‘Never. Not here. We go to the Kardomah, in town.’
‘Oh, do you? Where it’s all posh, eh? Don’t yer want me to meet ’er, then, and tell ’er what a lovely looking girl she is?’
He felt Ralph shudder: ‘There is more select company in the world.’
Herbert felt like punching him, but thought he’d rile him more by staying good humoured. ‘You’re stuck up, that’s your trouble. I’ll bet Mary knows it, as well. That’s why she won’t let you get yer ’and at them little pearly buttons between her legs.’ It was going too far, but at the same time he sounded halfway slighted, so as to make Ralph feel even more superior and wriggle further into the trap.
‘Ma told me you were reading a book the other night. I didn’t believe her, but she convinced me it was true.’
Herbert sounded disgruntled. ‘I ain’t got no secrets. I just like getting lost in a good yarn. At least I don’t read them wanking books,’ though now and again he took one from Ralph’s pillow to study the nudity.
‘You’ve got a filthy mind.’
‘Well, it’s a mind anyway. What do yer do when you’ve finished wi’ ’em?’
‘Every so often Ma comes and takes them away. God knows what she does with them.’
‘Gives ’em to Frank, I expect.’ For the moment Herbert had no more to say, and then they were asleep.
French letters were free gratis and for nothing because Archie’s brother Raymond worked for a dry-cleaning firm, handling officers’ uniforms from army and air force camps, and searching every pocket before throwing tunics and trousers into the bins. ‘He’s got a cardboard box full in his cupboard, and he don’t need ’em like we do.’ Archie lowered his voice in case anyone in the canteen should hear. ‘He hangs around the theatres to get his thrills, or he goes out with sailors. Dad ain’t said a dicky-bird to him, since one of the neighbours blabbed her mouth. I don’t care, though. He lets me tek as many frenchies as I like, and I need ’em to shag my Audrey. Raymond might be a nancy boy, but he’s still my brother, and it’s got nowt to do wi’ me where he shoves his dick.’
‘No, nor anybody else,’ Herbert said, for which understanding remark Archie gave him more french letters than even a priapic rattlesnake could use.
‘The foreman ’anded me five bob last week when I got ’im some. He’s having it off with that Mrs Jennings as works a drill. She’s sitting over there, eating her pudding. But don’t look now, you daft cunt!’
He hadn’t thought to. ‘I’m not stupid.’
‘I know, but ’er ’usband’s sitting next to her.’
‘Thanks for the frenchies, though,’ Herbert said. ‘I’ll buy you a jar o’ Shippoe’s when we go down town.’
‘That’s all right. They’re free for yo’. Just keep banging yer tart, like I do mine.’
Herbert leashed his smile into a straight face, the only way to be sure of not offending anybody. ‘How old was yer when yer first ’ad it?’ he asked at the door.
‘Well, I musta bin fourteen.’ Archie gave a marauder’s grin, and pulled up his collar against the rain. ‘I fucked this girl in Colwick Woods. We got down in the bushes. Lovely bit o’ stuff. What about yo’?’
‘About the same age, I reckon, only it was on the canal bank, up Wollaton. But it was more like she had me, because she was sixteen.’
On Saturday morning Herbert looked out of the parlour window and noted the fine spun hair and neat white shorts of Ralph’s girl Mary leaning her bike against the wall before coming up the stairs to knock. They were going on a fortnight’s tour of the Lake District, and Herbert envied her evident affection for milksop Ralph who ran to the door and went back down the steps with her so that she wouldn’t have to come in and meet Bert the lout. He watched them walk their bikes along the street towards the station, and holding each other’s hands took so much space that a milk float almost brushed into them.
Mrs Denman let the empty bed while Ralph was away to a Royal Marine on leave, who told everybody to call him Jacko. The first thing that came out of his kitbag was an unbroached bottle of South African sherry, which Jacko placed so conspicuously on the mantelshelf that it might as well have had a big label stuck on it saying DRINK ME.
‘Want a swig, matey?’
Herbert was lying on his bed for a quick read before tea. ‘Ar, wouldn’t mind.’
Jacko used both hands to pass the bottle, as if it was a head he’d decapitated in the scramble of battle, and Herbert, after a fair glug, returned it likewise to the proprietor, who had two bigger swallows without bothering to wipe the spout — which was noted as friendly — before putting it back on its altar.
Herbert walked the street while it was still daylight and went into a pub for a drink. His working jacket had come from a pawnshop, and he wondered who had owned it before, whether it had been sold out of destitution, or by a man who had taken a sudden step up in life. Maybe he’d even kicked the bucket. He thought a good story could be written called ‘The Adventures of a Jacket’, but spat the thought out as he pushed tall and upright to the bar and called for a pint to chase down Jacko’s oversweet sherry.
Individual voices were crushed under the singing, and such din, mostly from women and soldiers, cheered him after being at tea with lugubrious low-browed Jacko, who tackled Mrs Denman’s food as if she was trying to poison him. Though he normally enjoyed staying in a crowded pub, where no one could possibly care who he was, he suddenly sensed danger among such numbers, as if a banshee message was trying to tell him something. His pint only half gone, he turned and saw Dennis, one of Mrs Denman’s other lodgers, a tall and thin man with a Ronald Colman moustache.
‘Thought it was you,’ Dennis said. ‘Have one on me.’
‘Ain’t finished my own yet.’ He held it high. ‘Then I’ve got to go. I’ve a nobble on.’
Dennis called for a whisky. ‘I’ve just put my woman on a 39 bus. She lives in Radford, and she’s got to get home before her husband comes in from his shift at the Raleigh. Sure you won’t have one?’
‘Thanks. Another time.’ A clatter of chairs sounded, and then a scream as the door all but burst its hinges. ‘Eh, fuckin’ ’ell,’ came a shout. ‘What’s all this, then?’
Two six-foot policemen pushed with no messing through the crowd. Dennis turned away. ‘Watch yourself. It’s Popkess’s lads, come to pick somebody up.’
They could be checking Identity Cards, and Herbert wasn’t yet eighteen. He’d be yanked off for being under age, and charged with having a forged one. Then he’d be sent to Borstal, though maybe he wasn’t as frightened as he should have been because one of the lads at work had been in Borstal and according to his account, the regime sounded more easy-going than the one at Herbert’s school.
Speech and laughter corroded away, and the coppers got hold of a man a few paces along the bar, fixed him in a half-nelson when he tried to dispute what was said of him, and walked him out with his feet hardly touching the floorboards.
The pub was soon back to singing and talking, but more relaxed than before, as if those unmolested by the police were glad they’d been spared — this time. ‘It was Alf Morley.’ Dennis knocked back another whisky. ‘Still, it could have been anybody. As they say in this town: every copper’s got your number on the underside of his left boot. Old Alf will be back in six months, though, mark my words. It’s just that he gets a bit light-fingered now and again. Careless, if you like.’
Herbert now thought there was something to celebrate. ‘I’ll have that drink you mentioned, after all.’
When he went to change out of his overalls Jacko pointed sternly at the bottle, indicating its contents down to the halfway mark. His eyes seemed closer in, and the trenchlines across his forehead made him look uglier, if that was possible. ‘Have you been helping yourself to my sherry?’