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1. Broken Green Bottles
Clive Warner
Technical Data:
Word Count: Approx. 68,000
Genre: young adult with adult appeal
Setting: Historical (NW England, the north Mersey coast. 1959), and El
Alamein, Egypt, WW2.
P.O.V: The main protagonist is James, a 14-year-old boy. Written in first
person/past tense. He is the reincarnation of Buddy, who died in
WW2.
Other: I am preparing some line drawings to go with the text.
1

2. Broken Green Bottles
“This life's dim windows of the soul
Distorts the heavens from pole to pole
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not through, the eye.”
—William Blake
1
By the time I went walked upstairs, to bed, fog pressed against the windows. I pulled the
pillow over my head and listened to the bell-buoy, tolling its lonely sound from miles
away in the Mersey. Gug, the Barnacle Man, might be on his way, piloting his rotten hulk
from Formby Light to the Pier Head, looking for the lost. Gug, cruising slowly,
moonlight fingers searching through the trees! Great description that pulls me into your
story New passengers. Oh God! I shivered. Before At sunrise, Gug’s boat, slimy, green
and shivery, shrinking to a toy, would float into a filthy sewer intake beneath the main
sewer under the Pier Head, taking its tiny screaming cargo with it. (good images That’s
what the stories said about the onesof those who’d disappeared on the shore, lost after
dark. Were the stories true? Probably the only one who knew would be Old Beardy the
Hightown Hermit, and nobody dared speak to him; nobody of my age, at any rate.
2

3. Thinking of Beardy, I remembered the first time I saw him: I walked down Chester
Close, left along Saint Bernard’s Road, across the war memorial, straight on up
Thornbeck, and then off to the right, through the sand dunes. I climbed up a dune and
stopped dead.
A shiver passed through me.
He stood on a sandhill about twenty feet away, staring at me. I knew straight away who
he was, from his description—there couldn’t be two people like him. He stood quite tall,
taller than I, even bent as he was; like the silver birches on Formby Point, all bent over
one way, from the gales coming in off the Irish Sea. Lovely description
The evening sun reflected off his specs, which were as big as the bottoms of Lucozade
bottles and the same yellow. It looked like he was wearing a school blazer, which seemed
pretty weird for an old man with almost no hair. A piece of rope held up his trousers. I
guessed he’d found the rope amongst the flotsam on the shore. His neck was terribly
wrinkly, like Nana’s almost, and his nose seemed to get bulbous at the tip, so that I
couldn’t help but stare at it, fascinated and disgusted, and imagine the drip, drip—
Your description conveys well that this is a teenage boy
“Eh, boy! I know ye. I seen ye on the building site. I seen!” He waved a stick at me.
I turned and ran, ran, ran, until a stitch doubled me up. I clutched my left side, leaned
3

4. against an eroded lime-brick (what’s that?) wall, and panted for breath.
Yeah, that was the first and the worst time. I’d not seen him more than a couple of times
since then, and both times a long way off, on the beach.
Sleep wouldn’t come. I got to my knees, pulled the curtain back, and peered through the
window. The great cheesy face hung in the sky, and by its light, the shadows of the
leafless apple trees danced on the lawn. More lovely description.
I lay down but as sometimes happens, my thoughts began to spin faster and faster,
spinning out of control: ‘You know it will, oh but what about that, yes I know it won’t,
will work, will yes in the morning but will it. . .’ on and on and on. The room was so
quiet I could hear the pendulum of the cuckoo clock on the wall. So I started humming. A
stupid tune from my parent’s radio station, the BBC Light Programme. Sing Something
Simple. Over and over. Fill my head. And between cuckoo-clock tick and tock, I fell
asleep.I like the resonance of that last sentence; cuckoo-clock tick and tock.
* * *
I woke up. The clock said nearly half-past eight. I sat up in bed, reached over and pulled
the curtain back. Still dark outside. The fog had returned, and it was thick.,; ( don’t like to
see semi-colons when periods will do) I could hardly see the outlines of the trees in the
back garden, and there was no sign of the sun.
4

5. Den and Merv were supposed to be at my house by ten. Den lived in Waterloo, about ten
minute’s walk from the station at Blundellsands. Merv lived in Thornton, and got (took or
rode or caught would read better) a bus to his nearest station, Crosby. But would the
trains be running in this fog? I doubted it.
I got up, had a washed, and got dressed. By the time I went downstairs, Mum was already
making breakfast. She put doorsteps of white bread under the gas grill, but forgot them,
as usual, and had to scrape the black parts off with a knife. Then she spread them thickly
with New Zealand butter and passed them to me.
I sat at the table and stared glumly at my cup of tea. It must have been brewed a while
ago, from the greyish-brown patches of scum. What I really wanted was beans on this
toast. I got stood up and headed for the pantry.
“Just look at that fog outside,” my mum remarked in her best Lizzie accent. Mum
followed the doings of the Royal Family in the society pages. She thought she belonged
in Buckingham Palace. LOL!
“Yeah. Den and Merv are s’posed to be here at ten.” I couldn’t find the decent opener, so
I hacked the Heinz tin open with the crude wooden-handled opener one my mum used for
Dougal’s dog food. I couldn’t find the decent opener. What an apt description of what a
boy would do.
5

6. “Please, James. We say Dennis and Mervyn. Did you wash that before you used it?”
I hate her callingShe calls me James when she’s annoyed., Sshe knows very well I like to
be called Jim. “No. Sorry.”(good showing contrast of your inner, genuine dialogue and
your outer, polite, good son talk
Dougal, my mum’s Pembroke corgi, came panting in from the back garden, disappeared
under the table, and began sniffing my leg. I moved but he continued. My mum had to
have the same kind of dog as the Queen. Of course, the Queen has more of them. But
mum has a large tri-colour one she brought back from Wales. “They’re breeding them too
small now,” she says about the Queen’s corgis. Great, this tells reams about the woman’s
pretentiousness.
Dougal left my leg alone, but lay under the table watching my every move. I had trained
him to wait for the gruesome fatty lamb and lumpy Bisto that Mum serves without fail
every Sunday. So, for the other six days, I s’pose, that Dougal thinks I am being mean.
The radio was on the Light Programme. It played boring band music, mostly. Everything
on their radio was boring; the worst of all being a programme Mum and Dad doted on,
called ‘Sing Something Simple’. A chorus, singing the songs they sang in the war. Songs
they sang before the war, for all I know. I felt cheated, missing the war. Evidence lay all
around me: chopped-off houses in Liverpool, large empty lots paved in rubble. And
6

7. everyone seemed old, like my gran. She had so many wrinkles her face looked like a map
of Seaforth.
The door opened. Dad, who my mum calls Eddie, came in, carrying a folded newspaper
under his arm.
“I wrote to the Echo again but they never printed it,” Dad said.
“Oh. About the excavator? Mr. P called earlier. Are you doing the flowers again this
year? He wanted to know.” Mum looked at me. “Are you burning those beans,
JimJames?” I wondered why she called him Jim here and James earlier.
I gave them a stir then turned the gas off. The toast was already carboniszed, anyway.
I took the pan over to the table, and poured the Heinz Baked Beans on top of my toast.
The beans slid out of the pan like molten lava. Finally I scraped the especially tasty dried
crusty bits out and sprinkled them on top. Paradise on a plate.
Too funny, to look into a young boy’s mind
Dad slapped the Liverpool Echo down on the radio.
The dial light went out and the band music faded away.
Good, I thought.
7

8. Dad rapped the radio with his knuckles and the music came back, louder. “Bloody fools.
The sea’ll be through there one day, then there’s nothing to stop it before Ormskirk.” He
pulled his chair out from under the table and sat down.
Mum gave him a look.
“Oh.” Dad reached up and took off his grey trilby hat.
My earliest memory of Dad was him chasing after just such a hat, perhaps the same one
for all I knew, on Waterloo beach. While he wasn’t terribly impressive—many mistook
him for the popular Liverpool comedian Arthur Askey—at least he was good natured,
which was more than I could say for my friends’ parentsfather’s. (friends’ parents or
fathers? You mom doesn’t seem especially good natured.)
Mum daintily picked up some poached egg, using her fork upside down, as the Queen
did, supposedlywould.
“Half the dune’s gone already. Mr. B said they’re going to stop it, one way or another.”
Dad lifted his cup of tea and inspected the brown tidemark.
“What does he mean by that?” Mum asked. “And don’t look at me like that. I poured
your tea at the usual time.”
8

9. I sat down.
Dad said, “I Ddon’t know. And I don’t want to know. Don’t want to what? The wife said
nothing about drinking the tea. The tea’s cold.”
“What excavator, Dad?” I crammed buttered toast and beans into my mouth.
“The excavator? Damn fool machine Rainbrothers built. It’s out near the golf course, past
the old fort. Taking the dunes away, for building more houses.”
“Oh.” So that was where they got the sand from; the sand they used to build houses
where I played. One of my dens got bulldozed just last week. Immediately I formed an
intense hatred for the excavator. “But Dad, Mr Bulman told me that taking the dunes
away was bad. So building more houses must be bad.”
Mum must have caught me showing my anger on my face. “You mind your own
business, James. People have to live somewhere. Anyway, it's time to do your homework.
You’ve got mid-term. You’ll never pass.”
“Yeah, Mum.” I shoved the rest of the toast and beans into my mouth, then with cheeks
like a squirrel, washed my plate in the sink.
9

10. I’d have to talk to Den and Merv about the excavator. It must be a long way away,
though. Past the golf course, miles and miles. And we couldn’t ride our bikes through the
dunes. I remembered seeing the golfers from the train, on my journey to school. Groups
of men, tiny in the distance, pulling around small carts. Loonies! I like this boy. He’s got
great imagination.
I put my plate in the drainer and dried my hands on a towel.
“Mrs. J buys ten pounds of sugar a week, according to the sub-postmaster.” Mum shook
her head.
“Eh? Is that a lot?” Dad frowned.
“It’s five times as much as we use.”
“Maybe they’ve got worms.” Dad raised the paper to indicate that his end of the chat was
over. (Now I see where the boy gets it.)
On the back of the paper the headlines read:
10

11. DOCK STRIKE CONTINUES
I closed the kitchen door carefully, leaving my parents to enjoy the horrible music, went
into the lounge and picked up the phone. An eternity passed, then I heard the operator’s
voice.
“Number please.”
“Crosby five-oh-seven-one.”
“Connecting you, caller.”
Some clicks and whirring sounds came down the line, then I heard the ringing tone.
“Hello?” Merv’s mother. I recognised her Welsh accent straight away.
“Can I talk to Mervyn, please?”
“He’s doing his homework. Just a minute—”
She put the phone down and went away. In the background I heard the sounds of a door
11

12. being closed, footsteps.
“Yeah?” Merv’s voice.
“Hey. It’s Jim.”
“Yeah. Mum said.”
“You heard anything about an excavator? Somewhere out past the fort, near the golf
course?”
“Nah. Didja ask Den?”
“Not yet.”
“Well. Hey, I finished the guitar.”
“The bass?” Merv was building a bass guitar all by himself, since his parents refused to
give him any money to buy one. ‘Devil music’ his dad said.
“Yeah. ‘Course. I haven’t got an amp, but I can hear it if I put me head against the
kitchen door.”
12

13. “Gear. Can you play it yet?”
“No, but I’m practicing. My fingers hurt.”
“Gorreny ideas for Sarraday?” I lowered my voice in case my mum caught me trying out
my scouse accent.
“No. You?”
“Ah wuz thinkin’ of goin’ to the fort. See if we could find the excavator.”
“There’ll be a lot of people working on it, won’t there?”
“Maybe not. Do they work on Saturday?” My mum and dad both worked, but not on
Saturday.
“Dunno. Have to talk to Den. Gorra go now.” I heard a click, then the burring sound of
the empty line.
The operator broke in, startling me. “Have you finished, caller?”
“Er, yes. Thanks.”
13

14. “Then please replace your receiver.”
Realistic dialogue
* * *
I made a mess of my homework because I couldn’t get the excavator out of my mind.
Our whole village was built on sand. When you dig, sand just keeps flowing into the
hole. Why this shift to present tense? If you dig deep enough, the hole fills with water,
the sides fall in, and you can’t dig fast enough. Then back to past tense. I imagined sand
draining from under foundations, houses tipping, walls cracking, falling, the sea rushing
in. Horrible! Our house, though, was different from all the other houses in the Close.
Theirs had traditional foundations. Ours was built on top of a raft of reinforced concrete.
I remembered that Dad told the architect to design it that way. Maybe our house would
float. Then I had to laugh at myself: the idea of concrete, floating!
Ormskirk must be at least ten miles inland. Ten miles of green fields and black-and-white
cows and farmers under salt water. All of them in Gug’s boat, heading towards the Pier
Head. Screaming. Smaller and smaller. Gurgling. Would tiny people gurgle in high
pitched voices? Yeah. Alvin and the Chipmunks going into a sewer pipe. Oh, this is
great, and too funny.
The phone rang. I heard my mum answer it. After a moment she came into the dining-
14

15. room where I sat with my dog-eared exercise books and log tables. “It’s Dennis.”
I went into the lounge and picked up the phone. As usual, the plaited cable had turned
into a bunch of knots that reduced its length to about ten inches. I crouched on the floor
and jammed the cold black bakelite receiver to my ear. “Yeah?”
“That you Jim?”
“Yeah.” I looked out the lounge window. I could barely make out the garden wall in the
fog.
“My mum says I can’t go out in this. It’s too thick.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Merv rang. His mum said the same thing.”
“We’ll have to wait for next Saturday.” Tomorrow, Sunday, was no good because on
Sundays I always went with my mum to see nana, my grandmother, and grandad, and it
took us over an hour to get there by train and bus.
“Yeah. Oh well. Heard the new single by The Flamingos?”
15

16. “Shake Sherry?”
“Yeah. Gear, isn’t it?”
“It’s okay.” I hadn’t heard it yet. Dennis had an HMV record shop near his house. He
spent hours in the listening booth with the headphones on.
“Only ‘okay’?”
“Yeah it’s gear.” I wanted to get off this subject. “See you on Monday then.” Den and
Merv were both in my class at Waterloo Grammar.
“Yeah.”
“Right.”
“Bye.”
I heard the click as he replaced his handset. I put mine down before the irritating operator
could come on, demanding to know if I had finished. Why did my village have the only
operator-controlled telephone system left in the country?
My mother’s budgie, called Dickie, whizzed past my ear and perched on the standard
16

17. lamp in the corner of the lounge. Budgie poo covered the lampshade; really, it was
disgusting. After a few moments pulling at the fabric with his beak, the bird flew down
and strutted back and forth on the parquet floor, by the television in the corner.
Dougal the corgi wandered in and saw Dickie at floor-level. He charged.
The bird waited until the last possible moment then flew up, out of harm’s way, and back
to the lampshade for a triumphant poo, while the dog, unable to stop on the polished
wooden floor, slammed into the wall. Hilarious!
I wondered if someday the bird would be too slow. Hopefully yes. Then I wondered why
I thought these thoughts. After all, what had Dickie ever done to me? What a boring day.
Bloody fog.
I wandered into the kitchen. “I’ll be back in a minute,” I said, opening the door to the
back garden.
“Where are you going, JimJames?” There’s that Jim again, rather than James. Perhaps if
you somehow let the reader know that only when she’s putting on airs does she call him
James. my mum said from the sink, where she was removing my burnt-on beans with
Vim and a metal scouring pad.
“To see if the trains are running.”
17

18. “Oh. Don’t go too far, now." She showed me the pan. "Look—you’ve burnt the beans
again.”
I closed the door behind me and sniffed the air: dock leaves, Dad’s compost heap at the
bottom of the garden, some poo left on the lawn by Dougal, the leaves of the apple trees,
and the rotten bits of the garden fence where it touched the soil. ( Nice; picture shown
through smells.
Our house was a good mile from the river Alt but even so, if the wind was in the right
direction we still got a whiff of it. Dad said it smelt smelled? disgusting, but for me, it
wasn’t. It was boiled cabbage, drains, cut grass and damp soil, all mixed up. Except of
course for the rotting things, like the dead seagulls I hung from the rafters of the new
bungalows, to put people off buying them.
It seemed like I had cotton wool in my ears; everything muffled.
I walked straight ahead until I found the garden fence, turned right, and followed it to the
end of the garden, thirty yards to the east. Beyond was wild land still, although new
bungalows were going up a couple of miles away.
I stood at the end of the garden, tracing the local landmarks in my imagination: on my
left, to the north, starting about twenty yards away, the remains of an old lime- brick
18

19. (here you separated the words; earlier, you put them together.) factory. Nothing more
than foundations really. Ahead, the rabbit warren, followed by a deep ditch—I had a den
in there—then more warren, and finally a chain-link fence and the railway line.
I decided to see if the trains were running. That meant walking straight ahead. I nearly
fell down the ditch, and twisted my ankle painfully in a rabbit-hole. A terrible clatter
above my head made me jump. I looked up to see the dim outline of a railway signal. It
was at ‘go’ and a green light shone from the lamp within. I hobbled on and on, a long
way. Surely I should have reached my house by now? Then I realisedrealizsed: suppose
that train hadn’t been coming from the north, but from the south?
A signpost loomed out of the fog; two small wooden boards fixed to a piece of
galvanizssed channel and jammed into the sandy ground. There was no signpost near my
house.
One board said: 295th BRIG HQ PURPLE
The other read: SEPTIC
This was no good, I must have gone in the wrong direction. I turned round and began
walking back the way I came.
I heard a dog barking. Dougal? The barks, wrapped in cotton wool, seemed to float
19

20. towards me from a long way off.
I started running that way, but found myself caught in a patch of reeds. The tall stems
scratched my face. Wet oozed into my shoes.
The barking stopped. All around was quiet. I fancied I heard my heart thudding, the
sound magnified by the fog. No, it was a gentle plashing sound.
Suddenly I realizssed (perhaps this is British spelling? If so, please disregard my
change.)I was caught in the reeds of the river bank, where it was all smelly, sucking,
mud.
20

21. 2
I pushed the reeds out of my face but they sprang back. With both hands I parted the
stems and stepped forward, but my right shoe remained stuck in the mud and came off.
Now I was standing with one foot in the air. If I put it down again it would be covered
with the gluey black stuff, so I balanced on my left leg, let go of the reeds, and reached
down for my right shoe.
My left leg sank even deeper.
I couldn’t reach the shoe even if I half-crouched. I had to stand on both feet and bend
down. Now my stockinged foot was covered in mud too.
I groped around in the muck and got a couple of fingers inside the shoe, but could hardly
move it. God, that stuff was sticky! I heaved with all my might, feeling the left foot with
my remaining shoe plunge deeper.
Finally the right shoe came loose with a sucking noise. I poured the water out. It looked a
horrible mess. Now I had the problem of the left shoe. I tried to keep it on my foot as I
pulled, but my shoeless right foot sank deeply into the gunky mud and my remaining
shoe came off the left foot.
Jesus! Where was it? Black water had filled the hole already. I grovelled, elbow deep, but
21

22. couldn’t find it. And worse, I was up to my knees. And the tide seemed to be coming in.
Just the previous week in the Crosby Herald I read about two boys that were drowned
trying to wade the river. They’d probably stepped in a hole and gone under. I bet it was
the mud, though.
Frantically I pulled my left leg free, only to push the other deeper. I took one step
forward with the left. Reeds scratched my arms and face. I couldn’t get the right leg
unstuck. Think, think!
I’ll drown here, the water rising, lapping around my mouth, ripples entering my nostrils.
The last frantic struggles with my feet, flapping my arms, clawing at the water, but
sinking deeper. Sewage flowing cold down my throat, filling nose, lungs. Coughing,
spewing, gasping, gurgling, thrashing, expiring.
Stop panicking! Think!
The reeds?
I flung myself forward, and the reeds made a kind of mat to support me. There went the
rest of me covered in mud. I worked my stuck foot back and forth until it came out, and
crawled a few feet until I found firmer ground.
The fog still pressed in all around me. I stood with my back to the river, panting, holding
22

23. my one pathetic muddy, limp shoe in my hand. I tipped it up and poured out the
remaining river water, and wiped it on the coarse sea-grass that grew along the bank. It
made little difference. My mum was going to kill me when I got home. (you certainly
know how to wrench up a crisis and describe it well.)
I put my shoe on and hobbled along for a while but I felt stupid and uncomfortable going
up-down, up-down, so I took it off and carried it, even though it hurt when I stepped on
pebbles. I became angry at the mud, at the fog, at myself above all, and had to resist the
desire to hurl the remaining shoe, all squelchy leather, through the fog and into the river.
Stupid! Stupid, stupid, stupid!
Thinking these thoughts I failed to notice my feet leaving the sandy path and walking
across a slick, smooth surface. Too slick, for I slipped and had to go down on all fours to
save myself. Close up, I saw concrete, green with algae. I tried to stand up and nearly fell
flat.
Slowly I turned around and crawled away, but began to hear gloppy, gloopy sorts of
noises. I turned again, until they came from directly in front of me. The bell buoy
sounded, dooooooom, ahead in the estuary.
Stop now, stupid! But somehow I could not stop, and I stood up and walked slowly
forward to the edge. Below, a thin stream of foamy water poured from a jagged-edged
brown clay pipe into a lagoon of liquid mud. The colour of the mud ranged from olive
23

24. green to light brown. As I watched, the surface erupted, going ‘gloop’, splattering the
concrete sides. A smell like rotting cabbage wafted to me.
I was safe, at least ten feet above the surface, but now I was afraid to move in case I
might slip and fall in. But that was stupid. If I moved slowly, there would be no problem.
Silly. Just move carefully away, step backwards—but somehow I leaned forward over the
edge. It was the same feeling as when I visited Scarborough a year ago, and on a high
bridge, found myself wanting to lean over the guard rail, stretch my arms out, tumble
over, and fly. A feeling as if I were vibrating inside, a peculiar excitement, just step
forward . . . You describe the draw of the dangerous well
Another bubble formed on the surface, slowly swelling. Bloop! It burst. Pooh! What a
stink. I felt dizzy. Another bubble, there, growing . . .
Ahhh! I found myself swaying forward and jumped back, skidding and having to put one
hand down for a moment. Ugh. Slime. But the spell was broken. I retreated to the path,
and when I turned again, fog concealed the outfall.
I seemed to have walked much further than the boat club and was about to turn around,
when I found the paling fence that protected the boats. I followed it, trailing my hand
along the wooden fence staves, happy to be in familiar ground. Soon I came to the gate
and turned left, passing the first houses, then left again at the war memorial, down St
Stephen’s Road, and into Hester Close. I was thankful for the fog now; it hid the tattered,
24

25. filthy state I was in.
Even before I got to the house I heard my father calling my name. I waited until I got into
the back garden before I shouted, “I’m here!”
Dad came from the rabbit warren, with two of the neighbours, Bill Cointon and Ted
Brosely. They looked at me, shook their heads, and Bill said, “Well, he’s back. I’ll be off,
then. Best of luck.”
“Thanks Bill. I’ll deal with this now.” My dad looked at me and said through gritted
teeth, “Go to the bathroom and wash that mud off.”
I pushed the back door open and started walking through the kitchen but my mum said,
“Don’t walk on the floor like that! Stop there!”
She took a wad of old newspapers from the pantry and strewed them in a path, through
the kitchen, through the hall, up the stairs, across the landing and into the bathroom.
After half an hour I was clean enough, but it took me half an hour more to clean the
bathroom, pick up the muddy newspaper and put it in the bin. All this time my parents
maintained a stony silence.
My mother started: “Where is your other shoe?” dangling by one shoelace the slimy
25

26. remains I had carried back.
“I lost it in the mud.”
“The mud?” turning the shoe slowly and inspecting it as if it were a dead animal.
“I lost my way in the fog and got stuck in the mud down by the river.”
“I told you not to play down there! It’s full of all sorts of diseases!” Dad wrinkled his
nose and took a step backwards.
“Did anybody in the village see you like that, with no shoes?” Mum walked over to the
kitchen rubbish bin, lifted the lid, and dropped the shoe into it.
“No, mum. Honest.”
“Where do you think we’re going to get new shoes? The shops aren’t open tomorrow and
the trains aren’t running in this fog.”
“I dunno, mum.”
“You’ll have to go in your gym shoes.”
26

27. “It’s not allowed, mum. Black shoes only.”
“I’ll write a note for your teacher.”
“I can go in my other shoes, mum.” I meant my black winklepickers.
“I’m not having you going to school like a teddy boy, and that’s the end of the matter!”
“But mum—”
“Go into the dining room and do the next lesson. And no argument about it!”
I picked up my books and closed the kitchen door behind me. Through the door came my
mother’s raised voice saying, “Teddy boys!” and “After all we do for him!” You portray
the mother well, as a harsh, unsympathetic parent
That late September night my parents sent me to bed at eight o’clock, part of my
punishment I supposed. They never said anything. It was already getting dark outside,
and the birds were sleepy. For a while I listened to them arguing in the trees, then I
pushed the bedclothes and sheets away from me, sat up, leaned forward, and pulled open
my side of the curtain.
At first I thought the window was steamed up, so I rubbed it with my hand. But no, it was
27

28. still foggy, though it didn’t seem so thick now. I could easily see the outline of a street
light, about ten yards away. Earlier it would have just been a glow.
The light shone through the garden apple trees, through my window, and onto my
bedroom wall, making strange patterns on the wallpaper. There was a stain on the
wallpaper where it had got damp or something; in one place, if I blurred my eyes a bit, it
looked like a person standing there. When I moved my head from side to side, the face
seemed to follow, as if someone or something was moving through the edge of a dark
wood. The face reminded me of something—not something nice, but something shivery.
I closed the curtain and lost sight of it in the dark.
I reached over to my bedside table and clicked the radio on. It took a couple of minutes to
warm up. One of the output valves was a bit dicky and the loudspeaker cone was torn.
The thing I noticed most about it—the thing anyone would notice—was that just inside
the cardboard back cover, sat a huge green ceramic tube that almost glowed, it got so
hot.
I spotted the radio on the rubbish tip, a few months ago. The tip is not too far from Den’s
house. I don’t think I would ever say that to his mum. I go scavenging there for telly parts
and anything electric. I bought a fifty foot reel of aerial wire from Curry’s in South Road.
That’s four stops south on the electric railway. The wire runs from the top of my window,
across to the opposite corner of the garden, where I put up a wooden post about ten feet
high. This is my aerial. It’s called a long wire type. This is in a book called ‘The
28

29. Foundations of Wireless’ by a guy with a really funny name: Scroggie. The aerial gets
Radio Luxembourg. It’s too dangerous to connect it to the inside of the radio, but I found
that if I wrapped it round and round one end, Luxembourg comes in really gear.
A scratchy sound came from the torn speaker, then a familiar voice: “—Batchelor’s
Infrawdraw Method, Keynsham, that’s Kay . . Eee . . Why . . Enn . . ” and I knew it was
tuned in.
I spent an hour or so listening to a programme of the latest American hits. I really liked
the sound of Bobby Vee, but there was one group, the Crickets, that were great. Then I
drifted off to sleep.
It must have been about one in the morning when I woke up. I was lying on my back,
turned slightly to my right. Moonlight speared through a chink near the top of the curtains
and into my eyes, making me want to blink, but for some reason, I couldn’t.
I lay on the bed and listened as Radio Luxembourg slowly faded in and out. I tried to
remember the titles in case I found them in the second-hand singles racks in the Cremona
Souvenir shop. Personality, by Lloyd Price. Venus, by Frankie Avalon. Lonely Boy, by
Paul Anka. Dream Lover, by Bobby Darin. Good details
I sat on the bed, drew my vest up over my head and when it cleared my eyes, it seemed to
me that a man was standing in the wallpaper, where the stain was, as if he were half part
29

30. of it and half not. It was as if he'd always been there but somehow I'd not been aware.
I thought, "I'm dreaming," but then I heard the night birds calling in the distance, and I
knew I wasn't. Goose pimples stood up all over my arms, and the hair on the back of my
neck prickled.
"It's all right Jim. I used to be friends with your father. In the war." His voice sounded
soft, muffled, but I had no trouble making out the words.
"You're not having a good time of it here with your mum and dad, are you?"
"Who are you?"
"I'm your uncle Buddy, Jim. I died before you were born."
"But what are you doing here now? You're, um . . ."
"Dead. That's the word. But that doesn't matter. The war was just over when you were
born, Jim." Suddenly he detached himself from the wall and walked forward, stood
beside the bed.
I looked up at his face. It was reddish-brown as if he’d been in the sun. He had on a
uniform—khaki shirt and shorts—the same as in the mantelpiece picture.
30

31. “Come on Jim. We’ve got work to do.” Buddy reached his hand out.
I took it.
Buddy turned and stepped straight towards the wall. As I got closer I saw in the dim light
that it wasn’t really a stain at all, it was more like a shivering sort of movement that you
couldn’t really focus on.
Buddy stepped through and pulled me after him. You tell this and describe it well. I get
that the boy is going into a different dimension with Buddy.
31

32. 3
I felt my heart thud in my chest: fer-domp.
Bright sunlight hit me in the face, making me squint. In front stretched barren rocky
ground for a hundred yards or so.
I was carrying quite a weight. A heavy backpack, and a rifle. And a heavy belt round my
waist, with canvas pouches. Somehow I knew they were full of .303 bullets. And now I
get that the boy is either remembering a past life or traveling into a book he read or
something he imagined.
In front of my face a fly hovered, and for a moment I thought it was stuck in time, but
then I noticed its wings. Up, pause, rotate slightly, then down, pause, rotate slightly back
again, up . . .
To my left and right stood men in khaki uniform, rigid, unblinking. I took a step forward
and saw that I stood in the middle of the front rank of a squad of men. They all looked
disturbingly similar.
Fer-domp. My heartbeat boomed in my inner ear again. Somebody nudged my elbow. I
turned and saw a small boy; he carried the open top of a fruit crate as if it were a tray, full
of withered yellow fruit.
32

33. The boy looked up at me and said, “Mango, effendi?”
A rough-looking sergeant came up to me. “Come on Buddy. Get in line. The Teds aren’t
going to wait for us.” Good introduction of his name.
“Er, right.” Why did he call me, Buddy? Where was Buddy, anyway? I looked around but
Buddy was nowhere in sight.
The sound of lorry engines came on the wind, then louder, and a line of Bedford three-
tonners drew up.
The soldier next to me said, “Stick with me Buddy. We’ll show the Teds a thing or two.”
He steered me towards the nearest lorry.
We clambered in.
Shortly the Bedford pulled out, us swaying back and forth in the rear as the driver
accelerated, then crashed the gearbox, then accelerated again, finally getting up to a
boneshaking forty-five. My teeth rattled and I had to clench my jaw. The man next to me
laughed. Somehow I knew his name, Rusty. “It’s called washboard, Buddy.”
“Where are we going?”
33

34. “Some place the Teds are in, I dunno, Wadi El Araish or something like that.”
“Oh.”
“Your brother Eddie’s already there.” Here I get Eddie’s his dad in his real life, his
brother here, so the boy is his uncle Buddy during a war.
“Oh.” I got tired of shouting over the roar of the engine. It seemed weird to be here but
even weirder that Dad was here too, like in the fading black and white photos in the
dresser. Rusty just smiled or shrugged when I shouted questions at him, pointing to his
ear and shaking his head; the engine was so loud. I didn’t learn much.
The other man in my team, Frank, had somehow dozed off and was leaning heavily on
me.
The sun went down and the horizon grew dark, but the lorries didn’t put their lights on. A
man with a dim red torch sat at the back of each. Every half mile we passed a shaded
lantern.
As it grew darker the dust seemed to grow thicker, and many of the lanterns had been
smashed, so I began to wonder if the whole snake of vehicles would maybe end up in the
middle of the Sahara, that is if we were anywhere near the Sahara. My geography has
34

35. never been good, exactly.
After a couple of hours the driver changed down through the gears, turned right off the
rutted road, and bounced along over even rougher surfaces for a couple of hundred yards.
Then we stopped.
The tailgate went down with a crash and I heard a loud voice shouting, “Everyone out!
Come on, sharpish!”
We climbed down onto the surface of the desert. It was low scrubby bushes, pebbles,
hard baked sand and clay. The men started digging trenches but it was hard going. Rusty
led me over to where three men were unpacking a box.
“Buddy, set up the mortar.”
I began fumbling with the box. You know, I haven’t been able to critique much in this
section; it pulls me in so, and has me racing through the story. Good work.
“Come on! Look, here is the baseplate.” Rusty handed me a curved steel plate.
It surprised me how easy it was to set it up. The rest of the night I helped dig, so by the
time the first rays of the sun came over the horizon in the east, we had a pit about four
feet deep. A lot of the guys, though, the ones that had preferred to get some sleep, just
35

36. had scrapes in the soil.
* * *
“Here come the Teds, Buddy. Time to get busy. You do know how to aim it, don’t you?”
“I’ve read the instructions,” I said.
“He’s read the instructions!” Rusty roared with laughter.
Frank joined in.
“Well, tell you what. You can spot. If we’re short, you have to say “up” to make us shoot
further, and give us the distance in yards, like ‘up fifty’ or ‘down twenty’. Got that?”
“Yes.”
I went and stood on an old ammo box and peered through the binoculars. Surprisingly
large through the glasses, a line of clumsy-looking armoured cars was coming toward us.
I lowered the binoculars and tried to estimate how far. Maybe four hundred yards? I
wasn’t too good at distances.
The field telephone rang.
36

37. Rusty picked it up. “A.F.V.’s, yes. Cars. Three hundred? Right.” He turned and said,
“Three hundred yards, fire smoke.”
One soldier picked a bomb from the stack of ready ammo, then passed it to the other who
dropped it into the tube. After a moment the hollow-sounding explosion shot the bomb
into the air.
I turned back to the front to see where it landed.
A puff of yellow smoke came from somewhere behind the line of cars. At the same time I
saw bright lights winking from them and a moment later, the ‘ker-ack’ of bullets going
over.
I leaped off the ammo box and crouched down. “It fell behind,” I shouted.
I think they’d already seen that and adjusted the range. Hardly were the words out of my
mouth than the two-man team began dropping bombs into the tube as fast as they could,
which was pretty fast.
“Three in the air,” Rusty yelled. “Four.”
I became aware of the sounds of the other mortar teams on our left and right. The bullets
suddenly came a lot lower so I dropped below the parapet of the hole. Then I heard the
37

38. sound of the first bombs, ‘crump’, ‘crump’, crump-crump’.
“Drop twenty. Keep it up, lads!” I sneaked a look over the edge.
To my right, I heard loud bangs. Somehow I knew that they were our two-pounder anti-
tank guns opening up.
Rusty said, “They’re going away.” He peered quickly over the parapet. “All right, cease
fire, cease fire. They’re out of range.”
I looked through the binoculars. The armoured cars had vanished behind clouds of dust.
Rusty’s voice came from behind. “How about a brew, JimBuddy? Why did he call the
boy Jim rather than Buddy? The tea’s in the sock over there.”
I lowered the binoculars and saw the sock hanging on the side of the pit.
The mortar team were was already starting a fire of petrol mixed with sand, in a
blackened petrol tin.
I felt dizzy. The sun started going round and round my head, a roaring sound filling the
air, things going faster and faster until everything became a blur.
The roaring sound changed to a loud moaning, went up in pitch like the wind howling in
38

39. telephone wires, became a shrill whistle. Great transition back into Jim’s world.
"JamesJim? Are you all right? You must have fallen down the stairs.”
A blur of pink settled down and became my mum's face above me.
I hurt all over, especially my elbows, knees, and the side of my head. Then Dougal
arrived and began licking my face. I was lying in the hall at the bottom of the stairs,
listening to mum’s whistling kettle.
"Mum? What's a mango?" It must have been a dream.
Sunday dawned bright and sunny, with no trace of the fog that had ruined Saturday.
Through my bedroom window I saw one of the electric trains leaving the station on the
northbound track, heading for the next stop, Formby, four miles north on the coast. I got
up just before nine and went downstairs to the kitchen.
Mum was just putting down Dougal’s breakfast. The dog licked his lips as she placed the
bowl on the floor. My mother’s lips were set in a grim line, compressed and bloodless. Of
my father, I saw no sign.
“Where’s dad?”
“Out.”
“Oh.” I looked at the kitchen table but there was no place set for me.
39

40. Mum took a scouring pad from the sink and started scrubbing grease off the stove. I went
into the pantry, took the cornflakes box, and filled my Beatrix Potter bowl, the one with a
picture of Roger Rabbit playing cricket. I liked the bowl but I didn’t care much for the
cornflakes. They got soggy so quickly.
“Is it all right if I go out, mum?”
“Where? You’re not allowed to go near the river. The village, all right.”
I had a sudden flash of inspiration. “Can I go to the cricket club then?”
“I suppose so.”
I went to get my bike and cricket balls, but my bike had a flat tyre. By the time I fixed it
with the John Bull puncture kit, it was lunch time.
Dad came back just before Sunday lunch. My dread, but Dougal’s delight.
I sat in the window bay.
Mum pushed the kitchen table towards me, boxing me in.
My dad sat on the other side, making escape impossible, and lifted his newspaper.
My mum plonked a plate down in front of each of us, then sat down.
I stared at mine: triangular pieces of pale grey meat gathered in the middle of a pool of
lumpy brown gravy. Three shrivelled brown potatoes sat next to four mushy Brussells
sprouts.
40

41. I carefully scraped as much gravy as possible into a heap, then glanced down, under the
table. Dougal, watching me intently, pricked his ears up.
“The sea level’s rising, you know.”
My mum remained silent but my dad continued, “It’s those nuclear tests. They’re making
the earth hotter, melting the ice.”
“Mr B says the council should do something about it.”
“About the tests?” my dad lowered his newspaper slightly and peered past it, at my mum.
“No, dear. The excavator.”
“We were talking about that yesterday. I was talking about the tests.”
“Yes I know, you reminded me of what Mr B was saying because of the water. Going in
as far as Ormskirk.”
“Oh. What does Mr B know about it?”
“I believe he’s one of the ones going to take a look. Him and Mr P.”
41

42. While they were busy with their grown-up talk I took the chance to feed my lunch to
Dougal. After a decent interval I stood up. “Well I’ll be off now, mum.”
“If you go anywhere near the river—” my dad started.
“I’m going to practice my bowling. At the club.”
“Oh. I suppose that’s all right.”
There was a match going on at the main part of the club, so I went further down the lane
to where the second and reserve teams played.
After a while I got bored with bowling into the net. I crossed the field, heading towards
the used-tyre dump. They weren’t car tyres, but big, fat, round ones. Den once said they
were aircraft tyres, left over from the bombers in the war.
A half-empty ditch ran along the edge of the field. Tiny minnows, silver and gold, swam
in and out of the bullrushes. I knelt down and gazed into the clear water. After a while,
sudden movement caught my eye. A caddis fly larvae had found some prey.
A faint creaking sound made me look up. It came from the old pavilion, half-hidden by
brush and scrub. Although everyone called it the ‘Pavilion’, really it was just a shack.
42

43. I walked over to it. A few rickety wooden steps led up to an open front. I stepped to the
left, I don’t know why, and pulled the doorknob, the one on the door marked ‘visitors’.
The door swung open, so I walked inside. The room had a distinctive smell of wood, old
cricket pads, and dead flies.
A man was sitting in the corner. He wore cricket shorts, cricket shoes, white socks, but no
pads. He had on one of those white V-neck cricket sweaters. He wasn’t as old as my dad.
He wasn’t young, either. Probably he had been in the war. It seemed to me that pretty
much everyone had, since they still talked about it all the time.
Why was he dressed for cricket? I looked around. Wooden lockers, doors hanging open.
Sunlight glowed through the window, sending their pattern across the springy wooden
floor. It had been ages since anyone had painted the place. Dull white flakes of old paint
lay in drifts in the angles between walls and floor.
“Hello. Where are you from?”
“Oh—the village. You know.” I gestured vaguely in the direction of the cinder road,
perhaps a hundred metres down a rough track. “Been playing?”
“Bowled out. Gammy knee.” He pointed to his left knee. “Look—”
I moved closer. The skin over his knee looked like a crater.
43

44. “See this? motorcycle crash. Couldn’t walk for a couple of months. I can still bat, but I
can’t field. Here—” He took my hand and put it on his knee. “You can feel the bone isn’t
the right shape, can’t you?”
Feeling uneasy, I took my hand off his knee. “Yeah. Must’ve been a bad accident. What
speed were you doin’?”
“Whatever, it was too fast. Mind if I ask you something?”
“Yeah, sure.” I sneezed, without warning; the place was so dusty.
“Why do they come here to die, do you think? Why don’t they see what happened to the
others?”
“What?”
“The flies. All summer they come, and die like all the rest. Just like the war.”
He leaned forward and the evening sun, a deep ruby colour, painted his face. I saw a
pattern of lines on his cheek, deep at the corners of his eyes. He looked up.
“Do you like to touch yourself? Down there?”
44

45. The silence stretched between us. Cold dropped through the dusty air and settled on my
arms as gooseflesh. “No.”
“Liar.” His faded cornflower eyes stared through me, through the planks, across the fields
and far away. “Frogman liked to touch us down there. In the showers after the game. Play
up and play the game, Jennings.”
“The game?” Weren’t you supposed to humour crazy people?
“Oh, the great game, the greatest game of all.” He stood up and went to peer out the
window. “It’s going down.”
I thought I’d better be getting out of there.
He moved to the door. The boards creaked on the verandah, his shadow interrupted the
sunlight, just for an instant. Was he gone?
I sat there in silence until the first flight of ducks came over from the salt marsh. You tell
this spooky episode well, in an understated way, all the spookier for that.
45

46. 4
I had to get the eight o'clock express train from Hightown or I'd be late for
assembly. Trouble was, the eight o'clock always arrived full of sixteen-year-old
snob girls from the all-girl Manor High. Manor being fee-paying, they always had a
style of putting me in my place, and since they towered over me, this really pissed
me off. So I pushed and shoved my way on, all elbows and knees, with my nastiest
face pasted on. They got off at Crosby, but it took till the next stop, where I got off,
to get my expression back to normal. LOL
Skin, the school headmaster, announced that speech day was only three weeks
away. I groaned inside my head. Half an hour we all stood there in assembly, in the
great wax-floor-smelling hall, in four columns facing the stage: Tudor House, with
the first years in front, and the A level guys at the back. Then to my left, Stuart
House, Lancaster House, and York House.
Den, standing next to me, muttered into my ear, "bloody German first." A nearby
prefect a nearly perfect what? swivelled his head snake-like in our direction, so I
couldn't reply.
Smug, the German master, watched as we lined up outside our own classroom.
Then he pointed his steel-edged ruler and bellowed "Herein!" He was a big man,
maybe six feet or so. We all spent forty minutes cowering at our desks while Smug
46

47. stalked back and forth whacking the ruler into his hand. I was supposed to be
construing the third person nominaitive (spelling?) of the verb scheissen or
something like that. My brains were mush. All I could hear was the whack! whack!
of the ruler. I had ridges in my scalp from that ruler.
"Mimms get up."
Mimms, at the front of the class, started quaking. I saw his face falling like ash.
"Mimms, ich möchte, du . . . "
Mimms was really shaking now. Speechless.
Smug stepped quickly forward, took hold of Mimms' ear, and pulled Mimms to his
feet. "You haven't been listening! I'll teach you!"
Smug brought his other arm around in a round-house slap and belted Mimms
across the ear with his open hand.
Mimms flew across the classroom and oof! into a cast-iron steam radiator.
47

48. Smug went after him and dragged Mimms back up to his podium, then bang! He
gave him a good one in the other ear.
Mimms flew into the wall on the other side. He just managed to avoid putting his
head through the window. Slowly he walked back to his desk shaking his head
from side to side, and sat down. Then he fell off his seat.
Silence. Mimms lay there.
Somehow, the nurse arrived. All this seemed to be taking a very long time. The
nurse led Mimms away. Wow, heavy story.
Break. I found Merv and Den at the side of the bike shed. I wasted half the time
talking about Smug and Mimms. Then I remembered my plan. "Last weekend was
crap. I lost my shoe in the Alt and mum hasn't spoken to me up till now."
"Yeah." Den nodded.
"So if it's not foggy, and not raining, you've got to come, right? By nine." If they
didn't come I would be imprisoned again, with only Dougal and the budgie on my
side.
48

49. "Alright but you've got to go to the dance tonight. I'm not going on my own and
Den can't go," Merv said.
"Oh, all right. Now, on Saturday, I want to get as far as the old fort. I found a map
in my dad's bureau." I remembered that in the same drawer, I found a book called
'The Miracle Of The Human Body'. "There's a lighthouse, maybe two miles past the
end of Thornbeck. And then it shows the fort, maybe two more miles."
I'd often seen the fort, or rather just a corner of it, miles away, from the train. I'd
seen a tall fence, a gate, a concrete bunker, a strip of road that started nowhere, led
through the gate and disappeared into the giant sand dunes.
* * *
On Wednesday evening I put my best gear on, including my winklepickers, and
caught the train two stops, to Crosby. The dance was in the town hall, near the
station, so it only took me a couple of minutes walk.
Some skiffle group was already on, and they were pretty good for skiffle, but when
the main group came on, the skiffle seemed square. The Starlites played like most
of the bands. The lead guitar drowned out the rhythm guitar, and the drums
drowned that out, and the vocalist got what was left. The VOX AC-30 amps
sounded really loud.
49

50. The hall was about sixty feet long. On the left sat all the girls. The boys including
me sat on the other side. In between was no boy's or girl's land. The band played
desperately on.
After a couple of numbers some of the girls began dancing with each other, giving
the boys scornful looks.
I had no idea how to advance from the boy's trench across neutral territory and
speak to the aliens that sat over there. Did they wear those new things they call
tights? Too funny
"Den my head is spinning. How can you smoke those things?"
"I dunno you get used to it. Look at that blonde one over on the left. She's wearing
tights though."
"She's with that one with the big legs?"
"Oh God you're right. I don't fancy yours much." Den laughing.
Stuff you, Den. Me, I was secretly wishing of course that one of the girls might
accept an offer to dance. Out there. On the acres of polished wood floor.
50

51. "The band is gear, innit."
"Gear. Yeah." Some guy marched out on the floor. Christ who was it? About a year
older than me. A girl with flaming red hair got up to dance with him. Pretty. A
huge pang of jealousy struck through me. I found myself advancing across the
dance floor. This horse-faced girl with protruding teeth. Surely she wouldn't
refuse. "Wanna dance?"
"No thanks."
I stood there with no reserve plan. Totally screwed. And then an avalanche of guys
arrived and in an instant all the girls were on the dance floor jumping up and
down with their partners. All except for me. I went back to the wall and stood
there thinking about girls.
I was always looking for one of those pneumatic American girls like in the
romantic films on at the Odeon. The films the girls liked. But they didn’t look,
these girls, anything like the ones in the films. These girls had pinched blue faces
and bruises for eyes and TCP kisses and Dettol lips. These girls were all lumpy
under the surface. These girls came from council estates with prefabs and had
brothers who were Teddy Boys at night.
51

52. For a couple of weeks I had a girlfriend called Elaine, a blonde girl. I didn’t meet
her at one of these dances. Actually I had never met a girl at a dance. Elaine
organised a Dansette and a box of forty-fives for a party one night, and I tagged
along with someone else. We had a game of spin the bottle and she took me
upstairs with her, into her room, a goldfish, a big poster of Elvis on the wall, and
on the bed, we did something. But in the morning I had bruises for eyes and had to
put TCP on my bitten-up lip. And after school that day I heard that someone called
“Danny” was looking for me.
I stood there against the wall until the music stopped, and thought, good it’s
nearly time to leave for the ten-thirty train.
"That was gear, wonnit." Dennis grinned.
"Wasn't it." My mum has been nagging me for speaking scouse. I put a look on my
face.
"Yeah. Gear . . . " Den had a smirk on his face.
I could see he was thinking of the girl who practically threw herself at him.
"German tomorrow."
52

53. His smirk vanished.
53