A Man of his Time. Alan Sillitoe
avoid the rush at his trousers.
‘Don’t hit them anymore,’ Emily said. ‘I like the piggies. They’re my friends.’
‘How can you be friends with pigs?’ he jeered.
‘Well, I am. I’ve got names for both of them.’
‘And what are they, young madam?’
‘That fat one’s Lollipop, and the other’s Kidney.’
‘Percy the slaughterer’s coming up from Woodhouse soon to cut their throats,’ he said spitefully. ‘And then we’ll eat ’em.’
It was easy to make her cry. They sometimes called her Monkey Face, or Mrs Meagrim, or Dolly Dumpling, in spite of being told by Mary Ann to treat her kindly. ‘I’ll run away, then, and take them with me. We’ll go and live together in Robin’s Wood. I’ll cook their dinners and wash their faces.’
‘You like sausages and crackling and chitterlings and pork scratchings, don’t you? I’ve seen you gobbling them up when Mam wasn’t looking.’ He turned to Edith. ‘You’d better not let Burton hear you talking about him like that.’
‘Well, I do hate the old bastard. I always have. Did you see Oliver’s face? I’ve never seen such a bruise. He’s always hitting people. I’m going to leave home the minute I can.’
Thomas stroked one of the guzzling pigs. ‘And when will that be?’
Oliver came into the yard, two buckets on the yoke slopping water. He waved, and straightened his back before going into the house.
‘I’ll do it after I’m married,’ Edith said. ‘And he won’t dare touch me then. Every time I go out he tells me not to be long. And when I don’t go out he calls me in to do some work. And when I do go out I’ve always got to be back in bed by nine o’clock. I’m seventeen, and I’ve been working for four years.’
‘You stopped out till eleven the other night.’
‘Yes, and I’ll blind you if you tell Burton.’ The older girls, exploiting the inconvenience of a lavatory set apart from the house, sometimes made their way downstairs when Burton and Mary Ann were already in bed, as if to go there, then walked quietly through the gate and down the lane to see boyfriends in Woodhouse. They might not get back till midnight, but a piece of gravel at the window of their bedroom brought Sabina down to let them in. ‘The only good thing about Burton,’ Edith laughed, ‘is that he sleeps so deep an earthquake wouldn’t wake him, though if one should ever swallow him up it would be good riddance.’
‘I’ll run away from home,’ Rebecca said, ‘one of these days.’
Thomas smiled. ‘You’d soon come back.’
‘I bleddy wouldn’t.’
‘You might, if you got hungry,’ Edith said, ‘but once I go, that’ll be that. He won’t see me till after I’m married.’
‘You’re not twenty-one,’ Thomas said, ‘so he could fetch you back.’
Rebecca smoothed her long dark hair. ‘He might be glad to get shut of us.’
‘And where would you lay your head at night?’ Thomas asked. ‘Under Trent Bridge?’
‘I would if I had to.’
‘I’ll always find a bed to sleep in,’ Edith said, ‘but I shan’t say who with.’
‘You’ll get into trouble one of these days.’ Thomas took the empty buckets back to the outhouse.
They were locked in notions of what they imagined freedom to be. ‘I don’t care.’ Edith was adamant. ‘It’ll be better than staying here.’
Oliver placed the buckets under the large sink, came out of the pantry and picked up the long-handled woodsman’s axe to tackle a heap of logs by the fence at the laneside. At the noisy opening of an upstairs window they saw Burton’s face: ‘Don’t stand there. Get on with your work all of you.’
The house was small but adequate, one bedroom for the five girls, another for the three sons, and the largest for Burton and Mary Ann. There was a four-poster curtain-drawn bed, a wardrobe, and a chest of drawers with a swivel mirror above, which showed Burton putting on a laundered white shirt, a high collar, and square-ended bow tie.
Tucking the shirt into the trousers of his navy-blue suit, and fastening the thick leather belt into place, a sudden irritation took him again to the window. ‘Thomas! Get your hands out of your pockets and come in to polish my boots. The black ones. They’re in the parlour. And look sharp, or you’ll get a stick across your back.’
A few minutes were needed to arrange the correct set of the tie, and finish turning him from a blacksmith at the forge into a smartly dressed man of consequence. He fixed the watch and chain across his waistcoat with its attached couple of sovereigns, and slipped the white folded handkerchief in his lapel pocket. Down in the parlour he held his boots against the window to make sure they had a sufficient shine, then drew both on and carefully laced them up.
He went to the back of the house, the evening warm and damp with plenty of gnats, and from the garden decapitated a chrysanthemum with a small pocket knife, to adorn his button hole, thus completing the presence he wished to show. Satisfied that everyone was at their allotted tasks in the yard, he strode onto the lane, leaving the gate open.
He pushed into the swing doors of the Crown Hotel, the smell of pipe smoke and ripe ale as familiar as if he had known it even since before birth. Walking to the bar he noted everyone with hardly a turn of the head, those known and unknown. Eli the barman had the same facial colour and white albino hair as his father had at the old White Hart. ‘I’ll have the usual.’
‘Can’t get enough, eh, Burton?’ Morgan wiped froth from his long moustache. Burton had known him from a youth, but disliked such familiarity, at least so early in the evening.
Tom, who also worked with the ponies at Radford pit, hovered on the other side. ‘He’ll need a lot of ale to dowse the fire in him.’
Eli put the tankard down. ‘That’s a tanner you owe the till.’
He set a coin on the wood and, standing sufficiently apart in the crowded Saturday night taproom, said: ‘Have you seen Florence?’
‘She was serving in the jug-and-bottle. Then she went upstairs, but I expect she’ll be down in a bit.’
Burton let the rest of his ale stand while lighting a cigarette. At work he rolled them, but for the weekend emptied a packet of twenty Virginias into a silver case. ‘Is she all right?’
He was called to take another order. ‘She will be, as soon as she sees you.’
‘She’s not for you, Burton,’ Tom said.
Burton stared. ‘Nobody’s for anybody, unless you take them.’
‘You’ll need a horse to gallop away on if her husband sees you,’ Morgan laughed.
‘You think so?’ Saturday night was a time for ease, but he was annoyed at them putting their noses into what could only be his business. ‘I’ve never been on a horse in my life. I wouldn’t trust one an inch. Nor would I trust a woman, unless I wanted her. Only a fool would risk his neck on a horse, or his life for a woman.’
He noticed her stance at the foot of the stairs, glad she saw only him, and even more so at her approach in response to his faint nod. A tall well-built woman of thirty, she wore a flowery blouse with a lace collar. Her thin lips and the expression, as if for the moment unaware of where she was, made her seem eternally threatened, and too serious for Burton’s liking, until her smile changed to one of expectation, a lightening of the features he had noticed on first seeing her