A Start in Life

Part Two

It is a common belief, after being hurt by them, that simple people are not so much wise as cunning. This is wrong. They are neither. They have the knack of becoming united with their souls at certain inspired times, that’s all. Even then, they do not know what harm they have done. It is like a snake that has poison available when it is forced to strike. A simple person never strikes unless he has to, for he is basically lazy. Thus when he is driven to strike he uses far more venom than necessary because he was dragged unwillingly out of his simplicity and sloth which is, in effect, laziness. Something like this was in my mind when I remembered Miss Bolsover’s view of me as simple. Though it should have flattered me, and in some ways did, I could never forgive her for it. Thus I felt no blame, as I drove towards Grantham, at having left her for good. Claudine at least knew better than to think I was strong and simple, and for that reason it was rather more difficult to get her out of my mind.

But I was never a victim of too much thought, at least not to the extent that it did me any good, so I lit a cigar and got the pedal down at Radcliffe by-pass, until my speed was touching fifty, a fair lick as far as I was concerned. There was no reason for hurrying. A slight rain spat down, and my wipers tackled it sluggishly as if the batteries had been low and still weren’t charging properly. The engine was healthy, however, so I trundled on, beginning to make a road map of England under my wheels — though the winter didn’t seem too good a time for it, and now that I was on my way I didn’t love my freedom as I’d thought I would. In fact I began to feel a bit too much on my own, not only as if I didn’t know where I was going (which was true) but also as if I didn’t know where I had come from (which was false). But, I told myself, you can’t make a move like this without feeling as if a compass needle is struggling to find a way out of your guts. It would have been more natural if I had stolen the car and was making a getaway. There would have been some point in it then, but unfortunately I hadn’t been brought up to be a thief, so I couldn’t have the dubious benefit of that And if I’d make-believed it to be true, just to get a kick out of going away, it would have been telling lies, and I hadn’t been reared to be a liar either, at least not to myself. So nothing was on my side except bleak reality, and for the moment I had to make do with that.

I felt better with Grantham left behind and me dipping south along the Great North Road. The land was black and bleak and waterlogged, and the tarmac cluttered with lorries so that I got scared yellow overtaking with hardly the speed or charge to do so, which made me realize for the first time that my cronky old car wasn’t exactly the high-powered javelin I’d supposed it to be at first, out of heartfelt affection for it. I told myself though, that I mustn’t lose faith in my piece of machinery, otherwise it might be tempted not to do its best, or even let me down if I got discouraged without real cause.

A heavier rain drifted in from the Fens, and one or two drops came through the makeshift patches in the roof, though not enough as yet to have me worried. But I swore at having forgotten the roll of sticky paper. Against the roadside stood a solitary figure in a cap and mackintosh, a small case at his feet. He lifted his thumb, so I drew in and stopped, forgetting to flash my indicators. A lorry close behind, weighing several thousand tons, pressed its horns in rage, making such a noise that the top of my head nearly unscrewed itself. The man smiled: ‘He’s in a bit of a hurry. They always are, though.’

‘The bastard,’ I said. ‘Where are you going?’

He was about thirty, tall and thin, gnarled hands as he put them on my window. ‘South.’

I liked his succinctness. ‘So am I. Get in if you like.’

‘I will,’ he said, ‘if you don’t mind.’

‘My name’s Peter Wolf,’ I said, as he slammed the door so I thought it would drop off.

‘Likewise,’ he said.

‘What do you mean,’ I asked, ‘likewise?’

‘Mine’s Bill Straw,’ he said, with the most obvious idiot grin I’d ever seen from someone who was plainly alert and all there. I was nervous with another person in the car, in case I had an accident, so till I got used to him, I drove like a man of sixty-five who’d been a careful saver all his life. ‘Come far?’ he asked.

‘Derby,’ I said. ‘You?’

‘Leeds. Business or pleasure?’

‘Business,’ I told him. ‘I work for an insurance firm. Just spent three days in Derby wrapping up a contract for Rolls-Royce. Hell of a job. Cigarette?’

‘Please. Thanks. Going down to look for work, myself.’

‘What do you do?’

‘Anything,’ he told me cheerfully. ‘Just done two years as an interior decorator. That’s why I’m so pale. It’s a lousy job among all that paint. Don’t know what I’ll do in London. It’s a big place.’

I nodded. ‘You can say that for it.’ The one time I had been was on a school trip as a kid of twelve, when I’d seen Buckingham Palace (from the outside) and the Crown Jewels at the Tower of London (also from the outside). ‘There’s plenty of work there.’

‘There’s work anywhere,’ he said with a glum wisdom, ‘and that’s a fact. But I’m going south because it’s healthier. Can’t this grim bus go any quicker?’

‘If you’re in that much of a hurry,’ I said, ‘get out and walk. ’Appen you’ll pick up a Bentley to get you there for lunch.’

‘Come off it,’ he laughed. ‘I wain’t desert you.’

‘Take your pick. I’ll be stopping for a cup of tea and a swiss pudding soon.’

‘I could do with a bite as well,’ he said, in such a way that I knew he hadn’t got the money to pay for it.

The transport café was full, with a line of men at the counter. I felt their sarky looks at my collar and tie and best grey suit, as if I had no right to be getting in their way, so I handed Bill Straw half a crown and said: ‘Get two teas and two cakes,’ while I sat at a table and waited. There was a Daily Mirror a foot from my hand, and I reached for it to read the front page, but a huge driver coming back from the counter with his breakfast of eggs, chips, sausages, bacon, beans, tomatoes, fritters, and fried bread bawled out: ‘If you want a paper, buy one, mate, like I have to.’

He loomed over me. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘keep your shirt on.’ I stood up, as tall as he was, though not quite as meaty. ‘Nobody’s trying to make off with your paper. I was moving it out of the way so’s I could have somewhere to put my tea.’

He recognized my Nottingham accent: ‘I just thought you was one of them posh bleeders trying to save threepence.’

‘Not me,’ I said, as he chopped and scooped at his breakfast. Bill Straw came back and sat by chance where I could get a better look at him. ‘You didn’t sound much like an insurance nob to me just then,’ he said, ‘when you stood up to that pansy lorry driver.’

‘Keep your trap shut, for Christ’s sake, or he’ll have you on toast.’

‘He won’t,’ Bill said. ‘I’ll carve him up. I’ve done it before and I’ll do it now.’ I believed him. His face was thin, as though he’d fought with a razor now and again in his life to get what he wanted. Yet he had a few days’ growth of beard, and I thought he should use one at his own face to start with. His suit was threadbare in all places at once, and his filthy shirt was drawn together with a tie so old that it had a hole in the front. ‘Good of you to treat me,’ he said. ‘First bite since yesterday.’

I pushed another half-crown across: ‘Get something else, then.’

He jumped up: ‘I shan’t forget this,’ and almost ran to the front of the queue, so that I expected to see him get churned into little pieces and spat out through the windows. But he bustled at the nearest men, and gave them a strong sort of funny look, and it must have made things all right for him, because within minutes he was back with two eggs on fried bread which he scoffed almost before the plate was down. ‘You’re number one,’ he said. ‘You might not know it, but you’ve saved my life. It’s the turning point.’

‘Stow it,’ I said. ‘Forget it.’

‘I shan’t,’ he said. ‘I never will. You’re the good sort, I know, who’d like me to forget it, but I wain’t. Never.’

I was surprised at the colour it put into his cheeks, and offered a fag to complete his meal. ‘You don’t seem to have earned much as a painter and decorator.’

‘Maybe I wasn’t doing that sort of work at all,’ he smiled. ‘When we’re on the road again I’ll tell you a story. It’s so bloody long it’ll keep us going to Timbuctoo, never mind London.’

From outside came the sound of a lorry about to drive off, and under the noise of its engine I heard the ripping of tin and a crunch of gravel or glass. Someone at the counter said: ‘There goes Mad Bert. I expect he’s chipped somebody’s wagon.’

A man went to have a look, and came back laughing, while Mad Bert in the meantime seemed to have gone on his merry way towards Doncaster. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘it’s only a little black Popular. He’s taken the front bumper off, dented the side, and smashed the lamp. I expect Bert’s all right though.’

I jumped up and went outside, all eyes staring me through the door. The rain blinded and choked me. Apart from anything else I wondered why I’d chosen today to start on my travels. It was even worse than had been reported with such poker-faced glee. The left back wheel had been buckled, its tyre flattened and ripped.

Bill Straw followed me out. ‘The destructive bastard. Got a spare wheel?’ I nodded. ‘Let’s change it then,’ he said. ‘I’ll not desert you, don’t worry. You looked after me, now I’ll help you. It ain’t so bad. She’ll go like a bomb again.’ He bent down and pulled the bodywork straight so that the fresh wheel wouldn’t catch on it. The meal seemed to have given him strength, and I was glad of that at least.

In ten minutes we had the new wheel on. ‘The other’s buckled,’ he said. ‘You might as well throw it away. Ain’t worth a light.’ I agreed, and he bowled it towards a fence and left it there.

‘Let’s have some more tea,’ I said when he got back. ‘Maybe we’ll find out the name of the bandit who did it.’ There was a sharp pain in my heart, and tears mingled with rain under my eyes. No one knew who Mad Bert was, or said they didn’t, so after throwing a few curses over our shoulders we humped out. ‘That’s the solidarity of the working-class,’ Bill muttered. ‘Very strong among lorry drivers.’

‘Well, fuck it,’ I said, ‘we’re working-class, aren’t we?’

‘Not at a time like this, cock.’

In spite of its fearful wounds I felt a swamp of affection for my car as we went down the road. I was in a state of shock from my first automobile accident. All I wanted was peace and quiet, and didn’t much fancy any talk from my passenger. In fact I was beginning to wish I’d never picked him up, and made up my mind that there’d be no more lifts from then on. I was brooding so badly that I almost got to blaming him for what had happened, till I realized how cranky this was, and laughed. ‘What’s up?’ he asked.

‘We’re on our way,’ I told him. ‘The rain’s packing in. It’s light over Stamford.’

‘We could do with it. But what’s that smoke coming out of your headlamp?’ Through the drizzle it was like a gnarled finger going a little way into the air, as if diffident about the prospect of finding God’s arse. ‘What now?’ I cried.

‘Pull in when you can, and I’ll fix it. I’m a dab-hand when it comes to cars.’ His voice had such conviction, such solemn wisdom, that he sounded as if he’d lived for three hundred years and knew everything. ‘When I stopped on a grass verge he jumped to the front of the car and peered into the lamp. ‘Switch off,’ he shouted. ‘Now put your lights on. Put them off. Now on. Off. On. Off. On. No. it’s no good.’

‘What is it then?’ I wanted to know.

‘Don’t worry. You’ll reach London today, as long as we get there before lighting-up time.’ He was wrestling with the whole headlamp, as if it had threatened to come out and do for him. His two hands gripped it, a sort of spiteful look now on his face.

‘Leave it,’ I cried, getting out. ‘Stop it.’

He fell back with it in his hand and, as if it could still sting, threw it with mighty strength clean over a hedge.

‘That wasn’t bloody-well necessary.’

‘Didn’t I say I knew about cars? Listen, I was a garage mechanic for three years. All the wires in that lamp had fused. You’d have had a fire on your hands if it’d bin left in. Got a fire extinguisher on board? Of course you bloody-well haven’t. I’m not stupid, so don’t think so.’

‘Keep your shirt on,’ I said, beaten for the moment. ‘Let’s get going.’

True to its promise, there was sun beyond Stamford, and we both became more friendly at the feel of it through the windscreen. ‘I’ll get on with my story,’ said Bill.

‘I’m listening,’ I said, skating around a lorry and feeling for a moment as if neither of us would come out of it alive. But Bill hadn’t shown a tremor, seemed to have absolute faith in my ability to get him to London. I began to have faith too, in him, glad now that I’d picked him up, in spite of the terrible (though necessary, I had to suppose) piece of brute surgery on my brand-new second-hand car.

My name isn’t really Bill Straw,’ he said, ‘but don’t let that bother you. What’s in a name, anyway? I was born in Worksop thirty-seven years ago. My old man was a collier at the pit, and a weedy little get he looked as well, though he was hard enough for the job, but not so hard that he didn’t die of dust on the windpipe when I was ten. I remember going with my mother to the Co-op to get fitted up with a black suit, the first one, and I’d have been proud of it if I hadn’t been up to my neck in salt tears for my father. My two brothers and a sister followed Mother out of that shop like a gaggle of black crows, and next day we went to the cemetery, with fifty-odd colliers who were mates of the old man. It was a sunny day in September, and I remember being shocked and feeling sick because I’d always been told that most people that died, died at the end of winter, and I thought God had done this to my old man out of spite, and from then on I told myself I’d have nothing to do with Him. Kid’s talk, because it don’t matter whether you think about Him or not. Makes no difference, so you might just as well set your brain on to other things if you’ve got any brain at all.

‘At school I didn’t sing the hymns, just stood there with my lips firm, and though I got the strap for it I still didn’t sing, not bloody me. I got it again and again, but I never gave in. The teacher complained to my mother about it, and she asked me to be a good lad and do as I was told, if not for her sake, then for my father’s sake. That did it. I was more determined then not to give in, and they could do eff-all about it. It’s no use mincing matters. We starved for the next ten years. The only time I didn’t was when I got sent to an approved school for nicking a bike lamp. I wanted to go round the dark streets at night, and shine it into the sky. I must have been loopy to want to do a thing like that. Anyway, I went into a shop and took it from the counter, but the shopkeeper had a little glass panel in his cubby-hole door so that he could see anybody who came in. I was caught halfway down the street, and the police were called. So for a couple of years I got regular meals, even though they weren’t much cop, and when I came home at fourteen I’d grown tall and well set up. I made up my mind never to be so stupid again as to get sent away.

‘I got a job, and for fifty hours a week in a shop took home eleven shillings on Saturday night. I won’t go into whether it was worth it or not, because I’m trying to tell you how I come to be in your car, not complain about my life. Mother took in collier’s washing, and between us we kept the house going. Though I’d vowed never to nick anything again, I got into trouble a few years later. My youngest brother was still at school, and one day he came home with marks all over him where the teacher had pasted him. If we’d got a doctor and a lawyer on to our side we could have had this teacher thrown out on his arse — though I don’t think so, somehow. You see, I don’t believe in justice. I’d known him in my day as being a cruel bastard, but now I saw what he’d done to my own brother. Peter was the youngest of us, who’d hardly known his father, and for this reason we tried to make life easier for him than it was for us. He was also the weakest, and the brightest. A bit cheeky now and again, because perhaps he was spoiled, though he still had a hard enough life. Mother went to see the headmaster, but he shouted at her to leave the education of children to them, and get on with her own work. Something along those lines. You can imagine. Next day I left my job early and waited until that teacher came out of school. I caught him near the gates, and told him I was Peter’s brother. He pushed me aside. In front of a lot of the kids I smashed him in the chops, knocking him against the wall. I hit him twice before he got over the shock and came back at me. I went a bit potty, and in spite of his cracks (he was strong as well) I split his eyes and lips, and made enough of a mess before the police arrived and dragged me clear. You can imagine what happened.

‘The magistrate said I was a dangerous creature — that was the word he used — who ought to be put away from decent society — meaning that schoolteacher, I suppose. He said he’d have sent me to prison if I’d been old enough, but that under the circumstances, Borstal would have to do. I said nothing to all this. What was the use? I’d done the best I could to get my brother’s own back, but at the same time I had no use for revenge. My bitterness sank to the bottom like sand in a bucket of water, and I went into Borstal like a saint. I was a good lad, and gave no bother. Once my storm of temper was over I wanted peace to come back on me. I went through it like a zombie, which is the nearest thing to saying that I was let loose on the world, at the end of three years, a reformed character. That Borstal was a tough place, though. You had to fend for yourself, even if you wanted to get through it as easily as you could. But it didn’t seem too hard to me, I must admit. We all boasted as much as our imaginations let us. The stupid ones would claim that their brother was a racing driver or a champion jockey, but I used to entertain them with stories about gangs of young colliers from Worksop and Retford, who’d go to a lonely place in Sherwood Forest on Saturday afternoon to have fights with razors and bottles, just to pass the time, I said. I told them that even though I was young I’d been elected to the ranks of the Worksop Choppers because of my prowess at the pit face (where I’d never worked). They believed me, I don’t know why, and these stories made them wary of me when it came to persecution. They never knew when I wouldn’t go as berserk as a Worksop Chopper, and have at them in such a way that a few would bleed to death before they could overpower me. That didn’t save me from getting mixed up in a few midnight scuffles, but I soon learned that as long as you go on hurting somebody, then they can’t hurt you. If you stop, expect it, get out of the way, jump clear, mate.

‘In this frame of mind I came out of Borstal. Being set free made me feel like a piece of straw blown about in the wind. On the way home I stopped in Worksop market and pinched a big tin of pineapple chunks so that we could celebrate. It was a drizzly evening, but I found the house empty, because Mother had gone to see her sister, and had mis-read the date in my letter. I got in by the scullery window, made a good fire and sat down to wait. I looked at the tin of chunks in the middle of the table, my only contribution to the household in three years. To stop myself crying at how hard so many people in the world were done by, I got a tin-opener and took the top right off. They were well-packed, sweet fruit that all of us could enjoy. Pineapple chunks had always been a luxury, even though they did taste like turnips and sugar. I emptied them into a basin and put it in the cupboard. The circular tin-top had come off so neatly it looked like a razor, and I turned it round, running the ball of my thumb along it. I thought: why don’t I cut my throat so that that will be that? Being nineteen I felt I’d had enough, decided that I was good to no one and no good to myself. It was possible to do it, but when I thought that if I didn’t do it then, I would never do it, I lost heart and didn’t do it. It would make more trouble for my mother and the others, and none for myself. That was what stopped me, not because I hadn’t got the nerve. I wanted to do it because it seemed the only sensible thing. I’d ever thought of, but to be sensible like that you needed to be the most selfish bastard in the world. The others came back an hour later, and they were so happy to see me, you’d have thought all their troubles were over now that I was in the house again.

‘It was hard to get a job, just out of Borstal. I tried till my eyes went beady at the newspaper columns, and my legs rickety with walking. What references had I got to flash before their Bible-spiked noses? Still, there are some good souls in the world, and such a person was the rich old man who wanted a bloke to push him about in his wheelchair. When I called at his big house for the job he was sitting in the garden, and one of his servants showed me out there. A gramophone record was playing and I had to stand a couple of minutes till it finished, then, out of the goodness of my heart because he couldn’t reach, and not because I was sucking up to him, I lifted the gramophone head and stopped it. “I’ve had twenty young fellows here so far,” he said, “and I’m tired of it. Any special qualifications?”

‘“No sir,” I told him. “I’m fresh out of Borstal.” He was eighty years of age, and so shrunken and small that when he burst out laughing I thought he’d fall to pieces. I hoped he would, then I could blow away the dust and go on with my search. But there was something about him that toned down my hatred, specially when he said: “I’ll take you on, then. When can you start?”

‘Because of my shabby clothes I was led off by the butler who showed me a row of uniforms upstairs, and by luck we found one that fitted. It wasn’t the best sort of work, but I got thirty bob a week, as well as my keep, which wasn’t bad at that time of day. For the first time in my life I not only had a room of my own, small as it was, and right under the roof, but also the chauffeur gave me an hour’s driving every afternoon while the old man took his sleep. On my half-day off I went home, and gave all the money I earned to my mother, except a bob or two for fags. It wasn’t the sort of job you could ever boast about in Borstal, but at least it kept me alive, and rigged my brothers and sister in good clothes from time to time.

‘The man’s name was Percy Whaplode, and he owned a lot of land with farms on top and endless coalmines underneath. As I pushed him for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon around his garden and park he’d chat to me on the beauties of life, but mostly as if I weren’t there, cataloguing what he was going to miss when his head finally hit the tin lid. Often he really did talk to people he knew, or had known, but who weren’t there, or were no longer there. If they could have heard him they’d have been shocked, I can tell you, and many a time I was so doubled up with trying not to laugh at his fanciful language that I was frozen at the handle and not able to push. Now and again he’d speak to his two sons who’d been killed in the Great War, telling them how they ought to do their lessons, and study well when they got to university. Or he’d tell them, as I pushed him along the path by a stream, how good it would be for him and their mother (already dead) when they got married and had children of their own. Sometimes his stepbrother came to see him from Yorkshire. He was twenty years younger, and always shouted at poor old Percy if he wasn’t able to hear him properly.

‘When it rained Percy had to stay inside, and I’d push him for half an hour up and down the ground-floor corridors, because he couldn’t bear to be still. For the rest of the time he got me to read to him, and this was torture at first because he’d curse and shout and all but crack me with his stick if I was too slow or made a mistake. But sometimes he could be patient, and that helped, so that after a month or two I got to be a good reader, since it seemed to rain every other bloody day. All in all, we were quite friendly, and in any case I was forced to take his banter in good part because he was paying me for it. The chauffeur said he hadn’t seen Percy in such frequent good moods for years, and hinted that maybe he’d leave me a few quid in his will if I stuck at it. I took this as a joke, a bloody good one on the chauffeur’s part and a poor one on mine. Money would never come to me like that. I’d either have to earn it, or steal it, and I didn’t yet know which was the harder way.

‘I grew to feel at home there, wallowing in the easy hours and comparatively mild work. The housekeeper and the chauffeur were actually quite kind to me, talked to me from time to time like a human being, and fed me like a turkey-cock. My driving lessons went on so well that during my time at that job I was able to get a licence, paid for by the house. The chauffeur took Mr Whaplode for a drive every week around the Dukeries, and it was said that I might one day have a go at this, as if it were the greatest honour I could ever hope for.

‘The housekeeper’s name was Audrey Beacon, a plump woman pushing forty who came from some place near Chesterfield. She dressed plain in her job, but was good enough looking for the chauffeur, Fred Cresswell, to claim having had her a time or two, though I didn’t altogether believe him because she’d got the sort of mouth and seemed the kind of person who wouldn’t have let him go so easily. He claimed she wasn’t bad, except that there was a bit too much meat to plough through before you got to it. It took me some time to realize why she was feeding me up so well. One afternoon when I was lounging in the kitchen she came up behind and pressed her topwork into my back. I’d had one or two girls on the tumble, but nothing as grown up as this. She was kissing me at the shoulder blades, even though my shirt was on, and I was burning so much I daren’t turn round. When I did, I looked into her grey eyes, and put my arms about her shoulders. We got to kissing, and before anybody could come in and part us she told me to come to her room that night. I must have looked at her gone out at this, but she said, sharp: “You know where it is, don’t you?”

‘To cut a long story short, if she was a meal (and she was, I can tell you) I had a slap-up feed from it, because every time the plate emptied it was filled up again. It went on for months, so as far as that job went there was nothing lacking in it. What more could a young chap want? I had work, money, food, love, and shelter. I swear blind I’ve never had it so good since. And yet, I can’t think now how it was possible, but I got tired of her. From one day to the next I just didn’t go to her room. Something happened to me, and I don’t know what it was. I just closed up against her. I started going to Worksop more often, just to call home for half an hour in the evening. I’d have a pint at some pub, or a cup of tea somewhere, then walk the few miles back and crash into bed. I didn’t even meet another girl. Audrey tried to get me out of my mood, but found it was more solid than that, so she turned against me, and wouldn’t rest till she got me into trouble and saw the back of me.

‘This was difficult, because there was nothing in which she could fault me. I was, as they say, a man of sober habits who even, by now, liked walking around the house and looking at Percy’s paintings and sometimes dipping into his library when I got the chance. The old man was fond of dogs, and had a few slouching idly around the house. Now and again a red setter would follow us on our walks. Dogs are only valuable if they’re useful, but I had nothing special against them, even so. For his eighty-first birthday one of his great-grandchildren (no doubt thinking about his position in the will) sent him a Yorkshire terrier. The old man shed tears at this tender thought, and considered the dog to be his greatest treasure. In actual fact it was a bloody nuisance. It ran about and pissed all over everywhere and, worse still, took a strong dislike to me. It’s hard to say why, because I left it alone, and never so much as looked when it barked at me (and backed away) as I walked through the house to collect Percy for his outing.

‘One day it snapped at my ankle, and I thought: this has got to stop. I did nothing, but just walked on. Then I felt a rip at my flesh. Audrey Beacon was on her way by, but the pain was so sharp I let out a bloody good kick. I should have been man enough to ignore it, or just laugh, but I lost control, and the kick got it right on the arse. In fact the dog went skidding three-quarters of the way back up the corridor where it had come from. I suppose this might have been all right, but unluckily it let out a great yelp that echoed through the house. It was quite close to the room Whaplode was in. His deafness came and went, and this time he heard everything as clear as a bell. He called out as if he’d been stabbed, and I went in to see what was the matter. “The dog,” he cried. “What’s happened?”

‘I told him that I’d accidently stepped on it in passing, but he didn’t believe me, pulled the bell and went on roaring for the others. He threatened to sack everybody if he didn’t get to the bottom of it, but Audrey Beacon, as cool as a stone at the bottom of a stream, told him all she had seen. So I was ordered off the premises, Percy holding his pet dog, tears in his pot-eyes that didn’t look at me at all. I showed him the teeth marks on my leg and the rip in my trousers, but it made no difference. I walked from the place with four pounds in my pocket, on the lookout for something else to do.

‘I picked yesterday’s newspaper out of a litterbox and noticed that the war had started. It didn’t take me long to get a job. Luckily my driving licence came in handy because I got van work taking bread from a bakery to shops in the town. My family never wanted for it, because I dropped three or four prime loaves there every morning on my way by. The trouble was that I didn’t think. It still is, but my experience of the last few years has taught me a lot. The world’s got no use for people who don’t think. If you can’t think, then you can never be like they want you to be, and that’s no good, either for you or them. Maybe I’ll be able to steer a course between the two, and if I can do that, there might be no object to what I can get out of my life — in spite of myself.’

The sun warmed us. While he talked we smoked through my supply of fags. It was like listening to the radio, which I didn’t have because I’d left it with my mother. The car cruised at about forty, and Stamford was right behind. The morning was getting to its hind legs, and I was well and truly on my way, snapping the strings and ribbons one by one. I was glad they stretched such a long distance out with me, because as they broke each strand flew right back, giving the impression of being severed for ever. During the break in Bill Straw’s story, when he seemed to be gathering himself to tell more of it, which would no doubt increase the lines of his worried face because he was nearer to the end, I brooded on Claudine and how I still loved her. After all, she was going to have my child, and I decided to write a long and passionate letter when I got to London. I smiled at the thought that everything was going according to plan, the only trouble being I didn’t know whose plan it was, and I got brooding on this when suddenly the radiator blew up.

‘Pull in,’ Bill Straw shouted. I did so but, jumping out before him, lifted the bonnet to see how my lady did. ‘You’ve got no water,’ he said. ‘Burned up. Not a drop. Don’t you know the first thing about cars?’

‘She was full a couple of days ago,’ I said.

He had a hand clasped to his face: ‘Something’s wrong, then.’

‘Why don’t you ever tell me a bit of good news?’

‘I will when I’ve got some. You walk down the road for some water, and I’ll wait here,’ he said. ‘Just give me a fag to keep me company.’ I gave him the last out of my packet and set off.

After about a quarter of a mile a lorry passed me, and Bill Straw was waving and laughing from the cab. Then it was out of sight. That’s the last of him, I thought. Now I shan’t hear the end of his story. He’ll be in London soon, at that rate. Easy come, easy go. I suppose that’s what life is like on the road.

There was neither house nor filling station for another half-hour. I walked quickly, and the least exertion made me sweat, which was why I’d never taken to hard work, because I didn’t like to sweat. Not only did it smell, but it made me afraid that some vital part of me might melt away, if it ran too freely. But after a while walking became pleasant. I relaxed and slowed my pace, in spite of traffic pounding a few feet from my right elbow. Between such noise I heard birds and smelled the whiff of fields, and knew how free one might feel if there was no car to anchor your heart to its engine.

In the distance I saw someone walking towards me, and I would ask him where I could get water for my car. The face was familiar as he came close, and then I saw that it was Bill Straw carrying a jerrycan of water. ‘I thought you needed a walk,’ he said. ‘It’s no use sitting cramped up in that driving position for six or seven hours without stretching your legs. Makes you safer at the wheel. And it’s good for the liver. Come on, let’s water our horsepower.’

We walked back together. ‘I suppose you thought I’d left you?’ he said with a laugh, holding up twenty Player’s. ‘Here, have a fag to keep you company! I took them from the counter when his eyes were elsewhere. Don’t feel bad about it. You can pay him for ’em when we pass. I promised to take the can back, anyway. A very obliging bloke. If you need petrol we ought to buy a few gallons off him, just to show willing.’

‘You have everything buttoned up.’

‘Not yet,’ he said, alluding to something in his own mind, ‘but I shall have soon.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Ask me in three months.’

‘Christ,’ I said, ‘where do you suppose we’ll be in three months?’

‘Down among the tadpoles, for all I know. Where do you expect to be?’

‘I don’t know. I’m on my own.’

‘I thought you said you was an insurance bloke,’ he said. ‘Not that I believed you, with a car like that.’

‘I’ll tell you all about it,’ I said, ‘when you’ve finished your story.’

‘I’ll soon do that, when we get to that bloody car. Still, I’ll see it through, though it’s cutting hours off my life.’

I poured water into the radiator, screwed back the cap, and started up. Steam rose from the front, but I thought this was the residue of the previous heat, though Bill in his way of facing the truth with the eye-teeth of reality said that this wasn’t possible, because it could have cooled twenty times over while we’d gone for the water. By the time we reached the garage the radiator was empty again. Discouragement came easy to me, and I could have wept as I looked at it, wondering whether I shouldn’t abandon the car and tramp to the nearest railway station. I could be back home in a few hours. ‘You can if you like,’ said Bill Straw when I mentioned it. ‘But what’s the point? It’s such a tiny setback.’

‘How bloody tiny is it though?’

He held out his hand: ‘Give me five bob — no, make it ten — and I’ll settle everything.’ I’d taken to him, bonded by his story, and the look of self-assurance that came on to his face whenever there was an emergency — which was beginning to mean all the time. Yet also, in my black and superstitious way, I couldn’t help wondering whether there’d be an emergency at all if he weren’t with me. But I gave him ten bob. ‘See what you can do then.’

He left me leaning against the car with the caution not to press too hard in case I fell through it. He came back with the jerrycan full of water, which he’d bought from the proprietor, as well as a roll of sticky tape, and a packet of chewing-gum. This last we masticated rapidly, its foul mint taking away the fag-smoke and fresh-air taste patiently built up since leaving home. ‘Give it all to me,’ he said, which I was glad to do. He squelched it into a plaster, then got down to the radiator, plugging the hole and reinforcing it with tape. ‘That’ll hold for a while,’ he said, standing up to fill the radiator. ‘Meanwhile, we’ll be living on a diet of chewing-gum till we hit London. It’s good for the digestion, anyway, if you treat us to a dinner in half an hour.’

‘I’ll be sure to,’ I said, and we set out once more.

He lit two fags and passed one over, before going on with his story: ‘One day I stopped my bread van near a park and fed half of my load to the birds and ducks. I wasn’t as stupid as you imagine, because I’d already taken my daily quota home, and enough for the next few days, as well, if my mother wrapped most of it in tea towels as I’d asked her to do. Then I drove back to the office and told them I was packing the job in. When the manager said he’d fetch the police I laughed in his face. He thought I was a bit cracked, so gave me my wages less a quid for the loaves I’d fed to the birds and fishes. It was an awful winter, snow and ice piled everywhere, and I can’t see anything starve.

‘I went from one job to another, till I was called up into the Army. This wasn’t as bad as I’d expected, after the training, because I was posted to be a driver at a camp in Yorkshire. Much of my two bob a day went to my mother as a sort of pension, but I begrudged it a bit now because I needed more to smoke. I had a night shift for a week, then a day shift, for my job was taking a lorry-load of rations to a special signals camp a few miles from the main base. It was regular, and it was easy. One day I was thumbed for a lift by a corporal, who asked me to take him on to the signals depot. He was short and fat, and had wavy hair spreading from a parting down the middle of his head. He’d been a wireless operator in the Merchant Navy, but had left it and joined the Army because he was fed up with the cruel sea. He asked if I’d like to earn ten quid, by picking up a load one night and driving it ten miles to the nearest town. It was a good chance, and I took it. The family was having a hard time, because Peter, who’d been next on the list for work at fourteen, had managed to get to a grammar school and needed cash for his clothes and books.

‘On the night in question, having delivered the rations, I was flagged down beyond the camp gates by this corporal, and we went on to the signals school. “Now stop,” he said, while the road was still in the middle of nowhere, though I soon saw that it was only ten yards from a lonely part of the camp fence. A gang of swaddies were staggering through the gap, and began loading my lorry up with two hundred typewriters — though I didn’t know what they were till afterwards. I drove the corporal to town, and the goods, shall I say, were unloaded. Money was put into my hand, and I got back to my hut without anyone being much the wiser.

‘The only time you are in heaven and don’t know it is those few days between doing something wrong and catching the first glimpse of the police coming to ask you questions which are going to start the long slide down on your arse to prison. You walk lighter on your feet, breathe sweeter and better air — so it seemed after the lead weight had just fallen. Life is marvellous, and you are not only good-natured with everyone, but they are also friendly to you. You don’t even think of the past that was no good, or wish to live for ever because you feel so wonderful. Nothing matters but the exact minute, which you ignore anyway. It’s a state of grace, and the strength that you get from it is the easiest sort to carry. I know about this, because it’s happened to me a few times, which made life worth living more than anything else. But that was a long time ago, and I hope I’ve got over the need of it now.

‘Half the signals school must have been involved in that great typewriter grab, and a dozen of them got sent down, including me for eighteen months, for I was said to be the key man in it, the lynchpin of the whole operation. It passed the time on, and taught me a thing or two. The war was a little bit more on its way towards peace, though not far enough, for when I got out I was dragged back into the Army, and ended up in Normandy, with too much battle for my sort of stomach.

‘I got the Military Medal for driving a load of ammunition to some blokes who had been cut off by the Germans. I didn’t know I was doing it, you can bet. Normally I was shit-scared when a bomb went off five miles away, and skulked around at base so that I wouldn’t get any dangerous jobs, but this one time I forgot to hide, and was sent to a village that nobody told me was almost behind the bloody lines. I thought as I drove along: what’s that whizzing and whistling noise? The wheels shook, and when soil fell over the windscreen I must have been miles away in my woolly brain because I just put on the windscreen wipers, which naturally made knock-all difference. In any case the lorry was off the road, skirting the lip of a crater, but I kept the wheel steady. Shells were croaking like great frogs all over the place, but I got back to the road.

‘When I reached the village I wondered why the butcher was working in the open air. Then I cottoned on. It was a shambles, and the twenty or so blokes still alive and unwounded were ready to lynch me. One of them pointed a Sten, but the others didn’t want to carry things that far. All hell had been blasting for hours, but I’d reached them during a lull, so called, when the Germans hadn’t seemed too keen on the fight either. Our blokes had been short of ammunition, and the officers had been pooped off, so they’d decided to surrender and get taken prisoner. Then when I showed up with ammunition it meant they’d have to go on fighting to the last man, as it were, and that’s what made them just about ready to do me in. You should have heard the curses! The flower of the British Army. Some of the poor boggers were in tears. I sulked, and offered to drive them back in my lorry, which was the least I could do. A sergeant got on the radio to company headquarters and asked for permission to pull out, and back the answer came from a solid dug-out: “Fight on, you idle bastards,” and he was ready to put his boot through that piece of machinery. We had a meeting, and formed a plan. He asked HQ to arrange an air attack on the outskirts of the village because German tanks were moving up. They agreed, and said it would arrive in five minutes. At this, we threw off the arms and clambered on the lorry ourselves, packing it tight. At the first sound of planes I drove like a madman away from that village, shot at from all sides. Behind us the planes did their job so well, as we’d known they would, that the whole place went up in smoke and flame. “That was the end of us,” the sergeant beside me in the cab shouted.

‘We got back safe, telling how the Germans had attacked in such numbers that we couldn’t help but piss off out of it. Three of us got a medal for that brave job, but I kept a long way from exploding shells for the rest of the war. Even the pilots who blasted the village got a pat on the back for wiping out attacking Germans who were nowhere to be seen. My brain swims when I think of it, which I don’t, any more. I was twenty-three at the time, but felt fifteen because, after all, it was a childish throwback sort of game, playing at war, a fact which everybody realized at the time, though nobody said as much.

‘Later on, I was out of it, and my medal went over the side of the boat coming back to Southampton. At home I found I had one brother in the Army, another at work, my sister in the family way, and my mother in a mental hospital. Within a few weeks I was back in prison, and feeling as if I’d been born there. Those months were so black in my mind that I don’t even remember what I got sent down for. I was haunted by the looney-bin look on my mother’s face; which it seemed she had always had, but I hadn’t noticed it before. I never want to be twenty-five again, that’s all I can say. I breathed a sigh of relief when I was twenty-six, determined that from then on my life would take a turn for the better. To make sure this happened I did two things which made sure it never could: I got a job, and I got married.

‘We met in a pub, Jane Shane and me. Her middle name was Audrey, which she favoured most, Tawdry Audrey from Tibshelf, who got off the bus one Saturday night in Worksop market place. During an hour of comfortable drinking I saw she had smoky short black hair and diamond eyes, pale cheeks and thinnish lips, a real beauty until she opened her raucous chops. She’d had a baby by another man, but I wasn’t to know this until after we were married, and in those days I thought an agreement with a woman was something you couldn’t break no matter what the other party had done. After a quiet wedding at the registry office, she brought her kid to live at our house. My mother, now out of the looney-bin, went absolutely soft over the little boy, so that he soon loved her far more than his own mother who, in fact, totally ignored him except to kick and shout whenever he unluckily crossed her path.

‘Getting married seemed a good thing to do, but it wasn’t long before I got to Cuckold’s Cross, so one day I didn’t go to work but took a train to London instead. There were plenty of odd and casual jobs there, but they didn’t pay very much. One day I met a man who asked if I’d knock a car off for him, and take it to a certain garage in Bermondsey. There’d be a good load of money in it for me, but on delivery, he said. I asked what sort he wanted. We stood side by side in an arcade pumping tanners into a slot machine. He laughed because I’d given him a choice: “Get me a Jaguar.”

‘“I suppose you want it for a job?”

‘“Shut your mouth,” he answered.

‘“I’ll deliver it late tonight, then. Tell them to expect me.”

‘Back in my room at St Pancras I put on my best clothes. Then I bought a couple of window-cloths from a bucket shop, and put myself on the Northern Tube. It was a rainy day, spring, so I had my mac on and walked the streets and lanes of Hampstead with eyes wide open. I spotted two or three likely ones, but waited at a corner till I saw a well-dressed bloke get out of a flash Jag, a real beauty, and walk to a block of flats down the road. With a bunch of flowers and a parcel, he looked set for a long visit, or so I hoped. I started cleaning the windows of his car with my new orange cloths. A side window was half an inch open, so I took the newspaper from my pocket, smoothed it as flat as a board, and by sliding it through and then down was able to press the button that released the latch. I could get in whenever I liked, but showed no hurry. Even if the owner came back I could say I was down on my luck and only wanted to earn a bob or two by polishing his glass. Who could object to that?

‘But the time came to act, so I lifted the bonnet and started the engine. I snapped it down, got in, and was off, moving from the kerb and turning for the opposite direction to the one I’d seen its last owner vanish in. Like a newborn fool I’d left the dusters on the bonnet, just under the windscreen, and when I stopped the car to get them in, the engine stalled. Sweat roped off me, but I fixed it again, tightening the wires and burning my fingers. This time I was definitely away, taking the ring road and getting into Bermondsey from the south.

‘When the garage door closed behind me Claud Moggerhanger came out of a cubby-hole office and tapped the car at certain vital places. “Last year’s. I’ll give you fifty quid for it.”

‘I didn’t like the face of him because he looked not only all brawn but all brain as well, middle-aged, half-bald, a man who’d had enough prison and so much good living in his life that he’d kill you rather than argue. “It must have cost fifteen hundred quid,” I said.

‘“Take off the purchase tax, wear and tear, and the fact that it ain’t yours, and you’re lucky to get forty.”

‘My blood was up: “You just said fifty!”

“Its value goes down by the minute,” he smiled, while the three other blokes behind him laughed. “Thirty now.”

‘I gave in: “Fifty, then, and I’ll clear out.” He nodded, and I looked at the fivers to check on the silver thread, and make sure the head wasn’t upside down, or that the ink was dry. Even then I wasn’t sure. A couple of experts were unscrewing the number plates and dragging out spraying equipment, as if they really had a rush job on. Moggerhanger glared at me for hanging around, so I went away, spitting and cursing.

‘I got work with a group of blokes washing cars in St James’s Square, which in good weather drew in about twelve quid a week. I didn’t tell a soul about my fifty quid, but stitched the whole of it into my jacket to save till I was in need and no one could wonder where I’d got so much money. One day I was washing an Austin, and the rough Geordie who was more or less in charge told me to go to the other side of the Square and scrub down the Daimler that had just come in, a rush job for a regular and generous customer. It was a warm day so I took off my jacket and laid it on the car next to the Austin, then went over right away to do the Daimler. When I came back, an hour later, it was gone. I looked at the empty spot and a black wave floated over my eyes, going away just as quickly. I leaned against the car, then jumped into a frantic search in case I’d moved it at the last moment and forgotten where. I found Geordie, and asked if he’d seen my jacket. “No,” he said. “I’ve got one.”

“‘I left it by the Austin.”

‘He laughed: “I hope you haven’t seen the last of it. Ask Johnny Spode.” Johnny had vanished, and never came back. I found my coat stuffed under a bush, the money ripped out, so that I was practically penniless once more. If I had suddenly been able to get my hands on the thieving bastard I’d have choked the shit out of him. It’s all right robbing the rich, but when one working bloke robs another it makes high treason look like a parking offence. I was reduced to washing up in cafés, which kept me so broke that a fortnight later I went to the garage in Bermondsey to see if they needed another car. I’d have sold them a Rolls-Royce for twenty quid if they’d said yes, but the place was derelict and boarded up, so I’d only wasted my bus fare.

‘To deaden the long drag back I bought a newspaper, sat up front on the top deck to get the feel of being on my own while I read it. At one piece of news my head rattled. I pulled the paper on to my knee before I could fix it firm enough for reading, not knowing whether to laugh or get off the bus and run for my life in case the coppers had already got the hint to come after me. Johnny Spode had been charged with trying to pass false fivers at a pub in the East End, and I knew of course they could only be those Claud Moggerhanger had given me for the stolen Jaguar, and that I’d stitched into a secret pocket of my working jacket, and that Johnny had nicked from me. He’d been remanded in custody, which meant they were trying to make him squeal where he’d got them, I hoped it was the last of the bunch they’d found him with, for then he might argue his way out of it by saying some toff whose name he couldn’t remember and whose face was covered with smallpox had given it him for cleaning his car. In which case it could be I was in no danger at all.

‘I didn’t believe it, not on your life. It was better to be on the safe side, and flee. I got to my room and packed my small case, then spent my last few bob on a packet of fags and a bus ride to the south-west. This only took me twelve miles but soon I got a lift in a car going to Salisbury, which was lucky for it was starting to rain. My exhaustion, my downhearted ruin seemed certain and complete. My only need was sleep, but the chap driving wanted to know why I was heading for Salisbury.

‘“Going to see the Cathedral?” he asked, “or have you got friends there? Myself, I’m off to Dorchester, to look at a house I’m hoping to buy. What’s your work?”

‘I told him I was a gardener who’d heard there was work at Salisbury, and so I was on my way to find it. I didn’t spin any hard-luck yarn, though when he set me down in the middle of the town he opened his wallet and gave me ten bob. My thanks were never more sincere, at that time, and maybe it was an omen of good luck, because I stayed two years in Salisbury. Nobody bothered me during all that while, and I was known by a few people well, and many people slightly, and they saw me only as a quiet person who’d come down from the North. I gave out that I had worked as a miner since I was fourteen but that now, nearly twenty years later, having been menaced by a soot-kiss of silicosis, I had to get out of such drudgery. What’s more, my widowed mother had died, and being the only child of an only child, there was nothing in the line of duty to keep me in the North Pole of Nottinghamshire.

‘I worked as a van driver and odd-job man for a market gardener, so that I was soon seen to be getting my health back, much to everyone’s touching concern. I lodged with a widow who had a moonshine face, and who (so it was said to me later in the pub) had been married for a fortnight fifteen years ago to a man gone into the Merchant Navy at the beginning of the war. Before the end of it he had just vanished, so after a while I shared her bed at night because, believe me, there was still a lovely amount of juice in her.

‘But one morning, for no other reason than waking up with a headache (or it may have been stomach ache, I forget, and in any case, it doesn’t matter which it was) I kissed her goodbye as I always did on going to work, and came back an hour later when I knew she’d be out shopping. I had forty quid put by, as well as a watch and a small radio, and with my suitcase and overcoat I walked to the station and took the mile-a-minute train to London. I wondered whether I hadn’t done the wrong thing when I saw the desert of Surbiton out of the window, but stepping from the train at Waterloo, I walked along the Thames to Hungerford Bridge through the air of summer dust and smoke that made me shout with happiness. I crossed the footbridge, sweating over my case, though it wasn’t that heavy, and stood looking at the green water oiling its way against the supports below, and passenger boats loaded with people setting off downstream for Greenwich. The line of the shore pressed itself into me, and I was disturbed from looking at it by the whole bridge shuddering as a train punched out of Charing Cross. I was so happy I dropped a shilling in an old man’s cap who was playing a tin whistle. The city seemed made for me, a land of treasure I’d never felt so close to before.

‘When you feel like this on coming to town there’s only one sort of life you can lead, and that is a life of crime. I own up to it Knocking around Soho I heard of a garage that took stolen cars, and I lost no time in selling a few I found by the roadside — usually cars of the medium-expensive kind — and this time I got a better price for them, I might tell you. As is only right and proper, one thing led to another, and I began to help in robberies, usually as the driver of a getaway car. In this I was expert because I’d studied the map and was familiar with much of London. I could do a zig-zag course with such speed and skill that I’d throw anybody off the scent. To bring my story right up to press I was one of the four who did a job that netted eight thousand pounds. The trouble was that I got caught, while the others didn’t. We were getting away, but the cops were closing in because we had a radio with their wave length on it and could hear them yapping to each other. So I let the others out, and set off towards Croydon on my own. I was nabbed, and the beak gave me five years. I’ve just finished four of them, and got out yesterday, heading for London now so that I can claim my two thousand pounds. Don’t tell me it’s hopeless and that I won’t find it, because I know I will. I could have got off with a lot less than five years if I’d given the other three away and put the police on the trail of the loot, but I didn’t. I held out and said I’d done nothing except steal sixty-two cars, and finally that was all they could get me for.’

The end of Bill Straw’s story brought us north of Biggies wade. Rain was coming through the roof, and the South wasn’t living up to its promise. With so much damage done to the car, I was driving on borrowed time. Both of us felt it. The engine was coughing like a man in the last stages of TB and it was Bill Straw’s opinion that, as the car seemed to need not only a new body but also a new engine, I might be wise after all to abandon ship and leave it by the roadside to rot. ‘It doesn’t sound good,’ he said, ‘so you might as well cut your losses. Anyway, let’s have our dinner and give it time to cool down. A bag of damp hay might encourage it. Do it the world of good, and we’d benefit by something to eat as well — at least I would. Can’t seem to live on fags like you do.’

‘You’re always on about food,’ I told him, ‘when you’re not running down my car, or boasting about your past exploits.’

‘You should feel privileged,’ he said, ‘to be driving me to London. I’ll be a rich man when I get there, and then I’ll pay you back tenfold for all you might still spend on me.’ I had a strange feeling when he said this, not at all distrustful of him, as if he really might turn up in the future and demonstrate some blinding shaft of truth out of all the lies he’d been telling.

I parked as far as I could from the lorries, and followed Bill in. He stood at the counter, eyes turned up to the menu as if it was the light from heaven. ‘What’ll you have?’

‘I’ve already decided,’ he said. ‘It don’t take me long to make up my mind when it comes to food.’

‘I like a man of decision and character,’ I said, in a sarcastic way which finally annoyed him.

‘You’re getting a bit too bloody familiar. If you want to eat alone, you can. If you want to drive on your own, you can do that as well, but you’ll end up walking to London with that wreck on your back.’ He laughed so loud at this that the girl behind the counter asked him what he wanted. He rattled off a poem to the empty stomach: ‘Tomato soup, my lovely, then liver, sausages, onions and mashed spuds. Then steamed pudding and custard, a couple of them jam tarts, a mug of tea, four slices of bread and butter, twenty fags and a knife, fork, and spoon.’

‘Steady on,’ I said, ‘I’ll be bankrupt.’ He didn’t hear me.

‘Is that all then?’ the girl asked.

‘Except for a bit of you,’ he said, jutting his scruffy, but confident face over the counter. She blushed at this, stepped back and smiled: ‘Cheeky devil! I’ll call you when it’s ready.’ She turned to me: ‘What about you, then?’

‘Beans on toast and a mug of tea.’

‘You won’t carry that car far on that!’ Bill laughed.

‘You’re getting a bit too bloody familiar as well,’ I snapped, paying out the best part of a quid on his monumental scoff. ‘Nothing’s gone right since I picked you up.’

We walked to a table and sat down in silence. A slim, dark-haired woman of about twenty-five was at the other end of it. The fact that she looked bored with her solitude made her more fascinating than she might have been if seated in a convivial atmosphere such as the midst of a gay family gathering. But in any case I was halfway struck by her as she smoked a tipped cigarette over the remains of an apple pie — while I waited for sufficient wit and perhaps courage before opening my mouth to say something. I knew I had to speak before the food came, because it would be bad manners to talk on a full mouth.

Bill Straw must have had similar ideas, for he opened with: ‘Will you pass the sauce, duck? I must have a lick of something or I shall die. That dinner I ordered’s taking ages.’ She slid the half-filled bottle along, smiling at his common and slimy wit. He took the newspaper out of my pocket and offered it to her: ‘Like to read this while you’re waiting?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

‘I don’t blame you,’ he said, drinking the sauce to the bottom. ‘It’s full of lies. Do you want a lift to London, with me?’

I hoped she’d get up and kick him in the shins, but she didn’t: ‘I am going that way,’ she said with what could only have been a smile of gratitude. ‘Is it in a lorry?’

‘Car. We’ve come from Grantham. I don’t know why the mean bleeders don’t put sugar on the table. I could have a dip if they did. That sauce just set me going.’ When the waitress arrived she set each plate before him so that most of the table was covered. ‘Will you join me?’ he offered. I might have said the same, but what can you do with beans on toast?

‘I’ve eaten already.’

‘Sure?’

‘Of course. I set out from Leeds, and so far I’ve made good time.’

‘Well,’ he said, ladling the soup into his lantern-chops, ‘we’ll get you there in a couple of hours, more or less, if we all get out and push. My name’s Bill Straw. What’s yours?’

‘June. Do you live in London?’

He didn’t answer till the soup was gone, then stabbed his finger towards me. ‘He does, I don’t.’ The further he got into his meal, the more clipped his answers were, though he still left space between his lips for questions to get out: ‘Are your parents alive?’

Her eyebrows wrinkled with surprise. ‘What do you want to know for?’

‘Just wondered, love.’ It was hard to say whether he was the greatest card of them all, or just plain stupid. He took life too easy for a wise man, it seemed to me, and that might be dangerous if we got too close, so I thought it would be best to avoid him when our mutual journey was over. ‘You live in London?’ he asked her.

‘When I can.’

‘That’s a funny answer’ — onions streaming out of his mouth.

‘It’s expensive. Makes it hard. But I like it there. Life’s interesting.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Hey,’ she cried, ‘who are you, anyway? You’re so genuine you act like a plain-clothes man.’ It was something I’d never have thought about.

‘That’s a lark, for somebody like me. The best joke I’ve heard in ten years. I just wanted to know what you did.’

‘I work,’ she said. ‘What’s your sweat, then?’

‘Painter and decorator. I’m fed up with Notts, so I’m going down south. Left my wife and kids in Mansfield yesterday. Spent last night with my girlfriend in Nottingham and now I’m off to fresh fields and pastures new. Where will I be tonight then, eh?’ he ended with a leer. She said nothing to this, as if to show that he had gone too far. He accepted it, but only because he could then devote complete attention to his meal, which he gobbled so that anyone would have thought he’d fallen in love with that now, in his flippant, one-sided way.

I don’t know what sort of car she imagined we had, but when she saw it she didn’t show too much interest at getting in. Bill said he’d better fill the radiator now, which would save us doing it during the next three miles. Still, she put her small valise in the back, and got in when I held the front seat forward. ‘It don’t look up to much,’ said Bill, ‘but it pulls itself along all right. Slow but sure.’

I turned on the ignition. ‘Let’s go.’ Nothing happened, so Bill leapt out and flung the bonnet up, taking a piece of rag from his pocket to dry the contacts, which he thought might have got wet from the water he’d splashed too freely when filling the radiator.

June drew her coat around her in the back as if sitting in a refrigerator. ‘Shall we give it a push? The road slopes a bit here.’

Bill’s trick worked, and the engine coughed into life. ‘Push the choke in as soon as we get going,’ he said, ‘or it might stall.’

‘Whose car is it?’ she asked, when we were trundling along at a fair forty.

‘Mine,’ I said, before Bill could put his false spoke in. ‘Or my brother’s, I should say. He lent it to me to go to London for a holiday. I work for an estate agent in Nottingham, and I’ve been so bored the last few weeks that I thought I needed a break.’ Every hundred yards a noise went out of the exhaust pipe as sharp as a pistol shot, shattering the nerves of any car or lorry driver who happened to be nearby.

‘The engine’s bunged up,’ said Bill. ‘It sounds as though we’re armed to the teeth. Anyway, you can tell me your life story now. I’ve told mine.’

‘I can’t talk while I’m driving. It puts me off.’

‘That’s a bloody fine get out, ain’t it? I was looking forward to it.’

‘Some other time. What about June?’

She said nothing. Bill, who had managed to forget her existence for a few minutes, passed her a lighted cigarette: ‘All for one, and one for all. It’s sheer communism in this car, ain’t it, Michael?’

‘Seems like it,’ I said. ‘What’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is yours, but I’m the only one that’s got something.’

‘Don’t be like that. You’d be back there in the mud, trying to start this box if it weren’t for me. We all earn our keep. Eh, duck?’ he called significantly to June.

She stirred. ‘Oh, well, I suppose I’d better tell you all about myself, if that’s the way it is.’

‘If that’s the way you want to pay,’ he said in a mocking and disappointed tone. ‘But no lies, you know. This is a game of truth. The pot on the bloody fire, love.’

‘I never lie,’ she said. ‘I don’t see any point in it, especially in front of strangers.’

‘I thought we were friends?’ said Bill.

‘You can take your choice,’ she laughed.

‘All right, as long as the miles roll by under this fusillade of shots. I’ll have to interrupt you now and again to tank up that thirsty radiator. You’re a real sport,’ he went on, licking his chops, inside as it were, ‘to join in our fun and games.’

‘You think so?’ she said, in such a tone that I knew she wasn’t joining in anything at all, though only time would prove whether Bill or I was right. There was a strong whiff of petrol in the car, but the others didn’t say anything, so I decided to go until they did. Not that I doubted my nose, but I just didn’t see how it could be dangerous. In any case, I had always found the smell of petrol rather agreeable to the senses whenever I was beginning to be just a little bit tired.

‘I had a perfect childhood,’ June began. ‘You see, when my parents got married they wanted a girl, and I was a girl. Even they couldn’t mistake that. They were as happy as they could be that things had begun so well. At the time I didn’t realize this, and though they told me as, soon as they thought I was able to understand, it wasn’t till I was sixteen and began to have a mind of my own that I realized what a responsibility had been put on to my shoulders, especially since, after having me, my mother wasn’t able to produce any more. What had kicked off for them as a blessing ended up for me as a curse.

‘I was a girl, and therefore they indulged me in everything that had to do with girlishness — though you’ve got to remember I’m talking from hindsight and not so much from what I felt at the time. I was up to my neck — unwillingly — in dolls’ houses, dolls, ballet clothes, sewing machines, and embroidery sets. Whatever I wanted, I had, providing it was just just the thing for a little girl, the girl of their dreams. They weren’t very well-off, mind you. My father was a booking clerk at the railway station, but in providing so well for me they acted as if they were thanking God for having sent me in the first place. It was an act of worship. God’s altar was little me.

‘I suppose somebody should have told my mother that children were born from my father’s penis that in a moment of dark confusion got mixed up in her womb — and not in heaven. But they didn’t, and my ideal life went on for a few years more. My hair grew in dark ringlets down my back, and in looks I seemed to satisfy them as well, though they found me a bit quiet, which they put down to intelligence, and the much hoped-for fact that still waters run deep. But I only remember feeling sly and miserable, because though children can’t tell you what they feel they certainly know enough about what they feel to be able to remember it when they’re grown up. Being the apple of their eye they didn’t let me play with other girls on the street, thinking they were too rough for me and that they might initiate me into games of doctors and nurses, so I was reduced to dismembering my dolls with a kitchen knife when my mother’s back was turned, or cutting their hair with scissors as if they’d been found in some sort of unmentionable collaboration with a dirty hooligan down the street, or I’d make a hole between their legs and stick spent matches there. In actual fact, my mother was bored with looking after me, after she had lost her enthusiasm for petting and spoiling, so she was only too glad to see that I was pensively playing on my own for an hour. When my father came home he would slobber all over me for half a minute, then rush out to his railwayman’s club to play darts.

‘A few years went by before my mother realized that it would be impossible for her to have another child, and then a year or two more passed before they began to regret that they hadn’t had the sense to wish for a son first, since now it was too late to have one. They seemed to think, then, that their wish for a girl — me — had been the prime cause of the first child being a girl, and because of this their attitude began to change. I was at school, so at least I had another form of life to cushion the shock of it. But still, it was hard. I’m not blaming my patents, because I think those who blame parents for things they think were done against them as children are being a bit unrealistic. All you can do is state the case. Maybe I’m only saying this because I’ve got a seven-year-old daughter now.

‘Anyway, whereas before they loaded me with all the feminine things at a time when I wanted to know something about what boys had to do with the world, they now took everything like that away and brought me guns, Meccano outfits, chemistry sets. This might not ordinarily have been much of a shock to me, but the fact was that I’d actually been so weighed down with little-girl things from birth that I’d long since given in and grown to like it. I was a little girl, and that was that. My father would now teach me how to shoot a pop-gun. Once, he came proudly home from the club with a great parcel in his arms, which turned out to be an electric train set he’d won in a raffle. He set it up for me, and played with it for more than an hour while his supper got cold, and I sat boggle-eyed and not understanding a thing.

‘My parents were so selfish and gentle that they were totally ignorant. But when my father tried to dress me up in a cowboy suit, my mother drew the line, and at last got a glimmer of what confusion was being spread in me. So she went out next day and came home with the largest doll I had ever seen. I was eight, and didn’t like dolls all that much, anyway, as I’d often said, and when I pushed it aside in disgust so that it fell off the table and cracked its skull, she was so chagrined that she smacked my face for the first time in my life. All I could do was go back into my corner, and indulge in the age-old consolation of playing with myself, which I did, for at least by doing that I could see I was definitely and for ever a girl.

‘Though my parents may not have realized it, I already knew about the facts of life, because at school we talked on this topic continually. In fact I remember feeling that because my knowledge was so much more recent than any similar knowledge my parents could have had, mine was so much more accurate, while theirs must be right out of date. The fact that my nose was always up in the air because of this made them lose hope of their little girl ever growing up into a beautiful-dutiful daughter. From time to time they tried by an act of kindness to do something about it, but one or other of them usually ended up by cuffing me or pushing me aside in a despair that I knew wasn’t genuine.

‘In spite of this, and maybe because of it, I did well at school. From first to last I was top of the class, and though they made a show of being glad, this also puzzled them. Up to the age of ten my father had helped with my homework, but after that it became too complicated and I was left to deal with such mysteries on my own, which I was capable of solving. But my mother thought I was only doing it to spite my father, so as to make trouble between them. This wouldn’t have been difficult at the best of times, but they stood together by saying how ungrateful I was at them sweating blood half their lives to give me the ideal conditions in which to enjoy and take advantage of my education. It was awful, really. I hardly understood what they were saying. Going to sleep at night I’d made up stories to myself saying I hadn’t been born to them at all, but that gipsies had sold me to them as a baby, and that my real carefree wild parents were at that moment bending over a smoking fire in the mountainous part of some Balkan country waiting for the supper pot to boil so that they could feed themselves and the numerous children scattered around in the darkness who were all my real brothers and sisters. I even spread this story at school, not from spite, but because I wanted to appear different to the rest of the them. I didn’t hate my mother and father, I swear I didn’t, but to me they were more like other children than parents, whom I would try to fight on equal terms. I went so suddenly between love and hate when I got to the age of thirteen that in calm moments I’d picture myself running away from home. Neither of them thought twice about knocking me about, and a time of violent rows began that lasted till I was seventeen.

‘They used to take me to spend my holidays with an aunt at Southport, so that they could go off for a fortnight’s peace at Bridlington. It was lucky I liked my aunt, who was my mother’s elder sister and therefore a very different person. She managed a hotel, and never lost her temper with other people, not because she held herself in, but because she was altogether more good-natured and easy. She’d been a keen reader all her life, and every time I came home I brought a few books from her library. This annoyed my parents who thought they were losing the control over me that they didn’t know they no longer had. My room acquired these, and other books, because I’d gone by scholarship to the grammar school. They were proud of me for having done this, and when my father told me so in one of his rare bouts of confidence I was filled with happiness. The trouble was, if it can be called trouble since it is so normal, that we were a close group most of the time, and there was enough love floating around to keep us human, but not enough to keep us warm.

‘So you can see how uneventful my childhood was, and you can’t get nearer to perfection than that. This isn’t as sarky as you think, but the certain fact is that, being so perfect, it had to have the right sort of ending. My father accused me of becoming a precocious schoolgirl, though God knows where he picked up the phrase. I think he was the saddest person I’ve ever known. He had no idea how sad and ordinary his life was. He had given everything up to the purpose of rearing me, and that should have soothed him, but as an ideal it had cracked quite early on, and from that point he had nothing else in life — except my mother. And a man who has nothing except a wife can only make everybody’s existence a misery he comes into contact with. I’d never seen a man so trapped, yet I couldn’t feel sorry for him, because I happened to be his daughter.

‘Even now, when I can at least begin to have some respect for his crushed life, there’s nothing I can do for him. Whenever we meet he asks me continually when I’m going to mend my ways and settle down with a suitable husband or job. He says his friends are always asking about me, wondering what I’m up to, but I tell him to drop dead or wrap up because I can’t be bothered to try and break through the knot that ties him to wife-job-house-club. If only he was happy in it, I wouldn’t mind him getting at me. But he’s not. He sees me, only a woman, doing some of the things he’s often dreamed of imagining himself doing, such as lighting off to London and working there, living in my own room, sometimes with men, now and again with another woman, having a child and not caring that I wasn’t married. A life of freedom is no more marvellous than a life of slavery, I sometimes think, but at least I don’t feel that society is forcing me to live in the way it wants me to live.

‘At eighteen I went off to London, already pregnant, and became an unmarried mother. It’s about the easiest status for a girl to acquire in life. I fell in love with a boy I’d known at school, a dark-eyed secretive bastard who wrote poetry, and could talk his head off without giving anything away. But he was so handsome that nothing could keep me from him, and though my dear father shouted and bullied me for staying out late, my hours actually got later and later. I’d started a temporary office job, and was doing a secretarial course in the evening, which my parents wanted me to take in order to get on and become self-supporting. But because of it I was able to stay out late and be much of the time with him. We’d go to the cinema to see French films, or up on the moors so that he could read his poems to me. I tell you, it was a dream life, and I lapped it up because I was not only getting what I wanted but was doing what my parents had forbidden me to do. Something to hurt them with was handed to me on a platter. I could hardly believe it. My mother, in awful and mysterious tones, had warned me never to let boys and men do anything to me. She never really said why, but I don’t think it would have made much difference, anyway. So behind a sheep-wall and in the balmy air of summer, my flooded membranes tingled under Ron Delph. We couldn’t be kept apart, but by the time autumn came (it always does) Ron began to see that I was only one of many.

‘I don’t want to say that I got jilted or let down, because I was cooling off from him as well. His poems were all about me “giving myself” to him, and him “taking me”. They were like apples that went rotten after they’d fallen from the tree — meaning him. After our first big quarrel, full of heartlessness and spite on both sides, I woke up next morning and spewed into the bathtub. A girl at work laughed and said maybe I was preggers. What could I do but search out Ron Delph and tell him? He went almost crazy from fear and rage but I had no idea of getting him to marry me, because I couldn’t think of a worse fate for either of us. I only wanted to talk to him about it and maybe get a bit of advice. But even that was beyond his intellectual capabilities. We were in a pub, and after half a pint of beer he went out to the gents, and didn’t come back. I’m learning fast, I thought.

‘Only anger stopped me from the pouring tears. I wandered around in the rain, stunned that my first love had done such a thing. But after a cup of coffee it no longer had the power to devour me. I actually began to feel happy. A sense of lightness came up in me and pushed all gloom away, and it seemed wonderful to be living. I wished Ron hadn’t run like that from the pub, and then if the evening had been warm and dry we might have gone up on the moors and laid down together, because that’s what this feeling made me want to do. I didn’t hold anything against him, because my love was coming back strong, and I thought that perhaps the same true feeling was happening to him too. But I couldn’t be sure, and wanted to find out. Knowing where he lived, I went there. I suppose it’s crack-handed to talk about the turning points of one’s life, but be that as it damn-well may, this turned out to be one of them. Ron Delph was enough of a poet to know that I might consider going to his house when I got over the shock of his vanishing trick, so his obvious ploy was not to show up there himself. In my mind he’d gone home to his mother as fast as he could, and she’d hidden him in the farthest attic or coal cellar. But no such luck, for by the time I got to the door I felt like rooting him out from wherever he was, and giving him a good scratch across the eyes.

‘His mother stared, and asked what I wanted. The house was a semi-detached villa with three steps leading up to the front door, the sort of place where, if you want to be on a level with the people inside, you have to go round the back, up the entry and through the dustbins. She was a small woman, and pretty at the age of forty so that I had to ask if she was Ron Delph’s mother before I believed her. From all his lies I expected a bleak six-footer dressed in a sugar bag with a face like a rusty frying-pan, because he’d told me terrifying stories about her wild temper, and of nervous breakdowns which she’d had from the age of twenty-six. When he was four she’d throttled a live chicken in front of him — that was one of his tales, but to look at her now I knew she’d never done any such thing. I realized all this in a flash, and saw how things would improve if I went away. But I’d asked for him, and it was too late to back out now. “Whatever do you want,” she said, “with my son?”

‘“We’ve been seeing each other for the last four months,” I told her, “and I wondered if he was at home.”

‘“Well he isn’t, you fast young madam, having the nerve to come knocking at the door for him! I always thought this would happen, him being out at all hours and never telling me where he’s off or what he’s up to.”

‘A man’s voice called from inside: “Who’s that, Alice?” I felt as I’d always felt at the bottom of my spine, that I lived nowhere and belonged nowhere, was always set on the doorstep between house and street, and that in this home town at any rate there was no hope of ever getting to any fireside where I could really feel safe from the elements. I didn’t even belong to myself, never mind to a house, and I knew that I didn’t deserve to because all my life I’d not only had it too easy in being cradled with every comfort, but that at the same time I’d been trying too hard to get myself into something that didn’t exist. I wasn’t one person, I was two, if not three or four, and nobody in their right minds would want such a disturbing gang at their fireside.

‘I was set on a quiet getaway, but in answer to the man’s question she called back: “Oh it’s just some young trollop calling for our Ron.”

‘The street was dark behind me, but one or two people were walking by. “Is it?” I shouted. “Well, your darling son Ron has been getting off with me, and he’s been up me a few dozen times. He’s got me pregnant, and that’s why I’m here. I’m going home now to tell my parents, and they’ll be back in the morning with my six brothers to settle you lot.”

‘I was shouting and crying, then felt a sharp pain across my face where she’d hit me: “I’ll teach you to show us up in front of the neighbours. If our Ron’s got you pregnant you’ll have to prove it.”

‘I broke free, and walked off. It happened that I wasn’t even pregnant. We started going with each other again, and then I was, beyond any doubt. So I took my fifty pounds of savings from the post office, and packed a suitcase, leaving the house early one morning without saying goodbye, and not even telling Ron what I intended to do, because I didn’t really know myself.

‘That was seven years ago, and as for my work in London, we’ll leave that for another time. I’ve just been to see my parents, and I spent all my money there. They would have given me my train fare but I preferred to be independent, and have the fun of hitch-hiking. I do it now and again for kicks. Not that my life can be called dull, but as I said, that part will have to wait till we meet again. It’s rare, I suppose, but so far in my life I’ve never bumped into anyone I’ve not seen again. It’s impossible for me to lose track of anybody, even if I want to.’

‘It’s taking us so strenuously long to get down this London road,’ said Bill Straw, ‘that I vote we stop for a drink at the next inn that’s still pumping.’

‘That’s a bright idea,’ said June. ‘I could do with cheering up after my sad tale. That’s the first time I’ve told it in a long while.’

‘It almost brought tears to my eyes,’ said Bill.

‘It’s all very well,’ I said, ‘but if I get drunk I shan’t be able to drive, and I want to reach my destination in one piece.’

‘That’ll be a miracle, in any case,’ Bill said, ‘in this crumbling hearse.’ He was right, perhaps, because in the middle of June’s story, part of the exhaust pipe had snapped away, a great sudden clatter that sent the chill of disaster up my spine and left haloes of sparks on the road behind. But Bill’s suggestion of a drink was pleasant nevertheless, and I felt that one or two would do none of us any harm. Besides, it was so near midday closing time that there’d be no opportunity for tanking up later.

The brakes were failing, so as soon as Bill yelled that there was a snug pub to port, I dropped the gears one by one and gently trod the pedals so as to slow down in good time. Even so, I swerved too quickly into the parking lot and bumped into the far wall, jerking the three of us at the neck and bringing grumbles of protest.

It was a place where they served luncheons, and as we disembarked from the car a well-dressed middle-aged man came out of the dining-room door and spewed all over the gravel.

‘Good home cooking,’ said Bill. ‘Still, the whisky can’t be off. I’d rather die in there than on the road.’

‘It bodes no good though,’ I said, and while arguing, we watched the man, pale and harrowed, walk unsteadily to his car and get in, then fall asleep over the wheel.

‘I expect he’ll run some kid down on a pedestrian crossing before the day is out,’ June said with disgust. I liked the moral tone she was taking, because she’d be a safeguard against me having more than one drink. Bill wasn’t with us, and when we went in he was already at the bar.

‘I’ve ordered,’ he said, ‘so get your wallet out.’ Three double whiskies came up. ‘I’ll get your bottle now, sir,’ the publican said, sliding away to his secret and extensive cellars.

‘What bottle?’ I said, expecting the worst.

‘Don’t get gloomy, comrade. If that car of ours breaks down far from civilization we’ll want something to keep us warm and happy. Cheers!’

‘Cheers!’ June said, turning on her stool to look at a middle-aged man sitting over a brandy glass in the corner.

‘Do you know him?’ I asked. He had a thin bony face and a high pink bald head, wore a cravat instead of a tie, and hadn’t shaved for a couple of days.

‘It’s a writer,’ she told me, ‘called Gilbert Blaskin.’

‘Go over and say hello.’

‘I don’t know him that much.’ She turned back to the bar, and swung down the firewater in one gulp of her beautiful throat.

‘I’ve heard of his books,’ I said. ‘I even read one, but I don’t remember anything about it. It’s the first time I’ve seen a real writer, even from a distance.’

‘Don’t stare at him,’ she said, as if having a reason for not meeting him now, ‘or you’ll embarrass him. He’s very sensitive.’

‘Poor bloke! I suppose that’s what comes of being an author.’

The publican put a bottle of White Horse before me, then two packets of Whiffs and a consignment of Player’s. ‘Make it three more doubles as well,’ Bill cried, sliding his glass over like a lord.

‘Yes, sir,’ the publican said, with such obsequiousness that I wanted to put my boot into his lardy face for hating us so much after he’d said it. It helped me to pay up with a smile, treating June and Bill, my boon and travelling companions. There was nothing else to do, since I had money and they had none. I could hardly have walked out when we had grown so friendly with our story-telling in the car, and in any case I didn’t want to.

‘Drink up,’ I said, ‘and have another. I’ll order this time,’ but when I did the three glasses put before us came with no ‘yes sir’ for me.

‘You don’t have the personal presence yet to get that,’ said Bill, who noticed everything. I blushed at hearing this in front of June, and cursed Bill for an inaccurate and bloody liar, feeling I would certainly have got that sort of treatment if he hadn’t been there.

‘Let’s go,’ I said gruffly, ‘out of this clip joint.’ Bill saw a one-armed bandit by the door and, going over to the publican, asked for ten bob’s worth of sixpences, nodding across at me. I paid, and stood behind him as he almost pulled his arm off, but without getting anything back. When he’d wasted half I asked him to let me have a go, and held out my hand for some sixpences, but he told me to push off and get my own, which I did, and at the first pull I heard a dozen tinkle down into the space-mouth below.

‘You see?’ I said jubilantly.

He pushed me aside, trembling with greed: ‘I’ll get that fucking jackpot yet.’ But he lost every last sixpence in the next half-hour, and just as I was getting into my stride to do the same, and we’d knocked back a few more doubles, the publican bawled that it was time to close the pumps, making us feel like real bloody mugs.

That short stay at the pub cost me the best part of five quid, so I was glad to get out of it and back on the road, even though thick clouds were belting across the woods and steeples and it was starting to rain. June regretted not having got a lift in Gilbert Blaskin’s Jaguar as she huddled in the back expecting the worst, but Bill and I felt quite cheerful at such a mild attack of weather. I felt a bit drunk, with a rubber face, and steel arms broken in six places, but once we got going it didn’t seem much of a disadvantage. In fact we were all so tight that the car went better than before. The only letdown was when I nerved myself at last to switch on the windscreen wipers. They both shot sideways out of the car’s path and were never seen again. Bill made me stop while he crawled around in the wet for a long search, promising he’d be able to fix them back. ‘You know,’ he said, buttoning his saturated coat when he got in beside me, ‘I’m beginning to think that this vehicle isn’t roadworthy.’

‘Don’t be pessimistic,’ I said, when it started like a dream. Rain drummed down. I was driving on the ocean bed, and expected to see herrings and goldfish making boggle-faces at me. In spite of being drunk I was afraid to go faster than thirty miles an hour, and even twenty at times, so that lorry drivers hooted and cursed as they swung out to overtake. I was sweating with the work of it, a fanatical stare of concentration baking my stomach as we jogged along. By some incredible scissor-feat of the body, Bill managed to transfer himself into the back without knocking my driving arm, murmuring that he was going to make a party of it. June was nervous, but joined me and Bill in smoking a Whiff so that, what with their frequent swigs of whisky, the place stank worse than a pub on Saturday night. I suddenly realized that their lives were in my hands, so my stone-cold soberness came back quicker than it would normally have done.

I passed the map over my shoulder to Bill and asked him to find out where we were, but he laughed, wound down the window, and threw it outside. It must have opened and got laid by the wind across some unlucky bastard’s windscreen, because the scream of two or three hooters broke into me. I didn’t mind that so much, but when Bill tried to get the window back up it wouldn’t come, and gusts of rain ran around the inside of the car and sprayed us all. He and June (I could see them in my mirror) had their arms around each other, and started to sing ‘Oh it ain’t gonna rain no more, no more’. I wanted to get back there and throttle them, but couldn’t see out of the car behind me and so was afraid to pull up in case a lorry trampled us all to death. Apart from my wonky brakes, oil and water made the road as slippery as a frozen lake. Rain made it so dark that cars coming by had their headlights on, but I couldn’t do the same because I didn’t have any lights left. I thought of getting into a lay-by and stopping this mad journey, but I didn’t want to hear Bill’s scorn that I was yellow and had no guts. As long as they were happy I didn’t mind going on. June had the goodness of heart to light a cigar for me now and again, to lean over and put it like a kiss between my lips.

The rain eased down and normal daylight came back. This seemed to depress those in the back, so they dozed for a few miles. I pulled in and wiped the windscreen with a sheet of newspaper. Now I could see again. A bit of sun shone on their angel faces, and I felt I was driving the Lazaretto express as I got nearer to London. My recent fling with tender Miss Bolsover seemed years away, and my concern at having left Claudine in the lurch had turned into mild curiosity when I wondered what she’d do now I had well and truly gone.

I felt myself falling towards the middle of the road, though it was obvious to my senses, lost in sentimental recollection, that I was still in the car. Bill woke with a great shout, and June screamed, as a noise of scraping metal seemed about to cleft the car in twain, and dig all our graves before we could slump into them. An overtaking van braked and swerved, got safely by, and went on without stopping to see what peril we were in. My head hit the windscreen but did not break it. I applied all my skill to stop the car. The front right wheel had fallen off, we discovered, on getting out.

Bill scratched his head. ‘That’s rough. Are you a member of the AA?’

‘You know I’m bloody-well not.’

‘It’s not so obvious,’ he retorted. ‘Your badge might have fallen off. Everything else has. I can’t imagine when this car last had a service. The next one will be a church service.’

‘You’re too bloody funny. What are we going to do now?’

‘Get the wheel back on, then continue our journey. The first thing is to find it.’ This was done in a few minutes, and while June was stationed to warn other cars of our obstruction, Bill got tools from the boot and lifted the car up. All the nuts had vanished from the wheel, so he took a nut from the other three to fix on the erring one. The thread of the bolts was a bit raddled, but he did not consider this to be dangerous. In less than half an hour we climbed back in and set off. ‘That was a close call,’ he said, tilting his head to get the full benefit of the whisky bottle.

I laughed hysterically. ‘You can say that again.’

‘The wheels are all right now. I suppose the roof will blow off next time.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I reassured him. The wheel had buckled slightly when it flew off, so it wasn’t easy to steer. Sometimes I had to use all my strength to keep the car on the proper side of the road. Nothing had gone right on this trip, I brooded, fighting for my life and dreading another phase of rain. The sky in front was dark enough to promise it. When Bill came out of his drunken doze I asked if he knew a garage in London where I might have my car repaired.

‘Get rid of it.’

‘How much do you think I’d make if I sold it?’

‘At a rough guess,’ he said, ‘fifty bob.’

‘You’re cracked,’ I told him, feeling that my sense of humour was no longer to be trusted.

Bill slung the empty whisky bottle through the open window. ‘Take my advice. Abandon it at the first Tube station we come to. Park it somewhere, and finish your journey by public transport. You can always go back for it at a later date, if you’re still hankering for a final ride of death.’

‘I’m coming to the conclusion that I definitely don’t like the way you talk,’ I said. ‘It’s not that I mind pessimism as a line of patter, but with you it’s pure malice. What’s more you try to pass it off as humour, and that’s the dirtiest trick of all.’

‘I’m only trying to keep your spirits up.’

‘The car goes better when you stay quiet,’ I said, pressing the horn at a van too close in overtaking, and finding as I spoke that Fate must have cut its throat while I wasn’t looking.

‘Do you want to drive for a while?’

‘Not me,’ he said quickly. ‘It knows you best. A machine is human enough to know its own master, and you’re it, in this special case. Might kick me in the guts if I have a go.’

‘Can you drive?’ I asked June.

‘Yes, but you have to ride this one, and I’ve left my saddle at home.’ So, clapped-out as I was, I was on my own, and had to stick it out, which I began to think might be possible since we were only twenty miles from the middle of London. As the afternoon grew dim beyond Hertford, I knew I’d just about get there before I was called on to use my non-existent lighting system. Orange sodiums already canopied the road at intervals, though it wasn’t officially lighting-up time. It turned dark blue and smoky, as if snow were going to pour down. I felt cut off from where I’d come from, and where I was going to (wherever that was), and also from Bill and June who appeared to be snogging in the back. I was more on my own than I’d ever been, fighting my lone and maybe losing fight to keep the car going and on the road. It didn’t feel good being the one person between my friends and injury. All that stuff was so much crap, I thought, about responsibility bringing out the best in people. Certainly, one slip and we’d have been under the wheels of an articulated dragon coming in the opposite direction.

Traffic was thickening by the minute, and at the next box of lights a London swine wheeled down his window and called across at me that I should buy a new car. I was too done-for to respond, but Bill, straight from a refreshing doze against June’s precious bosom, poked his nut out of the gaping windowless window and shouted in his best, vicious jailbird’s voice that if the other bloke didn’t stop his feeble insults he’d take him and his instalment-plan tin-lizzie to pieces and pelt him with the rusty bits after he’d been tied to a traffic light with a fanbelt. The trouble about insulting somebody in a car is that you can’t see how big they are, though it was certain that no person could be bigger than Bill Straw’s big mouth.

The lamps were still on blood-red stop, so this chap swings his door open and comes over, aiming a punch at Bill that Bill dodges so that it grazes June. The light changed to amber so I shot forward as fast as my battered car would go, swinging across to the inner lane so as to put a line of protective traffic between me and the hefty swine now set to get my liver. This was a feat in itself, but soon his souped-up Zodiac came gliding sideways on, so close I felt a bump as he got me at the place where my fender should have been. ‘Let’s stop and fight it out,’ said Bill. ‘There’s a razor in my bag. I’ll cut him in bits.’

‘Maybe he’s got one too,’ I said. ‘It looks as if his boulder-head has been in a few avalanches.’ A wide front view with flashing headlights filled my mirror, and he then swung to get me in the flank. Bill mumbled something about having seen that face before, but couldn’t think where or who it belonged to. When I caught a glimpse of it looking at me, it seemed the sort that never forgot the face it looked at. My steering was so erratic that maybe he thought me a skilful manoeuvrer against his attacks — if a trifle reckless. But I hit the high kerb, and one of my wheel hubs spun along the gutter. It was the last I had, and made me want to get out and kill him. Several glimpses showed him as well dressed and about fifty, with a huge red-stoned ring on a finger of his hand that gripped the wheel. ‘I’ll know him if I ever meet up with him,’ I said. ‘I’ll never forget that face.’ He tailed me again, came close for another bumper-knock, trying to open my car like a sardine tin but do no damage to his own. He cruised alongside for a few seconds, and Bill also got a good look at him. As the thump tore against my front wing June said: ‘Bill’s fainted — or he’s seen a ghost. He’s as white as a sheet. If we can’t rustle up some smelling salts or another flush of whisky he’ll pass into the eternal fields.’

‘I know who it is,’ he croaked. ‘Why didn’t I guess sooner?’

I made a suicide dive to get back at him, feeling my car so battered that I’d nothing left to loose. ‘Who? For Christ sake, tell me!’

A police car with wailing sirens and a blue light flashing pushed by us both, and my attacker slowed down in front as if steel wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

‘It’s Claud Moggerhanger. I sold a brand-new car to him for fifty forged quid a few years back. What a nut I am, getting on the wrong side of him. I’ll never open my big mouth again.’

I thought he was going to burst out crying. ‘Not in this car you won’t, anyway. Just call next time he comes close and say you’ll apologize. Maybe he’ll let up.’

My engine started to bang like a machine gun that shot nuts and bolts, and I thought the end was close, even without Claud Moggerhanger. Strangely enough, it picked up speed and whizzed its howitzer way towards Hendon. As I crossed the North Circular I hoped vindictive Claud would veer off east or west, but he didn’t, and came in for another bang just beyond. It was like a dogfight, but he missed. Thinking he’d done the worst, and leaving my engine to do the rest, he turned off before me.

I reached the traffic island in Hendon, and instead of going round it to the middle of London, I took a wild swing to the left, pulling up to the kerb as soon as I could without killing us all. When the car was still, and a reasonable silence reigned, and before anybody could comment on our miraculous deliverance, the engine dropped out.

‘We just made it,’ said Bill, opening the left-hand door, which also fell off. ‘It was exciting while it lasted, though.’

I sat with my head in my hands, over the steering wheel, reflecting ruefully (that’s the only phrase I can use) on the fact that I’d bought the car especially to come to London in, and that such a simple journey had cost me a hundred and forty quid. At that price I could have hired a Rolls-Royce and chauffeur and eaten caviar and drunk champagne all the way down, and still stayed the night in Claridges or wherever the best doss-house was. ‘I thought I’d never see my little girl again,’ said June, pulling her valise out.

‘Come on, love,’ said Bill, ‘we’d better get going. I expect Michael’s going to stay here a while and make arrangements to have his car reconditioned.’

‘Go away,’ I said. ‘Vanish.’ It started to pour with rain, heavy drops drumming on the roof, homely and comforting now that the car had stopped, streams of water going down the perspex windscreen.

‘We can’t vanish,’ Bill said, ‘without the Tube fare.’ I gave him a ten-bob note. ‘What about a quid for a cup of coffee?’

‘Perish,’ I told him.

‘A right bloody comrade you are,’ he threw at me. ‘Come on, June. You can see me any night of the week at the Clover Leaf if you want to. Maybe I’ll buy you a drink.’ They ran along the road towards the Tube station, and fifteen minutes later, by which time I’d been able to recover from the awful fact of having to abandon my first and beloved car, I took up my suitcase and went in the same direction. A coat collar didn’t help against the blinding rain, and my legs were weak and wobbly, like a sailor just on shore after years at sea. I’d had a few months with a car, and was now back as a normal member of society, a bloke in the descending piss lugging his suitcase towards the Tube station, standing at the ticket box and asking for a one-way fare to King’s Cross. As the train rattled south I laughed at having done that simple journey so perilously, crossed that no-man’s-land after a red sky in the morning, all hundred and twenty-five miles of it.