Bliss by Peter Carey Page A

was why he always got into trouble for being late to school because he couldn't see the hands of the town hall clock.
    'The town hall,' he decided, 'was across the road from the school.
    'He did badly at school. He was not good at anything. Not sums, not writing, and not games.
    'His mother was short too. She was a Cockney from Bow in London and she was only four foot seven tall; almost, but not quite, a midget. This story is set long ago, and one year there was a competition on the beach – the beaches were different then, with bathing boxes and competitions – the people were more easily amused – a competition,' he said, 'for the shortest woman.
    'Now Daniel, or Little Titch as he was usually called, per-suaded his mother to go into the competition. The women were all lined up, ready to be judged, eyeing each other up, bending their knees, digging their feet down into the sand and so on, and everything was calm enough. But when they saw Little Titch's mother walk towards them a great cry of despair went up.
    'Oh, no.'
    And half the line of women just walked away. And Little Titch's mother took her place at one end of the line, very modestly, with that serious look she always wore on her face, and, naturally, she won.
    'When they went home on the tram that night Little Titch carried the silver cup his mother had won. Although it tar-nished quickly you could still read the inscription years later. It read: The Shortest Woman, Queenscliff, 1909 .
    'Little Titch was both proud and puzzled by the cup. He was proud that the people had smiled at his mother and given her the cup. He was proud that the cup was silver and there, where it was engraved (and he traced the words with his grubby finger), it was gold. But he could not understand, as much as he might think about it, either then or in the months that followed, that his mother should be rewarded for the very thing he, her son, was punished for. People did not kick his mother because she was small, or pull her ears (let them try!) or her nose. They did not pinch her when she was asleep and then laugh at her when she cried. But these things, these punishments, were the daily lot of Little Titch. His brothers were bigger and older, more like his father, and they took it in turns to box his ears and tell him how stupid he was. So when he walked back into the house that day it was not with happiness but with his habitual sense of fear, which was laced with cunning and not a little slyness, and he crept off into the corner under the big grey laundry trough where he would hide, with his dirty little arms around his scabby knees, for hours on end. When this hiding place was discovered, and they were always discovered – under the tank stand, beneath the house, in the smelly space behind the outside toilet – he would find another one.
    'He was not lazy. He always tried hard. And later, when his father took up aviation and bought a second-hand Bleriot monoplane, Little Titch would repeatedly break his arm, get-ting it caught by the great wooden propellors which had to be swung by hand.
    'But at the time of this story his father did not have aero-planes, or even taxis, but a stables with horses. So the work of the family was all to do with horses, backing them into the shafts, tightening their girths, doing their shoes, mucking out the stables, feeding them, and so on.
    'Little Titch tried to do whatever work they gave him but they said he was timid and stupid and only fit for shovelling out the stale straw and shit which he had to do each night after school and often he went to bed unwashed with only the cold smell of horse dung for company.
    'The most difficult and troublesome horse in the stables,' Harry said, 'was a gelding named Billy-boy who was not only prone to kick, but also to bite with a ferocity unusual even in a horse. It was nothing for him, one morning when his girth was being tightened, to turn and bite the arm of whichever elder brother was doing it, not just the