No longer a plain labourer, but a capstan lathe operator turning out objects for Rolls-Royce engines, I became familiar with the micrometer and depth gauge, since everything had to be correct to within a few thousandths of an inch. Working at top speed on piece work, my wages soon reached four pounds a week, which allowed me to save from the ten shillings my mother handed back. The repetitious sweat of producing over a thousand brass nuts a day did not worry me, because for one thing I was making it pay and, once accustomed to the process, could dream my way from morning till evening as if I were two people.
After a few months Bert Firman, who owned the place but came in full-time like any other workman, offered me an extra ten shillings a week to get there an hour earlier and sweep the place clean. This meant leaving home at half past six, but I accepted gladly, and the old school Bible was soon interleaved with pound notes. My mother told me later that she had found the hideaway and, taking one or two out on Monday morning if she had no cash, put them back by the weekend so that I wouldn’t know. But one week, being suspicious because they weren’t in the right page place, I pencilled an asterisk faintly on each note, and on finding one that was clean didn’t put the reason down to the influence of the Holy Scriptures. Why she should have been so short of funds by Monday was hard to imagine, because my father’s and my wages ought to have lasted the week. Though Peggy had joined the Women’s Land Army, so there was nothing more from her, Pearl had started work and brought money in.
While giving most of my earnings to the house, I never thought I had decent enough clothes to wear. Fortunately, attending all possible parades at the ATC, much of my spare time was spent in uniform. My mother provided me with overalls, for which extra clothing coupons were given anyway, but otherwise she bought me a suit from a pawnshop, whose pinstripes were almost brushed into extinction. A secondhand overcoat soon became too short, and was passed on to Brian, and for a while an ATC anti-gas cape covered me when it rained. I did not complain, because my mother had few enough clothes of her own, and was genuinely too hard up to supply my proper needs as well as those of three younger children whose priorities no one could question, though they weren’t exactly well dressed, either.
A dance at the ATC headquarters went on every Saturday night for about a year, and with a quiff in my hair as dashing as that of King George, and smart to the extent of a tie-pin showing at the opening of my buttoned waistcoat, I must have gone around the floor in waltz or foxtrot time much like a sailor after six months at sea.
Selecting my partners and the type of dance with care, I met a girl who interested me because she did not work in a factory. She was rather short, and very quiet, with hungry little features, and hair worn in a roll at the forehead and then a short way down her back. Grey eyes, the liveliest of her advantages, suggested that if she did have something to say — and she did, was the implication, lots — no one roundabout would be flattered by her opinions, so why waste what was better kept to herself?
I assiduously courted her but, though seeming to like my attentions, and accepting me as her ‘young man’, as if I would do until someone better swanned along, she was meagre with any favours beyond the customary good-night snogging. There was little fondness between us, but a mutual fascination at each other’s strangeness kept the friendship going. On my part I began to mistake it for love, because the aim of getting into her cunt became my main object in life. We went cycling once into Leicestershire, and I thought my chance had come at last when we lay down to rest on a hillside near the village of Gotham, but it hadn’t. Another time we walked from where she lived into the pocket of countryside around Top Valley Farm, but that was no good, either. She was the first girl I took formally out to lunch, instead of informally into a pub, which she would not have countenanced, and I telephoned the office where she worked twice a week from a public box near the factory to say how much I loved her.
After the weekly hop ended at eleven I walked her home, which was even further out of my way, and we spent an hour kissing, with me trying to get as far with her as I had with my previous girlfriend, who had been callously given up for this fruitless pursuit. Further along the wall her slightly more attractive sister was being fucked silly by a friend of mine, but it was my bad luck to be lumbered with the one who was so hard to get, and I never reached my goal, for she always slipped into the house and left me — high, but dry — cursing myself for a fool on the five-mile traipse home.
During the week at my lathe hope revived, only to be put down once more. She must have become frightened when she almost let me ‘get there’, and told her sister to say that she didn’t want me to see her again. I responded with a long and fervent letter, not one to give up easily, which she must have destroyed without reading. My self-esteem was damaged beyond repair, for a couple of days, and then I met a girl who enjoyed fucking with a steadiness of purpose that fully satisfied me until after joining the air force a couple of years later. Her widowed mother, in her fifties and somewhat deaf, had an Indian man for a boyfriend, and while they were banging around on the bed upstairs, my girlfriend and I were similarly at it, making hearthrug pie in the living room.
Chapter Fifteen
By the age of sixteen part of me was in every respect a fully integrated workman. If I wanted to come in late at night, or in early morning, when all others in the house were asleep, I had only to prise open the scullery window, find the key just inside, and let myself in by the back door, the only stipulation being that I lock up after me. So although by no means twenty-one, the key to the door was already in my pocket.
There would be new experiences, of course, the more the better (the more the merrier, also), and while there was a vast quantity to learn I seemed adult to myself, and imagined that other people thought so too. If a strong doubt lingered it was only because the officers of the cadet force led a life I knew little about.
I cared for no man, and cared not whether he cared not for me as I stood before the lathe with sleeves rolled up and, a thousand times a day — though the magic of turning out each separate object never left me — released the bar an inch towards my middle, spun back the turret, pushed in the chamfer tool, forced the drill, suitably cooled by a constant jet from the sud pipe, and worked the two cutting blades forward and back till the simple brass hexagonal nut fell into my right hand and was thrown into a tin, another item for the engine of a Lancaster bomber.
We worked hard in that factory, day in and day out, week after week, all through the war: youths like myself, women and girls, and the three men kept out of the Forces as toolsetters. One of the women, tall and thin, her hair entirely grey, had lost her sergeant husband in a bombing raid over Germany. Scanning other faces that breach the wall of memory, who was that tall fair woman with laughing eyes called Meg who came in every day from Edwinstowe? Then there was the slim dark-haired woman of impeccable but tragic aspect, or so it seemed to me, who sat on her high stool before a miniature lathe making I don’t know what superfine object. I only ever viewed her from a distance, and never knew her name, for she always sat with the women, mostly listening to their talk. Someone remarked that she was Portuguese, but it occurs to me now that she may have been a Jewish refugee.