LITMIR.BIZ

      I couldn’t really read before I was in Monsall. I could read the words in the pictures because they were all big letters, but there was a lot more of the story below the pictures in both big and little letters, and I didn’t understand those.

      I lay in bed and looked at the words. Some of the big letters were in the pictures and in the story below, and some of the little letters were the same as the big. I tried to work out what the strange ones were by putting them together. Names were the easiest. ‘KIT’ and ‘Kit’ must be the same. So ‘i’ was ‘I’, and ‘t’ was ‘T’. Then once I’d got that I saw ‘e’ was ‘E’, ‘n’ was ‘N’, ‘h’ was ‘H’, and ‘g’ was ‘G’ in ‘Stonehenge’. Then ‘b’ was ‘B’ in ‘Brit-basher’. And so, one at a time, I learnt the little letters; and after practising over and over, in one moment I saw I could read everything. I was that excited I had to stop and lie down flat in the bed. I was shaking and couldn’t hold the pages still. The sky was blue, with white fluffy clouds, and the sun shone on the barrage balloons.

      Barrage balloons were tethered to the ground with cables for the cables to catch against the wings of German bombers in the Blitz and make them crash. The balloons were like fat silver sausages, and each had three fins to keep it steady.

      Once, when I was at home, I heard a Spitfire engine and the sound of the machine guns. I went into Trafford Road and looked up and saw a barrage balloon had broken from its moorings and was drifting over the village and trailing its cable, and a Spitfire was trying to bring it down by shooting its fins and puncturing them so it fell gently without doing any damage or killing people. The pilot was circling round, being careful not to hit the body of the balloon, and I watched it sink until it disappeared over the Woodhill and the Edge.

      As soon as I could read properly, Arnold didn’t bother me much. Because I was reading, I didn’t hear him. And when I was well enough to get out of bed my mother and father were allowed to come and visit me.

      They could come for fifteen minutes, but they had to stand outside and shout through the window, and the window had to be shut tight.

      I told them about Arnold and how he’d cacked himself and how I could read now, and kept asking when I was coming home. And they laughed and my father said keep calm and carry on, which everybody used to say. And then the fifteen minutes were up and they had to go and it was somebody else’s turn for fifteen minutes. We kissed through the glass and the glass was cold and we waved and I cried and they went home. And I went back to bed and read my comics.