She didn’t want him to change; she simply wanted him to be happy and to fit in

A group of boys from the Gorbals play among the gravestones of the Corporation Burial Ground in Rutherglen Road, 1940s ©Getty Images

 

Like all the children in the neighbourhood, Charles played outside all day long unless it was raining. It was expected as he would otherwise have been in the way. For as long as he could remember he had been fetched at some point most days for this by his cousin Gwennie, who lived down the road by the river and the cottage where he was born, but which they’d left in a hurry because of rats. He loved her unquestioningly although she was older than him so was apt to treat him like a long-suffering doll, to be tugged here and there, dressed up, undressed, told off and co-opted into complicated games. With the instinct of any small defenceless animal, he quickly sensed she was his protector as well as a major source of treats. If she did not come for him first, he would seek her out.
(p. 61*)

Because he didn’t have a job like other fathers, the daily walk was what he did. He could only walk very slowly, so he wouldn’t get out of breath or too hot, but he did a lot of stopping to look at things and talk about them instead, so that the slowness was sort of hidden unless you knew to look for it.
(p. 61*)

The boy had to take a few knocks to fit in, he reminded her. She had not forgotten the rough and tumble of the schoolyard and knew Charles was just the kind of boy to be picked on. Even without the glasses he was too keen, too trusting, too ready to speak. She was glad he had Gwennie and tough little Bridie in the seniors to keep an eye on him, but he lacked male protection and playgrounds were tribal in the way boys and girls separated out. If he continued to play with girls the way he always had, the boys would be brutal. Some of the girls would, too, in time. She didn’t want him to change; she simply wanted him to be happy and to fit in. When he twice won top marks in a test she was thrilled and proud, naturally, but she was also fearful.
‘Be careful with that cleverness of yours,’ she warned him. ‘Sometimes the clever thing is not to seem too clever.’
(p. 68-69*)

He would never be like his cousins. She had to accept and embrace that. He would always be different, and less trouble in some ways and far more of a worry in others. He would, she realised, probably never be like everyone else, never be normal, and the butcher’s boy would probably not be the last to be maddened by his brilliance.
(p. 77*)

He wasn’t especially clever – really clever children didn’t have to work so hard – but he paid close attention. You were never asked anything in a test you hadn’t already been told; the trick was to pay attention and he had discovered he was naturally attentive. Most boys were as easily distracted as puppies.
(p. 78*)

Then Joe floated too and soon they were playing a game where they touched their feet, sole to sole, and each tried to push the other. Other boys played games like this all the time, pushed each other around, wrestled, chased balls or chickens or dogs or one another. When not obliged to sit still in class and listen to a teacher they seemed to spend their days like so many puppies, tumbling over each other, testing their strength, establishing who was leader. The simple, playful sensation of Joe’s bigger feet pressed against his acted on Charles like a stolen teaspoon of Mother’s liver salts, and brought on a kind of fizzing in him.
This unfamiliar sensation, he realised, was friendship, a thing he had witnessed and read about.
(p. 91*)

Best of all, every step away from its station into its bustling heart was a step nearer anonymity, a state that was still a precious thrill after growing up in a place where everyone was known. In Launceston locals couldn’t relax on meeting a new person until they had <<<<placed<<<< them, reassuring themselves the stranger was not strange at all, being Boy So-and-So’s cousin. To live and work there was to know yourself constantly observed and reported on.
(p. 128*)

She had always hoped for a clever, special boy and he had grown into a clever, special man, which meant he could be prickly and difficult and knew exactly how best to wound her with his sharp tongue. If he had been ordinary, or what Miss Bracewell called ‘low wattage’, he’d have been married by now, like several of his contemporaries, and lost to her that way, and probably risking his health in the iron foundry, sawmill or tanneries.
There were often times now when she looked at Charles, or more often at his firmly closed bedroom door, and remembered the tale of the foolish woodcutter and his wife whose magically granted wishes all came true but in unexpectedly wrong ways.
(p. 145*)

Laura scooped Fred up, stilling his cries by letting him wail then mumble into the warmth of her neck as she rocked him against her, delighting in the warmth of him and the indefinable smell, somewhere between rising dough and newly baked shortbread, coming from the top of his blond head. It was the smell she remembered from when Charles was that age, a smell nature had surely perfected for enslaving women over the centuries. Whenever she came across women who seemed offhand or even cold with babies, she always wondered if their noses were faulty.
(p. 173*)

The last pages of good novels and last scenes of good plays invariably left him with a kind of sorrow that they were nearly over, and a childlike frustration at being left outside the story and returned to his own life.
(p. 254*)

*according to my reader

Patrick Gale - Mother's Boy (Tinder Press, 2022)