Chapter 2:
FINDING FROGS
The sky was slate grey and there was a chilly breeze. Andrew and Vicky were playing in the street. Andrew’s feet were hurting. The trainers his mum had found for him at the charity shop were rather tight. He decided not to tell her. She had looked so pleased when she gave them to him.
He had found an old-fashioned pram in a skip. Vicky had helped him to lug it out from under a pile of plasterboard and empty paint tins and they had dragged it home. He had hoped to make a cart, a cart that would glide smoothly down the hill and round the corner, with traffic nowhere to be seen. In fact, as Vicky pointed out, one of the wheels was loose and the front axle was bent. Even Andrew realised that there was no chance of transforming this old wreck into a cart.
They were taking it in turns to spin one of the wheels to see how long it would go on turning. The heavy weight of school was gradually ebbing away.
“Tea’s ready!” It was Andrew’s mum.
“Can I come to tea?”
“I expect so,” said Andrew. Vicky often came home with him after school. Her mum knew that and never seemed to worry about her. She had a dad who lived at home, too.
Vicky knew there would be nicer food at home, but she liked the feeling of it being just the three of them, Andrew and Andrew’s mum and herself. Her own home was crowded and noisy, with Auntie May always playing her music, and Auntie May’s children, Rose and Violet, all over the place. Vicky had to share her room with them. Rose and Violet liked to investigate her belongings, and her schoolwork sometimes got messed up or even lost and then she would get into trouble with Mrs Warbloff, her form teacher. Mrs Warbloff was Andrew’s form teacher, too, and she was a problem for both of them.
When Vicky came home with Andrew, the two of them would get on with their homework together after tea while Andrew’s mum addressed envelopes. Vicky knew that she earned money from this and that the money went into Andrew’s school clothes fund. Even buying the clothes second-hand cost a bomb, and Mrs Canadine tried hard not to get into debt. It was one of her biggest worries.
She also worried about the possibility of Andrew’s dad coming home. It only happened once or twice a year but it was a time of shouting and bitterness and when he left, her carefully hoarded funds would be nearly all gone and she would have to start all over again. It was no use hiding them. He always managed to persuade her to give him “a helping hand,” as he put it, and when he came back from the pub around the corner there would be nothing left of the helping hand. Andrew hated to see her white, tear-stained face when this happened, just as he hated to see his dad’s angry red face and hear his loud angry justifications that went on being loud and angry deep into the night. He almost wished his dad would never come home again. He could be fun, though; he told Andrew jokes and stories, and once he had given him a wristwatch.
“What about the pram?” asked Vicky.
“Just leave it. I expect somebody will take it.”
They went in to tea. There was a smell of toast. The oven was second-hand, like most things in the house, and the grill had never worked. Mrs Canadine was ingenious, though, and she had found that if she balanced the wire tray on top of the largest ring on the top of the oven it would make toast. You could see dark brown rings on the toast, but it was toast all right. Today they were having baked beans on the toast. The beans were a little harder than the baked beans in Vicky’s house, and the tomato sauce was not so thick and tasty, but Vicky was happy to be sitting down at the old kitchen table with Andrew and Andrew’s mum.
The inevitable question came: “How was school today?” An awkward one, as always. Vicky left the answering to Andrew. He knew the sort of things his mum liked to hear. Her own mum was content to let school take care of itself, and never asked questions.
“We did frogs today.” They had copied a picture of a frog into their Science notebooks and had written out the information from the box in the textbook. Andrew did not tell how Mrs Warbloff had torn the page out of his notebook in front of all the other kids because the frog colour was wrong. He knew he sometimes got colours mixed up, and he tried really hard not to. He had no idea that he was quite significantly colour-blind and neither did Mrs Warbloff. She thought that was all nonsense anyway. There had been a colour-blindness test a year ago but Andrew had been in bed with one of his sore throats that day. Sometimes he whispered to one of the kids at his table to get help with his choice of crayons. The spiteful ones would encourage him to make the wrong choices. Vicky would never do a thing like that. She was a good sort. One of the best.
Mrs Canadine liked Vicky, too. She liked her big brown eyes, her curly black hair and her friendly chocolate-brown face that seemed to gleam in the light from the lamp bulb hanging above the kitchen table. It had had a blue lampshade once, but this had got broken on one of Andrew’s dad’s visits and had never been replaced. There were more urgent things needing money than that. She was happy that Andrew had such a nice school friend and although it meant opening another tin of beans or macaroni cheese or whatever else they were having for tea – for Vicky had a powerful appetite – she was glad to do so and would never turn her away. It was strange that Vicky never asked Andrew round to her house, though.
In fact, Vicky would very much have liked to ask Andrew round but she was afraid her mum would say “Why?” in that challenging way she had. And if she said, “Andrew’s my friend,” she was afraid her mum would give her scornful laugh, a type of snort really, that she used in all sorts of situations. Her dad would probably be sympathetic, but it somehow seemed against the rules to ask him instead of Mum.
“Frogs are amphibians,” said Vicky.
“And were you told what that means?” asked Mrs Canadine.
It was nice that Andrew’s mum took an interest in what they were doing. Vicky liked the sound of the word ‘amphibian’ but she had to confess that she did not know what an amphibian was. It had probably been in the information box they copied out, but she had been fully occupied writing out the words, trying hard not to make any mistakes, and so she had not actually taken in what they said.
“Let’s have a look in the dictionary.” Mrs Canadine went up to her bedroom and came down with the battered old volume. “Here, Andrew, you see if you can find it.”
Andrew knew she was doing this to help him in his education. She had often told him that being able to look things up was a useful skill. After a few moments’ fumbling, because it was a big, heavy book and the spine was broken, he found the word.
“Hey, amphibians can live in water as well as on land!” he exclaimed. “I wish I could do that!” He began to think of devices that he might be able to build. Some sort of submarine. One of the books at school had a picture of an early attempt to make a diving suit, a sort of barrel with arms and legs of canvas and a glass window. If he could find the right materials he might be able to build something like that. He could try it out in the canal the other side of the prison. The canal curved round there and there was a little lawn with some benches. He could attach a rope to it and Vicky could hold on to the other end and pull him to the side if he got into any difficulties.
He would have another look in the skip tomorrow and see if there was anything useful for the project. There might have been some old windows behind the paint tins. With a bit of luck one of the panes might not be broken and that could be the window. Maybe he could make the whole thing bigger and then Vicky could come in it with him.
“… shall we?” Andrew realised his mother had been saying something, but she was handing him his plate of beans on toast and it didn’t seem to be something he needed to reply to.
When they had finished their meal, Vicky washed the knives and forks and plates in the sink and Andrew dried them. They took turns at this when Vicky came to tea and they enjoyed doing it together. Mrs Canadine got out her box file and started work on her envelopes and the two children were
soon back at the kitchen table with their homework spread out in front of them.
It was maths tonight, just a page of money problems that Andrew could have zoomed through in ten minutes, but he knew Vicky found them hard, so he sat beside her and tried to explain how he got the answers. She really wanted to understand but a kind of fright took over when it came to maths. Her first teacher had spoken very fast and had looked fierce. Right from the start Vicky had been afraid of getting the wrong answer and now she seldom got the right answer. Unfortunately, it was Mrs Warbloff’s belief that children only needed to try harder in order to do well. If their work did not improve, it was obvious that they were stubbornly choosing to be that way.
Vicky did not become tearful when she was doing her maths next to Andrew, with kind Mrs Canadine rustling away with her envelopes at the other end of the table. Sometimes it even seemed possible that she was on the verge of understanding what was going on. At school tomorrow they would probably move on to the next page of the book and it would all get lost again in a blur of numbers and diagrams, and the whole subject would seem as dangerous and puzzling as ever. Just for the moment, though, in the cosy companionship of the kitchen, it seemed safe enough.
Homework over and stowed away, Andrew and Vicky went through to what was called ‘the other room’. It was cold and bare but they could chat for a while until it was time for Vicky to go down the road to the block where her flat was.
“I wish we didn’t have to go to school tomorrow,” said Vicky. She often said this, but Andrew did not mind. He agreed with her. If only there were no school, life would be a lot easier and a lot happier, too.
“What would you do tomorrow if there wasn’t any school?”
Vicky smiled. She enjoyed that sort of question. “I’d go and look for frogs.” Frogs had caught her imagination. She was not at all clear how big they were because she had never actually seen a frog. There were no parks in this part of London. If you went on the bus to the Social Security office you went past a park with iron railings round it. There were a few trees and the rest was worn out grass. In one corner was a slide and some swings, and that was all. She did know that frogs lived in ponds but there was no pond there. She had heard of a pond called the Round Pond, but she did not know where it was. Yes, she would go on an expedition to find the Round Pond and look at the frogs swimming along under the water.
“I’d start making a submarine and then we could look at the frogs properly,” said Andrew.
Mrs Canadine put her head round the door and smiled in at them. “Time for Vicky to go, I’m afraid.” Vicky would have been content to walk home alone but Mrs Canadine always insisted on accompanying her to the corner of her block and watching until she waved down at them from the balcony outside her flat on the third floor. Andrew always came along too and Vicky liked the feeling of being with the two of them a little while longer. Her mum might not even look up from the newspaper when Vicky came through the door. She would be slowly reading her way through it with the television on as well.
Auntie May might shout out a greeting to her, otherwise she would be largely ignored, except by Rose and Violet. They would probably have emptied out her little cupboard and would want her to join in a game with her things. She tried not to get angry with them. They were very young and they didn’t have anything else to do and very few things of their own. She would probably play with them until Auntie May put them to bed in the bunk beds that now blocked out most of the light from her window. Vicky would then have to stay in the kitchen until they were asleep.
The sky was black and it was drizzling as Vicky and Andrew and Mrs Canadine walked down the street. Vicky was not looking forward to the noise and confusion of home. Things would settle down a bit when her dad got home from work, but tomorrow there would be school again and two more days of school after that until the weekend came. Then perhaps there might be a way to find some frogs.
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Chichester Greenway Page 2