It seemed like summer had been going on for months, but it was just starting to warm up. Every day I watched from my window as school kids went past: shirts untucked, socks around their ankles – hair, soaked with sweat, sticking out like blonde and brown pavlovas, shorts held up by nothing but hips, ice clunking in water bottles wrapped in tea towels, brown faces, shoelaces undone and legs streaked with paint and blood from scabs picked during long, hot grammar lessons. My uniform had been ironed paper flat and hung up in my bedroom on a large brass hook. Every morning Mum would come in and say, Okay, school . . . and I’d reply, Just another day. Just another day. Until finally she lost patience. ‘No, today, Henry. It’s been a week. You’ll fall behind. Don’t you want to get there and make some new friends?’ No. So there I was, on the Wednesday of the second week of school, dragging my feet along Thomas Street, stopping and picking up a cast-iron Panzer but discarding it when I saw it didn’t have wheels or tracks.
