The pond

He milked his victory until teatime. He said he would not 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, announcing we might seen them come out the lorry so we did not need to see them again. Neither was he the smallest bit interested in our own belongings, so we took him down the pool, our half-acre shangri la.

There's tench 'n roach, we said, pointing thru the scum and oil slicks into its few stinking 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 larger pools than this soiled 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 announced, I'm not fishing here for a good starting point. I bet it's full of illness. I'll fish in Moat Park Lake in Maidstone whenever I want. It's over a mile long...

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

It was not his place to humiliate and criticise like that. Our village wasn't his place at all and the sooner we discovered a way to show him the better. We tried not troubling with him, but childhood knows few resolutions. Boys spin like weathercoks and have more faith in the moment than the principle. By chance our everyday life excluded him by nature ; fishing illness ridden ponds ; exploring which meant wading up a 2 mile stretch of sewer stream where you were not allowed 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 probably did join in occassionally, and he was immune to our own efforts at swagger. He just wornout us with his ball-hogging and wild shots at easy goalies wearing spectacles, his unsporting yorkers, his boasting about his famous past. He never produced anything which impressed us for its actual skill, and any obvious 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 own, but I never went along. Daz claimed he rode like Cycling talent, barking out the guidelines of the road, coming back home alone, abandoned and ostracized after reaching the destination regardless, like a missionary. He never did fish down the pool, but he began to spoil Ockley Pool instead. This was a little mill-stream waterfall full of wild trout and eels which we all shared with good grace, more or less. But Milky started getting bites whenever we weren't looking. Then one day he caught a two-pounder, only not one 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 anybody seeing. 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 ?

ridiculing 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 would been nowhere. We did not want to go anywhere, but Milky's unusual language mocked 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 dad 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 debates.

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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