travel books: and the Old Sweat replies: -"Mice." This is a Barker joke, pure and simple. If it is pouring with rain, he will say, not "Isn't it a terrible day?" but "Ain't it lovely?" As a free trader, he will starve rather than take a steady job. He has got to be his own master ... even if he, as master, drives himself out at four in the morning and pushes himself round the streets with the barrow until midnight, when there is a chance of selling a bit of fruit at an advanced price to the girls and the drunks. He will short-change the prosperous without pity ... or recklessly give stock away to the children of the poor. His father, a costermonger of the old school, was an Old Contemptible, who spent about a third of his Army life in the Glasshouse, but got a D.C.M. for some crazy impossibility with a bayonet against a machine-gun. That same old man Barker, having, in his cups, bored ten thousand listeners with ten thousand bitter curses on the Army and all concerned with it for the last quarter of a century, now makes everybody's life a misery with his savage denunciations of the corrupt authorities who, just because he has only one arm, turned him down in 19 gg. He says he hopes Hitler wins. If he hears anybody else say that you have to admit that Jerry hasn't done too badly, he has to be held down while he brandishes his solitary fist and yells that Jerry doesn't stand a chance and asks everybody to wait till he gets hold of Goering. Bob Barker is much the same, only he is young and humorous. If he goes out under heavy fire and saves somebody's life, he will say he did it because the man had some cigarettes. When he is decorated, he will books

Books > Old Books > They Die With Their Boots Clean (1953)

Page 39

THE RAW MATERIALS

and the Old Sweat replies: -"Mice." This is a Barker joke, pure and simple. If it is pouring with rain, he will say, not "Isn't it a terrible day?" but "Ain't it lovely?" As a free trader, he will starve rather than take a steady job. He has got to be his own master ... even if he, as master, drives himself out at four in the morning and pushes himself round the streets with the barrow until midnight, when there is a chance of selling a bit of fruit at an advanced price to the girls and the drunks. He will short-change the prosperous without pity ... or recklessly give stock away to the children of the poor. His father, a costermonger of the old school, was an Old Contemptible, who spent about a third of his Army life in the Glasshouse, but got a D.C.M. for some crazy impossibility with a bayonet against a machine-gun. That same old man Barker, having, in his cups, bored ten thousand listeners with ten thousand bitter curses on the Army and all concerned with it for the last quarter of a century, now makes everybody's life a misery with his savage denunciations of the corrupt authorities who, just because he has only one arm, turned him down in 19 gg. He says he hopes Hitler wins. If he hears anybody else say that you have to admit that Jerry hasn't done too badly, he has to be held down while he brandishes his solitary fist and yells that Jerry doesn't stand a chance and asks everybody to wait till he gets hold of Goering.
Bob Barker is much the same, only he is young and humorous. If he goes out under heavy fire and saves somebody's life, he will say he did it because the man had some cigarettes. When he is decorated, he will