He feels a lot as he watches his name being spread out in public. Bill Posters has been infamous in these streets for generations, bandit Posters, as well known or maybe scorned and scoffed at as Robin Hood, justly celebrated in that hundred verse ‘Ballad of Bill Posters’ recited for generations in Nottingham streets and pubs. There’s been a long line of William Posters, a family of mellow lineage always hoved-up in some slum cellar of Nottingham streets. His existence explains many puzzles. Who was General Ludd? None other than the shadowy William Posters, stockinger, leading on his gallant companies of Nottingham lads to smash all that machinery. In any case didn’t Lord Byron make a stirring speech in the House of Lords about a certain William Posters sentenced to death in his absence for urging a crowd to resist the yeomanry? Who set fire to Nottingham Castle during the Chartist riots? Later, who spat in Lord Roberts’ face when he led the victory parade in Nottingham after the Boer War? Who looted those shops in the General Strike? No one has ever proved it, but the ballad sings of it, and historians may make notes for future conjectures. To those who don’t think much about the present upholder of the Posters race he is half-forgotten, invisible, or completely ignored, but those wags and sparks whose hearts he lodges in sustain that image, keep his furtive ever-enduring figure alive as it flits at dusk or dawn down slum streets from one harbouring district to another. The fact that he is never caught indicates the vast population of his friends, and the one sure sign that he is never taken off by the cops is that his name is always being painted afresh on some wall or other. His enemies, though, are equally numerous, and it is even harder to say exactly who they are than his friends. Everyone knows Bill Posters is one of us, and everybody knows that his enemies belong to the people whose emissaries come with pots of paint and describe the fact, legally on some chosen wall, that Bill Posters is going to be prosecuted. Why are they so persistently out to get Bill Posters once and for all, to nail both name and man to the flagpole of that arse-rag, the Union Jack? To write so publicly and often the fact of Bill’s impending prosecution must mean that they had mountains of evidence against him. All of it was false, of course.
Maybe if he hadn’t been persecuted, Frank thought, he’d have turned out a different man, been a bloke like me who’d got a job at a factory and worked every week for fifteen quid or so. He might have been a good worker for the union and, who knows, in time become a big official — Sir William Posters ‘today went to confer with Beeching, Ford, Robens and Nuffield with regard to the General Strike called for tomorrow by his caucus of unions. According to the D. Worker Sir William maintained that he wanted a minimum wage of twenty pounds a week for all workers, as well as a communist government of six hundred and forty deputies to be chosen by him and sent to the House of Commons. Great cheers from all the workers’.
‘Don’t call me Sir William, lads. I shit on the Sir. Call me Bill — Bill Posters as I was born and bred.’ Comrade Posters, party boss, in his cloth cap and big topcoat as he inspects blast furnaces and power stations. ‘Good old Bill. We’ve got what we want now.’ Until an aeroplane flying over one day, sky-writes high up in the blue: ‘No you haven’t. BILL POSTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.’
Mostly the people who gave Frank lifts were happy to do so. One man was not, and said, when they were well into the wolds beyond Louth: ‘Don’t you sometimes feel ashamed, to be begging lifts like this?’
There’d been no smile when the man stopped to pick him up, nothing but a slit-mouth asking where he wanted to go. He wore a belted mac, and cap, was pale at the face and kept his steel-blue eyes angled towards the road. ‘To get where I’m going,’ Frank replied, ‘it would be cheaper by bus. I only hitchhike to give miserable bastards like you a break from yourself. Stop this car and put me down.’
The man smiled. ‘Well, now look here, I didn’t mean to be offensive, you know. I asked a question because I don’t see much point in sitting quiet for the next ten miles.’
‘If you don’t pull up I’ll grab that wheel and swing you into the ditch as well.’
The car stopped quickly. He reached for his pack and got out, not a word said, happy to have weight again on his moving legs. He gave lifts to hundreds of people, even those who didn’t look as if they wanted one. On the last day before leaving, anything to get out of town, warm sunshine dazzling through the spotless windscreen, he sped along a straight, narrow lane that ran two flat miles across open wasteground, had a yen to take his car off and crash the fence, subside into the ditch and grind up onto wider spaces. But what was beyond them except what he could see now? — the Trent, the power-station and, over the river, hills forming a hazy blackening cloudbank?
Driving towards a rooftop sea of newly built houses increased his worm-eaten discontent. Fields and woods bordered the sluggish river, a live, cloud-reflecting limb held under by a smart new bridge. Beyond the estate he turned to the main road, and, seeing a soldier and kitbag planted hopefully for a lift, drew up to find out where to. ‘Loughborough, sir,’ came the obliging answer.
‘Sling your sack in,’ Frank said, opening a packet of twenty, fresh and newly shining like Alfonso’s teeth: ‘Fag?’ He was about twenty — short haircut and come-to-bed eyes for a female ape — sallow-faced and ill at ease as he drew the door to. ‘Slam it, mate, or you’ll roll out, then you won’t be worth much as a soldier.’
‘I’m in a good regiment,’ the soldier said, stammering slightly. Frank lit up before driving off. ‘On leave?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Don’t call me sir. It makes my ulcers jump. Call me Frank. I might have a car, but I’m still one of the mob.’ Deep angry creases formed on the soldier’s forehead, as if he wondered: ‘Who does he think he is, telling me not to call him sir?’
‘How long you got?’ — a few bob a day, and kept on call with nothing to do but read Flash Gordon comics.
‘Seven days, sir. I’m a bit fed up. I’m married, and don’t see much of my wife. This is the first bit of leave I’ve had in months.’ Frank pitied him, stepped on the accelerator to get him back sooner to his hearthrug pie. ‘You know what you ought to do?’
‘What, mate — Frank?’
‘Pack it in. I’ll drive you down to London if you like. Fix you up at my house with a suit of civvies, and you’d never get caught. I’ll take your wife down at the same time. It’s no good being in khaki and having to jump out of your dreams every time some bloke with two pips on his bony shoulders opens his plumby mouth. I know. Was in myself once.’
‘I couldn’t.’ The soldier hesitated, still with a slight stammer, as if obliged to consider it seriously for the privilege of his lift. ‘I’m due out soon. There’s no point. Anyway, did you desert, then?’
‘No,’ he answered, unperturbed, ‘there was no one to help me. I was too stupid in those days’ — and went on talking as they sped along, making a short journey of it, plying the soldier and himself with cigarettes and hoping to brainwash him into saying: ‘All right, mate, stop the car, I’ll desert now’ — though it’s hard to brainwash someone with no brains. Not that Frank was serious; he was playing a game, knew it when a startling question was etched on the emptiness of his own mind, saying that since he was telling this young man to run away from his khaki troubles, why didn’t he pluck up guts enough to light off himself, sell his car, buy a rucksack and bike, and just fade out into the blue-and-green? He smiled: it was impossible to do anything while thinking about it.