Tom Hare laughed: ‘Jus’ depends on what kind o’ birds he’s watchin’. Them as wear skirts is more i’ my line…. An’ there’s some hot ‘uns down cut bank. Maggie Elves. Ha! She’ll let y’ do owt for a tanner.’
Harry scowled: ‘Aw … tarts agen. Blimey, don’t you e’er think about nowt else?’
Tom winked, clapped his hands together, grinned and showed his decayed teeth: ‘Ay, Harry, lad. Y’ want t’ go out wi’ Maggie fr a night, it’d do y’ good… On’y a tanner, then y’ could call y’self a man.’ He winked again at the others, sniggered and added: ‘He knows nowt about tarts, does he?’
Harry blushed: he hated to give the other boys the impression of his being a prude; at the same time he shrank from the thought of being in a class with Tom Hare. He protested, with warmth: ‘Aw, you wouldn’t talk like that if y’ ma heard y’. An Ah’ don’t believe y’ anyway, about this Maggie Elves. She must be a bright spark an’ hard up t’ have owt t’ do wi’ a guy like you.’
‘Me?’ replied Tom, not at all put out: ‘Me? Ha! Any tart’ll let y’ do what y’ want if y’ve enough money. Aye, any!’
‘Oh, no, they won’t,’ Harry retorted, thinking on Sal and Helen: ‘Ha, the kind as’d luk at you, might. They ain’t partic, anyway,’ impatiently: ‘Oh, but you make me sick,’ raising his brows and concluding, in tones of warning: ‘You let y’ ma hear y’ talkin’ like that. She’ll gie y’ Maggie Elves an’ cut bank.’
Tom made a grimace: ‘Me ma, eh. They’re all same, her an th’old man. … So’re all of ‘em as is married. That’s what they get married for… . Your ma an’ pa … ‘
‘Shut it, Hare,’ snapped Harry, white, a threatening stare in his eyes: ‘You leave me ma and pa out of it…’
‘Yaaah,’ Tom mumbled: ‘You’re just daft, that’s all.’ He glanced, furtively, at the others who were staring at their toes in silence. Their demeanours abashed him. He sensed he had overstepped the mark, and, accustomed as he was to have their attention only at the expense of relating the behaviour of his parents, in whose bedroom, owing to pressure on the accommodation, he slept, he laughed forcedly and said: ‘Aw, y’ get t’ think nowt at all about it when y’ get used to it… Why, on’y last night they came home drunk, and he…’
He was interrupted by Helen Hawkins who was passing, carrying a basin of the inevitable chipped potatoes. Tom Hare lowered his voice as Helen, a timid smile on her lips, paused in front of Harry. The others moved farther away to listen to Tom’s story. Now and again they chuckled.
He smiled, forcedly. The sight of her after his words with Tom Hare filled him with a discomfort. He was glad, though, that she had preferred to forget his impatience when he had told her that he was sick of girls. He felt he wanted to make amends for his rudeness. Yet, somehow, all that Tom Hare had said seemed related to the basin of chipped potatoes in Helen’s hand, related in a vague way, yet related. The food typified her home: the Hawkins family seemed to live on nothing else. Ach, her mother was too lazy to cook proper meals: she and her husband were too fond of going out boozing in the company of Tom Hare’s parents and letting the house go hang.
Suddenly, it dawned on Harry that Helen’s environment was precisely that of Tom Hare’s! A fearful thought flashed through his brain. Was it conceivable that Helen might have to listen to or even witness the drunken sexual behaviour of her parents? It was revolting, shameful.
It gave place to others. Did Helen sleep in the same room as her parents or was her bed in the back bedroom? Did her grown brothers sleep in the same bed as she? ‘Like me and Sal?’ a voice in his brain added the question.
The question bewildered him’ ‘Me and Sal? I’d ne’er thought of it like that, afore.’ But his sleeping with Sally was not the same as Helen’s sleeping with her brothers. Sally was his sister. Of course, they were Helen’s brothers. But in her case it didn’t seem right at all. It puzzled and plagued him. Then a deep hatred of all the families and the houses of Hanky Park swelled his heart. Aw, but who cared? Thinking things like this only spoiled Saturday. Forget all about it! There’d be the picture theatre tonight and there was money in his pocket, more money than ever he had possessed before. Why, if he’d been at Price and Jones’s he wouldn’t have finished until nine o’clock tonight when everybody else was enjoying themselves. Away with these perturbing thoughts; today was Saturday!
Helen, gazing at him, said, quietly: ‘What’s come over you lately, Harry?’
He forced a grin, knocked his cap to the back of his head: ‘What d’y’ mean?’ he asked, gazing at her. On a sudden he found himself marvelling at the charm of her girlish femininity: the thought that she was a girl and not a boy was wholly pleasing. He saw her instantly, in a new light; perceived qualities in her that were never before apparent to him; softness, freshness, an indefinable, elusive characteristic that seemed to fill, completely, some equally indefinable hiatus in his nature. Withal, a cautious voice bade him beware; friendship, exclusive friendship with her had its penalties. And, at the moment he did not wish to be penalized. Oh, he did not know what he wanted: she disturbed him: he didn’t want to be disturbed; wanted to preserve, indefinitely, this happy-go-lucky carefree Saturday air, these sensations of reckless abandon as were inspired by today’s affluence and the prospect of the evening’s search for diversion in the company of the boisterous boys. No, look what happened when he contemplated Helen: it left him miserable; made him think on such unpleasant things as her sleeping with her grown brothers; made him target to jealousy’s stinging barbs such as when thoughts of, say, Tom Hare’s laying his vile hands upon her, occurred to him. Absurd, impossible thoughts, yet such as filled him with exquisite pain. No, better remain fancy free; to love Helen was to embrace sadness. Oh, he did not know what he wanted. Staring at her, he knocked his cap to the back of his head and asked: ‘What d’y’ mean?’
She hesitated a moment, gazing at the pavement: ‘What have I done?’ she murmured: ‘I mean …’ she hesitated again, then looked up and said, haltingly; ‘I mean … I thought you and me were … ‘
He thrust his thumbs into the straps of his overall bib, smiled and asked: Thought we was what?’
‘We… . You know what I mean, Harry.
He noticed that she was blushing; he saw the pulse beating in her throat. He felt intensely flattered. He lit a Woodbine.
With restrained eagerness she said: ‘We could be … you know, Harry. Ah’ve allus liked you best of everybody. You hurt me when y’ didn’t go in office, but that don’t matter. Ah’d like to have seen y’ in office, that’s all; you were cut out for it an’ could ha’ … ‘ impatiently; ‘Oh, well, you’re different from that lot there.’
‘Oh, they’re all right, Helen,’ he said, smiling in the direction of the group of chuckling, whispering boys. He looked at her, paused awhile and knitted his brows: ‘It’s like this, y’ see,’ anxious not to give too much offence and lowering his voice so that the boys could not overhear: ‘Ah like you, too. Really, no kidding. But … ‘ the eager light died in her eyes: ‘But, well,’ a shrug; ‘Ah don’t want t’ go out reg’lar wi’ anybody, yet…. Ah. Oh; Ah dunno, Helen, Ah just don’t want.’ A pause, then, impulsively: ‘Ah want t’ have some fun.’ Instantly he saw her disappointment, and, in a desire to offer some sort of consolation, added, ingratiatingly: ‘Come t’ t’ Flecky Parlour (a local theatre) t’night? Y’ know, wi’ the gang,’ expansively: ‘Ah’ve got plenty o’ money.’
She stared down the street. One of her brothers, a bow-legged rickety child just able to walk, came out of the house clad only in his shirt. He toddled to the kerb, and sucking his dirty fingers, made water down the sough then returned to the house.
She sighed, dispirited. She did not know what to make of anything, and everything. Harry’s attitude of easy complacence (was it genuine?), his refusal to accept her offer of exclusive friendship, to forsake the company of those street-corner boys charged her with a heavy listlessness.
Harry did not under
stand.
Hanky Park and its squalor could be made invisible if only he would permit her to devote herself to him in the little things.
Such happiness as this would. … Oh, but it was too impossible a happiness. If only he and she were grown older. She felt herself to be matured already; but Harry still was a boy,-and he was out of reach. His refusal drew back the veil of sweet fancy with which she had shrouded the staring horror of her home.
No, that dirty, misshapen, half-naked child who had stood on the kerb a moment ago was not a character out of an absurd nightmare. His name was Tim Hawkins, one of a swarm, which lived, somehow, in the littered, mouldering kitchen which defied all efforts to keep clean. He and all that was associated with him; the unmentionable things, her parents’ shameless-ness which she herself dared not believe; these shut the door to idle dreaming and left her companioned only by her sole self.
Mother? Father? Brothers and sisters? Home? What meaning was there in them? A strange sensation stole over her, a perplexed incredulity. That dirty hovel, home? Where else? In all the wide world, of all the sweet dreams and fond imaginings of such homes as were writ of or projected at the pictures, of them all, hers was that in North Street. None else. The rest were words in a book, shadows flickering on a screen. Dreams. If she went elsewhere and asked for admittance the people would say: ‘You don’t live here. We don’t know who you are.’ Something within her contracted, recoiled; she shivered with loneliness. Oh, Harry, Harry Hardcastle. She could only look away from him, conscious of a hungering desire for his confidence and company.
Dully, insistently, crushing came the realization that there was no escape, save in dreams. All was a tangle; reality was too hideous to look upon: it could not be shrouded or titivated for long by the reading of cheap novelettes or the spectacle of films of spacious lives. They were only opiates and left a keener edge on hunger, made more loathsome reality’s sores.
When you went to the public baths and stood, after a day’s work, in a queue waiting your turn until the attendant beckoned you to a cubicle where was a bath half-filled with dirty water left by the girl or woman just quitted the place - you couldn’t, by any stretch of imagination, even when the attendant had drained off the water and washed the muck away, see it as anything other than what it was, Hanky Park, the small corner of the wide, wide world where you lived.
Escape there was, or, at least, relief, in friendship. In Harry, in none other, could she have confided, unburdened herself. She wanted him to herself; someone to whom she could talk, to whom she could confess the superflux of feeling; someone with whom she could dream her dreams.
But he did not understand.
He had given her opportunity to be with him tonight, though. She mustn’t, couldn’t, daren’t neglect the chance. Better share his company with others than be denied it altogether.
She saw her mother come to the door, a pot-bellied, middle-aged woman, teeth missing, hair in disarray about her face, her gait that of premature decrepitude. ‘Hey,’ she growled, and her stomach convulsed with the exclamation: ‘Hey, come on wi’ that there dinner, will y’. How long’re y’ gonna stand there gassin?”
Helen forced a smile and said, to Harry: ‘All right, Harry. Ah’ll come. Ah’ll be waitin’ here for y’.’
‘Righto, kiddo.’ She was blushing. Unaccountably, he felt a deep sympathy towards her. In an impulsive burst of generosity, he added: ‘Ah’ll treat y’.’ He watched her depart.
They’d have a great time, with the boys, at the pictures, tonight. He’d buy her a tanner’s worth of chocolate. There’d be the picture queue - always fun there - the fourpenny seats; perhaps a penn’orth of chipped potatoes each, wrapped in a piece of newspaper; wouldn’t be Saturday night lacking these. Then the noisy hilarity inside the Flecky Parlour. Tom Hare provoking the attendants by making that vulgar noise with his mouth which set the audience in convulsions of laughter. Oh, and the happy genial rowdiness of everybody infected by the Saturday night atmosphere.
Great not to be working until nine o’clock tonight; great to have money and to spare. His eyes sparkled, he raised himself on his toes and beamed. In the light of the happy present the allure of the future seemed without end. Soon they would put him in charge of a machine, and then …!
He breathed, deeply, stared into nothingness, transfixed.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 1 - REVELATION
THESE new experiences, compatible work, money to spend, Saturday nights’ entertainment, brought with them a calm serenity which gradually assumed an air of permanency as though it had come to stay for evermore. Memories of Price and Jones’s receded, were forgotten.
The human nature in him, though, found errand running become stale and uninteresting: he fretted for promotion, never allowed an opportunity pass without pestering Joe Ridge, the foreman, who, often as not, answered, snappily: ‘Aw, f God sake gie o’ever mitherin’ me, son. Y’ll be shoved on a bloody machine when it’s y’ turn. Tek things easy while y’ve chance. When y’ workin’ agen a stop-watch y’ll be bloody sick o’ sight o machines. Blimey, some o’ you kids don’t know when y’re cushy. Hop it, now, Ah’m busy.’
Sorry, though! Sorry to be entrusted with a lathe; a machine. Machines! machines! Lovely, beautiful word!
He would stand staring unblinkingly at the elder apprentices at work on the machines. Imagine it, they all were under twenty-one years of age! Sudden doubts clutched his heart. Had he their intelligence? Would he, ever, be as proficient as they? Suppose, when opportunity came his way, he proved to be a miserable failure! But he wouldn’t fail …
‘Hey, Hardcastle, go t’ t’ stores for this. Come on, man. Luk alive. Don’t stand dreamin’ there …’
Errand boy. Roll on, time. Come the day when some other boy would take his place. He became an assiduous student of the others’ working; flattered them, cunningly, that they might be induced to impart scraps of knowledge; was ever ready to watch a man’s work who wished to absent himself from the machine for a short spell. Then, when wanting a few months of his sixteenth birthday, promotion came.
Strange movements were afoot: change taking place everywhere. A great deal of the old machinery was taken away and replaced by new: beautiful, marvellous, wonderful contraptions that filled the eye with pride to look upon. Hundreds of the old faces were missing one Monday morning. A batch of new boys came into the machine shops, and, strange to relate, none of the indentured apprentices. Nobody knew why; nobody cared. Rumour said that trade was bad. But how could it be with all this new machinery, this general upset, reshuffling and reorganization. All this was more suggestive of busy times. Anyway, they couldn’t sack him; he was bound apprentice for seven years, only two of which had elapsed.
Promotion! After waiting for it so long its coming found him quite unprepared. Still, one could soon use oneself to it. And the day the batch of new boys came into the machine shops all wearing brand new overalls, all self-conscious and awed by all they saw, he found no difficulty in demeaning himself with mature superiority.
He was glad that many familiar faces of the time-served apprentices were missing; in their presence he could not very well pretend to omniscience. Besides, he never had been able to look on the older apprentices as apprentices; they had belonged to a different generation; some of them even had grown moustaches; they had been more akin to men than to boys. Anyway, they now were gone; their places occupied by much younger fellows to whom you could speak on terms of familiarity.
‘Now,’ said Joe Ridge the foreman: ‘Now, p’raps y’ll stop y’ mitherin’. There’s machine y’ve allus bin shoutin’ for. See as y’ don’t make a muck of it. An’ if y’ want t’ know owt, ask.’
Harry stared from the foreman to the capstan lathe, a smile growing on his face: ‘Oh, ta, Joe,’ he said, beaming: ‘Oh, Ah’m glad, really.’
‘Aye, Ah know all about it,’ replied Joe deprecatingly: ‘Jus’ watch y’ work’s done proper, an’ don’t start messin’ about. If owt guz w
rong stop machine an’ report it straight away. Allus y’ve t’ do is t’ watch; there’s nowt i’ this job. An’ if y’ behave y’self y’ll p’raps be shoved on one o’ t’ new lathes as’ll be ready next week, so tek care o’ y’self.’
True enough, this task was child’s play. But he was in charge of a lathe at last even though it was of the simplified capstan variety. He regarded it with pride of possession, ran his hand along it caressingly, touched its mechanism and stared, raptly as the tool shaved off fine ribbons of steel, which, spring-like, curled on themselves and snapped off. Fascinating. Thrilling, too, to know that promotion might be repeated again next week. In that case would be treble promotion since, in the ordinary course of events, he should first have had a spell on a drilling machine. He felt vastly pleased with himself, more especially when he remembered that Tom Hare, who had served three months longer than he, had been put to a drilling machine.
Tom resented it, apparently. At noon, he said, sulkily: ‘Tain’t fair, you bein’ shoved on that there lathe in front o’ me. Ah’m gonna see somebody about it…. Ah’ve bin here longer’n you,’ aggressively: ‘Why have they done it? That’s what Ah’d like t’ know.’
‘Ah dunno,’ Harry answered, secretly feeling that natural superiority must be the cause: ‘Ah dunno. Don’t ask me. Ah’m on’y doin’ what Ah’m told.’ Then, before he knew what had happened, he had added: ‘Y’ shouldn’t lark about so much, an’ y’ should stop comin’ late of a mornin’.’
Tom opened his eyes, incredulously: ‘Y’ what?’ he cried indignantly : ‘Who the — d’y’ think you are?’
Harry frowned: ‘Don’t you swear at me or Ah’ll swipe y’.’
‘You will?’ jeeringly, and showing his decayed teeth in a forced grin: ‘Ha! Luk who’s talkin’.’
Love on the Dole Page 7