It was almost too much to bear: the sympathy, the understanding, the sense of near tragedy. When he started to regain his strength, he needed to get out of the house, to clear his head. So he fell into the habit of visiting his grandfather, a big quiet man, a retired farmer who never seemed to get excited about anything, good or bad. Before he met Marjorie, Johnny’s grandfather had been the only true confidant in his life — but then his grandfather had died.
The old man had lived in a solid square house with a garden of vegetables and fruit and a garage in which he kept his bicycle and sacks of potatoes and boxes of sweet-smelling apples. He and Johnny would go for long, long walks through the fields by the sea. And Johnny would ask him what he thought of God and the prime minister, and why the world was always on the edge of war. On these walks he would pour out all the crazy mixed-up ideas and worries of a thirteen-year-old who had had too much time to think. And the old man would produce boiled sweets from deep pockets, butterscotch and fruit drops, some without paper and covered in fluff. He would rub them on his shirt to clean them and then take out his false teeth so that he could suck the sweets more easily.
He would listen with the patience of his eighty years and a lifetime lived in the peace of the countryside.
‘In my day us was only worried about filling us bellies and keeping warm in winter,’ he told Johnny. ‘Then there was war, two of the buggers. And us worried about keeping alive. There wadden time for nought else.
‘I tell ’ee this, boy, I don’t know if us be better off now or not. Buggered if I do.’
His words never amounted to anything clever or profound, but the old man had a natural wisdom about him, and wisest of all, he knew how much Johnny needed somebody to listen. And so the boy spent almost all his days with his grandfather, and his evenings scribbling poems in exercise books.
Most of it was not really true poetry, just outpourings of feelings, the things he said during the day put on paper in bad blank verse. All about knocking down the walls of ignorance, rushing through dark tunnels into vacuums of freedom, and trying to get back through the tunnel again because it was cosier on the other side.
But as Johnny grew strong once more, he went back to school and re-found his friends. He began to forget the fear. He stopped writing poems, and he stopped seeing his grandfather.
When the old man died he hadn’t visited him for months. Johnny was consumed with guilt and the thought that his grandfather had gone for ever was almost unbearable.
At the funeral everyone was glad the weather was fine. The ham was sweet, the pickles held the tang of last summer, the tea was strong, and they talked about everything except dying.
The coffin, and the flowers, and the body of Johnny’s grandfather, flabby and red and ugly with great age, had been burned. Johnny thought suddenly of flesh burning. Just for a moment he had a dreadful vision of flames licking through the rosewood and biting into the still body of his grandfather.
He left his ham and pickles, went to the lavatory, and was secretly sick. When he came back his face was white, but his hands were steady. And he sat down and ate his meal.
Twice now in his young life he had been confronted by death. Its shadow would never leave him. The third time was approaching — and that would finally destroy him.
On the night of his grandfather’s funeral, he had slipped out of the house taking with him all the money that he had. He had spent the evening in pubs where his age was not known, drinking more beer than he had ever drunk before. In the third pub he visited he found himself chatting up a pretty red-haired girl wearing thick eyeliner and the shortest possible miniskirt. Through the beery haze she looked very desirable to Johnny. He bought her whisky-and-coke and ordered a large whisky for himself.
The girl happily took up Johnny’s offer to walk her home, and raised no objections when he suggested a detour along the unlit riverside path by the park. They sat together on a bench and began to kiss. So far so good. She responded eagerly. Johnny fondled her breasts through the flimsy material of her blouse and she barely protested. He could feel that her nipples were hard. He didn’t know much — but he knew that was a good sign. He kissed her, gently at first, then a little more forcefully. He parted her lips with his tongue and began probing, exploring, inside her mouth. She was still responding, flicking her tongue against his, sucking his mouth. Very promising. He began to undo the buttons of her blouse. She pushed his hand away. Each time he tried to get a hand inside her blouse she pushed him away. Oh, how he wanted to feel those pert rounded breasts, to tweak those hard little nipples between his fingers.
He had an erection in spite of all the booze. Hopefully he placed her hand on the bulge in his trousers. She felt it for a few seconds, moving her fingers just a little, then took her hand away. He couldn’t make her put it back.
He began stroking her legs above the knees. He was aware that her skirt had slid up nearly to her crotch. She was teasing him with her mouth but not letting him do any of the things he so wanted to do with his hands.
Finally, drunk and frustrated, he held his left arm across her body and shoved his right hand, hard and directly on target, up between her legs. The skirt did not offer much protection. He ripped at her underwear, tearing tights and knickers in his eagerness. It was not until the next morning that he realised how stupid he had been.
The girl had screamed, struggled ferociously, and with the strength of fear managed somehow to heave him off her. She had jumped to her feet, slipped on the grass, fallen over, further damaged her already laddered tights, and covered her clothing in mud and grass stains. She ran off, sobbing and shouting that her father would kill her when he saw the state she was in.
Johnny sat on the seat a bit longer. He was very drunk. His stomach, assaulted earlier by the emotion of the day, started to rebel against the beer and whisky to which it was unused. He was sick again, and finally staggered unsteadily home, still feeling dreadfully ill. His father, who had waited up, took one look at him and gave him the lecture of his life. It was mostly wasted because Johnny could remember almost nothing when he woke the next morning.
His memory began to return all too vividly a little later when two policemen arrived on the Cooke doorstep. Johnny’s mother immediately telephoned his father, who came home from the greengrocer’s shop he ran in the town. The girl, forced by her parents to explain her appearance, had blurted out that she had been attacked by Johnny Cooke.
Johnny, suffering from the first real hangover of his young life, said over and over again that he didn’t do anything. The truth was that he couldn’t really remember what he had done, the police were not convinced, and so Johnny faced the court proceedings which were to continue to haunt him. The girl, it transpired, was only fifteen years old, and Johnny was charged with indecently assaulting a girl under the age of consent. The landlord of the pub where both youngsters had been drinking also found himself in trouble — but that didn’t help Johnny.
What did help him, in true small-town style, was the friendship of his father with the local police chief inspector — his Rotary Club friend Ted Robson. Only that prevented charges of attempted rape.
Johnny had appeared before the magistrates, pleaded guilty, and been put on probation for three years. His protests of innocence had not impressed his father, who never felt quite the same about his son again. His mother just pretended the incident had not happened. But the publicity in the local press had, she told her closest friends, ‘nearly killed her’.