Alan Sillitoe - Birthday

Flamingo

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Published by Flamingo 2002

First published in Great Britain by Flamingo, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 2001

Alan Sillitoe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007108831

Ebook Edition © MAY 2010 ISBN: 9780007387250

Version: 2014–09–15

IN MEMORIAM

June Sillitoe

Cover Page

Title Page Birthday Alan Sillitoe

Dedication Dedication Table of Contents Cover Page Title Page Dedication Part One ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX SEVEN EIGHT NINE TEN Part Two ELEVEN TWELVE THIRTEEN Part Three FOURTEEN FIFTEEN SIXTEEN SEVENTEEN Keep Reading About the Author Praise for Birthday: By the Same Author Copyright About the Publisher IN MEMORIAM June Sillitoe

Part One Part One

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

Part Two

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

Part Three

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

Keep Reading

About the Author

Praise for Birthday:

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Arthur dropped gear going downhill.‘Trams clanked through here once upon a time. Then you got tracklesses. Now there’s ordinary buses. But it pays to have your own car. Saves hanging around.’

Brian’s bedtime reading, set in the smokey-hot olive groves of Greece, was a potent antidote to the sight of his home town. ‘I like driving from London in a couple of hours, to call on the family whenever the mood takes me.’

‘We’re always glad to see you,’ Arthur said. Trains at one time grumbled up and down the double line through Basford Crossing, from the main station in town to populous colliery places such as Bulwell and Kirkby and Sutton-in-Ashfield,not to mention Newstead, which Brian had noted long before he knew of the Abbey and Byron.

‘Coal smoke used to reek as if it would cure the flu,’ Arthur told Avril, out for the first time since her bout of chemotherapy. ‘Even when it makes you cough enough to think you’d got TB it was a tonic for us.’

‘I’ll bet it was,’ she said wryly.

Shops selling food and cheap clothes, ironmongery and paraffin, had been packed around the crossroads. A public library gave shelter to a few down and outs in winter while they read the papers, and those with nowhere to lay their heads at night could trudge to a workhouse not too far up the road. A park for sitting in on sunny days had a pond at the centre, and Arthur thought God help the poor bloody fishes, though they seemed lively enough when fingers twirled the water, even if they did have two heads and a split tail from the bleach works nearby.

Children out of school would shout to be heard above the thunder of the unstoppable rhythmical puffer under its whitey grey coils of smoke, eyes showing envy and maybe fear at an engine that didn’t care (as if it could) whether they lived or died.

Brian remembered counting the trucks, and marvelling at the load a shining black locomotive could haul, staring as if his soul was struggling to get free from under the heaps of coal so that he could run as far away as his feet would take him. Magic names stencilled in big white letters along their sides flickered in his dreams on hearing wagons rattle through by night as well, unseen places more glamorous than the one he lived in.

‘I’m sure it’s altered a lot,’ Avril said, who had been brought up in London, and could only laugh at their talk of past and difficult times. ‘It must have done, by the look of it.’

Arthur recalled standing on the footbridge, which was still there, with its terracotta girders and white grid rail to stop people tumbling over. No more coal trucks laboured under canopies of smoke because there were no collieries for them to go to. ‘We never thought it would change like this.’ Pubs and pawnshops and bookies had been a part of the place as well. ‘There were crowds around here, but it’s a desert now. It’s half past seven on a Saturday night, and where is everybody?’

Shop doors were boarded up: brambles and dandelions sprouted from doorsteps, strips of paper swayed from a hoarding between two shops like the withered arms of a dead octopus, and a faded notice from way back advertised three-piece suits. ‘People are in flats and new houses,’ Avril said, ‘and good luck to them.’

The lights on stop, Arthur gently braked before a wider road with more traffic on it. He would have gone through on yellow, but there was always a flash bastard coming the other way in a BMW to clip you. ‘Some of us didn’t mind living like that. We didn’t know any other life.’

‘I remember telling people at a dinner party in London about my early days,’ Brian said, ‘and they asked whether I’d been happy growing up in a slum. When I said I didn’t remember it like that they thought I was putting it on.’

Arthur pointed out the white stuccoed façade of an old picture house, now an emporium for builders’ materials. ‘You’re right,’ he said to Avril. ‘It wasn’t so good living around here. You just didn’t realize until you left.’

Lights flashed permission for Arthur’s Peugeot to rumble over the crossing. The Methodist chapel, having lost much of its clientele for Christian worship, had a social security office on the upper floor, while newish houses beginning to replace the grubby dereliction of the old looked as if no one lived in them. His attention didn’t deviate from the macadam while nodding to Brian in the back. ‘I expect Jenny’ll get a shock when she sees your phizog at the party.’