and not so very far away.
‘It really is over there,’ said Víctor.
‘What’s it like?’ I asked him.
‘There’s sea pretty much all the way round, and people take picnics to the beach in the summer, and go swimming. We have festivals in the street at Christmas and Easter, when the men wear felt hats, and the women wear spotty dresses and roses in their hair – and we have this dance called flamenco.’
‘Did you ever dance flamenco?’ I asked him.
Víctor nodded.
‘I wasn’t always a priest,’ he said, laughing.
‘Is it like our dancing?’ I asked.
‘It goes something like this,’ said Víctor.
He got up off the little wooden chair and threw his hands in the air, and he started to dance about, with his hips swaying and his feet stamping.
‘The woman dances like this …’ he said, and now he was really laughing, and so was I, and he looked very funny with his big grey beard and his pinky skin, and his baggy trousers, swaying his hips and turning in circles and swishing out his imaginary dress.
A man called Nelson Mandela came on the radio.
Víctor stopped dancing and turned the volume up.
This Nelson Mandela had a voice you didn’t forget – kind of soft but hard underneath – like wool with steel inside it.
Nelson Mandela had made a suggestion to President Buyoya that the Tutsi and the Hutu could take it in turns to lead the country because this might stop Burundians fighting each other and dying all the time.
Víctor clapped his hands and said, ‘Yes! Yes!’
I said, ‘It’s so obvious. Why didn’t anyone think of it before?’
‘Because nobody likes to share power,’ said Víctor.
Power-sharing was proving a trial in Willow Crescent as, a year after the first Craft Fair, the committee prepared, with renewed vigour, for the second.
Janice Brown brought up the subject of whether the Craft Fair really was the best place for Graham Cook, and Barbara Cook got straight up from the table, and, as she did so, her wrap-around Indian skirt started to unwrap itself, revealing her large white pants and her spongey right buttock.
A terrible silence fell on the committee meeting, as the front door slammed shut.
My mother said, ‘Oh dear.’
Then the others all started saying that when you are on a committee you have to have difficult conversations, and you couldn’t hide from the truth, which was plain to see, that Graham Cook put off buyers from buying.
Julia and I were sitting there, good and quiet. She was pressing flowers in a wood-framed flower press, and I was leafing through my book of Latin phrases, when out of my mouth came the words, ‘If this Craft Fair is to help Graham Cook, then he might rather you didn’t bother so much about how much money his school got, and you just let him come.’
Julia raised her hand, the way my mother used to do when my father didn’t brake early enough in the car.
My mother sat completely still as if someone had pressed pause on her, before Hilary Hawkins said, ‘Nobody ever told me that this was about raising money for Graham Cook’s school.’
‘Who got the money last year?’ I said to my mother. ‘Didn’t it go to Graham Cook’s school?’
Now Julia took my hand in hers, which meant shut up.
‘I’m not sure,’ said my mother. ‘I’m not the treasurer. The treasurer is Janice Brown.’
Julia looked at my mother and then at me and then at my mother, and I knew that my mother had lied to my father to get him to agree to hold the Craft Fair in our garden.
‘Perhaps we could give a percentage this year,’ said Janice Brown, blushing, and also glowering at me when she thought my mother wasn’t looking – and thus not loving her neighbour at all, like it said on the white plastic sacks in which she collected our old clothes to send on to African children.
After that burst of noise, there was an even bigger silence, and into that silence came the noise of the train. We let the train blast into our silence. We were quite used to it. We didn’t know that Barbara Cook had gone for a walk to compose herself. We didn’t know that she’d got stuck the other side of what everyone in Hedley Green called, with a sigh, the crossing.
Hedley Green Level Crossing was always in the news – it caused people to give birth to babies in their cars and miss their A level exams, and it was a temptation to school boys, people said, and there were always bunches of dead roses tied to the fence where a boy called Fatty Jenkins had died playing with his friends at the crossing. Except, once he was dead, you were supposed to call him Frank Jenkins, or even Francis, which was the name he was christened.
His mother had a plaque nailed to the gate, and she would often be seen there, polishing it and watching the trains go by and staring about the place as if there was some small chance that Fatty Jenkins might come walking out of the long grass, after a very long game of hide-and-seek.
Francis Jenkins, 1980–1992, who died at the crossing and is now with the angels.
To me, sitting on the colline, trying to think of a way to change our future, the crossing meant the little stretch of water between Africa and Europe.
It meant peace and hope and the chance of a new life.
The train passed and the crossing gates came up – and Barbara Cook marched back through the door, her face set, her skirt done up, and she said that she was resigning. My mother said that of course she wasn’t, and they’d all agreed that Graham Cook was most welcome at the Craft Fair, and they went on having their committee meeting as if nothing at all had happened.
This time, I’d asked to be in charge of second-hand books. Amongst the tatty Enid Blyton paperbacks, I found an old leather book of Victorian children’s poems and rhymes, published in 1900, illustrated with beautiful watercolour plates, and I took this without asking my mother, and I put it under my mattress without telling anyone, even Julia.
I knew deep down that this was stealing.
But I wanted this book so badly.
Inside it were all the normal nursery rhymes that Julia and I knew off by heart and used to say so fast that the words blurred into each other when we were younger. ‘Humpty Dumpty’, ‘Little Bo Peep’, and ‘Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary’, which was another of my mother’s nicknames for me and drove me absolutely mad.
My favourite poem was called ‘The Pedlar’s Caravan’ by William Brighty Rands. The illustration showed trees and birds and caterpillars – and a Victorian caravan, made of wooden slats, yellow and red, with flowers painted in vertical plaited lines to the right and left at the front, and butterflies fluttering above them. It had tiny windows with geraniums in boxes, and ladder steps, and wooden wheels with cream-coloured spokes, and a smoking tin chimney, and it was passing under a huge tree, with a dark-looking woman and child at the window, and the pedlar man leading a dapple-grey horse to a dusky not quite see-able horizon.
When I was