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.
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. 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