We were about as bad as it got back then. A family down from the city. Handsome daddy, far too pretty mommy, and two boys, just around that age. Arriving with a rush and buying one of their old cottages - the one done up by a property developer who had bought it far too cheap from the mad old widow's imbecilic son less than a week after she had died. I know she was mad because the lady next door told me that she used to hear her singing to her cooking pots. Copper beauties hanging in a row - polished and incorporated as a 'feature' above the black range. Worst thing was, the neighbour claimed that she had heard them singing back. A metallic choir: starting from a 'milk-pan high' and ending at a 'stew-pot low'.

     Of course, she told me this after my mother had fled taking my brother along with her and father had returned to the solace of contracting work and equally lonely men. For five days a week, until he sometimes came home, I walked down those fancy Swedish stairs trying not to imagine they were narrowing and dampening again: slowing my descent just in case the pine and marble had been crowded out by a darker, older style: while always keeping one ear cocked for that first whisper of harmony to the rock music I played non stop, from any or all of those gaping, tainted mouths.

     At first, it was going to be our dream cottage. Everyone in the village probably supposed that we had bought it as a holiday home. They could live with that. 'Grockles' were a good source of summer income. Welcome to come and take a look: but not to stay too long: and definitely not to touch.

     But we were really a family on the run. Not that my brother, Ricky, or I knew about that. We just knew that we had been uprooted from our first and last years at senior school, from our best friends, everything.

     It really came home that first day at our new school. Years and years later someone would say to me, "If you want to find a fool in the country, best you bring him with you city-boy." By that time I would have learned in certain matters it was more than a fact. Back then, walking into my class for the first time, trying hard not to believe what I was seeing and hearing, I would have judged that statement as far from the truth as I felt from any comfort.

     We had been to a good school - strict you would say now: perhaps even barbaric, sadistic maybe. Two hours in the barnyard chaos that passed for a classroom felt worse to me than all the canes and straps tied together. I was sure, as I spotted my brother in the playground, that it must have been exactly the same for him. He was easy to find because he was the only other person standing alone. I walked toward him, thinking that perhaps his being three years younger might make it even harder to take. He saw me coming, looked away and moved quickly off. And it would not be an exaggeration to say that we've never really come together since.

     By lunchtime he was sitting, and had been accepted, by what turned out to be two of the roughest, most hillbilly boys in the whole school - drew him like a magnet. That night he would announce that he was going out 'rabbiting' and that his friend, Stan, had said, "There was some gert ones on the flatlands."

     I think that my father may have grinned. If he had, it could only have been because his wife looked so shocked and disturbed. He hated killing: "If you are not capable of creating life what right have you to destroy it?" One of his statements when we had requested air guns and then been allowed them to decide for ourselves. This was also the man that had walked us out of King Lear in Stratford because the director had chosen to present a version in modern English.

     Within a month Ricky was 'gerting' and turning grammar on its head with the worst of them. He was also killing most things with fur or feather, and then going out with 'skimming nets' and mopping up the fish from the edge of the tide. Ricky stated that he never wanted to leave Somerset in his whole life and I saw our mother place a hand on his shoulder as if she was proud of this adjustment.

     I made my first friend. He lived in the village and I had noticed him walking alone. We got to meet in the newsagent's and one of the only two shops in the place. We were both trying to find a book at the same time. His name was Rupert and he preferred John Wyndam to H.P. Lovecraft which I found hard to figure. I noticed he was shy and nervous when I took him home. "Is that your mom, Vinny ?" he asked when he heard me call her 'Connie'. "She is beautiful," Rupert said when I told him that indeed she was.

     Later, when I met Rupert's mother, it was easy to understand why mine stood out so strongly for him. She looked like some ancient more timid version of her son - his shadow almost, caught in too bright a light fighting to stay visible. They both kept staring out through the window of their pretty cottage. And though I could tell that she was pleased her son had a friend, she was desperate for me to leave. The other strange thing I noticed was that though there was shelf after shelf of display area there was not a single piece of porcelain anywhere, not a plate or cup on two large dressers, or any glass in what had once been an ornate mirror.

     The reason for their broken spirits and home arrived as I was leaving. Bike-riding, cider alcoholics were a local phenomenon back then. Probably already endangered: possibly extinct by now. Some of them could even be described as characters. Kind eccentrics. Like 'The Marshall' who wore a silver star and carried a replica Colt 45 'peacemaker' and would draw on tourists if challenged. He was also famous for roping his bike up outside the pubs and sometimes even taking it a glass of cider and throwing it over the saddle, "Maybe that'll keep you quiet now you bugger." There was also the mean ones, dangerous and unpredictable.

     Gunner was one of them. He had tried to ride his sit-up-and-beg bike along their garden path and fallen sideways into the edge. He looked about a hundred years old in the face with a plaited wire skeleton barely able to fill the dark blue, threadbare suit he was wearing. His cheeks were coated in a white stubble that seemed soft enough to smooth, but his eyes though were on fire, blood-red coals burning in liquid, like larva erupting in the depths of an ocean. And he was drowning all right.

     A stink of rotting, fermenting apples enshrouded him. It is a sour, unforgettable stench. "Rupert," he hissed. "Give your sweetest papa a kiss on his dry mouth."

     "Go home," Rupert pleaded to me, "quickly."

     He did not have to ask twice. I kept my head low and bolted. But Gunner had seen me. After that I began to dread his returns. Going out he was always fine. He might even speak, " I suppose you will be playing with that naughty son of ours," he was likely to say if I happened to be out with either of my parents. On his creaking return from the shebeens or cider barns it would not matter who I was with:

     "Fucking grockles want to go home."

     "Do you know what I've just heard about your shagging mother?"

     Just a couple of his greetings. Rupert began to cross the road when he saw me and stare into the sky - for which, in truth I was grateful.

     Then Billy 'Boom-boom' Tanner arrived. And things would get better and worse.

     My mother had always claimed that she would only ever be truly happy in a little thatched cottage in Cornwall. I questioned, silently - as whatever must have began in the city intensified and spiralled toward its ending: Was this half-way house to blame? Would that extra distance have helped them? or did my father know that no change of place changes who you are? And that this place was far enough. I do not think I ever - or have managed to since - get an understanding of my father's emotions. He either hid them or did not have them. He preferred books to people, philosophy and reason to loud voices and force. And the only betrayal of his feelings after she had gone was a scrap of paper I found one day with a quote or thought scribbled on it: 'All experience if it does not leave you dead: leaves you a better person'.

     At first she claimed just to be bored with the quiet village and to need something else. The something else was a part-time job at the golf club, then wearing mini-skirts and going out a couple of nights a week on her own. These actions met with no reaction from her husband, except that he had started to enjoy the occasional bottle of beer - which was new. I could recall us once all sitting outside one of the canal pubs near our home in Birmingham. He pulled a face as he took his first sip of bitter. "Don't you like it dad ?" I had asked. "No," he replied. "Then why do you drink it?" "Because," he said staring at my mother: "it makes me feel happy." I remembered walking to the edge of the canal and looking into the green slow water streaked with oil, then feeling his hand on my shoulder as we both watched the series of lock gates seeping tears of water: one after the other, step by step, a liquid stairway to the sky.

     Then mother made a friend. Her name was Doreen, and in many ways she appeared to be her opposite. Where my mother was petite and feminine in an old movie magazine sort of way, Doreen was large and brassy and would have been selling the popcorn or tickets at any of those picture palaces. One thing they did have in common though were husbands that were being left behind in this game. Doreen's, I recognized the first time I was taken to visit for some unexplained reason, could easily be the future version of my father. This one had clearly given up the fight. Like some slug in a cardigan he was melded to a chair, his glistening trail of grease coated the back and arms of the green fabric to almost black. Doreen shoved a tray of greasier food onto his lap and beckoned for us to follow her,

     "I want you to meet my son," Doreen told me. They too were relative newcomers and though they had not moved from so far as us, they were still strangers here.

     "William," she called. "William."

     It sounded like someone calling a stubborn dog. The noise approaching sounded like one coming - a big one, very big.

     Billy was a couple of years older than me, she whispered before he arrived. He'd left school but was still unsure as to what came next. She wanted him to go to college, his father wanted him to do something with cars as he had always done. We both left the house without a word. "I'm 'Boom-boom'," he said giving me one of the warmest smiles I had ever seen. He was just over six foot tall and would have weighed in at about 220 LB. His hair was the colour and texture of well-dried barley straw, his eyes ice-blue and sparkling. The rest of his features looked battered. We shook hands - or rather, he tried not to crush my doll's hand in his paw.

     He had been a school boy, then his county's, boxing champion. He was fighting now at top senior amateur level and had higher aims which he kept close to himself all through our friendship.

     "I hate that dirty bastard," Boom-boom said after telling me about his sport: "I would rather die than end up living like that."

     We walked away together - joined by something that had nothing to do with physical or intellectual parity but was real and vital for us - even if we did not have a clear idea why.

     Mary and Catherine had also teamed up. Though they were local to the area they were as displaced as us. Early refugees from this invasion of new people and ideas. An invasion that - unlike the one which never came, though the pill boxes and concrete shore defences still waited - had arrived and was total in its objectives. I suppose it was inevitable that we should unite: though the combination less obvious.

     Mary was so slight and white with long, straight black hair, she always made you stop and stare, then walk a little softer, breath gentler, china making you the bull. I could almost see her dancing on the palm of Boom-boom's hand like in a fairy tale.

     Catherine looked what she was, or was, I might now understand, pretending or needing to be: the tart, whore, slag - all of these and more. She was my first. And though she claimed we had stopped being virgins together and that she loved me, I did not know or care if any of it was the truth.

     Anyway, while I was climbing down the drainpipe and sneaking, like some bucolic Mr. Hyde through the sleeping village just about every night, then meeting Catherine in one of the caravans out the back of her father's farm, Boom-boom had just about, he whispered to me and blushed, managed to unclip Mary's bra. I lied and told him that Catherine still kept hers on.

     He learnt the truth a short while later. I had decided to try and help my father who, in his growing frustration, decided to have a blitz on the neglected housework. We had lit a bonfire at the end of the garden. Boom-boom sat on the rails of our garden fence. He was bruised from a hard sparing session at his new gym in Bristol. "Mary is coming to watch me fight next week," he told me.

     "Great," I said, throwing on a bag of newspapers and magazines. I tried not to notice the soft porn magazines that would eventually end up replacing Dickens and the Russians and had recently started appearing in his room as his wife started disappearing. That was where he had tried to hide them and I'd sneakily found them: it was also where my father now spent most of his time. Boom-boom was about to fight the Welsh champion in his weight or something. I had never been asked to go or had any desire to do so.

     "Do you think," Boom-boom asked in a slow, shy manner: "that Mary or Catherine would cheat on us if we all ended-up getting married?"

     "Billy," I started to say, "I would not marry Catherine if she promised to stay faithful until hell freezes over and little devils skate on ice.." When this high-pitched, querulous voice interrupted from over the garden gate,

     "You have no right to light fires around here," he squealed, before opening the gate and letting himself in. "My poor wife is indoors choking now. All of us have had to close our windows."

     This old man, Mr. Smearl, lived in a cottage a short way from us. It was a neat little picture book sort of a place - similar to what you might see on a box of cheap candy. He had a quiet way of walking and watching that almost fooled you until you saw that his dog kept its tail down and his wife had a lot of nervous twitches,

     "Piss off," I breathed into the crackling of the fire.

     "I heard that," he said: "I heard that. Everything was peaceful around here until you lot arrived. Now you have spoilt everything. And don't think I haven't seen you sneaking out every night. You needn't kid yourself about that. And I know where you go. I followed. I am going to tell that little slut's father all about it."

     Boom-boom got to his feet and shadow boxed toward the man. I could see my father's face at the open window looking down as those punches and words entwined and curled out of the smoke.

     "You wouldn't have thought that old sod could have moved that fast," Boom-boom said standing by my side and watching another naked body writhe and burn.

     A week later the whole village probably knew about my adventures with Catherine - even before her daddy brought the police around. She had run away, he said, again. Did we know that she was a 'ward of the court?' "Fourteen years old," he said, his thick dull voice filling our front room as my father stood next to the huge village bobby who was fingering his belt knowing that a couple of swipes could still cure all of this. "She has broken up two marriages already." He laughed at the look he thought he saw cross my face at this. "I had to close my little caravan park down because of her games."

     My father spoke through him: " Vincent, do you know the whereabouts of Catherine?"

     "No," I replied, truthfully. "She may have gone to see Boom-boom fight - Mary was going."

     "Would you like to search our home?" My father asked them angrily, suddenly.

     "That will not be necessary," the policeman said. He almost had to drag the farmer toward the door. "There are a lot of changes these days," he told us all: "I suppose they are for the best."

     I closed the door behind them,

     "If that girl is in your wardrobe, or whatever, I suggest you send her home now." He walked out of the room without showing any anger or, which made me feel a new mature sadness, any flicker of the humour which had always been his foil and armour.

     Catherine was not in my room. Or as far as I was concerned at that moment, ever likely to be again. The night before, I had sneaked out to visit her. We had not arranged anything but I had been unable to sleep and felt horny. I guess Catherine must have been suffering from a similar feeling, because she was already in the caravan. I stood listening to it rock for a while, heard her small, urgent screams bleating across the marshland, and risked a peep through one of those dainty, floral curtains she had mocked her mother for making. Catherine had her skinny legs wide and high, her hands were clinging to the cheeks of a man's arse. An old man's arse. I did not care to try and recognize whose.

     I won first prize later that week at school for my story, 'A Night Rose'. It described the village at night, sleeping and at peace. The colours drained from the flowers, the scent gently lingering for the passing, lone dog fox to catch. The competition had been organized by the deputy headmaster, a huge fan of correct English, the semi-colon, short haircuts, and devoted supporter of Henry Williamson and his neglected 'Chronicles of Ancient Sunlight.' If, however, I thought that my sentimentalized bullshit had fooled him, he would have the last word. A short time after my mother had gone he came hurrying out of the lounge of the local pub as I walked home. I think he may have even been watching and waiting for me. He placed a reassuring arm around my shoulders, "You must forgive your mother," he said. "It doesn't matter what we teach you or try to make you believe: life is not a 'rose garden': sleeping or awake."

     Boom-boom won his fight the same week as the visit from the police. And was about to have another that he would win then lose forever.

     A collective cheer would have gone up when Sigfried Barr, the small-time property developer, failed to buy Widow Craddock's cottage a small way from ours, upon her death. 'Swimming bar', my family - when still that - had nicknamed him, on account of a tale he told us about the low retaining wall which ran around the first part of our back garden and had curious little steps leading up to the front and one side. "It is a swimming pool really," he'd assured us on our first visit to view the property. "I built it when I thought that I was going to reside here. But then, when financial circumstances meant that I must let this jewel go, I thought of the families with little children and had it filled in. You could easily dig down, though."

     We tried one time. My father and I with a spade each. A very short way through the layer of topsoil we hit the sand that must have ran all the way to the nearby beach. The retaining wall went down about another foot and that was all.

     "I guess he must have pulled the plug out," I said.

     "And it must have been one hell of a drain hole," dad said. And we stood laughing as Ricky and mother the other side of our desert mimed swimming strokes: all together having a glimpse of fun for one of the final times.

     I would judge that about a fortnight after Widow Craddock's heir-apparent arrived any of those cheers would have been easier to swallow than a mouthful of our pool water - and that Sigfried Barr could have been a saviour.

     'Crad'. He told the local newsagent that he'd shortened the name himself, because he didn't like 'docks'. The newsagent had apparently replied, "Who did ?" Then added: "But of course they are good for nettle stings." He would have been pleased to have been able to offer that bit of lore, I imagine: Crad, equally pleased to have had his suspicions confirmed that these yokels would be easy prey.

     Not that our first meeting could have been so reassuring.

     We had heard about him. "Down from the Big Smoke," the postman told everyone. He had witnessed their arrival and delivered some mail. A tall Cockney and his very 'handsome' wife. "A nice couple," he said. "Though there was not a stick of what you might call 'real furniture' in the back of the whole van."

     After that, uncertainty. A bit like the coming of the Martians in The War of the Worlds: nobody knew what was happening. The lady next door to us explained that their keeping the curtains closed all the time was their way of showing that they were still in mourning for the loss of a relative. Then strange, loud music began to fill the street day and night, causing everyone to slow or hurry past, depending on their nature, excepting for Gunner who parked his metal steed, and in place of any courageous preacher, went forth to bid welcome. Mary had told all of this to Boom-boom, whilst priming him up to talk to me about Catherine. We were stood together on the pavement quite near to the light of the local bus stop. "Mary said," Boom-boom continued: "that the door opened and Gunner went in. A minute later he shot out and pedalled off through the village in a perfectly straight line." Mary's father, the newsagent, had told her the last time he had seen that was when Gunner had come home on the troopship to his young bride-to-be.

     We must have been laughing about that when the hatch opened and the alien and one of his visiting mates sneaked out, because seconds later, silently, they were upon us.

     Boom-boom somehow managed to bring the talk around to Catherine and to deliver his message that she 'loved me'. He said it in such a child-like, pathetic manner that I was about to suggest he should start wearing a head guard more often when a dark shadow appeared to engulf him and carry him away. Crad and his gaunt, shaven-headed friend were out for a walk. Crad must had decided that this was a good moment to start staking his territory. He walked through Boom-boom without slowing down or looking back, carrying on his loud conversation to show how insignificant we were.

     Now, up until that moment I had never seen Boom-boom fight. The one time he had got me mad enough to give him a shove and put my fists up with the words, "Come on, then." He had just smiled, patted me gently on the fist and walked home. This time he landed from being barged and sprang back like a bear. His first punch pounded between Crad's shoulder blades and all of the wind came out of him like a sigh of recognition of what was about to happen. His friend sprawled next to me as Boom-boom cuffed him out of the way and span Crad around with a hook into the side of his head so that he faced him. "Help me, Denny," he called.

     "Stay down," I said, bracing myself. And he did. More, I realized out of what he could see was going down and what would be left over for him than out of any fear of me. Also, by the expression on his face, mirroring mine, out of shock. I had fought a few times in school playgrounds etc., seen a few street fights, and a hundred stage-managed Hollywood brawls, but this was the real thing. Savage and raw.

     I suppose, technically speaking, the only clean punch was the one that followed Crad having been turned. We heard and felt it land, saw the already-crumbling teeth spray out of the head as it jarred back to stare upwards into infinity. Then Crad threw himself around Boom-boom like a parting lover desperate to hold on. I saw my friend struggle for a while, uncertain what to do, waiting maybe for the referee or coach to call, 'break'. Then, it dawned on him that he was free. And he really came into his own.

     My father always had a story in those days to warn us. He must have seen more people ' loose an eye', 'have a hand off', or get 'choked with their own neckties' than your average big city police force. I understand now that he must have known things were going wrong and that we would have to learn to survive quickly. Every lonely night must have offered up another scenario of danger he may not be there to protect us from. A good story, at least always has the chance of lingering after the voice of the teller has faded or been replaced by less honest tongues.

     He told Ricky and me one afternoon as we were admiring the elegant way Peter O'Toole was demonstrating 'Queensberry rules' to a drunken Irish thug. "One day," he interrupted us with, "I was standing in a bar in Malaya when two British Marines picked on a little Frenchman. He beat the two of them into a bloody pulp without taking his hands out of his pockets."

     That little tale was becoming solid as I watched Boom-boom use his knee better that any straight right and his head more effectively than a left jab. He kneed Crad so hard in the balls that both his feet came off the ground and he had to be pulled back to earth. Then he butted him. Followed by the knee. Crad appeared to collapse and Boom-boom threw him backwards. I saw his foot land and go back for another kick when Crad leapt up and ran. Boom-boom actually demanded he came back and fought, before taking off after him. I followed, side by side with Crad's friend as if we were allies or at least both too wise to offer our own pathetic version of what was taking place.