The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Alan Sillitoe
all this, but he wasn’t looking at me anymore, and all my thoughts about Skegness went bursting to smithereens in my sludgy loaf. I could have dropped into the earth when I saw what he’d fixed his eyes on.
He was looking at it, an ever-loving fiver, and I could only jabber: ‘The one thing is to have some real fags because new hoss-tods is always better than stuff that’s been rained on and dried, and I know how you feel about not being able to find money because one-and-three’s one-and-three in anybody’s pocket, and naturally if I see it knocking around I’ll get you on the blower tomorrow straightaway and tell you where you can find it.’
I thought I’d go down in a fit: three green-backs as well had been washed down by the water, and more were following, lying flat at first after their fall, then getting tilted at the corners by wind and rainspots as if they were alive and wanted to get back into the dry snug drainpipe out of the terrible weather, and you can’t imagine how I wished they’d be able to. Old Hitler-face didn’t know what to make of it but just kept staring down and down, and I thought I’d better keep on talking, though I knew it wasn’t much good now.
‘It’s a fact, I know, that money’s hard to come by and half-crowns don’t get found on bus seats or in dustbins, and I didn’t see any in bed last night because I’d ’ave known about it, wouldn’t I? You can’t sleep with things like that in the bed because they’re too hard, and anyway at first they’re. …’ It took Hitler-boy a long time to catch on; they were beginning to spread over the yard a bit, reinforced by the third colour of a ten-bob note, before his hand clamped itself on to my shoulder.
III
The pop-eyed potbellied governor said to a pop-eyed potbellied Member of Parliament who sat next to his pop-eyed potbellied whore of a wife that I was his only hope for getting the Borstal Blue Ribbon Prize Cup For Long Distance Cross Country Running (All England), which I was, and it set me laughing to myself inside, and I didn’t say a word to any potbellied pop-eyed bastard that might give them real hope, though I knew the governor anyway took my quietness to mean he’d got that cup already stuck on the bookshelf in his office among the few other mildewed trophies.
‘He might take up running in a sort of professional way when he gets out,’ and it wasn’t until he’d said this and I’d heard it with my own flap-tabs that I realized it might be possible to do such a thing, run for money, trot for wages on piece work at a bob a puff rising bit by bit to a guinea a gasp and retiring through old age at thirty-two because of lace-curtain lungs, a football heart, and legs like varicose beanstalks. But I’d have a wife and car and get my grinning long-distance clock in the papers and have a smashing secretary to answer piles of letters sent by tarts who’d mob me when they saw who I was as I pushed my way into Woolworth’s for a packet of razor blades and a cup of tea. It was something to think about all right, and sure enough the governor knew he’d got me when he said, turning to me as if I would at any rate have to be consulted about it all: ‘How does this matter strike you, then, Smith, my lad?’
A line of potbellied pop-eyes gleamed at me and a row of goldfish mouths opened and wiggled gold teeth at me, so I gave them the answer they wanted because I’d hold my trump card until later. ‘It’d suit me fine, sir,’ I said.
‘Good lad. Good show. Right spirit. Splendid.’
‘Well,’ the governor said, ‘get that cup for us today and I’ll do all I can for you. I’ll get you trained so that you whack every man in the Free World.’ And I had a picture in my brain of me running and beating everybody in the world, leaving them all behind until only I was trot-trotting across a big wide moor alone, doing a marvellous speed as I ripped between boulders and reed-clumps, when suddenly: CRACK! CRACK! – bullets that can go faster than any man running, coming from a copper’s rifle planted in a tree, winged me and split my gizzard in spite of my perfect running, and down I fell.
The potbellies expected me to say something else. ‘Thank you, sir,’ I said.
Told to go, I trotted down the pavilion steps, out on to the field because the big cross-country was about to begin and the two entries from Gunthorpe had fixed themselves early at the starting line and were ready to move off like white kangaroos. The sports ground looked a treat: with big tea-tents all round and flags flying and seats for families – empty because no mam or dad had known what opening day meant – and boys still running heats for the hundred yards, and lords and ladies walking from stall to stall, and the Borstal Boys Brass Band in blue uniforms; and up on the stands the brown jackets of Hucknall as well as our own grey blazers, and then the Gunthorpe lot with shirt sleeves rolled. The blue sky was full of sunshine and it couldn’t have been a better day, and all of the big show was like something out of Ivanhoe that we’d seen on the pictures a few days before.
‘Come on, Smith,’ Roach the sports master called to me, ‘we don’t want you to be late for the big race, eh? Although I dare say you’d catch them up if you were.’ The others catcalled and grunted at this, but I took no notice and placed myself between Gunthorpe and one of the Aylesham trusties, dropped on my knees and plucked a few grass blades to suck on the way round. So the big race it was, for them, watching from the grandstand under a fluttering Union Jack, a race for the governor, that he had been waiting for, and I hoped he and all the rest of his pop-eyed gang were busy placing big bets on me, hundred to one to win, all the money they had in their pockets, all the wages they were going to get for the next five years, and the more they placed the happier I’d be. Because here was a dead cert going to die on the big name they’d built for him, going to go down dying with laughter whether it choked him or not. My knees felt the cool soil pressing into them, and out of my eye’s corner I saw Roach lift his hand. The Gunthorpe boy twitched before the signal was given; somebody cheered too soon; Medway bent forward; then the gun went, and I was away.
We went once around the field and then along a half-mile drive of elms, being cheered all the way, and I seemed to feel I was in the lead as we went out by the gate and into the lane, though I wasn’t interested enough to find out. The five-mile course was marked by splashes of whitewash gleaming on gateposts and trunks and stiles and stones, and a boy with a waterbottle and bandage-box stood every half-mile waiting for those that dropped out or fainted. Over the first stile, without trying, I was still nearly in the lead but one; and if any of you want tips about running, never be in a hurry, and never let any of the other runners know you are in a hurry even if you are. You can always overtake on long-distance running without letting the others smell the hurry in you; and when you’ve used your craft like this to reach the two or three up front then you can do a big dash later that puts everybody else’s hurry in the shade because you’ve not had to make haste up till then, I ran to a steady jog-trot rhythm, and soon it was so smooth that I forgot I was running, and I was hardly able to know that my legs were lifting and falling and my arms going in and out, and my lungs didn’t seem to be working at all, and my heart stopped that wicked thumping I always get at the beginning of a run. Because you see I never race at all; I just run, and somehow I know that if I forget I’m racing and only jog-trot along until I don’t know I’m running I always win the race. For when my eyes recognize that I’m getting near the end of the course – by seeing a stile or cottage corner – I put on a spurt, and such a fast big spurt it is because I feel that up till then I haven’t been running and that I’ve used up no energy at all. And I’ve been able to do this because I’ve been thinking; and I wonder if I’m the only one in the running business with this system of forgetting that I’m running because I’m too busy thinking; and I wonder if any of the other lads are on to the same lark, though I know for a fact that they aren’t. Off like the wind along the cobbled footpath and rutted lane, smother than the flat grass track on the field and better for thinking because it’s not too smooth, and I was in my element that afternoon knowing that nobody could beat me at running but intending to beat myself before the day was over. For when the governor talked to me of being honest when I first came in he didn’t know what the word meant or he wouldn’t have had me here in this race, trotting along in shimmy and shorts and sunshine. He’d have had me where I’d have had him if I’d been in his place: in a quarry breaking rocks until he broke his back. At least old Hitler-face the plain-clothes dick was honester than the governor,