Late Night on Watling Street

by Bill Naughton

  “Do you think,” I said, leaning over the bar to glare straight into his piggy eyes, “that you would have been any sharper?”

  I was flabbergast. I couldn’t for the life of me make out whose was the voice coming off my own tongue. As for Shoutworth—a low cry broke from his lips, and a couple of his mates had to fling their flipping mitts out to catch him, or he would surely have fallen off his stool with the shock. When he was up he had to take a sup of whisky before he could speak, and then all he could get out was:

  “I’ll see you later!”

  But now the Guinness had got a proper hold on me, and I couldn’t let it go at that:

  “Don’t threaten me, Mister Shoutworth,” I said, “and above all, don’t snarl at me.”

  His tone changed to one of protest:

  “I did not snarl!”

  “You snarled!”

  “I did not——”

  “Tha did!” interrupted one of the navvies from the four-ale bar, “I heard thee. Tha snarled at the lad. Shame on thee—to snarl on Christmas Eve.”

  “No!” protested Shoutworth, “I may have spoken sharp, but snarl I did not!”

  “Liar!” shouted the navvies in a chorus.

  Shoutworth fastened his piggy eyes on me:

  “I’ll attend to you,” he hissed, “later I”

  “You’ll do nothing of the sort, mister,” I replied, and whipping my white apron off I flung it on the beery bar floor and danced on it, just like I had once seen a chap on the pictures do: “I’ve had enough of you,” I snorted at Shoutworth, “you bone-idle b—”

  This brought a rousing “Hear! hear!” from the navvies, who then began to thump their pint pots on the counter and boo at Shoutworth. And even his own cronies appeared to withdraw from him.

  I strode from the bar and went upstairs to my room where I collected my coat, hair cream, Sunday shoes, and an old pair of socks. When I came down the place was in an uproar—everybody calling for ale, saying that they hadn’t been served for twenty minutes, and Shoutworth yelling “Time!” All he could say to me was: “You’ll get no wages.”

  “You know what you can do with ‘em!” I said. And with that I gave a wave of the hand to all my mates in the four-ale bar.

  In the street I was itching to jump on the first D tram that came along, but I had to wait at the side-door until one of the waiters-on, a chap called Herbert Washington, slipped out to me.

  “Seven pun’, two shillings, I make it,” he whispered, “an’ that works out at three pun’ eleven apiece. Okay?”

  “Never mind the odd bob, Herbert,” I said, “give me the three-ten.”

  (We hadn’t half rung the changes that night: every order that Herbert came to the bar for he handed me a ten-shilling note, and I gave him change for a pound—working the difference straight on the cash-register in between times.)

  “God bless thee, lad,” Herbert wrung my hand, “and a Happy Christmas.” He spat on his bunce: “This means a turkey for the Washingtons.”

  “Tha’d be eating turkey every Sunday, Herbert,” I said, “if I’d stuck to that job any longer.”

  Then I chased off after the D tram, and hurried straight to Sally’s little home on Deblow Hill, where I found her filling the stockings of the younger end of their family.

  “What a lovely Christmas box!” she cried, jumping up and giving me a kiss.

  “I’m going to get a regular little job in a factory, Sally,” I said, “so that I can be a Christmas box for you every night in the week.”

  “That’s right, love,” she said, kissing me again, “you’re far too clever to be a boozer’s labourer.”

  Weaver’s Knot

  A deafening din of machinery halted young Harry Ackers on the threshold of the weaving shed. It hit him the moment he pushed open the old thick door, and so he stood there, choked right up to the gullet it seemed, with fear and foreboding, until the door, weighted by an old cast-iron cogwheel, gave him a brusque sideways shove, as much as to say “Either come in or get out”. He went in.

  Hundreds of looms palpitated with one solid thunderous racket beneath the vast low ceilinged shed, and under the coarse glare of gaslight stood the weavers—long lines of them, all women, both old and young, stopping and starting looms, changing shuttles with a flick of the hand, and turning from one machine to another to give anxious and stopping caresses to the tight newborn cloth that emerged from warp and weft.

  “Who do you want, luv?”

  “Eh?” Harry gave a startled turn. A small freckle-faced woman had seemed to fire the words softly into his ear.

  “Eh? Oh, sorry, I want—” he began to shout, but his voice made no impression against the volume of noise, and he stopped.

  “Who?” she asked, putting a hand on his shoulder. The one word tickled his ear.

  “Mester Hambull,” he said, “th’ overlooker.”

  She was watching his lips, and now she pointed a finger to a man on a workbench in the corner: “That’s Eddie,” she said.

  “Ta,” said Harry, “ta very much.”

  He went across to the squat figure perched fast asleep on the bench. Two hunched-up shoulders, a big head sunk on a chest that showed hairy and thick at the open shirt, two fat folded arms and a stubby hand clutching a steel spanner, and down the front of the bench dangled short legs in oily blue overalls. Below the neb of the greasy cap were two delicately closed eyes, bushy brows, a large shapely nose, and a full grey moustache. Harry watched the lift and fall of the chest, and looked with silent wonder at the sleeping face, oblivious of all the din. Preparing himself for what he should say when the man woke up, Harry quietly cleared his throat. Instantly at the sound the man woke up. He jumped off the bench with a roar:

  “Urroww… !” he growled, blinking up at the tall lad. “Wut game, eh? eh? wut game art up to? eh? wut’s the big idea? who are tha, anyway? eh? who?”

  “H-harry Ackers.”

  “Eh? who? wut caper art up to i’ my shed, eh?” “Manager sent me.”

  “Eh? wut art slummockin’ round my bench for?” asked the man.

  “I told you that Charlie Burgess, t’manager, sent me,” retorted Harry. “He sent me to you for you to find a weaver for me, to learn me weaving afore I can go an’ work as an apprentice in t’mechanic’s shop.”

  “Wut the ‘ell does Chey Burgess think he’s on?” the man asked. “Anyway, tha means ‘teach’. Learning is wut tha does thyself, if tha has sense enough.”

  I could have told you that, thought Harry, only I didn’t want to show off. I was talking at thy level.

  “Right,” went on the man, “tha’d better follow me.”

  The stocky figure strode down the narrow alleyway, brushing casually past thick whirring leather straps, and ignoring the vicious swinging picking sticks. Harry followed rashly behind, until a knock on the elbow gave rise to a timid caution. The man turned suddenly into a side alleyway. He went up to a woman weaver and touched her gently on the shoulder. Harry caught a glimpse of her—it was the freckle-faced woman. The man said something to her and then pointed to Harry. She nodded her head and smiled at the boy.

  “I’m puttin’ thee wi’ Hetty Dale here,” shouted the man. “See tha does wut she tells thee—or else thall have me to contend with.”

  He was making off when he turned unexpectedly and came back, came close up to the boy, and spoke intimately to him:

  “How old are you?”

  “Fifteen an’ a bit.”

  “Thy first job?” he asked, glancing at the rosy cheeks. “Aye,” said Harry.

  The man gave a keen look into his eyes: “Me an’ thee, lad,” he remarked, “well be the only two men in the entire shed. A shedful of women, see.” He gave a warning tap of a spanner to Harry on the shoulder: “Fm t’gaffer* here,” he added, “an’ let me give thee a tip—no wenching! I won’t stand for it.”

  For a moment Harry was dazed. He hadn’t quite understood the words, but instinctively he had sensed the feeling behind
them. He felt a strange ugly gush of emotion come up into his mouth. “Eh, hello, luv,” the freckled woman greeted him. “Ee, you look a bit sick you do. Here, have a sup of water—if you don’t mind drinking out of my mug.” Trembling he took the mug from her hands and gulped the water. He was thirsty suddenly, but couldn’t swallow properly. He felt exhausted from the hatred, adult and blind, that had sprung up in him. It even made him dizzy in the head. “Me an’ thee—men—women—I’m t’gaffer— no wenching.” Hetty helped him off with his jacket and he began to roll up the sleeves of the working shirt his mother had bought him the day before.

  It seemed to him that Hetty moved like a sprite. She darted about the alleyway from one loom to another, and slowfootedly he followed. Often he would lose sight of the head of pale yellow hair blobbed with cotton, when suddenly from between the reeds the two green eyes, gay and bright, would startle him. After her wash before going home she looked very pretty, with her smooth gleaming hair and delicate skin. And sometimes she changed her blouse, and came to work in her best coat, and then Harry could hardly keep his eyes off her.

  “Going to meet your boy?” he asked her one day.

  “Pooh—if you haven’t got a boy at thirty-one,” she said, “you never will have.”

  “Are you thirty-one?”

  “I am, luv,” she said, “an’ never been kicked, kissed, or run over.”

  “Ee, I wouldn’t ha’ thought it,” said Harry. “I mean that you were that age—I alius thought thirty was old.”

  It was the atmosphere of intimacy between them that made the job bearable for Harry. All day long they occupied the same narrow alley, two feet wide and ten feet long; their heads bent together over the same cloth, their bodies brushed by each other every minute or two, their hands touched, and they “kissed” the same shuttle. Often Harry would press his mouth to the tiny hole in the shuttle and suck and suck without the cotton coming through, then Hetty would playfully snatch it from him and at the touch of her lips the thread would spring out of the hole.

  “It’s your mouth, Hetty,” he said one day, “that magnetises even t’cotton.”

  One thing that eluded Harry was the “weaver’s knot”. It was a knot tied in a special way, to repair a broken end in the warp, and Harry’s thick fingers couldn’t master it. Hetty would go behind the warp as he struggled, lean over him and bring an arm over each shoulder, and her sure hands would take his fumbling ones and make them tie a knot. But when Harry felt her soft cheek against his, it seemed that the sight slipped from his eyes, and he couldn’t make out what the cotton ends were doing. Then one day it chanced that just as Hetty was bringing her arms over his shoulders his fingers should happen to tie the knot. “Ee, luv,” she laughed into his ear, “you tied your first weaver’s knot. You deserve a reward—” and she turned Harry’s face towards her and gave him a kiss on the mouth. A moment later, as she bent to draw the end through the reed, and saw the boy’s tense face, she shook her head: “Hetty, you didn’t ought ha’ done it,” she told herself.

  Harry had felt aware always of Eddie Hambull’s presence in the shed, and after the kiss he became more sensitive to it. Often he would get a glimpse of him at his bench, and he would get a feeling of being in a jungle, he a young growling lion and Hambull an old overgrown lion, and all the weavers lionesses. When the man passed the end of the alley the hair or something stiffened at the back of Harry’s neck.

  Most afternoons, and especially Friday, Hetty would start the singing off in the shed. Her voice fascinated Harry, for she could pitch it so that it rose with a ghostly sweetness above the din of the machinery, and soon all the shed would join in—mostly in hymns such as “Abide With Me”. Harry realized that there was no one in the world he thought of as he did of Hetty.

  Hambull moved Harry to two looms of his own, but since these were next to Hetty’s four looms he didn’t mind. She still gave him a lift, helped to keep the looms going, and charged against him when he got in her way. And Harry liked to buy a bar of fruit-and-nut chocolate and give it to her when they brought the morning cocoa round.

  “No thanks, luv,” she shook her head one morning, “I don’t feel like eating anything.”

  “Are you all right?” asked Harry anxiously. “You haven’t been looking yourself lately, Hetty. An’ I never hear you singing now. Have you just come over funny?”

  Hetty looked up and smiled at him: “Bend down,” she said. He did, and she whispered in his ear: “I’m going to have a baby.”

  Harry stared at her, unspeaking.

  She asked: “Know who’s the father?”

  He shook his head.

  She pointed a finger at him:

  “You!”

  “Me!”

  “Yes, you—” pouted Hetty. “It must have happened that day you kissed me behind the looms. I’ve never felt the same since.” Seeing his worried expression she touched her heart: “Cross me heart, Harry Ackers, I won’t tell a soul. But let it be a lesson to you.”

  Harry went back to his work in wonderment. He knew perfectly well that a woman didn’t have a baby when you kissed her behind a loom—but there was something different about this case. These last months Hetty had spent more time with him than with anybody, and she had never been out of his thoughts, and he had kissed her, or she had kissed him—and all that couldn’t mean nothing. In some virgin way Harry felt himself the father of the child Hetty carried.

  From then on the job of weaving became easy. He forgot all dissatisfaction and tackled things with a new spirit. He ran for Hetty’s cocoa, brought her baskets of cops, and often gave a matey glance over her looms, and handled his own with ease. Until one day he put two shuttles in one of his looms, and after the smash had to go and bring Hambull. “Don’t worry,” Hetty told him, “because you never make a weaver until you put two shuttles in.” But Eddie Hambull thought different.

  “Bladderhead!” he roared at Harry, “d’you think I’ve no more to do than wet-nurse thee?”

  Harry could have grabbed the man at his hairy throat, but instead he thought of Hetty and tended his other loom. The repairs did not take long, and when Harry came back early at dinner time Hetty was piecing up the last few ends in the quiet deserted shed.

  “Give me a lift with the weights,” she called to him, “an’ keep your eye out for the factory inspector—or else we’ll get sacked for working in the dinner time.”

  They hurried behind the loom and bent to lift the heavy weights which kept the warp at a certain tension. Suddenly Harry heard a groan.

  “Oh, what’s up, Hetty?” he cried.

  “I’ve hurt me, luv,” she whispered. “Help me round to my box.”

  “Shall I fetch woman from t’welfare room?” he asked.

  “No,” said Hetty, “go an’ tell Eddie.”

  “Who—Hambull?”

  “Yes. He’s gaffer.”

  Harry ran off for the overlooker, and found him putting on his blue slop. “Hetty Dale’s hurt herself,” he blurted out.

  “Hetty?—hurt herself?”

  “Aye, she were givin’ me a lift with the weights,” said Harry.

  “Get out me way,” roared the man, thrusting past Harry and running down the alley.

  “Wut’s up? wut have you done?” he shouted at Hetty. “Liften flamin’ weights—have you no more sense?” He turned to Harry: “Hy thee—dash off to Joe Kay an’ tell him have the firm’s car ready. Say one of my weavers has been taken bad.” And with that he put his powerful arm round Hetty and almost lifted her along the alley.

  Harry went to work the next day only because he was drawn to the job and the alley, because of their comforting associations of Hetty. Often his eyes turned to her four looms, standing in queer idleness, and he imagined her there.

  Two weavers were having a lip conversation across the shed, and Harry detecting the word “Hetty” watched their lips, for he was quick at following the words.

  “Last night at ten o’clock in hospital.”

&nb
sp; “So I heard. Stillborn.”

  “But she’s all right.”

  Harry felt a pain tighten at his heart. He was turning his eyes from the conversation when he caught the word “Hambull”.

  “It were a lucky let off for him!”

  “Fancy! And it would have been his first.”

  “At fifty-five!”

  “Wife’s an invalid.”

  “Men always come best off.”

  “Woman has to pay.”

  Harry saw a drop of cold sweat fall from his forehead on to the warp. Hambull! Ugly old Hambull. How could Hetty have? He straightened up, went round the alley and put on his jacket, knocked off the looms, and went off. At the end of the alley he came face to face with the man.

  “Where are you off to?” he asked.

  “I’m leaving,” said Harry.

  “Wut?”

  “I’m chuckin’ it. I’ve had enough.”

  Harry saw a sudden change come over the man’s face as he put his hand on his shoulder and took him over to his bench.

  “I suppose it’s over my shouting at thee yes’day,” he said. “Lad, tha’ll punish thyself all through life.”

  “How come?”

  “Tha takes things to heart. I’m t’same myself.” He brought his face close to Harry’s: “I’ve just had a thing happen me that I can’t tell thee or nob’dy else about, but I will say this—I’ve suffered the loss of a life’s hope. I were young yest’day—now I’m an old man.”

  Harry saw the man’s face shed its ugliness as the deep emotion filled his blue eyes. He realized that his own sense of loss was only a sickly moment beside the desolation on the face before him.

  “And where art going, lad?”

  “Navy. I’ve turned fifteen and a half.”

  “Then tha’ll be going to sea.”

  “Aye, to sea.”

  “There’s nowt here for me,” spoke the man. “I wish—I wish I were coming wi’ thee.”

  “Aye,” Harry was surprised to hear himself say as he shook the thick hand, “I wish you were, Eddie.”

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