Key to the Door

CHAPTER 4

Brian had just height and strength to wrench himself on to the parapet of New Bridge and see the free-wheeling bare spokes of the headstocks riding the empty air like upside-down bicycle wheels. Leaning on his elbows and booting a rhythm on the wall, he saw the semaphore arm of a signal rise upwards, and settled himself in the hot sun to wait for a train.

When he was on an errand to his grandma Merton’s, the couple of grandiose miles out from the last houses of Nottingham became an expedition. Across his route lay streams and lanes and stiles, and to the left stretched a green-banked railway line, rightwards an acre of allotment gardens whose shabby huts and stunted trees were often raided by roving kids from Radford — among them, he knew for a fact, Bert Doddoe and his elder brothers. Brian remembered, in the awesome silence before the advent of a train, how the whole family had descended on his house during the bitter blue snow of last winter. Ada, Doddoe her husband, and their four kids had done a bunk from Chesterfield with their bits of furniture because Doddoe had lost his job for cursing at the overseer down pit; and had spent his wages on booze before going home. Being two months behind in rent, they’d come back to Nottingham without a penny in any pocket, had been given a lift all the way by a lorry driver who had lived next door — otherwise they’d have walked. The lorry drew up outside the house one morning, and there was Ada calling to her sister Vera — crying at the same time she was — asking if they could come in for a warm because they were freezing to death. The look on her face forbade any questioning; to do so would mean going into the animal glare of uncivilized territories, as even Harold Seaton realized when the anger felt at their disturbing arrival had worn off. Ada tried to climb from the lorry-back, but her chapped fingers went aside — like cotton thread that misses the needle-hole when it doesn’t seem possible it can — and she fell towards the pavement while Vera screamed a warning. The rest of the kids watched, except Bert, who ran from under the lorry into his father’s stinging fist, a quick hand that opened in time to catch his wife and stop her fall.

That afternoon Bert and Brian played on the recreation-ground roundabouts while their mothers walked to the convent at Lenton to ask the nuns for bread. They slid face downwards from the high apex of the slide, hoping to work up speed for a dive into soil at the bottom — impossible because the surface wasn’t smooth enough. “You want a candle to rub on it and mek it proper slippy,” Bert had said, and Brian was impressed with the useful know-how of his much-travelled cousin. Their mothers came back with two carrier bags of bread and a tin of cornbeef, making a supper for the ten people who that night slept in three rooms. Next day Ada’s half-dozen moved into a house up Sodom. Lucky Doddoe bluffed a quid out of his old man and got a six-week navvying job from the labour exchange — at which the unwieldy barge of the Doddoe family was once more afloat in its native Nottingham.

A signal passed from the wall to his fingers: train coming. The thunder of its warning grew louder behind, until a black engine burst into the open and shot a choking cloud up from its funnel. He had intended counting the carriages as they clicked one by one into sight, but heavy smoke threw him from the wall.

The fields were divided by a narrow sandy-bottomed brook, and he descended the steps towards it. White clouds climbed shoulder upon shoulder over the houses of Radford, while in front two horses tethered to a tree-stump meditated the clover like statues. He forced a branch back from an elderberry bush until it cracked, stripped it with a quiet, preoccupied ruthlessness, each leaf dropping to the path and taken into an unwilling dance by the wind. His stick was a sword, and he fenced with the shadow of a bush. Thistles were sabred, stinging-nettles laid low, flowers massacred, and he turned up a lonely lane where bordering thorn hedges were tall enough to hide everything from view but the blackening clouds.

A thunder-noise quickened his walk, a distant drumroll that seemed to single him out from everyone else in the world as its first victim. With thunder, fear had come before the word. At its first sound in a darkening house his mother had looked at the window and said: “Thunder,” and between both pronouncements he had run to hide himself. I’m frightened because it makes a noise like guns and bombs, and guns and bombs can kill you, he thought.

He stood in the silent field halfway between home and the Nook, and without thinking he walked on, knowing he would rather go to his grandma’s than run back home, even though the storm might come smashing down any minute, chase him along the lane with each growl louder than the last, blue lightning like cats’ tongues licking the hedgetops. His stick was brandished, as if it could be used as a weapon to wheel and fight the storm should it catch him up.

He leapt a stream with bursting heart, seeing reedgrass between scissor-legs as he went across. Green and blue thunder-clouds rose like jungles over the uncannily lighted red of city buildings behind, and with the next burst of noise flat, heavy drops of rain fell against knees and forehead.

Still clutching his stick, he stood on tiptoe to reach the gate latch, heard the ceaseless grunting of the pigs as he rushed up the yard. A blue sausage-like globule of lightning bounced from a too-close hedgetop and he was impelled by a last effort towards the kitchen door, a box of red geraniums on the window-sill passing him by like a splash of blood. One push, and he was standing inside, breathless, wiping his feet, claimed by the interior warmth. Grandma Merton looked up from her sock-darning. “Hello, Brian, what brings you here?”

Sheets of newspaper protecting the recently scrubbed tiles were used as stepping-stones to the fire: “Mam says she can’t come to see you this weekend because Margaret’s badly again.”

“Don’t stand with your back to the fire, Brian, or you’ll be sick, there’s a good lad.” He moved, waiting for a proper response to his delivered message, hands in pockets and looking out at the last triangle of blue sky. “I don’t know,” she tut-tutted. “What’s up wi’ ’er this time?”

“I think she’s got measles, because she had spots on her face this mornin’.” She took knives and forks from the table drawer and laid them on the cloth for tea. “You must be hungry after coming all that way”—looking out of the window as if to see in one glance the total distance of his journey. She went down the pantry steps and the rattle of the panchion lid filled his mouth with instant desire for the pasty she would bring. Will it be jam or mincemeat? he wondered.

It was mincemeat, and he sat on grandad’s chair to eat it. A steel-blue flash across the window robbed one bite of its sweetness. “It started thunderin’ when I was comin’ over the fields.” He noticed the tremor in her hands, filled with knives and forks. She’s frightened as well, a fact that reduced his own fear.

Heavy boots sounded on gravel and cinders outside, and a tall man in a raincoat passed the rain-spitted window. The door burst open and Merton pushed his bike into the parlour.

“You’re back early, aren’t you?” his wife said. He took off his coat. “There’s a storm comin’ up, Mary”—dividing the embers and placing a log on the low fire. “There’s nowt to do at pit so they sent us ’ome.”

The storm roared as if threatening the house. Mary took steel knives and forks from the table to put them back in the drawer.

“What are you doin’?” Merton wanted to know, changing his boots by the fire. “We ain’t ’ad tea yet.”

She wavered, unable to stand up to him: “You know I don’t like to see steel on the table during a storm. It might get struck.”

He let out a terrific “Ha!” like a bullet: “You’d take ’em off the table just because it’s lightning?” he shouted. Brain drew back: what’s he getting on to me for as well? Merton jumped up, so that Brian almost lost his fear of the storm in wondering what he was up to. “I’ll show you there’s no bloody need to be frightened at a bit o’ lightning.” He scooped a bundle of knives and forks, flung open the window, and held them outside, waiting for a flash of lightning while Brian and his grandmother froze by the table.

Had Merton been at work, Mary would have taken an oil lamp on the stairs, where lightning was invisible and thunder muffled. For whenever the faintest flicker of lightning carved up dark and distant clouds like a Sunday joint, she would say to whoever was in the house: “It’s a bit black over Nottingham,” knowing that soon the storm would turn its deluge towards Wollaton. The children had been made to sit countless times on the stairs when they were young, and Vera never forgot the hours spent under the dim oil lamp that created shadows of merged and huddled forms on the landing walls. Not until the last low rumble of thunder had died away would she tentatively open the stairfoot door and motion her children back into the kitchen.

A sudden fleet of hailstones bullied the geraniums, sang against Merton’s cutlery, and bounced into the house. “Here it comes!” he cried, so that Brian, kept quiet by fear at the time, remembered the joy in his grandfather’s voice. A sheet of blue light covered the window. I heard it, Brain said to himself. I heard it sizzle — shielding his face and looking through splayed fingers. He’s dead. The dark kitchen was lit up, and immediately a thousand guns of thunder rolled over the house.

Merton slammed the window and turned round. “You see? There’s nowt to be frightened on.” Brian took his hands down: It ain’t touched him.

“God’ll repay you for such things,” Mary said, “and for frightening poor little Brian like that.”

“Go on,” he scoffed, slinging the cutlery back on the table as if contemptuous at its inability to kill him. “Old Nimrod ain’t frightened, are yer?”

Brian breathed hard; the circus act had seemed as much directed against him as his grandmother. “No, grandad. Course I ain’t.”

Grandad wasn’t won over by this. He sat by the fire, an image of the inside storm, while hailstones and rain torrents outside fought hand over fist to get down eaving and drainpipe into the safety of waterbutts placed around the house, a swishing and scrambling that discouraged Brian from talking for fear he wouldn’t be heard. Hailstones smacked against the window-panes, zigzagged down the chimney and died in the fire, or ricochetted so quickly from the fireback that they didn’t melt until hitting the hearthrug.

Knives and forks stayed on the table, but Mary wouldn’t touch them while lightning flashed. She lit the lamp and fetched tea food from the pantry, so superstitious that she did everything as if God were watching her: never threw bread on the fire (which was feeding the devil), never ill-treated a dumb animal, never turned a beggar away from the door. Even forty years with Merton had kept these principles alive, and they were so strongly instilled into her eight children that their children would also live by them.

Brian left his chair and went to Merton. “Grandad?”

“What’s up, Nimrod?”

“What meks lightnin’ an’ thunder?”

“Nay, I don’t know.” Merton was puzzled, forced to give something thought that he had taken for granted these last sixty years. Then his stern face changed to mischief and enlightenment. “It’s like this,” he said, leaning forward: “as far as I can mek out, God asks Sent Paul to get ’im a load o’ coal up from’t pit in ’ell, an’ Paul gets wagons loaded up wi’ some o’ the best. Then ’e ’itches up ponies and trundles it up to ’eaven where God is. Well,” his eyes flashed with inspiration, “when Paul unloads the coal it meks a noise, an’ that’s when it thunders.”

Brian’s laugh was belief and doubt. “It i’n’t,” he said.

Merton grinned. “Yo’ ask yer gra’ma, an’ see whether it’s true or not. Hey, Mary, ain’t that right?”

Salmon, pickled cucumber, bread already buttered, were spread on a white cloth, and they drew chairs in to eat. “That’s right,” she said, amused at such blasphemy since it put Merton in a good temper. Brian leaned across the table: “Hey, grandad, well, what about lightning?”

A forkful of cucumber was speared before the answer came: “That’s when they open the furnaces of ’ell, to see’f fires is still goin’, an’ if they need some more coal.” He grinned at his easy victory. “Look, old Nimrod don’t believe a thing I tell ’im. I don’t know, I can see nobody’ll ever be able to tell ’im owt wi’out he looks at ’em in that funny way, enough to call ’em a liar!”

Sun glistened on the wet slate wash-house roof across the yard. “He only believes what his mother tells him, don’t you, Brian?” Mary said. He shook his head, mouth full, at the sight of a hedge dripping with fresh rain. One line of hedge turned into another, bordering unused forgotten pathways, trodden deep between house-wall and pigeon coops, where you stood and could see nothing, yet heard the throaty warbling like water going through a broken-down whistle from perches beyond hexagonal-holed wire. The front door of the house faced away from the lane, over a garden into which Brian went after exploring the suburbs of inhabited hedgerows. He saw the well, conventional and frightening, a fairy-book piece of architecture on a low hill. He wanted to touch the wooden triangular roof and turn the chain-laden roller of wood, to sit on the circular low brick wall and let down the bucket for filling. But he was afraid. When he said: “I’m going out now, gra’ma,” she said, looking up from her pastry board: “Don’t go near the well then, will you?” He was eager to be off but asked: “Why, gra’ma?” “Because you’ll get drowned,” she told him ominously. Sometimes he saw Uncle George coming from it with a yoke across his shoulders, walking down the slope with two lead-heavy buckets. “When can I fetch water from the well, Uncle George?”

“Soon,” Uncle George told him, and went on to the house.

“Soon,” he discovered over square-wheeled months, was a misfit, a no-good word, a trick to fob him off with because it wasn’t a definite length of time like a minute, hour, week, or even year, but was whatever of those divisions he or she who said “soon” wanted it to be. So from now on, he told himself, whenever anyone says I can do something “soon,” I’ll say to them, yes, I know all about that, you bleddy liar, but when, when, when? “Hey, gra’ma, can I sleep here tonight?” he asked, bursting back into the house.

Merton spat on the hot bars. “This’ll soon be your second home, I reckon. Would you like to live here, you young bogger?”

“Can he sleep with you two?” Mary said to Lydia and Vi, looking up from her paper.

“He can for me,” Lydia replied. “It’ll be a bit crowded, but I don’t mind.”

That was settled. “Thanks, gra’ma. Can I play in the parlour?”

“Yes, but don’t break the gramophone, will you?”

“No,” he said. “Uncle George?”

George’s forkful of egg was reprieved for another minute: “What?” he asked, looking up.

“Can I build a Goose Fair with your dominoes?”

“Don’t break ’em then, or I’ll cut your nose off.”

“And you wain’t look up to much wi’ no nose,” Merton put in. “Will he, Mary?”

The only time he’d seen anyone in the parlour was when his grandad went in there on Saturday night to change his boots before going out, and then to take them off for Sunday dinner after an hour on the razz-mattaz in one of the beer-offs at Radford Woodhouse. Merton would lean back in a chair, and if Brian happened to be there, call for him, saying: “Unlace my boots, you young bogger.” Then: “Now pull for all ye’r worth.” Sometimes the boots would come off slowly and Brian would stagger back only one pace; often, pulling and lugging and all but twisting, they would loosen suddenly and send him crashing against the wallpaper, with Merton grinning from the chair when Brian on the rebound resentfully called out that he was fawce bogger, and boxed the curtain out of the way so that he could go into the kitchen.

Sometimes when Merton sat at ease in his high-backed chair at the fire he imperiously held out one of his long heavily knuckled fingers and called to Brian: “Hey, Nimrod, pull this.”

Mary tut-tutted: “Stop your tricks.” George and Lydia watched, smirking — or perhaps would turn away and try not to watch. Brian suspected a trick but pulled hard and strong at the finger anyway, and Merton would let out a long unmistakable splintering fart as he did so, a performance that brought the house down, and caused Brian to remark: “You dirty bogger,” and walk off.

When Merton was at the pit, or otherwise occupied around garden or toolshed, Brian was alone in the beamed parlour playing with Uncle George’s dominoes on the polished mahogany table. The dresser was covered with interesting untouchables: curios from Skegness and Cleethorpes, a porcelain war-memorial, sea-shells, a ship in a bottle. On a stand blocking the front door was an enormous horn that played tunes when the gramophone handle was turned two dozen times. A cracked voice — impossible to say whether man’s or woman’s — sometimes sang:

“O my darling Nellie Gray

They have taken her away

And I’ll never see

My darling any more.…”

And when he asked his grandmother who Nellie Gray was, she said she supposed it was some woman or other; and when he asked Uncle George, he was told it was a horse, a grey horse; so he saw a woman in a grey dress with a horse’s head whenever the maundering and cracked voice wove an arabesque through the cluttered room.

Above the mantelpiece hung a huge picture of a shy narrow-faced long-haired girl holding a posy that a waistcoated muffle-necked youth by her side had given her. They were sweethearts, he said to himself, and when his grandmother dusted the parlour he pointed to the picture: “Gra’ma, was that you and grandad?” “No,” she answered. “Who is it then?” “I don’t know.” But she must be having him on, for who else could it be but his gra’ma and grandad? Under the painting two lines were written, the last words of both sounding similar but for the first letter of them:

If you love me as I love you,

Nothing will ever part us two —

which he chanted to the click of falling dominoes, or copied on the white paper bordering indecipherable newsprint, or sang to the tune of Nellie Gray when the whining voice of the man or woman got on his nerves, building his Goose Fairs until all light had been drained into the garden and killed by some monster there, when he ran into the oil-lamped kitchen because darkness made him afraid.

A double-barrelled shotgun slung over his shoulder, Merton walked up the garden path and cut through a gap in the hedge, followed by Brian shouldering a stick, and Gyp the dog. Silently through a cornfield, they climbed a stile into a meadow, Gyp now picking a fight with stones that Brian ducked-and-draked for it over the grass. Brian stepped behind the tall upright figure of a grandad carrying a gun directly there was a feeling of birds in the blue sky, ink blots swooping to a rise in front.

Merton lifted the gun, and the persisting tune of Nellie Gray died on Brian’s lips. There was a roar, a startling explosion that imperceptibly moved the right shoulder above, and looking from behind the legs, he saw birds falling towards grass on either side of a stream.

“Go on!” Merton shouted to Gyp. He smoked his pipe, waited for the dog to lay the limp and bleeding thrushes at his feet. “Put ’em in the bag, Nimrod,” he said, “then I’ll let yer ’ev one for your supper.” Blood and feathers came off on to Brian’s hands, and he was startled by another double-crash of the busy quick-firing gun.

Merton’s hand made an eaving across his forehead. Brian saw a controlling skyscraper in halfway motion between a wave and a point, shouting: “Goo after ’em, Gyp”—as if each word were shot out by the downward bash of a piston somewhere in his chest.

Brian ran, competing with Gyp at finding peppered half-stripped birds, licking blood from fingers as he peered under a bush for what the dog might have missed. Who was Nellie Gray, grandad? (His grandad was the one he hadn’t asked, but he knew he wouldn’t get a straight answer, so didn’t bother.) “Get down flat,” he was told, “flat as a pancake, Nimrod.” And just as a nettle stung the end of his nose, another shell exploded a hundred feet above, and before he received the order to stand up, three more thrushes slapped his neck and legs. He punched the dog and took them for his own pocket, making his way through the wheat to where his grandad was lighting another pipe.

Brian and Gyp followed the swinging bird-bag to the house. “Thrush-pudding for supper,” Merton laughed, pipe-smoke drifting over them, “wi’ custard.”

“Will they be sweet then, grandad?”

“Ay, like new-born cabbages.” Merton waited, pushed the dog in front with his boot, and Brian with his open hand.

“Them’s not sweet,” he contested, looking round.

“Go on, you young bogger, you’ll be tellin’ me as rhubarb’s not sour next.” He gave a satisfied grunt as he pushed open the door. Brian pummelled Gyp on the cinder path outside, getting his ears chewed in return for being a bully and not letting the dog enjoy its own world. It freed itself, but stood by him waiting to be attacked again, tongue falling so far down between two molars that he could have tugged it like a girl’s plait at school.

“Gyp! Here, Gyp!” Merton called, appearing at the door with a bone. A fist crept to its face, then withdrew, and it waited for another knuckle-bound assault. (“Gyp! Gyp!”) “Go on,” Brian said, “grandad’s calling you.” The dog’s eyes said: If I turn you’ll jump on me. What do you think I am? When Merton called again it still didn’t run for the bone, and the next thing Brian knew was Merton striding towards them with a stick. “I’ll teach the bloody dog to come when I tell it.”

Brian pushed it away. But his “Go on” was too late, and the dog knew it, lost the look of playful complacency and shrunk its black and white patches to escape Merton’s wrath. “I’ll teach you to come to me when I shout,” he said, holding his breath back at each blacksmith’s swipe.

“Don’t hit it, grandad,” Brian shouted, wondering why the dog didn’t run. Head to one side, then under its front legs as if to bite its own tail, then up and sideways, until suddenly it winged across the yard, squealing on cinders because it couldn’t get through a hole in the hedge fast enough. Merton threw his stick down and went into the house.

After dinner the dog wasn’t back, making the difference between a full and an empty yard, for the others were shopping in Nottingham. He trod his way through the wheatfield, skirted the well, crossed into the Cherry Orchard, and came up out of the lane to capture the gigantic tree whose bole was burnt out, making a room so big that he could walk inside and sit down.

When this novelty had worn he walked the five-mile half-mile over humps and hollows towards the Arlingtons’ cottage by the wood, and met Alma when almost there.

“I’ve got a joke to tell you,” she said, wiping grass-juice on her white frock.

“All right then, tell it me,” he said impatiently.

She clarified her claim: “It ain’t a joke; it’s a piece of pointry,” then sat down.

He sat by her. “I like pointry. Go on and tell it me.”

Her face saddened. “I’ve forgot it.”

He was disappointed, liked to be told poetry and stories, except when he was made to learn them by heart at school. “You’re daft. You forget everything.”

“I’m not daft, Brian Seaton,” she pouted. “If you say I’m daft I wain’t tell you my pointry.”

“Did you make it up?”

Proudly: “Yes.”

She’s fibbin’, he told himself, but didn’t say anything because he wanted to hear it. “Tell it me, then,” he said again. “I didn’t mean it when I said you was daft.”

She was happy at this. “I’ve remembered it now”—and recited the poem.

“That’s a good ’un,” he said, laughing. She waited for him to stop: “Now you tell me one.”

“I don’t know any.”

“Mek one up then,” she ordered, “like I did.”

“I can’t,” he said defiantly.

She ran off across the field, slammed the rickety wooden gate, and went into the cottage.

The fire-scooped hollow of the tree smelled of charcoal: who made such a big blaze to scorch out all this wood? Must have searched days for twigs and leaves to get it going. But what a fire, to burn yet carve a black hooded hollow big enough for a good many to hide in from rain or chasing gang, though it wouldn’t make such a good hiding place because every kid in Radford knew about it. He went in, plucked a layer of charcoal and stamped it into the soft wet soil; picked off more to crush in his fingers and turn his flesh black. Must have smoked for days, everyone walking by and nobody thinking to piss on it even. Colliers riding past on their bikes, and laughing at it, letting it burn its heart into a hide-out and shelter for when it rains, though it wouldn’t be a good place if it thundered and lightninged because trees often get struck. Grandma ought to know because she’s older than mam, and even she knows. But p’raps somebody had chucked a bucket of water at the tree to swill it down, watched it sizzling and steaming and gone off thinking it was finished, but as soon as it stopped steaming it starting smoking again until it got red and went back to burning, which served the bloke right for trying to kill it out. He should have minded his own business and let it burn, because once fires start it ain’t right to bother ’em, especially if they’re in a field like this one was: you’ve got to let them get on with it and burn red hot, as any daft sod knows. Tons and tons of wood must a bin burnt in this tree and I’d like to a seen it. Mam says it’s allus bin like this, that even she can’t remember how it was before it was black and hollow.

By Sunday dinner Gyp hadn’t come back. Merton was in an amiable mood, bland with a few pints of soothing brown ale inside him, and asked at the table if anybody’d seen Gyp. They hadn’t. And no wonder, Violet said, after such a pasting as he’d given the poor bogger. For nothing, as well. Can you blame him for not coming back? Well, it should do as it’s towd, Merton maintained, then it wouldn’t get stick so often. I expect he’s roaming the fields, though. A forkful of mutton fat went into his hatch. He turned to Brian: “Shall you come wi’ me, Nimrod, and see’f we can find ’im after dinner?”

“O yes, grandad.”

They rounded to the house-back and set off up the sloping path, passing the sentinel well and making a bee-line for Serpent Wood. Was the stick he carried to help him on his walk, or to beat Gyp with for desertion? Yesterday he hated him for hitting the dog, but now, trailing behind in the heavy-clouded silence of green fields, he was unable to. Maybe they’d seen Alma, he thought, hands deep in his pockets when his grandad had told him a thousand times to take them out, though he didn’t suppose they would because she went to Sunday school as a rule.

They turned south from the wood, towards the railway. Merton stopped now and again, calling: “Gyp! Gyp!” each gruff cannon-ball shout met only by an echo, or by an uprising bird that didn’t know how lucky it was Merton hadn’t a gun with him. Two partridges took off from a bank, flap-winged over an elderberry bush, turned high in a steep curve, and vanished beyond the railway.

Great clouds were piled high in the distance like a range of mountains suspended in space. Merton leaned on the iron railing as if wondering whether to cross the railway and search there. Bush leaves swayed with a noise like waves against sand when you put a sea-shell to your ear, and tree branches creaked. “We’ll climb the bank, Nimrod, and see’f we can see owt in Farmer ’Awkins’ field. If we can’t we’ll goo back and see’f your gran’ma’s mashed. It looks as if it’ll piss down soon.”

Brian was already over and halfway up to the railway, then jumping from one steel rail to another, Merton close behind. He looked beyond, saw nothing but silence. Wheatfields swayed with the wind but made no noise, and smoke from a grey-roofed house went obliquely into the sky. It was funny, he thought, how soil smelled of rain when you’d think it’d be the air it came from. A steel-grey cloud-base stretched for miles, and there was no sign of the dog.

He shielded his eyes from an imaginary sun: “Can’t see ’im, grandad.”

“We’ll go back ’ome then. ’E’ll cum when ’e’s ’ungry.”

Brian turned to recross the railway: the long stretch of track disappeared round a bend to the right, no trains flying. Then he turned his head leftwards and, about to face front and leap over the lines, saw something white tucked into one of the sleepers.

He knew what it was before beginning to run, stared at the splashed blood on the ridge of each parallel track. It’s been run over, he said to himself, it’s been run over.

“Grandad,” his wavering voice called. He detached the bloodstained collar and folded it into his back pocket. They walked to the house without speaking.

Merton came later with a spade and buried Gyp in the field. While he was away Brian heard his uncle George and aunt Violet talking in the kitchen. “He led the poor dog such a life,” she said, “that it must have done itself in by laying on the lines till a train came.” Brian was sorry she said this because he’d been with his grandad when the dog was found and, walking back with him, noticed how he hadn’t said a word all the way, which was, he knew, because he was sorry he’d hit the dog. George agreed with her: “He’s got too much of it.” Too much of what? Brian wondered. But they said nothing to Merton when he came in.

Brian went home that evening, for it was school in the morning. His small figure walked quickly along, waving a stick, his pockets jingling with pennies and ha’pennies that his grandad, uncles, and aunts had given him.

CHAPTER 5

Eight-wheeled lorries came by the motorworks and followed each other towards the high flat tongue of land that had been raised by months of tipping and was slowly covering a nondescript area of reedgrass and water. From nearly every precipice men walked to where they hoped the loads would be dumped. Empty sacks flapped over their shoulders, and they called to each other, waving sticks and rakes. Brian, having already used his judgement, was scraping into a heap of swarf and scrap steel picked clean days ago, but which still gave off a pleasant smell of aluminum shavings and carbolic, oil and the brass dust of big machines his father had sometimes worked. He kept one eye on the rapid movements of his flimsy rake, and the other on a small pile of wood covered with a sack nearby. Bert had promised to be at the tips later, and Brian hoped he’d come soon to get something from the four lorries — and the convoy of high-sided horsecarts trailing at walking pace behind.

“Where’s it comin’ from, mate?” Brian asked. Steelpins were popped out and the back ascended slowly. Half a dozen men, waiting for the avalanche of promise, watched the heavy handle being worked by a driver who rarely spoke to the scrapers, as if he were ashamed of being set within the luxurious world of hard labour. Even uncommitting banter was rare, and the scrapers looked on, waiting, never offering to help so as to get the stuff rolling sooner to their feet. “Prospect Street, young ’un,” the driver answered.

Them old houses. A few bug-eaten laths. Wallpaper, dust, and brick was already streaming down the bank, filling up oil-stained swamp-pools and crushing rusty tins at the bottom. A piece of wall made a splash like a bomb, and that was that. The back was wound up, and the lorry driven off. Brian rubbed pieces of cold water from his ear. Men were scraping systematically at the rammel, though expecting little from those poverty-stricken, condemned, fallen-down rabbit-holes on Prospect Street. Yet you never knew: such exercise in hope may gain a few brass curtain rings, a yard of decayed copper-wire (from which the flex could be burned over the flames), or perhaps a piece of lead piping if it was a lucky day. A man whistled as he worked: speculation ran too high for speech.

Brian, having netted a few spars of wood, rubbed grit from his knees and stood up, gripped by a black, end-of-the-world hopelessness: Please, God, send a good tip, he said to himself. If you do, I’ll say Our Father. “What’s up, kid?” Agger called from the top of the bank.

“I’m fed up,” Brian said gloomily.

Men looked around, grinning or laughing. “Are yer ’ungry?” Brian said no, scraped a few half-bricks to reveal a fair-sized noggin of wood. “Sure? There’s some bread and jam in my coat pocket if y’are,” Agger said.

“No, thanks. I’ve got some snap as well.”

“What yer fed up for then?” He couldn’t answer. Like the old man often said: Think yourself lucky you’ve got a crust o’ bread in your fist. Then you can tek that sour look off your clock. But Brian couldn’t. “What does your dad do?” Agger wanted to know.

“He’s out o’ work”—already forgetting despair.

Agger laughed. “He’s got a lot o’ cumpny.” Agger came on the tips every morning — in time for the first loads at nine — pushing an old carriage-pram, an antique enormous model that may once have housed some spoon-fed Victorian baby and been pushed by a well-trimmed maid. There was no rubber on the wheels; all paint had long since blistered from its sides, and a makeshift piece of piping served for a handle. Another valued possession of Agger’s was a real rake unearthed from a load of brick and tile tippings, an ornate brass-handled tool of the scraper’s trade with which he always expected to pull up some treasure, good reaching under the muck for good, but which he used with relish whether it made him rich or not. Other scrapers envied it: Brian once heard one say: “Lend’s your rake five minutes, Agger. I’ll just get some wood for the fire.” The men around stopped talking, and Agger stayed mute: just looked at the man — a faint touch of contempt at such ignorance of the rules of life — though the blank look was forced on to his face mainly because the request was unexpected, and unanswerable if he was to maintain his sharp gipsy-like dignity. The man got up and walked away, beyond the fire’s warmth. “The daft fucker,” Agger said loudly. “What does he tek me for? He wants chasing off the bleddy premises.”

Agger often referred to the tips as “the premises”—a high-flown name as if “premises” was the one word and only loot he had carried off under his coat from some short term of employment — at being ordered off them himself by a despairing gaffer. “Premises” to Agger was synonymous with some remote platform of life where order might have been created from the confusion within himself, if only he could be respected as king for some qualities he hadn’t got — but wanted because he knew them to exist.

Winter and summer he wore a black overcoat that reached to his ankles and flapped around his sapling body. On the morning when his weekly gatherings had been sold to the scrap-shop for a few shillings, each deep pocket of his coat held a quart bottle of tea, panniers that steadied the folds of an otherwise voluminous garment. Each morning he coaxed a fire from the abundant surface of the tip, stoked it to a beacon with old oil cloth, tar-paper, and arms of brackenish wood that had laid between the floors and walls of back-to-back houses during generations both of people and of bugs.

On fine days, Brian noticed, some scrapers worked little, stood talking by the fire, and only ran madly with coats waving when a lorry came; others scraped industriously every minute of the day whether there was a fresh tip or not, working solidified rubble on the off-chance of finding something that might have been missed. Brian belonged to the latter sort, searching the most unpromising loads because hope was a low-burning intoxication that never left him.

While the damp wind — seemingly foiled by jersey and coat — concentrated on Brian’s face, he forgot it was also reaching into his body. He whistled a tune through a mixture of brick, wood-chippings, and scraps of slate, feeling snatched only when the division between an unreal cotton-wool dreamland and the scratches on his numbed fingers broke down and flooded him with a larger sensation: “snatched”—eyes and face muscles showing what the innermost body felt even though he hadn’t been aware of it, perished through and through, so that a blazing fire would only bring smarting eyes and a skin thicker though not warmer.

Agger worked nearby, cleverly wrapped up and more impervious to cold because he had been on the tips longer than anyone else — straight from Flanders at twenty, he said. The useless slaughter of employable sinews had crushed his faith in guidance from men “above” him, so that he preferred the tips even when there had been a choice. Sometimes he’d gaze into the quiet glass-like water of the nearby canal and sing to himself — a gay up-and-down tune without words — punctuating his neanderthal quatrains with a handful of stones by aiming one with some viciousness into the water, watching the rings of its impact collide and disappear at the bank before breaking out again into another verse that came from some unexplored part of him. Born of a breaking-point, his loneliness was a brain-flash at the boundary of his earthly stress. Still young-looking, though lacking the jauntiness of youth, perhaps out of weakness he had seen the end too near the beginning, had grafted his body and soul into a long life on the tips even before his youth was finished. The impasse he lived in had compensations, however, was the sort that made friends easily and even gave him a certain power over them.

Brian broke wood into small pieces and filled his sack, stuffing each bundle far down. “How are yer going to carry it?” Agger asked.

“On my back.”

“It’ll be too’ eavy.”

“I’ll drag it a bit then.” After a pause for scraping, Agger wondered: “Do you sell it?”

“Sometimes.”

“How much do you want for that lot?” Brian reckoned up: we’ve got plenty at home. I wain’t mek much if I traipse it from door to door. “A tanner.”

“I’ll buy it,” Agger said. “I know somebody as wants a bit o’ wood. I’ll gi’ yer the sack back tomorrow.” Brian took the sixpence just as: “Tip,” someone screamed towards a corporation sewer-tank veering for the far side of the plateau. Agger ran quickly and Brian followed, more for sport since his only sack-bag rested by Agger’s pram.

He scrambled down the precipice to watch the back open above like a round oven door, a foul liquid stink pouring out. Then the body uptilted and a mass of black grate-and-sewer rubbish eased slowly towards the bank, coming out like an enormous sausage, quicker by the second, until it dropped all in a rush and splayed over the grass at the bottom. “Watch your boots,” Agger snouted as he began scraping through it. “This stuff’ll burn ’em off.” He turned to Brian: “Don’t come near this ’eap, nipper. You’ll get fever and die if you do.”

Brian stood back as half a lavatory bowl cartwheeled down from a lorry-load of house-rammel. “Tek a piss in that, Agger,” the bowler shouted. It settled among petrol drums and Brian amused himself by throwing housebricks at it until both sides caved in. One of the men uncovered a length of army webbing: “Here’s some o’ your equipment from France, Agger”—throwing it like a snake at his feet.

Agger held it on the end of an inferior rake. “It ain’t mine, mate. I chucked all my equipment in the water on my way back”—put his foot on it and continued scraping. The stench made Brian heave: he ran up the bank holding his nose, and stopped to breathe from fifty yards off.

At twelve they straggled to the fire for a warm. All swore it looked like rain, some loading their sacks to go home, though Agger and most of the others stayed through the afternoon. Brian took out his bread, and Agger passed him a swig of cold tea. Jack Bird lay back to read a piece of newspaper: “Now’s your chance, Agger,” he said, lighting a lunch-time Woodbine. “What about joinin’ up for this war in Abyssinia?”

Agger reclined on a heap of shavings. “You on’y join up when they stop the dole and chuck us off these bleeding premises — when there’s nowt left to do but clamb.”

“They’ll never stop the dole,” Jack Bird said. “It’s more than they dare do.”

“It wouldn’t bother me, mate,” Agger rejoined, “because there’ll allus be tips, just like there’ll allus be an England. You can bet on that.”

Brian emptied pebbles from his left boot, shook the sock, and put it on again. Holes were visible, and when he pulled to tuck them under at the toe the gaps ripped wider. He doubled the long tongue of superfluous wool underfoot to keep stones from his flesh, careful at the same time to leave enough sock above the boot-rims to stop them chafing his ankles. It was a successful reshuffle of wool and leather, he found on standing to walk a few yards, bumpy underfoot, but there wasn’t far to go.

An empty tipscape stretched to the motorworks. Lorries wouldn’t be back till two, and he swivelled his head to view the building at the opposite far end of the tip, where corporation carts unloaded dustbin stuff into furnaces. Its high chimney sent up smoke as thick as an old tree trunk, a forest giant whose foliage flattened and dispersed against low cloud. The red-bricked edifice was far enough off to be slightly sinister in appearance, an impression added to by its name, the Sanitation Department, or Sann-eye, as the scrapers called it. A miniature railway had been laid towards the tip, where men wearing thick gloves worked all day pushing wagons of still hot cinders along its embankment, emptying them into the marsh on either side and forming another tongue of land which would eventually join up with that made by the lorries.

“Then they’ll make an aerodrome,” Brian speculated, “to bomb old houses like ourn was on Albion Yard.”

“To flatten the Germans, you mean,” a scrapper put in.

“They’ll build a factory,” Agger argued. “Or a jail. I’m not sure which they’ll need most by then.”

Along the high embankment by Sann-eye Brian saw his cousin Bert. Was it? He shaded his eyes and looked again. Yes, it was — walking towards the tippers’ camp — a long way off and coming slowly with hands in pockets, kicking the occasional half-burnt tin into the too-easy goal of waterpools below.

To meet him meant crossing the swamp by stepping-stones of grassy islands, and tin drums that had rolled from high levels. Brian’s feet were pushed well forward as he went through spongy grass towards the opposite ash bank, surprised that such a varicoloured collection of mildewed junk could meet in one place: half-submerged bedticks and ’steads, spokeless bicycle wheels without tyres sticking like rising suns out of black oily water, old boxes rotting away, a dinted uninhabited birdcage in front like a buoy at sea. Farther in the canal direction lay a dog-carcass sprawled half out of the water, its scabby grey pelt smoothed down by wind and rain. I’ll bet there’s rats whizzing round here at night, he thought, big rats with red eyes, and maybe cats with green ’uns. The pervading stench was of rotting diesel oil, as if countless foul dish-rags were soaked in suffocation and held under the surface. Patches lay on the surface like maps of gently rounded coasts, making whorls of blue and purple and greyish Inland, beautiful patterns that he now and again pelted with stones to see if they were real enough to stand explosions, but they merely let the stones through, and re-formed to a slightly different design.

He walked on, excited at swamp-roving, zigzagging from what he sensed were deeper scoops and gullies. His no-man’s-land was small, for he could still hear the sharp-voiced scrapers on the tip behind, and at the same time see Bert almost above him on the grey wall in front, a ragged-arsed sparrow calling out:

“Don’t come up: I’m coming down. I’ve got some chocolate ’ere”—patting his back pocket, walking to different parts of the slope before deciding which was freest of hot cinders. He waded through a pile of blue-shining burnt-out tins, stepped over ragged clinkers (like a cat on hot bricks, Brian thought), holding into the steep slope in case he should keel over and begin rolling. “Who gen yer the chocolate?”

Without looking up, Bert answered: “Nobody. I got it from a shop.” He disturbed a mass of tins and ash: “Never known anybody to gi’ me owt, ’ave yer?”—and an avalanche rolled into water, drops splashing against Brian: “Where did you get the dough from then?”

“Pinched it, if you want to know.” He walked to Brian and sat on a petrol drum: “I pinched this as well, from Doddoe’s pocket,” he added boastfully, drawing out a whole cigarette. “He’ll think our Dave done it, and paste ’im. And it’ll serve ’im right, because our Dave batted my tab last night, for nowt.”

Sandy-haired and pint-sized, one of the many kids broadcast from Doddoe’s loins, Bert’s fever-eyes and white face marked him a born survivor. He wore long trousers, a baggy cut-down pair of Dave’s. Like Brian, he had first lived in the bitter snows of March, was suckled under the white roof of a pullulating kitchen, then set free from everyone’s care because another kid was queuing up for air and milk behind. He pulled a match sharply against the drum and helped its flame to life in the cup of his dirt-worn adult hands. “I like a smoke now and again. It meks me feel good. I had a whole packet once all to myself and I stayed in the woods smoking ’em.”

“I tried it, but it nearly made me ’eave.”

“Not me. I’m nearly ten, see?” He drew a half-pound bar of chocolate from his back pocket: “Tek a bit. And break me a piece off as well.”

Brian ripped the blue paper away: “How did you pinch it?”

“Easy. A shop door was open. I stood outside to mek sure it was empty, then jumped across the doormat-bell, and slived my hand over the counter.” Brian passed him a double square: “Anybody see yer?”

“No. I was dead quiet. Had my slippers on. Look”—he held up his foot to show the rubber and canvas rags of what had once been one-and-fourpenny plimsolls, now like the relics of some long and fabulous retreat: “Quiet as a mouse. So don’t say a word to a livin’ soul. Not that I think you bleddy-well would,” he said, checking himself quickly. “You’re my best pal as well as my cousin, and I know I can trust yo’ more than anybody else in the world.”

“Did yer nick owt else?” Brian asked. (“Yer want ter stay away from that Bert,” his father said when the Doddoes had left to live up Sodom. “He’s a bleddy thief, and if yo’ get caught thievin’ wi’ ’im yer’ll get sent on board ship. So watch it, my lad, and ’ave nowt to do wi’ ’im.”)

“I don’t allus pinch stuff, yer know,” Bert said resentfully, as if he also had seen the pictures in Brian’s mind. “So don’t think I do.” He skimmed a piece of slate across the water: it ducked-and-draked and took his annoyance with it under the surface. “Want a puff? No? All the more for them as does then. I just saw this bar o’ chocolate, see, and went in to get it. That ain’t pinchin’, so don’t tell me it is. Break me a piece off then,” he asked, flipping his nub-end into a pool of water and laughing at the crack-shot sizzle. “We’ll scoff it up and see’f we can find owt on the tips.”

He led the way: “Watch that there; if you tread on it you’ll goo under. A pal o’ mine once got blood poisoning: cut his foot on an old tin can and they kept ’im in ’ospital six weeks. Wish it’d a bin me. He got marvellous grub. Ever bin inside Sann-eye?” he called back.

“No,” Brian admitted, “I ain’t.” He turned for a snapshot look: the massive building still in the distance, a row of windows top and bottom, less smoke travelling from its chimney.

“We’ll go in then later on, about five o’clock, when the men’s knocked off.” He pulled a bicycle wheel from the water and bowled it along with a piece of stick.

Brian asked questions: What about the nightwatchman? because he couldn’t imagine Sann-eye without one. He visualized the burning fires, oven-doors like a row of monsters’ mouths filled with flames instead of teeth, able to draw you in for devouring if you stood near too long. “That’s ’ospital,” said the voice of a girl who had taken him for walks not long after he had learned to walk.

“Nobody’s there. Fires is nearly cold by five. I went in last week with our Dave, up through the big winders. I’ll show yer.” The wheel swerved off the path and disappeared under a nest of bubbles. Bert threw the stick after to keep it company. It floated. They were almost at the escarpment. “I bet a good tip’ll come this afternoon,” he prophesied.

“We could do wi’ it,” Brian said. “But there ain’t much on tips today. I bin scraping since nine, and I on’y got a sack o’ wood.” Bert wanted to know where it was. “I sode it to Agger for a tanner.” Both were on hands and knees, making slow progress up the bank. “Yer got robbed,” Bert said. “He should a gen yer a shillin’.”

Brian was being called a fool: “It saved me carryin’ it ’ome. We’ve got plenty o’ wood anyway.” Bert relented, went on climbing: “Well, as long as you get your sack back.”

“Course I will,” Brian said. “What are you going to go for a rake, though?”

“Mek one. Flatten a piece o’ steel wi’ a brick.”

“It’ll break.”

“I s’ll look for summat else then.”

“I’d like a good rake,” Brian said. “I ’ave to mek a new ’un every day, as it is. After about six scrapes they break.”

“You need a steel ’un,” Bert told him.

“I know I do. I ain’t got one, though. The best rake I’ve seen is Agger’s. It’s got a proper ’andle. Most o’ the time he don’t use it an’ all.”

Bert reached out for what he thought was a piece of iron: slung it away when he saw it wasn’t. “Why?”

“It’s too good. He on’y uses it on loads where he might find good stuff. Most o’ the time he keeps it in his pram.”

“A rake’s no good if it ain’t used,” Bert reflected, as they came up on to the solid tips. He found a sack without too many holes, in which he put scraps deemed useful enough for home: an old kettle worn thin underneath that Dave would mend with a washer, a cup with no handle, dummy bars of chocolate for the kids to play with, a coagulated mass of boiled sweets to wash under the tap and eat, and a few choice pieces of fresh-smelling wood for the washday copper.

The scrapers were leaving the tips under a misty silence: a scuffle of boots could be heard kicking the fire out, and the tin shed — put up when it had looked like rain — fell with a satisfying clatter against the stones. “The rats don’t come out till it’s dark,” Bert said, which Brian was glad to hear. They walked without speaking, treading quietly through sedge, water seeping into all four shoes if they didn’t go forward quickly enough. Topping the precipice of tins and clinkers, Sann-eye looked empty and locked up for the night, its chimney cold and unsmoking, frail almost against heavy clouds, as if it had to bear an unfair weight and couldn’t for much longer.

Brian noticed Bert limping, remembered him walking with a strange motion ever since leaving the tips. Must have a stone in his shoe — yet it didn’t quite look like that. He’s acting daft, I suppose. Still, he himself had often simulated a painful limp when on Goose Fair, asking people for pennies because he was hungry. It was an old and secret joke between them: “I want some money, missis, because my crutches are in pawnshop and I can’t afford to get ’em out. No, I didn’t pawn ’em. Dad did. He was short for a packet o’ Woodbines. I tried to stop ’im but he knocked me down, and I couldn’t chase him because he’d snatched my crutches. Mam tried to get him as he was going through the yard, but he hit her with one of the crutches as well. So it’s ever so painful to walk without ’em, missis, honest it is. They’re in pawn for a bob, and I only want another twopence to mek it up. Thank you, missis, ever so much.”

And sometimes when that inner urge to beg was far away, they might limp because they felt like it. Brian often did so when alone, to look different from other people due to his uppity-down progress along the pavement, and also to make himself the object of sympathy to passers-by. After a while he’d realize he didn’t know whether or not they felt sorrow because it was never shown, so he changed his antics to a self-made interior tune whistled for his own benefit only. Like sometimes you thought people might at last feel sorry if you died, but you knew you’d never be able to see it, so it wasn’t worth it anyway.

He was going to ask about the limp, when Bert said: “This is where we goo up. I’ll nip first and yo’ can foller.” At the top he gave the sack to Brian, stared hard at the wall for a second. Then the patch of neat cemented bricks turned into an all-powerful magnet, for he shot across the few-foot gap at great speed, and was pressed like a flat frog against its vertical surface. His two hands clawed their way on the window ledge, and with one heave he was up.

Brian saw a distinct hollow in the wall on which to grip, so that he, too, after throwing up the sack, was all of a sudden flattened against the bricks, aware of his boots sixty feet free above the ground. Heavier rainspots tapped coldly against his hands. “You’d better come up quick before you get drowned,” Bert advised.

His feet, like swinging pieces of iron — one of which felt dangerously heavier than the other — also found ledges. It was a fight to steady himself, and he stopped breathing to do so, pushing each finger as far as it would go into the ledge to strengthen his grip for the pull-up. He heaved, and began to lift slowly. At the same time his fingers dragged back, as if the rainspots that had fallen on to the ledge were grease instead of water. Before they could snap off and send him whistling like a bomb into the ground, he lunged forward with his elbows, swung his body at the top shelf of stone, and landed in a sitting position. “Yo’ needed all day to do that bit of a job.”

“I didn’t tek as long as yo’ did,” Brian retorted. He looked back over swamp and tips, railway and distant factories, with not a living soul in sight, then turned to see a six-foot drop within the Sann-eye: mountains of dustbin rubbish ready for burning after the weekend, tins and boxes and cinders stretching in waves away from the wall to form an escarpment at the dozen doors of the cooling stoves. Dim light came in through high arched windows all around the great interior, and such vastness seen from the ledge he stood on made it seem like the inside of a church — except perhaps for the stuff of every dustbin piled below.

The oven-doors had been bolted and shutter-drawn; they looked harmless, not like monsters’ mouths any more but corpse-grey and a bit ghostly, sinister in their temporary inaction. The only remaining signs of heat were mixed with warm ash and a nose-cutting smell like that of old vegetables and fish. Something moved in the rubbish. “A cat: they get the biggest feed of their lives here.” Bert’s gruff voice echoed around the space still left between rubbish and ceiling.

“I’m off,” he said. He jumped a yard out from the window-sill and dropped into the rubbish, almost out of sight as his feet went in. “It’s like landin’ on a feather-bed,” he yelled. Brian held his nose and took a clumsy flying leap.

The height, twice his own, looked immense, but was reduced to nothing by the crash that pulled at his legs like an electric shock and rolled him sideways a bit too soon after the leap. Shuddering, he tried to get up, but couldn’t until Bert pushed a hand out and jerked him to where it was less spongy underfoot. “It’s like sinkin’-sands, if you ask me,” Bert said. A cold herring wriggled from his face. The green eyes of an angry cat speared him, outraged at the cheek of his intrusion. It’s trespassing in here, he thought. We’ll get sent off if a bloke comes in: there’s nowt worth pinching anyway, so what’s the bleeding odds? We should ’ave gone off and spent my tanner. He sat to look back at where he’d hit the rubbish and, peering through the grey of the foreclosing afternoon, used a few seconds to discover what it was piled in heaps and taking up nearly half of the whole Sann-eye. Herrings and mackerel and bloaters, he’d never seen so many, not even on the pictures when it showed you big steamboats bobbing around Newfoundland and pulling in netfuls. Where did they all come from? “I don’t know,” Bert said. “I expect it’s all rotten, though.”

“It don’t smell rotten.”

“You can bet it is anyway.”

“What about taking some home?” Brian said. “We can fry it for supper.”

“You can’t; it stinks like boggery.” Bert seemed certain, so Brian was ready to take his older word for it, except for: “It don’t smell all that bad.”

“It wouldn’t be ’ere if it worn’t, would it?” Bert retorted. “Use your loaf.”

“I’m using my bleddy loaf. Look, the cat’s eating it.” He picked up a fish and smelt it, opened its mouth, turned its tail. “It looks all right to me.” Bert was alrealy in another corner, scraping through more varied heaps. “Fish shops chucked it ’ere,” he called back.

“I’ve never seen this much fish in fifty fish shops.” He threw the herring back on the pile. “I suppose lorries brought ’em?” Bert said they must have. A huge black cat ran from a window, took a fish in its mouth, climbed out. Other cats were round about, fixed in the windows like bats or owls, bloated with food, hoping for enough appetite to make another dive. Some moaned like babies in the dusk, unable to move, too loaded to live, dazed at the shock of an easy life, as if filled with a nagging fear that they would never recover from it.

“I suppose they threw it away at the shops ’cause they couldn’t sell it? It’s old stock; like them tuffeys you find on tips.”

“Why don’t yer forget about that bleedin’ fish?” Bert said. “You’re getting on my nerves. Come over ’ere to look for summat good.” There was boat-loads on it, enough to feed thousands: you could roast ’em over fires or fry ’em in pans, and fill your guts for a year of teas and suppers, as long as it didn’t mek yer sick. “Bollocks,” he shouted to Bert, making his way on all fours over tin cans and ashes towards him.

“They’ve nearly orluss got this much fish in.” Bert was too absorbed to slam back. “It’s bad, though.” He tore into a wall of rubbish, and Brian had never seen him use a rake with such skill. Tin cans, bottles, cardboard boxes, orange peel, and solidified masses of unnameable parts were burrowed into, while objects of doubt were hooked up to the failing light: either jettisoned or laid aside on the sackbag.

Brian looked closer to see how such quick raking came about. “That’s a strong rake you’ve got. Did you find it ’ere?”

“On tips. It was under a load of old swarf from the Raleigh.” With a boastful gesture and a satisfied grin he held it up, meaning him only to glimpse it before bending to work again.

“I’ll believe you when I see it,” Brian said, already suspecting. The rake swung, so he grabbed out and pulled it close, which brought a laugh: “What did you think I was limpin’ all the way from the tips for? I couldn’t let anybody see it, could I?”

“That’s ’is best rake. He’ll be lost wi’out it.” Brian cried indignantly: “You rotton sod. Fancy doin’ a thing like that.”

Bert tried denying it, in fun as much as hope of belief. “It worn’t Agger’s. It was somebody else’s. Honest. Cross my ’eart and cut my throat if I tell a lie.”

“I don’t believe yer. I know Agger’s rake when I see it. I’m not blind.” Bert gave up his act of innocence and turned on him: “What if it is? Agger found it, di’n’t ’e? He di’n’t pay for it, did he? We needed one, di’n’t we?”

Brian admitted the truth of this barrage. “You still didn’t need to nick it.”

“I didn’t. I found it in his sackbag. Anyway, our Brian, when I took it I seed ’e’d got about ten more. He finds plenty o’ new ’uns every day. Or else p’raps he nicks ’em like I did.”

Maybe he does at that, Brian thought, and became absorbed in Bert, who seemed to be carving a grotto from the bank of rubbish. He stayed back while the dextrous excavation went on, on all kinds of domestic residue landing not far from his feet. He’ll get through to the wall soon by the look on it. That’s what came of nicking such a good rake: it worked like a machine, some sort of field thresher they often have near the Nook in summer.

A tunnel opened so that Bert was half hidden. What’s he trying to find? I’ll go in soon to see what it’s like under all that rammel. Maybe he wain’t let me. Course he will: he’s my cousin. My pal as well. Our birthdays are nearly the same. A large tin from the top of the mountain rolled menacingly towards him, and the instinct to kick it out of the way was curbed by a thought that it wouldn’t be safe to do so. Bert, adaptable and quick, capable of looking after himself, came from a long line of colliers, and cocked his ear as if he’d heard some mythical splitting of pit-props far down in his soul. Another tin rolled, followed by jars, bottles, and wet paper, until Brian saw the whole mountain sway like an earthquake. A cat ran across the top to forage at the fish beyond, its green eyes looking momentarily to one side as if its light feet were causing the subsidence.

Bert jumped to safety while Brian was distracted by the cat. The collapse was almost soundless. Hundredweights of rubble settled back into place, and Bert was out of range, rolling down the bank, shouts and laughter chasing around the high ceiling. Brian leapt clear, disappointed that Bert’s monument had been squashed out of existence. “That was good sport, our Brian”—Bert brushed ash from his clothes. “It didn’t get me, though.”

His hands were empty, black, and scratched, an unbleeding cut between the first and index fingers. “Where is it?” he demanded of Brian in a warlike way.

“Where’s what? What yer talking about?” Bert looked around, felt in pockets — but only knew the rake was lost when convulsed by a bout of swearing that shrunk his world to a black and thwarted brain. Brian looked at the flattened hill of refuse. It would take all night to delve: “I’ll help you.”

Bert could neither get over it nor act. “A rake like that,” he kept saying. “Would you believe it? A rake like that. Agger’s best ’un.”

“It’ll get shoved in the ovens with all that other stuff right enough.”

“I know it will.” There were tears between Bert’s curses. “I’m daft. I’m batchy. Nicked it and carried it right across the bleeding tips. For nowt. For bleeding nowt.”

Brian turned away, because four loud words hammered against the inside of his head — trying to get out. But he couldn’t say it, except to himself, and even then he felt treacherous, as well as foolish. “God paid him out,” they said. “God paid him out for nicking Agger’s best rake.” There ain’t no God. God is a bastard, his father had often roared in response to his mother’s taunt that God would pay him out as well. So maybe there is one. He scraped at the wall of refuse with a piece of stick while Bert sullenly loaded his sack.

And ’appen there ain’t, because where will poor owd Agger be tomorrow when he finds his rake missing? He’ll goo off ’is nut, ’aving to use old ’uns that break easy, and not getting such good stuff to sell. Maybe he’ll think I nicked it. I’d better not go back for a while in case he does. What a bleeding look-out! Where’ll I get wood for the fire? All through our Bert, the loony bastard. And then he went and lost it. I’m sorry for Agger, though, I am. I’m sorry for ’im. Out o’ wok and living off the tips. I don’t know. Nowt but an overcoat and an old pram to his name; and not even his posh rake any more. I’m fed up, I am. God-all-bleedin’-mighty, I’m fed up.

They climbed through the window, too morose to think of safety during the high drop on to the path. “I’m ’ungry,” Bert grumbled, trudging alone. “I ain’t ’ad a bit t’eat since that chocolate.”

A straight road led from Sann-eye to the bright flares of Wollaton Road. Lorries, cars, buses were crotchets along bars of music, drumrolls as they roared by in the distance, loud and frequent because people were going home from work. “I don’t suppose there’ll be any snap at our house,” Brian said, “and that’s a fact.”

“Nor at ourn, either.”

There was a smell of spring, a lightness of moss and grass and fresh nettles that stung their legs when they went too far into the hedge. Westwards the sky had reddened, as if a nightwatchman behind the clouds had lit his fire for the night, sitting there to keep out intruders from what paradise lay beyond; and a glow from it was cast against the sheer grey-plated walls of looming gasometers, making them seem taller as they walked by. Brian felt in his pocket: “I’ve still got that tanner Agger gen me for the wood, so we can get summat to eat. We’ll buy some Nelson Squares and crisps, and stuff our guts on that.”

“Marvellous,” Bert said, putting his arm around Brian’s shoulders, and they walked more quickly.

CHAPTER 6

Brian watched two pigs near the coal heap, nibbling black bits from under the dust. “Grandad, why are the pigs eating coal?”

Merton was mixing bran in a tub near the copperhouse door. “Because they’ve got nowt better to do, Nimrod.”

Brian thought he wasn’t getting the whole story. “Is it because they’re hungry?”

“Pigs is allus ’ungry.”

“But they eat bran, and taters wi’-their-jackets-on.” Merton stirred the soggy mess with a steel scoop. “Ay, they’d eat owt. They’d eat yo’, yer cheeky young bogger, if I served yer up in their trough!” He turned his back on questions and emptied a sack of potatoes into the tub. Brian saw Uncle George wheeling his bike up the path, a tall thin man wearing a cap, a wavy-haired god who worked at the Raleigh.

“Where yer bin, Uncle George?”

“To t’football match.”

“What for?” he asked, thinking: to play, or watch?

“Don’t ask questions,” George told him, putting his bike in the shed, “then you’ll ’ave no lies towd yer!”

With a laugh he followed him into the kitchen, where his grandmother was mixing flour for cakes and bread. “Did yer see owt on the placards?”

George bent to pull off his cycle clips, then looked up with them in his hand. “They’ve captured Addis Ababa. It looks like the Abyssinians is finished.”

His mother tut-tutted in sympathy. “Aren’t them Italians rotters? Fancy gassin’ poor black people as ’ave never done anybody any ’arm.”

“They reckon they were fightin’ wi’ umbrella sticks against machine-guns,” George said.

“Them Italians’ll suffer one day,” she prophesied, spreading jam over a flat sheet of paste. Brian listened with such interest that he unknowingly screwed a button off his shirt. “Now look what yer’ve done!” she cried. “Fancy piggling a button off like that.” He was given the jamjar and spoon, and after scraping sucking licking came the prelude to further questioning:

“Gra’ma?”

“What?”

“Who won the war?”

“Which one?”

He was puzzled. “The war.”

“The last war, do you mean?”

He stood, not knowing what to say, not wanting to be fobbed off with any war. “Was the last war the one where Uncle Oliver was killed?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“Well, who won that war then?”

“Nobody,” she said, taking the sticky jamjar from him. “Now go and wash your ’ands, there’s a good lad.” He walked to the sink, puzzled. For how could nobody win a war? Nobody ever answered his questions, he brooded. Nobody. Nobody wasn’t a word, it was a trick. There couldn’t be a war without somebody winning it. Somebody won; somebody lost. That’s how it was. And, washing hands and face from a bowl that his grandmother filled, he could hear them still talking about the war in Abyssinia.

Doddoe’s spirit passed to his children. Merton saw them once, a straggle-lined caravan coming over the Cherry Orchard, bearing misshapen apple-bosoms grown during a foray into someone’s garden. They kept well clear of his waving stick, knowing who he was and fearing him for that reason. The close-browed demon of bull-Doddoe seemed more desperate in his offspring due to the fact that they often had to find their own food, which meant putting themselves in the way of fences to be climbed, palings and barbed wire having good enough reason for being there: apples, potatoes, cabbages, or perhaps even more luxurious stores.

Sometimes a brace of them visited the Nook, hoping Merton was still at the pit. Mary would bring a jam pasty or piece of bread to the door, making them divide it fairly before they went away, which they did quickly, fearing the sudden expostulating wrath of Merton, regarded as more terrible than that of their father because they were less familiar with it.

While the Doddoes were discouraged from the Nook, Vera’s children were welcomed. For some reason Harold Seaton’s reputation had grown in Merton’s eyes; he was now considered a quiet sort of man who thought a lot of his family and looked after them as best he could, worked hard when there was work to be had, and didn’t throw his wages away on ale while his children marauded for what they could lay their thieving hands on — like the Doddoe tribe, for instance.

On the far side of Cherry Orchard, under the clouds of cloud and trees at the edge of Serpent Wood, were two farm-labourers’ cottages, and Brian was acquainted with only a fraction of the children who spewed occasionally from the doors of both. On Saturday he walked over the open roughs, mesmerized by the long dark strip of forest crossing his horizon, drawn to it more than to the pair of cottages and often mapping it with an explorer’s mind — though rarely going to open country beyond.

A gaggle of girls rose out of a hollow, wearing similar pink frocks and holding up hands made of daisies and buttercups. They came towards him, but stopped at an intervening patch of flowers to kneel and pick them. Brian went closer, paused. One of the girls looked up and said:

“Hello.”

He felt uneasy, thrust hands deep into pockets, dug holes in the turf with his shoecaps. “Hello,” he responded.

“You live at the Mertons’, don’t you?” she said knowingly.

“How do you know?”

“We’ve seen you playing in the yard when we’ve walked past, haven’t we, Fanny? Our Alma’s towd us about you, as well.”

“I’ll help you to pick some flowers,” he said.

She didn’t like his manner, because he hadn’t asked. “If you like. You ’elp our Fanny, ’cause I’ve got a lot already.”

Fanny turned shy, but he ripped up handfuls from the moist grass, throwing them into a heap for her to sort out. “Do you want any clover? I know where there’s a lot.”

“No,” Brenda replied, “I don’t like clover. Fanny don’t either.”

“Hey, our Brenda,” Fanny shouted from a hundred yards. She was all flowers now, yellow and white, a walking cornstack with arms and pockets full. “Let’s go and get some bluebells. I know where there’s ’undreds in our wood.”

Brenda pointed to a distant hedge, and nodded. “We’ll shout Ken and John first.” Cupping hands over her mouth she screamed: “Our Ken! We’re goin’ ter get sum bluebells. Cum on!”

The boys were running up and down over the hollows. “What’s your name then?” Brenda asked. He told her, grudgingly. “Brian Merton?”

“No, Seaton. I don’t live at the Mertons’, I on’y go up there when I’m not at school.”

He was astonished, almost angry, at how much Brenda knew of him: “I knew you didn’t live at the Mertons’. He’s your grandad, ain’t he? I know your grandad, and your gra’ma because sometimes they go out with our mam and dad and the Lakers into Wood’uss, boozing.” They walked towards Ken and John near the cottages. “Your grandad sometimes goes shootin’ and I saw him at the Farm Show last year. Once, when you wasn’t there, I went an errand for him into Woodhouse, and Fanny went with me, didn’t you, Fanny?”

The mute Fanny walking by their side managed a muted affirmative. “He sent us to fetch some fags and a pint of ale.”

The boys came up. “You don’t go to our school, do you,” said Ken Arlington, a statement, not a question.

“I go to one in Nottingham,” Brian said.

“Ours is a rotten school,” Brenda complained. “Miss Barber allus gives us the strap.”

Ken pushed her in the back. “That’s because you’re cheeky.”

“I’m not cheeky,” she shouted.

“Yes, you are. I heard you chelping her off when I walked by your class window one day carrying a case of milk bottles. No wonder you get the strap every day.”

“You’re a liar,” Brenda screamed. “You tell big fibs.”

“I’ll paste yo’,” Ken said, “if you call me a liar.”

“I’ll tell your mam if you do”—which she knew would put a stop to his threats.

“Coward,” he grumbled. At the cottages Brian was fascinated by the waterpump in the Lakers’ backyard. “We don’t have one of them,” he said to Brenda. “We’ve got a well instead.”

“It’s better having a pump,” she claimed.

“Can I have a go on it?”

“No,” she said in a righteous and holy voice, “you mustn’t. It’d be wastin’ water.” They stood aside when Mr. Laker came out of the door carrying a white enamel bowl. A few vigorous ups and downs sent water belching from the iron spour, flooding the bowl he held beneath. “Gerroff an’ play, kidders,” he said. His short hair stuck out like chaff, went suddenly limp under a sluice of water.

Brian set off across the Cherry Orchard. A few hundred yards from the houses he sat down and took out a packet of cigarette-cards: flowers, sorting them into seasons.

Brenda appeared, and he gathered them back into his pocket. “I’ve found some primroses,” she announced, falling beside him. “In the wood.”

“I don’t care.”

“You would if you found them,” she taunted.

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“Yes, you would.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” he repeated, “because I don’t like primroses. They mek me sick.”

“No, they don’t. Yes, they do.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do,” she went on with stark uncompromising persistence, almost crying. He turned away. “No, I don’t like them.”

“I’ll bash yer,” she cried, her face red with rage.

“I’ll bash yer back,” he said.

She stood up. “Well, if you don’t like primroses you’re daft, ’cause anybody who don’t like primroses is daft.”

Deadlock. They looked at each other with blank faces.

Then she said: “I love yo’, Brian.”

He was baffled. Love? His mam and dad loved each other: black eyes, split heads, table tipped over, black looks, and no fags for ever and ever. His teacher said that God loved everybody: Italians gassing blackies and mowing ’em down with machine-guns: dole, thunderstorms, school. That picture in his gra’ma’s parlour was about love.

They looked at each other.

“What have we got to do?” he asked.

She glared at him, angry again. “If you don’t like primroses, you’re daft”—and ran back towards the wood.

He gazed across the Cherry Orchard, the Nook chimneys just visible over bushes and trees. Wind bent back the longer patches of grass, and thick clouds lay across the sky. Far away, along Colliers Pad, a man was riding on a bicycle, his figure flickering through gaps in the bushes.

He advanced, but behind outposts. The Cherry Orchard was vast, remote, unfenced, a continental mile from house to house, treeless scrub and rise and dip breaking its green surface against the pillars and towers of Serpent Wood. It stained his unwary slippers or shoes with the juice of cowslip and celandine, hid him, exposed him, made him tired after a while, frightened him, but lured him on, into the wood where each leaf was alive and each stepped-on twig exploded through his vibrant nerves. By the stream bank he pulled smooth pebbles from the sand, loaded his pockets before passing between bushes and tall trunks, sometimes stopping to find a toadstool or an already rifled nest, or to skim his ammunition at a quick unhittable bird.

He crept under a fallen tree. In the wood’s centre, from where no fields could be seen and no sound heard except himself, he pulled his body into the lowest fork of a many-pronged tree, bark dust marking knees and hands, twig stumps scraping his groin as he went up. In a sitting position bushes were surveyed from above while many treetops were at eye-level: green humps and bracken dips of the jungle, his refuge from the punctuating black gulfs of school year and home-life that didn’t bear thinking about at times like these. Sounds came to him, the stream running, a cuckoo’s rhythmic and fluting whistle, a mooing cow from some bordering field. Primroses grew to each side of the track, and where the stream turned into a morass, tree spaces were flecked with bluebells. It was a wet wood after a long winter, soil and fungus smells weighing heavily on the air, though sun in more open spaces had turned the soil a drier colour.

Brian put both hands to his mouth and made a Tarzan call, the mere shadow of an incompetent warbling scream flitting through the trees, to a swift and against the unbridgeable obstacle of distance. He listened to it dying, waited for silence, then shouted what many swear-words he knew, using all the air his lungs could muster to send them far away. He paused between each word until its echo was about to fade, then he let go with another explosive monosyllable, hands cupped in a message to which no answer was expected. When he grew tired of the game he leapt down and set out for midday dinner at the Nook.

In the quiet afternoon he leaned over the pigsty gate, tapping the pink-white pigs with a piece of stick as they gathered at the trough on feeling a human being near. When they grew tired and wandered away he shook the gate latch to see how quickly they would converge again on the trough, and was astonished at the squeals sent forth in protest at his taps. His grandmother called that he was to stop tormenting them, talked for ten minutes about cruelty to dumb animals, saying that God would put him in a big fire when he died, if he wasn’t careful: and as he walked into the garden behind the house, ashamed at having been caught, he imagined a mighty hand catching him up and flinging him into an enormous heap of burning embers. But then he doubled back from this scene of horror, and pictured a skilful escape before events led so far.

Cats made less noise. He sat on a bench under a wooden awning when one came stalking tail up between potatoes, grey-black and mustard and yellow, round face turning left and right to box a white butterfly, then coming for Brian’s held-out hand. It had grown fat and trusting on a surfeit of cornfield and copperhouse rats, rubbed its flank against him and allowed itself to be lifted to his knees.

When it purred and rattled at its new-found nest, Brian’s knees opened and let it fall. Before it could amble away, he laid it again in the groove between his closed thighs. The cat liked it but, having lost self-confidence and being afraid to purr, preferred to leap down and find a warm patch of soil in the sun. Brian’s hands caught it in mid-air and brought it back.

A few minutes’ stroking of smooth fur raised the rattles of its purring again; then his knees moved a fraction, and the purring stopped abruptly. He knew when an escape was coming because the cat’s back legs stiffened, whereat his arms grew ready to snap out and bring it back.

It took longer to soothe it this time, but Sunday afternoon was endless. His hands played slowly, rhythmically along the length of its soft flanks, backwards and forwards, from the top of its leonine head to the base of its tail, up and down, from the side of its mouth to behind its neck and above the hardly felt ridge of its comfortable backbone, until it purred as loud as if its throat were clogged with marbles.

He prodded it from behind. The indications of its pleasure ceased, but returned after a few seconds in which it sensed that the prod had been nothing more than an accident of nature which had gone away quickly and would probably not return. It did. Annoyed, it leapt from Brian’s knees, but his hand shot out and set it firmly and with some roughness where it had been.

The tail, upright with righteous wrath, waved before his eyes. He took the end and held it still, feeling the force of it trying to free itself and continue its angry swaying. Letting it go, it swung completely to one side. When the back legs stiffened, his hands hovered above the cat’s neck, and as it sprang, a hard grip descended.

It realized eventually that there was no real need to escape, that if it stayed still on the warm knees no harm would come. But the controlling demon of Brian — felt dimly by the cat between escapes — grew tired of waiting for a next attempt, and prodded with such force that it was almost clear before being snatched by hovering hands. Each time it thought to abandon its prison there was an unmistakable warning, but the interval between the jerk in its back legs and the sight of its body in mid-air grew shorter, until the warning jerk became so faint that Brian’s heart almost stopped in an effort to stay aware of it.

Bored, he decided to let it free on the next sally, but the sight of the cat leaping to freedom was too much, and before it could scatter its four legs among holes and furrows, he had set it firmly down again on his knees.

He made a low fence around it with his arms, a tempting barrier that was hardly noticed; it stayed where it was, belly stiffened with rage, eyes staring, tail waving back and forth like the electrical-contact mast of a dodgem-car. Instead of bounding forward, it swung away to the side, under his hand, to the nearest bush. Brian threw himself down, held nothing but its tail end. The cat howled a slow threat, urged its strong body away from what millstone had caught it, from the vice closing tighter and tighter the more it heaved. Brian looked at the straining back, at fur-marks of black and grey and mustard yellow mixed in, at the ears trying to twitch, at the head bent forward like a bull’s.

The long tail relaxed. A mass of sharp needles ran along the soft fleshy inside of his arm, leaving pale white indentations the size of small fishbones magically turning red.

But he didn’t let go. He picked up the cat with both hands so that he was helpless, cuffed it twice about the head, and threw it to the middle of the garden. With a scuffle of orientation it hit the soil, skidded towards the hedge, and was free.

He dabbed at his bleeding arm with a black handkerchief, walking slowly to the house. His grandmother turned from the fire: “What have you gone and done now, you silly lad?”

“I fell into a bush,” he told her.

She busied herself in a drawer for clean linen to bind it. “I don’t know, getting scratched like that. I’ll bet you was after bird nests. You’ll get sent on board ship if a policeman catches you at it, you will and all.”

Lydia promised him a trip to the Empire. She was a stout, good-looking thirty-five and still unmarried, and was making sure, so Brian had heard his mother say, of a good time before settling down. The man courting her, though, was grey-haired and thin-faced, and sent Brian running errands to a dozen different places every time he came to the Nook for an afternoon. He had consumption, Lydia said. (“She’ll never get it, and that’s a fact,” Vera remarked, when discussing the case with Seaton.) “What’s consumption?” Brian asked, when Lydia was getting ready.

“Mek sure an’ wash yer tabs out. It’s a disease,” she informed him, taking the flannel and rubbing his ears violently, which he resented and struggled to evade. “When yer badly an’ wain’t get better.”

“Do they tek everybody away then when they’ve got consumption?”

“Ay,” she said, “they do. If you don’t make haste, we’ll be late and then Tom’ll be mad.”

It was raining, and the muddy lane was darkened by wet hedges like rows of steaming camels on either bank. Lydia clutched his hand as they walked with heads bent: it was his first time to the Empire, and everyone spoke of it as a marvel, something more grandiose than the Great War, as legendary and surprising as the wooden horse of Troy. Well scrubbed, and dressed in a new coat, he was aware of being taken to somewhere posh and rare. “What’s going to be on?”

She pulled him along: “Singing and dancing, and people who mek you laugh.”

“Cowboys and Indians?”

“No, not tonight.”

“Aren’t there any lions and tigers and snakes?”

“Them’s in a circus,” she said. “Besides, you don’t want to see such nasty things. They bite you.”

He had been so certain of seeing unique and astonishing scenes that he hadn’t bothered before this to question it; and now his wide-open ever-deepening stage had shrunk to a few lights shining on a woman singing at one end and a man trying to make people laugh at the other. He bit his lip in anger: had he been forced to get washed for that?

When they got off the bus in Nottingham the rain had lifted and the world changed. Slab Square rose up and greeted him on the forehead when he tripped, leaving a mound soon forgotten in the well-lit confusion. The dull sky seemed to be held at bay by barking newspaper sellers who thrust folded Posts at Lydia as they went across the square. Though he was big enough for his age, she dragged him through crowds like a dog on a lead, mixing him with traffic while his eyes were elsewhere: in dazzling windows, on the highlighted cabs of advancing buses, on faces crowding their reflected images in the wet pools before his feet. A sonorous booming of the great council-house clock ruled over the tinselled darkness for eight long beats, drowning voices and motor-horns, leaving only a smouldering smell of petrol until the world opened again after the collapse of the final gong. “Come on,” she tugged, “what are you counting them for? It’s eight o’clock and if we don’t ’urry we’ll keep Tom waiting.”

Tom already had the tickets, had got them half an hour ago, he said, and been for a drink to the Peach Tree rather than stand in the rain. Brian thought of him as old, dressed in a white muffler and good topcoat, hair well-combed with brilliantine, tall and delicate and never saying boo to a goose — a phrase he’d heard his grandfather use about him. Merton found him easy to tolerate, even had a certain respect for his gentleness. He’d been a bit of a lad though once, Lydia said with some pride — though in lieu of this, consumption had given him dignity. Tom had worked twenty years in the tobacco factory, and it was assumed that dust had caused his consumption so that the union made sure he had the wherewithal to maintain himself. Though in one way he appeared as strong as any other man, in another he seemed hardly to exist, walking on the world’s rim as if ready to shake hands and say goodbye to it at a week’s notice. He was in the rare position of a man regarded as dying on his feet, yet was looked upon by others with as much respect as if he had in some way proved himself a scholar, though as far as Brian knew he never read anything but newspapers.

Time went quickly. Brian kept his eyes on the stalls clock, hardly laughed at what the funny men said, though he was amused when they fell about the stage. He liked the man with the seal best because it barked and flapped its feet when everybody clapped. The only thing he didn’t like while fixed in his plush seat was the cigar smoke, and he felt sick until lost at what was happening on the stage. But the swirl of glaring colours clouted his brain and stupefied his ears with the music’s tuneful and furious beating. His eyes stared when women danced across the stage in something that looked like a bathing costume, and pushed out even harder when someone came from the wings in what looked like nothing at all.

At the interval Tom and Lydia smoked cigarettes, something Lydia never dared do in the house. She opened the packet and folded back the silver-paper with deliberate pleasure, handing the cigarette-card to Brian. When the ice-cream woman came down the gangway she said, feeling for her purse: “Get three tupp’ny cups, Brian, there’s a good lad.”

Tom pushed a shilling into his hand, and he struggled against solid-tree-trunk legs along the row, elbowed his way up the blocked gangway. Many people stood talking, and he waited in an ice-cream queue for the freezing cardboard cups and wooden spoons, novelties he had never seen in such pristine condition, had seen only crushed and mud-marked underfoot. He was reading the words on each when the lights dimmed for the second half.

Curtains opened, and a flourish of oriental music was driven out from the orchestra as if at the crack of a whip. Brian guided himself down the gangway, looking along each darkening row for Lydia and Tom, and keeping an eye turned on the stage so as to miss nothing. A black-faced lady in flowing robes appeared from the proscenium, greeted by arabesques of eastern music. Brian stared at her elaborate robes and turbanned headdress, at the silks and satins covering her figure with such neatness, was even more entranced at her sudden strange wailing. “Hey,” he called, a few yards from his seat, “Aunt Lydia, is she the Abyssinian queen?”

“She must be,” came some answer.

“That’s a good ’un.”

“She does look like it, and all.”

“I never thought of it myself.” Remarks flitted among the laughter, and Lydia pulled him into his seat, convulsed herself. Brian peeled the top from his ice-cream, eyes still on the stage, half believing himself to be in Abyssinia except when he turned to see the red-framed figures change as the curtains swung to for a new act.

The bus made him feel sick on the way back so Lydia and Tom got out to walk. “The trams never used to mek people badly,” she remarked. “But these new trolley-buses is terrible.” They didn’t mind the walk: it was fresh and without rain, and Brian saw a million stars when he looked up, like luminous breadcrumbs on some mighty tablecloth. Lydia and Tom stopped at a pub, left him outside while they had a couple at the saloon bar, and they came out after half an hour, Lydia bending with beer-smelling breath to give him a packet of crisps. They turned down the dark road, passed the fire of a nightwatchman’s hut where new drains were being laid.

“Uncle Tom,” he asked, “is Abyssinia a long way away?”

“Yes,” he told him, laughing, “ever such a long way.”

“How far?”

“Thousands o’ miles.”

“I’d like to go there.”

“You will some day.”

“I want to go soon.”

“Them black people’ll eat you if you do,” Lydia said.

“No, they wain’t. I’ll ’ave a gun like they ’ave on’t pictures. Anyway, Paul Robeson’s Abyssinian and ’e don’t eat people.”

“That’s a good ’un!” Tom said.

Houses were left behind and they walked through the long tunnel of the railway bridge, where Lydia was always afraid with or without Tom’s company. “Come on,” she snapped to him, “don’t tread in them puddles o’ water, you’ll get your socks all wet.”

“I’d like to go to Abyssinia,” he said. “I want to goo a long way.”

“I wish you’d stop talking about Abyssinia,” she complained. “You’re getting on my nerves.”

They walked for a time in silence. “I’m going to draw a map when I get home, Aunt Lyddy.”

“You don’t know how to draw maps,” she said, easier in her mind now that they were near the Nook.

“I do; it’s easy.”

“That’s the first thing I knew.”

“We do ’em at school,” he persisted. “I like making maps up.”

Tom said he wouldn’t go in with her, and they drew together by the hedge in what looked like a more desperate combat than that which was supposed to have taken place between St. George and the Dragon. After a few minutes Tom went into the blackness of the lane, and Lydia opened the gate so that she and Brian could go into the lighted house.

CHAPTER 7

Ada, by marrying Doddoe, had unwittingly outlawed her children from the Nook. Doddoe was a “bad lot,” Merton swore, a foul-mouthed drunken bully beyond the railings of reason or help or pity. His son-in-law would have laughed and agreed arrogantly with the truth of these random verdicts if Merton had said them to his face — which he hadn’t bothered to do, though Merton’s fiery stick-brandishing ostracism was nevertheless known.

Doddoe had an inside demon whose existence he was unable to acknowledge, a figure pictured by a friendly yet untrustworthy grin on Doddoe’s actual face, that pulled the strings of his recklessness in the most haphazard seesaw fashion. Harold Seaton didn’t like him, having frequently been put out when associated with Doddoe’s misadventures, and nothing made Seaton more black-dog depressive than to be put out by something. There was the time when the pair of them collected all the spare underwear their wives possessed and pawned it for the pleasure of a pint and a seat at the pictures. In retaliation Ada had laid hands on Doddoe’s Sunday boots and pawned them, for four shillings, which she shared with Vera because neither had any food to put on the table. But these were minor tribulations of Ada’s misery. Doddoe once blacked her eye before going to work, and returned after a prodigious stint of overtime in the evening to see not a limb of kid nor stick of furniture left in the house, whence it was his turn to roar all night like a stabbed bull in his misery. A month later they were back together again, and there seemed no denying on the night of the reunion that both kids and grown-ups liked it better that way.

Few people were fond of Doddoe, that tall sandy-haired muscular ex-bombardier sergeant of artillery who played a tempestuous forty-year centre-forward for whatever team could be persuaded to take him on. Navvy, collier, poacher by turn, he swung from job to job, content that his wages should leave him a bob for booze, allow him to sit taciturn in the pub and drink a few pints that came as his due either by treat or credit after his meagre shilling was exhausted. Doddoe placed himself too often at the mercy of bum-baliffs, coppers, publicans, gamekeepers, and bookies, mostly to the damage of himself and always to the detriment of Ada and their underfed children. Yet butties and chargehands were glad to call on him when work was going, because Doddoe, once set on, had a knack of harnessing his energies into careful prodigies of labour that outshone all other workers and often encouraged them. He toiled within a slow-moving pantomimic world of his own, behind a barred mind that had to be told the time before he would bring himself to cease work in the evening. For him, overtime was like free money: unfortunately it came too rarely, and when it did his children clamoured in such a mighty voice that he could not but give them a good share of what he had earned.

One Friday when Doddoe was ably labouring at a semi-detached row near Wollaton, Bert was told by Ada to take him a parcel of shirt, suit, and bowler hat. The message was clear, though Brian was also forced to memorize it: Doddoe was to change on the job, after finishing work, and come into town without stopping at any pub, to meet her for the first house at the Empire. “Mam thinks I’m daft and can’t remember owt,” Bert grumbled, carrying the enormous parcel, arms holding it in front so that Brian had to lead him by the hand to stop him burying both face and parcel in some thorn hedge. “I’ll tell people I’m blind and maybe somebody’ll gi’ me a penny,” Bert said. “Hey, missis,” he bawled to a woman, “I’m blind,” but she walked on without looking, so he passed the load to Brian.

Wet trees overarched the road, and they kept well in so that cars and buses wouldn’t splash their legs with mud and water. Fields stretched away on one side, and high moss-covered park walls on the other. Brian suggested he’d carried the parcel far enough, complained it made his arms ache, so Bert walked bent double with it on his back for a hundred yards. Brian found it harder work to help him stop it falling than to carry it himself, so he shouldered it for good. The too-long pressure on his arms made him relax unwittingly, and Doddoe’s bowler rolled into a hedgerow.

“Christ,” he exclaimed, “we’ll cop it now. Doddoe wain’t be able to put it on.” But, undismayed, Bert lifted it from the mud with a piece of stick, scrubbed it clean with sleeve and spit, and carefully refolded the parcel.

Doddoe was up a ladder with a hod of bricks, and they hung around till knocking-off time, kicking their feet in fresh-pared shavings and inhaling the ominipresent tar-smell that came from them. “If we wait a bit, Doddoe might give us a penny out of ’is wage-packet,” Bert said. “Besides, we’ve got to tek ’is wokkin’ clo’es back ’ome.”

Doddoe slung his jacket on a heap of ochred bricks, bent to swill his face at a tap. “Got them bleeding clo’es?” he called, wiping himself on a piece of old rag.

Bert handed them over. “Mam says you’ve got to go straight there.”

“I bleddy-well know that. She’s towd me fifty times already,” he said, and went behind a lorry to change.

“And not go in no pubs,” Bert added, ready to duck and run. But Doddoe was singing “Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow-wow”; jacket, cap, and shirt thrown on to an empty cement bag, boots and socks and trousers following, until he stood in clean shirt and bowler hat, about to don his handsome well-pressed blue-black trousers. “How’s yer mother?” he called out, laying bricks on the cement bag to stop it taking off in the wind. “Is she still grumblin’ at me?”

“She was getting ready when I left,” Bert told him.

“What was she wearin’?” Doddoe asked.

Bert came nearer. “A red coat and ’at, I think.”

“She would,” was the deprecating comment. “You’d think she’d got nowt else to wear. Whose lookin’ after t’ young ’uns?”

Bert ticked the kid-register off in his mind. “Beryl.”

Doddoe grunted. One leg was over one foot, and his shirtflap waved in a sudden breeze, showing a bare arse. “It’s bound to bleeding-well rain,” he swore. Brian noticed someone in the lorry-cab, and the roar of an engine sent heavily rubbered wheels spinning in ruts of sand and shavings.

“Bleedin’ ’ell!” Doddoe shouted, his screen moving away. It churned up a circular cement-making bed and turned by a brick stack, from where the driver could see what he’d uncovered. “What the bleedin’ ’ell der yer think yer doin’?” Doddoe bawled.

The engine roared loud, then decreased in sound for the Irish accent: “You should ’ave changed in one of the houses, then you wouldn’t be showin’ us everything you’ve got.”

Doddoe belched obscenities so quickly that the man hadn’t time to drown them with his motor. He then shuffled into the rest of his trousers, pulling his shirtflap violently in as if blaming it for all the trouble. “You leary bleeder,” he threw at the driver, massaging his sandy scalp before a pocket mirror. It was dusk before he gave Bert the parcel of old clothes, and tuppence between them for their trouble. “Now get off ’ome, you little boggers. Keep out o’ them allotment gardens and gas-meters or you’ll get a clink across the ear’ole wi’ my fist.”

They went off into the dusk. “Yer know what I’m goin’ ter do when I grow up?”

“What?” Brian asked.

“I’m goin’ ter find a big wood and right in the middle o’ this wood I’m goin’ ter build an ’ut. An’ I’m goin’ ter grow all my own grub in a garden, and shoot rabbits and birds so’s I’ll live like a lord wi’ lots to eat.”

“Smashin’,” Brian agreed. “Can I live there as well?”

“You can if you want.” Brian pondered on the geography of it, brewing pertinent questions: “Where will yer put this ’ut?”

“I ain’t thought about it yet — somewhere in Sherwood Forest, I suppose, near where Robin ’Ood lived. Then when I pinch stuff from shops in villages, or poach rabbits like our dad does sometimes, I can do a bunk back to my ’ut in this wood, and the coppers wain’t be able to find me. They wain’t if it’s far enough in, anyway. And if I pinch stuff I’ll hide it away, and live off it in winter when grub don’t grow and it’ll be hard to shoot it.”

“What about fags, and bullets for your gun?”

“Easy. I’ll just ’ave ter pinch enough to last me all I want. And maybe I’ll pinch ale as well so’s I can get drunk now and again like dad does. But I’ll eat rabbit stew, and tomatoes and bacon if I can, and bread with best butter and strawberry jam on it, and I’ll sit in my hut in winter when it’s snowin’ outside, and I’ll have a big fire in the grate and put the kettle on, and I’ll just sit there day in and day out mashin’ tea and readin’ comics. That’s what I want to do when I grow up: live in an ’ut all on my own, wi’out a thousand kids swarming all over everywhere. It’ll be smashin’, our Brian, I’m tellin’ yer. When I’m in this ’ut I shan’t care if it rains every day, as long as I’m inside with the winders and doors closed. Nobody to bother me, that’s what I want when I grow up. That’s why I want to find an ’ut like I’m tellin’ yer and fix it up just fer me. Then p’raps yo’ can get an ’ut like it not far off, and you can come and stay with me now and again, or nip in fer a jamjar o’ tea when you’re passin’ with your gun to shoot rabbits or summat, and I’ll see yo’ in your ’ut sometimes. It’d be smashin’ if that’s how we could both live when we grow up.”

“Wouldn’t yer want to go to t’ pictures?” Brian asked. “Or go down town for a walk?”

“Not me. If I’d got this ’ut I wouldn’t want to do owt like that. I’d ’ave too much work to do. I’d be out wi’ my ’atchet every day choppin’ wood for the fire, or plantin’ lettuces, or settin’ nets and traps for rabbits. If you lived in an ’ut on your own you’d ’ave plenty to do and wouldn’t bother wi’ goin’ to the pictures. That I do know, our Brian.”

A dominating question had to be asked. “What would you do if it thundered?”

“Nowt,” came the ready answer. “I’m not frightened o’ thunder like yo’. It wouldn’t bother me a bit. In fact, the more it thundered the more I’d like it. I shouldn’t bother if it thundered and rained and snowed for months, as long as I’d got plenty o’ grub and wood inside the ’ut. That’s what I’d like more than owt else to ’appen: to be stuck in my ’ut for months and months wi’ plenty o’ grub so’s I’d never ’ave to worry about nobody or nowt: just listen to it pissin’ down and thunder goin’ like guns, while I drank tea and puffed at a Woodbine.”

“Smashin’,” Brian said. “That’s what I’d like to do. And I’ll do it, as well, when I grow up. I shan’t go to wok when I’m fourteen like mam says I will. I’ll run away from ’ome and go to Sherwood Forest and live there. I don’t want to work in a factory, do you, Bert?”

“Not me. If I ’ave to wok I’ll wok on a farm or summat like that. Out in the open air. That’s what Doddoe says: it’s best to be a navvy or wok on a farm, then you wain’t get consumption. That’s the on’y wok I’d bother to do — diggin’. I like wokking wi’ a spade, diggin’ taters up, or shiftin’ sand, or shovellin’ coal into t’ cellar grate, or chuckin’ rubbish about. A spade is what I like because it’s easy an’ yer’ve got to be in the open air wi’ a spade. And blokes as wok wi’ spades aren’t on dole as much as other blokes are.”

“My dad’s allus on dole,” Brian informed him, “and ’e’s got a spade. It don’t mek no difference, ’cause when there ain’t no wok there ain’t no wok. Doddoe’s often on dole as well, an’ yer can’t say ’e ain’t. Nearly all the kids at school ’ave got dads on dole.”

“Well, if they can’t get wok,” Bert said, “then they’ve got to go on t’ dole, ain’t they? It’s better than nowt, though it ain’t enough to manage on, is it? That’s why I want to get an ’ut when I grow up, because then you can get your own snap and you don’t need to go to a factory or some new ’ouses to get a job because you can grow all your own grub. And then if you do that you never ’ave owt to do wi’ gettin’ the dole. That’s why I’d like an ’ut. It’s the best way to live, if yer ask me.”

“It is an’ all,” Brian agreed. Lights gleamed along Wollaton Road, a double line of mist-dispersers with traffic roaring between them into town. “It’s cowd,” Brian felt, so Bert set the parcel down and took out Doddoe’s working jacket, passing it to Brian, who put it on and folded it around him like a topcoat. Bert wrapped his father’s trousers around his arms and shoulders, topped his head with the too-big cap, rolled the newspaper into a ball, and kicked it before them to the goal of home, passing with quick footwork to Brian and screaming “GOAL!” every time he shot it along the pavement. “Doddoe says he’s going to mek me a jockey when I grow up because I’m little, but I’d rather be an outside left for Notts Forest. I’m getting quick as lightning with a ball. A crack shot when I get near a goal. I’ll never be as good as Doddoe, though.”

“You might,” Brian put in, booting the ball of paper back.

Bert pulled him to a stop, gave the ball a final slam away. “There’s a lemonade lorry outside Deakins’ shop — look.”

A weak roof of light came from a gas lamp farther down. “It’s loaded,” Brian said, “with bottles. Do you think they’re all full?”

“Some on ’em,” Bert said, “so let’s walk by quiet, on the outside, and grab a bottle as we go. Then we can drink it in our house.” They sauntered along the middle of the road and closed in towards the lorry. The street was empty, not a footfall or murmur anywhere. A door banged far away and did not matter. Brian looked into the lorry cab, but no one was there, so he stepped back a few paces and closed his hand around the neck of a bottle and drew it from the wooden crate.

“Round the back,” Bert said when they reached the house. Once inside and safe, Bert put two bottles on the table, Brian one. All dandelion and burdock. Bert cursed: “I wanted lemonade.”

“This is better than nowt,” Brian screwed the wooden top off, lifted the bottle to his lips. Three younger children clamoured for a drink and Bert gave them an open bottle, which they took into a corner to fight over and spill. “It’s a good job Colin and Dave ain’t in,” Bert said, “or we wun’t a seen much o’ this lemonade.”

“They wun’t get my bottle,” Brian affirmed, who had no elder brothers to lord it over him.

“Let’s drink up and go out to the Nag’s ’Ead,” Bert said. “I went there las’ Sat’day an’ ’elped to collect glasses and the bloke gen me a bar o’ choc’late and tuppence.” They buried the empty bottles in the garden with one of Doddoe’s spades. “We’ll tek ’em back to the shop in a week or two,” Bert said, “and get a penny each.”

Still sharing Doddoe’s cap and coat, they clambered over five-foot boards on to the railway, crossing it as a mighty train took the bend out of Radford Station. They kept together in the pitch-black fields, calling out when marsh became blood-sucker pool and flooded their shoes. A railway signal-box stood like a lighted watchtower, a man walking to and fro between banks of levers as they drew near the drier path and went through allotment gardens, a route high-bordered by privet and thorn. “Me and Dave came up here last week and scrumped a load o’ taters and lettuces,” Bert told him. “We was ’ere till twelve at night, Dave diggin’ ’em up, and me loadin’ ’em in a sack. Nobody seed us, but we nearly got run over by a train when we was crossin’ the lines.”

“I went scrumpin’ once,” Brian said, “up Woodthorpe Grange, for apples, but on the way back we found they was all sour, so we pelted the high school kids wi’ ’em on Forest Road. Jim Skelton was wi’ me, ’e can tell yer. ’E’s in my class at school.”

“Well,” Bert said, “a mate o’ mine got sent to ’prove school for breakin’ into gas-meters. That was two years ago, an’ ’e ain’t cum back yet. ’Is mam says he’ll be back this summer, though.”

“I’d rather not pinch than get sent to borstal,” Brian said. “Anyway, dad’ud kill me if I got sent away. He says so. So if I pinch owt I’ll mek sure I wain’t get found out, that’s all.”

“Sometimes yer can’t ’elp gettin’ found out,” Bert informed him. “Our Johnny pinched a bike lamp last year, an’ a bloke seed ’im an’ towd a copper. So ’e got put on probation for a couple o’ years, and ’e’s still on it, though it don’t mek any difference, ’cause ’e still can’t keep ’is ’ands to hissen.”

“A lot o’ my pals is on probation,” Brian said. “All they do is go down town every Thursday, and get their bus-fare paid, as well. Our dad goes down town every Thursday to get his dole, but he don’t get his bus-fare paid.”

The path widened to Bobbers Mill Bridge. Across the tarmac fork shone the Nag’s Head, where people crowded at tables set out between parked cars and a children’s playground. Bert and Brian decided on a visit to the fish-and-chip café nearby. Hunger gnawed as it always did, even after a Sunday dinner, or during a week of inexplicable surfeit. They gazed inside from the half-open door, at tables reaching far back into the large saloon. Few people were eating, but at some tables were plates not yet gathered by the waitress.

They advanced into the hall, went from table to table, scooping each plate clean, gathering up cold chips, tasty cod-shells of yellow batter, or crusts of bread and butter. Neither spoke, and the whole operation went on in silence. A man digging into a pile of steaming fish and chips stared at Bert, who was composed enough to take up the vinegar bottle and sprinkle it over what was in his hand, giving the impression either that he worked in the place collecting scraps like this, or that this was a form of super-cheap meal served by the café to unobtrusive waifs and tramps. Bert cleared another table, glancing now and again at the chatting waitresses nearby. A blonde-dyed, heavily painted woman passed Brian half a cup of still hot tea, which he drank too slowly for the job he was out with Bert to do. He set the cup down, and a man who had seen him drink the tea covered his meal protectively. Brian had never done this before, might normally have been afraid to come into a café and play locust to its cast-off food, but he was too surprised at finding such edible nutriment set out plainly for the getting to worry about who was looking on.

They sat under a wall, their findings spread on a newspaper that Bert had collected with the same insouciance as the food. Both ate hungrily, sorting minuscular chips that had been fried as hard as fishbones and using them to stab big soft ones, but liking the batter best — which meant a scrupulous sharing out. Some had fried fish left in the folds by fastidious eaters, and these prizes were scooped with thumb into ever-ready maw.

Brian dragged Doddoe’s coat sleeve across his mouth and stood up. “Why do people leave such smashing grub on their plates? That batter was marv’lous. I never knew you could get snap for nowt like that.”

“Well, I’ve got lots o’ things to show yer yet,” Bert boasted. “Colin an’ Dave tell me ’ow ter goo on. Yer should see the things they get up to. Last week they pinched a box o’ reject fags from Players and when they got ’ome Doddoe batted their heads and said they shun’t pinch things like that. Then ’e sat down to smoke ’em ’issen. I bet ’e sowd a lot on ’em later as well, because ’e got drunk that night and ’ad a big row with mam, and they was swearin’ and bawlin’ till two in the morning. The next day mam ’ad a black eye and Doddoe ’ad a big bump on ’is ’ead. It’s allus like that in our ’ouse.”

“Our old man’s a rotten sod as well,” Brian contributed. “I wish we was rich, don’t you?”

“I do an’ all. If I was I’d buy a bike and ride off on it wi’ my pockets full o’ pound notes. I’d go to Skeggy an’ never come back.”

“I’d get on a ship and go to Abyssinia,” Brian said.

“What do you want to go there for?” Bert wanted to know. “There’s a war on.”

“I’d go to India then, and ride about on elephants, and shoot at tigers.” Bert pulled the over-large cap down to his eyes. “Let’s go to the Nag’s ’Ead and ’elp ’em to get empty glasses in. People often drop dough when they’re drunk, so don’t forget to look under the tables, will yer?”

“I’m not lucky at findin’ things like yo’ are,” Brian answered. “I don’t think I’ve ever found owt like that in my life.”

“Keep on lookin’, though,” Bert said, “because you never know what you’ll find. If you see any big nubs pick ’em up and put ’em in your pocket so’s I can smoke ’em later, see?”

People sang beneath dim lights, and Brian’s ear caught the hypnotic clash of money as some table paid for its beer. “I’ll never waste my dough on booze when I grow up,” he said. “I’ll save all I get and buy a bike.” Bert’s eyes were elsewhere. White-coated waiters were unable to cope with the flood of work, so he hooked up half a dozen glass-handled jars and carried them to the counter.

The rhythmical often-beating pub piano thumped and jangled as Brian went from table to table with thread-looping fingers, making his route back to the counter when a maximum load of wet and slippery handles was reached. In darker corners men and women kissed, arms folded into well-coated bodies — for the night was fresh — double heads flush against the wall, undisturbed at the rattle of glasses as phantom Brian stole up to collect — wondering what they found in it all. A man sitting alone was seen to have a tiny pus-filled wound above the bridge of his nose at which he occasionally picked and dabbed with a handkerchief. Brian stared at it every time, and Bert said the man came there often, knew Doddoe in fact, who’d said that the hole had been shot there by the Jerries and wouldn’t heal. Bert pushed a chocolate biscuit into his hand: “The waiter gave me a couple.” Near ten, few glasses were left to look for, and both stood by the seesaw, hawk-eyed for put-down empties and ready to leap at any snatchable tankard. Brian was tired, wanting to go home. “So’m I,” Bert said, “but let’s wait a minute. They might gi’ us a tanner for what we’ve done.”

A cold wind blew, as if each gust were fitted with grappling hooks to scale walls and search out those without vests and jerseys. “I hate wind,” Brian said. “And rain and snow. I like it most when the sun shines.”

Bert pointed to a table. “Summer’ll be ’ere soon, then we wain’t need coats. Get them glasses in, and I’ll do the next lot.”

Fair was fair. They were at the far end of the yard, two halves left on an empty table, hooked with an easy experienced swing while pushing the rest of the biscuit into his mouth. The pub was about to close — towels overspread the three-handled beer pumps inside — and he walked quickly through the last-stand inebriated bawlers. A chair was pushed into his track by someone too drunk to get up slowly, and Brian skidded on a banana skin he had seen from a distance and meant to avoid.

The glasses went out at arm’s length, hooked too firmly to be thrown off in time. No one looked up at the musical crash, too busy swigging final drops, reaching for handbags, fur coats, walking-sticks, and Brian lay with orange sparks flicking and jumping before his eyes. Then in one sick flood he knew himself to be the cause of two priceless glasses having been destroyed, that could never be paid for because he had no money. Prison, borstal, his father’s big fist flashed before him in a bloody picture, and impelled him in a mad bullet-like charge towards the gate and clear of the pub.

A car came one way, a bus advanced with calm assurance from another, but he ran between them to the dark side of the road, back among the safe high hedges of allotment gardens, then into a ghost-ridden funereal zone of pathways that he wouldn’t otherwise have taken. Mud splashed him, thorn bushes scraped his face and pointed a way to drier land by the railway.

A goods train went slowly by and he watched the blaze from its engine cab, feeling more comfort with the dynamic unknowable monster than with the ordinary overalled men wielding shovels within. It went under the bridge to the colliery, leaving him wishing for a ride even though it was heading back for the pub. He kept its sound in his ears as long as possible, until it slid into a murmur, swallowed and killed by the bigger and all-embracing fog-dragon of night.

A voice replaced it, coming from paths he had traversed, rose gruffly and stayed high for a second, then tapered off. Blackness won a further round, voice dead as well as train gone. A hand tingled as if biting-ants were running over and, holding it up, he saw two jar handles firmly fixed into his middle fingers. With the other hand he forced them open, pulled off the glass and threw it as far as the blackness would allow.

The voice lifted again, nearer this time: “Brie-ie-e-errrn!” He sucked blood from his cuts and stayed quiet, listening for footsteps to back up the voice but hearing only frogs leaping in a nearby stream. “Brian, where are yer?” the gruff voice called from nearby. They weren’t chasing him, because it was only Bert. Why weren’t they? He’d smashed two glasses, hadn’t he?

He answered: “I’m over here,” gripped a blackened handkerchief in his teeth, held the other corner with his good hand and bound it around the cuts.

“Are yer orright?” Bert asked, by his side. “’Ere y’are, I’ll tie it up”—snapping it so tight that no blood could leak. “Why did you run away?”

Brian was surprised at the question. “I broke two glasses. Didn’t yer see me?”

“It didn’t matter,” Bert said. “Nobody said owt.”

“I thought they would. And I couldn’t pay for ’em.”

“Glasses often get broke.” By the railway embankment he gave Brian three pennies. “Your wages. The publican handed me a tanner for what we’d done.” In the streets of Sodom it was late, most doors closed and few people about, the dandelion-and-burdock lorry gone. Brian wanted to get home quickly. “I’ll see yer tomorrow night,” he said, outside Bert’s front door. “Is the Count o’ Monte Cristo on your wireless?”

“No, it’s nex’ Tuesday, I think. We’ll listen to it then, because mam likes it as well. Let’s go on t’tips tomorrer, eh?”

“O.K. So long.”

“Abyssinia.”

CHAPTER 8

Mr. Jones was a gett, a four-eyed twopenn’orth o’ coppers, a sludge-bumping bastard who thumped Brian six times across the shoulder with a hard knotty fist because he didn’t open a book quickly enough. “The Merch-chant of Venn-niss,” he screamed, each syllable a synchronized crash of pain on Brian’s bones. “Got it?” he demanded. “Got it, you oaf? When I order you to open your book, don’t spend five minutes over it.”

A parting bat on the tab for good measure left him more or less in peace, staring at a coloured picture on which his searching had stopped. A man called Shylock it was, tall and with a beard, a knife in one hand holding them at bay and a pair of taunting scales in the other, grey eyes set hard on a pack of getts like Mr. Jones, the same puffed-up bastards after a poor old man that were after Brian — and all because he wanted some money back he’d lent them. Old Jones was against Shylock — you could tell from the way he read the story — and Shylock was good then because of it, a poor old — Jew was it? — holding the world’s scorn from him, standing there with his knife and scales — as though he’d just stepped out of the Bible like that other bloke going to carve up his son because God told him to — while some posh whore in the court talked about rain and mercy. (Jones liked her; you could tell from the way he read that, too.) Shylock was clever and brave, an old man who in the end lost money, pound of flesh, daughter, while Jones and his side got everything and went on thumping and being sarcastic and batting tabs with nobody to say a word to ’em. Only Shylock had defied these cock-sucking persecutors, these getts and clap-rags. When Jones made them sing hymns about all things being bright and beautiful/I vow to thee my country/green hill far away, Brian and Jim Skelton turned every word to a curse. Brian knew that if he had to choose between Jones and his copper’s narks who had recently sent Bert’s elder brother to approved school after knocking the living daylights out of him so’s he’d tell them where he’d hid the gas-meter money, and poor done-down sods like Shylock, then he knew whose side he was on and who would be on his side if he could suddenly come to life and step out of the printed book before him.

Mr. Jones was enemy number one, a white-haired tod who stalked the corridors during school hours, peeped his white moustache and purple face over the glass partition that he could reach only by standing on tiptoe. His steel-grey eyes looked in at the class, moving left and right to make sure the teacher had the boys well-controlled. Signs of slack discipline would bring him bursting in, arms flying at unlucky heads as he marched between rows of desks, a navy-blue pinstriped suit sagging as he got thinner and thinner through summer and winter so that soon, everybody hoped, he would kick the bucket in some horrible way. If Brian were lucky enough not to feel the stab of his random fist, he could tell by his jumping nerves when Jones was coming close, and when he had passed, Brian glimpsed his white collar and putty-coloured spats over his shoes: “If I had old Shylock’s knife,” he thought, “I’d bury it in his bony back.” He laughed to himself: “I’d get my pound o’ flesh, half a stone in fact, and no posh whore would stop me.”

Headmaster Jones was never without a ball of plasticine, an all-year everyday possession rolled between thumb and finger, furiously moving yet keeping shape as he bashed the drum of somebody’s back with his free hand. Once, the plasticine rolled under a desk to unhoped-for liberty, so he stopped hitting the boy and walked up and down to make sure the rest were still “paying attention” to the teacher’s droning lesson but actually fixing his eagle eyes on the floor, hoping to see his precious ball of plasticine, which was, as it turned out, squashed and held under the boot of a raging boy he had recently thumped.

His tigerish walks were a nerve-wracking gamble for the class. Brian had a game. Listening to the soft padding of his footsteps approaching behind, he said to himself: Will he stop and hit me? I’ll bet he does. I bet a bloody quid he does. There, what did I tell you? The bastard. That’s a quid somebody owes me.

Even the teachers disliked him, Brian saw, always on the watch for him peering into the room, and when he did come in they immediately relinquished all power over the class and handed it to him — seemingly in the hope that something would go wrong. But nothing ever did that could not be solved by an erratic scattering of fists among the gangways.

Mr. Jones’s mouth turned down at the edges, and it was agreed in the class that he could not have been a very pretty baby, some sixty-odd years ago. Brian tried to imagine him as a boy even younger than himself so that he could look back on the age and see him more clearly — to fix an image of a youngster in his mind, visualize him walking over a field with hands in pockets, whistling and heaving a stone now and again at birds. Impossible. Even as a boy Brian saw him a blank-faced nonentity, face gradually becoming more shrivelled until a moustache appeared and the mouth below bent at the side, and the short trousers turned into those of a blue pinstriped suit, and the head of fair hair burst through starkly into white, and the meadow across which he had been walking lost its greenness and became the polished wax-smelling floor of a classroom, and then there was the actual awful figure beside you and you knew that whatever Jones had been like as a little boy it didn’t matter a bogger because Jones was what Jones was now and all you had to do was keep your eyes skinned for him and learn to bend your head right forward on feeling the first smack of his folded hand on your backbone.

Whenever Mr. Jones opened a book, either to ask questions or read a story, it seemed to Brian an unnatural combination. Books and Mr. Jones did not go together. The comfortable rustle of pages and the crack of his stick or fist did not belong in the same room, were disparate qualities that confused and annoyed him, and weren’t calculated to bring out the best side of his uneven intelligence.

At home there were no books, but he found a store at the Nook, ancient dust-covered Sunday-school prizes with the names of his uncles and aunts inscribed in impeccable writing within the front covers. He took them from the shelf (“Don’t destroy them, Brian, will you?” his grandmother said) and read their titles: John Halifax, Gentleman, The Lamplighter, What Katy Did Next, The Gypsy; opened them and smelt the mustiness from years of damp storage. A book was too strange an object to read, so he built them into a tower, watched it wobble, gave a push if his construction showed no sign of falling. He placed them in two piles, side by side so that they didn’t fall, took one from the top and opened it. “Once upon a time there was a gypsy named Meg Merrilees.… Nowadays the gypsies.…”

Merton could not read, but liked someone to reel off the front page of the newspaper to him. “Come on then,” he said sharply to Brian, “read me what it says.”

“I don’t know the first word.”

“Course yer do,” he said gruffly, thinking him obstinate. “Read the first bit on it.” Brian looked hard: “Art,” he said slowly. Merton waited for him to go on, demanded when he didn’t: “Is that all? Art? That ain’t a word.”

“No, there’s a lot more yet. It’s a big word I don’t know.”

“Gerron wi’ it then.”

“Tek yer sweat, I’m going as quick as I can. I’m building it up: ‘art-ill.’”

“You’re a bloody slow-coach,” Merton scoffed. “‘Artill!’ I never heard such a word.” He turned to everyone in the room: “What’s ‘artill’? I don’t know. I’m boggered if I do, do any of you lot?”

“It ain’t finished yet,” Brian protested, lifting the paper again.

“Well, finish it, then, Nimrod. Come on, I want some news. What’s ‘artill’? Is that the beginning o’ t’ word, or all on it?”

Brian was indignant: “I’ll finish it if yer’ll shurrup an’ let me. ‘Artill-er.’”

“That ain’t it, either.” Merton prodded him and winked at the others, who looked on. “I thought yer was a better scholar than this,” he said with disappointment. “There must be summat else besides ‘artill-er.’”

“There is,” Brian retorted, now seeing the joke Merton was having. “On’y a bit, though. Listen. I’ve got all on it now: ‘art-ill-er-y.’” Then slowly: “Artillery, that’s what it is.”

“It’s as bad as ever,” Merton pronounced, puzzled. He turned to Lydia: “What’s … what was it, Nimrod?”

“Artillery.”

“Artillery,” Merton repeated.

“Nay,” Lydia said, “I don’t know.”

“It’s guns, ain’t it, George?” Merton asked, half sure of himself.

“Yes,” he was answered.

“Go on then, Nimrod.”

Slowly he read: “Artillery preparations for the bombardment of Madrid.…”

He’d heard of scholarship papers that you took at eleven, but someone said you had to know Latin to pass. One weekend he sat in the Nook kitchen: “What people speak Latin, gra’ma?”

“I don’t know, Brian.” So he turned to Merton: “Grandad?”

“What, Nimrod?”

“Who speaks Latin?” He was still plagued by the possibility that Merton, being a grandad, must know everything. “Nay,” came the answer, “I’ve no idea.”

“Do you know, Uncle George?”

“No, lad.” He went back to his book puzzled. Who spoke Latin? He’d asked Ted Hewton, and Ted Hewton didn’t know. To ask Jones was inviting a crack on the tab for being so stupid as not to know a simple thing like that, even when no one else in the class knew, and it was better to stay ignorant than get a pasting, he felt. It was obvious that Spaniards spoke Spanish, French people French, and Germans German, but who spoke Latin, that puzzling language on the back of pennies? He copied it out: GEORGIVS V DEI GRA: BRITT: OMN: REX FID: DEF: IND: IMP — worse than Abyssinian it seemed. Mr. James told him, a quieter teacher who didn’t hand out pastings when asked questions: “But it’s dead now,” he added. “Nobody speaks it any more.” And that was that, all that fuss for nothing.

He stopped the playground flight of a paper aeroplane that, it turned out, was made from a French grammar. He unfolded the would-be bomber and tried to read its message: articles and nouns on one side, a picture-map of Paris on the other. He gave a dozen marbles for what was left of the book, then searched out Ted Hewton to show off his bargain.

Black-haired pallid Ted already knew how to count in French. “Our kid on the dole gets books from the library, and learns French because ’e ain’t got nowt to do. So ’e learnt me to say some.” They sat in a corner reciting: OON DER TWAR KAT SANK SEECE SET WEET NERF DEECE.

“What’s eleven?” Brian asked.

“I forgot,” Ted said. “I’ll ask our kid and tell yer tomorrer.” The first ten were memorized in a few minutes, would stay in a pocket of the brain all his life, but eleven and up was another thing, like a row of strong bolts opening on to the unknown.

He turned the page of his grammar. “What’s an article?”

“A thing,” Ted explained, “anybody knows that.”

“I know they do, but this article ain’t a thing, it’s a word, like ‘the,’ for instance.”

“Don’t be daft,” Ted scoffed. “How can ‘the’ be an article? An article’s a thing, I’m tellin’ yer.” Brian pushed the book under his nose: “Look. Le is an article, it says, and it means ‘the.’ So how can it be a bleddy thing?”

“It don’t mek sense,” Ted remarked. “Maybe the book’s out o’ date.”

“It’d better not be,” Brian said savagely, “or I’ll get my marbles back.” He flipped over more pages. “It’s still a good book, because it’s got lots o’ words in it. Maison, chemin, chapeau, main, doigt,” he said slowly, following the mock-pronunciation beneath each. Ted grabbed the book for a second look, as if he did not believe all those words were in it. “Ay,” he said approvingly, “it’s not a bad book at that.” He flipped through its wad of leaves to the back cover: “’Undred an’ ninety it goes up to. It’s long.”

“I gen twelve marbles for it,” Brian reminded him, snatching it back as the whistle blew for end-of-playtime.

Geography, history, and English: in each there was a possibility of learning about other countries and people. In Lands and Life were coloured pictures of camels by big ships on the Suez Canal, and snow-covered mountain tops on the Equator; and in Foundations of History he read how Greeks captured Troy by hiding in the belly of a wooden horse and being dragged inside by Trojans who thought the gods had sent it from heaven as a present (daft people who didn’t know any better); and often for English Mr. James read Coral Island or Ungava. But geography won, meant notebooks with blank pages on which the teacher pressed a roller that left an outline map when he lifted it off, and set strange names on the blackboard that you copied against the map. Brian scoured the food cupboard for labels from foreign places, found pictures of other continents in magazines to stick on the blank pages in his geography notebook until it grew fat with insertions and notes.

Six columns formed up to be marched in by the prefects. The asphalt yard sloped down to lavatories, and along the wall of the infants’ and junior girls’ departments was written in large white letters: CLEANLINESS IS NEXT TO GODLINESS — by order of Mr. Jones, who called in a man to repaint the letters so that on the first few days of each term they shone and glittered with reproach at the yardful of ragged-arsed, down-at-heel, and often unwashed kids.

Black clouds gathered across shining roof slates, and cold rain blew as they marched inside. Any inside was good in weather like this, and Brian felt happy that an English lesson was on the timetable. His belly was full from a meal at the dinner-centre, and he anticipated a ha’penny from his father when he got home, it being Thursday, dole-day.

Mixed telegraph messages of clacking desk-lids and stamping feet filled the teacherless room. Rain streamed down the window-panes and, as no one had been told to switch on the lights, the gloom that lay about needed much noise to dispel it. Brian made for the steampipes with Ted and Jim Skelton, and they watched two bodies rolling and pitching in a gangway fight. A smell of damp coats and trousers mingled with breath and polish smells, and a further violent surcharge of rain against the outside glass increased the recklessness within.

A sly face rose slowly above the door panel, stayed still for a few moments. “Get back to your desks,” Brian hissed. A phenomenon detached from the turmoil, the livid vivid face of Mr. Jones turned this way and that to take in everything before entering the room. Seconds went by like minutes, and Brian looked away from the face at the window to meet the equally distrusted visage of the Laughing Cavalier on the opposite wall, then turned with a half laugh to the front and stared at nothing.

After the crash of the door and the sight of eyes hollow with rage, the only sound left came from tangible rain outside. Mr. Jones grabbed four boys who had been fighting and hauled them one by one to the front, a few well-placed punches getting them into line.

“What were you fighting about?” he roared, shaking the nearest boy. The noise of rain flowered like a burst dam, for everyone in the room except the frantic expostulating Jones seemed to have stopped breathing. The life had gone out of them, but for hatred and fear. The boy could not answer, and the sound of flesh meeting flesh at great speed jerked silence out of the room. “What were you fighting for, you lout?” Mr. Jones shouted again, into the ear he had just hit.

“Nothing,” the boy blubbered.

“Nothing?” he bawled. “Nothing what, you jackanapes?”

“Nothing, sir,” came between the sobs. With a faintly sarcastic smile he lifted the desk-lid and took out a stick. His body doubled with spite as he leapt at the culprits: “You don’t fight for nothing, you idiot,” he yelled, hitting the nearest boy furiously across the back and shoulders. “You don’t fight for nothing, do you? Do you? Eh? If you want to fight,” whack, whack, whack, “then fight me. Come on, fight me,” whack, whack, “fight me, you nincompoop.”

He’s barmy, Brian thought. He’ll go into a fit one of these days and wain’t be able to come out of it. I’m sure he will, as sure as I sit here. Either that, or somebody’s dad’ll come up and knock him for six.

“Get back to your seats,” he gasped, straightening his royal-blue tie. “And come out the monitors.” Four boys, a piece of yellow ribbon pinned to each lapel, walked to the front. “In that cupboard you’ll find two stacks of books called Treasure Island. Give one to each boy.”

They went to their tasks with avidity. “I’m taking you for English literature during the next few weeks,” Jones went on, “and I’m going to start reading Treasure Island to you, by Robert Louis Stevenson.” A hum of excitement was permitted. Treasure Island. Brian had heard of it: pirates and ships and other-world adventure, a cinematic hit-and-run battle among blue waves and palm-trees taking place a million miles away yet just above his head, as if he could reach up and touch cutlass and cannon and tree branch to heave himself into hiding.

“And”—the plangent voice of Mr. Jones made an unwelcome return — “every other Thursday I’m going to ask you questions on what I’ve been reading”—his grey eyes glared, eyes empty if you dared but look at them, which wasn’t so dangerous as it seemed because they stared back at nothing when he wasn’t inclined to bully — “and woe betide anyone who hasn’t been paying attention,” he concluded ominously, opening the teacher’s clean copy the monitor laid before him.

He had a good voice for reading, rolled off the first paragraph in a booming tone that lit each boy’s imagination like a powder trail. They saw the captain as Jim Hawkins first saw him: a proud suspicious renegade stomping along the clifftop followed by a wheelbarrow bearing his far-travelled sea-chest, heard him demand a noggin o’ rum, and tell Jim to keep a sharp weather-eye out for a one-legged villain called Pew. He ran fluently on through several chapters, before the class was sent flying home through a real world in which the rain had stopped and a mellow sun shone on rainbows of petrol and water in the middle of clean streets. Brian was glad to be free, and could not think of the good story he had heard without imagining a wholesale tab-batting when Mr. Jones questioned them on what he had so far read.

It rained the next day and was cold, so that no one knew whether the year was coming or going. A mere drizzle fell by playtime, and Brian pledged his last four marbles against a boy from top class. He knelt, and aimed one at the blue-and-white of the bigger boy some yards away. It seemed a great distance, since he was not sure of his aim and his fingers were cold. He shivered in his jersey: I might hit it — hoping he’d hit something soon, with only four left, because there’d been nineteen in his pockets that morning. The bigger boy was impatient, so that Brian needed an even longer time setting his sights. “Look sharp,” his adversary said. “I want to play Smithy next, after I’ve skint yo’!”

The playground noise swayed about him: two hundred surging boys watched by a teacher walking up and down under the shed. He’d got his aim, couldn’t miss, drew back an arm to release the marble from between his fingers. A boy from his class walked over the target marble, and when he lifted his foot it was no longer there.

Brian looked around him up in the air, even felt in his pockets and opened his other hand. Where the marble had rested, the asphalt paving was blank. He could only stare at the boy who had walked over the marble, now at the other end of the playground, and saw that he was limping. He’d walked evenly before, but Brian guessed that the boy’s boots were so full of holes that it had caught in one of them. He watched him lift his foot to see what caused the limp, extract the marble, and glance back to where Brian was standing.

The bigger boy swung round, demanding: “Ain’t yo’ shot yet?”

“No,” Brian answered.

“Well, gerron wi’ it then.” He was tall and truculent, a dash of hair falling into his eyes, and even more holes around his clothes than Brian had in his.

“The marble’s gone,” Brian informed him. You big-headed bleeder, he swore under his breath. Big-head glared at the blank paving, spun with an accusing war-like snarl: “Yer’ve pinched it.”

“I ain’t,” Brian denied. “I ain’t a thief, if yo’ are!”

“Gi’ me that marble.”

“I ain’t got it, I tell yer.” Big-head edged closer: “I’ll bash yer up if yer don’t gi’ it me. I know yer’ve pinched it. Yer can’t gerraway wi’ that.”

Brian was about to tell him what happened, but held back. “I ain’t got the marble. It must ’ave rolled somewhere.” But, threatened with a nose-bleeder, he was forced to hand over a marble to Big-head; then went with his last three to play somewhere else.

In summer and winter, snow and rain and frost, and now again sunshine, Brian set out up the early-morning street with his brother and sister, telling them to hurry, otherwise they’d be late at the dinner-centre. With plimsoll shoes and peacock jerseys, he led them to the long hut beyond the recreation ground where at morning and midday meals were served to those whose fathers were on the dole. They were caught up from warm troughs of sleep by Seaton’s rough voice at seven o’clock: “Come on, Brian. Dinner-centre.”

“Come on, Arthur and Margaret, Fred,” he said to the bundles beside him in the bed, “dinner-centre.” The bottom room of the house was merely part of the route, though, on his way through, Brian wished they could eat breakfast there, but saw nothing on the table except a mug of tea to be drunk by his father.

Caution was needed to get his charges over the dangerous boulevard, for often out of the morning mist buses or lorries came rushing by like cliffs, and he had to arrange them level at the lights, wait for red to show, and walk them quickly across in line. Often they were first there and stood near the green-painted iron gates waiting for Miss Braddely. Other children appeared from the mist, shivering and silent, red-faced and still sleepy, and Brian would help carry the crate of cold milk bottles up to the kitchen door when Miss Braddely herself came short-stepping it from a different world from theirs. Brian went in the kitchen and watched her put cocoa on the stove to boil, then saw her work the bread-cutting machine and spread thick butter over each slice. He took Fred and Margaret and Arthur to their places in the hall, sat them quiet while they waited for breakfast to be pushed through the hatch, immersed in the low quiet talking from two dozen other children at the tables. The breakfast, when it did come, was magnificent: three thick half-slices of bread and butter each, and a mug of milky cocoa. There was no breakfast to beat it, as far as Brian knew, except tomatoes and bacon, but that was a dinner.

At half-past eight they walked back through the rec to school, now very much alive, noticed little bead-like mounds of soil made by worms among the flower-beds, discovered the ground to be less white, though their breaths still turned to vapour, so that Margaret put a piece of stick between her lips and shouted: “Look, our Arthur, I’m smoking! Don’t tell mam I’m smokin’, will yer?”

Brian met them at half-past twelve and played shepherd again over the much busier boulevard for dinner. As many as two hundred children (who had not bothered to go for breakfast in the morning) milled and played around the dinner-centre door waiting to be let in by fat Miss Harvey. The door opened inwards, and the crush was often so great that even the bulk of Miss Harvey couldn’t stop a dozen children falling into the hall, so that she beat them about the shoulders with a wooden spoon for not showing more restraint. Brian disliked the dinner — cabbage, potatoes, liver, and pudding — and often slid it quietly to his cousin Bert when Miss Harvey wasn’t looking. The meal lacked the clean simplicity of breakfast. Its smells were too diverse and often unidentifiable, and you had to eat whatever of the food you might like in too great a hurry. Often Miss Harvey made them sit quiet and say “grace” before dinners were handed out, a practice that the gentler Miss Braddely forwent in the too-early morning. Afterwards they splayed like confetti out on to the greensward of the rec, and on sunny days Brian fought for the swings or a place on the seesaw, slide, tabletop, or monkey climber, pulling Arthur and Margaret and Fred on after him, and forgetting the world till schooltime at two.

The second session with Mr. Jones came round, and everything was quiet when he entered the room. “For this lesson I want you to draw a pen-picture of the Old Sea Dog, when he comes to the Admiral Benbow Inn.”

There was a rustling from every desk, as though a gala of paper-chains had fallen down at Christmas. It’s funny, Brian thought, there ain’t any drawing paper in our books. Anyway, I’d rather do it in pencil because it seems daft to draw a picture with a pen. I suppose that’s what he means, so I’d better get on with it or I wain’t be finished in time. I don’t want his fist flying around me today. A pen-picture’s a picture you draw with a pen, he reasoned, still unsure of what exactly Mr. Jones wanted. What else can it be? Stands to reason. The whole class was engrossed in the exercise, and Brian sketched in the roof of the Admiral Benbow Inn.

Mr. Jones walked up and down the gangways, watching for signs of progress. The first thing Brian heard was someone being furiously thumped a few desks away. He trembled inwardly. “Idiot! Nincompoop! Fool!” Mr. Jones bellowed with each resounding bat of his hand. “Begin all over again.”

This made everyone wonder whether he was doing the right thing, and after several similar demonstrations Brian felt Mr. Jones peering over his shoulder. Blows exploded against his back and fell about his ears.

“This is the limit! Oh, my goodness!” Mr. Jones wailed in mock-despair. “Oh, dear! Would you believe it? This clown has actually drawn a picture! Actually drawn one!”

With hands bent over his head, he wondered: Why is he hitting me like this? It’s bad enough hitting me, but why is he telling the class I’ve made such a daft mistake? It was hard not to weep at such thoughts, and he was saved from tears only by a surge of hate; he let forth in his mind a stream of awful words he had heard his father use under his breath to his mother. Mr. Jones still hovered, ready to crack him again, while vivid barbed-wire images flashed through Brian’s mind. Why don’t he die? still building a dyke against the tears.

“You’re supposed to write a description of what the captain looked like. To use words,” Mr. Jones bellowed. “Do you hear?” Brian said in a low voice that he did hear, and after a parting hit, Mr. Jones went on his way.

More drawings were discovered, and those who did them paid for their mistake in the same way. Mr. Jones reached his desk clenching and unclenching his burning fists in an effort to cool them, the silent hatred of the class turned against him for the rest of the lesson. “I didn’t know we had so many artists,” he said, grey eyes twinkling in a dangerous good humour. The few clever ones who never made mistakes laughed at his joke, having correctly sensed what they were supposed to.

“If I had made such a blunder in my class when I was a boy,” Mr. Jones went on, “I’d have been thrashed with the leg of an easel. My schoolmaster used the leg of an old blackboard easel to knock sense into us.” Another joke, though fewer boys laughed than before. Brian’s shoulders still ached. “Daft bastards,” he said under his breath. “It’s nowt to laugh at. I wish old Jones would die, though, that’s all I know. Why don’t he die? Why don’t the old swine die? He must be sixty if he’s a day. But he’ll never retire because he likes hitting kids too much.”

CHAPTER 9

One Thursday afternoon Vera said: “Go up Ilkeston Road, Brian, and meet your dad. He’ll be on his way back now from the dole-office. Tell ’im to get five Woodbines and bring ’alf a pound o’ fish for our suppers. Go on, run, he’ll gi’ you ha’penny if you see him.” Brian gathered what brother was available, and did as he was told.

Vera had been glad to see the back of Seaton that morning. Hunched by the fireplace, sulking because he had no cigarettes and was out of work at thirty-five, he suddenly stood up and took his dole-cards from the cupboard. “I’ll have a walk,” was his way of putting it, “and call in at the dole-office on my way back.”

So she was shut of him for an hour or two, free from black looks, and filthy talk if she dared give him a black look back. Day in and day out, from dole day to dole day, he sat by the empty fire-grate, fagless and witless, a rotter to everybody that got near him. It worn’t his fault, that much she knew, but he could be better-tempered than he was. Sometimes he would get up from his black despair and send Brian to a wood-yard for a sack of waste, spend a day chopping sticks so that Brian and Fred could hawk them a penny a bucket from door to door. Or he would buy a few pair of shoes from Sneinton Market and set about mending them. Sitting on a box in the backyard, his mouth full of tacks, he hammered new-cut leather on to the last-held shoe. A semicircle of kids stood watching, and Vera swore to God he didn’t know they were there, held fast as he was in his work. The shoes were then sold cheap around the neighbourhood. He paperhanged and whitewashed, dug gardens or pushed loaded barrows, went coal-scraping with Abb Fowler, though such windfalls of work fell rarely in his way. But when the hands were happy and one side of the heart at ease, the other was wary and sly, adept at evading that ubiquitous bogey of the means-test man who docked your dole and sent you on “relief” if you were caught doing work not registered for. Brian and Arthur would meet their father at a whitewashing job, to come home with them, boy-scouting a hundred yards ahead while their father walked behind with the ladders. If Brian saw anyone who might look like the means-test man, he was to nip back and give warning, and when once he did, Seaton dodged into a yard while the means-test man went unsuspecting by. But the dole couldn’t go on forever, Vera thought, and hoped it wouldn’t, for a fifth child was about to join them.

Seaton enjoyed his two-mile walk to the dole-office — except when it rained. Tar-smells of clear-skied summer or the lung-stinging frost of winter were all the same, pleasant to get out of the house into, from the walls of the house to farther-apart walls of roads and streets which had no roof and let the good sky in on you. It was warm summer, and he stood in the long queue for his dole. Old friends were occasionally missing from the line — having stepped into the aristocrat class because they had got jobs, but Abb Fowler was always there, still the same wide-nosed sandy-haired moonlight-flitter, wearing his cap at a cocky angle, dismayed but unbeaten at being out of work. He carried a ragged copy of the Daily Worker and talked about the war in Abyssinia not long finished, and the war in Spain not long begun. Every Thursday for months he’d thought of volunteering to fight in Spain, but never did. “I’m a Communist, ’Arold,” he would say, “and I don’t mind gettin’ shot at, if you want to know, but not in Spain. It’s the bleeders in this country I want to stand up against a wall.”

Seaton came home with his thirty-eight shillings and handed them to Vera. He thought of the money she had given him not long ago: ten bob for scrubbing out an office every morning for a week. Further back than that, she had gone with Ada, collecting for an old woman who had died on Ada’s street. At nearly every house they were given a penny or a ha’penny, and at the end of the street they went on into the next, even though the old woman wasn’t so well-known there. Nevertheless, few people would refuse a ha’penny towards a wreath. So off to another street, and then another, the old woman’s name bringing less response on being mentioned after doors had opened to their knock. Ada had the cheek to collect in a pub as well, escaping by the saloon bar door when the publican strode over to throw her out. Fifteen shillings made a magnificent wreath for the dead woman, bigger than she could ever have expected on her meagre pension; and the few shillings made by Vera and Ada spread the tables of each household with a good meal that night. He had to laugh at the thought of it: what a couple o’ boggers they are! And black-haired sway-walking Harold broke into a shilling for a packet of Woodbines and enjoyed his first smoke since yesterday.

Vera took ten of the thirty-eight shillings to the corner shop, to pay for what food they had fetched on strap during the week. Then she went with Brian up Hyson Green, to cheap shops where she could stock up on tins of milk and packets of margarine, sugar and tea and bread, vegetables and sixpennyworth of meat for a stew that night.

Job or no job, there was usually a wireless set in the house. Seaton, after drawing his dole the following week, came in smiling broadly: “I’ve got a surprise on its way, my owd duck!”

“What? Have you won a thousand?”

“No, nowt like that.”

“What then?”

“A man’ll be ’ere in a bit wi’ summat yo’ll like!”

“And what’s that?”

“A brand-new wireless!”

By way of confession he told how, gazing in a shop window on his way back from town, he had spotted a good set that would blow the house apart if turned full on, and that without thinking he had gone in and settled the deposit.

“You know we can’t afford to pay for a wireless every week,” Vera shouted, but soon smiled and left off taunting his extravagance, knowing they both had to do such things now and again, otherwise put their heads in a gas-oven, or cut their throats with a sardine tin like poor Mr. Kenny up the street.

They managed the payments for a time, but after a few months of free music and news the set was disconnected and carted back. Then for six bob Seaton bought a wireless that didn’t go, though within a few hours of clever intuitive tinkering a powerful pan-mouthed Gracie Fields blared out over the house and yard. Seaton knew nothing of such machines, yet took it to pieces, tightened a nut here and a valve there, until the electrical maze of wires miraculously “went,” and it stayed on the dresser as a monument to luck and ingenuity.

On Sunday afternoon, after a pause of nothing from the wireless, a voice would announce: “Foundations of Music”—a title that intrigued Brian because one of his favourite books at school was Foundations of History and somehow he imagined the two same words would generate a similar intensity of interest, but nothing more survived than the title, for his mother would immediately say: “Take that off, Harold, for God’s sake!” and the knob would be swivelled on to the sugary music of Debroy Summers, or the rackety drive of Henry Hall.

Time and again Vera told herself that she shouldn’t be riled by Seaton’s moods of animal temper, for it only made things twice as bad. But after the dole money had been spent to the last farthing he would sit by the fire-grate in the small room, head bent low, nothing to say. She would know all he was thinking, that he was cursing his existence, her and the kids, the government, his brothers, her mother and father, anyone and anything that flitted into his mind, and she hated him for letting the lack of a few fags upset them. He looked around the room, from wife to children, and children to mother, until all but Vera went out. Then she would say: “You’re lookin’ black again, aren’t yer? What’s up, ain’t yer got no fags?”

He glared savagely. “No, and no snap either.” Each tormented mind fed the other in diabolic fashion: “Well,” she said belligerently, “I can’t help that, can I?”

“Send Brian to borrow a couple o’ bob from your mother,” he suggested, a last desperate remedy he knew she wouldn’t take up. “I can’t”—her voice loud and distressed. “We owe her something from last week.”

“Them skinny boggers wun’t lend owt.”

“We wouldn’t need to ask ’em if you went out and earned some money,” she said, near to tears at his and her unjust words. He was dimly aware of many answers to this, but could squeeze only a few words of protest from his locked-in despair: “I’d get wok if I could. I’ve wokked ’arder in my life than anybody’s ever wokked.” He remembered his fruitless expedition of yesterday, returning to a scene that had happened time and time again.

“Did you get it?”

“There was too many.”

“It’s a bogger, i’n’t it?”

He was bitter: “Don’t bother. They’ll want me soon. I know they will.”

“You all ought to get together,” she said, “and give ’em what for. Mob the bleeders.”

“You can’t fight wi’ no snap in you. Look at what ’appened to them poor boggers from Wales: got the bleddy hosepipes turned on ’em.”

“They’ll suffer for it one day,” she said. “They’ll have their lot to come, yo’ see.”

“Besides, I give you thirty-eight bob, don’t I?” he said now.

“And how far do you think that goes?” was all she could say.

“I don’t know what you do wi’ it,” was all he could think of.

“Do you think I throw it down the drain?” she screamed, going to the door.

“It wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Nowt surprises yo’, numbskull.”

She waited for him to spring up and strike, or throw something from where he was. But he sat there.

It went on, stupid, futile, hopeless. Brian listened outside the window, each word worse than a dozen blows from Mr. Jones’s fist. “They’re rowing,” he said to himself, a knotted heart ready to burst in his mouth. Margaret stood by him: “What are they rowing about?” “Money,” he said.

“Tell me when they stop, wain’t yer, our Brian?”

“Wait with me here,” he said, looking through the window, seeing his father still sitting by the grate, shoulders hunched and face white. His mother was at the table reading a newspaper. “They ain’t stopped yet,” he told her. They stayed out till dark, then went in hoping that somehow their father would be in a better mood, that their mother had miraculously been and cadged or borrowed, begged or stolen or conjured up out of thin air some cigarettes for him.

One day when a quarrel was imminent Seaton put on his coat and rode down the street on his bike. He returned an hour later on foot, a cigarette between his lips and a carrier-bag of food in each hand. Brian followed him in, saw him put the bags on the table and give Vera a cigarette.

“Where’s your bike?”

“I’ve got you some food,” he said, proud and fussy.

She smoked the cigarette and laughed: “I’ll bet you’ve sold your bike.”

“I ’ave, my owd duck.”

“Yo’ are a bogger,” she said with a smile.

“I’d do owt for yo’ though!”

“I know you would. But I don’t like it when you’re rotten to me.”

He put his arm round her: “I’m never rotten to you, duck. And if I am, I can’t ’elp it.”

“You’re a piss-ant,” she smiled: “that’s what you are.”

“Never mind, Vera,” he said. “My owd duck.”

“How much did you get?”

“Fifteen bob. I sowd it at Jacky Blower’s on Alfreton Road.” He’d had it over a year, always working on it, reconditioning a lamp, new brake-blocks he’d been given, a bell he’d found, hours spent cleaning and polishing. She’d never imagined him selling it.

“I went to one shop and they offered me six bob. Six bob! I said: ‘Listen, mate, it ain’t pinched,’ and walked out after tellin’ ’em where they could put their money. I did an’ all.”

“I should think you did.” He took off his coat and cap, pulled a chair to the table. Seeing Brian, he stood up again, saying: “Hey up, my owd Brian! How are yer, my lad?”—caught him in his broad muscled arms and threw him to the ceiling.

“Put me down, our dad,” Brian screamed, frightened and laughing at the same time. Seaton lowered him, rubbed his bristled face against his smooth cheek, then let him go. “Come on, Vera, mash the tea. There’s sugar and milk and some steak in that bag. If you send Brian out for some bread we can all have summat to eat.” The kettle boiled and Seaton stirred his tea. When Brian wasn’t looking he put the hot spoon on his wrist, made him yell from the shock and run out of range. Brian was glad when no one quarrelled, when they were happy, and he could love his father, forget about what he had thought to do when he grew up to be big and tall.

Vera often saw in her children similar rages and moods that she detested in Seaton, diversions of petty misery created between the big one of no fags. When Brian came in from the street she asked him to go out again for a loaf. He slumped in a chair to read a comic. “Wait till I’ve finished this, our mam.”

“No, go now,” she said, pounding the dolly-ponch into the zinc sud-tub of soaking clothes. “Come on, your dad’ll be ’ome soon.”

He didn’t answer, glared at the comic but saw nothing more of Chang the Hatchet Man. Vera emptied fresh water into the tub. “Are you going,” she demanded, “or aren’t yer?”

“Let Margaret go. Or Fred.”

“They aren’t ’ere. You go.” He could hold on for a while yet. “Just let me finish reading this comic.”

“If you don’t go,” she said, wiping the wet table dry before setting the cloth, “I s’ll tell your dad when he comes in.”

“Tell ’im. I don’t care.” Having said it, he was afraid, but a knot of stubbornness riveted him, and he was determined not to shift.

When Seaton came in and sat down to a plate of stew he asked for bread. Brian wished he’d gone to the shop, but still didn’t move. It’s too late now, he told himself, yet knowing there was time to ask his mother casually for fourpence and go out for the load so that his father wouldn’t know he’d been cheeky. He stayed where he was.

“There ain’t any,” she said. “I asked Brian to go for some ten minutes ago, but he’s too interested in his barmy comic to do owt I tell ’im. He’s a terror to me sometimes and wain’t do a thing.”

Seaton looked up. “Fetch some bread.”

He held his comic, as if courage could be drawn from it. “Wait till I’ve finished reading, our dad.”

“Get that bread,” Seaton said. “I’m waiting for it.”

“The devil will come for you one of these days, my lad, if you don’t do as you’re towd,” Vera put in. He dreaded the good hiding he knew he’d get if he didn’t move that second, but picked nervously at a cushion.

“Don’t let me have to tell you again,” Seaton said.

When Brian didn’t move Seaton slid his chair out from the table, strode over to him quickly, and hit him twice across the head. “Tek that, yer little bleeder.”

“Don’t hurt his head,” Vera cried. “Leave him now.” He got another for luck. Seaton took a shilling from the shelf, thrust it into his hand, threw him to the door, and bundled him into the street. “Now, let’s see how quick you can be.”

Brian sobbed on the step for half a minute and, still crying, slouched along the wall towards the corner shop, making fervid plans to kill his father with an axe, if he could get an axe, and as soon as he was strong enough.

To reach the bednight attic, Brian led the three others up through mam-and-dad’s room, then climbed a broad ladder to a kind of loft, a procession of shirts and knickers going up there out of sight. Arthur at three was ready to do battle with the rest, and the flying melee of fists and feet that broke out as soon as the makeshift latch had been dropped caused Seaton to open the far-below stairfoot door and bawl: “D’ye ’ear? Let’s ’ave less noise or I’ll come up and bat yer tabs.” He stood for a few seconds in the electric silence to make sure it continued, then went back to his supper. It was all Arthur’s fault, Brian whispered. He’d put his foot into the communal last-Christmas train set as soon as he got into the room. So let’s jump into bed, or dad’ll come up and posh us.

He spread the sandwich packet and placed the bottle of water on the table, threatening wiry Arthur with his fist as he grabbed at the paper. Margaret held him back, saying: “We’ll share it, now,” while Fred looked on from a secure position on the bed. Night was a picnic time, when Vera filled a bottle with water and Seaton sliced bread and dripping, saying: “All right then, I’ll cut yer a few slices. Yer must ’ave summat t’eat after you’ve climbed that wooden ’ill. Come on, Brian-Margaret-Fred-Arthur, it’s time you was up that wooden ’ill!”

With each divided portion scoffed, they blew out the candle. “Go to sleep now,” Brian bossed them.

“Tell us a story,” Margaret said.

He’d known they wouldn’t sleep unless he did: “What shall I tell you about?”

“Tell about war,” Fred said, his lips breathing from the darkness of bedclothes.

Arthur’s sharp feet seemed to attack every leg and backbone at the same time. “Stop it,” Brian called, “or I’ll thump you.”

“Thump you back,” Arthur threatened, but kept his feet still. “I’ll tell you what,” Brian said, “I’ll tell you all a serial story.”

They approved and curled up to listen. Arthur’s feet-stabbing subsided, and Brian narrated how three men with machine-guns sat in a cellar that they used as a den, drinking whisky, planning how they would rob a bank. In the middle of the night they came out of their den and drove up the dark street in their big black car, and when they came to the bank they put ten sticks of dynamite under the big doors and stood on the other side of the street while it blew up with a great big bang. And when the smoke had cleared and they could see again they all rushed in through the high doors shooting off their machine-guns. When they got to the strong safes, there was a nightwatchman who said: “Get back or I’ll shoot you with this gun under my coat.” But the robbers took no notice on him and shot him stone dead and put more dynamite under the safes. And when this blew up, they went inside and took all the money, millions of pounds. And when they’d put it all into sack-bags they had with them, they ran out of the bank. A man tried to stop ’em getting into their car, and one of the bandits said: “That’s the means-test man; let’s blow him up.” So they shot him dead. And then another man jumped on ’em, and the boss said: “I know him. It’s the schoolboard man. Let him have it.” And they killed him dead as well. So they got into their big car and drove off over Trent Bridge and out of the town into the country at ninety miles an hour. But later they stopped at a caff to have a drink of whisky and something to eat and a detective called Tom Briggs was in the same caff having something to eat with his girl. And as soon as Tom Briggs saw these three men coming into the caff he knew they was robbers and that they’d just robbed a bank because he saw moneybags that they had under their arms. “Stop, yo’ lot,” he said, and pulled a gun out that he allus carried, but they had their machine-guns ready and tied him and his girl up, and when they had them tight tied up to chairs, the boss of the robbers said: “We’re goin’ ter kill ’em now.” And he put some more bullets into his machine-gun and held it to their heads and said: “Is everything ready, boys?” And the other two said: “Yes, let’s kill ’em. It’s all ready.” So the boss of the robbers said: “All right, I’ll shoot ’em now,” and he started to pull the trigger of the machine-gun, and in two seconds they’d be dead. He killed ’em anyway, and then one of the bandits said to the boss: “Look out o’ that window and you’ll see we’re surrounded with fifty coppers. It looks as if we’re done for.”

“And that’s how part one ends,” Brian said. A car crashed through the silence below. Arthur breathed softly. “It’s smashin’.”

“What happens next?” Margaret demanded.

“I can’t tell you,” Brian said, not yet knowing. “Part two don’t come till tomorrer night.”

“How many parts has it got?” she asked.

“Four, I think.”

“Serials at pictures have twelve,” she said. “Sometimes they’ve got fifteen.”

“Do the coppers get ’em?” Fred demanded from down the bed.

“I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

Arthur put his spoke in: “Now.”

“You’re ever such a good story-teller,” Margaret said. So he told them more, and went on till no one was left awake.

On his way to sleep Brian heard the whistle from a train rumbling out of Radford Station: like a squeal of surrender in the lead-heavy night, a downward note hurled from a black cavern by some unknown terror. He shuddered, rolled in a half-sleep, suffocated among bundles of bodies. The fearful low piping followed him into over-arching slumber, the train gone, and the whistle alone was an almost visible monster crying in the mouth of the night. “Dad!” he wanted to shout. “Dad!” being afraid, and when he looked from wide open eyes, he saw the Devil on the end of the bed.

The sad long wail sounded again, muted and resigned and more discouraging than before, coming from what was beyond his experience because it was nearer than he to the pits and brink of dying. His fear was of the coalswamps, a million years back and a million years on, the dead already calling from the future behind the black flames of life, as if dying and living were no more than a vast circle broken at one tiny place — where he was. The whistle persisted its soul-in-agony hooting, imprisoned in the dark spaces of his brain, even while his eyes were staring at the Devil on the end of the bed.

The Devil wore a crimson triangular hat, had a grey round face, a snubbed nose, and big loose grey lips. Brian was aware of him grinning, and when the whistle blew again it was part and parcel of him, and the jaggle of trucks on the railway line was chains rattling when his arms lifted (though his body did not move); and they were the chains with which he was to take him away.

The small dark room ignored the silver of moon outside, and shrunk in size until the Devil seemed closer. The squat figure grinned and beckoned, and his chains rattled again, impatient to take him to the owl-whistles and mastodon coalswamps. The grey face leered, and Brian stared at the crimson triangular hat that, even in the darkness, he saw was the colour of dried blood. The Devil had come to take him away, and he didn’t want to go. Brian and heart and fibre were against it, and he opened his mouth to cry out. Nothing. Dad! Dad! Dad! No sound came. He couldn’t breathe, as if a giant hook were fixed into the mechanism of his lungs, though in a way it seemed more tolerable to cry out than breathe, except that his cries made no sound, and the figure of the squat Devil sat waiting, patient and assured, wearing an oxblood triangular hat and rattling grey chains in grey invisible hands. The whistle stopped, as if the train had fallen sheer over the missing span of a bridge joining two banks of night; and Brian without knowing it dropped into sleep.

He told his father he had seen the Devil. It was only a nightmare, Seaton said. You often have nightmares from eating too late at night. Brian didn’t believe it. It was the Devil, who had come to take him away. Yes, his mother said, it was the Devil right enough, and if he didn’t behave himself and do all her errands from now on, then the next time the Devil came he would wrap them chains around him and take him away, for good. Then he’d never see anybody again, not even his grandad Merton.

CHAPTER 10

After a hefty downward press of his boot, Merton swung back the fork and lifted an abundant root of potatoes, shook them vigorously to the soil, then cast the useless tops aside for Brian to load on the small red barrow.

Brian didn’t yet know how hard he worked, was enjoying himself, having been in the garden since breakfast, unplugging weeds and nettles and gathering broad beans for one o’clock dinner. He pronged up potato-tops in Merton’s wake with his own quick-working fork, piled them high on the barrow, then fixed himself into the shafts — like a pit pony, as Merton said. He ran a sleeve across his forehead, brought it down mucky with sweat and a couple of squashed thunder-flies. The hot days had lasted a long time, making his face red, then brown, below his close-cropped threp’nny haircut whose front scrag-ends dipped over, turning his normally high Seaton brow into a lower Merton one and falling almost to his angled blue eyes.

With dug-in heels the barrow was heaved from a self-made rut, drawn between flowers and marrow patch towards a dumping ground by Welltop Hill. A series of lorry-like manœuvres sent the wheels climbing a mount of weeds and heads already brown from the sun. Every weekend Merton started a fire under them with a sheet of newspaper, and Brian stood back with him while flame and grey smoke rose, then returned to see the circle of black ash at dusk. He charged like Ben-Hur back to the garden, taking corners at full speed and axle-catching the gatepost as he went by, to see that his grandfather had scattered more tops and carried several buckets of potatoes into the arbour-shed.

Merton leaned on his fork to watch Brian fix another load on to the barrow. He liked to have Vera’s lad with him, working strenuously yet not breathing hard, thrusting the fork under a load of refuse and testing its weight to make sure it wasn’t too heavy before swinging it on to the barrow. Each sure movement was recognized as an unconscious work-rhythm that he, with his oft-lotioned back, was beginning to lose.

He smiled widely at Brian, who did not know he was observed, admiring him for a good worker, a quality that made him fond of anyone. Yet he recollected him in the kitchen at evenings, head down over a book or pencilling an imaginary map, pastimes he couldn’t reconcile with the innate good sense of toil exhibited by the Brian now before him. It was an amusing combination that did no harm, and he didn’t suppose it could, as his grandson in yellow shirt, short trousers, and burst plimsolls loaded more weeds and potato-tops.

“Come on, Nimrod,” he called, standing erect and shouldering the fork, “stop doin’ that for a bit, and we’ll go and cut some rhubarb. ’Appen yer gra’ma’ll mek you some custard wi’t for your tea.”

After dinner he was equipped with brush and scraper to clean out the pigeon hut, a job he didn’t like but accepted because — apart from it pleasing his grandfather — he’d been promised a penny at the end of the day. A scraper-blade in his teeth, he crawled through the low opening and out of sunlight. Letting the scraper fall, he used his mouth for breath after the first force of the smell brought water from his eyes. Gradually he was able to see and move about, pushed his scraper along half-rotten boards, heaping excrement and feathers towards the far wall. He gave up trying not to dirty his clothes, and sat down whenever he felt tired. Working open-mouthed from corner to corner, he isolated the large central patch; then he cut lanes through it and gradually enlarged the island of clean-scraped board in the middle, until only a broken perimeter of filth remained. When this vanished he pushed the scrapings from the door with a dustpan dragged in from outside by his muscular sleeve-rolled arm.

On Sunday afternoon the Arlingtons and Lakers trooped out of their woodside cottages and came over the Cherry Orchard, passing the Nook on their way to Sunday school. Brian leaned over the fence, sleepy from an excess of dinner, waving and calling out. When they returned at five o’clock he would join them as far as the end of the Cherry Orchard, hearing talk about what the teacher had read from the Bible. He couldn’t understand why they went to school on Sunday, when five days a week was more than plenty for him. Besides, there seemed something shameful about going to church or Sunday school, a place you went to only if you were a sissie, or if you were posh. His grandmother said he should go. “Why do people go to Sunday school?” he demanded in a tone of contempt.

“To worship God,” she told him. “Besides, if you’re a good lad and go every week the teacher’ll gi’ you a book.” Even this didn’t shake his obstinacy. It was a rainy afternoon and he sat in the kitchen, competing for some hearthrug with the cat. Merton had shed his best boots and gone up to bed, leaving his wife to make bread and cake at the table. A saturating drizzle sent water down drainpipes and splashing into waterbutts, and the obliterated landscape edged the whole house slowly to sleep. Even the pigs left off grunting; the dog dozed in its kennel, and the silent cocks were petrified on their perches. Only the rain had energy, suddenly pitting at the windows. “Why do we have to worship God?” he asked in the same tone.

“So that He’ll love you.”

“What does it matter if God loves us?”

“Because if He does,” she catechized, “you’ll grow up strong and wain’t ever come to harm.”

“I don’t want God to love me,” he said.

“Ay,” she ended it slowly, “you don’t now, but you might some day.” He stood up and walked into the parlour.

The first light after the ending rain would be seen from there, and while waiting for it he put “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” softly on the gramophone. He looked at the picture above the mantelshelf. “If you love me as I love you, nothing will ever part us two.” He used to think the boy and girl were his grandparents when they were young, but now it looked as if the girl with the auburn hair could be Brenda Arlington in a few years’ time, and as if he might grow into the youth who was trying to give her a bunch of flowers. But not likely. They didn’t live in his world, had no connection with his brain just vacated by “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” were people who lived beyond his boundaries of school and tips and house and Nook and the swivel-eyed dole-packet that kept him alive and kicking. And while he gave his brain over again to the green-hearted spinning rhythmical record, the sky grew lighter, and beyond the window huge clouds were marshalled away like obsolete continents by the wind, and the sun like a drowned rat asserted itself over green and dripping fields.

Like the sun, the dog dragged its chain and came out of the kennel, and cockerels were letting it rip from behind their high wire. Mary took bread and cakes from the oven, and went out with a shovel for coal before the fire went too low. Merton pulled on his shoes and fed the grunting pigs. Brian sat down with them to salmon and cucumber and lettuce, rhubarb and custard, and jam pasty.

Merton said one morning: “They’re comin’ to mow the field nex’ week.” Blue flowers lay around the hedges, and corn was ready for cutting. The weather was dry and hot, and Brian had stayed at the Nook the whole five-week holiday.

“Are you gooin’ to ’elp lik yer did last year?” he asked, having seen him, tall, strong, wielding a long scythe, the high corn falling heap on heap in front. Merton’s white-spotted handkerchief wiped tea from his mouth. “Nay, Nimrod, I shan’t. Not this year. They’ll cut it wi’ a machine and when it’s finished all they ’ave to do is pick up the stooks an’ stak ’em, then wait for ’osses to cum an’ tek it away.”

“Can I watch?” Brian asked, mopping bacon-fat from his plate with a piece of bread.

“As long as you don’t get in anybody’s way,” Merton said. “Your grandmother’ll be busy. Farmer ’Awkins is goin’ ter send flour and bacon so’s she can mek the farm ’ands’ dinner. They’ll eve it in the yard ’ere.”

Bay rose and poppies were pictures of midsummer fires that surprised him at the turn of each hedge corner when crossing to spread the harvest news among Lakers and Arlingtons. He walked between white mats of daisies, rugs of buttercup, patches of yellow dead-eyed ragwort peeping from hedge bottoms, and entered the territory of a herd of cows. A breeze came between sparse prickly bushes and he whistled away the too-hard stares of the big dumb animals that slowly surrounded him. He could easily imagine becoming afraid, but walked whistling on, till the brace that stood in his path moved to one side and changed the circle into a horseshoe, leaving him free to walk out to the Arlingtons’ cottage.

“Is Ken in?” he asked.

No, he wasn’t, but his mother stood in the doorway, holding a colander of shelled peas, a small woman harassed from too much work, whose sharp, quick eyes reminded him of little Miss Braddely at the dinner-centre. “He’s gone to get some blackberries.”

Brian made for the dark glades of the wood, treading an undergrowth way from point to point of a map pockmarked on his mind, until the protesting scream of Brenda leapt to him through a belt of bushes. Ken and Harry were monkey-swinging on a branch that barely held them, while Alma and Brenda filled their frocks with blackberries below. Brian broke himself a stick, ripped away twigs and leaves. Harry Laker came down to earth, doubled from the impact and sprang straight like a Japanese doll. “They’re playing,” Brenda protested again, “while we work; it ain’t fair.”

She was on tiptoe, stretching her fingers for the richest clump. “I’ll get them,” Brian said, plucking two at a time. He hadn’t given Brenda time to reply, and she spurned his offer, retorting: “No, don’t bother, I can get them,” but she slipped and clawed her arm so that blood and blackberry juice mixed on it.

“Wipe it with my hanky,” he said.

Crimson with shame and anger, she sucked away the blood as if it were milk. “I don’t want your hanky.”

“All right then,” he said, “don’t have it.” Ken had a claspknife that cut through wood like chocolate, so they made bows, and launched into a game of Robin Hood. With aprons of blackberries Brenda and Alma sat on a tree trunk by the stream, and when the game of Robin Hood had worn itself out Ken shouted: “Let’s see’f they’ve got many berries yet. That’s not many,” he said, breaking through the bushes. “I’ll bet you’ve been eating some.”

“No, we ain’t,” Brenda denied. “They got spilled.”

“She did eat ’em,” Alma accused, “our Ken.”

Brenda turned: “Clatfart! She’s had a lot as well: look at her mouth.” Alma wiped away telltale stains that weren’t there, but Ken settled the argument: “All right, yo’ two’s had a lot, so we’ll finish ’em off. Come on, Brian. Come on, Harry”—thrusting his hand into the apron. “You big ’ogs!” Brenda shouted. “Gerroff!”

Ken smacked his lips, remembered the promise to take some home, so all began another collection. “They’re mowing corn in the field near our house next week,” Brian said, putting a blackberry into his mouth.

Brenda was distant: “Are they?” He was about to eat another, but dropped it into her apron. “You’re a greedy ’og,” she said. “You’re eating more than you put in my pina.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are, because I’m counting ’em.”

“There’s plenty more,” he said, reaching to the bush top. “Is your grandad going to cut the corn?” She looked at him with brown inquisitive eyes.

“No, Farmer Hawkins’ men are doing it.”

They walked down a path almost closed in by bushes. “I might come, then,” she conceded.

At the stream’s narrowest point Alma was nervous and wouldn’t cross. Ken found a large stone and plunged it into the middle with such force that everyone leapt to the bushes for fear of being splashed. “You needn’t a thrown it in like that,” Brenda cried. “It’s a steppin’-stone for our Alma.” She put her foot on it, swung to another stone, became rigid at seeing the distance left to cross.

“Go on,” Ken called. “You’ll be all right.”

A wave of panic masked her face, and with a sudden shrill cry she collapsed into the water, a dozen blackberries bobbing in the disturbance. Ken hauled her out, bedraggled and shivering.

“Oo you won’t ’alf cop it, our Ken,” Brenda sang with a dead-set serious face. “Oo you’ll cop it. Not ’alf!”

“I didn’t push her in,” he shouted, “it’s your fault. You knew she was going to fall, so you should have grabbed her.” They walked out of the wood, arguing bitterly, Alma a silent round-faced heroine shivering between them.

Still in bed, Brian heard work going on in the field: horses neighing and the jingle of harness, men shouting to one another, and harvest machines splutter-chugging up and down the lane. He ran to the window in his shirt: it was true, right enough, they’d started; pulled on his trousers and walked downstairs holding shoes and socks. His grandmother laid some breakfast. “The tea’s nearly cold, lazybones, but I din’t bother to wake you because I knew the noise’d do it sooner or later.” She poured a mug of tea: “Anyway, it’s on’y eight o’clock, so you’ve plenty of time.”

He washed, and bolted through the hedge. Merton was talking to Farmer Hawkins, so he stayed back. Drays and wagons stood in spaces already cut, and Brian felt a lingering fear of the huge juggernaut wheels of the wagons because three years ago near haymaking time he had asked his grandfather: “What do they carry the corn off in?” “Drays and wagons, Nimrod.” “But wagons eat you,” he exclaimed. Merton cried in surprise: “Eat you? Wagons?” “I read about it at school,” Brian said. “Well, if you did, all I can say is they teach you some funny things,” Merton laughed. Brian was disconcerted: “Well, wagons do eat you, because Sent George killed one.” “He must ’ave ’ad a bit o’ bother, then, stabbin’ the wheels,” Merton said mischievously. “I suppose it was loaded wi’ bottles of ale, and that’s why he wanted to kill it!” Lydia broke in: “Sent George didn’t kill a wagon, Brian. It was a dragon he killed.” “Ah!” Merton exclaimed. “I thought there was a catch in it somewhere.”

Even now Brian half expected a snorting scaly monster to come charging at him and felt disappointed on seeing a clumsy inoffensive thing on four wheels unable to move without the help of horses. At dinner-time he went down the lane to fetch Merton a quart of ale and with the change from a shilling bought himself an ice-cream cornet. A wind had risen, and though a hot sun shone, someone expected there’d be rain tomorrow, so they had to finish the field today. Brian sat on the gate and watched the wheat swaying in a charmed dance under the wind that fell on it from the long embankment of the railway. It turned and lifted like a gentle sea of yellow and gold. The field had shrunk since morning, was half the size of yesterday, would soon be a mere wasteground of short stems that stuck into slippers that walked over them. All heads were lifted and lowered, then went in a beautiful movement all at once from side to side as if making the most of a narrowing existence and knowing that by evening it would be flat and finished.

Something was wrong. Everyone stood around a horse that, still in the wagon-shafts, lay on its side, half-strangled and tilting the cart, which was in danger of falling. “What’s up?” Brian asked his grandfather.

“That ’oss’s gone mad.”

“What are they going to do with it?”

“Shoot it, if they can’t get it up.” The huge grey horse lay neighing and snorting, its unmoving eyes on the men around, sensing itself in an unusual position, yet unable to break through the dim mists covering its brain and gather strength to get up. Foam was like snow on its mouth and no one would go close and try heaving it on its feet. On its forehead was a red sore the size of a florin, a dozen flies buzzing over it. “Does it want some water, grandad?”

“It’s ’ad a drink,” Merton answered brusquely.

“But it’s sweating”—he pointed to glistening enormous flanks: the body twitched, and grey eyes rolled emptily. Farmer Hawkins, a heavily built man wearing a panama hat, pushed his way through the onlookers, demanding: “Ain’t you got the bloody thing up yet?”

Nobody spoke, seemed afraid of him. Merton smoked a pipe some distance off, and Brian stood by his side. Farmer Hawkins cracked a whip over the horse’s head, hoping it would leap up and pull the wagon away. No good: it lay as if dead. He tugged at the harness, but was forced back to his whip, which made red streaks down its flanks. It tried to rise at each crash, but its head fell in a dull half-paralyzed heap. The farmer saw it was useless, threw his whip aside and sent the labourers back to their work. “Got a gun handy, Jack?” he called to Merton. Brian edged closer: its body shimmered with sweat and fatigue, eyes showing grey, tail swishing feebly against attacking flies. Then all movement subsided, and he turned at hearing Ken Arlington shout from the hedge. Brenda’s wild face roamed over the field and stopped at the prostrate horse. “It’s gone mad,” Brian told them. “Grandad’s gone to get a gun.”

“They don’t ’ev ter shoot it just ’cause it’s gone mad,” Brenda said, “do they?”

“Course they do.” Farmer Hawkins cleared them off when Merton came back and they walked to the embankment hoping for trains, Brenda between them. “What’s up?” Brian asked at her silence.

“Nowt,” she answered. Remembering the horse’s face, he wanted to get far away before it was killed. “Why can’t they make horses better when they’re badly, like people?” she cried. “Can’t they get a doctor to it?”

“Don’t be daft,” Ken threw in sharply. “That hoss is too old. It’d be too much bother to try and get it better.” He plucked at blackberries. “Come and eat some o’ these, they’re ever so juicy.” Brian collected a handful and gave some to Brenda. Still eating, they sat on the railway fence. Brenda’s hair blew about: “I hope they don’t kill that ’oss,” she lamented.

They heard a train. Brian leapt from his perch and ran up the green slope, lying flat in deep grass near the top, already feeling a vibration from the approaching train. The others crashed on either side. “I hope it’s an express,” Ken whispered, his voice low as though the driver might hear him. Brian remembered how Bert near New Bridge laid flat on the tracks while a goods train rumbled over him — a daredevil who dared the others to do it as well, though nobody would take his dare. He bet Brian a pound, but Brian said: “Where will you get the pound if I do?” “Rob a meter,” Bert said, but Brian hadn’t done it anyway.

Before the train’s thunder grew too loud for them to hear anything else, a series of sharp echoes fled from the cornfield. Brian felt a pain in his chest, as if the bullet had struck there. He tugged a handful of grass by the roots and chewed it, and when the train screamed by, opened his green mouth to cheer, an arm waving above his head. Engine, wheels, and carriages came to within a few yards, ripping the view into tatters of blue sky and field, each in a decimated second dancing between the carriage-gaps. A column of smoke curled like a black long stocking into the sky, its head quickly dispersing at the shock of finding nothing to keep it in shape.

He followed them down the slope and over the fence. “I want to go away on a train like that some day,” he said, slashing at nettles with a stick.

“Where do you want to go then?” Brenda asked as he drew level. He hadn’t thought about it. “Anywhere. I don’t know.”

“I’d be frightened to go a long way,” she confided. “And trains might crash.”

“Well,” he said, a note of anger in his voice, “I wouldn’t be frightened.”

CHAPTER 11

Seaton was a secretive man, and his dark complexion may have been more than skin deep because of his inability either to read or write. This bred in him — when surrounded as he imagined himself to be by a fair world of literacy — a defensive wish to create his own peculiar brand of pencilled autobiography. He acquired notebooks and filled them with dates and columns of figures, copied monthly calendars on to sheets of cut-out cardboard, on which he starred each dole and signing-on day. In the books he kept accounts of what wages he came by on his short-lived expeditions into the world of employment. A spacious old toffee-tin held bills, lapsed insurance policies, pink forms of one sort or another, fading official letters he had some time received, birth certificates, and two photographs of his dead mother. All these items, as well as each added-up column of wages, were signed by his name in broad rugged handwriting, the only thing that, apart from figures (at which he was remarkably clever and quick), he knew how to write.

This private office, which gave him a sense of still being part of the world when it no longer needed his labour (yet of being master to a tiny and exclusive life of his own), was kept under lock and key with a tool chest he had made himself. Brian watched him saw the remaining hard gut out of half-rotten planks, plane and bevel, sandpaper and mortise-tenon the lid and sides. Within, on hooks or in equal compartments, lay screwdrivers and hammers, gimlets and bradawls, saws and chisels, hinges and brackets and bolts, and bits of shoe-leather (for he was a miser and threw nothing away except cigarette ends), all of them begged or borrowed or stolen, found perhaps but seldom bought. Brian was sometimes around when it was opened, and out came a smell of upholstery and bicycle inner-tubes, tobacco and sweat and leather, and the beginnings of ruts from straightened nails.

Seaton delighted in using his tools, worked with an animal absorption within self-found carefully defined limits of intelligent usefulness. His creative world was the result of necessity finding its own level in a man who might otherwise have made his family suffer too much, and infect them completely with his own melancholia, spite, and despair.

Brian saw him unlock the cupboard on certain evenings, spread papers and notebooks over the table, watched him set out a clear life in dates and figures and signatures with no explanatory prose, in the only way he knew how to record it. These were the times of his greatest contentment, and an aura of calm descended over the house.

Brian copied him, bought a penny notebook, and in awkward, uneven writing put down the names of schools he had been to and the dates at which he had left them, the streets he had lived on for as far back as he could remember. He saw other boys standing at street corners with pencil and paper collecting car numbers, but his own game was part of walking up Denman Street on Sunday morning to buy a sixpenny roast from a cheap butcher’s (pushing up to the counter and always hoping the roast would be bigger than last week’s), stopping on his way back near a corner plastered from top to bottom with cinema billboards: big letters in yellow and black, red and purple and gold, forming titles of adventure and destiny, and names from the brightest of heavens such as Robert Donat and Jack Hulbert, Jean Harlow and Clark Gable. Shopping-bag by the wall, he took out his book and self-consciously gathered on to paper the shining words of poetry around him, imagining the thoughts of passers-by: What’s he doin’, writing in a book like that? — for he would stay a long time laboriously copying and turning pages, while his mother waited at home to get the meat in the oven.

The game came to an end one evening when he opened his grandmother’s Evening Post and discovered two long columns on the inside page already filled with words he had so arduously hunted for and copied down. In one way it was like finding a goldmine, corn in Egypt that dazzled his eyes as he strove to take in such a fabulous concentration of titles. Though they lacked the colour and layout that went right into him at the hoardings, his game was finished.

At the beginning of September, time threw in its reserves of frost and fog to break down the year’s resistance, and he wore a coat, began in the chill and darkness of evening to anticipate Goose Fair and Bonfire Night and Christmas parties at school. Rain came, cold and persistent, drainpipes and gutters working overtime to wash away the dead from a battlefield of leaves and matchsticks. Houses grew farther apart in the misty odours of each earlier dusk, became more compatible for Knock-a-door and Spirit-tap and Dustbinlidder in the form of Brian, Ted Newton, and Jim Skelton, moving like wraiths from lit-up lamp to lamp in laughing agony at the distraught tormented who opened his or her door after mysterious noises, to see — their eyes still blind from an electric-lit room — nothing.

Brian with handbat played rounders, sent a tennis-ball smacking from wall to wall and corner to corner in half-darkness, sometimes cracking a window and bringing an irate man in shirtsleeves shaking a fist into an empty street threatening to have the shadows “sommonsed.” Those for the leap in Leapfrog sang as they went for the leap:

“Rum-stick-a-bum

Here I come

With my finger up my bum!”

A game of snobs went on across the pavement, or marbles in the gutter, and in the middle of the street a solid bundle of bellicose kids split into a dozen fragments when a car came by, or slowly dispersed when haggard mothers from doorsteps called them in one by one for tea or bed.

On Saturday morning a scraping of pennies and ha’pennies sometimes succeeded in mounting to threepence, the price of a matinée seat at the pictures. Brian collected rags and iron from the tips, cadged a rabbit skin from his grandmother, a stray beer-bottle from Merton, and traipsed them in a sack to junkyards on Alfreton Road. When Seaton did a paper-hanging job he was able to take Fred and Margaret to the flickerdrome as well. They stood hand in hand, an hour before time, in a long queue of shouting and restless children. Ice-cream barrows attracted knots of them by the kerb, and Fred absent-mindedly kicked the wheelspokes of one before he thought to slide his ha’penny on to the cool-looking lead-covered tub, then came back crying because his ice-cream had thrown itself from the cornet-mouth and was melting on the pavement as if it couldn’t disappear fast enough. Brian tried to pacify him, but a hard fist screwed towards weeping eyes, and the mouth beneath wailed: “I want another cornet!” at which Brian tried threats: “If you don’t be quiet I wain’t tek yer into the pictures at all.”

“I want another cornet,” Fred wept, and Brian had no staying power before tears. Weeping seemed the greatest disaster that could ever happen, much greater than what had caused it, which should already have been forgotten. Tears, more than faith, should move mountains — but what a pity they were shed so easily — as Fred went on roaring and everyone turned to look.

Margaret tut-tutted, as she had heard her mother do many times: “I’n’t ’e a mardy-arse?”

Brian relented. Had it been anyone else crying, he would have felt anger against him, but for his own brother he mellowed, became soft and almost afraid for them both. “I’ll buy you a cornet,” he said, and pushed a ha’penny into his hand so that Fred stopped the tap as if by magic. “Don’t let it fall out this time,” Margaret shouted at the stolid back of his head by the ice-cream barrow.

Cars and buses catapulted down the cobbled road, dodged by Brian to reach the paper shop and buy a “Joker” comic. He stood on the pavement reading the latest machinations of Chang the Hatchet Man, immediately drawn into a strange landscape, himself an unseen spectator standing by a broad riverbank, watching a junk loaded with dynamite carried by the current towards a dam, by which it would explode and bury both valley and distant plain in water. He was filled with admiration for such grandiose ideas of destruction, looking upon Chang with some sympathy, almost as if he was some long-lost great-uncle a few times removed, roaming the wastes of China. He knew Chang was a villain, and that three English youths standing hopelessly by the riverbank would have saved the dam if they could, but Chang was greater than these, the brigand who had set the junk in motion from further upstream, and was the real hero of the piece. The junk exploded, a thousand fragments suspended in mid-air till next week — and even this didn’t make him aware of Chang’s creator, of the fact that Chang was no more than a few pen marks on paper, lit into something bigger than real by the escape lanes of imagination.

He looked up to see the queue moving, and asked for three threepennies at the cashbox. The musty, scent-smelling cinema was already half full, and he led them to the front row; Margaret wanted to sit farther back but stayed with them because her mother had drummed it into her that she mustn’t leave Brian at any time: “You might get run over or talked to by a dirty old man if you don’t come home with the others.” Brian found it easy to imagine a bull double-decker grinding on its brakes, its meat-chopping radiator smeared with blood and bone and gristle as the bus capsized by the barber’s to a grinding of tin, a tinkle of glass, and a thump of fifty people and shopping baskets hitting the kerb. But a dirty old man — what did he want with little girls? Anyway, if I caught a dirty old man doing owt to Margaret I’d rush him and kill him.

Red lights dimmed from the fourpenny backs, bringing a tide of darkness and increased cheering towards the screen, a black-out of noise that went on and on. A length of boarding ran under the screen and the manager beat an iron bar against it, creating gunshots of rapid fire. Brian folded his ears in, one flap over the other and his flat hand over that, while more shots ricochetted as far as the balcony even when the cheering and booing had stopped.

“All right,” shouted the demoniac manager, a little man become giant-sized in the silence. “It won’t start until I can hear a pin drop.” Even those in for the first time knew better than to create more noise by laughing at his joke, one that Brian disliked and distrusted because at school old gett-faced Jones used the same catch to get you quiet before hymn-singing and prayers, different in that the stick he held was always still swinging from action before he got to the “pin-dropping” smirk.

At the consenting flash of the manager’s torch the Three Stooges came like jumping-jacks on to the screen, and pure untrammelled laughter grew like fireworks. At the end of the serial, when Jungle Jim was one side-stroke away from the scissor-jaws of a faster crocodile, all exits burst open and Brian kept Margaret and Fred before him, arms held out to stop them being wedged too tight in the flood. Fred shot out first, his mouth fixed in a Tarzan scream, until Margaret told him to stop it or she would thump him.

Brian led them running home because of a thin drizzle falling. The electric light was already on, and Vera was cutting doorsteps of bread, pasting them with margarine and plum jam. Seaton sat by the fire smoking a cigarette, cup of tea on the hob. “It was ever so good at the pictures, our dad,” Margaret said, and he pulled her to him with a laugh, covering her rain-cold cheek with loud kisses: “I love my little gel, I do an’ all!” He listened absorbed to her rehashed tale of Buck Jones and Jungle Jim. Brian bit his way through a doorstep. “The Three Stooges was best because there was women in the other pictures. I’ve never seen a big picture wi’out a woman in it.”

“And you wain’t, neether,” said Vera, setting up a line of cups and mugs for tea; “the men like to see ’em too much.”

“Yo’ll see enough o’ women some day, Brian,” Seaton said with a laugh.

As Vera drew curtains across the window, the urgent voice of a vendor shouting “Special” electrified the room. They could hear people buying papers, and the clink of money given in change when the newsman stopped under the window. Brian was afraid, feeling the blowing-up of bombs and black death and screams of gun-and-bayonet war, whenever he heard anyone shouting “Special,” because his mother once told him that Specials meant war. Vera broke the silence: “Shall I go and get one?”

“I shouldn’t bother,” Seaton answered. “I expect it’s on’y summat about Spain, and we’ll get it on the wireless soon.” When the man’s voice had gone Brian said: “A man came round to gran’ma’s sellin’ Old Moore’s Almanacks for tuppence, and when she bought one off ’im I read in that there’d be a big war soon.”

“There wain’t,” his mother scoffed, spreading more bread, “don’t yo’ bother. An’ if there is, yo’ wain’t be called up.”

“I ’ope not: I’m frightened o’ wars.”

Seaton grunted: it was a difficult sound to tolerate — an employment of bitter sarcasm while everyone knew him to be feeling fine. “It’s no worse in a war than it is now. You get boggered from pillar to post and get nowt to eat, just the same.” He pulled Margaret on to his knee with a laugh, a revolution in mood: “Come on, my curly-headed baby, tell me some more about what was on the pictures, then I’ll let you sup some o’ my tea.”

They looked into the deep black canyon between the canal locks, a fan-down shine of water fitfully seen by cloud-belaboured moonlight, like a coal-hole dug so deep that water had filled it, glinting like boot-polish. A few yards away, up and over the bridge parapet, cars and buses roared into the city from a wilderness of fields and woods, and headlit javelins of opposite desires left the huge illuminated rag-patch of town for Brian knew not where.

They were alone, sidetracked beyond lights and out of notice. Bert kicked the pram: “I’d like to chuck that in as well, but I’d get a pasting if I went ’ome without it. Our Midge is on’y four and mam pushes her up to t’ clinic every week to get her leg seen to.” He flashed his torch, a flat model for one-and-fourpence bought from money cajoled with the Guy in town. His fingers gripped it, pressed — and light came again from the one eye of Polyphemus bulging white out of the top.

Brian drew back from a twelve-foot fall into bottomless water, not only cold but wet as well, heavy on your clothes, and nothing to grip down there but smooth walls when and if you surfaced. “Come on then, let’s get the Guy Fawkes. Yo’ tek one arm; I’ll tek the other; and we’ll let go.” He looked over again: “It wain’t ’alf splash.”

“It’s a crying shame”—Bert shook his head. “It’d burn well if we took it ’ome and saved it for the bonfire.” Brian hated a change of mind. It made him uneasy — because his own unsure mind was inclined to follow every switch. A simple decision often meant hard work, and to break it, an extravagant waste of spirit. The decision to buy torches with the Guy Fawkes money had been easy to make, but both were now guilty at not splitting the three bob between their families for food, and needed to get rid of the Guy to prove, when recriminations flew at their faces, that it had been stolen from them by bigger boys before they could earn a penny. “It might not sink, for all we know,” Brian said. “And when a copper comes along in the morning it’ll look like a man who’s chucked ’issen in. Then the copper’ll sling his hat and coat off and goo in as well.”

That decided it. “P’raps he’ll drown if he does,” Bert said. “Yer never know. Not all coppers can swim.”

“Coppers don’t drown, though,” Brian said with conviction, fastening the Guy’s coat as if it were a paralyzed and much loved brother in danger of catching pneumonia. “If a copper dived in, he’d get out. We wouldn’t, but he would.”

“He might not”—Bert held the agreeable vision for as long as he could make it last — “he might get cramp. It’s cold enough for cramp, if you ask me. Once you get cramp, you’re a gonner. A lad at Poor Boys’ Camp got it in his leg last year, and he went under twice before anybody could get to him. He didn’t die, though.”

Brian caught on to his vision. “Well, if a copper got cramp and I was near, I wouldn’t help him to get out.” The Guy lay between them, flat like some derelict drunk, a sackbag arm across button eyes, as if not wanting to see what the world had in store for him next. One leg was akimbo and Bert kicked it straight. “Even if I’d got a lifebelt I’d chuck ’im a brick. Coppers is bastards. I was down town last week and opened a car door for a bloke. A copper cum up and batted my tab. He said I’d gent sent to borstal if I didn’t clear off. I worn’t bothering nobody.”

Brian flashed his torch, revelled in the magic of it. “Rotten bogger.”

“All coppers are like that.”

“I don’t know why they have coppers,” Brian said. “They’re worse than schoolteachers.”

“No difference,” Bert said, lighting his nub-end in the darkness. “It’s all part of the gov’ment. They’re all conservatives, as well. I know that for a fact, because dad towd me. Conservative”—he was proud of such a posh formidable word — “if ever yer vote conservative, dad said, I’ll smash yer brains out. And ’e showed me ’is big screwed-up fist to prove it. Then on Saturday night I seed him thumping a bloke outside a pub, and I suppose it was because dad ’ad got to know he’d voted conservative. He bashes mam sometimes, though, but I don’t know what for, because she don’t vote conservative.”

“Millionaires vote conservative. John Player and the bloke who owns Raleigh.”

“Well, I wouldn’t. Even if I’d got ten trillion pound notes I’d still vote red for Labour.”

“Me as well,” Brian said. “Shall we chuck the Guy in the locks then, like ’e was a copper?” And an idea came quickly. “Let’s get a couple o’ bricks and fasten ’em inside, so’s he’ll sink right to the bottom.”

“Nobody’ll think it’s somebody drowned,” Bert objected. “It wain’t be seen.”

Brian’s face exploded into a laugh, the force of a decision that took no deciding, happiness giving character to his face unseen in the darkness. “It’ll mek a big splash, though,” he managed to say at last, and Bert, relaxed and disarmed, knew that it would.

Labour, Brian repeated, bending to pull up his share of a huge stone. Labour — the word had a stern ring about it, like the hard labour they gave you in court. Perhaps this was soft labour since everybody voted for it. Or like Manual Labour, the Spaniard fighting in Madrid: cloth-cap, rifle, and a thin cigar. His father was Labour, red Labour, and so was everybody else he knew (except old Jones, the headmaster at school: you could tell a mile off that he wasn’t), though that didn’t make the word and meaning of it more acceptable. The stones were tied and centred into place, and he hooked his fingers around an arm and a leg. “We’ll count three,” Bert said. “Soft, though.”

“Back then,” Brian responded, feeling the straw-like texture of the Guy. Conservative — it was an official word to be distrusted, hated in fact. If a van stopped near you in the street at election time and some fist shot out and thrust into your hand a bunch of blue streamers, you didn’t stop to wonder why you’d been daft enough to accept them but threw them down immediately and kicked them to bits with your shoes — or else. Even being Labour like your father and street and suburb, you risked being battered to the pavement following the eruption of a gang of red streamers like a steam-engine out of the nearest corner. You might hold your breath long enough, though, hang on to the blue streamers and pin them to the door of someone you did not like, someone who had once sent too readily for the police when you played loudly on the nearby cobbles.

The final draw-back, then a masterly satisfying swing of the stone-bellied straw corpse into the air and over the welcoming water. Labour was the best thing — and if Brian ever felt distrust for that sympathetic organization it was only because all big names seemed like devil’s threats to hold his soul in thrall — and he wasn’t sure enough of his soul yet to trust it with such things.

It was late enough for a traffic lull along the nearby big road; a rough silence reigned between the corridor of its lights, and among the distant railway yards. The Guy, leaving their lunging arms, spent a glorious moment of freedom suspended in black harmless air, then, a straw-emasculated monster, it descended while Bert and Brian held their breath with anticipated delight.

It hit the water with a justified explosion, a reverberating thump creating havocs of sound in the canyon of the deep lock, while Bert and Brian embraced with roars of delight — and then set to pushing the now empty pram back along the towpath, their newly bought flash-lamps making spaces of clear light before them.

On rainy days clothes steamed in the classroom, emitting invisible yet olfactory vapours from waterlogged shoes and soaked jackets. Hot pipes were a December godsend, to be sat on before lessons began, stayed close to during them so that the hand could stretch slyly out and touch their luxurious warmth. At home, when he and Arthur and Fred ran in crying from the bitter cold of hot-aches, Seaton would pull them to the hearth one by one and press his fire-warmed hands over them: “Have a bit o’ fire. There’s plenty more where that came from”—making Brian’s bones ache from the pressure of strong maulers.

In winter he saw the Nook as a snowbound igloo set in the desolation of stark countryside, Merton and the rest plodding in or out for wood and beer and groceries. If there was no snow, then the fields were dull and wet under a grey sky, and there was no comfort in crossing fields and mud like a fugitive walking beyond the world of sound. Silence and rain surrounded it — not even a horse or lightning. Streets were better.

To subscribe penny by penny at the corner shop for some toy to Selection Box of chocolates ravaged his deep-seated natural inclinations. But it had to be done if Christmas was to mean anything at all, it being better to spend two shillings straight off than twenty-four pennies bit by bit. A concentration of resources left a more solid memory of having been rich for a day instead of stingily solvent for many.

“Who’ll join the Christmas Club?”

“I wouldn’t join two pieces o’ string,” Seaton said, “except to ’ang myself, ’appen.” But he laughed as he said it.

Trimmings and Christmas trees and toys were in every shop window, aquariums of light and colour, impossible to buy but good to look at. Seaton was still on the dole, with money harder to come by than it had ever been, though food and presents usually landed from somewhere at Christmas. Vera’s mother sent a Christmas pudding, boiled in the outhouse copper of the Nook six weeks before; Ernest sent a parcel of discarded toys from last year; a sister sent clothes and gave Seaton a few shillings when he walked to Carlton for them.

A Christmas tree came into the house. Seaton trimmed the hagged rim of a two-pound tomato tin, filled it with soil, laminated it with blue crêpe paper. It stood, like a god with multiple green arms, on the dresser. Out came the box of decorations, saved like gold from previous years in beds of tissue paper. A delicate yellow pear was held aloft: “Where shall I put this one?”

Arthur stood at tiptoe on a chair to point out a branch halfway up the stem, shaking the sideboard in his eagerness. Margaret bawled at him not to knock owt over. “Just there,” he said firmly.

Vera put down her cup of tea. “Come off that chair, then, our Arthur; you’ll fall.”

“And where’ll I put this one?” Seaton asked, holding up a coloured model of Santa Claus. Brian had seen enough Christmases to lead the chorus of: “Right on top! He’s the chief! Up top, our dad.”

“Ah,” Seaton responded, high on the chair, “you’ll be ’earing ’im on Christmas Eve if you listen ’ard enough. You’ll ’ear ’is reindeers trotting across the chimney-pots, wain’t they, Vera?”

“Santa Claus i’n’t real,” Margaret scoffed.

“That’s what yo’ think,” Brian countered.

“He i’n’t,” Arthur said, and his baited breath settled it.

“Our dad hides our toys in the pantry, don’t yer, dad?” Fred said.

He looked at Vera. “Ain’t he a sharp little bogger? You can’t tell these kids owt, can yer?”

“Yer can’t,” Vera said, pulling Arthur’s shoes and socks off. “Not like when we was kids. Believed owt, we did. When I was ten, only a little gel, our Oliver towd me to go up Canning Circus to gerrim some orange peel. When I asked him what he wanted it for, he said he’d bat my tab if I didn’t goo. He said he wanted it because he’d got an ’eadache, though. So I went. Silly bogger I was. It was miles away, and I was terrified coming back in the dark, under them bridges. I thought an owd man was going to run me. And when I got back wi’ me pina full of orange peel our Oliver just laughed. All on ’em did. I said: ‘Yer rotten bogger’—and chucked it in ’is face. Then me dad gen me a penny, and said it served ’im right. He was a bogger, though, our Oliver was. But he was good as well, though, a proper card. Everybody liked ’im. My dad cried like a baby when he got killed in the war.”

Brian had heard it before, yet always found it hard to believe in grandad Merton crying. He pictured someone bringing a telegram to the Nook: YOUR SON KILLED FOR HIS KING AND COUNTRY it would have said. Kicked to death by a drunken mule; Oliver’s pals had given it rum to drink before he led it across a moor — being a blacksmith like his dad and on his way to shoe it. Maybe they did it for a joke on him because he was having ’em on like he had his mam on. But everybody says he was a good bloke, though, so Brian was sorry Oliver’d got killed because that was one uncle less. A sprig of mistletoe was tied under the light. “Come on, Vera, let’s ’ave the first kiss of Christmas,” Seaton said.

“Stop it, ’Arold”—struggling, aware of four kids looking on. “Don’t be so bleddy daft.” But she was kissed.

The weekend before Christmas, Brian went to the Nook, stayed overnight, and the next day felt sick as he was about to start back. He stood by the door with a stick in his hand, ready to walk out and home under the black sky that looked like sending fists of rain at the hedges before he got far. He couldn’t move, and Lydia turned from her making-up at the mirror. “Look at ’im,” she said to her mother, “he’s badly, the poor little bogger. Come on to the fire, Brian. He’s as white as a sheet.” He leaned his stick in the corner and walked back. She undressed him and walked him up the stairs in his shirt, the smell of her newly applied powder and rouge bringing the sickness into his mouth so that she just got him to the pot in time. “How is he then?” Mary asked when she came down.

Lydia took two lemons and filled a jug with warm water. “He was as sick as a dog. I’m teking him some o’ this up.”

“He’d better stay ’ere over Christmas, if you ask me. Shall we get a doctor?”

“No. It’s only a bilious bout.”

Brian curled into a ball, half-slept in a colourful incomprehensible world under the blankets. His tightly closed eyelids held in flickering lights of orange and red, and while he wanted to open his eyes in the hope of driving them away — they attacked him like bluebottles that stung — he did not want to lose the sense of repose that closed eyes gave. He fought this problem for a while, until he was forced to push his head above blankets and look at the flowered wallpaper beyond the bed because open eyes steadied the equilibrium of his stomach and saved him from being sick at that moment. The dance of the flowers slowed down; the swaying ceased and eventually he eased his eyelids together and fell back into less dangerous rest.

On Christmas morning there was a train set on his bed, and its silver lines were held like a horseshoe as Merton’s heavy tread sounded on the stairs.

“Hello, Nimrod, is that bilious bout about gone?”

“I feel all right now.” He was in the middle of the wide bed, looking beyond brass posts at wiry tree arms outside that the teeth of winter had picked clean. Merton pulled the window open. “I think we’ll get yer up later.”

The railway line circled an uneven terrain of blanket. “Gran’ma said I couldn’t yet.” A wind blew sunlight into the room, the damp breeze sharp as smelling-salts after the sick odours of three days’ breath. “Ay, ’appen she did, but yer’ll never get better stayin’ in bed. Yer want a bit o’ fresh air round yer now.” He closed the window, stood at the end of the bed. “What yer got there, you young bogger? I suppose Santa Claus brought it for yer?”

“No, yo’ did, and gran’ma and the others. You all put to and brought it me from Nottingham.”

Merton laughed. “There’s a little sharpshit for yer. Don’t believe in Santa Claus any more. I don’t know. But yer believe in Sent George and the Wagon, though, don’t yer?”

Brian laughed, stood the train lines up like a child’s drawing of the Big Wheel at Goose Fair. He let it fall. “No, I don’t.”

Merton took the lines: “Let’s see’f we can’t get this contraption going.” He set them on the floor and turned the engine key until it came against the stop. Brian leaned over the edge of the bed: Merton lined the carriages behind the engine, stopped whistling when the caravan set off. “There,” he said, “nowt to it.” After a dozen times round he set an empty cup on the track, and they stared down on the whirring colourful train going by the counterpane that hung to the floor, then circling to Merton, then towards the washstand legs, finally turning with a clack into the cup, knocking it aside and going round and wearing itself to a standstill.

“Put a shoe on now, gran’dad.”

“Why, you destructive little bogger,” he said, feeling under the bed for one. It jerked the train sideways, sent it trundling at an angle: Brian heard a hollow thump as its snout smacked at the skirting board. “That did it,” Merton said, satisfied at Brian’s laughter. “Now yer know how to break it, I’ll leave yer. Though I expect yer’d a found out soon enough on yer own.”

He went down for Christmas dinner, and later found himself alone in the kitchen, the others either out or in bed. He was sitting on the rug, dressed, torn between a book on shipwrecks and the mountainous red shapes licking above the firebars. The book didn’t hold, except that it was new, another present. He tried a page: everyone stood on the deck and sang “God Save the King,” while the boat descended into a sea of sharks. Why didn’t they shoot the sharks, make boats, drink ale perhaps? It was nothing to sing about. When he was totally interested in a song, book, a picture, his face went dead, his pale snubbed features carved in wood, life only coming into his face when he didn’t understand something and was trying to. Like now, with the men singing “God Save the King” and sharks waiting to snap them up.

A grey and mustard cat purred in a hump by his knees. Merton would have booted it out of the way for being too near the fire. Brian prodded it, but went back to his book to read the end of the story over again. The cat’s paws flattened along the rug, its green full-empty eyes staring. Men were struggling in the sea: no more singing. The women were far away in rowing boats, wailing at the terrible grey sea that melted like mountains and then shot up again. The cat looked at him and he offered it a piece of mincepie from his plate. The next story was about a steamship with funnels — with ten times the number of people on board. The cat came eagerly forward to take the pie: put its claws on his bare knee, sniffed the pastry, and put out its pink tongue. Everybody said the ship couldn’t sink. Well, let’s see how it does. The cat went back to its half-sleep, unable to understand why Brian was eating with such enjoyment something it found uneatable, suspecting that what Brian ate changed from meat to dull flour by the time the cat got to it. An iceberg ripped the bottom out. There was a complete silence both in and outside the cottage. Even the dogs slept, gorged for once on scraps and bones.

Brian returned to school and snow, which fell so deep that gangs made barricades across the pavements and fought like revolutionaries in Les Misérables. White cannonballs spun through the air, soft and harmless as they collided with coat or neck, carrying cold instead of fire. After an hour contestants would melt away to nurse hot-aches, tired and jangled after charge and countercharge. The enemies of winter were snow and ’flu, and Brian was a reluctant casualty of the latter. He was in bed for a week, fed on rice-pudding, toast and margarine, and hot drinks of Oxo. Elbows on the window-ledge, fingers pressing against his cheekbones, he watched it snowing, protected from the outside world of cold and wet by the glass pane that nevertheless smelled of the wintry desolation when his nose went to within an inch of it. A jersey over his shirt, socks on for warmth, he singled out a particular snowflake, determined to keep it in view among the hundreds around, slowly bringing his eyes lower, as if it were a white butterfly pinned within his control by hypnosis and taken as a special privilege out of its secret den in the sky for safe conduct to earth and a better life.

Flat, triangular, an ordinary shape (yet different because it was the one he’d fixed on) — changing to oblong — others had decided to come with it, not wanting to be left back there alone. They were all pals, except that there were too many of them and they got in each other’s way. So he lost it, but looked on down into snow just the same, where it would by now have fallen. It was near evening. Snow along the street had been trammelled into ruts by passing traffic, but the pavement was still thick and inviolate, a long smooth bed of untroubled snow. Until a man-shadow rounded the corner, and went off towards home, hooked out of sight by another corner, only footsteps left behind, plain and deep.

The opposite rooftops were covered by snow-blankets made to measure. He thought of the Nook: saw larger snowflakes through the immediate curtain of his eyes burying doors and pigsties and even the house chimneys; then saw the chimneys without smoke and the dogs gone, the doors firm but guarding emptiness. Street lamps one at a time came on.

Undaunted at losing the first, he lifted his eyes to single out another snowflake. The storm thickened in silence. Crowds and crowds of soundless snowflakes elbowed and bullied each other out of the way in their hurry to escape from something in the sky that was terrifying them. He looked up, but couldn’t see what it was, again losing the chosen snowflake.

He went back to bed, still seeing a sky full of white butterflies when he closed his eyes.

CHAPTER 12

Singing in the rain and walking up Alfreton Road one Saturday morning, Brian and his cousin Dave whistled the actual song that came from a wide-open radio shop as they stopped at a big window to wonder what they could buy. Dave carried the money because he was seventeen and, so he claimed, could therefore look after it better than Brian, and this was all right by Brian because if it hadn’t been for clever Dave he wouldn’t be staring in a pawnshop window with a half-share in eighteenpence, a fortune earned by searching for take-backable beer bottles on the tips and collecting a penny on each after washing them well in the tadpoled cut.

Dave was Doddoe’s eldest, tall and curly-headed, with sunken cheeks and dark prominent eyes. His sharp face missed nothing as he scanned each window and (like a high-enough camera) took in the pavement from doorways to gutter — bending to pick up a threepenny-bit which Brian would never have seen but which brought their moneybags to one-and-nine. Jobless Dave wore long trousers ragged behind, a brown-holed jersey, and a pair of shoes that let wet in. Brian’s clothes were ragged also, but his boots at the moment kept his feet away from the rain. They passed a secondhand furniture and junk shop, and Brian read whitewashed letters painted across the window: GET YOUR GUNS FOR SPAIN HERE. “Are they still fightin’ in Spain?”

Dave nodded, trying as he walked along to disentangle two pieces of steel, a penny puzzle bought farther down the road. “How long will they go on fighting then?” Brian wanted to know.

“Till they all drop dead,” he was told. The road was wide and cobbled, bordered by scrapyards, toyshops, pubs, pawnbrokers, cheap grocery stores, the livewire artery for back-to-backs and factories hanging like clags on either side. People carried bundles to the pawnshop or sackbags to the scrapyard, or came up from town with untouched dole or wages in their pockets so that trading went on every day of the week.

Dave was fixed by the window of a radio shop. A wireless on show was dissected, and he explained how to make it work: a valve here, a condenser there, an impedance at such a place, fasten an aerial at that point, but Brian was bored because he couldn’t understand it. “If I bought that owd wireless for five bob, I could fix it up,” Dave claimed, “and I bet I could sell it for thirty bob then.”

It stopped raining, and meagre sun shone on wet pools in the road. Buses came slowly for fear of skidding, and a man whose bike brakes didn’t work dragged his boots along the ground when he appeared from a side street. Dave demanded: “Who’s the two best singers in the world?”

“I don’t know,” Brian answered. “I can on’y think o’ one and that’s Gracie Fields.” Dave walked on and said: “Paul Robeson’s the best, and the next is Al Jolson. So don’t forget.”

They looked at the glass-framed stills outside a cinema. “Would yer like ter goo ter’t pictures s’afternoon? You ain’t seen ‘G-men,’ ’ave yer?” He said no, he hadn’t. “It’s a good picture. James Cagney’s in it. About gangsters. It starts where he throws a pen at a fly and pins it to the door. Then a man’s fixin’ ’is tie in a mirror and the mirror gets shot to bits.”

“What time does it start?” Brian said, excited at these details.

Dave took the money from his pocket and began counting. “They wain’t let us in for another ’alf an hour, so we’ll ’ave summat t’eat fost.” He pointed out several shops across the road. “Go into that baker’s and get two tuppenny meat pies, then go into the paper shop and ask for a buckanachure. The buckanachure will cost sixpence.”

Brian drew in his breath at the long word: “What’s a buckanachure?”

“Nowt for yo’,” Dave said brusquely. “Yo’ can’t understand yet what a buckanachure is. But just go in that shop, give the man sixpence, and tell ’im yer want a buckanachure. Understand?”

Brian muttered it aloud as he crossed the road: buckanachure, buckanachure, and said it to himself in the pastry shop: buckanachure, buckanachure, so that he wouldn’t forget such a strange big word and wouldn’t let Dave down by going back without whatever a buckanachure was.

The word seemed ridiculous when he stood in the silent shop. Newspapers hung all around, rows of murder books lined the wall at the back, and in the window he could see magazines with bare women on the cover, and bare men as well, like Tarzans in the pictures. When a man in shirtsleeves asked what he wanted, he slid the sixpence across. “A buckanachure.”

“A buckanachure.” He would have stood there repeating it till he dropped dead, for the word was engraved on his lips for ever. The man looked hard, then rummaged beneath the counter. “Who do you want it for?”

“My cousin,” Brian told him. Nosey bleeder.

“I hope you aren’t going to read it.” He passed a green-covered paperback across the counter, let the sixpenny-bit fall into the till. Brian picked the book up as though he were a thief, walked out, and paused at the curb to look at it: Book of Nature — he said it to himself, then aloud: Book of Nature, Book o’ Nature — Buckanachure — so it’s a book about nature. He’d heard of the Book of Daniel and the Book of Job, but he didn’t know there was a Book of Nature. He opened it and saw drawings he couldn’t understand, but it seemed to be about science, and he thought Dave must be clever to want a book like this.

Dave snatched it from him, munched his meat pie rapidly and skipped through the book with avid interest. When the first unnatural edge had been taken from his curiosity, he slipped the book into his pocket and set to finishing his meal. “Do you ever read books?”

“At school,” Brian told him.

“Have you read Dracula?”

“No. Is it good?”

“Yes,” Dave laughed, “it frightens yer ter death.”

Brian laughed also. “I’m goin’ ter buy a book, though. It’s called The Count of Monte Cristo.”

“I ’erd that on the wireless,” Dave said. “A serial as went on for months, so the book’ll cost a lot o’ money.”

“I know, but I’ve bin savin’ up for a long time. Whenever I get a tanner I tek it to Larker’s down town, and the manager’s savin’ it till I get half a crown. Then I can ’ave the book.”

Dave was impressed by the purposeful method: “’Ow much ’av you got so far?”

“Two bob. I can fetch it nex’ week if I get sixpence more.” Dave fleeced his pockets of every coin, looked them over shrewdly: “’Ere’s threepence, Brian, I’ll gi’ yer the rest on Monday. I’ve got a lot o’ rags ter tek an’ sell, so I’ll cum ter your ’ouse and give it yer.”

Brian could hardly believe it: weeks might have passed before the final elusive sixpence had come his way by pennies and ha’pennies. “Thanks, our Dave. I’ll let yer read the book when I’ve got it.”

“No,” Dave said, “I can’t read long books. Yo’ keep it; if I take it to our ’ouse they’ll use it for lavatory paper, or Doddoe’ll write bets out on it. Anyway, I’ve seen the picture, so I expect it’s the same as the book.”

He screwed up the meat-pie paper and threw it into the road. They talked about films and film stars, until a man began opening doors on either side, and a smell of cloth upholstery that had been locked up in the depths of the small picture-house all night wafted out into the street. Then the doors slammed and a woman went into the paybox. “Come on, Brian, we can goo in now and find a good seat.”

They emerged three hours later. Saucers of sunlight danced before Brian’s eyes, and they ached from the shock of such a bright day, when in the cinema he had expected it to be equally dark without. A trolley-bus at Canning Circus swept them down one hill and up another, past Radford Station to Lennington Road, on which the Doddoes lived.

The long straight pot-holed street of newly built houses ended at a railway embankment. “They’re all bleedin’-well Jerry-built, though,” Dave pointed out, his finger towards the doors from which paint was already peeling. “You have to prune twigs off your doors and windows every so often.” Three children flashed by on a homemade scooter, pram-wheels and a piece of board: “They’d better watch out,” Dave laughed, “or the means-test man’ll tek it away”—as he batted the tab of the rear rider.

A tune from “Top Hat” was bursting from the radiogram as they went into the house, and Dave turned it down, so that Brian heard a pan sizzling from the kitchen stove. “Where you bin, our Dave?” Ada called accusingly. “It’s about time yo’ brought some money into this bleedin’ ’ous.”

“I would if I could get some,” he said. “I’ll tek them rags in on Monday and you can ’ev a few bob.” Ada was a good-looking blonde of forty, with six kids and one expected, boss of a family reduced by approved school and borstal — Bert having been taken to the former for lifting bicycle lamps, and Colin to the latter for impersonating a gas-meter man. The table overflowed with pots and half-eaten leftovers, and Dave nearly choked on a line of clothes strung across the room. “Look where yer goin’, yer daft bleeder,” Doddoe said from the hearth, speaking for the first time.

Brian found a chair, sat, and watched fourteen-year-old Johnny mending one of his father’s poaching nets on the other side of the room. Johnny was gaffer of the kids while Colin was in borstal, a self-appointed sergeant-major with meaty fists, and a sense of righteousness because he brought money into the house without stealing. He had done time at an approved school, and had learned to recognize authority and know what it meant to knuckle under to it. If you did as you were told at approved school the masters put you in positions of power over the other boys; and though Johnny could hold dominion by toughness alone, it was double-sweet and sure to have your power sanctioned by those above you. He was generous and good-hearted, though firm and inclined to bullying when his righteous will was disobeyed. He was Doddoe’s favourite, though it wasn’t acknowledged, and they rarely spoke to each other. But Brian felt an alliance of likenesses, so obvious in fact that it was recognized and commented on by others of the family, though beyond words to Doddoe and Johnny.

The unifying quality was one of fearlessness. Unable to get work and having a family to feed, Doddoe was absolutely convinced that it was right to go poaching in order to get food. It was more a question of good and evil, for while food in the form of rabbits was running on four legs around estates of the rich, who anyway had all the grub — and more — they needed for themselves, then Doddoe was right and fearless in his pursuit of it. He went on his bike most nights into the country, dressed in an army overcoat and wearing a cap, a knapsack slung over his shoulder to carry nets and whatever fur-covered victims ran into them — of which he would have plenty by dawn. A cosh sticking from the pocket of his topcoat was useful for knocking rabbits on the head if they struggled too long in the net, or for swinging at the gamekeeper should it come to a fight.

Johnny was equally strong, though in lesser ways because still young. Brian remembered a time when a pair of shoes dropped off Johnny’s feet and he lacked an overcoat in snow-covered months. Johnny had made the best of things: knocked the high heels from a pair of his mother’s, put on one of her fur-collared coats she had cut down for him, and walked off well-protected to school. No boys had laughed, but his teacher made a reference to his woman’s attire and Johnny, the words cutting into him like knives, couldn’t hide his bitterness from Ada that night. Nevertheless, he went to school clad the same next day and halfway through the class was astounded to see his mother walk into the room. “Your name Martin?” she demanded, standing by the teacher’s desk. He was even more stunned than Johnny at the buxom fierceness of blonde Ada. “Yes,” he said, “what do you want?” Ada’s fist landed hard across the side of his face. “That’ll teach you to tell our Johnny off because he’s got no clothes”—and walked out of the room. That same day the teacher took him to the nearest shop and rigged him up with a new pair of boots. “It just shows what a lot o’ good you can do when you stick up for your kids,” Ada remarked before breaking into a laugh when Johnny clomped into the house that night.

Doddoe sat by the table, bare feet stuck on the range for warmth, a basin of tea in his hand. He turned and greeted Brian: “Hello, yer young bleeder, what are yo’ doin’ ’ere?” He was out of work and his hard grizzle-haired head wasn’t in the best of tempers. Brian was on the point of answering when Dave, just back from a scrounge in the kitchen, said: “I brought ’im ’ome, dad. He wants summat to eat.”

“He’ll get nowt at this bleedin’ ’ouse,” Doddoe said. “We ain’t got enough to feed our bleedin’ sens.” And he turned back to staring in the fire. Ada came in with a plate of bacon and tomatoes, and Dave sat down to eat. “How are you, Brian, my owd duck? Is Vera all right?”

“Yes.”

“Has rotten Harold bin on to ’er lately?”

“No.”

“I’ll bet you’re ’ungry,” she said. “Are you?” His answers were short, discouraged by Doddoe. “Well, just wait five minutes and I’ll get yer summat.” Dusk filled the room with gloom and shadows, and Dave, chewing a piece of bread from his hand, stood up to switch on the light. “Yer’d better put that bleeder off,” Doddoe said, without turning round. “We’ll have the man ’ere soon to collect some money for the radiogram and we’ve got nowt to give ’im.”

But Ada said it should stay on: “When he comes for money Dave can go to the door and tell ’im we’re not in. I’m not goin’ ter sit ’ere wi’out any light.” Brian ate bacon and tomatoes, dipped his bread in juice and fat, uneasy at eating with Doddoe in the room, though so hungry he couldn’t but enjoy the meal.

Johnny finished the net, rolled it up for his father. “Thanks, Johnny. You’re a good lad. I’ll gi’ yer tuppence in the mornin’ when I’ve sold the rabbits.” Doddoe swung his bare feet from the range, dragged boots from beneath the table, and pulled them on without socks, tugging each lace tight through faded eye-holes. He went into the kitchen, and they heard him slinging cold water around his face. As he was donning his topcoat, a sharp knock sounded at the door and everyone stopped talking, eating, dressing, playing. “That’ll be the radiogram man,” Ada hissed. “Go and see ’im. You know what to tell ’im.”

Dave stood up: “I should. I’ve ’ad enough practice”—strode to the hallway. Doddoe was both into and out of his topcoat, like a half-draped statue, and Ada held the teapot, about to pour a last cup of tea before he left for the night’s poaching. Brian’s mouth was full, stayed that way until the crisis was over. The two children stopped playing on the rug, as if they had been trained like seals to be silent at such times. Only the fire flickered in the grate, and that was all right because it made no noise.

Dave opened the door — was greeted by a polite brisk voice saying: “Good evening.”

“Evenin’,” Dave slurred, towering over him.

“I’m from Norris’s,” the man explained. “Is your mother in?”

“She’s gone out.”

“Do you know when she’ll be back?” He stood in the rain, trying not to get his boots wet. “She wain’t be in tonight,” Dave said, into his stride. “She’s gone to her sister’s at Leicester.”

“Will she be back in the morning?” he probed. “I can call around then.” The briskness was leaving his voice, as though he knew it was a hopeless task.

“She might be away a week. Her sister’s badly in hospital and mam might ’ave ter wait till she dies.”

“Oh dear,” the man said consolingly, “that is bad.” He had a certain technique as well, but it could never succeed. “You can’t get blood out of a bleeding stone,” Doddoe had often said.

“It is, an’ all,” Dave agreed.

“Did she leave any money for Norris’s man?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? It might be behind the clock.”

“I’ve looked everywhere for money,” Dave shook his head, “but there ain’t a tanner in the ’ouse.”

The man was on his track: “Surely she wouldn’t go to Leicester for a week and not leave any money to feed the family?”

“Well, she don’t know ’ow long she’ll be away,” Dave went on, “an’ she said if she’s away a long while she’ll borrow summat in Leicester and send us a little postal order.”

“I see,” the man said, “but what about your father? Is he in?”

Dave shook his head sadly. “I don’t know where ’e is. We ain’t seen ’im for three days. I ’ope nowt’s ’appened to ’im.” Had it not been raining, the man might have stood long enough to be fobbed off with a shilling. “All right,” he said, putting the books into his mac pocket. “I’ll call in three days, on Tuesday say, to see if your mother’s in. Tell her if she doesn’t pay something soon our men will come to fetch the radiogram back.”

“I’ll tell ’er.” Dave shut the door in his face, for he always knew when victory was at hand. The tableau inside dissolved at hearing the man walk up the street. “Poor bogger,” Ada said with genuine sympathy, “he’s come all that way for nowt.”

“If ’e’d stayed much longer arguin’,” Doddoe said, swinging into the other half of his topcoat, “I’d a knocked ’im across the ’ead wi’ this cosh.” Brian went on eating, and Ada finished pouring tea for Doddoe. Having milked and sugared it, she turned the radiogram on softly, saying: “I expect we shan’t ’ave it much longer.”

“Not if I know it,” Doddoe said, between gulps of tea. “It’ll be in the pawnshop soon.”

“Yo’ll get six months for that,” Ada said.

“I’ll get no ale if it ain’t,” he laughed. “The dirty rotten bastards wouldn’t let a bloke live these days. I allus work when there’s work to be had, yo’ know that. I’m not going to see my kids fucking-well starve.”

“Yo’ll get drowned tonight,” Ada moaned, “goin’ poachin’ in this rain.”

“Well,” Doddoe said with finality, crashing the cup down on its saucer, “we’ve got ter live, and that’s a fact, so there’s nowt else for it. I’d rather sit in the Crown all night wi’ a jar of ale, but yer’d soon start bleedin’-well moaning if there was nowt on t’ table tomorrer.” They listened to the rain a few seconds: “Anyway, it keeps the gamekeepers quiet.” He took a lamp from the dresser, walked to the back door. “See yer tomorrer”—and they heard him drag his bike from the shed, then the rickety clack-to of the gate before he rode off in the pouring rain.

The only verdict was Ada’s: “Poor bleeder.”

“P’raps it’ll stop,” said Dave.

Brian stayed to hear a thriller on the wireless, against the background of Johnny in the kitchen sawing wood to make a stool. Dave was right: the world never stayed black and wet for ever; it dried now and again to let Doddoe do his poaching and Brian make his way home to bed. Stars ran between clouds, and children played within circles of beneficent gaslight as he looked back from the railway fence. One heave took him over, and he went up the embankment with bent back in case he should be silhouetted and attract attention from cops or shunters. A light twinkled far off across the field, then went out as if someone had lit a cigarette. Signals clanked up on another branch of the line and, wanting to beat the train, he leapt wildly from one steel band to another. Stones skidded underfoot and he slipped, scabbing his kneecap when his hand went forward and didn’t hold. This unexpected let-down of his limbs filled him with panic, increased by the sound of a locomotive gathering strength from the station, and a low far-off whistle from another train on this jungle network. Gasping and crying out, he reached the end rail, and saw the dim expanse of safe and marshy fields in front.

He sat in the nearest grass to get his breath back, as the train charged innocuously by along the embankment above. A horse moved and neighed by a bush. Two people approached, merging like shadows and talking softly: a courting couple. He counted the concrete steps mounting to the bridge: thirty-two. Lights shone from the colliery below, but it was so dark walking down the lane that he imagined daylight would never come, and fear didn’t leave him until he entered the kitchen at home and sat before the fire with a cup of tea and a slice of bread and cheese.

True to his promise, Dave donated the final threepence. Saturday afternoon was warm and dusty, and he walked to Canning Circus, past old houses being knocked down, lorries lining up to transport rammel to the Sann-eye tips. Crossing the complicated junction, he descended via Derby Road, looking into each shop, wondering as he skirted Slab Square what his mother and father would say when they saw him come into the house holding a thick and fabulous book.

A large atlas was opened at a map of the world, surrounded by dictionaires and foreign-language books — the only section of the shop that interested him. He went in, and told a brown-dressed girl by the cash-desk that he wanted to buy The Count of Monte Cristo, started to explain the simple financial system into which he had entered.

She left him standing with four pink receipts and the final sixpence, and came back with the manager. “I know him,” he said. “He’s a customer of ours.” He turned to Brian, took the receipts and money, and spread them on the cash-desk. “The Count of Monte Cristo, wasn’t it? Go and get it for him, will you?”

The book came, and he had only time to glimpse the picture-cover of a man holding a sword before it was taken away and wrapped up.

He opened the packet outside, flipped the hundreds of pages through his fingers, from cover to cover and back again. A posh woman’s voice said from behind: “You’re going to be busy, aren’t you?” He turned and said yes, ran his eyes up and down the formidable list of chapter titles.

No one was at home, and he sat by the fire to read. The room had been scrubbed and the table cleared, and in the congenial emptiness he sped on through the easy prose of the story, had reached Edmond Dantès’s betrothal ceremony before his parents came in. They took off their coats. “That looks a nice book,” his mother said. “Where did you get it from?”

“I bought it from down town.”

“Who gen you all that money?” his father put in.

“It must ’ave cost a pretty penny,” his mother said, spreading the cloth for tea.

“Nobody gen me the money,” Brian told them, closing the book carefully. “I saved it up.”

Irritation came into his mother’s voice: “How much was it?”

“Half a crown.”

“Yer’ve wasted ’alf a crown on a book?” his father exclaimed.

He’d imagined they’d be pleased at his cleverness in bringing such a thing into the house, but it was the opposite. It was as though he’d been split in half and was bleeding to death. All for a book. “It was my money,” he cried, anguished and bitter, because instead of buying the book he should have given the money to them.

“You’re bloody-well silly about books,” his father said, a definite threat in his voice. “You read till you’re bloody-well daft.” His mother came back from the kitchen: “You stand need to spend half a crown on books when you ain’t got a bit o’ shoe to your feet. And you’re a sly little swine to ’ave money in the ’ouse all that time when I’ve often bin wi’out a shillin’ ter buy some snap.”

“I didn’t have the money here,” he explained. “I took it bit by bit to the book shop, like a Christmas club.” This was even worse, because he’d made sure that, starving or not, they hadn’t been able to get their hands on it.

“You’d ’ave ’ad more sense to a got yoursen a pair o’ shoes,” Seaton cried. “I’ve a good mind to throw it on the bleddy fire.”

“’E’s got no more sense than ’e was born with,” his mother said. Brian was horrified at his father’s threat, saw flames already at their work. “It’s my book,” he shouted.

“Don’t cheek me,” Seaton said, “or you’ll be for it, my lad.”

Brian’s tears were open, and they saw it. “I hope there’s a war on soon so’s we’re all killed,” he raved.

“What a thing to say,” his mother said. “I don’t know where he gets it from.”

A smack across the head from his father. “Say one more word, and I’ll show yer what I’ll do wi’ yer.”

“Wait till I grow up,” Brian cried.

But Seaton only said: “He’ll be a lunatic one day wi’ reading so many books.”

He sat by the fire while they drank tea, trying to force back the sobs, difficult because he saw too easily how he had done wrong. But hatred and pity for himself surmounted this, and so he couldn’t stop. Vera passed him some tea: “Come on, it ain’t the end o’ the world.” His eyes were drawn to the book cover, where a brave man held a rapier as if he didn’t care for anyone in the world, as though nothing could ever trouble him. And if it did, the face and sword said, it would be an easy matter to fight a duel and dispose of whatever it was.

He ate bread and jam, and went on reading. The story grafted itself to him, slowly becoming him and he becoming it, and he left behind with each second the light and noise in the house and went on wondering footsteps down into the dungeons of the Château d’lf with Edmond Dantès, following the guards and slipping invisibly into the cell, and all night long he listened to the tapping and whispers that came from the granite floor, heard the patient scraping and scratching of freedom, was shown that even dungeons and giant prisons were unable to keep men in for ever, though fourteen years was longer by four than he had so far lived: he listened to the chipping of homemade tools, and voices whispering as if from the dead, which talked of knowledge and freedom and hidden treasure on the Island of Monte Cristo.

CHAPTER 13

Mr. Bates was powerless to stem the tide of commotion in the classroom. With good reason the boys were excited, everyone talking to everyone else. The regular timetable dissolved as if by magic, and the map of South America — in white chalk for the coastline and brown for the long curving rib of the Andes — was being rubbed out by the prefect, who even forgot himself and shook the chalk rag in the classroom, so that brown and white dust-clouds penetrated layers of light slanting in through the windows.

Assembly and prayers had gone by and, to the intense joy of the class, Mr. Bates stayed writing at his desk. Brian was close enough to hear the reedy turmoil of his pen and the rustle of overturned paper. What was he writing on a day like this? For whom could he be using these unique minutes? Maybe it was the best he could do while waiting to see what happened, because had he ordered the class into the hall and set them to singing hymns, they would possibly have mutinied, or acquiesced so truculently that hall-discipline would have been impossible.

“Bosworth!” Mr. Bates cried, glancing icily at the prefect when dust settled on his coatsleeve and notepaper. “How many more times do I have to tell you to shake that thing outside?”

But Bosworth recognized his words as a protest, not a threat. “Sorry, sir,” he said, hung the duster over the easel-lath, and went back to his seat after seeing his apology met only by a bent preoccupied head and the sound of a pen scratching across foolscap like the exploring claws of a badger.

Anybody’d think he was writing a book. The noise rose to a climax, a sea beating against the sound-barrier of Mr. Bates’s pen, until suddenly the stream of his thought was taken in the flank: “Quiet!” he shouted. The sea didn’t fall back, for only those closest, always careful not to make much noise anyway, heard him. “WILL YOU BE QUIET!” he bawled.

The sea-roar stopped, the waves receded, but the unbearable throb of excited unanimous conversation was replaced by a silence that paralyzed Mr. Bates’s pen. He assumed a stern expression and looked at the forty faces before him, adjusted the spectacles chafing the back of his ear: an unnecessary movement, but he could not at that particular moment keep his hands unoccupied. Every face, from four rows of ancient name-scratched desks with two boys frozen at each, converged on the focal point of his own. He knew quite definitely that each one was waiting, with their silent collective gaze, for him to tell them something — and the passing seconds assumed a pandemonic quality because he did not know what to say. He who held his class always within the bounds of discipline — though never tyrannically so — wavered because for once he could not give them their rightful due of words on a subject spreading like a thornbush through every brain.

“I suppose you all know,” he broke out firmly at last, “that gas-masks are to be given out today?”

A question to which no answer was needed. Everyone was relieved that he had addressed them with such satisfactory wisdom. Tension drew from each face, and he was aware of a smile growing like an apple rolling as if before wind among them.

“Also,” he went on, easy now that a beginning had been made, “there won’t be any geography or arithmetic lesson.” The smiles became definite, and Mr. Bates thought of his half-completed letter. “Go on talking, but keep your voices down. Mr. Jones may be in soon.”

Once more his pen scratched, disguising paper with a camouflage of ink, and slowly — like a great hoarse dynamo that has difficulty in starting — the noise of speculation grew until it reached a level that stopped Mr. Bates being aware of it.

“I’m glad there’s a war,” Brian said to Jim Skelton. “Dad says he’ll be able to get a job if there is. Then he’ll give me a penny every Friday. As long as we aren’t gassed, though.”

“I’m not frightened,” Jim replied, “but what about mam and dad and Maureen and Frank and the others? There’s seven of us and we can only just fit into our cellar if bombs start dropping.”

Brian absent-mindedly tipped the viscid contents of one inkwell into another, making a black pool on the wood and almost blotting out the first carved letter of his initials. “But perhaps everybody’ll have guns,” he ventured, dabbing at the ink and wiping it on his jersey.

“We won’t get guns,” Jim said. “Everybody’ll have to stop in their cellars. I can’t think what we’ll do.”

“Your dad’ll have to build bunks,” Brian advised. “He’s a joiner, so it’ll be easy for him. But our house don’t have a cellar to it.”

“You’ll go in air-raid shelters then.” No one had attended to the flowers in the window jars, and their yellow heads drooped for want of water; neither had those detailed entered the temperature or barometer readings on the graphs that stretched in coloured undulations along one wall like a mountain panorama in the geography books; it was inkwell morning and no one had filled them; and no books had been given out. Lack of timetable discipline convinced them that there was no need to be silent, to read, write, or sing, because it was marvellous, miraculous confusion, with all hoping beyond hope that disorganization had come to stay, thinking that if war was this then it wasn’t so bad after all.

Brian’s idea of war was Napoleonic, at any rate in tactics, with barricades in every street while a gas-masked Waterloo exploded from Clifton Grove to Gotham Village. Moulded by an addiction to Les Misérables, he saw wagons of paving-stones and sandbag-parapets blocking Denman Street and all approaches to it, while a higher blockade sealed each main road off from the country to stop tanks. His picture showed a tin-hatted soldier with rifle and bayonet running along the cobblestones of Radford streets, while Mr. and Mrs. Skelton and all the little Skeltons gazed anxiously up from the grill of their cellar grate. Then a bomb would fall and blow up a house, grey bricks shooting into the air, now coloured grey though they had been red before the explosion. Perhaps he, too, like Marius Pontmercy would go off with a rifle (a rifle picked up from a body in the street) to the barricades and fight the Germans and kill many men, saving the Skeltons, who, in the proscenium of his mind, still looked anxiously from their cellar grate at the soldier running up the street with bayonet fixed.

Then a container would fall — silently almost — and lay in the gutter, and after a few seconds a slit would open in its side and a yellow vapour spill out and ascend a few feet, then thickly spread. And Brian would put on his gas-mask (which miraculously appeared, for he did not have it a few seconds before) and clamp it over his face. If he saw someone without a gas-mask he would give it to him: for himself, he knew exactly what to do, which was to soak his white handkerchief in water that somehow appeared in the gutter, and lay it over his face. That would stop the mustard gas — or so Uncle Doddoe had told him.

And hadn’t his mother said there were to be trenches on the forest, as in the last war? He saw people wearing gas-masks filing into them as twin-plane aircraft came over to drop bombs — as he had seen them blasting the slum-dump ruins of Albion Yard. Then a change of scene as enemy — German, of course — soldiers came over the green-painted railings far away and advanced through mist towards the trenches, so that conveniently and from nowhere English soldiers streamed out to repel them, and Brian somehow mixed himself up with them and killed so many Germans with the rifle he carried that he was asked to organize a schoolboy battalion, of which he would be commander-in-chief.

“You won’t get a gas-mask.”

Through the glass partition of the next classroom, chairs and tables moved, feet shuffled, and orders were carried out. A report was passed from a daring observer: big boxes were being heaved in from outside and laid on tables. There was a smell of rubber. “Frenchies,” someone called, “that’s what they are”—as the words Large Medium Small were shouted time after time. Brian caught the note of jubilation that swamped the class: it was after ten and would soon be playtime, so that a rush for straws and milk could commence.

A second later he filled his underbreath mind with swearing, telling himself that he above all should have known that such freedom was too good to last: Mr. Jones walked in. Mr. Bates did not push the letter out of sight as he usually did, but left it lying on his desk and turned his chair to look at the small tight dynamite headmaster as he entered the room. There was no need to tell the boys to stop talking, for even the sea would fall silent at Mr. Jones’s shadow. He stood compact within a vacuum of silence, and Brian felt an itching behind his neck, but held his arm fast from scratching for fear of drawing notice to himself. Jim Skelton’s eye went into a winking match, but Brian did not take him up on it, seeing his lips curl up at one corner as if to smile. He’d better not make me laugh, the rotter. A lorry roared along the street and pulled up at the school door. The milk’s come, he guessed, but when he didn’t hear the clash of filled cases coming through the hall he assumed it was another load of gas-masks.

“They weren’t very quiet,” Mr. Jones said. Brian watched his plasticine pellet: if it rolled quick, he wouldn’t hit anyone; it if rolled slow, he was bound to.

“It’s hard to keep them quiet on a day like this,” Mr. Bates said as he casually slid the letter in his desk. Mr. Jones became sarcastic: “I feel sure you could have done better than that.”

“They’re excited.”

Picture-clouds of war plagued every brain, and the outposts of fear that preceded Mr. Jones as he walked among masters and boys had been neutralized by the overwhelming bomb of a question that smoked to varying shades in the hearts of boys and masters alike. “I still say there’s nothing to be excited about,” he snapped.

When is the old bastard going? Brian wondered. Why can’t he leave us to talk, or let Mr. Bates read summat good to us? If there’s a war I hope that old bastard’s the first to cop it, with a great big bomb (the biggest bomb in the world, if it can be managed) right on to his spiteful white loaf. Or maybe a Jerry will get him with a rifle when they start sniping from chimney-pots. You never know, these days.

“They wouldn’t be excited if they knew what war meant.”

“Boys never know what war means,” Mr. Bates said.

“It’s a pity they can’t be told then, and have some of this excitement drained from them.”

Mr. Bates’s eyes gleamed, as if about to water; he smiled to stop them doing so. “There’d be no cannon-fodder for the war after the one that’s about to start if that happened.”

Mr. Jones looked hard at him, then at the class. “Are they all here?”

“Ten are absent.”

“Too excited to come to school, even?” A few bold spirits began to whisper, and hisses passed from across the room like jets of escaping steam. “Silence!” he roared, his anaemic face flushing.

There was silence.

“What do you intend doing?” he asked Mr. Bates. “They can’t go on like this, war or no war.”

“I’ll probably read to them.”

Mr. Jones snorted. “Let me use your desk.” He moved aside and sat in a chair, a stack of Foundations of History rearing at the back of his head.

“I suppose you all know that they’re giving gas-masks out today?” Mr. Jones addressed them.

He knows bleddy-well we do.

“Any of you know what a gas-mask is like?”

Not yet, but we will.

“I’ll describe one to you. A word-picture of one.” Brian remembered: the first Jerry shooting from a chimney-stack ought to put one right into his four-eyed clock. “There’s a rubber facepiece, with a celluloid frame you can see through, and to this are attached straps that you pull back over your head to hold it on. Very neat and well thought-out. Now, under the chin is what’s known as a filter. This is what you breathe through. This is what makes the poison gas harmless before it gets to your mouth and nose. Simple, isn’t it? Any questions?”

No questions.

“I didn’t think so. You’ve all got heads made of putty. You wouldn’t think a putty-head would need a gas-mask, but it does.” A few crawlers laughed. Mr. Jones grinned at his own joke. “All right, putty-heads, I’ve told you what a gas-mask’s made of. Now I’ll tell you what it’s for. It’s to be used in case (or should I say when?) German aeroplanes drop poison-gas bombs on Nottingham.” He paused, possibly for questions, perhaps for some reaction, but they hadn’t heard enough.

“Anyone know what a black-out means?” No answer. “Well, putty-heads, it means that no lights of a city can be put on, that everything’s kept in complete and total darkness so that German planes flying above won’t know where they are. And at such times you’ll all have to go to bed early because there’ll be no sense playing in the streets when it’s pitch dark. And you’ll carry your gasmasks to bed with you, careful not to drop or damage them. If you do, then you’ll be in a fine fix when the bombs fall, won’t you? So you’ll take the gas-mask out of its cardboard box and place it by your bed for when the air-raid warning sounds.”

He settled himself comfortably at the desk. All day, Brian moaned. “Of course, when they do go and you hear bombers coming over, there’ll be no need to put your gas-mask on. Only when a man comes around the streets with a klaxon do you do that, and when gas is dropped you all act very quickly — except the putty-heads, of course — and pull the masks over your faces. Naturally, if any of you have smaller brothers and sisters you’ll help them with theirs before putting on your own.”

His bloodless head turned from one side of the class to the other, and as his face passed the front, both eyes were blotted out by circles of light as big as his glasses. “Something else,” came from his mouth: “Do any of you know when poison gas was first used in a big battle?”

One hand did: “In the Great War.”

“Ah, so you’re not all putty-heads. Yes, quite right. Fifty thousand Frenchmen (and many British) were gassed by an afternoon breeze at Ypres. All the troops saw was a greenish-yellow fog coming towards them at dusk and soon scores of hundreds of men were choking from it. Those who got away from the trenches were blinded or injured for life, and lines stretched for miles as each man followed the one in front to the hospitals behind the lines. Yes, war is a lamentable business, and it isn’t worth getting excited about, is it? IS IT, THEN, YOU PUTTY-HEADS?” he roared, his gun-burst lifting even the sleepiest from their daydreams.

A few voices sent out a mixture of yes and no.

“It’s hard to tell you what war is, but I can promise one thing: there’ll be plenty of pain flying about. I suppose the easiest pain I can think of in war is when you have to queue all day in the snow for food or coke, and when you have to eat horse flesh at the end of it, and when you have to listen to the noise of sirens. Not much pain there, is there? However, it’s possible that the war will still be on when you’re men, and one of the hardest pains perhaps is when one is left wounded after a battle without water or food. War is taking place in China and Spain at this moment, and happened in Abyssinia not so long ago, so what I’m telling you shouldn’t seem so impossible, though, judging by your faces, you aren’t bright enough to take in much of what I’m saying.”

He knows we’re all waiting to get to the playground for our milk, Brian said to himself, but he’s keeping us in out of spite, the sly bastard. “Do any of you really know what pain is? I suppose you think it’s pain when my fist clouts your putty-heads to make you pay attention? Well, let me tell you, it’s not. It’s nothing to what pain is in war. Ah, yes, I know, you’re all excited about the gasmasks and the war that’s coming. Well, you should be praying to God that by a miracle it doesn’t begin. For war means nothing but pain. Some people escape it, but don’t let that be a comfort to you, because during a war the earth will convulse with pain, and it will get you and me and possibly everyone else. So let’s have no excitement over the thought of war.”

He broke off and strode out of the room, and they heard the next class fall quiet as he went among them.

It’s all lies, Brian thought. Even if it’s the truth, it’s a lie. But he also scoffed at his own fiction of the barricades and pyramids of dead on paving-stones, convinced of nothing except the bursting top of his milk bottle at play-time and the pushing-in of a straw before sucking cool liquid into the dry chalk of his mouth, a liquid that nevertheless still tasted like the dull and sluggish iodine-pain that old Jones had blabbed about.

At four in the afternoon he ran home clutching a cardboard box, and burst into the house as his father was having tea. There’d been a rumour in class, while they were waiting to be served the respirators, that everyone had to pay for them, so much a week, and Brian had been pleasantly surprised to note when it was actually put into his hand that payment hadn’t been mentioned at all, at which he assumed that he had been given an expensive piece of equipment absolutely free. “Look what I’ve got,” he called out, swinging his treasure-box on its string. They were uninterested. Then he saw three others on the floor in a corner, their boxes already bent and battered, a strap hanging from one, Arthur doing his best to break up another. His mother was reading the Post: “There’ll be no peace in our time,” she said scornfully, laying it aside to pour Brian a cup of tea.

“No,” Seaton answered, in splendid gruff prophecy, “nor in any other bloody time, either.”

CHAPTER 14

Mr. Jones walked in with no preliminary spying. Dapper, smart, his jaw like that on a ventriloquist’s dummy, he held up a slip of paper and called, not overloud: “Robertson, come out.”

Brian heard a movement behind, and a gangly eleven-year-old walked to the front. Mr. Jones stood by the blackboard, hid Ceylon with a head as fiercely threatening as the cobra that represented the island. “So you’re Robertson?”

He admitted it, though reluctantly; not knowing where to put his hands, he tried to get them into his trouser pockets but was baffled when their entrances seemed to have closed up against him. “Keep your hands by your side when you speak to me,” Mr. Jones roared, smacking him across the ear. He held the menacing piece of paper up to his nose, chafing it like a fly so that Robertson got a smack on the other ear for trying to brush it off. “I’ve had a complaint about you from a lady who lives nearby. She says you broke her window with a football and used foul language when she came out to you.”

Robertson looked to one side, and said nothing.

“Well?”—in a roar that told the whole school he was on the warpath again. Parts of his face were streaked with tiny purple veins, like rivers on a finely drawn map, though his lips were bloodless. “Have you nothing to say, blockhead?”

Out of a sound of slow choking came: “I didn’t cheek her off, sir.”

Clap! “That’s for being a liar as well. I’ll teach you to use foul language, and lie to me.” He turned to the motionless teacher sitting at the high stool by his desk: “Give me your stick, Mr. Bates.”

The boy did not move when ordered to hold out his hand. “Are you deaf?” Mr. Jones screamed. He’s loony, Brian said to himself. If we all rushed him, though, we’d pulverize ’im. Robertson made as if to turn to the rest of the class, but no one could help him, being arranged at their desks in a helpless dead silence. “If you don’t hold out your hand, I’ll make you hold it out.” He brought the stick back and slashed at the boy’s shoulder with all his strength, but Robertson dodged it and ran, opened the door with unrehearsed dexterity, and slammed it behind him. He was heard clattering to safety along the street, running to the protection of his unemployed father. Mr. Jones threw the stick down and strode out.

Brian missed both verse and chapter from the Bible-reading that followed. On the streets, in your own land when playing at night, you still weren’t safe from the long arm of Mr. Jones. Even miles away in quiet and hedge-bound fields his rage seemed out to get you: next morning in school he might confront you with stick and piece of paper with your name on both demanding to know why you were in a certain field last night when a notice on the gate said quite plainly that trespassers would be prosecuted. Trespassers will be persecuted, more like it, persecuted by bastards like old dead Jones.

The only place he felt safe was at the Nook. Beyond the valley of the Lean and across the new boulevard, he made his way every weekend of the autumn. After the harvest, a pig was killed and the pork salted for Christmas. Mary made a list, in the back of an old laundry book, of those who wanted to buy a piece, and Brian would carry a loaded basket under the railway bridge and deliver to different houses in Radford Woodhouse.

Merton had set the date for the slaughter. “Percy’ll be ’ere at three, so I’ll not go upstairs to bed.”

Brian was at the table shelling a bowl of peas: “What pig are yer goin’ ter kill, grandad?”

“Come wi’ me, and I’ll show yer.” He took his stick, and as he walked out and along the yard, Brian noticed for the first time his slightly bent shoulders. Maybe he is very old, he thought, remembering his father’s reference to “that owd bogger.”

Merton pointed into the pigsty. “That one, Nimrod. See it?” Black and pink, they huddled together near the trough, squealing at the expectation of an unlatched gate with buckets of food to follow. “See it? That fat bogger as can ’ardly move.” He turned away to roll a cigarette.

“Will it hurt it when you kill it, grandad?”

“Nay,” Merton said, his face lost in smoke. “A man comes up special to kill it. I can’t do it myself ’cause I ain’t got a licence.” He turned and smacked one of the pigs across its rump for pushing a nose too insistently at the door of the sty, then took a steel scoop from the wash-house wall and stirred the large barrel of crusts and old potatoes, meal and bran. Brian unhooked the latch, and the pigs, smelling food, squealed and crowded at the empty trough so that Merton couldn’t get to it. He put the buckets down: “Pass my stick, Nimrod: I’ll get the boggers out o’ the way.”

Buckets of meal splashed into the trough, the pigs congealed into a solid row, gurgling and gobbling, Brian fascinated at the swill-level going down before his eyes.

The pig to be killed was driven from the food by Merton’s stick, kept wild-eyed and squealing in a corner until the rest had finished and were looking round for more. It was as if the sky had altered colour for it. While the rest seemed happy at not having been singled out for this limbo before death, the victim walked round the sty with nose to the ground, sniffing with nervous quickness. Its steel grey eyes, deeply sunk into an obese face, gazed at the sty fence that Merton and Brian leaned against; then it walked back to the trough, still unable to believe it had been left out, and expecting to find food there, hoping that its last sensation of having been set apart for some incomprehensible purpose had been only a dream. But it kept walking around the sty, repeating these expeditions to the trough, in between time squealing loudly with fear at the incontrovertible difference thrust upon it.

The pig-killer arrived, a small man of forty with a brown wrinkled face and a grey moustache. He wore a flat greasy cap and lit a cigarette as he stopped near the kitchen door. Over the cross-bar of his bike hung a small sack, in which he carried knives and an apron. “We ain’t hard up for time,” Merton said. “So we’ll ’ave a cup o’ tea first.” Brian followed them into the kitchen: “Can I watch the pig being killed, grandad?”

“Yer can for me. It wain’t hurt yer to see a drop o’ blood.” His grandmother overheard. “Don’t let ’im. It ain’t nice. You’ll see enough blood when you’re a big lad.”

“He’ll be all right,” Merton said.

But Mary didn’t want Brian to see it. He’d have bad dreams, she maintained, and Merton agreed: ay, maybe he would. Mary in fact wished the pigs could have gone to the slaughterhouse, for such piteous dying squeals chilled her; so she stayed in the parlour, turned chalk-white when the death blow was struck. It was impossible not to tremble for them: “Poor thing!” she muttered. “Poor thing!”

A large tin bath was placed on the table outside. Percy sorted his knives, got Brian to tie the strings of his apron: “Mek a tight bow, there’s a good lad.” A continual grunting and squealing came from the sty, as if the pigs were somehow able to smell the last blood-stains already washed from the slaughterer’s knife. Buckets of boiling water were carried from the wash-house copper until the bath was two-thirds full. “I might ’ave another done next month,” Merton said, “if I get enough orders for this one.” More people were wanting meat than last year, for work was coming back on the market. “You know where to find me,” Percy said.

The final column of hot steam was poured into the bath. “I’ll mek it right,” Merton promised. “There’ll be a good piece for yo’.” The poultry hatches were abnormally quiet: even the dogs and cats had fled from the vicinity of the house, though they would be back for scraps when the carve-up began.

Brian felt afraid at this silent inexorable display of purpose. Each twig of the nearby tree was significant and isolated as before a thunderstorm. His grandmother had forgotten he was outside, and had gone into the parlour until it was all over. Part of the yard where he stood was empty, for Percy and his grandfather had gone to get the pig from the sty. A wall of cloud darkened the yard and, strangely enough, even the pigs weren’t whining any more. He knew this to be a good time to escape without being thought foolish by his grandfather, yet he was unable to go indoors, was held by a gap in the hedge that showed him the dead fixity of a stubbled cornfield.

Squeals came round the corner, with scuffing and the smack of Merton’s stick across a pig’s back. Then the vacuum of silence was overfilled by every pig screaming at once.

They dragged the half-crazed animal along the ground, its eyes staring like ball-bearings to where it was being taken, but seeing nothing because the squeals were in its eyes and blinding it. Legs kicked from its podged body. Merton cursed, hit it with the stick he still managed to hold, but the blows only confirmed the animal’s instinct that it was going towards some terrible fate, and so caused it to squeal louder.

Those left in the sty were infected with its fear, joined the lament in the hope that they would not be next. With one heave the pig was on the table. Merton held its hind legs and Percy the front. It stared at a patch of blue sky through the branches of the alder tree. Then its head went to one side, and in the distance Brian heard a train passing, as if the pig had turned to watch it at that moment. Percy reached for a wooden-handled knife, held it above the pig’s throat. The blade curved, almost sickle-shaped: like that picture of Shylock, occurred to Brian. Percy’s arm came down strongly, pierced the throat, and ripped it sideways. A metallic, almost human cry covered the house, and died quickly, like a train whistle.

Blood was aimed into a bucket and nearly filled it. They lifted the pig (heavy like iron now) into the bath, and the steaming water changed magically to pink. “Well,” Merton said, “that’s that.” Percy wiped his knife on a cloth.

That’s what pigs is for, Brian said to himself. Its trough-searching snout was dead meat, ready to be cooked and eaten. On the point of tears, he remembered its struggle: that’s what it’s for, though, and now he had seen it. He went into the house.

“Is it dead then?” Mary asked.

Merton was angry that she looked so pale. “Course it is, why?”

“Nothing.” She filled the kettle to make tea.

“There yer goo agen,” he exclaimed, “worryin’ yersen to death over the bleddy pig. Anybody would think I was a bleddy murderer. The soddin’ ta-tas we ’ave over this. Don’t yer know you’ve got to killa pig to get summat t’eat?” Brian had heard his mother say that these words passed every time between them. “I know. But they squeal so.”

Merton took a packet of Robins from the shelf and offered Percy one. “Well, that’s their fault. We kill ’em as neat as we can. I hope I die as quick, that’s all I can say.”

After tea, the oil lamp lit, Mary stood in the pantry salting the pork. There was a great block of salt on the kitchen table, and Merton knocked off lumps, crushing them to powder with a rolling pin, filling basins for Brian to carry down the pantry steps. Slabs of pork hung from the ceiling, so clean that it seemed life was still in it. Bowls were filled with blood and lengths of intestine ready for blackpudding next day. All Brian’s sympathy for the pig had gone — except that on his way to bed faint squeals from its dying returned and during the night mixed with train whistles that made excursions into his dreams.

Pink houses of new estates were spilling into the countryside. Men with black and white poles and notebooks came across the new boulevards into lanes and fields; they set theodolites and dumpy levels pointing in sly angles at distant woods, into and over the Cherry Orchard where the Arlingtons and Lakers lived, invading Brian’s hide-outs, obliterating his short-cuts and concealed tracks towards the Nook.

After the surveyors came the clearance men, groups of pioneer navvies breaking down hedges and making trenches in a straight line out from the boulevard. It was no longer a lonely walk from Radford: trees were ripped out of the soil, ditches dug, and the first markings of a road skirted the Nook by a few hundred yards. Brian walked out with his grandfather one day. “What are they doing all this for?” It was like pictures he had seen of the Great War: an open landscape scored with trenches, stretching over to the black wall of Serpent Wood. “Going to build ’ouses and shops,” Merton told him, sounding as though he didn’t like the idea of it. “What do they want to build ’em just ’ere for, though?”

“Because they’ve got nowhere else to build, I suppose.” He slashed at the remaining twig-sprouts of a bush, as if angry that it had let itself be pulled to ruin so easily. Brian liked the idea of buildings going up: he would see men coming along with machines, trains of lorries bringing bricks and mortar. Instead of woods and fields, houses would appear along new roads, would transform the map in his mind. The idea of it caught at him like fire: “When will they start building then?”

“Not for a long time, Nimrod. They’ve got to finish clearing yet. Then there’s the drains to be put down. It might be a couple o’ years before they get the first one up.” But Merton was wrong. Allotment gardens, football pitch, and wheatfields were soon under the hammers of annihilation. Brian looked one Saturday from the bedroom window to see enormous lorries unloading drainage pipes not far from the Nook. The bricked-out foundations of houses were already visible near the boulevard.

Seaton was able to get a job on a factory site down town. There was even an urgency for overtime, and he would be out of the house for twelve hours in fine weather. On the first day Brian took him a can of tea, saw him among a gang of other men shovelling sand from a lorry. He waved and came over to the fence, wearing a workjacket too big for him, his black hair hidden by a new cap. Having subbed a pound from the gaffer, he was able to push money into Brian’s hand: “Here y’are, my owd flower. Tell yer mam there’ll be a lot more on Friday as well.” He turned back to his work. Brian shouted out a goodbye and walked off, unwilling to look at his father, who, he thought, might for some reason be angry if he did so while he was working. To Brian, he was captured, taken from being king of the house and set among strangers where he seemed insignificant.

Yet it was worth it, everyone agreed, for there was more food in the house. There was also more money, and though it had been supposed up to then that the lack of it had been the cause of all their quarrels, it was soon clear that they went on anyway from force of habit. Seaton was born with his black temper and would die of it, and Vera had never been able to express and defend herself, first against her father, then against her husband. The only thing she could do with any thoroughness was worry, which probably sprang from thinking she hadn’t had the best out of life and never would. If there was nothing tangible to worry about she was bored, so there was always something to be harassed into a problem. The house was too small to keep her busy all the time, and rather than make or repair clothes, she found it easier to buy cheap new ones. Her hands were clumsy and without confidence: patches and rips to be sewn were swiftly bodged, and in spite of washday and family meals, there was still time to worry, often over lesser things of the house that didn’t really matter. Now and again the whole family became embroiled in explosive quarrels about nothing: pots flew and fists struck out, and everyone from mother and father down were isolated by bitterness and misery, until the violence of it, after several hours, thinned itself out into their bloodstreams and brought them happily together again.

By another long bout of saving, this time more open, Brian bought his second book: Les Misérables. He’d heard it as a serial on the wireless, had been enthralled by the grandiose surprises of its plot. “Nineteen years for a loaf of bread!” was a cry rising like a monolith of burning truth from the placid waters and unruffled jungle that hid the murderous go-getters of Treasure Island, and stifled the inane parrot-cry of “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!” Hounded by the police, impervious to bullets at the barricades, carrying a wounded man on his shoulders through the serpentine arteries of the Parisian sewers, Jean Valjean’s life-long fight and death seemed an epic of reality. It was a battle between a common man and the police who would not let him be free because he had once stolen a loaf of bread for the children of his starving sister. And after such terrifying adventures of this man who did not want to be an outlaw, death was the only freedom he was allowed to find by the author of this bitter and sombre book. Good and bad were easily separated. On one side were Thénardier and Inspector Javert — both against a society of equals because Thénardier needed the rich to thieve from, and Javert the poor to persecute. On the other side were Fantine, Gavroche, Jean Valjean, Marius Pontmercy, Cosette — the weak, the young, the revolutionaries — those who could not live with the former in their midst. The barricades were stormed, the insurgents killed, but the novel was read and re-read, and read again.

There was no fight when he brought the book into the house: “Why,” Seaton said with a laugh, “the little bogger’s gone and bought another book. I don’t know. I wish I was as clever as he is. He beats me at being a scholar.” He gave him fourpence to see the film of the book, and made him tell all about it when he came home. The last creditor of the weekend had been fobbed off with a shilling, and Seaton sat by the fire with a basin of warm tea beside him on the hob. Vera switched off the noisy row of a football match and went back to darning a pair of socks. The light was on, and Arthur could be heard up in the garret-bedroom playing with a hammer.

“And when Jean Valjean came back to the bridge to keep his promise,” Brian was saying to his father, “Javert worn’t there any longer. And when he looked over the bridge into the water he saw that Javert (Charles Laughton played ’im) had chucked hissen in and was drowned. That’s where the picture ended, but the book goes on for a long time after that. Shall I tell you ’ow the book ends?”

“’E don’t want to ’ear it,” Vera said, a tone that made Brian uneasy because he couldn’t see whether or not it was meant as a joke: “Do you, dad?”

“Course I do, my lad.” He finished his story, pronouncing the French names in the imitated accents of the radio serial. Margaret stood before him, her long straight hair framing a mischievous laugh. It wasn’t long before her gaze penetrated: “I could die at our Brian saying them funny words.”

“If yer do,” Brian said, “I’ll bash yer.”

“I’ll bash yer back as well, wi’ our dad’s bike pump.” She edged towards the window, to observe in safety his increase of rage. “He thinks ’e can talk French; I can talk it better than ’im.” She gabbled quickly, imitating a foreign language.

“I’m tellin’ yer,” Brian threatened.

“Pack it up,” the old man said.

Margaret stopped a moment, but the more afraid she grew, the more something inside her said he knew she was becoming afraid and that she should continue taunting to prove him wrong. “Booky!” she cried. “Allus reading books.”

“Leave ’im be,” Vera said to her, “or I’ll start.” Brian felt the flesh at his mouth jumping, such a high twitch he imagined all could see it. Maybe there was something shameful in reading books, in imitating French, in writing, in drawing maps, that he was putting himself beyond their reach. He couldn’t quite grasp or understand the sense of betrayal, though its connection with books had been clearly seen and picked out by the others as his most exposed nerve. He knew he should show indifference to their taunts, but they touched something too deep for that. He stood by the table, a few feet from his tormentor. “Look,” Margaret sang out, “’e’s goin’ ter cry!”

“I’ll mek yo’ cry if yer don’t shurrup,” he exclaimed. Seaton came out of his huddle by the fire: “Now stop arguin’ or you’ll get sent ter bed out o’ the way. You’re allus on, the pair o’ yer.”

“She started it,” Brian said bitterly. “She’s allus causin’ trubble.”

“No, I didn’t, our dad,” Margaret threw back. “It’s ’im: ’e reads all them books till ’e’s daft.” She had heard her parents say this, and it cut into him like a knife.

Brian ran, sent a couple of quick thumps to her shoulder, and made for the door before his father could get at him. He was in the street, and heard Margaret crying as he went by the window, and his father saying: “Wait till the little sod comes back, then ’e’ll get it.”

But he didn’t return for two hours, by which time everybody had forgotten his attack, except Margaret herself. The parents were out, and she clenched her fist on the other side of the table, showing it to him menacingly while he cut himself some bread. Soon they were playing Ludo.

Some mornings Seaton turned a deaf ear to the knocking-up man, and even to Vera when she railed by his side: “Come on, Harold, if you don’t get up you’ll be late. The knocking-up man’s bin a long time ago.”

At the third nudge he mumbled from the sheets that he wasn’t going. “Don’t be idle,” she said. He went back to sleep with: “I’m not effing-well going in”—meaning that if he was to lose a day’s pay he was certainly intending to get the bliss of a lie-in. Later, downstairs and eating, he would say: “They did without me for six years, they can do without me today. I’m at no effer’s beck and call.”

“You’ll get the sack,” she said, taking the pots away.

“Not any more. There’s a war coming. And bring that cup back: I want some more tea.” These days and mornings off weren’t so frequent as to cause alarm. Vera knew he wasn’t idle, and Seaton knew it, too. Work had always been blood in his veins, but since his life-sentence to dole and means-test he didn’t find it so easy to climb down from the scrap-heap. On those days when he hadn’t been to work Brian would come home from school and find him in a blacker, fouler, and more vicious mood than he’d ever got into even on the most desperate of penniless dole days.

One Monday morning Mr. Jones didn’t turn up at school and word was tom-tommed around that he was ill, had caught a cold going home in the rain on Friday. The lessons went on as before, only more relaxed. Why can’t ’e allus stay away? Brian wondered. There don’t need to be a head teacher. He liked learning, but now and again during the free week he somehow expected Mr. Jones, by a supreme effort of spite, to come, still sick like a phantom from his bed, and scare the happy class merely by showing his gargoyle face above the partition. In any case, after a weekend gang fight Brian was apprehensive lest some parent whose boy had been cut above the eye by a flying stone should have reported the skirmish, and that Mr. Jones would break in during the scripture lesson and read out names from a list he waved in his hand — Brian Seaton being at the head of it.

He didn’t return the following week either. There was a lack of desperate noisiness in the yard at playtime, which meant more laughter and less nose-bleeders. Brian went early to school one day because it was his turn to enter the temperature and barometric readings on the wall-graph. Several boys were already in the classroom talking softly, and something was obviously up, for two looked as if about to weep, and one actually was making silent and helpless tears as if somebody had blown cigarette smoke into his eyes. This was the prefect, and the others were favourites of Mr. Jones who had never been under his wrath. They tolerated Brian’s company, however, because his examination results were often as high as theirs.

“What’s up, Johnnoe?” he asked, entering the readings.

“Mr. Jones’s dead,” Johnson told him.

The thought gave him pleasure, extended the vista of easy lessons. “Don’t kid me.”

“He’s dead. I’m not fibbin’.”

“It’s true,” somebody else said. “It was last night: from pneumonia.” The graph finished, Brian dashed from the room and met Jim Skelton coming into the playground. He hugged him, pulled him into an embrace, and tried to dance.

“What’s up?” Jim asked. “What’s up, Brian?”

“Jones ’as snuffed it,” he said. “He’s stone dead and kicked the bucket. Honest-to-God and cut my throat if I tell a lie.”

Jim’s ginger hair blew in the wind: “You bleeding liar. Stop ’aving me on.”

Brian laughed: “That’s what I said to ’em, but it’s true. He got pneumonia and kicked it. Johnson just towd me. If yer don’t believe it, go into the classroom and see ’im and ’is pals blubbering.”

It sank in; they seemed ready to cry at the good news, just as the others were crying at the bad. “Well, owd Brian, it’s about time, ain’t it?” He brought out a packet of marbles. “I’ll share ’em wi’ yer, then we can play.”

Prayers were said, and collections made for a fitting wreath: Brian dropped a ha’penny into the box. Any boy wishing to attend Mr. Jones’s funeral, it was said, would be given half a day off. Brian measured the pleasure of a break from lessons, and decided it wasn’t worth it. Three teachers went to the funeral, and under the lax discipline there was a subdued air of rejoicing.

CHAPTER 15

Water, gravel, cement, and sand were shovelled and poured into the circling cannonlike mouth of the concrete mixer. With these ingredients well shaken to a grey pulp, the mouth lifted upwards, still turning, stayed there for a time as if wondering whether to let itself go and spit its cement up at the cloudless sky. Then, as if remembering its humble fixed purpose in life, it gave a shudder of regret, and turned its mouth over to the side opposite Brian to pour its cement-guts dutifully into a huge vat.

He walked on, weighed down by four blue mash-cans of scorching tea. Fresh-planed wood planks slanted from doorways and windows, clean-smelling of resin and tar, giving off newness even more acceptable to the blood that buds in spring. A man, hosing down a stack of bricks, called: “Yo’ got my tea, young ’un?”

Brian stopped: “What’s yer name then, mate?”

“Mathews. That’s it, that one there.” Brian had found it hard at first to remember who owned what mash-can. Four or five faces were fixed in his mind when he collected them, but when he got back he stood desperately trying to distinguish between them while at the same time looking as if he’d merely stopped for a moment to watch the progress of work — until a man would call out for his can. Brian would give it to him, and no mistakes were made, though by the time he caught on to the ease of this system he knew most of the faces anyway. Mathews slid the can from his wrist: “I’ll pay yer grandma Friday, tell ’er.”

“All right, but if she says no, I’ll cum back an’ c’lect it.”

He looked around. “Will yer now? You’re a bleddy sharp ’un, an’ no mistake.”

“I’ve got to be, ain’t I?”

“Wi’ some, I dare say you ’ave. ’Ow much do yo’ get for this, anyway?”

“Grandma gi’s me a bob on Sat’day.”

“Not bad for a young ’un.” Brian’s summer holidays passed in fetching and taking their cans, running to Woodhouse for more tea and sugar, and gathering the money on Friday. The boundaries of fields had been trodden in by lorry ruts and brick stacks, and houses had made a rush forward during the spring as if they’d grown with the leaves. Some by the boulevard were almost finished, their tops still grinning like the pink tents of an army or circus — urged on, it seemed, by the totem-poles of factory chimneys in the smoking city behind. The sputtering sound of concrete mixers blended in the hot summer air with the klaxon-throated cockerels from the Nook, and privet hedges by the gate were dusty from powdered concrete.

The Nook was lighted by electricity, was magically blessed with water-taps so that the bucket-yoke hung as useless as a souvenir on the wash-house wall. The surface of the land was changing, becoming covered like memory, though Brian realized as he walked for the first time along new-laid pavements that the familiar soil underneath would never be difficult to reach. There was even soil under Slab Square in the middle of Nottingham, he realized, but that was harder to believe in.

With the money he earned he bought novels, dictionaries, and maps, browsed through the threepenny boxes in the basement of a second-hand bookshop downtown. His father hammered a shelf together in the bedroom so that they wouldn’t litter the kitchen. Books fitted into a separate part of his life, divided from reality by the narrow pen-knife cut of a canyon that he could cross and recross with ease. The book world was easily defendable because he was alone in it and without competitors — though it was occasionally threatened by his father’s resentful glare if he had them strewn over the table when supper-time was near and tea called for.

From where they were working on the foundations, past the singing of trowels as bricks were tapped into position by plumb-line and spirit-level, to where whole walls were complete and surrounded by scaffolding, Brian walked with his final can of tea. He watched a man ascend a swaying ladder with a hod of bricks: he was tall, thin, and agile, blessed with a good sense of balance and seemingly without fear. Someone from the top platform shouted out that he be careful, but he responded by a wave of the arm and by tackling the next few steps without holding on, ending his antic by sending a few swear-words like handclaps into the air. Brian wondered where he’d heard the voice, seen the lanky figure before: stood watching him unload his bricks and talk — friendly despite his swearing — with the bricklayers up top. He took off his cap to scratch his head, then came down the ladder swinging the emptied hod round and round like a mace. One man called to another: “Owd Agger’s a real glutton for wok. I ain’t seen nobody as can goo up ladders like he can, ev yo’?”

“He wants to be careful, though. I ’eard as a bloke on them new houses near Bilborough broke both his legs last week. He’ll get a lot o’ compo, though.”

Agger went to a stack of steaming bricks, and Brian decided to go close and greet him: “Ey up, Agger.”

“Hey up, kid”—only a glance. He was the same, a combination of the words “jaunty” and “gaunt,” and his lined face had the regular features of a hard exterior life without realizing it too much within. He seemed easier, though, relaxed compared to a year ago on the harder, more uncertain battlefield of the Sann-eye tips. His eyes had lost some of their haunted ironic glare, were as agile and good-humoured in fact as his limbs at the climbing of ladders.

“Don’t yer goo on tips any more?” Brian hoped he wouldn’t crack him one at thinking he and not Bert had stolen his prize rake on that far-off day.

“Not since I got a job. I di’n’t want to stop all my life on t’ tips, kid. Anyway, my missis passed on.” He spoke as if to an adult, and Brian wondered what his wife’s dying had to do with getting work. He counted twelve bricks being placed on the hod. “So I couldn’t mess about much longer. I knock up above fifty bob a week now, you know.” He felt Agger’s pride: his father was in work, hadn’t been able to get it up to then simply because it wasn’t on the market. Why didn’t Agger say this? “It’s an ’ard life on the tips, kid. This is better graft for us”—was as far as he would go.

“You said it,” Brian agreed, realizing that he had been taken as a full-time worker and feeling pleased about it. Agger smiled: “They’ve set you on as a mash-lad, ’ave they?” Brian told him the tariff drawn up by his grandmother, and Agger said he’d like a can as well, every morning at ten if he could manage it. “I’ll gi’ yer a tanner on Friday.” He hoisted the bricks on his shoulder, and was halfway up the ladder before Brian turned to deliver his last can of tea.

Merton didn’t like the idea of leaving the Nook, and said as much to Tom, who came for his fortnight’s rent. Mary laid the open book on the table, four half-crowns and sixpence down the dividing line of the middle. “I thought they were going to leave it a year or two,” he said, “what wi’ tekin’ so much trouble putting in water and electricity.”

Tom scooped up the money and wrote it in: “It’s the land they want, you see. As far as the railway and over to the woods.”

“Aye,” Merton grunted, “they’re bleddy gluttons for it.” He stood near the window, a tall thin figure wearing black trousers from an old suit, a brown cardigan, and well-polished laced-up boots. He’d finished his momentous fifty-odd years of work as a blacksmith, and now gave his strength to the garden, to chopping wood and seeing to his pigs and poultry — taking it soft, as he termed it. There was no work for Brian to do; Merton shouldered it himself as if, despite his fifty years’ hard labour, he hadn’t yet worked the violence out of himself, as if he had been put on the earth to attack life rather than live it, to subdue it with hammer and pickaxe, tunnelling his way through until he dropped within sight of the ligher daylight of death. He had a long way to go yet: stood erect, white hair cropped short, his blue eyes steadily taking in the view, an ironic fierce gaze set upon the tatterdemalion camp of wood and bricks and cement bags nearby. He turned back to the cups of tea Mary had poured: “Not that I ’adn’t bin expectin’ it.”

“It ain’t that black,” Tom said, not sitting down to drink. “They’ve got another house for yer: in the Woodhouse, on Vane Street.”

“That’s summat to be thankful for,” Mary said.

“Besides, it’s only two doors up from the beer-off.” Tom had a gnome face topped by a nicky hat, the sort of face that seemed to have dried-up river beds running down it to meet at his pointed chin, a worried expression that tried to do nothing but please because the vanity behind it wanted everyone to think him a good bloke and not insult him. He buttoned his mac. “Thanks for the tea, Mrs. Merton. You’ve got a month or two to think about moving.”

Merton thought about it: and since he had been expecting the upheaval, he wasn’t so disturbed as he led everyone to believe. It would be a change to live among shops and pubs and be nearer to bus stops for the city. Lydia thought so as well: that there’d be no walking down the muddy lane and under the lonely bridge on dark nights. Mary said the house was like being in the middle of a graveyard all through winter, and now they’d have neighbours and company for a change. Merton was galled most of all at the smaller garden. “I’ve seen ’em down there,” he said, “and they aren’t big enough to tek a piss in.”

The new house was in the middle of a long row inhabited mainly by miners working at Wollaton Pit. Merton sold up and moved in, George and Lydia glad because, apart from being comfortingly nearer the town, there was less work for him to set them to. Brian walked there along the main road and down by the canal side, went for the first time one afternoon and found no one in but his grandmother, who dozed by the fire. He sat on the sofa waiting for her to wake up. The kitchen was arranged exactly as at the Nook, with the same mixed pervading aroma of tea and spices, kindling wood and tobacco, baked bread and stew. Brass candlesticks towered on the shelf, with two black and white statue dogs that reminded him of Gyp about to leap for birds before Merton had killed him, and white pot ornaments were placed between seaside souvenirs of Cromer and Skegness, Cleethorpes and Lowestoft. A magnifying glass hung from a nail, waiting for Merton to come back from his walk and look closely at the photographs in tonight’s Evening Post: Brian always hoped to borrow it, to set fire to a piece of paper in the garden by holding it under the sun. On the other side of the room was a glass-faced cupboard of tea-services, and rows of Merton’s prize horseshoes. His grandmother sneezed and woke up. “Hello, Brian, I di’n’t ’ear you come in.”

“Well, I knocked first, grandma.”

She looked at the clock: “I’d better get some tea ready for when the others come. I’ll get the sack if I don’t.” She went into the scullery to put the kettle on the gas. Brian wondered where his grandfather was, pushed the cat away from the fire with his foot: “Shall I get some coal up from the cellar, grandma?”

“Yes, you can do that. Fill me two buckets, there’s a good lad. It’ll save your grandad doing it later.” He clattered down the steps whistling. Sunlight came through the grating, showing many small pieces of coal at the foot of the neatly stacked heap. But he pulled down an unwieldy lump and smashed the half-hundredweight of it to pieces with the hammer. Then he filled the buckets and trundled them back up. “Wash your ’ands and I’ll gi’ you a piece o’ jam pasty,” his grandma said.

Black liquid streamed down the sides of the white sink, and his hands smelt pleasantly of carbolic. The table was laid, and a half-pasty and a cup of tea waited for him. “Pull up a chair and get that down you,” Mary said. The Evening Post had just clattered through the letter-box, and she went to get it. He interrupted her reading. “I’m going up to the Nook tomorrow to see what’s ’appened. Then I’ll go over the Cherry Orchard to see Ken and Alma Arlington.”

The paper rustled to her knees: “You’ll find it altered. The Nook’s down already, and I did hear that the Arlingtons was going to have to leave as well.”

He slept at home that night, and woke up the next morning with Fred on one side and Arthur on the other. Pushing Arthur’s knee from his back, he remembered he was to explore the Cherry Orchard, and an hour later he set off down the street, turning over the Lean towards New Bridge. From its summit he saw that, apart from the immediate fields below, the countryside had gone. Nothing was the same, and beyond the broad new boulevard were houses, in which direction there seemed no set point worth searching for any more. He could go on walking on and on and not meet anyone he knew, could lose himself in the mountains of Derbyshire and reach the Atlantic at Wales without being able to stop a friendly face and say: “Hello, how are you” and “Which is the way back to Nottingham?”

He leapt streams and climbed over stiles in the pocket still left. Flowers hid among hollows and hedgerows, or stood in the wind of hillocks. His hair blew about, and most of the sky was blue. A horse nibbled at clover, and Brian thought it was the same horse that had nibbled there during the last four years he had passed through the field on his way to the Nook.

Across the boulevard he entered streets of new houses, and at the corner where he should turn and see the Nook, neither smoke nor roof was visible. The hedge had been trampled down, and the gate torn from its hinges, and instead of ochred walls he looked through into space towards the dark shade of the yet untouched wood. Nettles and thorns caught his ankles, and only the foundations of the house remained, and he stood in them, walking from section to section, kitchen to parlour, and down into the pantry — filled with bricks, filth, and glass fragments that had once been part of windows showing him marvellous fields and gardens. It hadn’t taken them long to flatten it, he thought, and imagined it being done, beginning with roof and chimney-pots cascading into the yard, then the slow ripping down of walls, and lorries carting everything away.

The garden was a jungle, and he walked through it to the well. The fairytale headstock was no longer there, and he dropped stones down the depths still left: the noise of stone sailing down to stone hypnotized him as he lay over the parapet of rubble, a great pace sounding between the stone leaving his hand and striking the depths below.

The Cherry Orchard was untouched, still in the country. Noises of machinery fell away, giving place to the whistling of birds, and bushes bending in the wind. The silence made him afraid. In the distance he could see the two cottages of the Lakers and Arlingtons, but as he got near there was no sound of water being drawn from the squeaking pump.

Their gate was also smashed. The cottage doors were boarded up and chimney-pots hung slantwise, as if youths had taken shots at them with bricks. He stood still, unable to speak his thoughts that were too deep to be fished up by the bent pin of sentiment. But the disappearance of his friends disturbed him, and trying to put his thoughts into speech was like an iceberg that grows hands in the middle of the ocean attempting to lift itself out of the water. The wood at the end of the garden sent out bird sounds: but no twigs cracked unexpectedly under other children’s feet.

He went into the wood. Where had the Arlingtons and Lakers gone? He knew the land of Nottingham and a few miles beyond, but all was unexplored after that, and his consciousness of it slid over the rim of the world like the sailors in olden days who had no maps. But there were farms, he supposed, other towns and woods and fields, mountains and oceans that went on for ever and ever, until you came back to where you were standing now.

Clear water ran along the stream, and he leapt over. Where had they gone to live, though? He had been to Skegness on a train when he was three, and vaguely remembered the rhythm of the wheels, a green blur of fields as he fell into sleep on his mother’s knee. Then the grey boiling sea burst on to the sand. He brushed fingers over yellow ripples of bittersweet, unknowingly trampled the curved vetch. They’ve gone to another farm, I expect. I wish I could go somewhere, a long way off, to jungles and mountains, and islands. I’ll draw a map when I get home. He ripped leaves from an elderberry bush and rubbed the stain over his hands.

He lay down for a long drink, legs outspread and knees bare against humps of dried earth. Stones on the bottom were of different sizes and shades, with sand and green weed between, like a landscape, a miniature world under glass, uninhabited by minnows or waterboats: an ideal country of No-One-Else, ripe for filling and exploration. His eyes bulged as he swallowed and caterpillars of stone-cold water jerked into his stomach.

Reaching the footpath, he kicked loose stones about, running them gloriously into imaginary unguarded goal-posts. Whistling out of the wood, he charged over the new road and across the field, sat on the embankment fence to watch an express train go fleeing by. Must be going to Skeggy, he thought, forgetting to count the carriages. I wish I was on it.

The ground plan of the Nook was on view to the sky for a long time, because men and materials couldn’t be spared for building houses, due to a war that had started. Its clear markings stayed until the war ended, and Brian didn’t notice that it had been covered with prefabs until he came back from Malaya, by which time its obliteration was looked on as a good thing.