“All right, but if she says no, I’ll cum back an’ c’lect it.”
He looked around. “Will yer now? You’re a bleddy sharp ’un, an’ no mistake.”
“I’ve got to be, ain’t I?”
“Wi’ some, I dare say you ’ave. ’Ow much do yo’ get for this, anyway?”
“Grandma gi’s me a bob on Sat’day.”
“Not bad for a young ’un.” Brian’s summer holidays passed in fetching and taking their cans, running to Woodhouse for more tea and sugar, and gathering the money on Friday. The boundaries of fields had been trodden in by lorry ruts and brick stacks, and houses had made a rush forward during the spring as if they’d grown with the leaves. Some by the boulevard were almost finished, their tops still grinning like the pink tents of an army or circus — urged on, it seemed, by the totem-poles of factory chimneys in the smoking city behind. The sputtering sound of concrete mixers blended in the hot summer air with the klaxon-throated cockerels from the Nook, and privet hedges by the gate were dusty from powdered concrete.
The Nook was lighted by electricity, was magically blessed with water-taps so that the bucket-yoke hung as useless as a souvenir on the wash-house wall. The surface of the land was changing, becoming covered like memory, though Brian realized as he walked for the first time along new-laid pavements that the familiar soil underneath would never be difficult to reach. There was even soil under Slab Square in the middle of Nottingham, he realized, but that was harder to believe in.
With the money he earned he bought novels, dictionaries, and maps, browsed through the threepenny boxes in the basement of a second-hand bookshop downtown. His father hammered a shelf together in the bedroom so that they wouldn’t litter the kitchen. Books fitted into a separate part of his life, divided from reality by the narrow pen-knife cut of a canyon that he could cross and recross with ease. The book world was easily defendable because he was alone in it and without competitors — though it was occasionally threatened by his father’s resentful glare if he had them strewn over the table when supper-time was near and tea called for.
From where they were working on the foundations, past the singing of trowels as bricks were tapped into position by plumb-line and spirit-level, to where whole walls were complete and surrounded by scaffolding, Brian walked with his final can of tea. He watched a man ascend a swaying ladder with a hod of bricks: he was tall, thin, and agile, blessed with a good sense of balance and seemingly without fear. Someone from the top platform shouted out that he be careful, but he responded by a wave of the arm and by tackling the next few steps without holding on, ending his antic by sending a few swear-words like handclaps into the air. Brian wondered where he’d heard the voice, seen the lanky figure before: stood watching him unload his bricks and talk — friendly despite his swearing — with the bricklayers up top. He took off his cap to scratch his head, then came down the ladder swinging the emptied hod round and round like a mace. One man called to another: “Owd Agger’s a real glutton for wok. I ain’t seen nobody as can goo up ladders like he can, ev yo’?”
“He wants to be careful, though. I ’eard as a bloke on them new houses near Bilborough broke both his legs last week. He’ll get a lot o’ compo, though.”
Agger went to a stack of steaming bricks, and Brian decided to go close and greet him: “Ey up, Agger.”
“Hey up, kid”—only a glance. He was the same, a combination of the words “jaunty” and “gaunt,” and his lined face had the regular features of a hard exterior life without realizing it too much within. He seemed easier, though, relaxed compared to a year ago on the harder, more uncertain battlefield of the Sann-eye tips. His eyes had lost some of their haunted ironic glare, were as agile and good-humoured in fact as his limbs at the climbing of ladders.
“Don’t yer goo on tips any more?” Brian hoped he wouldn’t crack him one at thinking he and not Bert had stolen his prize rake on that far-off day.
“Not since I got a job. I di’n’t want to stop all my life on t’ tips, kid. Anyway, my missis passed on.” He spoke as if to an adult, and Brian wondered what his wife’s dying had to do with getting work. He counted twelve bricks being placed on the hod. “So I couldn’t mess about much longer. I knock up above fifty bob a week now, you know.” He felt Agger’s pride: his father was in work, hadn’t been able to get it up to then simply because it wasn’t on the market. Why didn’t Agger say this? “It’s an ’ard life on the tips, kid. This is better graft for us”—was as far as he would go.
“You said it,” Brian agreed, realizing that he had been taken as a full-time worker and feeling pleased about it. Agger smiled: “They’ve set you on as a mash-lad, ’ave they?” Brian told him the tariff drawn up by his grandmother, and Agger said he’d like a can as well, every morning at ten if he could manage it. “I’ll gi’ yer a tanner on Friday.” He hoisted the bricks on his shoulder, and was halfway up the ladder before Brian turned to deliver his last can of tea.
Merton didn’t like the idea of leaving the Nook, and said as much to Tom, who came for his fortnight’s rent. Mary laid the open book on the table, four half-crowns and sixpence down the dividing line of the middle. “I thought they were going to leave it a year or two,” he said, “what wi’ tekin’ so much trouble putting in water and electricity.”
Tom scooped up the money and wrote it in: “It’s the land they want, you see. As far as the railway and over to the woods.”
“Aye,” Merton grunted, “they’re bleddy gluttons for it.” He stood near the window, a tall thin figure wearing black trousers from an old suit, a brown cardigan, and well-polished laced-up boots. He’d finished his momentous fifty-odd years of work as a blacksmith, and now gave his strength to the garden, to chopping wood and seeing to his pigs and poultry — taking it soft, as he termed it. There was no work for Brian to do; Merton shouldered it himself as if, despite his fifty years’ hard labour, he hadn’t yet worked the violence out of himself, as if he had been put on the earth to attack life rather than live it, to subdue it with hammer and pickaxe, tunnelling his way through until he dropped within sight of the ligher daylight of death. He had a long way to go yet: stood erect, white hair cropped short, his blue eyes steadily taking in the view, an ironic fierce gaze set upon the tatterdemalion camp of wood and bricks and cement bags nearby. He turned back to the cups of tea Mary had poured: “Not that I ’adn’t bin expectin’ it.”
“It ain’t that black,” Tom said, not sitting down to drink. “They’ve got another house for yer: in the Woodhouse, on Vane Street.”
“That’s summat to be thankful for,” Mary said.
“Besides, it’s only two doors up from the beer-off.” Tom had a gnome face topped by a nicky hat, the sort of face that seemed to have dried-up river beds running down it to meet at his pointed chin, a worried expression that tried to do nothing but please because the vanity behind it wanted everyone to think him a good bloke and not insult him. He buttoned his mac. “Thanks for the tea, Mrs. Merton. You’ve got a month or two to think about moving.”
Merton thought about it: and since he had been expecting the upheaval, he wasn’t so disturbed as he led everyone to believe. It would be a change to live among shops and pubs and be nearer to bus stops for the city. Lydia thought so as welclass="underline" that there’d be no walking down the muddy lane and under the lonely bridge on dark nights. Mary said the house was like being in the middle of a graveyard all through winter, and now they’d have neighbours and company for a change. Merton was galled most of all at the smaller garden. “I’ve seen ’em down there,” he said, “and they aren’t big enough to tek a piss in.”