A Likely Tale, Lad

by Mike Pannett

  ‘Nearly,’ I muttered, as the arrow slid down the slate roof, clattered against the metal gutter and fell to the ground, disturbing one pigeon, which flew across to the big ash tree and disappeared into the foliage. The other one, meanwhile, had hopped away from the roof, fluttered down and settled right in front of me, on the kitchen window-sill where somebody had left some breadcrusts out for the sparrows. It was a sitting duck, so to speak. I drew the string back as far as it would go, gritted my teeth and drew it back a little more, then let go.

  I didn’t quite get the pigeon. I almost got it, but of course it moved away as soon as the string went thwunk! My arrow flew through the air, headed straight for the place where the pigeon had been sitting, and through the kitchen window – which was closed. The glass shattered. Bits of it seemed to be flying in every direction. Not that I stayed around to see the full extent of the damage. I grabbed my arrows, slung my bow over my shoulder and ran for the woods.

  It seemed as though several hours had passed when I made my way cautiously back towards the farmyard, pausing at the gate. I knew I was starving and had a raging thirst. The car was parked up outside the back entrance, but nobody seemed to be around. I opened the gate and approached the house, straining to see the window, wondering whether my handiwork had been discovered. It had. There was a sheet of plywood over it, and as I stood there, dreading what might happen, out stepped Billy with a hammer in his hand and half a dozen nails between his teeth. Dad was standing next to him. Billy didn’t spot me, just went about the business of nailing the plywood firmly in place. I stayed where I was, dreading the moment when Dad would tackle me. But he didn’t say a word, just listened to what Billy was telling him.

  ‘Amazing,’ he said. ‘I watched the bird take off and fly towards the window, and t’next thing was – bits of glass everywhere. You wouldn’t think a pigeon could do that, but …’

  He tailed off then. He’d seen me out of the corner of his eye, and he half turned and winked at me. I slipped quietly into the barn and put my bow and arrows where nobody would spot them.

  A Star is Born

  It was a Saturday morning, the first day of the long summer holiday. I was tiptoeing out through the back door with my cricket bat under my arm when I felt a hand on my collar. It was Mum. ‘Just a minute, young Michael. Before you go wandering off. I thought I told you to put your sandals on.’

  ‘Girls wear sandals.’

  ‘Very true, Michael. And so do boys, especially in the summertime. If you think I’m going to let you run around all day in your only decent pair of shoes you’ve another think coming. I want them to last you another term at school.’

  ‘But we’re playing cricket. Cricketers wear boots.’

  ‘Which you do not possess.’

  I stood there, trying to glower. I’d been watching Just William on the telly and thought he did the best scowl I’d ever seen. ‘And it’s wet,’ I said. ‘I might catch pneumonia.’

  Mum looked up at the clouds, broken by a stiff breeze and more white than grey. ‘Was wet,’ she said. ‘But the forecast’s good. It’s sandal weather. End of conversation, you hear?’

  I headed for the cupboard where our shoes were kept, and pulled out the dreaded sandals. As it happened, I wasn’t heartbroken to take the shoes off. They were too big for me. They always were, when new. The idea was that I’d “grow into them”.

  ‘And now …’ Mum began. I wasn’t quite sure what was coming, but I knew it would begin with ‘seeing as you’re going out’. That’s why I’d been tiptoeing past her in the first place.

  ‘Seeing as you’re going out, there’s a few things I need at the shop.’

  She had in her hand a piece of cardboard she’d cut from a cereal box. I didn’t bother complaining – I knew what the answer would be – but all the same I pulled my ‘why is it always me?’ face. Had to be worth a try.

  ‘And you can wipe that expression off your face this minute. If you want any tea tonight, you’ve to pull your weight – the same as everybody else. Goodness knows I’ve got my hands full with you lot on holiday for six weeks and nothing to do but get into mischief. Now, listen to me. Are you listening?’

  She knew I wasn’t, and she knew that if by some freak chance I was, I’d still manage to forget whatever it was she wanted me to get. I waited while she wrote her list and handed it over.

  ‘There you are. Six eggs, a packet of lard and a tin of creamed rice. D’you want a basket?’

  ‘A basket?’ I said, and pulled my “I’m a boy, remember?” face. The last thing I wanted was for my mates to see me walking down the road with a wicker basket in my hand. I remember how much grief we gave Titch Burton the day he was sent to wheel his baby sister’s pram round the park. He never lived that down.

  ‘I don’t need a basket,’ I said, through gritted teeth.

  ‘Well, don’t you go dropping anything – especially those eggs, or you’ll be back to the shop to buy some more with your next week’s pocket money, d’you hear?’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  ‘All right. Here’s a pound. And don’t forget to stop for the change this time.’

  ‘No, Mum.’

  I set off down the Avenue. None of my friends were out yet, but they soon would be. Only the previous day we’d been talking about a cricket game against the Rowan Avenue lot. We were always playing Test matches and footie games against them. Either that or organising pitched battles, generally involving a few brandished sticks, a bit of stone-throwing and a lot of name-calling; or, after the fields were harvested, bombing each other with balls of straw.

  I hurried along the snicket and onto the path that led through the churchyard. I stopped on the bridge, leaning over the railings to inspect the slow-moving river. The air was still damp after a thunderstorm the night before; as the wind got up a few odd drips fell from the elder-trees that overhung the far bank. The fish would be rising. One of the boys said he’d caught a pike in there – a big one, he said. But then he could have been exaggerating. Oh well, no time for that just now. I made my way down to the green and the little parade of shops. In the general store I pulled out Mum’s list and handed it over the counter, then went and browsed amongst the comics. I pulled out a Beano to catch up on Dennis the Menace’s latest escapades. Mum and Dad disapproved of Dennis. They said he set a bad example.

  ‘Now then, do you want this lot or not?’

  The shopkeeper was standing there with my purchases, frowning at me. I shoved the comic back into the rack, went to the counter and handed over the pound note Mum had given me. I popped the change in my trouser pocket, stuffed the lard down my shirt and set off for home, carrying the eggs in one hand, the creamed rice in the other. I walked fast, occasionally breaking into a trot. The sun was trying to come out, the grass was drying and surely by now some of the boys would be marking out the pitch. I raced through the churchyard, over the bridge and back along the snicket. I turned into the Avenue and there they were, an upturned cardboard box in place for a wicket, fielders crouched, bowler running in. Tim was batting. He swung at the ball, caught it smack in the middle of his bat and heaved it skyward. I watched, fascinated, as it reached the top of its upward trajectory then started descending.

  Martin Longbottom was racing towards me, trying to position himself under the ball and catch it. As he clipped my shoulder he shouted, ‘Don’t drop your mum’s eggs!’

  I didn’t. Oh no. I clung onto the eggs for dear life. It was the creamed rice I dropped, right on my toe. And it didn’t half hurt – especially with no toe-cap to protect me. I picked the tin up, hobbled home and just managed not to start howling till I was inside the back door.

  Mum released my grip on the eggs and placed them on the kitchen table.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘what have we done now?’

  ‘The tin – it landed on my toe. And it hurts,’ I sniffed. I was about to start crying again when it occurred to me that the whole accident was Mum’s fault anyway. ‘It wouldn’t have
happened if you hadn’t made me wear them stupid daft sandals,’ I spluttered.

  ‘Those stupid daft sandals,’ Mum corrected me. ‘Not them. Anyway, Michael, you might not have dropped the tinned rice if you hadn’t been in such an almighty hurry. Tearing along as usual, I suppose.’ It wasn’t that Mum was a harsh, insensitive person; just that she’d been here before – many times. She knew all about boys. ‘Right,’ she sighed, ‘let’s have a look at it, shall we?’

  She squatted down and unbuckled my sandal – and with the pain that caused I couldn’t stop myself howling. The strange thing was that for all it hurt there was no obvious sign that anything was wrong, although it was starting to turn red. She prodded the toe carefully with her forefinger. ‘Does that hurt?’ But I’d already answered her question with a yelp. She tried to move the toe, and I yelped again. She stood up and gave the matter a bit of thought. Then she said, ‘Right, young man, I’m afraid it’s off to casualty with you.’ That stopped me from yelping. I looked up at her.

  ‘Casualty?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. It’s a trip into York, I’m afraid. We need to get this looked at. In the hospital.’

  ‘Wow!’ Suddenly the pain seemed to have eased. ‘Are we going to get an ambulance?’ I had immediate visions of us racing down Haxby Road, seventy miles an hour, lights flashing and bells ringing and cars swerving out of the way. ‘Am I going to sleep in an oxygen tent and have injections and stuff? Like on the telly?’ Suddenly life seemed full of exciting possibilities. ‘And will the nurses tuck me in at night?’ Young as I was I knew that I wanted to marry a nurse when I grew up – so the sooner I got to know one or two the better. There was something about that uniform that already attracted me. And besides, they were trained in looking after people, and there was nothing I liked better than to be looked after.

  As I paused for breath, Mum did her best to bring me down to earth. ‘I wouldn’t get your hopes up, my lad. They’ll take an x-ray. See if it’s broken. Maybe put a bandage on it.’

  ‘A bandage?’ I didn’t like the sound of that. If I’d broken something I wanted a pot, like Graham Baker had the time he busted his arm falling out of a tree. He wore that cast for weeks afterwards. Everybody got to write things on it. He even let the girls join in. Some of them put little crosses, and he said they were like promises, and when he took it off they had to kiss him as a sort of payment. Yes, a cast: that’s what I needed, and I was about to say so – just so that Mum and everybody else knew exactly where I stood.

  But Mum was no longer there. She’d gone to fetch Dad in from the garden, and tell him to get the car out of the garage. He would drive me in and she’d stay home and look after the others who were, she said, not to be trusted alone. I could understand that with Phil, but not the girls. They were just a couple of goody-two-shoes as far as I was concerned. But what did I care about them right now? I was an emergency. I was going to the hospital to have an x-ray taken. With any luck Dad would break the speed limit, and then I’d have a proper operation to re-set my toe, and tonight I’d be tucked into a hospital bed and kissed goodnight by all the nurses. It may not have been high drama to my parents, but in my mind it was up there alongside the circus we went to on the York Knavesmire one time.

  Dad didn’t break any speed limits, even though I grimaced and winced a lot and said that I hoped it wouldn’t take long because I might get gangrene. Looking back, I think he knew what I was after, because he slowed the car down at every grimace, saying he didn’t want me to get thrown about as he went round the corners. When we got to casualty we were told to wait. I couldn’t understand it. I was an emergency, and here were all these other people who hardly looked ill at all just sitting there reading magazines.

  We were there for hours and hours, it seemed to me. And when we finally did get to see someone they started the prodding and pulling all over again and made me yell. Still, that turned out to be a good move on my part, since a pretty young nurse came and stroked my head and told me I’d been a brave boy.

  After that came the x-ray – and, as Dad said – actual photographic evidence of my injuries, although as hard as I stared at the murky image I couldn’t make out the jagged fracture I’d hope to see.

  After that they kept us waiting around for another few hours – although Dad insisted it was no more than twenty minutes – before they let us go home. They hadn’t given me the pot I’d been hoping for, but they did let me have a copy of the x-ray photograph. They weren’t supposed to, but Dad knew the radiographer and had a word with him. They’d been at school together.

  So now I was an invalid. The bad news was that I couldn’t play cricket for several days. The good news was that I couldn’t be given any household chores. So I was allowed to sit indoors and watch the little bits of daytime telly that were available; or read comics; or play alone in the bedroom – anything, I soon realised, that kept me out of Mum’s way while she hurried around doing the cooking and cleaning.

  It was during this spell of enforced isolation that I started to watch a TV show that soon became a favourite of mine: Why Don’t You …? It was all about things you might do instead of sitting on your backside watching TV. ‘Why don’t you … why don’t you … just switch off your television set and go out and do something less boring instead?’ went the theme song. Children would write in and suggest activities, outings, games and so on. It was to play quite a part in my life in the months to come.

  There was one other great thing about the accident with the tinned rice pudding. When I was finally allowed out to play once more I was given a brand new pair of trainers Mum had bought to replace the sandals. Not just ordinary trainers, mind you, but Dunlop Green Flash.

  ‘Let’s face it,’ she said, as she handed them over to me, ‘the kind of things you get up to – climbing trees and kicking stones and racing everywhere pell-mell, you need to protect yourself, don’t you?’

  I was on the point of saying, ‘I told you so,’ but just as the words were about to escape I saw sense, and shut my mouth.

  People say that when they look back it always seems as though summer went on forever, and they never remember being bored as a child. Well, it’s parents who come out with that; usually when their kids complain it’s … guess what? They’re bored. I remember being bored. I remember lying on the grass with nothing better to do than watch the big white and grey clouds go by, and imagining that I was climbing them, right to the very top. I remember being told not to come home until five o’clock because Mum was shampooing the rugs, and checking the clock on top of the school every few minutes, wondering why it took so long to move. Kids do get bored, and time does drag. But the good part of that is that when something unusual comes along the excitement of it is overwhelming.

  We were back at school. I remember it was October, because I’d just got into trouble for bruising Trevor Bellingham’s hand with my conker. It was his fault. He moved just when I was taking aim at his. I caught him right across the knuckles, and he started swelling up immediately. Then of course he started blubbering and I was the one who got sent to the headmistress.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d been up to her study. The previous occasion was when I was caught climbing over the wall and scrabbling up the coke-pile – which was strictly out of bounds. That wasn’t my fault either. We were playing football and Danny Bridges had kicked the ball way up in the air, where the wind had carried it into the mound of fuel. Okay, I was the one who volunteered to go after it, but his job was to stand look-out, in case one of the teachers came by – and he got so interested, watching me climb three steps up and slide two steps back, that he didn’t notice Mr Adams approaching. I got a couple of whacks on my backside for that – and lost two weeks’ pocket money when I got home and Mum found the rip in my trousers where I’d skidded down the mound clutching the ball. To make matters worse, Mr Adams confiscated the ball for a week.

  Anyway, the point of all this is that it was definitely conker-time when the news broke. It was announced
in assembly that the BBC had written to the school asking if they could address us. It seemed that the producers of that programme I’d been watching, Why Don’t You …?, wanted to know if any of us had any unusual or interesting hobbies. If we did, we might feature on the show. Now this really did exercise my mind. The idea of being on the telly – well, that was strictly for famous people, wasn’t it? How often would an ordinary person from a Yorkshire village get on? And a child at that? I knew right away that I had to be that child. Which meant that I had to come up with a strange or exotic hobby. Soon.

  I thought about the problem. I thought about it long and hard. And the more I thought the more worried I became. The fact was, I didn’t have a hobby at all. I was too busy having fun to settle down and get absorbed in something the way other kids did. Too inquisitive: always wandering off in the fields or hanging around farmyards watching the animals and machinery. I was too impatient as well. I’d tried stamp collecting but couldn’t be bothered with trying to lick all those tiny paper hinges that kept them in the album. Somehow all the pages ended up getting stuck together, and when I forced them apart the stamps got ripped. I tried Meccano, but made the mistake of trying to build a crane outside. When I dropped all the nuts and bolts I could only watch as half of them rolled down the drain at the side of the house. I tried bird-watching one time when Phil and I spotted a kingfisher down by the beck. I even persuaded Dad to lend me his binoculars, but it seemed that we only ever saw sparrows, rooks and the odd blackbird. Half an hour of that and I was bored to death. And half frozen.

  So, when the big day arrived and the BBC were due to show up, I set off for school without the faintest idea as to what I was going to say. I knew I had to say something, because I had promised myself that I was going to be on that show, no matter what. Inspiration came quite unexpectedly. It came as I walked down our road. The idea was so brilliant that I could barely keep it to myself as I entered through the school gate and waited for the whistle that would see us line up and troop into assembly.