Where Shall We Run To?: A Memoir. Alan Garner

the round window. They were moving from side to side pushing each other.

      I said, ‘Who’s that?’ and there was a noise and the nurse got up from her chair and went to the door and opened it enough for her to get through and I heard voices again and then they stopped and the nurse came back in and I started to cry because the noises had been too loud and hurt.

      The nurse talked to me but I was still crying. She talked to me and held my hand. Then she held my wrist with her fingers and looked at her watch which was upside down on her chest. She put something under my tongue in my mouth and when she took it out and looked at it she said she was going to fetch something to make me feel better and went out of the room.

      I stopped crying but I felt worried. I put my elbows down on the bed and pushed and sat up from the pillows and looked out of the big window.

      The sky was blue with white fluffy clouds and I was looking down on a green lawn. A path went round the lawn and two people were walking away from me arm in arm. One was my mother wearing her best coat and hat and the other was my father in his soldier’s uniform.

      The pain in my head and neck and back and arms and legs jabbed and jabbed and jabbed and jabbed and jabbed and I fell in the bed and was sick.

      I got better later; enough to be moved into another room.

      It was big and had children in it. I didn’t like them. They were noisy all the time, and those that were well enough to be out of bed and play were the worst. They ran around banging their toys; and they stopped me from reading my comics.

      The very worst was called Arnold. His bed was next to mine on the right. He had yellow curly hair and big eyes, and he was always hitting the iron of his bedhead with a wooden hammer.

      We had rice pudding to eat, and one day Arnold cacked himself and mixed it into his rice pudding with a spoon and ate it. I shouted for a nurse and told her what he’d done, but she laughed and gave him a bath.

      My favourite comic was The Knock-Out. The best part in it was Stonehenge Kit the Ancient Brit, who was always fighting Whizzy the Wicked Wizard and his friends the Brit-bashers.

      I couldn’t really read before I was in Monsall. I could read the words in the pictures because they were all big letters, but there was a lot more of the story below the pictures in both big and little letters, and I didn’t understand those.

      I lay in bed and looked at the words. Some of the big letters were in the pictures and in the story below, and some of the little letters were the same as the big. I tried to work out what the strange ones were by putting them together. Names were the easiest. ‘KIT’ and ‘Kit’ must be the same. So ‘i’ was ‘I’, and ‘t’ was ‘T’. Then once I’d got that I saw ‘e’ was ‘E’, ‘n’ was ‘N’, ‘h’ was ‘H’, and ‘g’ was ‘G’ in ‘Stonehenge’. Then ‘b’ was ‘B’ in ‘Brit-basher’. And so, one at a time, I learnt the little letters; and after practising over and over, in one moment I saw I could read everything. I was that excited I had to stop and lie down flat in the bed. I was shaking and couldn’t hold the pages still. The sky was blue, with white fluffy clouds, and the sun shone on the barrage balloons.

      Barrage balloons were tethered to the ground with cables for the cables to catch against the wings of German bombers in the Blitz and make them crash. The balloons were like fat silver sausages, and each had three fins to keep it steady.

      Once, when I was at home, I heard a Spitfire engine and the sound of the machine guns. I went into Trafford Road and looked up and saw a barrage balloon had broken from its moorings and was drifting over the village and trailing its cable, and a Spitfire was trying to bring it down by shooting its fins and puncturing them so it fell gently without doing any damage or killing people. The pilot was circling round, being careful not to hit the body of the balloon, and I watched it sink until it disappeared over the Woodhill and the Edge.

      As soon as I could read properly, Arnold didn’t bother me much. Because I was reading, I didn’t hear him. And when I was well enough to get out of bed my mother and father were allowed to come and visit me.

      They could come for fifteen minutes, but they had to stand outside and shout through the window, and the window had to be shut tight.

      I told them about Arnold and how he’d cacked himself and how I could read now, and kept asking when I was coming home. And they laughed and my father said keep calm and carry on, which everybody used to say. And then the fifteen minutes were up and they had to go and it was somebody else’s turn for fifteen minutes. We kissed through the glass and the glass was cold and we waved and I cried and they went home. And I went back to bed and read my comics.