a monkey on a stick!’
His tone was totally non-malicious, but that didn’t save him.
I punched him on the nose. I didn’t even think about it. I just punched him.
Blood fountained out; one of the remaining adults – maybe it was Johnny’s mother – had been looking our way, and she screamed. Johnny sat there, stock-still, staring down at his cupped hand as it filled with blood.
I just wanted to be as far away from all this as I could get.
Again without thought, I found myself on my feet and heading as fast as I could run towards the welcome shelter of the distant woodland.
My shortest line took me past Imogen. She had stopped dancing and her eyes tracked me towards her and past her and I imagined I could feel them on me still as I covered the couple of hundred yards or so to the sanctuary of the trees.
That is my first memory of Imogen. I think even then, uncouth and untutored though I was, I knew I was hers and she was mine forever.
Just shows how wrong you can be, eh, Elf?
ii
I’ve just read over what I’ve written.
It strikes me this is just the kind of stuff you want, Elf. Childhood trauma, all that crap.
Except maybe I haven’t made it clear: I enjoyed my childhood. It was a magical time. Do you read poetry? I don’t. Rhyme or reason, isn’t that what they say? Well, I’m a reason man. At school I learnt some stuff by rote to keep the teachers happy but I also learnt the trick of instant deletion the minute I’d spouted it. The only bit that’s stuck doesn’t come from my schooldays but from my daughter, Ginny’s.
It was some time in that last summer, ‘08 I mean, it was raining most of the time I recall, perhaps that’s why Ginny got stuck into her holiday assignments early.
At her posh school, they reckoned poetry was important, and one of the things she had to do was write a paraphrase of some lines of Wordsworth. She assumed because I was a Cumbrian lad, I’d know all about him. A father doesn’t like to disappoint his daughter, so I glanced at the passage. A lot of the language was daft and he went all round the houses to say something, but to my amazement I found myself thinking, this bugger’s writing about me!
He was talking about himself as a kid, the things he got up to, climbing steep cliffs, moonlight poaching, going out on the lake, but the lines that stuck were the ones that summed it all up for him.
Fair seed-time had my soul and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.
That was me. I don’t mean fear of being clouted or abused, anything like that. I mean the kind of fear you feel when you’re hanging over a hundred-foot drop by your fingernails or when the night’s so black you can’t see your hand in front of your face and you hear something snuffling in the dark, the fear that makes your sense of being alive so much sharper, that lets you feel the lifeblood pounding through your heart, that makes you want to dance and shout when you beat it and survive!
Do you know what I’m talking about, Elf? Or are you stuck in all that Freudian clart, where everything’s to do with sex, even if you’re dealing with kids before they know what sex is all about?
Me, I was never much interested in sex, not even after my balls dropped. Maybe I was leading such a physical life, I was just too knackered. Of course my cock stood up from time to time and I’d give it a pull and I enjoyed the spasm of pleasure that eventually ensued. But I didn’t have much time for the dirty jokes and mucky books and boasting about what they’d done with girls that most of my schoolmates went in for.
Not that I didn’t have the chance to learn on the job, so to speak. Despite me ignoring them as much as I could, most of the girls seemed more than willing to be friendly, but I couldn’t see any point in wasting time with them that I could have spent scrambling up a wet rock face!
So what you’d likely call significant sexual experience didn’t come my way until…well, let me tell you about it.
Or rather, let me tell myself. I’m not at all sure I shall ever let you see this, Elf, which means I can be completely frank as I’m reserving the right to tear it all to pieces, if that’s what I decide.
So let’s go back to me taking off into the woods, leaving Imogen staring after me, Johnny Nutbrown bleeding from the nose, his parents puce with indignation, Sir Leon hugely disappointed and Lady Kira flaring her nostrils in her favourite what-did-you-expect expression.
Of course I’m just guessing at most of that, apart from Johnny’s nose. What I’m certain I left behind was the jacket and tie I’d taken off at Sir Leon’s suggestion.
He came round to Birkstane with them that evening.
I was in my bedroom. Naturally I’d said nothing about the events of the day to either Dad or Aunt Carrie, just muttered something in reply to their question as to whether I’d had a good time.
I heard the car pull up outside and when I looked out and recognized Sir Leon’s Range Rover, I thought of climbing out of the window and doing a bunk.
Then I saw there was still someone in the car after Sir Leon had climbed out of the driver’s seat.
It was Imogen, her pale face pressed against the window, staring up at me.
For a moment our gazes locked. I don’t know what my face showed but hers showed nothing.
Then Dad roared, ‘Wilf! Get yourself down here!’
The time for flight was past. I went down and met my fate.
It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. Sir Leon was very laid back about things. He said boys always fight, it’s in their genes, and he was sure my blow had been more in sport than in earnest, and Johnny’s nose wasn’t broken, and he was sure a little note of apology would set all things well.
Dad stood over me while I wrote it.
Dear Johnny, I’m really sorry I made your nose bleed, I didn’t mean to, it was an accident. Yours sincerely Wilfred Hadda.
Dad also wanted me to write to Lady Kira, but Sir Leon said that wouldn’t be necessary, he’d pass on my verbal apologies.
As he left, he punched me lightly on the arm and said, ‘Us wolves need to pick our moments to growl, eh?’
I expected Dad to really whale into me after Sir Leon had gone, but he just looked at me and said, ‘So that’s a lesson to us both, lad, one I thought I’d learned a long time back. My fault. Folks like us and folks like the Ulphingstones don’t mix.’
‘Because they’re better than us?’ I asked.
‘Nay!’ he said sharply. ‘The Haddas are as good as any bugger. But if you put banties in with turtle doves, you’re going to get ructions!’
And that was it. He obviously felt in part responsible. Me, I suppose I should have been delighted to get off so lightly, but as I lay in bed that night, all I could think of was Imogen, and why she’d accompanied her father to Birkstane.
I found out the next day. She wanted to be sure she knew how to get there by herself. I left the house as usual straight after breakfast, i.e. about seven a.m. Dad got up at six and so did Aunt Carrie. Breakfast was the one meal of the day she could be relied on for, so long as you were happy to have porridge followed by scrambled egg, sausage and black pudding all the year round. If I decided to have a lie-in, the penalty was I had to make my own, so usually I got up.
It was a beautiful late July morning. The sun had been up for a good hour and a half and the morning mists were being sucked up the wooded fellside behind the house, clinging on to the tall pines like the last gauzy garments of