Free Sail Upon the Land by Josa Young

salad. His grandparents had added packets of peanuts, wine gums, Murray mints, Smith’s crisps, Bourneville and Cadbury’s chocolate bars and White’s lemonade and ginger beer – all barely subdued by the wicker lid’s straining leather straps.
    ‘Just some food and stuff from my grandparents,’ he replied shyly.
    ‘Tuck!’ exclaimed Payge and, his eyes gleaming, immediately took charge. Bert had nothing to worry about. Difference in the area of tuck was wholly acceptable.
    Soon the hamper was concealed under the travel blanket prescribed in his kit list, in the dark space beneath the battered and carven shelf that served as a desk in his cubbyhole.
    After that, Payge let it be known to a few select companions that Hayes had unlimited access to tuck, and word spread. His new friends seemed ravenous and Bert noticed that they wished to be in his good books to feed their insatiable hunger. Born just before or during the war, none of them had ever known anything other than rationing. Even now treats were scarce.
    And never mind that Hayes’ grandparents were ‘in trade’. The trade they were in was food, and that made up for everything. Moreover, Bert had a generous nature and, having been brought up with groceries, took the food for granted. He had no desire to hoard and it was no novelty for him. Each time he went home for an exeat, his grandparents replenished the hamper with a lack of caution that was their silent way of loving their only grandchild.
     
    Armishaw’s stood on the Downs above Eastbourne, its high clock tower dominating the skyline and causing grumbling resentment among certain elements in the town. Bert had always been aware of the school, but without taking any kind of personal interest. Before he had ‘gone up the hill’, he had seen the senior boys out of uniform and on their superior bicycles on Sundays, circling aimlessly, going to the pictures or looking at girls. Their accents gave them away. To begin with it was strange to be transported up there himself, leaving his old friends down below.
    It was all so odd that Bert didn’t dare open his mouth to begin with, but Payge was friendly and put him at his ease. He was what Bert imagined himself expected to be at some cloudy point in the future, used to the whole business of public school, a country house sitting there in the background not mattering too much. Bert had never seen his house, and had no clear ideas about what his random inheritance meant to him or his future. He didn’t know how he was meant to behave in this new world, so he got on with copying Payge’s manners and demeanour.
    Payge’s bottomless appetite for fruit cake was the mortar that cemented their friendship, but it was Bert’s anguished confession that he had inherited a title, and that there was a house somewhere, that sealed their bond. Without fruit cake, Payge would undoubtedly have wandered back into his own year, having done a bit of perfunctory showing Bert where the lavs were in those first few weeks.
    After a term of getting used to school, he felt he could trust Payge enough to confide. He waited until Payge was quite stupefied with food one autumn evening, and began stumblingly to explain himself.
    ‘Not Albert Hayes then. Mount-Hey? We should call you by your real name. But it’s a bit of a mouthful, is it pronounced like that?’
    ‘I don’t know. I never met any others. Everyone else is dead.’
    He tried to recall what the solicitor had said, but only remembered the novel taste of cold Coca Cola sucked up a straw.
    ‘Well they would have to be, wouldn’t they? Otherwise you wouldn’t have inherited. Much more straightforward in my family. Lots of sons in every generation, including mine.’
    Payge stopped, thinking.
    ‘We should shorten Mount-Hey, it’s sort of awkward sounding. Knock off the corners, wear it in a bit. Like St John is always called “Sinjin”.’
    He rolled the name around his mouth, muttering the syllables over and over