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Mrs Philpott looked at our mother imperiously. She marched down the garden with her cuttings of jasmine, sensible shoes clipping along the cracked paving stones of the garden path and out of our lives forever. So began life at 99, Queens Road.
Tom and I had baked beans on toast that night, eating sitting on the tea chests that filled the kitchen while our parents had an Indian takeaway from silver foil containers. After he finished, Tom poked a finger deep into a nostril, stared at what he found up there, rolled it into a ball, and flicked it at me.
‘Tom just threw a bogey at my face.’
‘Is this true?’ said Nev.
‘Guess so.’
‘Right, Tom. I’m going to fine you 50p. Until you learn to treat people with a bit more respect I’m going to have to hit you where it hurts – the wallet.’
Tom dug around in his pocket, pulled out a 50p coin, and flicked it at Nev. He grabbed wildly for it, missed, and the coin clattered off before coming to a halt somewhere underneath one of the boxes.
‘Butterfingers,’ said Tom, with a yawn.
In a few days’ time, Tom would start at Westminster School. He had won a scholarship, leaving me to fester at a private boys’ school our parents had moved me to a year earlier. That was around the time the serious money for Mum’s tabloid articles with titles like How to Turn Your Tubby Hubby into a Slim Jim began to kick in. I protested that I had been perfectly happy at the local primary school, but this change, along with getting rid of a beautiful car called a Morgan that had the minor disadvantage of breaking down on most journeys, was an inevitability of our new, prosperous, aspirant life. Once the house was cleared of any remaining Philpottian traces and transformed into a temple of soft furnishings and comfort befitting a young modern family on the up, our new life was to unfold here.
‘I want the front room for my study,’ announced Mum. ‘You’re going to have to put shelves up in there, Nev. And I can’t live with this kitchen a minute longer. What we need is a high-end, top-quality fitted kitchen from John Lewis, with a nice cooker.’
‘But you never do any cooking,’ said Tom.
‘That’s not the point,’ said Mum. As she turned her Cleopatra-like nose towards the mouldy ceiling she added, ‘I shall also need a microwave.’
For the next few months, the house underwent its metamorphosis. Beige carpets ran up and down the stairs and hallways. Florid Edwardian Coca-Cola posters and reproductions of Pre-Raphaelite scenes of medieval romance filled freshly painted walls. Nev replaced the doors of my cupboard. We had a drawing room – I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a drawing room before then – complete with chaise longue, real fake fire and a three-piece suite upholstered in green linen by GP & J Baker. At least the Philpotts had left the built-in bookcase that ran along two walls of the drawing room, which meant Your Erroneous Zones, Fear of Flying, Our Bodies, Ourselves and the complete works of Jackie Collins now took up spaces once filled with dusty books on Greek history and Latin grammar. We also had a TV room with beanbags, an Atari games console and a pinball machine, which was a present to Nev from Mum from around the time I was born. An oak dresser found space between the microwave and the new fridge-freezer and gave the kitchen a hint of rusticity. A sweet tin with scenes from ancient Chinese life on its four sides took up occupancy too, on a shelf alongside boxes of Shreddies, Corn Flakes and, in a nod towards healthy eating, Alpen.
Nev worked long hours at the Daily Mail, which, from the way he described it, sounded like a cross between a newspaper office, a prison and a lunatic asylum. There was a woman who was paid to not write anything, a man called Barry with a severe and very public flatulence problem, rats in the basement, a section editor who pinned journalists up against the wall and printers who threatened strike action if anyone so much as suggested they stop at two pints at lunchtime. Despite all this, Nev seemed to be doing well. As the medical correspondent he was breaking big stories: he had the scoop on the first test-tube baby a few years earlier, and now he was one of the first British journalists to cover DNA sequencing and stem cell research. One evening he came back home and announced that an exposé he had written about American petrochemical companies illegally dumping waste into city water supplies had earned him an award from the San Francisco Sewage Department.
‘That’s what you get for writing a load of shit,’ said Mum.
Whatever he achieved, however, never seemed to be enough. The more his star rose, the worse his mood grew. We became used to Nev getting the splash – the front page – and the good cheer that briefly followed, which could result in anything from being allowed to stay up and watch an episode of Hammer House of Horror (and creep up the stairs in sickening terror afterwards), to going on what he called a Magical Mystery Tour, which was a trip to the fun fair on Putney Heath. But it didn’t last. A day or so after Nev broke a major story on a campaign against fluoride in drinking water, or even after winning an award from the San Francisco Sewage Department, he would come back home late, sink into a chair, and scan the day’s papers with a mounting air of defeat.
‘Well,’ he said one evening, ‘there go my plans for a feature on Prince Charles’s new interest in alternative medicine.’
‘How do you think I feel?’ said Mum, clearing our plates a few minutes after putting them on the table. ‘Eve Pollard beat me on the interview with the world’s first man-to-woman-and-back-to-man-again sex change. And she can’t write to save her life!’
Nev and Mum sat at our round pine table, eating takeaway and talking about work. Sweat beads gathered on Nev’s furrowed brow as he bent over a tin foil carton of pilau rice and went through the stack of newspapers that were delivered to our house each morning. One evening, two weeks after we moved into 99, Queens Road, he had just taken off his crumpled beige mackintosh as we sat down for dinner. The phone went. Mum told him it was the office. He rubbed his head as he said, ‘Yes … OK … Is there really nobody else available?’, and when he put the phone down, his shoulders dropped, his head shook, his eyes clenched, and he screamed, ‘Fuck!’ He stood up and shrugged on his mackintosh.
‘I’ve got to go back to the office.’
‘Oh, Nev, you can’t,’ said Mum, with the wounded look of a loving wife and mother seeing all her efforts go to waste. ‘I’ve just put the frozen pizzas in the microwave.’
Another night, I got Nev to help me with my mathematics homework. It involved fractions. Maths seemed at best a pointless abstraction and at worst a cold-blooded form of mental torture, particularly as my maths teacher was an eagle-like man with a beaky nose and talons for fingers who smelt of stale alcohol. ‘On the morrow we shall attempt t’other question, which shall be fiendishly difficult,’ he told us, before dozing off in the corner.
Nev understood mathematics. His parents had wanted him to be an accountant. Tom was a mathematics genius, but asking him anything only got snorts of derision. Mum’s inability to understand even the simplest sums rendered her close to disabled. Nev was the one with the magic combination of patience and skill. That night, though, my ineptitude got the better of him. The entire concept of algebra appeared nonsensical, particularly as the numbers and letters kept jumping about on the page. Eventually, after I had frozen entirely at the prospect of a minus number times a minus number somehow equaling twenty, Nev screamed ‘The answer’s right there in front of you!’ and hammered his finger down on a page of my homework until it left an angry grey blur. His face looked like a balloon about to pop. He wiped his brow, muttered something about being too tired to think straight, and walked out, clutching his head.
The following morning before assembly, I managed to filch all the answers for the maths homework from a boy in the class in exchange for a fun-size Mars Bar. I assumed that would be the last of it but unfortunately the boy, a normally reliable Iranian called Bobby Sultanpur, had just found out that his father had been named by the Ayatollah Khomeini as an enemy of the people, hence his including the words ‘Please let us see a return to glorious Persia in our lifetime’ as part of the answer to an algebraic formula. And I had copied everything out so diligently, too.
‘Hodgkinson!’ growled our teacher, his fetid, whiskery breath a few inches from my face, ‘Your sudden concern for the plight of the Persian aristocracy strikes me as devilishly suspicious. You shall be detained at the conclusion of the school day when fresh horrors, in the form of a combination of long division and trigonometry, shall await you.’
The next Sunday, Tom had some of his new Westminster friends over. They silently trooped up the stairs and into his room like angle-poise lamps on a production line. I followed them. Tom slammed the door before I could get in. Some sort of strange new music, definitely different to Teaser and the Firecat by Cat Stevens, our favourite family album, which Nev described as ‘deep’, seeped underneath the door. I knocked. A boy I had never seen before answered.
‘It’s, uh, your little brother,’ said the boy, arching his head over to Tom, who was sitting with two other boys by a small table, dealing cards. He was wearing a baseball cap and chewing gum in an open-mouthed way, like a ruminating cow.
‘Tell him to get lost,’ he said. ‘No, wait. Gambling is thirsty work. Scum, be a good kid and get us some Coca-Cola, will you?’
‘Fold. Man, I’m out. I’m on a one-way ticket to the poorhouse,’ said a boy, who I discovered later had a father who owned around half of Fitzrovia.
‘I’m folding too,’ said another one. ‘These high stakes give you the sweats.’
I looked down at the table. The boys were gambling away their setsquares, compasses, protractors and rubbers.
‘What are you playing?’ I asked Tom. ‘Can I have a go?’
‘Sort out the brewskis and I’ll think about it.’
Mum was in the TV room, singing along to Songs of Praise in a high-pitched falsetto. Nev was at the kitchen table, hunched over a stack of papers, muttering. I crept past both of them with a bottle of Coca-Cola from the fridge. Neither noticed.
‘I’ve got the drinks,’ I said to Tom. ‘Now can I play?’
Shuffling the cards, Tom said, ‘Shall we deal him in?’
‘Does that mean we have to explain the rules?’ said someone.
Tom sighed and nodded. Then he looked at me and said: ‘The thing is, we haven’t really got the time to “hang out”.’ He made the inverted commas sign. ‘We’re kind of in the middle of a serious situation here. Haven’t you got any of your own friends to annoy?’
As it happened, I did have a friend. A small, sandy-haired child. Will Lee was terrified of water, had a teddy bear called Tipper-Topper, and lived a few streets away in a house as old and as tasteful as ours was new and brash. We had met as four-year-olds at the house of two sisters called the Webbers, during The Lone Ranger of Knickertown. To put the labyrinthine complexity of this role-playing game in simple terms it involved The Lone Ranger (me) and Tonto (Will Lee) riding into a forsaken place called Knickertown (Becky and Elaine Webber’s bedroom) where the piratical inhabitants (the girls) robbed us of all our clothes before casting us naked into the desert (the landing) at the mercy of unspeakable dangers (Mrs Webber). It proved a bonding experience. Becky and Elaine are lost to memory but Will and I have remained inseparable ever since.
I rang the doorbell to Will Lee’s tall, terraced house. A hundred-year-old wisteria clung to the Victorian brickwork and the car, a crumbling estate, rarely washed, gave evidence of the highborn provenance of its owners. Will’s father answered. Hugh Lee was a tall, bald man in his sixties with narrowed eyes and pointed ears. He wore tweeds. He peered down.
‘Hm.’
He turned his head upwards and bellowed ‘Willerrrgh’, before shuffling off to his studio underneath the stairs.
I bounded upstairs, past the three-dimensional paintings of muted, abstract shapes the house was filled with, and which Hugh Lee had been working on every day but never putting on sale since he retired from the Civil Service two years earlier. Will was in his room. I rattled on the glass-framed door and heard a startled yelp come from within.
‘Oh. It’s you. I was reclassifying my fossils.’
Will’s room was not like mine. There were no cheap plastic toys or stacks of comics. There were microscopes, atlases, posters of star formations and glass trays containing the stones Will had collected on the shores of Dorset. ‘Look at this,’ he said, holding up a grey pebble with a few indistinct lines along its smooth surface. ‘What do you think of that?’
‘It’s a pebble. What am I meant to think about it?’
Will closed his eyes. ‘It’s a trilobite. It’s 300 million years old.’
‘Let’s go up to the attic.’
The attic was the best room in the house. Hugh Lee had only semi-converted it, putting in windows and laying down a hessian carpet but leaving the spindly retractable staircase and sloping roof, turning it into a den-like space which Will’s much older half brothers and half sister, now all living elsewhere, had used throughout their teenage years. Next to a record player and a stack of records was a book with a plain brown cover and the words Les Demoiselles D’Hamilton etched in gold down the spine.
‘You have to see this,’ said Will, sitting cross-legged and opening the book on his lap with slow reverence. ‘This guy has an amazing ability to convince women to take their clothes off.’
I looked through the sepia-tinted, dreamy photographs of young women in French country houses, stepping out of tin bathtubs, riding bicycles through the woods in flowing white dresses, and admiring each other’s semi-nude bodies, breasts falling out of thin white blouses. Years later I discovered that the photographer, David Hamilton, had used nymph-like teens as his models, but to me, an eleven-year-old, they seemed sophisticated, fully grown, untouchable. The pictures reminded me of a holiday in the South of France where the women on the beach had gone topless and there was a photographer’s studio in the local town with nudes, posed and artful, in the windows. ‘He’s a lover of the human form,’ said our father, awkwardly, as we passed the studio, before pushing us away from the window and towards the nearest ice-cream stand. Even then, Nev appeared to view the body like other men might view an affair: guilt inducing.
I looked at a David Hamilton image of two girls, their hair in loose, messy buns, sitting on a bed and admiring themselves and each other in an oval mirror. The girls wore dresses, but one of them had pulled the dress up to her waist. She was kneeling. You could see the tan line around her pale white bottom. The photographs were as confusing as they were fascinating. I was used to the sight of breasts because we got the Sun and Mum had told me not to expect all girls to look like Page Three girls, but this was something else entirely: exotic and romantic, otherworldly.
‘I wonder where you meet women like this,’ I said.
‘France,’ Will replied, authoritatively.
I wasn’t sure whether looking at David Hamilton’s girls, and what we called the FF (Faint Feeling) it inspired, should make me feel guilty or not. A few years earlier, Nev had suggested there was nothing wrong with sex. When I asked him about the basics of reproduction he explained that a man put his willy inside something a woman had called a vagina. ‘It sounds horrible,’ I said, but he told me people liked it. On his rather more official talk on the subject two weeks after we moved into 99, Queens Road he sat me down at the kitchen table, took out a textbook, sweated even more than usual, and, as he pointed shakily to an anatomical drawing of the male reproductive system said, in a faltering voice, ‘And here we have the vas deferens.’ The talk was high on technical detail but it left me none the wiser about what you were actually meant to do when the time came.
School wasn’t helping matters. Mine was boys only, which meant girls were less a different sex and more a whole different race. I might have got to meet a few local examples of their kind on weekends had not our parents enrolled me in Saturday Club, a school-run activities service featuring judo, chess, photography and other off-curriculum subjects. There was a way of avoiding the lot of them, however. All you had to do was accompany a certain teacher to the store cupboard and allow him to whack you on the bottom with an exercise book every now and then. Three or four of us sat in there each week, wedged into the narrow space between the metal shelves and the wall. If you hit him back he would say, ‘Ooh, you devil you!’ and pinch your cheek excitedly, but he asked for nothing more. That’s why I felt it was unfair when this teacher was hounded out of the school by an angry mob of outraged parents. Some idiot had told his mother about the store cupboard scene, thereby ruining a perfectly good way of bunking off Saturday Club. From then on I only ever saw the teacher in the changing rooms at the local swimming pool.
The official sex education talk came from Mr Mott, our Rhodesian science teacher with tiny red eyes and a sandy white beard who threatened to whack us with his ‘paddle stick’ should we do so much as snigger at the mention of a spermatozoa. The science room, a poky basement that stank of ammonia and chlorine, was always hot, and he decided to give us the lesson on an unseasonably close autumn morning.
‘Your bodies will be goin’ through many changes,’ he shouted, marching up and down the room and intermittently bashing a pre-adolescent head with the paddle stick. ‘You will be gittin’ pubic hair. You will find your pinnis goin’ hard at inappropriate moments. You will develop fillings for a gil, or, in some cases, a led.’
‘Yeah, Sultanpur,’ said Christopher Tobias.
Mr Mott allowed himself a little smile. ‘Settle down, you bunch of jissies. Right then. We will now be looking it the female initomy.’
It was so hot, and it had been such a long time since I had had anything to drink, that I began to feel faint. I dared not ask Mr Mott to be excused; that would be asking for trouble. Instead, I tried to concentrate on the matter at hand. ‘Look at this vigina,’ Mr Mott barked, tapping the diagram projected above his head with his paddle stick. Hodgkinson, you little creep, git up here and blerry well locate the clitoris.’
My head was swimming with the heat, but to ignore an order from Mr Mott was to sign your schoolboy death warrant. I stood up quickly. And that’s when the blackout must have happened. The next thing I knew I was lying on the floor while the school nurse, a young blonde woman with large lips and a concerned but accommodating manner, fanned me with a copy of It’s OK to Say No.
It was left to the adult world, the world of parents, to provide clues about what went on between men and women, and the real evidence came at our first party at 99, Queens Road. It was on Bonfire Night, a tradition that brought out the best in Nev because of his deep and profound love for blowing things up, fireworks, fire, destruction and chaos in general. And he really outdid himself that year. Alongside getting a huge box of Chinese fireworks with deceptively delicate names like ‘Lotus Blossom in Spring’ and ‘Floating Stars in the Night Sky’, he took us to Hamley’s to find something special. He found it. The Flying Pigeon was an enormous construction that looked like five sticks of strung-together dynamite. It came with a long rope on which it zipped backwards and forwards.
Nev scratched his chin as he studied the Flying Pigeon. ‘This does look pretty good. But it’s very expensive, and it does say that it’s designed for major displays only and definitely not garden parties …’
‘But Nev. Imagine seeing that thing in action.’
A mischievous grin coursed over Nev’s face. The battle for the Flying Pigeon was over. He was powerless in the face of pyrotechnic mayhem.
The party would be a chance to see our parents’ friends again. Among our favourites were Anne and Pete, an actress and a globetrotting businessman who had been our next-door neighbours in the old house until moving to a run-down vicarage in Faversham in Kent. Despite Anne and Pete not having kids, their home had its own games room complete with table football, a fruit machine from the 1940s and all manner of mechanical automata. Every time Pete came back from a work trip to the States he returned with unusual and unavailable toys, for us and for himself.
‘He was always larger than life,’ Mum said of Pete, as she put trays of baked potatoes into the oven. ‘He had an MG when he was at university, while the rest of us were trying to scrape enough to get a bicycle. He’s one of those working class Yorkshiremen that just know how to make money. He was chasing after me for a while. Not that I was interested. Nev may have his faults, but at least he’s got long legs.’
Guests filtered in. Tom and I were on drinks duties. Tom, wearing a black velvet jacket and a clip-on bowtie, took to the job with a lot more enthusiasm than I did, possibly because it gave him a chance to harangue every new person who came along with his latest thoughts on literary theory, advancements in physics and all-round egghead boffin theorizing.
‘Yes, yes … our mother struggles with the great writers,’ he said to one woman in a silver tiara and a plunge-neck ball gown, as he offered her a prawn cocktail. ‘She can manage Jane Austen and the like, but forget about Proust. Beyond her.’
The house filled up. There always seemed to be a woman with a hand on Nev’s shoulder, leaning forward and laughing with him about something. I carried trays of champagne into the drawing room, and all the glasses got whisked away in a flash. Some adults, usually men, took a glass without bothering to look at me; others, usually women, seemed charmed by the idea of an 11-year-old waiter and thanked me effusively and called me a darling child. With typical flamboyance, Pete brought a crate of champagne and a trade-sized jar of pink and white marshmallow sweets called Flumps. I poured half of the Flumps into a bowl and offered them around, along with the champagne. The Flumps did not prove appealing to adults so I decided to eat a lot of them myself, just so they didn’t feel unpopular.
Sandy and John Chubb arrived. John Chubb was some sort of a lord and Sandy, although a working-class girl who had left school at fifteen, had the plummiest voice of anyone I knew: rich, low and gracious. They lived in a huge house in Oxford with two toddlers, where John Chubb spent his weekends windsurfing and Sandy taught yoga in high security prisons, which always struck me as a dangerous career choice for this most glamorous of women. Sandy, looking regal with her thick black hair tied into a bun and a diamond necklace dazzling at her long swanlike neck, came up to Tom and me with presents, even though it wasn’t our birthdays: an album each. She got Tom Transformer by Lou Reed and me Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) by David Bowie. We stared at the cover photographs of these bizarre men, transfixed.
Sandy sat down with us by the record player and put on the Lou Reed album. On the back was a photograph of a butch man and a sexy woman. ‘Which one is Lou Reed?’ I asked her, through a mouthful of Flumps.
Sandy looked at me meaningfully. ‘They both are, Will dear. It’s all about transvestites, and hustlers, and other exotic people from the New York Underworld.’
‘But what are they doing there in the first place?’ I asked her, wondering where on earth the short, muscular, strutting man and the pouting, slender woman would fit in employment-wise to the New York Underworld, which I assumed was America’s equivalent of the London Underground. I certainly couldn’t imagine them in the ticket office.
‘It’s a very different scene over there. Anyway, have a listen to this.’
A song called ‘Vicious’ came on, to roars of approval from the guests. Annie started shimmying with a bearded man, Sandy got up and tried to make a reluctant-but-amused John Chubb dance, Mum was saying something about everyone being so bloody conventional and Pete was cornered by a curvaceous woman who was pressing her considerable cleavage up against him, causing his eyebrows to raise in tandem with the glass of beer in his hand.
I continued to fulfill my role as champagne and Flumps waiter until the Flumps ran out, which was strange because nobody had actually wanted one. Apart from a single Flump that Tom had picked up, stared at, and attempted to jam up my nose, I had, I realized, eaten the lot of them.
Nev appeared, charcoal marks on his sports jacket. ‘OK everybody, let’s go outside. I’ve lit the bonfire.’
It was a huge, bright red pyramid, stacked high with dried branches, planks, an old wooden chair and a punk-themed Guy Fawkes effigy at the top (punks being déclassé in 1981). Nev, Tom and I had been building it for days, adding anything that would burn, and now it was a mighty inferno. Mum brought out the tray of baked potatoes while Nev tied the rope for the Flying Pigeon between the apple tree and a pole holding up the washing line, and I, regretting having stuffed myself with Flumps for the last hour, sat down on the grass and leaned against the large wooden box containing all the fireworks and clutched my stomach.
This was the kind of party I liked, even if I was beginning to wish Flumps had never been invented. There was nothing better than Nev having fun because he spread it in our direction. He liked the same things as us: building dens in the woods, making fires, playing board games and going on Magical Mystery Tours to the local fun fair. He was clearly good adult company too, because all these interesting, lively people wanted to be with him. Mum didn’t like any child-related activities and she probably never had, but she enjoyed a party, while Tom relished having a bunch of adults around on whom to test out his maturity. I was overhearing him declaiming to a silent listener about the life of Dr Johnson, and Mum telling someone about her latest article on why she would rather be interviewing a top celebrity in a fancy cocktail bar than being bored at home looking after her children, when Nev appeared.
‘Sturchos,’ he said, grinning down at me excitedly, ‘I’m going to get it all going with the Flying Pigeon. Want to come over here with me to get a good view?’
‘You go ahead,’ I moaned, waving him away. ‘I think I’ve eaten something that disagrees with me. I’ll just stay here for a bit.’
Nev bounded off, telling everyone to clear the line of fire. If only I didn’t feel like I was going to send a hundred half-digested Flumps hurtling towards the ground I would have been up there with him, as Nev’s passion for anything involving fire and the destruction it wrought was matched only by my own. It was terrible to think that I wouldn’t be close to the mayhem – Nev was much more fun than most fathers because health and safety had never been at the top of his priorities – but my conviction was that if I just sat still for a couple of minutes I could recover from this unfortunate situation in time to enjoy the rest of the party, not to mention the rest of the fireworks in the box behind me.
‘OK everyone,’ said Nev, sparking the wick of the Flying Pigeon with a disposable lighter. ‘Here we go …’
The wick fizzed and sparked. People cheered. There was a high-pitched squeal, like it really was a pigeon whose tail had just been set on fire. A shower of sparks burst out. The pigeon took flight, zipping along the rope, spinning around and sending multicoloured rays of exploding gunpowder out into the night sky … and then it stopped. It fizzled out. Only one of the sticks of gunpowder had been used up.
Nev went to examine his prize item, poking around it to discover that the connection between the first stick and the rest had been broken. ‘Well, I’m not going to see that go to waste,’ he said, and before anyone could tell him not to he ripped the Flying Pigeon off the rope and chucked it onto the bonfire.
It sat there for a few seconds, before blasting into the air in a flash of colour. Then it turned and headed down, straight towards me. There were screams. Nev was running towards it, pipe-cleaner legs leaping forward. It looked like it was going to come down right on top of me – and then it was gone. But I could still hear it fizzing away. Where did it go? It all happened so quickly that I didn’t have time to get up and run before I realized.
From the open-mouthed faces of the people all staring at me, it looked like they had realized too. It was in the box of fireworks.
‘Will, get out of the way!’ shouted Nev. He almost made it over, but it was too late: the chaos began. A rocket screamed its way out of the box and headed straight towards Pete’s admirer, who displayed a nimbleness her curves belied and leapt into a rhododendron bush. A Catherine Wheel span wildly and helicoptered along the ground towards John Chubb’s titled ankles. A psychedelic Mount Vesuvius of dynamite exploded everywhere. I put my hands over my head and crouched as World War III broke out on a suburban lawn. Every time I peeked through my fingers, another firework had escaped. People were running, shouting useless warnings to each other and generally dissolving into panic. There was a red roar behind me for what seemed like ages (actually about a minute). Then it stopped.
I poked my head out. John Chubb and Pete were standing alert and looking up as if defending the party from an airborne invasion. People emerged from behind trees. There were groans but no injuries. I didn’t appear to be hurt.
There was one more explosion, followed by a whizzing sound and the sight of a single white light, floating silently in the night sky, mingling with the stars. It was a parachute firework. I looked up, and then looked at Nev, who was staring at this peaceful, brilliant light in contemplative wonder. He wore an expression I hadn’t seen before: transported and spiritual. He was motionless.
Then he shook himself into action and ran and picked me up from the ground.
‘Sturch! Are you all right?’
‘All right? That was the best fireworks display ever!’
What a dad. Who else could cause a grown-up party to descend into such anarchy? Unfortunately other guests, particularly the women, did not share my enthusiasm. They rounded on Nev as one, screaming at him for almost committing them to a lifetime of blindness and singed hair. And why was his poor son lying there next to an arsenal of lethal fireworks? To see Nev, perspiration clouding up his metal-framed glasses, twitching at his tank top as an army of harridans led by his wife accused him of something approaching child murder was far more disturbing than anything that had happened before.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ shrieked Mum, the ferocity of her coal-black eyes made a little less scary by the fragment of Roman Candle jutting from her bouffant, ‘Will could have been killed.’
‘But I’m fine,’ I shouted.
‘You keep out of this,’ she shouted back. ‘Honestly, Nev, sometimes I think you must have gone round the bend.’
Mum and Pete’s wife Annie went back into the house, arms linked, shooting Nev freezing glances over their shoulders. Pete and John Chubb told Nev not to worry, that nobody was hurt, and that women were mad anyway. Tom stood up, brushed down his velvet jacket, and walked towards the house with his hands clasped behind his back, kicking up dust with his shoes as he resumed his soliloquy on Dr Johnson.
