The envelopes were handed out to the children and the meeting came to an end with the singing of a cub scout song, ‘Always share the camp fire with the ones who are behind you’. Bertie glanced at his envelope as he sang. There was a label stuck on it which said, To the parent or guardian. Bertie looked up at the ceiling. It did not say which parent the letter was to be given to, which meant, he felt, that he had a choice. It would be safer, perhaps, to give it to his father, as he was more likely to say yes to whatever proposal the letter contained. But it would be even safer, he thought, to read the letter before he passed it on at all. There was nothing on the envelope to say that one could not open it before passing it on to the parent or guardian, and Bertie had once read somewhere that what was not forbidden was permissible. You can do what you like unless you can’t, he thought. It was the sort of thing that a moral compass would say, perhaps.

25. 100 Things for a Boy to Do: Part 1

Bertie was collected at the end of the cub scout meeting by his father and together they travelled back to Dundas Street on the top deck of the bus.

‘Another exciting evening, Bertie?’ asked Stuart.

Bertie nodded.

Stuart smiled encouragingly at his son. ‘And did anything happen?’

This was the question that Bertie had been dreading. The usual answer of most children to such a question from a parent is that nothing happened – the lives of children, by self-report, are barren and empty, quite devoid of incident. Nothing happens, nobody says anything, and indeed nobody is present at any function they attend. By the same rule of infantile omertà, nothing is learned at school, where the resolute silence of the classroom is never punctuated by any observation on anything. By contrast, the telephone conversations of children – among themselves – reveal lives crowded with incident, with high drama and intrigue, with passions and plots.