Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

He knocked his leg on the bicycle pedal, swearing at the pain, complaining at Jack’s barminess for leaving it in such an exposed position. ‘How does he think I’m going to get in with that thing stuck there?’ he joked. ‘Tell him I said to leave it in the backyard next week, out of ‘arm’s way.’

Brenda hissed and told him to be quiet, and they crept like two thieves into the living-room, where the electric light showed the supper things — teacups, plates, jam-pot, bread — still on the table. A howl of cats came from a nearby yard, and a dustbin lid clattered on to cobblestones.

‘Oh well,’ he said in a normal voice, standing up tall and straight, ‘it’s no use whisperin’ when all that racket’s going on.’

They stood between the table and firegrate, and Brenda put her arms around him. While kissing her he turned his head so that his own face stared back at him from an oval mirror above the shelf. His eyes grew large in looking at himself from such an angle, noticing his short disordered hair sticking out like the bristles of a blond porcupine, and the mark of an old pimple healing on his cheek.

‘Don’t let’s stay down here long, Arthur,’ she said softly.

He released her and, knowing every corner of the house and acting as if it belonged to him, stripped off his coat and shirt and went into the scullery to wash the tiredness from his eyes. Once in bed, they would not go to sleep at once: he wanted to be fresh for an hour before floating endlessly down into the warm bed beside Brenda’s soft body.

It was ten o’clock, and she was still asleep. The sun came through the window, carrying street-noises on its beams, a Sunday morning clash of bottles from milkmen on their rounds, newspaper boys shouting to each other as they clattered along the pavement and pushed folded newspapers into letter-boxes, each bearing crossword puzzles, sports news and forecasts, and interesting scandal that would be struggled through with a curious and salacious indolence over plates of bacon and tomatoes and mugs of strong sweet tea.

He turned to Brenda heaped beside him, sitting up to look at her. She was breathing gently; her hair straggled untidily over the pillow, her breasts bulged out over her slip, a thick smooth arm over them as if she were trying to protect herself from something that had frightened her in a dream. He heard the two children playing in their bedroom across the landing. One was saying: ‘It’s my Teddy-bear, our Jacky. Gi’ it me or else Is’ll tell our mam.’ Then a low threat from the boy who would not hand back his plunder.

He sank down contentedly into bed. ‘Brenda,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Come on, duck, waken up.’

She turned and pressed her face into his groin.

‘Nice,’ he muttered.

‘What’s time?’ she mumbled, her breath hot against his skin.

‘Half-past eleven,’ he lied.

She sprang up, showing the crease-marks of crumpled sheets down one side of her face, her brown eyes wide open. ‘You’re having me on again,’ she cried. ‘Of all the liars, you’re the biggest I’ve ever known.’

‘I allus was a liar,’ he said, laughing at his joke. ‘A good ‘un an’ all.’

‘Liars don’t prosper,’ she retorted.

‘It’s on’y ten o’clock,’ he admitted, lifting her hair and rolling it into a ball on top of her head.

‘What a time we had last night,’ she grinned, suddenly remembering.

It came back to him now. He had put away more swill than Loudmouth, had fallen down some stairs, had been sick over a man and a woman. He laughed. ‘It seems years.’ He took her by the shoulders and kissed her lips, then her neck and breasts, pressing his leg against her. ‘You’re lovely, Brenda. Let’s get down in bed.’

‘Mam,’ a small plaintive voice cried.

She pushed Arthur away. ‘Go back to bed, Jacky.’

‘It’s late,’ he crooned tearfully through the door. ‘I want some tea, our mam.’

‘Go back.’

They heard the shuffling of a small foot behind the door. ‘I want to see Uncle Arthur,’ Jacky pleaded.

‘Little bogger,’ Arthur muttered, resigning himself to the disturbance. ‘I can’t have a bit o’ peace on a Sunday morning.’

Brenda sat higher in the bed and straightened her slip. ‘Leave him alone,’ she said.

Jacky was insistent. He kicked the bottom of the door.

‘Can I come in, Uncle Arthur?’

‘You little bogger.’

He laughed, knowing now that it was all right.

‘Go down to the parlour,’ Arthur said, ‘and get the News of the World that’s just bin pushed in the letter-box. Then I’ll let yer come.’

His bare feet went thudding softly on the wooden stairs. They heard him hurrying through the parlour below, then running back and climbing the stairs with breathless haste. They drew apart as he burst in and threw the paper on the bed, jumping up and crushing it between his stomach and Arthur’s legs. Arthur pulled it free and held him high in the air with one hand, until he began to gag and choke with laughter and Brenda said he was to be put down or else he would go into a fit.

‘Young Jacky,’ Arthur said, looking up at his animated face, five years old, with pink skin and fair hair, fresh in his shirt and clean from bath-night. ‘You little bogger, young Jacky, you young jockey.’ He let him down, and the child burrowed up against him like a passionate rabbit.

‘Listen,’ Arthur said to him, blowing in his ear between each word, ‘go and get my trousers from that chair and I’ll gi’ yer a bob.’

‘You’ll spoil him,’ Brenda said, touching him under the blankets. ‘He gets enough money as it is.’ She lifted herself out of bed and picked up a skirt draped over the bottom rail. Both Arthur and Jacky watched her intently as she dressed, deeply interested by the various secrets of her that became hidden with the donning of each item of clothing.

‘What does it matter?’ Arthur demanded at being forced to justify his generosity. ‘I give ‘im money because I was lucky to get a ha’penny when I was a nipper.’

She was slovenly and easily dressed for Sunday morning: a white blouse open at the throat, a wide grey skirt, a slip-on pair of shoes, and hair pushed in strands to the back of her neck. ‘Come on, get up, Arthur. It’s nearly eleven o’clock. You’ve got to be out of the house before twelve. It wouldn’t do for Jack to see you here.’

‘That bastard,’ he said, holding Jacky at arms’ length and pulling a face at him. ‘Who do you love?’ he shouted with a laugh. ‘Who do you love, young Jack Blud-Tub?’

‘Yo’, yo’,’ he screamed. ‘Yo’, Uncle Arthur’ — and Arthur released him so that he fell with a thud on to the rumpled bed.

‘Come on, then,’ Brenda said impatiently, tired of watching, ‘let’s go downstairs.’

‘Yo’ goo down, duck,’ he grinned, ‘and cook me some breakfast. I’ll come when I can smell the bacon and egg.’

Jack’s head was turned and she bent over to kiss Arthur. He held her firmly by the neck, and was still kissing her when Jacky lifted his head and looked wonderingly at them.

At half-past eleven Arthur sat at the table with a plate of bacon-and-egg before him. He tore a piece of bread in half and dipped it in the fat around his plate, then took a long drink of tea. Jacky, already fed, stood on a nearby chair and followed every move with his blue eyes.

‘It’s thirsty work, fallin’ downstairs,’ Arthur said. ‘Pour me some more tea, duck.’

She held the newspaper against her midriff with one hand. ‘Plenty of sugar?’

He nodded and went on eating. ‘You’re good to me,’ he said after a while, ‘and don’t think I don’t appreciate it.’

‘Yes, but it’ll be your last breakfast in this house if you don’t hurry. Jack’ll be home soon.’

Tomorrow is work, and I’ll be hard at it, sweating my guts out until next weekend. It’s a hard life if you don’t weaken. He told her what was on his mind.

‘No rest for the wicked,’ she laughed.

He passed a choice piece of bacon to Jacky. ‘A present from Uncle Arthur.’

‘Ta!’ he said, relishing the honour before his mouth closed over the fork.

Brenda suddenly stiffened in her chair and half turned her ear to the window, silent like an animal waiting to spring, an alertness that transformed her face to temporary ugliness. Arthur noticed it, and swilled down the last of his tea. ‘He’s coming,’ she said. ‘I heard the gate open.’

He picked Jacky up and kissed him on the lips, feeling his arms curl tight around his face and ears. He then stood him on a chair while he kissed Brenda.

‘So long,’ he said. ‘See you next week’ — and walked towards the parlour. He stood by the bicycle for a moment to light a cigarette.

‘Get going,’ Brenda hissed softly, seeing her husband open the gate and walk down the yard.

Arthur unlocked the front door and pulled it towards him, sniffing the fresh air of a bright Sunday morning as if to decide whether the day was fine enough to venture out in. It was. He clicked the door to and stepped into the street, as Brenda’s husband Jack opened the back door and came in through the scullery.

2

He lifted a pair of clean overalls from the bed-rail and pulled them over his big white feet, taking care not to disturb his brother Sam who, while still in the depths of sleep, rolled himself more advantageously into the large mound of blankets now that Arthur had left the bed. He had often heard Friday described as Black Friday — remembering a Boris Karloff film of years ago — and wondered why this should be. For Friday, being pay-day, was a good day, and ‘black’ would be more fitting if applied to Monday. Black Monday. Then there would be some sense in it, when you felt your head big from boozing, throat sore from singing, eyes fogged-up from seeing too many films or sitting in front of the television, and feeling black and wicked because the big grind was starting all over again.

The stairfoot door clicked open.

‘Arthur,’ his father called, in a deadly menacing Monday-morning voice that made your guts rattle, sounding as if it came from the grave, ‘when are yer goin’ ter get up? Yer’ll be late fer wok.’ He closed the stairfoot door quietly so as not to waken the mother and two other sons still at home.

Arthur took a half-empty fag-packet from the mantelpiece, his comb, a ten-shilling note and heap of coins that had survived the pubs, bookies’ counters, and cadgers, and stuffed them into his pockets.

The bottom door opened again.

‘Eh?’

‘I’eard yer the first time,’ Arthur said in a whisper.

The door slammed, by way of a reply.

A mug of tea was needed, then back to the treadmill. Monday was always the worst; by Wednesday he was broken-in, like a greyhound. Well, anyroad, he thought, there was always Brenda, lovely Brenda who was all right and looked after you well once she’d made up her mind to it. As long as Jack didn’t find out and try to get his hands around my throat. That’d be the day. By Christ it would. Though my hands would be round his throat first, the nit-witted, dilat’ry, unlucky bastard.

He glanced once more around the small bedroom, seeing the wooden double-bed pushed under the window, the glint of a white pot, dilapidated shelves holding Sam’s books — rulers, pencils, and rubbers — and a home-made table on which stood his portable wireless set. He lifted the latch as the stairfoot door opened again, and his father poked his head up, ready to tell him in his whispering, menacing Monday-morning gut-rattle that it was time to come down.

Despite the previous tone of his father’s voice, Arthur found him sitting at the table happily supping tea. A bright fire burned in the modernized grate — the family had clubbed-up thirty quid to have it done — and the room was warm and cheerful, the table set, and tea mashed.

Seaton looked up from his cup. ‘Come on, Arthur. You ain’t got much time. It’s ten past seven, and we’ve both got to be on by half-past. Sup a cup o’tea an‘ get crackin‘.’

Arthur sat down and stretched his legs towards the fire. After a cup and a Woodbine his head was clearer. He didn’t feel so bad. ‘You’ll go blind one day, dad,’ he said, for nothing, taking words out of the air for sport, ready to play with the consequences of whatever he might cause.

Seaton turned to him uncomprehendingly, his older head still fuddled. It took ten cups of tea and as many Woodbines to set his temper right after the weekend. ‘What do you mean?’ he demanded, intractable at any time before ten in the morning.

‘Sittin’ in front of the TV. You stick to it like glue from six to eleven every night. It can’t be good for yer. You’ll go blind one day. You’re bound to. I read it in the Post last week that a lad from the Medders went blind. They might be able to save ‘im though, because ‘e goes to the Eye Infirmary every Monday, Wednesday, an’ Friday. But it’s a risk.’

His father poured another cup of tea, his black brows taut with anger. Short, stocky Seaton was incapable of irritation or mild annoyance. He was either happy and fussy with everybody, or black-browed with a deep melancholy rage that chose its victims at random. In the last few years his choice of victims had grown less, for Arthur, with his brother Fred, had been through the mill of factory and army and now stood up to him, creating a balance of power that kept the house more or less peaceful.

‘I’m sure it never did anybody any harm,’ Seaton said. ‘Anyway, yer never believe what the papers tell yer, do yer? If yer do then yer want yer brains testin’. They never tell owt but lies. That’s one thing I do know.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that,’ Arthur said, flipping a dead Woodbine into the fire. ‘Anyway, I know somebody who knows this kid as went blind, so the papers was right for a change. They said they saw this kid bein’ led to the Eye Infirmary by ’is mam. It was a rotten shame, they said. A kid of seven. She led ‘im along wi’ a lead, and the kid had a stick specially made for him, painted white. I heard they was getting him a dog as well to help him along, a wire-haired terrier. There was talk o’ standin’ him outside the Council House for the rest of his life wi’ a tin mug if he don’t get better. His dad’s got cancer, an’ ‘is mam can’t afford ter keep him in white sticks an’ dogs.’

‘Ye’re barmy,’ Seaton said. ‘Go an’ tell yer stories somewhere else. Not that I’m bothered wi’ my eyes anyway. My eyes ‘ave allus bin good, and allus will be. When I went for my medical in the war they were A1, but I swung the lead and got off 3C,’ he added proudly.

The subject was dropped. His father cut several slices of bread and made sandwiches with cold meat left from Sunday dinner. Arthur teased him a lot, but in a way he was glad to see the TV standing in a corner of the living-room, a glossy panelled box looking, he thought, like something plundered from a spaceship. The old man was happy at last, anyway, and he deserved to be happy, after all the years before the war on the dole, five kids and the big miserying that went with no money and no way of getting any. And now he had a sit-down job at the factory, all the Woodbines he could smoke, money for a pint if he wanted one, though he didn’t as a rule drink, a holiday somewhere, a jaunt on the firm’s trip to Blackpool, and a television-set to look into at home. The difference between before the war and after the war didn’t bear thinking about. War was a marvellous thing in many ways, when you thought about how happy it had made so many people in England. There are no flies on me, Arthur thought.

He stuffed a packet of sandwiches and a flask of tea into his pocket, and waited while his father struggled into a jacket. Once out of doors they were more aware of the factory rumbling a hundred yards away over the high wall. Generators whined all night, and during the day giant milling-machines working away on cranks and pedals in the turnery gave to the terrace a sensation of living within breathing distance of some monstrous being that suffered from a disease of the stomach. Disinfectant-suds, grease, and newly-cut steel permeated the air over the suburb of four-roomed houses built around the factory, streets and terraces hanging on to its belly and flanks like calves sucking the udders of some great mother. The factory sent crated bicycles each year from the Despatch Department to waiting railway trucks over Eddison Road, boosting post-war (or perhaps pre-war, Arthur thought, because these days a war could start tomorrow) export trade and trying to sling pontoons over a turbulent unbridgeable river called the Sterling Balance. The thousands that worked there took home good wages. No more short-time like before the war, or getting the sack if you stood ten minutes in the lavatory reading your Football Post — if the gaffer got on to you now you could always tell him where to put the job and go somewhere else. And no more running out at dinnertime for a penny bag of chips to eat with your bread. Now, and about time too, you got fair wages if you worked your backbone to a string of conkers on piece-work, and there was a big canteen where you could get a hot dinner for two-bob. With the wages you got you could save up for a motorbike or even an old car, or you could go on a ten-day binge and get rid of all you’d saved. Because it was no use saving your money year after year. A mug’s game, since the value of it got less and less and in any case you never knew when the Yanks were going to do something daft like dropping the H-bomb on Moscow. And if they did then you could say ta-ta to everybody, burn your football coupons and betting-slips, and ring-up Billy Graham. If you believe in God, which I don’t, he said to himself.

‘It’s a bit nippy,’ his father remarked, buttoning his coat as they turned into the street.

‘What do you expect for November?’ Arthur said. Not that he didn’t have an overcoat, but you never went to work in one, not even when snow was on the ground and it was freezing. An overcoat was for going out in at night when you had your Teddy-suit on. Living only five minutes from the factory, walking kept you warm on your way there, and once inside at your machine the working of it kept your blood running. Only those that came from Mansfield and Kirkby wore overcoats, because it was cold in the buses.

Fat Mrs Bull the gossiper stood with her fat arms folded over her apron at the yard-end, watching people pass by on their way to work. With pink face and beady eyes, she was a tight-fisted defender of her tribe, queen of the yard because she had lived there for twenty-two years, earning names like ‘The News of the World’ and the ‘Loudspeaker’ because she watched the factory go in every morning and afternoon to glean choice gossip for retail later on. Neither Arthur nor his father greeted her as they passed, and neither did they speak to each other until they were halfway down the street.

It was long, straight, and cobble-stoned, with lamp-posts and intersections at regular intervals, terraces branching off here and there. You stepped out of the front door and found yourself on the pavement. Red-ochre had been blackened by soot, paint was faded and cracked, everything was a hundred years old except the furniture inside.

‘What will they think on next!’ Seaton said, after glancing upwards and seeing a television aerial hooked on to almost every chimney, like a string of radar stations, each installed on the never-never.

They turned on to Eddison Road by the big red-bricked canteen. The November sky was clear and dark-blue, with some stars still showing whitely. ‘Everybody’ll ‘ave little baby ‘elicopters,’ Arthur answered readily. ‘You’ll see. Five-bob-a-week-and-misses for ten years and you can go and see your mate at Derby in lunch-hour.’

‘Some ‘opes,’ the old man scoffed.

‘I read it in the paper,’ Arthur said. ‘It was the one last Thursday, I think, because my snap was wrapped-up in it, that they’ll get to the moon in five years. In ten they’ll be having cheap-day returns. It’s true right enough.’

Seaton laughed. ‘You’re crackers, Arthur. You’ll grow-up one day and stop telling these tales. You’re nearly twenty-two. You should know better. I thought they’d a cured you on it in the army, but I can see they didn’t.’

‘The on’y thing the army cures you on,’ Arthur retorted, ‘is never to join the army again. They’re dead good at that.’

‘When I was a lad they din’t even have wireless sets,’ Seaton ruminated. ‘And now look at what they’ve got: television. Pictures in your own ‘ouse.’

They were caught by the main ingoing stream: bicycles, buses, motor-bikes, and pedestrians on a last-minute rush to breach one of the seven gates before half-past. Arthur and his father walked in by the hexagonal commissionaires’ office, a building in the centre of a wide roadway dividing the factory into two unequal parts. Seaton was on viewing in the three-speed shop, so turned off after a hundred yards.

‘See yer’t dinnertime, Arthur.’

‘Tarr-ar, Dad.’

Arthur walked into a huge corridor, searching an inside pocket for his clocking-in card and noticing, as on every morning since he was fifteen — except for a two-year break in the army — the factory smell of oil-suds, machinery, and shaved steel that surrounded you with an air in which pimples grew and prospered on your face and shoulders, that would have turned you into one big pimple if you did not spend half an hour over the scullery sink every night getting rid of the biggest bastards. What a life, he thought. Hard work and good wages, and a smell all day that turns your guts.

The bright Monday-morning ring of the clocking-in machine made a jarring note, different from the tune that played inside Arthur. It was dead on half-past seven. Once in the shop he allowed himself to be swallowed by its diverse noises, walked along lanes of capstan lathes and millers, drills and polishers and hand-presses, worked by a multiplicity of belts and pulleys turning and twisting and slapping on heavy well-oiled wheels overhead, dependent for power on a motor stooping at the far end of the hall like the black shining bulk of a stranded whale. Machines with their own small motors started with a jerk and a whine under the shadows of their operators, increasing a noise that made the brain reel and ache because the weekend had been too tranquil by contrast, a weekend that had terminated for Arthur in fishing for trout in the cool shade of a willow-sleeved canal near the Balloon Houses, miles away from the city. Motor-trolleys moved up and down the main gangways carrying boxes of work — pedals, hubs, nuts, and bolts — from one part of the shop to another. Robboe the foreman bent over a stack of new timesheets behind his glass partition; women and girls wearing turbans and hair-nets and men and boys in clean blue overalls, settled down to their work, eager to get a good start on their day’s stint; while sweepers and cleaners at everybody’s beck and call already patrolled the gangways and looked busy.

Arthur reached his capstan lathe and took off his jacket, hanging it on a nearby nail so that he could keep an eye on his belongings. He pressed the starter button, and his motor came to life with a gentle thump. Looking around, it did not seem, despite the infernal noise of hurrying machinery, that anyone was working with particular speed. He smiled to himself and picked up a glittering steel cylinder from the top box of a pile beside him, and fixed it into the spindle. He jettisoned his cigarette into the sud-pan, drew back the capstan, and swung the turret on to its broadest drill. Two minutes passed while he contemplated the precise position of tools and cylinder; finally he spat on to both hands and rubbed them together, then switched on the sud-tap from the movable brass pipe, pressed a button that set the spindle running, and ran in the drill to a neat chamfer. Monday morning had lost its terror.

At a piecework rate of four-and-six a hundred you could make your money if you knocked-up fourteen hundred a day — possible without grabbing too much — and if you went all out for a thousand in the morning you could dawdle through the afternoon and lark about with the women and talk to your mates now and again. Such leisure often brought him near to trouble, for some weeks ago he stunned a mouse — that the overfed factory cats had missed — and laid it beneath a woman’s drill, and Robboe the gaffer ran out of his office when he heard her screaming blue-murder, thinking that some bloody silly woman had gone and got her hair caught in a belt (big notices said that women must wear hair-nets, but who could tell with women?) and Robboe was glad that it was nothing more than a dead mouse she was kicking up such a fuss about. But he paced up and down the gangways asking who was responsible for the stunned mouse, and when he came to Arthur, who denied having anything to do with it, he said: ‘I’ll bet you did it, you young bogger.’ ‘Me, Mr Robboe?’ Arthur said, the picture of innocence, standing up tall with offended pride. ‘I’ve got so much work to do I can’t move from my lathe. Anyway, I don’t believe in tormenting women, you know that. It’s against my principles.’ Robboe glared at him: ‘Well, I don’t know. Somebody did it, and I reckon it’s you. You’re a bit of a Red if you ask me, that’s what you are.’ ‘Now then, that’s slander,’ Arthur said. ‘I’ll see my lawyers about you. There’s tons of witnesses.’ Robboe went back to his office, bearing a black look for the girl inside, and for any tool-setter that might require his advice in the next half-hour; and Arthur worked on his lathe like a model of industry.