In a Good Light (7 page)

These Sunday evenings were especially precious because so much of Christian's time was taken up with matters more important than Monopoly or me. It was his final year at Junior School, and he seemed to spend every waking moment being drilled by Mother in Maths and English in preparation for some great test. After school, instead of tearing around the garden with me or practising new ways of getting from the attic to the cellar without touching the floor, he would sit in the dining room, chewing his pencil over
Fletcher Book Three
, and
More Verbal Reasoning
. At first I was allowed to be present at these lessons, in the hope that I might pick up some crumbs of knowledge as they fell. I would sit next to Christian while he wrestled with sets and sequences, and dash off crayon drawings one after another. In half an hour I might have produced twenty pictures, and Mother would be muttering about paper not growing on trees. Eventually I was expelled from the sessions for disruptive behaviour. My habit of clamping my tongue between my teeth and humming while I drew was too much of a distraction to the would-be scholar.

On Saturdays Mum would put on the newest of her nearly-new dresses and drag Christian off to various open days run by local schools. On her return she and Dad would
withdraw to the dining room to confer, while Christian tore off his shirt and tie and joined me in the garden. The few free hours remaining to Christian during this period were spent outdoors, practising one or other of the sports at which he excelled. He was the sort of boy who could spend hours quite happily chucking a tennis ball against a wall, or bouncing a football on his head. He even took his cricket bat to bed with him and hugged it while he slept. He couldn't stand still for a minute without his arms wheeling around in a burst of imaginary spin-bowling, or walk down the street without dribbling a pebble along at his feet. On one occasion we rigged up a badminton net in the garden using two bamboo canes from the runner beans and a gooseberry net. Dad chewed a rectangular court out of the long grass with the rotary mower and for weeks we did nothing but chase shuttlecocks as the wind sent them swooping into the rough. Then the birds started eating the gooseberries, and that was that. Instead we put a wellington boot on the end of the bamboo poles and used them for jousting on our rickety bicycles. We faced each other at opposite ends of the garden, lances balanced on handlebars, and rode like the wind, until – Whump! – I'd feel the impact of a boot in my chest and I'd be on my back in the grass, gazing at the sky through a spinning pattern of oakleaves.

The letter offering Christian a scholarship to the best boys' school in the area arrived on a Saturday morning in spring. Having exerted themselves for some months with just this end in mind, Mum and Dad were oddly subdued. Success, of the sort that comes in envelopes, was always to be treated with caution, it seemed. They sat Christian down to break the good news.

‘Well done, son. You've got a scholarship to Turton's,' Dad began, offering him a hand to shake.

‘Was that the one with the pool and the squash courts?' Christian asked, punching the air when Dad confirmed that it was. ‘Magic.' He mimed a forehand smash.

Mum, already totting up the cost of another variety of racket, not to mention the uniform, smiled bravely. ‘It's a great opportunity for you, Christian,' she said. ‘You're very fortunate.'

Having dispensed with the congratulations, Dad launched into the first of their reservations. ‘The thing is,' he said, folding and unfolding the letter mechanically, ‘if you do go to Turton's, you'll be mixing with boys from much wealthier families.'

‘So?' To Christian, other boys' families were a matter of complete indifference, wealthy or not. ‘I don't care.'

‘What we're trying to say is that the friends you make there will be able to afford things that we can't,' Mum explained.

‘What sort of things?'

‘Well, pocket money, television, new bicycles, expensive toys, parties, foreign holidays.' Mum got quite carried away counting off potential areas of deprivation on her fingers until Dad interrupted.

‘These are unimportant material things, of course, we all know that,' he put in hastily. ‘The point is, if you go to Turton's you'll have to accept that there will be times when you feel left out. And we won't be able to buy you back in.'

‘Doesn't bother me. If people like me, they'll like me, won't they?'

‘Exactly. That's just the right attitude. Good lad,' said Dad, hoping to wrap up the discussion and post off the
acceptance slip before Mum had a crisis of conscience and changed her mind.

‘The other problem with schools like Turton's,' she said, stalling, ‘is that they tend to give the boys who go there the idea that they're a cut above.'

‘Is that bad?' asked Christian. He had, after all, spent the last six months hunched over those test papers trying to ensure he was a cut above the other three hundred or so applicants.

‘In the eyes of God everyone is special,' Dad said.

‘But not boys at Turton's?'

‘No, no,' said Dad, conscious of having muddied the waters. ‘You'd be special whichever school you went to. And children who don't go to Turton's are no less special than anyone else.'

‘Can I go to Turton's one day?' I asked.

‘No, darling,' said Dad, patting my hand. ‘It's a boys' school.'

‘Are boys specialler than girls?'

‘Absolutely not,' said Mum.

‘So can I go there or not?' Christian wanted to know.

‘I don't see why not,' Dad said, uncapping his pen.

‘Now that we've ironed out those few little worries,' Mum added. We all watched as Dad drew a squiggle on the dotted line. It was Christian who broke the silence of this solemn moment.

‘Can I have a squash racket?' he said.

The evening before the first day of term, Christian was made to parade in front of us in his school uniform. Grandpa Percy – Mum's dad – had sent a cheque for the whole kit: even the socks were new. Christian stood scowling in the
middle of the sitting room, a cardboard doll, hung with his press-out clothes. The blazer sat stiffly on his shoulders; his trousers held twin creases like the blade of a sword. He held his head awkwardly as though wearing an orthopaedic neck brace. On closer inspection it was discovered that he had failed to remove the cardboard packaging from the shirt collar.

A flash cube splintered and popped as Dad took a photo to send to Grandpa Percy, as proof that his funds had been properly deployed and not diverted to the Less Fortunate, as had sometimes been known to happen.

‘Right, that's enough preening,' said Mother, giving Christian a gentle push. ‘Off to bed.'

I was the only one who remembered his shoes. Mum found me ten minutes later in the cupboard under the stairs, picking through a box of rags. ‘What on earth are you doing in here?' she asked.

‘Looking for shoe polish,' I replied, still rummaging. ‘Have we got some?'

‘I don't know.' She looked helpless. ‘It would be here if anywhere, I suppose. What do you want it for?'

‘To clean Christian's shoes for school,' I explained, hoping she might take over.

‘That's a nice thought, dear,' she said, and left me to it.

Eventually, after further ransacking, I turned up a dented tin of black Tuxan containing a couple of fossilised pellets of polish. I carried it into the kitchen along with one of the fresher rags, and set to work.

So it was that Christian began his career at Turton's with shiny shoes, and I went into the top infants with black fingernails and was called a dirty little tinker by the dinner-lady.

OUR SUMMER HOLIDAYS
were spent at the same place every year – a caravan on the Pembrokeshire coast, just upstream from Milford Haven. The owner was a friend of Dad's from his college days who had disgraced himself by abandoning his wife and young son for another woman. My parents, who strongly disapproved of his behaviour, had allowed the friendship to lapse, but his ex-wife, Barbara, still maintained irregular contact by letter, and insisted we continue to use the caravan. They evidently shared my parents' horror of anywhere ‘commercialised' – a term whose broad sweep took in everything from the Blackpool illuminations to a solitary gift shop – as the caravan was parked, by arrangement with the farmer, at the edge of a field on a river estuary, several miles from the nearest settlement. It was reached by a rutted clay track full of deep potholes, filled in wet weather with tea-coloured water. The car would often get bogged down, its
trapped wheels spinning helplessly, and we would have to fetch stones and slates to build up the collapsed path beneath the tyres. In dry weather the car crunched over sharp chippings and sagged onto punctured rubber. Dad would say, ‘Hey-ho,' and reach for the jack, while we unloaded the luggage onto the side of the path to dig out the spare wheel. None of this ruffled Mum and Dad, who accepted all such minor inconveniences with perfect serenity. Holidays were not an opportunity to wallow in luxury, but a chance to renew our appreciation for the comforts of home.

We bought milk and eggs daily from the farm and filled our giant canisters with drinking water from the outside tap. Every morning we would hike across country, over stiles and streams to the village shop and return carrying bread and fresh meat and vegetables. The round trip took most of the morning; the rest of the time Christian and I spent mudcombing along the shoreline at low tide, or fooling around in our rubber dinghy when the water was high, trying to stop the outboard motor snagging the reeds. Dad, safely upstream of our splashing, dozed over his fishing rod, while Mum sat on a canvas deckchair peeling through a pile of library books, or knitting six inch squares for an aid project known as The Universal Quilt.

In the evening Mum would cook dinner on a two-ring primus stove, using whatever we had managed to buy that morning, along with our supplies of dried food from home. Some of these combinations were more successful than others: chicken with mushrooms and rice we liked; pork chops with spaghetti and marrow we didn't. Plates had to be cleared either way, as there was no larder or fridge for raiding later. Dad would boil a kettle to wash the dishes in
a bucket, and then we would sit around the table by the light of a whining gas-lamp and play non-competitive games until bedtime.

One night, on our first visit there, I woke up to a darkness so complete I thought I'd gone blind. My screams must have been audible in Milford Haven, and caused pandemonium in the confined space of the caravan, as the other three blundered around, stubbing their toes and colliding as they hunted for the torch. After that episode I was never comfortable in a blackout again, and Mum had to leave a candle burning all night to placate me.

Caravan life favoured those with a strong bladder. It was a half-mile hike to the chemiloo in the farmer's spidery shed, which had no light and the bottom half of a stable door which didn't shut. If you applied any pressure it was likely to come adrift from its one hinge altogether. For emergencies there was a bucket behind the caravan. I don't remember washing: I think we went without.

We seldom left our immediate surroundings, except on foot. That stony track was a powerful deterrent to unnecessary travel, particularly if we'd used the spare tyre on the way in. One glorious day, though, when the temperature was in the nineties, Mum and Dad contained their revulsion and took us to a seaside resort, where we dug fortifications against the incoming tide and threw our grubby little bodies off the collapsing ramparts into the surf. Mum changed into an ancient flowered swimsuit with an attached skirt and moulded cups like half coconuts, and showed off plucked-chicken skin to the sun. Dad, who was red-haired and likely to burn, stayed covered up and did the crossword. When Christian and I started to wrinkle from too much
time in the water we scratched ourselves dry on thin, prickly towels and played tennis on a court drawn in the sand with the edge of a spade.

In the afternoon we walked along the front and bought 99s from a fat man in a kiosk. The ice-cream swirled onto the cones, whiter than anything in nature, and tastier too.

‘Forty new pence!' mum muttered, shaking her head as she handed over the cash. ‘That's eight shillings.' It nearly broke her heart to give that sort of money to someone who looked so well-fed.

‘Still, it's only once a year, eh?' Dad said, seeing the rapture on our faces as we licked the pointed white peaks into smooth hills.

‘You're right, you're right, I should just shut up and enjoy it,' Mum sighed. ‘But what a price.'

Lured by the flashing lights and the chink of coins, Christian and I hung back at the entrance to the amusement arcade, gazing at the slot machines, with their tempting overhang of copper pennies. Anyone could see that it would only take one more penny to bring the whole lot crashing down, but we knew better than to ask for something that didn't grow on trees, especially after that ice-cream.

There was a whoop from an old woman beside the door. The one-armed bandit had started to pump out silver:
ker-chunk, ker-chunk
, went the beating of its metal heart, as the woman scrabbled to collect her winnings. Christian's eyes gleamed as she moved away. He could see one she'd missed – a ten pence piece winking in the corner of the tray. He waited until she had gone and then ducked inside to claim it.

‘Where did you get that?' Mother demanded, pouncing.
She had been looking at postcards a few doors down and only just noticed we weren't with her.

‘From in there. It was just lying there,' he said defensively, his fingers closing round the coin. Up ahead I could see a man holding a box of flags and a collecting tin in the shape of a lifeboat. Christian saw him too. ‘Please can I keep it?' he begged, knowing how Mum's mind worked.

‘Well,' she looked to Dad for a ruling, but he just shrugged. ‘All right,' she relented. ‘But you'd better pray you're never shipwrecked!'