One Secret Summer by Lesley Lokko Read Free Book Online

Him.
Again?
    For the next half an hour, she concentrated fiercely on following the professor’s low, soft voice, ignoring the quivering
     panic that kept rising in her as the morning unfolded and she realised her grasp of jurisprudence was even shakier than she’d
     feared. At Nottingham she’d always been amongst the top four or five students in her year; here at Oxford, she understood
     immediately, things would be different. Aristotle’s Golden Mean; Aquinas and Hobbes; Dworkin and analytic jurisprudence …
     the phrases flew out of the professor’s mouth and seemed perfectly comprehensible to everyone else in the seminar room except
     her. She struggled to keep up, noticing out of the corner of her eye that she was the only one writing practically everything
     down – everyone else sat upright and alert, nodding every now and then, jotting down a word here, a name there … no one seemed
     to be drowning in a sea of information as she was. ‘In short,’ Professor Munro said, getting up and lighting his pipe as a
     way of making his point, ‘anything that concerns the way a society is organised is political.’ Julia’s hand stopped mid-sentence
     and a ripple of pain ran up and down her spine.
Anything that concerns the way a society is organised is political, Julia
. It could have been her father speaking to her. In a flash she was fourteen years old again, standing next to him in his
     shed at the bottom of the garden, helping him stuff envelopes for the by-election amidst the smell of ink and printer’s chemicals
     that never quite left his hands. Mike Burrows was a printer and a trade unionist at the
Newcastle Herald
, just like his father; a stout, fiercely independent man with a strong social conscience and the intellectual fervour of
     the self-taught. He was fiercely ambitious – the opportunities that were open to Julia’s generation hadn’t been available
     to him, and Julia had grown up somehow knowing that there was a future ‘out there’ that would be different for her. But it
     was more than that. Mike was different from most of the men who lived in the streets around them. There was somethingabout him that kept people at arm’s length. They came him for advice or support, not for a drink or a game of cards. At least
     once a month there was someone whose life came spiralling out of one of the neighbouring houses and whose children ran in
     fear of what they’d seen. Hanging around the living room listening to their talk, rubbing a foot surreptitiously against her
     shin, Julia caught a glimpse of something she’d never seen in her own home – a husband who beat his wife; a man who came home
     drunk every night; a man who was going to lose his job. Mike was asked to ‘speak’ to them. One day there was a woman Julia
     recognised as Mrs Glenby from the other side of Elswick Road. Her daughter, Winifred, was in Julia’s class. The snivelling,
     fear-distorted face was of the kind she’d never seen in her own home. The image burned in her mind’s eye for months afterwards.
    Although Sheila, Julia’s mother, had never had a career of her own, she was just as ambitious for Julia. Together they went
     to the local library every Saturday with a list of books they’d selected that week and handed it over to the librarian. They
     read together in the evenings whilst the radio was on in the background – classics for Julia and a Catherine Cookson or the
     occasional Agatha Christie for Sheila. Mike didn’t hold with watching TV every night. The soft tones of Radio 4 were the backdrop
     of Julia’s teenage years.
    And then one day everything changed. It was a Friday evening, six weeks before Julia’s O level exams. Mike and Sheila were
     driving back from their weekly grocery shop. Witnesses said the small red van had come up Park Close at a ridiculous speed.
     There was a sudden, deafening screech of brakes as it rounded the bend and then the driver lost control of the vehicle. He
     was