The Good Companions by J.B. Priestley — Read

At the beginning of that week at Sandybay, Mr. Oakroyd was a happy man. Never in all his dreams of being an independent craftsman had he been so independent or so much the craftsman as he was now. He put in as many hours working as he had done at Higden's mill, and sometimes he put in a great deal more, achieving a day's labour that would have horrified every Trade Union secretary in the country. But you could hardly call it work; it was like a kind of hobby; it was nothing but a pleasant dream of work; and it made old Sam Oglethorpe, with his "Joinery and Jobbing Work Promptly Attended to," his hen-run, and his cottage, look like "two-pennorth o' copper. " When Mr. Oakroyd remembered that only a week or two before, he had envied old Sam, he was amazed at his good fortune, which indeed had still something unreal about it. True, he had a lot to learn about this business; all this messing about with curtains and bits of scenery and electric lights was new to him; but then he was learning fast and liking it. So long as they did not want him to appear on the stage -- he drew the line at that, even if it was only choosing a card out of a pack for Mr. Mitcham -- he was ready to do anything they asked him to do. And if he made any bit of a thing for these people, they were pleased and thankful and went on about it until he hardly knew where to look. This attitude towards work seemed to him astonishingly novel. At Higden's, if you didn't put all your back into a job, they asked you what you thought you were there for; but when you did put your back into it, finishing the job in fine style, then they said "Ay, that'll do. " And he could not help thinking that these strange theatrical people -- indeed, all these Southerners he was meeting now -- did overdo this patting you on the back and making a fuss when you did some little bit of a thing: it made you feel soft. But he was also compelled to admit that it did oil the wheels and put heart into you when you had to tackle something new. Oh, the job was a gift! Then there was the travelling. Talk about being on t'road! Talk about being down South! Why, at this rate, there would hardly be anywhere in England where they hadn't been, after six months. The places these theatre folk had seen! Even Susie, only a bit of a lass, could talk by the hour, like Joby Jackson himself, about the towns she had been to, dozens and dozens of them. As for Mr. Mitcham, if you only believed half he said, he must have played that banjo of his and done his conjuring in nearly every place under the sun, in places too where you would not think they would want to hear a banjo or see any conjuring. Such folk, who could afford to be particular, might well think nothing of Rawsley and Dotworth, but Mr. Oakroyd had enjoyed himself in both these towns. They seemed to him delightfully foreign. At Rawsley the woman at his lodgings had given him for supper one night some little dry dumplings with bits of bacon in them, something that Bruddersford had never set eyes on; and in a pub there he had met a man who thought Bruddersford United was a rugby team. Dotworth was equally outlandish. There they had put nothing but Swiss milk in tea, called buns "cakes," did not know that wool had to be washed and combed before it was spun, and got terribly mixed up between Yorkshire and Lancashire all the time. It was in a pub at Dotworth that he had been able to set a chap right very nicely. This was a scene he had often wistfully amused himself by imagining back at Bruddersford, when he dreamed of being a travelled man. He had imagined himself taking his pipe out of his mouth and saying quietly, "Half a minute, mate! You're wrong there. I've been and I knaw. " And it had actually happened like that. This chap, who drove a cart and seemed to fancy himself, was laying down the law a bit and got on to talking about the Great North Road. He said it went through Lincoln and York, and all the Dotworth innocents, gaping at him over their half-pints, said that he was quite right. Then it happened. Mr. Oakroyd took his pipe out of his mouth and said quietly: "Half a minute, mate! You're wrong there. " Ho. 'e was, was 'e? Yes, he was, and had he ever been down the Great North Road? No, he hadn't, but he had pals who had and knew it well. "Well, yer pals is wrong too, mate," Mr. Oakroyd had told him and the company. "Great North Road nivver sees Lincoln and York. I've been and I knaw. Only come down it t'other night, on a lorry. " And for the next quarter of an hour he had told them a thing or two, and the landlord himself had stayed in the taproom to listen.