Sketches, Dispatches, Hull Tales and Ballads - University of Hull

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nine years, two months, and a day. He was delighted with his newly
pronged jaw and his old, rich, varied diet. He wanted to try
everything, wanted to think that no morsel now was beyond his
range. Granted, he had acquired a strange taste for beetroot scurf
and briars from the boscage, but he was not concerned. The
operation had been painful, and eating too had been a crucifixion
for a while. He had cried, in pleasure and agony, before bowls of
sickly semolina and mugs of hot tea; but he nay mind, he said, for
the salt in his tears came from sausage and bacon, and other things
that taste as good as that. When he had raced his last goat of the
summer, though, and bred the last of his woodlouse dynasty, his real
problems began. ‘Some might say,’ he said, ‘my history began.’
School began. In poor New Testament Greek the other children
swore at him freely. They jeered at him and stole his books, and
would-not-play with him. He was an outcast. They said he was a
rodent, a bloody gnawer. Soon he was just a boy alone in a
graveyard, picking at turf with cuts of flint, and daring the dead to
rise out of their boredom and drag his willing body to a harsh New
Testament hell. While he dug the graveyard turf alone, and
whispered dares to the dead through the cracks in the earth that he
made, other children’s voices menaced from the playground’s
toothless, lisping warzone.
Very soon Adam started suffering from too much grasp. He
grasped that his status in the village was the lowest, and that his
mother’s was the lowest next to him. He grasped that to his friends
he was a joke, and to his elders an experiment. He grasped that he
was both fatherless and all-too-many-fathered, and started looking
for his own face in the faces of the beetrootmen (whose visits were
now less and less frequent). He was no longer met by his cousin on
the way to school.
‘They’d all just come out from getting their syringes,’ he said. ‘I’d
scunged in the back way, not wanting to know them,’ he said, ‘just
wanting to get on with the lessons and get out.’
We asked him to explain ‘syringes’.