Long Lankin by Lindsey Barraclough Page A

it. It’s called the Dairy. The old lady, Mrs. Rust, sits in there all day with a hairnet on, knitting. Some people must go in, but we never do. Everything on the shelves in the Dairy has a great big space around it. There’ll be a loaf of bread and then three feet of empty shelf, then a jar of Golden Shred, then four feet, then a packet of Daz and some Marmite.
    Mum sends me down to Mrs. Aylott’s with a list, and if I can’t carry it all, Mr. Aylott comes round with the stuff in a box when the shop shuts.
    I really like Mr. Aylott a lot.
    When it was the Garden Fête over on the field in June, Mr. Aylott was Madame Zaza the Fortune-Teller. He wore one of Mrs. Aylott’s scarves done up in a turban and some earrings made of brass curtain rings on loops of string. When he came out of his tent for a cup of tea, Dennis and his friend Bernard kept creeping up on him and lifting his skirt. Mr. Aylott would turn suddenly and pretend to take a swipe at them, and they’d go shrieking off. I don’t know why they did it over and over again; he still had his trousers on underneath.
    I told Cora what Mum had said about Mr. Aylott — that a shell had exploded right next to him in the First World War and he was the only one of his unit left. It left him rather deaf, so you have to shout at him.
    “He’s got a piece of apple in his head,” Pete said.
    “What are you going on about?” I said. “What piece of apple?”
    “Mum said,” said Pete. “From the war, and forty years later it’s still in there.”
    “You idiot!” I said. “A piece of
shrapnel
— not apple. What a dope!”
    “What’s shrapnel, then?”
    “It’s a bit of metal stuff out of a bomb, like a bullet,” I said.
    “Could he go off, then?”
    “Go off? Of course he couldn’t go off. The blinking bomb’s already exploded once. That’s why he’s got a bit of it in his head. Sometimes you say the most stupid things, Pete. I don’t know how you’re ever going to get your scholarship. And take that blinking hankie off your head. It’s disgusting.”
    We went into Mrs. Wickerby’s to buy a stamp for Cora’s letter. Mrs. Wickerby is like one of those little black spiders that eat their husbands, especially when she’s sitting in her post-office box, waiting for him to bring her a cup of tea. Mr. Wickerby is very quiet.
    She kept us waiting and waiting as she did something important with postal orders, even though she knew we were standing there. Then she caught sight of Cora out of the corner of her eye and leaned right over in her box to look her up and down.
    “Yes, can I help you?” she said.
    “I need a stamp,” said Cora.
    “Didn’t anyone ever teach you to say
please
?
Please may I have a stamp?
”
    “I need a stamp,
please,
” Cora said.
    We posted the letter in the pillar box outside the shop, then crossed over Ottery Lane.
    Our house is up a dirt track called Fieldpath Road, on the left just after the Dairy. The first house is old Gussie Jetherell’s. We tend to run past it pretty sharpish because she often comes out shouting rubbish, with her hair sticking out like a big white brush. She always wears the same grubby skirt, the same men’s checked slippers with holes in the toes, and the same dirty grey cardigan, all baggy in the front so I don’t know where she keeps her bosoms. She’s got millions of cats.
    The house joined onto old Gussie’s is Mrs. Campbell’s. She does for the Treasures and cleans the church. I think Mrs. Campbell goes into old Gussie’s sometimes to check on her. She must be mad to go in there, it looks so disgusting. Then, after Mrs. Campbell, across the end of Fieldpath Road, there’s us, and nobody else.
    Our house is wooden with a veranda, and we’ve got a smashing garden that goes all the way round. Dad grows dahlias out the front, and we’re not allowed to touch them. In the winter, he digs them up and puts them in a box in the shed. The back garden’s really good because Dad doesn’t