March 18, 2025: Jim Edwards, "Growing Up Without Inky"

Growing Up Without Inky

by: Jim Edwards

(From the Undermountain Review, Fall 1991)

Tony and me, we were watching the girls, Cathy and Sarah in the playground. They were showing off, running around the boys. They skipped and their hair bounced and they could shout their happiness the way us boys weren’t supposed to. I look back now, and five was a great age to have been.

“That’s skipping!” demanded Incledon. We called him Inky. It wasn’t so difficult to say. Inky hopped. Two feet on the floor. Two feet lifted at the same time. Two feet returned to the same spot. He hopped.

The war between Inky and the rest of us waged every week from Monday to Friday at school, but sometimes Inky would come to Sunday School and then we could kick him when he had the right answers – he always sat in the front row and we could whack him if we swung our legs. Inky had new boxing gloves, but Tony had beaten him up behind the garages. Tony only had an old left glove, but he beat Inky’s new shiny red pair. Inky had a whole skate board whilst we grazed our knuckles on the paving, grasping onto books, thick trusty annuals, resting on our single skates.

We demonstrated our version of skipping. One foot, landing, lifting, stepping, the other foot lifting, landing ….

“That’s hopping!” said Inky. He just had to be different. He always did. We fought. It didn’t matter. I mean, we were on grass and we weren’t going to break any windows. The teacher stopped us. Why we fought made no sense to her. Hopping? She demonstrated …. On one foot! Now we were confused. We left it there. Inky was smiling. We sulked, but we knew we were right

Tony and I whizzed our Matchbox cars from camp bed to camp bed along the waxed floor of the nursery school during our after-lunch siesta. Inky kept reaching down from his cot to stop my ambulance from crashing into Tony’s Green Hornet, but we were cleverer. We knew we were right. He’d learned nothing.

We learned … that … we didn’t need our own new boxing gloves. Tony had beaten Inky with one hand, one glove. I had punched Inky when he kept saying his team had won 3-2, and I knew that we had scored before the bell. You couldn’t win an argument with Inky. He always got teachers to show us he was right. He was always right. So I hit him. On the nose! 3-3!

We didn’t need Incledon and his gloves and his record player and his girls and his Scalextric slot car racing track and his Lego (we had Betta Bilda blocks) and his dad who was brilliant! We learned that.

An English cathedral schoolboy, attending two universities, teaching in three high schools, led to thirty-two years helping at the creation of the U.P. Children's Museum.  Jim Edwards is a Yooper.