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. |
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