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me and told me it was secret. When she let Dad in she told him what a fine lad I’d become. He laughed, and said hadn’t he just come from showing off about me in the Columba Club.
    I grew quickly that summer. I played in the blackout trousers. They faded, they tightened, the hems frayed and holes were worn into the knees. I played in the great soccer games on the high playing fields: dozens of boys from opposing streets rushing at the ball and kicking and cursing each other. I set off with my friends on expeditions into the Heather Hills. We carried knives and homemade spears and parcels of sandwiches. We looked down upon the new buildings rising in Felling Square. We squatted among the ruins of the old gun site, peered to the distant North Sea, reported bombers coming in. We lit fires and smoked cigarettes pinched from our fathers. Our bodies ached and tingled with sunlight, exhaustion, exhilaration. We lay close together in the warm long grass and talked of the journeys we’d take when we’d grown.
    Sometimes I came across Kev Golightly. He grinned at me and talked of the filthy old witch and asked if she’d been in my pants yet.
    I dreamt of Miss Golightly’s slackening flesh, of her dead soldier, of her baby in the jar. Often it began to grow, familiar features to appear in its face.
    Late August I went with Dad to buy new pens and a mathematics set. I put on the uniform again, felt how the blazer had become a closer fit. A bus pass naming my route was sent to me. The days were shortening fast. Earlier and earlier we looked down from the hills to the whole of Tyneside fading into the dusk.
    “That’s it,” we whispered on the final evening as we went back down.
    Miss Golightly’s heart gave out that October. A child who passed through Kitchener Street one morning saw her lying dead at the center of her living room. I went with my parents to the funeral. She lay in her coffin at the front of the church while the service was said. I knew that she would have already begun to decay and I tried to imagine her lying in there. I wore my uniform, and I fingered the last stitches she’d made for me, which would soon need to be undone. We spoke the prayers and sang the hymns for her. The minister said that she had left the troubled body behind and had been born again into glory. I said a private prayer that her soldier would be waiting for her. I heard her voice in me: Where am I? Where is he? and I cried, for I understood that their baby could not be there with her.
    Afterward, as we drove home in the Austin, Mam said she’d heard Miss Golightly’s family had been awful, already fighting to get their hands on the few things she’d owned.
    By then I’d heard teachers whispering that I was the best of my year. Dad said I had the world in the palm of my hand. Mam smiled as she unpicked Miss Golightly’s stitches, and asked where her little boy had gone. One evening Kev Golightly’s mother came to the door with a parcel. She said the old woman had written a note that I should have these. She scowled and told Mam it would take weeks to get rid of the clutter. She said you wouldn’t believe the things they’d found in there. She stood and watched as I unwrapped the photographs of the nurses and soldiers and of Felling as it was. She looked at Mam and raised her eyes and shook her head and hurried out into the night. Dad helped me to put the photographs up in my bedroom. I showed them Miss Golightly in her youth. I showed them her soldier. Together we picked out the familiar features of our town. I recalled Miss Golightly’s brightness, her gentle touch.
    In the evenings I sat beneath the photographs to work out my problems and write my compositions. I tried once to write the story of a nurse, a soldier, a baby in a jar, but it came to nothing. I knew I wouldn’t get away with it.
    Autumn deepened, darkened. Frost came early. On Saturday mornings the soccer games on the high playing fields continued. Their ferocity