LITMIR.BIZ

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cycle down the road and post a letter for me, young Jack, and keep your cakehole shut,’ she'd say. ‘There’s sixpence in it for you.’

      He always looked forward to such errands since she gave him the postage and a letter that he could throw away in the sure knowledge that no further enquiries would ever be made. The money went on Spangles for his cake hole. She never sealed the letters to save postage and he struggled to make sense of their contents.

      ‘You ought to stick them down, Gran,’ he urged in a fit of cupidity, ‘even if it costs a bit more.’

      ‘No,’ she snapped. ‘I've got to save the money for my old age.’

      Her furniture had been chosen with an eye neither to utility nor beauty but because the individual pieces were bargains at the auction sales she liked to visit. Each was a minor victory over the capitalist process, a slave redeemed from the market. An auction list was to her like a form sheet. She would go through it, pencilstublicking, marking down good bets and on viewing day Jack would be sent off to hunt through the heaps of piled up what-nots, exploded coaching chairs and lines of gloomy pianos to find the good prospect she had picked out. She would assess and value, check limbs and joints, weigh the likely opposition and take her seat at the sale with the assured aplomb of a major purchaser.

      ‘This one 'ere. This one 'ere,’ the dramatically ravaged and nicotine-patinated assistant chanting his chorus and holding up or pointing out the lots between gasps of smoke, a pack of twenty peeping out from the top pocket of his work jacket. Everyone seemed to have a fag in their mouth in those days. Granny Scoggins particularly liked to snatch a good piece from the filter-tip chomping jaws of a dealer, grimly raising her bid by a shilling a time, irritating the caller, making them work for it, no surplus value there, till they threw up their hands and either raised by a pound or walked away muttering. Her trophies were crammed round the walls, under the posters showing Soviet heroes snarling in Cyrillic script, an unrecognised bow-fronted chest of drawers of the 18th century – Jack had slept as a baby in one of those drawers - a Victorian prie-dieu with claw-feet, a bearskin rug with missing teeth and a crumbling plaster head, even a metal hospital trolley in chipped cream enamel - piled up year after year as if in storage.

      ‘Why don't you sort them out, gran, and get rid of stuff you never use?’

      ‘I will. I will,’ irritably, ‘when I work out where I'm going to settle down.’

      On the dresser she had a volume of photos even older, in tones of hushed sepia, set like statues in gold-rimmed alcoves scooped into thick, cream paper. She would point to flat-chested women in pudding-basin haircuts.

      ‘Look. That's what we used to wear. Your Auntie Mabel got the back of the hairbrush for doing the Charleston in the parlour with a sailor. She was a flapper.’

      Jack could hardly believe it when, years later, he found out she had bought the album too at a jumble sale and simply adopted the abandoned pictures as her own vanished past, as you might take in a stray cat.

      ***

      Jack’s school had begun as a large private house of some pretension, raised up by a successful manufacturer of gas mantles, his income securely protected for life with a hedge of patents, whose builder had a taste for adding on expensive extras like bay windows and fretwork gables. Once it had even had a name and a weathered inscription over the door lintel still read La Belle Époque. The bottom had fallen out of the gas mantle business and it was here that now lay the headmistress's office and living quarters. Being in a house, made the whole school seem a mere temporary wartime billet and justified the eccentricity of its arrangements. It was here that health workers in acts of state benefaction and control groped boys' testicles, patted budding breasts, held up fingers to be counted while the nit nurse – Nitty Nora - lifted greasy hair with a pencil probing for infestation. Jack wasn't impressed by the nit nurse. For years she missed Tony Wrigley's lice. Should get her own eyes tested. The bugs were so at home that, in sunny weather, they crawled out to bask on his forehead like seals on rocks. As a party trick, he would comb them out on the desk, spear them on the nib of his pen and drown them in the inkwell. It was only when other parents refused to let their children sit beside him that something was finally done about it and he stank the class out with rank coal tar. Oddly, he had never been mocked. To the children, he was a figure of awe.

      The first joke every Weylands child learned was to call La Belle Époque 'The Belly Poke.’ Over the years the house had not maintained its decorative elements. So it had a weathervane, porch and gazebo but the first no longer moved, the second had no roof and the third had no floor as well as no place in the children's vocabulary and was given over to brambles as Nature’s way of forbidding climbing. In the spirit of utility Britain, the gardens had been crisscrossed with lumpy tarmac paths by the erratic sprayers of the Department of Works. Sour, craggy men, do-it-for-you-private expressions on their faces, they had taken bitter pleasure in their work like the Romans imposing straight lines on the curvaceous English landscape. Between the paths, the gardening club's rose bushes clung to an undernourished and poisoned semi-life, their only protection the terrible penalties with which the children were threatened for unauthorised stepping off the tarmac.

      Around The Belly Poke had accreted a series of meaner structures, as the post-war demographic bulge passed through the school system like a goat down the body of a boa constrictor. There was a large hall of ecclesiastical feel but built of those cheap municipal bricks with the raised herringbone pattern that they used for clinics, council houses and other shoddy dispensaries of State charity and that crumbled to the touch. There was an outside toilet block where the pipes froze and burst every winter but which was ideal for felonious pursuits. Some of the older boys could pee over the wall into the bit where the girls skipped but throwing water over in your hands was just as good and made them scream. Jack saw the competitive peeing as not distinct in kind from any other athletic pursuit, running, jumping and throwing things. A concrete canteen, bolted together with rusted iron clamps, was haunted by ghosts of boiled cabbage and prunes. The fifth form dwelt apart and exclusive in a separate modern prefab of brieze blocks and metal windows that offered an alluring taste of the perks of maturity.

      In short, it looked the way a school should look, ramshackle, serviceable, territorially diverse, was immediately identifiable as such and could in fact be nothing else. The authorities tried to humanise the blank playgrounds with a policy that combined kindness and parsimony. A painter turned up and painted large bullseye patterns on the outside walls of the hall before the puzzled eyes of the children. The idea was that they would amuse themselves by throwing balls at these targets. But disorderly ball games were strictly banned on school premises and anyway the children would not have used the bullseyes, being primly shocked and baffled by this unsuitable and punishable graffiti.

      Across the way was the war memorial. The First World War had led to the erection of a yeoman redbrick version of the cenotaph with bronze name tablet and garland-brandishing goddess of peace whose leaves corroded and dropped over the years so that she now seemed to invite to a game of deck quoits. The Second War, being a sort of sequel to the First, was economically accommodated by putting up an extension to one side so that the original structure was now lopsided like a one-armed veteran but the older and least mature members of the village still raised their hats to it as they passed. Children avoided that by not wearing their caps until out of its range and to climb on it carried a rumoured threat of the death penalty.

      Since school was a thing of good works, it fell largely within the female domain like church-going and midwifery. Some of the teachers were married but since only charladies on the wireless could use plain 'Missus' as a form of address, they were all called 'Miss' in class, spinsterhood thrust upon them out of politesse. The headmistress, Miss Dappleforth, known to generations as ‘Dora Duckweed’, was as short as her patience, ancient and frightening with hair-sprouting warts – one on her chin had two black hairs exactly like the feelers of an insect - blue veins and a penchant for tweeds and sensible shoes. These she repaired herself with iron brads so she combined the tread of an Aldershot drill sergeant with the smell of old leather and Yardley's lavender. She spat when she talked.

      ‘Don't spray it, say it,’ the children chanted under their breaths. If they didn't dare say the words, just

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