Harry's Game by Gerald Seymour

Author:Gerald Seymour [Seymour, Gerald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 1975-05-22T14:00:00+00:00

The scrap merchant would take Harry on to his payroll. He’d obviously liked the look of him. He said he had a brother at sea, and asked Harry if he could start there and then. There was not a word about National Insurance cards or stamps, and twenty pounds a week was offered as pay. Harry was told he’d need to spend a month or so in the yard to see the way the place was run. There was to be expansion, more lorries. When they came, if it all worked out, there would be a driving job, and more money.

On his first morning Harry prowled round the mountains of burned and rusted cars. These were the stock-in-trade of the scrapman, heap upon heap of rough, angled metal.

Harry said to the neat dapper little man who was his new boss, ‘Is this what the business is? Just cars? You’ve enough of them.’

‘No problems with the supplies of that. You must have seen it, though you’ve been away. Terrible driving here. If you take the number of cars, they say, and work it out against a percentage of all the people that own them, and the number of accidents . . . then it’s worse than anywhere else in the whole of England or Ireland. Maniacs they are here. The boyos down the road do the rest. We’ll have a dozen wrecks in tomorrow morning. There’ll be a double-decker, as well, like as not, but they’re bastards to cut up.’

He smiled. Small, chirpy, long silk scarf round his neck, choker style, hat flat on his head. They’re all the same, thought Harry, likeable rogues.

The scrap merchant went on, ‘It’s an ill wind. Scrapmen, builders, glaziers . . . we’re all minting it. Shouldn’t say so, but that’s how it is. The military dump the cars that are burned out, up there on the open ground. We send a truck up and pull them down here. Not formal, you know. Just an understanding. They want them off the street and know if they put them there I’ll shift them. We’ll have a few more today, and all.’

He looked up at Harry, with the brightness evacuating his eyes. ‘People are powerful angry about this girl. You’ll find that. They get killed in hundreds here. Most of the time it doesn’t mean a damn, however big the procession. But this girl has got them steamed again.’

Harry said, ‘It’s a terrible thing pulling a girl like that out of her house.’

‘Poor wee thing. She must have been awful scared of something to want to do that to herself. Mother of Jesus rest her. Still, no politics in this yard, and no troubles. Those are the rules of the yard, Harry boy. No politics, and that way we get some work done.’

He walked round with Harry and introduced him to the other men in the yard, six of them, and Harry shook hands formally. They greeted him with reserve, but without hostility. When his escort went back to the office to look to the papers Harry was free to browse.

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