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gate for us. They were both young, and be must have been good enough looking, for he preferred to talk rather than eat, and I watched him open his lunch-box and take out an apple and a piece of cake.
    Any attempt to soften what I am about to say will put me at the beginning of a lie. Nevertheless, I will lift belief to a higher plane by making it dependent on truth and not lies. It is as if truth were a crime that I am burning to commit, but the only crime would be to distort the truth knowingly no matter what amount of lip-service is paid to lies. But I am intending to commit this crime for myself alone, and not for the benefit of anyone around me. It might feel like a sudden advent of religion, when God is seen to be of Truth, his stern and precipitate appearance promising me an increase of faith in myself providing I placate him with my own hollow spirit by the time I have finished writing.
    I wasn’t even hungry, but did as I was told and went to the other end of the tip with my apple and cake. After I had eaten I started to build my first road, and was lost in the work of it when my mother said we must go because the gate was about to be locked. I took her hand, but she was too distracted to be with me on the way back, because she must have been worrying about my father. She needn’t have bothered though, because she had, after all, only taken me out for a walk.

25
    When Howard was nine and out to buy a comic he saw a trolley-bus on Wollaton Road whose poles had come loose. Running across to look he was struck by another bus, which so mangled his leg that he had to have it off.
    His father was Oswald, Burton’s second son who had married a Catholic girl called Nellie. While the whole family moaned the loss of Howard’s leg, they tried to console the parents by saying that at least he hadn’t been killed—while Burton was heard to remark that it might have been better if the poor little bogger had. The only reply to shut him up was when Ivy said that though he had but one eye he still liked living. He didn’t deny this, but went on thinking he was right.
    Howard sat in the parlour because he could not tolerate the light, much like Burton for another reason. He passed the time sifting piles of silver paper collected by all the family so that he could take it to the hospital on days when he went for treatment. He had been learning the piano but wouldn’t play it any more, sat on its stool unable to lift the lid.
    Ivy took him to the Elite cinema a year after the accident. In the middle of the film he complained of pain in his leg. He was a stoical boy, so she knew something was wrong, and took him home. In bed he sang beautiful songs, words and music of his own making, his face animated but his eyes closed. It was impossible not to weep on hearing them. He died a fortnight later with a heart no longer strong enough to support him.
    Howard was a year older than me and I had not been encouraged to play with him because I was considered too rough. I called at the house some time after he had died, on my way to Engine Town. It was early morning, and Nellie was still in bed, while Oswald was getting ready to go on duty as a sort of guardian on the nearby canal, where he worked because there was no longer much for him to do as a blacksmith. He was a tall, thin man like Burton, but there was a more human and vulnerable handsomeness about him, a sensitive enough man because he had some of the Tokinses complexity and pity in him passed on by his mother. He told me to finish the bacon left from his breakfast, and I looked at the plate of rinds with the hard cold fat still attached, and the slice of bread he generously cut. Although I hadn’t eaten I couldn’t touch it. The food was good, and in another house I would have scoffed it, but my appetite would not rise.
    Nellie tried to console herself by going down town to St Barnabas’ Cathedral, and by drinking bottles of stout, but the grief