to pour it down my throttle without winding myself, but soon I was reduced to taking big swigs and gasping my breath in between. Before it was half finished there was sweat bursting from every pore in my body, and I had to unfasten the top three buttons on my trousers, to let me stomach swell out, and make room for more. It seemed that I would never get to the bottom, and once when I looked down the bottle neck to see how much was inside it was just like a black sea of stout swilling around.

  But fear of Shoutworth drove me on, and at last I put down the bottle—drained to the final drop, bottoms and all. Then I grabbed two boxes of bottled ales, and something made me make it three, and then I wedged a fourth under my arm, and with this load I trotted up the steps. At the top I stopped: “There’s one fellow,” I said, “carries a girder on his nut after one bottle—you should be able to handle more than this lot after necking five times as much.” I dropped the four boxes and went down for a fifth, which I carried on my head, and, picking up the other four, I forced my way into the bar.

  But for all I was strong in the arm, I was faint in the heart, for I somehow sensed that Shoutworth was ready to pounce upon me—and sure enough he was.

  “Boy!” His voice shot straight at me through the din of chatter (being a one-time Poona lance-corporal he invariably addressed me as “boy”). “Boy! you’ve been some time getting them bottles, eh?” (Notice that he hadn’t a word to say in praise of my feat with the load of boxes.)

  Now what always happened to me when he spoke like that was that I’d flush to the roots of my hair, and begin to mumble apologies—and in fact I did start reddening up, when just in the middle of it, the Guinness started pumping into my blood stream, and a dead calm courage came over me.