by Ray Connolly
‘Yes, that’s right,’ I heard myself saying. ‘Too bloody hot to be taking exams. Sod the Congress of Vienna, and Napoleon and Madame de Pompadour and the War of bleeding Jenkins’s Ear.’
And with a final extravagant gesture I casually emptied the remaining contents of my satchel into the stream and threw it overarm right down the river. Terry watched aghast.
‘What’re you doing, you daft bugger?’ His cap was virtually falling off his head in surprise. That was one little token I’d forgotten, and reaching into my blazer pocket I retrieved my screwed up, old and shrunken cap and sent it skimming ducks and drakes fashion across the water.
‘Sod it!’
For a moment there was silence while Terry tried to make some sense of what I’d done. Then the tension broke as words and offers of advice came tumbling out of him.
‘You’ve gone mad … no … look … come on … I’ve got an extra pen. I’ll lend it you. Oh blimey … come on.’
He looked so flustered I almost felt sorry for him: ‘No. You go on. I’ve had enough of sodding school,’ I said, and pushing myself off from the bridge I turned round in the road and began to pedal slowly and contentedly back up the road towards home.
‘Jim!’ I looked back. Terry was standing holding his bike in a state of shock.
‘Bye, bye,’ I waved. Then as an afterthought I shouted. ‘Tell them I’ve got Jenkins’s Earache.’
And then I rode away down the lane leaving Terry rooted to the spot. Somehow I felt as though the pressure had been lifted from my shoulders. I was elated, almost drunk with the new-found sense of freedom that I was experiencing; with the feeling of total relaxation. The spinning front wheel on my bike mesmerised me.
‘Madame de Pompadour …’ My mind began to compose lines of nonsense verse, a habit I’d had for years.
‘Madame de Pompadour
Was, I think, a silly old … whore.
She made a pie from Jenkins’ Ear
And washed it down with a bottle of beer.’
I’m a madman, I thought to myself. A complete madman. And taking out my mouth organ I played what I hoped sounded like a merry little jig, to mark this moment of celebration in my life.
Nothing about my little outburst of lunacy had been premeditated. Perhaps it was the sun which had prompted me, or perhaps my toleration level had been over-reached. Whatever it was it didn’t matter. I knew what to do.
Grandfather was in the garden and my mother in the shop when I reached home. I knew that grandad had seen me sneak in the back door, but my mother was too busy to notice. Up in my room I changed into a pair of jeans and a less formal shirt, and shoved as many casual things into my case as I could carry, leaving my blazer, school shirt, shoes and tie in an abandoned heap on the floor. There wasn’t really a lot that I wanted to take with me, just a few pictures off my wall and my Post Office Savings Book, which my mother had been adding to since I was a little boy. I felt a bit guilty about taking this money, as though it didn’t really belong to me, but it was all I had.
Coming out of the house again my eyes met grandad’s. He was working with a pair of wire cutters on the chicken run. I knew he wouldn’t call and tell my mother. He didn’t really have enough guts to do that. All he wanted was a quiet life. But he must have realised that something was seriously wrong. Looking over my shoulder to ascertain that I hadn’t been spotted I approached him. We’d never had much to say to each other, and he hardly bothered even to look up from his work. He showed no surprise. The suitcase must have told him everything he wanted to know.
‘Well, you might at least let your mother know where you’ll be. I don’t think that’s too much to ask. For weeks now she’ll be saying “like father – like son” and for once she’ll be right.’
His wire cutters clipped at a particularly thick strand of wire and cut it, so that one half of it jerked viciously towards me. I pulled my head back and he looked up at me momentarily before going back to his work. And that was it. I backed off a little way across the patch of grass we called a lawn, and then with a last look at the house, slipped through the garden gate and into the side road, taking, as I went, one last glance at the bike I’d once been so proud of and which was now propped against the side of the house.
And then with one bound,
I thought,
Jim was free.
Chapter 4
The one thing you can never learn about loneliness, unless you’ve experienced it, is your own silence. Nobody talks to you, so you don’t talk. There’s never any reason for conversation, never any opportunity for it. But it’s something you can never know about until you leave home. It’s awful, and if there was any one thing that ever made me have doubts about deciding to run away then it was that. The terrible absence of any kind of communication. The weird feeling of alienation which swamps you, and turns you from an active participant in events which are going on around you, into a silent, watchful observer. The number of whole sentences which I must have uttered during that first week after leaving home could probably be counted on one hand. There was no-one to talk to.
After leaving grandad I walked into town, took out ten pounds from the Post Office, and by the afternoon I was sitting up on the back of a lorry, hugging myself inside my windjammer trying to keep warm in the cool wind created by the speed of the truck. I hadn’t had any plans other than to hitch a ride to somewhere, and when the truck pulled up for me at the traffic island I’d just said Shankwater because that was the place printed on the door of the driver’s cab. ‘Going all the way, son. Hop on the back,’ he’d said, and he dropped me off two hours later on the fringes of that small coastal resort, best known for its elegant pier and pebbly beach.
It was quite dark by the time I found my way to the centre of the little town, too late, I thought, to go looking for a room, so I decided to sleep on the beach. I’d read in a copy of Life magazine, which I’d found in the barbers, how beatniks in California had formed a society called the Sand-duners, and how they refused to ever leave the beach, eating, sleeping, painting and singing there. I wasn’t very sure how practical it was, but it sounded very glamorous.
I bought some chips and fish at a café just off the front and then made my way along the promenade looking for a place to sleep. At one point I had to walk past a gang of teds, who did their usual menacing routine bit. But I wasn’t really scared. Not then anyway. Later on, after I’d eaten my chips, and was huddled up against a wooden breakwater I heard them again, shouting at each other on the front, but I couldn’t see them anywhere. Then I heard the shouts drawing closer and I wondered if they were coming for me, but still nothing happened. That’s the other thing about loneliness. Wrapped in the void of your own silence, outside noises are interpreted as threats, and there’s nothing quite so frightening as the threat you can hear but can’t see. It makes you want to scream out as loud as you can that you’re not bloody well afraid. Even though you’re terrified.
I listened for a long time to the noise of the teds, until way into the night I imagine, and it was quite late before I fell asleep, listening to the sound of the sea. I didn’t sleep for very long. At about four in the morning I was stiff with cold, and eventually made my way back along the front looking for an early morning café, carrying my case with fingers which had become blistered from holding it for so long. Today I’d have to find a new home for myself.
‘The rent is two pounds ten a week. You’ll be able to manage that, will you? Well, in any case, it’s in advance, if you don’t mind … now there’s a lavatory two floors down, and there’s a bathroom on the first floor … if you’ll be taking a bath that will be two shillings. You have a lock on the door, so if you lose anything by your own carelessness it’s no use coming crying to me. And we have a very nice house here so if you don’t mind you’ll not be having any young ladies up here to entertain. It’s really a very nice little room you have here … and like I say that’ll be two pounds ten in advance …’
The landla
dy’s hand opened, and then closed over my rent money, and without another word she disappeared out of the room, leaving me to inspect my new home. There wasn’t really much to inspect. It was a small attic room at the top of a crumbling Victorian house, with a sloping roof that came down to within a foot or so of the bed, a small table, a dressing table and a tiny partitioned off section with a washbasin and mirror. By the gas fire was a meter, and next to that a gas ring. A strip of wallpaper hung down from the ceiling in the centre of the room. It was a bleak and dirty place, a slum I suppose, at the top of a slum house. But it was my own room. I looked at the bed, and wondered for a minute about that rule about not entertaining young ladies. We’d have to see about that. And then I looked out of the window. I might have known what to expect. A perfect view of the gas-works.
I got a job pretty easily, probably because I was looking for work right at the beginning of the season before all the students had come down. I suppose I could have done better than being a deck chair attendant, but I was still keen on the idea of living on the beach like they did in California, and also it seemed like a good place to watch, inspect and, hopefully, get off with women, and the ideal place to get a tan, which in those days was of paramount importance in my life. It wasn’t a very hot summer, not a good summer even by England’s lukewarm standards, though I did manage to make the most of the few nice days we had. But there wasn’t much going on in the way of girls. Shankwater is basically a resort for old people and for couples with young families, and the single girls who go there looking for action are pretty scarce. Most days I’d spend hours playing football on the beach with little boys.
One wet day I thought my luck had changed. It was about a fortnight after I’d been officially hired as a Corporation deck chair seller and I was standing with my back to the sea wall watching the tide coming in and wondering if it was going to reach as far as my pile of deck chairs. They’d told me that for every one I lost I forfeited a pound of my wages, but I didn’t believe them. The sea was hurling itself up the beach with a lunatic ferocity and dragging piles of pebbles back with it as the waves drained back down the slope again. I could see someone way over by the pier going for a swim. He just had to be mad, I thought, and I watched, while his head ducked and bobbed under the waves. Then I noticed two figures in plastic macs paddling along through the waves towards me, hitching their skirts up almost to their knickers, and nearly being thrown over by the force of the waves. I waited while they got closer to me. They knew I was watching them. I suppose they were enjoying it. They were both pretty, one fair and cocky, the other dark and pale. They must be crackers too, I thought as a wave suddenly splashed up against the fair one, almost pushing her over. The rain was coming down in buckets.
‘Come on now, never mind the girls, concentrate on the job.’ A group of three old ladies had appeared from behind me, and were joking and laughing at me. ‘What about getting those deck chairs over there?”
The leader of the troupe pointed to some chairs some little way down the beach. The old ladies had turned up on the beach early that morning and insisted on taking three deck chairs for the day, although it was clearly going to be no day for sunbathing. They’d come down from Bristol, muffled up in macs and see-through plastic rain-hats, and were determined to get some sea-air if it killed them. It seemed to me that there was every possibility of that. But they were a hearty trio, and were enjoying themselves despite the gale.
I was embarrassed that they’d caught me watching the girls.
‘Come on, love, I know we’re not as young as you’d like us to be, but can you tell us where we’d find the Ladies?’
‘Up the steps and along to the left,’ I answered, hoping that the girls, who were quite near now, hadn’t heard them mentioning lavatories.
‘Well perhaps it’ll brighten up later,’ one of them laughed and amid a lot of good-natured chatter they made their way back up the steps to the promenade. I turned and looked at the chairs. The girls were quite near by now. This seemed a good time to go and collect them, so I made my way casually down the beach. I could see the two girls talking to each other as I moved towards them, but tried to pretend I hadn’t even noticed them. Suddenly the blonde one, the cocky looking one, came out of the sea and marched up the sand towards me, so that I could hardly avoid looking at her.
‘What happens around here every night then?’ she said.
I met them outside the fair. That seemed the best place to go, because as there were two of them it was no good suggesting the pictures, and a dance was out, because I couldn’t dance. So the fair it was. But there was a problem. Somehow I had to split them up. I didn’t really mind which one I got. But I really wanted to get off with one of them. It was a pity Terry wasn’t with me really. He’d have been a help. But he wasn’t. It was all up to my own ingenuity. The girls were called Wendy and Joan. Wendy was the fair one. She had a look about her that said ‘come-on’ and which promised all kinds of erotic goodies. Joan was quieter and less forward, but she seemed to have some vice-like grip on Wendy. They were both about sixteen, at that silly age where girls still dance with each other. Well they did in the fifties.
Anyway, like I said, I met them at the fair. First they made for the big dipper and jumped straight in a car leaving me to pay the fare. It hadn’t occurred to me before who was going to do the paying, but I quickly got the message. All through the ride they clung on to each other, enjoying it all enormously, and then as soon as we stopped they were off through the fair looking for some other fun thing with me trailing behind like a spare part with a pocketful of money. The trouble was I didn’t have a pocketful of money. And having to pay for three came a bit pricy, after we’d been through the Ferris wheel, the carousel and on the dodgems. I tried every way I knew to break them up, but they just stuck together, forcing me even to go in another car on the dodgems. I paid though. I paid for everything.
When the elbow came I was half ready for it. We were walking along the row of stalls down the side of the dodgems, them a little in front and me tagging on, when I noticed they were slowing down by the place where they sold chips. This was the crunch moment, I knew. I didn’t have any money left. So I just walked on as though I hadn’t noticed, hoping that they’d follow. But they didn’t. When I turned back to look at them they were still waiting there. And then as I watched they just turned, smirked and walked away. I’d been conned.
An hour or so later, while I was still hanging around the fair, too depressed to go home, I noticed them again. This time they were sitting in one of the cars on the whip, whirling round and round and having quite a time, while the operator leaned on the safety bar of their car and chatted. He must have been some chatter, because when the ride ended Joan suddenly got up, looking really annoyed, and stormed off down the steps while the operator jumped in next to Wendy, and put his arm around her as the cars began to move again. He’d separated them in no time at all. They really had a way with girls those blokes on the fair, that was for sure.
And so for a while I stood there, half hidden, watching as the operator, all grease and donkey jacket, and Wendy, so clean in her high heels and cardigan, got better acquainted. And I stayed just long enough to see them disappearing into the crowds at the end of the evening to get up to I didn’t know what.
During those first few weeks the loneliness never lifted; nor the echo of my own silence. Even during the abortive evening with Wendy and Joan I’d hardly spoken, and things didn’t improve. One night I went to a dance, and watched them all quickstepping and foxtrotting hither and thither, but something told me that that wasn’t going to be my route to social acceptance. A couple jiving in a corner did give me hope though, and for weeks after I practised jiving in the privacy of my room, listening to Radio Luxembourg on a second-hand radio I’d picked up, and using the door handle as my partner. I got very fond of that door handle.
On the beach I continued with my job, though the weather was generally poor and the pay hardly enough to keep me an
d my little room together. Still I managed, and by and by I began to collect a few things around me which made it look a little more like home. Even in my lowest moments I’d never really considered going home. That was something I knew I couldn’t face. My mother should have known it, too.
One morning I was playing football with the kids by my pile of deck chairs, and using a couple of them as make-believe goal posts, when I suddenly heard a familiar voice beside me.
‘Could I have a deck chair, young man?’ My mother’s voice seared through me like a razor cutting into live bone. I hadn’t noticed her coming down the steps on to the beach, hadn’t noticed her in that ridiculous straw hat that someone had given her when they came back from a holiday in Madeira. For a second we both looked at each other, totally embarrassed, and then kicking the ball back to the kids, I pulled a deck chair out for her and set it up next to my pile, sitting down in the sand by her feet. She was wearing sandals and no stockings I noticed. It was years since I’d seen her without stockings.
‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘haven’t you got anything to say for yourself?’
To be quite honest, I thought, I haven’t. But I didn’t say that. I just sat there, and ran my hands over the pebbles, and thought about how it would have been a better beach for sun-bathing had there been more sand. It’s strange the way your mind goes off at a tangent whenever you’re faced with an awkward situation.
‘How much is it?’ My mother was fumbling with her purse, not looking at me at all.
I shook my head. ‘No, mum. That’s all right. You don’t have to pay.’