Vera had been glad to see the back of Seaton that morning. Hunched by the fireplace, sulking because he had no cigarettes and was out of work at thirty-five, he suddenly stood up and took his dole-cards from the cupboard. “I’ll have a walk,” was his way of putting it, “and call in at the dole-office on my way back.”
So she was shut of him for an hour or two, free from black looks, and filthy talk if she dared give him a black look back. Day in and day out, from dole day to dole day, he sat by the empty fire-grate, fagless and witless, a rotter to everybody that got near him. It worn’t his fault, that much she knew, but he could be better-tempered than he was. Sometimes he would get up from his black despair and send Brian to a wood-yard for a sack of waste, spend a day chopping sticks so that Brian and Fred could hawk them a penny a bucket from door to door. Or he would buy a few pair of shoes from Sneinton Market and set about mending them. Sitting on a box in the backyard, his mouth full of tacks, he hammered new-cut leather on to the last-held shoe. A semicircle of kids stood watching, and Vera swore to God he didn’t know they were there, held fast as he was in his work. The shoes were then sold cheap around the neighbourhood. He paperhanged and whitewashed, dug gardens or pushed loaded barrows, went coal-scraping with Abb Fowler, though such windfalls of work fell rarely in his way. But when the hands were happy and one side of the heart at ease, the other was wary and sly, adept at evading that ubiquitous bogey of the means-test man who docked your dole and sent you on “relief” if you were caught doing work not registered for. Brian and Arthur would meet their father at a whitewashing job, to come home with them, boy-scouting a hundred yards ahead while their father walked behind with the ladders. If Brian saw anyone who might look like the means-test man, he was to nip back and give warning, and when once he did, Seaton dodged into a yard while the means-test man went unsuspecting by. But the dole couldn’t go on forever, Vera thought, and hoped it wouldn’t, for a fifth child was about to join them.
Seaton enjoyed his two-mile walk to the dole-office — except when it rained. Tar-smells of clear-skied summer or the lung-stinging frost of winter were all the same, pleasant to get out of the house into, from the walls of the house to farther-apart walls of roads and streets which had no roof and let the good sky in on you. It was warm summer, and he stood in the long queue for his dole. Old friends were occasionally missing from the line — having stepped into the aristocrat class because they had got jobs, but Abb Fowler was always there, still the same wide-nosed sandy-haired moonlight-flitter, wearing his cap at a cocky angle, dismayed but unbeaten at being out of work. He carried a ragged copy of the Daily Worker and talked about the war in Abyssinia not long finished, and the war in Spain not long begun. Every Thursday for months he’d thought of volunteering to fight in Spain, but never did. “I’m a Communist, ’Arold,” he would say, “and I don’t mind gettin’ shot at, if you want to know, but not in Spain. It’s the bleeders in this country I want to stand up against a wall.”
Seaton came home with his thirty-eight shillings and handed them to Vera. He thought of the money she had given him not long ago: ten bob for scrubbing out an office every morning for a week. Further back than that, she had gone with Ada, collecting for an old woman who had died on Ada’s street. At nearly every house they were given a penny or a ha’penny, and at the end of the street they went on into the next, even though the old woman wasn’t so well-known there. Nevertheless, few people would refuse a ha’penny towards a wreath. So off to another street, and then another, the old woman’s name bringing less response on being mentioned after doors had opened to their knock. Ada had the cheek to collect in a pub as well, escaping by the saloon bar door when the publican strode over to throw her out. Fifteen shillings made a magnificent wreath for the dead woman, bigger than she could ever have expected on her meagre pension; and the few shillings made by Vera and Ada spread the tables of each household with a good meal that night. He had to laugh at the thought of it: what a couple o’ boggers they are! And black-haired sway-walking Harold broke into a shilling for a packet of Woodbines and enjoyed his first smoke since yesterday.
Vera took ten of the thirty-eight shillings to the corner shop, to pay for what food they had fetched on strap during the week. Then she went with Brian up Hyson Green, to cheap shops where she could stock up on tins of milk and packets of margarine, sugar and tea and bread, vegetables and sixpennyworth of meat for a stew that night.
Job or no job, there was usually a wireless set in the house. Seaton, after drawing his dole the following week, came in smiling broadly: “I’ve got a surprise on its way, my owd duck!”
“What? Have you won a thousand?”
“No, nowt like that.”
“What then?”
“A man’ll be ’ere in a bit wi’ summat yo’ll like!”
“And what’s that?”
“A brand-new wireless!”
By way of confession he told how, gazing in a shop window on his way back from town, he had spotted a good set that would blow the house apart if turned full on, and that without thinking he had gone in and settled the deposit.
“You know we can’t afford to pay for a wireless every week,” Vera shouted, but soon smiled and left off taunting his extravagance, knowing they both had to do such things now and again, otherwise put their heads in a gas-oven, or cut their throats with a sardine tin like poor Mr. Kenny up the street.
They managed the payments for a time, but after a few months of free music and news the set was disconnected and carted back. Then for six bob Seaton bought a wireless that didn’t go, though within a few hours of clever intuitive tinkering a powerful pan-mouthed Gracie Fields blared out over the house and yard. Seaton knew nothing of such machines, yet took it to pieces, tightened a nut here and a valve there, until the electrical maze of wires miraculously “went,” and it stayed on the dresser as a monument to luck and ingenuity.
On Sunday afternoon, after a pause of nothing from the wireless, a voice would announce: “Foundations of Music”—a title that intrigued Brian because one of his favourite books at school was Foundations of History and somehow he imagined the two same words would generate a similar intensity of interest, but nothing more survived than the title, for his mother would immediately say: “Take that off, Harold, for God’s sake!” and the knob would be swivelled on to the sugary music of Debroy Summers, or the rackety drive of Henry Hall.
Time and again Vera told herself that she shouldn’t be riled by Seaton’s moods of animal temper, for it only made things twice as bad. But after the dole money had been spent to the last farthing he would sit by the fire-grate in the small room, head bent low, nothing to say. She would know all he was thinking, that he was cursing his existence, her and the kids, the government, his brothers, her mother and father, anyone and anything that flitted into his mind, and she hated him for letting the lack of a few fags upset them. He looked around the room, from wife to children, and children to mother, until all but Vera went out. Then she would say: “You’re lookin’ black again, aren’t yer? What’s up, ain’t yer got no fags?”
He glared savagely. “No, and no snap either.” Each tormented mind fed the other in diabolic fashion: “Well,” she said belligerently, “I can’t help that, can I?”