by Alan Garner
It was our favourite story, and every time E. Paminondas got home without the bread my grandma stopped, and we all shouted, ‘Laws sakes, E. Paminondas, you ain’t got the sense you was born with! You never did have the sense you was born with! You never will have the sense you was born with!’
When I read about E. Paminondas in The Children’s Encyclopaedia I found his name was spelt ‘Epaminondas’ and he was an Ancient Greek general who had saved Thebes from the Spartans at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC. I wondered how anyone so daft could have grown up to do that.
Mrs Finch’s Gatepost
Marina and I checked the gatepost every morning on our way to school.
It was while my mother and I were spending the nights at Belmont with my grandma when my father was in the army.
There was no gate to Mrs Finch’s garden. We couldn’t remember ever seeing one. But the stone post was there, and the wall; and set in it was an iron thumb latch, which had two positions: up and down. If it was up, there would be no rain that day. If it was down, rain was certain sure. So, as we passed, we checked, and changed the weather when necessary.
Mrs Finch lived in a thatched cottage next to The Royal Oak on Heyes Lane. The cottage was built of brick and was yellow ochred. It was so old it sat below the level of the road. The garden was an overgrown orchard. Above her door was a brown painted sign with gold letters offering Refreshments and Teas with Hovis Bread. The door was always open, but inside was that dark it was hard to see.
Mrs Finch lived alone. She had company, though.
Cats sat in the doorway, ran in the grass and up the trees, walked along the stone wall and on the thatch, and we saw them moving inside the house, sitting on the furniture and in the windows, upstairs and down; and one cat, not always the same cat, was curled round the teapot in the middle of the table, keeping the pot warm in case someone called for a Hovis Tea, Marina said.
The stink made us hold our noses, even on the road.
Mrs Finch didn’t scare us. And we didn’t laugh at her. She was kind, and smiled. She should have been a witch, but we never thought she was. We met her on the road between her cottage and Rupert Warren’s shop, where she went to cadge offal and scraps. The stink came with her and stayed after, as she shuffled along, always in a black coat and hat, always nodding and talking, though we didn’t ask her who she was talking to.
One day, PC Pessle found her in the gutter at Joshua’s Stile, opposite The Cottage Hospital. She was fighting over a cod’s head with three tomcats, and an ambulance took her to Macclesfield. We never saw her again.
Some men from the Council came to get rid of the cats, but they couldn’t. They drowned a hundred and twenty-three, Charlie Garner said, and then they lost count and gave up. Cats were running out of the door and jumping through the windows with kittens in their mouths. They made off and went wild on the Edge, and for a long time afterwards we saw big cats up there. When we were playing Tarzan they were lions.
I was always Tarzan, because I was the only one who could do Tarzan’s war cry like Johnny Weissmuller at The Regal. And Sheila was Jane. But I couldn’t climb, so I ran about on the ground while the baddies went up the trees. That’s when I used to see the lions in the bracken, but I didn’t run fast enough to catch one and wrestle it to death, in case I caught it.
I read Tarzan of the Apes eleven times, more times than any other book ever, because my grandma’s book was old and the end was missing, and each time I read it I thought I’d find the lost bit and know what happened, but I didn’t. What I did learn was ‘Kagoda’ meant ‘I surrender’ in gorilla language. And I told Tarzan stories of my own in the playground at school, and we acted them.
The only high place for Tarzan to swing from on his liana ropes was from the ledge outside the railing at the top of the cloakroom steps, so I jumped from there and swooped with my arms up, gripping the liana, round the girls playing Shake-a-Bed and Queenie-o-coco as I chased the baddies with my war cry. I knew it was liana because I’d read about it in The Children’s Encyclopaedia. One day, John got fed up and gave me a Chinese Burn and wouldn’t stop, even when I said ‘Kagoda.’
Marina was called after a princess who got married the year Marina was born. That was why there were other Marinas in the class.
Marina liked my Tarzan stories, and when we had Composition on Wednesday afternoons I wrote one in my Composition book and let her read it as I went along. I was still writing at playtime, but Miss Turner let me stay in so I could go on; and she let me not do Geography afterwards, too. But at the end of the afternoon she stopped me and wouldn’t let me take my book home to finish the story. The next day I was ill in class with scarlet fever and pneumonia and pleurisy and didn’t come back for a long time. That was another Tarzan story never finished.
When I started to get better I liked being ill. It meant that I didn’t have to go to school and could lie in bed and think and read. What I liked best were The Beano, The Dandy, The Knock-Out, The Champion, The Hotspur, The Wizard, The Children’s Encyclopaedia, my grandma’s fairy-tale books, The Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary and the Rupert Annual, though that was only at Christmas.
My grandma said a dictionary had every story that could ever be told, if the words were put in the right order; and if I was reading anything and came across a word I didn’t know I must look it up in the dictionary, write it down, feel it in my mouth and not forget what it meant. So I did. When I went back to school I called a window in Composition ‘opaque’, and got a red tick for it.
I was ill a lot, but this time, when I was better and could play with Marina again, she showed me what had happened.
Mrs Finch’s house had been pulled down. The orchard had gone. The wall had gone. The gatepost had gone.
The gatepost had gone, and the thumb latch had gone too. We couldn’t stop the rain any more. Marina cried. I told her I’d read about weather while I was ill, and I explained how rain happened; but she didn’t believe me. And I didn’t, either. The Children’s Encyclopaedia didn’t say about thumb latches.
I wrote about the thumb latch to The Brains Trust, which was a programme on the wireless where people answered questions listeners sent in. They’d answered before, when I asked why the blade of the guillotine was slanted; but this time nothing happened.
Then Marina died.
St Mary’s Vaccies
When the war came we had the vaccies. They were children moved out of the cities to be safe from the German bombers and they were made to live with the families in the village. The people in the big houses on the Edge didn’t have any, unless they wanted them.
My mother had to take in a boy called Raymond. I didn’t like him, and he didn’t like me; and we had to sleep together in my bed. He wrecked my colouring pencils and skrawked my books and tore my comics and made me cry. In the end his mother came and took him back.
The first vaccies were a whole Roman Catholic school from Manchester, and there was only one Roman Catholic family in the village, the Nolans, who managed The Regal, and the rest of us were Church of England or Methodist. In the cemetery, Church of England were buried on the right of the straight road down the middle and Methodists on the left. A corner of bushes was kept for ‘Suicides and Other Faiths’.
Our school was a Council school, and the Roman Catholics wouldn’t work with us for lessons or prayers, and there was a big muddle. But it was the start of the war, and nobody knew what they were doing; and because nobody was bombed the quarrel fizzled out and the Roman Catholics went home.
When the war really got going, the vaccies were from everywhere. But I didn’t have to share with any of them, because I had whooping cough, measles and meningitis all at the same time.
The vaccies from Wallasey and London were townies, and a lot of them were from the slums. They were rough and had ringworm and impetigo and nits. Their clothes were in a worse mess than ours and didn’t fit them, and a lot had their heads cropped in patches and stained with gentian violet and thei
r faces were scabby and had yellow cream on, and their eyes were sticky. But Joan wasn’t like that. She always wore a white blouse and black gymslip. We called her ‘the clean vaccy’.
The worst was Alan, from London. He had a podgy face with slitty lids and he knew how to do real harm, not just hurt. He had my name, too, and I wanted him to die.
We couldn’t escape in the playground, but out of school it was different. The vaccies weren’t used to gardens, so we could hide. And if we were chased all we had to do was get into a field, because no townie, not even Alan, would risk finding a cow. But our real safe place was the Edge. There the trees and rocks and steep height kept us safe.
So the townies fought among themselves, and because they were gangs they couldn’t join together to fight as one lot against us. But they taught us dirty swearing, though only one of us did it. We called him Kipper, because he smelt of pee.
Most of the vaccies stayed according to how long the Blitzes were on. The real vaccies were the Channel Islanders, from Torteval School in Guernsey. They stayed for five years, and the youngest, Madelaine, was only five when she came.
They weren’t bothered by fields or the Edge, and we liked them.
They hadn’t come because of the bombers but because Guernsey had been invaded by the Germans. They’d been brought out fast, with their headmaster Mr Le Poidevin, and they didn’t know what had happened to their families and couldn’t write to them or get letters. They were lonely and hard to talk to at first, and they could speak another language between themselves. But they played our games, not theirs, and only one of the boys was a bully. He was called Punny.
Punny scared me, until I found he couldn’t read properly, so I helped him at playtime, and then he wouldn’t let anyone touch me, not even Alan. Because Punny had a gun; or he said he had. I never saw it.
Punny lived with a family on Heyes Lane, but most of the Channel Islanders were all together in St Mary’s Clyffe, one of the big houses on the Edge.
St Mary’s Clyffe was built on a crag over a straight drop. It was on Woodbrook Road, which my Hough grandad’s grandad, Old Robert, had helped to cut. The road had high rock sides with his pick marks on them, and it was dark and wet, with ferns and mosses growing, and the cobbles of the road were slippery.
(Courtesy of Hilda Gaddum)
The house was red bricks and blue bricks in patterns, with spikey tiles sticking up on the roof ridges like on a dragon’s back; and there was old-fashioned woodwork and sharp gables and a carving over the main door saying: GOD’S PROVIDENCE IS MINE INHERITANCE. We knew it must be haunted.
On Woodbrook Road, at the bottom of the garden of St Mary’s Clyffe, there was a lamp post, and Madelaine used to climb up it into the garden to save her walking round by the gate, and slide down it on her way to school.
Madelaine was small, with deep brown eyes, and she was clever. She had two plaits and was a fast runner, and the only vaccy that laughed a lot, though I knew she was sometimes unhappy because she used to sit and look at her desk.
Miss Turner taught us, and everybody loved her. She had short hair, freckles, and she wore a green jacket and a green skirt and lisle stockings and flat shoes, and the first two fingers of her right hand were nearly black from cigarettes.
(Madelaine)
Miss Turner made everything interesting. On the twelfth of March 1945 we were allowed to write the date in our workbooks as ‘12.3.45’, because that couldn’t happen for another hundred years. And she didn’t have any favourites. I sat at the back of the classroom, and once I was so tired of not being chosen when she asked a question I was lying along my desk with my arm on the wall, not bothering to put it down, and walking my fingers along the bricks and staring out of the window. Miss Turner told me to sit up straight and stop fidgeting. She could see I was there, she said, and I was to put my hand up only if I didn’t know the answer. But another time she let me draw the cross-section of a volcano on the blackboard in different-coloured chalks, just as I remembered it from The Children’s Encyclopaedia. I got chased for that afterwards at playtime.
Every fortnight a van from Chester brought a crate of books to the school for us to choose to borrow and take home. We were supposed to have one each, but Miss Turner let us have as many as we liked, and Madelaine and I both read five a week.
In Miss Turner’s class we started to have tests as practice for the Eleven Plus exam. One day, she set us an Intelligence test, and she said if we got the answers right the first letters of each answer, put together, would be the clue to a prize.
I finished the test before everyone else, and read the first letters downwards from the top. They were COALSCUTTLEINSTAFFROOM
I ran from my desk, out down the corridor past the other classrooms, up the stairs to the staffroom. By the fire there was a coal scuttle full of coal. I got hold of it with both hands and lifted it off the hearthstone onto the carpet, but I had to put it down. It was too heavy to carry, so I humped it across the floor, onto the staircase, and banged it backwards down a step at a time, holding the handle in my elbows. Then, at the bottom, I dragged the scuttle along the stone corridor towards the classroom to get my prize.
The scuttle made a screeching noise on the stone, and I was sweating and hurting.
When I was nearly at the classroom Madelaine came out, jumped over the scuttle, ran off down the corridor and up the stairs. I shouted to her to come back because I’d got it. She took no notice. I dragged it on towards the door.
Madelaine and I arrived back in the classroom at the same time. I had the coal scuttle clue, and Madelaine had the bar of Cadbury’s Bournville Plain Chocolate prize that was under it.
Miss Turner said very good; well done. And now take the scuttle back, please.
We knew when the war was ending, because all the soldiers left and we watched the Spitfires and the Hurricanes and the Lancasters and the Mosquitoes flying south, with three white stripes on each wing and the fuselage, which my father said meant we were going to invade France, because he’d painted them; but it was nearly another year before the war finished. And then I was ill.
The cheesecloth that had been glued onto my bedroom window to stop splinters of glass if a bomb dropped was peeled off and I could watch outside again with the window shut and make the weathercock on St Philip’s steeple and the whole of the steeple wobble by moving my head. It was the old glass of the window pane that did it.
I saw Madelaine running up Trafford Road. It was still school time. I opened my window and asked her what she was doing. She said she was going home, and ran on. I didn’t see her again.
Widdershins
Privet leaves were green all year and tasted bitter, but hawthorn leaves were sweet and nutty when the buds were opening in spring, and we called them bread-and-cheese.
The privet hedges grew along Trafford Road, past our house, to the corner of Mottram Road, which was the road to my Hough grandad’s house. From the corner it was hawthorn to the Hough and Mottram. I started to walk to my grandad’s house when I was three, after I’d got better from diphtheria. There was a big, round white stone at the side of the road by the end of his garden, and it was a measured mile from the stone to the village. That was how I found how long a mile was and how much it made my legs ache.
Sometimes we used to go to see my grandad and grandma on a Sunday after tea. They lived in a house built of baulks of oak pegged together in squares, and the squares were filled with bricks or wattle and daub, which was mud and straw and cow muck on woven slats; and my grandad whitewashed the house every five years, my father said; and the roof was thatch.
Before I could walk, if it was dark, my father pushed me there in my black pram with a hood on it. He never pushed me in daylight, in case any of his friends saw him, because pushing a pram was a sissy thing for a man to do.
(© the author)
The part of the road where my grandad and grandma lived was steep, and when we left to go home my father used to run down with me in the pram from
the gate as far as the Hough chapel.
One night, it was raining hard and I lay in the pram and my father began to run faster and faster, and I was getting more and more excited because he had never run so fast, and the pram was bouncing on its springs and I was shouting at him to run even faster.
Then there was a bang, and the pram upended and all the water in the apron tipped into my face and I yelled. Next, I heard my father asking me if I was all right, and I started shouting at him for getting me wet.
What had happened was my father, in the dark at the gate, thought my mother had hold of the pram, and my mother thought he had; and it wasn’t until he said he’d take me they found out, and he caught up with the pram just after it crashed into the stone wall at the top of Hough Lane by Henshall’s farm. I wouldn’t let him run with me after that.
I used to eat the privet and hawthorn leaves when I was going for a walk with my mother to the Woodhill. As soon as I nibbled bread-and-cheese round the corner of Mottram Road, even though it was only a few yards from home, I knew we were in a different place.
The gardens of the big houses began and went right up the hill to the top of the Edge. There was a wild patch behind a fence of chestnut palings tied with twisted wire, and in it was an overgrown well with an iron lid. Further along, on the left, was the Cricket Club, where the people from the big houses went to play cricket and tennis. Across the road, St Mary’s Clyffe sat on a rock above the trees. Then there was Squirrels’ Jump, the last of the houses, and after it the Woodhill came straight out of the ground beside the road.
The Woodhill was all beech trees, and their tops were so thick nothing could grow beneath them, except for patches of grass and bilberries near the road, and the ground was brown fallen beech leaves which people collected in sacks to make leaf mould to feed their gardens with. Sunlight came through the trunks like torch beams used to shine before the war.