would soon come to realise this was a normal suburban road – a cul-de-sac – but I couldn’t see any wide green spaces or trees or distant hills, only a few small flowers in gardens down the road. Worse still, I could hear a continuous rumbling sound in the background, which I later found out was traffic. At Field House there had always been peace and quiet, except for the birdsong in the trees, so this was all a huge shock to me.
‘Let’s go inside,’ suggested Pearl, leading me in through the front door.
CHAPTER 6
Stepping into a small gloomy hallway, the first thing I noticed was the strong smell. I recognised it as a clean smell, similar to our bathroom at Field House. It was the smell of bleach. How strange that it should be in the hall of this house instead of beeswax polish. I suppose I thought everybody lived as we did, so now I would have to learn different ways.
Standing in the hallway with Pearl, I was wary of Arnold, standing behind us. She must have known.
‘Let’s go up to the bathroom first and clean you up properly,’ she said. She led the way up the stairs and straight into a clean white bathroom. ‘Take off all your clothes,’ she said, opening my case and getting out my change of summer clothes. She ran warm water into the basin and used soap and a flannel to wash me down, then dried me with a fluffy towel – much nicer than the scratchy old ones I’d been used to.
‘Can I go to the toilet?’ I asked, desperate by now.
‘Yes, of course, it’s just next door to the bathroom.’ She opened the door for me.
Meanwhile, she must have put my case in one of the bedrooms.
‘That’s better, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘You’re all clean and smell nice again. Let’s go downstairs and I’ll show you round the house.’
We walked down the thin, red cord carpet running down the middle of the stairs. At the bottom the hall floor was covered in lino, with a flowery pattern. There were three doors from the hall, one of which was closed.
‘That’s the front room,’ explained Pearl, opening the door just wide enough for me to see a dark, formal room with old-fashioned furniture and quite a musty smell. ‘You’re not allowed to go in there on your own, only when one of us is with you.’ She quickly closed the door again.
‘This is the kitchen,’ she said, taking me through an open doorway to the back of the house. It seemed very clean and sparse. Again, there was a lino floor, with a different flowery pattern and a flowery mat in front of the sink. Almost everything in this house seemed to be floral!
‘This leads to the garage,’ she said, opening a door at the side of the kitchen. ‘You can play in there if you want to, when the weather is bad.’ She opened another, narrower door at the back. ‘And this is the pantry. We keep all of our food nice and cool in here.’ She opened that door to show me the shelves, stacked high with tins and packets of all shapes and sizes.
Being a boy who loved his food, I was relieved to see that they had so much of it stored away, but I was puzzled there were no cooking or baking smells in here. I was quite hungry by now, having not eaten since lunch, but I knew I would probably have to wait until it was a meal time.
‘We bought this house when it was newly built,’ said Pearl, ‘so we could choose to have a nice modern kitchen.’
I suppose it was very modern for its time, with a stainless-steel sink, cupboards and a small work surface, plus a Formica and tubular steel table and four matching chairs – all very neat and tidy.
‘This is our sitting room,’ she said, taking me back through the hall and opening the third door, which led into a lighter, airier room. ‘Arnold and I come and sit in here in the evenings.’ She indicated the sofa and two armchairs. Then I noticed the strange wooden cupboard thing in the corner, with a small piece of glass in the front.
‘What’s that?’ I asked, pointing at it.
‘That’s our television.’
‘What’s a television?’
‘You switch it on and it shows moving pictures of things, like in the cinema.’
‘What’s a cinema?’ This was all new to me and my curious mind.
Pearl explained in more detail about films and television programmes, which intrigued me.
‘Does it have programmes for children?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she replied, lowering her voice. ‘But Arnold might not let you watch those.’ She didn’t explain why. ‘We don’t watch it much,’ she continued in a whisper. ‘Arnold doesn’t like most of the programmes they show.’
‘What do you like?’ I asked Pearl, innocently, too young to interpret her reticence.
She looked a bit uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know,’ she eventually answered. ‘Arnold doesn’t like me watching it when he isn’t here – he likes to decide what we watch.’ She paused. ‘He likes Dixon of Dock Green, so we watch that.’
Just then there was a metallic noise. ‘What’s that?’ I asked, turning towards the corner of the room where it came from. That’s when I saw the cage and its yellow and green occupant. ‘You’ve got a budgie!’ I exclaimed. It was the first time I had smiled since I came into this house.
‘Yes, that’s Joey,’ she said.
‘We had a budgie at Field House,’ I told her. Then I turned to the bird and said, ‘Hello, Joey.’ He didn’t reply, but he cocked his head to one side as if interested in what I was saying. ‘Hello,’ I repeated.
‘He doesn’t talk,’ explained Pearl, ‘but I think he likes you.’
I was pleased because I could look forward to getting to know Joey and maybe teach him to say ‘hello’ – I would enjoy that.
Also at that end of the room was an oak gate-leg table and four chairs.
‘This is where we eat our Sunday lunch,’ explained Pearl. ‘The rest of the time we eat in the kitchen.’
There were two windows and a French door to the back garden. I looked outside to see if there was a lovely big lawn to run around and trees to climb, but I was disappointed. There was a concrete raised area and some steps down to a patch of grass, but it was very small and being a new house, there was nothing much growing there yet.
‘Now, let’s go back upstairs and I’ll show you where your bedroom is,’ suggested Pearl. ‘We can unpack your case.’
At the top of the stairs was a landing, a bathroom and three bedrooms. I’d already seen the bathroom, which was very small, but it had everything it needed. Pearl showed me where my toothbrush and face flannel could go and she’d bought a new pale blue towel.
‘It will be your towel,’ said Pearl. ‘Just for you.’
