“Our old man wants a new ’un,” Dorothy said. “There was ructions at our house the other night when Fatguts was bellyaching on the wireless.” Albert spun round with a broad overpowering laugh: “O Christ, yes. Go on, tell ’em, love.”
“Well,” she gave him a mischievous look, “Owd Fatguts was going on and on, and dad ups and brings his grett fist down on the wireless. I thought he was going to bost all the valves. ‘Tek that,’ he says. And there was a big crack right across the top: ‘You old bogger,’ he says. Mam towd ’im not to be so daft, but when she said that, he hit it again, as if he was going off his loaf, and he kept on hitting it — ever so hard — until Owd Fatguts made as if he was coughing hissen to death and the wireless stopped. ‘I don’t ’ave to listen to that bleedin’ liar,’ dad says, and mam gets on to him then because he’s broke the wireless. But he just tells her to shurrup and says he’ll get a new one next week. He towd me later, when mam was upstairs, that he felt an electric shock when he gave it the last big crack.” Laughter engulfed them, like ice breaking.
“He saved England, though, didn’t ’e?” Frank Varley called from a few feet away.
“You reckon so?” Brian answered. “It was him and his gang as turned hosepipes on the hunger marchers before the war.”
“Old Fatguts was saving his own neck,” Albert said, “not ourn. He didn’t give a bogger about us. It was all his bleeding factory-owners he saved, the jumped-up bags like owd Edgeworth who’s making a fortune. You can’t tell me owt. I’ve got eyes and I use ’em to read wi’.”
“I can read as well, you know,” Varley retorted. “I get the Express on my way to work every day and I read all of it.”
Albert wasn’t in a quarrelling mood, laughed: “I read three papers every day, Frank, not one, because it’s best to get more than one opinion so’s nobody can say you’re biased. I get the Worker, the Herald, and the Mirror. And my old woman gets Reynolds on Sunday, so I have a goz at that as well.”
“We’ll make you Prime Minister in the next government,” Varley said. “Then you can boss it over vacant bleeders like us.”
“If I was Prime Minister,” Brian said, “I’d get rid o’ blokes who sit at wok all day typing dirty stories.”
Mrs. Dukes walked slowly over from the Infants’ door while Albert was reading aloud from his worn-out Soviet Weekly. She listened a minute before breaking in, regarding him as one of the most intelligent members of the club: “I’ll get Jack Taylor to come and talk to you in a week or two,” she said at last. “He’s a socialist and you’d like hearing him.”
“He’d have a job to convert us, Mrs. Dukes,” Brian laughed, “because we all are as well.”
“Still,” she said, “you’ve got to know more than you know.” And they went in to get their share of tea and sandwiches before splitting up for home.
He stood with Pauline by the back door of the Mullinders, and the end of their quiet evening blazed between them in a battlefire of kisses, bodies pressed close, and arms inside each other’s open coats. Neither wanted to leave, and time ran by. Pauline’s mother was in bed, had left her to a good-night kiss at her own risk. A cat scuffled before the lightless windows, a dog dragged its chain over the stone-cold monotonous paths of the estate gardens, and they were snug in the porch, out of the wind and half asleep against each other, warm and inexhaustible in a bout of long slow kisses. This is love, he said to himself. “I’ve never been in love like this, Brian,” she said into his ear.
“What?”
“I must go, and I don’t want to. I’ve got to go in now, duck.”
“Not yet,” he said.
“I don’t want to either.”
“Don’t yet then: I can’t let you go.”
“It’s comfortable,” she said. “I like being here, so close. I hope it’s allus marvellous like this.”
“It will be,” he told her. “I know what you mean. I mean I love you.”
“I shan’t go yet,” she answered. Work tomorrow, but so what? Work was the one definite landmark always visible at any moment from the delectable night before, so it didn’t matter whether you felt good or bad about it. He’d be able to get up no matter what time he went to bed.
The moon saw him home, following him on a long walk through the utter silence of allotment gardens, a cigarette to keep him warm, the smell and presence of it an added comfort along the same lonely footpath as when he had fled from the Nag’s Head clutching a couple of beer-mug handles five hundred years ago, Bert running after him to say it was all right. It is all right an’ all, he laughed, blowing out smoke against the damp air. In a few days the war would be over, and there was nothing on God’s earth to stop it ending. Then the world would change, at any rate be new to him, because he hadn’t been alive long enough to know what the ending of a war was like.
It finished welclass="underline" wooden forms and bunks were dragged from airraid shelters and heaped on to bonfires. In the White Horse, a buxom loud-mouthed ear-ringed woman of fifty did a can-can on one of the tables, clattering her shoes among a ring of pint jars to the bashing of the rhythmical piano, cocking her legs up high to show — apart from her fat knees — that her baggy drawers had been made from the gaudy colours of a Union Jack.
Brian, sitting in the pub with Pauline and his parents, drained his pint and joined in the wild release of singing with the rest of the packed room, enjoying the empty thoughtlessness that went like flashpowder among the moving throng and only allowed the arms of the clock to move by the half-hour. Yet at certain moments he stopped singing to take in the dozens of faces, saw them as mere life-shapes with such sad clarity that even the sound they were making left his ears and drew back until he couldn’t listen any more. They were wild with excitement because the war had ended, yet the truth of it didn’t seem real to him. This was just a booze-up night, more joyous and violent than usual, but what difference would it make to everybody? They would wake up tomorrow with sore heads and see out of their windows the same backyards and line of lavatories, hear the same drone of factory engines. He remembered opening the Daily Mirror when just home from work a few days ago, coming to the double pages of the middle and seeing spread out before him something he would never forget: the death pits of Belsen, a scene of horror making a pincer movement through each eye to the middle of his brain. He closed the paper, every other word irrelevant, and the images stamped forever. But the end of the war meant something, he thought, lifting another pint his father put before him, a lot in fact: backyards and Belsen — and it meant getting rid of both.
But the beer stunned that part of him and, victory or no victory, he was kay-lied. Pauline, his mam and dad, all of them sat at a table roaring their guts out, arms around each other and happy, done for at last by the six-year desert of call-up and rationing, air-raids and martial law. All this was finished and victory had come, victory over that, even more than over the Germans, and what else could he want but to sing out his happiness in the biggest booze-up anybody could remember?
Vera and Seaton had been drinking all day, and Brian helped his father along Eddison Road at firelit midnight, Pauline behind with his mother and the children. Seaton leaned heavily, slurred his words, tried to apologize but clapped hand to mouth to stop his false teeth falling. Brian was flexible on his feet, sober enough to hold himself up as well as his father. “Come on, dad. Stop draggin’ or you’ll ’ave me down as well.” He turned: “Y’all right, mam?”