The Children Of Dynmouth Read Online Free PDF Page A

anything you had here –’
    ‘It’s quite all right, thank you.’
    ‘I do the surrounds for Mrs Abigail, and stuff in the garden for the Commander. I’d clean your boots for you, sir. Mrs Dass’s as well.’
    ‘We don’t need help in the house. I really must ask you to go now.’
    ‘You didn’t mind me asking you? I’ll pop in again when I’m passing, sir. I’ll have a word with Mr Feather about the curtains.’
    ‘There’s no need to call here again,’ Mr Dass said quickly. ‘About curtains or anything else.’
    ‘I’m really looking forward to the Spot the Talent, sir.’
    The door banged behind him. He walked down the short tiled path, leaving the garden gate open. It was too soon to go to the Abigails’. He wasn’t due at the Abigails’ bungalow in High Park Avenue until six o’clock, not that it mattered being on the early side, but it was only five past four now. He thought of going down to the Youth Centre, but all there’d be at the Youth Centre would be people playing ping-pong and smoking and talking about sex.
    Slowly he walked through Dynmouth again, examining the goods in the shop windows, watching golf being played on various television sets. He bought a tube of Rowntree’s Fruit Gums. He thought about the act he’d devised for the Spot the Talent competition. He began to walk towards Cornerways, planning to dress himself up in his sister’s clothes.
    At Dynmouth Comprehensive Timothy Gedge found no subject interesting. Questioned some years ago by the headmaster, a Mr Stringer, he had confessed to this and Mr Stringer had stirred his coffee and said it was a bad thing. He’d asked Timothy what he found interesting outside the Comprehensive and Timothy had said television shows. Prompted further by Mr Stringer, he’d confessed that as soon as he walked into the empty flat on his return from school he turned on the television and was always pleased to watch whatever there was. Sitting in a room with the curtains drawn, he delighted in hospital dramas and life at the Crossroads Motel and horse-racing and cookery demonstrations. In the holidays there were the morning programmes as well: Bagpuss, Camp Runamuck, Nai Zindagi Naya Jeevan, Funky Phantom, Randall and Hopkirk (deceased), Junior Police Five, Car Body Maintenance, Solids, Liquids and Gases, Play a Tune with Ulf Goran, Sheep Production. Mr Stringer said it was a bad thing to watch so much television. ‘I suppose you’ll go into the sandpaper factory?’ he’d suggested and Timothy had replied that it seemed the best bet. On the school notice-board a sign permanently requested recruits for a variety of departments in the sandpaper factory. He’d been eleven or twelve when he’d first assumed that that was where his future lay.
    But then, not long after this conversation with Mr Stringer, an extraordinary thing happened. A student teacher called O’Hennessy arrived at the Comprehensive and talked to his pupils about a void when he was scheduled to be teaching them English. ‘The void can be filled,’ he said.
    Nobody paid much attention to O’Hennessy, who liked to be known by his Christian name, which was Brehon. Nobody understood a word he was talking about. ‘The landscape is the void,’ he said. ‘Escape from the drear landscape. Fill the void with beauty.’ All during his English classes Brehon O’Hennessy talked about the void, and the drear landscape, and beauty. In every kid, he pronounced, looking from one face to another, there was an avenue to a fuller life. He had a short tangled beard and tangled black hair. He had a way of gesturing in the air with his right hand, towards the windows of the classroom. ‘There,’ he said when he did this. ‘Out there. The souls of the adult people have shrivelled away: they are as last year’s rhubarb walking the streets. Only the void is left. Get up in the morning, take food, go to work, take food, work, go home, take food, look at the television, go to bed, have