The tiny outhouse is uncomfortably cold as usual, the water supply kept from thawing by a paraffin lamp hung from the cistern. I silently curse my parents for this. We are in the age of moon landings, heart transplants and LSD and yet I have to put up with this.
When I've finished, my feet slide and slip to the back door. I go inside and up to my room to finish my homework, a French translation going the hard way from English to French: "It would have been possible for my father to find work had he but the slightest inclination to do so". That means at least a conditional tense and a subjunctive mood, well spotted, Etchells! I can see the red ticks in Mr J.'s corrected version already.
I move to my window and ponder further before committing my translation to paper. To the left, If I'm in luck, I shall see a vertical shaft of light, maybe five feet by six inches on the far wall of Mr Bradford's workshop. The light comes from the ceiling lamp in the entrance hall of his house and shines through the workshop door which has been left thrillingly ajar. One of the things that used to excite me, and still does, although Tchaikovsky and Charlie Mingus played on my Dansette tend to move me more nowadays, one of those things was to stand at my window and see this shaft of light become broken up by the shadow of Mr Bradford as he climbed the stairs to his workshop.
Three, four, five, six seconds of flickering blackness animated the wall until Mr Bradford switched on the room light, and the vertical movie disappeared and the magic was gone. Then Mr B., who was a dentist would sit at his workbench and settle down to making a pair of dentures from the wax moulds he got his toothless patients to bite on.
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