Then We Take Berlin by John Lawton Read Free Book Online

system, but imposing some sense of system was the job of universities and boys of John Holderness’s class did not go to universities, and rather than a butterfly mind he might best be described as having a jackdaw mind. Not admitting any of this saved him many a playground kicking.
    The first he knew of his mother’s death was not when he got home to the empty flat in Maroon Street—that, after all, was the norm—but when she didn’t turn up to eat the meal he had cooked her before he went to bed.
    When the pubs closed—those that had survived another day in the Blitz—an ARP warden banged on the door to tell him through beery breath that his mum was dead.
    He ate her portion and went back to bed, only half-wondering if his dad would be recalled from Wales, and, if he was, how best to handle the bastard.
    In the morning, he dressed, ate the egg that Lily had set aside for herself, and was preparing to set off for school when his grandfather—his maternal grandfather, Abner Riley—let himself in.
    “The buggers only told me an hour ago,” he said.
    “I’m fine, Grandad.”
    “No, son. No, you’re not.”
    He sat down on the only armchair in the room, wedged between the cooker and the fireplace. Wilderness had no idea what the old man meant.
    “It’s the flat, d’ye see? Council-owned. They’re going to want it back. And given how many poor buggers got bombed out these last six months they’re going to want it back sharpish.”
    “But I live here. This is my home.”
    “Copper who banged on my door at first light this mornin’ sez you was like as not goin’ to a home. A hinstitution. On account as you was now a norphan. Bollox I tells him. The boy’s a norphan the day they nail me down in me box. So . . . you grab your things and you come back wi’ me.”
    Wilderness did not see how he could be an orphan while his father still lived, but knew that the verbal shorthand said how little the neighbourhood thought of his father. They could not forget him—he had thumped too many heads for that—but they might prefer to. Whilst preferable to a London County Council orphanage, the prospect of life with Abner Riley was not pleasing. Wilderness liked him more than he had liked his daughter—Lily had been an impossible person, and hence impossible to like with any sustained affection—but he was a complete rogue and an habitual criminal. The great-aunts out in Essex were his sisters, the very best of a very bad bunch—better because settled, their parents having given up the gypsy life with its caravans and petty theft for a fixed abode and more serious theft about the time of the old Queen’s jubilee.
    “’Ave yer much to pack, son?”
    Wilderness thought his grandfather, however well meaning, had little grasp of children. It had been woman’s work to men of his generation, and to their sons’ generation too. He could have said he’d pack his teddy and Abner would not have batted an eyelid. Instead, he stuffed his spare trousers into a cardboard suitcase along with a shirt, the rags that passed for underwear and the socks desperate for darning. He tied the laces of his football boots together and slung them around his neck. His books he bound up with a striped elastic belt with a snake-S buckle and stuffed under one arm.
    “OK,” he said.
    “Books, eh? You must take arter yer dad. No one on my side o’ the family ever cared much for readin’. Never learnt meself. Righty-ho, we’re orf.”
    Wilderness took a last look at the only home he had never known, and despite what he had said on the matter of “home” to Abner, he found no remnant of home than could even aspire to meaning. Two rooms, furniture that was scarcely better than matchwood, a khazi out in the yard, a single tap above the sink, wallpaper that peeled off in the damp, mouseholes in the skirting, black patches of mold in every cold corner. Two rooms that froze in winter, only to swelter in summer.
    He doubted too that Abner lived