Say Goodbye to the Boys Read Free Page A

five, remember? She was Welshier than Owen Glendower.’
    But Mash was not to be side-tracked. ‘You’ll let me join, all right?’ He appealed to Emlyn, for him the leader in everything. Mash drew closer and touched Emlyn’s shoulder. ‘I’d like to join. I would.’
    â€˜Get your filthy hands off me,’ Emlyn said, then he smiled. ‘Not promising anything, mind – but we’ll see what we can fix up. But no more swims in your Sunday best – OK?’
    Mash gave a whoop, jumped high in the air, and the Ariadne rocked beneath us. ‘Great!’ he said. ‘Isn’t it a great day? “Summer’s got a fine warm face”.’ He came out with this quotation now and then. The only one he knew, Emlyn claimed, just about the only thing that had stuck in his memory after all those years at school, all that private tuition. And what is more Emlyn was positive that the line came from a poem in the school magazine for 1937, a poem written by a boy in form two by the name of Edward Mortimer, whom I couldn’t remember.
    Emlyn remembered names and details that I had totally forgotten. Louise Gobrilmov – the family had been refugees from somewhere, and she a little dark girl with big eyes – but I only remembered the details through him. ‘“Winter has a cold embrace, Summer’s got a fine warm face”,’ Mash said. And he nodded and smiled and flexed the huge muscles in his arms. ‘I can join, can’t I?’
    â€˜After you,’ Emlyn said, ‘she won’t know we’ve been!’ And we laughed and lay back, the day opening up around us, the fine warm face of summer above.
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II
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    One step inside the Market Hall and you were in another age. Built by a speculator in Edwardian times it retained, after two wars, the atmosphere of those days. A step back in time to gas lighting, a penny bazaar look about the place. Around its perimeter were tiny lock up shops, in the centre open stalls for use on market days. All goods were on display because the shops had moveable shutters instead of windows, and there was a smell about the place – of fruit and meat and hung up leather shoes, and the public toilets – that was special, evocative. It had a sound of its own too – ringing, hollow, echoing – and the light in there was different from any other place in the town. Here my father had his bookshop, with which Laura now had to struggle. The wrong place, of course. Most of my father’s ventures had been miscalculated.
    That day when I had come back the other shopkeepers had given me a hero’s welcome. From Mollie Ann Fruits to Isaac Moss Cobblers, from one end of the hall to the other they had come shuffling, first a wipe of the hand on a skirt or the backside of a trouser, then a firm grip. They were all elderly, all immensely dignified, all highly articulate. Rachel Boots and Shoes had even come forward with a verse, and Harry Morgan Second Hand Furniture had left a dead cert customer standing. Tom Parry Butchers had advised me to watch my health because your blood thinned in the tropics, and Nell Lewis Crockery had said, ‘Well, I never, well I never’ over and over again, just as she did when she watched the men having a piss in the gents. It was she and her sister Kate who had set up the mirror, their shop facing the urinals... Small traders, who had known my father, and who catered for bargain hunters and thin purses. I was glad to be in their company once again. But it was a hell of a place for a bookshop, a second-hand bookshop at that.
    â€˜Rushed off your feet, are you?’ I asked Laura. She was sitting on a high stool outside the shop, a mug of tea on a pile of books, reading the Daily Mirror .
    â€˜My feet are perished,’ she replied. That was something else about the Market Hall; it only had a few windows, and these were high up and black with years