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Clive Eales-Johnson   Synopsis   Caedmon and his Clever Whistle

Caedmon and his Clever Whistle

By

Clive Johnson

Chapter One

The Castle

I started visiting the castle when my sight began to trouble me. I’ll tell you later how and why I made these trips. Soon after my first day at infants’ school, my vision of the playground blurred. The autumn sunlight on the playing children hurt my eyes. Each child I saw split into two. I stumbled into class and wasn’t able to take part in anything.

I couldn’t read for very long. My head ached and I fell behind with reading, writing and arithmetic. The white haired teacher scolded me.

‘If you combed your hair, you wouldn’t be cross-eyed,’ Miss Dartington said.

My mother didn’t realise how difficult it was for me to learn. My hand shook and each slope and curve I penned with the steel nib crept raggedly across the page. ‘Your teachers say you’ve got to buck your ideas up,’ she said.

She took me to a specialist who made me wear a patch to cover the good eye to make the weak eye work. The left one hurt and strained to see numbers and letters on the board. I felt shut in. The other children kept away from me. My sisters’ friends said, ‘Martin is boss-eyed.’ I wore the patch for two months then put my head back while mother applied some sticky drops that stung and made the pupils grow. Cars, road, pavements and people floated in a mist. The specialist stood over me and shone a little torch that sent a narrow beam of light that pierced the gluey stuff. From the reflection, he could tell which lens to choose to make the muscle work.

From then on I would have to wear a pair of ugly spectacles. The rims were round and made of steel. The left lens strained my eye. It hurt and tired. I had to sit close to the board. The children had to share their reading books in crowded classrooms so I had to stretch my neck to see small print on pages held away from me.

The ointment helped me see the other world. From that day on, when I was dreamy or dissatisfied, I saw through the left eye how Dovecote was nine hundred years before. The people round me were familiar. The cook who scolded me was just like that old witch, Miss Dartington. The burly earl looked like the head. A tiny, bony man with a white face, resembled Mr Nivalis my class teacher and two boys who taunted me and called me ‘funny eyes’ were chubby Henry and his crony ginger Dick, though they wore Saxon clothes.

Each morning when I rose I heard my father clear his throat aggressively and stamp about the room next door. Beyond the spruce next to my window was an avenue that led to Dovecote’s shops. A line of them was visible across the waste patch where two bombs had fallen seven years before. The pavements on each side were lined with trees. The silver birches grew along the street beside the house as well. Their bark gleamed in the sunlight as they stood like soldiers in two lines up to the summit of the hill and to the corner on my left.

As I was on my way to school I heard the children in the playground shriek and call. The noise carried for two streets from the brown building with brick walls and windows everywhere. From the main gate, beyond the whirring skipping ropes and chanting girls, the school looked like a castle with an oriel: a jutting window in a turret over the arched door. Once I had left the drive and turned left by prefabricated huts, the view was ugly. The flat roof and oblongs of glass made Dovecote Primary look like a factory.

A little man with a thin face stepped out. His darting movements, sharp pale face and silver hair made him look like a predator. He was like a weasel and his spectacles didn’t diminish his ferocity. When Nivalis blew his whistle, I could feel a hollow where my stomach used to be. The teacher waited until the boys had formed in lines before they marched in single files into each class. The ‘A’s’ went first and then the ‘B’s’. The ‘C’s’ were last and so it was with everything: last in the dinner queue, last into class, last in the hall.

Once boys and girls were seated in rows, I waited anxiously while Nivalis paced into the stockroom and took out a pile of slim blue-covered books. Mine was placed in front of me. Martin Martin was written at the top with 3C next to it. The autumn term had just begun. This was the second day of my last year at Dovecote. Though I had little hope of going to a grammar school, my parents hoped Nivalis would cure me of my lethargy. The class already knew what to expect from their new teacher. He was feared throughout the school. Each morning there was bound to be someone to fling about and thump for writing badly, spelling something wrong or making a mistake of grammar or arithmetic.

The man gripping my arm snarled like an angry dog.

‘What did I say to you about your name? What did I say? What did I say about putting your surname first and then your Christian name?’

I couldn’t answer even if I knew what I’d done to make him mad. ‘And why have you written your first name twice? Eh? Eh? Eh?’

Each ‘Eh?’ went with a shake or punch as I was spun about the room. The faces of my classmates came and went as different sections of the class whirled into view. How strange it was to notice they were pale and scared as they flashed by. Each time the words were formed that ‘Martin’ was my first and second name, the master thumped my back or shook me round the room again.

At last, with trembling legs, I said, ‘My name is Martin Martin.’

‘You mean that is your surname too?’ asked Nivalis.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Oh! You should have said so,’ he said. ‘What are you shaking for?’

The shaking wouldn’t stop.

‘What is the matter, little man?’ said Nivalis in a way that seemed to say,

‘Look how gentle and thoughtful I am.’

*

When I began my composition, my weird eye began to work. The right one rested while the crooked one looked at a world beyond the page and I was whisked away into a cruck house: a small cottage not much bigger than a garden shed. The largest room was windowless and lit by a bright fire that blazed on a raised hearth of clay where a pot bubbled on its hob of earthenware. Some wisps of smoke escaped through the straw thatch above the beams. I sat on straw and looked about me at the meagre furniture. Facing the door there was a loom and next to it there was a wooden trestle table. Opposite, a chest of drawers was bound with iron and locked, though it contained few articles of any worth. There, I would rise each day I spent as Caedmon and would journey through the woods to Dovecote Castle where I worked.

I sat and plucked my six-string harp and made up words to celebrate the exploits of my tribe. I wanted to be a scop, a poet who recited tales in the courts of lords and kings. Though the feats of heroism weren’t mine my boastful chanting made me feel strong.

The stories were supposed to give my listeners resolve. I took on the roles of great warriors who withstood hardship, acted selflessly and won great victories.

Someday my skill at storytelling would earn me land and gifts of rings and gold coins. I would be the equal of a thane, not quite an earl, but grand enough for one of lowly origin.

The harp’s accompaniment was tuneless. It wasn’t meant to produce a pretty melody. It had to keep time with the rhythm of the verse. It was too large to play comfortably while standing.

I put it down and left by the small door at the south end. The home looked prettier outside than the little ‘semi’ with grey pebbledash. The walls were creamy where the cow dung mixed with straw had slowly dried. The muddy coat was daubed on wooden slats in basket weave. The wattle filled the oblong gaps between the posts sunk in the ground and criss-crossed with beams. The timber ‘crucks’ that gave the house its name, sunk by the door and at the facing wall were curved so that they met. They formed a v supporting the roof beams. The wheat straw roof that sloped until it nearly reached the ground was like a shaggy hat.

I rehearsed a tale and hummed. Another sound, a bell, cut short my playing. I was Martin once again. I blotted the lined page and waited for Nivalis to collect my work.

*

When Nivalis had finished, MrsTandy came. She taught us poetry and read from tales by men and women who had suffered in their homes and classrooms years before. She must have picked the stories because she knew Nivalis ill-treated us. I loved the lessons. She transported us to other places, other lives. There was a story of a girl sent to a boarding school where bigger, older girls ill-treated her and stole her food. Another book about a workhouse boy told how he ran away to London where he joined a gang of pickpockets.

The cheery speech trainer would pick me for a contest every year. I’d be on stage with all the children in the upper school beneath me seated on the floor. When MrsTandy helped me to rehearse, she stood below me and conducted with her hands. She waved her arms to help me keep up with the rhythm of the verse. Her face was leathery. The cigarettes she smoked had turned her lips and fingers brown. She coughed a great deal, but her smile was warm.

The speakers had to read a piece of prose and memorise some verse. Standing on stage was an ordeal. I learned the words of a short ode, but when I saw the faces staring up at me, so round and pale and still, I jumbled everything the author said.

The pleasures of the hour we spent with Mrs Tandy were abruptly spoilt. Some clanking in the playground and a horrid smell that crept along the corridor and up the stairs told me the canisters of squidgy food had come. My concentration lapsed as I imagined what the giant urns contained: the swede I couldn’t swallow, over-salted roast potatoes, and the tapioca all the children called frog’s spawn.

The members of the class who ate school dinners joined the queue. At last when I sat down to eat, Miss Dartington stood behind me to make sure I finished everything although the yellow swede tasted as awful as it smelt. It made my stomach scream, ‘Keep out!’ It knew I couldn’t hold it down.

‘Don’t be a baby!’ said the white haired witch. ‘It’s good for you.’

She looked just like the cook in Caedmon’s castle. At last, Miss Dartington would let me go to play, but I would stand apart until the teacher’s whistle blew.

Chapter Fifteen

The Ship

Mrs Tandy took ‘Special Interest’ class on Friday afternoons. She told us we could work together if we chose. Cooper thought he would make a Tudor ship. He crossed the aisle to my desk.

‘We’re going to make a square rigged boat,’ he said. ‘If you give me the money, I’ll get some balsa wood and paint.’

‘I haven’t got any money,’ I said.

‘You’ve got no money!’ Cooper jeered. ‘You live in a posh house and you say you’ve got no money!’

‘It’s not so posh. I don’t get pocket money. My father says I don’t deserve it.’

‘He’ll give it to you for your ‘Special Interest’ work. Ask him.’

I went to mother with the plan.

‘How much is he contributing?’ she asked.

‘Nothing. He’s poor.’

‘So are we.’

She told me to find out what the cost would be. Cooper knew what he would have to spend on wood and paint. I went with him to the timber yard by Dovecote station. We looked round the stacks of planks beneath the bridge. Cooper shouted above the crackling current and the grumbling of the trains.

‘Where’s the money?’ he said.

I gave him the cash and he bought some balsa blocks. The sawdust underfoot reminded me of the hardware shop. The smell was very similar. We went to Mr Mulberry’s to buy some paint.

‘Did you pay for the wood as well?’ the old man said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

The old man gave Cooper a look that said, ‘That wasn’t fair!’

‘Well, I’ve seen you now,’ he seemed to say.

On Friday, Cooper started on his ship. I stood next to him and watched him cut and sandpaper the light blocks of balsa wood. Mrs Tandy noticed I wasn’t allowed to help in any way.

‘Cooper, you’re supposed to work together,’ she said.

Cooper reluctantly gave me wood to sandpaper. The Tudor craft took shape. The sails, cut into squares, were made of rags. The rigging came from fishing line. As Mrs Tandy watched us work, I wondered if she had a mental picture of Colby clutching a severed hand. It wasn’t hard to see that I was afraid of Cooper.

Cooper was called away.

‘Don’t do anything until I get back,’ he said.

I stood waiting helplessly.

‘Why aren’t you working?’ Mrs Tandy said.

‘There’s nothing to do but paint it,’ I replied.

‘Then paint it.’

‘Cooper said I mustn’t.’

‘Well, I say you must.’

Cooper wasn’t pleased when he saw the black paint on his precious toy.

‘I told you not to paint it!’ he said.

‘Mrs Tandy told me to.’

‘You’ve put too much on,’ Cooper moaned.

When it was finished, mother asked me, ‘Who is going to keep it?’

‘Cooper is,’ I replied.

‘I thought as much. You should keep it for six months and he should have it for six months.’

‘He says it’s his because he did all the work.’

‘And you paid for everything.’

I suggested to my partner in the enterprise that we should share the model, but Cooper had planned to keep it when he asked for my help.

‘I’ll toss you for it,’ Cooper said.

He tossed a sixpence. I called, ‘Heads.’ Of course, the tail lay upward. Cooper picked it up.

‘Come to Hope House on Saturday and you can watch it sailing on the pond,’ he said.

Hope House seemed to be burning in the morning sun, when I made my way to the back door. Though it was glowing brightly the blank wall looked menacing. Without windows to give some sign of life inside, the house was a blind monster. The back door with its peeling paint stood open, but it wasn’t welcoming. The giant was about to swallow me.

Inside, a narrow flight of steps between distempered walls led from a gloomy hall. I climbed them to the first floor corridor. I heard some cosy sounds: a baby’s crying and a friendly radio, but wasn’t comforted. The doors were wide with grubby plaster cherubs playing golden trumpets over them. Bill Sykes was lurking on the other side of one. With club in hand, he waited to spring out. The robber’s mongrel would tear out and chew my legs. As I crept past the rooms, I remembered Cooper’s tales about the angry shouts and blows he heard when he had gone to bed.

Once patterned wooden tiles led to the darkened ending of the corridor. Now, I walked on drab linoleum. The common room was empty when I stepped inside. A moulded plaster ceiling and a wide stone fireplace were sad reminders of the Georgian elegance before the council had replaced Rococo furniture with shoddy cheaply made chairs. There was no carpet on the floor. The walls were bare, except for pictures cut from magazines. Princess Elizabeth was dressed in white and stood beside her prince. I saw some board games folded on a side table. I heard the house’s younger residents outside. Through shuttered windows I could see the warped veranda and the tangled garden leading to a pond. Around the weedy water, children knelt with nets and jars and fished for newts: miniature dragons with unfriendly eyes.

‘Come on,’ said Cooper behind me. He held the balsa craft. He led

me to another stair.

‘Careful how you walk,’ he said.

The balusters on either side had gone. A shrivelled grey haired man

passed us and looked at Cooper nervously.

‘That’s the caretaker. Dad wants to see him,’ Cooper said.

‘You’re here then Mr Talkative,’ growled someone on the landing.

I looked up and saw a tall dark man lean over the grey-headed one. I recognised John Cooper, though I had seen him only fleetingly when we passed the lighted gates in the alley.

‘I’m surprised you’ve lowered yourself to come in here,’ the tall man said.

‘It’s my job,’ quavered the older man.

‘It’s not your job to go blabbing to the newspapers about how we live.’

‘I wanted to help,’ said the caretaker.

‘Help! How would you feel if you had no work and the council herded you into sties and some busybody blabs to the newspapers about your shame?’

‘Come on,’ said Cooper and pulled me through the hall entrance.

I went with Cooper junior down veranda steps and through a jungle to the water’s edge. We glumly watched the vessel float from bank to bank. The model didn’t look much like a Tudor ship. It looked like something seaworthy, but my eye for detail would have made it look much more if Cooper had allowed me to do more than sand the wood.

‘That’s it,’ said Cooper as he picked up his toy.

‘Is that all I get?’ I asked.

‘What else do you want? I did all the work.’

‘And I paid for it.’

‘That doesn’t give you a right to it. We tossed for it and I won. I’ll

show you the way out.’

He led me to the corner of the house and left me to thread my way through rhododendron bushes growing thickly up to the Scots pines that hid the mansion from the road. When I reached the drive, I came upon a fright far worse than that of Nivalis at his worst. I saw a bony face, wild eyes and black unruly hair. John Cooper stood in front of me.

I expected a war whoop. Instead, the renegade attacked me with words.

‘You’re my son’s friend, the posh’ouse kid,’ he said.

‘Yes sir,’ I said, though I would not call the grubby boy who

cheated me a friend.

‘Don’t sir me. I’m no toff,’ he said. ‘That’s my home, that pigsty next to you.’

He pointed to the wall behind me.

‘People who live round us think they’re better than we are. Like that caretaker. He talks too much. People who talk too much can end up in the morgue. Do you want to end up there posh’ouse?’

‘No Mr Cooper.’

‘Mr Cooper! Very respectful. You just stay respectful. Respectful people don’t come slumming like the journalists the caretaker brought here. Are you slumming?’

‘No Mr Cooper. I came to sail the ship.’

‘Better if you hadn’t come. You wouldn’t see things respectful people shouldn’t see and hear. What did you see and hear?’

‘Nothing, Mr Cooper.’

‘Don’t kibosh me. You passed us on the landing. Who was with me?’

‘I don’t know, Mr Cooper.’

‘No, you don’t. You didn’t see anyone and you didn’t hear anything, did you?’

‘No, Mr Cooper.’

‘Forget you ever saw me. Forget the ship. That shouldn’t be difficult. You’re no genius, my son tells me. Bye, little softy.’

He stood aside. I ran through the rhododendron bushes to the hole in the wire fence. I didn’t stop for breath until I reached the alley’s end.

I soon learned why John Cooper warned me to keep quiet. Dovecote Gazette printed a story that explained what happened on the landing after I went to the pond. The headline said, ‘Murder at Hope House.’ Someone had killed the caretaker by pushing him downstairs. Some residents heard shouting and the sound of Mr Murphy’s fall. Nobody knew who pushed him but the Coopers and the ‘posh’ouse kid’.

Mother pointed at the headline and the picture of Hope House.

‘Saturday!’ she said. ‘You were there on Saturday! Did you see anything?’

‘No,’ I lied. ‘I just went and sailed the ship.’

‘I don’t want you to go there again,’ she said.

If only I could keep away, I would gladly obey her. As I expected, Cooper repeated his father’s threats when we walked home.

‘You’re not going to say anything about what you saw, are you?’ he said.

‘I didn’t see anything,’ I said.

‘That’s right, you didn’t,’ he said. ‘You didn’t see the caretaker and you didn’t see my father.’

To make sure I took the instruction seriously, he twisted my arm. I fell against the wire fence where holly had grown through. The pronged leaves scratched my face. I cried out. A man in a dark suit was passing us. He stopped and said, ‘Cut that out!’

‘What for?’ said Cooper.

‘You’re hurting him,’ the man said.

Cooper released my arm. We walked on. More people were approaching us from the entrance to the Ministry of Defence offices. Cooper waited for the last group to pass before he reapplied pressure to my wrist.

‘Of course I was hurting you,’ he said through his large discoloured teeth. ‘That was the idea. I’m going to hurt you a lot more if you start remembering. Got it?'

‘Yes!’ I cried.

‘You’re good at lying, aren’t you?’

I didn’t answer. My wrist was forced further against the joint.

‘Aren’t you?’ he insisted.

I agreed, but he didn’t relent. I screamed and my legs buckled. My head hit the ground. I’m not sure how long I was unconscious. Cooper had gone when I awoke with my cheek in the mud next to the hole in the fence made by Hope House residents.

My parents didn’t learn about their son’s involvement in the crime until after the play was produced. If I couldn’t tell anyone that Mr Cooper was a murderer, I could give the information in another way. How would Caedmon reveal the criminal’s identity? While I pondered over the problem, I sketched a plan. The story would involve a Saxon boy who fought to gain some confidence. His whistle would help him become a scop.

The people in my story were my tormentors at school. My play would show how nasty they could be. The picture of the castle wasn’t meant to be historically accurate. There would be modern facts mixed up with details of the Saxon world. The audience would understand the play wasn’t about the past.

Mrs Tandy read my plan.

Chapter Twenty

Why?

I can’t remember when I started visiting Old Dovecote. I started going there before my year with Nivalis began. Egesa took shape after my second day when Nivalis hurled me round the class. It wasn’t difficult to visualise a vicious scribe who treated children in that way.

One afternoon, when Mrs Tandy’s class had gone, I went in and asked her how I could turn the adventures in my head into good tales.

‘You’ve never finished a composition, have you?’ Mrs Tandy said.

‘No,’ I replied.

‘Why do you think that is?’

‘I can’t see how it’s going to end.’

‘You start your stories before you have worked out how they are going to end?’

‘Yes.’

‘Everyone who teaches you agrees you have a vivid imagination, so why is ending a story such a problem?’

‘I don’t read stories the way teachers expect us to. I like to put myself in the place I am reading about, so I’m not remembering details we’re asked about in comprehension exercises. It’s the same with my own stories. I am there but I don’t control what’s coming next.’

‘What do you do when you think of a beginning?’

‘I see things.’

‘What things?’

‘Things in my head.’

‘Do you see them in front of you?’

‘No. It’s more like pictures at the cinema or in a dream.’

‘So you see pictures. How does that stop you from finishing what you are writing?’

‘I’m seeing people, but they are..’

‘What?’

‘They are not doing what I want.’

‘You aren’t controlling them.’

‘Yes.’

‘So you’re waiting for them to finish their story.’

‘Yes.’

‘That could take a long time. You’ve got to make them do what you want them to.’

I wondered how I’d made my visions come.

‘Those waking dreams are in your head, because you put them there,’ Mrs Tandy said.

I think my expression told her I didn’t believe I was the master of my dreams.

‘You may not think you invent your dreams, but how else do they get there?’

‘Sometimes I see people I’ve never met.’

‘And yet they seem real. Those witches you painted, the old hags flying over the battlements, who were they?’

‘Nobody. I just gave them old, evil faces.’

‘Like the witch in Snow White?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Hansel and Gretel?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve combined them. That’s what imagination does. But there is more to it than that. What made you paint witches?’

The question worried me. I didn’t want her to know everything about my hopes and fears.

‘There are women on the staff the children regard as witches,’ Mrs Tandy observed and pulled a nasty face through the grey cloud that formed in front of her. She cackled like the hags I’d seen in pantomime.

‘I’m like a witch to boys and girls I have to tell off,’ she said.

I smiled back at her.

‘Not long ago,’ she said, ‘people believed old women could cast spells on sheep and cows. There was no science, so they looked for magical explanations for illnesses and cures.’

She pulled open a drawer and placed her cigarette on the ashtray she had hidden there. A thin blue stream curled upwards from the stick of ash. It made my nostrils itch.

‘I’ve got something that may help,’ said Mrs Tandy.

She rummaged in a cupboard by the board and handed me a heavy illustrated book. A picture on the cover showed young Jack escaping a huge man. It showed a castle, and a girl in rags with a gold slipper on one foot.

‘British Folk Tales,’ I read.

‘The stories in that book were passed on by people trying to explain their hopes and fears in fantasies,’ Mrs Tandy told me. ‘The stories are simple and unbelievable, but have a way of telling us about the way we think and act. You’re trying to be Charles Dickens when you should be Hans Anderson. He wrote lots of novels, but they’re forgotten. He’s best known for fairy tales. He took his dreams and troubles and changed them into fairy tales. Don’t sniff at them.

You’ll be surprised what they have to say about real people. Many of his stories are about people who achieve their dreams after great pain. Sometimes they wish they hadn’t. He was very superstitious. He thought one day he’d see his doppleganger. A doppleganger is a kind of ghost. It is your twin and you see it, so the story goes, before you die.

You’ve read his fairy stories. Read these tales and see if you can make

up some out of your experiences. Keep it simple. You can write Oliver Twist when you’ve got more time.’

I thumbed through Mrs Tandy’s book. There was a tale about a fisherman who caught a woman from the sea. He stole and hid the mermaid skin she shed and made her live with him. The mermaid had three children. When they wore shoes, they were like other boys and girls, but their feet were webbed. One day when they were playing, they discovered the seal skin and took it home. Their mother put it on and went back to the waves.

It made me think of my home. I started on a story about a lighthouse keeper who was cold and stern.

The stories about robbers made me think about Colby and his father. There were tales about dauntless girls who weren’t afraid of ghosts and gave away robbers and murderers by telling riddles. Some of them were saved when they discovered severed limbs hidden by their would-be murderers.

Someone once told me that there were only seven kinds of story in the world. The book of folk tales had showed that there were many more than that. The different kinds of story were numbered in an explanation that listed thousands of them with even more varieties under each heading. There would be different versions of what became of a hero who fell among robbers. Jack who fooled thieves could begin as a thief. He could become their leader or he could fool them and return to a blameless life with their loot. The adventures in each tale had themes to be found in other kinds of story.

Mrs Tandy explained that each yarn was made up of motifs: the themes on which the tales were based. Hundreds of themes existed that could be combined in different tales. There could be thousands, millions, to be made up in that way. No one could say how many there would be. To count them all one would need every different story there had been and every one that there would be.

‘The best stories,’ Mrs Tandy said, ‘start from character, the kind of person who is having the adventures. Each of us is different. We can be weak or strong, clever or stupid, gentle or cruel. So each of us will have a different life. Each life is a different story. The tales in that book stem from character, though they are very simple. We don’t know much about the people of Gotham. We just know they are stupid.’

There was the tale about a kind of gnome, a boggart he was called. He argued half a farmer’s land was his. Another story was quite like Caedmon’s adventures with the creatures of the wood. A blackbird, stag, and eagle with a salmon and an owl helped Arthur’s knights find Mobon, when the child was stolen from his mother three days after he was born.

I read about King Arthur and his knights asleep beneath a mountain waiting for the day when they must rise again. Treasure was hidden in their cavern and a great bell to wake the warriors hung at the opening. Cooper would like to hear about the soldiers who were ready to win back their land.

My mother turned the pages of the book and found a drawing of two figures. She saw a dark shape crouched behind a youth wrapped in a sheet. A tipsy man reeled in the lane below.

‘What’s this?’ she asked. ‘It looks terrible!’

‘It’s about a young man whose brother drinks too much. He thinks he’ll scare him by pretending he’s a ghost. He waits in the churchyard with a sheet over his head. He stands on a bank above the road when his brother goes by. He moans and his brother hears him, but he’s not frightened. The brother in the sheet realises a real ghost is behind him and he tumbles off the bank and breaks his neck. The moral is, you shouldn’t mock ghosts.’

‘What a horrid story!’ mother said. ‘It’s got a moral though. You shouldn’t scare people with tricks like that. Someone might do the same to you. He didn’t deserve to break his neck though.’

‘He was trying to scare his brother to stop him drinking his money away,’ I said.

‘Something like that happened to me,’ mother said.

‘You saw a ghost?’

‘Yes. Not a real one. I was coming home from work when a man jumped out on me with a sheet over his head.’

She told me about her fright.

‘I used to cycle from Dovecote station every night when I came home from work in Harrow. I was only fourteen and I had to ride along the country lane to Goose Hill. It was dark and I didn’t see anyone until I got home. Pop used to come and meet me until he was too ill. Sometimes I had to go up the drives to the big houses to make deliveries from the store.

The seniors were supposed to do that. But they sent me. They shouldn’t have done that to a young girl.

This white thing stood in front of me and went ‘woo-oo-oo.’ Then the sheet came off. The man realised he’d made a mistake. He was waiting for his daughter to give her a scare. She was going with a lot of airmen at the camp and he thought he’d teach her a lesson. How he hoped to change her by frightening her I don’t know.’

‘I thought you lived at the pub,’ I said.

‘We did until Pop was ruined. He turned to drink and he was too generous with his money. When he went into hospital Nanna had to move to Goose Hill. It was an awful time. We were means tested because mother had to draw assistance. They came and looked at everything we owned. Pop came out of hospital for a while. Then he died. What’s this one - Mossy Coat? It’s like Cinderella.’

‘Yes. It’s a bit unkind to the ugly sisters. Just because they’re ugly it doesn’t mean they are bound to be bad or that a beautiful girl is bound to be good. It’s sad that some people are plain and not very clever.’

‘Life can be unfair. Looks aren’t so important for a boy though.’

I couldn’t see why looks didn’t matter to a boy. I knew too well what people thought of mine. I decided that the heroin would be the plain one and the sisters would be beautiful.

Mother didn’t often talk to me like that, except to tell me what to do or what to wear. She couldn’t think of much to say. She had long conversations with my sister Zoe. They got on very well. Often when I got home she would say, ‘Hello love’ and asked me how my day had been.

I couldn’t tell her about the bullying because she would become upset. My teachers had told her I was unpopular because I was a ‘goody goody’ and she cried. She sometimes asked me what I’d eaten for my lunch. ‘Meat,’ I’d say.

The ‘Dinner Ladies’ didn’t tell us what the grey flesh was. I only knew it had no flavour and Miss Carapace stood over us and forced us to swallow gristle and fat. I hadn’t yet learned to use a bag to hide revolting bits.

At teatime, I would sit with mother and listen to ‘Children’s Hour’. She enjoyed the serials as much as I did. I would often daydream and mother’s words would be a buzz. I dreamed about a blonde girl in my year. She smiled so sweetly when I saw her in a pageant passing through the shops. She had worn Saxon clothes. I imagined her in Caedmon’s world. I called her Torfrida after the girl whom Hereward had rescued from a bear.

‘What are you smiling about,’ mother asked.

‘Nothing!’ I said indignantly.

I was afraid to tell her I’d day-dreamed about a girl. Mother had embarrassed me when she had asked me anxiously, ‘Who is she? Do you like her.’ My parents had seen me with her by her father’s shop.

She cried, because she thought I didn’t want to share my thoughts with her.

‘You’re like a bear sometimes,’ she said.

‘Don’t cry,’ I said. ‘It’s private that’s all.’

After that incident I knew I wasn’t supposed to talk to girls until my parents decided I was old enough. I started on my version of ‘Mossy Coat’.

When it was written, I handed the ill-spelt piece to Mrs Tandy.

‘The Plain Folk’ was about a widow and her daughter who lived together in a cottage on a hill. It was a lonely place. The daughter worked hard in a shop and cycled home when it was dark. Her mother made her living washing and ironing for gentlefolk. At night, she sewed Clara a coat made out of moss. It took her a long time.

She had meals to cook and furniture to dust. She wanted her plain daughter to put on the fairy coat and wish herself away from drudgery.

Clara wasn’t a pretty girl. She had a homely, gentle, pleasant face, but

Bill the pedlar did not mind. He was as plain as she was.

‘Clara,’ he said. ‘I love your double chin. How many people in

Dovecote can boast two chins.’

‘And how many people in Dovecote have a head as big as yours,’ she said.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I travel all over the place and I’ve met some big people who have smaller heads than mine.’

‘But bigger feet,’ said Clara.

‘Like yours,’ said Bill. ‘What a wonderful pair of paws!’

‘I’m glad you like them. Other people in the village say they are too big and joke about them.’

‘They’re jealous,’ said Bill. ‘Anyway, it’s what I want that counts.

When are you going to marry me?’

Her mother said he was too common and that he would have to prove that he was capable of keeping her in the manner to which she was unaccustomed. She sent him on quests for silk dresses with silk and gold trimmings and a pair of golden shoes. The stories of his quests and the way Clara rescued him from a dungeon filled many pages.

I began a story about a serving boy who lived in a home built out of wood outside a Norman castle. He wasn’t liked because his left eye turned in badly. He was clumsy as a consequence.

If the hero of my story could find a way to show people he was just as good at things as other boys, that would make the story interesting. Then I thought of the whistle I kept in my pocket. Of course! He’d have a clever whistle that could tell him what to do. You’ve guessed that the hermit who advised Caedmon was based on Mr Mulberry.

Mrs Tandy read my scribbled ill-spelt compositions and declared, ‘When you can spell and punctuate, you’ll be the finest writer in the school. This one about the Saxon boy reminds me of The Dauntless Girl. The difference is, the boy is helping his own kind against a tyrant. Where could that come from?

I explained the noble’s hall was like the one we stood in for assembly. I had learned in history lessons that a platform stood at one end like the stage. Where Mr Cumberland spoke to the school, the Norman earl held sway.

Though I felt sure she knew the answer Mrs Tandy asked me, ‘And who is the earl based on?’

I wouldn’t say.

‘The other one isn’t in the book, she said. ‘Where did you get it from?’

‘We’ve got a neighbour just like him.’

‘And the funny folk in the cottage came from his belief that the people next door were asses?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I must say you’ve come on. What’s your next project?’

‘I want to write more adventures of the serving boy. He’s got a funny eye. It helps him see into another time. He comes to this school.’

‘What does he do here?’

‘He has to eat bad food and people say bad things to him because he’s got a funny eye.’

‘Could he have anything to do with you?’

‘A little.’

‘You’ve seen the story about the magic ointment then.’

‘Not yet.’

‘The magic eye is similar. It’s about a young woman who goes to deliver the baby of a farmer’s wife. The little cross-eyed farmer tells her to put ointment on the baby’s lids, but not to try the ointment herself. When the baby is born, she notices it has cross-eyes. She anoints its lids and when nobody is looking, dabs some ointment above her right eye. Her left eye sees the everyday; her right sees costly furnishings and clothes. The children viewed through the right eye are wicked looking pixies.’

I didn’t know what to say. The folk tale was so similar.

I think Mrs Tandy saw that I was shocked. ‘You didn’t know about the ointment and the cross-eyed family?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘I can see why he has odd eyes,’ said Mrs Tandy. ‘You have a squint that brings abuse from people who see any defect like that as evil. We haven’t changed much since the Iron Age. The Scots in Richard Crookback’s time believed anyone with a deformity had been marked by elves. In his time, it was thought mad or bad folk were changelings put there by elves instead of babies kidnapped by them to give to the Devil. What is your serving boy called?’

‘I haven’t got a name for him.’

‘I’ve got a little book of Saxon names. They all have special meanings.’

She disappeared inside her stockroom and returned with a slim volume entitled ‘Names and what they mean’. She passed it to me.

‘Why not call him Caedmon?’ she suggested.

I looked for the name. It meant ‘poet’. I smiled.

‘Yes?’ said Mrs Tandy.

‘Yes,’ I said.

There were other useful names. Derian meant ‘trouble’. Colby meant ‘from the dark village’. Since Rowe meant ‘red’ it would suit the ginger boy. Egesa meant ‘terror’. The hermit could be called ‘Avery’ because he ruled the elves. The cook would be named Rowena because she had white hair. Daedbot meant ‘penance’. That would be a lovely name to give someone who enjoyed inflicting pain.

I expect you guessed the Saxon world was make believe.

When I told Mr Mulberry about my stories, the changelings in the castle and the school, he asked, ‘What’s a changeling?’

I told him that ancient people believed that if someone was born deformed, elves had marked them. If they were peculiar, they thought the elves had stolen them at birth and replaced them with a demon.

‘You’ve got an imagination!’ Mr Mulberry said. ‘You’re a daydreamer.’

‘Like Walter Mitty?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Did you see the film?’

‘Yes. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.’

‘That’s the one. It’s about a dreamer. Did you understand it?’

‘It was easy really. He’d be doing something boring or his mother would be nagging him and then he’d be a pilot or a surgeon or a cowboy.’

‘So you knew he was in a dream world.’

‘Yes.’

‘Does that ring any bells?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Does it remind you of anyone?’

‘He’s a bit like me.’

‘I’d say he was a lot like you.’

‘Walter Mitty is a different person in his daydreams. He’s clever or brave. Caedmon’s like me.’

‘He wins though, doesn’t he?’

‘He’s started to.’

‘Did you like the film?’

‘Yes, I liked it, but I couldn’t say so.’

‘Why?’

‘My sister Zoe embarrassed me.’

‘How?’

‘She asked me, ‘Did you like it?’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘The way she asked me. She smiled at me in a funny way and talked funny.’

‘How was it funny?’

‘I can’t find words for how strange she can be. She talked to me like a

baby in a pram.’

‘As if you were a baby in a pram?’

‘Yes. She pulls such soppy, sloppy faces and coos at me and I don’t know what to say.’

‘I know what you mean. She means well.’

‘Does she? She told my mother I didn’t like it and my mother said.

"Oh Martin doesn’t like anything!"’

‘How does your other sister treat you?’

‘The opposite. She hates her friends saying I’ve got boss eyes. She doesn’t like having to show me things and having to take me to places.’

‘Things will be different when you’re older. At least Zoe is fond of you.’

‘But she’s so soppy. One Saturday night we were listening to opera on the radio. She loves opera, but she pulls a sad face. I cried and my parents asked me what was wrong. I said Zoe made me cry.’

‘That wasn’t fair.’

‘I didn’t mean it was her fault. I meant she made me sad watching her.’

‘Some girls are soppy at that age. What else does she do?’

‘She talks through films we watch. She gets involved in them. Sometimes she knows what is going to happen. When we were watching The Red Shoes, she said, "Oh no. She’s going to jump on the rails."’

‘Did it scare you?’

‘Yes. I didn’t understand what they were saying to each other. Some of the scenes were frightening when they were dancing. My sisters liked it though.’

‘It’s a fairy story. Like the ones you tell. It’s about a girl hurt by her ambition. Sometimes we get things we want and they don’t turn out as we expected.’

I told him about my visits to the cinema. A gang of us would go. My mother and her sister and their children met outside. Sometimes my sisters’ friends would join us in the darkened auditorium. The Grand was a low building by a garage and a pub. It might have been a warehouse if it didn’t advertise its double bill. The windows of the projection room stood open and shoppers could hear the booming voices of the actors, gunfire and horses, laughter and screams.

We would rush through our meals. Chloe took longer when she didn’t want to eat her greens. I disguised the flavour with brown sauce. I wouldn’t touch the red. Chloe had told me that it looked like blood. The sticky sweet red stuff looked foul. We got there just in time. We often got to the ‘Bug’utch’ too late to see the opening scenes. We sat through second features and the news until we recognised the moment when we had come in.

Some boys and girls would giggle in the ninepennies. A burly man with sleeked back hair went down the aisle and shone a torch into the faces of the children at the front. ‘Shut up,’ he growled, ‘or you’ll be outside.’

‘That’s Maybrick,’ Mr Mulberry flashed. ‘I think he’s had that blue suit for years. It’s all shiny where the iron’s been. He’d do better if he let the kids alone.’

You don’t see many cinemas these days. The studios are tiny by comparison. Even our local Bug’utch had more room. The pantomimes you go to are different in some ways. The principal boy might be a football star or the dame could be a wrestler, but panto never was like the old films we used to see. You never could say, ‘This is where we came in.’ Panto has always changed.

Critics of my story complain, ‘Kids won’t want to know what happened in schools in the nineteen fifties; things were different then.’ Were they so different? I’ll bet you know teachers who have favourites and shout and sneer at pupils who fall behind. I’ll bet there are bullies like Cooper, Henry and Dick.

*

Five years later I visited the school. The former pupils were invited to return and meet their former teachers. I’m not sure why I wanted to go back. I had few pleasant memories of the establishment its staff deemed a good school. The front door was open and a long queue of young people, some of them mature, trailed through the forecourt.

I glimpsed Miss Carapace shaking a woman’s hand and decided I would try the entry by the boy’s lavatories and explore the corridors. Everything looked smaller. I walked by the grey huts where first year pupils sweated in the classrooms heated by coke fuelled stoves. We shivered for a week or so when one of them exploded.

I passed the iron-grilled cloakroom with its washbasins and open gutters. I headed for the hall. The stage looked tiny and the area in front of it seemed far too small to hold five hundred bottoms seated on its shiny brown lino. Warm sunlight streaming through high steel framed windows failed to banish memories of waiting anxiously before we filed out to Nivalis’ class. I looked beyond the green hummocks of the air raid shelters and a football pitch at Dovecote County, Dick’s grammar school. I wondered if he had profited from his placement there. Henry had gone to a different secondary modern from mine. I’d seen both boys a few times in the high street or at Dovecote fair, but they didn’t speak to me.

A hubbub round the corner drew me to an open door. Young men were ransacking the class where I had spent my last year at Dovecote Primary. One of them was writing ‘Nivalis’ on the board. He wrote a swearword after it. Another man was aiming the long pole Nivalis used to hook the ring fasteners to open the high windows. The lance bounced off the stockroom door.

‘That’s what I would’ve done to ’im if ’e’d come,’ he shouted.

I joined the throng for tea and sandwiches in the infants’ school downstairs where we once had to sing ‘In the Bleak Mid-Winter’ before the dismal class began. I spotted Henry and Dick. Henry looked slimmer. Dick was tall. They looked at me disdainfully and blended with the crowd.

Mrs Tandy touched my arm. I hadn’t changed much evidently. I hadn’t prospered since I saw her last. My scholarship hadn’t improved and woodwork and metalwork on Thursday afternoons filled me with dread. She talked about the play.

She told me she had worried about the close resemblance of the characters to members of staff, but decided that if the teachers recognised themselves, they would have to accept that their behaviour had been bad.

‘How did you know the earl was meant to be the headmaster?’ I asked.

Mrs Tandy replied, ‘Because he was in charge and he let the scribe bully the children.’

‘You know who the scribe was then?’

‘Yes. It’s one thing knowing what people get up to. It’s another proving it. Mr Nivalis broke a boy’s leg and there was an enquiry, but none of the children was willing to say anything against him.’

‘But Mr Cumberland knew what he was like. He’d seen him do it.’

‘Mr Nivalis was too valuable to him. He was a good teacher. We held the national record for eleven-plus passes.’

‘That was no reason to let him get away with it.’ I replied.

‘A lot of things aren’t right. That’s why we need people like you to tell your stories, showing us what’s right and wrong. Strangely people find all kinds of reasons to justify their bad behaviour. "The little devil tried my patience." "I’ve got to keep discipline." "If they don’t pass their exams, they’ll end up in dead-end jobs."’

‘What was wrong with him?’

‘What’s wrong with Wackford Squeers? No doubt, he was treated badly when he was small.’

‘And Mr Pantalone?’

‘Sh!’ Mrs Tandy said.

*

Did it matter when you learned that Caedmon was just a phantom in my head? My funny eye was real enough. It’s better now, but I hope I’ve captured what it saw. Young readers of my fantasies tell me my history is ‘wonky’. It probably is. Caedmon’s castle was my school.

You must have noticed that the incidents in Caedmon’s world reflected episodes in mine. When Dick said I deserved to eat pigswill, I fancied I would turn him into a porker. When Cooper told me the residents of Hope House lived like pigs, I imagined what would happen if the children Nivalis mistreated turned into the beasts and chased him round the school.

The trick I played on Atol was a dream of vengeance against Pantalone. Like many boys I wanted to repay Nivalis’ brutality and I made him suffer in a ritual. Like Caedmon I drew power from my imaginings. What if my whistle was as mute as Mr Mulberry’s torch? Would you rather have a whistle that can answer you or an eye that can take you anywhere you want to go?

THE END