‘In this frame of mind I came out of Borstal. Being set free made me feel like a piece of straw blown about in the wind. On the way home I stopped in Worksop market and pinched a big tin of pineapple chunks so that we could celebrate. It was a drizzly evening, but I found the house empty, because Mother had gone to see her sister, and had mis-read the date in my letter. I got in by the scullery window, made a good fire and sat down to wait. I looked at the tin of chunks in the middle of the table, my only contribution to the household in three years. To stop myself crying at how hard so many people in the world were done by, I got a tin-opener and took the top right off. They were well-packed, sweet fruit that all of us could enjoy. Pineapple chunks had always been a luxury, even though they did taste like turnips and sugar. I emptied them into a basin and put it in the cupboard. The circular tin-top had come off so neatly it looked like a razor, and I turned it round, running the ball of my thumb along it. I thought: why don’t I cut my throat so that that will be that? Being nineteen I felt I’d had enough, decided that I was good to no one and no good to myself. It was possible to do it, but when I thought that if I didn’t do it then, I would never do it, I lost heart and didn’t do it. It would make more trouble for my mother and the others, and none for myself. That was what stopped me, not because I hadn’t got the nerve. I wanted to do it because it seemed the only sensible thing. I’d ever thought of, but to be sensible like that you needed to be the most selfish bastard in the world. The others came back an hour later, and they were so happy to see me, you’d have thought all their troubles were over now that I was in the house again.
‘It was hard to get a job, just out of Borstal. I tried till my eyes went beady at the newspaper columns, and my legs rickety with walking. What references had I got to flash before their Bible-spiked noses? Still, there are some good souls in the world, and such a person was the rich old man who wanted a bloke to push him about in his wheelchair. When I called at his big house for the job he was sitting in the garden, and one of his servants showed me out there. A gramophone record was playing and I had to stand a couple of minutes till it finished, then, out of the goodness of my heart because he couldn’t reach, and not because I was sucking up to him, I lifted the gramophone head and stopped it. “I’ve had twenty young fellows here so far,” he said, “and I’m tired of it. Any special qualifications?”
‘“No sir,” I told him. “I’m fresh out of Borstal.” He was eighty years of age, and so shrunken and small that when he burst out laughing I thought he’d fall to pieces. I hoped he would, then I could blow away the dust and go on with my search. But there was something about him that toned down my hatred, specially when he said: “I’ll take you on, then. When can you start?”
‘Because of my shabby clothes I was led off by the butler who showed me a row of uniforms upstairs, and by luck we found one that fitted. It wasn’t the best sort of work, but I got thirty bob a week, as well as my keep, which wasn’t bad at that time of day. For the first time in my life I not only had a room of my own, small as it was, and right under the roof, but also the chauffeur gave me an hour’s driving every afternoon while the old man took his sleep. On my half-day off I went home, and gave all the money I earned to my mother, except a bob or two for fags. It wasn’t the sort of job you could ever boast about in Borstal, but at least it kept me alive, and rigged my brothers and sister in good clothes from time to time.
‘The man’s name was Percy Whaplode, and he owned a lot of land with farms on top and endless coalmines underneath. As I pushed him for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon around his garden and park he’d chat to me on the beauties of life, but mostly as if I weren’t there, cataloguing what he was going to miss when his head finally hit the tin lid. Often he really did talk to people he knew, or had known, but who weren’t there, or were no longer there. If they could have heard him they’d have been shocked, I can tell you, and many a time I was so doubled up with trying not to laugh at his fanciful language that I was frozen at the handle and not able to push. Now and again he’d speak to his two sons who’d been killed in the Great War, telling them how they ought to do their lessons, and study well when they got to university. Or he’d tell them, as I pushed him along the path by a stream, how good it would be for him and their mother (already dead) when they got married and had children of their own. Sometimes his stepbrother came to see him from Yorkshire. He was twenty years younger, and always shouted at poor old Percy if he wasn’t able to hear him properly.
‘When it rained Percy had to stay inside, and I’d push him for half an hour up and down the ground-floor corridors, because he couldn’t bear to be still. For the rest of the time he got me to read to him, and this was torture at first because he’d curse and shout and all but crack me with his stick if I was too slow or made a mistake. But sometimes he could be patient, and that helped, so that after a month or two I got to be a good reader, since it seemed to rain every other bloody day. All in all, we were quite friendly, and in any case I was forced to take his banter in good part because he was paying me for it. The chauffeur said he hadn’t seen Percy in such frequent good moods for years, and hinted that maybe he’d leave me a few quid in his will if I stuck at it. I took this as a joke, a bloody good one on the chauffeur’s part and a poor one on mine. Money would never come to me like that. I’d either have to earn it, or steal it, and I didn’t yet know which was the harder way.
‘I grew to feel at home there, wallowing in the easy hours and comparatively mild work. The housekeeper and the chauffeur were actually quite kind to me, talked to me from time to time like a human being, and fed me like a turkey-cock. My driving lessons went on so well that during my time at that job I was able to get a licence, paid for by the house. The chauffeur took Mr Whaplode for a drive every week around the Dukeries, and it was said that I might one day have a go at this, as if it were the greatest honour I could ever hope for.
‘The housekeeper’s name was Audrey Beacon, a plump woman pushing forty who came from some place near Chesterfield. She dressed plain in her job, but was good enough looking for the chauffeur, Fred Cresswell, to claim having had her a time or two, though I didn’t altogether believe him because she’d got the sort of mouth and seemed the kind of person who wouldn’t have let him go so easily. He claimed she wasn’t bad, except that there was a bit too much meat to plough through before you got to it. It took me some time to realize why she was feeding me up so well. One afternoon when I was lounging in the kitchen she came up behind and pressed her topwork into my back. I’d had one or two girls on the tumble, but nothing as grown up as this. She was kissing me at the shoulder blades, even though my shirt was on, and I was burning so much I daren’t turn round. When I did, I looked into her grey eyes, and put my arms about her shoulders. We got to kissing, and before anybody could come in and part us she told me to come to her room that night. I must have looked at her gone out at this, but she said, sharp: “You know where it is, don’t you?”