What I Was Read Free Page B

the boy in a slightly stilted voice, as if he didn’t speak English fluently or perhaps had lost the habit of speaking. He poured water from a large metal tin into a kettle and placed it on one of the hotplates.
    I thought of the dreary Victorian schoolrooms of St Oswald’s, of the freezing brick dormitories, of my parents’ home with its gloomy semi-rural respectability. This place was unassuming and intimate, its spirit soft, worn and warmed by decades of use. It was as if I had fallen through a small tear in the universe, down the rabbit hole, into some idealized version of This Boy’s Life.
    Remembering what I had in the way of manners, I gave the boy my name and he didn’t flinch – a rare enough reaction, and one I appreciated. Panic began to overtake me at the thought of having to drink my cup of tea and return to the reality of school food and school rules and school life. I sat, photographing the scene with my eyes and looking around for signs that the boy lived here with a grown-up of some description. The hut was very small, but also very tidy. The floors were free of sand, and there were none of the usual cheery beach relics crowded on to window sills. The cotton rugs, though worn, were immaculate. A large pyramid of wood had been stacked neatly beside the stove.
    Not a detail out of place.
    The boy returned to the little sitting room carrying a teacup with roses on it. ‘It’s black,’ he said, handing me the tea, with no apparent desire to know if that would do.
    ‘Thank you.’ I raised the cup and gulped a hot mouthful. ‘Do you live here alone?’
    He did not welcome questions, this much was clear. Without answering, he turned back to the kitchen, followed by the cat. I waited for him to volunteer an explanation, but it didn’t come so I jabbered instead, uncomfortable with silence.
    ‘I’m at St Oswald’s, a boarder. It’s diabolical,’ I said, in an effort to prove somehow that I was on his side. ‘I hate studying and I’m no good at sport. It’s cold all the time and the food is inedible. It’s the most idiotic waste of time.’ I looked up from my tea, anxious for sympathy. ‘And money.’
    He appeared not to be listening.
    ‘Do you have a name?’ I asked.
    ‘Finn,’ said the boy.
    ‘Nice to meet you, Finn.’
    I finished my tea slowly, but once it was gone could think of no reason to stay. ‘I’d better go then,’ I said, with what sounded even to me like a lack of conviction.
    ‘Goodbye,’ Finn said and I felt like weeping.
    Outside, I turned to wave, but Finn had already shut the door on our encounter. Back at school I’d missed breakfast, chapel, and the beginning of Latin. Which meant detention and fifty extra lines.
    And bothered me not at all.

5
    It was nearly a month before I saw Finn again. By means of careful questioning I uncovered rumours of a boy who lived by himself on the coast, but no one I asked seemed terribly interested in the story. If he existed he was probably desperately poor, on the dole, with an alcoholic mother who showed up occasionally and knocked him about. The hut probably stank. It was, in other words, not the sort of story that would interest my contemporaries, involving as it did poverty, misery, deprivation.
    This pleased me. Finn was my fantasy and I didn’t feel inclined to share.
    Please don’t get the wrong impression from my use of the word ‘fantasy’. I didn’t long to see him in that way. It wasn’t even that I longed to see him so much as to be him, to escape the depressed sighs of my teachers, those exalted judges of my unexalted little life.
    ‘Not an athlete,’ sighed Mr Parkhouse. ‘Not a student either,’ sighed my Latin, maths, geography, French, English and RE masters.
    And yet I wasn’t quite ready to resign myself to the existence they imagined for me: the minor public school boy with the minor job, minor wife, minor life. I could see by their expressions that they had me pegged as the bank manager who never