Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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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

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Source ISBN: 9780008306007

Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008305994

Version: 2019-02-14

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.

The Nettling of Harold

We were my cousins Betty and Geoffrey, me; Harold, his older brother Gordon, and baby Arthur; Ruth and Mary, sisters; and Iris. Betty and Iris were Big Girls, though Iris couldn’t read. Arthur was there because he was in nappies and Harold had to look after him all the time. We were the Belmont Gang. I lived half a mile away, but my grandma lived at number 11, so I was let in, though I was a strug because I didn’t come from Belmont. A strug was the word my uncle Syd and Harold’s father used for a stray pigeon.

My grandma was old, and had wrinkly brown skin and silver hair and could skip better than the girls. She’d moved from Congleton to live in the village to be near her family because a war was coming, and number 11 was empty because the man living there had hanged himself in the lavatory.

The Belmont Gang, 1939. Back row, left to right: Betty, me, Gordon, Iris. Front row: Mary, Ruth, Geoffrey, Harold with baby Arthur (© the author)

Belmont had been built as four blocks of three houses in Potts’s brickyard field. Each house was two up and two down, with a kitchen, and a garden at the front and a walled yard at the back. Later they had a lavatory added on in the yard. The cistern was in the kitchen to stop the pipe from freezing, and the chain went over a wheel and through the wall. We used to wait until people were sitting down and then pulled the chain to make them shout.

Next to my grandma lived Mr and Mrs Kirkham. They were old, too, but they kept themselves to themselves.

One day, the police had come from Macclesfield and told Mr and Mrs Kirkham they must move out because the house was going to be searched. They went to stay at number 11. This was before my grandma lived there.

The police lifted up the bedroom floorboards and the stone flags downstairs, and took out the built-in cupboards and made holes in the ceilings and tapped the walls and broke through the plaster and the bricks where they heard hollow sounds. And in each place they found money and jewellery and gold and silver. Burglars had lived in the house earlier and had hidden their loot there.

The police put everything back properly and tidied and redecorated the house, but my grandma said Mr and Mrs Kirkham were so upset they were never really happy again.

The allotments for the houses were separate strips, side by side, and my uncle Syd and Harold’s father had their pigeon cotes there. We played on the patch of sand where the privies had been before Belmont was modernized.

When the war came, a brick air-raid shelter with a flat concrete roof was built, and it was dark, and the voices of grown-ups swore at us from inside when we tried to look.

There was an oak tree next to the shelter. We climbed onto the roof by putting our backs against the wall and walking up the trunk of the tree. The roof was our aerodrome, and we used to run round it with our arms out, preparing for take-off, and then have dogfights. Harold was a Messerschmitt 109, or a Focke-Wulf 190, because people said his great-grandfather had been a Gypsy. I was a Spitfire, because I could make the noise of a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. This meant Harold was always shot down and had to crash by jumping off the roof. He liked that. But I was too scared, and landed by hanging from the concrete and dropping into the grass.

I kept a hedgehog in a hutch on my grandma’s allotment, and Harold and I gathered slugs to feed it. We picked the big black ones, and sometimes we found orange and grey. We popped the slugs with splinters of glass to make them easier for the hedgehog to eat, and we watched the innards, trying to work out which bits were which. We were both interested in Nature.

We were interested in everything.

I saved up by taking empties back to Mayoh’s off-licence and collecting the tuppence deposit, and I once got into trouble with my mother for carrying the beer bottles in a basket without covering them with paper, because people could see. I bought myself Woodpecker cider with the deposit money, and spent some on carbide which Dobbin Brooks sold at his bike shop for making the flame of acetylene lamps.

Harold and I went fishing at the Electric Light Works, further along Heyes Lane, in a big concrete water tank. A woman had drowned herself there, but we weren’t bothered in the daytime.

We put stones in an empty cider bottle, filled the bottle with water to just below the neck, and dropped lumps of carbide in. The lumps started to fizz as soon as they were wet, and we screwed the top on fast and tight and threw the bottle into the tank and watched it sink. Then we waited, excited; and the longer we waited the more excited we got; but we didn’t make any noise.

We were waiting for the explosion to thud, and the dome of water and bubbles the same as the depth charges we saw in the newsreels at The Regal. Then the fish came up, stunned or dead, and we pulled them in with branches. They were sticklebacks. We couldn’t eat them, because they were small and had spines, and I couldn’t get the deposit back on the bottle; but that didn’t matter.

The bottles had another scientific use.

We took them into the allotments where the long grass grew under the fruit bushes. We sat and turned the screw tops back and to, which gave a sound like the mating call of grasshoppers rubbing their legs on their wings. We were soon covered with grasshoppers. They were on our clothes and in our hair, and they tickled our necks and faces, and tried to go up our noses and into our ears.

The allotments belonged to us. Although each house had its plot, the plots joined, and we moved between, following the fruit. We made our dens in the grass below the roof of leaves, which gave a light not like outside; and we golloped raspberries and blackcurrants and we talked.

We talked about why the sky was blue, why blood was red. Was it true if you put a hair from a white horse on your hand when Twiggy caned you the cane would break? Harold said stones in fields grew, because they came up every time a field was ploughed; but I said they didn’t. My grandma had been a teacher, and she’d given me her Arthur Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopaedia of 1910, which taught in a different way from school. It asked and answered the questions teachers didn’t, and had all sorts in it, but nothing about stones growing.

Why did stars twinkle? What was a rainbow? Why did lightning make thunder? How far off was the moon? How long would it take to get there in a steam train travelling at sixty miles an hour? And we asked our own questions. Where would they get the coal for the train from on the way to the moon? Why did the wind make leaves turn over before rain? Why did bubbles come on puddles just before the end of a downpour? Why, in the films at The Regal, did the spokes of car and wagon wheels go backwards? Did God watch us pee?

Why did nettles sting?

It mattered to me, a mardy-arse. I always made sure I knew where the dock leaves grew to stop the hurt. And it mattered most of all every year on Oak Apple Day, the twenty-ninth of May. Then, the boys used to run around holding nettles and stinging anybody not wearing an oak apple or an oak leaf. I got both ready the night before, so I couldn’t be caught on the way to school.

Next to the air-raid shelter there was a great clump of nettles, Roman nettles, with purple stems. They were the worst.

I was standing by the clump with Harold, and I thought of the pain of one nettle. Here there were ever so many, hundreds. How much pain would that be? Would rubbing dock leaves on be enough to cure it? If one nettle made me cry, what would all these do? It was a big question; a scientific question. I must find the answer.

I moved behind Harold, put both hands between his shoulders, and pushed him in.

I’d not heard a boy scream before. It went on. It didn’t stop. It wasn’t Harold. I ran. I ran all the way home, up the stairs, fell on my bed, and yelled and yelled, still hearing the scream in my head, and cried and cried; but I hadn’t got any dock leaves.

The next day, Harold called me a daft beggar and a mucky pup.

It was the time of the Liverpool and Manchester Blitz. My father joined the army to guard us against Hitler at Rhyl, and my mother and I went to Belmont every night to sleep with my grandma.

When the air-raid siren alert sounded we took cover in the gloryhole under the stairs. But that was damp and smelt of feet and old shoes, and after a while we stayed in bed. The brick and concrete shelter was never used.

I listened to the sound of the Dornier 17s, the Junkers 88s and the Heinkel 111s passing. The Heinkel engines made a low, beating noise. Then the Ack-Ack guns in Baguley’s fields opened up and shook the furniture.

When the all-clear sounded, the Gang went out into Heyes Lane with torches to look for shrapnel. The glass in the torches was covered with black paper and had only a thin cross cut to show light; and we were careful not to point upwards, in case Jerry saw us.

Shrapnel was the bits of exploded shells meant to hit the bombers, and it had to be handled carefully because it was jagged and sharp. We wrapped the pieces in our handkerchiefs and swapped them in school at playtime next day. Hot-found ones were worth twice as much as cold-found; I don’t know how we told the difference.

Harold was lucky one night and found a German incendiary bomb that hadn’t exploded properly. It was in the gutter near Nancy Ford’s shop, and it was like a bicycle pump, and a sticky white paste with a nasty smell was coming out of the cracks in the metal. We were all looking at it in the playground next day, but we made so much noise Miss Fletcher heard and came out and took it off us. We never did find another, and Harold was vexed for a long time after.

The air-raid siren in the village was the best in Cheshire, Harold said. It was always the first to sound the alert and the first to sound the all-clear. The rest followed, one after the other, at different times.

I told him it was because of the speed of sound, same as thunder after lightning. The sirens sounded all at once, I said, but we heard them later because they were further away. I’d shown him in The Children’s Encyclopaedia, and how you could tell the distance by counting the seconds between the flash and the thunder. A second was as long as it took to say ‘my-pet-monkey’, and sound travelled a mile in five seconds. But Harold wouldn’t have it. He agreed about lightning and thunder because he’d seen it in the encyclopaedia; but there was nothing about air-raid sirens; so we still had the best.

When the war came we sang in the playground:

‘We’re going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line!

Have you any dirty washing, Mother dear?’

It was one of the songs soldiers sang, and we heard it on the wireless and in newsreels at The Regal. In school, with Miss Turner, we sang ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and ‘The Raggle-Taggle Gypsies’ and ‘The Ash Grove’. ‘Waltzing Matilda’ was a song from Australia about a man who stole a sheep and was caught and drowned himself and turned into a ghost. It had good words in it; words like ‘swagman’, ‘billabong’, ‘coolibah’, ‘jumbuck’, and ‘tucker’. ‘The Raggle-Taggle Gypsies’ was about a rich young lady who fell in love with a Gypsy and ran away with him and slept in the cold cold fields, and I wondered if she was related to Harold, or was one of the Gypsies that came and sat in our garden sometimes, but I never saw any that looked like her. ‘The Ash Grove’ was sad and made me want to cry.

One year, headmaster Twiggy had the whole school do a Carol Concert at Christmas to please Canon Gravell, with Miss Bratt playing the piano and him conducting.

Nobody liked Twiggy. He made us scared of him on purpose. And in the practices he never said we were any good but always how bad we were and how we didn’t sing the words clearly. But that was because some of us weren’t singing the real words at all. We were singing what we sang in the playground.

It was Harold’s idea.

The knacky bit was to have only the Gang in on it, which was eight of us out of nearly three hundred in the school. If Twiggy did hear what we were singing he wouldn’t be able to tell who it was.

So we sang:

‘While shepherds washed their socks by night

All sat around the tub,

A bar of Sunlight soap fell down

And they began to scrub.’

Then we sang:

‘Hark! The jelly babies sing,

Beecham’s Pills are just the thing.

They are gentle, meek and mild,

Two for a man and one for a child.

If you want to go to Heaven,

You must take a dose of seven.

If you want to go to Hell,

Take the blinking box as well!

Hark! The jelly babies sing

Beecham’s Pills are just the thing.’

Then there was another.

‘Good King Wences last looked out

Of the bedroom winder.

Silly bugger he fell out

On a red hot cinder.

Brightly shone his arse that night,

Though the frost was cruel,

When a poor man came in sight

Gathering winter fue-oh-Hell!’

And the best was to end with.

‘O come, all ye faithful!

Butter from the Maypole,

Cheese from the Co-op

And milk from the cow.

Bread from George Cragg bakers,

Beer from Billy Mayoh.

O come let’s kick the door in!

O come let’s kick the door in!

O come let’s kick the door in!

Twiggy’s a turd!’

At the finish, Canon Gravell thanked Twiggy, not us. Then we broke up for Christmas. And the Gang laughed.

Soon after the war ended, though, Mr Ellis, our class teacher, told my parents I should go into Manchester and take a test. None of us knew what he was talking about. My class was being tested all the time, practising for the Eleven Plus exam. But my mother said because Mr Ellis was Cornish he had the Second Sight; and I liked him. A lot didn’t. He let me read to myself in class while the others were reading aloud. He taught me to play chess and he taught me special punctuation. I liked semi-colons. He was strict, but not bad-tempered like Twiggy.

So I went to Manchester and took the test, along with two thousand other boys, in a room as big as The Regal.

A letter came in the post some time after, and my mother was waiting for me at the end of School Lane when lessons were over. She told me I’d won a scholarship.

That evening, the Gang were playing round the sand patch. It was Ticky-on-Wood. Harold’s mother came out of the house. Her face was different. ‘Well, Alan,’ she said, ‘you won’t want to speak to us any more.’

I didn’t understand. I felt something go and not come back.

Rocking Horse

When I was five, my mother told me I was going to have to start school and I said I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay at home and look after her. She said she’d waited since September so as not to spoil Christmas, but now I had to go or else we’d be summonsed. I shouldn’t have to stay for school dinners, though. I could come home.

I said what about playtimes. She said I’d have to stay for them, but I could take the wooden curtain ring my father had brought back from one of the houses he was decorating, and the playground was bigger than our floor, so it would roll further.

My mother got me a new pair of clogs and greased the wooden soles with lard between the irons to stop the snow from bawking up and twisting my ankles, and we went to school for twenty to nine so I could meet the teachers.

Miss Fletcher was the headmistress of the Infants and she showed me my peg in the cloakroom where I had to hang my coat. It was number 17, the same number as my birthday. Then I met Miss Bratt, who was the teacher for the Second Year. She had a big head and grey skin and wore a box on her chest under her dress and her voice was hard to understand. That was because she was deaf, my mother said. Then there was Miss James, who was small and dumpy and had red cheeks. Her dress came right to the floor and she had to pull herself up to sit at her high desk.

Miss Fletcher took me to see the playroom, and I grabbed my mother’s coat and wouldn’t let go.

There were two horses, much bigger than me, made of wood and painted dapple grey. Their hooves were black with a gold line for horseshoes and their eyes were glass and bulged and their teeth were white and their nostrils and inside their ears were red and their manes and tails were real hair.

Miss Fletcher tried to lift me to sit on the saddle of one, but I shouted, so she put me down, and I shouted more because the horse had come alive and was rocking back and to and its nostrils were snorting over my head and it was going to eat me.

Miss Fletcher took hold of my hand, but I wouldn’t let go of my mother. Then Miss Fletcher looked at me, and her eyes were like no one’s eyes I’d seen before, and my mother got loose and went home. Miss Fletcher carried me into Miss James’s classroom and sat me down in a desk next to a girl called Sheila, and Miss James told me to give over skriking.

The desk had two squares carved on the top, one for each of us. The squares were filled with other squares, ten across and ten down each side. The middle four squares made one big square with two lines from corner to corner, which made eight triangles. I didn’t know what they meant, but counting them stopped me crying; and then Miss James was telling us a story about Three Little Pigs, and I listened, though I knew it already from my grandma.

Then it was playtime.

The Infants. I am in the back row, two along from Miss Fletcher, and Sheila is at the end on the right of the second row from the front (© the author)

First we had to drink a third of a pint of milk through a straw out of a bottle. The milk was delivered by Johnny Baguley from up the Hough. He was thin and tall and wore his cap sideways, and he could jump over a five-barred gate in his milking coat and wellingtons without touching it. The milk was coloured light blue because he put water in, which was against the law, but he did it.

Miss James showed me how to push a hole in the middle of the cardboard lid and stick the straw through, and I knew how to suck the straw because that was how I drank when I was ill. Then we went out to play.

The playground was big and had a slope between the flat top and bottom parts. I’d never seen so many children or heard that much noise, and I was scared.

I saw Iris and cousin Betty from the Belmont Gang, but they were playing House with the Big Girls and didn’t speak to me.

Other Big Girls were walking slowly in a circle clockwise, holding hands and singing:

‘The wind, the wind, the wind blows high.

The rain comes pattering down the sky.

She is handsome. She is pretty.

She is the girl of the golden city.

She has lovers, one, two, three.

Pray can you tell me who is he?’

It made me feel sad. I didn’t know why.

I couldn’t see anyone else from the Gang. There were some boys playing Cigarette Cards. They were sitting on round gas mask holders made of tin, but I had to carry my gas mask in a square cardboard box, and I couldn’t sit on that because I’d have squashed it. I’d asked my mother to let me have a tin one, but she said they were the wrong shape and would break the gas mask and I’d be killed if there was an attack.

Cigarette Cards was played by the first boy flirting a card forwards out of the side of his hand, and then the other boys took turns to flirt theirs to land on it. If a card landed on another then that boy won it and had another go and went on until he missed. But if the card missed first time they both stayed on the ground and the next boy tried. It was hard to flirt cards because the shape made them curve in the air and soon there’d be lots of cards lying on the ground. Then the knacky bit was to land a card on more than one and take as many as it touched until there was a winner. Girls didn’t play Cigarette Cards.

The tin gas mask holders meant you could sit down in snow and not get wet. It had snowed the night before, and a slide had been got going down the steepest part of the playground, and I wasn’t allowed on because my clog irons would have brogged it. So I went to roll my curtain ring.

I tried, but the snow made the ring fall over. Then I found a part next to the school wall where the snow had melted, and the ring went down all the way to the bottom, but one of the boys took it and ran off and wouldn’t give it back, and the bell went for the end of playtime.

I sat next to Sheila and worried about my curtain ring. Then I got up and went to Miss James’s high desk and pulled at her dress. I was crying again and she asked me what the matter was. I said I wanted a holiday. Miss James said she did too but she couldn’t have one and nor could I, and she told me to go and sit down.

At dinnertime I went home and ate my bread and jam and said I wasn’t going back to school. My mother said I had to, and she took me.

The first part of the afternoon was Sleep Time. There was an iron frame at the end of the classroom, with folding beds hanging on it. We had to lift them off the frame and set them out on the floor in rows. It took two of us to lift a bed. Michael showed me how to do it and helped me, and then I helped him. My bed was number 28, and I knew that was how old I’d be when I died.

We had to take our shoes and socks off and lie down and sleep while Miss James sat at her high desk and wrote in a book. Michael was next to me and his toe nails were long with thick white ends that let the light through.

If I lay on my back I could see two things. One was a round window near the ceiling made of different-coloured glass which had patterns I could turn into dragons. The other was an old-fashioned framed picture of a mother talking to her children. My mother had taught me big letters before I started school, so I could read what was underneath the picture. It said:

WE MUSTN’T SING ON SUNDAYS

BECAUSE IT IS A SIN.

BUT WE MAY SING ON WICKED DAYS

TILL SUNDAY COMES AGAIN.

When we got up, Michael had to lace my clogs and tie the bow because I didn’t know how.

My first proper writing, January 1940 (© the author)

Miss James taught us for a year; then we went to Miss Bratt. We called her Polly because her voice sounded like a parrot. My mother said when children were in Miss Bratt’s class they got too noisy to live with because Miss Bratt was deaf and everyone had to shout, and they shouted at home; and so did I.

Miss Bratt’s room was not in the Infants part of the school. It was next to the hall, where we had Prayers, and it was horrible.

There were two windows, set between carved stone, high up, so we couldn’t see out; and it was dark, because the branches of the holly and yew trees in the vicarage garden pressed against the glass all the time and weren’t ever cut back.

Next to Miss Bratt’s high desk was an iron stove. It burned coke, which was kept in the playground without any covering and was always wet, and the smell made us cough.

In front of the stove there was a wire mesh fireguard with a brass rail round the top. If any of us got soaked with rain on the way to school we had to stand against the fireguard until our clothes stopped steaming before we could sit in our desks. The stove was so hot it made our legs blotchy red and white, and sometimes it made us cry, but Miss Bratt went on teaching because she didn’t hear us.

And Miss Bratt wouldn’t let any of us be excused during a lesson; so if we wet ourselves in class the boys had to stand at the fireguard to dry, and for the girls Miss Bratt took their knickers off and hung them on the brass rail. The smell of pee made us cough more.

One day, the smell was so bad I ran from the classroom, through the hall, out of the porch and up School Lane. Miss Bratt ran after me, shouting, ‘Richard! Richard!’, but I didn’t stop and ran all the way home.

My mother was cross and said she’d tell my father, and then I’d get what-for. But it was the end of the afternoon, so she didn’t take me back to school.

When my father came for his tea, my mother told him what I’d done, but he laughed when I said how Miss Bratt had chased me and called me Richard. I said I didn’t know why she’d called me that, because she knew it wasn’t my name. And my father laughed even more, and then he told me how my uncle Dick had done just the very same thing when he’d been in Miss Bratt’s class, and she’d run after him shouting at him to come back, and she hadn’t caught him, either.

My mother said my father must smack me, but he was laughing so much he gave me a hug and rubbed his whiskery chin against my cheek, and my mother went to wash the pots.

After Miss Bratt, we had Miss Fletcher. She was fierce, but her classroom was big and light, and she’d built a museum with rocks and fossils and sea shells and butterflies and beetles in a glass case. And on Friday afternoons she read real stories to us: Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, and she did all the voices differently. But the rest of the week it was Class Reading, and that was Milly-Molly-Mandy books, and we had to read them aloud in turn or all together. This was boring, except when we had gas mask lessons, where we wore our gas masks the whole time.

We put our gas masks on by dipping our chins into the rubber mask against the tin breathing part, which had woolly asbestos in to stop the gas, and then pulling the elastic straps over the back of our heads with our thumbs to hold the mask fast.

The eyepiece soon misted up so we couldn’t see properly, and if we breathed hard the rubber sides of the mask made rude noises, but Miss Fletcher didn’t say anything.

I liked Miss Fletcher, even though I got into trouble.

One day, when there was an air-raid warning, I lost my balaclava in the shelter and the teachers had to look for it after school.

The next morning, at the end of Prayers, Miss Fletcher called me out in front of everybody and told me what a nuisance I was. Then she lifted me up into the air with one hand by the back of my braces and spanked me. Because I was swinging in my braces it didn’t hurt much, and I didn’t cry, but it made me feel silly.

Afterwards, though, the same day, when we had Class Reading, Miss Fletcher gave me one of her very own books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, all to myself. And I sat and read it with my fingers in my ears and breathed hard in my gas mask so I couldn’t hear that Milly-Molly-Mandy.

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