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sound of another slap resonated between the rosebuds I heard my mother snarl, “Notta dissa one anyway!”
    * * *
    Mum’s fight in the flats ended any lingering doubts I might have been harbouring about the purpose of Woolverstone and the value that it held for her. With an absent husband, two older children on a knife-edge between total apathy and disaster and the lingering threat of more to come, Woolverstone’s welcome embrace was something she reciprocated by clutching it in her arms with great pride; you could criticise much about her and her children if you so pleased, but Woolverstone was unimpeachable. The ruckus also meant that my friends became exquisitely polite whenever they called for me.
    Politeness was always for a reason, never natural. We wouldbe polite to shopkeepers if we thought they might top up the bag with a few extra gobstoppers, or we would offer gracious assistance to the porter when it seemed possible he would throw us a fifty pence piece. More likely, the porter would be hurling abuse and fury at us as we scurried from the roof of his workshop. Now, however, there were two very compelling reasons to be especially polite to my mother: the hands of granite. If they hadn’t seen the fight then my friends would have heard about it, and, by dint of the estate grapevine, the story would have been vividly embroidered by the time it reached their ears. If they had ever worn ties, they would have tightened and straightened them as they knocked on our door to call for me.
    “Mrs Volpe, can Mike come out to play?”
    “No, fuggoff!”
    “OK, Mrs Volpe, thanks Mrs Volpe”.
    At about that period Serge had been at Woolverstone for a year or so. He had departed without fanfare, and we would get a phone call from him occasionally. Usually, I would hear Mum trying to reassure him and telling him not to cry with obvious homesickness, but I thought he was being a bit of a wuss and that this was no way to build me up for my (intended) impending departure. I think he and a friend even ran away once, appearing at home several hours after Mum got a warning phone call from the school. Nowadays of course, a fully-fledged police hunt and an HSE inspection would ensue, but Woolverstone had enough confidence in a boy’s ability to find the A12 not to call out the brigades. Despite Serge’s desertion, I wasn’t spending too much time worrying about joining him and I liked visiting him there, imagining the day when I could sample some of the fun he talked about having when he wasn’t despising every waking moment and hitchhiking his way back to London to escape. I thought thatleaving Fulham and replacing my estate for one seventy-four acres bigger and several shades greener would be a doddle, and I was still, at that time, getting excited whenever I saw a cow in a field.
    Honesty compels me to say that I really don’t remember what I was thinking about the prospect of Woolverstone, but I don’t recall being overly worried about it. Given the rebelliousness of my nature and what was becoming an erratic emotionality, it is reasonable to expect that I should have been concerned by the school’s express desire to weed that sort of thing out of its pupils. Of course, I might have been concerned if I’d had any idea what the place was all about, which of course I didn’t. The fog of ignorance was evidently a protective veil behind which I merrily carried on regardless. I did often contemplate my impending change of circumstances, and it is possible, I suppose, that I could give a retrospective treatise on the thought processes I was going through; but I would be making it up, just projecting backwards. Applying intelligent analysis to the significantly less than bright behaviour of a boy four decades ago can never be anything but revisionist, but if I can’t now shine a positive light on what I was up to, I daren’t imagine how bad I looked in 1976.
    I have struggled through the process of remembering my childhood