Free Birthday by Alan Sillitoe Page B

army, or I’d have done it myself. Dave had always had a soft spot for Margaret, but she was his cousin so he couldn’t try anything, and when mother told him that Albert was knocking her about, Dave waited for him to come out of the pub one night with his usual skinful. Albert probably looked forward to taking it out on Margaret when he got home, but Dave put both boots in. He told me when I asked about it. “Who else did you think did it?” he wheezed. “With every kick I told him to leave Margaret alone, and when he shouted he’d get the police if I didn’t stop, I started all over again.” Then a week later Gladys phoned to tell me Dave had died. The older you get the more people around you kick the bucket. God used to have a musket to try picking you off with, so at least you had a chance, and when you were young it didn’t matter, but now the old bastard’s got his hands on a machine gun.’ He pushed his plate aside. ‘I’ve heard there’s an Industrial Museum near here. I wouldn’t mind having a look.’
    Parking by the white domed pavilion, Brian saw half a dozen hikers heading across the road on their way into the hills, all rucksacked up and looking like figures on Ordnance Survey map covers of the thirties. He felt a yen to follow, witness landscape with seventeen-year-old eyes, except that in those days he had seen only so much height and so much green, one line folding into the other, little beyond tarmac in front of the handlebars, too controlled by adolescent thoughts to see much else.
    Arthur walked among the displays of two thousand years of mining, quietly studying the giant water pressure engine made out of wood and iron during the industrial revolution, while Brian, though familiar with machinery from his time in factories, knew little about it. He did a ten minute recce, then stood by the information counter to buy postcards he wouldn’t look at till sending one to Arthur in a year or two as a reminder of today.
    Whitening clouds skimming from the west turned flimsy, larger areas of blue left behind. ‘We’ll go to Cromford for lunch. It’s a nice place.’
    Arthur buttoned his overcoat against the wind. ‘You know your way around here better than I do.’
    â€˜I used to shoot up from London for a day or two whenever I was bored.’
    â€˜Yeh, I’ll bet you did.’
    â€˜I was a dirty young man then, and now I’m a dirty old man.’ He swung right into Cromford. ‘I think I love this area more than any other.’
    He was glad to hear it, as Brian led him into the beamed lounge of the Boat Inn, and sat him at a table, while he went to the bar to get their pints and order two lunches of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, boiled and roast potatoes, cabbage, carrots and peas.
    The enormous platters came and Arthur unwrapped his irons from the paper napkin. ‘You wouldn’t get anything like this in London, not at this price anyway. Nor in Nottingham, either, as far as I know. It’s real fucker’s grub.’
    Brian relished his use of the old lingo, recalling how he put on his cap to go out with his brothers and sup pints in familiar pubs, and no one thinking him a foreigner who didn’t belong.
    â€˜You can eat better here than down south,’ Arthur said. ‘So why don’t you come and live this way?’
    Sell his flat? Find a lace-manufacturer’s bolt hole in the Park? See the Castle glowering when he went for his morning paper? Wander moribund more than alive around the middle of town? It was a great city, with concerts to go to and plays worth seeing at the theatre, radio and television stations. The magnet of the East Midlands had a self confidence no one could fault, a cosmopolitan go-ahead conurbation whose unique pulse animated young and old alike, the capital of his heart with a long history.
    The garden of Derbyshire was close to its back door, and out of