by Ray Connolly
‘What?’ Her eyes bored into mine. ‘I see, dishonest as well are you now? How much is it?’
Trust her to misunderstand my better motives. She took out a handful of change from her purse.
‘What I meant, mum, was that I’d pay for you …’ She wasn’t listening, purposely, I think.
‘Here, it’s a shilling for the morning, isn’t it? I won’t be here long. I can’t afford to idle my life away at the seaside.’
I took the money and dropped it into my money bag without another word. Actually it was one and sixpence for the morning, but I didn’t feel it was the right time to be correcting her. Come to think of it I don’t think there ever had been a right time.
So I sat in the sand and wondered what to say, and made a pattern with pebbles near her feet. It was quite warm and before she said anything else, she began to go through an embarrassing rigmarole of covering every inch of her body which might be lucky enough to be exposed nakedly to the sun. Her hat was pulled down shading her face so that I couldn’t see her eyes, and she covered her knees and ankles under a copy of the Daily Express, which was telling in great detail the meteorological antics of THIS CRAZY SUMMER. Despite the warmth she kept a cardigan pulled round her bare arms, which was a blessing because her flowered dress looked like a horticulturalist’s nightmare. Finally, having equipped herself to brave the elements, she began.
‘I got your postcard …’ There was silence. I’d done as grandad had asked and let her know where I was and what I was doing. She waited for a moment and then carried on. ‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing … why didn’t you …?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. Whatever her question was to have been I didn’t have any answer for it. For a moment her sun hat shifted its angle in surprise, but quickly it settled down again. I couldn’t see her eyes from where I was sitting.
There was a long and awkward pause before she spoke again: ‘You’ve lost weight. Chips for every meal, I suppose.’ True, I thought, but didn’t bother to answer. I couldn’t think of anything to say.
She tried again: ‘This room you live in …’
‘It’s all right,’ I said, cutting her off. I didn’t want her round there poking and prying and criticising. She would have had a fit if she’d seen it.
Then she began to speak slowly and clearly, as though on the train journey down she’d mentally rehearsed what she was going to say to me: ‘Jim … look … well, what I mean is, it’s not too late to come home. You could take your exams in November … of course it would mean that you’d be a year behind, but … well it might give you a bit of time to mature … what I’m saying is if you came home now … well your grandad and me.
‘No.’ I had to stop her. I wasn’t going home. Not now. Not ever. I sensed my mother’s tenseness relaxing, and she settled in her chair more comfortably. Presumably that was what she’d come to say: and having tried and been repulsed she was probably glad the moment was over.
‘Shankwater’s quite a nice resort, isn’t it?’ Incredibly she was looking round the beach, making inconsequential small talk now. ‘I remember we came here once – your dad and me. Just before he was called up. You don’t get many common people here, do you? Your dad liked it because it was quieter than most seaside places.’
I could sense that she was looking at me, but I didn’t dare face her.
‘Look, Jim … I’ve brought you some things I thought you might need,’ she said at last, and shoving her hand into her shopping bag, she pulled out a couple of cartons of biscuits, then some fruit, then a couple of tins of soup.
‘Here …’ For a moment I thought I caught a break in her voice, but I still didn’t look up at her She began to get up, folding up her newspaper again, and fastening her cardigan.
‘Is there anything else you’d like from home?’
I hesitated, uncertain of whether I dare ask for it: ‘Well, there are my records and record player.’
‘Yes … I might have known.’ She didn’t sound reproachful: just resigned She stood up, and for virtually the first time I allowed myself a look at her: her eyes looked puffy, hidden there under her ridiculous hat.
‘Here, you might need this,’ she said, and suddenly putting her hand into her handbag she withdrew several pound notes and shoved them into my hand. I didn’t object, or pretend that I didn’t need the money. I just took it, and didn’t say a word.
‘Well, write to us now and again, won’t you, your grandad and me … well, anyway …’ She never finished what she was going to say, because suddenly in mid-sentence, she gave me a funny look and then turned and walked clumsily back across the beach and up the steps, on to the front, and away and out of sight, never once turning back to look at me.
That night I went to the fair again, but this time by myself. I had a lot of money to spend. And I spent it, racing around on the dodgems, and showing off to myself on the rifle range. I’d never known until then what a good shot I was. I had a good time, by myself, acting out my fantasies of virility and forgetting for a time that I was alone and lonely. And I liked the fair, and its music, where rock and roll played all night, and where I could pretend all I wanted.
Chapter 5
The first girl I ever kissed was called Bertha. She was big, and ugly, but she had an enormous bosom, which reminded me of Boadicea – you know, carrying all before her. I met Bertha in a club called the Jacaranda. Well I’m not sure if I met her, or if she met me, but anyway, it was the end of summer and I’d plucked up my courage to go in, and there was Bertha wallflowering it by the door. I ignored her at first, but after a couple of drinks I realised that she was watching me. Nobody else was, which is just as well because I couldn’t take drink and I’m sure I looked a bit merry. Anyway I’m not sure how it happened but one way or another I found myself offering to walk Bertha home, or maybe she offered to walk me home, and there we were loping silently past the pine woods that came down to the beach at the east end of Shankwater. We hadn’t said anything. Then Bertha suddenly got very tired.
‘Phew, I’m jiggered,’ she said, and sat down on a patch of grass just off the path.
‘Me too,’ I said, and sat next to her.
‘Bit cold, isn’t it?’ said Bertha, moving close to me.
‘Yes,’ I said, suddenly noticing that every time she moved her paper nylon petticoat began a very loud electric rustling.
‘What’s your name?’ said Bertha, rustling closer to me and putting her hand on my knee.
‘Jim,’ I said, listening to this weird cacophony of sound, and looking at the flood of petticoats that seemed to be billowing up under her skirts as though it were alive.
And then because I was a bit drunk and because I couldn’t think of anything else to do I leant across and kissed her just to the left of her mouth, since I didn’t know whether you were meant to kiss on the lips straight away, and she turned, and rustled a bit and looked surprised, and then put two great arms round my neck, and returned the compliment, opening her mouth and working her tongue between my teeth and halfway down my throat. And all the time the rustling of her petticoats got louder. ‘Christ,’ I thought. And then she suddenly lay down, and since her arms were still around my neck she sort of pulled me down with her, and the noise grew louder, and every way I tried to move to free myself from this lunatic tongue which was trying to choke me, the crackling and rustling increased, until in a fit of wild embarrassment and fear I broke loose. And sat up. And said that I thought we ought to be going. And she just lay there and said, with her talented tongue: ‘Why?’ But we went, all the same.
It was the end of September when Terry came to see me. I was in my little room making toast at the time. I had toast every night for my tea.
‘Bugger me,’ his perennial expression was out even before I’d had a proper chance to open the door. I tried not to laugh, nor to show how pleased I was to see him. He was carrying my record player and a carrier bag. ‘Is this all you could afford?’ He looked round my little room
with a summary dismissal. I reckoned he was probably jealous. It had come on a lot since I moved in, and I now had pictures and posters stuck up all over the place, as well as quite a few drawings I’d done myself. I thought it looked rather Bohemian, to be honest. ‘I bet you’re crawling with fleas now.’ It was hard not to like Terry sometimes. He was so negative. So I smiled, and offered him a chair and a piece of my toast, and taking my record player I noticed that the plug was wrong. So I ripped the flex from the plug, straightened the two pieces of wire and poked them into the two-prong plug by my bed. I’d been waiting a month to hear a new Crickets album I’d bought with some of the money my mother had given me. I’d expected her to send Terry along earlier.
I dropped the pick-up on to the record, and listened for those familiar Tex-Mex guitar opening bars.
‘I got three distinctions.’ Terry was breaking into Buddy Holly’s singing.
‘Too much,’ I said, and began to go through the records he’d brought with him in the carrier bag. There were also a few more packets of biscuits and a sealed envelope, no doubt a little monetary gift from my mother. I took it out and without opening it stuck it in my pocket. Terry watched, looking, I think, a bit self-righteous.
‘Eat your toast,’ I said.
‘Why did you do it?’
’Do what?’ I was being deliberately evasive.
‘You know … the river.’
‘Oh … that. I … I wanted to see the books float down the river.’ I laughed a little self-consciously, and wondered whether he’d recognise that I’d pinched a line from East of Eden. He didn’t.
‘You’re looking well,’ he said. I think he’d always envied the fact that I always got browner than he did.
‘Well, now, then, there … everyday, in every way, I get browner and browner and browner, Mr Benedict, sir.’
Terry looked at me with blank non-comprehension. Clearly he hadn’t seen Giant. On the record player Buddy Holly was now singing Maybe Baby. Despite myself, I found myself wondering about school.
‘What did they say when I didn’t turn up for the exams that morning?’
Terry started to laugh. At last we were talking about something we had in common: ‘Oh … yes … they thought you’d gone mad. I said you hadn’t felt well and had gone home. Then when you didn’t turn up in the afternoon either, the head got in his car and went round to see your mum. She blamed me … old Selmes was very upset. You were always his pet. He was banking on you, you know …’
‘Sod him.’
Terry finished off his piece of toast and looked around for some more bread. There wasn’t any.
‘You must be daft, you know,’ he said. ‘You can’t sell deck chairs for the rest of your life.’
He still didn’t understand: poor beggar.
‘Don’t worry about me, Terry. I’ll find something, just you wait and see. I’ll probably end up the first rock-and-roll-British-deck-chair-Green-Shield-stamp-selling-millionaire-tycoon. Or something …’
There was no Indian Summer that September and autumn came early, as troughs of low pressure brought days on end of rain and drizzle. On the beach I built a little shelter out of deck chairs, but it was hardly waterproof and I would go home at night quite soaked. I knew that I would have to look for another job soon, but in the meantime I whiled away the last days of summer sketching away in my little shelter and composing nonsense rhymes to ease the tedium.
I am a lone and loony man
Who lives upon the sand.
When I left home
I thought I’d be
The leader of the band.
Chapter 6
Terry was right: I couldn’t sell deck chairs for the rest of my life, and a couple of weeks later the Shankwater Corporation notified me officially with thanks and regrets, that my services would be no longer required. It didn’t come as any surprise, and within a few days I’d found new employment picking apples in an orchard, perched at the top of a pair of step ladders filling a basket, and being cursed every time I dropped and bruised one. When that finished I moved on to potato picking, which was even more back breaking, and from which I made even less money. Winter jobs didn’t come too easily in Somerset in those days, even though Harold Macmillan was beginning to tell us how we’d never had it so good. What worried me was that if the fifties was a boom period, what were my chances likely to be when I finally made it in the sixties. I hoped all the zip didn’t go out of the economy before I got my share of the goodies.
Navvying on a building site definitely didn’t agree with me, and I was sacked for skyving after four days (much to my relief) but there were three weeks of humiliation at the National Assistance Board before the Labour Exchange fixed me up with a job more to my liking – waiter in a coffee bar.
The El Cabino was, I’m sure, quite the grandest place in Shankwater. During the day retired gentlefolk would come and nibble at gateaux and say they shouldn’t because of their figures, as they gorged themselves. Then in the evening, sometimes, the sports car brigade would turn up, and talk about rugger, and admire their cavalry twills in the reflection from the aquarium which ran all the way along one wall. In its way it was quite a snobby place really (in the off-season anyway) because I noticed we never got any of what the manager called the ‘local riff-raff’ in. Probably they thought twice about paying two and sixpence for a coffee, and all that Hawaian music was probably chosen purposely to keep the teds out. Mr Sukey, the manager, wanted cravats not boot-lace ties in his establishment.
In its way the El Cabino did have charm, though. Today they’d call it fifties kitsch but then it was trendy; gold fish swimming about the aquarium, cockatoos and parrots squawking in an aviary near the door and mock-fishermen’s nets hung low from the ceiling to remind us that we were by the seaside, and indeed not thirty yards from the pier.
Mr Sukey was okay, too. When I’d first gone to work for him he’d suggested I get my hair cut, and even given me the money and told me where to go to get it styled properly, but apart from that he never criticised anything I did. He was divorced and he liked to have someone to talk to. He said he could trust me to look after his coffee bar, which he could, and that he was grateful for finding me. He also paid me pretty well for the few things I had to do, and I was welcome to all the chocolate gateau and omelettes I could eat. I seemed to have dropped on for once, which was nice, because I’d spent Christmas shivering by myself in my bed-sitter listening to the Queen’s speech on the radio and cooking sausages on the gas ring.
I enjoyed working at the El Cabino, but you could hardly say we were madly busy. Clearly Mr Sukey made his profit in the summer because hardly anyone came in during the off-season, and there was only him and me running it – him doing the occasional cooking, and me the waiting and washing up. In between chores it became an obsession with me to teach the cockatoo to talk. I would stand for ages repeating simple words with my mouth pushed right up against his cage, but he never responded. It used to amuse Mr Sukey.
‘You keep playing with that cockatoo and you’ll go blind,’ he said time and again. That was his little joke. He’d just said it one night about closing time when the door opened and this … this sort of incredibly sexy girl walked in. She was blonde, and breasty, and much more sophisticated than most girls who lived in Shankwater, and she wore her hair in a French pleat.
‘Any chance of a meal?’ Her voice was husky, the way that actresses talk when they’re trying to sound sexy.
Normally I’d have said ‘Sorry, nothing doing’. I wasn’t one for working overtime, but … well, I thought … you never know …
‘Maybe a coffee, that’s all, I’m afraid,’ I said, glancing over my shoulder to see if Mr Sukey was looking. I knew he was ready to go himself.
‘Thanks.’
She came in, clicking past the tiny tables in her high heels, and sat down next to the aquarium. I dashed into the kitchen and raced back with a coffee. There was something about the way she looked at me that seemed to be giving m
e green light signals. She couldn’t fancy me, I thought.
‘Worked here long?’ she said as I served her a coffee.
‘Oh … you know … a couple of months.’ I paused. Somehow I had to keep this conversation going. ‘What do you do?’
‘I’m a demonstrator.’ There was something about the way she said that word demonstrator that I can’t quite define. It sort of oozed out from somewhere between her larynx and her tonsils, and I swear that as she said it her bosom rose and fell, settling on the edge of the table. At that moment Mr Sukey decided to turn the lights out, and further conversation was killed.
‘That’s it. We’re closed.’ I gestured hopelessly, and while she drank the rest of her coffee I raced back into the kitchen and changing from my white jacket into my coat I was back at the door just as she was about to leave. I didn’t know, but I had a feeling, that she was deliberately going slowly to give me time to catch up. As I reached the door Mr Sukey reappeared from the kitchen holding the night’s taking.
‘It’s raining. Can I give you a lift anywhere?’ She was smiling at me. I turned and looked towards Mr Sukey, he was smiling to himself. Seeing me looking, he winked.
‘Thanks,’ I said, and hurrying out we ran across the pavement towards her green Morris Minor. Not only had I been picked up by a beautiful blonde. But she had her own car. Christ!
The beautiful blonde was called Vivien, and I saw her twice after that. The first night she just took me home, and we talked for a bit before I went in, wondering whether I should have tried to kiss her goodnight, but deciding that if I’d tried and been rejected I’d have made a right fool of myself. She told me she was from Ealing in London and she was based in Shankwater while she toured Somerset demonstrating a new kind of baby’s high chair. She didn’t look at all to me like the kind of girl who would want to know anything at all about babies.
Then she came in again the next night; once more it was just as we were closing and again she offered to take me home. But this time she went the wrong way, by mistake, and ended up having to turn round in a field. She kept nudging me and laughing at her own silliness, and I wondered whether she was hinting. But I was too afraid to try anything on, so eventually she got out of the field and drove me home, pulling up outside my house, turning off the engine, and leaning with her head back on the seat, her face half turned towards me. My stomach was in knots of indecision. I mean, was she just being friendly, or was I expected to make some move towards her. The gap between her face and mine seemed like miles. How could I accidentally brush up against her without her thinking it was some kind of mad rapist’s assault?