Читать книгу Fitting In - Colin Thompson - Страница 50

There were six of us in the woods behind the school. Past the outbuildings and the copse where the pheasants were fed, across the field where the goats grew fat on damp grass, the woods were thick with old oak trees and rumours of a secret tunnel leading back to the cellars below the school, where big boys took new boys, blindfolded and shaking with fear, and made them eat live worms. The worms were tinned spaghetti, but a terrified child has a terrified imagination and most of us believed that what we were eating was alive and more than one boy threw up down his shirt and was punished by matron.

Bluebells were growing in the lakes of sunshine between the trees. The air was warm with spring softness and on the bank behind us the primroses were coming out. Pigeons were whispering softly in the treetops, unaware that the children below them would be blasting them to death with shotguns in a few weeks’ time.

Badgers, foxes and squirrels were spring-cleaning. The sap was rising everywhere, even in us unsuspecting ten-year-olds.

‘Can you make yours go hard?’ Smith One said.

‘Of course I can,’ I said. ‘Everybody can. Can’t they?’

‘Girls can’t,’ Huntly-Jones said and we all giggled.

‘Girls haven’t got one,’ I said.

‘Do you know why?’ said Porter.

‘Er, no,’ I said. ‘They just haven’t.’

‘It’s to make babies,’ said Porter.

‘What do you mean?’ Huntly-Jones asked.

‘My brother told me,’ Porter explained. ‘You put your thing inside their hole and they have a baby.’

‘Don’t be stupid.’

‘That’s why it gets hard,’ said Huntly-Jones. ‘So you can push it inside them.’

‘That’s disgusting.’

‘In where?’ I asked.

‘They’ve got a hole,’ Huntly-Jones told us.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said, ‘that’s where they wee-wee.’

‘No, they’ve got another one,’ Huntly-Jones said.

‘That’s where they poo-poo,’ Jenkins sniggered, and we all giggled again.

‘I’m not pushing my thingy in a girl’s bottom.’

This remark was prophetically ironic because some years later Jenkins was arrested in London for trying to push his thingy inside a young man’s bottom.