It was from the date of the sympathetic incident that Ernest became the over-earnest glum young man whom Millie joked about. He also became a very staunch, steady Trade Unionist and an admirable workman. He’d show ’em!
For the next few years there was nothing, certainly, to cheer him. In 1926 came the General Strike. (“Serve ’em right!” thought Ernest with a sombre joy.) In 1931 came the frightful business recession. The firm his father served collapsed. Ernest was pleased, though for the Armleys it was, of course, a disaster. There were simply no jobs going in the textile trade; the old man got work for a few weeks as a night-watchman on some road repairs, but then the rheumatism which his hours of driving in the rain had started years ago descended on him and crippled him, and Ernest was left as the main financial stay of the family. (His sisters were by now both married, but their husbands were out of work like everybody else and on the dole, and they had children to keep.) An excruciating reorganisation took place in Ernest’s firm; for a couple of years nobody ever knew from one week to the next whether they would have a wage-packet to take home or not. Ernest lay awake at night sweating with fear lest he should lose his job. He felt as if he were being buffeted incessantly by stormy seas which threatened to drown him, without being able to do anything to help himself—he had no confidence at all, of course, that they would manage to extricate the textile industry from its troubles. However, somehow he kept his job, and somehow—small thanks to them, Ernest felt sure—the waves gradually calmed, though just before they really settled, his father, worn out by it all, developed rheumatic fever and painfully died. Ernest felt angry about this; it was a shame his father could not see his son’s later prosperity.
However, there it was. His mother and Ernest were left alone together. His mother began to tease him about getting married.
“And what would you do if I got wed?” enquired Ernest.
“Go to our Amy’s,” replied his mother promptly.
Amy was the younger of Ernest’s sisters; her husband had turned into an invalid and Amy had to go out to work, so that a grandmother to look after the children would be of real assistance. Ernest pondered. He was now twenty-six, but had never yet seen a girl he had a fancy for. He looked around seriously to see if he could find one. Almost at once his eye fell on Millie. (Or perhaps after all he had noticed her before? He was never quite sure about this, though he often gave serious thought to the matter.) Millie was a mender at Holmelea Mills outside Ashworth where Ernest still worked after all these years; in a large light room opening off his own department she sat before a window, dealing with knots and broken ends in the cloths. Mending was highly skilled work so that menders’ wages were relatively good; it was also a craft which mothers often taught their daughters. There were several of Millie’s relatives, of different generations, beside herself in the mending-room; in fact, it was quite a family party; they were all large, plump, jolly women, with abundant brownish hair and sparkling grey-blue eyes, much given to laughter. Indeed their favourite beginning to an anecdote—and they told many—was: “It was that laughable …”
The gas stove on which the men’s lunches and cups of tea were heated stood in the mending-room, and the menders were not averse to “giving an eye” to the food and drink of such of the men as were friendly with them. Ernest never ventured to ask this favour, but listened with interest, even smiling a little, to the repartee freely exchanged around him as he stood by the stove. When he began seriously to consider marriage somehow his thoughts flew at once to Millie, though he had hardly exchanged a word with her in his life. One day when after the customary joking about men, women and their relationships which brightened the lunch hour the others had trooped out, Ernest lingered a little and said on an impulse, leaning his tall lean form against the door:
“You’d never marry a chap like me, Millie, I don’t suppose.”
“Why not?” snapped back Millie, quick as a flash. “Why do you suppose so, Ernest Armley? You cheeky thing!”
“Well—it seems obvious like,” said Ernest, considering gloomily the long, sallow face, the heavy eyebrows, the serious dark brown eyes, which he saw in the glass when he shaved.
“It isn’t obvious to me.”
“I didn’t mean any harm, Millie,” said Ernest in his slow tones apologetically. “I was only just supposing.”
“You’ve got no right to go supposing about me.”
“No. Well,” said Ernest on a valedictory note, beginning to edge away round the door.
Millie followed him.
“Thinking of getting wed at long last, are you, Ernest?”
“Aye—well—I might,” conceded Ernest. Rallying a certain sardonic humour which he possessed (though Mr. Arnold, for instance, would never credit him with it, thought Ernest crossly) he added: “Have you any objection, Millie?”
“No objection at all, so long as you don’t marry me,” snapped Millie.
“Don’t say that, Millie!” protested Ernest. He was so deeply wounded that he blurted out his real feeling: “I’ve always had a fancy for you, you know.”
“Then why didn’t you say so before, gaumless?” exclaimed Millie, laughing up into his face.
“Well, I were worried,” began Ernest seriously.
“You worry too much, Ernest Armley,” said Millie, for the first of a thousand times: “Ernest by name and earnest by nature, that’s what you are.”
“Will you wed me, then?” said Ernest incredulously.
“Of course! Auntie, Bertha, Nora!” cried Millie, running to the centre of the room and shouting joyously: “Me and Ernest’s going to get wed!”
Ernest’s mother thought he was marrying beneath him, while Millie’s relations all wondered what she saw in that long glum fellow, but they all came round to the match in the end. “She’s a right good lass, is Millie,” said Ernest’s mother eventually, and Ernest was well aware of the verdict of his relations-in-law upon himself: “He worrits too much, of course, but he’s a real good husband.”
Nobody, not even Millie herself, would ever understand how Ernest felt about Millie. They went to live up Walker Street, though it was inconvenient for Ernest’s work, because Millie’s relations were all clustered in that district and Millie needed her family to live amongst as a fish needs water. The house was always full of a hurly-burly of hearty, laughing, jolly people; there were Millie’s sisters and cousins and aunts, with their masculine counterparts, and Ernest and Millie’s three children, and their friends, and now that Nora was married, a couple of grandchildren as well. (Kenneth was courting, too.) That he, Ernest Armley, that solemn dull fellow who lost his first job before he’d held it a day, should have a house of his own, a wife who was an excellent if slapdash cook, three fine children—Nora was very nicely married to his own second-in-command, Kenneth almost out of his engineering apprenticeship, Iris at the Ashworth County Modern School and doing well—no! He could never believe it. Of course it was all due to Millie. He could never be sufficiently grateful to her. He felt deeply and tenderly protective towards her merry spirit; he must never let anything cloud that warm-hearted gaiety.
Of course this feeling of responsibility for Millie tended to make him worry all the more…. For somebody had to worry, and Millie never worried. The only thing which upset Millie was if she hadn’t a good meal ready for him on time when he came in. The only time he ever remembered her crying, for example, in all the years of their married life, was when she dropped a dish of dehydrated potatoes which she had just hydrated and heated, during the war. The hot dish dipped from the oven-cloth to the floor and broke, and Millie burst into tears. (He was home on leave, Corporal Armley, at the time; that was when young Iris was started.) Yes, that was the only time he had ever seen his Millie shed tears. Upset because his meal was spoilt. Just like Millie. Always thinking of him and the children, never of herself. So he always took care—Millie called it worrying, he called it taking care—to let her know when he was going to be out late, or come in early. Tha
t’s why he had been careful to tell her last night, Sunday, after supper, as they all sat round supping a bedtime cup of tea:
“Don’t get in a panic now, if I’m late or early back tomorrow—I’m going out to buy a new machine with the boss.”
Then what must young Kenneth do but up and ask if Ernest would be passing anywhere near Ashworth Town Hall.
“For if you are, dad,” said he, “you might renew my driving licence for me, eh?”
Well, that was the younger generation for you. He’d reminded Kenneth and reminded him, over and over again, that his driving licence—he drove one of those motor-bikes, very unsafe Ernest thought it, particularly when he had his girl Edna planted on the back; the way they swerved round corners was nobody’s business—was due on Monday, and with driving licences there were no days of grace allowed. He’d even brought Kenneth the necessary form. But still he hadn’t renewed the licence. True, the engineering firm where Kenneth worked stood on a hill a good way out of town, so it wasn’t easy for him to get to the Borough Treasurer’s office in the Town Hall on a weekday. But there was Saturday morning, as Ernest explained to Kenneth; he could have renewed the licence then.
“The office closes at eleven-thirty on Saturdays, dad,” said Kenneth.
Ernest was rather taken aback, but rallied.
“If you young chaps left your beds a little earlier, Ken,” he began.
But Iris interrupted.
“Oh, don’t be such a Malvolio, dad,” she said.
“You have the advantage of me there, Iris,” said Ernest seriously. “I don’t know what that is.”
“Oh, well, never mind, dad. I daresay he wasn’t the same at home. Not to worry, as they say,” said Iris, dropping a kiss on his bald spot as she passed on her way to the teapot. “Have another cuppa.”
“Well, you know your dad,” said Millie comfortably, passing Kenneth’s licence and form across to Ernest. “Ernest by name and earnest by nature. You can’t hardly expect him to change at his time of life.”
Ernest, stowing the form and the little red book neatly away in his wallet, had pondered. Not to worry! That was what the doctor had said. But how could he help worrying? There was so much to worry about. He’d always thought so; he’d thought so last night and he certainly hadn’t changed his mind today.
“I think I shall buy it, choose how,” said Mr. Arnold at this point in a jocular tone. “We need another cropper, you know, Ernest.”
There you were, you see! A new machine to be installed! Plenty to worry about, coming up!
“Well—it mightn’t be so bad if we altered it a bit to suit us own idea, like. It’ll do delicate work and run fast,” agreed Ernest grudgingly.
Always new machines, running faster and faster, and complete automation just round the corner. (Ernest spared a thought here for his father the driver, superseded by the motor lorry.) But that was the least of it. If automation came, it came; he could do nothing about it one way or another. It was the things he was so to say responsible for which worried Ernest. Nuclear fission now—these bombs. Should we make them? Should we test them? Was Russia sincere? Was America over-bossy? (The antics of their Trades Unions made Ernest gravely shake his head. As for the Russians, they had no T.U.’s as he understood the term.)
But these things too, troubling though they were, did not worry Ernest as much as economic problems. All his life since the “sympathetic” incident he had been firmly determined, absolutely set, to distribute the wealth of the country more evenly and raise the standard of living for the working classes. Well, they’d done it and he rejoiced in it, and he hoped they’d go on doing it even more. But a whole batch of economic worries seemed to have come in the Welfare State train. Mr. Arnold, for instance, sometimes said that if wages went much higher, England would price herself out of world markets and lose her trade. Ernest listened sceptically. In the view of his party, the bosses never lost from a rise in wages, they always passed the rise straight on to the consumer, and took a little salary rise themselves on the way. On the other hand, in the thirty or so years he had known Mr. Arnold, he had found him on the whole shrewd, and honest within the code of his class; he was not one given to “sympathetic” humbug, he played the game according to the rules. Mr. Arnold said that the very thought of inflation made his hair stand on end; look what happened to the currencies and trade position of countries with inflation! England might quite simply starve, Ernest, he said, and that’s flat. The young shop steward at Holmelea on the other hand said the Union didn’t mind a spot of inflation as long as wages kept up with it—the worst time the workers had this century he pointed out, was with deflation, in 1931, and Ernest knew this to be true.
So there was much to ponder and worry about. It was all very well Iris saying “not to worry”; somebody had to worry or where would the working class be? These young people nowadays! His mother wouldn’t have demeaned herself by entering a public-house, but his daughter Nora thought nothing of it, went regularly for a drink with her husband. And look at Kenneth’s wages! And his motor-bicycle and his leather coat and that! The young people nowadays had no ideals, thought Ernest sadly; they couldn’t be bothered to attend Union meetings, with them it was all football pools and rock and roll and motor-bikes and the telly. Everything for themselves and let the other fellow go hang.
“A chap’s entitled to a bit of fun, dad,” said Kenneth once, when Ernest expressed these sentiments.
Entitled? “A chap’s not entitled to anything but what he earns, in my view,” said Ernest slowly.
“Oh, go on, dad. Don’t you want us to enjoy ourselves? Don’t you want us to be happy?” said Kenneth, laughing.
Ernest pondered. Yes, he certainly wanted them to be happy. So it was all very perplexing. The rock bottom of it all was, that nowadays Ernest could not rightly see what was right and what was wrong. So how could he help worrying?
“You’ll have to try, Mr. Armley,” said the doctor.
The doctor. Yes. Because for several weeks this spring Ernest had suffered from pain in his abdomen; nausea, vomiting. But he had concealed his distress, he had fought it down as long as he could. Stay away from work? Show a weakness? Lay himself open to sham sympathy, which would lead in some clever fancy way to the sack? (Finding the work a bit heavy, eh?) No fear! Ernest endured in silence as long as he could, till he was hardly able to stand upright between his cropping-machines, then secretly, without a word even to Millie, he visited the doctor. Not that one could be very secret nowadays, under the National Health Service; all those queues! Still, Ernest had managed his various medical visits quite successfully; he set off to go ostensibly to a Union meeting, and dropped in at the tail end of the doctor’s evening surgery and hadn’t long to wait.
The doctor sent him to be X-rayed and he had to go off work in the middle of the afternoon; he lied at the mill and said the trouble was toothache (a thing that might happen to the healthiest person), not wanting to give himself away.
“You’ve got yourself a nice little ulcer with your worry, Mr. Armley,” said the doctor, holding a set of nasty cloudy photographs up to the light. “You’ll have to knock off work for a few weeks and stay in bed, drink milk every four hours and forget your worries, or you’ll be in for an operation.”
“And what do I use for money meanwhile, eh?” said Ernest grimly.
“Talk sense, man,” said the doctor. “You’ll have your National Health benefit.”
“And suppose I don’t lay off work, what’ll happen?”
“The ulcer will get rapidly worse,” said the doctor shortly.
“I shall worry far more lying at home in bed than standing about at the mill,” said Ernest.
“Rubbish,” said the doctor.
They argued the matter back and forth for some time.
“Well, if you want to be a fool in your own way, of course you can,” said the doctor at length. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
He prescribed a diet, medicine, as much rest as
possible, and repeated strongly his injunctions that Ernest should not allow himself to be irritated, should avoid sudden shocks and angers, and above all should not worry.
“I’m not given to bursts of temper,” said Ernest stiffly, offended.
“No? Well, that’s all to the good,” said the doctor.
He clapped Ernest on the shoulder and pushed him gently out of the consulting-room. “Come in to see me every week, keep to a milk diet and don’t get worked up about anything, and you may get rid of it without our having to do anything drastic.”
In point of fact, now that Ernest knew what the trouble was and what had to be done to cure it, he felt much better. He obeyed the doctor’s orders with his usual meticulous care. He told Millie that his stomach was a trifle out of order and she gave him his milk punctiliously; he went to bed early and rested all day on Saturdays and Sundays; above all, when he felt vexation rising in him he subdued it and tried to think of something else—his newest grandson, a charming infant in white creepers, was very useful in this respect. As a result, he had had no severe attack of pain in the last five weeks, and the doctor was pleased with his progress.
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