Читать книгу Fitting In - Colin Thompson - Страница 34

Every year they seemed to live somewhere different, places that were far away and exotic – Shropshire, Dumfries, Cornwall. I think Uncle Ted got restless, maybe they all did, because they never seemed to stay in one place for long.

Not like us. We had our feet nailed to the ground. Everyone in Audley Road, Ealing, London, W5 did. I was born in the Old Court Nursing Home round the corner, baptised and went to Sunday School in the church round another corner, and went to school down the road.

We were all like that round there, because we knew our place and we knew it didn’t get any better than that.

But Uncle Ted had a head full of dreams – nothing dramatic like moving to Australia, but where his dreams flew his body and his family followed. Their homes were always full of half-unpacked cardboard boxes as if they never knew when the wanderlust might take them again, so there was no point in unwrapping everything, just what they needed there and then.

The boxes with their newspaper nests were always home to a troupe of cats that travelled the country with them, stragglers left behind here, new kittens adopted there.

Every summer I spent the holidays somewhere new, in places that were full of excitement, places that to most people were probably quite ordinary, but places where life might suddenly break out of its rigid repetition and burst into song.

Cornwall was the best. I was fifteen by then, but life with Pam and Ted was still a wonderful adventure of illicit happiness. And when I look back, I realised they just lived a normal life that thousands of families everywhere did and none of it was illicit at all.

Normal people often left the washing-up until the next morning and didn’t get into trouble or feel guilty about it. Normal people told dirty jokes and laughed unashamedly at them and sometimes went to bed in their vests. They didn’t kneel on the floor every night, hands clasped, eyes uplifted to some invisible fiction, asking for blessings and forgiveness from some demanding spirit that lived above the ceiling and could never be satisfied.

Normal people gloried in the simple joys of life, sitting in the sun, drinking beer, playing football with their kids, leaving the dust to gather on top of the wardrobes. Life rough around the edges, frayed carpets, frayed tempers sometimes, running indoors, lying on the bed with their shoes on, digging holes in the garden – I wanted that.