Life Without Armour by Alan; Sillitoe Read Free Book Online Page A

giving hours of brainless diversion.
    When I was coming up to eleven my grandmother thought I should take a Free Scholarship examination which, with sufficiently high marks, would get me to a school until the age of seventeen, instead of starting work at fourteen. One’s age began to assume importance: a change in life at eleven would decide how the next six years were spent.
    Grandmother Burton had taken in my preoccupation with the school prizes in her parlour, and habitually gave me old laundry or penny cash books with pages still clear at the back to write on. My grandfather must have considered buying the house, because he let me have two cadastral plans of that part of Lord Middleton’s property on which it stood. These were drawn to a scale of 1:2,500, and I learned that one inch on the paper equalled 2,500 inches on the ground.
    Unfolding the thin sheets, it was possible to make out the land, on which I daily rambled, in such detail that by going a hundred paces I had moved over an inch on the paper. With pencil and rubber I arranged the companies and platoons of an imaginary battalion into defensive positions around groups of cottages, on a bridge, by the edge of a wood, and along the railway embankment. Machine-guns were set out for crossfire, and barbed wire laid, the maps used this way until they were worn out. The idea of joining the army as soon as I became of age appealed to me as a way of leaving home.
    My grandmother said that on my passing ‘the scholarship’ she would pay for uniform and books by arranging a loan from the Cooperative Society, of which she had long been a member. What attracted me to the scheme was that at a secondary school one would be taught French, a necessary road through education being paved with a knowledge of that language. Jack Newton’s brother taught him to count up to ten in French, and these magic syllables were passed on to me. I bought a dictionary and tried to translate sentences into French, though not knowing how to conjugate verbs was a fullstop to getting anywhere in my studies.
    In the basement of Frank Wore’s secondhand bookshop downtown was an enormous table on which many treasures could be found for threepence, and some for slightly more on the shelves above which occasionally came out under my coat. A Pitman’s French grammar showed my errors of translation, and provided a rough but effective phonetic guide to pronunciation. One such primer contained a plan of Paris, making me familiar with the buildings and street names of that place much sooner than with those of London.
    In the week before taking the scholarship examination I felt set apart from those in the class, though the proportion of pupils sitting for it was not small. My sister would tell her friends proudly on the street: ‘Our Alan’s going to do his scholarship next week.’ Needless to say, I did not pass, though two boys did, one whose father ran a hardware shop, and another whose mother owned a café. The unfamiliar puzzles and conundrums I was asked to solve might just as well have been Chinese ideograms, for I had expected to be tested on knowledge rather than intelligence.
    When the result came my disappointment was not acute. I had wanted to pass, and hoped I would, yet didn’t care too much that I hadn’t, telling myself that the test had been taken as much for the experience as for anything else. Perhaps it was thought by the teacher, however, that my marks had been close enough to justify another attempt, for I accepted the chance of a free scholarship exam the following term for Nottingham High School. Hard to remember what season it was, the day of the test being cold and wet, and my shoes letting in water, but the high spirits of Arthur Shelton and I declined somewhat on going through the gate and seeing masters wearing caps and gowns much like those at the school of Billy Bunter in the comics we laughed at.
    Since my experience of the