The Cornflake House (3 page)

With wonderful ease, the preternatural wind plucked the tin roof from the classroom and left the children screaming at the dreadful sky. Within seconds they were soaked through and frozen. In sheer panic they clutched each other and the furniture. Arithmetic books flew like birds above their heads. The little girls' skirts blew skywards and their plaited hair whipped their faces. Hysteria spread from child to child.

‘Down on the floor,' screamed Miss Downy as the roof, a silver, headless pterodactyl, flapped away from sight. The wind ate the teacher's words. The children stampeded, charging through the door, fighting their way to the playground following the flight of their roof.

‘It was
War Of The Worlds,
played out for us right there in our own familiar yard,' my mother said. ‘The black sky ripped by lightning flashes, wind so strong it was lifting us off our feet and bringing objects from miles away to display before it jerked them on again, dustbin lids, pots, even a whole washing line complete with mangled, twisted laundry. And the roof, so unwieldy and threatening as it hung over us, but wonderful too, awesome and alien being freed like that from all its confines.'

The children were gathered up, herded back into the comparative safety of the brick-built hall where they found the rest of the school sitting in a clutch on the floor.

‘It was then that I began to feel the pain,' Victory explained to us, her children. ‘At first I ached all over, but looking around me I could see others were scratched and shaken so I supposed I'd bumped into something when running from my classroom. Those of us who'd been outside were frozen, the sound of teeth rattling was a kind of harmony to the awful noises coming from the weather itself. I tried to concentrate on them, the sounds, but the pain was too strong and then I realized it wasn't all over me anymore, it was only in my right leg. In my right thigh. It was so sharp I wanted to cry out, but I bit my tongue. I must have gone a funny colour, I caught Miss Downy giving me a worried look, probably thinking “whatever next”. Then she turned away and I took a peep at my thigh, lifting my frock to see if perhaps my knicker elastic was too tight, praying that I'd find a wound which would take away the feeling of dread. But there was nothing, not a mark on me.'

The whole school sat shivering and listening. Amongst the howling of the wind and crashing of thunder there was one almighty thump which shook the building. Then, as quickly as it had arrived, the storm left them and went to cause havoc somewhere else.

‘I didn't find the passing of the storm as comforting as most,' my mother told us, ‘because I was sure the pain, which now felt like a saw cutting through me, meant there was worse to come.'

The Headmaster stood on the platform and spoke to his quivering flock.

‘We have had a bad storm, a freak storm,' he told them, as if they didn't know, ‘but now it has passed and we must all try to calm ourselves, to carry on as normal. In a few minutes it will be dinner time, and I would like my class to get the tables and benches set up, please. A hot meal will do us the world of good. The rest of you can stay in here, but move to the sides please.' For a few minutes the ploy worked, children forgot their fear as they shifted to the sides of the hall or pulled out the furniture for dinner. Many hands were raised because many small bladders could contain themselves no longer, but the Head told them to wait until he had a chance to check the playground. The toilets were outside.

It was at this point in the story that we, Victory's children, would snuggle down in bed, pulling our covers up for protection. For once we'd be glad we had to share our bedrooms. Knowing what came next only made the tale more gruesome. We trembled as we anticipated the arrival of the Roof Giant.

Once everything was ready for dinner there was quiet in the hall, and not a sound from outside.

‘Then my leg gave way under me,' Mum would say, ‘and I collapsed on the floor, unable to get up. All eyes turned on me, but only for a second because that was when the sound came. It was the sound of a giant climbing out of bed, his bones creaking as he lifted one leg, “Errrumpth,” then the other, “Grraahh.” And it came from directly over our heads. We hardly had time to wonder what it was when an almighty crash was heard, and hurrying to the windows the braver kids called, “It's fallen, it's in the playground.”'

It seems that for a short time there'd been two roofs over the school hall; the freed tin roof had landed there, balancing precariously on top of the tiled one. Then it had shifted, the Roof Giant as we called it, and tumbled to earth. This time not even the Headmaster could control the children. The entire school ran outside, eager to explore this tunnel in the playground.

‘There was such a din,' my mother would whisper as we lay in our beds, ‘boys whooping, girls yelling, children kicking the roof and running sticks along it to make it echo and sing. It looked as if there should be a house underneath it, buried in the concrete. It was inviting and uninviting all at the same time, but it had to be explored. Not by me, I was still dragging my right leg along, wincing as the pain increased. I made it to the cloakroom door, but no further. I was still convinced there was something bad, something worse than the roof, to come, but those few moments when the other children first broke away to go exploring were pure delight for them.'

Of course it was dark in the roof-tunnel, the far end was resting against a classroom, so light could only get in the near end. The first adventurers to brave going inside screamed as they bumped into each other and tripped each other up. Their cries had the hollow distant sound of riders in a ghost train, thrilling and chilling the timid outsiders. Amongst all this noise, my mum picked out the genuine, piercing screams of a little girl called Kathleen Tucker.

‘She's found him, she's found him,' my mother shouted. And this time Miss Downy, who was standing just behind the semi-collapsed child, acted. She grabbed the school bell and churned it up and down until it rang louder than ever before.

‘Get back inside,' she ordered between clangs, ‘all of you, this instant, back inside.'

Victory pressed herself to the wall as a few obedient children reluctantly passed by. Then Miss Downy went to the mouth of the roof-tunnel and rang her bell there, making a dreadful echoing knoll to which all but one adventurer responded by coming out holding their ears. When the teacher laid the bell on the ground there was only one sound left, the clear high screams of Kathleen Tucker who had reached the point where nothing short of a slap would calm her.

‘She had only found his leg,' my mother explained, his right leg, the only part of Donald Clark which was actually in the roof-tunnel. Poor Kathleen had stumbled on this limb and, thinking it was part of a teasing playmate, had tried to kick it out of her way. But it was stuck fast, a fact she realized when she felt around in the near darkness and discovered there was no body, no second leg or trunk, attached to it. Although she was shocked by the leg and the state Kathleen was in, Miss Downy did the right things. She led the trembling child from the tunnel and gave her into the care of another teacher. She couldn't find the words to answer questions, to say what it was that had upset Kathleen so, but she squeezed her way down the outside of the roof-tunnel and came across the rest of Donald wedged there.

The Headmaster called for the ambulance and the fire brigade, there was some heavy lifting to be done. Donald was freed from his tin prison and taken to hospital. His classmates suffered more from the trauma than he did, initially. He was, thankfully, unconscious when found. As they carried him on his stretcher across the playground his almost severed leg refused to join the remainder of his body, it simply wouldn't lie parallel but dangled at an aberrant angle from under the grey blanket.

It was this sight that woke the children of my mother's school in the nights that followed, this glimpse of the abnormal sent their fingers creeping under the covers, feeling for reassurance. It kept us, the next generation awake, for long hours too, but we were always ready to hear the story again and again.

The teachers, who tried not to mention the storm too often in the company of their pupils, spoke of little else in the staffroom, and they discovered that many of the children had taken to absent-mindedly rubbing the tops of their right thighs in class. As if they, like Victory, were suffering in sympathy with Donald who had, ultimately, lost his right leg and who then lay recovering in hospital.

‘Donald had always had a problem with his bowels, they didn't work to order,' Mum told us, ‘so although he tried to start and finish what he had to do during break-time, he was often still there, sitting in one of the outside toilets, when the bell rang. He got caught by the storm, stranded on the far side of safety. They found the door of the toilet he'd used hanging by one hinge, whether he'd kicked it in an attempt to get somebody to rescue him – his shouts would never have been heard above the roaring wind – or whether the storm had tried to invade, was never clear. He became a hero overnight, and he'd been a quiet, unassuming little boy 'til then. But once he was back with us we bestowed on him instant charisma, or perhaps his limp and his false leg did that for him. Nothing was more provoking and exciting than to get Donald to tell of how he'd sat, trapped on his throne as the world outside his door churned. How he'd waited and waited and, best of all, seen the Roof Giant land on the hall, watched it coming to rest. Then, once the storm was over and everything seemed calm, how he'd stood up, looked around and decided to make a dash for it. But his tummy hurt him, he clung to the wall and had to take one slow step at a time. He'd heard the roof before he saw it, being doubled up with pain. Then …

‘Well, we tried to help him out, but the poor lad couldn't remember anything else, so the less thoughtful children used to fill in the gaps for him. He was never allowed the luxury of pretending it hadn't happened.'

My mother's pain stopped the moment the authorities took over. Her own leg was cured as she walked back home. We wondered if it was a sort of double premonition she had, if she'd felt so deeply for Donald because of a subconscious knowledge of what was to come for her own father. Eric's condition fascinated and frightened us but we were never able to make Victory speak of it with any emotion other than scorn. She told us that neither her mind nor her body would have felt sympathy for Eric because he deserved none. There were those, and my mother said this as if she was numbered amongst them, who said they wouldn't put it past Eric to have chopped off his own leg so as not to have to work at all, ever again. Of course this was rubbish; he was hardly working himself to the bone before it happened.

Mind you, in a way he did chop off his own leg, or made a good start to the job. It happened before I was born, one day when Editha was down with a bad dose of flu, far too poorly to carry let alone to chop wood. Grumbling all the way to the wood shed, Eric grudgingly picked up a log, set it too close to the edge of the chopping block and raised the axe. The log shot into the air as the axe came down and Eric, slipping backwards, made an impressive and very bloody dent in his left leg, about halfway between knee and ankle. They had no telephone, besides, Eric, not being a great one for doctors, wouldn't have phoned for help anyway. Instead he limped to the house, called Editha from her sick bed, made such a fuss that she was barely able to clean the wound, then sat for several weeks without letting her change his bandage. Did he not want the leg to heal? We shall never know; only Victory ever had the courage to ask and he gave her a gruesome snarl in answer. As Eric's luck would have it, Editha recovered and was well enough to walk out for help not long after gangrene set in. It was also fortunate for our grandfather that the day they came and carted him off for his amputation, was the very day Chamberlain made his ‘no such undertaking' speech; so Eric was able, by a hair's breadth, to boast that he'd lost his leg in the war.

Being an amputee sets one apart, it must be like being blond in China. Although we were a hotchpotch of children and often stared at for our own differences, we were as prone to gaze and gawp at Grandad as any stranger might have been. There's something appalling and mysterious about an unstuffed trouser leg, in Eric's case a tube held together with three fancy safety pins, the kind usually seen at the hems of kilts. It's absence that attracts the eye. His remaining leg was hardly worthy of consideration, we kids seldom wondered how it felt, never asked ourselves did it ache in sympathy, did it pine for its partner? A shining white band would sometimes peep at us from the space between his sock and his filled trouser leg, but that was merely flesh, not nearly as absorbing as the lack on the other side of his groin. Then there was the question, not spoken aloud, but once whispered in the dark from child to child, of what happened to Eric's other shoes. This question had been hanging around, loitering with intent, for years before it made its hushed appearance. There was no sign of these surplus items, they weren't to be found, alone and dusty, under dressers or on top of wardrobes. We'd all wondered at their fate, but never dared to ask, until one day, when we were living in a little caravan at Eric and Editha's smallholding, Editha went shopping and bought Eric a new shoe. A single brown leather lace-up, size eleven. For a right foot. It was January the thirtieth, his birthday; Editha rarely shopped. I watched him unwrap his gift, give a grateful grunt, and discard his old, black, footwear to try on the new. The old shoe was put in the dustbin, although, since Eric's only journeys were from bed to chair, it wasn't exactly worn out.

That night, in our caravan, Fabian and I lay awake long after the smaller children had fallen asleep, discussing in whispers the fate of the left brown lace-up. We couldn't believe that our Granny would simply throw away a brand new leather shoe. She was, by necessity if not by nature, a thrifty soul, such waste would have seemed criminal to her.