Patrick Parker's Progress Read Free

union took her quite by surprise, rendered her weak, and made her ready to rip the world apart with her jaws should any element in it try to hurt the babe at her breast. It surprised her all over again that such perfection should be borne out of such an ugly act, such a painful sequel. No wonder, she thought, that it was considered original sin.
    After a few weeks, Florence reluctantly made the train journey back to ravaged Coventry, with George at her side. 'Ah, the proud father,' said a hearty lady in the carriage, after cooing over Florence's bundle. Florence looked up as if she were about to say something sharp and all George, who had come to accompany his wife and son, managed was a sheepish smile. He knew it embarrassed his wife. If he felt any atavistic stirrings of masculine pride, he kept them to himself. If you were a woman and you sat with a man in a railway carriage, and you held that man's baby, then it meant you had been doing unmentionable things with him. It was all George could do to stop himself leaning across the carriage and saying to the hearty lady 'It's all right you know, we only did it twice - ever.'
    The council found them the three-roomed ground floor of a house to the south of the town - with a small scullery, shared bathroom above, but its own privy out the back. Florence, though she moaned about it, realised that they were lucky compared with some. Her previous neighbours, a childless couple, were now living in one room and a kitchen and the WC was down two flights of stairs. She stroked little Patrick's head as he nuzzled at her breast - another blessing, another miracle - if it hadn't been for him who knew what kind of a tip they'd be rehoused in. He was, in every sense, his mother's salvation. In the midst of ruin and chaos, he will bring light, she thinks. She also thinks he will bring glory for her. Before her marriage Florence looked after her three brothers and her father - Mother having departed when she was in service in London and little Flo recalled to take her place. George had seemed like a miracle then. A man with a future, she thought, in the railways, a safe job throughout the Depression - only he never got further than collecting tickets and making his models and looking miserable about it.
    With miracles and blessings in mind, the baby was draped in white lace and fine, hand - knitted woollens (this latter a present from dexterous Dolly) and taken into town to the Methodist Church where he shrieked and yelled a blue fit at the coldness of the water. Indeed, he pummelled and cried and held his breath and made the Reverend Pincher so irritated and tight-lipped with all his kickings and wrig glings that Florence was convinced the Man of God had lived up to his name. She very nearly took her baby back off him, but the Reverend Pincher held on tight (thus increasing the outraged volume of those little lungs) saying that it was necessary in the sight of God that he hold on to the little perisher to complete the job. With Florence shadow-close and snorting and flapping like a mother seal the baptism took place. Plain Patrick became Patrick Nigel and was handed back as such. The Reverend Pincher mopped his brow and called him a determined little lad. George, shaking the man's damp hand, could not quite hide a little smirk, feeling that if the ruddy church didn't know how to deal with the boy, it was no wonder that he, George, his own father could not. Florence strode off calming the angry child and was overheard to murmur all the way down the chapel path, 'There, there - didn't you like the nasty man with the horrid water, then?' Which the Reverend Pincher thought was somewhat against the grain of the baptismal ritual.
    George's daft sister Ada stood godmother, upsetting his other sister Bertha - which pleased Florence who did not care for Bertha's outspoken ways. Although Ada lived in Coventry she was not one of those women who knew, to the nearest number, how many beans made five and