And Roland said, “Well? Take them.”
I did not take them.
I turned round to the porch.
“Bevan. Come here a second.”
PART 2 — WHAT I DID
I did not make a speech.
I have been asked about this a lot since and everybody wants the speech.
Bevan came down the path and stood next to me, and I gave him the little parcel off the bonnet — the one he had given me that morning, which Roland had put down — and I said, “Open it for me, I haven’t done it yet.”
That is all I did.
He opened it in front of twenty-five people. It was a set of feeler gauges, because I had been doing up a moped in his garage since the March and I had been borrowing his.
Eleven pounds, probably.
And he laughed, and I laughed, and about four people who knew what the moped was laughed as well, and my mother put her hand over her mouth.
