The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Alan Sillitoe

honest when she really told that copper what she thought of him and called him all the dirty names she’d ever heard of, which took her half an hour and woke the terrace up.

      I trotted on along the edge of a field bordered by the sunken lane, smelling green grass and honeysuckle, and I felt as though I came from a long line of whippets trained to run on two legs, only I couldn’t see a toy rabbit in front and there wasn’t a collier’s cosh behind to make me keep up the pace. I passed the Gunthorpe runner whose shimmy was already black with sweat and I could just see the corner of the fenced-up copse in front where the only man I had to pass to win the race was going all out to gain the half-way mark. Then he turned into a tongue of trees and bushes where I couldn’t see him anymore, and I couldn’t see anybody, and I knew what the loneliness of the long-distance runner running across country felt like, realizing that as far as I was concerned this feeling was the only honesty and realness there was in the world and I knowing it would be no different ever, no matter what I felt at odd times, and no matter what anybody else tried to tell me. The runner behind me must have been a long way off because it was so quiet, and there was even less noise and movement than there had been at five o’clock of a frosty winter morning. It was hard to understand, and all I knew was that you had to run, run, run, without knowing why you were running, but on you went through fields you didn’t understand and into woods that made you afraid, over hills without knowing you’d been up and down, and shooting across streams that would have cut the heart out of you had you fallen into them. And the winning post was no end to it, even though crowds might be cheering you in, because on you had to go before you got your breath back, and the only time you stopped really was when you tripped over a tree trunk and broke your neck or fell into a disused well and stayed dead in the darkness forever. So I thought: they aren’t going to get me on this racing lark, this running and trying to win, this jog-trotting for a bit of blue ribbon, because it’s not the way to go on at all, though they swear blind that it is. You should think about nobody and go your own way, not on a course marked out for you by people holding mugs of water and bottles of iodine in case you fall and cut yourself so that they can pick you up – even if you want to stay where you are – and get you moving again.

      On I went, out of the wood, passing the man leading without knowing I was going to do so. Flip-flap, flip-flap, jog-trot, jog-trot, crunchslap-crunchslap, across the middle of a broad field again, rhythmically running in my greyhound effortless fashion, knowing I had won the race though it wasn’t half over, won it if I wanted it, could go on for ten or fifteen or twenty miles if I had to and drop dead at the finish of it, which would be the same, in the end, as living an honest life like the governor wanted me to. It amounted to: win the race and be honest, and on trot-trotting I went, having the time of my life, loving my progress because it did me good and set me thinking which by now I liked to do, but not caring at all when I remembered that I had to win this race as well as run it. One of the two, I had to win the race or run it, and I knew I could do both because my legs had carried me well in front – now coming to the short cut down the bramble bank and over the sunken road – and would carry me further because they seemed made of electric cable and easily alive to keep on slapping at those ruts and roots, but I’m not going to win because the only way I’d see I came in first would be if winning meant that I was going to escape the coppers after doing the biggest bank job of my life, but winning means the exact opposite, no matter how they try to kill or kid me, means running right into their white-gloved wall-barred hands and grinning mugs and staying there for the rest of my natural long life of stone-breaking anyway, but stone-breaking in the way I want to do it and not in the way they tell me.

      Another honest thought that comes is that I could swing left at the next hedge of the field, and under its cover beat my slow retreat away fom the sports ground winning post. I could do three or six or a dozen miles across the turf like this and cut a few main roads behind me so’s they’d never know which one I’d taken; and maybe on the last one when it got dark I could thumb a lorry-lift and get a free ride north with somebody who might not give me away. But no, I said I wasn’t daft didn’t I? I won’t pull out with only six months left, and besides there’s nothing I want to dodge and run away from; I only want a bit of my own back on the In-laws and Potbellies by letting them sit up there on their big posh seats and watch me lose this race, though as sure as God made me I know that when I do lose I’ll get the dirtiest crap and kitchen jobs in the months to go before my time is up. I won’t be worth a threpp’ny-bit to anybody here, which will be all the thanks I get for being honest in the only way I know. For when the governor told me to be honest it was meant to be in his way not mine, and if I kept on being honest in the way he wanted and won my race for him he’d see I got the cushiest six months still left to run; but in my own way, well, it’s not allowed, and if I find a way of doing it such as I’ve got now then I’ll get what-for in every mean trick he can set his mind to. And if you look at it in my own way, who can blame him? For this is war – and ain’t I said so? – and when I hit him in the only place he knows he’ll be sure to get his own back on me for not collaring that cup when his heart’s been set for ages on seeing himself standing up at the end of the afternoon to clap me on the back as I take the cup from Lord Earwig or some such chinless wonder with a name like that. And so I’ll hit him where it hurts a lot, and he’ll do all he can to get his own back, tit for tat, though I’ll enjoy it most because I’m hitting first, and because I planned it longer. I don’t know why I think these thoughts are better than any I’ve ever had, but I do, and I don’t care why. I suppose it took me a long time to get going on all this because I’ve had no time and peace in all my bandit life, and now my thoughts are coming pat and the only trouble is I often can’t stop, even when my brain feels as if it’s got cramp, frostbite and creeping paralysis all rolled into one and I have to give it a rest by slap-dashing down through the brambles of the sunken lane. And all this is another uppercut I’m getting in first at people like the governor, to show how – if I can – his races are never won even though some bloke always comes unknowingly in first, how in the end the governor is going to be doomed while blokes like me will take the pickings of his roasted bones and dance like maniacs around his Borstal’s ruins. And so this story’s like the race and once again I won’t bring off a winner to suit the governor; no, I’m being honest like he told me to, without him knowing what he means, though I don’t suppose he’ll ever come in with a story of his own, even if he reads this one of mine and knows who I’m talking about.