Innocence Read online

  I promise you that if somebody had caught me by the shoulder at that moment and said to me, ‘What is your greatest wish in life, little boy? What is your absolute ambition? To be a doctor? A fine musician? A painter? A writer? Or the Lord Chancellor?’ I would have answered without hesitation that my only ambition, my hope, my longing was to have a bike like that and to go whizzing down the hill with no hands on the handlebars. It would be fabulous. It made me tremble just to think about it.

  My second and only other memory of Llandaff Cathedral School is extremely bizarre. It happened a little over a year later, when I was just nine. By then I had made some friends and when I walked to school in the mornings I would start out alone but would pick up four other boys of my own age along the way. After school was over, the same four boys and I would set out together across the village green and through the village itself, heading for home. On the way to school and on the way back we always passed the sweet-shop. No we didn’t, we never passed it. We always stopped. We lingered outside its rather small window gazing in at the big glass jars full of Bull’s-eyes and Old Fashioned Humbugs and Strawberry Bonbons and Glacier Mints and Acid Drops and Pear Drops and Lemon Drops and all the rest of them. Each of us received sixpence a week for pocket-money, and whenever there was any money in our pockets, we would all troop in together to buy a pennyworth of this or that. My own favourites were Sherbet Suckers and Liquorice Bootlaces.

  One of the other boys, whose name was Thwaites, told me I should never eat Liquorice Bootlaces. Thwaites’s father, who was a doctor, had said that they were made from rats’ blood. The father had given his young son a lecture about Liquorice Bootlaces when he had caught him eating one in bed. ‘Every ratcatcher in the country’, the father had said, ‘takes his rats to the Liquorice Bootlace Factory, and the manager pays tuppence for each rat. Many a ratcatcher has become a millionaire by selling his dead rats to the Factory.’

  ‘But how do they turn the rats into liquorice?’ the young Thwaites had asked his father.

  ‘They wait until they’ve got ten thousand rats,’ the father had answered, ‘then they dump them all into a huge shiny steel cauldron and boil them up for several hours. Two men stir the bubbling cauldron with long poles and in the end they have a thick steaming rat-stew. After that, a cruncher is lowered into the cauldron to crunch the bones, and what’s left is a pulpy substance called rat-mash.’

  ‘Yes, but how do they turn that into Liquorice Bootlaces, Daddy?’ the young Thwaites had asked, and this question, according to Thwaites, had caused his father to pause and think for a few moments before he answered it. At last he had said, ‘The two men who were doing the stirring with the long poles now put on their wellington boots and climb into the cauldron and shovel the hot rat-mash out on to a concrete floor. Then they run a steam-roller over it several times to flatten it out. What is left looks rather like a gigantic black pancake, and all they have to do after that is to wait for it to cool and to harden so they can cut it up into strips to make the Bootlaces. Don’t ever eat them,’ the father had said. ‘If you do, you’ll get ratitis.’

  ‘What is ratitis, Daddy?’ young Thwaites had asked.

  ‘All the rats that the rat-catchers catch are poisoned with rat-poison,’ the father had said. ‘It’s the rat-poison that gives you ratitis.’

  ‘Yes, but what happens to you when you catch it?’ young Thwaites had asked.

  ‘Your teeth become very sharp and pointed,’ the father had answered. ‘And a short stumpy tail grows out of your back just above your bottom. There is no cure for ratitis. I ought to know. I’m a doctor.’

  We all enjoyed Thwaites’s story and we made him tell it to us many times on our walks to and from school. But it didn’t stop any of us except Thwaites from buying Liquorice Bootlaces. At two for a penny they were the best value in the shop. A Bootlace, in case you haven’t had the pleasure of handling one, is not round. It’s like a flat black tape about half an inch wide. You buy it rolled up in a coil, and in those days it used to be so long that when you unrolled it and held one end at arm’s length above your head, the other end touched the ground.

  Sherbet Suckers were also two a penny. Each Sucker consisted of a yellow cardboard tube filled with sherbet powder, and there was a hollow liquorice straw sticking out of it. (Rat’s blood again, young Thwaites would warn us, pointing at the liquorice straw.) You sucked the sherbet up through the straw and when it was finished you ate the liquorice. They were delicious, those Sherbet Suckers. The sherbet fizzed in your mouth, and if you knew how to do it, you could make white froth come out of your nostrils and pretend you were throwing a fit.

  Gobstoppers, costing a penny each, were enormous hard round balls the size of small tomatoes. One Gobstopper would provide about an hour’s worth of non-stop sucking and if you took it out of your mouth and inspected it every five minutes or so, you would find it had changed colour. There was something fascinating about the way it went from pink to blue to green to yellow. We used to wonder how in the world the Gobstopper Factory managed to achieve this magic. ‘How does it happen?’ we would ask each other. ‘How can they make it keep changing colour?’

  ‘It’s your spit that does it,’ young Thwaites proclaimed. As the son of a doctor, he considered himself to be an authority on all things that had to do with the body. He could tell us about scabs and when they were ready to be picked off. He knew why a black eye was blue and why blood was red. ‘It’s your spit that makes a Gobstopper change colour,’ he kept insisting. When we asked him to elaborate on this theory, he answered, ‘You wouldn’t understand it if I did tell you.’

  Pear Drops were exciting because they had a dangerous taste. They smelled of nail-varnish and they froze the back of your throat. All of us were warned against eating them, and the result was that we ate them more than ever.

  Then there was a hard brown lozenge called the Tonsil Tickler. The Tonsil Tickler tasted and smelled very strongly of chloroform. We had not the slightest doubt that these things were saturated in the dreaded anaesthetic which, as Thwaites had many times pointed out to us, could put you to sleep for hours at a stretch. ‘If my father has to saw off somebody’s leg,’ he said, ‘he pours chloroform on to a pad and the person sniffs it and goes to sleep and my father saws his leg off without him even feeling it.’

  ‘But why do they put it into sweets and sell them to us?’ we asked him.

  You might think a question like this would have baffled Thwaites. But Thwaites was never baffled. ‘My father says Tonsil Ticklers were invented for dangerous prisoners in jail,’ he said. ‘They give them one with each meal and the chloroform makes them sleepy and stops them rioting.’

  ‘Yes,’ we said, ‘but why sell them to children?’

  ‘It’s a plot,’ Thwaites said. ‘A grown-up plot to keep us quiet.’

  The sweet-shop in Llandaff in the year 1923 was the very centre of our lives. To us, it was what a bar is to a drunk, or a church is to a Bishop. Without it, there would have been little to live for. But it had one terrible drawback, this sweet-shop. The woman who owned it was a horror. We hated her and we had good reason for doing so.

  Her name was Mrs Pratchett. She was a small skinny old hag with a moustache on her upper lip and a mouth as sour as a green gooseberry. She never smiled. She never welcomed us when we went in, and the only times she spoke were when she said things like, ‘I’m watchin’ you so keep yer thievin’ fingers off them chocolates!’ Or ‘I don’t want you in ’ere just to look around! Either you forks out or you gets out!’

  But by far the most loathsome thing about Mrs Pratchett was the filth that clung around her. Her apron was grey and greasy. Her blouse had bits of breakfast all over it, toast-crumbs and tea stains and splotches of dried eggyolk. It was her hands, however, that disturbed us most. They were disgusting. They were black with dirt and grime. They looked as though they had been putting lumps of coal on the fire all day long. And do not forget please that it was these very hands and fingers that s