Читать книгу Fitting In - Colin Thompson - Страница 32

Ken was something to do with the British Forces Radio Network in Germany. I’m not sure exactly what and later he ended up travelling England as a locum, not for doctors or dentists but for pub landlords, who he then attempted to drink into bankruptcy while they were away on holiday. I’m not sure who won because in the end, he drank himself to death.

My mother always claimed Ken wanted to marry her, which I do hope wasn’t true. He would have been a great dad, but I would never have wished my uptight joyless mother on him.

My other hero was my Uncle Ted. He was my real uncle, not a cousin, and married to my mother’s younger sister Auntie Pamela. The rest of my family thought that Pamela had married beneath her, more than anything because Uncle Ted came from ‘Up North’.

We all knew that once you travelled further than about thirty miles away from London everyone wore sacks and shoes made out of wood, especially if you went north where it was even worse. Up North, shoes were just a rumour that many people refused to believe in. It was all right to go on holiday there if you didn’t stay too long and only in nice hotels, and it was even all right to buy their vegetables or bunches of violets or even possibly employ them, but one did not marry them.

Except Auntie Pamela did.

Every summer holidays Aunt Pam and Uncle Ted rescued me from my tidy quiet sterile box into a home of topsy-turvy excitement with my four cousins and an uncle who told me to pull his little finger and then farted.

A larger-than-life Uncle Ted, who rowed my cousin Stephen and me down a wide green Shropshire river and told us that if we touched any of the brass screws in the bottom of the boat it would fall apart and sink.

So we sat clutching our knees trying to hold our feet in the air because the water looked so cold and neither of us could swim.

Giant Uncle Ted, who at weekends took us into the empty laundry where he was the manager and let us ride the conveyor belts up into the roof, high over the silent machines, and fall off the end onto mountains of dirty clothes.