The Man Who Won the Pools Read online

  When he’d walked a couple of streets he stopped dead the way he sometimes did. He was in flight, there wasn’t another word for it, and what he was in flight from was all he knew. But who wouldn’t – he asked himself, rallying – get away from this when the going was good? Really away. Not just from St Ebbe’s to their bleeding Dickey-bird Leys, from the machine shops to telecommunications via the ‘Tec, from his auntie to – well, to Beryl and kids and a three-wheeler and a fortnight in August with Billy Butlin. Really away. You’ve nothing to do, he told himself, but buy your ticket and take your seat. They do the rest.

  He was in one of the streets that had pretty well had it. One side was down, and brick-dust coated everything left on the other. The doors were all chalked on by the kids – nothing rude, but just rubbish about Elvis and the like, and on a window-pane thick with grime some finger had scrawled ‘I love Derek by Wendy’. You take kids and keep them nine years in some apology for a school, and then they go out and find a surface sufficiently mucky for writing ‘I love Derek by Wendy’. But hadn’t he done it himself? Let’s hope, he thought, that I love Wendy by Derek. Then perhaps they’ll live happy ever after.

  He’d worked round and was in Paradise Street when he heard a shout.

  ‘Hi’ya, Phil!’

  ‘Hi’ya!’ he called back cheerfully. It was the gang. It was Fred Prescott and Arthur Coutts, both in Pressed Steel, and George Pratley that had gone to Radiators some time back. They’d all four been neighbours as kids, and they still kept together quite a bit – even although they all had girls now, which made things rather different naturally. A month ago Arthur Coutts had been thinking he’d have to get married. Only it had passed off.

  ‘How you keeping, Phil?’

  ‘Not too badly, Fred. Yourself?’

  These were rather elderly greetings. They indicated what you might call constraint. Phil saw that they knew all right. They were probably on their way to find him. Now they stood round him in a half circle, grinning and excited, see-saw between hostile and friendly, confronted with the unknown. If Fred Prescott also looked a bit sheepish it was perhaps because his girl had got the upper hand of him, as all could see, and made him quit that Duck’s Behind for a straight sleeking back with oil. George Pratley had his Tony Curtis still. Perhaps his girl liked it – although, Phil thought, it was as common as Andy Capp. As for Artie Coutts, you never noticed his hair – or anything about him except his big round glasses. Artie was quiet and learned, a public-library, evening-classes type. It was funny he fitted in so well. And it was funny it would be Artie who’d find himself thinking he’d got his girl in trouble. Absent-minded, of course.

  ‘How’s it feel, Phil?’

  Fred’s voice was challenging. He had to assert himself, having been got down like that by a skirt. But the question was crucial. It would set a tone, you might say.

  ‘It’s a comedy.’ Phil thought he’d try something airy. ‘Prime Minister on the blower saying won’t I join his Cabinet. Knock on the street door and it’s the Governor of the Bank of England.’

  There was a moment’s silence that told of a bit of a misfire. Then, because their intentions were good, there was boisterous laughter.

  ‘Is it all that-much they say it is?’ George Pratley asked.

  ‘I don’t know what they say it is. But they’ll have got it about right, I expect.’ This time, Phil looked at his friends without any thought of calculating an effect. ‘It’s nearly a quarter of a million nicker. And it’s in my pocket now.’

  There was another silence, but this time as if for serious thought. It surprised Phil that none of them asked to be let have a look at the cheque. And he’d almost made as if to produce it. So he quickly thrust his hands carelessly in the trouser-pockets of what was his second-best suit.

  ‘Christ, what a day,’ he said.

  ‘Last of the season,’ Fred said with some awkwardness. ‘And United’s playing away. Think I’ll fish.’

  ‘Nice by the water now,’ Artie said. ‘Let’s go by the canal.’

  ‘Got a bet for my dad,’ George said, ‘has to go in down Park End Street. All go that way.’

  ‘Okey-dokey,’ Phil said. He felt it was for him to respond quick. ‘I want a breath of air. Helps thinking.’

  This time the silence was sympathetic. You must back up a man who’s got himself so that he has to think. George produced a packet of fags and they all had a drag. They strolled through the morning sunshine, whistling, straying, giving a kick at an old match-box – anything. This part of Oxford you could own as you walked. There were only a few women with baskets, hurrying along, the way women do, with the lion’s share of yesterday’s pay-packet in their bags.

  Artie Coutts fell behind with Phil.

  ‘It seems a question,’ he said, ‘of ‘ow to set up as yer own boss. That’s the solid thing.’

  Artie had obviously been giving the problem thought. Phil, as a matter of fact, had some hopes of Artie. Artie wasn’t like Phil, loudly uneducated and swearing he never opened a book. He was frankly and shamelessly well informed. Of course it got him into trouble at times, particularly when he turned out a bit wrong. But Artie didn’t seem to mind.

  ‘That’s it,’ Phil said soberly. ‘No good just joining the idle rich.’

  Artie nodded approvingly.

  ‘You can’t,’ he said. ‘Not join them. Only be born into them, the bleeders.’

  ‘That’s right, man.’ Phil spoke with all proper conviction. But he had glanced up at small white clouds in a blue sky, and had taken a deep breath of the soft air of this heady month, and suddenly he wasn’t all that certain that he couldn’t do with a bit of being idle rich. Hazy pictures out of films, out of books by Dornford Yates – cheap stuff but enticing – suggested places with ten times this amount of sun, suggested white sails on calm seas, swimming pools alive with lovely girls, bronzed athletic bodies rejoicing in their skill at no end of sports and games.

  ‘Eating and drinking and screwing,’ Artie was saying sombrely. ‘Screwing and drinking and eating. Rot a man in no time.’

  ‘Unless born to it,’ Phil said, a bit ironic.

  ‘But about being yer own boss, you see,’ Artie went on, ‘it’s a matter of the scale being the difficulty, if you follow me.’

  ‘Ah,’ Phil said, ‘orders of magnitude.’

  ‘Perhaps that.’ Artie looked disconcerted for a moment. ‘What I mean is, man, that you with yer head screwed on right could start in as yer own boss any day. Not, of course, that yer age wouldn’t be against it. Folk would think to take advantage, like.’

  ‘I’d learn them,’ Phil offered toughly.

  ‘But it would have to be business in a small way – or say a middling small way.’ Artie had added this at a truculent look from the new capitalist. ‘Just as a matter of technique and experience, you see. Of course you could start some great big fing with yer quarter million. I don’t know just ‘ow big a fing you couldn’t start on that.’ Artie allowed a small pause for awe. ‘But you’d ’ave to ’ave managers and the like that knew so much more about it than you did that it wouldn’t be like being yer own boss at all.’ Artie Coutts stopped for a moment on this clear statement. ‘And then you wouldn’t—’ he rather unexpectedly went on—’ ’ave much notion of how honest you’d ’ave to be.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ Phil demanded wrathfully. ‘Aren’t I honest?’

  ‘No worker’s honest, man. And no boss is honest either. But they’re dishonest in different ways. And if the one way gets mixed up with the other, then yer as good as inside.’ Very suitably, Artie jerked a thumb over his right shoulder in the direction of Oxford gaol. ‘Declassy, you’d be,’ he said. ‘And once a man’s declassy he ‘as to mind his step.’

  Phil was silent for a moment. He marked down a loose pebble not far off his path, and swerved aside to kick it viciously past Fred and George still strolling ahead.

  ‘What d’you recommend then, Artie? I been trying to think. But it’s not ea
sy.’

  ‘Somefing small for a start.’ Artie was at once firm and vague. ‘You must learn to walk before you can run, man. And look before you leap.’

  Phil was silent again. He didn’t find this Wayside Pulpit stuff encouraging, and his hopes of Artie Coutts faded. He doubted whether Artie had much command of what they called the spirit of enterprise. And Phil was pretty clear he needed that. This money hadn’t come to him through caution and thrift and prudence and foresight and all that. It had come to him by luck, and because for some months he’d been blowing several shillings a week in a way any intelligent chap would have told him was pure down-the-drain. He oughtn’t to behave with it as if it was all a monument to the Industrious Poor and Samuel Smiles and Self-Help. But they were in Park End Street now, and it was with a sense of remembering something that he suddenly noticed the post office there.

  ‘Half a jiff,’ he called out to the two in front. ‘I got to buy a P.O.’ He dived in, fished out his auntie’s ten shilling note, and bought the P.O. and a stamped envelope. He picked up the pen on the counter and hastily scrawled Pompadour Caff, George Street. There was no time for good spelling, and he was out again in a minute and stuffing the thing into the pillar box.

  ‘Doing the pools, Phil?’ George Pratley asked with a great flash of wit.

  ‘Pools is a mug’s game.’ Phil was not to be outdone. ‘Something I owed a chap from when I picked up a crate from the beer-off last week.’

  They were all liars. And Phil would have told any size lie rather than admit to this morbidly honest act to which a sudden memory of the undergrad Peter Sharples had prompted him. He could see that being moneyed required a new attitude in some matters. But it didn’t, thank goodness, prevent his thinking up a good thumping lie for this old crowd.

  ‘Two crates it was,’ he said.

  Chapter Five

  George Pratley placed his old man’s bet, and then they went round by Hythe Bridge Street and took the canal. Phil was for walking with George now. George was the one that never had a chip on his shoulder. He’d be completely friendly still, even if he wasn’t that bright that he was likely to have anything very useful to suggest. But Artie hung on to Phil, so they went forward as before. Presently, Phil knew, they’d all stop and sit down and chuck stones in the water and have a bit of chinning and scuffle and then lie soaking up this sunshine as it got warmer. You have to stand at a bleeding lathe five days of the week to know it’s heaven just doing that.

  ‘Taxation’s very bad,’ Artie said.

  ‘PAYE?’

  ’Yer through with that, man. Face it. Yer never going to be ‘anded a pay-packet again. Nothing but dividends and bonus issues. Of course the bonus issues are pretty good.’ Artie said this a shade reluctantly. ‘But it’s the Supertax gets you,’ he added brightening.

  ‘Supertax—me?’ Phil was honestly astonished. It would never have come into his head.

  ‘That and yer income-tax’ll be sixteen an’ frippence in the pound at the top, you’ll see, you will.’

  ‘Garn!’ Phil said incredulously.

  ‘Unless you start an ‘orspital or somefing. Or go in for farming. A lot of them does that.’

  ‘I don’t want any hospital. I’m healthy. And what would I be doing farming – mucking around in pigs’ shit and all? Come off it.’

  ‘It’s an occupation for a gentleman, like.’ Arthur Coutts was now openly mocking. ‘Goes with ’untin’ and shootin’ and being the ruddy ol’ lord of the manor. Sir Philip Tombs of Liberty ‘All in the County of Snobshire.’

  ‘You’re helpful,’ Phil said, sarky but forbearing.

  ‘You could emigrate, mind you.’ Artie, apparently repentant, was returning to earnest thought on his friend’s problem. ‘There’s countries that ’aven’t the same advanced trends in social legislation wot we’ve got ’ere.’

  ‘Say it simple,’ Phil said. He had more words than Artie, if Artie only knew. This thought put him in good humour again.

  ‘There’s famous authors lives in Ostrailyer. Sydney ‘as some very ’igh-class suburbs, they say. And there’s a sort of fishin’ and shootin’ all rolled into one. You go arfter whales and sharks and the like with ’arpoons.’

  Moby Dick, Phil thought. The Old Man and the Sea. He said: ‘Nerts for Australia.’

  ‘And there’s parts of Africa that’s much better. That is, from this ‘ere fiscal point of view. Taxes ain’t nuffin, ’cos yer whack all the labour out of the blacks.’

  ‘Nerts for Africa. With knobs on.’

  ‘But the money’s not everyfink, Phil. There’s clarse. Yer got to consider that.’

  ‘Hell there’s class,’ Phil said. He was thinking that Artie Coutts had what you might call a dead common accent. Really that. It came from being born somewhere in South London. His words weren’t rich in his mouth, like the others’ words were. They were all chewed away.

  ‘There’s nowhere such a thing as a clarseless society. Not yet. Not in Soviet Russia, any more than ’ere. I ’ave a mate made somefing on Ernie, almost same as you, last year. ’E went to Russia and drove all around. Clarse everywhere, ’e said. Money too, mind you. First night, they put ’im in a big hotel, and it corst ’im pretty well ’is pants. But that worn’t all. Bosses going about looking like don’t-you-touch-me. Wearing ’ats.’

  ‘So what? I’m not going to Russia.’

  ‘But then there’s the Open Society. That’s what you want. Means plenty of opportunity to use yer capital. Build up an affair like Woolworth’s, if you like, and be ’irin’ and firin’ blokes by the thousand, just as yer fancy takes you. But no ’igh ‘at clarse feelin’ against you just ’cos yer a parvenoo.’

  ‘Sounds like having it both ways, that does. Where d’you say this Open Society happens, Artie?’

  ‘Where?’ The well-informed Artie oddly faltered. ‘Dunno,’ he said vaguely. ‘I’d ’ave to look it up. Queer about them bleedin’ swans.’

  Phil looked at the swans. What was queer about them was the way they went after each other up and down the canal. They didn’t swim and they didn’t fly. They flapped and paddled half-and-half, and looked as if they were putting a lot of energy into not managing very much. Something had been done to their wings, he supposed, so that they’d remain around for ornamental purposes. It didn’t look comfortable. Neither one thing nor the other. Perhaps that was the plain English for what Artie called being declassy.

  The others had sat down. A bit farther back they might have sat down on grass and looked across the canal at this park or garden – Worcester College’s was it? – with an old grey stone building far back through the trees and a lake and a cricket field and some idle chaps lying around. But they marched past all that, rolling slightly on their hips and sometimes pivoting on a heel in a kind of routine make-believe as if they were tripping each other up, since it was the idea when they got together to behave as if they were sixteen-year-olds still. Now they sat down on what was mostly gritting ashes but they didn’t mind that. And on the other side of the canal there was a wharf with great stacks of red tiles and hundreds and hundreds of raw red chimneypots. It was a nice view and for a time they all four sat idle, just chucking a bit of grit into the water or reaching about for a twig to chew or fetching out a comb and passing it the right way through their hair. Then Phil got out his Camels and they lit up. He lay back with his knees up and an arm under his head, looking at the sky that was growing bluer and feeling the sun that was growing warmer it seemed every minute. And George Pratley lay beside him, sprawled on his belly and with his head on his wrists, so that he was murmuring into Phil’s ear.

  ‘Christ you’ll have a lovely time,’ George murmured happily. ‘Good old bleeding Phil.’

  ‘What sort of lovely time?’

  ‘Oh, I dunno.’ George contrived to yawn without either raising his head or letting the cigarette fall from his lips. ‘Have whatever you fancy. It’s a comedy, man, like you said.’

  ‘Women?’

  ‘Goes
without saying, man. All the new season’s models. Straight off the conveyor belt and guaranteed in perfect mechanical order.’

  ‘I never bought a woman yet. Shan’t begin now.’

  ‘Garn!’ George’s heavy incredulity was a polite convention. Phil turned his head and they grinned at each other – each out of the same sex experience, not what would be approved by a parson, but licensed, codified and respectable within their world. ‘Not that you need always be thinking of skirts,’ George went on. ‘Poor-man’s occupation, that is. With money you can do things. Mount Everest. North Pole.’ He spat away the butt of his cigarette. ‘What about being the first man on the moon? Cut in on the Ruskies.’

  It was funny that it was always old George Pratley, who never opened a book, and not Artie Coutts with all his free library stuff, who had these flashes.

  ‘Take millions and millions,’ Phil said. ‘A whole country like Britain can’t scarcely afford that kind of thing.’

  ‘’Tain’t so much money that’s needed as ’nitiative, man. Pitiful this sodding country is – staring into the telly at Quatermass and that, and the Ruskies really doing the bleeding thing, and even the Yanks not misfiring every time. Rich amatcheur with enthusiasm might get things moving. Put British rockets on their feet, like.’

  Phil turned his head. Fred Prescott and Arthur Coutts were sitting up and jawing at each other in low voices he couldn’t catch. And then Fred gave Phil a quick look Phil thought odd. Of course he had to expect odd looks, this thing having happened to him. But there was something about Fred he didn’t like, all the same. Perhaps it was just that girl they said had taken to running him, perhaps he was thinking of snapping out on her. But that seemed no reason for this quick look at Phil.