It’s a good life, I’m saying to myself, if you don’t give in to coppers and Borstal-bosses and the rest of them bastard-faced In-laws. Trot-trot-trot. Puff-puff-puff. Slap-slap-slap go my feet on the hard soil. Swish-swish-swish as my arms and side catch the bare branches of a bush. For I’m seventeen now, and when they let me out of this — if I don’t make a break and see that things turn out otherwise — they’ll try to get me in the army, and what’s the difference between the army and this place I’m in now? They can’t kid me, the bastards. I’ve seen the barracks near where I live, and if there weren’t swaddies on guard outside with rifles you wouldn’t know the difference between their high walls and the place I’m in now. Even though the swaddies come out at odd times a week for a pint of ale, so what? Don’t I come out three mornings a week on my long-distance running, which is fifty times better than boozing. When they first said that I was to do my long-distance running without a guard pedalling beside me on a bike I couldn’t believe it; but they called it a progressive and modern place, though they can’t kid me because I know it’s just like any other Borstal, going by the stories I’ve heard, except that they let me trot about like this. Borstal’s Borstal no matter what they do; but anyway I moaned about it being a bit thick sending me out so early to run five miles on an empty stomach, until they talked me round to thinking it wasn’t so bad — which I knew all the time — until they called me a good sport and patted me on the back when I said I’d do it and that I’d try to win them the Borstal Blue Ribbon Prize Cup for Long Distance Cross Country Running (All England). And now the governor talks to me when he comes on his rounds, almost as he’d talk to his prize race horse, if he had one.
‘All right, Smith?’ he asks.
‘Yes, sir,’ I answer.
He flicks his grey moustache: ‘How’s the running coming along?’
‘I’ve set myself to trot round the grounds after dinner just to keep my hand in, sir,’ I tell him.
The pot-bellied pop-eyed bastard gets pleased at this: ‘Good show. I know you’ll get us that cup,’ he says.
And I swear under my breath: ‘Like boggery, I will.’ No, I won’t get them that cup, even though the stupid tash-twitching-bastard has all his hopes in me. Because what does his barmy hope mean? I ask myself. Trot-trot-trot, slap-slap-slap, over the stream and into the wood where it’s almost dark and frosty-dew twigs sting my legs. It don’t mean a bloody thing to me, only to him, and it means as much to him as it would mean to me if I picked up the racing paper and put my bet on a hoss I didn’t know, had never seen, and didn’t care a sod if I ever did see. That’s what it means to him. And I’ll lose that race, because I’m not a race horse at all, and I’ll let him know it when I’m about to get out — if I don’t sling my hook even before the race. By Christ I will. I’m a human being and I’ve got thoughts and secrets and bloody life inside me that he doesn’t know is there, and he’ll never know what’s there because he’s stupid. I suppose you’ll laugh at this, me saying the governor’s a stupid bastard when I know hardly how to write and he can read and write and add-up like a professor. But what I say is true right enough. He’s stupid, and I’m not, because I can see further into the likes of him than he can see into the likes of me. Admitted, we’re both cunning, but I’m more cunning and I’ll win in the end even if I die in gaol at eighty-two, because I’ll have more fun and fire out of my life than he’ll ever get out of his. He’s read a thousand books I suppose, and for all I know he might even have written a few, but I know for a dead cert, as sure as I’m sitting here, that what I’m scribbling down is worth a million to what he could ever scribble down. I don’t care what anybody says, but that’s the truth and can’t be denied. I know when he talks to me and I look into his army mug that I’m alive and he’s dead. He’s as dead as a doornail. If he ran ten yards he’d drop dead. If he got ten yards into what goes on in my guts he’d drop dead as well — with surprise. At the moment it’s dead blokes like him as have the whip-hand over blokes like me, and I’m almost dead sure it’ll always be like that, but even so, by Christ, I’d rather be like I am — always on the run and breaking into shops for a packet of fags and a jar of jam — than have the whip-hand over somebody else and be dead from the toe-nails up. Maybe as soon as you get the whip-hand over somebody you do go dead. By God, to say that last sentence has needed a few hundred miles of long-distance running. I could no more have said that at first than I could have took a million-pound note from my back pocket. But it’s true, you know, now I think of it again, and has always been true, and always will be true, and I’m surer of it every time I see the governor open that door and say Good morning lads.
As I run and see my smoky breath going out into the air as if I had ten cigars stuck in different parts of my body I think more on the little speech the governor made when I first came. Honesty. Be honest. I laughed so much one morning I went ten minutes down in my timing because I had to stop and get rid of the stitch in my side. The governor was so worried when I got back late that he sent me to the doctor’s for an X-ray and heart check. Be honest. It’s like saying: Be dead, like me, and then you’ll have no more pain of leaving your nice slummy house for Borstal or prison. Be honest and settle down in a cosy six pounds a week job. Well, even with all this long-distance running I haven’t yet been able to decide what he means by this, although I’m just about beginning to — and I don’t like what it means. Because after all my thinking I found that it adds up to something that can’t be true about me, being born and brought up as I was. Because another thing people like the governor will never understand is that I am honest, that I’ve never been anything else but honest, and that I’ll always be honest. Sounds funny. But it’s true because I know what honest means according to me and he only knows what it means according to him. I think my honesty is the only sort in the world, and he thinks his is the only sort in the world as well. That’s why this dirty great walled-up and fenced-up manor house in the middle of nowhere has been used to coop-up blokes like me. And if I had the whip-hand I wouldn’t even bother to build a place like this to put all the cops, governors, posh whores, penpushers, army officers, Members of Parliament in; no, I’d stick them up against a wall and let them have it, like they’d have done with blokes like us years ago, that is, if they’d ever known what it means to be honest, which they don’t and never will so help me God Almighty.