Roundabout
Bolts - THE SALESMAN was a tall, dark, spidery man with an air of melo- dramatic sincerity. His bright little eyes were dog-like. The kind of dog which sits slavering at the visitor's knee in a strange house, mutely begging. (Don't give him anything, he's far too fat,' says the hostess with an indulgent laugh. But the visitor does, guiltily, because he can't bear those eyes.) The salesman had been admitted to the house by the wife and immediately and cun- ningly had taken refuge in the nursery. He sat in the husband's armchair. He watched the television set with the desperate air of a student who would have to write an essay cn the plot of Noddy in Toy/and. Absent-mindedly he smoked the wife's cigarettes. It took a few moments for the husband to attract his attention. It was obvious that the salesman would win. He was so defenceless. Sup- plication welled up in him like detergent foam in a millrace. 'Locks?' he said with the air of a man uttering the brief, clinching password. The husband blustered feebly. 'What's all this about locks? I don't want locks. Can't afford them. Eve nothing to pinch. Ha-ha.'
The salesman buckled in sympathetic under- standing. He swayed back over the play-pen like a boxer rolling with a nasty opening punch. He was so pliant, so plasticine, so politely tuning to the husband's wavelength, so insidiously seeing it all the other chap's way. With a flick of a hand he opened a small, neat case and advanced in a controlled, well-rehearsed flurry of whirling mechanism. He held up .a dazzling steel bolt that could have been mounted on the sideboard as a sporting trophy.
'For that reason, if I may say so, for that exact reason, we have developed what we call the Inner Ring. See.' The gadget clicks and twirls and beckons like a hypnotic wand. 'Windows. Well, windows, in a house like this?' he hisses delicately, steam needling through chiffon. 'Cost you £25? At least. So, so, what do we do? We seal off the inside doors. The Inner Ring. The sneak thief is a nasty fellow. P.s.ss.st. After the wife's handbag on the kitchen table. The silver change on the mantelpiece. Hooks it out—quick. And if he's disturbed. Psssst. Say by the wife. Well, he turns really nasty. Pssssi.
'Gets in by the-windows. But the door of the room is locked. What does he do? You know as well as I do. Psss.st. Piece of celluloid opens the Yale-tipe lock. The jemmy forces the lever. Ah yes. But with this simple bolt o'n the inside? Where he can't get at it? He can't budge it with either.
'Thwart these fellows and they cut the place up. Rip it up. That's what they're always doing. Rip- ping up places like these. And if anybody gets in their way, Ps.vs.g.'
Five minutes later the husband wandered into the kitchen with a shiny bolt dangling in his fingers. The wife was bending over the stove. 'Hope you didn't buy whatever if was,' she said without turning round. '1 meant to tell you. The people up the road fitted thosebolt things on every door. You know, the ones who were burgled last week and lost everything.'
Locks
THE TRADE BOATS on the canals are long and lean and low in the water. The small rain washes in the shiny coal in the open hold and trickles down the face of the captain at the tiller. As the diesel engine put-put-puts its warm gargle and the willowy banks slide by at three miles an hour, the water lilies throw up their leaves in drowning desperation and sink below the surface sucked by the undertow. The reeds rise in the water and then bend low in a courtier's bow. The cattle stare like Hollywood talent scouts with blank myopic eyes and ceaselessly rotating gum-chewing jaws. A heron creaks low, trailing its toes in the ripples.
The boatmen work fourteen hours a day seven days a week. On these interminably winding rib- bons of water, rarely more than six feet deep and often only twenty feet wide, they are as isolated from the dry, bricks-and-mortar life of Welfare State workmen as if they were perpetually under glass—like ants in a natural history exhibition. Some live in families—inbred, suspicious water- gypsies who may have as many as eleven Children crammed wriggling on top of each other in a tiny cabin. Sometimes a pair of boats are run by a man and his son—tiny, flat-faced, brown creatures dressed in peasant black serge suits and caps and huge bulbous-toed boots. Others are sullen, muscular bachelors with masses of Teddy-boy curls and browning cigarette perpetually pasted on to a curled upper lip.
Their lives are endless, slow, circular pilgrim- ages from wharf to wharf through the ugly back- sides of a dozen small picturesque country towns. The day begins at five-thirty while the farmers are still turning in half-sleep. It is divided not into hours or miles but into locks. Tirelessly they run up and down the slippery stone steps, whir round the stiff, rusting paddle handles, and push the creaking wooden gates which are like the gates of abandoned mediteval cities. Dusk ends their day i at some forgotten tiny canal-side pub where they soak themselves into unconsciousness and tumble in a daze into their claustrophobic below-decks bunks. They are the last of the serfs. su pa ac lac a int set fill Su on wi
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