Once Read Free

pot.’ Undaunted by our mother, his mother stood over him, in her wrap-around floral apron (in summer), or her broad-belted brown gaberdine (in winter wind and rain), to the last mouthful. Just so one day she brought an ugly old hedgehog on a shovel to show my mother the new family pet. It was a world, full of eccentricity, of ordinary folk and simpletons and oddities, and community.
    There was, for a sublime example, the lady who whistled through her teeth. Every time she spoke, she whistled, like a twittering canary. We were once in the queue behind her at Trelevan Jones the baker. She had a cardboard box on the counter containing a large order of loaves. ‘What’s in the box? What’s in the box?’ I demanded loudly of my mother every time the lady whistled. Each time I asked Mrs Whitworth serving the canary-woman died of trying not to laugh. ‘What’s in the box?’ I was convinced it was a canary. My grandad had a canary called Hamish. I knew what canaries sounded like. ‘Shush! Shush!’ said my mother, bending confidentially, and ‘SHUSH!’ for all to hear.
    There was Alan in the terrace just below Ratcliffe’s. He stood in the window all day knitting a scarf from a ball of wool that tumbled slowly as it unwound in a tall glass vase. How long was that scarf, where did it wind to in Alan’s head? Up into the attic or the boxroom, like an anaconda, taking over the house. He seemed to have no other sense of time passing than the slow unwinding of a ball of wool.
    While Sam Cook has it on his hands, and all the dirt of ages. Sam is Dick’s nextdoor neighbour, and Alan-the-knitting’s chaperone. He gives Alan his daily constitutional, an act of simple kindness. Sam owns houses on Beach Road. Rentier, rent-collector, and great unwashed, he’s a short round man in a peaked cap and national health specs, with a moustache like a tired yard-brush and finger-nails like a badger’s.
    Don’t let him give you a sugared almond out of his coat pocket. It’s been there since before the war. Or that apple. Watch your mother snatch it away, with a set smile, before it gets to your lips. But if you are dutiful in pursuit of sixpence, go and sit an hour with Miss Cook, Sam’s bedridden sister, and suffer her to teach you how to knit ‘pan-scrubs’ (pronounced with a strong Northern English accent), out of a wool wound with a fine wire.
    What’s the time? Only two minutes older than when you wondered last. Oh the sickly sweet smell of a bedridden body in a white mop cap and a shawl. Oh the race down the road after, clearing your lungs of mothballs and disinfectant, and the smell of fish and chips from Oldham’s to greet you, and a waft of beer from the Ship nextdoor, the salt sea blowing beyond Min-y-Don, and the Emerald Isle Express snorting steam and soot, rattling along, laden with Irishmen, bound for Holyhead or Euston, the fireman in his shiny peaked cap, waving, as if it was all a novelty. For so life seemed.
    If not at the pictures, where else might I have heard the siren, whether the air-raid warning or all-clear, except, perhaps, on the radio? Maybe parents explained or older children told us what it was. But I suspect no one told anyone. It was on the air we breathed. Yet I know, to me, it was the all-clear, not the air-raid warning. As who would need warning of lunch, unless they took school dinners? To be clear to go was what I wanted, back into momentary freedom, however fleeting; and fleet-of-foot I’d run to make the most of it, home to ‘Thornfield’, our damp little, narrow little three-bedroom semi with its short backyard and long steep garden terraced high above it, from which you could see the tops of the trees in the Fairy Glen, across the Red Wood road below.
    But how keen I’d been to surrender my freedom to the prison-house of Pa-D’s Primary. I suppose I adored my sister, or else envied her, or was