Things had a pattern.

There was School every day.

My father would wake me up and i would get dressed. In winter i would get dressed near the fire in the front room, warming the long grey socks beFore i put them on. there was a ritual to getting up and getting dressed and going to school. the clothes were the same every day, the school uniform. long short and long socks, a shirt a tie a jacket and a cap.the jacket was not called a jacket it was was called a blazer. all of those things were grey. there was a cap too and it was also grey. the only thing that was not grey was the raincoat. the raincoat was not called a raincoat it was called a mac. the mac was dark blue. you were supposed to button it up and do up the belt. now, when i se a man wearing a coat that has all the buttons done up and the belt done up, i imagine that he has been dressed by his mother. motherless children do not button up their coats. they do not do up their belts. they do not like being snug. they do not ike keeping their tummies warm.

was there breakfast? there must have been. i remember Ovaltine. Ovaltine was a chocolatey drink. to make it you had to put some milk in a saucepan and heat it up. if you weren’t careful, the milk would start to boil and froth up and over the sides of the saucepan. even if you were careful dn it didn’t froth up, it would still sizzle loudly on the sides of the pan when you poured it into the cup, over the small mound of Ovaltine powder. The thing you certainly did not want to happen was for the milk to form a skin. i don’t know what made it form a skin and i couldn’t tell you why sometimes it did and sometimes it didn’t.  if you didn’t clean the saucepan straight away, it was going to be much harder to get it clean later on.

and there was something else. a cereal. in france it would have been a half slice of a section of baguette with butter on. something that you would dip into a bowl of hot chocolate to soften it. but this was london. in summer you would put cold milk on the cereal. in winter you would put more milk in the saucepan and pour some of it over the creel as well as into the Ovaltine.

we would leave the house together and walk to the bus stop at notting hill. my father would look me over and ask if i was sure that i had everything. ‘everything’ meant what was in my school satchel and that meant last night’s homework and whatever else was going to be needed at school on that day.

my father wore a hat. in those days most men still wore hats. part of wearing a hat was also knowing when not to wear a hat. you did not wear a hat inside a house or inside a church. you took your hat off if a funeral procession went by. you raised your hat when you greeted a lady. a lady was anyone who was not a man. there weren’t some women who you didn’t take your at off to and others that you didn’t. not to take your hat off would have been rude. if you wanted to be rude to someone, you would not take off your hat. it was not so much a question of actually lifting the hat right off you head and holdng it by your side or over your heart. it was more question of reaching up and pinching the front of the hat like you were going to the it right off, but only raising it a little. if there had been a gust of wind you would have felt it between your hat and the top of your head. if you weren’t being quite as polite, you might not actually raise the hat at all. only touch the front part of it. it’s like the hand kissing thing. when you kiss a ladies hand, you don’t actually kiss it. it’s not like slobbering over the glow ted had of a cardinal or a pope. you are supposed to just go through the motion of kissing her hand. you take the hand in yours and ou bow forward and you stop your lips about an inch (2.5cm) before they would make contact with skin or glove. it goes without saying that you do not grab her hand. you would only do all this stuff if she was to proffer it. this applies to a not-so-fancy handshake too. you do not shake a lady’s hand unless she offers it to be shaken, just as you are not supposed to go up stairs behind a lady. when having to go upstairs, you always go firstt. that way you are not going to be looking at her behind, which would be about the only thing that you would be seeing if she was to go first.

when you go to a fancy place, you do not rubberneck, you are supposed to just take it all in without moving your head around. if you really want to let the side down, you gawp at something, lie a ming vase and then you point at it and the you say ‘wow. check out the vase. is that a ming?’ someone would no doubt let you know in the driest voice that it was from the tang dynasty. if you really wanted to make a complete fool go f yourself you would insist that it was among and at that point they would no doubt flick the side of it with their finger and the whole room would hear it go, ‘Tang’.

so.

we have just closed the big black front door of number 5 Ladbroke Square. it is a house that house belongs to the czech refugee trust fund. it is divided up into flats. we have the flat on the ground floor. there are five doorbells. each of the buttons has a name next to it. all the names begin with a ‘K’. to get to the front door you have to go up seven stone steps. we go don the seven stone steps and turn right and start to walk to the bus stop.

there is someone further down the street who is coming our way. it is mrs. mcbride, she is the wife of major macbride. my father is going to reach up to his hat and say ‘good morning’, but he is not to to raise his hat off his head. he whispers to me to say good morning. i know that he does not like the major. those days we would b probably say that the major was an asshole, but in those days the word asshole did not exist. in fact assholes did not exist and neither did talk of anything which could be classed as the general province of medicine south of the border. In france, they had livers and intestines and stomachs and pancreases and kidneys. in england we had ‘tummies’.

my father did not like the major and he was not going to lift his hat off his head for the major’s wife, but he wanted me to say ‘good morning’ to her at the same time as he said ‘good morning’ to her.

karen told me recently that when her mother would drop her off with her aunt, she would cry as her mother drove off to work. as soon as the car was out of sight, she would turn off the tears and get on wit having a lovely day with her aunt. she would turn them on again at the end of the day when she heard her mother’s car approaching so that her mother would think that karen had a had a miserable time.

what i was about to do was not quite the same, but it was something similar. the idea was to torture my dad by letting him say ‘good morning’ to the major’s wife and build up some tension in him by leaving my saying ‘good morning until the last possible moment. that would have been a moment after he had already said ‘good morning’ but before we had passed her by completely.

let’s just take a moment to figure out what is going on here.

my father is teaching me about manners. i am supposed to do what he does.to mape sure that i do, he whispers to remind me to d say good morning and maybe even do something similar with my school cap to what he does with his hat. if i don’t provide a demonstration that i am a well-behaved, good-mannered, polite boy it is going to be evidence that he is a bad father. I am being a little shit and making him think that i am not about to say ‘good morning’ when he does, and then the world is going to know what a terrible job he is doing of bringing me up properly.

i wasn’t any kind of star at cricket, but i was a good all-rounder. i was good in the field, i could throw the ball in from a long way out. i was not so hot at batting and would be 10 or 11 in the batting order. there are eleven players in a cricket team, so number eleven is the last one to get sent in to score some runs or get out for a duck and some wild cheers from the other team. i could bowl. not like keith williams who would run up from somewhere on the horizon and with the opposing batsman quaking in his boots, hurl a meteor down the pitch which anyone in their right mind would do their best to get out of the way of. i was a spin bowler. with a run-up of only a few steps, i had learned how to grip the ball in tricky ways and how to flick my wrist so that the ball, when it hit the ground, would leap off surprisingly to the left, or, if i wanted it to,to the right. bringing me in to bowl after a few overs would be such a change of pace for the batters that they would be dismayed to find themselves dismissed.

saturday mornings were for cricket practice. chris curtis had the bat and three or four of us were taking it in turns to throw the ball to him. the idea was that he would hit the ball and then one of us would catch it. it was catching practice. we weren’t standing that far away from chris, so when he decided to give the ball a really good whack, there was nothing that i could do to avoid it hitting me in the eye.

my eye swelled up and closed straight away. it really hurt, but i didn’t cry. i just held my head and experienced a new kind of pain. when i took my hands away, the others gasped. i had a black eye. an instant ‘shiner’. if it hadn’t happened at cricket practice with just a few of us there, if it had happened during a game or during a match, i would have been some kind o hero. as it was, it was sort of a non-event with just the others saying are you all right? and looking at me funny.

my dad showed up. i saw him walking across the sports ground when he was still a long way off. at last i thought that iwas going to get some s real sympathy and gain some points for not having cried when horribly injured. what happened instead was that he looked at me and scowled. with practice over, we all walked off together. my father bought all the boys ice creams. he chatted with them and totally charmed them with what a nice man he was, and every now and then he would give me a hateful look.

it took me twenty something years to figure out what was going on. it finally dawned on me that he was worried that the neighbours would think that he was the one who had given me the black eye. and it was a classic. there was no missing it. from swollen and black it went to purple and red and later to dark green and yellow. from my side of things it wasn’t that hideous. unless i was looking in a mirror, it wan’t something that i could see, and once that i could see properly again, it wasn’t bothering me. but it did bother my dad. it was only after i had become a father myself that the penny finally dropped.