LITMIR.BIZ

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I said they didn’t. My grandma had been a teacher, and she’d given me her Arthur Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopaedia of 1910, which taught in a different way from school. It asked and answered the questions teachers didn’t, and had all sorts in it, but nothing about stones growing.

      Why did stars twinkle? What was a rainbow? Why did lightning make thunder? How far off was the moon? How long would it take to get there in a steam train travelling at sixty miles an hour? And we asked our own questions. Where would they get the coal for the train from on the way to the moon? Why did the wind make leaves turn over before rain? Why did bubbles come on puddles just before the end of a downpour? Why, in the films at The Regal, did the spokes of car and wagon wheels go backwards? Did God watch us pee?

      Why did nettles sting?

      It mattered to me, a mardy-arse. I always made sure I knew where the dock leaves grew to stop the hurt. And it mattered most of all every year on Oak Apple Day, the twenty-ninth of May. Then, the boys used to run around holding nettles and stinging anybody not wearing an oak apple or an oak leaf. I got both ready the night before, so I couldn’t be caught on the way to school.

      Next to the air-raid shelter there was a great clump of nettles, Roman nettles, with purple stems. They were the worst.

      I was standing by the clump with Harold, and I thought of the pain of one nettle. Here there were ever so many, hundreds. How much pain would that be? Would rubbing dock leaves on be enough to cure it? If one nettle made me cry, what would all these do? It was a big question; a scientific question. I must find the answer.

      I moved behind Harold, put both hands between his shoulders, and pushed him in.

      I’d not heard a boy scream before. It went on. It didn’t stop. It wasn’t Harold. I ran. I ran all the way home, up the stairs, fell on my bed, and yelled and yelled, still hearing the scream in my head, and cried and cried; but I hadn’t got any dock leaves.

      The next day, Harold called me a daft beggar and a mucky pup.

      It was the time of the Liverpool and Manchester Blitz. My father joined the army to guard us against Hitler at Rhyl, and my mother and I went to Belmont every night to sleep with my grandma.

      When the air-raid siren alert sounded we took cover in the gloryhole under the stairs. But that was damp and smelt of feet and old shoes, and after a while we stayed in bed. The brick and concrete shelter was never used.

      I listened to the sound of the Dornier 17s, the Junkers 88s and the Heinkel 111s passing. The Heinkel engines made a low, beating noise. Then the Ack-Ack guns in Baguley’s fields opened up and shook the furniture.

      When the all-clear sounded, the Gang went out into Heyes Lane with torches to look for shrapnel. The glass in the torches was covered with black paper and had only a thin cross cut to show light; and we were careful not to point upwards, in case Jerry saw us.

      Shrapnel was the bits of exploded shells meant to hit the bombers, and it had to be handled carefully because it was jagged and sharp. We wrapped the pieces in our handkerchiefs and swapped them in school at playtime next day. Hot-found ones were worth twice as much as cold-found; I don’t know how we told the difference.

      Harold was lucky one night and found a German incendiary bomb that hadn’t exploded properly. It was in the gutter near Nancy Ford’s shop, and it was like a bicycle pump, and a sticky white paste with a nasty smell was coming out of the cracks in the metal. We were all looking at it in the playground next day, but we made so much noise Miss Fletcher heard and came out and took it off us. We never did find another, and Harold was vexed for a long time after.

      The air-raid siren in the village was the best in Cheshire, Harold said. It was always the first to sound the alert and the first to sound the all-clear. The rest followed, one after the other, at different times.

      I told him it was because of the speed of sound, same as thunder after lightning. The sirens sounded all at once, I said, but we heard them later because they were further away. I’d shown him in The Children’s Encyclopaedia, and how you could tell the distance by counting the seconds between the flash and the thunder. A second was as long as it took to say ‘my-pet-monkey’, and sound travelled a mile in five seconds. But Harold wouldn’t have it. He agreed about lightning and thunder because he’d seen it in the encyclopaedia; but there was nothing about air-raid sirens; so we still had the best.

      When the war came we sang in the playground:

      ‘We’re going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line!

      Have you any dirty washing, Mother dear?’

      It was one of the songs soldiers sang, and we heard it on the wireless and in newsreels at The Regal. In school, with Miss Turner, we sang ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and ‘The Raggle-Taggle Gypsies’ and ‘The Ash Grove’. ‘Waltzing Matilda’ was a song from Australia about a man who stole a sheep and was caught and drowned himself and turned into a ghost. It had good words in it; words like ‘swagman’, ‘billabong’, ‘coolibah’, ‘jumbuck’, and ‘tucker’. ‘The Raggle-Taggle Gypsies’ was about a rich young lady who fell in love with a Gypsy and ran away with him and slept in the cold cold fields, and I wondered if she was related to Harold, or was one of the Gypsies that came and sat in our garden sometimes, but I never saw any that looked like her. ‘The Ash Grove’ was sad and made me want to cry.

      One year, headmaster Twiggy had the whole school do a Carol Concert at Christmas to please Canon Gravell, with Miss Bratt playing the piano and him conducting.

      Nobody liked Twiggy. He made us scared of him on purpose. And in the practices he never said we were any good but always how bad we were and how we didn’t sing the words clearly. But that was because some of us weren’t singing the real words at all. We were singing what we sang in the playground.

      It was Harold’s idea.

      The knacky bit was to have only the Gang in on it, which was eight of us out of nearly three hundred in the school. If Twiggy did hear what we were singing he wouldn’t be able to tell who it was.

      So we sang:

      ‘While shepherds washed their socks by night

      All sat around the tub,

      A bar of Sunlight soap fell down

      And they began to scrub.’

      Then we sang:

      ‘Hark! The jelly babies sing,

      Beecham’s Pills are just the thing.

      They are gentle, meek and mild,

      Two for a man and one for a child.

      If you want to go to Heaven,

      You must take a dose of seven.

      If you want to go to Hell,

      Take the blinking box as well!

      Hark! The jelly babies sing

      Beecham’s Pills are just the thing.’

      Then there was another.

      ‘Good King Wences last looked out

      Of the bedroom winder.

      Silly bugger he fell out

      On a red hot cinder.

      Brightly shone his arse that night,

      Though the frost was cruel,

      When a poor man came in sight

      Gathering winter fue-oh-Hell!’

      And the best was to end with.

      ‘O come, all ye faithful!

      Butter from the Maypole,

      Cheese from the Co-op

      And milk from the cow.

      Bread from George Cragg bakers,

      Beer from Billy Mayoh.

      O come let’s kick the

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