by Alan Garner
Four generations, Tamworth 1939 (© the author)
And the church was different. It didn’t have a steeple made of hard grey stone with a weathercock on top. It had a tower with battlements same as the castle at Tamworth where my great-grandad lived, and the stone was yellow brown and old and worn. And there were painted shields everywhere inside.
The next church was Birtles. This had a tower, but it looked new outside because it was brick. Inside, though, it was full of carved furniture and panels and old stained glass from somewhere else.
Then there was the best church of all, at Marton. It was built of oak and plaster, black and white outside, and it was right next to the Congleton road, so my mother and I passed it every time, but we never stopped to go in.
When I went by myself I opened the door, and I was in a forest. The church had been built from trees. I could climb a ladder up to the bells and look down into the branches through a hole the shape of a four-leaved clover cut in the wood.
Near the church there was a lane, and when I explored it I found a farm. The house was old, with stone at one end, but next to the yard, by a midden, there was something older, I knew. It was an oak tree. It wasn’t very tall, but it was wider than any tree I’d ever seen. The branches grew out and backwards, as big as trees themselves, with gaps between, and it was all hollow inside, without any wood except for the branches and the bark, and it was being used as a shed for farm machinery. And the roots were as thick as the trunks of ordinary trees. I’d never seen anything like it.
My bike showed me how the village and the Edge fitted into the rest. And when my grandma gave me her set of Bartholomew’s Reduced Survey for Tourists and Cyclists maps I saw how it all worked.
I’d got Philips’ New Pocket Atlas of the World, which had the countries in different colours, and everything belonging to Great Britain was red, but these other maps had roads on them.
I could see a black speck that showed where my Hough grandad’s house was, and how Mottram Road met Trafford Road. And then I saw how the roads joined and made one big road, and I could ride from our house anywhere, to my great-grandad at Tamworth, if I wanted, and all the way to the sea.
Mr Noon
Mr Noon was the school caretaker. He had a brick hut inside the gates to the Big Boys’ playground, next to the woodwork room. There was a ledge outside the shed, and Mr Ellis kept his thermometer on it, which he checked at playtime and then wrote the temperature in a notebook.
There were two playgrounds; one for the Infants and Big Girls and one for the Big Boys. Between them was a wall, with a door that was always locked. Each playground had a covered shelter for bad weather. The roof was on iron poles painted green, and the paint was worn thin by boys climbing. Girls didn’t climb, because it showed their knickers.
Next to it were the lavatories. In the Infants’ playground the boys’ were stalls, which the girls passed going to their pans, and they giggled. But we had a way of getting even.
We used to have competitions to see who could pee over the lavatory wall into the playground. Norman was a Liverpool vaccy, and he was the best. He shot the other way, with his back to the playground, and could send a stream right into the girls’ pans, which had walls but no doors, and make them scream. He was that good he aimed his first round to the furthest pan, dropping back one at a time as he lost pressure, with a pause between. We liked Norman.
The Big Boys’ pans were used mainly for smoking, and every playtime Mr Ellis came out to sniff.
At the end of playtime, Miss Fletcher called the Infants and Big Girls in by ringing a brass hand-bell. It had A.R.P. on the rim, standing for Air Raid Precautions. Miss Fletcher was an air-raid warden after school. If there was a warning during the night, school began half an hour later the next morning, and sometimes an hour. It depended on how long the time was between the alert and the all-clear sirens. But it was no use pretending there’d been a warning if there hadn’t, because Miss Fletcher would know.
To call in the Big Boys Mr Ellis used a whistle, which he blew three times. The first meant Stop Playing; the second, Stand Still And No Talking; the third, Get Into Line. And when we were all in our files we marched to our classrooms.
Our teacher in the first year of Big School was Miss Benison, who was tall and wore round glasses. She had pits in her neck where glands had been taken out for tuberculosis.
Once, Miss Benison had to be away from school to go to her mother’s funeral. Her mother lived in Liverpool and had been killed in an air raid. When Miss Benison came back she finished the story she had been reading to us before she went. It was called The Magic Faraway Tree.
In Miss Benison’s class we had Private Reading. That meant we could bring books from home, if we had any. I took The Daily Express Film Annual which had a photograph of Greta Garbo on the front. It was the only time Miss Benison scolded me. She picked up The Daily Express Film Annual from my desk and walked to the front of the class, waving it in the air, and she said it wasn’t a book. The next time, I took Stories of Tuffy the Tree Elf. And after that I took Newnes Family Doctor. Miss Benison let me read both those books.
For Simple Physical Exercise we went into the playground, and Miss Benison held her arm straight above her head and we had to run and jump to smack her hand. I was the tallest in the class, and the second tallest in the school, and there was only me could smack Miss Benison’s hand, because she was so tall too.
I was tall because I kept being ill and had to stay in bed. One year I grew seven inches, my mother said, and my Hough grandad called me a stick of forced rhubarb.
My grandma called me Half-Chick sometimes, because when I wasn’t being ill I was always on the go and asking ‘Why?’ Most grown-ups just said ‘Because’; but she didn’t. And I didn’t walk. I ran; or skipped. I skipped sideways, to school and back. And once I skipped sideways the measured mile right up the Hough.
If I was very poorly and couldn’t read, my grandma used to come and sit by my bed and tell me stories. One was about Half-Chick. He wasn’t like the others. He was born in half, and he was never still and wouldn’t be told.
‘He had only one leg one wing and one eye.
He left home. He made his mother cry.
He went hoppity-kick down the road, over the strand.
Hoppity-kick hoppity-kick to spy out the land.
The wind put him up on a steeple so he could.
And hoppity-kick hoppity-kick there he stood.’
My grandma said I was just like Half-Chick. I was a little autocrat, she said. I thought she said ‘a little naughty cat’, and I said I wasn’t. That made her laugh, and it taught me a new word.
The next tallest in the class was William. He lived in the Back Streets, which were dangerous because the boys were rough and beat up anyone that didn’t live there if they caught them. William’s father kept Gort’s chip shop, which wasn’t as good as Elsie Shaw’s. The fat had a sour taste and there was only one light, with no shade for the bulb. William said his grandad was Lord Gort VC, who was a Field Marshal in the army, fighting the Germans in Malta, but we didn’t believe him.
What I didn’t like most about the Big School was all the Big Boys played together and I couldn’t play with the girls any more.
Mr Ellis took the Big Boys’ Senior Physical Exercise. For this we put two squares of coconut matting together and had to stand with our toes against the edge of one and do a standing jump to land on the other. Only Kipper and I could do it, and Kipper was better than me because he was a year older.
He jumped in a funny way. He crouched with his hands together in front of him as if he was saying his prayers; then he jumped, and his legs and arms went out wide same as a frog’s and came together when he landed more than half way along the second mat.
Kipper always wore a yellow jersey; and he held one shoulder higher than the other and turned his head, which made him look sideways when he spoke, though there was nothing wrong with him. He used to punch me on my backbone with th
e knuckle of his middle finger. That was one way I found I could run faster than anyone else.
Chelford was the next village, and every fortnight on Fridays the Big Boys from that school came to do woodwork. They were worse than Kipper. They lived on farms and were strong, and in the playground they ganged up to catch me. They twisted my arms and pulled my hair, and one put a lump of white dry dog dirt in my mouth. I was so scared I had stomach cramps, which made me cry and bend over when I walked. I told my parents, but my father called me a sissy, and said bullies were cowards when you stood up to them and fought back. It wasn’t true. Not even Punny, the vaccy from Guernsey, could look after me on Fridays. I didn’t know what to do.
But I worked it out.
If I waited at the far end of School Lane I could hear Mr Ellis blow his whistle. At the first whistle I ran down the lane to the school wall. At the second, I ran to the gates. At the third, I ran into the playground and joined the file.
The Chelford boys were the last out for playtime because they had to tidy their work benches, and I could get into School Lane and wait for the whistle for lessons to start again. But Mr Noon saw me. His shed was between the woodwork room and the gates. And after he’d watched me a few times he told me to come to his shed at playtime and hide in there.
Mr Noon was a big man with a round white face which was always the same. He never smiled or frowned. Most of the time he sat in his shed and mended things. He had a cobbler’s last, and if anyone came to school with broken or leaking shoes he gave them spare ones to wear and mended theirs on his last before home time.
So I used to go and sit in his shed while he tapped nails and stitched seams in the light from the doorway, not speaking; then I’d dodge out and get into line at the third whistle; and nobody knew.
Mr Noon lived in Tyler Street, near to John.
Glyn Ridgeway lived in the Back Streets and worked for the Council. He did the jobs that didn’t need him to be clever. And one day he came to get rid of the rats that were in the main sewer down the middle of Trafford Road. He opened the manhole cover by turning a key on the end of a rod with a handle on top. There was a deep shaft to the water, with iron rungs to climb on. But this day, Glyn Ridgeway didn’t go down. He’d brought a sack of carbide, and he lifted the cover outside our house and poured the carbide into the shaft so it would mix with the water and the gas would kill the rats.
When he saw the water was bubbling and fizzing he put the cover back and locked it. But as he locked the cover he dropped his cigarette end down the shaft.
The gas exploded, and the force of the explosion went along the sewer so fast it couldn’t escape sideways into the house drains. It went all the way along Trafford Road to the end. But at the end, the very last house on the sewer, in Tyler Street, was Mr Noon’s.
Mrs Noon was sitting on the lavatory, and the explosion came up the drain and lifted the lavatory off its base and threw Mrs Noon into the air.
Mr Noon was at home and heard the crash and Mrs Noon screaming. When he got to her he found her on the floor among the pieces of the bowl, with the seat round her neck and her knickers round her ankles. I don’t remember how we knew this last bit; but that was what everybody said happened.
Mrs Noon wasn’t hurt, though she was under the doctor with nerves for a long time after; and Mr Noon retired. But by then the war was over, and the Chelford boys didn’t come any more.
Half-Chick
The war went. We sang in the playground:
‘Bikini lagoon,
An atom bomb’s boom,
And two big explosions.’
David’s father came back from Burma and didn’t eat rice. And we were in Mr Ellis’s class, the class of the Eleven Plus, which was the only way to escape being taught by Twiggy.
When my father had been at school and was a Big Boy he’d spent some of his time wheeling sand and cement and bricks for the extension of the school to make extra classrooms, the corridor, the stairs and the staffroom. The headmaster then had been Pop Kennedy, who taught by walking up and down the rows between desks playing a violin, with a cane hanging from his elbow, and reciting Latin and Shakespeare. My father remembered ‘Deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles,’ and ‘Where is thy leather apron and thy rule?’ Inky Gezink was always in trouble because he couldn’t recite Shakespeare and said, ‘Where is thy leather apron? And thy rule.’ And Pop Kennedy caned him for it.
Twiggy was different. He taught by reciting ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ and the thirteen times table. He was fat and short and he shouted, and he had white hair, nearly bald, and cut into bristles. His neck was as wide as his head, and the back of it was folds, and the creases made eyes and a nose and a mouth, so when he was writing on the blackboard the creases moved up and down and seemed to be watching us and doing the talking.
Twiggy was a bully, though he never took any notice of me. Once, he came into Mr Ellis’s room shouting and pulled Michael out of his desk by his ear and swung him round in front of the class. Michael was so scared he wet himself and the floor and ran out of school. Mr Ellis asked Twiggy to leave; and he did.
Mr Ellis was thin and tall, and he had a big forehead and a sharp red nose. He always wore a brown suit and waistcoat and shoes, and a brown trilby hat when he was outside. His bike had a rack over the back wheel to carry his brown leather case strapped down.
That year we had our first Guy Fawkes Night since before the war. My mother bought a ten-shilling box of fireworks from Alison’s shop where I got my comics. Nobody else had as many fireworks as I did. She bought them weeks early, and I counted them every day and read the instructions and ‘Light the blue touchpaper and retire immediately.’ There were rip-raps and sparklers and Catherine wheels and whizz-bangs and Roman candles and bombers and two rockets and all sorts. They were the first bright colours I’d seen since I was five, except for the Gypsies’ clothes and the covers of The Dandy, The Beano, and the Knock-Out books. But soon after, the rims of plates and cups and saucers were coloured too.
On Guy Fawkes Night my father and mother took me along Mottram Road and we let off the fireworks below the Woodhill. We pinned Catherine wheels on the trees and stood the rockets in an empty beer bottle, and we laughed and shouted and I jumped in the dead beech leaves.
I’d been worried all weekend and all the week before, in case it would rain and spoil everything, and that Monday morning I sat in my desk and looked out through the window at the sky. The sky was blue, with white fluffy clouds, and the weathercock on St Philip’s church in School Lane stood still, and it glinted.
(© Peter Wright)
The weathercock was on the top of the steeple, and if I was at the bottom and put my head right back and looked up when the wind was blowing the clouds from behind me the steeple and the weathercock seemed to be tumbling down, but I knew they weren’t. I showed Shirley, and she ran and hid in the school porch and wouldn’t come out until Miss Turner told her it was all right and made me say sorry.
Next to the porch was the window of the hall. It was filled with diamond-shaped panes of glass set in lead; and when I stood to the side the weathercock was reflected in every one: a hundred and twenty-four half-chicks turning together.
The weathercock was bright gold because my father had gilded it fresh after the war ended. The steeplejacks had lowered it down for him, and I sat on its back. I hadn’t thought it was that big.
And there it was now, high up again, glinting on the first Guy Fawkes Day since the war, while I worried about the rain.
Mr Ellis told me to pay attention. I thought I was in trouble. But Mr Ellis said it wasn’t going to rain tonight. The temperature was forty-five degrees, and the barometer was Set Fair. So I’d have my fireworks.
Later, there were other fireworks we could buy, whether it was Guy Fawkes Night or not. They were plain white sticks with a stiff fuse and no instructions or writing on them. They were tuppence each. We called them Bangers because they were t
he loudest of all, as loud as those we’d seen used by the Home Guard and the army when they were training. Harold and I used to collect woodlice and slugs and fill a tin with them, light the Banger, put it in, screw the lid tight, and run. When the Banger went off we looked to see how many woodlice and slugs were still alive and whether the woodlouse armour made any difference, and how far the bits of the tin had travelled.
We couldn’t put the Banger in too soon in case the burning fuse used up all the air and didn’t explode. So we timed how long the fuse burned; it was between twelve and sixteen seconds. We reckoned we were safe to hold the Banger for eight seconds before putting it in the tin and there would be enough air for the fuse to burn.
All the boys had Bangers, but we were the only ones to experiment with them. Somehow Mr Ellis found out, and Bangers were banned and Alison’s stopped selling them.
When everybody was present there were thirty-three of us in the class, including Denis. But Mr Ellis said he wasn’t worth teaching and sent him to weed the garden of the telephone exchange outside the school, where he could see him from his high desk.
Then there was Shirley, and Sheila, and Angela, and Roy, and John, and me. The others called us ‘Ellis’s Pets’ and we sat next to his desk. John and I sat together, and the difference between us was at the end of a lesson John’s part of the seat was warm and mine was cold. John said it was because I was skinny, and I said it was because he had a big bum.
Mr Ellis taught us differently from the rest. They were given work to do and told to get on with it; and they had to be quiet. If any of them coughed, Mr Ellis said they hadn’t got long for this world. But with the six of us he was patient and worked us hard, and we talked about different things.
The whole class was getting ready for the Eleven Plus exam. If we passed we went to grammar school; and if we didn’t Twiggy had us until we were old enough to leave school and get a job.
