Attic Haunts

by Mike Ward

They moved in at the beginning of the summer holidays. It was only a couple of streets away but it was a bigger house with a large overgrown garden. The estate agent called the garden, �mature�.

His parents, of course, had fallen in love with the house as soon as they stepped into its gloomy hallway. �Oh my God,� his mother exclaimed, �just look at that light-switch, I just adore Bakelite.�

Chris brought up the rear in the little party led by the gushing estate agent. The place was definitely full of potential, or at least it would have had potential if his parents hadn't been such freaks.

For starters it was a large house, four bedrooms as well as two smaller rooms in the attic. Three reception rooms, a tiny room that the agent called a study, a big kitchen, one bathroom. Only one bathroom, and not even an en-suite shower in the largest bedroom. Oh yes, to anyone else this place would have buckets of potential. But Chris could see straight away, for his parents it didn't have any potential. It was just perfect as it was.

The freaks had always been into the nineteen-fifties in a big way. His Dad wore double-breasted suits that could have been rejects from a Humphrey Bogart movie. His Mum just loved big skirts and dainty blouses. Chris's sister bought into the whole fifties thing too, choosing, on occasion, to wear a tunic dress that must have been borrowed from the St Trinian's wardrobe. His whole family were freaks, fifties freaks.

It had always been that way. Chris's early childhood had been happy enough but he knew early on that his family were odd. Everyone else at school lived in brightly-coloured houses with light airy kitchens, large colour televisions, dvd players, and proper showers. The fifties family had a tiny black and white portable television that Dad fitted into an old wooden cabinet so that it looked as if it belonged in their nineteen fifties sitting room. The local newspaper used to do feature pieces from time to time about life in the fifties family. The last story had been about how a fifties lifestyle was eco-friendly. But as far as Chris was concerned, fifties life was the pits. The food was awful, the furniture was uncomfortable, the house was cold, and his parents were embarrassing.

At least they didn't interfere when it came to his own space. His bedroom was very much a twenty-first century bedroom with pretty much most of what any ordinary fourteen year-old would have wanted. Three of the walls were painted yellow, the fourth was dark-blue. His bed was like a bunk bed only it had a sofa underneath instead of a lower bunk. Trailing across the floor from the sofa were leads that connected his Xbox to a proper telly. All of the furniture in the room had been bought in what had been a day of pure torture for his Dad, a trip to Ikea, and Chris loved every bit of it.

When he got in from school he would grab a glass of milk from the kitchen and get up to his room within seconds so that he wouldn't have to endure too much of the weirdness that was his very strange family and their very strange life. When friends at school asked him about his home he would summarise it simply, �outside, it's 2008. Inside, it's 1958�.

And then the house came on the market.

The ads said that it needed a lot of renovation and modernisation. His parents said that it sounded just perfect.

The trip around with the estate agent had really been nothing more than a formality. The more his parents heard about the place, the more they wanted to buy it and preserve it just as it was.

The old widower who used to own it had died earlier in the year and he didn't have any really close relatives. The house had been left to a charity and the charity had been quick to get it on the market. The price was low for the size of house and location, but then, for any ordinary person it was a house that would have needed a new kitchen, a new heating system, new carpets and flooring, total rewiring, and a hell of a lot of new plumbing. Chris's parents loved it just as it was.

The estate agent offered to have the furniture dumped, but as they were moving from a much smaller home they said that they would prefer to keep the old stuff for the time being. Nobody thought that the house contents could be worth more than a few hundred quid.

Chris thought that they should have burned the lot, or offered it to the local museum. The stuff was massive, dark, and ancient. His sister adored the dressing table in what was going to be her bedroom. Chris made a successful bid to have the whole attic for himself. He had an idea that lots of white paint would be a good and easy start so that soon enough have his own self-contained twenty-first century flat.

The first problem was something that should have been really obvious to Chris when he chose the attic; his loft-style bed was simply too high for the room. Rather than choose one of the other bedrooms he simply placed his mattress on the floor, figuring that soon enough he would find a way of setting the room up to his own liking. The second problem was a bit more difficult.

Anything electrical that Chris tried to plug in simply blew a fuse within moments. The only thing that was able to run on the house's outdated electrical wiring was a desk-lamp. Sound system, telly, computer, and xbox, were all too much for the ancient circuits. Chris tried his xbox in a few rooms but the result was the same each time. His Dad reckoned that while the bakelite switches were lovely it was probably true that the whole house needed to be rewired for safety's sake. �But that's something we will have to leave for a couple of months until I can get the cash together.�

His mother was in heaven. His sister had totally fallen in love with the ancient dressing table in her new room. His Dad was just bonkers as always.

Chris figured that he might as well start on clearing out some of the old stuff in his attic rooms. One of the rooms was smaller than the other and he planned that if he moved the old desk, bed, chest of drawers, and wardrobe, into that smaller room he would at least have a clear space to transform into a room that would be every twenty-first century teenage boy's idea of paradise.

The chest of drawers and the wardrobe just needed to be emptied first, they both had old clothes and junk that could be boxed up and put away and then Chris would be able to call his Dad up to help with actually shifting the furniture. But the unpacking was fascinating and soon enough Chris figured that it might take a day or two more than he had planned before he would have the room cleared.

First of all was the weird discovery that the wardrobe contained only two items of clothing; a school blazer and a dark grey jacket. And what really fascinated Chris was the fact that the blazer was very obviously part of the uniform for the local boys' grammar school, the very school that Chris had been attending for the last two years. The old blazer was heavier than Chris's and it had orange trim along the collar and edges whereas the more modern blazer was just a plain green, but it was still, despite the passage of time, the same green, and very much the same badge on the breast pocket. The old blazer smelled musty and damp but despite that Chris tried it on and found that it was a pretty good fit. He felt kind of good about the fact that his new bedroom had in all likelihood been occupied by a boy a bit like himself.

The chest of drawers was pretty full. The top drawer had vests and underpants that might have been white at some stage in the years past, but were now a rather unpleasant-looking yellow. Alongside these were some socks and when Chris unrolled a pair he found that they were long school socks with his own school's colours of green and orange on the tops. Chris recalled the old photographs along one of the school corridors and the fact that the front rows of some of the older photos were occupied by boys in short trousers who were evidently wearing socks just like the pair he was holding. So ok, that at least was one clear difference between himself and whoever had owned these clothes.

Sure enough another drawer contained five pairs of neatly folded shorts; two pairs of grey school uniform shorts, two pairs of sand-coloured summer shorts, and a pair of dark blue corduroy shorts. There was no sign of any long trousers and Chris guessed that his predecessor in this room must have lived there back in the old days when boys seemed to wear shorts all the time.

The big drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe seemed to contain the most interesting stuff. A cardboard box with frayed edges which boasted the name Meccano was full of odd little bits of metal with nuts and bolts, and a little booklet bound by rusty staples that had line drawings of boys making various strange objects by joining the metal strips together.

�All very fifties�, thought Chris, �my parents would just love it if I left this room just as it is�.

The smaller attic room was completely empty so Chris figured that it would be simplest to start painting that and sorting it out. The junk in the larger room could wait a week or two until things had calmed down from the move and his Dad would have time to help him shift the furniture. Within a few weeks he would have his own space sorted out and it would definitely be worth the effort.

Chris decided that the smaller room would be his bedroom; sleeping and clothes didn't really need much space. The larger room would be where he would set up his music and games, have his desk and sofa, and generally be his own living room. It was a plan, and it was a good plan. It was just a shame that so much time and work would have to be put in to making it happen.

Without power there wasn't much that he felt like doing that first day so he tinkered with the old Meccano set as he thought through his plans. It was just lots of little metal strips and different shapes, each with loads of holes which allowed you to join the bits together with nuts and bolts; not very high tech but kind of satisfying as he worked towards something that began to look a bit like a helicopter. Chris laughed as he reckoned that Meccano must have been like a fifties xbox or wii, and that happy thought continued to amuse him as he went downstairs and joined the rest of his family for their first evening meal in their new fifties house.

Dinner could have been worse, it could have been better. It was obviously a take-away given the chaos in the kitchen. It just would have been nice if his parents had allowed their fifties life to stretch to an Indian, Chinese, or pizza. But takeaways were always fish and chips. They just didn't have any other sort in the fifties around here!

Chris couldn't have been asleep very long when he woke up feeling distinctly cold and uncomfortable. He had gone up to bed quite early feeling wrecked from the day's activity and felt sleep come over him within seconds of lying down. Somehow his duvet had slipped to one side and he pulled it back and curled into its warming folds. He was kind of half awake for a few moments as a dream came back to him.

Someone, a man, an angry man, was saying something; something about how he always told you about clearing away your toys and keeping your room tidy. Then there was kind of whacking noise which seemed to go on for a while. It was definitely a weird dream and Chris struggled to make sense of it before he felt sleep coming back.

Someone was sobbing. Chris sat up on his mattress, suddenly very awake. He switched on the desk-lamp which he had placed close by on the floor and sat up. It must have been another bit of a dream, but for a moment he could have sworn that he had heard someone crying over by the old bed. He curled back into his duvet, grateful for its generous warmth. Sleep stole back over him as he reached out towards the light-switch.

The following few days were spent in yet more exhausting activity. The electrical system wouldn't handle a floor sander so Chris spent two whole days on his hands and knees working away at the roughest parts of the floor boards in the smaller room. His Dad suggested that a tick woodstain would look well in there as carpets would have to wait for quite a while. Getting the electrics sorted was first on the spending list after the costs of the move.

But it was a really satisfying task and Chris felt quite mature as he set about his first real bit of do-it-yourself. A few friends dropped by but only one stayed any length of time and helped. The rest must have been put off by the reddish dust that covered Chris from hand to foot. He wore nothing but an old t-shirt and his school rugby shorts for the work as the attic rooms got hot during the day and the dust from sanding down the floor boards made a mess of everything anyway. So he looked quite a sight when friends called round and he could understand why they laughed off his invitations to join him. But by the end of the week when Chris stepped back having applied the last stroke of white paint to the last bit of wall, he knew that he had just completed something of which he could be really proud. The room looked pleasant, light-filled and spacious. He would leave it for a day to let the smell of the paint fade away before setting up his bed but for the moment he felt really good about having achieved something worthwhile.

That night he stumbled onto his mattress feeling very content with himself. He could feel that he was really tired but he was also so chuffed with how well the other room looked that he couldn't drop off to sleep immediately. In fact he got up again and went through to the smaller room to have another look at smaller room. The floor looked good and the ceiling and walls were just a nice clean white. His Dad had come up earlier and told Chris that he was really proud of how well he had decorated the room, 'look, not a fleck of paint out of place. That's a really nice professional job.�

It was a good job and Chris knew that he could be pleased with it. Now all he had to do was set up his own furniture in that room and he could make a start on the larger room. As he lay back on his mattress again he wondered if his mate Alex, who was the only one who had stopped by and actually helped, might come around again and put in another few hours with him. Alex was a couple of months older and they had known each other for years. They had gone to the same primary school, sat the eleven-plus together, and gone on to the boys' grammar school. They were good friends even though they mostly hung out with different groups at school. Chris's gang was made up of boys who played rugby at the local club, while Alex hung out with a group that had evolved into something of an emo gang.

Alex's hairstyle had worked its way towards the distinctive emo long fringe over the past year and he even wore a bit of eye-liner on days off school. Chris wouldn't have noticed but his sister pointed it out and when asked Alex replied, �Sure I do, I kind of like the way it makes my eyes look sadder.� It didn't phase Chris. Some of the guys at school would knock against the emo kids and call them stuff like faggot but Chris knew that Alex just didn't give a fuck. And to tell the truth, Chris didn't give a fuck either. After all, he used to think, what is the difference between kissing a girl and kissing a boy? Everyone seems to close their eyes no matter who they find themselves snogging.

And Alex did look really cute the other day when he stripped off to help. He could see that his board shorts and t-shirt would have been wrecked if he left them on while sanding those floor-boards so he stripped down to his briefs and refused Chris's offer of an old pair of football shorts by remarking that it was pretty hot already. It was true, the attic seemed to really heat up in the afternoons and the work was sweaty and dusty. And it was so like Alex to be wearing colourful cartoon briefs instead of the more usual trunks. Not that either could have been surprised by the other's choice of underwear as they usually shopped together for clothes. But stripped, fit, tanned, sweaty, and dusty, Chris reckoned that Alex looked pretty good that afternoon.

They showered together afterwards. The shower was pretty pathetic, a big rose thing that was fixed to the wall above the bath and dribbled out cold water. But what would you expect from fifties plumbing? They had seen each other naked so often over the years that neither felt uncomfortable standing in the bath together. And of course they had kissed before. The first time had been back just after Christmas when Alex had kind of dared Chris by asking, �What could be the big deal about two guys who are friends and like each other kissing each other?� And looked at that way Chris couldn't see any problem and in fact it had been a nice experience, actually better than kissing Becky who had gone all rigid when their tongues connected on the way home after the youth club Christmas party.

Of course it was different snogging your best mate in the shower. For starters they were naked and while Chris's hands settled on Alex's shoulder blades, Alex's hands made their way down to land gently on Chris's backside. They only snogged for a couple of minutes before soaping each other up with gel and rinsing away the dust in each other's hair. No big thing; just two friends looking after each other.

But lying on his mattress, the work on the smaller room finished, Chris wondered what it would have been like if they had gone further. Some guys called the emos, 'cocksuckers', and maybe that was true. It was meant to be an insult but the emos would just laugh, and the more Chris thought about it the more he reckoned that sucking off another boy wasn't much more of a deal than kissing a boy. It was just logical really. Why would having your cock sucked off in the mouth of a boy be any different to having it sucked by a girl? And if you would let a boy suck you, why wouldn't you return the favour? Being hung up about who did what to whom was just so fifties.

Naturally his cock hardened up as he imagined Alex kneeling down in the shower, gently kissing the tip of his cock before accepting it into his mouth. Did people really suck? Was that what made it so good? Some of the guys at rugby would say stuff about how they could just do with a nice cock-sucking slut but chances were that those guys hadn't even had so much as a frigid kiss yet. But all the same, in a kind of instinctive way, it was pretty obvious that having your cock caressed in someone's mouth would have to be a pleasant thing.

Chris reached for a tissue and climaxed just as he had begun to wonder what you were supposed to do if someone was sucking you. Should you pull out and try to aim away? Maybe you'd end up splattering it over their face but that would be a bit gross. It would be more natural, sweeter, if they just kept sucking and drank down your cum. But would he want to swallow Alex's cum?

The tissue fell to the floor and Chris slipped deeply into sleep.

He wasn't really awake; just that nice kind of dozing where he knew that the sun was up but it was still too early to get up. He squinted at the alarm clock; just after six-thirty. The light was way too bright so he turned over onto his other side away from the window. Curtains would be something for after painting and decorating. He wondered about starting on the bigger room that day but figured that he would be better waiting until he had set his bed set up in the other room. A day off would be nice. His eyes closed up again and he dozed again, half-asleep, less than half-awake.

�You filthy little boy! You wretched sinful creature.�

Chris felt as if he really could hear an angry man shouting in the room but he felt that it would be giving in to the wildness of his imagination if he actually opened his eyes to look.

�Where's the rod? A sound thrashing is what you need.�

Chris sat up on his mattress, and rubbed his eyes. He felt himself slowly coming to life but his dream still seemed to continue uninterrupted.

�Please Daddy, I didn't do anything.�

�Don't you ever dare lie to me. The proof of your filthy self-abuse is there on the floor for all to see as if you were proud of the abomination.�

Chris couldn't place one sound, a whish followed by a thud, but he recognised the cries of pain that followed. Someone, some boy, was being hurt. There had been something about a rod; surely he wasn't dreaming about a boy being punished with a rod? He was too awake for it to be a nightmare. He stretched his arms and moved to stand up. The whishing noise had stopped. Even though Chris was now standing, it still seemed to him that his imagination continued running ahead of him, making him think that he could almost hear the sounds of a boy crying over by the old bed.

Returning from the bathroom Chris was still puzzled by the dream. What on earth could have led him to imagine a boy being caned, for that clearly was what he had dreamt. A boy being beaten like they used to in the old days. For the first time in his life Chris realised that his parents, dotty about the fifties as they were, at least observed more normal approaches to disciplining their children. Chris had been grounded a few times, and his mother's threat of a 'time-out' still alarmed him some six years on from the last time she had actually taken him by the arm and steered him towards the dining room where he would have been left for twenty minutes to calm down from some childish tantrum. His parents were weird but they weren't completely mad.

That guy who was shouting in the dream; he was definitely mad, sick in the head or something.

Chris pulled on a polo shirt and a pair of trunks as he thought about what he might do on his day off from decorating his attic. It took him a moment to find a pair of shorts that wouldn't clash with shirt. Most of his clothes were still packed in boxes and would have to stay there until he sorted out his new rooms. He found a pair of khaki chino shorts that he liked but before he pulled them on he was struck by the fact that they were quite similar to the old khaki shorts in the chest of drawers. He pulled the drawer open and took the shorts out. They smelt a bit musty and the material was lighter than the chino cotton but they were in good shape; a little bit worn in the crotch perhaps, but that was to be expected. The blazer in the wardrobe had fitted and he guessed that the shorts would too. In fact they were a little loose in the waist, the fifties boy who wore them must have been a bit bigger. But a belt soon had them secured around his waist and he turned to the wardrobe-door mirror to see what they looked like. Maybe a bit baggier than anything he would have chosen, certainly lighter, a couple of inches shorter than his Bermuda length shorts, and much simpler as they didn't have cargo pockets. But they were certainly comfortable. He was about to change back into his own shorts when the thought came to mind that it might be fun to dress in fifties shorts and see if anyone noticed.

No one did. Not down in the kitchen for breakfast anyway. Perhaps his parents and sister were still too distracted about the move to notice something as ordinary as a teenage boy wearing clothes that suited the summer's heat. His mother asked about his plans for the day but he still didn't really have anything formulated. He suggested that he would probably go into town for a while, see if any of his friends were around, maybe get in a game of football. �If you're heading into town could you take my library books? They need to be back by tomorrow.�

It was another of his mother's little fifties things that instead of buying books or reading stuff on the net she would borrow them from the public library. It was, however, one of those fifties things that Chris didn't really mind. The library was kind of neat; hushed and full of stuff that you might want to read but weren't too sure about buying for yourself with precious pocket money. If he went straight to the library he could dump his mother's books and then head on about town to see what other stragglers from school hadn't been taken off to Cornwall or France or wherever.

He was still walking towards the town centre when he realised that a visit to library could provide him with some extra information about the boy who used to have the attic bedroom.

It could have taken very little time as Chris knew where the collection of annuals and publications from local schools was kept, and he remembered that the boy's first name was David, but he had forgotten how his surname was spelled. But that wasn't much of a problem. It was there in neat little embroidered capitals on a label that was sewn to the waistband of the shorts he had chosen to wear. A quick trip to the toilets provided Chris with what he needed to know.

Chris had come across the school annuals a couple of years earlier as he explored the library shelves. The two grammar schools, boys and girls, and a small local public school, published a book each year and a bound hardback version was kept in the local history section of the library. They were fascinating to look at; full of black and white photographs of stern-faced schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, teams for every sport in every age-group, as well as photos of each class, debating team, chess team, drama group, choir, and so on. Chris had been fascinated to discover that his own boys' grammar school had once had a radio club where boys learned morse code and listened in to messages being broadcast all over the world. Three cheers for email and mobiles, had been his thought then as he looked at the huge apparatus in the background. Who could be doing with messing about with stuff like that?

It didn't take long to find David. Chris had guessed that his quarry was likely to show up in an edition from the fifties and sure enough, among the first-form class photos for 1955, a well-scrubbed David Challis looked out from the middle of the second row. As ever, when Chris saw old school photos like this, he was struck by the way all the youngest boys were wearing short trousers and neatly pulled up long socks. In the 1956 annual, David was sitting cross-legged on the ground in the front row of his class photo. He was smiling, as were all the other boys in the picture and Chris thought that it looked like a happy enough group of guys. It looked as if at least a few boys had switched to long trousers but most, like David were still wearing shorts.

The third-form photos from the 1957 annual really marked the transition; most of the boys were wearing long trousers but a few still appeared with bare knees. Chris couldn't be sure that David was wearing shorts as the boy was standing behind another row, but a slight gap seemed to show long socks rather than trousers. Anyway, there hadn't been any long trousers in the attic wardrobe so Chris guessed that David must have been one of the last in his class to make the switch from shorts.

He need not have bothered with the detective work. The fourth formers in the 1958 annual were very much a long-trousered group but for a few bare-kneed stragglers. One class didn't seem to have any boys in shorts, David's class had two, of whom David Challis was very clearly one. In the middle of each class group was a teacher who must have been their tutor or form-master, and Chris was intrigued to see that David's class in 1958 was gathered around a very young-looking Mister Geo. Whitmarsh, the very same Mister Whitmarsh who lived, in seemingly happy retirement, a few doors down from Chris's old house.

Chris wondered if there was any chance that David had been kept in shorts for even longer. A flick through the rest of the 1958 annual showed that even among that year's second formers short trousers were worn by very few. It looked as if they must have been a rule for first-formers but thereafter boys would have made their own choice, or more likely, had to wait for parents to let them switch to longs.

Chris pulled out the 1959 annual and started scouring the names under the fifth-form photos. There was definitely no David Challis in that year's photos. Chris checked that David might not have repeated a year, skipped a year, been photographed but missed off the list of names. But he couldn't find him. The relevant sixth form photographs for 1960 and 1961 didn't produce any David Challis either. The boy must have left the local grammar school after that fourth-form photo had been taken. Chris looked again and figured that David Challis looked like a sporty and pleasant guy, someone with whom you would want to be friends. It would be interesting to know what had happened to him; a visit to old Mister Whitmarsh was called for.

But that could wait a few days. Chris felt that he really needed to team up with some friends and have a kick-around in the park.

That evening, after dinner with the family, Chris retired to his room. He took out the Meccano set from its drawer, sat down on the floor and leafed through the little instruction booklet, having decided that it might be amusing to have a go at making something that might have once been made by David, the room's former occupant back in the nineteen-fifties. It was, thought Chris, a bit bizarre that he was wearing boy's summer shorts from the fifties, sitting in a fifties bedroom, and playing with a fifties toy. Actually, it was very bizarre when he thought about how weird he thought his parents were with their total immersion in the fifties. But on the other hand, there wasn't much point in trying to be a twenty-first century boy given the ancient electrical system that blew a fuse if more than three or four light bulbs were switched on at the same time.

Chris settled on making a three-wheeled car, the set didn't have a fourth wheel for anything bigger. Getting corners to work out neatly took more skill than he anticipated and his thumbs seemed to get in the way whenever he tried using the little spanners. It was actually quite engrossing and the minutes went by quickly enough.

As he neared completion of the project he found that one piece snapped out of place just as he fastened the other end. He heard someone laugh and he actually looked up even though he knew that the laughter had to be in his mind. But it was nice laughter and for a moment Chris imagined that David Challis was sitting nearby, smiling away at the sight of a twenty-first century boy struggling with a nineteen-fifties toy.

The little car sped along the floor and bumped into the wardrobe. �Neat enough�, thought Chris, and he stood up, picked up his toothbrush and figured that even though it was still very early, he was still tired enough to hit his bed. Returning from the bathroom he stripped down to his trunks and stretched out on his mattress.

He was about to switch off his light when he felt uneasy, a suspicion that there was something that he had not finished off properly before getting into bed. He looked around the room and recalled the dream from a few days earlier when someone was being punished for leaving toys out. It was a silly thought and he was about to dismiss it, but then the image of David Challis in those school photos came to mind. Chris got up, tidied the Meccano away, folded his clothes, or rather, folded away his own shirt with David's old shorts.

As he switched off the light he thought he heard a sigh of relief. It was an odd thing to imagine, but it made him feel much more comfortable as he nodded off to sleep.

The following morning brought no new unsettling dreams. Chris dressed in his rugby shorts and paint-spattered t-shirt in anticipation of a hot day's work in the attic. The little bedroom still had a whiff of paint so he didn't feel inclined to move in there yet, but he could make a start on clearing some of the stuff out of the bigger room.

The old desk came apart quite easily, the top lifting off two sets of drawers, and those drawers in turn lifting off two little plinths. No allen keys, no awkward screws and bolts; not quite flat-pack but neat enough. All the same, it was going out. Chris was going to have his own desk in that corner. He hauled the pieces of desk downstairs to the dining room where boxes of stuff that had yet to be unpacked were competing for space with other furniture that the family was choosing to get rid of.

Next he figured that he should tackle the wardrobe. He would need his father's help to shift it but he decided that he should see how much he could do first. To start with he could remove the blazer and jacket, and shift the Meccano set across to the smaller chest of drawers. That chest was going to stay, he didn't want to obliterate everything of David Challis just yet. It looked as if the wardrobe might come apart like the desk. The top pediment was bolted to the main part of the wardrobe with wing-nuts, so Chris went to work on loosening these first. That was when he found something he had missed, a cane hooked over the rail and tucked back into the darkened side of the wardrobe.

Chris had obviously never seen one of these before but he knew straight away that it was an old school cane. Cartoon schoolmasters in old comics would wield a crook handled school cane in the last frame of every other story. Old films had the occasional pupil being threatened with 'six of the best'. Even a twenty-first century boy would know a cane when he saw it, and even a boy like Chris, who had never suffered any form of corporal punishment, would flinch involuntarily at the sight of an authentic school cane.

Chris held the cane, imagined being told to bend over, and even just thinking about it felt painful. It must have been horrific. He couldn't understand how a boy could participate in the infliction of so much pain on his own body by bending over without being physically hauled into place. Chris placed the cane on the chest of drawers. His Dad would see it later and maybe he, who had even joked about being sent to the headmaster for a thrashing, could shed some light on what went through a boy's mind in the old days when schools were allowed to use such a barbaric instrument.

The rest of the wardrobe held no more surprises. The top came off easily, the main part would come away from the large base drawer but that would need two people.

Chris and his Dad hauled the wardrobe down after lunch, and the cane had indeed been the first thing Dad noticed when he entered the room. �For fussake! Where did you get that?�

Chris laughed at his father's barely-recovered exclamation and told him that the cane had been hanging in the wardrobe.

�The headmaster at my old school had one like that, and it was bloody painful let me tell you. I'm certainly glad that my own parents never had one; the few cracks I endured from your grandfather's old belt were painful enough.�

They shifted the wardrobe and Chris got his Dad to talk about his two trips to the headmaster's office. �The cane was fearsome. More often you just got whacked over your trousers with an old running shoe but in my schooldays corporal punishment was on the way out and so even that was rare. You had to have been pretty wild to get more than a detention back in the eighties. My second caning wasn't really necessary, more of a dare really to see who in my year could be the last boy to have been caned before the school abolished it ahead of the change in the law.�

But Chris wasn't all that satisfied with his Dad's answer to the question about why they bent over and took a thrashing. �You just did. Some kind of honour thing really. You were caught and you paid the price, and back then the price might be a trip to the headmaster, or a whack of the slipper, or a crack of your old man's belt. It was just the way it was. But you're right. I remember thinking once that I was big enough, I must have been just a bit older than you are now, big enough to thump the master on the nose and tell him to get stuffed. But I just took my whacking. We all did.�

The old bed would have been next to go but Chris, knowing that he was due to get a longer bed soon, decided that he would dump the old mattress, paint the frame, and put his own mattress on it and use it as a kind of couch. It would be a bit out of place, but then the whole house was out of place in some way or other and he reckoned he could live with it. There was something else he couldn't quite explain even to himself, but he felt uneasy about getting rid of David Challis's bed. Not just yet anyway.

That evening the family went out to a local pizzeria; a concession to Chris and his sister, a compromise for their parents, and a pleasant meal away from the house and all the work that each of them was putting in to making it into their new home. Chris wore a pair of jeans for the outing. Ordinarily he would never have thought of it, but as he pulled the jeans on he realised that he had been wearing shorts all week, and he wondered if David had ever pulled on a pair of long trousers in that bedroom. He suspected that he knew the answer, that David wouldn't have had anything other than shorts until he was at least fifteen or sixteen.

The answer came to him in a different way early the following morning. There was something familiar and disturbing about the deep slumber in which he was semi-conscious but still dreaming. The man was shouting again, as angry as ever if not even more so.

�How dare you sneak out at night! Where were you? Your bedtime is nine o'clock and well you know that you must be in the house in good time. Off with your so-called jazz friends again, I suppose. And I suppose it was one of them who lent you these disgraceful trousers. Where is the cane? What have you gone and done with the cane? I'm going to give you such a hiding you'll never forget it. Sneaking off around town in the evenings pretending that you are a big man in long trousers. Let me tell you, you know well that you were going to be kept in short trousers until fifth form, well now you'll be lucky if you get longs for the sixth! Where is that cane?�

The man was screaming and seemingly getting angrier and angrier. �What's it doing there? It doesn't matter, now I've got it you're going to get it, and you're going to get it good and hard. Drop your pyjamas, you're getting this thrashing on the bare!�

The whish-thud noise started up. This time Chris knew that it was the sound of a genuine rattan school cane flying through the air and landing on the bare skin of a boy's buttocks. This time Chris cringed at each crack of the rod and counted them, �three, four five, six, seven; oh my God, will he never stop? Eight.�

A boy screamed out during the caning but his screams diminished as the caning went on, his voice clearly hoarse and exhausted so that he just sobbed deeply into his pillows as the cane continued to punish his backside. Eight strokes, it didn't seem a very logical number, but the angry man was in a rage, had probably not even given any thought to the number of strokes.

A boy was sobbing, sobbing his heart out, and quietly repeating one word over and over, �why?�

�Why, why, why?�

Chris looked across at his jeans draped over the old bed's rail and felt certain that he knew why.

His sister and his parents were out for the morning so he had the house to himself, or more specifically, he had the twin-tub washing machine to himself. Few guys at school would have even seen a twin-tub let alone know about operating one. A nice front-loader would have been more effective but the twin tub was what they had. Of course it blew a fuse as soon as the water began to come to temperature but Chris, like the other members of his family, had become used to that. He went around the house and found his sister's bedside lamp still on. With that switched off he got the machine going again and started on David Challis's old clothes; the short trousers, shirts, socks, and even the old underwear. It didn't take long, one of the advantages of the twin-tub system being that you could move through the stages as quickly as you felt appropriate for the clothes that you were washing.

The summer's heat dealt effectively with the drying and by just after midday, Chris was ironing and folding his little collection. A visit to old George Whitmarsh was called for and Chris wanted to dress as much like David Challis as he could get away with.

One of the shirts was a simple plain-blue short-sleeved shirt that looked just like any other summer shirt. The khaki shorts had benefited from the wash and felt fresher and even a bit softer. Wearing another boy's underpants was a bit weird but they must have been washed at least twice since the last time they were worn and Chris, used to living with fifties stuff, wasn't about to get grossed out by a bit of cloth. His own al-terrain sandals completed his outfit for the day having figured that kneesocks and shoes would really make him stick out.

George Whtimarsh was pleased to see the boy whom he had seen growing up from toddler years into teens. Chris had cut George's lawn a few times over the recent summers and George was fond of Chris's parents and their obsession with the 1950s.

�How's the new house? I am so pleased to see you. I thought it would be ages before I'd see any of you again now that you have moved so far away.�

Chris laughed. The actual distance they had moved was only a couple of hundred metres by road, less if you were walking and could cut through the little alley. �Well,� said Chris, �it's certainly very fifties, and it does have loads of extra space.�

They chatted for a while and then Chris brought up the reason for his visit. He thought that the room he was sleeping in had once been the room of another boy, David Challis. Chris explained that he had looked up photographs of David in the old school annuals and had seen a much younger George in one of them.

George hesitated for just a moment, �A lovely boy was David, such a sad loss.�

David had been a bright boy, usually at the top of his class and his class was the most academically able of his year group. And he had been a promising rugby player, �quick down either wing and never one to chicken out of a heavy tackle�.

�A really lovely boy. It may shock you but I don't remember most of the boys I taught over the years. You see what? Maybe a hundred new boys each year over forty years. It's far too many to remember. But David, I think I would have remembered David even if he hadn't passed away so young.�

�I was his form-master when he was in the fourth. Then he came back for fifth-form and did well. His Christmas report would have been all praise and top marks. But he was a bit off his rugby. The medics diagnosed TB, tuberculosis. You don't hear much about it now except for cattle and badgers, but it was common enough back then. We would probably lose a boy a year to the san but they would mostly come back a year later, repeat a form, and be fine. David Challis was just one of the unlucky ones. He went terribly quickly. The TB really took over his lungs and he passed on within a couple of weeks of getting to the san. End of October it would have been. It was incredibly sad, so much promise gone, such a fine boy crushed by something that could well have responded to some of the most basic drugs that the medics have nowadays. A very sad loss.�

�His parents took it badly of course. His father was a manager in the Council and they were farsighted enough to let him have time to mourn. But you don't lose a boy like David, your only child, without being deeply affected. Of course they loved him to bits.�

Chris made his first intervention. �There was a cane in the wardrobe.�

�Well, there were canes and straps, and even nastier and much more unpleasant things in many households back then. Most parents would smack or thrash a boy for things that seem pretty minor now. And of course we caned boys, left, right, and centre, in school. Back then every schoolmaster had his cane and you were considered a disgrace to the profession if you didn't use it at least once a term. The boys would run you ragged otherwise. Some guys were just thrashing-mad, but most of us got away with only doing two or three canings a week. It was just how it was back then.�

�Strange thing is, I never gave it a moment's thought. Then when there was talk of changing the law I had a Damascus moment. Of course it wasn't necessary, all that thrashing and beating. Maybe one or two boys over the years that I was teaching changed their ways after a caning. The rest just took it as part of growing up, and would even compete with each other to see who could take the hardest beating without showing signs of suffering. We certainly did that too when I was a boy. But times move on. I'm glad that we moved on from thrashing boys for petty little misdemeanours.�

Chris made his second, this time whispered, intervention. �I want to know what it felt like. I need to know. So that I can sleep at night without worrying about David.�

The pendulum on George's old grandfather clock swung back and forth. The two sat in silence as minutes passed.

�I see,� said George. �I think I understand. I guess a life of teaching boys has left me some sort of insight into their minds and thinking.�

�You do appreciate that it would be pretty useless to just give you a token. It would have to be a proper caning; I usually gave four strokes, never more than six, and even six was very rare. Four good strokes across your shorts, that's what it would have to be if it's to be any good for you.�

�I know.�

�I still have a couple of old canes from the old days. We could do it now.�

�That's what I was hoping. Otherwise I could run home and fetch David's cane.�

�I'm not sure that would be wise. OK, stand up, let's get this over with. You'll be best off leaning over the arm of this big armchair. There were very few boys who could take a proper caning just bent over and touching their toes.�

It didn't take long.

The pain was excruciating. Chris wasn't sure but he thought that if you could measure pain then those four strokes were close to being the most painful thing he had ever experienced, but still quite a lot less than when he had been kicked in the balls during a playground scrap. The cane was painful, but there could be much worse. And strangely enough, after only a minute or two, all he felt was a tingle that wasn't entirely unpleasant.

Chris hugged George and thanked him. Something that had become more oppressive than he had realised had been exorcised. David had lived in a different time, even a more serious caning was something from which he could probably have recovered quickly enough. The TB had also been of his time. His death might have been untimely but Chris suspected that George was right; that David had been loved while he was alive, and mourned after his death. Things were just different back then.

August was a lovely month. The weather wasn't as good as it might have been but Chris and his family had a great summer anyway.

David seemed to be having a reasonable time too. Every now and then Chris would get the feeling that someone was standing close by, smiling away as Chris toiled to lick the attic into twenty-first century shape. The Meccano had pride of place, Chris chose to wear David's old clothes more often than not, and Chris took extra care to make sure that he avoided doing anything that would have caused trouble for David.

He had kind of figured it out himself but it was Alex who summarised it best when after a long conversation about what had been going on in the attic Alex said, �so you mess up and another kid gets beaten. Not the fairest arrangement is it?�

And it wasn't fair, so Chris did his best to behave as the most well-behaved of any nineteen-fifties boys, even if he did allow himself some slack whenever he was around at Alex's house.

There was just one niggling little thing.

Chris figured that chances were that David would only be around until the middle of October. He couldn't be sure, but he suspected that he was right, that David would be able to let go and leave the house this time around. So there was just until half-term really.

But that half-term was the problem.

If Chris didn't want to get David punished, and if David got punished every time that Chris did something that David wasn't allowed to do, then it was only logical really.

Alex said that he would call round and walk with Chris to school on the first day of the new school year. It was, Chris reckoned, going to be a very long walk. But everyone knew that his family was weird and stuck in the past. Why shouldn't he just join in and go with the fifties.

The short trousers weren't really the issue. Chris could list off a few guys who were only ever seen in proper long trousers when they were at school and who might even envy him his bare legs.

It was the socks. The socks were definitely going to be the killer.

But surely it was the very least a guy could do for an old friend, and an old friend who didn't have much time left in this world at that?