Erwin Mortier - Shutterspeed

I pulled off my socks, relished the cool air around my feet and sat down.

‘Joris, your food’s getting cold,’ Aunt called from the bottom of the stairs.

I held up the missal and, just before clapping it shut to feel the rush of air hitting my cheeks, I glimpsed the words Thou has sent widows away empty, and the arms of the fatherless have been broken .

THAT NIGHT THERE WAS A THUNDERSTORM.

‘Doesn’t look too good out there,’ said Uncle. He had got up from his chair by the reading lamp and was pulling all the plugs from their sockets. Aunt continued playing Patience with stoic resignation.

‘Funny, that,’ she said in a peevish tone just as Uncle made to sit down again. ‘Whenever you decide to disconnect the electric all over the place, you leave the lamp by your chair on. As if we’re the only ones the lightning has it in for.’

He heaved an indifferent sigh, switched off his reading lamp and left the room to hunt for candles elsewhere in the house. Aunt could get rather tetchy in this kind of weather. Uncle had also turned off the radio, so that she was missing Songs from the Homeland , her favourite programme.

‘Why don’t you read me something, Joris,’ she said. ‘It would take my mind off the storm at least.’

A few days earlier, Mr Snellaert had given me a book to take home: Mysteries of Nature Unravelled . In contrast to my school reports, which he said bore a strong resemblance to the Pyrenees with all those soaring peaks and deep valleys, my love of reading met with his approval.

‘What’s it about?’ she wanted to know.

‘All sorts of things,’ I said.

‘So long as it’s not about prehistoric monsters, it’ll do for me.’ She found it impossible to believe that such dreadful creatures had ever walked the earth. A spider in the bathroom was enough to scare the living daylights out of her.

‘Don’t worry,’ I replied, and cleared my throat.

‘It says here,’ I intoned, ‘that Palissy, an avowed Protestant, wrote a book called A Wonderful Tale of Waters and Fountains , in which he established, after long years of study, that each snowflake falling on the top of a mountain helps to feed the world’s great rivers, and even the oceans!’

‘Did he really need to do all that studying just for that?’ Uncle grinned, setting a candle on the table. ‘Just to find out that water always goes down, never up? If that’s all it takes, I could be a professor myself …’

‘Werner!’ hissed Aunt. ‘Just let the boy get on with it.’

The book contained wonderful pictures, including one in which the heavens resembled a bell jar made of crystal, or a soap bubble. Tucked away in a corner at the bottom was a little man who, having walked to the end of the earth, poked his head out through the side, apparently reaching for the stars with one hand. The vast unknown and the foolhardiness of the human spirit , read the inscription.

Other pages had brightly coloured illustrations with captions like The earth before the dawn of civilisation , in which the continents didn’t look at all like the wall maps in our classroom. As though God Himself had hesitated even as He was creating. As if He had experimented with all sorts of shapes in His rough sketches, cleaving continents in two or more pieces and drawing inordinately squiggly coastlines, and it seemed to me that He must have been trying to escape a kind of boredom that was a thousand times worse than the boredom I suffered every morning around eleven o’clock, when noon seemed aeons away.

Some places on earth, like the Pacific Ocean, looked as if He had skimmed over them in a semi-sleep, dreaming of land masses which, upon waking, He had crumbled between His fingers into a dusting of atolls.

It gave me a giddy sense of power to be able to survey the whole world and speak the names of all the deserts and mountain ranges, as if I were personally responsible for their existence. I held my hand in the light of the candle to cast a shadow on Hawaii. In my mind’s eye I saw the streets of Honolulu thronged with people looking up in astonishment at the sudden eclipse of their sun. I took my magnifying glass from the table drawer and held it over the islands of Micronesia.

‘All those peculiar names,’ said Aunt, fretfully, ‘you’re not pulling my leg, are you? Houaheina, who’d ever think of it?’

She shook her head, but that was more on account of her card game not coming good yet again.

‘I’m glad I was born here and not anywhere else. Not too cold, not too hot, most of the time anyway, none of your unpronounceable names and no horrible savage beasts either. We can count our lucky stars, we can.’

She contemplated the cards she had laid out on the table for another game, placed her hands on the nape of her neck and threw back her head. The sound of the vertebrae cracking always gave me the creeps.

‘Houaheina,’ she mused.

Outside, the thunderstorm seemed to be waning before it had got well and truly under way. Uncle had fallen asleep; he began to snore.

‘A fanfare for free,’ Aunt grumbled. ‘There he goes again.’

I kissed her good-night and went upstairs.

Lying naked on my bed with my feet up against the wall, I carried on reading by the light of the street lamp outside my window, which threw a luminous, silvery triangle on the sheet. I still preferred to read the way I had learned in my first year at school — not in silence but in whispers, which gave me the feeling I wasn’t actually mouthing the words but fingering them carefully, as though fishing them out from the pages between thumb and forefinger.

There were words that set my teeth on edge like grit in poorly rinsed spinach, others that I swallowed whole like aspirin for fear of them tasting vile. One of my favourite words was ‘iodine’, which I had come across in a book called Principles of Chemistry . The title sounded mysteriously pleasing to my ears, if only because I was unsure what ‘principles’ meant.

I thought they were probably something like the shelving units we had in the shop. Principles would have their own little compartments with labels indicating names or dates, and iodine would be kept in one of them. The book said that iodine was to be found in sea water and that it occurred ‘in high concentrations in the sea air’, besides being ‘of vital importance for proper functioning of the thyroid gland’.

I often took down the book from the ledge over my bed, just to check whether iodine was still in there, given that it was such a volatile substance, and when I read the bit about the thyroid I always felt a tickle in my throat. One day I asked Uncle Werner where that particular gland was situated. He responded by placing his thumb and forefinger on either side of my Adam’s apple and giving my throat a squeeze.

‘Around there somewhere,’ he said. ‘In animals it’s called sweetbread.’ It sounded like some type of cake, but I preferred the name ‘thyroid gland’. The word thyroid came from the Greek for shield, and the idea of having a shield-shaped gland in my body made me think of knights in shining armour.

At school one day, when Mr Snellaert asked whether anyone could remember what the Flemings’ battle-cry had been during the Bruges uprising, when our people had at last — at long last, so he reminded us — taken up arms against the foreign invader, I jumped up from my desk without thinking and shouted ‘For gland and glory!’ My voice was so loud that even I was startled.

There was a long pause while the master rolled his eyes. He waited for the gales of laughter to die down, then came up to me quite calmly and gave me a resounding clip around the ear.

‘What you need is a thorough drubbing,’ he said in conclusion, wiping his hands on his dust coat.