Life Without Armour by Alan; Sillitoe Page B

twopence-halfpenny for a stamp, as well as a penny for her trouble, to take to the post office. But the girl had spent all the money on sweets, and dropped the letter in the box to get rid of it. Nevertheless, the spell of my idyllic life in Worksop was broken, and in any case, not long afterwards, when I had been there about three months, my mother wrote to say she was coming to take us home.
    The Cutts were sad, and so was I, because there had been talk between Mr Cutts and his captain of trying even at this late stage to get me into a grammar school. When my mother arrived the Cutts laid out a good tea, and wondered why she wanted to take me back. ‘The war might go on for years,’ she told them, ‘and Nottingham ain’t likely to get bombed.’
    Mr Cutts was sceptical about that. ‘The war hasn’t begun yet. You’d do best to leave him, I’m telling thee.’
    In one way I felt no wish to leave, but change was also attractive. If I had shouted definite objections to going back it might have been possible to stay, and perhaps that was what the Cutts were hoping for, yet I was finally without will one way or the other as if, during such periods of decision, it was only possible to live from minute to minute rather than with any sense of days or weeks.
    We said goodbye, then followed my mother to collect the rest of her children, and went together to the bus station. I took back more than I had brought in the form of clothes and goods, and an interesting view on how other people could live. On the other hand, being an outsider, such knowledge hadn’t been earned the hard way by having to grow up in the family. If that had been the case it might have seemed little better than my own, except that there would have been more food to eat and better clothes on my back. But I never forgot how good the Cutts had been to me.

Chapter Ten
    Nottingham seemed a different place after Worksop: there was a war on. My father laboured again at the sugarbeet factory, and would come home every day with half a pound of purloined sugar in his mashcan – of which there was already a shortage – adding it to a cache in one of the cupboards.
    School at the normal place was discontinued, but classes were held in Wollaton Hall a mile or so away, and it was put about that we should go if we could. Arthur Shelton and I chose not to for a while, relishing the freedom to roam. By a railway bridge near the Trent a solitary soldier manned a Lewis gun in his sandbagged outpost, looking over what we could see as a wonderful field of fire. An army lorry stopped close by, and a soldier took a slice of bread and a mug of tea to the Lewis gunner, before getting back into the cab and driving to the next lonely sentinel.
    The wherewithal to construct an Anderson shelter was dumped in our patch of back garden, and my father, one of the few in the terrace to accept one, dug out the soil into which it would fit, the dimensions suggesting no more than a rather wide grave. He then pieced the curving panels of corrugated tin together and put planks inside for us to sit on, dubious that such a cubby hole would be much help if a bomb fell anywhere near, but padding plenty of soil over the top nevertheless.
    One morning when my mother went across the street to fetch a breakfast loaf she saw a soldier standing forlornly in the shelter of the shop doorway. On her coming out he asked if she knew where he could get a cup of tea. ‘Yes, my duck,’ she said unhesitatingly, ‘come back to our house, and we’ll give you one.’
    Over the breakfast that went with it he told her he had gone absent without leave from his nearby anti-aircraft artillery unit, and she let him stay with us, sleeping on the settee in the living room for six weeks. I was persuaded to give up my Identity Card, on which he rubbed out my name and inscribed his own, so that he could go to the Labour Exchange and apply for a job. This was a