Let Right Be Done

Chapter one.

September 1944.

Everything about him was wrong; a boy like him didn't belong in a place like this. He rested his face against the ornate iron railings wondering how they had escaped being taken down and used to build spitfires earlier in the war. He swallowed hard clamping down on his memories, he didn't want to think about the war. The railings were in perfect harmony with the large Neo Gothic building they surrounded. The Victorians had loved the elaborate and this building was a lasting monument to that era; imposing, grandiose and to a child on his first day at school, daunting. In parts it reminded him of a church, which wasn't surprising as it had been built by the Church almost a hundred years earlier. He shivered slightly he had no time for the Church or God, not anymore. He lived in a Victorian building but a world away from this one. It was one of hundreds of two up two down houses, built back to back and stretching for mile after mile. They were homes for the miners whose job it had been to dig out the coal that fuelled the industrial revolution. Now they were little more than slums, a place where dirt, grime and death were daily companions.

The children in the playground were different from the kids he knew. Their posh accents sounded strange and unfamiliar to his ears. Their uniforms were smart and their shoes polished. He fingered his own uniform; they'd know it was a hand me down, not shiny and new like the other first years. They'd know that his mam qualified for relief. They wouldn't know why and even if they did it wouldn't stop them picking on him. He tugged at the sleeve of his blazer, it was two sizes too big, but it had to last and he was growing like a weed in the vegetable plot on his granddad's allotment. That was another thing that was wrong everything about him was too long; from his Romanesque nose and gangling body with feet too big for themselves, to the length of his hair.

He watched as a young boy walked into the school grounds. He was small and undoubtedly a first year. His uniform was also too big but that was where the similarities with him ended. This boy's uniform was so new that it was possible to still see all the creases where they'd been folded in the shop. He fairly bounced through into the school yard an eager smile on his face. A cow lick of hair on the crown of his head refused to lie flat spoiling the image of neat precision. He belonged there, Ricky Deeming thought, unlike me. He walked along the railing dragging his hand against the iron bars to the arched and gated entrance. If it weren't for his mam he'd skive off for the day, but she wanted this for him. When the teacher at his junior school had said he should sit the scholarship exam she'd been that proud. She'd hugged him until his ribs ached and kissed him till he'd turned pink with embarrassment. That night she had written a letter to his dad; it might be months before he received it but she wanted to tell him anyway. That was the trump card she'd used that morning when he had told her he didn't want to go. She'd reminded him of how his dad had felt when he had heard that his son had passed the exams for grammar school. He had to go, she said, to honour his dad's memory.

It was later in the day that he saw the boy with the shiny new uniform in the playground. He knew his name now, John Bacchus; he was one of those annoying little twerps who sucked up to the teachers offering to clean the board and collect the books at the end of the lesson. It was a wonder his arm hadn't fallen off the amount of times it had been in the air during the day.

Ricky had been right about Anderson Street Grammar School, he didn't belong there. The posh mummy's boys in his class were a world away from him. They'd had a spelling test with words he'd never heard of; oddly enough he could spell them but didn't know what half of them meant. The teacher whod asked his name at the beginning of the day had called him Richard trying to make him like the other posh boys in the class. He'd shaken his head in despair at his lax manners and strange speech. Don't talk he'd said until you have learned to speak properly but his eyes had widened in surprise when he realised that he had got full marks in both the spelling and maths tests. Ricky had gained a lot of satisfaction at the look of surprise in the teacher's eyes. Yeah I may not talk as posh as you but I am not a thick navvy either, he thought. He made a vow to himself right then, if he stayed at the school, and that was far from certain, he would never learn to speak with a plum in his gob just so he would fit in. He was proud of his roots; to change his accent would be to admit to a shame he did not feel.