A Piece of the Sky is Missing. David Nobbs

being thirteen, that he was going to be beaten up.

      ‘Hullo,’ said the older boy.

      ‘Hullo.’

      ‘You’re a new-bug, aren’t you?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘What’s your name?’

      ‘Bellamy.’

      The older boy walked along beside him. He was about eighteen and almost six foot. Perhaps nothing was wrong after all.

      They were walking down a narrow path which led towards the edge of the heath, through gorse bushes. It was a lonely, windswept place. Robert wished there was someone about.

      ‘Which house are you in, Bellamy?’ The older boy seemed nervous.

      ‘Drake.’

      ‘That’s quite a good house. Spotty D isn’t a bad chap. Where do you come from?’

      ‘Richmond, but we live in the Cotswolds just now.’

      ‘What do your parents do?’

      ‘My father’s dead. My mother’s bought a house in the Cotswolds and she’s modernized it. Now she’s going to sell it, and there’s another place she hopes to get in Sussex.’

      The older boy put his arm round him. Robert shrugged it off and began to run. The older boy caught him up and rugby-tackled him. He tried to get up but the older boy overpowered him. He lashed out and struck the older boy one or two good blows, he was the better fighter, but in the end he had to give in because he was more than four years the younger.

      The older boy took Robert’s trousers down. The grass was damp and repulsive.

      ‘I can’t help it, Bellamy,’ said the older boy. ‘I’m sorry.’

      It was soon over. The older boy didn’t say anything, just walked away. Robert pulled up his trousers and walked away too. When he got back to school there was bread and peanut butter. He didn’t report the incident.

      ‘We’re making excellent progress,’ said Dr Schmuck.

      April, 1949. It was early afternoon, a traditional April day of sudden spring showers and brief bursts of warm sunshine. Outside, in the traditional churchyard, the traditional rooks were cawing. All was well with the world, except for Mr Randolph Clegg. Mr Randolph Clegg was his mother’s friend, and he looked rather like Hitler.

      His mother had bought the potentially charming but ruinously dilapidated Elizabethan cottage for a song – ‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag’ had been the comment of embryonic funster Robert Bellamy, thirteen, to the mild but gratifying amusement of his colleague Bernard Howes, fourteen. Now she was engaged, in company with Mr Clegg, her ‘business associate’, in knocking down a dividing wall.

      At the end of the war his mother, her health much improved, had been kept busy looking after poor Nanny, who had retired permanently to bed, a prey to malaria, bronchitis, rheumatic fever, scurvy, Braithwaite’s Disease and fear of lizards. His mother had nursed her devotedly until she died, late in 1946. His mother, who didn’t need the money, had decided that she must occupy herself, and had gone into the business of renovating old houses. Robert had immediately become a boarder.

      Now home for the Easter holidays Robert stood awkwardly in an obscure corner of the cottage’s low-beamed living-room, hoping that his mother would notice him and that Mr Clegg wouldn’t.

      His mother was up the step ladder, wearing trousers. She was really rather a smasher. He didn’t know what she saw in Mr Clegg. Adults fell for very peculiar people sometimes.

      ‘If you’re going to hang around here, son, fetch me some nails,’ said Mr Clegg, handing Robert a box of odds and ends.

      Robert hunted through the box. There were no nails. Mr Clegg would blame him, silently. Mr Clegg would take one look at the box and find nails galore. Vicious, spiteful, disappearing nails.

      Robert liked to help, and at first his mother had encouraged him, but lately, seeing that he was never any help at all, she hadn’t bothered. Robert knew that he wasn’t by nature helpless. He was only helpless when Mr Clegg was around. Mr Clegg rendered him mute and helpless.

      ‘What do you think this is holding up?’ said Mr Clegg.

      ‘I was wondering,’ said his mother.

      ‘Nothing, if you ask me.’

      ‘I don’t see what it can be.’

      ‘Well, no. I mean, look, it ends there.’

      ‘Yes.’

      Mr Clegg was standing very close to his mother, just touching her back with his front. She turned and gave him a look which said: ‘Careful. Not in front of the boy’. He gave her a look which said: ‘Blast the interfering little brat. You think of him too much. He wouldn’t notice anyway, the steaming great loon. Look at him, standing there all thumbs. Hasn’t found a single nail, even. You can’t spend your whole time worrying about him’. She gave him a look which said: ‘Now, Randy, we’ve been through all that’.

      Robert had once heard his mother say: ‘If you’d only try to be nice to him, Randy.’ Mr Clegg had said: ‘But I do. I try all the time. I’m just not a child person, Emmie,’ and his mother had said: ‘He is taking to you a bit, isn’t he?’ and Mr Clegg had said: ‘I’ve tried to get him to call me Randolph. He won’t. It’s Mr Clegg this, Mr Clegg that. He does it to hurt me. I’m a sensitive man, Emmie. I’m easily hurt. You know that. I have delicate feelings. The boy knows that. Children sense these things. He calls me Mr Clegg to hurt me. He hates me.’

      Robert would have been prepared to call him Randolph if he was even remotely Randolphish. That would have been only fair. But he never was. He was Mr Cleggish, and the more Randolphish he tried to be, the more Mr Cleggish he became. You will not have my mother, vowed Robert.

      Mr Clegg began the simple task of removing the short length of wood which was holding nothing up. Robert felt that it might be dangerous, but they knew better than he.

      Twice Mr Clegg’s hands touched Robert’s mother and paused momentarily before passing on. That sort of thing gave adults a big thrill. They really were the most extraordinary people. Especially since Mr Clegg’s hands were like uncooked fillets of plaice.

      The length of wood was so rotten it came away in their hands. Two cross beams and a whole section of the ceiling collapsed with it. One of the beams struck his mother across the head. Mr Clegg fell in a shower of plaster.

      Half his mother’s money went to Mr Clegg and half to Robert. Half of Robert went to Aunt Maud and half to Aunt Margaret. It was the fairest solution the family could find.

      September, 1953. The first dark night at Catterick. Lectures from the hut sergeant and the two hut corporals. Practice at making bed-packs. Your bed-pack is not considered to be up to standard, probably because you have a refined voice. Out it goes on to a soaking flowerbed. Finally at 12.30 a.m. the lights are put out. You make your bed in the dark, and struggle into the damp sheets. Your bed smells of wet earth. The hut smells of huts. In the morning you are awakened at 4.14. After two and a half hours devoted to making straight lines round the barrack-room floor with boot polish you are allowed five minutes for breakfast. After two days of this sort of thing you have to wear your denims for the first time. They have been issued without buttons, and you have to sew the buttons on yourself. To you this smacks more of sheer inefficiency than of inspired character building. You begin to sew them on. Your efforts do not meet with success. You begin to master the technique, but it is too late, and you find yourself on parade with safety pins in place of fly buttons, and your trousers held up by the thread from your spare pair of green drawers cellular. As you march the safety pins stick into your genitals. This hurts. The trousers begin to slip. You look down. A voice yells out: ‘You can look down when your trousers fall down, Bellamy, and not before, yunnerstand?’ The voice says: ‘You can look down now, Bellamy.’ You pull your trousers up.

      The