'It's absolutely true. And grasshoppers have theirs in the sides of their tummies. They are lucky to be able to hear at all because nearly all the vast hordes of insects on this earth are deaf as well as dumb and live in a silent world.'
On this Thursday, on this particular walk to school, there was an old frog croaking in the stream behind the hedge as we went by.
'Can you hear him, Danny?'
'Yes,' I said.
'That is a bullfrog calling to his wife. He does it by blowing out his dewlap and letting it go with a burp.'
'What is a dewlap?' I asked.
'It's the loose skin on his throat. He can blow it up just like a little balloon.'
'What happens when his wife hears him?'
'She goes hopping over to him. She is very happy to have been invited. But I'll tell you something very funny about the old bullfrog. He often becomes so pleased with the sound of his own voice that his wife has to nudge him several times before he'll stop his burping and turn round to hug her.'
That made me laugh.
'Don't laugh too loud,' he said, twinkling at me with his eyes. 'We men are not so very different from the bullfrog.'
We parted at the school gates and my father went off to buy the raisins. Other children were streaming in through the gates and heading up the path to the front door of the school. I joined them but kept silent. I was the keeper of a deep secret and a careless word from me could blow the lid off the greatest poaching expedition the world would ever see.
Ours was just a small village school, a squat ugly red-brick building with no upstairs rooms at all. Above the front door was a big grey block of stone cemented into the brickwork, and on the stone it said, THIS SCHOOL WAS ERECTED IN 1902 TO COMMEMORATE THE CORONATION OF HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS KING EDWARD VII. I must have read that thing a thousand times. Every time I went in the door it hit me in the eye. I suppose that's what it was there for. But it's pretty boring to read the same old words over and over again, and I often thought how nice it would be if they put something different up there every day, something really interesting. My father would have done it for them beautifully. He could have written it with a bit of chal
k on the smooth grey stone and each morning it would have been something new. He would have said things like, DID YOU KNOW THAT THE LITTLE YELLOW CLOVER BUTTERFLY OFTEN CARRIES HIS WIFE AROUND ON HIS BACK? Another time he might have said, THE GUPPY HAS FUNNY HABITS. WHEN HE FALLS IN LOVE WITH ANOTHER GUPPY, HE BITES HER ON THE BOTTOM. And another time, DID YOU KNOW THAT THE DEATH'S-HEAD MOTH CAN SQUEAK? And then again, BIRDS HAVE ALMOST NO SENSE OF SMELL. BUT THEY HAVE GOOD EYESIGHT AND THEY LOVE RED COLOURS. THE FLOWERS THEY LIKE ARE RED AND YELLOW, BUT NEVER BLUE. And perhaps another time he would get out his chalk and write, SOME BEES HAVE TONGUES WHICH THEY CAN UNROLL UNTIL THEY ARE NEARLY TWICE AS LONG AS THE BEE ITSELF. THIS IS TO ALLOW THEM TO GATHER NECTAR FROM FLOWERS THAT HAVE VERY LONG NARROW OPENINGS. Or he might have written, I'LL BET YOU DIDN'T KNOW THAT IN SOME BIG ENGLISH COUNTRY HOUSES, THE BUTLER STILL HAS TO IRON THE MORNING NEWSPAPER BEFORE PUTTING IT ON HIS MASTER'S BREAKFAST-TABLE.
There were about sixty boys and girls in our school and their ages went from five to eleven. We had four classrooms and four teachers.
Miss Birdseye taught the kindergarten, the five-year-olds and six-year-olds, and she was a really nice person. She used to keep a bag of aniseed balls in the drawer of her desk, and anyone who did good work would be given one aniseed ball to suck right there and then during the lesson. The trick with aniseed balls is never to bite them. If you keep rolling them round your mouth, they will dissolve slowly of their own accord, and then, right in the very centre, you will find a tiny little brown seed. This is the aniseed itself, and when you crush it between your teeth it has a fabulous taste. My father told me that dogs go crazy about it. When there aren't any foxes around, the huntsman will drag a bag of aniseed for miles and miles over the countryside, and the foxhounds will follow the scent because they love it so. This is known as a drag hunt.
The seven-and eight-year-olds were taught by Mr Corrado and he was also a decent person. He was a very old teacher, probably sixty or more, but that didn't seem to stop him being in love with Miss Birdseye. We knew he was in love with her because he always gave her the best bits of meat at lunch when it was his turn to do the serving. And when she smiled at him he would smile back at her in the soppiest way you can imagine, showing all his front teeth, top and bottom, and most of the others as well.
A teacher called Captain Lancaster took the nine-and ten-year-olds and this year that included me. Captain Lancaster, known sometimes as Lankers, was a horrid man. He had fiery carrot-coloured hair and a little clipped carrotty moustache and a fiery temper. Carrotty-coloured hairs were also sprouting out of his nostrils and his earholes. He had been a captain in the army during the war against Hitler and that was why he still called himself Captain Lancaster instead of just plain Mister. My father said it was an idiotic thing to do. There were millions of people still alive, he said, who had fought in that war, but most of them wanted to forget the whole beastly thing, especially those crummy military titles. Captain Lancaster was a violent man, and we were all terrified of him. He used to sit at his desk stroking his carrotty moustache and watching us with pale watery-blue eyes, searching for trouble. And as he sat there, he would make queer snuffling grunts through his nose, like some dog sniffing round a rabbit hole.
Mr Snoddy, our headmaster, took the top form, the eleven-year-olds, and everybody liked him. He was a small round man with a huge scarlet nose. I felt sorry for him having a nose like that. It was so big and inflamed it looked as though it might explode at any moment and blow him up.
A funny thing about Mr Snoddy was that he always brought a glass of water with him into class, and this he kept sipping right through the lesson. At least everyone thought it was a glass of water. Everyone, that is, except me and my best friend, Sidney Morgan. We knew differently, and this is how we found out. My father looked after Mr Snoddy's car and I always took his repair bills with me to school to save postage. One day during break I went to Mr Snoddy's study to give him a bill and Sidney Morgan came along with me. He didn't come for any special reason. We just happened to be together at the time. And as we went in, we saw Mr Snoddy standing by his desk refilling his famous glass of water from a bottle labelled Gordon's Gin. He jumped a mile when he saw us.
'You should have knocked,' he said, sliding the bottle behind a pile of books.
'I'm sorry, sir,' I said. 'I brought my father's bill.'
'Ah,' he said. 'Yes. Very well. And what do you want, Sidney?'
'Nothing, sir,' Sidney Morgan said. 'Nothing at all.'
'Off you go, then, both of you,' Mr Snoddy said, keeping his hand on the bottle behind the books. 'Run along.'
Outside in the corridor, we made a pact that we wouldn't tell any of the other children about what we had seen. Mr Snoddy had always been kind to us and we wanted to repay him by keeping his deep dark secret to ourselves.
The only person I told was my father, and when he heard it, he said, 'I don't blame him one bit. If I was unlucky enough to be married to Mrs Snoddy, I would drink something a bit stronger than gin.'
'What would you drink, Dad?'
'Poison,' he said. 'She's a frightful woman.'
'Why is she frightful?' I asked.