Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018

Copyright © Alan Garner 2018

Cover photograph provided by the author

Design by Jack Smyth

Alan Garner asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins..

Source ISBN: 9780008305970

Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008305994

Version: 2018-09-11

Dedication

For Tom

Epigraph

Pancake Tuesday’s a very happy day.

If you don’t give us a holiday we’ll all run away.

Where shall we run to? Down Moss Lane.

Here comes Twiggy with his big fat cane!

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Bomb

The Nettling of Harold

Rocking Horse

Monsall

Porch

Mrs E. Paminondas

Mrs Finch’s Gatepost

St Mary’s Vaccies

Widdershins

Bunty

Bike

Mr Noon

Half-Chick

DOWN MOSS LANE

Bomb (1955)

St Mary’s Vaccies (1974)

The Nettling of Harold (2001)

Also by Alan Garner

About the Publisher

Bomb

John and I were going up the Hough to pick watercress in Pott Brook and to look at the anti-aircraft battery in Baguley’s fields.

DANGER. DON’T TOUCH.

The notice was on the board outside the police station on Heyes Lane. A red arrow pointed to pictures of a high-explosive shell, small bombs with fins, a hand grenade; and there were some harmless-looking things too. And underneath was printed:

IF YOU FIND ONE OF THESE, TELL TEACHER OR A POLICEMAN.

DO NOT TOUCH IT, EVEN WITH A STICK.

AND DO NOT THROW STONES AT IT

Pott Brook goes under Hough Lane, and we jumped from the bridge into the field and began to look for caddis fly larvae in the water.

Caddis larvae build tubes from grit and bits of leaf and twig bark to protect their bodies, with only the head and legs poking out. They showed the water was clean. If there were no caddis flies we didn’t pick the cress.

It started to rain.

We walked along the bank to where the cress grew, and John found five tubes. We left the cress to be gathered on the way back and went upstream to look at the guns.

We were nearly across the field when we saw it.

It was on the other side of the brook, floating in a tangle of alder roots. It was grey, with a neck, and a black mark or letters or numbers on the side. We couldn’t read them that far off. But we knew.

What must we do? There was no teacher to tell. It was holidays. It had to be a policeman. The notice said.

We ran back to the station. We looked at the notice again. There it was: on the left, third from the top. Should we tell our mothers first? It said: tell teacher or a policeman. We went in.

The sergeant was sitting at his desk, and he asked what he could do for us. We told him about the cress and the caddis and the thing in the brook, and we took him out and showed him the poster. He said we had sharp eyes, and we went back inside.

The sergeant opened a big book and began to write. Then PC Pessle came in. He was the policeman that saw us across the main road to and from school, and he had given me a broken police watch when I was two because I could tell the time. That’s why my cousins called me Ticker.

The sergeant told PC Pessle what had happened, and asked him to go and check what we’d found. PC Pessle set off with us to investigate. It was raining hard.

We led him over the field at Pott Brook to where the thing was still bobbing in the alder roots. He got down into the water and broke off a dead branch from the tree. We shouted he mustn’t touch it EVEN WITH A STICK. He told us to go back to the bridge and wait.

From the bridge we could see him bending down and poking. Then he climbed onto the bank, holding the grey thing with a neck and a black mark or letters or numbers on the side, just like the poster. John and I ducked below the parapet of the bridge, but PC Pessle told us not to be scared and showed us what he’d got.

It was a grey pot bottle, with words in black on the side:

VITAMIN BEVERAGES LIMITED

BREWED FROM HOPS, GINGER, ROOTS, SUGAR

WHICH ARE GOOD FOR YOU. ASK YOUR DOCTOR.

KEEP COOL.

PC Pessle went back with us to the police station and reported to the sergeant. They both said what good lads we were, and the sergeant wrote in the big book. John and I kept the bottle and we tossed for it. I won.

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