Tom All Alone (6) (i)

Then there were days when different things happened.  Days when dad would take him out on the lorry when he did forage deliveries around the city and sometimes out in the countryside.  Sitting beside dad on the cracked leather seat in the old flatbed, the engine loud in the cab, the smells of hay and straw and sweat, and the smoke from dad's cigarettes.

      "Alright, boy?  'appy?"

      Watching the scenes outside rush by.  The streets and people and traffic.  The shops and houses, the fields, the trees.  The noise and lights and sheer speed of it all, like a film - like a tunnel of life they were moving through, looming up and blurring past.  He'd put his hand on the gear knob and dad would place his on top and guide it through the changes - up - down - up-across-up - down.  The different sounds the engine made with each change.  The stops they had for a sandwich and a cup of tea.  Then the big stops for the unloading - a brewery, a riding stables, a large house in the country all on its own behind high hedges and gates, with big cars parked on the gravel outside and a paddock out back instead of a yard.

      "Who lives in that house, dad?"

      "A rich man, son."

      "Aren't you rich, dad?"

      "No, son.  I wish I was.  Then I wouldn't have to work so hard."

      "Will I have to work one day, too."

      "You will, in time.  When you're older and leave school."

      That word again.  He always felt it, like a weight in the pit of his stomach.

      "When am I going to school?"

      "Next year."

      Next year seemed a long way away, so he tried to forget it.

      Russell did a job now, on Saturdays.  He did deliveries for the shop on the corner where mum worked, using a big black bike with a basket on the front.  In the middle of the bike frame was a black triangular wooden sign saying 'Gibney's Groceries' on it in white joined-up lettering, like mum wrote on her shopping list and nan wrote in her letters and Russell wrote in his school books.  Jim Gibney used to pay him from the till and he'd bring the money home and show it to Tom - all the silver coins and a three-penny bit.

      "Do you want some?"

      "Yes."

      "Yes what?"

      "Please."

      "Go on, then.  Take one."

      Just as he was about to, Russell snapped his hand shut, like the flap on the letter-box.

      "You can't have any, 'cos it's all mine.  I earned it working."

      He'd spend it on bars of Five Boys chocolate, or Airfix model planes from Joneses around the corner, which he'd painstakingly glue together and paint, putting all the little transfers on after floating the papers in a saucer of water.  Then he'd hang them from the bedroom ceiling, using invisible thread.  Sometimes he'd heat up a needle in a candle flame and use it to burn 'bullet holes' in the planes.  He'd stick on pieces of cotton wool sprinkled with red and yellow paint, so that it looked like smoke and flames coming from the engines.  They'd hang at different heights and facing different ways, in 'dog-fights' Russell called them, though they didn't look to Tom anything like dogs fighting, which dogs did sometimes in the street.  Usually the little black dog from up the road and the brown and white terrier from the Skelton's three doors along.  They had a lorry a bit like dad's, but painted blue, and they kept it in the back road.  They sometimes went out in it all day - the dad and the older son, Stephen.  Tom saw them come back one evening with a load of tree branches in the back.  He'd watched out the window, with the light off, as they'd unloaded the branches into their back yard, and some bikes that had been underneath.

      "Why have the Skelton's got loads of bikes?" he'd asked mum.

      "They probably repair them for people," mum said.  "Don't be nosey.  It's not our business."

      He'd heard nan say they were Romanies.  But they didn't look like the Roman soldiers that were in Russell's big history book.

      "Why are they called Romanies, nan?" 

      "Because they're always going roaming, I guess," she said.

      Sometimes, if Russell and Tom had had another argument, Tom would throw his rubber balls up at those planes - the Spitfires and Messerschmitts and Stukas and Lancasters and Hurricanes - and try to knock them down.  On some Saturdays, dad would take him around to Joneses, too, and the old man or his son would come out from their room at the back and show him what Corgi or Dinky cars they had in so that he could choose one.  A Mini, or a Ford Anglia, or a Morris Oxford.  Or a Black Maria or an ambulance.  He was building up a collection of them, which he kept in an old biscuit tin in his toy box.  He liked to line them up, or race them across the lino, or crash them.

      "Will I be rich one day, dad?"

      "You might do.  If you work hard enough."

      "Don't you and mum work hard?"

      "Course we do."

      "Why aren't you rich, then?"

      "Rich people do different work."

      "What work do they do?"

      "I don't know.  Lots of different things."

      Tom thought about it.

      "The Queen must work hard, 'cos she's rich."

      "That's right.  That's the sort of thing."

      "What does she do, then?"

      "She's the Queen, boy."

(continued)  https://www.abctales.com/story/harryc/tom-tom-turnaround-6-ii