A Shilling in the Pound

Chapter One: February, and the Smell of Steam

The train came into Barnstead at twenty past four in the afternoon, and Sohan Singh could not tell whether it was dusk or whether the town simply had no light in it.

He stood on the platform with his cardboard case in one hand. Rain came down at an angle, the way it seemed to do here, not falling so much as being thrown. Beyond the station wall there were chimneys — he counted eleven before he lost track of which were chimneys and which were the dark stripes of rain — and beneath the chimneys, rows and rows of small brick houses with grey slate roofs, all identical, all shining wet, stepping up the side of a hill like something stacked by a careful child.

A porter looked at him and looked away.

In his inside pocket, wrapped in a page of Punjabi newspaper to keep it flat, was a photograph of his wedding. In it he wore a turban and a borrowed jacket, and Amrit sat beside him with her eyes lowered and her hands in her lap, and neither of them smiled, because you did not smile in photographs, and also because there had not been much to smile about in the spring of 1948. Behind them you could see the canvas wall of the camp tent if you knew to look for it.

In his other pocket was a piece of paper with an address written on it in English capitals, which he had learned to copy but not to read: 14 GILL STREET, BARNSTEAD, LANCS.

And in his chest, where he carried it always, was the debt. Eighty-two pounds for the passage, arranged by a man he had met twice in Jalandhar, a man with a gold tooth and a fountain pen who had said, brother, England is a bucket with a hole in it, they cannot get men enough, they will take you as you stand.

He had not been taken as he stood. That came later.

A boy at the station gate, nine or ten, with a face like a wet apple, watched him come. "Where you from, mister?"

"Punjab," said Sohan.

The boy considered this. "Is that in Africa?"

"India."

"Oh," said the boy, satisfied, and ran off shouting something to somebody else, and Sohan walked out into the town.

It took him fifty minutes to find Gill Street and he could have done it in twelve if anybody had answered him. Two men gave him directions with their thumbs and did not stop walking. A woman in a headscarf crossed the road. At last an old man outside a public house, so drunk he was beyond prejudice, took him by the sleeve and walked him three streets and pointed up a cobbled slope and said, "Yonder. Mind the muck."

Gill Street ran uphill in two rows facing each other, close enough that neighbours could have passed a cup of sugar across without leaning far. Every door opened straight onto the flags. There was no garden anywhere. There were no trees. Halfway up, a gas lamp hissed and made a small yellow room of light in the rain, and in that light three children were kicking a tin can and stopped to stare at him with their mouths open.

Number fourteen had a green door with the paint gone in strips. Sohan knocked.

The man who opened it was younger than Sohan expected — thirty-five, perhaps — wearing a collar and tie and a cardigan, with hair oiled flat and a small neat moustache. He looked Sohan up and down the way a farmer looks at a bullock, quickly, without insult, pricing.

"Sohan Singh?"

"Ji."

"You're two days late."

"The boat—"

"The boat is the boat, the ledger is the ledger." He stood back. "Come in. I am Baldev Sahota. You will call me Baldev. Wipe your feet, we are not animals."

Inside, the house was hot and thick with the smell of frying onions and men. There was a front room with a table in it and a paraffin heater, and behind that a kitchen no bigger than a cupboard where a man in a singlet was slapping chapatis onto a black iron tava. A staircase went up steeply from the middle of the house, and Sohan could hear feet on the boards above, and somebody coughing, and somebody snoring, at half past five in the afternoon.

"Fourteen men," said Baldev, following his eyes. "Nine beds. Night men sleep days, day men sleep nights, and Sundays we all sleep and nobody sleeps. You are night. Crowther's No. 2, the spinning floor. Ten till six, six nights."

"I am glad of it," said Sohan, because he was.

"Yes. Sit. Tea."

The tea was strong and milky and unbelievably sweet, and it was the first warm thing Sohan had had inside him since Tilbury. Baldev sat opposite with a black-covered notebook, licked his thumb, and turned pages.

"Now. Terms. Rent, twelve shillings and six a week for the bed and the bedding. Chapatis and dal, six shillings. That is cheap, ask anybody, in this town they will charge you a pound to sleep in a coal hole. The passage: eighty-two pounds, of which you have paid nothing."

"I sent thirty."

"You sent thirty to my brother in Jalandhar, who is a fool and takes a commission, so it is twenty-two here. Interest, one and six in the pound, monthly, which is fair; go to a bank and see what a bank says to you." He wrote as he talked. His handwriting was beautiful. "And a shilling in the pound off your wage, for the job."

Sohan set down his cup. "For the job?"

"For keeping the job." Baldev looked up, mild as milk. "Crowther's does not hire you. Crowther's hires me, and I supply the night crew. If a man is sick I put another man in his place before the whistle, and so the floor never stops, and so Mr Crowther never has to think about us, which is what an English mill owner wants above all things — never to have to think about us. That is what the shilling buys. Also your pay packet comes to me on a Friday with the others, and I take what is owed, and I hand you the rest, and there is no argument and no arithmetic and no shame in the street. Men prefer it."

"I can count my own money."

"Can you read it?"

There was a silence with the paraffin heater ticking in it.

"No," said Sohan.

"Then you cannot count it," said Baldev, without triumph, and closed the notebook. "Eat. Yusuf will show you your bed. You start Monday." He paused at the door to the passage. "One thing more. Your hair."

Sohan put his hand up to his turban before he knew he had done it.

"Crowther's has a rule about machinery," said Baldev. "No loose clothing, nothing that can catch. The overlooker on nights is a decent enough dog but he will not have a turban on his floor, he will say it is the insurance. I have argued it. There is no arguing it." He shrugged, one small movement of a cardigan. "Eleven of the men here were Sikhs. Now there are two, and they work in a foundry in Bolton for less money. Think about your son."

He went out. In the kitchen the tava hissed.

Sohan sat for a long time with his hands around the cold cup.

The man called Yusuf Khan came and sat down opposite him without being asked. He was perhaps forty, broad, with a face made almost entirely of good humour and a beard going grey at the edges. He put a plate in front of Sohan: three chapatis and a spoonful of dal the colour of the pavement outside.

"You are the new one. Punjab?"

"Jalandhar side. And you?"

"Mirpur. Kashmir side." Yusuf grinned. "So we are enemies, they tell us. Eat, enemy." And then, seeing where Sohan's hand had gone again, to the turban, he stopped grinning. "Ah."

"Is it true? What he says?"

Yusuf turned his hands over. "It is half true, which is Baldev's favourite kind. The rule is real. Baldev could fight it if he wished, and he does not wish, because a man with no hair and no God's mark on him is a man who has already given something up, and a man who has given something up is easier to keep." He said this in a low, pleasant voice, as if remarking on the weather. "But the wage is real also. Thirteen pounds some weeks, with overtime. In Mirpur that is a year."

Sohan looked at his plate.

"How long have you been here?"

"Four years next month."

"And do you send money home?"

"Every week." Yusuf reached inside his jacket and brought out, of all things, a biscuit tin, dented at one corner, the lid printed with a picture of a thatched cottage and roses. He prised it open. It was full to the top with small brown wage envelopes, packed on their edges like the pages of a book.

"Every one," he said. "Four years."

"Why do you keep them?"

"Because I cannot read them," said Yusuf, and shut the tin, and put it away. "I am not a fool, brother. I am only a man who cannot read. One day there will be somebody I trust who can, and then we will sit down, he and I, and we will see what four years look like."

On the Sunday night they did it in the scullery, because the scullery had the sink and the sink had the only cold tap.

There were three men. Yusuf held the lamp. A Sikh boy from Ludhiana called Karnail, who had done it to himself the previous autumn and cried for two days after, worked the scissors. A Punjabi Muslim called Nazir, who had been a barber's son in Sialkot, had the razor, and stropped it on his belt with a professional's flick, and did not once meet Sohan's eye.

Sohan unwound the turban himself. Five yards of cotton, the colour faded to the blue of a rained-on sky. Underneath, his hair was long enough to reach the small of his back when it fell, though it had not fallen in front of another man since he was a boy. It smelled of the oil his mother had used and then of the oil Amrit had used, which was the same oil, because Amrit had asked his mother, in 1948, in a tent, what oil he liked.

He had gone into Burma with this hair under a steel helmet. Through Kohima, and down the road to Imphal that everyone at home said was a road and which was in fact a wound cut through a green hill. He had come out of it with a scar on his shin and this hair.

"Brother," said Karnail, "tell me when."

The scissors were blunt and the sound was terrible: a crunching, a sawing. It took a long time. The hair came away in ropes and Yusuf caught them in a cloth on his knees, gathering them like a man gathering a harvest he was ashamed of. Then the razor, and the cold water, and the strange, obscene cold of air on scalp.

Nazir cut his beard last. That was worse. That was his face.

When it was done, nobody said anything encouraging. That was the kindest thing they did. Karnail went out into the yard and Sohan heard him being sick. Nazir wiped the razor and folded it and put it in his pocket and put his hand flat on Sohan's shoulder for a moment, and then he went upstairs.

Yusuf held out the cloth with the hair in it.

"Some men burn it," he said. "Some men throw it. It is nothing to me either way, but I would not throw it, if I were you. A man should know where his things are."

Sohan took it. In the small square of mirror over the sink there was a man he had never met: a hard young face with hollows in it, cropped like a convict, older by ten years and younger by twenty, all at once.

He put the hair in a tobacco tin, which was the only container he had, and pressed the lid down, and slid it under his mattress between the ticking and the bed slats.

That night he began four letters to Amrit and finished none. In the end he wrote, in Punjabi, in a hand that shook because his hands ached from the cold: *I have work. It is a spinning mill and I am strong enough for it. The money is good and I have begun to pay Sahota. The town is called Barnstead and there are chimneys everywhere. Kiss Ravi for me and tell him his father is coming for him.*

He did not write about the scullery. He did not write about it for five years.