Читать книгу Fitting In - Colin Thompson - Страница 44

Boundaries were reinforced from afar. The cotton wool was packed around me. I was safe and sterilised and everything was in balance. In the kitchen my mother and grandmother made dinner while my grandfather drove home from work. Sometimes the door moved and Tigger came in smelling of Kit-e-kat and rubbed around my legs. The television was older than me, the pictures blurred and colourless, but it was a window into another world, a world where order was sometimes not as well balanced as my world, a world I never visited. When Elizabeth II was crowned queen in 1953, my mother took photographs of the TV screen with her Brownie box camera.

My grandfather had bought the TV in 1939 and for the five years of war it had stood locked shut in the corner gathering dust until 1945 when programmes started up again. My grandmother dusted it off, opened the doors and life resumed, almost in mid-sentence, as if nothing had happened.

At six o’clock every night we sat in the dining room and ate dinner. We bowed our heads and thanked God for what we were about to receive. It was a little ritual of my mother’s. The rest of us sat through it staring into our napkins. If we should have been thanking anyone, it should have been Papa who made the money to buy the food and Nana who had cooked it.

After dinner God went back to what he’d been doing before we’d asked him to bless our meat and two veg. Papa drank whisky and dozed