The Blackpool Highflyer (10 page)

Shortly after she'd started I had bought her an India rub­ber, and she'd said, 'Thank you very much,' while opening
the window and shying it all the way to Hill Street. 'I will
never
get on with one of those in the house,' she'd said, to
which I'd replied, 'Well how will you remove your mistakes?'
'By not making them,' had come the answer.

I had never seen anything bounce like that India rubber.

For weeks afterwards, I would find half-done letters about
the house that she'd brought back from the technical school.
'Dear Sir, My directors wish me to convey to you . . .'; 'My
directors wish to inform you that the matter you name
.
. .'
- all with imaginary directors named and supplied with
hundreds of initials. Or: 'Replying to your letter of the 5th
inst, our reqxxxxmentx .. .' And then might come a long line
of bbbbs or !!!!!s, for there was a lot of ginger in the wife.

It had not been easy for her to come to Yorkshire from
London, and at first she had seemed in a daze, and, when not
in a daze, blue. The rain was like prison bars. She told me she
thought that Halifax and places around were like Red Indian
villages thrown up all in a moment on the side of a hill. To
her, coming from London, they were fly-by-nights, not real.

Slowly, she had begun to make her corner. Through ladies
at the parish church - to which we went most Sundays, the
wife to pray, me to guess the engines coming into the Joint
(which was just over opposite) by their noises alone - the wife
had joined the Women's Co-operative Guild, which had
suited her philosophy to a tee. Equal fellowship of men and
women in the home, the factory and the state: this was their
line, and it was all quite all right by me, except it meant I
would frequently miss my tea, for the wife would be off to
some talk on 'Cheaper Divorce', or 'The Air We Breathe',
because they were not afraid of tough subjects. I would then
go off to the Evening Star or to the Top Note Dining Rooms,
which was where the two of us seemed now to be heading.

We walked on through the little streets between our house
and the middle of town. It was very hot, but there was nothing
in these streets to catch the gleam of the evening sun. You'd
see children in all the back alleys. The poorer sort were bare­foot, and the wife would say, 'Poor mites, I don't know how
they manage to live.'

They seemed to me to manage all right, going all out to
make a racket as they did so: rattling the marbles in empty
glass alley bottles, skipping in the sun and counting end­lessly, or echoing about unseen.

The wife was always pleasant to the kids, and told me not
to speak of a child as 'it', which I was in the habit of doing, but
I noticed she would always walk fast until we got out of the
back streets, which happened when we struck the Palace The­atre at Ward's End. This was all Variety, and I would usually
stop to have a look at the bills. I'd been inside twice, but never
with the wife. She preferred lonely sounding ladies at the
piano, of the sort they sometimes put on at her Co-op
evenings. She'd once said to me: 'What's funny about a little
man in big boots?' and I said, 'Well you must admit, it's fun­nier than a
big
man in big boots.' But no. There was no funny
side to boots at all as far as the wife was concerned.

Looking quickly at the Palace bill for that week, I saw the
word 'Ventriloquist', and resolved to go along later. After
comedians, ventriloquists were my favourite turns; there'd
been one on at the Palace just recently, and I'd meant to go
along. A good show would be just the tonic I needed.

Next to the bill, another of the advertisements for the
'meeting to discuss questions
' had been pasted up. I
pointed it out to the wife, and she said, 'Why do they ask:
"The Co-operator
.
.
.
Does He Help?'"

'How do you mean?'

'Why "he"', said the wife, 'and not "she"?'

'Well,' I said, 'it's mankind, isn't it?'

The wife snorted, and turned away from the poster, saying:
'They don't like excursions.'

I stopped and looked again at the poster. 'Blackpool: A
Health Resort?' I read. You could tell they had a down on the

place. I wondered what they thought of Scarborough, for that
was the same thing on the other side of the country. 'Wakes:
Curse or Blessing?' I read once more. 'Mr Alan Cowan,
founder of the Socialist Mission, has the Answers.'

'Mr Robinson,' the wife was saying a moment later, as we
waited for a gap in the traps and wagons racing along Foun­tain Street; 'that's the gentleman at the mill who gave me the
start...
He said that he would prefer me a little faster at the
keys, but that I was the only one he'd seen over the position
who knew what worsted was.'

The wife looked at me, but I was miles off, thinking of Mr
Alan Cowan and the Socialist Mission.

'What?' I said.

'Mr Robinson’ she said, 'who interviewed me for the job,
said I was the only applicant who knew what worsted was.'

'Doesn't say much for the others’ I said.

'How do you mean?'

'Well, they must have been a lot of blockheads if they didn't
know what worsted was - and them living in a mill town,
too.'

'What is it then?'

'What's what?'

A tram was coming along Fountain Street, keeping us
pinned to the kerb. The driver standing in his moving pulpit
- for that's how it always looked to me - had been burned by
the sun.

'Worsted’ she said.

'Worsted?'

'Worsted, yes.'

'Well...
it's a sort of cloth.'

'Cloth made of what?'

'Wool.'

We were dodging through the traffic now. Happening to
glance backwards I noticed that all the little high back win­dows of the Palace were open on account of the heat - a sight
I had never seen before.

'What sort of wool?' the wife was saying.

'Well, you
know ...
sheep's wool.'

'Long
staple’
said the wife. And she looked away, and then
she laughed. 'Eh, you daft 'aporth,' she said. She was practis­ing her Yorkshire. 'You wear it every day but don't know
what it is,' she said, straightening her white bonnet with her
thin, brown hands.

'You could have said something quite clever there you
know,' I said.

'I believe I did,' she said, smiling at me. The hat was righted
now.

'You could have said you'd
worsted
me over worsted -' I said.

'You're loony,' said the wife.

'- if you really
had
done of course.'

We were now outside the Hemingway's Music Shop in
Commercial Street. It was the wife's favourite shop, along
with the Maypole Dairy at Northgate, where they had very
artistic cheeses, kept cool by fans, like the drinkers in the
Imperial Saloon. The Maypole could draw quite a crowd in
the evening, although whether it was the cheeses or the fans
that did it, I never knew. At Hemingway's, the wife always
liked to look at the Hemingway's Special Piano they had in
the window that was £14. She wanted to have only the best
items in our home, and the Special Piano was on the list and
some money towards it was in the tea caddy. Meanwhile we
had no items, or very few. Whenever we struck this subject of
furnishings I always pictured the shop in Northgate that had
the sign in the window saying:
'homes complete from
£10
to
£100'. It was the ten pound part that interested me, but the
wife would have none of it. 'I will not equip the house from a
cheap john,' she would always say.

'The marvellous thing’ she said, still looking in the win­dow, 'is that it looks just like any other piano.'

'That's one of the things that worries me,' I said.

'But for
fourteen
pounds’ she said.

'That's nigh on three months' wages,' I said.
'There'll soon be two of us earning’ the wife reminded me,
'and now that the room's
let...'

'But what about the extras . . .
tuning
it, and the two of us
learning to
play
the piano.'

The Top Note Dining Room was two doors up from Hem­ingway's Music Shop, which might have explained the name.
Nothing else did. The tables went the whole width of a wide
room, and the people eating at them looked like workers in
a mill. But they would give you ice in a glass of lemonade
without waiting to be asked. The wife and I took our places.
We both had steak and fried onions with chipped potatoes. It
was the first good meal I'd had since the smash, which had
put me off food in lots of ways.

'You see it's not that I don't like Cape gooseberries,' I said,
'I just don't want to eat them for tea.'

'Well,' she said, 'it's just that I've had so many interrup­tions.'

'I would be willing to make my tea for myself,' I said, 'I
would . . .
almost.'

'Oh, we can't have you living on Bloody Good Husband
Street’ said the wife, 'you the dolly mop!' Then: 'Would you
like to see the mill where I'm to go on?'

It was one of those lonely ones up on Beacon Hill. The
trams couldn't get up there, so we took one as far as the Joint,
sitting on the top for a bit of a blow. The sky was a greenish
pink with the sunlight leaving it only slowly, and the smoke
still coming out from the mills, snaking into the sky, adding
to the heat and weirdness of all as they made their slow S's.
The smell in the air was twice burnt.