Stan Barstow

From The Search for Tommy Flynn

H

e had walked the mile and a half from his home, letting the lighted buses career past him down the long winding road; and on the edge of town he began to look inside the pubs he passed, sometimes startling the people there by the sudden intensity of his face, all cheek-bones and jaw and dark burning eyes, as it appeared briefly in the doorway, then vanished again. And when, after more than two hours, he came to the centre of town, he was, as usual, no further in his search. He stood on a street corner and watched the faces of the people passing by. He even stood lost in contemplation of the suited dummies in the lighted window of a tailor’s shop, as though he hoped that one of them might suddenly move and reveal itself as his lost pal. And all the while the yearning, the terrible yearning despair in him grew into an agony, and he muttered hopelessly, over and over again, “Tommy, oh, Tommy, I can’t find you, Tommy.”

                He wandered along a line of people queueing outside a cinema for the last show, looking at every face, his own face burning so oddly that it provoked giggles from one of a pair of girls standing there; and a policeman standing a little way along looked his way, as though expecting that Christie might at any moment whip off his cap and break into an illegal song and dance.

                They laughed. They laughed because he could not find Tommy Flynn. Everybody against him: no one to help. Oh! if only he could find just one who would help him. He stopped and gazed at, without seeing, the “stills” in the case on the wall by the cinema entrance, then turned away.

NOTES AND EXERCISES:

1.       Some irregular plural nouns change the letter “f” into “v” while others do not. Write the plural forms of the following nouns: half, belief, chief, cliff, proof, roof, safe, dwarf, handkerchief, hoof, scarf, wharf, calf, elf, knife, leaf, life, loaf, self, sheaf, thief, wife, wolf.

2.       When the prefix “il–” is added to a word beginning with the letter “l” the letter is doubled. Add the prefix to the following adjectives: legal, logical, literate, legitimate, liberal, legible.

3.       Nouns ending in “–man” do not differ in the pronunciation of their singular and plural forms: policeman, policemen [p¶´li:sm(¶)n]. Read the following nouns: postman—postmen, Englishman—Englishmen, clergyman—clergymen, gentleman—gentlemen, stuntman—stuntmen.

4.     Word study:

dummy          an object made to look like and serve the purpose of the real person or thing: a tailor’s dummy (a dummy for fitting clothes)

to yearn (for something/to do something)                         to long for with tender feeling or affection. Yearning (n.)—a strong desire; a tender longing

to giggle        to laugh lightly in a nervous or silly way

a still              an ordinary photograph selected from a cinema film, e.g. as used for advertising in the press: stills from a new film

odd                 strange, peculiar; not exactly divisible by two

5.     Translate the following expressions and use them in sentences of your own:

        the odd houses (in a street), the odd months, £5 odd, 30 odd years, odd jobs, to do odd jobs, oddly enough, to make odds even, it makes no odds, the odds are against us, the odds are in our favour, odds and ends (“I have tidied your workbasket; the odds and ends are in this box”—small, unclassified things; what remains when more important objects have been dealt with), no odds (no consequence), what’s the odds! (what does it matter!), long odds (it’s long odds against Arthur coming home from Australia this year), the odds (The odds are that Jim will be able to come.)