Doctor Who_ Time and Relative - Kim Newman [4]
After Assembly, I handed in my Lines and got a nod of acknowledgement from Mr Grange. Doing a punishment should wipe the original offence from everyone's minds so you get treated normally again. There are ways of making everyone (even you) forget what you've done and why you did it, but it doesn't work like that on Earth. Mr Grange knows what the children call him, but has picked on me to be blamed for it. Children nicknamed him Ghastly years ago, long before I ever came to School. You can get Lines for whistling 'Only the Lonely' within earshot because an earlier 4G made up a lyric about him that went 'Lastly the Ghastly'. He looks at me and sees all the children down through the aeons who didn't show respect.
Someone should teach him that respect has to be earned.
Later —
The cold.
I don't understand it.
London is in a relatively temperate climatic zone. The United Kingdom is characterised by short, mild winters.
Spring should have sprung, but there's no sign of a thaw. Not a single
snowdrop.
Snow has been on the ground for months, since well before Christmas, thick and settled, with new falls most nights. In streets and playgrounds, the white carpet has been mashed to slush and frozen, then snowed on again, slushed and frozen again, over and over. Dangerous layers of ragged ice lie beneath the dusting of soft, white snow. The football pitch is ploughed clear so the boys can troop out to battle on Friday afternoons. The grassless earth is as hard as playground asphalt and the boys crawl scraped and bleeding to the showers, bare legs and arms blue. Because the boiler is acting up, the showers last week were cold and there was very nearly a mutiny.
Clear, sharp, thick stalactites hang from all the ridges of the buildings, forming draperies and traceries. Children melt messages into the ice with matchflame-heated pen-nibs: initials (never mine) in hearts, 'Long Live the Hotspurs', 'Girls Beware — Dirty Gertie at Large!'. The caretaker goes into the loos first thing in the morning and has to smash the ice in the toilet-bowls. The heating, dependent on a pre-war furnace and boiler, is often on the blink. Heavy iron radiators in all the classrooms make snapping, fizzing and drumming sounds all day but don't give out proper warmth. Children cluster close and press themselves against the thickpainted metal, which doesn't help.
In Foreman's Yard, snow drifts higher than my shoulders. A clear path leads to the Box, with banks that threaten to collapse every day. If anyone ever did want to buy any of the scrap in the Yard (no-one has ever asked), they'd have to wait until glaciation receded.
Early in the morning or late in the afternoon, when there's no sun, you can breathe in the cold and feel microscopic ice-chips in your nose, windpipe and lungs. Tears freeze like sleep-sand. You mustn't touch the iron railings with bare fingers, because of black ice. Supposedly, you'd leave skin behind. It's a fearful temptation to try — just a fingertip, to see if what they say is true.
Every class has two or three children with splints. Gillian and John the Martian are plotting to give F.M. an undetectable shove one break-time, hoping to slow him down with a broken bone or three.
Have I written about Francis Minto? I hate him!
John the Martian showed me a book he likes, called How to Be Topp, written by Geoffrey Williams with pictures by Ronald Searle. In the book, there is a picture captioned 'every skool hav a resident buly who is fat'. Ronald Searle must know F.M., for the picture of the 'resident buly' is Francis to the life. I expect he also knows Gillian, because he spells just like her.
At morning break, F.M. assaulted our snowman.
Gillian was putting an old flat cap and a scarf on the snowman's football-shaped head when Francis turned up with his gang of smaller boys. He sneered at us for being 'infants' and 'loonies', then took a cricket bat from his gym bag and swatted off the snowman's head. Sadie cried, which made Francis back down before a teacher came over to ask