A Lazy Afternoon

One morning at work, several years after the war, I was thinking of becoming sick and having the afternoon off. I was working at Joseph Lucas, the big electrical company, as a production control clerk. I liked working there because the pay was good, and I could wander around the factory, and no one knew if I was reading a book on the toilet or not; which I did a lot. There were several girls in the office, who spent a lot of time making up their faces and giggling. One of the girls was called Nelly.  We did not get on.  I just couldn’t understand why she didn’t fall for my deadly charm. Of course she did have that monotonous Birmingham whining accent, but so did I, although mine had been moderated somewhat due to my travels.

Ever since learning to drive in a three ton Bedford with a crash gear box, I had wanted some wheels of my own. No one in my family, except toffee nosed Uncle George had owned a car. So I saved my pennies and bought a Ford Prefect that turned out to be a white elephant. The only good thing about it was that it was very shiny and black. At least it had a synchromesh gear box, so it didn't play a tune every time I changed gear. However, I soon found out that it had a six volt system, which meant that every day it needed a battery charge, if you stopped and started the engine more than twice a day. Also the windscreen wipers ran off a vacuum from the manifold. This meant, of course, that if you went uphill on a rainy day, the windscreen wipers stopped; I got used to running into other vehicles. Of course England has a rainy day pretty much every day, so this was a disaster of a car. And it had a cranking handle, which was imperative if one wanted this black shiny box to be of any use at all.

Anyway, or as they say in Birmingham and the Midlands, ‘any road up’, my brother Michael and I (I sometimes talked this way instead of using the common ‘Michael and me’ grammar that most people used, to impress certain people, especially my manager, because it confused him - he didn’t know if I was taking the piss or not) used to go for two pints of Best Bitter from the nearest pub, ‘The Strangled Magpie’, at lunch time. I can tell you that there is nothing like two pints of bitter on a hot day. The trouble is of course that one spends most of the afternoon on the loo, but if one sits on it to urinate, one can have a quick read of the paperback book that one always carries in one’s pocket.  (My manager really got confused whenever I talked like that.) I have been known to take a quick kip now and then sitting on the pedestal - which reminds me of the time I fell asleep, and was woken by Jock my Scottish friend, tapping me on the head with a broom; he was standing on a wooden box. Then later on we got pagers, so if Management were looking for you, you got woken up by the beeps instead and didn’t get into trouble.

But, to get back to the story, after a pint or two, with or without Michael, who didn’t always have the half a crown required for the beverage, if I saw a fellow office worker from Lucas on the way back to work, I’d stop and offer them a lift. That made me feel real good and I often refused the bus money that was usually offered by the more generous ones.

One afternoon, waiting at the bus stop after lunch was Nelly. She thought she was really something, and whatever top she wore, it was always one or even two sizes too tight. Although to be honest, I have never been averse to a large chest on a member of the opposite sex, but not so with male chests, not having a big one myself. I had vowed to woo Nelly because she was a bitch, and because I was good at it, wooing that is, and win her over, then discard her with a flourish. Once when we happened to walk in the factory together by accident, I thought I would start.

‘Nelly, what beautiful eyes you have,’ I said, with just the slightest tinge of passion.

‘I know,’ she replied, in that miserable moaning Brummie accent that we all had.

From that day on, whenever we met she widened her eyes. It was very annoying and yet somewhat interesting. Once I nearly walked into the manager, I was so interest in looking at Nelly’s eyes. In my wooing quest, I winked at her a lot as well.

 But, I digress.  To get back to the story, I was going back to work on my own, as Michael was out of half-crowns and I was fed up of shouting him, and I saw this big chest at the bus stop, and lo and behold, when it turned, it was Nelly, so I pulled up at the bus stop with a flourish and yelled,

‘Wonna lift Nelly?’

She ignored me for a few seconds, and then screeched in a high falsetto, ‘Not in that old wreck, I might get damaged.’

Then, she quickly changed her mind and said, ‘Oh all right,’ as though she was doing me a favour.  

When she got in the Ford Nellie moaned, ‘I don’t really wonna goo back to werk.’

‘I don’t ever wonna goo to werk,’ I replied in an equally annoying Brummie whine.

Let’s goo back to my place then,’ she said. ‘Auntie Doris’ll give us a cup o’ tea and a piece.’

But to go back to Nelly’s aunt’s house would be worse than werk. I had met her aunt at the works Christmas dinner. She also had a big chest, and used it mercilessly on young men. And she did my ears in too.

So I replied, ‘Let’s go to the Lickey Hills, and tomorra we’ll say we were taken ill with some mysterious disease.’

Nelly reluctantly agreed, and we headed off.  She ducked her head down as we drove past Lucas, and we kept going at thirty miles an hour to an afternoon of freedom and who know what else. It was exciting to miss work, on the spur of the moment. And I could continue my devious wooing.  

We had two ice creams from the shop at the foot of the Lickey Hills, then climbed up to the top and looked at the vista. Then we lay on the grass side by side and watched the clouds gently moving, to the east, I remember.

Then  Nelly asked, ‘Did anythin’ ‘appen to you or your family in the war?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘same things that happened to everybody - the bombs, no food, Dad in the Army an’ that.’

Then after a bit I said, ‘How about you, Nell?’

She didn't answer for a minute, and I thought she hadn’t heard, but then she said in a soft voice, that sounded like somebody else, ‘We got bombed out; Mom, Gran, Emily, my sister, they all died.’

Then she added, ‘I aint got nobody now, except Auntie Doris.’

‘Oh.’ I said, ‘Sorry.’ For what else could I say.

We lay there for a while, looking at the clouds, moving languidly across the very blue sky, and then her hand crept slowly over the grass, and interlocked my fingers, and we held hands. Although not really liking each other much, we were soulmates.  We’d lived a childhood different to most; we had been children in wartime, children amongst the bombs, the fires and the rubble – others born before us or after us weren’t the same. No more needed to be said. I couldn’t pretend to court Nelly anymore, because I had grown to like her. And we became friends.

We continued looking at the sky, holding hands for a while, and then we slowly got up and walked back down the hill where the old Ford Prefect was waiting.  I drove her home, neither of us saying much, each involved in our own memories.

The next day the staff in the office smirked when they noticed that we had both got our faces sunburned on the afternoon we had both been sick.

But no one said anything.