The Cornflake House Read Online Free PDF Page A

know; only Victory ever had the courage to ask and he gave her a gruesome snarl in answer. As Eric’s luck would have it, Editha recovered and was well enough to walk out for help not long after gangrene set in. It was also fortunate for our grandfather that the day they came and carted him off for his amputation, was the very day Chamberlain made his ‘no such undertaking’ speech; so Eric was able, by a hair’s breadth, to boast that he’d lost his leg in the war.
    Being an amputee sets one apart, it must be like being blond in China. Although we were a hotchpotch of children and often stared at for our own differences, we were as prone to gaze and gawp at Grandad as any stranger might have been. There’s something appalling and mysterious about an unstuffed trouser leg, in Eric’s case a tube held together with three fancy safety pins, the kind usually seen at the hems of kilts. It’s absence that attracts the eye. His remaining leg was hardly worthy of consideration, we kids seldom wondered how it felt, never asked ourselves did it ache in sympathy, did it pine for its partner? A shining white band would sometimes peep at us from the space between his sock and his filled trouser leg, but that was merely flesh, not nearly as absorbing as the lack on the other side of his groin. Then there was the question, not spoken aloud, but once whispered in the dark from child to child, of what happened to Eric’s other shoes. This question had been hanging around, loitering with intent, for years before it made its hushed appearance. There was no sign of these surplus items, they weren’t to be found, alone and dusty, under dressers or on top of wardrobes. We’d all wondered at their fate, but never dared to ask, until one day, when we were living in a little caravan at Eric and Editha’s smallholding, Editha went shopping and bought Eric a new shoe. A single brown leather lace-up, size eleven. For a right foot. It was January the thirtieth, his birthday; Editha rarely shopped. I watched him unwrap his gift, give a grateful grunt, and discard his old, black, footwear to try on the new. The old shoe was put in the dustbin, although, since Eric’s only journeys were from bed to chair, it wasn’t exactly worn out.
    That night, in our caravan, Fabian and I lay awake long after the smaller children had fallen asleep, discussing in whispers the fate of the left brown lace-up. We couldn’t believe that our Granny would simply throw away a brand new leather shoe. She was, by necessity if not by nature, a thrifty soul, such waste would have seemed criminal to her.
    â€˜Maybe,’ Fabe suggested, ‘there’s a shop for one-legged people, where they’ll sell you a left shoe or a right one.’
    â€˜Yes,’ I liked this idea, ‘and they have stuff for people with only one arm too, like single gloves.’
    â€˜Maybe,’ Fabe sounded unsure, ‘but buying a pair of gloves isn’t the same. Everybody loses gloves, but a whole shoe’s different. Anyway, Gran only went to Spalding, they won’t have special shops there. Only maybe in London.’ Yes, in London, we’d been told, you could buy anything, from furnishings to furbelows – whatever they might be; but not in Spalding.
    â€˜Well then there’s a club,’ I ventured, ‘and the members swap the unwanted things. This time it was Granny’s turn to send somebody, a man with only a left leg, the spare shoe. Next time it’ll be his wife who has to post the right shoe to Granny.’ We let this concept swim in the dark with us for a while, but it faded when we thought hard about it. Granny hadn’t been seen with brown paper and string, wrapping a shoebox, and surely the box would have been used if any posting took place. In fact she’d appeared in the kitchen, having walked from the bus stop, with the single shoe in its box, and we’d been given this