Steady Now Doctor Read Free Page A

remember that blonde at the grocers?”
    â€œYes,” said Andy.
    â€œI bet it was Maggie Thatcher.”
    â€œMy God, I bet you’re right,” said Andy, “but only if the Watling Street goes through Grantham.”
    He remembered Lichfield, Atherstone, Newcastle-under-Lyme, then Warrington to Preston, all cobbles, and he believed it was near Preston he said goodbye to Joneson and, in fact, it was some years before they met again, as he changed schools the next term.
    The journey took them four days, and he was given a hero’s welcome in Blackpool. His mother and father were there, both pleased to see him. His father more than his mother, not that either liked him more than the other, but if anything had gone wrong with his trip his mother would have blamed it on his father.
    His bum was the sorest it had ever been, and he was just about muscle-bound. He was taken to a slipper bath in Blackpool Central the next morning. A slipper bath was just an ordinary bath, one of many in a public bath building. Organizing a bath at short notice at home was much more difficult in those days. For the next few days he basked in the glory of his achievement, then some event of national importance took away everybody’s attention.
    ***
    His mother and father rowed incessantly. There was nothing so small it could not lead to a heated argument. Several Christmas dinners were spoilt by arguments on how the turkey should be carved, with everybody finishing in tears, and as a finale, his mother locking herself in the coal place.
    There are many types of sin. Too many to enumerate. But in his limited experience he felt that nagging was by far the most serious. His mother was an expert. If it had featured as an event in the Olympics, she would have won a gold medal.
    An example of her skills was the day his father won some award. She was included in the celebrations, but, of course, not the main event as he was. He was up on the stage, blushing about the nice things that were said about him, received his award to thunderous applause, returned to his seat next to his wife, who whispered in his ear, “Did you know that your suit was shabby?”
    Now that was really a class act. She hadn’t broken any laws, and perhaps had told the truth, yet in those few quiet words she felled him with one stroke, as surely as one can fell a sapling with an axe.
    His father held his own through sarcasm. They were really like two plants in adjacent pots, his father growing more quickly in his than Andy’s mother, who tried to keep him down to her size by hacking at his roots.
    There must have been times when they communicated. There was rarely a noise from their bedroom, and perhaps this was where they communicated best. It was always a wonder to him how Lettice had been conceived. He learned in later years that it was behind a bush in the dark in some northern park. Surely they couldn’t have been arguing then.
    His father was a bit of a lad, which was confirmed once when Andy was leading the Peewit Patrol through some local forest. They came to a clearing, and there was his father in his parked car with his secretary. For some reason he didn’t seem as pleased to see Andy as Andy was to see him.
    That night, when he got home, his father was waiting behind the kitchen door, springing out when he arrived, shoving a half crown into his hand and saying, “Don’t tell your mother you saw me.”
    â€œWhat’s going on,” said his mother with her antennae raised.
    â€œI’m just seeing he’s all right,” said his father.
    Andy couldn’t understand any of it. It seemed quite natural to him that his father should take his secretary for a spin, though, for some reason some of his patrol sniggered. Years later his father told him that some of the parents of his patrol cut him dead after this event, but this was probably just his guilty conscience.
    This was just about the time Andy was