He was loud, rude, undisciplined, and entirely too intelligent for his parents, whom he ruled with incontinence and screaming. I remember the time when, at dinner, he spat in the mashed potatoes, and how my father sat in silent smiling fury through the whole affair, since it was the little snot’s house we were visiting, and it was the little snot’s mum who had mashed the spuds he’d spat in, and it was their gold-rimmed dish that continued, untaken, around the table, so that a proper punishment was far outside his jurisdiction. One afternoon, both his parents having to sing in the matinee of something by Gilbert and Sullivan, the Kaiserling (as my father called him) was fobbed off on me. We were playing with trucks and trains in the living room, just at the feet of my father, who was trying to read and at the same time obliterate our presence by opening the evening paper widely across his face, thus disappearing behind its sheets. Suddenly (on what provocation I cannot recall, if there was one) the Kaiserling hurled a cast-iron dump truck through the headlines, piercing them the way a trained tiger leaps through a circle of paper flames, and raising a red welt the precise size of the barrow on my father’s brow, before the entire toy fell against the base of a floor lamp with what seemed to me a terrible crash.
