Old Drumble Read Free

a click. Andy the Drover did it all the time.
    Jack had practised it in the bathroom mirror, but he couldn’t seem to get it right. When he did the nod, he forgot to close one eye, or his head went up and down instead of sideways. He went out to the wash-house now, stood on a box so he could look in the mirror over the hand basin, and nodded at himself. His eye didn’t close, and his chin didn’t seem to swing to one side, not the way Andy’s did. And he couldn’t get the click right. It didn’t sound like “Click!,” it didn’t come at the right time, and he thought he looked silly, so he poked out his tongue, tried to say, “Unga-Yunga!” to it, and bit it.
    He tried several more times and was just thinkinghe’d got it right, nodding his head, winking one eye, and clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth, when his mother’s voice said, “What on earth are you up to now? Shaking your head, blinking into the mirror, and making that noise. Get off that box at once, and find yourself something useful to do.
    “Anyway, what are you doing inside, getting under my feet and upsetting my house? Why aren’t you outside, running around and making the most of it while the rain’s stopped?”
    Jack didn’t remind his mother that she’d ordered him to keep inside out of the puddles and mud. He shot out the door before she changed her mind again, galloped through the water that was left, and made channels in the mud with his heel so one puddle could run into the next along the side of the road and help him make up his mind which end of Ward Street was up and which was down. Away down the other end of Ward Street, Harry Jitters was doing the same thing, but it was too far for Jack to see whether he was still holding his head well back.
    Jack found he could get the water to run from one puddle into another, all right, but sometimes it emptied out of a puddle towards his end of Ward Street, and sometimes it emptied towards the other end. He was still trying to work out which was the top and which was the bottom when he heard the voice he’d been waiting for.
    “You’ll catch it from your mother, splashing aroundin the mud, getting your clothes wet. Here, jump up and I’ll give you a dub home.”
    Jack put one foot on top of his father’s boot on the pedal, climbed on the bar, rang the bell, and asked, “Dad, which is the top end of Ward Street?”
    His father whistled. “Now that’s an interesting question!” Jack thought of what his mother had said and grinned over the handlebars at the front mudguard. “We call this the top end, because we live up here,” said his father. “Down where Harry Jitters lives, that’s the other end to us, so we call it the bottom end.”
    “But Harry reckons his is the top end and ours is the bottom end.”
    “That’s how it looks to him,” said Jack’s father. “But from up our end, he’s down the bottom end. We go down to his end, but he comes up to our end.
    “When I think of it,” he told Jack, “I have to pedal to get up to our end, from down Harry’s end. But I have to pedal to get down his end from up our end as well. You realise what that means?”
    “Does it mean that Ward Street goes down in the middle?”
    “Maybe.” Jack felt his father shake his head as he pedalled in their gate, around the back of the house, and said, “I suppose you realise it could mean that Ward Street’s flat.”

Chapter Six
    Why They Dug the Drains With a Fall in Them,
Why You Don’t Want to Think About
Making a Click When You Nod, and
How Jack Knew His Mother
Was Having Him On.
    J ACK WASN’T SURE that he wanted Ward Street to be flat. He rang the bell again and said, “I thought if the puddles ran away down the street to Harry’s end, that would make our end the top end.”
    “And did they?”
    “They just ran into each other and soaked away.” With his big toe, Jack felt for his father’s boot, curved his foot to fit it, and slipped off the bar.
    “We’re