I felt a few spots of rain. ‘What did you do with them?’

He wasn’t about to say. There was some chance I’d tell Val, and then he’d be in trouble. ‘Back to school, eh?’

‘Next week.’

‘How much longer you got?’

‘Last year. Matric.’

But he wasn’t interested in that. ‘Government wants to sack them.’

‘Who?’

‘The teachers. They hate teachers. I know they’re a lazy pack of bastards, but you need ’em, I s’pose.’

‘Good if they sacked all ours.’

Ernie had the bone. ‘They reckon if they sack a few thousand, make the classes bigger, they can save ten million. That’s the sort of people we got running the place.’

He seemed to be enjoying his afternoon soapbox. Thirty years a unionist had left him with a simple world view: workers worked, bosses screwed them, politicians couldn’t give a shit, as long as they kept their jobs.

‘At least yer mum didn’t send you to St Paul’s. That’d be even worse.’

Like Pop, he hated the Catholics.

‘Ten million, and we’ll have a bunch of boneheads, but they can’t see that.’

Soon it would be Marx, and the red flag, and that bitch Thatcher needs stringing up. Tripping over words, spitting, shaking his head in disgust.

‘What you gonna do with yourself after that?’ he asked.

I shrugged. ‘Work in a bank.’

‘Ha!’

I knew what this meant: banks were evil. The reason workers couldn’t get ahead.

‘I thought you was gonna be a mechanic, like yer pop.’

‘Maybe.’

Fi-Fi stopped, looked up at him, and he knew. He picked her up and we continued walking. ‘Anyway,’ he said, resting his hand on my shoulder, ‘you got your whole life ahead of you, so don’t be in a rush.’

‘I’m not.’

‘My dad expected me to be a boilermaker, but my mum said, let him choose. But you couldn’t choose, not back then. At fifteen I was already welding boilers. I don’t think I enjoyed a single day.’ He put Fi-Fi down, but she refused to walk, so he picked her up, and we continued. ‘Every day I’d think, give it another six months …’ He faded, lost in another world, another life. ‘Your mum says you got a good brain.’

‘Did physics, but dropped out. I didn’t get it. I like history.’

‘What sort?’

‘European.’

I could hear his smile creaking. ‘I could help you with that.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Marx and Engels. It’s what they saw in the mills. Kids, half your age, losing hands. No education, nothing. That’s what you wanna study. I got some books on it.’

‘Maybe you could help me.’

‘Oh yeah, I can help you. Look at that place …’ He indicated the infant school of Gleneagles Primary: an old, wooden building with the gutters falling off, the roof rusted away. ‘Main thing is, use your eyes and your brain. See things for what they are.’

‘What’s that?’

But, I guessed, if you had to tell someone …