earnest, straining to tackle, diving to save, deflecting the ball off Her Majesty’s trunk, getting up a sweat and blowing white fire from their throats. When the dark came down on the garden they went inside for a tea of anchovy toast and lemon barley water.
That evening’s panel on
Juke Box Jury
was Jack Good, Johnny Tillotson, Helen Shapiro and, making his only appearance on the show, Bobby Camino. Curly was also a fan, and hung on every word he had to say about the Dovells’ ‘Bristol Stomp’ before he was shut out by Mr Fowler’s chortling joke that ‘They’re more like the Bristol Zoo than the Bristol Stomp. That’s hungry animals crying out to their keepers, that’s what that is.’ And Henry and Curly longed for the day when they would agree with him, without equivocation, without even a frisson of excitement at the wailing which defied propriety. That was the teatime when the Fowlers taught Curly canasta.
Then it was Henry and Curly, Curly and Henry. Curly wasn’t a card, nor was Henry. Curly wasn’t a caution the way his brother had been, he was as cautious as Henry. It was always Henry and Curly, in that order, according to age and experience. Henry took the boy they had somehow overlooked off his parents’ hands, their cack-hands when it came to their younger one, now, terribly, their only one. They were happy, Mr and Mrs Croney, to let their boy hang around with their lost one’s friend. It never occurred to them, nor should it have, that there was anything mucky (a well-used word of Mr Fowler’s) about this friendship. They were right. Henry and Curly never even talked of girls or sex. Stanley’s death had relieved Henry of the pressure to compete in an adolescent contest which he’d not wanted to partake in. He was no longer obliged to boast of conquests which he hadn’t made, hadn’t the nerve to make, lacked the will to make. Had Stanley really believed him when he said he’d fingered Cathy Pelly, when he said that Sally Sanger had unzipped his Terylene trousers? He had only been echoing Stanley after all. Stanley had never expressed incredulity, had never questioned his seductive prowess. So he had believed him? Not on your life.
Henry was happy that the onerous obligations of mucky behaviour had been lifted. He was a loner in most regards – he had few friends other than Stanley and now Curly – so why not be a loner in sex too? It was a private matter, sex, not to be shared, not to be witnessed save by the morosely mocking eyes of the monochrome girls in the discreetly proportioned pocket magazines which he stole from the near-blind Mr Gough, the newsagent whose devotion to such magazines had brought him to that state, had brought him out in brown stains on his skin, had done for his hearing too. Henry could open the door to the shop without causing the sprung bell to ring, without disturbing Mr Gough, frotting and coughing in his cell of tobacco and flesh at the far end of the shop.
Henry knew it was wrong to steal these profane images. But stealing was appropriate because it augmented his shame, it doubled his sin, it increased the guilt attached to his betrayal of his parents with meaty tarts, it made sex conditional on crime even if that crime was venial and the sex was the glueing together of silky pages that were potent beyond their size. These thefts were, so far as he could recall, the only crimes he had ever committed. Try as he might he couldn’t remember anything half as bad. He was out of step with his contemporaries’ judicious delinquency. He saw the good sense in not jaywalking. He was contemptuous of the kudos attached to getting (a girl) into trouble. And whilst other adolescents were swept along by the glandular revolution within their bodies and allowed it to determine their mores, Henry resisted the hormonal call. At the age of sixteen he was already the victim of a longing for the certainties and stasis of his comfy past.
Stanley had persuaded him to read
That evening’s panel on
Juke Box Jury
was Jack Good, Johnny Tillotson, Helen Shapiro and, making his only appearance on the show, Bobby Camino. Curly was also a fan, and hung on every word he had to say about the Dovells’ ‘Bristol Stomp’ before he was shut out by Mr Fowler’s chortling joke that ‘They’re more like the Bristol Zoo than the Bristol Stomp. That’s hungry animals crying out to their keepers, that’s what that is.’ And Henry and Curly longed for the day when they would agree with him, without equivocation, without even a frisson of excitement at the wailing which defied propriety. That was the teatime when the Fowlers taught Curly canasta.
Then it was Henry and Curly, Curly and Henry. Curly wasn’t a card, nor was Henry. Curly wasn’t a caution the way his brother had been, he was as cautious as Henry. It was always Henry and Curly, in that order, according to age and experience. Henry took the boy they had somehow overlooked off his parents’ hands, their cack-hands when it came to their younger one, now, terribly, their only one. They were happy, Mr and Mrs Croney, to let their boy hang around with their lost one’s friend. It never occurred to them, nor should it have, that there was anything mucky (a well-used word of Mr Fowler’s) about this friendship. They were right. Henry and Curly never even talked of girls or sex. Stanley’s death had relieved Henry of the pressure to compete in an adolescent contest which he’d not wanted to partake in. He was no longer obliged to boast of conquests which he hadn’t made, hadn’t the nerve to make, lacked the will to make. Had Stanley really believed him when he said he’d fingered Cathy Pelly, when he said that Sally Sanger had unzipped his Terylene trousers? He had only been echoing Stanley after all. Stanley had never expressed incredulity, had never questioned his seductive prowess. So he had believed him? Not on your life.
Henry was happy that the onerous obligations of mucky behaviour had been lifted. He was a loner in most regards – he had few friends other than Stanley and now Curly – so why not be a loner in sex too? It was a private matter, sex, not to be shared, not to be witnessed save by the morosely mocking eyes of the monochrome girls in the discreetly proportioned pocket magazines which he stole from the near-blind Mr Gough, the newsagent whose devotion to such magazines had brought him to that state, had brought him out in brown stains on his skin, had done for his hearing too. Henry could open the door to the shop without causing the sprung bell to ring, without disturbing Mr Gough, frotting and coughing in his cell of tobacco and flesh at the far end of the shop.
Henry knew it was wrong to steal these profane images. But stealing was appropriate because it augmented his shame, it doubled his sin, it increased the guilt attached to his betrayal of his parents with meaty tarts, it made sex conditional on crime even if that crime was venial and the sex was the glueing together of silky pages that were potent beyond their size. These thefts were, so far as he could recall, the only crimes he had ever committed. Try as he might he couldn’t remember anything half as bad. He was out of step with his contemporaries’ judicious delinquency. He saw the good sense in not jaywalking. He was contemptuous of the kudos attached to getting (a girl) into trouble. And whilst other adolescents were swept along by the glandular revolution within their bodies and allowed it to determine their mores, Henry resisted the hormonal call. At the age of sixteen he was already the victim of a longing for the certainties and stasis of his comfy past.
Stanley had persuaded him to read
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