The Complete Pratt

by David Nobbs

  There was a letter from Ezra. He was in…they were hoping to advance to…before…and he loved them both very much.

  Summer sunshine streamed into the kitchen. Reginald Foort at the theatre organ streamed out into the fields. Auntie Kate was bottling soft fruit. Ada was humming cheerfully. Henry was buried in his Beano. After the sad business with Jane Lugg, he was less sure about Pansy Potter, the strong man’s daughter – ‘Pansy laughs, the cheeky elf – she makes a ‘U’ Boat shoot itself’ – and he could never quite forgive the Boy with the Whistling Scythe for replacing the Wild Boy of the Woods. His favourite was Lord Snooty and his Pals, who were Rosie, Hairpin Huggins, Skinny Lizzie, Scrapper Smith, Happy Hutton, Snitchy and Snatchy, and Gertie the Goat. They had some hard battles with the dreadful Gasworks Gang. He quite liked Cocky Dick – he’s smart and slick – and Musso the Wop – he’s a big-a-da flop. He liked it best when people bopped Huns. The Huns went ‘Der Wow!’ and ‘Der Ouch!’ and serve them right. Henry hated them. That was why, on this, his first day of the summer holidays, Simon and he were going to open up a second front. They owed it to the nation.

  His dinner was in his satchel. A ham sandwich, an egg sandwich, a cake made by Auntie Kate out of cornflakes coated with chocolate, and an apple. A dinner fit for a man going to battle. Especially when supplemented by a Mars bar out of your own pocket-money. His pocket-money was threepence a week. This bought him the Beano and the Dandy on alternate weeks. If he had enough coupons he would spend the rest on sweets. In those days of rationing, sweets were luxuries to be savoured. At his peak, he could make a Mars bar last an hour.

  The first seven months of 1942 had passed quite smoothly. One of Simon’s budgerigars had won second prize in the cobalt or mauve cock or hen class at the Barnoldswick Fur and Feather Society. Henry’s progress at school had been steady. The nation fought germs almost as keenly as Germans in this era of food shortages and rationing. The newspaper adverts aimed at the authority of military commands. ‘Fortify those kidneys!’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Stop that terrible itching.’ ‘Sorry, sir.’ ‘Wake up your liver bile.’ ‘Righto, sir.’ Even in Upper Mitherdale, where ways of circumventing rationing were not difficult to find when you kept your own pigs, Henry was made to consume cod liver oil and Californian syrup of figs with the utmost regularity. There had been a big nationwide competition to see which area could collect the most waste-paper. Henry’s Beano was full of poems exhorting him to save paper:

  Waste littler, paste Hitler.

  and:

  Come on girls! Come on chaps!

  Dot Hitler on the napper.

  Save up all your little scraps,

  And be a ‘paper scrapper’.

  and again:

  Bop the Wop, Slap the Jap,

  Stun the Hun, with paper scrap.

  Dutifully Henry had added his old Beanos and Dandies to the Rowth Bridge pile much as he longed to keep them. Uncle Frank and Auntie Kate had rewarded his patriotic efforts by taking him and Ada to Skipton to see the opening of the Skipton and District Warship Week. The week was opened by Viscountess Snowden, and there were loud cheers as she moved the indicator to show that £109,557 had already been collected. The indicator had been made by members of the Skipton College of Art. There was a march past by the Skipton Home Guard, the Skipton A.T.C., the St John’s Ambulance Brigade, the Civil Nursing Reserve, the Civil Defence workers, the Women’s Land Army, which included Jackie, who looked very solemn, the Boy Scouts, the Wolf Cubs and the Girl Guides. Many of the stores featured attractive window displays with a naval theme. Henry wished that he was taking part in the march, although he knew that if he had been he would have wished that he wasn’t.

  In the war there had been losses on all sides and victories for nobody. The British had bombed Lübeck and Rostock. The old wooden houses had burnt well. The Germans had responded with the ‘so-called’ Baedeker raids, on historic British cities. Once or twice, Henry had heard Ada crying in the night. This morning, a letter had come from Ezra. He was safe. The battle of…had been a right…they were now dug in at…and likely to be there for some time. The food was very…but he was well, and he loved them both very much.

  So Ada was smiling, the sun was shining, Reginald Foort was playing, Auntie Kate, was bottling soft fruit and it was good to be alive.

  Henry and Simon climbed the hill on the east side of the dale, past the remains of the old smelt mill. It was a clear morning, with just a few puffy clouds forming above Mickleborough. They disturbed an oystercatcher, and above them lapwings tossed themselves around joyfully.

  They lay in the cotton-grass, commanding a view of the dale from Mickle Head to Troutwick, and kept their eyes skinned for Huns while they ate their Mars bars slowly.

  Their conversation was an attempt at the style of the comics.

  ‘Gasp!’ said Henry. ‘Is that a Hun over there, Eckers?’

  ‘A Hun? Ho ho, you silly twerp! It’s a horse.’

  Henry pointed excitedly.

  ‘I think that’s a Hun,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s go and bag the blighter,’ said Simon.

  They crawled along the ground towards the unsuspecting enemy, which was actually Pam Yardley again. It was the first time the Leeds girl had dared brave the fells since she had last been taken for a Hun. She was collecting sphagnum moss to hand over to the Red Cross for use as padding in splints.

  They got to within twenty yards of the Hun without his suspecting them. Then they charged. He ran off. They chased him. Henry brought the fiend crashing to the ground. It was the only successful rugby tackle he would ever make in his life, wasted on a lonely evacuee girl who didn’t even know that she was supposed to be a Hun.

  ‘Give over,’ said the Hun, picking himself up and trying not to cry.

  ‘Tha’s a Hun. We’ve just captured thee,’ explained Henry.

  ‘Oh. Right,’ said Pam Yardley, a little more resourceful than on her last capture. ‘Hang on a sec.’ She worked herself up into being a captured German. ‘Der wow!’ she cried. ‘Der ouch! Der Gott in Himmel! Der lemme go, Britisher swine!’

  The Deadly Duo discovered that capturing German prisoners was a mixed blessing. You had to share your dinner with them. They did think of starving her, but had to admit that she had been a pretty sporting blighter, for a rotter.

  They saw no more Germans, and fairly soon grew bored. As they returned to Low Farm, they could hear the music of Reginald New at the theatre organ.

  Henry volunteered to escort the prisoner home, but as soon as Simon had gone home, he abandoned the pretence that she was a Hun, and told her that he liked her. She kissed him quickly, and skipped off into the Wallington home, clutching her puny collection of sphagnum moss in her hot little hand.

  Stay-at-home holiday activities were laid on in the towns that summer, and Skipton was no exception. Ada was to take Henry in the bus. He was so excited that he got up at half-past six. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have seen the Real Live Hun!

  Uncle Frank had gone out early, to examine some sick sheep, whose complaint he was unable to diagnose.

  Henry wandered up the field towards his great-uncle. The dew was heavy, and cloud hung over the top of Mickleborough.

  Suddenly there was a great roar, and an aeroplane with a swastika on its side came rushing up the dale towards Mickle Head. A long trail of dark smoke was pouring from its tail. The pilot had a faulty compass, and was trying to get home after being the only man ever to make a Baedeker raid on Burnley.

  Henry and Uncle Frank stared open-mouthed. The plane tried vainly to gather height. The pilot ejected, tumbled headlong for a hundred feet, then his parachute opened. The plane crashed into the side of Mickleborough and a great flame spurted into the air. Silence fell, save for the bleating of the surprised Swaledale sheep in the next field, as the Hun fiend landed gently among them.

  Henry’s flesh came out in goose-pimples as they approached the Terrible Teuton.

  The pilot gathered up his parachute and walk
ed towards them nervously. To Henry’s surprise, he looked young, bewildered and frightened and really quite nice, not like a fiendish killer with bared teeth and a snarl.

  The German youth looked at Uncle Frank nervously, but Uncle Frank seemed quite calm.

  ‘Now then, lad,’ said Uncle Frank. ‘Does’t tha know owt about sheep?’

  It was a long day for Ada. There was the bus ride, on two buses, changing at Troutwick, down winding roads bordered by stone walls and grass verges flecked with meadow cranesbill. An advert on the village bus showed a drawing of a conductress. The caption was ‘Give her a big hand – with (if possible) the correct fare in it!’ On the village bus the conductor was the driver, Jim Wallington. He gave out brightly coloured tickets from his clip board. On the outskirts of Skipton, in the second bus, they passed a static water tank. They watched a display of blitz cookery by a team of Girl Guide camp advisors in the Friendly Society’s yard. The girls demonstrated the use of the sawdust cooker, the haybox cooker, the camp cooker and the W.V.S. blackout cooker. They lunched in style on Australian minced-meat loaf at the café in the bus station. They joined a large crowd on the rugby field. The crowd were amazed at the speed with which the Home Guard put up barbed wire entanglements. She took him to the cinema for the very first time. They saw ‘The Wizard of Oz’ at the Plaza. It was his best film ever, so far. It was quite a day, and by the end of it Ada’s ankles, large at the best of times, were swollen horribly. You couldn’t have said that Henry hadn’t enjoyed his day, but Ada felt that much of her thunder had been stolen by the real-life German prisoner.

  Back at Rowth Bridge, Germans and outings over, the summer continued placidly, and Henry wrestled with his secrets.

  His secrets were that he liked girls and evacuees! He liked the two in one! He liked Pam Yardley! He couldn’t think why boys thought girls were soppy. Pam had a nice, square, honest face, and chubby, smooth legs, covered in bites and scratches. It gave him a warm feeling in his body to be near her. He went to the Wallingtons’ house and listened to ‘Children’s Hour’ with her. They sat with pencil and paper and tried to do puzzles, questions and catches set by P. Caton Baddeley. They listened to ‘Mr Noah’s Holiday’, a Toytown story by S. G. Hulme-Beaman. They laughed together at an evacuee boy from the south who didn’t know that ‘laiking at taws on t’ causer edge’ meant playing marbles on the pavement. Pam Yardley showed Henry her marbles. They exceeded expectations. She came to Low Farm and they watched the harvest and listened to the faint strains of Reginald Dixon at the theatre organ wafting over the fields. Always there was music at Low Farm, exotic names from a magic world outside. Nat Gonella and his Georgians. Don Felipe and the Cuban Caballeros. The Winter Garden Orchestra under the direction of Tom Jenkins. They laughed together at Stainless Stephen, Jeanne de Casalis as ‘Mrs Feather’, Revnell and West, and Gillie Potter speaking to them in English from Hogsnorton, although they barely understood a quarter of it all.

  Henry invited her to church one Sunday, and outside afterwards he held her hand and waited for Belinda Boyce-Uppingham to notice them and realise what she had missed.

  Uncle Frank was chatting to Kit Orris.

  ‘How’s t’ lambs, Frank?’

  ‘Nobbut middling, Kit.’

  There she was. If only she’d turn and see them.

  ‘Tha’s only got feed for six months. Tha feeds ’em up. They come on grand. Then they deteriorate. It’s a bad do.’

  Belinda Boyce-Uppingham turned and looked straight at them. Henry squeezed Pam’s hand. Belinda Boyce-Uppingham turned away, her sang-froid apparently undisturbed, but Henry fancied that the thrust had gone home.

  Pam came for Sunday dinner. Afterwards, they listened to the gardening advice of C. H. Middleton. ‘Not at this latitude,’ commented Uncle Frank. ‘April! Tha’ll be lucky…Six inches apart! Give over!’ The young love-birds slipped out and wandered down by the river.

  Simon Eckington was approaching. When he saw them he veered away.

  ‘Simon!’ shouted Henry.

  He watched his best friend walk away without looking back.

  ‘Forget him,’ said Pam Yardley. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’

  She put her arm round Henry. He blushed. He hoped nobody would see them, especially Simon.

  ‘Give over,’ he said, shaking himself free. ‘Gerroff.’ Then, so as not to seem unfriendly, he said, ‘Race thee to t’ top.’ They ran up the slope, away from the river. The sheep, just about over the shock of the German airman, retreated before them in panic.

  Pam Yardley beat him by about forty-five yards.

  She flopped on her back and waited for him to arrive.

  ‘What a weed,’ she said, ‘I couldn’t marry a weed.’

  ‘Marry,’ he gasped.

  Pam Yardley put her hand on his private parts.

  ‘What’s tha doing?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t know,’ she admitted, ‘but I saw Debbie Carrington do it to Stanley Lugg, and he liked it.’

  ‘Aye, well, he’s a Lugg,’ said Henry.

  Pam Yardley squeezed.

  ‘Give over. Tha’s not doing it right, wharever it is,’ he yelped.

  Luckily, Pam Yardley gave over.

  ‘Are we to get married when we’re grown up then?’ she said.

  He considered the question seriously.

  ‘I think we’re a bit young to decide,’ he said.

  A cool evening breeze sprang up, and they ran helter-skelter down the hill, and tumbled breathlessly back into the farm fields.

  They could hear the music of Reginald Porter-Brown at the theatre organ.

  In the morning, Henry asked Auntie Kate if there was anything he could get at the Post Office and General Store. He needed an excuse to see Simon.

  He stood in the cool interior of the shop, gazing longingly at the almost empty bottles of sweets. He’d used up his ration. He wanted two stamps, a packet of snap vacuum jar closers, some Eiffel Tower lemonade crystals, Gibbs Dentifrice (No Black Out for Teeth with Gibbs Dentifrice) and he could try for Reckitt’s Blue.

  Mrs Eckington served him and he asked for Simon. Simon came into the shop and hissed, ‘Come outside.’

  They went outside.

  ‘What’s up?’ said Henry.

  ‘I don’t go around wi’ evacuees,’ said Simon.

  ‘I’m not an evacuee,’ shouted Henry.

  ‘It’s Patrick,’ whispered Simon, and disappeared back into the shop.

  School began again. The nit lady came. Pam Yardley had nits. Her brown hair was shorn and she was sent to Coventry and Henry didn’t dare speak to her and Simon came up to him in the playground, and Henry knew that Simon was only pretending not to be his friend because he was frightened of Patrick, so he thought everything might be all right now he wasn’t seeing Pam Yardley any more, but suddenly Simon’s face was twisted into hatred, and he shouted, ‘Pam Yardley’s got nits. Pam Yardley’s got nits.’

  On account of his divided loyalties, Henry had ended up without a friend in the school. His little group of six had changed slightly. They had left Cyril Orris behind, and caught up with Lorna Arrow. Jane Lugg, Pam Yardley and Simon refused to speak to him at all. Henry Dinsdale was distant. Lorna Arrow, fair, tall, thin and toothy, tried to be friendly once on the way home, but he spurned her offer. ‘It’s nowt personal,’ he said kindly, ‘but girls are more bother than they’re worth.’

  Montgomery defeated Rommel at El Alamein. There was no news of Ezra. His son, Henry, buried himself in his studies and his reading. He listened to his good friend, the wireless. He heard an all-star concert with Naughton and Gold, and Rawicz and Landauer, Music Hall with Elsie and Doris Waters, Randolph Sutton and Magda Kun. On ‘Children’s Hour’ there was ‘Stuff and Nonsense’, fun fare on the air concocted by Muriel Levy, with Doris Gambell, Violet Carson, Wilfred Pickles, Muriel Levy and Nan. But, without friends, there was no fun in his heart any more.

  Christmas drew near. One day, as he reached the end of the village on his
way home, he found his path blocked by Simon and Patrick Eckington, Freddie Carter and Colin Lugg. They took him to Freddie Carter’s.

  Colin Lugg and Patrick Eckington grabbed him, and twisted his arms. Colin Lugg’s breath smelt of sick and Patrick Eckington’s breath smelt of freckles. They forced him to the lavatory, and thrust his head deep into the bowl, which was the creation of Cobbold and Sons, of Etruria. But Cobbold and Sons could not help him now.

  The bowl was dark and smelt vaguely fetid. They held his head there until each boy had flushed the cistern, which took a long time to fill.

  They let him go then, without a word. Simon Eckington couldn’t look him in the eye.

  At the Christmas carol service, Belinda Boyce-Uppingham sang a solo of ‘Gloria in Excelsis Deo’ quite exquisitely. Henry fancied that she was inspired by the desire to humiliate him.

  He refused to go to the children’s party in the Parish Hall. By all accounts he missed a treat. Coon songs were given by Mr Ballard, who also proved his ability with the banjo.

  In April, news came that Ezra had been injured. He was on a troop ship, which would dock at Plymouth.

  Ada set off to meet him. Henry wanted to accompany her, but was told that this was a crisis, not a treat. Nobody could be sure how badly Ezra had been injured.

  On Troutwick Station, windswept among the high hills, Ada said, ‘Now tha’ll be a good, brave lad, won’t tha?’

  ‘Oh aye,’ he said. ‘How many wheels does tha think t’ engine will have?’

  The engine roared in and shuddered gasping to an exhausted halt.

  ‘It’s got ten wheels,’ he told her. ‘Two little ’uns and three big ’uns on each side.’

  ‘Oh aye?’ said Ada. ‘Now think on. Be a good lad.’

  The train started with such a display of skidding and coughing from the engine that Henry felt sorry for the iron monster.

  Some chickens which had arrived from Carlisle in a wicker basket protested volubly.