The pool

He milked his victory until teatime. He announced he wouldn't let the likes of us have a go on any of his things : Not on my nelly. He would not even bring them out to show us, asserting we'd seen them come out the truck so we did not have to see them again. Neither was he the smallest bit interested in our own effects, so we took him down the pond, our half-acre paradise.

There's tench 'n roach, we said, pointing through the scum and oil slicks into its few stinky feet of green water. We loved our pool, its rats and stunted fishes, cats, frogs and sticklebacks.

Well, whaddya fink ? We asked, really hoping his clever tackle might hook its best.

it's simply an old dump, he announced. Christ, I've fished in bigger pools than this filthy old rat-hole. Look, it's full of rusty prams.

So what ? We said, not bothering to mention Don Ham's stock auto parked on the bottom.

Jeepers creepers, Milky said, I'm not fishing here for a start . I bet it's full of disease. I am able to fish in Moat Park Lake in Maidstone whenever I need. It's over a mile long...

Milky was not even a seven-day wonder. By teatime even big-heart skinny unpopular Milky's courage. Milky called him a clot and shot him up the arse with his very own catapult, snapping the elastic and saying it was not much cop if it wasn't rubber, like his own toy-shop window Diawa.

It wasn't his place to humiliate and criticize like that. Our village was not his place at all and the earlier we found the way to show him the better. We tried not bothering with him, but infancy knows few resolutions. Boys spin like weathercoks and have more belief in the moment than the principle. By chance our everyday life excluded him by nature ; fishing disease ridden pools ; exploring which implied wading up a two mile stretch of sewer stream where you were not permitted to put your welly on the bank until the end. Anything mucky and he'd stay in the garden polishing his bike with Turtle Wax.

But he did join in now and again, and he was impervious to our own efforts at swagger. He just tired us with his ball-hogging and wild shots at easy goalies wearing glasses, his unsporting yorkers, his boasting about his famous past. He never produced anything which impressed us for its tangible talent, and any clear fluke or mis-kick was met with his pet bluster : I did that on purpose.

a couple of times he got up a bike ride or a fishing trip of his very own, but I never went along. Daz said he rode like Cycling proficiency, barking out the guidelines of the road, coming back home alone, deserted and ostracized after reaching the destination regardless, like a missionary. He never did fish down the pond, but he started to spoil Ockley Pool instead. This was a small mill-stream waterfall full of wild trout and eels which we all shared with good grace, more or less. But Milky started getting bites each time we were not looking. Then one day he caught a two-pounder, only none of us were there at all . The largest we'd ever seen was about 12ozs. Down Bodiam he lost a biggun, somehow right under our eyes without any of us noticing. Anything we caught he called a tiddler. And meanwhile his supremacy gleamed in the sunshine as our cane rods warped, our unoilable reels clacked like a flock of ducks. Him and his ball-bearing precision world was even having our dopey mums say : Why can't you act like that nice Melvyn for once... What, lie and cheat and ridicule ?

mocking he shone at.. Old Egdod Makchap he'd call Dodge Packham. I was Cirdec Yill, to become Sir Deck Yill. I didn't get it so he called me a gib loof.

Ask me where my Dad's been working, he'd say.

Where ?

No, not Ware, Hoo and he'd howl at our ignorent expressions. We might heard of none of these places. We might been nowhere. We did not want to go anywhere, but Milky's strange language ridiculed our hamlet world. He was beyond us and he knew it.

Ynnicks tog a wen skid-lid morf retap Ynnicks...

We had no use for this sidewinding language. We spoke in our own tongue which till then had not let us down. Milky made us doubt ourselves, like our flies were always undone and he was looking down and catching us out. His pop even let him say bloody so long as it was in that cowboy drawl, claimed in humour and never in annoyance. And he'd point at Skinny's feet on the turf and say : Sod, with intended results, the English lesson which always followed hurt arguments.

It was August Bank Holiday, and Secondary Modern was a week away. We went up the crossroads to watch all the cars back from the coast jam on Highgate Hill. Dodge’s big brother Malc was jossed up astride the railings with a massive radio on his shoulder like a coal sack, the music scraped out into the hot, dry leaden dust as Malc jerked his neck and shoulders like a chicken, half chewing, half singing :

And they called it...purppy lur-ur-ur-urve....

Then Milky went by with his fishing rod, put away in the cloth bag, a green fishing harversack on his shoulder.

« Cawt any old boots lately ? » Malc shouted out.

« I caught a one and a half pounder ».

« What wazzat then, a surgical boot ? »

« No, a brown trout, fathead ».

Malc shoved the radio at me and went to leap off the railings at him. But it was hot, there was a wave of glaring Anglias and Cortina’s all inching forward and everyone was watching. What a time for Milky to drop his bombshell on us. I had to admit, that ponce had nerve.

« My dad’s complained to the council », he said. « About the pond. He said it’s dangerous and unhealthy, so they’re going to fill it in... »

« We’ll fill you in first, » I said, knowing it wouldn’t do any good, knowing that this time we’d better do something or Milky White was going to ruin our lives.

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