Private - Keep Out!

by Gwen Grant

  Contents

  1 ‘Who said ghosts can see in the dark?’

  2 ‘What are angels, Mam?’

  3 ‘Do I have to go to dancing class?’

  4 ‘Why are there spots on my face?’

  5 ‘Did God make Gloria Hottentot as well?’

  6 ‘Where did our Pete find this tiger?’

  7 ‘Could I really have blown up all the seaside, Mam?’

  8 ‘Why did that burglar shout for the bobbies?’

  9 ‘Who loves people like Gorilla Face?’

  10 ‘Why is it wrong to hate our Rose?’

  11 ‘Doesn’t the Killer Kid like our Tone?’

  12 ‘What does our Pete want to marry Miss Brown for anyway?’

  13 ‘Why did the coal men swear, Mam?’

  14 ‘Dad, is it Christmas now?’

  About the Author

  Gwen Grant was born in 1940 in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, and lives there still. When she was twelve years old, she was Highly Commended in a national competition for her essay on the Cocoa Bean - she has written ever since. Her many books for children include Private - Keep Out, its sequels Knock and Wait and One Way Only; The Lily Pickle Band Book and The Revolutionary’s Daughter. She is also a published poet.

  1

  ‘Who said ghosts can see in the dark?’

  Well, It’s not often a great bundle of clean paper comes my way like this, so I’ve decided I’m going to use it for writing about the street where I live and then when I’m very old, say about thirty, I’ll be able to read all about what happened in 1948. I want to be a writer when I grow up, so this’ll be good practice.

  I suppose I ought to mention how I came to get hold of all this paper first. Well, now then (that’s a thing I’ll have to watch – using ‘Well’ all the time). I think I’m beginning to change my mind about being a writer. It’s too fiddly. You’ve got to worry all the time. Mind you, our Mam worries something terrible and she doesn’t write. She cleans the animal ladies’ house out three times a week. The animal ladies look after cats and dogs other people don’t want. I don’t know why they need someone to clean for them. There’s only two of them and no kids, as our Mam always says. There’s six kids in our family and our Mam has to clean for us all.

  First, there’s our Mam and Dad, who’re all right really. Then, there’s our Pete, who’s the eldest and works on a farm and thinks he knows everything and says, ‘Do this. Do that’, all the time. If you even so much as shake your head to say, ‘No’, he starts going mad and saying ‘Do as you’re told else you’ll get a rattle round the earhole.’ It makes you think brothers aren’t up to much which isn’t very good for me because I’ve got two more.

  There’s our Tone, he’s the next eldest, and just because he’s as big as a house side he thinks he’s going to be the champion boxer of the world in two years’ time when he’s eighteen. I said to him, ‘You couldn’t box your way out of a paper bag,’ and I had to lock myself in the lavatory for about fourteen hours till our Mam rescued me.

  I haven’t written down all the bad news yet because I’ve also got two sisters. Just writing that makes me sad.

  There’s our Lucy. She’s the next in age to our Tone and she’s still at school, but only till Christmas and then she leaves. She combs her hair over one eye like a film star and looks in the mirror a lot. She’s got a job in a dress shop and thinks she’s the cat’s whiskers because of that. ‘I don’t know about cat’s whiskers,’ I said to her. ‘You look more like a dog’s dinner to me,’ and she went wild. I said to her, ‘If I threw you a piece of meat now, it’d be gone in a flash,’ and then I had to run faster than I’ve ever run before. She told our Mam that unless something was done about me showing her up in front of her mates, she’d do something about me herself.

  ‘Why didn’t you stand me on top of a hill when the war was on?’ I said once, because I was fed up to the back teeth with them getting mad at me all the time. That’s the biggest trouble with our family. They’ve none of them got a sense of humour. They can’t take a joke, not for any money they can’t.

  Our Lucy said if she’d known then what she knew now, she would have stood me on top of a hill when the war was on with a big arrow pointing at me, saying, ‘shoot here’, and they all fell about laughing, so then our Mam rattled them for being so unkind to me and making me cry. I must say that made me laugh all right.

  It’s writing all this down which makes me realise how unlucky I am, because next there’s our Rose. She goes to the same school as me but she always tells everybody she’s not really my sister at all. That’s because I’ve got black curly hair and say ‘Mam’ and she’s got blonde curly hair and says ‘Mother’. She says our Mam found her on our front doorstep and she’s really a princess in disguise and there was this note pinned to her and it said, ‘This is a princess in disguise. Look after her and you shall be rewarded’.

  I said to our Mam, ‘Did you really find her on our front doorstep?’ and she said, ‘What do you think?’ and I said, ‘Because if you did, I think you should have left her there.’

  ‘What?’ says our Mam. ‘Leave a poor little baby in the snow?’ and I said, ‘This wasn’t a poor little baby though. This was our Rose,’ and our Mam laughed and said, ‘Now, Rose is a very nice girl,’ and I looked at her and I thought, ‘You can tell she’s a Mam thinking our Rose is a nice girl.’

  I’m nearly at the end of them now, thank goodness, because all this is making me feel really miserable. Next, there’s our Joe. He’s all right. He’s a big head and thinks he knows everything in the entire world and he goes on and on about aeroplanes and guns and daft things like that but I don’t mind him too much. I always liked him better after he showed me how to be a pilot in a Spitfire and he went round the street going ‘Bbbbbbrrrrrr!’ and spitting pebbles out of his mouth and one went straight through Mrs Elston’s front window.

  ‘Who did that? Who did that?’ she shouts, rushing out and catching hold of our Joe. ‘It was me bullets, Missis,’ our Joe said and Mrs Elston said ‘What? What? I’ll give you bullets, young Joe,’ and she gave him a real shaking. All of a sudden our Joe went bright red and went ‘Erk!’ – gasp, gasp, gasp – and Mrs Elston said ‘Whatever’s wrong, lad? Whatever’s wrong?’ and I said to her, ‘I think he’s swallowed the rest of his bullets,’ and Mrs Elston said ‘Bullets. Bullets. What bullets?’ I told her about the pebbles in our Joe’s mouth that were supposed to be bullets and Mrs Elston went, ‘Oh! Oh!!’ – scream scream – and our Mam rushed out and our Joe was going ‘Ugh!’ – gasp gasp – ‘I’m dying,’ and our Mam thumped him sharpish on the back and this great big pebble shot straight out of his throat.

  ‘Look at that,’ our Joe said and we all stood and looked at the bullet lying on the floor and our Mam had to be given a cup of tea and so did Mrs Elston and I had to fetch Grannie Bates to make it because neither of them could lift a kettle on account of how their hands were shaking.

  ‘I’ll never make old bones,’ our Mam said to Mrs Elston, and Mrs Elston said at the rate our family were going, neither would anybody else in the street either.

  Anyway, that’s all our family, thank goodness.

  Now then, where was I? Oh yes, I was going to tell how I got hold of all this paper. Well, me and our Mam went to a jumble sale at the Methodist Chapel Hall and it was underneath a great pile of old rubbish. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw it.

  ‘Get us this, Mam,’ I said, and she turned round and looked down at me staggering around with it in my arms and said, ‘Why, you can hardly stand. Whatever will you do with all that paper?’

  ‘I shall write on it,’ I promised her.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘if you’re sure and you won’t waste it?’ I nearly fell over b
ackwards telling her I wouldn’t waste it.

  ‘All right then,’ she nodded. ‘But I shall expect to see you writing on that, young lady.’

  ‘Oh, you will,’ I said, and so she bought it for me. It was threepence and if this was one of those snooty comics, I’d say, ‘And I will have to have it stopped out of my pocket money.’ But it isn’t and I don’t get pocket money either. We can’t afford it.

  All the boys in the comics I read go away to boarding school. I don’t read girls’ comics because our Mam can’t afford to buy girls and boys comics, so we have to have comics for the lads. I don’t mind, though. I’d rather read about Desperate Dan than about posh old Angela and Fenella and Jennifer who do nothing but eat at night when they’re supposed to be in bed asleep. Mind you, they don’t do anything very much more interesting in the daytime either. They’re either playing hockey or riding horses.

  Our Rose got hold of one of these comics once and she said to our Mam, ‘Can I have a pony?’ and our Mam said, ‘Oh yes, I’m sure. You can have three if you ask nice,’ and our Rose got all red in the face and started crying.

  ‘This is a rotten old house,’ she said. ‘You can’t have anything in this house,’ but of course she was dead wrong, as usual, because our Mam said, ‘Oh yes, you can. You can have this,’ and she clipped her round the leg for being such a mardy baby. I laughed – like a drain, which I shouldn’t have done, because I got a clip as well, for making fun out of other people’s misfortunes, as my Mother said (I call her Mother when I don’t like her very much).

  Well, the idea was to write about where I live, wasn’t it? And you needn’t think I haven’t noticed that ‘Well’ at the beginning because I have, but I’m ignoring it.

  Our Dad says we live in a market town, because we have a cattle market where they sell sheep and pigs and cows and that, and a market with stalls where they sell everything you can think of. He says it is also a pit town, because there are a lot of pits where the men work. Our Tone works down the pit. So you can see it’s a funny town when it’s two things at once.

  Where I live there are lots of streets, but we really live in about six of them. There’s River Street, Bank Street, Shore Street, Willow Terrace, Avon Place and the Black Hole of Calcutta which is really called End Street. We live in River Street and it’s the nicest street of the lot. There are sixteen houses in River Street. Eight down each side. There are some pretty horrible kids who live round here, not including me, of course. I’m nice (ha, ha). I never thought of that. I can write all nice things about myself.

  It’s not posh where we live. All the rest of the town is posh but we’re not. There’s a school just round the corner where we all go and there’s a big sand quarry where we play, although you’re not supposed to. They keep a man with a big black dog in the sand quarry and every now and again he chases you and for about a day after you go around saying ‘I’m never going in that quarry again,’ but then you forget and you do.

  The streets are all twisty and they’ve got passages and entries in them that lead through to other streets. When anybody chases you, if you know your way around, you can get away from them easy by using the entries and passages. There are hundreds and hundreds of people living in the streets around here, and in summer each street has a big party and that’s the only time everybody’s friends with everybody else.

  There are some little shops and about three pubs and a long road which leads to the bluebell wood and the fields. We spend a lot of time in the fields and the woods in the summer.

  I told our Lucy I’m going to be a writer when I grow up and she said, ‘You should be a good one then. You tell enough lies.’

  Then I told her how much I hated her and she hit me and I said, ‘When I’m big, I’m going to hit you and hit you,’ and she said, ‘When you’re big enough, you’ll be too old. Anyway, what will you hit me with? Your walking stick?’ and then she fell about laughing. There are times when I wish I was an only child.

  Of course, it’s a week since I last wrote anything in here. I wasn’t sure about being a writer but our Mam sort of decided it for me because she said, ‘Where’s all that paper I bought you?’ and I said, ‘Upstairs,’ and she said, ‘Not doing a lot of good up there, is it?’ Then she stared at me in that particular way I hate because it always means she’s going to say something like, ‘And when did you last wash your face?’ and she said, ‘I’d better see you writing on that paper, my lass, when I get back, or you’ll hear all about it.’

  ‘I can’t think of anything to write,’ I said, and our Joe, who just happened to be sat imitating a sack of potatoes, said, ‘You want to write down some of them lies you tell at school then. I should think they’ll fill up three-quarters of it without any bother.’

  ‘What lies?’ I shouted, noticing our Mam was giving her impression of Sherlock Holmes. ‘I don’t tell no lies,’ I said, and then our Mam said, ‘Well, you’ll not go far if you use grammar like that and that’s a fact,’ and in the end, I left them to it and swept out of the room.

  I read that in a book once. ‘She swept out of the room,’ it said, and I’ve wanted to do it ever since. Mind you, it would have been a lot better if our Joe hadn’t got his great foot in the way.

  I’ve been seriously thinking of going to live on a desert island for a bit of peace because if I didn’t know my own brothers personally, I wouldn’t believe such a horrible bunch could exist and they make me sick.

  The other night I went to bed as usual at about half-past nine. It was pitch black, and we don’t have electricity in our house. It hasn’t come up into our streets yet. I heard this man on the wireless the other day saying all the world would have electricity by 1980, so we’ve only got thirty-two years to go. They’ve got it at school. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? But we haven’t got it.

  ‘What you never had, you never miss,’ our Mam says, but I don’t think she’s right. I miss a lot of things I’ve never had, not least of which is a bike. If I had a bike, I should think I’d never ask for anything else in the world again, but our Mam says, ‘Oh yes, you would. It’s in human nature to want one thing and then another.’

  ‘I’m different, Mam,’ I said. ‘You buy me a bike and I’ll show you.’

  ‘I’ll just have to take your word for it,’ she said. ‘Because you’re getting no bike.’

  I never expected to get one anyway, but I’m just proving that you can miss what you’ve never had, even if our Mam doesn’t believe it.

  So, as I was saying. I went to bed at about half-past nine and somebody shut the stairs door at the bottom so that I couldn’t see where I was going, naturally. I was only halfway upstairs and it was really spooky. We have to have a candle with us because there’s no gas upstairs either. Only downstairs in the kitchen and the front room. So there I was, halfway upstairs with a candle in my hand and I thought, ooooh! I don’t like this, and I nearly went back down.

  Anyway, I got into my bedroom all right. Well, it isn’t my bedroom. I share it with our Mam and Dad, Lucy and Rose. Me, Lucy and Rose sleep in one bed and our Mam and Dad sleep in another. It’s all right, but it gets a bit crowded at times.

  Because I’m the youngest, I have to go to bed first, which I think is dead unfair. So I put the candle on the table at the side of the bed and I got into bed and I have to sleep in the middle and you should just try that. It’s terrible. I get up every morning black and blue with people’s arms hitting me in the face and great big feet kicking me in the back and then our Lucy and Rose turning over at the same time. I know what it’s like to be a sardine in a tin, I do. And I wish our Lucy and Rose had tails. Then I wouldn’t have to keep on at them about cutting their toe-nails.

  Where was I? Oh yes. So I got into bed and I’d just laid down and the bedroom door started opening very slowly. It went, ‘Cccccccrrrrrreeeeeaaaaakkkkk – ccrrreee-aaakkkk.’ I nearly died there and then and I felt just like our Dad says a rabbit behaves when it’s faced with a fox. I couldn’t move. I just sat there bolt
upright and the candle was making all flickering shadows in the room, and because the door was half open the curtains were blowing out. And then, this candle appeared at the end of a long white arm and there was this horrible wailing noise. ‘Ooooooooohhhhhhhhh!’ it went, and then again, ‘Ooooooooohhhhhhhhhh!’ And from behind the door came a ghost! Holding a candle!

  Of course I screamed and screamed and screamed and three-quarters of the neighbourhood rushed up the stairs to see what was wrong.

  There was my Mam and my Dad and Mrs Elston from next door, and Granny Bates from across the road and Old Flo from round the corner. What a crush! I can just remember seeing Old Flo and Granny Bates sticking in the doorway.

  ‘Get out of the way, Flo,’ Granny Bates said and Flo said, ‘I’m sure I shan’t. I’ve as much right here as you have,’ and our Mam said to our Dad, ‘For goodness sake, give them a push so that one or the other of them gets in.’ And he did and they came out of the door with a pop, like a cork out of a bottle.

  ‘Whatever’s the matter?’ our Mam was shouting at me, and Granny Bates leant over me and said, ‘That child’s not well,’ and our Mam said, ‘Go on!’ and Granny Bates said, ‘Oh well, if that’s the attitude you’re going to take,’ but she didn’t go away.

  Then Old Flo looked at me and said, ‘Do you remember when old Johnny Boy was taken away?’ I remember when he was taken away because he was shouting and screaming at the end of our street and our Mam said it was because he was shell-shocked in the war. That means somebody dropped a bomb on him and it hurt him in his head, in the bit where you think. I stopped screaming and gulped and yelled at our Mam, ‘Don’t let them take me away,’ and our Mam lifted me out of bed and said to Old Flo, ‘You’d better go down, Flo. I’ll see to her,’ and our Dad got them all back downstairs.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ our Mam said and I told her about the ghost and she said, ‘And it was carrying a candle, was it?’ and I sobbed, ‘Yes, Mam, it was,’ and she said, ‘That’s very interesting,’ and she laid me down again and said, ‘Dad’ll bring you a nice cup of cocoa in a minute. You just lie there.’