One afternoon, in a particularly bright and glowing August, some years before I knew I was happy, George Hooping, whom we called Little Cough, Sidney Evans, Dan Davies, and I sat on the roof of a lorry travelling to the end of the Peninsula. It was a tall, six-wheeled lorry, from which we could spit on the roofs of the passing cars and throw our applestumps at women on the pavement. One stump caught a man on a bicycle in the middle of the back, he swerved across the road, for a moment we sat quiet and George Hooping’s face grew pale. And if the lorry runs over him, I thought calmly as the man on the bicycle swayed towards the hedge, he’ll get killed and I’ll be sick on my trousers and perhaps on Sidney’s too, and we’ll all be arrested and hanged, except George Hooping who didn’t have an apple.
But the lorry swept past; behind us, the bicycle drove into the hedge, the man stood up and waved his fist, and I waved my cap back at him.
‘You shouldn’t have waved your cap,’ said Sidney Evans, ‘he’ll know what school we’re in.’ He was clever, dark, and careful, and had a purse and a wallet.
‘We’re not in school now.’
‘Nobody can expel me,’ said Dan Davies. He was leaving next term to serve in his father’s fruit shop for a salary.
We all wore haversacks, except George Hooping whose mother had given him a brown-paper parcel that kept coming undone, and carried a suitcase each. I had placed a coat over my suitcase because the initials on it were ‘N.T.’ and everybody would know that it belonged to my sister. Inside the lorry were two tents, a box of food, a packing-case of kettles and saucepans and knives and forks, an oil-lamp, a primus stove, ground sheets and blankets, a gramophone with three records, and a table-cloth from George Hooping’s mother.
We were going to camp for a fortnight in Rhossilli, in a field above the sweeping five-mile beach. Sidney and Dan had stayed there last year, coming back brown and swearing, full of stories of campers’ dances round the fires at midnight, and elderly girls from the training college who sunbathed naked on ledges of rocks surrounded by laughing boys, and singing in bed that lasted until dawn. But George had never left home for more than a night; and then, he told me one half-holiday when it was raining and there was nothing to do but to stay in the washhouse racing his guinea-pigs giddily along the benches, it was only to stay in St Thomas, three miles from his house, with an aunt who could see through the walls and who knew what a Mrs Hoskin was doing in the kitchen.
‘How much further?’ asked George Hooping, clinging to his split parcel, trying in secret to push back socks and suspenders, enviously watching the solid green fields skim by as though the roof were a raft on an ocean with a motor in it. Anything upset his stomach, even liquorice and sherbet, but I alone knew that he wore long combinations in the summer with his name stitched in red on them.
‘Miles and miles,’ Dan said.
‘Thousands of miles,’ I said. ‘It’s Rhossilli, U.S.A. We’re going to camp on a bit of rock that wobbles in the wind.’
‘And we have to tie the rock on to a tree.’
‘Cough can use his suspenders,’ Sidney said.
The lorry roared round a corner—‘Upsy-daisy! Did you feel it then, Cough? It was on one wheel’—and below us, beyond fields and farms, the sea, with a steamer puffing on its far edge, shimmered.
‘Do you see the sea down there, it’s shimmering, Dan,’ I said.
George Hooping pretended to forget the lurch of the slippery roof and, from the height, the frightening smallness of the sea. Gripping the rail of the roof, he said: ‘My father saw a killer whale.’ The conviction in his voice died quickly as he began. He beat against the wind with his cracked, treble voice, trying to make us believe. I knew he wanted to find a boast so big it would make our hair stand up and stop the wild lorry.
‘Your father’s a herbalist.’ But the smoke on the horizon was the white, curling fountain the whale blew through his nose, and its black nose was the bow of the poking ship.
‘Where did he keep it, Cough, in the washhouse?’
‘He saw it in Madagascar. It had tusks as long as from here to, from here to …’
‘From here to Madagascar.’
All at once the threat of a steep hill disturbed him. No longer bothered about the adventures of his father, a small, dusty, skull-capped and alpaca-coated man standing and mumbling all day in a shop full of herbs and curtained holes in the wall, where old men with backache and young girls in trouble waited for consultations in the half-dark, he stared at the hill swooping up and clung to Dan and me.
‘She’s doing fifty!’
‘The brakes have gone, Cough!’
He twisted away from us, caught hard with both hands on the rail, pulled and trembled, pressed on a case behind him with his foot, and steered the lorry to safety round a stone-walled corner and up a gentler hill to the gate of a battered farm-house.
Leading down from the gate, there was a lane to the first beach. It was high-tide, and we heard the sea dashing. Four boys on a roof—one tall, dark, regular-featured, precise of speech, in a good suit, a boy of the world; one squat, ungainly, red-haired, his red wrists fighting out of short, frayed sleeves; one heavily spectacled, small-paunched, with indoor shoulders and feet in always unlaced boots wanting to go different ways; one small, thin, indesively active, quick to get dirty, curly—saw their field in front of them, a fortnight’s new home that had thick, pricking hedges for walls, the sea for a front garden, a green gutter for a lavatory, and a wind-struck tree in the very middle.
I helped Dan unload the lorry while Sidney tipped the driver and George struggled with the farm-yard gate and looked at the ducks inside. The lorry drove away.
‘Let’s build our tents by the tree in the middle,’ said George.
‘Pitch!’ Sidney said, unlatching the gate for him.
We pitched our tents in a corner, out of the wind.
‘One of us must light the primus,’ Sidney said, and, after George had burned his hand, we sat in a circle outside the sleeping-tent talking about motor cars, content to be in the country, lazily easy in each other’s company, thinking to ourselves as we talked, knowing always that the sea dashed on the rocks not far below us and rolled out into the world, and that to-morrow we would bathe and throw a ball on the sands and stone a bottle on a rock and perhaps meet three girls. The oldest would be for Sidney, the plainest for Dan, and the youngest for me. George broke his spectacles when he spoke to girls; he had to walk off, blind as a bat, and the next morning he would say: ‘I’m sorry I had to leave you, but I remembered a message.’
It was past five o’clock. My father and mother would have finished tea; the plates with famous castles on them were cleared from the table; father with a newspaper, mother with socks, were far away in the blue haze to the left, up a hill, in a villa, hearing from the park the faint cries of children drift over the public tennis court, and wondering where I was and what I was doing. I was alone with my friends in a field, with a blade of grass in my mouth, saying, ‘Dempsey would hit him cold,’ and thinking of the great whale that George’s father never saw thrashing on the top of the sea, or plunging underneath, like a mountain.
‘Bet you I can beat you to the end of the field.’
Dan and I raced among the cowpads, George thumping at our heels.
‘Let’s go down to the beach.’
Sidney led the way, running straight as a soldier in his khaki shorts, over a stile, down fields to another, into a wooded valley, up through heather on to a clearing near the edge of the cliff, where two broad boys were wrestling outside a tent. I saw one bite the other in the leg, they both struck expertly and savagely at the face, one struggled clear, and, with a leap, the other had him face to the ground. They were Brazell and Skully.
‘Hullo, Brazell and Skully!’ said Dan.
Skully had Brazell’s arm in a policeman’s grip; he gave it two quick twists and stood up, smiling.
‘Hullo, boys! Hullo, Little Cough! How’s your father?’
‘He’s very well, thank you.’
Brazell, on the grass, felt for broken bones. ‘Hullo, boys! How are your fathers?’
They were the worst and biggest boys in school. Every day for a term they caught me before class began and wedged me in the waste-paper-basket and then put the basket on the master’s desk. Sometimes I could get out and sometimes not. Brazell was lean, Skully was fat.
‘We ‘re camping in Button’s field,’ said Sidney.
We’re taking a rest cure here,’ said Brazell. ‘And how is Little Cough these days? Father given him a pill?’
We wanted to run down to the beach, Dan and Sidney and George and I, to be alone together, to walk and shout by the sea in the country, throw stones at the waves, remember adventures and make more to remember.
We’ll come down to the beach with you,’ said Skully.
He linked arms with Brazell, and they strolled behind us, imitating George’s wayward walk and slashing the grass with switches.
Dan said hopefully: ‘Are you camping here for long, Brazell and Skully?’
‘For a whole nice fortnight, Davies and Thomas and Evans and Hooping.’
When we reached Mewslade beach and flung ourselves down, as I scooped up sand and let it trickle grain by grain through my fingers, as George peered at the sea through his double lenses and Sidney and Dan heaped sand over his legs, Brazell and Skully sat behind us like two warders.
We thought of going to Nice for a fortnight,’ said Brazell— he rhymed it with ice, dug Skully in the ribs—‘but the air’s nicer here for the complexion.’
‘It’s as good as a herb,’ said Skully.
They shared an enormous joke, cuffing and biting and wrestling again, scattering sand in the eyes, until they fell back with laughter, and Brazell wiped the blood from his nose with a piece of picnic paper. George lay covered to the waist in sand. I watched the sea slipping out, with birds quarrelling over it, and the sun beginning to go down patiently.
‘Look at Little Cough,’ said Brazell. ‘Isn’t he extraordinary? He’s growing out of the sand. Little Cough hasn’t got any legs.’
‘Poor Little Cough,’ said Skully, ‘he’s the most extraordinary boy in the world.’
‘Extraordinary Little Cough,’ they said together, ‘extraordinary, extraordinary, extraordinary.’ They made a song out of it, and both conducted with their switches.
‘He can’t swim.’
‘He can’t run.’
‘He can’t learn.’
‘He can’t bowl.’
‘And I bet he can’t make water.’
George kicked the sand from his legs. ‘Yes, I can!’
‘Can you swim?’
‘Can you run?’
‘Can you bowl?’
‘Leave him alone,’ Dan said.
They shuffled nearer to us. The sea was racing out now. Brazell said in a serious voice, wagging his finger: ‘Now, quite truthfully, Cough, aren’t you extraordinary? Very extraordinary? Say “Yes” or “No.”’
‘Categorically, ‘Yes” or “No,”’ said Skully.
‘No,’ George said. ‘I can swim and I can run and I can play cricket. I’m not frightened of anybody.’
I said: ‘He was second in the form last term.’
‘Now isn’t that extraordinary? If he can be second he can be first. But no, that’s too ordinary. Little Cough must be second.’
‘The question is answered,’ said Skully. ‘Little Cough is extraordinary.’ They began to sing again.
‘He’s a very good runner,’ Dan said.
‘Well, let him prove it. Skully and I ran the whole length of Rhossilli sands this morning, didn’t we, Skull?’
‘Every inch.’
‘Can Little Cough do it?’
‘Yes,’ said George.
‘Do it, then.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Extraordinary Little Cough can’t run,’ they sang, ‘can’t run, can’t run.’
Three girls, all fair, came down the cliff-side arm in arm, dressed in short, white trousers. Their arms and legs and throats were brown as berries; I could see when they laughed that their teeth were very white; they stepped on to the beach, and Brazell and Skully stopped singing. Sidney smoothed his hair back, rose casually, put his hands in his pockets, and walked towards the girls, who now stood close together, gold and brown, admiring the sunset with little attention, patting their scarves, turning smiles on each other. He stood in front of them, grinned, and saluted: ‘Hullo, Gwyneth! do you remember me?’
‘La-di-da!’ whispered Dan at my side, and made a mock salute to George still peering at the retreating sea.
Well, if this isn’t a surprise!’ said the tallest girl. With little studied movements of her hands as though she were distributing flowers, she introduced Peggy and Jean.
Fat Peggy, I thought, too jolly for me, with hockey legs and tomboy crop, was the girl for Dan; Sidney’s Gwyneth was a distinguished piece and quite sixteen, as immaculate and unapproachable as a girl in Ben Evan’s stores; but Jean, shy and curly, with butter-coloured hair, was mine. Dan and I walked slowly to the girls.
I made up two remarks: ‘Fair’s fair, Sidney, no bigamy abroad,’ and ‘Sorry we couldn’t arrange to have the sea in when you came.’
Jean smiled, wriggling her heel in the sand, and I raised my cap.
‘Hullo!’
The cap dropped at her feet.
As I bent down, three lumps of sugar fell from my blazer pocket. ‘I’ve been feeding a horse,’ I said, and began to blush guiltily when all the girls laughed.
I could have swept the ground with my cap, kissed my hand gaily, called them señoritas, and made them smile without tolerance. Or I could have stayed at a distance, and this would have been better still, my hair blown in the wind, though there was no wind at all that evening, wrapped in mystery and staring at the sun, too aloof to speak to girls; but I knew that all the time my ears would have been burning, my stomach would have been as hollow and as full of voices as a shell. ‘Speak to them quickly, before they go away!’ a voice would have said insistently over the dramatic silence, as I stood like Valentino on the edge of the bright, invisible bull-ring of the sands. ‘Isn’t it lovely here!’ I said.
I spoke to Jean alone; and this is love, I thought, as she nodded her head and swung her curls and said: ‘It’s nicer than Porthcawl.’
Brazell and Skully were two big bullies in a nightmare; I forgot them when Jean and I walked up the cliff, and, looking back to see if they were baiting George again or wrestling together, I saw that George had disappeared around the corner of the rocks and that they were talking at the foot of the cliff with Sidney and the two girls.
What’s your name?’
I told her.
That’s Welsh,’ she said.
‘You’ve got a beautiful name.’
‘Oh! it’s just ordinary.’
‘Shall I see you again?’
‘If you want to.’
‘I want to alright! We can go and bathe in the morning. And we can try to get an eagle’s egg. Did you know that there were eagles here?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Who was that handsome boy on the beach, the tall one with dirty trousers?’
‘He’s not handsome, that’s Brazell. He never washes or combs his hair or anything. And he’s a bully and he cheats.’
‘I think he’s handsome.’
We walked into Button’s field, and I showed her inside the tents and gave her one of George’s apples. ‘I’d like a cigarette,’ she said.
It was nearly dark when the others came. Brazell and Skully were with Gwyneth, one each side of her holding her arms, Sidney was with Peggy, and Dan walked, whistling, behind with his hands in his pockets.
‘There’s a pair,’ said Brazell, ‘they’ve been here all alone and they aren’t even holding hands. You want a pill,’ he said to me.
‘Build Britain’s babies,’ said Skully.
‘Go on!’ Gwyneth said. She pushed him away from her, but she was laughing, and she said nothing when he put his arm around her waist.
‘What about a bit of fire?’ said Brazell.
Jean clapped her hands like an actress. Although I knew I loved her, I didn’t like anything she said or did.
‘Who’s going to make it?’
‘He’s the best, I’m sure,’ she said, pointing to me.
Dan and I collected sticks, and by the time it was quite dark there was a fire crackling. Inside the sleeping-tent, Brazell and Jean sat close together; her golden head was on his shoulder; Skully, near them, whispered to Gwyneth; Sidney unhappily held Peggy’s hand.
‘Did you ever see such a sloppy lot?’ I said, watching Jean smile in the fiery dark.
‘Kiss me, Charley!” said Dan.
We sat by the fire in the corner of the field. The sea, far out, was still making a noise. We heard a few nightbirds—‘“To-whit! to-whoo!” Listen! I don’t like owls,’ Dan said, ‘they scratch your eyes out!’—and tried not to listen to the soft voices in the tent. Gwyneth’s laughter floated out over the suddenly moonlit field, but Jean, with the beast, was smiling and silent in the covered warmth; I knew her little hand was in Brazell’s hand.
‘Women,’ I said.
Dan spat in the fire.
We were old and alone, sitting beyond desire in the middle of the night, when George appeared, like a ghost, in the firelight and stood there, trembling, until I said: ‘Where’ve you been? You’ve been gone hours. Why are you trembling like that?’
Brazell and Skully poked their heads out.
‘Hullo, Cough my boy! How’s your father? What have you been up to to-night?’
George Hooping could hardly stand. I put my hand on his shoulder to steady him, but he pushed it away.
‘I’ve been running on Rhossilli sands! I ran every bit of it! You said I couldn’t, and I did! I’ve been running and running!’
Someone inside the tent put a record on the gramophone. It was a selection from No, No, Nannette..
‘You’ve been running all the time in the dark, Little Cough?’
‘And I bet I ran it quicker than you did, too!’ George said.
‘I bet you did,’ said Brazell.
‘Do you think we’d run five miles?’ said Skully.
Now the tune was Tea for Two.
‘Did you ever hear anything so extraordinary? I told you Cough was extraordinary. Little Cough’s been running all night.’
‘Extraordinary, extraordinary, extraordinary Little Cough,’ they said.
Laughing from the shelter of the tent into the darkness, they looked like a boy with two heads. And when I stared round at George again he was lying on his back fast asleep in the deep grass and his hair was touching the flames.