Free Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido Page B

as the pinnacle of superior man, had licence to make his own manners and that his handwriting was the mark of his magnificent disregard for the standards of the world. The truth of the matter was simply that Roger had lousy, undistinguished handwriting. It was a thing he was no good at.
    Roger, in his first letter to me, said that he was helping to teach maths in a country high school in a Nissen hut, and that in addition he banged out hymn tunes every morning on a piano which gave him the horrors. There was no felt left on the hammers, he said, and there was too much Christianity about. The buses had no springs, but carried you into town and slung your bicycle on the roof if you were lucky enough to have one. Everybody insisted on sharing bananas with you on bus journeys. Neighbourliness, he said, drove him mad. The houseboy, who came with the house, drove him mad too, he said, taking hours to scrub with steel wool at a few aluminium saucepans which he could polish off in minutes. The same despised menial, he said, got insulted if you washed your own shirts and chose instead toscrub at them with blocks of blue mottled soap because he was so used to white employers crabbing at him about the cost of Square Deal Surf. There were mangoes more profuse than people, more wonderful than Christianity, and he would bring some back for me. He had forgotten to take his transistor radio and he needed it, he said, to prevent the possibility of conversation with the people who shared his house. ‘Provincial English bores,’ he said, who thought that progress was making ‘the whole world like West Hartlepool’. They drove him mad. Everything drove him mad. I loved him for his commanding snobbery.
    â€˜I want to tell you that you sing well,’ he wrote. ‘Also that I hope John Millet is no great friend of yours.’ As a result of this curious letter, which I reread every hour, I struggled to improve myself by looking up West Hartlepool on the map and resolving from then on to wash my own clothes which, until then, my mother had always washed for me. My mother, unfortunately, manifested herself as a person as possessive of her territory as Roger’s houseboy.
    â€˜When you have your own house you can do what you like,’ she said, insufferably, denying me access to the washing-machine. When I complained to Jane about this high-handed dismissal of my rights, I found, understandably, that her perspective on the matter was different.
    â€˜Any place where somebody else does the washing can’t be all bad,’ she said. ‘Do you know, Katherine, when my twins were born I screwed out of Jacob the right to use disposable nappies only to find that the bloody things didn’t work.’
    I wrote back to Roger, telling him warmly how sorry I had been to go without saying goodbye. I told him, in order to recreate the moments of our togetherness, that I believed the piano to be the Holy Ghost’s revenge for his insults in the blackberry bushes. I told him that I had been to a concert with his mother who had tried on my eye make-up in the loo and what a smashing lady I thought her. That my term had begun and that I had had the great joy of spending my book allowance.
    That I had covered all my clip-back files in Florentine wrapping-paper out of pure joy, and sharpened all my green Venus pencils. That I found it all delightfully unlike school and that Jacob was a terrific hit with the students, being a very racy and lucid teacher. John Millet, I assured him, was a very casual friend who occasionally took me to the theatre. I wished him many happy evenings escaping the sound of steel wool on tin and speculated upon whether or not my letter would be delivered to him by a runner who would carry it, mud-stained, in a forked stick.
    â€˜I have been singing on my way from the underground station because you praised my voice,’ I wrote. ‘Tell me what I should sing.’ Thinking back, I could