like German generals from the tops of tanks. And even when I jog-trot on behind a wood and they can’t see me anymore they know my sweeping-brush head will bob along that hedge-top in an hour’s time and that I’ll report to the bloke on the gate. Because when on a raw and frosty morning I get up at five o’clock and stand shivering my belly off on the stone floor and all the rest still have another hour to snooze before the bells go, I slink downstairs through all the corridors to the big outside door with a permit running-card in my fist, I feel like the first and last man on the world, both at once, if you can believe what I’m trying to say. I feel like the first man because I’ve hardly got a stitch on and am sent against the frozen fields in a shimmy and shorts – even the first poor bastard dropped on to the earth in midwinter knew how to make a suit of leaves, or how to skin a pterodactyl for a topcoat. But there I am, frozen stiff, with nothing to get me warm except a couple of hours’ long-distance running before breakfast, not even a slice of bread-and-sheepdip. They’re training me up fine for the big sports day when all the pig-faced snotty-nosed dukes and ladies – who can’t add two and two together and would mess themselves like loonies if they didn’t have slavies to beck-and-call – come and make speeches to us about sports being just the thing to get us leading an honest life and keep our itching finger-ends off them shop locks and safe handles and hairgrips to open gas meters. They give us a bit of blue ribbon and a cup for a prize after we’ve shagged ourselves out running or jumping, like race horses, only we don’t get so well looked-after as race horses, that’s the only thing.
So there I am, standing in the doorway in shimmy and shorts, not even a dry crust in my guts, looking out at frosty flowers on the ground. I suppose you think this is enough to make me cry? Not likely. Just because I feel like the first bloke in the world wouldn’t make me bawl. It makes me feel fifty times better than when I’m cooped up in that dormitory with three hundred others. No, it’s sometimes when I stand there feeling like the last man in the world that I don’t feel so good. I feel like the last man in the world because I think that all those three hundred sleepers behind me are dead. They sleep so well I think that every scruffy head’s kicked the bucket in the night and I’m the only one left, and when I look out into the bushes and frozen ponds I have the feeling that it’s going to get colder and colder until everything I can see, meaning my red arms as well, is going to be covered with a thousand miles of ice, all the earth, right up to the sky and over every bit of land and sea. So I try to kick this feeling out and act like I’m the first man on earth. And that makes me feel good, so as soon as I’m steamed up enough to get this feeling in me, I take a flying leap out of the doorway, and off I trot.
I’m in Essex. It’s supposed to be a good Borstal, at least that’s what the governor said to me when I got here from Nottingham. ‘We want to trust you while you are in this establishment,’ he said, smoothing out his newspaper with lily-white workless hands, while I read the big words upside down: Daily Telegraph. ‘If you play ball with us, we’ll play ball with you.’ (Honest to God, you’d have thought it was going to be one long tennis match.) ‘We want hard honest work and we want good athletics,’ he said as well. ‘And if you give us both these things you can be sure we’ll do right by you and send you back into the world an honest man.’ Well, I could have died laughing, especially when straight after this I hear the barking sergeant-major’s voice calling me and two others to attention and marching us off like we was Grenadier Guards. And when the governor kept saying how ‘we’ wanted you to do this, and ‘we’ wanted you to do that, I kept looking round for the other blokes, wondering how many of them there was. Of course,’ I knew there were thousands of them, but as far as I knew only one was in the room. And there are thousands of them, all over the poxeaten country, in shops, offices, railway stations, cars, houses, pubs – In-law blokes like you and them, all on the watch for Out-law blokes like me and us – and waiting to ’phone for the coppers as soon as we make a false move. And it’ll always be there, I’ll tell you that now, because I haven’t finished making all my false moves yet, and I dare say I won’t until I kick the bucket. If the In-laws are hoping to stop me making false moves they’re wasting their time. They might as well stand me up against a wall and let fly with a dozen rifles. That’s the only way they’ll stop me, and a few million others. Because I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since coming here. They can spy on us all day to see if we’re pulling our puddings and if we’re working good or doing our ‘athletics’ but they can’t make an X-ray of our guts to find out what we’re telling ourselves. I’ve been asking myself all sorts of questions, and thinking about my life up to now. And I like doing all this. It’s a treat. It passes the time away and don’t make Borstal seem half so bad as the boys in our street used to say it was. And this long-distance running lark is the best of all, because it makes me think so good that I learn things even better than when I’m on my bed at night. And apart from that, what with thinking so much while I’m running I’m getting to be one of the best runners in the Borstal. I can go my five miles round better than anybody else I know.
So as soon as I tell myself I’m the first man ever to be dropped into the world, and as soon as I take that first flying leap out into the frosty grass of an early morning when even birds haven’t the heart to whistle, I get to thinking, and that’s what I like. I go my rounds in a dream, turning at lane or footpath corners without knowing I’m turning, leaping brooks without knowing they’re there, and shouting good morning to the early cow-milker without seeing him. It’s a treat being a long-distance runner, out in the world by yourself with not a soul to make you bad-tempered or tell you what to do or that there’s a shop to break and enter a bit back from the next street. Sometimes I think that I’ve never been so free as during that couple of hours whem I’m trotting up the path out of the gates and turning by that bare-faced, big-bellied oak tree at the lane end. Everything’s dead, but good, because it’s dead before coming alive, not dead after being alive. That’s how I look at it. Mind you, I often feel frozen stiff at first. I can’t feel my hands or feet or flesh at all, like I’m a ghost who wouldn’t know the earth was under him if he didn’t see it now and again through the mist. But even though some people would call this frost-pain suffering if they wrote about it to their mams in a letter, I don’t, because I know that in half an hour I’m going to be warm, that by the time I get to the main road and am turning on to the wheatfield footpath by the bus stop I’m going to feel as hot as a potbellied stove and as happy as a dog with a tin tail.
It’s a good life, I’m saying to myself, if you don’t give in to coppers and Borstal-bosses and the rest of them bastard-faced In-laws. Trot-trot-trot. Puff-puff-puff. Slap-slap-slap go my feet on the hard soil. Swish-swish-swish as my arms and side catch the bare branches of a bush. For I’m seventeen now, and when they let me out of this – if I don’t make a break and see that things turn out otherwise – they’ll try to get me in the army, and what’s the difference between the army and this place I’m in now? They can’t kid me, the bastards. I’ve seen the barracks near where I live, and if there weren’t swaddies on guard outside with rifles you wouldn’t know the difference between their high walls and the place I’m in now. Even though the swaddies come out at odd times a week for a pint of ale, so what? Don’t I come out three mornings a week on my long-distance running, which is fifty times better than boozing. When they first said that I was to do my long-distance running without a guard pedalling beside me on a bike I couldn’t believe it; but they called it a progressive and modern place, though they can’t kid me because I know it’s just like any other Borstal, going by the stories I’ve heard, except that they let me trot about like this. Borstal’s Borstal no matter what they do; but anyway I moaned about it being a bit thick sending me out so early to run five miles on an empty stomach, until they talked me round to thinking it wasn’t so bad – which I knew all the time – until they called me a good sport and patted me on the back when I said I’d do it and that I’d try to win them the Borstal Blue Ribbon Prize Cup for Long Distance Cross Country Running (All England). And now the governor talks to me when he comes on his rounds, almost as he’d talk to his prize race horse, if he had one.
‘All right, Smith?’ he asks.
‘Yes, sir,’ I answer.
He
