He worked his way up the tunnel. Soot was lukewarm on top but scorched his hands and knees when he scooped down to the bricks. He’d retreat a few feet until his hands cooled, then go forward to make a few more rapid sweeps with his shovel. Why am I going like a bleddy mad-head? he asked himself. To get it finished, he answered, pushing another load out of the opening. He’d been eight months at Robinson’s cardboard factory: a tall building blackened with age and the odours of sweated labour in the middle of a long street of two-up and two-down houses. At first he was an odd-job lad, lifting, carrying, running errands, and sweeping up. He clocked in at eight every morning, and for a few weeks was set helping the charwoman during the first hour to clean the offices. This was a light and leisurely job, something that helped the morning go quicker in that he didn’t begin real work in the factory till nine. Tea-break at ten, and before he knew where he was, he was clocking out at one and running home for dinner. Each director of the firm had his office, and in Mr. Rawson’s was a huge war-map of Europe, well coloured and of sufficient scale to show the names even of small towns recaptured by the Russians — each one announced by Moscow to the accompaniment of ten salvos from three hundred and twenty-odd guns, and repeated on the nine o’clock evening news by the BBC. Solnetchnogorsk, Volokolamsk, Kalach, Ordzhonekidzegrad, Debaltzevo, Barvenkovo, Tagonrog — names of steel and defence in depth, signifying disaster for the Germans on a scale that even they couldn’t comprehend, brute force triumphing this time on the right side and smashing inch by inch towards the belly-button of Berlin. In full black flower, the Germans had gone goose-stepping into the land where all factories and property were owned by the people, and had made it grim and awful with starvation and suffering, a country which would one day become the promised land of the earth, where bread would be free and men would work only four hours a day.
The very name Russia Russia Russia touched Brian like a root-word (even before he knew it meant much more than a country) and gave him an understanding of its invincibility, so that when he first heard that Germany had gone into Russia he was glad because the war had started to end. Meanwhile the German image was rampaging: a giant figure with buck-shot teeth and a crossbow face, piked hands and hatchet feet, gun-metal eyes and barbed-wire hair, a sandbag forehead and armoured body — yet reeling now, bleeding from Stalingrad and Moscow, smashed everywhere by the Red Army, the returning hordes of the working man washing in like broad rivers of retribution, making for the big-shot Nazi rats of Germany. He laughed, buried in the black hole of Robinson’s factory, pushing soot under his belly and back towards his feet like the dead dust of burned-up Germans.
At home he had his own maps of the Russian front, not so grand and durable as Mr. Rawson’s, yet sufficient for him to mark by pencil the sinuous band of scorched earth and death. It was a game, listening for the latest towns to fall and changing the front accordingly. If the Soviet line of advance bulged too far west between Bryansk and Kharkov he knew that the Germans along the Donets farther south would be cut off unless they skedaddled quick. There were few newspapers at home, and at the beginning of the invasion he had difficulty in equating the place-names given on the wireless with their written forms on the map. He’d searched hours before finding one particular locality, had pored over the map with his cousin Bert — who was also taken with the war game set loose by Hitler. The difficult name ended the uphill climb of comprehension, for after this had been marked and mastered, every other two came easy. The six syllables at normal announcer’s speed went too swiftly into Brian’s ear, sounded like a saw going into wood: BYELAYATSERKOV. Battles raged around it for days, until the noise of it sunk in: BYELAYATSERKOV. Bert helped him look for it, a word joining their thoughts and difficult to forget after so much repetition, a holy grail searched for within a vast circle of Kiev. Bert spotted it first.
Mr. Rawson’s map held a series of red-headed pins marking the Russian front, and Brian, on the first morning of his office-cleaning, saw they were too far east, hadn’t been moved for a week or two. Maybe Rawson had lost interest; it certainly wasn’t because he was too hard-working to shift them, for he was one of the younger and less hard-driving directors, a man about thirty-five, with a squat face and ginger hair matted back, a good-natured man, it was assumed, since if he passed when you weren’t working he didn’t tell you off about it. He wore a big pair of spectacles above his heavy moustache, was a safely married man in no danger of being called up for the forces because his work at Robinson’s was said to be of national importance. Some held this freedom from the army against him, saying he should be fighting even though he was a relation of big boss Robinson himself, but one or two of the old sweats said he was doing well to keep out of it, and good luck to him.
Brian swept his office, emptied the wastepaper basket, dusted the Remington (after typing out his name and putting a few paperclips in his pocket), then studied Rawson’s map of Russia, offended that the pins had been neglected for so long. The front still led from Leningrad through Moscow to Stalingrad and into the Caucasus, whereas vast areas had passed again within bounds of the Red Army. A crippling thought came to him: maybe Rawson had only been interested in the farthest limit of the German advance, and couldn’t bring himself to rejoice over land recaptured by the Soviet forces. He laughed and in a frenzy — it was five minutes to nine — began moving pins to their rightful places, and before he took his brushes and rags and tins of polish back to the cleaning woman the Russian front was fixed in accurate positions once more.
He felt better, from then on made a more thorough job of cleaning the office, and of moving the pins each morning to their rightful places as fresh towns were captured. One day he didn’t resist the temptation to write in pencil SECOND FRONT NOW on the bottom margin of the map. A lark, he told himself. I’ll see’f he notices it, find out whether he’s altogether fed up with his toy pins or not. Maybe I’d better rub it off, though: some blokes don’t like the Russians; either that or they’re fussy about people writing on their posh maps. Yet he left it on, for somehow he’d hoped for recognition, a sign perhaps, a few words at least, from Mr. Rawson, saying that he was knowledgeable and clever at being able to find the complicated names of Russian towns and in plotting the front line with such vivid accuracy. Who else out of the two hundred working at the factory could have done it? No one as far as he knew, and that was a fact. You’d have thought old Rawson would have come along and said: “You’re a bit of a hand at the maps, Seaton. We s’ll have to see if we can’t find you a job in the office one of these days.” But they don’t do things like that. And what can you do if they don’t? You can’t go up to him and say: “Eh, Mr. Rawson, have yo’ seen what I’ve done to your map? I thought it was a shame, it being such a good ’un and the pins in all the wrong places.” In one way he might think it a bit of a cheek, me taking his game over without saying a dicky-bird, though on the other hand he can’t be offended if he don’t even see what I’ve done, and neither in that case can he offer me a job in the office. Not that I want one anyway, because you’d have to wear a suit and a clean shirt every day, and where would I get the dough to find owt like that? Mam wouldn’t be able to do it. I’d rather stick in the factory and rough it with the rest of the lads.
By dinner-time he’d cleared soot from the first half of the left-hand flue. The length behind was now too long to push the soot out with his shovel so he went in with a couple of deep pans, and when both were filled he dragged them to the opening. Near the far turning behind the stoke-hole, soot drifts went up as far as the ceiling, and the heat was fierce under him. Sweat became mud on his face, ran to his mouth to be blown away when it chafed, or wiped if he had a free hand. He rested after every six pans, curled up on his side like an experienced collier, craved a cigarette or a mug of tea. Accustomed to the work and heat, confined space and lack of air, he grew to like his temporary double-pay job. There was a feeling of toughness, even danger to it, and if his mother or aunt Ada or grandad Merton could have seen him now they would have said: “It can’t be good for him, in that hot tunnel. Still, he’s a hard worker so it wain’t do him much harm.” Also it was good to be on his own where no gaffer could see how much shovelling he did — though for one thing he was doing a good share of work, and for another, he grinned, burying his spade again in the soot, they wouldn’t dream of coming up here to see how I was getting on.