happening to the world. At Worksop, a colliersâ town twenty-seven miles to the north, we assembled in a church hall to be sorted out for different homes. Unable to say goodbye to the others in the crowd, a car took me to a house in Sandhill Street, much like our own but slightly larger, opening at the back on to a shared area of beaten earth. Forty-year-old buxom Mrs Cutts, who wore glasses, showed me into her comfortable living room, a pot of delicious beef stew warming on the hob, which my hunger wasnât yet acute enough to taste.
Mr Cutts, a big man who also wore glasses, and was fond of his beer, sold fruit and vegetables from a handcart for a living. During the Great War he had served with the South Nottinghamshire Hussars in the Salonika Campaign as a sergeant-major, which gave his voice a sufficiently high decibel count for bellowing his wares. Schools hadnât yet been found for the evacuees, so I was soon helping him to push the cart through the streets, up on to awkward pavements and among the backyards of the houses. On Saturday he would give me threepence and an apple, and even a banana if he had done good trade.
Another evacuee shared my bed, and we explored the country roundabout, roaming quarries for newts to put in a jam jar, so that it wasnât long before Worksop and its environs was as familiar as my native Radford. The Cutts left us free to come and go, the only rules being that we had to sit down to a hot dinner at midday, and finish supper by eight oâclock at night. For breakfast there was porridge and toast, and sometimes a treat of tinned pineapples at tea. When the trousers I arrived in became unfit to wear Mr Cutts bought me new ones out of his own money.
I was fascinated, possibly infatuated, by a girl called Laura, who lived in a caravan of the gypsy sort on some nearby waste land. Her parents sold crockery from a horse-drawn cart in the mining towns roundabout. On once referring to them as âgypsiesâ Mrs Cutts gently corrected me: âThey arenât gypsies, Alan, theyâre âtravellersâ,â though no offence had been meant by me, because âgypsyâ sounded more romantic.
The idea of going to school in a strange town was not to my liking, but the day came when Mr Cutts ordered a general sprucing up and took me to a building much like the one in Radford. My teacher, he said, had been his captain in the Great War, and would be sure to look after me providing I behaved myself. This cohering microcosm of society seemed strange after the non-hierarchical homogeneity in Radford, where my father avoided everyone except an equally destitute friend or two.
At school I was commended for an essay on âThe Great Nottingham Warehouse Fireâ, perhaps my first piece of fiction, for it had never happened, though the conflagration was lovingly described. I joined the public library and took books into the Cuttsâ home, the only one found there being a spy novel by William le Queux.
It was easier to get into the adult cinema, and also cheaper than in Nottingham, though try as we might the ushers would not let us pass to see a French film about venereal disease called Damaged Goods . Still, we saw H for Horror films such as Dracula and The Vampire Bat , which more than made up for our disappointment.
An indefinite stay in Worksop would have been to my liking, but one morning a letter from home was handed to me by Mrs Cutts, who had paid the postman, since it had come without a stamp. I immediately imagined that my father had lost his job, that my mother hadnât even the money to spare for postage, that they were once more on the edge of penury and fighting as bitterly as ever. In the letter she merely asked how I was getting on, and told me that all was well at home, but the air of gloom lasted for days at the implication of the missing stamp.
The matter was easily explained. She had given the letter to a girl in the street, and the
Mr Cutts, a big man who also wore glasses, and was fond of his beer, sold fruit and vegetables from a handcart for a living. During the Great War he had served with the South Nottinghamshire Hussars in the Salonika Campaign as a sergeant-major, which gave his voice a sufficiently high decibel count for bellowing his wares. Schools hadnât yet been found for the evacuees, so I was soon helping him to push the cart through the streets, up on to awkward pavements and among the backyards of the houses. On Saturday he would give me threepence and an apple, and even a banana if he had done good trade.
Another evacuee shared my bed, and we explored the country roundabout, roaming quarries for newts to put in a jam jar, so that it wasnât long before Worksop and its environs was as familiar as my native Radford. The Cutts left us free to come and go, the only rules being that we had to sit down to a hot dinner at midday, and finish supper by eight oâclock at night. For breakfast there was porridge and toast, and sometimes a treat of tinned pineapples at tea. When the trousers I arrived in became unfit to wear Mr Cutts bought me new ones out of his own money.
I was fascinated, possibly infatuated, by a girl called Laura, who lived in a caravan of the gypsy sort on some nearby waste land. Her parents sold crockery from a horse-drawn cart in the mining towns roundabout. On once referring to them as âgypsiesâ Mrs Cutts gently corrected me: âThey arenât gypsies, Alan, theyâre âtravellersâ,â though no offence had been meant by me, because âgypsyâ sounded more romantic.
The idea of going to school in a strange town was not to my liking, but the day came when Mr Cutts ordered a general sprucing up and took me to a building much like the one in Radford. My teacher, he said, had been his captain in the Great War, and would be sure to look after me providing I behaved myself. This cohering microcosm of society seemed strange after the non-hierarchical homogeneity in Radford, where my father avoided everyone except an equally destitute friend or two.
At school I was commended for an essay on âThe Great Nottingham Warehouse Fireâ, perhaps my first piece of fiction, for it had never happened, though the conflagration was lovingly described. I joined the public library and took books into the Cuttsâ home, the only one found there being a spy novel by William le Queux.
It was easier to get into the adult cinema, and also cheaper than in Nottingham, though try as we might the ushers would not let us pass to see a French film about venereal disease called Damaged Goods . Still, we saw H for Horror films such as Dracula and The Vampire Bat , which more than made up for our disappointment.
An indefinite stay in Worksop would have been to my liking, but one morning a letter from home was handed to me by Mrs Cutts, who had paid the postman, since it had come without a stamp. I immediately imagined that my father had lost his job, that my mother hadnât even the money to spare for postage, that they were once more on the edge of penury and fighting as bitterly as ever. In the letter she merely asked how I was getting on, and told me that all was well at home, but the air of gloom lasted for days at the implication of the missing stamp.
The matter was easily explained. She had given the letter to a girl in the street, and the
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