Whenever Mr. Jones opened a book, either to ask questions or read a story, it seemed to Brian an unnatural combination. Books and Mr. Jones did not go together. The comfortable rustle of pages and the crack of his stick or fist did not belong in the same room, were disparate qualities that confused and annoyed him, and weren’t calculated to bring out the best side of his uneven intelligence.
At home there were no books, but he found a store at the Nook, ancient dust-covered Sunday-school prizes with the names of his uncles and aunts inscribed in impeccable writing within the front covers. He took them from the shelf (“Don’t destroy them, Brian, will you?” his grandmother said) and read their titles: John Halifax, Gentleman, The Lamplighter, What Katy Did Next, The Gypsy; opened them and smelt the mustiness from years of damp storage. A book was too strange an object to read, so he built them into a tower, watched it wobble, gave a push if his construction showed no sign of falling. He placed them in two piles, side by side so that they didn’t fall, took one from the top and opened it. “Once upon a time there was a gypsy named Meg Merrilees.… Nowadays the gypsies.…”
Merton could not read, but liked someone to reel off the front page of the newspaper to him. “Come on then,” he said sharply to Brian, “read me what it says.”
“I don’t know the first word.”
“Course yer do,” he said gruffly, thinking him obstinate. “Read the first bit on it.” Brian looked hard: “Art,” he said slowly. Merton waited for him to go on, demanded when he didn’t: “Is that all? Art? That ain’t a word.”
“No, there’s a lot more yet. It’s a big word I don’t know.”
“Gerron wi’ it then.”
“Tek yer sweat, I’m going as quick as I can. I’m building it up: ‘art-ill.’”
“You’re a bloody slow-coach,” Merton scoffed. “‘Artill!’ I never heard such a word.” He turned to everyone in the room: “What’s ‘artill’? I don’t know. I’m boggered if I do, do any of you lot?”
“It ain’t finished yet,” Brian protested, lifting the paper again.
“Well, finish it, then, Nimrod. Come on, I want some news. What’s ‘artill’? Is that the beginning o’ t’ word, or all on it?”
Brian was indignant: “I’ll finish it if yer’ll shurrup an’ let me. ‘Artill-er.’”
“That ain’t it, either.” Merton prodded him and winked at the others, who looked on. “I thought yer was a better scholar than this,” he said with disappointment. “There must be summat else besides ‘artill-er.’”
“There is,” Brian retorted, now seeing the joke Merton was having. “On’y a bit, though. Listen. I’ve got all on it now: ‘art-ill-er-y.’” Then slowly: “Artillery, that’s what it is.”
“It’s as bad as ever,” Merton pronounced, puzzled. He turned to Lydia: “What’s … what was it, Nimrod?”
“Artillery.”
“Artillery,” Merton repeated.
“Nay,” Lydia said, “I don’t know.”
“It’s guns, ain’t it, George?” Merton asked, half sure of himself.
“Yes,” he was answered.
“Go on then, Nimrod.”
Slowly he read: “Artillery preparations for the bombardment of Madrid.…”
He’d heard of scholarship papers that you took at eleven, but someone said you had to know Latin to pass. One weekend he sat in the Nook kitchen: “What people speak Latin, gra’ma?”
“I don’t know, Brian.” So he turned to Merton: “Grandad?”
“What, Nimrod?”
“Who speaks Latin?” He was still plagued by the possibility that Merton, being a grandad, must know everything. “Nay,” came the answer, “I’ve no idea.”
“Do you know, Uncle George?”
“No, lad.” He went back to his book puzzled. Who spoke Latin? He’d asked Ted Hewton, and Ted Hewton didn’t know. To ask Jones was inviting a crack on the tab for being so stupid as not to know a simple thing like that, even when no one else in the class knew, and it was better to stay ignorant than get a pasting, he felt. It was obvious that Spaniards spoke Spanish, French people French, and Germans German, but who spoke Latin, that puzzling language on the back of pennies? He copied it out: GEORGIVS V DEI GRA: BRITT: OMN: REX FID: DEF: IND: IMP — worse than Abyssinian it seemed. Mr. James told him, a quieter teacher who didn’t hand out pastings when asked questions: “But it’s dead now,” he added. “Nobody speaks it any more.” And that was that, all that fuss for nothing.
He stopped the playground flight of a paper aeroplane that, it turned out, was made from a French grammar. He unfolded the would-be bomber and tried to read its message: articles and nouns on one side, a picture-map of Paris on the other. He gave a dozen marbles for what was left of the book, then searched out Ted Hewton to show off his bargain.
Black-haired pallid Ted already knew how to count in French. “Our kid on the dole gets books from the library, and learns French because ’e ain’t got nowt to do. So ’e learnt me to say some.” They sat in a corner reciting: OON DER TWAR KAT SANK SEECE SET WEET NERF DEECE.
“What’s eleven?” Brian asked.
“I forgot,” Ted said. “I’ll ask our kid and tell yer tomorrer.” The first ten were memorized in a few minutes, would stay in a pocket of the brain all his life, but eleven and up was another thing, like a row of strong bolts opening on to the unknown.
He turned the page of his grammar. “What’s an article?”
“A thing,” Ted explained, “anybody knows that.”
“I know they do, but this article ain’t a thing, it’s a word, like ‘the,’ for instance.”
“Don’t be daft,” Ted scoffed. “How can ‘the’ be an article? An article’s a thing, I’m tellin’ yer.” Brian pushed the book under his nose: “Look. Le is an article, it says, and it means ‘the.’ So how can it be a bleddy thing?”
“It don’t mek sense,” Ted remarked. “Maybe the book’s out o’ date.”
“It’d better not be,” Brian said savagely, “or I’ll get my marbles back.” He flipped over more pages. “It’s still a good book, because it’s got lots o’ words in it. Maison, chemin, chapeau, main, doigt,” he said slowly, following the mock-pronunciation beneath each. Ted grabbed the book for a second look, as if he did not believe all those words were in it. “Ay,” he said approvingly, “it’s not a bad book at that.” He flipped through its wad of leaves to the back cover: “’Undred an’ ninety it goes up to. It’s long.”
“I gen twelve marbles for it,” Brian reminded him, snatching it back as the whistle blew for end-of-playtime.
Geography, history, and English: in each there was a possibility of learning about other countries and people. In Lands and Life were coloured pictures of camels by big ships on the Suez Canal, and snow-covered mountain tops on the Equator; and in Foundations of History he read how Greeks captured Troy by hiding in the belly of a wooden horse and being dragged inside by Trojans who thought the gods had sent it from heaven as a present (daft people who didn’t know any better); and often for English Mr. James read Coral Island or Ungava. But geography won, meant notebooks with blank pages on which the teacher pressed a roller that left an outline map when he lifted it off, and set strange names on the blackboard that you copied against the map. Brian scoured the food cupboard for labels from foreign places, found pictures of other continents in magazines to stick on the blank pages in his geography notebook until it grew fat with insertions and notes.