“The Life & Times of the Thunderbolt Kid” – Bill Bryson



“The Life & Times of the Thunderbolt Kid” – Bill Bryson

One day when I was not quite six years old I was in the basement, just poking around, seeing if there was anything sharp or combustible that I hadn’t come across before, and hanging behind the furnace I found a woolen jersey of rare fineness. I slipped it on. It was many, many sizes too large for me-the sleeves all but touched the floor if I didn’t repeatedly push them back-but it was the handsomest article of attire I had ever seen. It was made of a lustrous oiled wool, deep bottle green in color, and was extremely warm and heavy, rather scratchy, and slightly moth-holed but still exceptionally splendid. Across the chest, in a satin material, now much faded, was a golden thunderbolt.

Interestingly, no one knew where it came from. My father thought that it might be an old college football or ice hockey jersey, dating from sometime before the First World War. But how it got into our house he had no idea. He guessed that the previous owners had hung it there and forgotten it when they moved. But I knew better. It was, obviously, the Sacred Jersey of Zap, left to me by King Volton, my late natural father, who had brought me to Earth in a silver spaceship in Earth year 1951 (Electron year 21,000,047,002) shortly before our austere but architecturally exuberant planet exploded spectacularly in a billion pieces of pastel-colored debris. He had placed me with this innocuous family in the middle of America and hypnotized them into believing that I was a normal boy, so that I could perpetuate the Electron powers and creed. This jersey then was the foundation garment of my superpowers. It transformed me. It gave me colossal strength, rippling muscles, X-ray vision, the ability to fly and to walk upside down across ceilings, invisibility on demand, cowboy skills like lassoing and shooting guns out of people’s hands from a distance, a good voice for singing around campfires, and curious bluish-black hair with a teasing curl at the crown. It made me, in short, the kind of person that men want to be and women want to be with.

School Memories – Also from “The Life & Times of the Thunderbolt Kid”

Stepping into Greenwood was both the scariest and most exciting event of the first five years of my life. The front doors appeared to be about twenty times taller than normal doors, and everything inside was built to a similar imposing scale, including the teachers. Everything about it was intimidating and thrilling at once.

Greenwood had the world's finest gymnasium. It was upstairs at the back of the school, which gave it a nicely unexpected air. When you opened the door, you expected to find an ordinary classroom and instead you had - hey! whoa! - a gigantic cubic vault of polished wood. It was a space to savour: it had cathedral-sized windows, a ceiling that no ball could ever reach, acres of varnished wood that had been mellowed into a honeyed glow by decades of squeaky sneakers and gentle drops of childish perspiration, and smartly echoing acoustics that made every bouncing ball sound deftly handled and seriously athletic. When the weather was good and we were sent outdoors to play, the route to the playground took us on to a rickety metal fire escape that was unnervingly but grandly lofty. The view from the summit took in miles of rooftops and sunny countryside reaching practically to Missouri, or so it seemed...

They used to keep the school heated to roughly the temperature of the inside of a pottery kiln, so pupils and teachers alike existed in a state of permanent, helpless drowsiness. But at the same time the close warmth made everything deliciously cheery and cosy. Even Lumpy Kowalski's daily plop in his pants smelled oven-baked and kind of strangely lovely. (For six months of the year his pants actually steamed.) On the other hand if you carelessly leaned an elbow on them you could leave flesh behind...

The school day was largely taken up with putting on or taking off clothing. It was an exhaustingly tedious process. It took most of the morning to take off your outdoor wear and most of the afternoon to get it back on, assuming you could find any of it among the jumbled, shifting heap of garments that carpeted the cloakroom floor to a depth of about three feet. Changing time was always like a scene at a refugee camp, with at least three kids wandering around weeping copiously because they had only one boot or no mittens. Teachers were never to be seen at such moments.

Boots in those days had strange, uncooperative clasps that managed to pinch and lacerate at the same time, producing some really interesting injuries, especially when your hands were numb with cold. The manufacturers might as well have fashioned them out of razor blades.

Nigel Slater - Jam Tarts

This passage shows how a simple idea such as baking jam tarts can symbolise the close relationship between a child and their mum or dad.

Every few weeks my mother and I would make jam tarts. She had small hands with long, delicate fingers. Gentle, like her name, Kathleen, and that of her siblings, Marjorie and Geoffrey. They say there was some Irish blood somewhere but like my mother's asthma no one ever spoke of it.

She would weigh the flour, the butter, the bit of lard that made the pastry so crumbly, and let me rub them all together with my fingertips in the big cream mixing bowl. She poured in cold water form a glass and I brought the dough together into a ball. Her hands started work with the rolling pin, then, once the ball of pastry was flat, I would take over, pushing the pastry out into a great thin sheet. We took the steel cookie cutters, rusty, dusty, and cut out rings of pastry and pushed them into the shallow hollows of an even rustier patty tin.

Mother didn't like cooking. She did this for me.

There had to be three different jams in the tarts. Strawberry, blackcurrant and lemon curd. I put a couple of spoonfuls of jam into each pastry case, not so much that they would boil over and stick to the tin, but enough that there was more jam than pastry. My father loved a jam tart and would put one in whole and swallow it like a snake devouring a bird's egg.

The tarts were in the top oven of the Aga until the edges of the pastry cases turned the pale beige of a biscuit and the jam had caramelised around the edges. As the kitchen became hotter and more airless my mother would take her inhaler from the top drawer and take long deep puffs, turning her face away as she did so. Sometimes, she would hold her hand to her chest and close her eyes for a few seconds. A few seconds in which the world seemed to stop.

My mother was polite, quietly spoken, but not timid. I once heard her telling off the delivery boy from Percy Salt's the grocer because there was something on the bill that shouldn't have been. I never heard her raise her voice. I am not sure she could have done if she wanted to. She certainly never did to me.

One day my father came home from work, and even before he had taken off his coat he grabbed one of our jam tarts from the wire cooling rack. He couldn’t have known they had come from the oven only a minute or two before. His hands flapped, his face turned a raspberry re, beads of sweat formed like warts on his brow, he danced a merry dance. As he tried to swallow and his eyes filled with the sort of tears a man can only summon when he has boiling lemon curd stuck to the roof of his mouth, I am sure I saw the faintest of smiles flicker across my mother's face.

“What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”

The following extract describes the author, Haruki Murakami, running the original marathon route in Athens. He is the only person running the route. it is the height of summer and it is his first marathon. This example shows how you could describe a sporting or extreme physical challenge.

I run on and on. The sun reveals all of itself, and with unbelievable speed rises in the sky. I’m dying of thirst. I don’t have time to get sweaty, since the air is so dry that perspiration immediately evaporates, leaving behind a layer of white salt. There’s the expression beads of sweat, but here the sweat disappears before it can form beads. My whole body starts to sting from the salty residue. When I lick my lips they taste like anchovy paste. I start to dream about an ice-cold beer, one so cold it burns. No beers around, though, so I make do with getting a drink from the van about every three miles or so. I’ve never drunk so much water while running.

I feel pretty good , though. Lots of energy left. I’m only going at about 70 percent of capacity, but am managing a decent pace. By turns the road goes uphill, then down. I leave behind the city, then the suburbs, and gradually enter a more rural area. As I pass through the small village of Nea Makri, old people sitting at an outdoor café sipping morning coffee from tiny cups silently watch me as I run by. Like they’re watching a scene from the backwaters of history.

After I pass nineteen miles the headwind from the sea starts blowing, and the closer I get to Marathon the harder it blows. The wind is so strong it stings my skin. It feels like if I was to relax at all I’d be blown backward. The faint scent of the sea comes to me as the road gently slopes upward. There is just the one road to Marathon and it’s as straight as a ruler. This is the point where I start to feel real exhaustion. No matter how much water I drink, a few minutes later I’m thirsty again. A nice cold beer would be fantastic.

No – forget about beer. And forget about the sun. Forget about the wind. Forget about the article I have to write. Just focus on moving my feet forward, one after the other. That’s the only thing that matters.

At around twenty-three miles I start to hate everything. Enough already! My energy has scraped bottom, and I don’t want to run anymore. I feel like I’m driving a car on empty. I need a drink, but if I stopped her to drink some water I don’t think I could get running again. I’m dying of thirst but lack the strength to even drink water anymore. As these thoughts flit through my mind I gradually start to get angry. Angry at the sheep happily munching grass in an empty lot next to the road, angry at the photographer snapping photos from the van. The sound of the camera shutter grates on my nerves. Who needs this many sheep, anyway? The whole thing really bugs me no end. My skin’s starting to rise up in little white heat blisters. This is getting ridiculous. What’s with this heat anyway?

I pass the twenty-five mile mark.

The naked sun is blazing hot. It’s only just past 9am but I feel like I’m in an oven. The sweat’s getting in my eyes. I wipe away the sweat with my hand but my hand and face are salty and that makes my hand sting even more.

Beyond the tall summer grasses I can just make out the goal line, the Marathon monument at the entrance to the village of the same name. It appears so abruptly that at first I’m not really sure if that’s really the goal. I’m happy to see the finish line, no question about it, but the abruptness of it makes me made for some reason. Since this is the last leg of the run, I want to make a last, desperate effort to run as fast as I can, but my legs have a mind of their own. I’ve totally forgotten how to move my body. All my muscles feel like they’ve been shaved away with a rusty plane.

The finish line.

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