The Crest, by Brian Thewlis

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

The letter came in the June of 1953, the week of the Coronation, so that for years afterwards I could not see bunting without thinking of it. I had passed. In September I would go to the grammar school on Moortown Road, the first boy from our street ever to do so, and my mother read the letter aloud three times in the scullery and then sat down on the coal box and cried.

The list came a fortnight later. Blazer with crest, two pairs of grey flannel trousers, cap, tie, games shirt, rugby boots, a leather satchel, a fountain pen. My mother priced it in pencil on the back of the envelope and added it up four times. Then she took in washing for the Harrisons and the Dobsons and a family in Chapeltown she had never met, and all through August the kitchen smelt of wet wool and starch.

My father was a conductor on the number 2 bus. He thought the whole business was hilarious. When the blazer arrived from the outfitters in its tissue paper he made me put it on and walk up and down the yard while he bowed and called me ‘your lordship’ and offered to carry my satchel. ‘Mind,’ he said, ‘they’ll have you talking proper by Christmas. You’ll not want to know us.’ My mother told him to give over. He winked at me. I laughed, because I could not imagine it.

I learned quickly. I learned that dinner was called lunch and tea was called supper, that nobody else’s father carried a ticket machine, that a boy called Hollis whose father was a surgeon thought my accent was the funniest thing he had ever heard. I learned to keep my mouth shut until I had checked the word. I learned, by the end of October, to say I lived ‘near Roundhay’, which was almost true if you walked for forty minutes.

In the second week of November it rained, and my father, finishing his shift at the terminus, came to meet me at the school gate. He stood across the road in his uniform with the ticket machine still strapped across his chest and his cap pushed back, and when he saw me he lifted his whole arm and waved, the way he waved to the drivers coming the other way.

Hollis was beside me. ‘Who on earth is that, Kenneth?’

‘No idea,’ I said. And I put my head down and walked on, past my father, as if he were a lamp-post, and I did not look back until I reached the corner, and when I did he was still standing there with his arm half lowered.

He did not mention it that night. He did not mention it ever. After tea he took my school shoes out to the step, as he did every evening, and polished them until they shone, and set them side by side inside the door.

I am fifty-three now. I have been trying to cross that road for forty years.

“The writer makes us feel nothing but sympathy for Kenneth.”

To what extent do you agree with this view?

You should write about:

• your thoughts and feelings about how Kenneth is presented in the extract
• how the writer has created these thoughts and feelings

You must refer to the language used in the text to support your answer.