Key to the Door (35 page)

A group of over-sixteens had already done a ten-till-six night shift. Light stemmed from the door at the end of the corridor, and stars shone above the sheer windowless walls of it—one wall taller than another so that the sky looked like the jewel-studded underside of an enormous cutting blade. At his feet was a manhole with the lid off, and half the gangway was choked by piles of soot and clinker excavated from the factory bowels. So this is what we have to shift, the sight of it already making his throat dry and wanting cups of tea. He looked down into the boiler room, at a host of pipes and dials upside down over a cavernous circular door out of which, arse backward and legs kicking, came Jack Parker. His face, hands, and boiler suit were blacker than the back of dominoes, and he stood up cursing because of it. “I'm glad I don't have to clean that lot out in there. There's mountains of soot and it's still 'ot yet at back.”

“I suppose the young 'uns 'ull 'ev ter do it then,” Ted Bosely the mechanic said. Brian had been told by Samson the manager not to clock in for this extra work: “It's against the Factory Act, seeing as you aren't sixteen yet,” Bosely said, “so keep it quiet.” He walked through the shadowless cellars, between huge rolls of paper stacked almost to the sprinkler valves. What a fire there'd be if this lot went up, he thought, warmed by the image of it. There'd be no black-out then. 'Appen the Jerries'll get it one night, though I suppose the raids wain't start any more. A nub-end might do it, and if it did I'll bet it'd tek more than the sprinklers to put it out. Parker was taking off his beret as he went into the stoke-hole, revealing a springy mop of flaming auburn hair. “Your turn now,” he said, seeing Brian.

“It ain't six yet,” Brian answered, watching his rights. Nevertheless he took the spade. On either side of the furnace mouth were two flue holes about a foot square, the left one going parallel with the furnace, then rounding the back and emerging to the right of it. “I've shovelled a good bit from the front,” Parker said, taking out a pocket mirror: “Christ, I look like a bleeding collier.”

“Aye,” Bosely said, also ready to go off, “they'll 'ev yer in the pit yet.”

Just after six Brian looked into the stoke-hole flue but could see nothing, then got on his knees and pushed himself in to the waist, to find it black and suffocatingly warm. With one heave he was right in and flat on his stomach, taking care to drag the shovel and keep it by for when he needed to begin excavations. He wriggled forward over brick flooring, intrigued at the lugubrious new world he had pitched into. It was black and tight around him, all sounds blocked from the outside. He lay still, astonished, pleased in a way that he'd been allowed to stumble into this fabulous mechanism of the industrial world, unwilling to start work before revelling a moment in it. It was warm, and frightening if he thought too much, but he went on a few feet until reaching drifts of hot dust piled almost to the top bricks. It was impossible to stay there, and he went on for as far as he could go, his body and face almost immersed in the powder, nose eyes ears filled with it. He tried to turn round, and the discovery that he couldn't in the confined space sent a spear of panic through him. Dust kicked up by movement stopped his breath and he lay as if dead in his endless coffin, yet breathing quickly so as to make the least ferment. He had been out of school more than a year and this was his second job, so he regarded himself as an experienced member of the labour market, a man of the factory world already, smoking and passing himself off for eighteen in pubs where the waiters turned a blind eye; also he was courting what girl he could get hold of, and had been in a fight last Saturday so he wasn't going to be beaten by a bit of tubercular soot.

Lying still, his apprehension went. I'll just drop out for a breather, then get stuck in proper. He had to move because the bricks were too warm for much hugging. It's hot and I'm smothercating, though I suppose there's worse things at sea. The impression was of a coffin with lid on tight but minus head and foot, and having to work in the dark set him thinking of coal mines and pit ponies, and the fact that he would go crackers if he didn't get out and prove he wasn't buried a thousand feet underground. Jean Valjean traipsing through the sewers was better off than this, though I expect Edmond Dantès in
his
tunnels didn't feel too good either. He gripped a handful of soot, hoping it would solidify, but it fell like the fine sand of an eggtimer through his opened fingers. If I had to do this to escape from prison I wouldn't give a bogger, would get crackin' and work my balls off, be out in no time, but as for the slave-driving penny-pinching poxetten getts of this flyblown factory—I'll do as I like; and if they don't like it they can whistle, because they wain't be able to see me for a start. Knees and hands were burning, so he pushed backwards until his feet hung in mid-air and light over his shoulder told him he was in the clear breath of the open cellar.

The bulbs dazzled him. “That was a quick look round,” Mr. Wheatcroft said. “You was only in two minutes.”

“It felt like a bleeding year.” Brian rubbed hands and knees, batted soot from his clothes, wanted to look at his face but couldn't see a mirror anywhere. “I'll get back now, though, and dig a bit out.”

“That's a good lad,” Wheatcroft said. “Don't stay in too long at a time or you might conk out on us. I'll set Bill Eddison starting from the other side. You'll soon 'ave it done between yer.”

Per'aps, Brian said to himself, back into the black soot of the tunnel. “Don't volunteer for owt,” the old man had told him time and time again, but he'd never taken notice of him, though his common sense should have said that anything needing to be volunteered for was sure to land you smack into the clutches of hardship. “Don't join owt, not even a Christmas club, not two pieces of effing string.” And Brian realized, from the deep passion of experience ringing in the old man's words, that he couldn't but be right. The trouble was, though, that you joined or volunteered even before you knew you were going to do so. A trait you knew nothing about and certainly could never trust lurked within, waiting for a weak moment when somebody asked you to volunteer or join, and then before you knew where you were, you were fighting for breath like now in the Black Hole of Calcutta, shovelling soot for all you were worth at seventeen pence an hour. Sweat flowed out of him. This is how you get TB, he thought, by breathing black dust like this for hour after hour. I'm cracking already.

He devised a system: dragged a load of soot, shovel by shovel from in front, then (having found a doubling-up technique after many try-outs) turned himself to face the isolated mound and push it bit by bit to the opening. Then back to the soot-face to part off another load. I'll get an X-ray next week, he thought. He'd been asked by Jim Skelton to go with him for one weeks ago, but hadn't been able to make up his mind. He knew he was afraid, and wasn't shy of admitting it, but now thought he ought to go because of the double doses of fine dust already causing him to cough for half a minute at a time. If I've got it I've got it, and if I ain't I ain't. You've only got to die once. It was a disease he'd been afraid of all his life because everybody seemed to die of it, even more than war. Aunt Lydia's bloke Tom had kicked the bucket, eaten to a shadow by it. Less to feed maybe, but it was a bleddy shame. Mrs. Coutts died of it as well, and so had a good many more whose names he'd forgotten. It was a disease he was yellow of, just as he'd been frightened of being blown up when bombs were falling a year or so back. So I'll keep that X-ray date with Jim Skelton and see where I stand.

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.