by Alan Garner
Everybody practised taking tests. I liked the English and the Intelligence, but I didn’t like the Arithmetic. I never had liked Arithmetic, and because I’d been ill so much I’d missed more than half of my time at school and the learning needed to understand sums. So I was never Top in that. In the rest I was, and always got 9/10, 9½/10 or 10/10, with a Red Triangle sticker in Miss Turner’s class and a tick and VG for Very Good in Mr Ellis’s.
One Wednesday morning it went wrong.
We’d collected our marked Composition exercise books from Mr Ellis. We wrote on white paper with blue lines and a red line down the left-hand side for a margin, and the covers were grey, with Cheshire Education Committee and SAFETY FIRST! and a list of DANGER DONT’S! printed on the front cover.
My composition was on the last page in the book. It followed a composition where I’d written about constellations and stars which I’d read about in The Children’s Encyclopaedia and then found them in the sky, and I’d been given a tick and 10/10. I had 10/10 now; but I saw the difference.
I was used to writing about ‘A Day in the Life of a Penny’ and ‘How to Clean a Pair of Shoes’; and sometimes we were allowed to write stories for ourselves. Now, though, I looked at what I’d written, and because it was the last and on the last page I saw what it said. This was what the work and the learning had been for.
I’d written a practice letter to apply for a job. Mr Ellis had put on the blackboard how we should write it, and what words we should use, and how we should say something interesting about ourselves, and how we should sign it. And I’d written:
Dear Sirs,
In this morning’s ‘Daily Express’ I saw your advertisement concerning the vacancy in your counting house, and, gentlemen I would like to offer my application for the situation. I am now attending Alderley Edge Council School, and have been quite successful in English.
Hoping this will receive your attention,
I beg to remain,
Your most humble and obedient servant …
And then my name.
But I wasn’t begging. I couldn’t remain what I hadn’t been. I didn’t want to be humble and obedient. I wasn’t a servant.
(© the author)
For a while, when I was little, I’d wanted to be a man that worked down drains. Then later, Harold and I had sat on Castle Rock and watched Barracuda dive-bombers from Ringway aerodrome being tested, and how they stood on their tails and climbed, flipped over and came straight down at full power as if they were going to crash, but always pulled out in time; and I wanted to be a test pilot. Now I didn’t know what I wanted, but it wasn’t a humble and obedient servant.
Miss Turner and Mr Ellis, the very best teachers, had tricked me with their Red Triangles, VGs and 10/10s. So, at the very bottom of the book’s back cover, opposite the letter asking for the job as a vacancy in a counting house, I wrote in tiny letters, In Two days I Sit for the Manchester Grammar School Scholarship.
(© the author)
Then I looked at what I’d done, and I panicked.
When we reached the end of an exercise book we had to take it up to Mr Ellis for him to initial it and give us a new one. I had to do that now. And my tiny writing inside the cover got bigger and bigger. I tore the bottom of the cover where it met the page, folded it over the writing, made a tight crease and took it to Mr Ellis’s desk. He scribbled his initials JHE in red pencil on the cover and gave it back to me, along with a new exercise book; and he smiled, though he didn’t usually. He must have seen what I’d done.
Before we sat the Eleven Plus exam, which I had to take even though by then I’d got the other scholarship, Mr Ellis explained what would happen.
We were going to sit at our desks with the exam paper face down so we couldn’t read the questions, and we wouldn’t be allowed to talk. Mr Ellis would be there, but he wasn’t allowed to say anything in case he helped us. An old man, Dr Heywood, was in charge, to tell us when to turn the paper over and start, and also when to stop at the end of the exam time, and to make sure there was no cheating. If we finished answering the questions early we should check everything until Dr Heywood said the time was up. Then we had to put our pens down at once and sit up and not talk until Dr Heywood told us we could. But, so we’d know how much time was left towards the end, Mr Ellis showed us his signals.
Ten minutes before the end, he was going to put one hand against his chin and the other over the edge of his high desk; and each minute he would close a finger or a thumb. That way, we’d know how long we’d got.
On the day, Dr Heywood came with a big silver watch. I was wearing a clean shirt, tie, jersey, knee socks and my best trousers, which were too small and hurt, and boy’s knickers underneath made of yellow shiny string my mother had knitted specially, and a clean vest she’d sewn a silver thruppenny bit inside for luck; and she’d polished my clogs and combed my hair using water with sugar in to keep it flat.
Dr Heywood told us the rules and how long we had to answer the questions and asked us if we understood. Then he clicked his watch with his thumb, and we began.
The sums were hard, but the rest was easy and I finished and checked everything three times before Mr Ellis started to bend his fingers until Dr Heywood clicked his watch again and said stop.
Then it was over, and we had the rest of the day off.
A few weeks later we got the results. Shirley, Angela, Roy, John and I had passed; but Sheila hadn’t. Roger had. He was quite clever, but nobody had thought he would get through. Mr Ellis told the class the wrong one had won the place and it ought to have been Sheila.
Not much else happened.
There was Victory Sports Day on Norbury’s Rec, which was a field where the village played football, and I won the Flat Boys Age 10 Running Race because I was used to it after being chased so much. I got half a crown for that.
Then there was a Fair. A tent had a sign outside it saying: HITLER’S SECRET WEAPON 1d. John and I paid the man at the entrance and went in.
People were standing around a box, and on top of it was a cage, and there was another sign saying the giant rat inside had been caught in the Manchester Blitz, where it had been dropped by parachute with hundreds of others to eat babies and children.
It was brown and gnawing a turnip. It was about two feet long, with a tail as long again, and it had a white snout and huge bright orange teeth. But it wasn’t a rat. It was a coypu. I told the man this, and he told me to shut my gob or else. But I told him coypus were from South America, not Germany, because I’d read about them; and they ate vegetables, not babies or children.
The man said he’d clip my ear hole, and John pulled me out of the tent and we ran. John called me daft. But I said it was a coypu. It really was.
And there was Empire Day. We had Prayers, then the whole school marched outside to the flagpole by the telephone exchange, and Canon Gravell came from the vicarage dressed in his white and black robes, and the Union Jack was hoisted up the flagpole and we saluted, the boys with their right hand and the girls with their left, and we sang ‘God Save the King’, ‘Remember, Remember Empire Day, the Twenty-fourth of May’ and ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers! Marching as to War’. I didn’t know why we were singing it this year, now the war was over. Then Canon Gravell told us about Clive of India, and Gordon of Khartoum and other heroes, and he said prayers for them, and we said Amen and we went home.
Then it was the last day. John and I had planned what we were going to do.
It began with Twiggy leading Prayers. We knew we’d never have to hear him again. For him the summer holidays were five weeks, but we had seven before we started our new schools. It was the last dinnertime; the last playtime; the last whistle; the last bell.
Mr Ellis said goodbye and wished us luck.
We went out of the classroom for the last time; into the corridor for the last time. I looked up for the last time at the electric light bulb in the ceiling that was different from the others. It had a pointed tip, and Mr Noon said
it was an original bulb, still working from the first day of the new extension my father had helped to build while he was in Pop Kennedy’s class. And we went out of the door into the playground for the last time.
Between the school gateposts there was a strip of brass let into the ground; and this was our plan.
While we were on the playground side of the strip we were still at school. We would not have left until we had crossed it. We could cross; but Twiggy couldn’t. He never could.
John and I held hands and ran. We ran from the playground, jumped over the brass, and were out; out under the sky and the white fluffy clouds with the gold and the glint of the weathercock burning to the wind.
DOWN MOSS LANE
Bomb (1955)
Twelve years after finding the anti-personnel vitamin beverage bottle, with National Service in the Royal Artillery behind me, I was conducting, illicitly, my first archaeological investigation on the Edge. It was the Goldenstone.
The earliest surviving mention of the Goldenstone is in a Perambulation, or record, of the boundary and its marker points between the townships of Over Alderley and Nether Alderley, made in 1598. ‘… and so to the great stone called the golden stone on the north side of the wain way …’
I had been trying to find the wondrous-sounding stone for a long time. Boundaries in England are usually ancient and don’t move. When they were established they often incorporated features in the landscape as marker points because they were known and beyond dispute, and boundaries were the straight lines between. The Quest of the Goldenstone was important. It could be something very old.
When after many years I discovered the spot, a bank of earth had covered the stone, and I set about retrieving it with a pointing trowel and a soft brush, because that was what archaeologists did.
(© the author)
It soon became clear that the Goldenstone was old. It was a block of grey sandstone; not an outcrop, not golden, not even yellow, and dense with white quartz pebbles. It had been brought from a distance, and showed no sign of metal tooling but had been shaped by battering with other stones. It turned out to be some twelve tons in weight. It would have needed time and effort to bring it here; which, along with the battering, suggested that it was perhaps prehistoric, possibly Bronze Age.
I worked slowly with trowel and brush. It took a fortnight.
In the second week I was trowelling down the western face of the stone, making a trench two feet wide to work in.
The tip of the trowel came up against something hard. I tapped. The sound was different. I abandoned the trowel and began to brush.
Aluminium and brass grew out of the sand. Engraved letters and numbers and a scaled band appeared … 208 MARK 6/2 … My guts cramped. I knew what it was, and what it meant.
I put the brush down gently, and rolled across the top of the Goldenstone to the other side and lay curled in a foetal position, eyes and mouth shut, my back to the stone, with my thumbs in my ears and my index fingers compressing my nostrils, as the army had taught.
Nothing happened. I snatched air. Nothing happened. I scurried in a crouch to the east of the Goldenstone and round in a wide arc to the trackway, straightened, and ran to Stormy Point and Saddlebole, down to Hough Lane and the police station.
I bashed opened the door. Sergeant Pessle looked up from his desk. I reverted to artillery jargon and shouted that I’d found Unexploded Ordnance, and told him to get the bomb squad immediately. Sergeant Pessle was not impressed.
I became more technical. I’d unearthed a high-explosive three-seven Heavy Ack-Ack twenty-five-pounder shell with a mechanical two-zero-eight Mark six-two fuse; and it was armed. The timer had jammed. It was unstable and could explode at a touch.
Sergeant Pessle asked me where I’d found it. I told him it was at the side of the track to Edge House farm. He asked me how I’d found it. I said I was digging. Digging what? The Goldenstone. A golden stone? he said. I repeated that it could explode at any time. The stone? he said. No; the shell. Sergeant Pessle supposed we’d better go and have a look, then.
We went out and got into his black Morris Minor and drove up the hill. At The Wizard we turned off the road and bumped along the track for Edge House farm. At Seven Firs I told Sergeant Pessle to stop.
Sergeant Pessle said he couldn’t see anything. I told him it was ahead, round the corner of the track, on the left. He released the handbrake, but I said we couldn’t go any nearer because the fragmentation shrapnel was lethal up to two hundred feet. He asked me what I expected him to do, and I told him again to get the bomb squad. He said there was no bomb squad, so I must show him.
I refused. He said I could suit myself, and got out of the car. I told him not to touch anything.
He set off along the track. I went and stood behind a tree. Sergeant Pessle reached the corner and stepped into my excavation. He held up the trowel and asked if this was all I’d got. He shook his head and knelt in the trench. I heard metal scrape on metal and shouted to him not to touch. He took no notice. He stood, dropped the trowel, bent down, wrenched and wrestled, and turned, holding the shell in his arms.
He laid the shell on the Goldenstone and came back to the car. I asked him what he was going to do. He said he was taking it to Wilmslow because there was a safe there.
He drove the car up to the Goldenstone, opened the boot, dumped the shell in, turned the car and came back. I ran to another tree. The shell was trundling around the floor of the boot and banging against the sides.
As he went past, Sergeant Pessle put his head out of the window. ‘Eh. Alan,’ he said. ‘You do find ’em, don’t you?’
St Mary’s Vaccies (1974)
St Mary’s Clyffe was turned into flats. Several years later it needed repairs, but it was found to be infected throughout with dry rot, and shortly afterwards the Gothic fantasy caught fire and blazed on its crag like the climax of a horror film. In its place was built something bland, not worthy of the setting; but I salvaged a spike of dragon tile.
Miss Turner wrote to me shortly before she retired. She was now the deputy head of a girls’ school, and she wanted me to present the prizes at Speech Day. I had endured enough Speech Days to know that this was not something I could manage. But Miss Turner had asked. And Miss Turner was Miss Turner.
I arrived at the school. Miss Turner had aged, but not changed. I decided to do as she had done, so long ago. I would not be dull.
I presented the prizes; and then, a trick I’d learnt from seeing Danny Kaye at The London Palladium, I took a chair, turned it round, put it stage centre at the front, sat astride it, and told the story of the coal scuttle.
A few days later, a packet arrived by post. In it was a bar of Cadbury’s Bournville Plain Chocolate, and a note in an unmistakeable hand, saying simply: ‘Better now?’
I went to my workroom, shut the door, and ate the bar in one go.
The Nettling of Harold (2001)
I was by the Holy Well on the Edge, thinking, and did not want to be disturbed. The man’s face was lined; the teeth were gappy, snaggled yellow. But I knew the grin; the eyes.
It was Harold.
My conveyor belt had taken me to Oxford. Harold’s father was a general labourer, his brother Gordon a roofer. Harold’s memory was of men coming home wet and exhausted, and he had been determined not to work outside. So he had become apprenticed to upholstery and undertaking. Now he was a psychiatric nurse caring for the criminally insane.
Harold told me what had happened more than half a century ago.
Our friendship had mattered to him. Although I was a sissy and a mardy-arse and one of ‘Ellis’s Pets’ who got all the attention while the rest of the class were treated as rubbish, he and I had thought differently from the others. We talked differently and about different things; and I made him laugh. But the Belmont Gang played differently; and once I had gone he followed them.
He bunked off school with my cousin Geoffrey. They found it better to spend the day sitting in the dim of the s
chool’s disused air-raid shelters on cold benches, their feet on wet duckboards, learning to smoke the dib ends they picked up in the street, than to endure Twiggy’s teaching.
Later, Harold’s quality showed, and he was offered a place at Technical College. It was too late. ‘When you’ve got five quid in your pocket on a Thursday,’ he said, ‘you want to be out with your mates at the weekend, not skint and stuck in the house with your nose in a book.’
But books drew him, and history was his need; history allied with travel. He was not a tourist. He went to see for himself what his reading had shown him. Scandinavian culture and archaeology were his special interests, along with the social history of his background and his innate knowledge of the Edge.
Harold (© Hazel Johnson)
When Harold and I met at the Holy Well I was on the committee of The Alderley Edge Landscape Project, a ten-year multi-discipline investigation by The Manchester Museum and The National Trust of every aspect of the village, starting with the Early Triassic geology of two hundred and forty-five million years ago.
The committee consisted almost entirely of academics, who were strangers to the place. I was the only native; but I had been removed by education and life. My colleagues saw that the Project lacked an essential component: a member of the community capable of interpreting our work to the village; an advocate go-between.
Soon after the meeting at the Holy Well I knew that Harold was the one. He had spent his life within a quarter of a mile of where he was born; his connections with the culture of the adult Belmont Gang were unbroken; and he was articulate.
I reported back, and Harold was invited onto the committee.
The immediate reaction to his presence was alarm. Harold, through his time as a psychiatric nurse working with a team, knew how to function in committee. His ability was beyond doubt; but the form it took and the structure of its expression disturbed the academic mind. Where some followed the tradition of speaking with convoluted syntax through the Chair, Harold cut the flummery with wit. The committee learnt to beware of his flashing eye and grin. A few expressed unease in private that such a rough diamond had come among us and questioned the probity of his remarks. But Harold and his wisdom prevailed.