Douglas Vallender had a big voice, a martial stride, navvy’s hands. His face was veal in winter, beef in summer; its lips were obese all the year through, the hair above it was scalped from a baby. His tummy bulged like a cyclopean teat. He was always laughing and quaffing (his sort of word) and slapping backs too young to suffer such strong hands. He liked big houses, big checks, big cars. He wore tweed woven to blind, drove cars with plenty of wood on them, with running boards and exhausts like exposed intestines. He ate with his hands, licked his lips, was kind to animals and good at knots. He swam, fished, sailed, picked up Bonny, sent her spinning to the sky and was there to field her before she hit the lawn. He rolled on the hard blond grass (water shortage) so his little girl might clamber over him. He drank long from his pewter tankardful of Guinness and White Shield. He threw a ball to Poor Eddie who was crouched beneath the yew prodding an exposed root with a stick; the ball bounced past him through the dusty shade and Douglas Vallender shook his head.

The Grieving Widow warned from her deckchair: ‘You’d better fetch it Darling else Uncle Douglas won’t play with you after lunch.’ Eddie obeyed, and was still searching a border of shrubs and manure clods when Monica came from the house and called us to lunch. Douglas Vallender stuck out a hand to The Grieving Widow and to my mother: ‘Come on girls. Rally, rally, rally.’

And to me: ‘Get yer skates on Johnson old chap. Sirloin’s already cooling. Do you know,’ – he pirouetted with Bonnie horizontal and gurgling – ‘Johnson, why it’s called sirloin? ’Sbecawse Henry Eight, y’know, Good King Hal and all that, knighted it. Arise Sir Loin.’

I believed him. I went on believing him for years. I liked the way he addressed me as Johnson.

The judgment of children is invariably aberrant. Never think otherwise. A child is born into solipsism, is blessed with the confidence of the ignorant, is confided in by the ignorant, is importuned by children in adult bodies, i.e. the maquis of the inadequate and stunted and cerebrally fucked – the ones who want it all simple for ever, the model makers, the gricers logging locos on wintry platforms. (Never talk to a man with a vacuum flask and a duffle-bag.) The fact is, a mutual attraction exists between children and wrong ’uns; the wrong sort of wrong ’uns, the hairy shinned onanists who’ll do their tronk solo, Rule 48, out of fear of reprisals, the ones whose probing fingers trespass beneath the elastic and have nails so long the skin is bound to break, the mucous membrane bound to bleed.

Douglas Vallender’s fingers are not like this. They are smeared with his own excrement, water drips from them back into the bowl; it’s no use pretending that his dislike of Eddie is qualified.

His timid nephew (5) enters the dining room having searched for the ball – it’s impossible to remember whether he found it: Eddie’s knees are grained with dirt, they’re big fingertips. And his shirt’s out, his socks are down, his parting’s zigzagged with hanks and shocks. The beef is bleeding on the Spode, the Yorkshire leatherette, the veg are making the windows wet. Here’s Mrs Gub the help, smelling of old age and boiled laundry, and carrying the gravy. The pannelling’s rich, brown, bogus Stuart; above it are plates, a coach horn, mugs with monks’ faces, beersteins with lids. Monica is strapping Bonny in her high chair, my mother’s drinking pink gin with the angosturas in, The Grieving Widow’s at the leaded window – there’s much she might envy out there: the Allard, the Healey shooting-brake, Douglas’s traction engine, the cedars and wellingtonias and acacias, the tile hanging, the brick paths, Russet the pony in his edible field, the white post and rail, the orderly gravel raked like plough. Her bungalow is smaller than Douglas’s garage.

She told Eddie to wash. The dog beneath the table sighs. Eddie opened the heavy door with battered hinges and crossed the hall. The soles of his sandals squeaked on the tiles (the complexity of whose pattern was enhanced by lozenges of glass-stained light so rich he wanted to own them. And a chair was striped with purple, a chest was arced in green). The stair newel was carved into fructuous abundance, his fingers loitered in the deep dark incisions. The corridor beyond was dusk all day long, coats hung from contorted pegs and their bristly hems brushed his face, it all reeked of Uncle Douglas’s rubber riding macs, skirted garments so stiff that they were headless men emitting bad breath from the sites of their truncation. Eddie turned the handle of the lavatory door.

Douglas Vallender crouched on the lavatory, his thighs spilled over its sides, and his lip jutted and his hands were clenched round his knees in excretory effort. His tiny penis (a clitoral apology for a cock, a cockette, a pork penknife) peeped out of its silky bush, which was itself obscured by creamy belly folds. He filled this small room. Eddie gaped at the vulnerable monster. Douglas roared. The smell was a grown-up one, one that Eddie (representing all children) hated; Eddie was going to say something like ‘no lock Uncle’, something like ‘sorry Uncle’. Eddie said nothing. Douglas Vallender shifted himself, extended a freckled arm into the lavatory bowl, chose his missile with prompt deliberation, and hurled it at his nephew.

Now the average daily stool is about 140 grammes (5 oz for readers with pre-metric scales), representing 12.5% of food taken. Douglas Vallender ate much more than that. Moreover he was prone – fatally prone is near the mark – to constipation (he didn’t get enough thiamine, suffered a lazy colon); he used violent aperients – senna, fig, desiccated plum, dry aloes, the resin called scammony. These are the agents of a rectal wash and brush up, of intra-colonic hoovering; thus what he threw at Poor Eddie was not sausage but stew (actually it was his breakfast).

‘You pissy little orphan – bugger off! What are you bloody playing at …’ This is what Eddie said he said. It doesn’t make it better that Douglas missed – he didn’t have much to aim at, a peeping face stuck between jamb and door, that’s all, and he was throwing from a sitting position, he has that excuse too. No, it makes it worse: the little boy who creeps back into the dining room and blubs into his mother’s lap is physically unchanged. There are no faecal freckles to show you, there’s no impasted stain on his shirt. There’s just the eye that saw, the drawer of memory where it’s in store, the shadow on him. Douglas wipes the door down, humming the starting bars of Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto, ‘bom bom-bom bom-bom-bom-bom-bom bom-bom’ – you know the one. He wipes in time to it.

He claps his hands as he enters to carve, his clean hands. The hands, anyway, do not necessarily touch the meat they carve. The Grieving Widow scrutinises him – Eddie’s not usually a liar (he’s been at her ear from close to, filling it with sibilant horrors). And he gets worse, his asthma plays up, his chest fills with short wave signals. Douglas beams at him as he saws the meat. And The Grieving Widow wonders, she doubts her son in the face of the brother-in-law who did her, stitched her, showed little mercy and no grace. How could she have doubted Eddie? (Something platinum crosses left to right at this point.) Yumyum, Douglas licks his fingers, passes a plateful of meat to my mother. He sharpens the knife on a horn-handled steel.

The carving of meat is for many men emblematic of strength, male assertion, sex; carving matters to these unfortunates (they can’t all be as genitally wanting as Douglas, they can’t all be compensating). Blade against steel is an aural analogue of the duel – shut your eyes, picture an épée, then another, then two men who don’t need skeins of wool down the front of their tights. Now keep your eyes on the rolled, tightly-strung strata of quondam bull and see the golden shower of fat emitted by the vicious tines. Don’t go – the knife now makes its first incision, shaves the brown bark from the hunk of amputee: how do we know, Douglas, that our amputee really was bull when it resembles and represents man? It’s cannibalism, this hieratic surgery, isn’t it? It’s familial eucharist (which is the same thing) celebrated by the head man. It’s auto-celebration of the head man’s prowess as provider, hunter, killer. Castration, too – it’s that as well: the offal chop, the chopper off. Come off it, it is. Own to it D.V. Whoever did you want to chop?

Certainly, Johnson, it was, yes, a limb of the vanquished. But, Johnson, I tell you – I spell it out – that meat, that Sirloin (you got that etymology from me, remember?), that beef was bull, wasn’t my brother. Ask the croc. Ha! (How are things? Felt your Pa the other dusk – still offish, you know. I’d like some light, Johnson …)

Tosser, dead tosser.

The light made by garden beeches is fugitive. It worries children. Here’s Eddie, Poor Eddie, postprandially pram-pushing – here he is, in the sort-of shade, heaving Bonny’s hefty Pedigree Elizabethan. He’s tired, can go no further. His baby cousin gurgles and bounces, she’s a perfect model of a dappled being. Aren’t her little hands just so? Cute as mini-bricks, curled like caterpillars.

Me, I’m the only witness there ever was. The house is almost out of sight, a flash of bargeboard beyond the fronds, bits of bricks, the dazzle of a sun-struck pane – this is all that’s discernible from the Clump. And they can’t see us. My mother’s badered, slumped in an armchair, she’s berating Douglas for his meanness to The Grieving Widow. Douglas is grinning. The Grieving Widow’s contorted in embarrassment like a fretful foetus and she’s at her scalp again, as ever. Monica’s going, ‘Oh pipe down Bunty and have another drink.’ In the meadow beyond the Clump a Friesian calf has a complicated curved formation of flies round its head, a gyroscopically mutating hat that I’d like to touch, that I would touch were it not for the barbed wire, the thorn hedge, the hairy stingers, my fright. And I’m captivated by the fondant caramel that issues from the calf’s eyes and dries crystalline across its soft hide.

I ignore Eddie till he calls: ‘Jonerfin, it’s that dog.’ I turn to him: what I saw, what I see now (effortlessly, through the layers of the ages) is Eddie bent over the hooded pram so it lists on its contorted springs that are complicated as suspenders. The glossy black baby-hearse squeaks and its load purrs, for Eddie has his right hand in her nappy and is moving it as though to soothe an itch. He’s too preoccupied to shoo the pooch, which scares him shitless, which is a machine for turning meat to turd, which is called Postman because it once bit one (its previous cynonym was Brack. Douglas soon got rid of that). Postman is part wolf, part jackal, wholly labrador, easily distracted. Throw the dog a cone and he’s away. I don’t believe I said anything to Eddie. I probably reckoned that this is what cousins did – though I was sentient and knew that my cousin Elinor (Hi, Lindy, how’s osteopathy, how’s Geo, how old’s Davey now?) didn’t entertain me so; but then she lived far away – it was twenty-three miles to So’ton in those days – and I saw her rarely, knew her less.

Eddie saw Bonny every Sunday; his mother and he set off regular as the calendar after church in the church where I was baptised. They waited twenty minutes for the no. 55 at the bus stop close by the entrance to the mess called The Cliff; young officers, the Grieving Widow’s coevals, tooted their horns at her and double de-clutched (all roaring revs) as they took the corner with sporty braggadocio.

They got off the bus at the Canal – there was no canal, the tontine funded company had gone bust; all that remained, still remains, of the thwarted venture are the street so named, a docks building, Navigation Straight, the freakish mounds of excavation at Whaddon where it made the bankrupting cross from the valley of the Avon to that of the Dun. They walked from the Canal through the alley beside the Guildhall and across the Market Place to the bus station. Here they waited three quarters of an hour in infirmary gloom beside tarnished tea urns.

Hungover, awol soldiers heading back to camp and jankers fixed her from their benches; these were Stella’s lovers, layers, impregnators. They came in squads, these bloodshot squaddies with their oily hair and glottal lingos and ready seed; they breathed each other’s loutishness, fed on mob yobbery (team spirit with dropped aitches), they grunted sullen taunts, smoked Weights from behind their ears. The closer Eddie moved to his mother the more they called him Little Softy. Now one would make a circle with his left thumb and first finger and pump the second finger of his other hand through it and sing: ‘If you don’t get shagged on a Sat’rday night you’ll never get shagged at all.’ Now another would let his tongue descend his chin then moan: ‘ ’Slike a nun’s minge in an effin’ drought.’

The Grieving Widow was resolutely impassive. She stared through the metal-framed Daily Mail windows at the red buses and the green buses and the airbricks in the back wall of the scrumpy bar. A soldier vomited in the corner. The acne moon next to him split where the teeth were: ‘Come on Softy, come ’nd lick i’ up.’ His tongue slapped about the split, he stretched his hand towards Poor Eddie, he was the first The Grieving Widow whispered about to the military policemen, the ‘soddin crushers’ whom he’d spotted as their Land Rover, showy in its sylvan camouflage, tiptyred from between buses. The first red-capped crusher beckoned the second while the third and fourth and fifth made with their nightsticks, prodded conscripted kidneys, looked dangerous. The second was the boss red cap (tidy ranker, lousy vowels). This second’s lips were full, puckered, dry. He listened with officious courtesy.

‘Nothing wrong with them that the usual methods won’t rectify. Apart from laddie there.’ He twitched to indicate the wriggling half-nelsoned tunic two crushers were scraping across the floor: ‘He’s in a fair spot of bother I’d say. His future’s looking gloomy, I’d say so yes.’ He turned to watch his men do their stuff, scrutinised the now empty waiting room.

‘Rightyho then that’s all taken care of – the cancer gouged out I’d say. Believe me, there’s not many rotten apples. I trust you haven’t been too inconvenienced Mrs …?’

‘Vallender,’ said The Grieving Widow. ‘No I haven’t, it’s just a little …’

‘Vallender?’ he murmured, did something dreadful with his lips. ‘That’s not a name you hear too often … Still, indubitably a coincidence, I’d say.’

The Grieving Widow said: ‘It probably isn’t … I mean, it’ll be my brother-in-law that you know: Douglas. The firework manufacturer. At High Post.’

Eddie said: ‘The family firm.’

The middle-aged red cap captain shook his head, ‘I’ve observed the factory of course – can’t hardly miss it … but no that’s not the Vallender I, ah, had in mind. No, that would be a different Vallender – a certain Major Guy Vallender. But there you are … must be a more common name than I thought,’ he staged a rictal smile.

The Grieving Widow sniffed and winced and gasped. Outside a squaddie screamed, the sun jumped through the window sure as floodlight, Poor Eddie squeezed his mama’s hand. ‘He … was my husband,’ she croaked.

‘Ah! Your husb … well, blow me. Was? Did you say was? Was your husband … What, did a bunk did he? – that’d be his style. Well well well – so you know what laddie there’s in for eh? Can’t be much you don’t know about courts martial … Well, what a turn up …’ He clicked tongue and teeth and grinned in autocollusion. He looked down at Eddie: ‘And this’s his boy is it. Well I never – must be like being dealt one off the bottom of the pack …’

The door swung behind him. The Grieving Widow put a hand to her crown. Poor Eddie wondered about the man’s twanging accent, tutting tongue, clacking strut. ‘He didn’t say bye bye,’ said the indignant boy. His mother didn’t hear, her ears were packed full of roaring blood, and she didn’t hear the martinet’s bark that pealed like gust-buckled sheet metal. The aggregate in the concrete out there was smooth tan pebbles.

The bus, a red Dennis in this green valley, drove away from the crossroads. Mother and son stood beside the signpost. Also: rookeries in the elms, banks of Queen Anne’s lace, tyre marks on the bend, haze, clumps of trees in brain formations, jungly fecundity, grass up to here, a wall with thatch on top, cattle chafing against willows in the meadows, summer.

She took his hand and they walked first up the steep road stained by chalk and starred by flints. Their shadows wriggled round their ankles. Then the verge was cropped, springy, and the ball bearings were rabbit dung. After a five-bar gate, a sign proscribing fires and a cabin with broken windows there was a rutted road between conifers and birches. Eddie kept to the track of grass along its centre. The Grieving Widow started when pigeons and squirrels hurtled through the wood, fearing they were rangers out to catch her fag in hand. Hideous brooms made of twigs were strapped to poles set beside the road. The Grieving Widow panted. When he reached a boggy firebreak Eddie turned and ran back to her and cowered along beside her: this was the dorsal bayonnet, Eddie. This is what scared you best, this terrorscape your young mother dragged you through, it was built to make your shoulders chill. Is this what you see when you die, is this what they saw when they died?

It’s like it still; I returned the other week (grid ref: 127352) and smelled the ghost of your boyhood, I felt the ghost of your mother’s life. The anthills are slumped like sacks with moving threads. The twigs are bright with lichen. There are lichenous branches underfoot. The sloughed bark of silver birches is monumental swarf, it’s curled like shavings from a giant’s turbine. The firs are dead, their needles are bleached. This must be death itself, it’s all built from bones. And between scrolls of bark and formic cities grow death-caps, death-caps, death-caps: enough amatoxin here to do the livers of very many unhappy families.

Now they’re coming down the hill and I’m running out to meet them. ‘Don’t’ – called my mother – ‘go out on the road.’ ‘Wait at the gate Johnson – there’s a good fellow. That way you’ll still have your limbs for lunch. Mnhnhnar.’ The Grieving Widow kissed me distractedly, then Eddie and I ran together to see the pony. I patted it, Eddie kept his distance.

One of those Sundays, there by the clean fence Russet nuzzled against Eddie asked: ‘Jonerfin – what’s courts martial?’.

Another of those Sundays, while he fondled baby Bonny and the first breeze of autumn slipped through the Clump, I told him: ‘Court martial is when your daddy’s naughty.’ Eddie winced and I turned to kick a little puffball. He put his hand in Bonny’s clothes and stroked her milk-smooth pudendum. I didn’t see him; but he did stroke her, I’ll bet he did, I can see him now, and Bonny, she’s cooing at her coz.