great to have a fort but having a fort with flair made all the difference.
I put some vinegar on a piece of cotton wool and rubbed around the area where there was supposed to be a wound. John groaned like a wounded soldier. I used the hard plastic snout of the vacuum cleaner to examine the wound. John had his eyes closed and was moaning.
‘I have to get the bullet out.’ Taking a stick I’d found under the plum tree, I drove it in hard under the kneecap.
‘Fuck!’ John had screamed the F word. ‘You fucking bastard.’
‘It’s just a flesh wound.’ I jumped out of the fort and stood on the grass below. I called up to John who was rocking on his back, cradling his knee to his chest. ‘If you hit me I’ll tell Mum you said the F word, twice.’
My next patient was little Johnny Hawkins. He came in doubled over saying he’d been shot in the stomach. I made him lie on his back.
‘Take your shirt off. It’s covered in blood.’ Johnny was no stranger to this game. We often played together in his garage. I undid the zip of his shorts and had just pulled them off when I heard someone outside. I knew it was my brother. He wanted to get me back for the knee job.
‘Piss off, you German bastard. I’m not finished with this John.’
The door flew open and my father stuck his head and shoulders into the fort. He looked at Johnny’s naked body, then at me, then at Johnny again. Johnny’s underpants were in my hand.
‘I’m a nurse, Dad.’
My father reached in and grabbed me by the collar, dragging me outside where I was smacked in front of the other boys. He then marched me to the bedroom I shared with John and told me to stay there until dinnertime. I watched from the window as he cleared out the fort and then went at it with an axe and hammer. It took him an hour to reduce it to a pile of splintered timber. I was crying as he loaded everything on to a trailer and drove away.
A couple of days later I saw Mum rummaging in the cupboard where she kept the cleaning things. She then did a room-to-room search, looking under beds and furniture. She was flushed when she came back to the kitchen.
‘Are you all right, Mum?’
‘I must be going mad. I can’t find the extension to the vacuum cleaner. The little plastic end bit. I’ve looked everywhere.’
John took the loss of the fort hard and refused to talk to me for a full month. This was fine by me because I was busy preparing for the end of year pantomime at St Kevin’s. Mum was thrilled. I was to play Joseph which was a much bigger speaking role than baby Jesus who only got to gurgle. My sister Carmel was recruited to work the pulleys and change the backdrops. Several boys had wanted this job but they were no match for my sister who at the age of nine could already run faster and punch harder than anyone I knew.
My stage debut would have been a triumph if Brother O’Hare had not torn the veil off my head at the last minute. It was Mum’s navy blue chiffon scarf and looked fantastic with the pale blue caftan I’d been given to wear. O’Hare had wanted a bareheaded Joseph but this made no sense when the Three Kings had fancy headgear. He’d stopped me in the wings, insisting that a nativity scene was no place for a lady’s scarf. My cue came and went as I was trying to argue my point. By the time we noticed, Mary and the donkey had been waiting on stage for a full minute. She might have stayed there longer if a familiar male voice had not boomed out over the audience.
‘Move that ass!’ Dad thought he was a funny man.
The laughter spurred Brother O’Hare into action. I was thrust from behind and propelled across the stage, running with my head down as I struggled to get my footing. I heard the laughter even before I hit the donkey head-on and broke it in two. Mary toppled off and fell to the side with a squawk and a thud. The audience roared. The hindquarters of the donkey turned and lunged at me. It was Robbie Skint and, despite the handicap of his donkey leggings, he lunged very fast. The audience roared again as he tackled me and clasped his hands around my neck.
I was gasping for air and twisting my head to free myself when my eyes fell on Carmel. She was standing in the back holding a rope above her head. With a smile she let it go. The backdrop of the stable scene unfurled at high speed and hit Robbie’s head with a bonk.
At the start of the new school year, I was given a seat next to Paula Stromboli. I was the only boy in the class who had no desire to sit next to old Smelly Pants. She was very bold for a girl of eight. I’d heard all about her and didn’t want to go anywhere near her cotton tops.
Brother O’Hare had written a line from a psalm on the blackboard: ‘Hear my cry, O God, listen to my prayer.’ Our job was to copy it into our exercise books with as much precision as possible. Erasers were not allowed. The task was one of concentration. I’d done a brilliant job and was up to the ‘prayer’ bit when Paula grasped my knee and squeezed. My leg shot up and banged the bottom of the desk, causing my hand to leap forward with the pencil. I finished the word but it now read, ‘Hear my cry, O God, listen to my player.’ I looked at it for a while. There was no way to repair the damage without an eraser. The clock was ticking. I wedged a small V before ‘player’ and wrote the word ‘record’ above it. At least it now made sense.
‘You think you’re funny, don’t you, Corker.’ O’Hare had gripped my shoulder and was digging his fingers into the flesh.
The other children were looking at me.
‘It’s Corkle, sir. I was just trying to—’
‘—be the class clown. Corker, you’ll stay here during lunchtime and write out the entire psalm.’
Paula squeezed my knee again as Brother O’Hare turned back to the blackboard. I twisted in my seat, ready to drive a pencil into her thigh, but stopped with my hand in mid-air. She had lifted her dress and pulled down her knickers. I was staring at a bare pink mound. I looked up at Paula’s face. She was smiling, oblivious to the frightening non-event in her underpants. It was bad enough watching men and women kiss on television but to have the Stromboli mound at my elbow was more than I could stand. I turned to the front and put up my hand, waving it about until I got the brother’s attention.
‘Yes, Corker.’
The class laughed.
‘It’s Corkle, sir.’
‘Yes, Corker.’
The class laughed again.
‘Brother O’Hare, can I swap seats with Ralph Waters?’
‘No you cannot.’ He turned back to the blackboard and resumed writing.
‘Excuse me, Brother O’Hare.’
‘What now, Corker?’
The class laughed again.
‘Can I swap seats with Robbie Skint?’
‘No. Now be quiet!’
‘Could I just stand then?’
Brother O’Hare marched up to my desk and pulled me out of my chair. ‘You want to stand? Then stand still now.’
He yanked out my hand and hit the palm six times with his wooden ruler. I sat back down cradling what felt like a throbbing baseball mitt at the end of my left arm.
Ralph Waters approached me at playtime. I would’ve run off but I was scraping the hundreds and thousands off a fairy cake and didn’t see him coming. Ralph was one of the toughest kids of my year. He was skinny and sinewy. His blond hair was cut extremely short with barber’s clippers and his nails were chewed to crumbs. Ralph spent the breaks playing with plastic soldiers under the white-painted tyres that some genius had half buried in the playground as