Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood

heavy responsibility crushed him. He now was in the class of senior apprentice: he was sixteen, the eldest among them was only four years and a few months his senior. Year by year would see him taking a step upward as the eldest were gradually displaced until he, too, reached the top rung five years from now when to be numbered among the time-served men.
    For a moment the inexorable quality of Time’s flight appeared to him in an alarmingly vivid glimpse. Until now a year had seemed an interminable age, something that stretched away into the hazy infinity of the future and could not be comprehended. In a flash he saw twelve months each treading on the other’s heel in a never-ending suffocating circle, monotonous, constrained, like prisoners exercising mechanically in the confines of the prison yard.
    He’d been at Marlowe’s nearly two years now. And they were gone! Irretrievably. He felt perplexed, puzzled, cheated.
    Sixteen years old, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. Five years hence he would be a man. ‘A man.’ It was inconceivable. Yet Billy Higgs was a man and always had looked it. Think on it! When he first had commenced here Billy was only nineteen, just three years older than he, Harry, was at this moment. Why, in three years’ time…!
    A vivid recollection of the war years occurred to him. He saw himself standing on the kerb clutching his mother’s skirts and thrilling to the martial music as he watched the latest batch of Lancashire soldiers marching to their death in the Dardanelles. He had thought how fine and big and strong the nineteen-year- old soldiers had looked and had been strangely perplexed by hearing his mother say, to Mrs Bull who stood with her:
    ‘Ay, ain’t it shameful. Childer they are and nowt else. Sin and a shame, Mrs Bull. Sin and a shame.’
    Them as start wars, Mrs ‘Ardcastle,’ Mrs Bull had replied, emphatically: Them as start wars should be made t’ go’n fight ‘urn. An’ if Ah’d owt t’ do wi’ it, fight ‘urn they would. They’d tek no lad o’ mine. Luk at them lot there, boys an’ nowt else.’
    The recollection amazed Harry. Why, those soldiers had only been three years older than he. They were men at nineteen, then. Had he been their contemporary he, too, would have been a soldier; a corpse, probably, in some foreign land. He shivered.
    Try as he would he could not bring himself to think himself a man. Did he lack some masculine quality which others possessed? Lacking it or no he would be forced into it.
    There were some little boys at school at this moment, who, two years from now would be engaged by Marlowe’s. He licked his lips. These newcomers would see him as he had seen Billy Higgs, a man. He blinked and licked his lips again; wanted to go search out these boys to tell them that he wasn’t a man at all, had no intention of being a man: ‘Ah ain’t no man,’ he told them, in his mind: ‘Ah ain’t no man…. D’y’ understand? Ah’ll on’y be eighteen when you start here. D’y’ see? On’y four years older’n you. Aye, an’ y’ll be gettin’ more’n me to spend an’ Ah’ll nearly be out o’ me time,’ to himself: ‘Blimey, kids o’ fourteen gettin’ more’n me to spend when Ah’m eighteen. Blimey, Ah’ll on’y be earnin’ sixteen bob a week then and pay me own insurance.’
    Glimmerings of truth began to dawn. A million mysteries slowly unfolded their secrets; what had been tinged with glamour crumbled to stark and fearful reality.
    He saw groups of young men lounging at street corners; young men serving their time or not serving their time: the sight was so commonplace that nobody ever noticed it. Why were they lounging there? Why didn’t they go to the picture theatre or some place of amusement? Why didn’t they smarten themselves by wearing their Sunday suit of an evening? He knew why they never went in search of amusement, because they were as he, lacking the necessary money. And the remembrance of