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By Root 648 0

do with his odd looks. Goz had black curly hair that sat on top of his head like a nest that had landed there without him noticing. He had darkish skin and a long nose that widened at the end like a spoon. (It was a belief shared by Win, among others, that a Gyppo had once spent the night in the lower branches of the Gosling family tree.) Goz was strange in other ways, too. He had funny ways of talking, as if he hadn’t settled on a voice of his own. He laughed at things that no one else did. He didn’t like football. He was, however, the estate’s undisputed champion at slow biking. It took him ten minutes to cover the twenty yards from the corner to Clem’s gate, and when he got there, he held the bike stationary, jigging his shoulders and twitching the handlebars to keep his balance. Then, with a tragic wail, he fell sideways and clutched the gatepost.

“Orright, Clem? Hot enough for yer?”

Clem shrugged. “Nah. Call this hot? My dad says when he was in the desert, if yer wore a tin helmet —”

“Yer brains’d be cooked in quarter’n hour an you’d go mad an die. You told me.”

“Did I?”

“Yeah. Twice.”

Clem pushed himself away from the gatepost, and when he clonked back, he said, “What’re you doin?”

“Nothun. Thas bloody Sundy, ennet?”

Goz switched his voice to posh, like an officer in the films.

“So I thought I’d undertake a spying mission deep into enemy territory. Loaded the jolly old transmitter into the saddlebag. Codebooks in my pants, where Jerry’d never think to look. Cunning, eh? Sewerside pill on my tongue, see?”

He stuck his tongue out to reveal the Polo mint, sucked thin as a wedding ring but still intact, on its tip.

“Wanna come for a ride?”

“Yeah, but I can’t.”

Goz sighed, got off his bike, and dropped it into the hedge. Clem saw that he was barefoot, which was amazing. Goz sat on the curb with his naked feet on the hot road and his back to Clem.

He said, “I hear yer passed the Scholarship.”

“Yeah,” Clem said after a pause.

“So’ve I,” Goz said.

“You hent.”

“I hev.”

A long silence. Then Clem said, “Hev anyone else? Woodsy, or Cush, or any of them?”

It was a monumental question packed with fear.

“Nah,” Goz said. “Not as I know of, anyhow.”

He turned and looked up at Clem.

“So thas just me an you, then, ennet?” He grinned, displaying his buck teeth. “We’re gorna get some stick, young Ackroyd.”

George’s pride in his son’s achievement flipped into outrage when he received a packet of information from the grammar school. The first item was a grudging letter of congratulation on headed notepaper and signed by Miss A. D. Withers, Secretary to the Headmaster, Lieutenant Colonel B. O. Bloxham, MBE. The second was the school brochure in a buff cover featuring an ink drawing of Newgate’s splendid Jacobean frontage.

The Sir Henry Newgate School, George read, was founded in 1606 by Sir Henry Newgate, Bart, the grandson of Sir John Newgate, appointed Sheriff of Norfolk by King Henry VIII. Originally (and properly) known as the Sir Henry Newgate School for the Sons of Gentlefolk, the school’s values emphasized, and continue to emphasize, academic rigor, discipline, and Christian values. The school chapel, completed in 1621 . . .

George took up the third item. It was a list of what Clem would need when he went to Newgate. Everything was, helpfully, costed and could be procured, exclusively, from Treacle and Phipps, School Outfitters, of Cathedral Plain, Norwich.

“Hell’s bells,” George said, looking up at Ruth. “The blazer is five quid, and the badge is ten bob on top of that, sew it on yourself. And he’s got to have house tabards for sport, whatever the hell they are. Stone me.”

Ruth scanned the list. “That all come to more than thirty-five pound, George.” She’d gone rather pale. “An thas not countun shoes. He’ll need new.”

George ground his cigarette out in his saucer.

“I thought education was meant to be free in this ruddy country,” he said.

That evening Win went up to her bedroom and returned with four five-pound notes in her hand. She handed them to her astonished daughter, along with a heavy sigh.