Honky Tonk

1. Eleven-plus

My Dad used to pull out his own teeth.

I first saw him do it with a pair of pliers when I was eleven. He and Mum were getting ready to go and be talked to by my headmaster about my Eleven-Plus result.

'You just watch this, Larry,' he said as he propped up his shaving mirror above the scullery sink. 'After you see this, you'll know there ain't nothing what hurts what'll hurt you.'

Dad didn't pronounce his aitches. Nobody I knew of in running distance of the Old Kent Road did. And our th's were f's or v's. So that 'nuffin could 'urt my faver', I could write here. But I won't.

I stood on a wooden chair behind him so that I could see better. Mum stood ready in her best coat, the one the war damage department gave her because we'd lost everything in the bombing.

'Hurry up, Perce,' she said. 'I can't stand here waiting for you all day. One of these days I'll wait till I'm in me box.' I didn't know why she called him Perce when his name was Herbert. Everyone called him Perce.

'There was I, waiting at the church.' Dad sang the first line of one of his favourite songs. 'Didn't leave you in the lurch, though, like the one in the song, did I, Alice, mate? Well at least you'll be in your box with all your teeth in,' said Dad as he prepared to lever the pliers. 'The false lot what that dentist give you.' He laughed as he levered. That was a way he had to put up with difficulty of any kind. He laughed, or seemed to.

And the tooth was out and in the sink. Dad cupped his hands under the tap, slooshed his mouth out and wiped it with the towel Mum handed him. He looped his starched collar round the top of his best shirt and slipped in the collar-stud.

'There we go, mate. Ready, then?'

I was trembling a bit because I didn't know what Mr Binstrop, the headmaster, had to say about me. What did that letter mean? My sister Dot had read it out aloud to all of us round the Sunday tea-table. She knew what 'failed the Eleven-plus' meant, so did my other sister Lilly and her husband Bill, as well as Mum and Dad. It must have been important. Why should the school have sent it by post?

Dad put on his trilby, which Mum had been holding for him, and we were off, up the linoed corridor to the front door, out onto the street opposite the Bible Factory, which had seen better times but at least it was still there and giving out jobs after the V2s. Cowan Street now was a bit like Dad's teeth – all gaps where the bombs had dropped until three years ago. I liked the gaps between the two-storey terraced houses. They were my playgrounds, you could find so much there, not like the flat asphalt outside school.

We passed bombsites now, Mum and Dad arm-in-arm and me running on ahead swinging round the lamp posts and hopscotching over the pavement squares between the copings and the gutter. It was Friday and the printing firm had given Dad half a day off for the parents' meeting. There were other couples, all dressed up to the nines and walking arm-in-arm towards Scarsdale Road Primary School. Nobody said very much, just 'Ullo.' The boys in my class ran on and off the bomb-sites imitating Spitfires andMesserschmitts and the girls tittered, staying close to their mums and dads.

Something different was up today.

Nobody even glanced at Mr Duncan's corner sweet shop or thought of the sticks of liquorice and the sherbet twists and the glass jars of allsorts and jelly babies. None of us thought of a game of leapfrog or of levering back the plank fence of Mr O'Brian's corner yard where he kept his homing pigeons. We were all on our best behaviour, just showing off our air-fighter skills, but not shooting each other down today. Something we didn't understand was about to happen.