On the Brighton Road
by Richard Middleton
Slowly the sun had climbed up the hard white downs, till it broke with little of the mysterious ritual of dawn upon a sparkling world of snow. There had been a hard frost during the night, and the birds, who hopped about here and there with scant tolerance of life, left no trace of their passage on the silver pavements. In places the sheltered caverns of the hedges broke the monotony of the whiteness that had fallen upon the coloured earth, and overhead the sky melted from orange to deep blue, from deep blue to a blue so pale that it suggested a thin paper screen rather than illimitable space. Across the level fields there came a cold, silent wind which blew fine dust of snow from the trees, but hardly stirred the crested hedges. Once above the skyline, the sun seemed to climb more quickly, and as it rose higher it began to give out a heat that blended with the keenness of the wind.
It may have been this strange alternation of heat and cold that disturbed the tramp in his dreams, for he struggled for a moment with the snow that covered him, like a man who finds himself twisted uncomfortably in the bedclothes, and then sat up with staring, questioning eyes. ‘Lord! I thought I was in bed,’ he said to himself as he took in the vacant landscape, ‘and all the while I was out here.’ He stretched his limbs, and rising carefully to his feet, shook the snow off his body. As he did so the wind set him shivering, and he knew that his bed had been warm.
‘Come, I feel pretty fit,’ he thought. ‘I suppose I am lucky to wake at all in this. Or unlucky – it isn’t much of a business to come back to.’ He looked up and saw the downs shining against the blue like the Alps on a picture-postcard. ‘That means another forty miles or so, I suppose,’ he continued grimly. ‘Lord knows what I did yesterday. Walked till I was done, and now I’m only about twelve miles from Brighton. Damn the snow, damn Brighton, damn everything!’ The sun crept up higher and higher, and he started walking patiently along the road with his back turned to the hills.
‘Am I glad or sorry that it was only sleep that took me, glad or sorry, glad or sorry?’ His thoughts seemed to arrange themselves in a metrical accompaniment to the steady thud of his footsteps, and he hardly sought an answer to his question. It was good enough to walk to.
Presently, when three milestones had loitered past, he overtook a boy who was stooping to light a cigarette. He wore no overcoat, and looked unspeakably fragile against the snow. ‘Are you on the road, guv’nor?’ asked the boy huskily as he passed.
‘I think I am,’ the tramp said.
‘Oh! then I’ll come a bit of the way with you if you don’t walk too fast. It’s a bit lonesome walking this time of day.’ The tramp nodded his head, and the boy started limping along by his side.
‘I’m eighteen,’ he said casually. ‘I bet you thought I was younger.’
‘Fifteen, I’d have said.’
‘You’d have backed a loser. Eighteen last August, and I’ve been on the road six years. I ran away from home five times when I was a little ’un, and the police took me back each time. Very good to me, the police was. Now I haven’t got a home to run away from.’
‘Nor have I,’ the tramp said calmly.
‘Oh, I can see what you are,’ the boy panted; ‘you’re a gentleman come down. It’s harder for you than for me.’ The tramp glanced at the limping, feeble figure and lessened his pace.
‘I haven’t been at it as long as you have,’ he admitted.
‘No, I could tell that by the way you walk. You haven’t got tired yet. Perhaps you expect something the other end?’
The tramp reflected for a moment. ‘I don’t know,’ he said bitterly, ‘I’m always expecting things.’
‘You’ll grow out of that,’ the boy commented. ‘It’s warmer in London, but it’s harder to come by grub. There isn’t much in it really.’
‘Still, there’s the chance of meeting somebody there who will understand –’
‘Country people are better,’ the boy interrupted. ‘Last night I took a lease of a barn for nothing and slept with the cows, and this morning the farmer routed me out and gave me tea and toke because I was little. Of course, I score there; but in London, soup on the Embankment at night, and all the rest of the time coppers moving you on.’
‘I dropped by the roadside last night and slept where I fell. It’s a wonder I didn’t die,’ the tramp said. The boy looked at him sharply.
‘How do you know you didn’t?’ he said.
‘I don’t see it,’ the tramp said, after a pause.
‘I tell you,’ the boy said hoarsely, ‘people like us can’t get away from this sort of thing if we want to. Always hungry and thirsty and dog-tired and walking all the time. And yet if anyone offers me a nice home and work my stomach feels sick. Do I look strong? I know I’m little for my age, but I’ve been knocking about like this for six years, and do you think I’m not dead? I was drowned bathing at Margate, and I was killed by a gipsy with a spike; he knocked my head right in, and twice I was froze like you last night, and a motor cut me down on this very road, and yet I’m walking along here now, walking to London to walk away from it again, because I can’t help it. Dead! I tell you we can’t get away if we want to.’
The boy broke off in a fit of coughing, and the tramp paused while he recovered.
‘You’d better borrow
