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 door in!
O come let’s kick the door in!
O come let’s kick the door in!
Twiggy’s a turd!’
At the finish, Canon Gravell thanked Twiggy, not us. Then we broke up for Christmas. And the Gang laughed.
Soon after the war ended, though, Mr Ellis, our class teacher, told my parents I should go into Manchester and take a test. None of us knew what he was talking about. My class was being tested all the time, practising for the Eleven Plus exam. But my mother said because Mr Ellis was Cornish he had the Second Sight; and I liked him. A lot didn’t. He let me read to myself in class while the others were reading aloud. He taught me to play chess and he taught me special punctuation. I liked semi-colons. He was strict, but not bad-tempered like Twiggy.
So I went to Manchester and took the test, along with two thousand other boys, in a room as big as The Regal.
A letter came in the post some time after, and my mother was waiting for me at the end of School Lane when lessons were over. She told me I’d won a scholarship.
That evening, the Gang were playing round the sand patch. It was Ticky-on-Wood. Harold’s mother came out of the house. Her face was different. ‘Well, Alan,’ she said, ‘you won’t want to speak to us any more.’
I didn’t understand. I felt something go and not come back.
When I was five, my mother told me I was going to have to start school and I said I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay at home and look after her. She said she’d waited since September so as not to spoil Christmas, but now I had to go or else we’d be summonsed. I shouldn’t have to stay for school dinners, though. I could come home.
I said what about playtimes. She said I’d have to stay for them, but I could take the wooden curtain ring my father had brought back from one of the houses he was decorating, and the playground was bigger than our floor, so it would roll further.
My mother got me a new pair of clogs and greased the wooden soles with lard between the irons to stop the snow from bawking up and twisting my ankles, and we went to school for twenty to nine so I could meet the teachers.
Miss Fletcher was the headmistress of the Infants and she showed me my peg in the cloakroom where I had to hang my coat. It was number 17, the same number as my birthday. Then I met Miss Bratt, who was the teacher for the Second Year. She had a big head and grey skin and wore a box on her chest under her dress and her voice was hard to understand. That was because she was deaf, my mother said. Then there was Miss James, who was small and dumpy and had red cheeks. Her dress came right to the floor and she had to pull herself up to sit at her high desk.
Miss Fletcher took me to see the playroom, and I grabbed my mother’s coat and wouldn’t let go.
There were two horses, much bigger than me, made of wood and painted dapple grey. Their hooves were black with a gold line for horseshoes and their eyes were glass and bulged and their teeth were white and their nostrils and inside their ears were red and their manes and tails were real hair.
Miss Fletcher tried to lift me to sit on the saddle of one, but I shouted, so she put me down, and I shouted more because the horse had come alive and was rocking back and to and its nostrils were snorting over my head and it was going to eat me.
Miss Fletcher took hold of my hand, but I wouldn’t let go of my mother. Then Miss Fletcher looked at me, and her eyes were like no one’s eyes I’d seen before, and my mother got loose and went home. Miss Fletcher carried me into Miss James’s classroom and sat me down in a desk next to a girl called Sheila, and Miss James told me to give over skriking.
The desk had two squares carved on the top, one for each of us. The squares were filled with other squares, ten across and ten down each side. The middle four squares made one big square with two lines from corner to corner, which made eight triangles. I didn’t know what they meant, but counting them stopped me crying; and then Miss James was telling us a story about Three Little Pigs, and I listened, though I knew it already from my grandma.
Then it was playtime.
The Infants. I am in the back row, two along from Miss Fletcher, and Sheila is at the end on the right of the second row from the front (© the author)
First we had to drink a third of a pint of milk through
