He built a whole villageful of characters, most of them made up of fragments of real people: his wife’s mother became Mrs Thompson at Greendale Farm the Westmorland phone book gave him names and new ideas he popped round to the post office to find out how things worked there. Now, when he sat down to write about this jovial country postman, Cunliffe constructed a community where everyone was happy and nobody broke anybody else’s spectacles for the sheer pleasure of it and the more he wrote, the more precisely he could see it all. Years later, he could still feel the injustice of it all and he still hated any kind of violence or oppression. He was terribly upset but the headteacher, who was a bully himself, did next to nothing to the guilty boys. Once, he had turned up for school with a new satchel which had been hand-stitched by his mother and he had come back from class to find it had been slashed to ribbons on his hook.
They used to ambush him routinely on the way home and batter him and his bike, too. He was naturally a peaceable boy who didn’t enjoy fighting at all but he had the misfortune to be much taller than anyone else so he was a natural target for every little hard man who wanted to make his mark in the playground. As a boy at school in Colne, an old mill town in Lancashire, he had been a punchbag for the local bullies.
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