the primary school in Hammersmith for ever, and had always taken it for granted that he would move away from it when the rest of his class moved, at eleven. He felt, without actually being able to recall the relevant conversation, that his mother had quite definitely implied this. But it didn’t work out like that. ‘You should go in September,’ his father said, and that was that.
‘Oh, darling,’ his mother murmured when the arrangements had all been made. ‘Oh, Michael, I’ll miss you.’
His father would pay the fees and his father would in future give him pocket-money, over and above what his mother gave him. He’d like it at Elton Grange, his father promised. ‘Oh yes, you’ll like it,’ his mother said too.
She was a woman of medium height, five foot four, with a round, plump face and plump arms and legs. There was a soft prettiness about her, about her light-blue eyes and her wide, simple mouth and her fair, rather fluffy hair. Her hands were always warm, as if expressing the warmth of her nature. She wept easily and often said she was silly to weep so. She talked a lot, getting carried away when she didn’t watch herself: for this failing, too, she regularly said she was silly. ‘Mrs Silly’, she used to say when Michael was younger, condemning herself playfully for the two small follies she found it hard to control.
She worked as a secretary for an Indian, a Mr Ashaf, who had an office-stationery business. There was the shop – more of a warehouse, really – with stacks of swivel chairs and filing-cabinets on top of one another and green metal desks, and cartons containing continuation paper and top-copy foolscap and flimsy, and printed invoices. There were other cartons full of envelopes, and packets of paper-clips, drawing-pins and staples. The carbon-paper supplies were kept in the office behind the shop, where Michael’s mother sat in front of a typewriter, typing invoices mainly. Mr Ashaf, a small wiry man, was always on his feet, moving between the shop and the office, keeping an eye on Michael’s mother and on Dolores Welsh who looked after the retail side. Before she’d married, Michael’s mother had been a secretary in the Wedgwood Centre, but returning to work at the time of her divorce she’d found it more convenient to work for Mr Ashaf since his premises were only five minutes away from where she and Michael lived. Mr Ashaf was happy to employ her on the kind of part-time basis that meant she could be at home every afternoon by the time Michael got in from school. During the holidays Mr Ashaf permitted her to take the typewriter to her flat, to come in every morning to collect what work there was and hand over what she’d done the day before. When this arrangement wasn’t convenient, due to the nature of the work, Michael accompanied her to Mr Ashaf’s premises and sat in the office with her or with Dolores Welsh in the shop. Mr Ashaf used occasionally to give him a sweet.
‘Perhaps I’ll change my job,’ Michael’s mother said brightly, a week before he was due to become a boarder at Elton Grange. ‘I could maybe go back to the West End. Nice to have a few more pennies.’ She was cheering herself up – he could tell by the way she looked at him. She packed his belongings carefully, giving him many instructions about looking after himself, about keeping himself warm and changing any clothes that got wet. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said at Paddington on the afternoon of his departure. ‘Oh, darling, I’ll miss you so!’
He would miss her, too. Although his father and Gillian were in every way more fun than his mother, it was his mother he loved. Although she fussed and was a nuisance sometimes, there was always the warmth, the cosiness of climbing into her bed on Sunday mornings or watching Magic Roundabout together. He was too big for Magic Roundabout now, or so he considered, and he rather thought he was too big to go on climbing into her bed. But the memories of all this cosiness had become part of his relationship with her.
She wept as they stood together on the platform. She held him close to her, pressing his head against her breast. ‘Oh, darling!’ she said. ‘Oh, my darling.’
Her tears damped his face. She sniffed and sobbed, whispering that she didn’t know what she’d do. ‘Poor thing!’ someone passing said. She blew her nose. She apologized to Michael, trying to smile. ‘Remember where your envelopes are,’ she said. She’d addressed and stamped a dozen envelopes for him so that he could write to her. She wanted him to write at once, just to say he’d arrived safely.
‘And don’t be homesick now,’ she said, her own voice trembling again. ‘Big boy, Michael.’
The train left her behind. He waved from the corridor window, and she gestured at him, indicating that he shouldn’t lean out. But because of the distances between them he couldn’t understand what the gesture meant. When the train stopped at Reading he found his writing-paper and envelopes in his overnight bag and began to write to her.
At Elton Grange he was in the lowest form, Miss Brooks’s form. Miss Brooks, grey-haired at sixty, was the only woman on the teaching staff. She did not share the men’s common-room but sat instead in the matrons’ room, where she smoked Senior Service cigarettes between lessons. There was pale tobacco-tinged hair on her face, and on Tuesday and Friday afternoons she wore jodhpurs, being in charge of the school’s riding. Brookie she was known as.
The other women at Elton Grange were Sister and the undermatron Miss Trenchard, the headmaster’s wife Mrs Lyng, the lady cook Miss Arland, and the maids. Mrs Lyng was a stout woman, known among the boys as Outsize Dorothy, and Sister was thin and brisk. Miss Trenchard and Miss Arland were both under twenty-three; Miss Arland was pretty and Miss Trenchard wasn’t. Miss Arland went about a lot with the history and geography master, Cocky Marshall, and Miss Trenchard was occasionally seen with the P.T. instructor, a Welshman, who was also in charge of the carpentry shop. Among the older boys Miss Trenchard was sometimes known as Tampax.
Twice a week Michael wrote to his mother, and on Sundays he wrote to his father as well. He told them that the headmaster was known to everyone as A.J.L. and he told them about the rules, how no boy in the three lower forms was permitted to be seen with his hands in his pockets and how no boy was permitted to run through A.J.L.’s garden. He said the food was awful because that was what everyone else said, although he quite liked it really.
At half-term his father and Gillian came. They stayed in the Grand, and Michael had lunch and tea there on the Saturday and on the Sunday, and just lunch on the Monday because they had to leave in the afternoon. He told them about his friends, Carson and Tichbourne, and his father suggested that next half-term Carson and Tichbourne might like to have lunch or tea at the Grand. ‘Or maybe Swagger Browne,’ Michael said. Browne’s people lived in Kenya and his grandmother, with whom he spent the holidays, wasn’t always able to come at half- term. ‘Hard up,’ Michael said.
Tichbourne and Carson were in Michael’s dormitory, and there was one other boy, called Andrews: they were all aged eight. At night, after lights out, they talked about most things: about their families and the houses they lived in and the other schools they’d been at. Carson told about the time he’d put stink-bombs under the chair-legs when people were coming to play bridge, and Andrews about the time he’d been caught, by a policeman, stealing strawberries.
‘What’s it like?’ Andrews asked in the dormitory one night. ‘What’s it like, a divorce?’
‘D’you see your mother?’ Tichbourne asked, and Michael explained that it was his mother he lived with, not his father.
‘Often wondered what it’s like for the kids,’ Andrews said. ‘There’s a woman in our village who’s divorced. She ran off with another bloke, only the next thing was he ran off with someone else.’
