Alan Sillitoe - The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

I’m in Essex. It’s supposed to be a good Borstal, at least that’s what the governor said to me when I got here from Nottingham. ‘We want to trust you while you are in this establishment,’ he said, smoothing out his newspaper with lily-white workless hands, while I read the big words upside down: Daily Telegraph. ‘If you play ball with us, we’ll play ball with you.’ (Honest to God, you’d have thought it was going to be one long tennis match.) ‘We want hard honest work and we want good athletics,’ he said as well. ‘And if you give us both these things you can be sure we’ll do right by you and send you back into the world an honest man.’ Well, I could have died laughing, especially when straight after this I hear the barking sergeant-major’s voice calling me and two others to attention and marching us off like we was Grenadier Guards. And when the governor kept saying how ‘we’ wanted you to do this, and ‘we’ wanted you to do that, I kept looking round for the other blokes, wondering how many of them there was. Of course,’ I knew there were thousands of them, but as far as I knew only one was in the room. And there are thousands of them, all over the poxeaten country, in shops, offices, railway stations, cars, houses, pubs – In-law blokes like you and them, all on the watch for Out-law blokes like me and us – and waiting to ’phone for the coppers as soon as we make a false move. And it’ll always be there, I’ll tell you that now, because I haven’t finished making all my false moves yet, and I dare say I won’t until I kick the bucket. If the In-laws are hoping to stop me making false moves they’re wasting their time. They might as well stand me up against a wall and let fly with a dozen rifles. That’s the only way they’ll stop me, and a few million others. Because I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since coming here. They can spy on us all day to see if we’re pulling our puddings and if we’re working good or doing our ‘athletics’ but they can’t make an X-ray of our guts to find out what we’re telling ourselves. I’ve been asking myself all sorts of questions, and thinking about my life up to now. And I like doing all this. It’s a treat. It passes the time away and don’t make Borstal seem half so bad as the boys in our street used to say it was. And this long-distance running lark is the best of all, because it makes me think so good that I learn things even better than when I’m on my bed at night. And apart from that, what with thinking so much while I’m running I’m getting to be one of the best runners in the Borstal. I can go my five miles round better than anybody else I know.

So as soon as I tell myself I’m the first man ever to be dropped into the world, and as soon as I take that first flying leap out into the frosty grass of an early morning when even birds haven’t the heart to whistle, I get to thinking, and that’s what I like. I go my rounds in a dream, turning at lane or footpath corners without knowing I’m turning, leaping brooks without knowing they’re there, and shouting good morning to the early cow-milker without seeing him. It’s a treat being a long-distance runner, out in the world by yourself with not a soul to make you bad-tempered or tell you what to do or that there’s a shop to break and enter a bit back from the next street. Sometimes I think that I’ve never been so free as during that couple of hours whem I’m trotting up the path out of the gates and turning by that bare-faced, big-bellied oak tree at the lane end. Everything’s dead, but good, because it’s dead before coming alive, not dead after being alive. That’s how I look at it. Mind you, I often feel frozen stiff at first. I can’t feel my hands or feet or flesh at all, like I’m a ghost who wouldn’t know the earth was under him if he didn’t see it now and again through the mist. But even though some people would call this frost-pain suffering if they wrote about it to their mams in a letter, I don’t, because I know that in half an hour I’m going to be warm, that by the time I get to the main road and am turning on to the wheatfield footpath by the bus stop I’m going to feel as hot as a potbellied stove and as happy as a dog with a tin tail.

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 a 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 Goodmorning lads.