For John Pym
The stars! How clear the night sky was then, when we moved into the still unfinished council estate, how deeply dark, and how bright the stars! On a cold winter’s night, you almost gasped when you saw Orion hanging there, magnificent, or, rather, striding across the universe, so in your face; whilst Rigel and Betelgeuse, or nearby Aldebaran, or Capella and Procyon, threw such long, steely shafts of light that they actually seemed close, seemed to be watching, or even watching over, or even communicating with the boy observer! I soon transferred the star-charts on the end-papers of The Golden Book of Astronomy to the heavens overhead. And then I got a two-and-a-half-inch refractor telescope. Poking it through a tall rose trellis between our house and the next, I followed after sunset the mysterious phases of brilliant Venus. I could discern the rings of Saturn, and discovered tiny glinting moons next to Jupiter. I peered into the Pleiades and tried to count how many ‘sisters’ it really had. Gradually I found nebulae and the great cartwheel galaxy of Andromeda – so clearly a galaxy, so clearly remote beyond imagining…and I stared at it through my telescope for minutes at a time, in awe that it was just like our own Milky Way yet only one of numberless galaxies… Although it was risky, I also tied layers of red cellophane over the eyepiece and squinted at the Sun. I could clearly see the burns on its face and great flaring prominences like hair, that dwarfed the Earth. I longed for a comet. Yet nothing, actually, could have compared with that simple experience, night after night, of the whole universe lying out there before me, of looking millions and billions of miles into its depths, and into time, yet knowing there was no end to it (and the idea of that endless void was depressing). The stars…the stars…the panoply of ‘our’ stars… Truly, they were the Firmament of Wonder to me.
In those days, hardly any astronomy was taught in schools. A girl at primary school who was keen on astronomy, and had been to the Planetarium in London, was obliged to show a teacher one of her books before he would believe that the Sun is only a ‘small’ star. At secondary school, I was the only person I knew whose hobby was astronomy, and I kept the fact to myself.
I was astonished, then, to see in the creative section of the school magazine a long piece entitled ‘Our Solar System’. In construction it was rather basic, even simple-minded. It began with a general descriptive paragraph, then went through the planets one by one, starting with Mercury and devoting three or four lines to each. These invariably began ‘X is the Nth planet and Y million miles from the Sun’. It looked boring on the page, but the string of figures given for each planet – diameter, density, rotation, length of year etc – was impressive.
It was written by someone in the class above me called Peter Frere. I had never spoken to him, but knew who he was because ‘Frere’ was the tallest boy in his form, if not the school. He was thin and subliminally gawky. His legs were incredibly long, his stomach rather hollow, his chest broad and quite deep, his neck thin, and his face cavernous. There was no mistaking that his rather coarse hair was greying. The eye sockets beneath it were enormous, but his eyes were so large and blue, with long lashes, that they seemed like a woman’s. His face was always pale. It tapered to a small, hard chin.
I gathered that Peter Frere lived on a corner in the oldest part of the council estate, so I waited outside the school one day for him to appear on his way home and casually joined him. No introduction seemed needed; I plunged straight in and congratulated him on his article.
‘Hm…’ he said, cocking his head at me slightly quizzically, flickering his eyelashes in a disarming smile, and holding a finger and thumb in the air. ‘It’s important for people to have the data. Did you know that Jupiter is big enough to contain over 1300 globes the size of Earth?’
‘No, I didn’t!’ I exclaimed in amazement at Frere’s knowledge.
As we walked along, he entertained me, between pauses, with a series of facts – usually statistics – which he introduced with the same words, ‘Did you know?’. I remember, for instance, hearing from him for the first time that an American rocket had recently passed close to Venus and reported that the planet’s rotation was ten times slower than previously thought and ‘retrograde’, i.e. ‘the wrong way’. Peter was sceptical, however, about the Americans’ data.
‘The Russians are much more likely to be accurate. Did you know that they estimate the number of asteroids at 200,000, whereas everyone else thinks it’s about 40,000?’
Again, this was completely news to me. I suddenly realised as Frere was talking, that he had already started shaving – and the light stubble on his cheeks was silver. Although only fifteen, he seemed older. Everything about him, including his woman’s eyes, seemed much older.
We carried on walking to his house and talk turned to the Moon.
‘Did you know that in 1958 a Russian astronomer at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory witnessed a volcanic disturbance inside a crater on the Moon?’
‘That’s incredible! No, I didn’t…’
‘Not to mention, of course, that in 1959 the Russians photographed the other side of the Moon for the first time, from Lunik Three.’
‘Yes. It was a strange photo, wasn’t it? You know, you just saw these big holes in it, like cheese.’
‘Ye-s – yes!’ said Peter, smiling broadly again and raising his finger and thumb. ‘But before long the Russians will be landing on the Moon. That is Khrushchev’s plan. Sorry, Khrushchov’s… N.S. Khrushchov. Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchov…’
I was impressed by this precise enunciation of the Russian leader’s full name, but bemused. Peter bestowed on me a stream of figures about the heights of mountains and dimensions of craters, then commented casually:
‘The best time to look at the Moon, of course, is at the Quarters.’
We had reached his house.
‘Do you have a telescope?’ I asked him.
‘Yes, my father bought me one. You must come and see it…’ He looked down on me from his height, cocking his head to one side and addressing me as his junior. ‘I can’t invite you in now, as I’ve got to do my homework.’
It was a day in mid-January when I ‘went round’ to the Freres’ house for the first time. I knocked on the front door, was admitted by Peter, and directed by his outstretched arm straight into the front room to meet his father.
I was a bit taken aback at first that Mr Frere was so old (he was probably in his late sixties). As we entered, he put down his newspaper, which I could not help noticing was the Daily Worker. He was sitting in an armchair in the corner of the room next to the window. The most arresting thing in his vicinity was a brightly lit aquarium with tropical fish sailing about in it. On the other side of the room a coal fire was burning and there was a television. He was wearing thick-framed glasses, a black jacket, flannel trousers, waistcoat, white shirt and tartan tie. There was a stick on each arm of his chair, and a mug of tea on a table beside him. He was evidently quite a short man, jovial, with more than a passing resemblance to Arthur Askey.
Peter announced me with a histrionic gesture.
‘Dad – Martin Barlow.’
‘So you’ve come to see Peter’s astronomical telescope. Are you interested in astronomy?’
‘Yes, sir, I am.’
‘No no no – we’ll have no “sirs” here, my boy! Do you know who Gagarin is?’
‘Of course!’ I laughed.
‘Isn’t he an amazing man?’
I agreed with Peter’s father, although I hadn’t really given Gagarin’s personal qualities much thought. With that, the interview was over.
‘Well, I am glad to meet you, Martin. Off you go, then, and Joy will give you something to eat.’
Mrs Frere was already standing in the hall. She was unmistakably Peter’s mother: her head was roughly triangular, her eyes large, and she had thick, greyish eyebrows. But she wore bright lipstick and looked no more than fifty. You could imagine there might well be something joyful about her, but at the moment she was anxious. She clasped her hands together and almost wrung them.
‘So you are Peter’s friend Martin… Hello, I’m Joy. Would you like me to bring your tea up to you, boys, or would you prefer to have it in the kitchen afterwards?’
‘Oh, we’ll have it later, Mom, thank you,’ said Peter with a flourish of his hand, and set off upstairs.
Peter’s bedroom was intriguing. It smelt less than fresh, and seemed almost that of an adult. For one thing, the bed was a double one, taking up much of the room. On the wall above it was a large poster of Valentina Tereshkova. The right hand wall bore a diagram of the zodiacal constellations with fanciful outlines, and next to it the Periodic Table. Beneath them, on a small trunk, lay a neat pile of the Daily Worker. The darkest corner contained what was evidently Peter’s desk, with a little shelf above it holding a multi-volume encyclopaedia. By the window was the telescope, with a map of the Moon sellotaped to the wall next to it. I was rather disappointed. The refractor was on an altazimuth mounting and proper tripod, but it looked only two inches across and was in black and white plastic. Peter explained that the big window slid back and he did all his observations from here, where he could always follow the Moon. Rightly or wrongly, I assumed this meant he never actually went outside to view the night sky, as I had to.
‘I’m studying the moon in detail,’ Peter told me, ‘because I think someone will make a soft landing on it soon, and I wonder where’s best. My own guess is between the Oceanus Procellarum and Copernicus…’
He showed me a small white cardboard box that he was setting up to measure the brightness of the night sky and individual stars. It featured a variable slit and thin vertical copper wire.
‘The…mm…mathematics of it are rather difficult,’ he said, pointing to an adjacent tome with a battered dust jacket, entitled Astronomer’s Handbook. ‘That belonged to my father.’
After this, we went downstairs, passed the open door to the front room, where Mr Frere was deep in his newspaper, and Peter opened the door into the kitchen.
It was almost stifling, but extremely light as there were windows all round overlooking the garden, which was small and wedge-shaped. Mrs Frere immediately fussed over making our tea. The source of the heat was prominent: a coal-fired range across one wall, complete with scuttle, tongs and fender. But the most unexpected thing was the sight of three medium-sized tortoises propped against the inside of the fender, soaking up the glare of the grate. Two more tortoises, large and very scrawny in the neck, were plodding awkwardly across the kitchen floor, whilst a small yellow one lay beside an open cardboard box snapping at some lettuce. Mrs Frere realised that I was surprised, so promptly explained, as she toasted our teacakes, that they had had the tortoises ‘for a very long time’ and hadn’t ‘the heart’ to put them in the garden shed every winter to hibernate. It was a good tea and I left by the side door, as I always did in future.
It was clear to me that Mrs Frere was concerned about Peter’s friends and that he probably had few. This was dramatically borne out a couple of months later, when I was going home at the end of the morning and passed the large windows of an isolated form-room near the school library. I could clearly see Peter lurching about the room between desks, pursued by three of the worst bullies in the school – ‘Crudmore’ (I don’t remember his real name), Wilkins and Webb, who were shorter and stockier than him. Peter was trying to treat it as a game, emitting mock cries, dodging and even leaping in the air. But one of the bullies was standing by the closed door and hit him in the back whenever he passed, whilst the others punched him as hard as they could whenever they got close enough. When this happened, he uttered real screams. They grabbed his satchel and threw his lunch on the floor. Peter did not see me. Then I caught sight of the faces of other members of his form watching in horror through the pane in the door, and continued on my way fast.
I was shocked, of course. Why had they picked on Peter? Why didn’t he defend himself, seeing as he was so much bigger than them? I realised that he probably annoyed them as a ‘freak’. He was ‘too tall’ for his age, his head was a funny shape, his eyes were not ‘masculine’, yet he could already grow a beard; and he was too clever. Yes, he was eccentric, ‘weird’…
The next day, in the morning break, I went to see a young teacher who had a daughter of my own age and seemed to me protective and likely to do something about the bullying. He was well known to be left-wing and was said to have stood up to the acting headmaster even physically after the latter beat a boy in front of the school. He listened attentively, but said nothing. I couldn’t work out whether he was going to take the case up; also whether his silence betokened that he thought I was just ‘telling on’ the perpetrators. The boys in Peter’s form who had witnessed his torment through the glass told a friend of mine that they had reported it, but it had been going on for weeks in that classroom after the last morning lesson. I also heard on the parental grapevine that Joy Frere was in tears about it and had gone with her invalid husband to complain to the new Head. The ‘Crudmore’-Wilkins-Webb ritual certainly stopped, but I sensed that a different form of bullying took its place: ostracisation because Peter hadn’t ‘stood up for himself’ and everyone knew that his mother, for goodness’ sake, had had to do that for him.
Since he was in the year above me, I had no contact with Peter at school, and never mentioned the bullying to him. There also seemed no call for me to go and look through his telescope, or for him to come and look through mine. I was much more interested in persuading Charlotte Greene, the daughter of the local chemist, that she ought to come and view the moons of Jupiter through my telescope. It was set up on a tripod now in our back garden, and round the eyepiece I thought I might be able to get close enough to her face to kiss it.
It was a bright Saturday in early April when I next visited the Freres. I bumped into Peter as I was coming home from town and he invited me to carry on walking with him and drop in.
We entered by the front door again, and as we passed the front room I could see Mr Frere in his armchair smoking and watching the television.
‘Hello there, my boy!’ he waved at me, and we went straight through to the kitchen. It was full of sunlight and they had the back door open, through which the tortoises were laboriously stumbling in and out.
‘We are letting them into the garden now,’ Peter’s mother explained, ‘but we bring them in again at night in case there is a frost.’
She rapidly provided Peter and me with drinks and biscuits, which we took up to his room.
Because of the size of the bed, and the fact that the trunk with the newspapers practically blocked one side of it and the telescope the other, I hadn’t actually been able to sit down on my first visit. But the telescope on its tripod had now been propped in a corner, and there was a small stool under the window. Sitting down on it, beside the bed, I immediately noticed that the zodiacal figures on the wall opposite had been replaced by a poster of a heavily bearded gentleman with an eyeglass on a cord, and the Periodic Table by a chart of the Russian alphabet.
‘Are you learning Russian?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I’m teaching myself.’ Then he added lightly: ‘I think it’s quite important… I think given the superiority of Soviet science, Russian is likely to become the new lingua franca. But in any case it’s the language of the future.’
I didn’t question this, but made a few jokey remarks about the new headmaster and the quirks of some of our teachers.
‘But what do you expect, Martin? The school is just part of the establishment…the bourgeois establishment. I’m completely alienated from it, but I’ve got to get my O Levels. “The social life from which the worker is shut out is life itself, human activity, human enjoyment, real human existence”.’
I looked at him.
‘Marx,’ he informed me, pointing at the bearded gent. ‘Forwards, 1844.’
‘Ah.’
‘As Marx and Engels say in the Manifesto, “the proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority”…’
I was very impressed, but reacted to the quotes as if they were simply facts Peter was spouting like the astronomical ones earlier. Yet he delivered them differently, somehow. He looked at me from the semi-darkness of his chair, flickered his eyelashes, spoke, then gazed beyond me out through the window.
‘The triumph of socialism and then communism is historically inevitable.’
I stared at him.
‘Marx has proved that scientifically.’
After failing to seduce Charlotte Greene to the science of astronomy – and having exhausted almost all I could do with my telescope – I had become more interested in natural history. So I asked Peter a few questions about the family’s tortoises. They were indeed of different species, he said. Mr Frere had first become interested in the creatures when he fought at Gallipoli (‘like Clement Attlee’). He had watched heavy armoured vehicles lumber over them in the sand, only for the tortoises to get up again and walk away. When I left, Joy Frere was carrying the tortoises, who helplessly worked their legs in the air, from the garden into the kitchen.
It was interesting to talk to Peter every so often, there was no doubt about that, as he was so different from everyone else I knew; in a word, he was unconventional. But I could not work out what it was he ‘knew’ that gave him such an essential apartness, a condescending yet dreamy remoteness that he had not possessed during his astronomical phase, but which made me convinced we weren’t really on the same wavelength. There was an elephant in the room, I sensed, but I couldn’t see it.
At school, the interdict on bullying him stood, I think, but whenever I heard his name mentioned it was with amusement, as if he were a ‘crank’, or lived with his elderly parents in a world that no-one recognised or understood. Some boarders from my form had been over to the next town one Saturday afternoon, wearing uniform of course, and seen Peter in jeans, denim jacket and a red shirt selling the Daily Worker on the street, which they found hilarious. I was going to Germany that summer as part of the school exchange, but Peter wasn’t, as he didn’t ‘do’ German in the Lower Fourth. Nevertheless, I heard the German master telling a colleague in the corridor that he gathered ‘Frere’ was going to East Germany for the equivalent period, which the German master found ‘most peculiar’. My mother mentioned to me later that all the Freres had gone and Mrs Frere had had ‘a wonderful time’.
Altogether, there was no reason for me to visit Peter any more, but I still bumped into him out of school, particularly on Saturdays. One such Saturday in November, by which time I was in the Fourth Form and Peter in the Fifth, I was coming home from the centre of town when I saw him ahead of me in a gabardine mac. I could hardly walk past him, so I drew level.
‘Oh, hello,’ he smiled faintly, and cocked his head at me graciously. ‘I haven’t seen you for ages. Do you want to call round for tea tomorrow? I can’t invite you this afternoon, I’m afraid, we’ve got a meeting.’
I said that I could not make the next day, as it was Remembrance Sunday. I offered no further explanation, because I reasoned that if he knew I was taking part in church services for Remembrance, he might sound off about religion being ‘the opium of the people’ (the only quote from Marx that I knew).
‘Mmm…’ he said. ‘Commemoration of the victims of imperialism!’
‘What?’
‘The so-called “fallen” and “Glorious Dead” in both world wars were the victims of imperialism – which is just the highest stage of capitalism, can’t you see that, Martin?’
‘Well…I can see they were the victims of German and Nazi imperialism, I suppose.’
‘No. They were also the victims of British imperialism. French imperialism. American imperialism. Both wars were wars between capitalist imperialists for the control of economic resources. The proletariat was so weak then that it was manipulated by British, German etcetera bourgeois capitalists into going to war.’
‘You mean the soldiers didn’t know who they were fighting for?’
‘Precisely, my dear Martin: they were fighting on both sides for their masters, the monopolist capitalists…’
‘Hang on, I don’t think you can be right there, Peter, because I know my grandfather joined up to defend his country – to stop it being taken over by the Germans…and my father hates Hitler and the Nazis even now.’
‘No no,’ Peter laughed, ‘they may have thought that’s what they were fighting for, but only the capitalists profited from it. I’m a pacifist. As Marx and Engels said, “the working men have no country” – patriotism is bourgeois indoctrination. When the new proletarian era comes, there will be no more wars. How could there be, after socialist revolutions in every country?’
‘So in Britain, for instance, the people who were killed in two world wars won’t be part of the nation any more, so to speak…they’ll just be victims of the past, kind of lost..? After the revolution, we won’t feel anything for them any more, no pity, no gratitude, no sort of…connection? We won’t remember them?’
‘Pity we shall feel, my father always say that. But pity for them as working men who were duped – who didn’t really know what they were fighting for.’
‘You mean they were duped because they were only “working men”? That’s a bit snooty, isn’t it?’
‘Not at all, Martin. That’s just how it was. There is going to be a proletarian revolution – it’s historically inevitable – but they didn’t know that. “We’ll make Winston Churchill smoke a Woodbine every day, when the Red Revolution comes!”.’
I found Peter’s certainty about these matters unsettling, indeed slightly frightening. After all, could he be right? But it was obviously impossible to argue with him, because his belief in this stuff was now so complete; almost as though it were a religion, I reflected ruefully. I decided not to make any effort to talk to him again. Circumstances, however, soon changed that.
(To be concluded 12 June)
© Patrick Miles, 2023
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Short story: ‘Crox’
In memoriam John Baddeley
A dripping mass of leaves and twigs slapped across the window. The bus began very slowly to take the hill.
Near the top, in an oval of meeting branches, a horse and rider were visible, reduced to immobility by the distance, the drizzle, and the drops on the glass, as if fixed with a few blobs on a miniature.
The bus growled closer. He could see that the rider must be a girl. The animal’s bright hooves flopped through the puddles and steam fumed from its sides. But she sat completely straight, her head slightly raised, her thighs gripping firmly. As they passed, the boy glimpsed a pale, finely chiselled nose, blue eyes, and short fair hair beneath the helmet.
Lone rider!.. Dare he turn?
‘Smoking a bit heavy aren’t you, son?’ said the gaffer in the seat in front, and moved further off.
Half-term seemed really long, even if they were going back the day after tomorrow. Just a few days off, and you began to relax, to live ‘properly’, to take some pretty unusual things for granted. That blonde bombshell, for instance.
But there was the cathedral above the shingle roofs, here he was clambering down from the upper deck, now he was about to set off into the city centre to do his ‘shopping’, and –
He frowned. Opposite the bus station was the side entrance to a department store. He knew that it had an amazing modern bookshop. He looked round casually, crossed the road, and half an hour later emerged with a copy of Brave New World.
He set off in the direction of the old, unbombed part of the city, where his mother had told him to buy a new pair of black shoes at a half-timbered shop called Hartley & Brown. But then he stopped. What was wrong with buying them from Wisemans, which he had just come out of? They had a whole floor of shoe shops, strip-lit, glassy, and open plan. It would mean he need not go near the cathedral, whose presence he found oppressive. He was already a bit behind, so going back into Wisemans would buy him time.
He walked out of the lift, turned right into the footwear department, and the first thing that caught his eye was the words ‘For the Teenager’ on the wall in a far corner. He made for it over new, seemingly perfumed carpeting.
A girl, or, well, a young woman, was sitting to the right of the till with her legs stretched in front of her, her hands together in her lap, her eyes open, but apparently dreaming. He approached. With a little jerk of the head, she stood up, smiled, and came towards him. She had short, wavy black hair, a thin line of lipstick, and wore black trousers, a light-grey top, and black open cardigan, beneath which he registered small, young, but perfectly formed breasts.
‘Can I help you..?’
She smiled even more, with her bright dark eyes, and looked at him comfortably but very directly. In a flash he realised that she was only a year or two older than himself.
‘Yes. Thank you very much. I’m looking for a pair of black shoes – ’
Suddenly a large, florid man erupted through the curtain to the left of the till.
‘Can I help you, sir?’ he effused, adding: ‘That’s all right, Anita, just watch.’
‘Yes, Mr Brimley.’
‘I’m looking for a pair of black shoes for less formal occasions…’
‘Certainly, sir. And what size would that be?’
‘Nine and a half.’
The man actually closed his eyes, wrung his hands, and cocked his head in ecstasy at the ceiling.
‘We have just the shoe for you, sir. Anita, fetch the gentleman a pair of Crox size nine and half, and make them snappy, hahaha!’
The girl darted through the curtain, darted back, and handed her boss the box. He removed the lid with a flourish, rustled apart the tissue paper, and presented the creation on his open palm.
‘There we are, sir, the very latest in teenage fashion. Crox from Liverpool!’
The boy eyed them critically. They weren’t actually black, but a very dark, night blue. It was matt with sort of contour lines visible in the leather; you couldn’t polish it. And they were gussetted; no laces. They looked rather tapered, and their black rubber soles were fiercely serrated, hence, presumably, their name.
‘Can I try them on?’
‘Of course, sir, of course!’ The manager beckoned him to a foot-rest and gently, professionally fitted one for him with a horn. He pressed the toe.
‘There you are, sir, plenty of growing room, they will fit perfectly. Put the other one on, would you, and try walking about… How do you find them?’
‘Very comfortable. Very comfortable.’
‘I thought so. They suit you, sir, in fact if you don’t mind me saying so they are you!’
The boy ruminated. They were not, perhaps, what his mother had in mind, but you were allowed to wear gussets in the sixth form, and he was sure they would cost less than the money she had given him. And he would be able to wear them outside school. The bloke was right: they were ‘him’, they were slightly sneakerish and mod, his friends would ask him where he had bought them.
‘Thank you. Yes, they’re excellent. I’ll take them. How much do they cost?’
‘Anita, that will be three pounds nineteen and sixpence from the gentleman, please.’
The girl bobbed, smiled with both mouth and eyes, and went round to the till. This was more money than the boy was expecting, but even so he would be bringing his mother plenty of change. He paid. The bloke reassembled the box, slid it into a paper bag, and thrust it out.
‘There we are, sir. It’s been a pleasure to serve you!’
He had hardly walked eight paces when he heard Brimley say something to the girl about ‘butter up’. He half-glanced behind him. Brimley was disappearing through the curtain, but the girl gave the boy her nice smile.
With his two paper bags, he ambled to W.H. Smith’s and bought a German newspaper. He read it ostentatiously over lunch in an unpretentious café he knew, then smoked a miniature cigar with his coffee.
The bus home filled up rapidly. At the first village a bulky middle-aged couple got on. There were only two empty seats downstairs. The woman made it to the back seat, the man gripped the rail and swayed there with a stick.
‘Why don’t you sit down?’ she said to him.
‘I will do, when this cowboy has moved!’
The boy started. He was blocking the window seat. Presumably the bloke was referring to his artificial leather jacket. The boy got up and stood in the gangway. With a dramatic sigh, the bloke struggled to the window seat.
The boy resumed reading Brave New World, which was to be a set book. Suddenly, he remembered the shoes. He put the book back in its bag, manoeuvred the lid off the box on his lap, and parted the tissue paper. The natural light accentuated the contour lines on them and brought out the blue. They were distinctly pointed…and he wasn’t sure he liked the jagged soles after all. Crikey, now he looked at them more closely, had he made a terrible mistake? But no: they were allowed more relaxed shoes in the sixth form, and these shoes would definitely go with what he wore among his friends. No, they were what he wanted. But what would his mother say?
She caught him as he was passing through the kitchen, and exploded.
‘Those are aw-ful! What on earth were you thinking of? Or were you thinking at all in that head of yours? I can’t believe it! I gave you six pounds ten to buy a good pair of black leather lace-ups from Hartley and Brown, and you come home with winkle-pickers! Where did you get them?’
‘At Wisemans…’
‘A cheap and nasty department store! Why? Why? You can’t possibly wear those to school – ’
‘But we are allowed to wear gussets and less formal things now.’
‘Well you’re not going to! You flatly ignored what I told you, and have made me buy you a pair of vulgar winkle-pickers. They’re not even black! Why do you do these things to me?! You won’t be able to wear them at weddings, funerals, or anything else – everyone will think you’re a teddy boy!’
‘They won’t think I’m that…’
‘Well. You can take them straight back. Tomorrow. I don’t know who managed to sell you this rubbish, but you can go straight over there, demand my money back, and then go and do what I told you to.’
Drained and almost trembling, he went up to his room. Dammit…perhaps he hadn’t thought carefully enough before he bought Crox. He definitely wanted to keep them, though. He got out his National Savings book and counted the money in his wallet. He couldn’t afford them, given his other expenses. But he was in despair at the idea of persuading that fat arse Brimley to give him his money back – and he was sure Brimley had nothing ‘For the Teenager’ that he could exchange for them, so what was he going to do? It was an impossible situation. Tomorrow would be like going to the scaffold. Maybe if his mother took the shoes back, she’d be able to persuade Brimley… But she would never do that.
When the boy entered the shop in the middle of the afternoon next day, Brimley was attending to a mother and son and did not acknowledge his arrival. Anita, however, noticed him and smiled.
After an agonizing wait, Brimley saw his satisfied customers off and his eyes lighted on the boy. He beamed.
‘Well well, sir, have you come back for more? What can we do for you?’
The boy went over to the two of them and tendered the shoebox to Brimley on both hands.
‘Er, I’m afraid there is a bit of a problem, Mr Brimley… I haven’t worn the shoes, because my mother doesn’t like them.’
‘Your mother doesn’t like them?’ He was genuinely taken aback.
‘No. You see, she sent me out to buy some shoes and I bought the wrong ones. Now she would like you to take them back and…refund her money.’
‘Oh no, son, I’m very sorry, we can’t do that. I thought you were buying the shoes, not your mother! Don’t you like them?’
‘Yes, yes. I do. But you see, she gave me the money to buy a pair of black leather lace-ups…for school. And I rather forgot… My mother is… She doesn’t understand shoes like Crox.’
‘I see – I think. Where is the receipt?’
‘I…I can’t find it anywhere, Mr Brimley. I think I lost it…’
‘Well, I can’t give you any money back, and we don’t sell school wear, but I might just be able to help you. How much is your mother prepared to spend?’
‘Yesterday she gave me six pound ten and I’ve brought the change with me.’
‘Right, son. Wait here. Put the shoes over there and I’ll see if I can fix something up with one of my colleagues. I can’t promise anything. I’ll be back in ten minutes. Anita, watch the shop.’
He adjusted his tie, put on an important-morbid expression, and sailed away.
When he had gone, Anita sat down beside the till and looked across at the boy. She stretched her legs out and placed her hands in her lap as she had yesterday. In her concentration on him, however, she slid her hands down the sides of her groin. She bent forward slightly and even moved her hands up and down in the creases.
‘Good grief, what’s she doing, that’s her pubic hair, her mons Veneris,’ thought the boy in shock, but instantly knew he could never think of such a girl in that way.
She leant further forward, smiling at him with her beautiful, sensitive mouth and her dark eyes, which were as wide as wide, as still as still on him. He felt she saw directly, unwaveringly, lovingly right into him.
‘What happened?’ she asked him softly.
© Patrick Miles, 2021
Happy Christmas to all our readers!
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.