The Broken Chariot (7 page)

So Bert he was, and must know himself to be, if he wanted to be absorbed into the shop, which seemed to be happening because, on going into the canteen for dinner at half past twelve, he found that Archie had kept a place for him at the long table. ‘This fuckin' grub'll kill yer, but it'll keep yer goin' till it does.'

A grunt of agreement was safe enough, as he was getting his head down towards the spuds and mincemeat, a delicious smell compared to most of the meals at school. After the pudding and coffee Archie stood up. ‘Let's go outside a bit, and 'ave a fag.'

‘I forgot mine this morning,' Bert said.

Men were kicking a tennis ball along the pavement, and they stood to watch. ‘'Ave one o' these, then. I on'y smoke Players.'

‘Ta.' Herbert took one and put it between his lips. He would buy a packet and pay Archie back, but meanwhile he had to make sure he didn't seem a stranger to the habit. Archie held the light, and Herbert puffed without drawing in too much of the smoke. ‘I'm used to Woodbines.'

Archie was looking at one of the office girls walking by. ‘Not bad, eh, is she?'

‘Yeh,' Bert took another puff of his fag, and managed not to choke.

He cleared swarf from between the machines, or lifted boxes of shellcaps and fuse cases from the gangway to the viewing benches. Archie showed him how to bend from the knees instead of the waist. ‘Ye're tall and thin, see? and this way you wain't snap yer backbone. Yer wouldn't be any good at fuckin' then, if yer did that, would yer?'

Not that the labour was hard to get used to, Herbert mused, maybe due to the game and cadet scramblings on the obstacle course at school. Everything was so new that whenever he looked at the clock another hour had gone by.

In the evening he sat in his room and popped blisters with a needle heated over a match flame, dousing them in TCP, then picking brass splinters out with tweezers before they could fester. Archie was his mentor, with no asking, sharp eyes for his problems and always volunteering a remedy. ‘If you don't tek care o' yer 'ands they'll get to look like tree stumps, and the women don't like that. As long as they're nice and clean they'll let you get at their knickers.'

He was clocking out when Walter Price, a toolsetter of about forty who had been lame from birth, asked if he played darts. He remembered Isaac's advice to fall in with everything. ‘Now and then.'

‘It's like this, yer see, we need a new chap on the team, because that bleddy fool Jack Blundell cum off 'is motorbike and broke 'is arm last week. Can yer cum to the Plough tonight, after yer tea?'

He had scorned the dart board in the games room at school, as something to amuse the tiddlers who were miserable at being away from mummy and daddy. Now he wished he hadn't, though he recalled some of the jargon. ‘I'm a bit rusty. Down from three-o-one, though, in't it?'

Walter smiled like a man who only did so to hide his pain. ‘That's the ticket. We'll show yer. It's the enthusiasm of youth we want on the team.'

Herbert's uncertainty was overcome by assuming that if these men could do it, so could he. At his probationary session, he tried for the bull, and though the first half-dozen went all over the board at least none gouged a hole in the blue plastered wall.

‘Don't 'urry, lad. Just chuck 'em about a bit to get yer 'and in.' But after a few more scatterings Walter lost patience. ‘I'll coach yer. Now, just watch me.' The disability of having one leg shorter than the other had made Walter a better player than most. ‘I want a treble, don't I? A seven? Now don't tek yer eyes off me.' Lopsided he got one. ‘Now a double six, then a bull – inner and outer. Y'er not lookin'! Look at me!' He got those as well. ‘Now yo' ev a go, me owd duck.'

Herbert applied the rules of the firing range, while taking in what he could of Walter's expertise. Legs apart and firm on the ground, arm straight and fingers holding the dart as if an extension of both, he aligned his eye along the length. Taking time, he let go, and got an outer bull. When the next dart hit a treble Walter set a pint on the table. ‘Sup that. Y'er doin' well, for a beginner. I on'y 'ope it ain't starter's luck.'

He doused his chagrin, but smiled agreement with irony he hoped, at each comment. ‘He's got a cool 'ead, that's the main thing,' Walter said to the others.

Herbert's long drink of beer put a fur lining in his throat. Use all the time you need, just like they're doing. Imitate, he told himself. Act. Mimic. Away from work, they knew how to go easy, from long experience. On the next run he tried for a double and a treble, and got them with two darts, though the third was nowhere.

‘It's a matter o' patience, from now on,' Walter said.

‘He'll do, though,' came a voice from the back.

Better to try the accent while wiping beer froth from his lips. ‘Mekin' progress, am I?' The thud of steel tips into cork was satisfying, but he was happy to let the old hands have a go, since the pint might foil his aim.

People he didn't know would call in a friendly way as he walked into the canteen: ‘Hey up, Bert!' His name went up on the notice board and after a few more sessions he was let in on a match, though feared he'd never be as good as most others on the team.

During an hour or so when there was no sweeping, or lifting, or trolleys to push, and it looked like someone had hammered nails against the arrowed hands of the clock face, he had time for thinking, and didn't much like it. The heavy load in his mind was asking to be sorted out, and that wasn't what he had taken a job in the factory for. A voice he didn't trust said the only course was to pack up at his digs and get on the train to another town. Life would be interesting again. The challenge of the unknown would get his blood jumping.

‘Slowin' down a bit, aren't you?' Archie said.

Herbert leaned on his brush handle. ‘I'm bored out o' my clogs.'

‘You're gettin' used to it, that's why. But don't let it get yer down, the first three years is the worst. Just 'ave a word with the chargehand and tell 'im yer aren't mekin' it pay. Tell 'im yer've got to mek it fuckin' pay, or you'll gerra job somewhere else. Things might look up, then.'

Herbert thought it best to be inconspicuous. Another place would be just as boring, and there'd be less chance of being recaptured if he stayed where he was.

‘It gets fucking monotonous working on a lathe as well,' Archie went on, ‘but at least I'm mekin' munny, so it don't!'

The best way to diffuse the blues was to flash up the Stalag towers of his school. He swept a coil of swarf from Archie's lathe, like the discarded tail of a steel piglet. Eileen looked as if trying to weigh him up – what for? – and not for the first time he noted her blush as she turned away. One of the women beside her said: ‘Go on, he wain't bite yer!'

He might, one day, if he got the chance, and decided to be pleasant in her presence and see where it got him. The dungarees over her bosom in no way hid the shape, and her headscarf only scantily covered glistening auburn hair. Hard to imagine there'd be much chance with such a favourite of the department, though she wasn't near as stuck up as Dominic's sister had been.

He marched across to the viewing tables, in response to her shout: ‘Come on, Bert, get these boxes out o' my sight.'

The first one slotted on to the trolley. ‘Tek yer sweat. You're workin' me to death.'

‘We all thought you'd faint when you first come into the factory,' she said. ‘You looked as if yer'd never done a day's hard work in your life.'

He leaned close to smell her powder. ‘Yer was wrong. I've worked since I was fourteen.'

‘What made yer so strong, then?'

‘Bovril.' He pushed the trolley away. ‘And Oxo,' he called over his shoulder.

Arthur Elliot went off sick, so Herbert was set to work on his lathe. ‘We'll give you a day to get used to it.' The chargehand thought him a bit daft to be writing the instructions down. ‘After that we'll set you up on piece work. We'll find Arthur summat else when 'e comes back.'

‘Now you'll be able to GRAB!' Archie bellowed into his ear as he passed on his way to the lavatories. ‘Just like me!'

Herbert practised for an hour, and next morning the chargehand came to see how he was getting on. ‘Have you done this before?'

Herbert flicked the turret ninety degrees, adjusted the sud pipe, and eased in the drill. ‘No, never.'

‘You're on your own then, from now on. Two bob a hundred. I'll bring you a time sheet.'

To make it pay in the manner of Archie was not part of his purpose. ‘Grabbing' wasn't in him. Still, he thought, if I don't make a show they'll smell me out and snub me for being stuck up or incompetent. So, a few days more and it was grab grab grab like the rest of them. Bert nodded a response, too grabbing and making it pay to take a hand off the levers and signal back, which concentration at the job no one understood better than Archie.

The result of putting on an act was that after a while his behaviour became normal, and Herbert had never imagined that life could be so easy and engrossing. For the first week his limbs ached even more by the end of the day, due to hour after hour of daunting repetition, though there was something satisfactory in that as well, proving that grabbing on a lathe was better than sweeping up and humping boxes for a living.

He looked on the machine as his own possession, with its handles and levers, and power supplied by a motor down by his feet. A clumsy touch and your hand got gouged, so he treated it much like the chariot witless Phaeton had tried to control on his feckless jaunt across the skies, pulling and spinning, easing here and there with calculated panache. If a thief came by and began to unbolt it from the base he would fight to the death to stop him.

Conceding his past, at least to himself, he baptized the lathe with a splash of milky suds over the turret, calling it Dominic, after his old chum at school. ‘Hey up, Dommy,' he said every morning, ‘'ow's tricks today? Going to be a good lad and earn me a bob or two?' He could turn off a thousand or more pieces from clocking in to clocking out, which brought in six pounds a week. Stoppages left him with four pounds ten bob, but it was more than enough to live on. With subtle economy he was able to buy a new suit, as well as go out now and again for a pint with Archie.

Eileen was disappointed when he went on the lathe. ‘I can't shout at yer any more, and I shall miss yer long face.'

‘Thanks for nothing.'

‘Nothing!' she mimicked. ‘Where did you get that?' – a warning that he still needed to watch his language.

‘I 'eard it on the wireless, duck. But I miss your nice face, as well. I'll come and wink at yer now and again.'

‘Won't yer say summat, as well?'

‘Course I will.'

So that was all right. Machines were being turned off all round, men and women crowding the gangways. Were they downing tools, or was it a ritual they'd been miffy enough not to let him in on? Hard to believe, because Archie, already wearing his jacket, took Herbert's from the nail and brought it over. ‘Switch off, and put this bit o' rag on yer back. We're going out for some swill.'

‘What's it all about?'

‘War's over.'

He'd known it couldn't be far off, but hadn't assumed they'd pack in work when it was. ‘'Ave the gaffers said owt?'

‘Fuck the gaffers. I expect they're blindoe already. Anyway, it's a national 'oliday. Churchill says so.'

The pub crawl took them into every place, a continual push through the crowds in each to get at the bar. In the singing and drinking Herbert lost his cap, but enjoyed himself to an even greater pitch when his mind flashed a picture of the chapel at school, where beyond doubt the poor sods were bellowing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers' and slavering at the thought of an extra cake with their piss-like char.

Slipping on the cobbles near the Trip to Jerusalem he thumped Archie in the ribs out of happiness at not going down, and got like treatment on the rebound for what deep-buried reason neither could say. An old man with a blind drunk glitter in his eyes and spluttering into his ale at the bar called to his mate above the din: ‘We beat the fuckers. Oh yes, we beat the fuckers. Didn't we Alf?'

‘Yeh,' Alf said, ‘but they'll be at it again in twenty years.'

‘No they won't,' the old man said. Bert had never seen a pint go so quick. ‘Not this time they won't.'

To the tune of ‘Coming Round the Mountain' (and she'll be wearing camiknickers when she comes) Bert took a wet-gin kiss from a woman old enough, he thought, to be Mrs Denman's grandmother. ‘That's for you, my lovely handsome duck,' she said.

‘Yer've clicked,' Archie laughed.

‘Course he's clicked,' she screamed at them with a laugh, huddling back against her smiling husband.

‘Let's run, Bert, or she'll 'ave us both.'

‘She will, an' all,' her husband laughed.

In the Royal Children a girl shoved a full pint at Herbert through the fug saying she'd bought it for her bloke but he'd nipped out to heave his guts up, and what a shame it would be to waste it. The cold slurry went down too quickly, and after a further jar in the Rose of England Herbert also ran out to the back yard and threw up as if all the weary years at school were fighting pell-mell to get from his system.

Archie led him the shortest way back to his digs, Bert hardly aware of passing streets. They sang their way up the steps into Mrs Denman's impeccable parlour, from which place she hurried them into the kitchen. Bert screwed a knuckle into his eyes for clarity. A tall thin man with greying hair was introduced by Mrs Denman as Frank, her Frank, her own especial Frank (she'd had one or two as well), Frank of about forty who, the only one sober because he'd had to stay on at work doing maintenance, suggested Bert be roped to a pit prop, first to stop him falling on his face, and then to shoulder him up to bed.