The Cuckoo's Child Read Online Free Page A

many to find, and all too often their discovery inflicted mortal wounds on them.
    When this palled, I would stand in my clean dress and neat sandals by the window of the front room, which was rarely used and as cold as a well, and watch the ragamuffins enjoy their noisy play outside. They shouted and laughed, tormented one another and roared about, kicking balls or racing up and down the street on battered bikes. How I envied them those bicycles! To be able to go so fast, so far, so quickly; to hop the kerbs and perform incredible feats of balance; to throw the machine down with unthinking nonchalance when something more interesting claimed the attention, knowing it would be there, ready to speed off again on a whim!
    â€œYou don’t want a bike,” said Mum. “You’d only fall off and hurt yourself, and what about the traffic? No, it’s much too dangerous around here. You’d be under a lorry before you could say knife.”
    School brought partial liberation. Even though it had its own brand of regimentation, this was a place where parents had little influence. From the very first day when I was marched along to the local primary school, a monolithic brick building surrounded by a bare playground and a wrought iron fence high enough for a maximum security prison, I was tipped into the sea of ragamuffins to sink or swim. That first day was cautious and reserved; my memory gives me no sense of other children around me, apart from one little girl with dark hair who cried all day long, but I have never forgotten the feel of high ceilings, and the big alphabet cards around the walls, and the squeak of the slate as I drew.
    Knowing what I know now about world events, I am amazed that none of that global drama and agony ever coloured my life. Think about it: my first experience of school came soon after Hiroshima, the liberation of Auschwitz and other concentration camps, the V2s, yet all I retain of that time is the round of practising my wobbly printing, listening to stories, sewing animal shapes with thick yarn with bootlace ends, and making music with miniature triangles and castanets and—wonders!—cymbals. I suppose the only hint of the war came in the occasional male teacher with an empty sleeve or rigid leg, or the sudden news that we should all bring some kind of container to school to carry home our share of the drinking chocolate supplied in a food parcel from the United States.
    We tumbled up the years, unknowing. Even for me, seldom allowed out, sent firmly to bed by seven o’clock, life was a game and an endless search. Our parents were all grimly coping with post-war austerity in a shattered city that smelled always of soot and boiled cabbage, but we chewed the delicate new leaves of the lime trees, and turned ourselves into racehorses by wearing our woolly scarves as bridles and galloping home from school, and grew like weeds, forcing our mothers to let down and out the clothes that were always bought several sizes too big so they would last. But our greatest sources of delight were the bombsites.
    They were forbidden, of course, but we went anyway. Who could resist? You wouldn’t have been able to, would you, Stephen?
    Whenever anyone refers to something as an eyesore, I have an instant vision of the bombsite at the end of our street. It was the one I knew best, I suppose, though there was no shortage of them around my home. Being near to the docks and the main railway stations had turned the whole area into a target; every street had at least one ruinous wasteland slowly being softened by the invading weeds. Rose bay willow herb and golden rod were the first wildflower names I learned; the pink and yellow rioted over the broken masonry and piles of rubble.
    Mum was able to prevent me from playing on the bombsite when I was at home, but there was nothing she could do to restrain my curiosity when I was on the way to and from school. Four times a day I passed it. The adults