Grandpa Ted had these books, loads of them, called The Adventures of Augustus, which had been written all about him apparently by his aunt. Viola had read a couple of them to Sunny. Augustus got up to all kinds of naughty things but everyone seemed to think that was all right, sort of, but if Sunny so much as dropped a pea from his plate he was the worst boy in the world as far as his grandmother was concerned. It wasn’t fair.
He wished Bertie was here. She would have snuggled in bed with him and kept him warm. She was good at cuddling, so was Grandpa Ted. No one in Jordan Manor ever touched him unless it was to pinch or smack or, in the case of the dogs, bite. His grandmother favoured a wooden twelve-inch ruler on the back of his legs. “It was good enough for Dominic,” she said. (“Yar, an look ’ow ’e tuuurned out,” Mrs. Kerrich said. Not that Mrs. Kerrich was against corporal punishment. Far from it.) He wet the bed quite a lot, which he’d done at home as well, but here it was Mrs. Kerrich who had to deal with the bed sheets and she never stopped reminding him that he was “a little pisser,” and when she was really annoyed she made him sleep in the cold damp sheets the next night as well.
Mouldering books and Victory puzzles had also been carelessly left behind in the nursery. Sunny did his best with them. He was a terrible reader but he was very good at jigsaws, although there were only so many times that you could gain satisfaction from making “Anne Hathaway’s Cottage” or “King Arthur on Dartmoor.”
The nursery was still littered with the debris of Dominic’s childhood and Sunny was forever standing on a rogue toy soldier or skidding on a Dinky car and he gathered these little treasures into an old shoebox. He had held on to (against all the odds) the little silver hare that Grandpa Ted had given him, but he wished he had the comfort of his stones. There was some gravel on the driveway but that was hardly enough. His best pebble, the one he had found on the beach just before they left Devon, had been taken from him by his grandmother. (“Dirty thing.”) If he’d had his stones he could have left a trail like Hansel and Gretel did and then found his way back home. Or Bertie, his Gretel, could follow the trail and find him and release him from his cage and push “Grandmama” into an oven and burn her to ashes. He fell asleep with this happy thought in his head.
The “vexed question” of educating him arose. Mrs. Kerrich said to Thomas that she didn’t see why he couldn’t just go to the local school. “Not good enough for a Villiers,” Thomas said. My name’s Todd, Sunny thought, Sunny Todd, not Philip Villiers. How long before he forgot this? Mrs. Kerrich said she thought “the son and heir” was backward so her ladyship didn’t need to get her knickers in such a twist about his education. “I’m not backward,” Sunny muttered. Mrs. Kerrich said, “Speak when you’re spoke to, young fellow my laaad.” Mr. Manners shook his head in despair at Thomas and Mrs. Kerrich’s lack of breeding.
Mrs. Kerrich was right, the local primary was out of the question for his grandmother, the very words “state school” made her shudder. He wasn’t old enough for the boarding school that Dominic had attended. “Yet,” his grandmother said. Not until his eighth birthday. Eight seemed awfully young, even from the view of a seven-year-old. “Yeah,” his father said. “I was miserable there, but not homesick. You can’t be homesick for somewhere like here, you can feel sick when you’re in Jordan Manor but it’s a relief to be out of it.” This was quite a lot of words for Dominic. He was coming “out of hibernation,” he said, throwing off his torpor. “Stopped taking the medication and all that shit. Seeing things clearer now. Need to get away from here.”
“Me too,” Sunny said. Perhaps they could run away together. Sunny had a vision in his mind of the pair of them walking along a country road, carrying their belongings in red-and-white spotted handkerchiefs knotted on to sticks. Perhaps a little dog trotting by their side.
“They don’t know anything about children,” his father said. “You have no idea what it was like growing up here.”
I do know what it’s like, Sunny thought. I am growing up here.
“They believe in deprivation, that’s the problem, they think it’s character-building when in fact it’s quite the opposite. Of course, really, I was raised by a nanny. She was worse than the lot of them put together.” Sunny had no idea what a nanny was. The only nanny he knew about was the goat that he remembered from Devon. She had smelt horrible and always tried to eat your clothes if you got too close to her. It seemed unlikely that his father had been brought up by a goat, but Sunny was beyond surprise these days. “Yeah,” Dominic said, drifting away on the memory. “Nanny was a real cunt.”
“What’s that?” Sunny asked.
“A really bad person.”
A solution” was found by his grandmother. A local prep school, a day school—Thomas would drive him to and fro every day. (“Oh, he will, will he?” Thomas said.) “Not a terribly good school, actually,” his grandmother said. “But that means we won’t be so embarrassed by Philip’s behaviour.” What behaviour? He was as meek as a mouse these days.