All the Way Home and All the Night Through Read Free Page B

happened after that, more spectacular things were to happen to us, but it really finished on that day.
    A day near Christmas, and my small hometown looked nice with all the shop windows dressed up and the homes of friends done out with Christmas trimmings and flocks of birds flying across beautiful ice blue four o’clock tea-time skies, but it was the worst Christmas I ever spent in my life.
    The town where my home is lies on the banks of a wide river.
    It’s a small town, about six thousand souls all told. It slopes up from the flat marshland next to the river to the top of the healthy wolds. The plan of the town hasn’t changed much since feudal times. There is a Westfield Road, an Eastfield Road, a West Acridge, and an East Acridge. Old names abound: Castle-dyke, Fleetgate and Holydyke, Barrow Road and Finkle Lane. The way of life is easy. Everybody has their problems, people there worry as much as people anywhere else, but the surface effect is one of easiness. The youth of the town protests its dissatisfaction with the confining effect of small town life, but hardly anyone ever leaves the place. The boys work on the land or for builders or in light engineering workshops. Or they work alongside their fathers at the brickyards or at the steelworks fourteen miles away, travelling to the latter on shift buses. Some get office jobs with firms in the nearby cities and study accountancy in the evenings, travelling to work on the train or on the ferry or on both. Some, only a few, stay on at school in the sixth form and then go on to University or Trailing College. Some sail the barges up and down the river. Others go to sea but still return home. The town seems to have that kind of an effect on people.
    The girls take jobs in the local shops or at the rope factory or at the stocking factory, or they become typists in offices across the river. Or they come to their coveted goal quicker than they expected and they get married, work a job, having only served as a thin seam between school and womanhood.
    The scale of the town is in keeping with its surrounding coun-tryside. Small hills, caused by the downward, riverward sweep of the wolds, penetrate into the streets of the town, creating slight, unspectacular but pleasant changes of level and viewpoint. Rows of houses, streets, hedges, trees and fields, skylines and horizons are just right in their relationship to each other.
    Outlying parts of the town hold mystical, romantic qualities for me, stemming from youth-based experiences, memories of which persist with a clarity of line which is at times disturbing. I used to go regularly to these places with my friends when I was at school.
    The disused cement works on the river bank, overgrown and decaying, plaster peeling from the brickwork, the bricks themselves working loose and tumbling down, create miniature screes round the rootless shells of buildings.
    The remains of a small disused pier rotting quietly through the seasons.
    The cliff. Two huge worked-out chalk pits. Mysterious with thick foliage and tall, dark silent woodland.
    The Bore Wood. A terrible, haunted collection of trees and bottomless pools isolated in the centre of marshy pasture land close by the river.
    The Rabbit Pit. A bowl of low silence in the centre of a ploughed field.
    These were holy places to the friends I loved and to myself. They belonged to us. They served as a weekly escape from the long suffocating days at the Grammar School. These places formed a private world for us to which we withdrew and then, once there, we became public to each other.
    This was my home, the place where I started from. A town of huge March skies full of clean light and enthusiasm, a town of cosy winters chimney-smoking up into the blue and pink of Christmas mornings. A town remembered in perpetual Kodachrome.
    It was seven o’clock. Outside a summer breeze dawdled round the garden. We lived in a big house, a house that had true atmosphere. Attics and cellars,