Opposite the Cross Keys Read Online Free PDF Page B

that the newcomer, like all its companions, was doomed to disappear with the rest.
    So far as I was concerned, once I had learned how to manage a pair of scissors, the day of the week when newspapers came into their own was Friday. Every Friday, after tea, Maud and I would sit at the kitchen table, reducing the Thunderer of Fleet Street and all its satellites impartially to Fenner toilet paper. Unlike the unfortunates at St Giles, who had to make do with rolls of polished stuff, chill to the skin and about as flexible as quarry tiles, the Fenners of Salham St Awdry wiped their backsides on great events, cut into fine, generous squares. Every Friday Maud and I cut a week’s supply for Mrs Fenner to take back with her on Saturday, Maud wielding a skewer to pierce the completed pile with a hole through which, with an enormous sense of achievement, I threaded a piece of string which I knotted and finished with a loop so that it could hang on the nail knocked into the Fenners’ lav door.
    Once, greatly daring, I abstracted a piece ready for bunching, and retired with it to our lavatory; but, there, could not bring myself actually to use it. It seemed a kind of blasphemy, seeing it had a picture of Lloyd George on it.
    However, as I had already crumpled it, I couldn’t hope to return it, undetected, to the kitchen. Needing to get rid of the evidence, I dropped it in the pan and pulled the chain. Horror of horrors – plumbing in St Awdry’s must have been different (It was. I later discovered there was none) – it would not go down. That is, it did at last, but not before I had learned never again to get ideas above my station.
    When I came back downstairs, Maud, who had heard the cistern filling, emptying and refilling, looked up dourly from her scissoring to remark, ‘What you been doing up there, then? Cannon-balls?’

Chapter Two
    The Saturday afternoon which, of all the Saturday afternoons I spent on the Market Place with Maud and her mother, I select from my treasury, was a day mellow as honey, one of those autumn days you sometimes get in East Anglia, the memory of which keeps you going through the months when Arctic gales sweep down from the North Pole, and the damp of the Broads corrodes your very soul. I was just six years old, in my first term at Eldon House School, and looking very chic, I congratulated myself, in my new school uniform – double-breasted navy overcoat with a dinky little half-belt at the back, hat of plushy velour with a badge in front embroidered with EHS, and a hatband striped in black, purple and white, the school colours; knee-high white socks, black lace-up shoes and navy gloves, knitted ones, with a narrow edging of black, purple and white which showed that they came from Green Brothers, the officially appointed school outfitters, not any old shop. To be seen out on the street in your school uniform not wearing your gloves was, if not the sin against the Holy Ghost, the next thing to it.
    Was it OK to take them off for eating? I hadn’t been at Eldon House long enough to be sure. I was already a bit uneasy about the gloves even before I bumped into the Saunders girls – the younger one was in my form – out with their mother. I had purchased a pennyworth of locust beans, or ‘lokusses’, as they were called by the cognoscenti , something purportedly vegetable with the texture and taste of varnish and the further advantage that neither Maud nor her mother could stand them, so that I could safely pass them round. I was very fond of them, though I had to admit, that particular Saturday, they did not taste quite as good as usual, stuck all over with glove fluff.
    â€˜Take your gloves off, fathead!’ Maud commanded: and when I explained that to do so was against school rules, she made a face, not having yet forgiven them, whoever ‘them’ might be, for removing me from her jurisdiction for the better part of the day, and said, ‘