A Start in Life (19 page)

‘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.

Part Three

A catchy tune was playing all over London, and I don't remember the name of it any more, not even the tune itself. Sometimes it half comes back to me, but before it can turn fully on, I blot out my mind and fight shy of it, as if I really don't want to remember. It was a gay, jumpy, tuneful, deathlike-trancelike tune which seemed to be everywhere, livening up the wet winter, and giving people a reason for thinking they were alive. But conductors and window-cleaners whistled it, hummed it, thrummed it on their bells and buckets as if determined to prove themselves made of flesh and blood. I first heard it on the Tube train from Hendon to King's Cross. A long-haired youth had a transistor radio, and it broke into my speculation as to what I should do now that I had reached the smoke.

In spite of losing my car, things weren't as bad as they might have been. I had a hundred pounds in my pocket, and supposed most people came to London with less in their wallets than that. It felt like a fortune that would never run out, to be lived on in affluence for endless weeks. I found a hotel beyond the station, that was full of old ladies and foreign students, where I could get a decent bed and breakfast for thirty bob a night. My name was Donald Charles Cresswell, and I gave my address in the book as 11 Stoneygate Street, Leicester. Why, I don't know, because I didn't even feel I was doing it till I had (which is always the case), though I considered only a minute later that it might one day come in useful.

My room was the smallest space I'd ever been in on which a door had closed. There was a bed, built-in wardrobe, chair and small table, and above in the ceiling was screwed a one-candlepower bulb. It really made you feel welcome, but I was in such high fettle at being in the big town at last that after a wash and brush up I went down the stairs whistling the same one-eyed tune I'd already heard with such scorn.

The counter clerk asked what time I'd be back as I handed him the key and I said: ‘Why, will I get locked out?' and he stared at me as if I wasn't playing the game by popping that uncivilized question.

‘No sir, but if you come in past midnight you'll have to ring the bell.'

I thanked him very much, and stepped into the burnt air. A woman asked me to go with her but she didn't look much good, and I thought I ought to be a bit wary of these London tarts in case she had the shirt off my back and gave me a dose of the Baffin Land clap. It was only yesterday that I'd been to bed with Claudine first and Miss Bolsover second, and that would have to last me for a while, if I weren't to call myself greedy. Also I was flayed out with tiredness, and reckoned only on a short walk in the surrounding streets before going back to my matchbox for a hard-earned kip.

I said goodnight to her and wandered till I came to a place to eat. A cat slept in the window, but the meal was good enough, considering the price. While I got stuck into my stew, an old grey-bearded ragbag came in selling almanacks, and I bought one, giving him half a crown and telling him to keep the change. His brown eyes glinted out of all that bush: ‘Thank you,
sir
!' he said, with the heaviest sarcasm I'd ever heard.

I could have kicked myself that such goodness of heart had been spurned by the bug-eaten old bastard, but by the time I was ready to throw a sharp crust of bread in his face the door rattled and he'd gone. As I chewed through my minced-up mutton and cat I wondered where he'd come from, and a low feeling gripped me when I thought maybe he left Nottingham forty years ago full of hope and promise. Perhaps he'd worked well at a good steady job, but then he'd felt the strain and taken to having a few drinks now and again. He'd got into bad company, overspent, embezzled, been sent to prison. Then his wife left him, his kids grew up not knowing him and disappeared, and he'd gone from one job to another, bad to worse, beer to meths, sleeping under bridges and on waste-grounds, walking the streets with a sandwich board on him, and finally he'd taken to pubs and cafés selling almanacks so that he was known to everyone, a bit contemptuously, as Almanack Jack. I shook off the black mood and ordered coffee, the best part of the meal, and from a good long swig I looked up to witness the return of Almanack Jack.

There were three other people in the place, but as luck would have it, he shuffled up to me: ‘You look as if you could do with a bit of advice, hearty.'

I held out my hand: ‘Going to read my palm?' He stood by my table, tall and hefty, and not at all as old as I'd thought him at first sight. ‘Sit down, and have a cup of something.'

‘Tea,' he said, ‘and a piece of bread and butter,' when the waiter came over. He stank rotten, so I lit a cigarette. ‘You're too generous,' he added.

‘How else can you live?'

He sat down and faced me. ‘I've known lots of people who know how. In this piece of bread you can see the greatness of God. It gives power to nature. There's no other way I can put it.'

‘I don't believe in God.'

‘Neither do I,' he said, ‘but I believe in the power of bread, and that's the same thing, as far as I'm concerned. I like to feel the greatness of God in my belly.'

‘You're welcome,' I said. Hoping he was a vegetarian, I added: ‘You can have a piece of meat as far as I'm concerned.'

‘I'll dwell on that,' he answered. ‘Meat is the Devil, and bread is God. But since man is compounded of God and the Devil at the same time, and I don't deny my truly human nature, then I'll take you up on your kind offer.' He snapped his fingers for the waiter with such experienced aplomb that I began to see a reason for his looking so healthy, and well built. He ordered stew and rice, and when the waiter brought it I asked for another coffee.

‘I don't suppose you get much of a living flogging almanacks.'

He smothered his volcano with salt: ‘Enough. How much do you think a man needs if he isn't God?'

‘I wouldn't know,' I said, lighting my last Whiff.

He looked ruefully as I crunched the packet up. ‘You can live on much less than you think,' he said. ‘I buy my almanacks at fourpence each, and mean people give me a tanner, while others pay a shilling. Occasionally I get half a crown. I have been known to get a pound from someone who mistakenly feels sorry for me.'

‘You seem to have got yourself a nice little corner,' I said, realizing that he was no fool, because the longer he talked the more the educated edge to his voice came through. His beard was not so much grey, as reddish-ginger, and it was obvious that in fact he couldn't be a day over forty-five.

‘Not that it adds up to what a young fellow like you might call a good wage, but it gets me a room and a few simple eatables.'

‘Don't you feel a bit of a shitbag though,' I said, ‘not doing a hard day's work? You're living and scrounging on the backs of those who sweat their guts out, and that's the truth.' A piece of stew got tangled in his beard, and I wanted to pick it off and eat it rather than see it go to waste by falling on to the floor as he shook his head violently from side to side. I felt that he had no right to waste even that much food, the idle bastard. Then he gripped it in the pincers of a piece of bread and put it into his mouth.

‘You think that, do you? And why not? If you didn't I wouldn't be eating this meal at the moment, and that would never do. My existence like this is only possible because people like you believe in doing a fair day's work. That's putting it mildly, though. You see, ninety per cent of people are of such low intelligence and intellectual perception that they'd go crazy if they had no work to do. Let me show you the system, dreary and accurate though it may be. The vast teeming majority couldn't exist without work. Their spirits would shrivel up, their bodies would perish. You need vision to be idle. But at the same time they want to hear that one golden day in the future they'll only have to do ten hours' work a week – but that right now civilization will go under if they don't pull their weight.

‘It certainly will when they only work ten hours a week, and thank God I won't be here to see it, because it won't happen for another three hundred years. The first government that allows it will have revolution on its hands in five minutes. Oh, no, the longer and harder they work the better. That's what people want, though you've got to tell them they don't want it and that it's a bore just so that they'll go on doing it. God dreads idleness, you goddam bet he does, and with good reason. He'd better, otherwise the world will be full of Nimrods shooting up arrows to drag him down from his golden fur-lined palace. And it's not only factory, farm, and office slaves who must sweat to keep alive. No, it's also doctors, artists, lawyers who wither if they don't get enough to do. You have to have a particular, peculiar, God-given bent to exist without work. I'm a great benefactor of humanity, because though I'm often a bastard in my behaviour I've never been as much of a bastard to actually deprive anyone of work by joining the task force myself. I deliberately abstain in a great spirit of self-sacrifice, even at the risk of destroying my own character. It's an experiment I've been carrying on for a few years now, though not for so long that I can see how it's going to end or who is going to get the ultimate good from it. Oh no, don't think my life's an easy one, though I suppose I like it, otherwise I'd change it.

‘If those who felt like me (and there are quite a few of us) suddenly decided to demand jobs, the social structure would collapse. Maybe that would be no bad thing according to certain people, but I'm no revolutionary. If ever any government threatened me with work I'd put on my dark glasses, take up my stick and kidnap a dog, tie a label on me saying “Blinded by Work”, and tap my way to the nearest seaport so as to make my getaway to foreign parts. I've no desire to take any man's job, which is most likely his only reason for being on this earth at all. And if you're appalled at the unparalleled extent of my self-sacrifice, maybe you'd like to make amends by buying me a cup of that marvellous Turkish coffee they sell here.'

‘How could anybody refuse after that little talk?'

‘People do,' he said. ‘They're vicious at times. Don't think I made my decision to run this kind of life lightly. I didn't. I was forty, in the prime of life, with a wife, two kids, a big flat, a mistress, two cars, a country cottage, as well as being near the top of my job in textile designing. It was a very comfortable and satisfying existence for the type of person I was then. I didn't even feel that because things were so perfect there was nothing left in life for me. My decision to turn the other cheek wasn't that shallow. But immediately I made up my mind, from one minute to the next, that the present life was no good for me, then I was a different person, and it was no longer satisfying, but a torment until I began to change it. The only thing I regret was not doing it the easy way by making the break clean enough. I was a liberal-humanitarian, so I did it by stages, thinking that this would be more effective, and that it wouldn't allow me to change my mind, and that it would cause less pain all round. I wasn't very strong-willed, you might say. My faith at the beginning wasn't too strong. It had to develop, through the fire. So within the space of a few months my domiciles had come under the hammer, my wife was in a looney-bin, my children were in care, my mistress was having psychoanalysis, my job was filled by one of the hungry generation with sharper teeth than ever before, and I was in hospital with double pneumonia. But I knew that when the dust settled everybody concerned would be able to live the life they'd always wanted to lead.