In a Good Light by Clare Chambers Read Free Book Online Page A

comforting tone, as she counted out Mother’s change.
    â€˜What nonsense,’ said Mother, who had no time for such platitudes. ‘The soldiers on the Somme were crawling with head lice and you don’t think they had clean hair.’ And snapping her purse shut, she led us out of the shop with our dirty, infested heads held high.
    At home the scissors were produced and Mother cut my long, looping curls to a ragged two-inch crop. Christian laughed when he saw me shorn and smeared with lotion, then shut up when Mother turned the scissors on him.
    â€˜You look like a boy,’ he said afterwards, as we gazed at ourselves in the big gilt mirror above the fireplace. I was standing on a chair, so our heads were level, and I noticed for the first time that we had the same large, crumpled ears.Since much of my time was devoted to the business of emulating Christian I didn’t take his remarks as an insult. On the contrary I was delighted. Boys had all the best games: they could climb onto the shed roof, throw tennis balls right over the apple trees, ride a bike no-handed, and swarm up to the top of the rope swing and sit in the oak tree, miles above my head, pretending not to hear anyone calling.
    â€˜Let’s play death-sticks,’ I suggested. This was a game of Christian’s own invention, involving rolled-up magazines which functioned as treasure and weapons. The object was to impound each other’s hoard by any means possible – principally force. There were no rules. Daring raids on one another’s territory usually ended with the two of us brawling in the long grass and thumping each other with tattered copies of
Shoot
.
    Christian pulled a face. ‘It’s too easy. I always win.’
    This wasn’t boastfulness, but simple fact. His five-year head start meant that there was no game at which I could beat him, no skill I could ever teach him. Nothing I did could ever impress Christian, but the effort of trying seemed to rule my whole childhood.

3
    OUR PARENTS WERE different from other people’s, and they had different rules. They didn’t mind if we were noisy or boisterous, or if we traipsed mud through the house, or slid down the compost heap, or caught nits. They didn’t rant and fume when we came home from school with indelible ink on our uniforms, or pockets torn loose, or our shoes scuffed grey. When we left our pens all over the kitchen floor, Mum and Dad stepped over them, and when we trampolined on the beds and crippled the springs, and left footprints on the wall from sliding down the banisters, they just shrugged.
    Dad’s position on discipline owed much to his job at the prison. He spent all day among young people for whom rage was the normal mode of expression; he had no wish to witness or participate in angry scenes at home. His sternest reproof was likely to be ‘Now, now . . .’ and a telling off was referred to as ‘a kind word’. Mum’s attitude to child-rearing – in factto everything – had been shaped by those years with the mission. She had seen so much poverty and suffering, and so much resilience of spirit, it had left her with a contemptuous disregard for life’s petty problems. What was faulty wiring, or a dirty carpet to a woman who was in mourning for a whole continent? Her view – not one widely held in the suburbs at that time – was that children in good health, who had food and shelter, were already thrice blessed and needed no further cosseting. Money that could be given to charity was not to be wasted on frivolities like television, sweets and trashy plastic toys.
    Instead, we had the run of the garden and its amenities: the trees, the rope swing with the tyre on the end, the shed and its collection of ancient tennis rackets, bats and balls, the nettle patch. We seldom had other children back to play. Mum had tried it once but it hadn’t worked: a girl from my nursery school had