MORNING SERIAL

I’D be held firmly in her grip while being scrubbed with a fat yellow bar of Sunlight soap like a pat of butter, and a rough ‘flannin’ cloth.

‘Djawled! You’ll catch a disease from that stinking river.’

So I was thoroughly decontaminated over the old stoneware ‘bosh’ with hot water from the new gas geyser until my hands and face felt as if they were glowing.

The day of the dead puppies I sat down for a tea of Pek meat and waxy boiled potatoes coated with butter and Branston Pickle. As I ate, the bag of little bodies lingered in my thoughts.

I did not mention it. It was not a thing to share with grown-ups. It would have been a grown-up, after all, who had done the deed.

Grown-ups dealt with death – it was a concern of theirs and not of us kids. I thought they understood it. Hadn’t I seen them deal with it?

When a funeral happened in the street, they knew just what to do; the men wore black ties and their Sunday suits, and the women closed the curtains of each front room, blocking out the daylight.

There was a hearse, and the minister came; Erastus Jones, perhaps, wearing his black homburg and carrying his bible, all stern propriety but with kind, tired eyes.

As the cortege passed, the men in the street stopped what they were about, removed their caps and bowed their heads in silence.

They knew just what to do; grown-ups always knew. Any one of them would have known what to do with a bag of drowned puppies, I thought.

Bryan and I had intruded, had stumbled upon, that glimpse of lifelessness and through that had glanced that aspect of the grown-up world that was most ugly and fearful.

We had been interlopers there, just for a while, and I felt a little guilty about it.

But sitting quietly afterwards in my grandparents’ kitchen, having my tea, and no one any the wiser about what we had seen, I felt normality flooding back into my childhood world and I was glad to feel immortal once again.