Brian didn’t mind meeting his grandfather when walking along Wollaton Road with Pauline, and noted the mischievous wink in his eye: “Hey up, Nimrod, where are you off to, then?”
“A walk.”
Merton looked at Pauline: “A bit o’ courting, eh? I suppose you’re off up Cherry Orchard?”
Christ, Brian said to himself, he wain’t say the right thing now. “Maybe,” he grinned.
“What’s your name, me duck?” Pauline told him. He’ll run me off if I’m not sharp, Brian thought. I’ll let me gra’ma know if he does, though. “I wondered if you might be going to Abyssinia,” Merton laughed, turning to Pauline: “The young bogger used to say that, when he was a kid. If I got on to him and made him wok too ’ard, he’d get up and shout: ‘Bogger you all, I’m off.’ ‘Where yer off to?’ his auntie Lydia would say. ‘Abyssinia,’ he’d tell us, and run back to Radford. He was a bogger when he was a lad.” Brian wondered how Merton could have invented such a tale on the spur of the moment — then realized it was true, and that while it had been buried deep in him and may have seemed a century ago if he’d remembered it at all, it appeared only a year or two back and as plain as a door to Merton. What else will he come out with? he wondered.
Pauline laughed: “Well, he’s still a bogger, if you ask me.”
“I allus knew he would be,” Merton said, ready to be on his way. “So long, then, Brian. Look after yourselves, both o’ yer.”
“He’s nice, your grandad,” was Pauline’s verdict, as they turned towards the Cherry Orchard to make love in some hump-lipped hollow of the dusk, and be there an hour in silence before piped notes of cuckoos nipped out on the echo from Snakey Wood.
The club was noisy and popular, absorbed those youths and girls from streets roundabout who snubbed any suggestion of joining a cadet force, yet wanted a place to meet friends once a week. Two middle-aged women of the Co-op and Labour Party ran it, organized talks (mostly political) and saw that the evening ended with hot tea and sandwiches. After being at hard work all day, a lightness or lack of weight crept into Brian’s bones on getting the body back into motion after a twenty-minute sit-down slump at the tea table, energy recalled by a second wind of fatigue and fought by a cold breeze footballing it down from the Pennines when, having thrown off his heavily greased overalls and had a good swill at the sink, he walked the odd mile to the club.
Frank Varley met him at the school gate, a crafty smile on his lean handsome face. “Hey, Bri”—he waved a wad of paper from the step-tops — “have yer seen this one?” He was the pen-pusher of the gang, worked in an insurance office down town, and somehow got hold of dirty stories that were given to him, he swore blind, by his brother when home on leave from a signals battalion at Catterick. Brian inwardly disputed the truth of this, wondered whether or not Horace Varley sat at his typewriter all day making them up, though if he did they were bleddy good and he was on his way to earning big money as a journalist. Somebody started ’em off, and that was a fact. Usually they were a dozen typed sheets of single-spaced narrative, the first one Frank handed around being about a special sort of club in India formed by officers’ wives to keep themselves happy while their husbands were away for months at a time. The goings-on described in Frank’s black-market tale made everybody’s hair curl — the girls’ included, for they wouldn’t be left out of such exotic readership. Another story described a week’s leave spent by a soldier in Rome, and the wad now handed to Brian as he entered the playground concerned, he discovered on stopping in the middle of the yard and not caring that those sitting on the far side knew what froze him, the adventures of a nubile young woman who kept a St. Bernard dog. Wind bent the pages back and he made this an excuse to turn round so that no one would witness the slow growth at his groin. The story ended when some man shot the dog because it attacked his little girl, and its mistress died of a broken heart. Brian read it again so that by the time he walked across to the others he need no longer feel ashamed.
He held it up: “Who’s next?”
“Nobody,” Frank said, a grin of triumph. “They’ve all read it”—indicating Pauline and Dorothy. Albert was immersed in his Soviet Weekly, bringing his squat head up now and again to spout out some marvellous fact about Russia: “It says here that ten years after the war nobody’s going to work more’n forty hours a week.”
“I don’t see how that can happen,” Frank said, folding up his sexual proclamation. And the cranky bleeder let the girls see it, Brian cursed. Think o’ that. He ought to have more sense.
“It’s easy,” Albert argued. “All you do is round up them bastards as never do a stroke o’ work: get ’em in the factories and on the railways.”
“Round up a few pen-pushers as well,” Brian put in, a punch at Frank. “All they do day in and day out is copy dirty stories, then come here at night and get a cheap thrill passing ’em round to girls.”
“He might,” Pauline said, “but I don’t get a thrill, I can tell you that. It just makes me laugh.”
“I think it’s disgusting,” Dorothy said, her round swarthy face flat and angry.
Frank laughed out loud: “Owd Dolly! You know you liked it.”
Albert set himself square like a boxer: “Lay off Doll. Nobody likes that sort o’ stuff, you pen-pusher.”
“We can’t all work a machine, you know,” Frank recoiled.
“Somebody’s got to reckon our wages up,” Pauline said, coming to his defence. “Not that it would take long to reckon up mine.”
“Don’t worry,” Brian said. “We’ll be better off as soon as we’ve beat the Jerries. We’ll get rid of Old Fatguts and vote a socialist government in.”
“You’ll still have to work, though, won’t you?” Dorothy called out sarcastically.
“Shurrup, sharp-shit,” Albert said, as if forgetting she was his sweetheart. “I don’t mind wokkin’.”
“You should wash your mouth out with soap,” she called.
“It don’t bother me either,” Brian argued. “As long as I get paid.”
“I don’t see why you’ve got to ’ave money,” Albert said. “I reckon you should be able to get all you wanted for nowt. As long as everybody worked, what difference would it make? I read in the Worker that it’d be possible for bread to be free in Russia one o’ these days. That’d be all right, wouldn’t it?”
Everybody thought so. “It’d tek a long time to come true, though,” Pauline added. Shadows lay heavily in the playground, from air-raid shelters to lavatories, gate to cycle-shed. The sky was blue, and starless unless you looked hard for a few seconds. A cold night was driven into the city like a lost traveller wanting warmth, harried on by an officious wind that scaled the wall and played around them. Coats were unobtrusively pulled together and buttoned.
“Suppose it took fifty years?” Brian said. “That’s nowt: the flick of a gnat’s left eyelid. As long as we start now. There’s enough snap and clo’es and houses for everybody.”
Frank was dubious: “It’d tek a lot o’ doin’.”
“I ain’t found anybody at wok as don’t want another government,” Brian put in. “’Ave yo’, Albert?” No one had. The end of the war was coming, and so were the days of change, a definite thing that everyone felt.