The one I had was called 'Elementary Crystallography', so I
opened it up and said: "Excellent, really first-class," keeping
turning the pages. Then I said in a very shocked type goloss:
"But what is this here? What is this filthy slovo? I blush to
look at this word. You disappoint me, brother, you do
really."
"But," he tried, "but, but."
"Now," said Georgie, "here is what I should call real dirt.
There's one slovo beginning with an f and another with a c."
He had a book called 'The Miracle of the Snowflake.'
"Oh," said poor old Dim, smotting over Pete's shoulder and
going too far, like he always did, "it says here what he done to
her, and there's a picture and all. Why," he said, "you're
nothing but a filthy-minded old skitebird."
"An old man of your age, brother," I said, and I started to
rip up the book I'd got, and the others did the same with the
ones they had. Dim and Pete doing a tug-of-war with 'The
Rhombohedral System'. The starry prof type began to creech:
"But those are not mine, those are the property of the mu-
nicipality, this is sheer wantonness and vandal work," or some
such slovos. And he tried to sort of wrest the books back off
of us, which was like pathetic. "You deserve to be taught a
lesson, brother," I said, "that you do." This crystal book I had
was very tough-bound and hard to razrez to bits, being real
starry and made in days when things were made to last like,
but I managed to rip the pages up and chuck them in handfuls
of like snowflakes, though big, all over this creeching old
veck, and then the others did the same with theirs, old Dim
just dancing about like the clown he was. "There you are," said
Pete. "There's the mackerel of the cornflake for you, you dirty
reader of filth and nastiness."
"You naughty old veck, you," I said, and then we began to
filly about with him. Pete held his rookers and Georgie sort
of hooked his rot wide open for him and Dim yanked out his
false zoobies, upper and lower. He threw these down on the
pavement and then I treated them to the old boot-crush,
though they were hard bastards like, being made of some new
horrorshow plastic stuff. The old veck began to make sort of
chumbling shooms - "wuf waf wof" - so Georgie let go of
holding his goobers apart and just let him have one in the
toothless rot with his ringy fist, and that made the old veck
start moaning a lot then, then out comes the blood, my
brothers, real beautiful. So all we did then was to pull his
outer platties off, stripping him down to his vest and long
underpants (very starry; Dim smecked his head off near), and
then Pete kicks him lovely in his pot, and we let him go. He
went sort of staggering off, it not having been too hard of a
tolchock really, going "Oh oh oh", not knowing where or
what was what really, and we had a snigger at him and then
riffled through his pockets, Dim dancing round with his
crappy umbrella meanwhile, but there wasn't much in them.
There were a few starry letters, some of them dating right
back to 1960 with "My dearest dearest" in them and all that
chepooka, and a keyring and a starry leaky pen. Old Dim gave
up his umbrella dance and of course had to start reading one
of the letters out loud, like to show the empty street he could