The Herring Seller's Apprentice by L. C. Tyler Read Free Book Online

these particular lines that my father eventually acquired the nickname ‘Glom’, which, all things considered, was one of the most positive developments to come from his poetry readings. The name rather suited him and, had the boys really disliked him, they were capable of coming up with nicknames that were very much worse than that.
    Sometimes, in desperation, he would try one or two of the Saxon riddles, hoping that their clumsy double entendres would appeal to our adolescent sense of humour.
    ‘“Swings near his thigh a miraculous object! It hangs below the belt, midst the folds of his garments, stiff and hard, with a hole in its front.” Well, what do you think that can be, Thompson? Eh?’
    His mild blue eyes would scan the class, desperately pleading with each of us to share the joke. But while the class would often laugh uncontrollably during tragic epics or love poems, my father’s attempts at humour would invariably stun them into horrified and embarrassed silence.
    Being in his class for English was, however, infinitely preferable to being taken by my father for games. The news that their football match was to be refereed by him was always greeted by the teams concerned with loud groans and pitying looks in my direction. My father’s attitude to football was simply this: that it was a singularly unimportant activity and that it therefore mattered little whether he followed the strict rules of the sport in question. I believe that he did in fact have a better grasp of the laws of the game than any of us (he certainly had a number of books on the subject at home) but he seemed to delight in awarding free kicks or disallowing penalties in the most cavalier and arbitrary manner. His refusal to see that, for us at least, each game mattered enormously, was the closest my father ever came to deliberate cruelty. But time spent on a muddy sports field was, for him, time utterly wasted and he would have scorned to pretend otherwise.
    He used to say to me that if he could only teach just one child to love the beauty of Anglo-Saxon poetry, then his life would not have been entirely in vain. It is doubtful however whether even this relatively modest ambition was achieved. When I went to university I elected to read geography, even though I preferred both history and English, on the grounds that geography was a subject wholly untainted by any contact with Angles, Saxons, Jutes or Gloms.
    But by that time my father had discovered that whisky could be an excellent substitute for ambition, or indeed life. I don’t believe that he ever registered either my treachery or even the fact that I had left home.
    Later, after I became known for my detective novels, people would ask me whether I had based the pessimistic and introspective Inspector Fairfax on anyone I knew. I have always replied ‘no’. Though my father had good cause to take a dim view of life, he remained in fact an incurable optimist, right up to the day that he committed suicide.
    ‘You’d have thought that a decent pub would have at least stocked Cadbury’s.’ Elsie deposited onto the wet table a pint of beer for me and a lemonade for herself. Alcohol was not her vice. Chocolate was.
    I placed my glass on a beer mat, the one small dry island on an oak table well watered by its previous occupants. Elsie plonked her glass unconcerned in the beer lake that lapped around it. She was dressed that lunch-time in a sort of turban and long flowing garment that I would have had difficulty in giving a precise name to, though I did not doubt that it was the height of fashion. Elsie was a small plump woman who insisted on dressing like a tall willowy one. It was a strange vanity for somebody who was, on the whole, entirely free of vanities of any sort.
    ‘So they gave you a grilling, did they?’ she asked, rescuing the dampening sleeve of her robe from its place on the table. ‘Did they fingerprint you? Don’t try to spare your feelings: just tell me every