The house was small, box-like; it contained a pokey sitting-room, so full of furniture that there was hardly room to stand up in it, and a still smaller kitchen that even the brand new, highly polished appliances, all cream and chrome, could not prevent from appearing dingy and ill-lit. The narrow staircase, after negotiating a backbreaking hairpin, carried you up to the two small bedrooms, which had the same overcrowded air as the downstairs chambers. Books were stuffed everywhere : paperbacks lay open, their spines broken, upon the floor, cheap histories of art, illustrated with miniaturized reproductions, were stashed into the crevices between dressing table and wall, monographs on the working conditions in motor-car factories nestled against journalistic accounts of life in the Soviet Union and volumes of literary criticism lined the mantelpiece above the chocked up fireplace.

A desk beside the window in the larger of the two rooms was piled with papers, beneath which could be discerned two or three filing trays in grey plastic, more symbolic than useful. In the smaller room, the walls were covered in highly-coloured childish daubs, representing houses, trees, birds and strange animals, unidentifiable to the adult eye. Here some, but by no means all, of the books, crammed into shelves or stacked upon a chest of drawers, were such as a readerly parent might employ to entice their offspring into literacy.

Beneath the window could be seen a lean-to shed, its tarred roof gleaming dully in the little sunshine that managed to filter its way into the back lot, supported by the wall of an oblong protrusion that seemed to have been added on to the house as an afterthought and which contained the bathroom and lavatory. Beyond that was a long, narrow garden, hardly wide enough to allow room for more than one row of struggling flowers or vegetables on either side of the concrete pathway that lead to the compost heap, sown by the railway viaduct. A brightly painted fence ran along one side of the garden, separating it from its neighbour, which, more spacious, was graced with an apple tree. On the other side, a red-brick wall stood so high as to prevent anyone's peeping over it, although whether this was to prevent outsiders from spying into the garden or to prevent the gardeners themselves from having a clear view of whatever lay on the other side must remain a mystery.

At around four o'clock of a weekday afternoon, a key would be thrust into the latch from the outside, the door would open, and a push-chair would enter, bearing a two-year old girl zipped into a yellow all-weather coverall, its hood lined with brown synthetic fur. This would be followed by a young woman who, steering the push-chair with one hand, tugged along behind her with the other a chubby, bright-faced boy of about four.

"Come on, Jeremy. In you come, before it starts to rain!"

Jeremy, who was expecting a drink of orange juice and some chocolate biscuits, was not fundamentally reluctant to comply with his mother's wishes, but a day at play-school had left him tired and a little irritable. The threesome swayed back and forth upon the doorstep for some moments in what seemed a gentle tug-of-war between the two children for possession of their parent. Inevitably, victory was accorded to the younger of the two, Jeremy notching this defeat up upon the tally-stick with which he recorded his daily humiliations, an operation which promised satisfaction in some obscurely perceived future. At present, he stood mute in the tiny hallway, while his mother unbuttoned his overcoat and peeled it off him, then watched as she unstrapped and unzipped his sister, feeling some compensatory satisfaction as an odour of warm urine rose from the little girl's clothing.

"Dear me, Amanda. You're rather wet, aren't you?"

His sister was borne off up the stairs, and he was left standing, his momentary triumph already snatched from him. As his mother turned the corner, he saw Amanda's face, her eyes staring into his. They remained thus locked to one another until she disappeared from view, whereupon he turned and pushed his way into the kitchen to get himself his snack.

Deborah and Andrew Cullingham had chosen their house with the same care for the future as they had chosen their children's names. They could have afforded something larger, more comfortable; they could have lived further away from the railway tracks. But their present address had the estimable advantage of enabling them to send their children first to a good playgroup, and subsequently to a reputable primary school, where their little friends would be well-brought-up and well-connected and where they would be taught to speak properly.

Deborah, whose speech retained traces of her secondary-modern childhood, regarded culture as something external to herself and which she would have to buy for her children in order to facilitate their entry into the world. Her attitude to educators of all kinds, which was similar to that of an unmechanically minded motorist reluctantly delivering his vehicle into the hands of a garage mechanic, was in part founded upon the idea that they possessed an expertise akin to that of any skilled tradesman and in part on the sense of personal inadequacy which her own schooling had instilled in her, a feeling tempered with some resentment towards members of the profession which had, she believed, reinforced her ignorance rather than enlightening her.

She looked upon the future academic success of Jeremy and Amanda as something of a revenge and as something of an apotheosis. Andrew, whose own upbringing had been such as to make his relationship to the dominant culture organic rather than instrumental, and who recognized, without condemning it, his wife's superficiality in this respect, wished to ensure that his children would share his own advantages; he was easily convinced of the utility of the material sacrifices that their decision entailed. In any case, he was confident in his own capacities, and believed that he would soon be able to afford a more agreeable home in the same neighbourhood.

Thus it was that Jeremy found himself, a social pioneer, well-scrubbed and well-turned-out, delivered every morning by his equally well-scrubbed and well-turned-out mother to the care of two bright young women who presided over a spacious many windowed room, furnished with all the requisite educational playthings, where he joined twenty or so other children, all as well-turned-out as himself. His mother would chat brightly to the bright young women for a minute or two, and would then kiss him good-bye, to return to the car where Amanda had remained strapped in the safety seat in the back.

At first, he used to watch the car disappear with a hard feeling in his chest for which he had as yet no words, but after some days, this feeling had seemed to liquefy, to spread itself through him, until it was a part of his being which no longer attached itself to any specific place or event. So, after the first weeks he would thrust his way into the mass of children almost before his mother had had time to plant a kiss upon his cheek, and seemed not to hear her last words of farewell.

Towards mid-morning, his mother would reappear at one of the large windows, along with all the other mothers, and he and his comrades would struggle into their overcoats, pull on their boots or shoes, leaving buckles and laces to be attended to by fingers more deft than their own, and jostle their way through the door. Deborah, deep in conversation, would grasp his hand with a rapid glance down as she felt him reach up to her, reserving for him a moment of full attention when they returned to the car, where she would kiss him and ask him about his morning. Sometimes, the words would well up in him and he would still be excitedly explaining what he had done to the plasticine when the car pulled up in front of the house. On other occasions he would pull his head into his overcoat and stare close-lipped in front of him.

"My, you are a grumpy old thing this morning!" his mother would exclaim. As far as he was aware, his mood on these occasions was entirely independent of the morning's activities. He noticed that Amanda seemed to share them for when he had nothing to say she, usually so loquacious, would stare at him in silence until they were back in the house, when she would begin to chatter to the dog or the cat, pulling them about in a way which they seemed strangely willing to put up with coming from her. Then he would go and sit in the children's bedroom until his mother called them for lunch. Sat on his bed, he would wait for the trains to pass over the viaduct, closing his eyes when they did so, the better to feel the rumbling vibrations that ran through his body.

While Jeremy was at the play-group and whenever Amanda slept, or would agree to play on her own in the bedroom, Deborah read. She read everything with a voracity that amused her husband. She would involve herself in her reading as she had used to throw herself into the television serials that were the staple of her parents' home. She struggled through "Tess of the d'Urbervilles", several times throwing the book to floor and raving at Angel Clare's stupidity. She sided vehemently with Becky Sharpe, much as she had rooted for the cat when watching Tom and Jerry cartoons. She signed up for evening classes at the local College of Further Education, where a young man with a sunken chest, who wore cashmere sweaters and very tight-fitting jeans, had tried to persuade her that there were no characters in the novels she read.

"But Deborah, it's just a text, just writing," he would repeat when she pronounced that Pip and Estella would never be happy together. But she knew better. The following year, she tried History. A tall young woman, with red hair and a quiet manner, who would become acidic when discussing Napoleon and warmly lyrical over Cobbett, instilled in her an excitement that she found difficult to explain to Andrew; she felt intelligent, cultivated, surer of herself. At a loss what to study next, she tried Sociology; a brash young man who wore a leather jacked and roll-neck sweaters demonstrated mathematically that the working classes were overexploited. She remained sceptical. One evening he read aloud in class the last radio messages broadcast by a sinking trawler, and she felt tears tugging at her eyelids; later she came to feel that he had been taking an unfair advantage.

Amanda started at the playgroup and Jeremy went on to Primary School. Jeremy felt closer to his sister now that she was no longer alone at home with his mother. Seeing Deborah plunged into her books, and having been informed by Amanda that Mummy read all the time, he came to feel sorry for his sister, even a little protective. After they had been put to bed, and they had heard the front door close on their mother, as she hurried off to her evening class, leaving Andrew to baby-sit, the boy would tell Amanda long involved stories about wolves and dragons. Such evenings, particularly in the lighter months of the year, seemed to last and last, for Deborah always put them to bed early when she was to leave the house, unwilling to bother Andrew or a baby-sitter with a task that she felt incumbent upon her alone. Their father would watch television; to his mind, reading was something that one got over and done with in adolescence and at university. Sometimes, if they made too much noise, he would shout up the stairs at them. When this happened, they would wait for five minutes or so and then begin again.

Amanda seemed to like listening to his stories as she cuddled up to him, for she would always creep into his bed, hug him and suck her thumb. But perhaps what she really liked was the sound of his voice. He would talk and talk, aware of the warmth of his sister's body, a warmth that he associated with the creatures of his imagination so that her light breath upon his neck became that of a snuffling tiger and the pressure of her hip upon his thigh invited him to mount upon some broad-winged bird and soar into the sky. And then he knew that he loved his little sister in a way that he had never loved anyone else and he would stop telling his story to turn and kiss her. "Go on," she would whisper, "go on. Don't stop," and he would resume his tale, riding the bird across the continents from adventure to adventure until she fell asleep. Later, when their parents came to bed, Amanda would be lifted from one bed into the other and then Jeremy, awakened by the movement, would roll over into the warm patch that she had left behind her.

His mother would still take him to school and come to collect him at the end of the day, but as the school was further away than the play-group had been, he no longer came home for lunch. During class-time, much seemed familiar to him; the bright young women of the play-group had been replaced by other bright young women, the toys were very little different and although now he knew that he was learning things, learning to read and to write and to do sums, the atmosphere was still one of sedate playfulness. The teachers emanated a calm which reminded him of his mother.

But there were also other, different times, when supervision was lighter, when the whole schoolful of children would rush about, shouting wildly, jumping at each other and at nothing, rolling over each other, throwing balls, skipping over ropes, climbing the tree at the southern end of the playground and scattering their comrades with blossom, or playing marbles in the sandpit. These times excited him; he would join the other children in their games, would lose himself in the whirling crowd, run and jump, push and shove with the others. But then a peremptory fear would come over him, and he would retire to the schoolroom wall, close to one of the supervisors, and watch.

He didn't know quite what he was frightened of. There was little open cruelty amongst those carefully raised children. What fights there were were brief and bloodless. Rarely would an elder boy pick on a younger, rarely would a group gang up on an outcast. It was not the others who frightened him; rather it was a sudden feeling of emptiness which seemed to open in his chest without warning. Emptiness. Now he had a word for it, a word connotative of hunger, of food not given. In the midst of this festivity, of the cell-contained revelry, of social feasting, he suddenly would feel that no place had been set for him, and would drift from the centre of things; to lean, hands behind his back, against the wall.

This sentiment never lasted long. Catching sight of one of his favourite classmates, one or two of whom had moved from the playgroup at the same time as himself, he would grin and give a short high-pitched squeal, rendered interesting by a kind of bubbling trill that he added to it with his tongue, which no other boy in the school was capable of reproducing, and rush off as gaily as if he had never felt the earth rolling from under his feet. His teachers noticed nothing untoward in his conduct; indeed his progress in reading and writing was held to be excellent, one or two of his compositions being read out to the class as models, and pinned to the wall.

His first real schoolfriend was Jonathan. Jonathan was rather taller than he, with short-cropped blond hair, a long face and ears that stood out on either side of his head. Jonathan was perversely proud of these ears, refusing to grow his hair long despite his mother's pleading. He even went so far as to encourage his friends to call him Radar, and would, at the drop of a hat, claim to be a space satellite, emitting a series of bleeping noises, to which Jeremy would respond with his own special squeal. Thus they would circle the play-ground, bumping into others of a like mind and drawing twenty or so small boys into an immense spatial battle.

The centripetal force which Jonathan exercised upon his entourage, the life which he infused into all of his doings, seemed to Jeremy to lift him up and out of himself, to remove him from that hollowness which threatened him so obscurely. When Jonathan lead the dance, there was not time to gather the fear to your belly; it could be dismissed with a flick of the head, thrust out with the shrill burbling with which he rallied to Jonathan's marshalling bleeps. So through the playtimes and lunch breaks, he and Jonathan span and turned, turned and span, feet leaping from the asphalt, spraying sand from the pit, heads in a universe of stars, a universe first borrowed from the films that their fathers would bring home for them from the video club, and then transfigured by their boyish imaginations into a realm isomorphic but not isonomic to their school playground.

One day, to his excitement, he was invited to stay the night at Jonathan's. It was to be the first night he had ever spent away from home. On leaving for school in the morning, he took a small grip bag containing freshly laundered pajamas, a toothbrush, soap and a crisp, warm-smelling flannel, a towel and clean clothing for the next day. That evening, he passed through the school gates with his friend, to be met by the latter's mother, a tall, pale woman with long dark hair and deep red lips. Jeremy thought her very beautiful. She greeted the two boys with a warm smile.

"Well, hello, you chaps. I suppose you are Jeremy?"

"Yes," Jeremy held out his hand. "How do you do, Mrs. Baxter."

Mrs. Baxter shook hands with him. Then she turned and lead them to the car, holding the door open while they climbed in. On the way back to the house, Jeremy was silent, contemplating the back of Mrs. Baxter's head while Jonathan told his mother a selection of his day's experiences. As they drew up the drive to the Baxter's house, Jeremy felt a tremor of awe. He had known, of course, that there were houses bigger than his own, but he had not thought that anyone he knew lived in such a place as this. To his eyes, it was immense, a veritable mansion, almost a fairy-tale castle. The plants growing up the wall startled him, the huge darkened windows startled him, as did the massive oak door, with its brass knob and bell-pull.

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