Rainbow's End Read Online Free PDF

long hair floating behind some of the girls, and knew they were laughing as they crossed the yard, though he could hear none of it. His job did not allow for much sentimentalism, yet, he could not help seeing himself in that collection of children, for all of their separate personalities, and he could not suppress the nostalgia that threatened to overwhelm him, watching the little band filing double-breasted through the church enclosure.
    It had not been a part of his own childhood; probably it would have been had either of his parents survived the war. His father had been a wing leader in the RAF, flying a long-range mission over Munich. In that respite after his father had been shot down and before his mother had been killed, he had not yet been quite of school age.
    Still, he had sat and watched them go by, the kids in uniforms, the ones walking down the Fulham Road in dark green, walking past his block of flats. They had seemed so chummy and clubby and ages older than he.
    He remembered sitting there on the lower steps outside of his flat where he had lived with his mother, just the two of them now, sitting outside while his mother, inside, sewed.
    His mother had done a great deal of sewing and managed to earn their living doing it, and he could still hear the comments of her “ladies” as they bustled down the steps into the Fulham Road, comments that told him she must be a very good seamstress indeed. Some of her clients were rich; most of them were stout—figures that needed the drape and fall of dark materials, cleverly designed. His mother favored black, even for herself, though she was thin, not stout, and young and pretty. And she always seemed to him to be wearing that bracelet of pins, a soft mound with straight pins sticking out of it on a ribbon tied round her wrist. It made him think of a porcupine’s back.
    He had sat on the steps in the mornings eating his toast, in the afternoons drinking lemonade, watching the schoolchildren troop by, making their way to the Boswell School up on the corner. This world of the Boswell School seemed to him enchanted and its students forming a magic circle he could not enter, not if he didn’t have one of those uniforms.
    â€œMum, when can I go to school? Go on, Mum,” he would demand, as if it were his mother’s stubbornness and not the educational system which prevented his entrance into the magic circle of the Boswell School.
    Then another long holiday, and back again they trooped, the dark green uniforms. The time between holidays seemed like years to his six-year-old mind, and it was hard for him to believe that when the next long holiday was over, it wouldn’t be time for him to go to school. Time stretched and stretched like the strand of taffy his mother would loop over the doorknob for him to pull. As thin and narrow as it got, it would never give up, but stretched still farther. That was his Time. Between Whitsun and some time in July he thought surely he must have aged years and grown inches.
    â€œMum, when can I? Mum, go on!”
    It was especially painful to him, having to sit out the day (or so it seemed to him) on the steps watching, since his heart’s desire, Elicia Deauville, who lived in the flat next door, at seven and a half had joined the procession in her own new hunter’s green uniform. Elicia would fly past him, tumbling down the steps with an almost disdainful toss of her long, thick hair; yet, she would smile slightly, as if even shehad a hard time keeping up the pose the green uniform seemed to demand.
    Later, he would pick up the pin-quills from the faded turkey carpet upon which his mother kneeled before the dressmaker’s dummy, fixing a hem. While he pushed the pins into the porcupine bracelet, he hit on a clever (he thought) notion: his mother could make him a uniform.
    And in this uniform he might be able to steal quietly into the procession passing the steps, simply meld with the others, and no