The Professor, by Brenda Haxby

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

The ambulance was coming for Ossie at nine o’clock on Monday morning, and on the Sunday night, at tea, he announced that he was going on his holidays.

‘Pinewood,’ he said, spreading the margarine right to the edges of his bread, the way Mum hated. ‘Sea air. Three dinners a day. Lie in bed till noon.’ Then, to me: ‘Some people, Professor, have to go to school.’

The doctor had used a different word for it on Thursday, a long word with a cough in the middle of it, and Mum had gone into the scullery and run the tap for a long time. We were twins, eleven years old, and we had never once slept apart. I was the clever one, which was why he called me Professor. He was everything else.

Mum pressed the tea towel to her mouth. Dad put down his fork and did not pick it up again. So Ossie stood on his chair, which was strictly forbidden, fetched the cardboard suitcase and packed it in front of us like a conjuror at the end of the pier.

‘One pair of pyjamas, best,’ he said, holding them up. ‘One mouth organ, played only by the finest musicians. And one Professor, for emergencies.’ He tried to fold me into the suitcase, and I shrieked, and the lid came down on his fingers, and he hopped round the kitchen howling like a dog at the moon.

Dad laughed despite himself, and then Mum laughed behind the tea towel, and Ossie sat down again looking pleased, as if he had mended something. He had a gift for that.

I found him later in the old shelter at the bottom of the garden. He was sitting on a sack with the suitcase open on his knees, taking the pyjamas out and folding them and putting them back, again and again, as if there were a right way to do it that he had not yet found. Every so often he coughed into his sleeve, quietly, so that nobody in the house would hear. He had been crying. He was very bad at hiding it, Ossie; his whole face went red, right up into his hair.

‘Go away, Professor,’ he said.

I did not go away. I sat down on the other sack, and for a long time neither of us said anything.

‘A year, Dad reckons,’ he said at last. ‘Maybe more. You’ll be in the top class. You’ll have new friends. You’ll forget which side of the bed is mine.’

‘I won’t.’

‘You will.’ He took the mouth organ out of the suitcase and held it out to me. ‘Look after this. Don’t learn to play it, mind. If you learn to play it I’ll have nothing left to show off with.’ Then he grinned at me, red-eyed, and the old Ossie came back into his face like a light going on in a house. ‘And if anybody asks at school, tell them I’m in Monte Carlo.’

What impressions does the writer create of Ossie? How does the writer create these impressions?

You must refer to the language and structure used in the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.