Отрывок из книги
There would be two Christmases for Jack that year. The second would be the usual arrangement of one child and three kings, the first a quite different encounter involving a slip of a girl and half the rulers of the earth. Coronation year in Britain - 1953 - was a time of pride hedged with the slight embarrassment of public falsehood. It was as if, in one of those medieval paintings of the Adoration, the king holding up the Christ child said, red-faced and foot-shuffling, ‘Er...actually ...It's a girl!’ Everyone pretended not to notice.
In the south of the Kingdom - not Queendom - of Britain, in a little village called Weylands, there lived a small boy called Jack. He was a quick, slight boy, dark-haired, light of frame with big earnest eyes that consumed the force of the rest of his body. He was not a pretty child but endearing, rather as terriers are endearing for their scruffy, self-absorbed determination in just being themselves. He was considered shy but that was simply because he seldom spoke unless he felt he had something important to say, so that his life would be fought against an encroaching ocean of silence that threatened to swallow him up in its depths and make him invisible. He did not feel himself at home in the world and sometimes was so puzzled by the ways of the people about him that he suspected he must be a cuckoo-child and whenever he thought he had understood the pattern of things, it would all suddenly unravel again, like the knots around a dropped stitch in knitting. He lived with his older sister Susan, younger brother Tom, mother, father and granny in what would later become a desirable cottage or artisan's dwelling suitable-for-conversion-to... It was currently a house of mean, yellowish bricks with a crumbly slate roof and a mainly dirt yard that had yet to recover from Jack's last attempt to dig through to Australia, looking for diamonds on the way. It was a house devoid of any charm or comfort. But at least it was a house.
.....
He took small back roads, mostly dark with just the odd light on the corners, muffled by trees. When he reached Heath Street, he dismounted, parked his own bike and wheeled Dick's softly to the front of Eva Frick's house. She had been getting above herself lately and needed bringing down a peg or two as well. Two birds with one stone. He leant the bicycle gently against the gatepost, like a man abandoning a baby and crept away on creaking toes, the light gleaming on the shiny seat of his trousers and his grinning teeth.
Like Queen Mary, granny had clearly never been properly young. The few pictures on the mantlepiece showed an uneasy girl mostly at banner-waving political demonstrations - Support the Miners, Second Front Now - looking off beyond the camera, someone yet to reach the age they had been designed for. She had spent the interim waiting for the Revolution that had been announced and was inevitably to come and fallen prey to grandad whom Jack had never met, dead before he was born.
.....
