Hugo was a liar. Of course, he lied to escape punishment and ended up being punished for lying, but he was also a fantasist whose lies invented a world where everything was extraordinary. At primary school while toying with the rose-hip syrup slopped in the middle of his semolina, he would entertain the girls with stories of his youth in India (the large pink place on the classroom map) and explain how the vestigial third ear joined to his real left ear was the swelling of a poison bee sting.
Everyone lied at primary school. Rosemary’s father was Batman and her brother was Robin. Mandy’s father had a stable of horses (in addition to the polite pony she trotted around Hadley on Saturday mornings), and Jonathan’s father was always about to move up the ladder of the monopoly board and buy a house in Mayfair. Hugo soon countered that with the lie that his father had bought a house in Curzon Street, and when a new boy arrived late at St Monica’s C. of E. Primary School for girls and boys, Hugo and his little sister together lied about the two houses their parents owned in Hadley. One large and one small. They always seemed to go back to the small one but that was explained by their father’s constant absence in foreign parts. Somehow he was always back in time for PTA meetings and the school play.
At this stage Hugo still had a rough idea what was true and what wasn’t and his classmates also had a rough idea that everything he said was untrue. He was already an odd fish, always skipping with the girls and never playing football with the boys. Quick-witted and smart-lipped he had no real friends and no real worries. Except for money. He had no real money either and that worried him. It worried him even more that his parents didn’t seem to share his concern.
Hugo had always been convinced that he was born to greatness. But at seven years old Hugo’s idea of greatness had little to do with the world arena and much more to do with social notch-counting on the Hadley yardstick. A lot of things counted as notches in Hadley, and each one was etched on Hugo’s mind: a big house with more than four bedrooms and a long garden with an optional pool (indoor was beyond comprehension, outdoor was useful only to show off with), model cars with pedals, roller skates with fibreglass wheels, two cars (one Jag) and a two-car garage, holidays in Gibraltar or Majorca and a pony for the eldest daughter. Later of course the eldest son would get a moped then a motorcycle and, if he was still alive by seventeen, driving lessons. Several sons of Hadley never made it to the driving lessons. That was the down side of the notch-counting. But Hugo was too young to understand about teenage death and parental irresponsibility. He just wanted his father in a bigger car and the family in a bigger house.
Some might balk at a child so precocious, so aware of the accoutrements of wealth before his pocket money had reached double shillings, but Hadley was in large part to blame.
The daily walk to school was enough to instil in Hugo a keen sense of social lacking. Hadley was a hill and the Harveys lived at the bottom of the hill. As Hugo walked up the hill every morning with his sisters and his satchel, he watched the houses get larger and the cars get newer. He spotted (and notched or etched) the Jaguar on the red-gravelled drive that belonged to Mandy’s father (Laura’s father had one too but Laura didn’t have long hair) and the Mini that her mother drove (Laura’s mother had one too but her mother wasn’t called Bunty and wasn’t a social yardstick). He clocked and ingrained Clifford’s Raleigh Chopper abandoned in front of the door to the garden extension and Simon’s Scalextrix visible through the window of the den. He even winced slightly as he noticed that David (whose parents hadn’t been that rich last year but then took him by surprise by leapfrogging up the social ladder to a top of the hill house) was no longer walking up the hill to St Monica’s, but had a new purple uniform and cap and was walking down the hill towards the tube station.
