The game came to an end one evening when he opened his grandmother’s Evening Post and discovered two long columns on the inside page already filled with words he had so arduously hunted for and copied down. In one way it was like finding a goldmine, corn in Egypt that dazzled his eyes as he strove to take in such a fabulous concentration of titles. Though they lacked the colour and layout that went right into him at the hoardings, his game was finished.
At the beginning of September, time threw in its reserves of frost and fog to break down the year’s resistance, and he wore a coat, began in the chill and darkness of evening to anticipate Goose Fair and Bonfire Night and Christmas parties at school. Rain came, cold and persistent, drainpipes and gutters working overtime to wash away the dead from a battlefield of leaves and matchsticks. Houses grew farther apart in the misty odours of each earlier dusk, became more compatible for Knock-a-door and Spirit-tap and Dustbinlidder in the form of Brian, Ted Newton, and Jim Skelton, moving like wraiths from lit-up lamp to lamp in laughing agony at the distraught tormented who opened his or her door after mysterious noises, to see — their eyes still blind from an electric-lit room — nothing.
Brian with handbat played rounders, sent a tennis-ball smacking from wall to wall and corner to corner in half-darkness, sometimes cracking a window and bringing an irate man in shirtsleeves shaking a fist into an empty street threatening to have the shadows “sommonsed.” Those for the leap in Leapfrog sang as they went for the leap:
“Rum-stick-a-bum
Here I come
With my finger up my bum!”
A game of snobs went on across the pavement, or marbles in the gutter, and in the middle of the street a solid bundle of bellicose kids split into a dozen fragments when a car came by, or slowly dispersed when haggard mothers from doorsteps called them in one by one for tea or bed.
On Saturday morning a scraping of pennies and ha’pennies sometimes succeeded in mounting to threepence, the price of a matinée seat at the pictures. Brian collected rags and iron from the tips, cadged a rabbit skin from his grandmother, a stray beer-bottle from Merton, and traipsed them in a sack to junkyards on Alfreton Road. When Seaton did a paper-hanging job he was able to take Fred and Margaret to the flickerdrome as well. They stood hand in hand, an hour before time, in a long queue of shouting and restless children. Ice-cream barrows attracted knots of them by the kerb, and Fred absent-mindedly kicked the wheelspokes of one before he thought to slide his ha’penny on to the cool-looking lead-covered tub, then came back crying because his ice-cream had thrown itself from the cornet-mouth and was melting on the pavement as if it couldn’t disappear fast enough. Brian tried to pacify him, but a hard fist screwed towards weeping eyes, and the mouth beneath wailed: “I want another cornet!” at which Brian tried threats: “If you don’t be quiet I wain’t tek yer into the pictures at all.”
“I want another cornet,” Fred wept, and Brian had no staying power before tears. Weeping seemed the greatest disaster that could ever happen, much greater than what had caused it, which should already have been forgotten. Tears, more than faith, should move mountains — but what a pity they were shed so easily — as Fred went on roaring and everyone turned to look.
Margaret tut-tutted, as she had heard her mother do many times: “I’n’t ’e a mardy-arse?”
Brian relented. Had it been anyone else crying, he would have felt anger against him, but for his own brother he mellowed, became soft and almost afraid for them both. “I’ll buy you a cornet,” he said, and pushed a ha’penny into his hand so that Fred stopped the tap as if by magic. “Don’t let it fall out this time,” Margaret shouted at the stolid back of his head by the ice-cream barrow.
Cars and buses catapulted down the cobbled road, dodged by Brian to reach the paper shop and buy a “Joker” comic. He stood on the pavement reading the latest machinations of Chang the Hatchet Man, immediately drawn into a strange landscape, himself an unseen spectator standing by a broad riverbank, watching a junk loaded with dynamite carried by the current towards a dam, by which it would explode and bury both valley and distant plain in water. He was filled with admiration for such grandiose ideas of destruction, looking upon Chang with some sympathy, almost as if he was some long-lost great-uncle a few times removed, roaming the wastes of China. He knew Chang was a villain, and that three English youths standing hopelessly by the riverbank would have saved the dam if they could, but Chang was greater than these, the brigand who had set the junk in motion from further upstream, and was the real hero of the piece. The junk exploded, a thousand fragments suspended in mid-air till next week — and even this didn’t make him aware of Chang’s creator, of the fact that Chang was no more than a few pen marks on paper, lit into something bigger than real by the escape lanes of imagination.
He looked up to see the queue moving, and asked for three threepennies at the cashbox. The musty, scent-smelling cinema was already half full, and he led them to the front row; Margaret wanted to sit farther back but stayed with them because her mother had drummed it into her that she mustn’t leave Brian at any time: “You might get run over or talked to by a dirty old man if you don’t come home with the others.” Brian found it easy to imagine a bull double-decker grinding on its brakes, its meat-chopping radiator smeared with blood and bone and gristle as the bus capsized by the barber’s to a grinding of tin, a tinkle of glass, and a thump of fifty people and shopping baskets hitting the kerb. But a dirty old man — what did he want with little girls? Anyway, if I caught a dirty old man doing owt to Margaret I’d rush him and kill him.
Red lights dimmed from the fourpenny backs, bringing a tide of darkness and increased cheering towards the screen, a black-out of noise that went on and on. A length of boarding ran under the screen and the manager beat an iron bar against it, creating gunshots of rapid fire. Brian folded his ears in, one flap over the other and his flat hand over that, while more shots ricochetted as far as the balcony even when the cheering and booing had stopped.
“All right,” shouted the demoniac manager, a little man become giant-sized in the silence. “It won’t start until I can hear a pin drop.” Even those in for the first time knew better than to create more noise by laughing at his joke, one that Brian disliked and distrusted because at school old gett-faced Jones used the same catch to get you quiet before hymn-singing and prayers, different in that the stick he held was always still swinging from action before he got to the “pin-dropping” smirk.
At the consenting flash of the manager’s torch the Three Stooges came like jumping-jacks on to the screen, and pure untrammelled laughter grew like fireworks. At the end of the serial, when Jungle Jim was one side-stroke away from the scissor-jaws of a faster crocodile, all exits burst open and Brian kept Margaret and Fred before him, arms held out to stop them being wedged too tight in the flood. Fred shot out first, his mouth fixed in a Tarzan scream, until Margaret told him to stop it or she would thump him.
Brian led them running home because of a thin drizzle falling. The electric light was already on, and Vera was cutting doorsteps of bread, pasting them with margarine and plum jam. Seaton sat by the fire smoking a cigarette, cup of tea on the hob. “It was ever so good at the pictures, our dad,” Margaret said, and he pulled her to him with a laugh, covering her rain-cold cheek with loud kisses: “I love my little gel, I do an’ all!” He listened absorbed to her rehashed tale of Buck Jones and Jungle Jim. Brian bit his way through a doorstep. “The Three Stooges was best because there was women in the other pictures. I’ve never seen a big picture wi’out a woman in it.”