That'll Be the Day

by Ray Connolly

  ‘What are you going to do next year?’ All this questioning could be embarrassing. They didn’t look like the kind of girls who would be impressed by my scholastic record. Best to be evasive, I reckoned.

  ‘Oh, I dunno. We’ll see … you know. What about you?’

  Shirley turned and smirked at Helen: ‘I’m going as a receptionist at County Motors.’

  ‘Is that what you call it?’ Helen had quite a strong Somerset accent, and immediately went into a fit of dirty giggling. Terry, unembarrassed, and indeed uninterested in the conversation, got up to go.

  ‘Are you coming, Jim?’

  I gave him a quick and hidden wink and a nod while the girls were still giggling at their double entendre. ‘No, I think I’ll just stay a bit longer. See you on Monday.’

  ‘Okay then …’ Terry shrugged, took a last look at the three of us, and then walked out of the coffee bar to where he’d knobbled his bike.

  There was an expectant pause as both girls looked at me. Left by myself I couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  ‘D'you want another Coke?’

  ‘Thanks.’ Shirley answered for both of them, offhandedly and ungraciously, but, grateful for the opportunity of cementing the rapid ground I was surely making, I rushed back to the counter.

  ‘Three Cokes.’ I wondered whether they were watching me from behind, perhaps beginning to fall out over who would be the lucky girl to get off with me. ‘… oh, and have you got a shilling for two sixpences for the juke box?’ Pocket money taught thrift in those days.

  ‘Who’s that then?’ Suddenly over my shoulder I heard a new voice. There were two of them. Two garage mechanics in overalls, I think, who must have come in while I’d been at the counter and who were now sitting with Shirley and Helen. I didn’t recognise either of them, but they looked older than me, confident and worldly.

  ‘Oh nobody.’ Helen was dismissing me as though I’d ceased to exist, although she must have known I could hear. For a moment I hesitated. Clearly they’d moved in, how could I get out now without a loss of face. Better to brave it out, perhaps, to join the party. I sat down again and handed round the drinks. No-one even bothered to look at me.

  ‘We’re going to the Floral Hall tomorrow night … are you coming?’ The taller of the two blokes was fondling the sugar bowl as though it had hidden sensuously tactile qualities.

  Helen smirked, and crossed her legs. I noticed that while I’d been at the counter she’d opened another button at the top of her dress: ‘What d’you think, Shirl? Can we trust them?’

  Everybody laughed, so not wanting to be left out I joined in. Suddenly they were all looking at me, as though they’d just become aware of my existence.

  The other bloke turned towards me. He was small, and built like a midget Sherman tank and his hair was sticky with grease.

  ‘We weren’t interrupting anything, were we?’

  It’s surprising how much menace a man can get into his voice. Facing these four hostile faces I felt myself going red with embarrassment. I wished I’d left with Terry. I didn’t even fancy the stupid bitches anyway. But still trying to appear casual, I took a gulp of Coke, and then felt tears come to my eyes as the bubbles went down the wrong way.

  ‘Cokus interruptus,’ I said, remembering Ovid, and trying to joke my way out of my embarrassment. The joke fell flat, not surprisingly, and the temperature of non-cordiality continued to drop.

  ‘Well … be seeing you …’ I tried to make it look as though I hadn’t noticed that I’d been pushed out, and was just about to add something about having something else to do, when I realised that no-one was listening anyway. I’d already been dismissed. And picking up my satchel I walked as gingerly as possible out into the street.

  On the way home that afternoon, with my baggy turn-ups catching in my oily bicycle chain because I was too embarrassed to be seen around town wearing bicycle clips after suffering such a total humiliation, I wondered whether girls ever had any idea how vulnerable boys can be. It seemed to me that they just didn’t care whose feelings they hurt. And what those stupid tarts could see in those gormless greasy looking twits from the local garage I couldn’t imagine. They looked about as sensitive as a pair of grinning baboons. Anyway, they were welcome to each other if they were so keen.

  But I couldn’t help wondering what Shirley was really like, and what would happen after the Floral Hall tomorrow night. Where would they go? I’d been told that Big Bob’s Wood was a favourite spot for oating but you had to have a car or a motor bike to get there. I bet they were both a couple of ravers, but I wondered how far they went. Someone had told me that Helen went all the way, but Shirley was hanging on to it. I wouldn’t mind hanging on to it for her, I considered, and taking out my harmonica took my hands off the handle bars and began to play a slow bluesy Ivory Joe Hunter tune I’d been practising for months, pedalling slowly down the tree-lined lanes on my way home after my last day at school.

  Chapter 3

  My mother was in the shop when I got home. I went in the back way, and I could hear her talking to Mrs Rimmer as I went up the stairs. She was on about me again. Me and my bloody career. That was all she ever seemed to talk about these days. I just wished that she would leave off for a bit, instead of always trying to push me up the spiral of her own frustrated ambitions. Nowhere did I feel really free of it all: of the continual pressure to conform and be a good boy; to be a little soldier like my father had said.

  I dropped my blazer on to my bed, and sitting down began to take off my black lace-up shoes. Then with one shoe off and the other shoe on, I crossed to my record player and dropped a turquoise labelled HMV seventy-eight on to the turntable, watching as it raced away.

  Well you may go to college, you may go to school

  You may have a pink Cadillac, but don’t you be nobody’s fool.

  ‘Elvis, boy … you make life worth while,’ I thought, then standing in front of the mirror allowed my lip to curl down in that half sneer that had changed my life and the looks of half the Western world. ‘Really,’ I thought, ‘I do look quite a bit like Elvis. If they’d let me grow my sideboards I’d look even better.’ I took off my tie and gazed at my reflection. A spot was just about to erupt in front of my left ear-lobe. Sodding adolescence. No wonder I hadn’t got off with Shirley. That had probably put her off. A sideboard would have covered that nicely. I took my tie off, and unbuttoned my shirt down the front. This year hadn’t been very sunny and I wasn’t very brown yet. But give it a chance, once the exams were over I’d spend three months at the pool. Maybe I could go this weekend. I looked out of the window and studied the sky. It looked promising. Down in the garden grandad was feeding the ducks in the hen-pen. It seemed to me that the older he got the more he depended on the company of his ducks. He was a nice bloke, but what a wasted life he’d had stuck here in the middle of nowhere. It would have been better for him if he’d nipped off one night like my dad.

  Tea-time was like every tea-time during the summer: boiled ham and salad, and pointless murmurings of conversation first from my mother and then from grandad, who tonight got some salad cream caught on the lower ledge of his bottom lip, but who didn’t notice all the way through tea. Neither mother nor I mentioned it.

  ‘Mrs Rimmer was in this afternoon asking after you again, Jim.’ My mother was trying to start a conversation. ‘I told her examinations didn’t bother you.’

  I didn’t answer, so grandfather filled the sound vacuum.

  ‘That old goose is getting a right temper. She fair went for me when I was going to water them just now. She nearly had my leg off.’

  This time it was his turn to be ignored.

  ‘Will you be swotting this weekend, love?’

  ‘I thought I’d do some at the pool if it gets hot,’ In a not so metaphorical way I was testing the water. I wasn’t quite sure how my mother would react to the idea of my going loafing round the swimming pool the weekend before exams. As it happened she didn’t react in any particu
lar way.

  ‘It’s too close,’ said grandad. ‘We could do with some rain to clear the air.’

  ‘I suppose you’ll be wanting some money then,’ said my mother at last. ‘I don’t know, I look forward to the day when you’re bringing a wage in.’

  ‘I could get a job … I don’t have to go to university.’

  ‘No. I didn’t mean that, and you know it. A pound will be all right, won’t it? Let’s not have any more of that “getting a job” talk. You can help me around here until you go to university in October.’

  ‘They go off laying when it gets this hot,’ said grandad.

  I went to the pool making a swiss roll of my trunks inside my towel, but it was too cloudy to get a tan, though it was quite hot again. No-one spoke to me, although I recognised a few of the younger boys from school charging about playing depth charges and making a nuisance of themselves.

  There are three things you can do at a swimming pool. You can swim, you can lie on your back and close your eyes, or you can lie on your tummy and watch all the girls. If you want to watch the girls you have to lie on your tummy, or you might make some kind of exhibition of yourself: know what I mean? That was my experience that Saturday afternoon anyway, lying there, resting on my elbows and trying to adjust myself to some comfortable position. There weren’t many girls there that day, and really they weren’t up to much, but they were better than nothing. And nothing was exactly what I’d been getting so far.

  They used to wear tight rubber bathing caps in those days which were very unflattering, but from my low angle on the ground I didn’t get to look at their heads too much. And so for hours and hours I watched thighs and bottoms, bobbing breasts, and the odd bikini-bared belly-button; girls with little pin pricks sticking out in the centre of their breasts after they climbed out of the cold water; girls with muscular thighs, or thin ones that didn’t meet; and girls with swimsuits cut high at the front which fired my already raging imagination. No wonder I never went swimming that day. There was no way I could have got as far as the water without someone noticing my predicament.

  They were showing James Dean in Giant at the Rex that night. It wasn’t a new film – in fact James Dean had been killed in 1955 – but some pictures took quite a time getting down as far as Somerset. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen it, though. Shortly after it had been released I’d gone up to Bristol for the night, and for weeks after I’d been talking in what I thought was a Texas accent, and walking about with my hands pushed into my trouser pockets, shoulders hunched, the way all good fashionable rebels were supposed to look in 1958. I really modelled myself on James Dean. Imagine how my faith in humanity was shaken to the foundations when I read later that he was queer. Just to think I based my whole personality on a pouf.

  Still, in June 1958 I didn’t know that, and just after eight I joined the queue outside the pictures for the second house, looking resplendently moody in my red jacket and blue jeans: he’d dressed like that in Rebel Without A Cause. If only that Shirley could see me now, I thought, crossing my arms and staring at the pavement, eyes just turned up so that the whites showed under the coloured bits. I must have looked magnificently rebellious, I thought.

  ‘Jim … hey … Jim. Hello.’ My moodiness melted suddenly as I found myself glowering at Jeannette Sutcliffe, Terry’s sister. She was with a couple of her school friends and they were just coming out of the first house. For a moment I was embarrassed. She looked a bit young to be seen talking to outside the pictures.

  ‘Oh, hello … it’s you.’ I couldn’t think of anything to say so I rubbed my nose. ‘Didn’t you bring Terry?’

  ‘He’s swotting again. Shouldn’t you be?’

  ‘No … I’m brighter than he is.’

  ‘More big headed, too.’ She laughed, and walked after her friends who had carried on down the road. She was all right really. Better than her brother, I thought, although he was my friend. Suddenly I thought of something to say.

  ‘Hey, Jeannette … tell Terry that he should have stayed last night. That Shirley’s sex mad … and her friend’s a raving nympho.’

  By this time Jeannette had walked quite a way down the street and I was having to shout for her to hear me. Suddenly I realised that half the queue had turned round to see who this boy was who was shouting about sex, and, covered in confusion, I retreated back behind my shell of sham surliness.

  ‘How d’you feel?’ It was breakfast time on the Monday, the day exams began, and my mother was nipping about the place, serving in the shop, getting breakfast for grandad and me, and being generally annoying.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Not nervous?’

  ‘No.’

  My answer went trailing after her as she went into the shop to serve somebody with a morning paper. Meal times were always like this. She nearly always ate hers standing up while she nipped backwards and forwards to serve, but this morning she was unusually chatty and cheerful. I suppose it was her way of taking the tension out of things, but it was getting on my nerves. I looked across at grandad. He was reading the cartoon page of the Daily Mirror.

  ‘Well … this is the first big hurdle.’ She was back and rattling on in fine form. ‘I wish I’d had your opportunities. By October you’ll be at university. That’ll be nice won’t it, father?’

  Obediently grandad tore himself away from the jokes: ‘they’ll make him get his hair cut when he gets there, all right?’ My hair and grandad did not get on together. Ever since the bloody Somme he’d had his shaved half way up the side of his skull and he thought I was an effeminate pansy to desire to wear it any other way. Sometimes he was such a twerp.

  ‘Listen mum … I’ve been thinking … well three years at university …’ I hardly knew what to say I was so exasperated. ‘Well … three years is a long time, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind making a few sacrifices.’ My mother had completely misunderstood what I meant.

  ‘No,’ I found myself almost shouting at her. ‘I didn’t mean that. What I’m saying is that if I’m fed up now what am I going to be like in three years’ time …?’

  But again the bloody shop door bell had gone and she dropped her toast and whisked away to serve someone with a packet of Woodbines, not even listening to what I had to say.

  Grandad looked up over his newspaper: ‘You should know you can’t argue with your mother.’ Trust him to cop out of any family disharmony straight away.

  ‘Anyway, it’ll soon pass.’ Mother was back, picking up her toast and marmalade again. ‘Oh, come on now, look at the time … it’s turned half past eight. You can’t be late today.’

  And shoving my satchel and my little plastic box of sandwiches into my hand she edged me towards the door.

  ‘All the best then love.’ I turned to look at her, and walked straight into one of her kisses. They hadn’t come my way very often in recent years, and I was surprised. These exams meant a lot to her. ‘You go and show them. Just wait until you’re at university. You’ll be the first in the family.’

  Terry was waiting for me on his bike at the end of the road, turning in wide circles, just skimming past the grass verge on either side, as he did, and had done, nearly every morning that we’d been going to school together. It was a hot morning, clearly the start of a proper heatwave, and already he had traces of sweat on his forehead. For the first time in my life I found myself really looking at him. Worthy Terry, waiting there for me under that cap that seemed too big for his six and seven eighths head, and in a clean white shirt with which to start the week’s academic tournaments. We’d been friends an awful long time but I couldn’t think why for the life of me. Without speaking we began to ride alongside each other on the way to school. We rarely spoke much first thing in the morning. There never seemed much to talk about really.

  At last Terry, a startled, manic look in his eyes, broke the silence, as he always did. (Often I’d wait purposely for him to say something, just to see how long he could stand the silence.)


  ‘Jeannette said she saw you outside the pictures on Saturday night.’

  I didn’t say anything but pedalled on, contemplating my mother’s crass attitude, and her subtle castration of grandad.

  ‘Bugger me. I’ve been swotting non-stop since Friday …’

  ‘Yeah?’

  Terry looked at me suddenly, but I went back to studying the spinning front wheel of my bike.

  ‘Well it is our big chance, isn’t is? I mean we’re lucky to get it. My dad’s always said he wishes he’d had the chance to be a teacher.’

  Christ, Terry was as bad as my mother. He was making me angry with his nervous gabbling.

  ‘Is that all you want to be?’ He looked at me uncomprehendingly.

  ‘What d’you mean?’ he said. ‘What else is there?’ Tragically he was right. What else was there for those poor clots who decided to do arts degrees. Nobody at school had ever suggested that there might be openings for us other than back into teaching. It seemed to me it was a subtle conspiracy to keep us all at school in some way or other for the rest of our lives.

  ‘Please teacher may I leave the womb?’ I said. Terry looked at me sharply.

  A little further on was a bridge over a small river that we had stopped at virtually every school-day for the past seven years. When we were younger we’d got into the habit of looking for tiddlers, and now a few seconds watching the running water had become a custom for both of us. Terry reached the top of the bridge slightly ahead of me, and stared down. I suppose for him to have gone past it on this of all mornings might have meant bad luck for him or something like that.

  ‘The water’s getting lower.’ Terry’s face was running with perspiration, and he pushed his cap back on his head. ‘Bugger me, it’s going to be a scorcher.’

  I didn’t say anything, but watched the river. He was right, it was going to be a scorcher. It was already a scorcher. And as I stood there the strangest feeling slowly came over me, as though this had all happened before, and I was watching myself acting out a memory. And quite deliberately I turned round and taking my satchel from the back of my saddle where it was fastened, I undid it, and began to empty its contents one by one into the river. First a notebook, then a rubber, then a pen, a six inch ruler, a history text book and my sandwich box: there was me, tossing them slowly and carefully over the wall and into the river below.