Читать книгу The Dream Room - Marcel Moring, Shaun Whiteside - Страница 5

And so we started building model aeroplanes. It was a warm spring that year, and the evenings were long and balmy, and despite the fine weather, we sat from early morning till late at night and worked away on Hawker Hurricanes, Spitfires, Mosquitoes, B 17s and Lancaster Bombers. All over the house were model planes in various stages of completion. My father had strung a wire from one end of the room to the other, from which we hung the models when they were finished. The bar was covered with freshly painted planes and the table strewn with fuselages and wings, wheels and elevators. When I came home from school my parents had already done half a day’s worth. Usually we’d have a cup of tea on the balcony and I’d tell them about what had happened at school that day, and then we’d sit down at the table and get to work. We each had our own place in the assembly line. I unpacked the boxes, took out the larger pieces and glued them together, while my mother assembled the smaller parts and my father filed and painted the finished planes and added the markings.

We lived in a bubble where everything was quiet and sheltered and friendly; the pot of tea steaming over a small flame, the sounds from the park behind our house drifting in through the wide open balcony doors. Once I bent down to pick up a wheel and saw that my mother had crossed her leg over my father’s. His hand lay high up on her thigh. Her shoe lay on the floor and she was stroking his calf with her stockinged foot.

I remember that time with the same keen vividness as my father recalled his days as a spray plane pilot.

A week or two after we had started building, the weather turned and the rains began that were to last all summer long. Most mornings when we woke up, we heard the rain pelting down on the windowpanes and often it wouldn’t let up until late in the afternoon. It never really got cold, but I still wore a jacket to school, hood up, Wellington boots on my feet. In the corridors, outside the classrooms, it stank of wet clothes and damp shoes and usually we stayed inside at break times, hanging around in the corridors or eating our sandwiches at the grubby formica tables in the cafeteria. The older students congregated in the toilets and smoked secretly in the cubicles, which meant we had to hold it in until they’d had their last cigarettes and gone back to their classrooms. One boy in my class complained, but after he had had his arm twisted behind his back and his head held under the tap, we waited patiently in line until the seniors left.

In the afternoons I’d walk home through the tail-end of a shower, trying to avoid the ankle-deep puddles that had been lying there for days and seemed as if they would never go away. It rained so hard and so long that the water in the canals rose above the stone embankment and soaked the grass. In some places, the stones had been washed away and it looked as if some gigantic water beast had taken bites out of the banks. The trees were black with water, the streets were flooded, and one time it hailed so heavily that people on the street, their faces contorted in pain, ran for shelter in doorways and shops.