In Cardiff once again there was nothing doing. It was time for more drastic measures. We went to Bristol to see the German consul. But he at once observed our lack of financial backing and chucked us out with a shilling or two. After that we thought we’d go back to Cardiff.
There were a whole lot of boats lying around on the beach without a soul in them. We got into one. But when we wanted to shove off there wasn’t any water. The tide was out. What’s more it was extremely cold. My friend. . . . But of course there are two sides to what I am about to say. On the one hand it was extremely cold and we only had very thin things on, while on the other the man who owned the boat together with the jacket and boots that were in it would certainly have offered to lend my friend those warm things supposing he had happened to be there. After all, it wasn’t our fault if the fellow chose not to spend all day sitting around in his boat. So we simply annexed the jacket and the boots. After which I remember our tramping across a long bridge, roughly half an hour long. Then night fell. We had sneaked into a barn when suddenly a tall policeman stood there beckoning to us. At the police station they asked to see our papers, but we found it difficult to understand them and as for the jacket we prudently said it had been a gift. They were not all that keen to believe us. They asked in an underhand kind of a way where had we come from, and when they heard we had crossed the bridge they told us that was strictly prohibited and jugged us for four days.
We didn’t take it too seriously, because episodes like that are the price one has to pay for showing initiative. We hadn’t crossed that bridge because we thought it any special fun, and we hadn’t meant anybody exactly to suffer; but of course there were other initiatives of ours which we might easily have been jugged for if only they had thought of it, and the same would apply to anyone. What I say about immorality is this: if only one didn’t freeze when it gets cold and didn’t stop feeling hungry when one has had a slice of bread, moral standards would be a lot higher. Then there would certainly be far fewer people staying in prison.
Just for walking across a bridge, which wasn’t even particularly adapted for walking since it was really only intended for the railway – and to say nothing of the more or less gift jacket – we got five days in Bristol gaol.
That gaol wasn’t at all bad. They had to feed us like everyone else, and no matter if we had frittered away our reputations it was pleasant to stick your hands in your pockets and walk round in a small circle whistling, hemmed in by specially thick walls designed to stop dangerous people like us from breaking out and menacing the island.
We could also observe the other prisoners to our hearts’ content, since the warder considered us very decent and when he said he was keeping his eye on us it was really a compliment. At times when we played cards with him he used even to say he thought we should be in chains, except that unfortunately he hadn’t got any in small enough sizes. Because, you see, he taught us how to play cards. He was very fat and not at all healthy and the doctor had told him he needed a bit of exercise, so he played cards. But we had no money on us and playing cards without money is like a meal without salt, so we scratched our heads till Tubby came up with the suggestion that he should pay us to smoke a pipe. We’d never done that, and the warder thought it would amuse him to see us smoking. We agreed, so he brought in a friend of his from two cells further along who used to be in a bank. The pipe was provided by another prisoner; he was in for murder with violence according to the warder, and to judge by the state of the pipe it had been a multiple offence. We had to smoke damned hard to earn our money, and we lost it only too easily at cards.
But when we finally left Bristol gaol we had made good use of our time and learned something that would last us for life.
What’s more, Tubby gave us a bit of money, so when we arrived back in Cardiff we were able to get into the Sailors’ Home. There are plenty of places in England – you don’t need a map to realise that – but Cardiff was the only place we knew, so it was where we always went back to. And in Cardiff we knew the Sailors’ Home. That’s how lazy people are.
It was my first love that took me away from Cardiff. One day a man turned up at the Sailors’ Home looking for a hard-working bloke to work in a hotel. The landlord said we’d be somewhere on the beach and he shouldn’t let our appearance put him off.
Right enough, there we were by the water’s edge seeing who could spit the furthest.
The man watched us for some time before making his proposition: he wanted to see what we were like and which of us would suit his purpose better. I spat furthest and I was the one he hired.
To start with I was the oddjob-man and did the shoes, but soon I graduated to baker and made the pancakes for the self-service restaurant.
My friend stayed on at the Sailors’ Home; I used to see him in the evenings, he was doing very well, he lived mainly on pancakes. But now he had to spit in the sea all on his own and he didn’t care for that. He said nothing, but one evening when I arrived with a few pancakes to smoke a quiet pipe with him he had gone. I never saw him again.
To offset that I used every morning to see a young girl in the hotel corridor. She was about thirteen and a maid-of-all-work. Every time she saw me she smiled like a lady. But I myself was a gentleman, being tall as a spruce tree despite my sixteen years. I couldn’t help running into her in the corridor now and again; what’s more there was nothing to stop me exchanging a few harmless words with her. I must say there’s nothing so inspiring as when there’s ‘nothing to stop’ something. The things there’s nothing to stop are the things one does time and again. For instance there was me exchanging a few harmless words with her and it turned out there was a fair on in Cardiff and nothing to stop our going to it. In Cardiff at the fairground I saw my first boxing match.
And not only saw my first boxing match but boxed myself for the first time. It happened like this:
They had a canvas booth there for boxing in. That’s to say there were two people there whose fulltime job it was to bash each other’s heads in, on top of which anyone in the audience who wished to get socked could volunteer. You had to pay 20 pence to watch. It wasn’t an exorbitant sum – in fact I’ve always thought that boxing was underpaid – but for me in Cardiff at that time it was quite a lot, particularly as I had to pay for two tickets. Anybody who boxed of course was let off paying, so after we had hung around outside the booth for some time and the situation was getting embarrassing for a gentleman I told the proprietor as carelessly as I could that I would ‘like to have a few words with his man’. He gave a shifty kind of smile and escorted my lady very politely to a seat in the front row where she would be well placed to watch me ‘have a few words with his man’. I’d just as lief have had her sit slightly further back. What call had she got to see it all so clearly? Anyhow there she sat.
They put a couple of gloves on me – to stop me hurting their man too badly, I supposed – after which their man arrived and clambered over the ropes. He hadn’t a very welcoming look.
Since then I’ve seen a lot of fellows clamber over the ropes to fight me, better boxers no doubt, but I’m not lying when I tell you many of them have completely vanished from my memory, that’s to say, even when I see their names in my cuttings book I can no longer remember what they looked like. I may read some press cutting where it says I was actually knocked down in round two – which suggests that the man wasn’t just doing me a kindness – but his face is more than I can recall. My first opponent however is still before my eyes, as if it was only yesterday that we shook hands. He shook more of me than my hands, come to that.
Even now he strikes me as having been eight feet tall and as solid as an ox.
He seemed to have a totally debased character. He looked as if he’d be no more reluctant to treat a living creature with no evil designs on him as an unfeeling sack of bran than to eat a Christmas pudding. How stupid of me not to have asked for his photograph beforehand. The bell went, and it was too late for second thoughts. All this took pl
ace one night in June. Inside the tent it was very hot, people sat round the ring in their shirtsleeves smoking so sinfully in defiance of the notices that anyone in the ring would have had to take a pneumatic drill and bore through the smoke in order to see anything. I remember how once the bout had started the oil lamps overhead began slowly swinging. There must have been something queer going on, or they’d have knocked against the smoke cloud that hung over the ring. Besides that I could vaguely hear the hoarse roar of the fifty or sixty spectators present, mixed up with the devilish noise of a dozen barrel-organs from the neighbouring roundabouts. Right from the start I had a premonition of what was coming, and a very faint premonition it was. Because what came was not a boxing match but a massacre. Quite simply I was beaten up. I’d got in cheap, it’s true, but I’d got in for a purpose: to be smashed. The man made no bones about it. He just reached out for my face and made major alterations to it. His blows came from left, right, above and below, apparently without taking aim, and he always scored. Assaulting peaceful people as if they were murderers, when all they wanted to do was sleep, was something he seemed to have sucked in with his mother’s milk. My gloves served me merely to hold in front of my face. Then he smashed through them. Somehow I managed to stay on my feet to the end of the round, apart from one or two interludes where I lay on the floor for a while to have a bit of a rest. I hadn’t time to notice anything, or I’d have surely have noticed what I came to realise since: that he didn’t by any means want to knock me out as quickly as possible but as slowly. He couldn’t just abandon himself to his bloodlust but was bound to consider his audience, who wished to see a fight. That’s why he always allowed me long enough to get more or less on my pins again, after which he would give a further demonstration of his art.
He demonstrated his art for two rounds. And as art it was splendid. At the end of those two rounds I was as weary of life as if I’d been 120, lay on my back in a corner and wished I could die.
All the same, and despite the fact that I was in no position to wish a love affair on myself, I could see my lady’s face in a kind of blur above me past a number of swellings, and she was saying something. Exactly what, I was in no position to say because my ears were too far back. My idea about the girl had been to wave to her now and again, just when I was passing her seat perhaps. It would have been an excellent idea. Unfortunately the fight got in the way.
I must say, though, that she conducted herself every bit as creditably as I did. My appearance before the fight, while not all that charming, was at least a lot better than after, yet beforehand she had largely concealed her feelings from me. She’d never for instance have kissed me if I hadn’t had a ghastly black eye and, where most people have their second eye, a swelling the size of a fist. As it was she kissed me.
Women are peculiar. Generally they do the opposite of what one wants. But on that occasion I wanted her to do what she did. We went home far better friends than when we had set out, and from then on when she gave me a smile in the hotel corridor it wasn’t always a lady’s smile.
All the same this agreeable affair became one of those two-sided things such as I described earlier. One side of my love was that it was agreeable; the other was spelt out for me by my friends.
From what they said it was a damned risky business.
In England, so they told me, nothing involving girls is all that simple.
In England, so my friends in the hotel kitchen told me, when people kiss they are supposed to get married. And right away too. Or else, so my friends told me, the sheriff would take an interest in the affair, and the sheriff is even less able to take a joke than the girl herself.
My friends didn’t think my situation was really dangerous, but they said it would be better if I disappeared.
Whatever the reason, I must admit that disappearing is always a good thing.
I asked my friends along to a pancake supper which turned into a game of cards – this being the reverse side of the supper, and with a view to the journey – then went off next morning to Barry Dock with some money for the trip.
Barry Dock is a small port.
When I got there, not a single ship was to be seen – something quite exceptional. Four days later all my friends’ money had gone and I went home. Home was Cardiff.
Cardiff however contained my lady.
Naturally I had not told the girl I meant to clear out, but when four days went by without her seeing me she must have realised.
My employer wished to take me on again right away; in fact he wanted to have me trained as a chauffeur, but I realised in time that my girl had begun keeping an eye on me, and I was conscious of the sheriff in the background.
I ate myself reasonably full and played a bit of cards with my Cardiff friends, then went back to Barry Dock to look for adventure.
I never saw my lady again. She was very pleasant.
Then I sat on a railing by the dockside and spat into the Atlantic and a desire came over me to have a look at London. If I had had better eyes I might have seen across the ocean to America, but never London because my back was turned to it. To get to London I was forced to make a detour via Alexandria in Egypt: I managed to get a job as messroom steward on a little steamship that was going there, and since my money ran out again I had a look round Alexandria too.
Anyhow the ship itself was a lot more interesting than Alexandria. Alexandria looks much like it does on postcards, only cleaner. (In fact anyone who cannot get hold of a postcard of Alexandria can make do just as well with one of Constantinople, the postcards being very much alike.) Add the fact that the women there go around with their heads tied up, and you’ll get some idea of it. I admit I’m prejudiced against Alexandria because I got no shore leave there and couldn’t look round the place.
All the same that trip and the one or two that followed taught me a hell of a lot about life. All I had to do was make the officers’ beds, clean the shoes, do the washing. That was easy enough, but I also had to get along with the people themselves, and that was a great deal more interesting. They weren’t by any means the worst bunch I’ve come across, but nearly all of them felt a lot better if they could give a tall and rather slow-moving young fellow a good boot up the backside, and they thought it a great thing to trip him up as he went by and pummel his kidneys in a friendly way.
I must say I was dead against that from the outset. It’s absolutely senseless. I told them so right away and when they didn’t mend their ways I hurled a man against the galley wall to emphasise my point. This is how I did it: it’s very important in a fight to be as angry as possible.
Sometimes of course you’re naturally angry, but at others it just has to be organised. For instance if I had to hurl my man against the galley wall I would set out by doing my best to get worked up against him. I’d tell myself all the nasty things that could be said about his nose, let’s say, and if he merely glanced in my direction I’d instantly mutter something about his insolent habit of staring. I would also put up with all I could from him and keep on telling myself ‘don’t do anything till you can’t bear him any longer’. Because nothing gets you more furious than that, and it’s best to keep your fury as tightly bottled up as you can – which vastly adds to it. Finally your man only has to stir a finger and you hurl him against the galley wall. This is a far better method than launching an assault in cold blood. Most of the brutalities I’ve seen have come from being too cold-blooded rather than too hot.
If I had set about it blindly I would never have known if I wasn’t merely getting angry when nobody else was around, which would have meant that it was all for nothing. This way however I could fix things so that enough people were around, then choose the right moment and just let fly. Pretty soon they began to take note of my dislikes.
From that point on my existence improved vastly. It was the very man I had hurled, so I noticed, who invited me into a card game, and not because he was worried – for I was only able to beat him because he didn’t get furious too, and
he hadn’t an evil thought in his mind – but because he had taken a shine to me and I was now somebody to be reckoned with.
That’s the most important thing in life: needing to be reckoned with. But good as it was to find out how satisfactory it is to be strong and not to care who knows it, it was even better to have learnt, as I did around the same time, that strength by itself is not enough. I learnt this from the episode with the ship’s cook.
The ship’s cook was a nigger. He was called Jeremiah Brown and added up to nothing more than the black contents of a white uniform. He was the most self-satisfied man I’ve ever met. Whenever he was talking to one of us he would keep looking at his watch or something, to show that almost anything mattered more to him than our conversation. His galley was papered all over with photographs showing him in a variety of roles – from general to householder sitting in a rocking chair in front of a two-storeyed villa – amounting to every kind of glamour a nigger’s imagination could conceive.
This man taught me a painful lesson.
The story starts with Brown taking me on to haul coal and bake bread because I was strong – and against Brown I was powerless because he was well in with the officers, who treated him as a kind of a private joke. When I found my kitchen jobs beginning to stretch late into the evening I became quite inventive, for while on the one hand hauling coal naturally calls for strong people, on the other hand it is just those strong people who are best placed to resist such calls. I started by shaking Jeremiah’s black hand as often and as heartily as I could. I did so for preference when there were other people standing around so that they could see how fond I was of him and he couldn’t swear if I gripped him rather hard. Unfortunately I was foolish enough at the outset to put them wise, and so he came to realise that they were all waiting for him to yowl with pain. He was so vain that he would sooner have put up with any amount of discomfort than cry out in front of everybody. So I was forced to go further. I think it was my first conflict with another man, and as I said it taught me a lot.