England Made Me (23 page)

Young Andersson stepped out of his dungarees. The failure of one machine made little difference to the racket in the hall he had left, but long familiarity with this particular cutter had made him familiar with a slight recurring cough in its whine. He couldn't hear the cough. His pale thin face became momentarily troubled; he had never before failed to hear that cough every six seconds. He couldn't visualize the trouble he had caused; he had seen the drying-room; a friend of his worked one of the saws; but he knew nothing of the further depths, nothing of the hall where the trunks were unloaded, nothing of the lorries and where they came from. A man from his shift passed through the cloakroom to the lavatory. Young Andersson watched him; he walked quickly with his head bent; he had raised his hand and his place at the machine had been taken; he would be allowed four minutes; if he was longer than four minutes he would be fined. Young Andersson took off his jacket from his peg and left the cloakroom. He had to cut across the end of the machine-room; a man came down the room carrying an oil-can; he dripped the heavy black oil into the well of each machine on the left-hand side; a man carrying a similar can walked up the other side. They knew so exactly the position of the wells that they had no need to look; they walked and turned the wrist and walked and turned the wrist.

The man carrying the can down the room stared at Andersson; he was astonished, he hesitated with his can and left a little dropping of oil like an animal's pad on the polished steel floor; he watched Andersson out of the door. Andersson climbed down the curving steel stair of the emergency exit into the courtyard; he was afraid to wait for a lift in sight of the machine-room. He carried the man's face with him in his mind, tiredness, astonishment, envy. Andersson walked across the courtyard to the gateway where he clocked in and out. The porter was unwilling to open the gate. ‘Sick,' young Andersson said, ‘sick.' It was unnecessary to act sickness; his pallor, his habitual slight stoop, the new worry which sat his face uneasily like a recruit at a riding-school, were his
bona fides
. The gate of the factory was opened for him.

He had a sense of strangeness, seeing the long asphalted road between the high wooden walls quite empty. One side lay in shadow; a long way off the walls ended and a few silver birches stood in a pool of afternoon sun. Young Andersson began to run along the two-foot strip of shadow. It's not right, he thought with astonishment, it's not right. The idea had never occurred to him before.

Young Andersson was conservative. He read the papers, he believed in the greatness of Krogh's. His father's socialism was something old, tiresome, didactic; it smelt of night schools; like the morality of old people it was a substitute for experience. ‘A fair share for the worker', ‘proletarian unity', like a long Lutheran Sunday his father's phrases went droning on. They had no more meaning to young Andersson than ‘three in one', ‘the persons of the blessed Trinity'.

‘Do you believe in nothing?' his father said.

‘Stick to my job,' young Andersson said. ‘Things all right. Good wages. Save a bit. Well off myself one day.'

Now he ran gasping up the shadowed wall.

‘Krogh one of us once. Chance for us all.'

The smell of tar, of oil, very far away the trees, the man with the oil-can envying him. It's not right, young Andersson thought, it's not right. Father wrote that he came himself, joked, gave him a cigar, why he even asked after me, promised that everything was all right. That was only a few days ago. Of course he doesn't know; he's got to be told. He's a just man. Young Andersson believed in justice. He had seen it working, the idle man dismissed, the industrious rewarded. His own wages had been raised two years ago.

He couldn't run any more; he was out of training; the oil man's job was the healthiest, walking up and down; he must cover a good many miles in a day. The end of the wooden walls seemed as far away as ever; they were nearly a mile and a half in length. When a man left work it took him twenty minutes quick walking to get clear of the factory. Some men complained that they should be paid for that time. They couldn't live nearer than they did. The wooden bungalows began where the wooden walls left off.

He passed them, walking fast; they were good bungalows painted in bright colours. They all had a small piece of garden; some of the men's wives kept chickens. Young Andersson was unmarried; he lodged with a man on the night-shift. The man's wife was digging in the garden as he passed. She stopped digging and called to him: ‘What's the matter? Where are you going?' He was embarrassed, he stood in the middle of the road and kicked the surface.

‘I shan't be in to supper.'

‘Is anything wrong at the works? Where are you off to?'

Young Andersson blushed and kicked the road. He looked at her sideways. He always blushed when he spoke to her and he never looked straight at her. He slept in the next room and the thin matchboard wall kept out no sounds. He could hear her clean her teeth, wash, he could hear her when she lay with her husband; he wouldn't have minded if she had been old and plain, but she was young and pretty. It made him shy and furtive to know so much about her.

‘Nothing wrong. I've got to go up to Stockholm. I'll be late tonight.'

She wasn't inquisitive. Nothing which he did, he knew, really interested her. She thought him a poor sort of a fellow; she was passionately in love with her husband. He knew only too well how passionately. He blushed and kicked the road and said: ‘I'd better be getting on.'

‘Don't get into mischief,' she said without interest and began to dig again.

At the station he found he had only just enough money to reach Stockholm. There was half an hour to wait. He need not have hurried. Now he had to walk again, up and down the platform; there was nothing else to do. He tried shaking a slot machine; sometimes a coin had stuck. He tried another. He shook every slot machine he could find. At last he was successful. A coin tinkled into place and young Andersson drew out the drawer; it contained a paper handkerchief. Well, he thought, it's something for nothing, and put it in his pocket. A long goods train laden with timber for the factory drew up at a siding. She's pretty, he thought, it's not right hearing everything like that, and then he thought of his father. A faint premonition of injustice touched his brain. He told himself, Herr Krogh just doesn't know, he'll put it right. A joke, cigar, he asked after me.

One of the works managers came on to the platform; he was seeing off his wife and daughter. Young Andersson knew him by sight, but he didn't know Andersson. He carried a big box of chocolates for his wife and a bunch of flowers for his daughter. Young Andersson came near; he was curious to know what these people talked about when they were not at work. He knew what he talked about: money, drink, the factory.

‘Yes,' the manager said, ‘yes. It will be quite all right. I'll be up for the week-end. Make up the four.'

‘Count me out,' the girl said. ‘I'm going dancing.' She was very fair with very small ears; her lobes were prettily painted. Young Andersson thought of the matchboard wall again and blushed. It just wasn't right. When she walked along the platform, she was like an athlete entering a stadium. Her legs moved so freely that she might have been wearing nothing under her fur coat; she seemed quite unconscious of her sex, but there was in her manner a dash of desperation, of nerves, she looked over-trained.

‘You're spending too much time dancing,' the manager said. He was hurried and irritated; he kept on looking at the clock. It was obvious that the flowers and the chocolates meant nothing, he had no affection for either of them, it was simply an act that he always performed.

When the train drew in, young Andersson had to pass the group to reach the third-class carriages. The manager kissed his wife on the cheek, but his daughter shook hands with him. Young Andersson touched his cap. The manager never noticed. He said to his wife, ‘You'll have to order some more drink. Ask them for eight o'clock. I shan't get home earlier.' The girl saw Andersson touch his cap and nodded to him; there was no condescension in her nod; she might have been recognizing a fellow competitor on the running track.

Young Andersson sat back in the bare-boarded carriage and saw the station, the manager, the factory, the bungalows drawn back and out of sight. Between a narrow hem of silver birch-trees a lake spread under the flat late sunlight. He sat with his hands pressed between his knees, jolting with every movement of the slow country train. He thought: what should I say to her? . . . dancing . . . spending too much time tobogganing in winter, the scream of the runners cutting the snow at the bend under the fairy lights, talking in a friendly way on an inn bench, cold and happy and having fun; he nodded in a sleepy way, seeing great possibilities in the life before him.

The trees became dark against a lower greyer sky; the lake lay like lead between the gaps; somebody looked to see if the heating handle were turned; a long whistle before a tunnel and on the other side an abruptly darker world; a few sparks tingled against the window-pane. Young Andersson opened his eyes and saw a group of men bicycling home from work; the lights on their machines had been lit; out-distanced they carried their small burning globes backward. The train whirled away from the lake and the trees, and darkness fell over a long wide waste of grass.

‘You're going up to the city?' an elderly woman asked and she opened a basket to find a buttered roll. The light in the carriage roof burned suddenly brighter; darkness was like the drawing of blinds before the evening meal. Those in the carriage began to feel towards each other a companionship, a sense of trust; they were all happy together with the night outside. ‘Yes,' young Andersson said.

‘Aren't you in work?' she said, slipping a piece of ham between the two halves of her roll.

‘Oh, yes,' he said with pride, ‘I'm in Krogh's,' and they both stared out of the window with a momentary sense of well-being, he because he was in Krogh's and she because of her roll. The train stopped at every village and the warmth and friendliness of their carriage were duplicated by the lights outside, by a woman cooking, by a child sitting up in bed to see the train.

‘You're lucky to be in Krogh's,' the woman said. ‘There's a future in a job like that.'

‘There's a future,' young Andersson said and then was silent. He had remembered how he had left his job in the middle of his shift. His pale unintelligent face grew stubborn; he had done the right thing. All the stubbornness which had kept him for years reliably by his machine, earning a little more money every few years, had conditioned him to leave it the moment he heard the news about his father. Stubbornness had made him a conservative; stubbornness made him believe in justice; stubbornness had checked his machine, cluttered the tray, congested the drying chamber. It will be all right, he thought, when I tell them. If I'd stayed to argue I might have missed the train.

‘Don't get up to mischief,' the woman said, shaking crumbs from her skirt on to his knees. Everyone was telling him not to get up to mischief. He said sadly in explanation: ‘I'm going up on business.'

‘We all know that sort of business,' the woman said and rummaged for a bottle of milk in her basket, and the word ‘mischief' and the word ‘business' in her large friendly voice took on an unusual meaning to young Andersson, something not to be blushed at or hidden, something cheerful, common, careless, come today and gone tomorrow. He said: ‘There might be time when this is over. . . . It won't take long.'

‘You're only young once,' the woman said, shaking her grey ribald head.

When the train drew up in the Central Station it was nearly seven o'clock. Young Andersson had no idea how late they worked at Krogh's. He had never seen Krogh's. He had to ask the way of a policeman, and the man watched him suspiciously out of sight, curious at his workman's clothes, his collarless shirt and heavy boots and air of determination. But the porter at Krogh's wouldn't let him in. ‘What do you think you are?' he said, talking through the wrought-iron gate. ‘He wouldn't see you even if he was here.'

‘I work down at the factory.'

‘What difference does that make?' the porter asked.

‘It's about my father,' young Andersson said. ‘Herr Krogh knows my father.'

‘Your mother, you mean,' the porter shrieked through the gate, laughing and holding on to the ironwork with long simian arms. Then he grew serious. ‘You've no business here. This place isn't for the likes of you. You ought to be down at the factory.'

‘I've got to see Herr Krogh.'

‘Even the Prime Minister doesn't see Herr Krogh except by appointment.'

‘I'd make an appointment.'

‘Ah,' the porter said, ‘but first you have to see the secretary.'

‘I'll see the secretary.'

‘But nobody,' the porter said, cackling through the iron flowers, ‘can see the secretary without an appointment.'

‘I'll make an appointment,' young Andersson said.

‘Why at this place,' the porter said, ‘you are lucky to see me without an appointment.'

‘But Herr Krogh knows about me. My father wrote to me. He said Herr Krogh asked after me.'

‘Your father's a liar.'

Young Andersson lowered his head. He came nearer to the gate with his fingers crooked. He had not lost his air, of stubbornness, of determination.

‘Why, look about you,' the porter said. ‘This is Herr Krogh's. What do you think he'd have to do with you or your precious father? Look about you,' the porter repeated, and Andersson looked, at the initials burning against the sky, the glass walls, the water splashing down the side of the green block of stone.