Saville

6

The boys he played with were slightly older than himself. Some of them already wore long flannels. Their leader, when he wasn’t in hospital or didn’t feel too tired to come out, was a boy called Batty. He was very tall and had bright red hair. It was because of his height that he was always having trouble with his feet. They stuck out sideways and when he ran his legs were flicked out sideways too, his knees knocking against one another and causing him such discomfort that usually when he was out playing he spent most of his time calling to the others, ‘Hey, come on. Let’s walk.’ He was sometimes called Walkie-Talkie, other times Lolly, though usually Batty seemed to do.

He came from a large family farther along the terrace: there were seven brothers, all with red hair. ‘Our kids’ll bash you,’ Batty would say whenever his authority was questioned and he would indicate the windows of his crowded home.

The centre of Batty’s life was the hut he had built in the Dell, half a mile away. It stood between the high, fenced walls of the gasworks on one side and the sewage beds on the other.

After the birth of the baby Colin spent a lot of his time in the hut. He would go down there after school, or in the dinner hour. Sometimes, getting up early and hearing his mother feeding the baby in the bedroom, he would get dressed and go out, taking a piece of bread with him. His mother would sometimes call out and when he went in she would be sitting up in bed, the baby held over her shoulder. She would ask him if he would like some tea, straighten his tie with her one free hand and look at his ears and neck. His father worked mornings now and got up like Mr Shaw next door, though an hour sooner because of the ride. Sometimes when he came home from school he found his mother in bed, white-faced, her cheeks sunken, his father busy in the kitchen with a brush, or washing-up.

‘It’s all this getting up at night to feed him,’ he would say. ‘She’ll be all right once he settles.’

‘Can I go out?’ he would ask him.

‘Yes,’ he’d say. ‘Just clear this bit up first.’

In the hut, when Batty wasn’t there, he usually found Stringer. He was Batty’s deputy: he was small and squat with black hair, and whenever they were alone he would sit in the armchair normally reserved for Batty and bite his nails, gazing with an abstracted look at the glow of an old oil lamp, which stood on a table immediately inside the door and, on hearing the slightest noise outside, rushing for his gun which he always brought with him.

It was an air-gun Batty himself had given him and which, once he was in the hut, he fired at anything that moved. One night by mistake he had fired at his own father, who had come to fetch him, a man as squat and as black as Stringer himself. Mr Stringer had taken the gun from his son, bent it in two, first one way then the other, then finally wrenched the halves apart. The next day, however, Batty had provided Stringer with another. ‘I’m glad he broke it,’ Stringer said. ‘That o’d ’un wasn’t any good.’ Outside the door he would hang up the birds he had shot, their feet strung up to a rafter, the blood collecting in beads around their beaks and eyes.

Stringer didn’t like the hut a great deal. But for Batty he would gladly have moved it to another spot. There was always the smell of the gasworks lying there, mingling with the smell of the sewage pens. ‘The pong’s all right,’ Batty told him whenever he complained. ‘I picked it because of that. It’s a good defence.’ Beyond the sewage pens were the swamps. Tall reeds obliterated the view in every direction. If anyone entered they had to walk on the piles of bricks and sods of earth that at some time in the past Batty had placed there. Amongst the bulrushes were still, brown pools about which Batty had invented stories. Into them bodies had fallen never to be retrieved. They had no bottoms. They opened out directly into the centre of the earth. It was here that Stringer hunted for rats, hanging them up by their tails along with the birds he had shot.

Once or twice, when Stringer was busy elsewhere, Colin would be left on his own in the hut. He would light the lamp and sit in Batty’s chair, the door barred, one of the windows which were normally shuttered open so that he could see anyone approaching along the path.

There was a small stove in the hut on which Batty made cocoa or cooked chips in a broken pan. On the walls hung bows and arrows, the arrows tipped with rusty wire. There was also a cupboard which Batty kept locked and inside which he kept his secret possessions – a rope with a noose on the end, a tin called his ‘In-it’ tin, for no one knew what was inside, and a hammer.

It gave Colin a dull ache to sit alone in the hut, looking round at the wooden walls and the weapons, listening anxiously for any sound or signal from outside. Often he was glad even to see Stringer.

‘What do you come down here for?’ Stringer would ask him: there were two or three years difference between their ages.

‘To look after it,’ he would tell him.

‘I mean,’ Stringer would say, ‘why do you come so much?’

‘I don’t mind,’ he said.

‘Not even the pong?’

‘No,’ he said.

Sometimes he would add, ‘In any case, there might be an attack.’

‘Aye,’ Stringer would say, looking at him slyly.

An attack was what Batty most longed for. It was in anticipation of an attack that all his weapons and the various booby traps outside had been prepared. The latter were a series of deep holes covered by grass that they had to walk around when they arrived.

The attack too would bring a light to Stringer’s eyes and invariably, when it was mentioned, he would check his gun, pushing in a pellet if by some rare chance it was unloaded, and go to the window, narrowing his eyes to peer out. A pair of binoculars, another of Batty’s possessions, facilitated his watch.

Yet the attacks never came; the only intruders who approached the hut were miners from the Club and Institute who came to relieve themselves behind the wall as they struggled home at night.

His father was a little sceptical of the time he spent with Batty. ‘Nearly all their lads have been in prison,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to get mixed up with that. What do you do in that hut, anyway?’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Play around.’

‘If he asks you to go thieving you better tell me straight away.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘We’ve enough worries with your mother being unwell, without us adding another.’

Yet in the evening his father would go into the field at the back of the house with Batty’s father and some of his sons, and sometimes Stringer’s father and Mr Shaw, and play cricket. The women would come out into the yards to watch, their arms folded under their aprons.

The men would set up two sticks for a wicket, Batty’s father – who was tall like Batty and almost completely bald – swearing at his sons whenever he was out, his own father laughing, standing with his hands on his hips, his head thrust back, or sometimes bowling, running up with a slow, stiff stride and flicking the ball out of the back of his hand. Whenever one of the men hit the ball towards the houses they would call out, as if a tree were falling, and if a window were broken they would run off and hide behind the fences and in the doorways before coming back, laughing, to hand out the money. Later, as the sun set, they would lie in the grass by the worn wicket, talking, their wives calling from the doorsteps as it grew dark.

‘Toil and trouble,’ his father would say, getting up, although his mother never called him. ‘Come on, Colin,’ he would tell him. ‘Time for bed.’

‘How’s thy young ’un going?’ they’d ask him.

‘Oh, fair and away,’ he’d say.

He’d built a cradle for the baby from an orange box and painted it grey, like the bunks in the shelter, with colliery paint. It stood in their bedroom on a wooden chair. The box had been hexagonal in shape and his father had removed three of the sides, the baby lying inside on a pillow and rocked slightly, whenever it cried, from side to side.

It was as if the baby represented a subtraction from his mother’s life, a piece of her that had been taken away, without anything to replace it. She was so much thinner, and gave all her attention to the child. Sometimes when he went in to see her in the morning she would call out, ‘Is that you, Colin?’ even when she knew they were alone in the house and he would stand at the door waiting until she added, ‘It’s all right now, love. You can come in.’

She would be holding the baby across her shoulder and patting its back. Whenever he looked at it its eyes were closed, its cheeks bloated, its lips pouting slightly and covered in greyish milk.

On Sundays, when she had fed it, he would take it for walks in the pram. ‘We all have to do our bit,’ his father said. Often now his father did the cooking himself, standing at the kitchen table, whistling, his hands covered in flour. ‘I don’t need a book,’ he said whenever his mother opened her cookery book for him on the table. ‘If you haven’t the touch you might as well not try.’ He took as much trouble over the cooking as he had over the shelter and he seldom got anything wrong, laying out the cakes he had made on a tray by the window so that Mrs Shaw or whoever passed by could inspect them. He bought himself a small sewing machine which, like the pram, he had seen advertised in the local paper, and in the evenings, before he went to bed, he would sit by the fire, his head stooped to the light, sewing curtains, his eyes glowing, his heavy fingers drawing out the thread. ‘You get your strength up,’ he said to the mother. ‘I’ll see to this for a while.’

On Sundays, when Colin pushed the pram out, he would walk past Batty’s house and when he whistled Batty would come out, usually with a plank of wood or a piece of metal, and they would put it across the sides of the pram, the baby asleep underneath, and push it down to the Dell.

The pram was a high, carriage-like shape, with a curled handle and with large spoked wheels that overlapped at the sides. When his mother noticed the mud collected on the wheels and discovered where the baby spent its morning, lying beneath the rows of rats and birds outside the hut, she told his father, who, baking at the time, wiped his hands of flour and took him upstairs, looking in his bedroom for his belt.

He seldom beat him, but when he did it was with his belt, laying him over the arm of a chair or over his bed, his father, afterwards, going out to the lavatories, where he would sit smoking a cigarette, his head in his hand, his mother standing in the kitchen, her hands clenched, gazing at the fire.

The following Sunday she watched him walk off in the opposite direction, towards the centre of the village and, beyond, the colliery and the Park.

Every Sunday his father put on his best suit and walked out in the same direction, past the Park, to the manor house. Here, at the back, an outbuilding had been designated as the headquarters of a local defence volunteer force. The building had stone walls and a padlock on its metal-studded door, and inside there was an old desk and several canvas chairs. In some respects it was a bit like Batty’s hut.

The men assembled here at eleven o’clock just as the bell in the church across the manor grounds was sounding for morning service. Some of the men wore uniforms, but most of them had suits. They marched up and down on the paved yard of the manor, swinging left at each corner and coming to a halt when the sergeant in charge called out. He came in a small army truck which, once they had finished marching, some of the men took turns in driving round the yard, calling out and laughing, crashing the gears.

After a while the man in the truck brought several rifles with him. His father at this time was one of the few men without a uniform, because of his small size, and he would march at the back of the column, the rifle held almost horizontally over his shoulders, his head thrust back, his eyes glaring, his left hand swinging stiffly at his side.

When they had finished drilling they would line up and load the rifles with imaginary bullets and fire them at imaginary targets at the end of the manor yard. Occasionally they would charge across the yard, fling themselves down on a grass bank the other side and fire at the bushes. A piece of hessian and a sack were laid down where his father and another man had to fall because of their best suits, and when they reached it they would pull up the knees of their trousers before getting down.

One Sunday the sergeant brought several bayonets in addition to the rifles, and on each subsequent Sunday the men would attach them to the ends of the rifles and run with them, screaming, across the yard, and stick them in a sack hanging from the branch of a tree the other side.

Colin, pushing his brother in the pram, occasionally accompanied his father to the manor. He would climb up into the house while the men drilled in the yard. A flight of narrow stone steps led up to the first floor, and from there a broad wooden staircase led up to the floor above. Few of the ceilings of the house remained; birds nested in the rafters; most of the windows had been removed. Through the gaps he could gaze down into the grounds, at the church and the Park, the colliery and the village lying beyond. He could pick out figures moving in the streets or on the colliery heap and, on a clear day, could make out the trees by the river almost two miles away. From below would come the shouts of the sergeant, the screaming of the men as they ran with the bayonets, and the barking of the caretaker’s dog, fastened up at the side of the building.

From the rear windows he could look down on the men in the yard below, sprawled out on the bank if they were firing at the bushes, or marching up and down if the session had just begun, his father, smaller and neater from this perspective, marching stiffly behind.

His face was quite severe when he drilled, his chin tucked in, his chest pulled out, his eyes having a glaring, slightly strained expression. Often when they had left the manor and were walking home, he would say, ‘Come on, come on, now. Pick ’em up. Pick ’em up,’ in much the same manner as the sergeant, marching along, his head erect, his arms swinging, and looking down now and again to make sure that, despite pushing the pram, he kept in step.

One Sunday the men marched through the village. They were joined by a unit from another village and by a band. At first, his father had refused to go because he had no uniform. ‘You go,’ his mother said. ‘It’s the spirit that counts. And in any case, you’ll have a rifle.’

‘You’d think they’d have made one my size by now,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t even mind one a bit bigger.’

Yet he went in the end and on this occasion had been set near the front, the taller men at the rear. At the front itself marched an officer with a cane, an elderly man with silver hair and a row of coloured ribbons on his chest. His father came only a few steps behind. They marched through the village one way, past the colliery, then the other way, their route the shape of a cross. When they came back once again to the centre, where the road from the station and the south met the road leading to the west and the city, they drew up in a long column, marking time, his father’s knees rising high in the legs of his best trousers but, because of the newness of the cloth, not as high as the rest.

Afterwards, as the men drank outside the pub, his father stood back from the rest, nodding his head but scarcely talking, the men who had joined much later than him leaning in their uniforms against the pub wall, laughing and calling, some already with stripes on their arms.

‘I’m going to have no suit left,’ he said as they walked home. ‘What do you think? I nearly asked that officer for one himself.’

Yet when his uniform finally came he was unable, as a result of a serious accident, to wear it: it hung for a while from a hook on the wall, his father, his legs encased in plaster, gazing at it in frustration from across the room.

He had been coming home from work one morning, while it was still dark, riding down one of the many lanes that led from the pit to the village, when he had seen the lights of two cyclists coming towards him and had already turned tiredly to ride between them before he realized they were the heavily shaded headlights of a car.

He had hit the bonnet in the middle and had been flung over the top of the car, crashing down on the boot before being flung off into the road.

The driver of the car took him to hospital in a near-by village, and a few hours later, after his mother had telephoned the colliery to find out where he was, a policeman came with the news of the accident and she went out again, leaving Steven and himself with Mrs Shaw, to telephone the hospital and find out how seriously he was hurt.

He came home a few days later in an ambulance. He had broken both his legs, an arm, and had damaged several ribs. He seemed, as he got out of the ambulance, more cheerful than he had been for a long time, particularly since his trouble with his uniform. He was carried in on a stretcher and put straight to bed.

He only stayed there a few days. The plasters on his legs had been made in such a way that they could support his weight: they passed down in iron rings under his feet so that he appeared, suddenly, several inches taller. With the aid of these and a stick he walked down the stairs.

It was his ribs that caused him most discomfort. He would lie in the chair by the fire, holding his chest and groaning, breathing slowly in and out.

‘You don’t have to tell me,’ he said whenever his mother complained. ‘I’m lucky to be alive,’ adding, ‘but then, lying in that bed I might as well be dead.’

Other times he would lie back, his eyes searching the ceiling, wild, half-tormented, and say, ‘The number of times the roof’s broken and I’ve been nearly buried, my back broke and God knows what else, and then when it really comes where am I? On an open road wi’ nothing else in sight.’

The baby was crawling now and he would give it rides on his pot leg like a rocking horse, stooping forward, stiffly, to hold Steven’s hand, bouncing him up and down.

Sometimes too he would stand at the window, balancing on the hoops, staring out at the backs, sometimes holding to a cupboard and hitting the pot on his legs with his stick. He had, over the year, been trying to save ten pounds for a holiday and now it had all gone. He would beat the wall with his fist while his mother looked on, her hands clasped together.

‘The thing to do now is get you better,’ she said. ‘Not complain.’

‘Complain?’ he said. ‘With my life draining away.’

‘It’s not draining away by the sounds of it.’

‘Isn’t it? Isn’t it?’ He would throw the stick on the floor, trying to break it only, a moment later, having to ask her to pick it up because he couldn’t move without it. ‘Last time I broke my leg, you know, I damn near lost my job,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But now there’s a war, and everybody’s wanted.’

‘Everybody’s wanted. And what have I got? Two pot legs.’

Earlier in his life, just before he had got married, he had lost his job when it was impossible to get a job at all. He had been helping to sink the shaft at the colliery where he now worked when, at the bottom of the shaft, while it was still being dug, he had fallen out of the cage and twisted his leg.

It was only as he cycled home that it had begun to swell, particularly around his ankle. He bandaged it up and went to work for another week, afraid to have his leg examined in case it might be more seriously injured than he thought. At the end of the week he could scarcely bear to put his foot to the ground and it took him almost two hours to push his bike to work. Finally, he collapsed one morning in the lane leading to the pit and lay in the road groaning, his bike fallen over him.

The foreman of the site sent him to hospital on the back of a coal cart. He was in for three weeks.

‘Another day and they’d have had to take off my leg. They couldn’t understand how I’d managed.’

‘How did you manage?’ Colin said. Each day now, when he came home from school, his father would tell him some different incident from this episode, or from others not unlike it.

‘If you had my job you’d know how,’ his father said, laughing. ‘As soon as I came out I went straight back and reported for work. “I thought you were dead, Harry,” the foreman said. “We’ve given your job to another man now.” “What man?” I said. “Why, that man,” he said. “The one that told us you were dead.” Would you believe it? He had him brought up in the cage. An Irishman he was, as big as a house.’

‘What did he say?’ Colin asked him.

‘What could he?’ his father said. ‘“There’s two of you and only one job,” the foreman said. “I’ll give you five minutes to settle it between you.”’ His father paused. ‘We went round the back of the foreman’s hut and after five minutes only one of us came back.’ His eyes lighted, smiling, as he watched his face.

‘And which one was that?’

‘I’m not saying,’ his father said, laughing. ‘But I’ve worked there ever since!’ He burst out laughing once again, with his mother, watching his expression.

His father was always having fights as a young man, and he was often drunk. He never lost a fight and he was never so drunk as to lose out on any situation.

‘Oh, he was a devil when I met him,’ his mother said. ‘When people heard his name they used to rush in their houses and lock the doors.’

‘How do you mean?’ his father said. ‘I could always look after myself. I mayn’t be very big, but the thing was I could move very fast.’

‘Yes,’ his mother said. ‘Particularly when he saw trouble coming.’

His father would smack his stick on the table, his face reddening. I’ve never run away from nought. Never.’

‘No. No. I know,’ she’d add, leaning down to kiss him.

His father was often angry, but just as easily appeased.

Perhaps it was the accident that made him decide to leave the pit where he was and go to the one in the village.

Colin had never really thought of his father working underground at all. He had never even seen the colliery where he worked, though he had heard him describe it many times and the men who worked there, Walters, Shawcroft, Pickersgill, Thomas; each one of them brought some particular image to his mind, large men who in some way, because of their strength, submitted to his father’s authority whenever there was a crisis or a situation they didn’t understand.

‘I’m surprised that that pit’s still working while you’re away,’ his mother said when, after a week or so, she began to grow tired of his stories. She would hold Steven over one shoulder while she changed his nappy, kneeling to the hearth then to lay him down and looking at his father with the pins in her mouth. Since his accident she had grown much stronger, and now Steven slept virtually the whole night through.

His father would get up at these moments and go to the window, rocking on the irons with the aid of his stick. Perhaps it hurt him that the battles he had fought at work, the roofs collapsing, the men he had saved, the instinct that had led him one way rather than another whenever a rock fell, that none of this could be reported to her other than by himself: Walters, Shawcroft, Pickersgill and Thomas all lived in other villages. It might have been this that finally decided him, so that Mr Stringer and Mr Shaw, and perhaps even Mr Batty could report to her the things which, one way or another, he did to save life and increase production almost every day at the pit.

A few doors down the terrace lived Mr Reagan. He worked in the office at the colliery, and every day went to work in a dark suit, wearing yellow gloves and a bowler hat and carrying a rolled umbrella. He was a tall man with a red face, and had a light Irish accent. His wife would hold open the front door every morning when he left for work, standing there with her arms folded, gazing after him until he reached the corner of the street and disappeared. He never waved nor looked back, yet she never moved until he had gone. Shortly before he came home again in the evening she would re-appear at the door very much as if, in the interval, she hadn’t stirred at all, holding the door for him to enter, which he did at the precise moment that he removed his bowler hat. They had one son. He was called Michael and played the violin. He was built like Mrs Reagan, with a large head which jutted out at the back, a narrow body and thin legs. His father, Mr Reagan, would have nothing to do with him. In the evenings, whenever the men were playing cricket in the field, he would stand by the fence at the end of his garden, his waistcoat open, his white collar removed, and shout, ‘Hit it, for Christ’s sake! Hit it harder,’ while behind him, from the open window, would come the sound of the violin.

His father was very attracted by Mr Reagan. He was the only man in the street who didn’t work shifts, who had regular hours, who dressed like a gentleman and who never seemed to care about his wife. On a Saturday night he would go to the Institute dressed in his suit, with his bowler hat and gloves, and stand at the bar never showing, despite the quantities of liquor he consumed, the least discomfort. The miners at the pit stood a little in awe of him: he made up their wages, was responsible for explaining their stoppages, and knew what every man in the village earned. In addition, he would fight any man by whom, for one reason or another, he felt he’d been abused.

His father would describe Mr Reagan’s fights in some detail, and they frequently followed the same pattern. In most instances they took place at the bar of the Institute, and invariably began with some comment on Mr Reagan’s appearance, on the hat he never took off, except at the office, or as he entered his front door, on the yellow gloves which, similarly, he never removed, or on the rolled umbrella which he never opened, even when it rained.

Mr Reagan himself, in fact, would give no indication to begin with that anything untoward had occurred. He would continue whatever it was he was doing, talking, smiling, gazing benevolently around until, at a point determined entirely by himself, he would put his glass down, resting it a moment on the counter as if he suspected very much that, out of his grasp, it might disappear for good, then, with the same gravity, remove first his hat which he would lay beside his glass, then his right glove which he would lay on the hat, then his left which he would lay on the right; then, finally, he would hoist up his cuffs.

‘Would it be you’, he would say, turning slowly to the person in question, ‘who passed a comment upon my appearance a moment ago?’

The man, quite frequently, would look round puzzled, the moment for him, at least, having passed.

‘If so,’ Mr Reagan would say, ‘you’re on the very point of having your teeth pushed down your throat.’

Occasionally the man would deny all knowledge of having made any comment on Mr Reagan’s appearance, or indeed on anything at all.

Other times, however, he might nod his head, smiling, and say, ‘Oh, and who’s going to do that for you?’

‘Why,’ Mr Reagan would say, ‘I have the feller here just ready for the job.’

According to his father, who watched over Mr Reagan’s fights with an almost evangelical passion, Mr Reagan seldom hit his opponents more than once, so fast and so hard was his initial blow. If more were required he provided them, if not he turned with the same casual momentum to the bar, pulled down his cuffs, replaced his gloves, then his hat, tilting it to the angle he favoured best, and picked up his glass. Raising it, he would empty its contents at a single swallow.

His father, when he felt strong enough to go outside, spent much of his time now with Mr Reagan. He would stand at the window at tea-time and wait for him to come down the road from the colliery office, then he would come into the kitchen, wait impatiently for fifteen minutes while Mr Reagan had time to consume his tea and glance at the paper, then go out along the backs, rocking on his rings and swaying on his walking stick, and tap on Mr Reagan’s back window calling, ‘Are you in there, Bryan? Don’t tell me they’ve let you out already?’

Sometimes Mr Reagan would return along the backs with him and putting down a folded newspaper sit on the doorstep, his collar and waistcoat undone, his braces showing at the back when he leaned forward.

His father would argue with him about his work. ‘If I worked the hours you did, and did nought but lick envelopes and fill in forms and count out other people’s money, I’d fall asleep before ever I started.’

‘Ah, well,’ Mr Reagan would say. ‘I know the feeling well. But then, any silly fellow can heave a pick and shovel. It takes a man with brains to sit on his backside all day and get paid for it.’

His father would nod and laugh, looking in at Colin and his mother inside the kitchen as if this were just the answer he wanted them to hear.

‘In any case,’ Mr Reagan would say, ‘you don’t do so much yourself. Two pot legs and a pot arm: it’s a wonder there aren’t more at it.’

‘Aye,’ his father would say, sadly. ‘I’m lying around like any old woman.’

‘Oh, now,’ Mr Reagan would say, ‘I wouldn’t say it was as bad as that.’

Whenever his mother protested Mr Reagan would add, his accent thickening, and bowing his head, ‘Oh, now, Mrs Saville, not counting yourself.’ And then, tipping his head in the direction of his own house he would add, ‘But there are some, you know, who go round flicking dusters all day till you can’t put your foot down without breaking your neck, who dress their lads up like lasses and have them scraping cat-gut all evening till you don’t know where you are from one minute to the next.’

Yet Mr Reagan himself seemed either too indifferent or too lazy to do anything about it. He would sit on the step, or stand by the fence, shouting at the cricketers, the colour of his face slowly thickening, but in the end, his arms swinging loosely, he would turn back to the house. Occasionally he would come out into the yard with a violin and chop it into pieces. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do with it,’ he would shout. ‘And I’ll tell you what I’ll do with him too in a minute.’ Sometimes he would do the same with his son’s clothes, which his wife made specially for him, little suits and bright blouses, standing in the yard ripping them up and stamping on the pieces, his face so red it seemed it would burst.

‘And yet why do I do it?’ he would say to his father. ‘I have to pay for all the damned things in the end.’

Whenever his father asked Mr Reagan about working at the pit he would look up, surprised, and say, ‘Why, you’re better off where you are, Harry. If I told you some of the things that went on there you’d never walk past the place.’

‘Oh,’ his father said. ‘One pit’s much the same as another.’

‘Aye,’ Mr Reagan would say. ‘That’s why I’d stick with what I’d got.’

Perhaps Mr Reagan did put in a word with the management. Yet when his father went to see them, shortly after the pots on his arm and legs had been removed, he came back looking pale and discouraged. Colin saw him walk up the street, his legs straddled slightly as he tried to walk without the stick, and go into the house without as much as glancing in his direction. When he went in his father was sitting at the table, his arms laid out before him, his back stooped.

‘They want you where you are,’ his mother was saying. ‘They know how valuable you are.’

‘Valuable? I’m not valuable. I could be killed tomorrow and there’d be somebody to take my place.’

‘It’s not what you always say,’ she told him.

‘Say?’ he said. ‘What do I say?’

‘How valuable you are. Where you work at the moment.’

‘Aye.’ He nodded his head, not looking up from the table. ‘I have to say that. If I don’t, what am I? Just another piece of muck.’

In the end he went back to his old pit. Even when he could walk without the stick, and had long lost his limp, there was a slowness in his movements as if some part of his life had been arrested.

7

He started Sunday School. He went with a boy called Bletchley who lived in the house next door.

His mother until then had had little relationship with Mrs Bletchley: she was not unlike Mrs Shaw, who lived the other side. Though no brasses hung on her walls, her floors were covered in rugs and carpets, lace curtains hung in the windows, and in the front window stood a plant with flat, green leaves that never flowered or seemed to grow. Mr Bletchley was one of the few men in the terrace who didn’t work at the colliery. He was employed at the station and occasionally when Colin went there he would catch sight of Mr Bletchley carrying a large pole and supervising the shunting of the trucks in the siding, or walking to and fro across the lines. He was a small man, with sallow cheeks, and seldom spoke to anyone at all.

Mrs Bletchley was small too and was always smiling. Her main dealings were with a Mrs McCormack who lived the other side. Mrs McCormack would stand with her broad arms folded, nodding her head whenever Mrs Bletchley called from her step, unable to resist the attentions of the other woman, for whenever Mrs Bletchley failed to come out, on a morning or in the evening, she would go and knock on her door and stand there, still as silent as ever, listening to Mrs Bletchley speak.

The Bletchleys’ son was called Ian. He was fat; his mother made all his clothes. His trousers were of grey flannel and ended just below his knees, which popped out beneath them as he walked. He had little interest in anything and would stand in the back door sucking his thumb and staring out at the children in the field.

In addition to his fat body he had a very large head, his features were gathered together in a straight line down the centre of his face, folds of fat drawing out the contours disproportionately on either side. His legs too were fat, they were flat at the back and flat at the front, the sides vaguely curved. The skin on the inside of his knees was inflamed: it was at this point that his legs rubbed together and each morning, before he went to school, Mrs Bletchley would rub them with cream.

On alternate Saturday mornings, if the weather were fine, she would set out a wooden chair in the yard and Mr Bletchley would sit on the step while his son sat on the chair and Mrs Bletchley cut his hair, snipping behind his ears with a comb and scissors. He often cried. Colin would hear him crying on a morning, and in the evening, and when he had his hair cut he would often scream, rising in his chair and attempting, unsuccessfully, to kick his mother. ‘You’ve cut me, you’ve cut me,’ he would shout.

‘No, dear,’ Mrs Bletchley would tell him. ‘I don’t think I have.’

‘You have. I can feel it.’

‘I don’t think so, dear. Let me have a look.’

‘I’m not.’

‘I can’t cut it unless I see it.’

‘I’m not letting you cut me any more.’

He would run off into the house, his knees already reddened from their chafing on the chair, Mr Bletchley standing up to let him by and occasionally going to the chair himself.

‘Oh, we’ll give him a minute, dear,’ his wife would say and stand waiting, occasionally sweeping up the bits she had cut into a pile.

‘If he was my lad,’ Colin’s father would say, watching from the step or the window, ‘I’d boot his backside.’

‘Well, you’re not his father,’ his mother said.

‘I would. From morning till night.’

Once, when his father was working in the garden, he had called out to Mrs Bletchley, ‘You’re as daft as a boat-hoss, missis.’

‘What?’ Mrs Bletchley had asked him.

‘You want to clout his backside.’

Mr Bletchley himself had looked away.

‘Oh, well,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to be patient.’

‘Aye,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘But not for long.’

It was his mother’s idea that he should go to church with Bletchley. She had seen him several Sunday afternoons setting off for church, his legs creamed, dressed in a grey-flannel suit and a red-striped tie, and in the evening she had said, ‘Well, whatever you say about Ian, he’s always tidy.’

‘So’s a pig-sty,’ his father said, ‘if it’s never put to use.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘going to church won’t do you any harm.’

‘Who?’ his father said. ‘Him or me?’

‘Colin,’ she said.

They had both glanced at him. Then, just as quickly, they looked away.

‘I don’t want to go,’ he said.

‘No,’ his father said. ‘I suppose not. But then, you don’t want to do a lot of things.’

‘It’ll do you a lot of good,’ his mother said. ‘You could go with Ian. I’ll ask his mother.’

Two Sundays later he set off with Bletchley, in his own best suit, which he had scarcely worn since the birth of Steven.

Bletchley was silent for most of the way. There was the soft rubbing of his legs as he walked, the faint drag of one trouser leg against the other. He breathed heavily the whole time, occasionally snorting down his nose as if it were blocked and walking a little distance ahead as if reluctant to be seen with anyone else. In much the same way he walked in the street with his parents.

When, prior to setting off, Colin had appeared on the doorstep, Bletchley had regarded him with a great deal of surprise, his eyes, buried in folds of fat, gazing out at him with a surly distaste. Only as they neared the church, having passed the colliery and started up the slope, past the Park, towards the upper part of the village, did he turn round and say, panting slightly, ‘You believe in God?’

‘Yes,’ he said, nodding his head.

‘What’s He look like?’ Bletchley said, stopping and gazing at him.

In the Park, little more than a field stretching down at the side of the road, Batty was swinging on one of the swings in the recreation ground, pushing himself to and fro with one foot, and kicking Stringer, who was sitting in the next swing, with the other.

‘Like an old man,’ he said.

Bletchley examined him for a moment and said, ‘Have you seen Him?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘If you don’t believe in God they won’t let you in the door.’

‘Yes,’ he said, and added, ‘Well, I’ll tell them I do.’

‘They send you to see the vicar and he gets it out of you.’

Bletchley watched him a moment longer, then turned and, in much the same silence, continued up the slope.

From the swings Stringer had shouted, ‘Where’re you going?’

‘Church,’ he called.

Stringer nodded, glancing at Batty, but added nothing further.

The Sunday School was split into two groups. The Crusaders, who were eleven and over, sat in the church itself behind a row of banners clipped to the end of the pews, each bearing the emblem of a saint or an apostle: a bird for St Francis and a pair of fish with large eye-balls for St Peter. The Juniors met in the Church Hall, a small stone structure to the rear of the church, which at one time had been a barn. The floor was of bare wood and the walls were unplastered. A large fire at one end kept the place heated and throughout the meeting a small woman with red eyes would shovel on pieces of coke, sending up little puffs of smoke, wiping her eyes then her nose on her handkerchief as if she were crying.

The children sat on small wooden chairs arranged in circles. Each circle was supervised by a teacher, a young man or woman, they themselves overlooked by the vicar’s wife, a small, fat woman, in shape not unlike Bletchley himself, her eyes hidden behind a pair of thick glasses. Their own teacher was a man called Mr Morrison. He was tall and thin, with a long thin neck and a long thin face. On either cheek was a clump of bright red spots. He had a prayer book and a Bible which Bletchley, sitting on his right, held for him, handing them to him whenever they were required, his own face serious and extremely grave. They sang a hymn first under the supervision of the vicar’s wife, then they put their hands together and said several prayers, some of which the children knew by heart. They sang another hymn, then they sat down and Mr Morrison told them a story about a man who went fishing.

The teachers in the other groups were telling stories too, some of the children looking across at Colin, others sitting on their hands, gazing at the walls or ceiling.

In the roof were visible the timbers of the barn, old and gnarled as if they’d beer taken straight off a tree, and here and there pieces of string hung down as if at one time they had held decorations. Periodically one or two of the children went out to the lavatory, coming back to sit down again, folding their arms and staring at the roof. Everyone had on their best suit or dress, and clean shoes.

Bletchley listened carefully to Mr Morrison, his head turned stiffly from his tight collar so that he could watch Mr Morrison’s mouth. Whenever Mr Morrison asked a question Bletchley would put up his hand, and though for a while Mr Morrison might ignore it, despite Bletchley whispering, ‘Sir, sir,’ in his ear, in the end he would turn towards him with a slight nod, his eyes avoiding Bletchley altogether, who, in turn, would lower his arm, coughing slightly, and direct the answer specifically at the circle of faces before him.

When Mr Morrison had finished speaking he glanced at his watch and looked over at the vicar’s wife talking to her group by the fire, then took the Bible from Bletchley, opened it at a piece he had already marked, and handed it back to Bletchley to read.

Bletchley stooped forward to read, resting the Bible on his inflamed knees and following the print with his chubby finger. Whenever he faltered on a word he would bow his head several times in rapid succession then, having got it out, would look up at Mr Morrison with a smile.

Finally, at the end of the room, the vicar’s wife stood up. A last hymn was announced, Bletchley wandering round the group sorting out the pages for those who couldn’t read and stabbing his finger at the number. Mr Morrison stood by his seat blowing his nose, dabbing at the spots on his cheek then looking at his handkerchief to see if they had left a mark.

When the piano began to play Bletchley sang with a loud voice, almost shouting, his head turned conspicuously away from the page to indicate that he knew it by heart. Those who couldn’t read and didn’t know the hymn simply stared at the book, occasionally opening their mouths and making a humming sound in time with the music.

At the end of the hymn a moment was allowed for everyone to put down their books. Bletchley had already closed his before the last verse and had turned, while everyone else was singing, and laid his book on the seat, turning back, still singing, to finish the hymn with his eyes half-closed, gazing vacantly towards the ceiling.

A final prayer was said, the vicar’s wife waiting until everyone had closed their eyes and put their hands together, then a blessing was given and as the woman at the piano began to play a slow tune each child picked up their chair and carried it to the side of the room. Bletchley, with one or two of the older children, had begun to collect the hymn books and the Bibles, the teachers themselves standing together at the end of the room with their backs to the fire, rubbing their hands.

When Colin went out the sun was shining and the wind blowing across the fields towards the church. The children either went and stood in the church porch to wait for their elder brothers and sisters, picking up the piles of confetti dropped there from the weddings the previous day, or ran off down the slope, past the Park, towards the village.

Batty was still sitting on the swings when Colin went past. Stringer was standing behind him, pushing him to and fro.

‘Hey,’ Batty shouted and he went in the gates. One or two children from the Sunday School had already run in before him and were standing by the swings and the roundabout waiting for Batty’s permission to climb on. ‘Hey,’ Batty said. ‘How often you go there?’

‘It’s the first time,’ he said.

‘Who sent you? Your old man?’

‘No,’ he said.

Batty nodded and said, ‘All right, Stringer, catch me,’ and Stringer caught the chains, bringing the swing to a halt.

Batty jumped off and Stringer sat down, taking off one of his boots and pushing his hand inside. The sole of his foot, just below his big toe, was covered in blood.

‘What d’you do, then?’ Batty said. ‘Talk about God?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘My old man’, Batty said, watching him intensely, ‘believes in God.’ He examined him a moment longer then, adding nothing further to confirm this, said to the children waiting the other side. ‘You wanna ride?’

‘Yes,’ they said.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Five minutes.’

Stringer had put back his boot and removed the other one. On a seat the other side of the Park the Keeper, a retired miner with a wooden leg, sat with his leg up on a bench, reading a paper.

‘Hey, Fatty,’ Batty shouted, catching sight of Bletchley in the road. He was walking down the hill with Mr Morrison, carrying his Bible. Beside him walked the woman with the red eyes.

Bletch’ey didn’t look up, his gaze turned towards Mr Morrison and the woman the other side.

‘Hey, Stringer,’ Batty said. ‘You want to bash Fatty Bletchley.’

‘Yes,’ Stringer said, wincing, as he drew on his boot.

Colin’s Sundays now were very full. His father’s uniform had arrived while he still had his legs in pot and though he had conveyed to his mother at the time something of the irony of it appearing when he could no longer wear it – laying it out on the kitchen table and stroking it very much as if it were a dog – now, once again walking freely and with no longer the trace of a limp, he would march through the village on a Sunday morning, in khaki and with the one stripe which, perhaps because of his accident, he had recently been given, Colin walking beside him, or sometimes a little behind, pushing the pram and combining with this duty the two undoubted pleasures of watching his father drilling and exploring the old house. In the afternoons he went to Sunday School and it wasn’t until tea-time that he was ever free.

He took little notice of the baby: it had begun to sit up now, so that when he took it walking, it would invariably be looking round, its blue eyes large, impassive, occasionally waving its arms. In the house it sat on the floor turning over the toys it was given, reaching over, making tentative efforts to move but only in the end falling over, lying on its stomach then and beginning to cry. His mother was now trying to make it hold a spoon, and each morning there was the ceremony of holding it over a pot.

His father, since his return to work, had grown quieter and more detached. In the evenings, though he still went out into the field to play cricket, he would, more often, sit at the table in the kitchen, drawing.

He had brought home a large pad of squared note-paper, a black pencil, a wooden ruler and a piece of rubber. Whenever he had spread the sheets out on the kitchen table and begun to draw his cheeks would swell out and redden, and no more so than when he had made a mistake and, with his tongue sticking out between his teeth, he rubbed it out, fanning away the crumbs of the rubber with the side of his hand.

At first it was difficult to make out what the subjects of his drawings were. Whenever he had finished for the evening he put them away in a drawer at the end of the table, reminding his mother that no one was to look at them in his absence. After a while, however, when it seemed that the rubbing out had passed its peak and he had begun to write on the drawings, occasionally asking for words to be spelt and sketching large arrows from one side to the other, he told them that the drawings were to do with an invention he had thought up at work. He stood with his head held slightly to one side as he regarded the various sheets, his eyes half-closed, his tongue slowly licking his lower lip: then, having spread out the sheets on the table top, he leaned carefully over them and in the top left-hand corners numbered them from one to six.

The first drawing was of an aeroplane. It was a bomber, standing on the ground, with a single engine drawn in carefully on either wing. Underneath the aeroplane lay a large bomb and beside it, coiled in a heap, a metal chain.

The second drawing was of the same aeroplane taking off. Heavy strokes of the pencil around the edges of the paper indicated it was night, and amongst the pencil strokes several stars and a large crescent moon like a half-closed eye had been carefully interspersed. His father had no particular skill at drawing: one wing of the aircraft rose rather helplessly from the top of the fuselage, despite numerous half-rubbed-out efforts to correct it, and on one of the engines the whirling propeller was almost as large as the wing itself.

In the third drawing a group of aeroplanes were shown flying together. A swastika had been carefully inscribed on each wing, on each fuselage and on each tail. This group was confined almost exclusively to the right-hand side of the picture and a trail of black dots beyond them suggested that there were still many more to come. To the left of the picture, and by far the largest shape in it, was the bomber. It was flying, as a large, shaded-in arrow indicated, at a height a little above that of the aircraft approaching from the right. The round emblem of the Royal Air Force had been inscribed on its tail, on its fuselage and on both wings, while, from the bottom edge of the paper, the beams of numerous searchlights stood up like blades of grass.

Beneath the aircraft itself was slung the bomb, dangling on the end of the chain, on its side too the round emblem of the Royal Air Force and a message which said in capital letters, ‘THIS IS FOR YOU, ADOLF’. A series of notes and arrows indicated that it had been lowered to the precise height of the approaching aircraft.

The fourth drawing suffered more than any of the others from corrections, the bomb itself having been drawn in various positions before it had arrived at its final situation almost touching the nose of the nearest aircraft from which the faces of several Germans, each wearing a swastika on his arm, could be seen anxiously peering out.

The fifth drawing was taken up entirely by the subsequent explosion. Flames and jagged pieces of metal had been flung in every direction, while around the edges of the conflagration sections of tails and wings and disembodied pieces of fuselage could be seen falling to the ground. Several notes in the margin confirmed the effectiveness of the explosion, indicating not only the number of aircraft destroyed but the number of enemy airmen killed and the number of bombs exploded in the bomb-bays. The last drawing provided additional confirmation of this for from a clear sky a dozen or more aircraft could be seen hurtling towards the earth, flames licking at every surface, black plumes of smoke spiralling from their shattered frames in an elaborate pattern of swirls, curls and volutes. Flying above, close to the upper edge of the picture, was the solitary bomber responsible for all this destruction, bearing the insignia of the Royal Air Force on its fuselage and tail, the chain still dangling beneath it, while from its cockpit had emerged a hand, as large as the tail-plane itself, with its forefinger and second finger upraised, amidst numerous erasures, in the signal of the Victory V.

His father sent off the drawings in a brown envelope with the address printed in the same black crayon on both sides. At the top of the envelope he wrote the word ‘Private’ then, shortly before he took it into the village to post, he crossed it out and wrote instead ‘Of Utmost Concern’, practising the words first on a piece of paper.

A little later, when he had given up hope of any reply and had begun to copy out the drawings again with a bigger bomb and even more aircraft falling, the envelope already prepared and marked in red ink ‘Urgent!!’, he received a letter with an official address printed across the top and a typed message underneath indicating that the drawings were receiving attention.

For several days running he took the letter to work, bringing it back each morning a little dirtier and more heavily creased, in the evenings taking it along the backs with various copies of the drawings, stopping at the doors and explaining to Mr Shaw, to Mr Stringer, to Mr Reagan and Mr Bletchley, and even on one occasion to Mr Batty, the principles on which his invention worked. The following week he brought home a fresh pad of paper from the pit office and began to draw a second invention, suspending in this instance not one bomb but several beneath the aircraft, at varying height, like bait swinging from a row of hooks.

The culmination of this design was a drawing which occupied the entire surface of the kitchen table. Several squared sheets had been glued end to end, their edges crinkly and embellished with thumb prints, and on the single sheet, with a great deal of groaning, his face flushed, his tongue almost permanently protruding, he drew a flotilla of aircraft with an assortment of bombs strung out beneath them, some of the bombs, because of their size, carried by two or more aircraft with ‘THIS IS FOR YOU, FRITZ’ printed on the side.

After he had posted it, folded in a neat parcel and sealed with red wax, he turned his attention to several other designs which this recognition of his efforts had suddenly encouraged. As time passed and no news of his inventions reached the papers, these grew in complexity and profusion, culminating in the design for a bullet which, according to his calculations, could be fired round corners. It was shaped like a ball and was flung out of a grooved barrel in such a way that it curved in flight, eventually, if it was provided with sufficient velocity, returning to the point at which it had started.

‘Won’t it kill’, his mother said, ‘the person who fires it?’

‘How can it?’ he said, irritated whenever he had to explain his inventions unduly. ‘There’s bound to be something in the way. And in any case, you can shorten the range by reducing the size of the cartridge.’

‘I see,’ she said, nodding her head and gazing down at the numerous figures, firing round house corners, that his father had drawn.

Occasionally, as the flow of inventions faltered, he would get up from the table, put his pencil down, stretch for a while before the fire, his head back, his hands clenched into fists above his head, then, making sure that his work things were ready for the evening, his shirt warming in the hearth beside his socks and his boots, his trousers and his coat hanging on a nail beside them, he would wander out on to the doorstep and light a cigarette.

From there it was only a few steps down the garden to the field where the men were playing football. And there, by the fence, he would stand smoking, his hands in his pockets, occasionally calling out, finally glancing back at the house and climbing the fence and offering a kick at the ball as it came in his direction.

Within a short while he would be standing in the centre of the field, waving his arms, calling, the cigarette still in his mouth until that moment when, laughing, the ball at his feet, he flung the cigarette out, running one way then another towards the nearest goal, shooting then calling out, ‘Goal! Goal! What did I tell you?’ His legs were slightly bowed when he ran, and they kicked out wildly whenever he lost control or the ball was taken from him, his voice calling ‘Foul! Foul!’ distinguishable from all the rest by its tone of belligerence and complaint.

Later, as it grew dark, the men would crouch down in the middle of the field. Finally, when the light faded, all that was visible was the glow from their cigarettes and the occasional flare of a match. The low murmur of their voices came through the quietness. His mother would go on to the step and call into the darkness, scarcely loud enough to hear, ‘Harry. Harry. You’ll be late for work.’

He would come in complaining, his eyes still dazed from the darkness, his elbows and knees stained green, his figure stooping impatiently by the fire as he drew on his work clothes and fastened his boots: ‘I must be a madman, going to work at this time,’ taking his bottle of tea and his tin of sandwiches which his mother had already packed in his knapsack and getting out his bike, feeling the tyres, switching on the dynamo for his lights, then calling out to the men still gathered in the darkness as he rode away.

8

Mr Reagan’s son Michael had joined Bletchley and Colin at Sunday School. He was a tall boy with a long thin face and a long thin nose. His eyes were pale blue like Mr Reagan’s. When Bletchley and he walked down the road together people laughed, the one so fat, the other so thin, Reagan apparently unnoticing but Bletchley himself walking more quickly, his knees reddening as his agitation grew. When they returned from Sunday School Reagan walked on one side of Mr Morrison and Bletchley on the other, the woman with reddened eyes walking slightly ahead or behind.

On the third Sunday Reagan brought his violin. It was at the invitation of the vicar’s wife, who announced the presence of the instrument at the beginning of the service, Reagan stepping out from behind his chair with the case so that the vicar’s wife could hold it up. The violin itself was like a large shiny nut, reddish brown, lying in a bed of green baize. He had, the previous two weeks, been practising a hymn tune and when the last hymn was announced he went to stand by the piano and took the violin out.

The children watched him in silence. He folded a white handkerchief beneath his chin, bending his head towards it to keep it in place, then sliding in the violin.

Bletchley stared across at him intensely. He had, on the way to Sunday School, kicked the case at one point, saying, ‘The vicar’ll take it off you. They don’t let you have things like that inside.’

‘Mrs Andrews asked me to bring it,’ Reagan said, mentioning the vicar’s wife.

‘She’s not the vicar,’ Bletchley said. ‘In any case, if she doesn’t do what she’s told he knocks her about.’

Now, however, Bletchley regarded him with a smile. He winced, screwing up his eyes, glanced at Mr Morrison, and winced again, gazing at the roof.

Reagan’s eyes expanded as he played, squinting slightly as he tried to watch the bow crossing the strings, pausing, his body shuddering, his eyes closing whenever his notes failed to correspond with those from the piano, the sound fading when the children, and Bletchley in particular, began to sing.

Bletchley sang with his eyes closed, turned in the direction of the violin, his head raised as if he were addressing Reagan directly.

When they walked home after the service he kicked the case again. ‘You’ll be getting it broken, bringing it out like this,’ he said. ‘In any case, I bet you can’t play the piano.’

‘No,’ Reagan said.

‘My cousin can,’ Bletchley said.

A few days later Colin noticed Bletchley and Reagan playing in the field at the back of the house. Reagan was carrying Bletchley on his back, his thin figure stooped under the load, his head bent almost double. Bletchley was hitting his legs with a stick, saying, ‘Go on, boy! Go on!’ and clicking his tongue. They wandered round a hole, the sides of which had fallen in.

A little later Mr Reagan appeared in his garden. He had just returned from work and was in fact wearing his yellow gloves and his bowler hat, his jacket alone unbuttoned as an indication that he had, at least, arrived home. ‘Hey,’ he shouted, and when Bletchley looked up added, ‘Get off his back.’

‘What?’ Bletchley said.

‘Get off his back,’ Mr Reagan shouted.

Bletchley got down. He stood for a moment gazing across at Mr Reagan.

‘Michael,’ Mr Reagan shouted. ‘Get on his back.’

Reagan had stooped down to rub his legs, inflamed from Bletchley’s stick.

‘Get on his back,’ Mr Reagan shouted.

Bletchley stood still, frozen, his eyes never leaving Mr Reagan as Regan himself grasped his shoulder and tried, unsuccessfully, to climb on his back.

‘Get down,’ Mr Reagan shouted, waving his arm.

‘What?’ Bletchley said.

‘Bend down.’

Bletchley stooped slightly, his eyes still fixed on Mr Reagan, and Reagan himself slowly clawed his way on to Bletchley’s back. Bletchley stood swaying for a moment, his hands clamped behind him on Reagan’s legs.

‘Give him the stick,’ Mr Reagan shouted and when Bletchley did so he shouted again, ‘Start walking.’

Bletchley stumbled, hoisted the weight on his back and, his legs trembling as he struggled to keep his balance, began to walk round in circles.

‘Hit him,’ Mr Reagan said.

Reagan had looked up, his eyes wide and staring as when he had played the violin.

‘Hit him.’

Reagan did so, fanning the stick beneath him at Bletchley’s legs.

‘Ow,’ Bletchley said, screwing up his face.

‘Faster,’ Mr Reagan shouted.

‘I can’t,’ Bletchley said, beginning to cry.

‘Faster. Or I’ll come out there myself.’

Bletchley tried to run, his cheeks trembling, his knees rubbing together.

‘Ow,’ he said each time Mr Reagan called out, his shouts growing louder as he tried to attract the attention of someone in his house.

‘Faster,’ Mr Reagan said, his face inflamed now as when he watched the cricket, his thumbs tucked into his waistcoat pockets. ‘Faster, or I’ll fan you myself.’

Bletchley had fallen.

He gave a loud groan and collapsed on his side, his eyes closed, his mouth open.

He lay moaning for a while, clutching his ankle, Reagan standing over him scratching his head. ‘Oh,’ Bletchley said. ‘I’ve broken my ankle.’

‘I’ll break the other one if I catch you again,’ Mr Reagan said. ‘Get up now, or I’ll lift you myself.’

Bletchley stood up. He groaned again, his eyes closed, his face turned up. ‘I’m going home,’ he said, adding something which Mr Reagan couldn’t hear, glancing round however in case he had been mistaken and with several groans and grimaces limping his way back to his fence, his arms flung out either side to retain his balance.

‘I’ll give you a leathering myself’, Mr Reagan said to Reagan, ‘if I catch you again. If he hits you with a stick hit him back.’

‘Yes, Dad,’ Reagan said.

Bletchley was attempting to lift his legs over the fence farther down the field retaining at the same time all the effects of his injury, his groans and sighs, his tortured expression, limping up his garden to his door. ‘Mam! Mam!’ he shouted as he neared it, ‘Mam!’ almost screaming and, as the door opened, collapsing on the step.

And yet, after that, it was unusual to see Bletchley and Reagan apart. They went to school together each morning, walking at the same slow pace, each wearing an identical satchel in which they carried an apple, a bottle of ink, which often got broken, and a pen. Occasionally their respective mothers stood talking in the street, or passed across the fronts of the houses to one another’s doors. Finally, a little later, the two women began to go to church together, attending the Sunday morning service, occasionally accompanied by Mr Bletchley dressed in a brown suit, and a little later by Bletchley himself and Reagan. Mr Reagan could occasionally be heard shouting to them from the bedroom as they passed the door.

‘They’ve gone to church, Harry,’ he would say, coming across the backs to where his father sat at the back door reading the paper. ‘She has that lad kneeling down every night by the bed.’

‘Kneeling?’ his father said.

‘Praying.’

‘Ah, well,’ his father said. ‘Praying never did any harm.’

‘Nor any good,’ Mr Reagan said. ‘She’s going to make him as silly as she is.’

‘Ah, well,’ his father said again, still gazing at the paper and, in this instance at least, refusing to be disturbed. ‘You can never tell.’

‘That’s what I mean,’ Mr Reagan said. ‘The same happens whether you do or you don’t.’

On Sundays Mr Reagan wore his suit without the jacket, the waistcoat unbuttoned save for the bottom, a stiff collar and around it the tie of his old school. A thin gold chain ran from the top button of his waistcoat to the top pocket on the left hand side. ‘Though it’s fastened to nought but a lump of stone,’ his father said. ‘I know that for a fact.’

Since his disappointment over getting a job at the local pit his regard for Mr Reagan had slightly faded.

‘Oh, Reagan’s all right,’ he’d say. ‘But if he’s got all these complaints why doesn’t he do something about it?’

‘He’s frightened of his wife,’ his mother said. ‘In fact, he’s frightened of women in general.’

‘Of women?’ His father had laughed, gazing at his mother in amazement. ‘If he was frightened of women,’ he said, still laughing, ‘he’d be on his knees afore any man. And he’s never been that. Not as long as I’ve known him.’

His mother nodded but answered nothing back.

In fact, having heard this excuse, his father’s regard for Reagan was momentarily restored: he even went across the backs to talk to him on a Sunday morning after Mrs Reagan and Michael had gone off to church, sitting in the porch and laughing at the various things they read in the paper, occasionally joined by Mr Batty or Mr Stringer and a little later setting off for the Institute in a noisy group.

It was from Mr Reagan that the idea sprang that Colin should sit for the examinations. The opportunity to go to the grammar school in the city came the following year, and if he failed the examination a second opportunity occurred the year after. If he failed again he would go to the secondary-modern school at the other end of the village, from which the pit recruited most of its miners.

‘It’s as Reagan says,’ his father told them. ‘Do you want him to be like me or like Reagan, getting paid for sitting on his backside all day? I know what I’d do.’

‘Mr Reagan works,’ his mother said. ‘Sitting down is a different kind of work, that’s all.’

‘Ah, well,’ his father said. ‘You’re the one that knows about education.’ His mother, unlike his father, had stayed at school until she was fifteen. In a cupboard upstairs was a certificate carefully filled in with copper-plate script testifying to her efficiency at English, nature study and domestic science.

It was his father, however, who set him his homework, coming round the table whenever his mother had suggested some subject he might do, saying, ‘He’ll never learn nought from that,’ taking the pencil and setting his own small, square hand, bruised, its nails blackened with coal, firmly in the middle of the paper and across the top, with much snorting and panting, printing in capital letters the subject of a composition: ‘A FOOTBALL MATCH’, ‘SUNDAY SCHOOL’, ‘A RIDE ON A BUS’. Sometimes he would stand by the chair, waiting for him to start, stooping forward slightly to follow the words as he began, sometimes stepping back, whistling through his teeth until, finally, he called out, ‘If you take all that time to begin, by God, the exam’ll be over before you start.’

‘He has to think it out,’ his mother would tell him. ‘In any case, standing over him won’t be any help.’

‘And what if I don’t stand over him? He’ll never get done at all.’ Yet he would step back then, perhaps pick Steven up, who was walking now and swing him over his head, saying. ‘When you get started we’ll see the sparks fly. You wait, we’ll show them. By God, I’m sure of that.’

Steven had blue eyes, like his father, but his face was like his mother’s, round and smooth, with the same turned-up nose. He had much the same expression as his mother, as if inside there were a shy, almost silent person peering out. He’d begun to speak and his mother, whenever she handed him an object, would repeat its name several times, nodding her head at each one. Occasionally when Steven was out of the house and playing in the yard with the younger children from down the terrace he would talk quite freely, running to and fro on his short, slightly bowed legs, shouting, ‘It’s mine. It’s mine,’ or, to some much older boy, ‘Stop it. Stop it.’

‘Can you say Colin?’ his mother would ask him.

‘Colin,’ he would say, looking up with a frown.

His father usually had to get ready for work as Colin was finishing the essays, looking over his shoulder while he pulled on his trousers or his shirt to see how much of the page he had covered with his slow, careful scrawl, or if he had turned over to the other side. ‘Two sides,’ he’d say. ‘They won’t give any marks for half a dozen lines.’

‘Leave him alone,’ his mother would tell him.

‘Don’t worry,’ his father said. ‘You won’t educate anybody by leaving them alone.’

He’d brought a red pencil home from the pit office to mark the essays and as he waited he would sharpen it impatiently over the fire, turning round then and saying, ‘Are you ready? I’ve to be off to work in half an hour,’ looking over Colin’s shoulder then at the clock to say, ‘I should leave it there, then. End of the sentence will do,’ sitting down in the chair as soon as Colin himself had stood up and adding, ‘Don’t go away. I want you to take notice of these mistakes.’ He screwed up his eyes slightly to read, his mouth pulled down at one side as he puzzled over the spelling, occasionally looking up and saying, ‘How do you spell “fair”, Ellen?’ and when his mother had told him, scarcely looking up from her own tasks, her ironing, or her washing-up, he would say, ‘Isn’t there an “e” in it somewhere?’ adding impatiently when she explained, ‘All right, then. All right. I only asked. I don’t want a lecture.’

‘Do you want to get it right or not?’ she’d ask him.

‘All right, then,’ he would say, pressing the point of his red pencil more firmly into the paper, going carefully over each of the words he had written himself and at the end of each sentence, if he approved of it, giving it a little tick. ‘That’s right. And that’s right,’ he would say to himself.

He took a great pleasure in marking the paper with the red crayon and when he had finished he would write in the space at the bottom some comment he thought appropriate: ‘Excellent’, ‘Could do better’, ‘Attention not on your work’, or, ‘Will have to work harder for examinations’. Beside it he would add some mark out of ten. On principle he never gave him less than three and seldom more than seven. Finally, when all this had been completed, he would draw in a large tick, beginning it at the bottom left-hand corner and stretching it across almost as far as the top right, and beside it printing, with something of a flourish, his full initials, ‘H.R.S.’, Harry Richard Saville.

Later, when he had grown tired of reading Colin’s stories and compositions, he brought home several mathematics books borrowed from a man at work. Inside the front cover of each one was printed in pencil, ‘Sam Turner HIS book’, and beside it, in one or two instances, the figure of a woman which his father had tried unsuccessfully to rub out.

The books dealt with subjects he had scarcely touched on at school, fractions and decimals, figures split up on the page into little parts, and since his father didn’t understand them either he would read the book first himself, sitting in the easy chair by the fire, a piece of paper on his knee, copying out figures over which he coughed and dropped the ash of his cigarette, rubbing them out and groaning, and quite frequently stamping his foot, slamming it against the floor and rubbing his head in exasperation.

‘Here, let me have a look,’ his mother would tell him.

‘Damn it all, woman,’ he would say, covering the book up or snatching it away. ‘Am I supposed to be doing it or aren’t I?’

‘Well, you’re supposed to be,’ she’d say.

‘Well, then let me get on with it and stop shoving in.’

She would go back to her work and he would continue to groan and stamp his feet, finally getting up and coming round the table to set out the figures on the squared colliery paper on which, much earlier, he had drawn out his inventions, scratching his head over each one as if, even as he wrote them, he wondered if they might have any resolution.

He would then copy down the same problem himself and take it back across the table, working it out as quickly as he could, whispering under his breath, rubbing out, groaning, looking up to ask Colin if he had finished and going back to his own with relief when he told him he hadn’t. When he came round to mark the sums he always stood beside him, never asking to sit down, as if at any moment he expected himself to be corrected, stooping over his shoulder or occasionally going back to his own version on the other side of the table to stare down at the figures before coming back yet again to mark down a tick or a cross.

As the problems increased in complexity and his father’s patience slowly ran out, and as Colin’s own tiredness after a day at school grew more apparent, his mother would begin to complain. Often when he had gone to bed, the problems, still unsolved, racing round his head, he would hear their voices raised in the kitchen, his father saying, ‘Nay, I won’t bother, then. We’ll send him down the pit like all the rest. After all, why should he be different?’

And when he came down in the morning his mother would be saying as soon as his father came in from work, ‘There’s no reason at all why he should go down the pit.’

‘And where else will he go in this place, then?’

‘I don’t know,’ she would say as he clattered about the kitchen, taking off his boots, picking up his red pencil and beginning again with the problems where he had left off the night before, even occasionally bringing out the solution from his waistcoat pocket, written down for him by someone at work. ‘It’s no good forcing him’, she would add, ‘into something he can’t do.’

‘He can do them,’ he would say. ‘The reason he doesn’t do them is because you’re for ever hanging over him.’

‘He can’t do them’, she said, ‘because he’s tired,’ picking up Steven, who invariably cried when they quarrelled, pulling at his mother’s skirt and asking to be lifted.

‘It’s better that he’s tired now than he should have my job and be tired like I am, later.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘you should give him time and not press him.’

‘Press him,’ he would say, stamping his stockinged feet and, getting no effect from that, banging his fist on the table so that all the cups and saucers rattled. ‘I’m damned’, he would add, ‘if I’m going to be beat by a decimal point and a couple of fractions.’

In the mornings too when Colin came down his father would look up from his breakfast, the pit dirt still black on his lashes, and say, ‘What’s two point five multiplied by seven? Quick now, in your head,’ gazing at him with his pale-blue eyes, black-rimmed, then glancing quickly down and saying, ‘That’s right,’ when he had answered and adding, ‘How do you spell “geography”? Quick, now. Isn’t it with a “j”?’ shaking his head in frustration if his mother corrected him and saying, ‘I was only testing him out,’ beating the table in rage.

In the end his father was quickly distracted. On the road leading out of the village to the south, past the Institute and the Dell, a field had been divided up into allotments. Each plot of land was twenty or thirty yards square and in the evenings and on Sunday mornings the men would go down there, carrying their spades and forks, to turn over the hard, tufted turf of what had once been a cow pasture. His father had been given a plot close to the road so that as the men came into the field or left he could always call out to them and frequently, having carried the spade down for him, Colin would be left digging on his own while his father sat in the hedge bottom smoking and talking to Mr Stringer or Mr Batty or Mr Shaw. ‘Nay, dig a straight line,’ he would call out and add to the men, ‘The war’ll be ovver afore we’ve grown ought here.’

He bought plants on the way home from work and set them out in neat rows; cabbages with pale-green leaves on yellow stalks, cauliflowers and sprouts. While Colin dug back the grass on one side, turning it over and breaking it up in the earth, his father would rake out the rows, sifting the soil and drawing the stones and larger pieces away. Crouching down at the end of each row he would take out the gaily coloured packets of seed from his waistcoat pocket, tearing off a corner and tapping a few of the seeds into his hand. With his fist clenched he would waft them out on to the soil like a man shaking dice, crouching down or stooping, and covering the seeds up with the edge of his boot as soon as they were scattered. When he had reached the end of the row he would look for a stick, pierce the empty packet, and set it in the ground. In this way he planted carrots and beetroot, while peas and beans he carried in large packets in his coat, sticking his finger in the soil if it was soft and setting one bean or one pea at the bottom of each hole. Finally, when all the seeds were planted, he cut sticks out from the hedge at the end of the allotment and set them over the rows like a net, occasionally breaking off to cross over to where Colin was digging and say, ‘Here, let’s have a go: we’ll be here till midnight,’ digging in the spade and turning over the heavy sods. ‘You’d have thought they’d have ploughed it over for us, for a start. It’s like trying to dig a mountain.’

With the proximity of the Institute many of the men spent their time there, bringing their tools down in the early morning only, once the Institute was open, to disappear up the road, coming back at lunch-time to retrieve their spades or forks or, in the case of Batty’s father, lying down on the grass mounds between the plots to sleep, his mouth wide open, snoring, his arms stretched out at his sides.

‘I don’t mind drinking,’ his father would say. ‘But I don’t go for a man who doesn’t know when he’s had a drop.’ Yet whenever he spoke to Mr Batty he would stand by him, looking up almost shyly at his red face, saying, ‘That’s right, Trevor, lad,’ laughing with his hands held to his side.

His father took a great deal of trouble with the allotment. He paid the same sort of attention to it that he did to his sewing, or to the cooking when his mother was ill. Whenever the milkman’s cart had passed the door and left some manure in the street, he would say, ‘Up you get and let’s have it in,’ and in the evening Colin would carry it in a bucket to the allotment and spread it over the rows, his father wandering off to one of the other plots to talk to Mr Batty or Mr Shaw, and adding, ‘You might pull out a few of those weeds while you’re at it. I don’t know. They come up as soon as you look.’

Though he hadn’t troubled to take a plot himself Mr Reagan often came down on a Sunday or, extending his stroll beyond the Institute, on an evening, carrying the cane which he always affected whenever he intended going beyond the end of the street or the colliery yard and, standing by the hedge in his bowler, leaning on his stick, he would say, ‘No, no, I won’t come in,’ indicating his shoes which were always shiny, and adding, ‘I wouldn’t like to put the old lady to any great trouble cleaning these.’

If he had arrived unobserved he would call over the hedge to his father, laying the leaves aside with his cane, saying, ‘Why, Harry, that’s a fine job you’re making there,’ or, later in the year, when the beetroot had come up in dark clumps above the soil, and the carrots were shining bright orange beneath the ferny leaves, he would call, ‘Why, Harry, that’s a very fine showing you have there,’ adding, if his father took one out of the soil to show him, ‘Why, Harry, I wouldn’t mind having a few of those on the table tomorrow lunch-time,’ shaking his head in surprise whenever his father pulled a few out. ‘Why, Harry, that’s very decent of you. That’s very decent of you, indeed,’ leaning over the hedge to take them or coming to the gap, holding them well away from his suit, by the tip of their leaves, as he walked away.

‘Aye, well, we can’t eat them all ourselves, can we?’ his father would say and invariably would also pull up a few vegetables for Mrs Bletchley next door.

A little while earlier Mr Bletchley had been called up. Unlike the men who worked in the mine his job had no priority and in fact, shortly after he left, from the same station, carrying a little suitcase and with Bletchley on one side and Mrs Bletchley on the other, both crying, a woman in faded blue overalls took over his job of carrying the long pole between the trucks and, after a brief visit home, in uniform, looking strangely tanned and contented, Mr Bletchley wasn’t seen again. The only contact they had with him was through Bletchley himself, who, on the way to school with Reagan, would describe the number of men his father had killed the previous week, the number he had captured, and the extent of the terrain which Mr Bletchley personally had overrun. ‘How many has he killed?’ Batty would ask him and when he’d been told would gaze at Bletchley with a slightly dazed expression, saying, ‘What’s he do it with?’

‘His bare hands,’ Stringer would say. ‘It’d take half an army to kill as many as that.’

‘Not with a machine gun,’ Batty would tell him, rushing strangely to Bletchley’s defence whenever his figures and exploits were questioned.

Some Sundays they went walking, usually for about an hour before tea. They spent some time getting ready. His father would clean his own shoes and his mother’s, rubbing at them with a brush and then with a duster as if he wished to rub them away, Colin cleaning his own shoes and Steven’s. Then they got washed and while his mother dressed Steven in a pair of grey shorts and a jacket Colin would put on his suit, his father coming down in his own, his face red and glistening, stooping over him while he inspected his ears and neck and then his hands. There would be several minutes waiting then while his mother went upstairs to get dressed, his father standing in the kitchen in front of the mirror, spreading cream in his hands from a small white bottle then rubbing it on his hair, combing it down with a parting at one side, the fringe neatly turned back on top, calling out over his shoulder, ‘Now, look. Stand still. Keep clean. Don’t move.’

When finally his mother came down in her best coat, dark brown and hanging almost to her ankles, she would bolt and lock the back door on the inside and put the key in his father’s pocket saying, ‘Have you got your handkerchief? Have you got any money?’ never troubling to look at herself in the mirror at which, although he had repeatedly combed his hair, his father still cast frequent glances. They would then all go through the front door.

It was the only time the front door was used to come in and go out of and his father, conscious of the windows across the street, would lock it carefully behind him, test it, then put the key in his pocket with the other one. ‘I never know why we lock it,’ he would tell her. ‘What have we to pinch?’

‘It’s surprising what people find once they get inside,’ his mother said and, looking up at the windows to make sure that they too were secure, they would set off down the street.

Colin always walked in front, holding Steven’s hand, his mother following behind with her arm linked in his father’s. Occasionally they would call out, ‘Pick your feet up. Don’t drag them. Take your hands out of your pockets. Your hair needs cutting. No wonder those shoes are worn out,’ or, if they were trying to walk with some care, ‘Come on, now. Walk a bit faster. We’re going to be treading on your heels.’

Invariably they walked through the village to the Park, his father, whenever they passed someone they recognized, whether he knew them or not, calling out, ‘Afternoon, Jack. Afternoon, Mick,’ the men often glancing across uncertain, nodding their heads. ‘They had that chap up last week for carrying matches,’ he would tell his mother and she would say, ‘That one? I don’t think it can be him. He drives a lorry.’

‘No, no,’ he would say. ‘He’s down the pit. I know him well,’ glancing back to make sure but seldom arguing further.

In the Park they would walk slowly round the paths that took them by the swings and the ornamental pool. Other families, often pushing prams, would be walking up and down or, if the day were dry, sitting on the grass, the men lying back asleep, the women sitting upright, knitting, talking across to one another, the children playing on the swings. ‘No going on swings on Sunday,’ his father said whenever Steven showed signs of wandering in that direction ‘keep to the path and keep your shoes clean.’

Usually on the way back Steven would ask to be carried, and though he often cried, tugging at his father’s hand and saying, ‘Dad, I want to,’ his father would say, ‘You’re walking. How can you get any exercise if you’re being carried about? And in any case, if I was going to carry you I wouldn’t have put on my suit,’ sometimes taking his hand however so that Steven could swing between him and his mother, Colin himself walking on ahead or, if he were feeling tired, following behind, his father occasionally turning and calling, ‘Come on. Don’t lag,’ and adding to his mother, ‘It’s like trying to drag a horse.’

Finally, when they reached the house, his father would unlock the door, his mother would go inside before him and, picking up the kettle, would set it on the fire before she removed her coat, his father mending the dying ashes with pieces of coal before he too removed his coat, and turning to the table – which was set already with cups and saucers – he would help to get the tea.

9

The air-raids began again the following winter and his grandfather came to live with them. He was a small, slight man with a straight back and thick white hair which, like his father’s, was still cut in a boyish fringe. His eyes too were light blue and the skin around them creased up in a half-smile. ‘This is a big lad you’ve got here, Harry,’ he would say, grasping Colin’s arm, standing him between his knees, feeling his biceps, or, when he had lifted Steven up, he would sing in a light voice, ‘Follow my leader, follow me do: I’ve got a penny here for you.’

‘Which pocket is it in?’ Steven would say, feeling round him.

‘Nay, Steve,’ he would say. ‘You’re as quick as your dad.’

He had been living with his father’s brother for some time but now the brother had been called up and he had come to live with them. He had only two teeth, one at the top and one at the bottom, and shortly after he arrived Colin’s mother took him to the dentist.

‘Last time I went they near tore my mouth to pieces,’ he said. When he came back he had no teeth at all. ‘They’ll be ready in a fortnight,’ he told Colin’s father. ‘What have I to do till then?’

‘You’ll be all right, Dad,’ his father said. ‘We’ll fill you up with beer.’

‘Beer,’ he said. ‘Beer did no good to any man. I’ve lived long enough to tell you that.’

Whenever the air-raid sirens sounded he sat under the table, smoking his pipe. The shelter had been dug up in the back garden and replaced by a metal one, of corrugated iron: each of the houses had one but many of them were full of water and refuse and none of them were used. ‘They’ll not frighten me,’ he said whenever his father tried to coax him out into the cupboard beneath the stairs. ‘I’m not frightened of any bombs.’

He would sit under the table with his legs stretched out, smoking his pipe, his head stooped forward. Or sometimes, if Colin’s father and his mother tried to coax him out together, he would crouch on all fours or lie on his side with his hands wrapped round one of the legs. ‘You get in,’ he would tell them. ‘I’ll be safe enough here. It’s not me they’re after.’ And later, when he had got his new teeth, he would crouch under the table with his pipe clenched between them as if they had been fixed, perpetually, in a grin.

The teeth were large and very white and he often sat in the doorway so that he could see Mr Shaw or Mrs Shaw or Mrs Bletchley, smiling whenever they appeared so that they would say, ‘Why, you look twenty years younger, Mr Saville.’

‘I don’t know about younger,’ he would say, sitting there again the next day, and the next.

In the evenings he would take the teeth out and brush them under the tap, then drop them into a jar full of water, taking them up to his room and standing them on a chair facing him by the bed. He slept in the same room that the soldier had slept in and on the same bed, and Steven, who had had the room for a little while, moved in with Colin.

His grandfather always wore his suit, which was dark blue and slightly too large for him, the sleeves hanging over his hands, the trousers drooping over his ankles. Each evening he hung it up on a coat-hanger, the trousers underneath and the coat on top, sometimes calling to his mother as he got into bed, ‘Ellen. Ellen. Come and hang up my suit,’ standing about impatiently until she had come and hung it up on a hook on the wall.

‘It wouldn’t do it any harm to fold it over a chair,’ Colin could hear her say through the wall.

‘Nay, I’ve had that over twenty year, Ellen.’

‘You bought it two years ago,’ she would tell him.

‘No, no,’ he would say. ‘It was longer than that.’

He had a special regard, perhaps because of the suit, for Mr Reagan, and Mr Reagan had a similar regard for him. ‘A good suit is a good suit,’ Mr Reagan would say. ‘And there’s nothing in this world quite with which to compare it.’ And when his grandfather had asked Mr Reagan to inspect his teeth, smiling for him or even, on some occasions, taking them out, Mr Reagan would say, ‘I always say a good set of teeth make up for any deficiency of face. And that, mind you,’ he would add, ‘I’m saying to someone whose face, if you’ll pardon the expression, doesn’t come into that category at all.’ On other occasions, when they had been out for a walk together, to the Institute or down to the allotment to see Colin and his father digging, he would say, ‘There’s many a restraint I’ve to put on the women, Harry, now that your father’s walking through the place.’ And when his father laughed he would add, ‘Oh, now. He’ll be coming back from his walk one of these days a married man.’

His grandmother had died long before Colin was born and his grandfather had been a widower for many years. ‘He always says twenty years about everything,’ his mother told him, ‘because that’s when his wife died.’

‘Aye,’ his grandfather would say. ‘She was a fine woman. They don’t make them like that any more.’

He saw too, occasionally, at this time his mother’s father and mother. They lived in the next village, four miles away, and on some Saturdays he would go with his mother and Steven on a bus to visit them. They lived in a row of little houses built specially for old people. Each house consisted of a single room from which an alcove opened out on one side, and in which, behind a curtain, stood a metal double bed, and on the other a small alcove which was used as a pantry. A door led directly into the house from a footpath at the front, and at the back a porch led to a lavatory and a tiny walled-in opening in which they kept coal. Sometimes at week-ends his father filled a sack of coal and having roped it to his bike, laying it across the pedals, he and Colin between them would push it the four miles to the next village and tip the coal into the little opening. ‘I get it at reduced rates,’ his father would say. ‘It’s cheaper than them buying it,’ or when they got back, riding on the bike, Colin sitting sideways on the cross-bar between his father’s arms, his father would say, ‘Has your mother told you what her father was when I met her?’

‘He was a farmer,’ his mother would say.

‘A small-holder, a small-holder,’ his father would tell him, almost shouting. ‘He kept pigs. He was a pig-breeder. You had to be in love, I can tell you, to step inside that house.’

His father would sit laughing in his chair while his mother complained, then he would add, ‘Ah, lass, you know I love you. I married you all the same.’

‘We kept other things as well,’ his mother would tell him, ignoring his father, her face flushing, her eyes large.

‘Aye, but pigs is all you smelled!’ His father would lie back in his chair laughing and slapping his knee with his hand or, if he were smoking, sit choking on his cigarette. ‘Pat us me back, pat us me back,’ he would say. ‘I forgive you.’

His mother’s father and mother were perhaps even older than his grandfather. They were called Swanson; the name was embroidered on a piece of cloth which was framed and hanging over the high mantelpiece of their room: ‘To Edith and Thomas Swanson on their Golden Wedding’, beneath which was the date and, in smaller lettering, ‘From the Old People’s Guild’, the writing itself surrounded by a border of pink flowers and small blue-birds swooping in between.

Grandfather Swanson would either be sitting by the fire, which was set in a high range on the wall at the level of his knees, or lying on a couch at the back of the room. He very seldom moved when they were there, only his head rising occasionally when they came in, after knocking, and his grandmother had said, ‘Ellen’s come to see us, Tom,’ his dark eyes turning slowly in their direction before his head sank back on the couch or the chair. His grandmother had a small, very round face as if, all the time, she were puffing out her cheeks. They were always bright red, particularly in winter, and her eyes which were greyish were very narrow so that when she smiled they almost disappeared. She often got Colin’s name mixed up with Steven’s and with the name of some other grandson he had never met, so that she would often say, ‘Would you like a sweet, Barry, or an apple?’ then look up when he didn’t answer. ‘Now,’ she would say, the grey eyes shining, ‘I don’t know which one it is.’

Sometimes his mother came away from his grandmother’s crying. Some time after they had arrived his grandmother would say, ‘You’d think you’d get more help from your own daughters as you grow older,’ and his mother would say, ‘I do help you, Mother. Harry brings you coal, and I come over and do your washing.’ Sometimes, too, his mother would do the cleaning. While his grandfather and his grandmother sat by the fire she would put on an apron she’d brought with her, fill a bucket at the sink in the corner, then scrub the floor. Outside she would scrub the front step and the paving stone below it and scone it with a yellow stone so that when it had dried it glowed a dull yellow. She would do the same with the back door and then make the big double bed with its brass rails and brass head-piece, and clean the small, heavily curtained windows, borrowing a pair of steps from a woman next door. The washing she did in a shed built at the back of the houses. Colin never went there, for his mother, ashamed to be seen working in these conditions, with pumped water and where the washing was beaten against a stone, refused to let him inside. He would play on a piece of bare ground between the shed and the houses while he waited, or sit with his grandmother by the fire. When his mother came in from hanging the clothes up she would say. ‘You can ask Mrs Turner to get them in, Mother, when they’re dry.’

‘Oh, we’ll be all right,’ his grandmother would say.

‘I’ve to get back for Harry’s supper. He’ll be off to work,’ his mother would add.

‘Don’t worry,’ his grandmother said. ‘We’ll manage somehow.’

And when they got back home and his father could see that she had been crying he said, ‘Take no notice. They’re like that. Just do as you see fit.’

‘I never get any thanks. Ever,’ she said.

‘Then don’t go expecting any,’ he told her.

‘If I did nothing at all she’d have some right to complain.’

‘Aye. She’d be in a right mess all right.’ His father would look away, uncomfortable when she cried.

Sometimes on the bus back the conductor said, ‘Are you all right, love?’ leaning over her, his hand on the back of the seat.

She would wipe her eyes then blow her nose and try to see the money in her purse.

‘People are like that when they grow old,’ she said, and other times she would say, ‘Never expect anything of people then you’ll never get hurt.’

However, at Christmas or on their birthdays she would take over a present or even a special cake that she had baked herself. ‘There’s a time for forgiving,’ she would say whenever his father complained and he would turn away saying, ‘Let them find out what it’s like on their own. They’ll soon come begging.’ On their birthdays, or sometimes on the Saturdays when she went over, she would cook them a meal, grandfather Swanson lying on the couch gazing at the ceiling, his white hair falling in thin wisps over his cheeks, his grandmother sitting in a rocking chair by the fire saying, ‘Two potatoes will be enough,’ or, ‘If you use all that cabbage, Ellen, we’ll be without for the rest of the week.’

‘I’ll buy you some more, Mother,’ his mother would say, ‘before I go.’

‘If you have the money you can always manage.’

Sometimes she stood over the pans with her eyes full of tears, wiping them away on the back of her hand, his grandmother taking no notice.

‘I’ve no patience with you, I haven’t,’ his father said when she got back, enraged himself and banging the table with his hand. Yet he would add, ‘No, no, sit down. I’ll make you a pot of tea before I go to work.’

Grandfather Saville had fought in the First World War. He would sit looking at the newspaper through a pair of heavy black-rimmed spectacles perched on the end of his nose, his head held back, studying the pictures but never the text. ‘Look at this, Colin,’ he would tell him, holding the paper up so that he could see the picture of a burnt-out building or a tank with its turret broken open or slumped down in a hole without its tracks. ‘They don’t fight wars now like they used to. In those days it was man to man. Now they think nothing of bombing women and children, or shelling people miles away they never see.’

In the evenings when Colin was ready for bed and had changed into his pyjamas, and his mother had looked in his ears and at his neck, his grandfather would say, ‘Sit down, lad, for five minutes,’ and when his mother complained, saying, ‘He hasn’t even said his prayers yet, he’s going to be late into bed,’ he would answer, ‘What I have to tell him, Ellen, won’t take more than a nod of your head.’

Or when he was already in bed and had put out the light his grandfather would come in and say, ‘Are you awake, lad? They’ve sent me up to bed as well. Sitting down there listening to the wireless. They’ll listen to ought, people nowadays. In one ear, out the next.’

His grandfather had been to Russia. He would sometimes call to Mr Reagan in the street or in the backs saying, ‘Come in, come in. The missis will make us a cup of tea,’ and when Mr Reagan had come in and, carefully easing up his trousers, taken a seat at the table, he would say, ‘Did I tell you the time I was in Russia?’ and when Mr Reagan had answered, ‘Yes, I believe you did,’ he would say. ‘We went in to save the Czar. Would you believe it? A socialist all my life and when they call me up they send me to shoot the workers.’

‘War’s an unpleasant thing,’ Mr Reagan said, ‘even at the best of times.’ He was himself only a year ahead of the latest drafting and would sit at the table when his grandfather had finished, saying, ‘A colliery official like myself is as important to the pit as any miner, perhaps more so. Yet do I get deferment? I do not. Why, only the other day one of the owners came up to me and said, “We shall have to get someone out of retirement to take your place, Reagan, or one of the women out of the offices.” Why, it’s taken years of training to get where I am.’

‘Have you ever seen snow?’ his grandfather would ask him.

‘Snow?’ Mr Reagan said.

‘Marching for days with it up to here.’

‘Oh, a biscuit would go very well with it,’ Mr Reagan said whenever his mother put down his cup of tea. ‘That’s very kind of you indeed. Ah, ginger. A favourite.’

‘Moscow,’ his grandfather said. ‘Landed at Sebastopol in the Crimea and marched four hundred miles and all the way back again. Wolves? We fought everything. We even fought women.’

‘Women?’ Mr Reagan said, sipping his tea.

‘They come in at night when you’re asleep, with sticks and shovels, and try and take your food,’ his grandfather said. ‘Why, one woman could take ten men apart in a matter of seconds.’

‘I can well believe it,’ Mr Reagan said. ‘If they left wars to women they’d be over in half the time. Perhaps even sooner.’

‘When we left we were shelled.’

Mr Reagan nodded and bit his biscuit.

‘Came down on you from every side. The Heights of Sebastopol,’ his grandfather said. ‘We threw everything off the ship that we could and filled the hold full of women and children. Aristocrats. Hundreds of them. When we reached Istanbul they wouldn’t let them out until we’d de-loused them.’

‘Istanbul? Now, isn’t that in Turkey?’ Mr Reagan said.

‘Filled the holds with disinfectant and they had to swim around for hours. When I came ashore a woman offered me a gold necklace to marry her so that she could come back to England.’

‘That sounds a very tempting offer,’ Mr Reagan said, re-crossing his legs.

‘They were all at it. You could have anything you wanted,’ his grandfather said. ‘There was nowt they wouldn’t do, given half the chance.’

‘Here, Colin,’ his mother would say. ‘Will you take the bucket and fill it up with coal?’

‘It won’t do the lad any harm, missis,’ his grandfather said, ‘to hear where his forebears came from.’

‘The Irish Revolution’, Mr Reagan said, ‘was very much the same.’

‘You fought there, then, Mr Reagan?’ his grandfather said.

‘No, no. But I had an uncle who was killed in Belfast.’

‘The Black and Tans,’ his grandfather said.

‘Ah, yes,’ Mr Reagan said, and shook his head.

If his father came in and found them talking he would say to Mr Reagan, ‘Has my dad told you about the harem in Constantinople?’ and when Mr Reagan said, ‘No, no, I don’t believe he has, Harry, that’s the one thing he hasn’t mentioned,’ and winked at his father, he would add, ‘Show us your leg, Dad,’ and his grandfather would pull up his trouser to reveal a long white scar running the length of his calf. ‘There,’ his father said. ‘The guards caught him one as he was nipping over the wall.’

‘On the way out,’ his grandfather said, smiling with his new teeth.

‘On his way out, Mr Reagan,’ his father said.

‘It’s a miracle I’ve still got a leg at all,’ his grandfather said, laughing, his father getting up then as he choked to tap his back.

At night he said two prayers that his mother had taught him since starting Sunday School, kneeling by the bed, his head pressed against his hands. ‘God bless Mother, Father and little Steve, and make Colin a good boy. Amen’, and, ‘Lord keep us safe this night, secure from all our fears, may angels guard us while we sleep, till morning light appears.’ Then he said, ‘Please God, let me pass the examination. Amen’, and pressing his head against the blankets repeated it three times before climbing into bed.

His uncle called at the house. He was small like his father, with the same light-coloured hair and blue eyes and even the same moustache, though he was younger, and would come into the house without knocking, saying, ‘Ellen, and how’s our favourite lass?’

His mother’s temples reddened and she would turn away to the fire, to the kettle, and put on a pot of tea as if his appearance caused her no surprise at all, saying, ‘Don’t you knock before you come in?’ and he would say, ‘Not when I’m visiting my favourite sister.’

‘Sister-in-law,’ she would tell him and he would answer, ‘Well, then, aren’t I going to have a kiss?’

He had been called up into the Air Force and usually came in his uniform, his cap tucked into the lapel on his shoulder, parking a blue-painted lorry with an R.A.F. insignia on its cabin on a piece of waste ground at the end of the road. When he had kissed his mother on the cheek and hugged her a moment he would stand with his back to the fire clapping his hands together and saying, ‘Well, then, who wants a round?’ shadow-boxing for a while then adding, if no one responded, ‘Aren’t we going to have a cup of tea?’ and then, ‘Here you are, Steven. Here you are, Colin. See what I have in my pocket.’

He usually brought a bar of chocolate or, failing that, would bring out a coin and press it into their hands saying, ‘Don’t tell your mother where you got it or she’ll want it back’, and adding in a louder voice still, ‘Now, then, make sure she doesn’t hear.’

When his father came in he was always serious, saying, ‘How are you, Jack?’ shaking his hand before sitting down at the table and perhaps adding, ‘Have they given you a cup of tea?’

‘It’s on the boil, Harry,’ he’d tell him, clapping his hands again and looking over at his mother. ‘I wish I was a miner and that’s for sure. Fighting on the Home Front. There’s nothing to beat it.’

‘Oh, I’ll swop you any time,’ his father told him. ‘Riding around in a lorry. You never risk ought but a bloody puncture.’

‘Don’t worry. The Jerries are over our station every night,’ his uncle said.

‘He doesn’t look as though he’s worried, does he, Dad?’ his father said and his grandfather shook his head and added, ‘Have you brought us ought, Jack? What’s in the back of your lorry?’

They walked down sometimes and looked inside and sometimes his uncle would say, ‘Come on, Colin. Jump up inside,’ and they would sit together in the large seat, smelling of oil and petrol, Steven sitting between Colin’s legs, while his mother would say, ‘Don’t take them far, Jack, I want them back for dinner.’

‘Just round the town,’ his uncle would shout over the roar of the engine, which he revved up for some time before they began, attracting the attention of the people in the other houses.

He drove, always, very fast. They started with a jerk, the tyres squealing, and ended with one. Because he was a small man his uncle’s head was scarcely visible from outside and he would sit on a cushion, occasionally half-standing to see ahead, pulling himself up on the wheel and saying, ‘Now, then, what happens here?’ whenever they came to a bend. If someone got in the way he would shout out, ‘Just look at that. They don’t know how to use a road let alone a vehicle.’

‘Mad Jack they used to call him,’ his father said when they got back. ‘And Mad Jack he still is.’

‘Mad as a hatter, me,’ his uncle said and if his father had come down from his afternoon sleep before going off on the night shift he would say, ‘Don’t you keep proper hours in this house? I keep coming here hoping to find you at work and my lovely sister-in-law on her own.’

‘It’s a good job I do work nights,’ his father would say, sitting down at the table and looking up, blinking his eyes, at his brother.

For several weeks before the examination Colin had returned to doing his nightly essays and his nightly sums while his father sat across the table correcting them, occasionally, if he had to go to work, leaving them on the sideboard to correct when he came home in the morning. ‘What’s the decimal for three-tenths?’ he said when he came down on a morning. ‘They won’t give you any longer than that. How do you spell hippopotamus?’

The day before the exams he and the other children who were taking them were given a new pen, a new pencil and a new ruler at school to bring home with them. In the evening Colin had gone to bed early, his mother coming up to tuck in the blankets and his father coming up before he got ready for work. ‘Think of something nice,’ he said, ‘like your holidays, and you’ll soon be asleep. An extra hour’s sleep before midnight is as good as half a dozen next morning.’ And after he had gone out his grandfather came in and said, ‘Are you asleep, lad? Spend this on ought you like,’ putting a coin in his hand. When the door had closed he put on the light and saw that it was half-a-crown.

He seemed to be awake all night. He heard his father go to work, wheeling his bike out into the yard, calling out to Mrs Shaw as she came out of her door to get some coal. Then, only a few minutes later it seemed, he heard his grandfather climbing into bed and singing as he often did now, ‘Rock of Ages, cleft for me,’ his voice trailing off into a vague murmuring and moaning. Then, later, he heard his mother raking the fire and bolting the back door, coming up the stairs to her room, saying something to Steven, who for that night was sleeping with her, then going back down to bring him a drink. All night he lay awake turning fifths into decimals, decimals of a pound into shillings and pence, spelling circumference, ostrich and those words that his father had made him learn by heart. He was still struggling to convert a fraction of a yard into feet and inches when he felt his mother holding his shoulder and saying, ‘It’s time to get up, Colin. I’ll warm some water for your wash.’ When he went down his clothes were lying over the arm of the chair by the fire, his trousers pressed, his socks just mended, his shoes freshly polished in the hearth. His mother had been up early to iron his shirt and it was stretched on a clothes horse in front of the fire. ‘I cleaned your shoes then you won’t get polish on your hands,’ she said. The bowl of water stood steaming in the sink.

A little later his father came back from work, wheeling in his bike, the shoulders of his overcoat and the top of his flat cap wet, the wheels of the bike leaving a wet track on the floor. ‘It’s just started,’ he said. ‘Cold enough to snow,’ shaking his coat as he took it off. ‘Have you got a bit of spare paper’, he added, ‘to put in your pocket? It’s just what you’ll need for working things out.’ He washed his hands at the sink, then tore a sheet from the colliery pad and folded it up ready for him to take. ‘Is his ruler and his pen out?’ he asked his mother, and took them down off the mantelpiece to examine the nib, saying, ‘This isn’t very strong. One good bit of writing and it’ll break in two. Haven’t we got one he can take with him, Ellen?’

‘They’ll have all that there,’ she said. ‘I should just leave him to get on.’

‘Aye, he’ll be all right,’ his father said, standing by the table, rubbing his hand along the back of the chair, gazing down at him, then at his mother, then staring helplessly about the room. ‘Remember what I’ve told you,’ he said. ‘Before you write ought down think. They’ll not go much by somebody who’s always crossing out.’

When Steven came down his father lifted him up and said, ‘Now, then. Are we going to have another scholar in the house?’ Steven struggling to get down to the table where his bowl of porridge was waiting. ‘If he does his sums as well as he eats we’ll be all right,’ his father added. ‘We’ll none of us have to worry.’

When his grandfather came down still in his pyjamas he said, ‘Where’s my tea? Nobody brought me up my tea this morning, missis,’ and when his mother said, ‘Oh, we’ve got more important things to think about,’ he looked down at the table and said, ‘Porridge, now that’s going to fill out his brains.’

‘Aren’t you going to eat it, Colin?’ his mother asked him.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t feel hungry.’

‘You want something. You’ll do nothing with an empty stomach,’ she said.

‘It’s nerves,’ his father said. ‘I get the same feeling when I’m going down at night.’

‘He can take an apple,’ his mother said, gazing down at him, her hands clasped together. ‘He’ll soon fill up when it’s over.’

When he was ready he picked up the ruler and the pen and pencil and put the piece of paper in his pocket with the apple his mother gave him in the other. He pulled on his black gabardine raincoat and his cap, and his mother said, ‘Nay, not out of the back. You can go out of the front today.’

She’d already gone to fetch her coat, saying, ‘I’ll come down to the bus stop with you,’ and he’d said, ‘No, I’d better go on my own.’

‘Well, if you’re sure,’ she said.

She held the door open, holding Steven in her arms and saying, ‘Are you going to kiss him for luck, then, Steve?’

Steven shook his head, kicking his legs against her and turning away, and his father said, ‘Well, good luck, lad. And remember what I’ve told you.’

‘Yes,’ Colin said and shook his father’s hand as he held it out, shyly, half-flushing.

It was still quite dark. The rain fell in a fine drizzle. Farther down the street Mrs Bletchley and Mrs Reagan were walking towards the bus stop with Bletchley and Michael Reagan, the bright orange pens and pencils sticking from their satchels.

‘Have you got everything, then?’ his mother said. ‘Your money for your dinner?’

‘Yes.’ He didn’t look up.

‘Remember last night,’ his grandfather said. ‘There’s more where that came from.’

When he reached the corner and looked back his mother was still standing in the door. When she waved he waved back, then turned the corner and walked quickly to the stop.

There was a crowd of children and mothers already there, clustered together in the half-darkness, and one or two men with pit dirt still on their faces. Everywhere there were the bright orange rulers and pens and pencils.

‘Have you got a rubber?’ Bletchley said.

‘No,’ he said.

‘You have to have a rubber.’ Bletchley took one out of his pocket. ‘That’s for rubbing out pencil and that’s for rubbing out ink,’ he said, indicating either end. ‘Got any blotting-paper?’

‘No.’ He shook his head.

Bletchley opened his satchel and took out a sheet folded in two. Reagan had a similar piece in his satchel and an identical rubber. Inside too were a bag of sweets, a bar of chocolate, an orange and an apple, and a bottle of ink.

‘Haven’t you got any ink?’ Bletchley said. ‘You won’t be able to write anything, will you?’

When the bus came, with its shaded lights glowing in the damp road, Bletchley was the first to get on. He kissed his mother, who then stood in the doorway until he had got up the steps. There were twelve children and when they were all on the mothers and the two or three miners stood at the windows, the women on tiptoe, waving. A teacher sat down at the front. The bus started.

The fine drizzle fell against the panes as the day lightened, and the lights with their blue-painted bulbs were switched off. The hedges on either side were drooped down with damp, the cattle herded together in the corners of the fields. The windows soon steamed up, and after a while, except by rubbing against them, little of the countryside could be seen. Bletchley sat near the front with his satchel on his knees, the inside of his legs still covered in the white cream that hadn’t yet been rubbed off. Reagan, who had sat farther back in the bus, had begun to cry, his thin face screwed up, his forehead a peculiar white, his cheeks crimson.

The teacher got up finally and came up the gangway to stoop over him, and when they stopped at the next village and another group of children climbed on, their coats wet with rain, the teacher got off and went to fetch Reagan a cup of water from a house. When they set off again he sat sobbing in his seat, his chest shuddering with strange, sudden spasms, the air rattling in his throat, his satchel still strapped around his body.

‘His dad says he has to pass or he’ll get a good hiding,’ Bletchley said coming up the bus to sit with Colin. ‘If they sec you crying they knock ten marks off. They watch you all the time. Did you know that?’ leaning across to say to Reagan, ‘They’ve probably failed you already, Mic.’

The school they arrived at was a brick building with tall, green-painted windows and a tarmac yard: it stood beside a row of arches carrying a railway across a shallow cutting, and at the other side of the yard ran a stream full of oil drums, pieces of bedding and mounds of rusted metal.

Several groups of children were already waiting in the lee of the building, out of the drizzle, each of them clutching the familiar orange pens and rulers. The doors of the school were still closed: numerous muddy footprints marked the lower panels.

Another bus stopped at the gate and several more children came into the yard, looking vaguely about them, at the school, at the arches across which occasionally an engine hauled a line of trucks, sending clouds of white steam and black smoke billowing into the yard.

‘Why did they pick this place?’ Bletchley said and Reagan shook his head.

‘Every school’, someone said, ‘takes its turn. Next year it might be yours, then you don’t get an advantage.’

‘I wouldn’t call this an advantage,’ Bletchley said. ‘Not even to anyone who lived here.’

The boy who had spoken had fair hair, cut short and brushed into a neat parting at one side. He wore, too, a clean white shirt and a woollen tie with red and blue stripes. He had a fountain-pen clipped in the top pocket of his blazer and beneath it was the badge of his school, a red rose on a white background with ‘En Dieu Es Tout’ written underneath on a scroll.

Bletchley, who had stared at the silver clip of the fountain-pen for some time, said, ‘You’ve been here before, then, have you?’ scarcely troubling to look at the boy’s face.

‘Not here,’ he said. ‘I’ve taken the exam before. This is my last chance.’ He laughed and put his hands in his pockets…

‘What’s it like?’ Bletchley said, Reagan too looking up, his chest still shaken intermittently by sobs.

‘It’s not the exams,’ he said. ‘It’s just there are so many taking it. It’s just a question of luck.’

‘Luck?’ Bletchley said, nodding his head as if, in this respect, he possessed an undeniable advantage. His face began to swell and his eyes expanded.

Behind them one of the green doors had opened and a woman appeared carrying a bell. She looked up at the sky, at the viaduct then began to ring the bell just as another teacher began to do the same at a second door. ‘Boys in this door, girls in the other,’ she said. ‘Go to the classroom with your initials on.’

The school was set out in a square with classrooms along each side. He entered the classroom with ‘Surnames S-Y’ inscribed on the door. Several boys were already there, one from his own school whom he scarcely knew, standing in the space between the blackboard and the desks. A small, grey-haired woman said, ‘You’ll find your names and your examination number pinned to your desk. Find it, sit down, fold your arms and don’t talk.’ A notice which said ‘No talking’ was chalked on the blackboard behind her.

His own name and number were pinned to a desk at the front by the door. A piece of pink blotting-paper was already laid there and the ink-well, set inside a metal disc, had recently been filled. He lifted the lid, looked inside the desk, then set out his ruler, the pen and the pencil on the top and folded his arms.

Across the room the boy with fair hair had sat down, unscrewed the top of his fountain-pen, examined the nib, screwed the top back on and placed it in the rack on the desk. Beyond him three large windows looked out on to the yard and, beyond that, the line of arches. Thin lines of moisture had begun to run down the panes.

The teacher called a register, ticking off each name, then came round the room collecting the letters which stated they could sit for the examination and which in his case had been signed by his father.

Returning to her desk she read out the rules of the examination from a printed paper. A boy came in carrying a pile of ruled paper; when a piece was placed on his desk he saw that it was folded like a book with a notice printed on the front which said, ‘Do not write your name. Fill in your examination number and leave the rest of this page blank.’

The room grew quiet. Later, the only sounds that came in were the movement of milk bottles in the corridor outside, and the noise of lorries passing in the road. Occasionally an engine and trucks passed across the viaduct.

Some boys wrote quickly, scarcely looking up, their heads bowed to the desk, almost touching the paper, others gazing up at the ceiling then at the figures around them, dipping their pens repeatedly in the ink-wells, tapping the nib dry, then beginning to write slowly only, a moment later, to look up again and stare at the window.

Across the room the boy with fair hair wrote with his chair pushed well back from his desk, his arm stretched out casually before him as if at any moment he might push the desk away, get up and walk out. He wrote with his left hand, his head slightly inclined to his right, glancing at the question paper without moving his head then writing out the answer with his fountain-pen, its cap fastened on the top, its bright clip glinting in the light from the window. He pursed his lips slightly as he wrote as if he were chewing the inside of his cheek.

The boy next to him was writing his name on his blotting-paper, stooped over the desk, his cheek laid against the desk top, dipping the nib in the ink-well then printing the letters in rows of little blots. Occasionally he half-raised his head to glance at the effect, then laid his cheek down on the desk top again and began to surround his name with an elaborate scroll.

After a while the teacher said, ‘There is now half an hour left. By this time you should have reached question eight or nine.’

Question nine comprised an entire sheet of the examination paper. He had to copy out the description of a shipwreck and put in the correct punctuation and the correct spelling. The very last question on the paper simply said, ‘How many words can you make from “Conversation”?’

Several of the boys had put down their pens and were sitting with their arms folded, gazing at the teacher.

‘If you have finished already,’ the teacher said, ‘don’t waste the time. Read through your paper again and see if you have made any mistakes. I’m sure some of you have.’

Finally she said, ‘In two minutes I shall ask you to put your pens down. Finish off the sentence you are writing and make sure that your ink is dry.’

When they had put their pens down she said, ‘I want no one to speak until I have collected the papers. You will remain in your places until I tell you to leave.’

When he went out in the playground the boy with fair hair came across and said, ‘How many did you do?’

‘Nearly all of them,’ he said.

‘I just about finished,’ the boy said. ‘I thought it was harder than last year. It doesn’t matter, I suppose.’

Across the playground Reagan was eating an orange and Bletchley an apple, Reagan with his satchel still fastened across his back.

‘What’s your name?’ the boy said.

‘Saville,’ he said.

‘Mine’s Stafford,’ he said. ‘Both S’s!’

When Bletchley came across he said, ‘How many words did you get for “conversation”?’ and when he said, ‘Nineteen,’ Bletchley said, ‘Is that all? I got twenty-seven. Did you get onion?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘I got thirty-four,’ Stafford said.

‘Thirty-four,’ Bletchley said, his face reddening round his cheeks and nose. ‘Did you get notes?’

‘Yes,’ Stafford said, his hands in his pockets. ‘And nation.’

‘Nation,’ Bletchley said, flushing more deeply. ‘I got that one too.’

When they went back a mathematics paper had been given out.

Whenever Colin looked up he saw Stafford sitting in exactly the same position as before, his arm stretched out casually to the desk as if it were something he touched with only the greatest reluctance, his head resting just as casually to one side, occasionally glancing up at some point immediately in front of him, above the blackboard, and frowning slightly before returning to his figures, which he wrote out very quickly. Whenever he crossed anything out he did so with a slick flick of his wrist, as though he were pushing something aside, his head stooped forward very briefly before returning to its position.

The time passed more quickly than before. Several of the questions involved the conversion of decimals to fractions, and fractions to decimals, of the kind that he had practised at home, and when he had finished he had time to go over the paper once again before the teacher said, ‘Pens down – Sit up. Arms folded. Leave your papers in front of you for me to collect.’

When the papers had been collected she added, ‘Those of you who are staying to dinner form a queue at the end of the corridor, those who are going home for lunch must leave by the main entrance.’

‘Are you any good at sums?’ Stafford said as they waited in the queue.

‘Not really,’ he said.

‘Decimals,’ Stafford said. ‘We’ve only just started them at school. Last year they weren’t as difficult as this.’

Bletchley was already sitting at one of the tables in the hall when they went in, writing something on a piece of paper for the benefit of the boy sitting beside him, then slowly shaking his head and pointing at the paper with his fork. Reagan, with his satchel round his shoulders, stood at the back of the queue searching in his pockets for money, then came to the woman at the door and shook his head. Finally his name was taken and he was allowed in.

‘Intelligence after dinner,’ Stafford said. ‘Last year one was, “What has a face, a pair of hands, a figure but not often any legs?” Can you guess?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘A clock.’ Stafford laughed, leaning back on the bench where they were eating. He ate in much the same way that he wrote, sitting well back from the table.

‘Did you finish all the sums?’ Bletchley said as he went past.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I finished half an hour early. But they wouldn’t let me out. Did you get eighty-four for number nine?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘You’ve got it wrong, then,’ he said and glancing at Stafford went on to the door.

After lunch, when he returned from a walk, the yard was full of children. Reagan was sitting in the porch eating an apple. Bletchley was standing, leaning against the wall beside him, eating an orange.

When they went in the teacher, who was already standing by her desk, had said, ‘Some boys have been writing on their blotting-paper. This is not allowed. All the blotting-paper that has been written on has been changed and anyone caught writing on it, or printing anything on it whatsoever, will find themselves in serious trouble.’

The examination paper was given out. It was a small book with a space left for an answer beside each question.

The woman teacher put her handbag on the desk and took her watch from her wrist and laid it on the lid before her. After a certain shuffling of chairs and the occasional groan or gasp which greeted the first reading of the paper, the room fell silent. A dog began barking in the yard outside, and on the viaduct another engine passed. A cloud of steam, caught by a gust of wind, condensed against the windows.

The first question was, ‘Complete the following sequence of figures: 7 11 19 35 -.’ The second was: ‘If a man in the desert walks north north east for five miles, south south east for five miles, east south east for five miles, west south west for five miles, south south west for five miles, north north west for five miles, west north west for five miles, east north east for five miles; (i) at what point will he have arrived? (ii) Describe but do not draw the shape his footprints will have left in the sand.’

Perhaps it was this question he saw Stafford answering, for he was drawing with his pen on the back of his wrist, occasionally looking up at the teacher behind the desk then licking his finger and rubbing it out. Another question was, ‘Which is the odd one out and why: a rectangle, a parallelogram, a circle, a rhomboid, a triangle, a square?’

The boy sitting next to him had laid his cheek again on the desk and with his pen was inking in a shape on the desk top, his tongue sticking out between his teeth, his eyes distorted. Beyond him, in the next row, a boy had screwed up his face, bringing his eyebrows down over the bridge of his nose, and from beneath this was gazing fixedly at the teacher.

Finally, when the teacher said, ‘There are twenty minutes left. You should now be on question eighteen or nineteen if you are doing them in order,’ a heavy groan came up from the back of the room and a moment later someone else had laughed.

When the papers had been collected they were allowed outside.

‘Do you know what the boy next to me wrote?’, Stafford said. ‘For that question about the man in the desert who walks all the way round the compass?’ He walked beside Colin, his hands in his pockets, kicking his feet against the ground. ‘Where it said “at what point will he have arrived?” he wrote “potty”. I saw it as they collected them up.’

A wind had sprung up since lunch-time and clouds of paper were blown across the yard, drifting up against the wall of the building then swirling round.

‘I’ve run out of ink,’ Stafford said. ‘I’ll have to fill up with this school ink. It rots the rubber.’ He unscrewed the pen to show him. ‘Do you want a sweet?’ he added. ‘They’re to give you energy. I’ve forgotten them until now.’ He ran off across the playground, taking out a piece of paper and standing with a group of boys in the door, comparing answers.

Reagan was standing against the school wall with his satchel still strung round him, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched up against the wind. When Bletchley came across he said, ‘Did you get number seven? Half of them have written rhomboid because they didn’t know what it was.’

‘What was it, then?’ he said.

‘A circle,’ Bletchley said. ‘It’s the only one that hasn’t got a straight line.’ His face was flushed, his eyes watering slightly from the wind. From his satchel, which he carried under his arm, he took out a piece of chocolate. ‘One boy in our room got disqualified,’ he said. ‘He’d written down the answers on a piece of paper to pass to somebody else. Did you hear the shouting?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘That’s him over there.’

Bletchley pointed him out but he couldn’t see him. When they went back in fresh sheets of paper had been given out and the woman behind the desk was smoking a cigarette which, the moment they came in, she put out.

Later, when they came out, Stafford said, ‘Which subject did you write about?’

‘The war,’ he said.

‘I wrote about the pit hooter “blaring out the emergency signal”. I’ve never seen a disaster. Have you?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘What else did you write about?’

‘My favourite hobby.’

‘I wrote about an historical character. King Canute.’

‘Do you know anything about him?’ he said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not much.’ When they reached the buses standing in the street outside he said, ‘Which one are you on?’ and when he pointed it out he added, ‘I’m on the one behind. I’ll see you. Good luck,’ standing outside however with several boys until Colin had climbed on.

As he sat down Bletchley, who was in the seat behind, leaned over and said, ‘You know what Reagan’s done? In the essay he wrote about the nurse, writing home to her parents,’ continuing to lean forward slightly while he laughed in his ear.

Reagan, who was sitting beside him, his satchel on his knee, smiled slightly, gazing across at him then out at the school and the yard where, in the faint light, several boys were playing football.

‘There are male nurses,’ a boy said who was standing up in his seat behind Bletchley.

‘Male nurses,’ Bletchley said, glancing at Reagan then, falling back in his seat, slapping his knee. He winced then, slightly, drawing down his brows, frowning. His knees were reddened from the wind and he held them apart.

The bus moved out of the village. Gusts of wind swept under the door, swirling the tickets between the seats. It was growing dark and the sky had begun to fade against the mass of fields and trees outside. Inside the bus itself the dull blue lights came on.

Low grey clouds scudded across the sky. Someone at the back of the bus had begun to sing.

When they reached the village Mrs Bletchley was waiting at the bus stop with Mrs Reagan. ‘You’ve been a long time, mister,’ she said to the driver.

‘Nay, missis,’ he said, ‘you can’t drive fast down these lanes,’ lighting a cigarette then and laying his hands on the radiator cap to warm them, stamping his feet in the road.

‘How did you get on, Ian?’ she asked Bletchley, pulling his scarf more tightly round his neck and fastening the top button of his coat. ‘You’ll catch your death of cold. How was it?’

‘Easy,’ he said. ‘Michael wrote a composition about nurses.’

‘About a nurse,’ Reagan said to his mother in case she might complain.

‘Oh, well. That’s very good,’ Mrs Bletchley said. ‘We better get home for a hot meal.’

They walked down the street together, Bletchley getting out one of his examination papers from his satchel and showing the questions to his mother in the dark. She flashed a torch on to the paper, not troubling to read it, but saying, ‘Ian you’ve done very well, I can see.’

Mrs Reagan had taken Reagan’s satchel, holding it in one hand and holding Reagan with the other.

‘You’d think they’d have an easier way than this for sitting the scholarship,’ she said.

‘You would,’ Mrs Bletchley said, clapping Bletchley’s gloved hand between her own to keep it warm.

When they reached their respective front doors they called good night and went in. Colin went round the back assuming that now the day was over the privilege of using the front door had probably expired.

When he went in his father’s bike was standing upside down on a sheet of newspaper in the kitchen, his father kneeling beside it, the chain hanging down from the rear wheel. His grandfather was sitting by the fire asleep.

‘How did you get on?’ his father said, looking up. ‘We were just thinking of coming down to the bus stop to find you.’

‘All right,’ he said.

‘What were the papers like?’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘All right,’ and shrugged.

His father watched him intently for a moment then glanced away. ‘My chain’s broken,’ he said.’ ‘And I’m off to work in an hour. You haven’t seen a spare link, have you, lying on the floor?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘I meant this morning.’

‘No,’ he said, and shook his head.

His father looked around a little longer on the floor, under the cupboards and the table, then stood up. ‘Well, then,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what they’re like.’

He took the papers out of his pocket and put them on the table. Then he took off his coat.

‘Is there any tea?’ he said.

‘There is. There is,’ his father said, stooping over the table and trying to examine the papers without actually touching them with his blackened hands. ‘See,’ he said. ‘Just turn this one over. Thirty-four. That looks right to me.’

His mother came down, calling behind her to Steven, whom she had just put to bed, then closing the door and saying, ‘Well, then, I thought I heard you. How did it go?’ going to the kettle, filling it and putting it on the fire.

‘He’s one or two right here,’ his father said, nodding his head now, almost laughing. By the fire his grandfather opened his eyes, which were red and watery, gazing blankly at the ceiling a moment. Then, groaning, he leaned forward and ran his hand across his face.

‘By,’ he said. ‘You need some coal on that fire, Ellen. It’s freezing,’ looking up to add, ‘Well, then, did you get any of the answers?’

‘What did you get here, then, for number twelve?’ his father said. He brought a piece of paper and his red pencil to the table and, still keeping his greasy hands off the cloth, began to work it out.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, looking over his shoulder.

‘One pound, three and sixpence,’ his father said, staring at the paper, then crossing the sum out and starting again. ‘There’s a catch in that somewhere. I hope you were watching out.’

‘Now, let’s have the table and get him some tea,’ his mother said.

When the time came for his father to set off for work he hadn’t mended the chain. He went next door to borrow Mr Shaw’s bike and when he came back he said, ‘Don’t move any of those papers. I’ll work it out in the morning.’ The table was covered in calculations, some screwed up. ‘If it’s not thirty yards for number eleven,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure what it can be. I’ll ask Turner. He’ll know.’

When he went up to bed and drew his curtains he saw that it had begun to snow. It drifted down from the darkness in large flakes, driven up against the window. Already a thin layer covered the garden, outlining the declivities of the soil and leaving a dark space by the railings at the far end.

When his father came back in the morning the snow was plastered to his coat and his cap. It fell off in frozen crusts, sizzling in the hearth and melting in little pools on the floor. ‘Now, then,’ he said. ‘Where have you put the sums?’ slapping his hands together in his khaki gloves and rubbing his stockinged feet in the rug. The snow had frozen on his eyebrows and lay in a thin crust around his mouth.

10

The snow lasted for several days. Only the tips of the fences and the mounds of the air-raid shelters were visible in the yards.

Colin’s father came home the second morning an hour late. Across his back were roped several pieces of timber and two metal rails. ‘See here, I took these off a wagon,’ he said, unfastening the wood in the open door.

The snow was plastered to his boots, which he knocked against the outside wall, and to his trousers as far as his knees. It had been driven up and frozen on to the back of his coat. ‘I’ve pushed that’, he said, ‘through some stuff,’ banging the bike against the wall so that the snow, matted together between the spokes, fell off. The wood had been sawn into even lengths. Holes too had been drilled through the rusty rails. ‘I had Harris joiner it at work,’ he said. ‘It won’t take more than a minute to put together.’

When Colin came home from school at lunch-time a sledge was standing half-completed against the kitchen wall. It was long and flat. In the hearth were the two metal rails and a hammer. One of the rails was bent at one end. ‘He’s been trying to curve those to fît underneath it,’ his mother said, indicating the thin rib of wood where the runner would have to be screwed.

‘I’ve never heard so much swearing,’ his grandfather said. ‘Not in one house, by one man, in one morning. It’s a wonder this place hasn’t turned bright red.’

When he came home at tea-time the sledge was finished. Pieces of wood still lay about the floor, the sledge itself turned upside down, his father polishing the runners. ‘This’ll go,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to keep your eyes skinned I think to catch it.’

Two holes had been burned through the wood at the front. A piece of rope had been knotted through. ‘Have your tea,’ he said, ‘then we’re off.’

His father dressed Steven to take with them, pushing the sledge up and down outside, wearing the rust off the runners. When they set off it left two brown tracks in the snow behind.

‘No, no, you sit on,’ his father said, setting Steven between Colin’s legs. ‘The more weight on we have the better.’

His father looped the rope around his shoulders and strode along in front, stooped forward to their weight, the studs of his pit boots shining underneath, the snow collecting in the insteps then falling off: it crunched beneath the runners, the woodwork rattling over the bumps. It had already begun to grow dark and as they passed the windows his father would call out, tapping on some, saying, ‘Get him out. Get him out. Let him have some fresh air, then, missis.’

When they reached the hill running up to the Park his father added, ‘Nay, Colin, you’ll have to jump off,’ and as they started up the slope, ‘Don’t you want a pull? It’s light as a feather with Steven on.’

In the Park, on the slope of the hill, several figures were silhouetted against the snow and as they got nearer he recognized Batty and Stringer and Stringer’s father. Batty was half-way down the slope pulling up a sledge on the back of which Stringer was sitting, kicking his legs.

‘What’ve you got there, then, Harry?’ Mr Stringer said.

‘This is a toboggan,’ his father said.

‘A toboggan, is it?’ He came across. ‘It’ll not last five minutes,’ Mr Stringer said.

‘It’ll beat anything of thine,’ his father said.

‘Right,’ Mr Stringer said. ‘You’re on.’

In the faint light the flattened snow could be seen curving away between the flower beds and the ornamental pond.

‘Ay go, our Malcolm,’ Mr Stringer said. ‘Hurry up wi’ yon sled’, we’re barn t’have a gamble.’

Mr Stringer was dressed as he always was in a sleeveless shirt with its collar undone. His trousers were tucked into his socks: on his feet were a thin pair of shoes.

‘Are you coming down with me, Colin?’ his father said. He sat on the sledge with Steven between his legs. ‘When I give you a nod,’ he added, ‘give us a shove and when we’ve got going jump on behind.’

Mr Stringer had already sat down on the other sledge. It was slightly higher than his father’s and had a piece of carpet to sit on, wet now, however, and crusted with snow. He began to shout through his cupped hands to the figures below, ‘Ay up. Move over,’ adding, ‘We s’ll have killed somebody afore we’ve done. How much do you want on, then? Half a dollar?’

‘We’ll give it a go first,’ his father said.

‘Right,’ Mr Stringer said. ‘When I say off.’ He shouted down the slope once more, waved his arm, then said, ‘Give us a good shove. Hold on. Are you ready? Right. We’re off!’

They began to shout as they pushed the sledges down the top of the slope. ‘Faster,’ Mr Stringer said. ‘Faster. God damn it, I’ll get off here and push it myself.’ He went off first down the slope, Stringer and Batty jumping on behind.

As their own sledge gathered speed his father shouted, ‘Jump on, Colin. You’ll have us over.’ The distance between them, however, increased.

Colin held on to his father’s neck, his father kicking his legs to one side then the other. ‘Nay, you’ll have us over,’ he shouted, laughing, the sledge, half-way down the slope, plunging suddenly to one side, dipping down into a drift of snow and flinging them off.

His father lay beneath him, kicking up his boots. The front of the sledge was buried in snow. From lower down the slope came Mr Stringer’s shouts followed by his cries as he guided his sledge between the swings.

‘That was short and quick,’ his father said, adding as Steven, his face covered in snow, had begun to cry, ‘A bit of snow won’t hurt you, love.’

‘I want to go home, Dad,’ Steven said.

‘Nay, we’ll have one more go at least,’ his father said.

When Mr Stringer came to the top he said, ‘How much was that, then? Ten bob?

‘Ten nothing,’ his father said. ‘We’ve had no practice.’

‘You’ll need no practice with that,’ Mr Stringer said. ‘You’ll never get it to go, not if you put it on wheels and fasten on a motor.’

‘I’ll ride it down myself,’ his father said. He pushed the sledge to the top of the slope.

‘How much start do you want?’ Mr Stringer said.

‘None,’ his father said. ‘We’ll go together.’

Mr Stringer sat upright and was pushed off by Batty. ‘Go on, Dad,’ Stringer shouted. ‘Faster.’

Colin’s father however ran behind the sledge, pushing it, then, when it had gained momentum, flinging himself on top, kicking out his legs to steer.

‘Get over,’ Mr Stringer shouted down the slope. He caught hold of his father’s sledge and pulled it across. ‘Get it off. Get over,’ he shouted, his small figure upright as if, silhouetted against the snow, he were sitting on nothing at all.

The sledges ran off into the snow to one side. A little later Mr Stringer could be seen standing up, dusting the snow from his head and his shoulders saying, ‘I was going to overtake you there, then, Harry.’

‘He had hold of my legs,’ his father said when they finally came up. ‘I’d have beaten him to the bottom by a mile. I had him beat.’

‘A mile,’ Mr Stringer said. ‘Why, I had to hold on in case he fell o’er.’

His father picked up Steven and said, ‘Come on down and have a ride.’

‘I want to go home, Dad,’ Steven said. He shrank against his father as Mr Stringer said, ‘I’ll warm you up. Have a go on my back, then, love.’

‘He’s a bit frightened,’ his father said. ‘He hasn’t been on a sledge, tha knows, afore.’

Several other people had arrived and set off down the slope. Shouts echoed up from the swings below.

‘I’ll have one more go,’ his father said. ‘Then I’ll take him back.’ And as he put Steven down he said, ‘Give him a ride round, Colin.’ And when it seemed he wouldn’t be pacified he said, ‘Come on, then. We’ll all go down together.’

But Steven refused either to sit on the sledge between his father’s knees or on his back, and when Mr Stringer took him and set him down on his own sledge he called out even louder.

Already his father was pushing off.

‘A gill to nought, then, Harry,’ Mr Stringer said.

Colin pushed against his father then jumped on top. His father gasped. As they came to each bump his father gasped again. Behind them they could hear Mr Stringer’s shouts.

The snow shot up against Colin’s face. Beneath him his father twisted, his legs kicking, as he turned the sledge. They slid between the posts of the metal swings.

‘Hold on. Hold on,’ his father said as Colin clung more tightly to his back, his head pressed down against his father’s neck.

The snow crunched beneath the runners, his father flinging his legs from side to side, the sledge running out into the unmarked snow at the foot of the hill. They turned in a wide arc and came to a halt beneath the hedge.

‘That was a run,’ his father said. ‘A run and a half.’ He lay on the sledge for a while, groaning, after Colin got up. ‘By go, you’re a ton weight,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve broken my back.’

Mr Stringer was waiting farther up the track. ‘I thought you were off home theer and none of us’d see you again,’ he said. ‘I’ll stand you a gill and a half for that.’

‘I thought I better pull in,’ his father said. He lifted Steven on to his back and said, ‘I better be getting this one home. He’s not enjoying himself a bit.’

‘I’ll come back with you,’ Mr Stringer said. ‘They’ve been open an hour.’ He rubbed his hand across his arms and then his chest. ‘Sithee, it’s running out of me like watter.’

Colin could see them a little later as they reached the Park gates, his father – with Steven on his back – pausing as he lit a cigarette then held the match for Mr Stringer. They disappeared down the road towards the village.

Later, he was left alone on the track. When he went down all he could hear was the scudding of the snow beneath the runners. No sound came from the Park at all. The sky had cleared. Ice ran beneath the sledge to the foot of the slope.

He went sledging each evening as soon as he came home from school. Occasionally Batty and Stringer came with him, and sometimes only Batty: he would slide down the slope in his large boots, then, having got tired of pulling the sledge, he’d go back home. Only on the second night did Colin’s father come with him: his interest in the sledge expired with its making. He stood at the top of the slope smoking after the first ride down saying, ‘You go, lad. I’m getting too old for this,’ finally turning back up the slope and adding, ‘I better be getting ready for work. Your mother gets worried, you know, if I’m late.’

Often he was last on the slope, waiting for the others to grow tired and leave, pulling their sledges slowly up to the gate, their voices fading down the road. Sometimes, when he had comedown the track, he lay on the sledge, his check on the snow that had frozen to the wood, his breath rising in a thin mist past his face, the hill silent, glowing faintly, the odd calls, the barking of a dog and the shutting of doors coming from the houses beyond. A moon had risen on the second night: it shone as a bright disc, the track like a strip of metal running between the smooth mounds on either side. Towards the town, as the night settled, there was the faint probing of searchlights, moving like stiff fingers, slowly waving to and fro.

Each morning when he came home his father brought news of fresh disasters he had seen: a lorry driven over a banking, a car skidding into a wall, a factory so frozen up that no one could work in it, a chimney that had collapsed through the ice breaking up the stone. ‘It’s a wonder I’ve got home at all,’ he would say if there had been a fresh fall in the night. ‘It’s not often it comes so late in the year. There were buds on the branches a week ago. Now look at it. Antarctica. I s’ll come home one morning a penguin and you’ll wonder who I am.’

His father built a snowman in the garden almost as tall as himself, setting on top of it his flat cap and underneath a pair of eyes, a nose, a moustache and a large mouth, each feature made up from bits of coal. Bletchley, who had built a snowman in his own yard, threw stones at theirs in the early mornings, removing first its head then various pieces of its body, the buttons, the fingers and the dividing of the legs, all of which his father had fashioned from pieces of wood. Finally the snowman toppled in the yard. Its body, freckled with soot, still lay there, dismembered, when the rest of the snow in the gardens and the backs had melted.

The last night Colin took the sledge to the Park the runners grated against the pavement. The track was worn through in dull brown patches.

In the spring his grandfather left. He went back to his uncle’s. ‘I’ll be back,’ he said the day he left. ‘That’s the motto of my life: “Keep moving”.’ He bent down to kiss him. ‘Look after them, Colin. Keep an eye on them. They need somebody, tha knows, round here.’ When his suitcase had been put on the bus he sat by the window at the front, smoking, winking at them with nods of his head.

The next day his father said, ‘It looks as though we shall have another young ’un in the house, then, Colin.’

‘When is it coming?’ he said.

‘Oh, not for a few months yet.’ He grasped his shoulder and laughed. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘You and Steve can look after him all right.’

Colin played with Steven now a great deal. His brother had something of his father’s build, broad and fair-haired, his blue eyes slightly pained, and puzzled, preoccupied, so that when they were crossing the field or had gone to play on the wasteland at the end of the street, or, as spring came, in the Park, his sole preoccupation would be on where he was walking, stumbling over holes or protuberances, his arms stretched out, awkwardly, scarcely looking up from the ground by his feet. The other children called him Flipper. ‘He’s like a seal,’ Batty said. ‘Are we supposed to wait for him or summat?’ Frequently Colin would be left behind, waiting for Steven, taking his hand or finally lifting him up and carrying him on his back.

‘Don’t ever leave him on his own,’ his mother said. ‘If he’s any trouble, wait. He’s more important than any of them.’

Once he took Steven to the river; they went on bikes, taking it in turns to ride. Some of the children rode on the cross-bars, some on the seats; the others ran behind. It took them the whole of the afternoon to get there: they played on the metal coal-slip used to load the barges, and beyond, on the supports beneath a metal bridge. It was almost dark by the time they got home.

His mother was standing at the door.

‘Wherever have you been?’ she said.

He was carrying Steven, who was almost asleep. They were covered in coal dust from the metal shute.

‘Your father’s out looking for you. He’s been all over.’ She took his arm. ‘Is Steve all right?’

‘I’ve been carrying him,’ he told her.

‘Just look at him,’ she said. ‘Where on earth have you had him?’

When his father came back he took him upstairs.

‘Supposing Steven fell in?’ he said. ‘And you couldn’t get out.’

Colin felt the strap against his legs. The pain tugged at his stomach.

Afterwards he stayed upstairs. He heard Steven go to bed, his mother’s voice in the other room, then her steps outside the door. She paused. A moment later he heard her voice.

‘Are you all right?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I hope you’ve learnt your lesson.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

She put her head round the door, peered in a moment, then closed it quietly and went on down the stairs.

In the summer the results of the examinations had been announced. It was three months since he’d sat them. He was standing at the back of the hall, in morning prayers, when he heard his name read out. It was the last to be announced. Bletchley’s name came first: he was going to a co-educational school in a near-by village. His own name was included in the list of boys being sent to a grammar school located in the city. When the successful candidates were let out early he ran off home, rushing in the door. There was no one in the kitchen. He could hear his mother in a room upstairs: she came out on the landing.

She stood there for a moment, looking down.

‘I’ve passed,’ he said. ‘I’m going to the grammar.’

‘Well,’ she said.

She started slowly down.

‘Is my dad in, then?’

‘He’s gone down to the shop. He won’t be a minute.’

‘Bletchley’s passed as well.’

‘Has he?’

‘He’s going to Melsham Manor.’

‘That’s a good school.’

‘Reagan hasn’t passed.’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’m not surprised.’

They waited for his father.

When she heard his step she stooped to the fireplace, setting on the kettle.

His father, his head bowed, rubbed his feet on the mat, looking up suddenly to see his mother.

‘What’s got into you?’ he said.

‘He’s heard the result,’ his mother said. ‘Of the examination.’

‘Nay, then.’ His father slowed. He gazed at him with a kind of anger, as if suddenly afraid he might be hurt.

‘I’ve passed,’ he said.

‘Have you? Have you?’

‘To the grammar.’

‘By God, then, lad.’

His face had flushed.

‘Sithee, are you sure?’ he said.

‘It was announced. Those who passed they’ve let out early.’

‘Sithee, I better sit down,’ his father said.

He rested in a chair, leaning to the table.

‘I knew you could do it. What did I tell you?’ he asked his mother.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We knew he could.’

‘It’ll mean a lot of expense,’ he said. ‘They wear a uniform,’ he added.

‘I suppose we’ll manage,’ she said, and laughed.

‘Aye. I suppose we will,’ he said. He shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it’s happened.’

Steven came in from playing in the yard. His mother picked him up.

‘And what’s your brother gone and done?’ she said.

‘Nowt but show’, his father added, ‘that he’s just about the brightest on this road.’

‘Wait till Steven gets started, then.’

‘Aye, we’ll have two of ’em,’ his father said.

‘If not a third,’ his mother said.

‘Aye.’

His father laughed for a moment, then clapped his hands.

‘Wait till I tell them at work,’ he added.

11

Colin went with his mother to the town to buy the clothes. He’d only been to the town on one or two occasions, most memorable for him when the bombing started. There were still signs of damage. But no bombs had fallen for over a year. They crossed the river and started up the hill the other side. The shop where the clothes for the school were sold stood opposite the cathedral, in the city centre. They gazed in the window at the uniform before they entered: it hung on the bright pink dummy of a boy with blue eyes and red lips and cheeks, a dark-blue cloth with a gold-coloured ribbon. The badge of the school, a coat-of-arms, was almost as large as the breast pocket of the blazer.

‘There, then: what do you think of that?’

A boy came out of the shop: he had on the cap; beneath his raincoat Colin glimpsed the blazer.

‘I suppose we better go in,’ his mother said.

It took them an hour for his mother to choose the clothes. Everything she bought was too large for him; the blazer itself, and the trousers, were particularly large.

‘He’ll need room to grow into them,’ she told the assistant.

‘On the other hand,’ the man had said, ticking off their name in a list of pupils, ‘by the time he fits them they may have worn out.’

‘Aren’t they good quality, then?’ his mother had said.

‘Oh, they’re good quality,’ the assistant said. ‘But boys will be boys,’ he added with a smile.

‘If they’re good quality he’ll look after them,’ she said.

Colin stood in front of a mirror in the gold-ribboned blazer. The man, after trying several sizes, finally put a large peaked cap on his head. Gold ribbing ran down from the button at the top. ‘His head’s not likely to grow,’ he said when his mother inquired if he might have a larger one.

The raincoat he brought came to below his knees. It reached almost to his ankles.

‘There’s a good three of four years’ growth there,’ the assistant said. He fastened the belt. It was large enough to encompass a figure twice his size. The tongue of the belt was fastened round his back.

‘Well, I think that should do him,’ his mother said, yet gazing at the next size on the peg.

‘Oh, I think that’s large enough for all eventualities,’ the man had said.

He totted up the bill.

‘Will that be a cheque or cash?’ he said.

‘Oh, cash,’ his mother said, and flushed.

Each of the notes she had folded into four; she lay them down on the counter one by one, and added, ‘I’ve got the change,’ rooting in the narrow purse and taking out the coins. She’d worked out the sum exactly at home, allowing even for the larger sizes.

‘Would you like to wear them, or shall I make a parcel?’ the assistant said. He was an elderly man with greying hair; he wore the kind of suit Colin had only seen Mr Reagan wear before.

‘If you could make a parcel,’ his mother said.

Colin put his old clothes on. His mother, after watching him put on his coat, pulled out his collar. She straightened his tie as they waited by the counter.

The man came back with the clothes in a parcel.

‘If there’s anything we can do in the future, Mrs Saville,’ he said, ‘you only have to ask.’ He smiled across the counter as he handed Colin the parcel and added, ‘I suppose you’ll carry it, young man,’ and as he held the door of the shop he said, ‘And good luck at the grammar.’

Outside the shop his mother paused. She looked at the bill, checked the items, checked the money remaining in her purse, then looked round her in a blinded fashion.

‘The bus doesn’t go for an hour,’ she said. She looked over the roofs to the cathedral clock. ‘I suppose we could go on the train, only I’ve gone and got returns.’

They stood by the window; he could see their two figures reflected in the pane, his mother in her long brown coat, ending just above the ankles, he in his short raincoat which he’d had for several years. The town stretched back, immense, beyond them: the shop fronts, the crowds, the passing traffic.

‘We could go and look at the school,’ she said.

She’d made this suggestion before they left; his father, for this reason, had wanted to come with them. His mother, however, had put him off. ‘We’re only getting his clothes,’ she said. ‘We can see the school another time.’ And when his father had persisted, she had added, ‘When I’m buying clothes I’m not to be hurried.’

‘I suppose we ought to have the time,’ his mother said. She stopped a man in the street and asked the way.

An arched alleyway ran beneath an old timber-framed building opening off the city centre. It was broad enough to take a car, its surface roughly cobbled; on one side stood a baker’s shop, on the other a café with wooden beams and panelled walls. Beyond, the alleyway opened on to a narrow street; it was overlooked by shops on either side and farther on broadened into a main thoroughfare which ran back, diagonally, towards the city centre. Trees overhung the pavements, and the shops themselves gave way to houses, low, brick-built and black with soot. Tall brick chimneys projected from low, large-slabbed roofs.

‘Well, this is an interesting part. I don’t think I’ve been up here before,’ his mother said.

She gazed over at the houses on either side; some had shallow, tree-filled gardens; others opened directly on to the road – they could see into sitting-rooms, and here and there, through an open door, into a narrow hall.

‘I bet it costs a lot to live in those. See how old they are.’ She paused at a doorway and read the date inscribed on the stone above the porch. ‘Seventeen nineteen. And some are older if I’m not mistaken.’

The school itself stood back from the road. It was a long, low building with tall mullioned windows. It had two turrets at the centre, battlemented, and a wing, going back from the road, at either end. It was built of stone; a broad stretch of lawn led up to a pair of metal-studded doors.

Both the grass itself and the doors were evidently unused. A gravel drive ran up to either end of the building: twin metal gates, set between black gate-posts, were standing open; one or two figures in the now-familiar school uniform flitted between the main building and a taller, narrower building, also of stone, standing farther back from the road.

‘They even go on Saturdays,’ his mother said.

They stood at the gates looking up at the low, stone mass.

‘Saturdays as well?’

‘Saturday mornings, the letter says. Though they have Tuesday and Thursday afternoons for sport.’

A boy came down the drive. He put on his cap, pulled a satchel across his shoulder, and ran off behind them, across the road.

‘See how clean they are,’ his mother added.

They set off back towards the city centre. A bus swept past. It was the first time he’d been aware of how large the city was. In the past the place itself had been a name, a vague memory of towers and domes, the single steeple glimpsed from the bus across the valley: now it was narrow streets and looming buildings, and roads amongst which he felt already lost.

‘Oh, you’ll get used to it in a week,’ his mother said.

They waited at the bus-stop, below the cathedral.

‘We’ll get in touch with the Connors’ boy. He goes,’ she added. ‘He’ll know the way.’

He sat silent on the bus when it finally came. He watched the outskirts of the city pass, the river, then the fields, the woods, a stretch of heath.

‘Shall I have to stay for dinner?’ he said.

‘Lunch,’ his mother said. She added. ‘You can’t really come back, then, all this way.’ She eased the parcel against her knee. ‘As it is, you’ll set off early. And you’ll not get back until quite late. Then there’s homework, of course. That takes an hour. An hour and a half, I think they said.’

When they got back home the clothes were unpacked. He went upstairs, at his father’s insistence, and put them on.

Colin came back down; he saw his father’s look – he gazed at the blazer, at the large badge, the coat-of-arms, worked in gold thread on the breast pocket, at the gold ribbon that followed the edge of the blazer as far as the collar, at the cap, with its gold ribbing running from the button, the badge set at the front, the broad, projecting peak; he looked at the stockings with their twin gold lines around the turned-down tops; his lips had parted; he began to smile.

‘Sithee. I wouldn’t have known him then.’

‘Now he looks something like,’ his mother said.

Steven sat across the room, not stirring.

‘Sithee, and what does that mean, then?’ his father said.

He ran his finger beneath the badge.

‘“Labor Ipse Voluptas”,’ he read aloud.

‘I don’t know,’ Colin said. He shook his head.

‘Didn’t you ask at the shop?’ his father said.

‘No.’ His mother touched the badge herself: she ran her finger around the yellow thread.

‘Labour something,’ his father said. ‘Dost think they’re all socialists, then?’ he added.

‘I don’t think it can be that,’ his mother said.

‘It’s one of the oldest schools in the country. I hope you realize that,’ his father added.

His smile had faded: he shook his head.

‘I never thought we’d do it. Come up from nowt, and now see where we are,’ he said.

He went over to the Connors’ house one evening. They lived across the village on a small estate of private bungalows. Connors was a tall boy, solemn, fair-haired: he was half-way through the school. His father had offered him his rugby shirt, gold and blue striped and worn slightly at the collar, and a pair of worn-down rugby boots. Connors himself, too, had offered on the first day to take him to the school, and arranged to meet him at the bus-stop.

When Colin got to the door Connors had come out after him.

‘I better warn thee, I suppose,’ he said. ‘My faither says I should.’

‘What about?’ he said.

‘They collar new lads, first day theer, and duck ’em in the toilet.’

He gazed up at Connors’s face: it was dull and heavy, the cheeks flushed, as if he were talking to him from a long way away.

‘What do they do?’

‘They pull the chain.’

He pictured it for a moment, then shook his head.

‘Do they do anything else?’ he said.

‘Well, sometimes,’ he said, ‘they shove you in the basins. Full of water. And count ten slowly before they let you up.’

The vision haunted him throughout the summer, first the toilet, then the basin. He practised holding his head under water and counting up to ten, slowly. His mother came in one morning to find him with his head submerged, the sink spilling over on to the floor of the kitchen.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ she said.

‘Nothing,’ he said, and added, ‘Washing.’ He practised holding his breath in bed at night. He thought, in the end, he would be able to manage, if not, he’d decided, he would have to drown.

Occasionally on week-days Bletchley wore the uniform of the new school he was going to. It was more austere and simpler than his own, the blazer decorated merely by a badge, his cap the same. He wore it to Sunday School, wore it to the shops, or whenever he went out walking with his mother. He’d bought a new satchel; he would sit on his step, taking out his ruler, his pen, his set of instruments for geometry and science, showing them to Reagan, who, not having passed the examination, regarded them with a dazed expression, gazing off, after having been shown them, across the yard. Bletchley had also been bought a present for passing, a red-painted bicycle with white celluloid mudguards and swept-down handlebars which he rode up and down the street each evening.

‘We’d have bought you summat, don’t worry,’ his father said. ‘If it hadn’t have been the expense. What with that and a new brother or sister on the way, we’ve not much left.’

There was talk now of sending him to his uncle, his father’s younger brother, who lived in the town.

‘Nay, we mu’n keep you at home if we can. Both of you,’ his father said. ‘I hope to get on days when the baby’s due, then we can all of us sleep at home together.’

He played in the street, watched Bletchley on his bike, played cricket with Stringer and Batty, and several of Batty’s brothers. He watched the others go back to school. The grammar school didn’t start until two weeks later; he wandered through the village on his own. Occasionally he caught sight of Connors on a bike, and of one of the other boys who’d passed to the grammar school: apart from the long holiday they had nothing in common. He practised holding his head under water for longer spells.

When the day came his mother offered to go with him to the stop. It was barely seven o’clock; the streets of the village were still deserted. He stood at the door, conspicuous in his uniform, while his mother pulled on her coat.

‘I want to go on my own,’ he said.

‘What if Connors isn’t there?’ she said.

‘I’ll still catch the bus.’

‘And what happens at the other end?’

‘I can always ask the way.’

She stood in the door with her coat unbuttoned and watched him walk off along the street. When he reached the corner he didn’t wave; he glanced back, sharply, then went on towards the stop.

He was twenty minutes early. The stop was opposite a public house in the centre of the village. There was no one else about. He carried his raincoat over his arm, his satchel, an old one, over his shoulder. There was nothing in it. He’d thought of taking the football shirt and the pair of worn-down rugby-boots, but, despite his mother’s insistence, had decided finally he wouldn’t.

A lorry went past. Through the windows of the pub he could see the vague shape of a clock set up against the wall. He couldn’t see its face.

A miner came down from the direction of the colliery and sat down in the gutter. He sat with his hands between his legs. Another came down; one or two other men appeared. Their voices came in a quiet murmur as he himself stood farther down the road against the window of a shop.

Finally, from the direction of the nearest houses, Connors and another boy appeared. Connors didn’t wear his cap; apart from a worn satchel which he carried beneath his arm, there was no indication that he was going to school at all. He wore long trousers; his school blazer, if he wore one, was concealed beneath a greyish raincoat.

He scarcely glanced up as he reached the stop; he nodded his head then went on talking to the other boy. They stood against the wall of the pub, between the miners, Connors kicking the wall behind him with his heel.

The other boy was older; he carried a small suitcase, dented and fastened by a leather strap. The cap of some other school was screwed up and set inside his jacket pocket.

Colin waited. One or two of the miners had looked across: they glanced at the brightness of the jacket, at the gold ribbon, which glistened in the sun, at the cap, at the new raincoat folded on his arm. One of them nodded to the others; there was a burst of laughter.

He glanced the other way. The stop was opposite the junction of the two roads that met at the centre of the village. The principal road swept through from east to west; the road from the south, and the station, crossed it, between halt signs, and continued past the Park and the manor, northwards, narrowing slightly as it crested the hill.

It was from this direction, careering downwards, that the bus would come. Twice he heard the roar of an engine, and twice a lorry appeared, rattling down the hill in a cloud of dust.

He heard a second burst of laughter; he glanced in the window of the shop behind – he could see his reflection, the high-peaked profile of his cap, the neat outline of the blazer. The shop was full of clothes – skirts, blouses, stockings, and women’s underwear. He studied the houses opposite, where the slope dipped down from the shop-lined crossing. He thought of his mother at home, and Steve.

The bus appeared: it ran rattling down the hill, its windows glinting in the sun. It paused at the corner; the miners crouching against the wall stood up.

He waited for Connors. He and the other boy, still talking, leant against the wall.

Colin got on. He sat downstairs.

One or two other people appeared, a man in a raincoat, a woman with a basket. Their feet shuffled on the roof above his head; then, but for the murmur of the miners and the occasional slur of a match, the bus was silent.

Connors had taken out a book and was turning the pages; the other boy took the book from him and pushed back against the wall. The conductor came round. The driver got in. The engine started. Only when the conductor pressed the bell did Connors make a move: he closed the book in the other boy’s hand, put it in his satchel, made some remark to the boy, then, waving, stepped up on the platform. As the bus gathered speed he glanced over at Colin, nodded, and without making any remark went quickly up the stairs.

There were only two other people sitting downstairs, both miners, both black-faced and laughing as the conductor called out to them in recognition. He saw the redness of their lips, the white eyes and teeth, and smelled the dust from their clothes as the draught came back from the door.

He waited; there was no sound of Connors coming down again.

The conductor took his fare. He sat with his satchel across his knees, his raincoat laid on top.

They passed the end of the lane leading to the pit; he could see the roof of the school across the yard and nearer the plume of smoke and steam from the colliery engine. A miner was running down the lane; he waved his arm, but the bus passed on.

From where he was sitting, leaning backwards, he could see the last houses of the village as they disappeared. Soon all that was visible behind were the hedged fields, the top of the pit chimney, and the outline of the colliery stack.

Another boy, wearing a new uniform like himself, got on; he was accompanied by his mother.

They passed a large stone mansion, set back beyond a line of trees; the bus swept over a hump-backed bridge; he glimpsed a lily-padded lake. Beyond, the road rose steeply to a row of houses; a group of girls got on. They wore light-blue dresses and yellow straw hats: he could hear Connors’s voice as they climbed upstairs. The bus was full: at the crest of a rise he caught a distant glimpse of the town, a silhouette of towers and the single steeple.

They emerged finally beside the river: barges were moored above a concrete weir. The single spire and the towers of the town were visible once more above stone-slabbed roofs. A hill appeared: the bus shuddered slowly to its summit.

‘All off. All change,’ the conductor called.

The walls of the cathedral were visible across the road.

Colin caught a glimpse of Connors as he came off the bus – talking to the girls in the yellow straw hats, he set off in the direction of the city centre.

There were other groups descending from the crowded buses at the top of the slope. He followed the largest group, which made its way through the narrow, cobbled alley into the thoroughfare of shops beyond.

It was half-past eight. Other groups joined those emerging from the alley: a mass of dark-blue figures moved slowly along each pavement.

The doors to the school itself were closed. A flight of stone steps led down to a field. Blazered figures walked to and fro. Immediately behind the building itself a wooden fence divided the field from a pebbled yard.

A bell was rung: the mass of uniformed figures divided into two and moved off towards either end of the dark stone building.

He went back up the steps. Boys with tasselled caps were standing at the door. They called out to the boys as they rushed inside.

Connors was standing immediately inside.

‘I wondered where you’d got to,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking in the field.’

He took his arm.

‘Have you got your health certificate?’ he added.

He took out the piece of paper he’d been given before he left. It had been signed at the bottom, first by his mother and then, after an argument, by his father.

‘Three A. You’ll have old Hodges,’ Connors said.

‘When do they do the ducking?’ he said.

‘Haven’t they collared you already?’

He shook his head. He wondered if he’d been abandoned because of his build, or overlooked.

‘They’ll probably have you in at break, then,’ Connors said. He released his arm. ‘If you have any trouble I’ll see you around.’

The corridor itself was full of figures; the walls were lined by framed photographs of football teams. Stone steps went up to the floor above.

Connors had left him at a panelled door. The room inside was tall: so high, in fact that the ceiling went up into the roof of the building. The windows, mullioned, with diamond panes, took up the greater part of the outside wall. The other three walls were completely bare. The desks themselves were large and stood in four rows the length of the room. The spaces between the rows were full of boys – mostly like himself, in new blazers, some still wearing caps, they stood gazing up at the ceiling, at the height of the windows, at the massive, square-shaped desks and the empty walls.

A man came in. He wore the white collar of a clergyman. His clothes were dark, his face red, a line of white hair receding across his scalp and growing out in two broad tufts at the back of his head.

‘Caps off! Caps off! Do you wear caps inside a building? What manners have you been taught? Caps off, caps off inside a building.’

The few caps still on were taken off.

‘Sit down. Don’t stand around,’ the man had said.

He went to a large desk at the end of the room.

‘What are you doing, boy?’ he shouted.

Several of the boys, following his command, were already sitting.

‘Do you sit down before a master?’

‘No, sir,’ one of the boys had said.

‘Wait till I’m seated.’ He raised his head. ‘Then you sit down, when I’m sat down.’

The boys got up. The master sat down. He wore a long black gown over his dark-blue suit.

‘Now please be seated, gentlemen,’ he said.

Colin found a chair at the back of the room. Most of the desks were already taken.

‘First things first,’ the master said. ‘I’ll call your names. Have you got that clear?’

‘Yes, sir,’ some of the boys had said.

‘When I call your name you come up here, hand me your certificate, your health certificate, and go back to your place.’

He waited for an answer.

‘Yes, sir,’ most of the boys had said.

‘Sit up straight. I want no loafers in 3A.’

The names were called. The master ticked them off inside a register.

‘Not here. Not here,’ he began to shout at one point. ‘You’re in 3 Upper, boy, not here. In with the brainy lot, not these first-year duffers.’

The boy went out.

Colin went up when his name was called. He gave in the certificate: it was opened out, straightened, put on the pile, and he went back to his chair.

‘All present. All correct,’ the master said. He screwed back the top of his pen, took off the pair of glasses he’d put on to mark the register, and glanced slowly round the room. The murmur of voices faded.

‘My name is Hodges,’ he said. ‘Not Bodges. Or Codges. Or even Dodges. Mister Hodges.’ He gazed round at them again for several seconds. ‘I’ll be your form-master for the whole of the year. And woe betide’, he added, ‘any boy who gets himself into any trouble. I don’t like trouble. I have an aversion to trouble. Trouble and I have never got on well together. You’ll see that now by the colour of my face. You’ll see it going slightly red. It gets even redder when trouble actually appears. It becomes positively scarlet, and woe betide anyone who comes in front of me when my face is scarlet. I do all sorts of unimaginable and horrible things when my face is scarlet. I do pretty terrible things when it’s even red; but when it’s scarlet I can’t tell you the things I’m capable of. So trouble is something I don’t wish to hear even mentioned in this room: not in my own classes, that is, or anyone else’s.’

He waited for the colour to subside.

‘Now there’s a lot to do today. At times, to some of you, it may seem extremely tedious. Whenever it does I want you to gaze, not at me, nor at your neighbour, nor at the floor, nor at your desk, but at the ceiling. If you gaze at the ceiling it’s my opinion you won’t come to any harm. I want you, whenever you feel boredom coming on, to gaze in a vertical direction and silently, so no one anywhere can possibly hear, recite to yourself your multiplication tables. I want you to recite the two times, the three times, right through to your twelve times. I shall test you on those tables at the end of the morning and woe betide anyone who gets one wrong. I have a strong aversion to boys who get things wrong, particularly to boys who’ve had all morning to get things right.’ He waited. ‘You, boy: what’s twelve times seven?’

A boy near the front put up his hand.

One or two other hands went up.

The boy who had been asked had gone bright red.

‘Twelve times seven.’ He waited. ‘You’ll be one of the boys whose head I’ll expect to see gazing for quite lengthy intervals in a vertical direction. What is it? What is it? What is it, boy?’

‘Seventy-two, sir,’ one of the boys had said.

‘Seventy what?’

‘Eighty-four!’ several boys called out.

‘My goodness. The procedure for admitting boys to this school deteriorates visibly every year. I expect a seven-year-old boy to tell me that. How old are you?’

The boy with the red face had murmured his age.

‘What? What? What’s that?’

‘Twelve, sir.’

‘Twelve? Twelve what? Weeks? Months? Hours? Rabbits?’

‘Years, sir.’

‘Years.’

He waited, nodding.

‘I can see we’ve got a great deal of work before us here. A great deal.’

He waited once again, still looking round.

‘I was going to add, if there are any clever-dicks here who think they know their tables backwards I would like them by a similar process – namely, the head inclined in a respectful manner towards the ceiling – to memorize and familiarize themselves with a favourite hymn. It may be a Jewish hymn, a Catholic hymn, a Methodist hymn, or an Anglican hymn, or, indeed, a Buddhist hymn if they so desire. But whatever its source, a paean of praise directed to the Divine Presence who overlooks us all. Has that been understood?’

He waited.

‘I shall, after the multiplication tables have been thoroughly tested, turn to the hymns and call forth from amongst you, ad hoc… what does ad hoc mean, boy?’

Another boy’s face turned red.

He waited.

No one, however, had raised their hands.

‘Ad hoc. Ad hoc. What language can it be, I wonder? German? Dutch? Double-Dutch?’

He waited.

‘Anybody heard of Latin?’

Several hands went up.

‘I wonder: can ad hoc be Latin?’

‘Yes, sir,’ someone said.

‘There’s a bright boy. Latin. Latin.’ He waited once again. ‘Ad hoc is Latin for “specifically for this purpose”. In other words, I shall ask certain individuals specifically to give evidence of their silent – and I repeat emphatically silent – memorizing of their favourite paean of praise to God Almighty. And may God Almighty come to your rescue if you haven’t got one ready.’ He paused. He examined each of their faces in turn. ‘What a miserable looking lot. What a clump of sour-faced duffers. Here I am, sitting in front of forty white-faced puddings, while you have the privilege of sitting in front of me.’ He paused. He looked up, speculatively, towards the ceiling. Arched supports ran across it from the walls on either side. He contemplated these for several seconds. ‘I shall expect’, he said, ‘to see not only forty studious faces memorizing their tables as well as their favourite hymnal text, but forty cheerful faces, forty smiling faces – not grinning, smiling - not laughing, not baring teeth and fangs, but joyful faces, not dismal faces, but faces which will be a welcome distraction whenever I happen to raise my head.’

He examined his watch. He removed it from his waistcoat beneath his gown, placed it on the desk in front of him, then opened the register once again. He replaced his glasses.

‘Now, then, boys,’ he said. ‘Begin.’

Several additional desks were brought in later. Piles of books were carried in. Paper parcels were opened and exercise books, brightly coloured, revealed inside. Several of the boys were moved around: ‘You, that big lump, I think I’ll have you sitting here by me. I can keep an eye on you if we both move closer, the mountain cometh to Mahomet.’ Finally they had all been given desks.

Colin sat near the back. A hot-water pipe ran along the wall immediately below his elbow; through a hole in the floor came a smell of cooking. He was too low down to see out of the window.

Books were given out. Most of them were old and battered. At one point a bell rang and they lined up by the desks and were marched out to the corridor; columns of boys were moving down the tunnel-like interior towards a pair of glass-panelled doors at the opposite end. Older boys directed them to follow.

They came out in a hall. It was taller than the classroom, its ceiling vaulted. A large mullioned window almost as broad as the room occupied the wall at one end. Immediately beneath it stood a wooden stage, with a lectern, a tall, narrow desk, and several chairs. The body of the hall was full of benches; at the rear a spiral staircase ran up to a narrow gallery in the centre of which stood an organ, its pipes set up on the wall on either side. Benches too had been arranged here and were already full of boys.

Hodges appeared on the platform; several other gowned figures filtered through the hall. Their own class had been set at the front: rows of boys were sitting on the floor. The chairs on the stage were slowly filled. Finally, the hall itself grew quiet, an odd voice called out, intoning a name. Then, to Colin’s right, a figure appeared in a mortar-board and gown: the face beneath was sharp and thin, the mouth broad, thin-lipped, the eyes narrow. Without any expression it moved down the hall and mounted the platform. After a quick look round, the mortar-board was taken off and slotted in a shelf beneath the desk.

‘Morning, school,’ the figure said.

A murmur of acknowledgment came from the hall behind. The room was packed. The heat rose with the dust through the beams of light which came in diagonally through the mullioned window.

‘That’s Trudger.’ He heard the whisper to one side, saw other heads turn, then immediately above him a hymn was announced. From the platform, beyond the headmaster’s figure, Hodges gazed down in their direction.

The hymn was sung: the boys sat down. A tall boy wearing a blazer stepped up to the platform, mounted the lectern, and read the Bible. His legs trembled as he read, his voice faltering finally when he closed the book.

‘Let us pray,’ the headmaster said.

Hodges continued to gaze round even while the prayers were said; his face, if anything, had begun to darken, glowing red against the whiteness of his clerical collar.

The other masters were of a similar age; there were three women, also wearing gowns, their handbags set on the floor beside their feet.

Finally, when the prayers were over, the boys sat down.

‘I’d like to welcome all the new boys at the beginning of our school year,’ the figure at the desk had said. ‘I’m sure they’ll grow familiar with the routine of the school by the end of the day. If they have any inquiries they can ask the master in charge of their form. And, of course, I welcome back the rest of the school.’ He took out his mortar-board from the desk and with a slight acknowledgment of the figures behind stepped down from the platform.

The masters and the mistresses on the platform, having stood up for the headmaster leaving, slowly filtered out of the door on the opposite side.

They went back to the classroom.

Hodges came in. He strode to the desk, sat down and waited until the last shuffle in the room had died.

‘Someone in this class’, he said, ‘prays to the Almighty with his eyes wide open.’

He waited.

‘They also pray with their hands stuck in their pockets.’

He put on his glasses, and set his watch in front of him again.

‘On future occasions, at morning assembly, I shall keep a watchful eye on the praying habits of this evidently dissolute class and woe betide anyone who doesn’t show the respect appropriate to such occasions. Eyes closed, hands together, and mind fixed resolutely on the true essentials: heaven, redemption, and the alternative prospect of a long sojourn in hell.’

He waited. He looked around.

‘Now, then. I’ll give you your time-table for the week.’

A small, rectangular notebook was given out to each of the class; it was like a diary. ‘Record Book’ was printed in black on the cover and inside were pages divided into columns for the days of the week.

‘This is the most important document you’re likely to possess,’ the master said. ‘Keep it with you at all times. On suitable occasions, in addition to your time-table, certain masters will inscribe commendations or, conversely – though in this class I’m sure it won’t apply – reprimands in the spaces given over to their respective lessons. At the end of each term the total of good records – or, conversely, bad records – will be added up. Those with a certain number of the former will be invited to visit Mr Walker in his study, those with a certain number of the latter will also be invited to visit Mr Walker in his study – but with quite a different purpose in mind, quite a different purpose. Those in the latter category will be invited to make the acquaintance of, if I may use the phrase, a certain piece of vegetation – known affectionately in these environs, though not by those with whom it comes into the closest contact, as “Whacker”. “Whacker”, I might add, takes a very stern view of boys who mount up records of a reprehensible nature, a very stern view, I might add, indeed.’ He paused, adjusted his glasses, glanced round, then, getting up from the desk, turned to the blackboard and began to write down the time-table for the boys to copy.

More books, later, were given out. At one point, referring to the register, Hodges had said, ‘Saville? Who is Saville?’

Colin stood up.

‘Your name is Saville, boy?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Heads at the front of the class had quickly turned.

‘Is that with one “l”, boy, or two?’

‘Two l’s, sir,’ he said.

‘Two l’s. There are two l’s in your name, not one l?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Several of the boys had laughed.

‘Why is that I have one l in the register?’ he said.

‘I don’t know, sir.’ Colin shook his head.

‘There’s one l on your certificate, boy.’ He held up the certificate still on his desk.

‘It’s always been two l’s, sir,’ he said.

‘Come here, boy,’ Hodges said.

He got out from the desk. The room was silent. His feet echoed as he walked down the room to the master’s desk.

‘Is that one l, or two?’ the master said. He pointed a narrow finger at his father’s signature. It was something Colin had noticed occasionally in the past, that his father signed his name differently on different occasions, sometimes with two l’s, sometimes with one.

‘One, sir.’

‘One, sir.’ The master gazed at him over the top of his glasses. ‘You’ll admit I’m not mistaken, then?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Very well, Saville double l, go back to your desk.’

The class had laughed. He walked back to his place.

‘Now, then, Saville double l, either your father can’t spell his name correctly,’ – laughter – ‘or I have entered it incorrectly on my list.’ He examined the register once again. ‘“Father’s occupation.”’ He wrote something down on a piece of paper. ‘Now “colliery worker” means that he works at a coal-mine. Is that correct?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Yes, what?’

‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

‘Now there are any number of people who might legitimately say they work at a coal-mine. The manager of a coal-mine might say he works at a coal-mine.’

He waited for an answer.

‘Yes,’ he said, then added, ‘Sir.’

‘I take it, of course, he’s no such thing.’

Colin waited, unsure of what to add.

‘He’s not the manager, Saville?’

‘No.’ He shook his head.

‘No, what?’

‘No, sir,’ he said.

‘He’s not the deputy-manager, either, I imagine.’

‘No,’ he said.

‘Does he work on top or, as they have it, underneath?’

‘Underneath.’

‘Does he superintend the men down there, or does he actually hew the coal itself?’

‘He hews the coal,’ he said.

‘’E’ ews the coal.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The class had laughed.

‘In other words, Saville, he’s a miner?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then why couldn’t he put that on the form?’

He bowed his head and wrote in the register for several seconds.

‘Well, Saville double l, have you got an answer?’

‘No, sir.’ He shook his head.

‘What’s the meaning of those words written on your jacket?’

He glanced down at the badge.

‘I take it you’re aware there are words written on your jacket?’

At first he wasn’t sure what the master meant.

‘Beneath that rather decorative emblem, placed symbolically above your heart, are written three words. I assume you’ve read them?’

‘Yes,’ he said. He bowed his head.

‘And I suppose’, the master added, ‘you’re familiar with their meaning?’

He didn’t answer.

‘Are you familiar with them, or are you not?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘Am I to assume you don’t know what your school motto means, then, boy?’

He didn’t answer.

‘Do you think they’re there for decoration?’

‘No.’ He shook his head.

The master paused.

‘Where do you come from, Saville?’

‘Saxton, sir,’ he said.

‘And Saxton, I take it, is located somewhere in these regions?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘How old are you, Saville?’

‘Ten, sir.’

‘And are you able to read?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘In that case, would you mind reading those three words out?’

He couldn’t see them clearly: he twisted his head.

‘Labour ips voluptas,’ he said.

‘Good God, man, do you realize what you’re saying?’

He gave up offering any answer: he saw Hodge’s face now through a sudden haze.

‘Labor, Labor, Labor,’ Hodges said. ‘Ipse, Ipse, Ipse,’ he added. He gestured round. ‘Woluptass, Woluptass, boy.’ He groaned. ‘Sit down, Saville. I believe I’m ill.’

He took out a handkerchief and wiped his brow.

‘“Labor Ipse Voluptas”,’ he said. ‘Does anyone know what the phrase might mean?’

Several hands went up.

‘Yes, boy? Yes, boy?’ He waited. ‘Don’t give me the wrong answer, boy. If you’re not sure of your answer better confess to it, like Saville. Well, then, boy?’

‘Work is pleasure, sir,’ a boy had said.

‘Work is pleasure. Correct, Correct.’ He wiped his brow again. ‘Work is pleasure, Saville. Have you got that? Have you heard?’

‘Yes, sir.’ He stood up at his desk.

‘Work is pleasure, Saville, which to revert to our original point, is a concise and unambiguous statement.’

‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

‘Whereas “colliery-worker”, as the definition of someone’s occupation, is not an unambiguous statement, Saville. I’d say, as a definition, it might cover, quite easily, a multitude of sins.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Whereas miner, and, in particular, coal-miner, as a description of someone’s occupation, is unlikely to cause misapprehension on anyone’s part. If someone tells me he is a coal-miner I am immediately aware of the sort of job he does, even if’, he added, wiping his brow again, ‘I am not aware of the actual way he goes about it. Does he work with a pick, for instance, or has he got a machine?’

He waited.

‘Does he use a pick, then, Saville?’

‘Yes, sir,’ he said, and added, ‘sometimes.’

‘I see.’ He gazed across at him for several seconds. ‘I think we have the seeds of a rebel in the class.’ He paused. ‘I sense a certain degree of rebelliousness in Saville’s nature, a resistance to instruction.’ He paused again. ‘I shall keep my eye on Saville. And on one or two other people whose behaviour over the past two hours has not escaped my notice.’ He glanced round. ‘Sit down, Saville. I shall look forward to hearing your answers to our arithmetical test, as well as to your no doubt individual hymnal contribution.’

More books were given out. Names and subject-matter and the class were inscribed on the covers. The bell sounded once again.

‘The bell is for my benefit, not yours,’ Hodges said as several heads turned round. ‘You’ve fifteen minutes’ break, to be spent in the field behind the school and not, I might remind you, on the steps. No one stays inside. Milk, for those who take it, will be found in the cloisters beneath the school. When you’ve drunk it, straight into the field.’

They were dismissed in rows.

The cloisters comprised a row of filled-in arches facing on to the field at the back of the school. The central arch stood open: it was here the milk was stacked. Crowds of boys milled round in the yard outside. Inside, within the darkness of the building, he made out several doors and the flickering, intermittent glow of boilers.

‘So you got here after all, then,’ someone said.

He turned from the crates and saw a fair-haired figure leaning up against the cloister wall drinking from a bottle.

‘What form are you in, then?’ Stafford said.

‘Three A.’

‘Three Upper.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Across the corridor from you.’

Stafford smiled.

‘How do you like it, then?’ he added.

‘All right.’

‘You passed your exam all right?’

He nodded.

‘I failed.’

‘How did you get here, then?’ he said.

‘Paying fees.’ Stafford shrugged. But for the blazer he looked no different. A silver-coloured pen was clipped to his pocket.

‘What’s the difference between Three A and Three Upper?’ he said.

‘I think we do Greek, as well as Latin,’ Stafford said. ‘You just do Latin.’ He smiled again. ‘Finished your milk? We can go into the field,’ he added.

They walked up and down.

‘Have they ducked you in the toilets?’ Stafford said.

‘No.’ He shook his head.

‘I don’t believe they do. It’s one of the things they tell you, but it never happens. I know three people who started here last year and all three of them say it never happens.’

Groups of boys ran past. One took hold of him a moment, spun him round, shouted to someone behind, then, still shouting, ran quickly on. Air-raid shelters, like low, windowless houses, lined one side of the field. Metal railings, set on a low brick wall, cut off the end of the field from a road beyond. To one side of the field stood a yellow brick house.

‘That’s where Trudger lives. And one or two boarders,’ Stafford said. Its large window looked down directly to the field. ‘He’s not supposed to be keen on teaching,’ Stafford added.

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know. They say when he canes anybody he begins to cry.’

Colin looked at the house. He could see a figure standing at a window, but from this distance it was impossible to see whether it was a man or a woman.

‘He’s got two daughters who’re worth looking at,’ Stafford added.

A bell rang. The games of football were broken up. The crowd of dark-blazered figures turned back towards the school.

‘Staying for lunch, then?’ Stafford said.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘See you later, then.’

Stafford slapped his back and ran off, calling someone’s name, towards the steps.

The day passed slowly. He didn’t see Stafford at lunch. They ate in a narrow room converted from one half of the cloisters, rows of tables and wooden benches set out behind the windowed arches. Afterwards, in the field, he saw Connors playing football, jogging up and down, the tail of his shirt hanging out beneath his jacket. For a while he stood with several other boys at the edge of the field, avoiding going to the toilets as long as he could. Finally, when he went there he found them empty. There were the usual cubicles and a row of basins, but going by their colour they could never have been used.

The afternoon, like the morning, was divided into two. Lessons started. Hodges, deliberately or otherwise, had forgotten about the tables; he’d forgotten about the hymn as well. After dismissing them for lunch they only saw him briefly at the beginning of the afternoon when he came into the room to mark the register and to announce that lessons were to start forthwith. ‘Mr Platt, who is coming in shortly to take your English, makes me, gentlemen, sound like a veritable angel. I should pay the utmost heed to everything he says, and woe betide any boy who doesn’t do immediately everything he tells you.’

He went out quickly with a swirl of his gown, removing his glasses and brushing his hand across his head.

For a while the room was silent. Then one or two voices had murmured from the front. Someone laughed; they heard a surge of voices in the corridor outside; someone called; the voices died.

The murmuring in the room began again. Throughout the morning, when they’d finished writing out their time-table in the record books, or writing their names on the fronts of the exercise books, or inside the covers of the text-books, the heads of most of the boys had been turned towards the ceiling. Several heads were turned up now, the eyes held wide and vacant, the noses below the eyes distended, the lips below the noses moving.

A man had appeared at the back of the room. He was short and squat, with thick black hair. He wore glasses; the eyes behind them were invisible because of the reflection of the light. The lenses were thick, the features beneath the glasses heavy, the nose short like the man himself, the mouth full-lipped and broad, the jaw projecting sharply.

He waited until his presence had been acknowledged by the boys at the front. Then, in silence, he walked the length of the room, placed a pile of books on the teacher’s desk, cleared his throat, wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, then, glancing round the room, sat down.

‘My name’, he said, ‘is Mr Platt.’

He continued his inspection of the class for several seconds.

‘Your names I don’t know but quite shortly,’ he said, ‘I suppose, I shall.’

He allowed the silence to continue a little longer.

‘You’ll have been given a green-backed text-book this morning with the title Principles of English Grammar. I’d like you when I give the order, quietly to take that green-backed text-book out. I’d also, when I give the order, like you to take out your bluecoloured exercise book, marked “English Grammar”.’ He paused. ‘Two books, a pen, a ruler. The ink, I believe, for those without fountain-pens, is already in the ink-wells. I give the order now: take out.’

Colin remembered little of the lesson. A drowsiness, induced by the heat of the room as well as by the smell of food still coming through the hole in the floor, caused him at one point to lean his head against the wall. He felt the coolness of the wood against his cheek, and was aware of little else until a bell rang to mark the end of the lesson.

There was no play-time in the afternoon: the black-robed figure of Mr Platt went out and was replaced a few moments later by a tall, fair-haired figure in a sports-coat and flannels who introduced himself as Mr Wells. He taught French. They recited vowels. Wells had a narrow mouth; his eyes were blue, his nose long and thin. He caused laughter round the class as he pronounced the vowels, pulling back his mouth to shape the e, elongating his face to shape the o, pouting his lips grotesquely to shape the u.

The class repeated the sounds together: they wrote down simple words. One or two stood up at Wells’s command and sounded the vowels singly: there was a suppressed air of laughter in the room of which Wells himself appeared to be unaware. He stood red-faced by the teacher’s desk almost as if he were alone, practising the sounds in front of a mirror. The lesson, like the one before it, had lasted three-quarters of an hour. A feeling of excitement crept over the room as the prospect of the bell grew near. When it actually sounded a murmur swept the class.

The lesson continued. The boys grew silent. They could hear shouts and cries from the corridor outside, the banging of doors, the shuffle of feet. Shouts came clearly from the street beyond.

Wells continued: words had been written on the board; they were copied down. Finally, looking up, the master turned his head to the noise outside.

‘Was that the bell?’ He gestured round.

‘Yes, sir,’ nearly everyone had said.

‘Homework,’ he said. ‘I take you, I believe, tomorrow morning.’

Instructions for learning certain words were given out.

Wells picked up his books; with the same absent-minded expression with which he’d entered the room he wandered out. Before he’d reached the door several boys had gone out before him.

He didn’t see Connors on the way to the stop; by the time he reached the bus he found a queue had formed. He stood for the first few miles. It was six o’clock by the time he got back home; he’d been away from the house for over ten hours.

His father came down; he sat at the table, listening, while his mother prepared his tea.

‘You’ve started work already, then?’

‘French,’ he said. He mentioned the English.

‘Have they set you homework?’

‘I’ve an hour to do tonight.’

‘Nay, tha mu’n better get started, then,’ his father said.

‘You’ll let him get his tea first. And have a rest,’ his mother said.

They watched him eat.

‘What are the teachers like?’ his father said.

‘They call them masters.’

‘Masters. Masters. What’re the masters like?’

‘They’re very strict.’

‘Nay, they’ll have to be, I suppose, to get things done.’

He took out his record book.

His father glanced through it; he flicked the pages.

‘What’re these for, then?’ he said.

‘Good work and bad work. They mark it down.’

‘I can see they believe in work,’ his father said.

‘That’s the motto. Work is pleasure.’ He pointed to the blazer.

His father laughed.

‘Sithee, not where I work, then,’ he said. ‘The one who wrote that has never been down yon.’

He read the time-table, stooping to the page.

‘Latin, I see. Chemistry. Physics. That’s a lot of work inside a week. Four mathematics. Four English. Five English,’ he added, running his finger across the page.

His father went to work a little later. He stood in the yard, fiddling with his saddle.

‘Thy football’s on tomorrow, then.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Give as good as you get,’ he added.

‘Yes,’ he said.

His father glanced across.

‘They’re not stuck up or ought, then, are they?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘You don’t feel out of place?’

‘No.’ He shook his head.

‘It’s a damn good school.’

‘Nay, get on,’ his mother said. ‘It’s as good as he deserves and nothing less.’

‘Aye, I suppose you’re right,’ his father said.

He set off down the yard.

‘Good luck tomorrow, if I don’t see you before I leave,’ he said.

Colin stood in the yard and watched him go. He went up to his room a little later. He sat on the bed, pronouncing vowels, learning the list of words the master had set.

His mother came up at the end of an hour.

‘Nay, love, you ought to be getting in. It’s after your bed-time, you know, already.’

‘I haven’t learnt them all,’ he said.

‘Well, you’ve done as long as you should,’ she said.

‘I still haven’t learnt them, though,’ he said.

‘Well, I’ll write them a note saying you’ve learnt them long enough,’ she said.

He got ready for bed. He could see Batty and Stringer playing in the field outside. Before he got into bed he went back down.

‘You needn’t write a note,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell him myself.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll write him one. You’ve done the work, after all,’ his mother said.

‘I’ll tell him myself,’ he said. ‘You needn’t bother.’

She watched him go. He could hear her from his bedroom moving round the kitchen; he heard Steven stirring in his bed through the wall. Finally the doors were bolted, the windows shut: the sound of his mother’s feet came slowly from the stairs.

She went into Steven’s room. He heard her creak the bed as she tucked in his blanket; she opened the door of his room.

He waited; a moment later the door was closed.

The sun hadn’t set; daylight came in beneath the curtain. He fell asleep with Batty’s and Stringer’s voices still ringing in his head.