it, both of you. You know I can’t stand scenes. I still don’t see what Timmy is going to do. Sid doesn’t play anything, does he?’
‘Sidney Noggett has been on the fiddle for years,’ says Dad wittily. ‘That’s the only way you get anywhere, these days. A decent working-class man with a set of principles might as well stay at home.’
‘You do stay at home most of the time, Dad.’
‘It’s my back, isn’t it? There’s no cause to mock the afflicted. If me and a few more like me didn’t have our aches and pains you might be feeling the Nazi jackboot across the back of your neck.’
Dad does tend to over-dramatise a bit for a bloke who spent most of World War II fire watching. In fact I have known him turn off Dad’s Army because he found it too harrowing. Still, he is very sensitive on the subject and since my present standing in the family is one of grovelling I should be advised to lay off.
‘Sorry, Dad.’ The words are more difficult to form than the Bermondsey branch of the Ted Heath fan club.
‘I should bleeding think so. Young people today don’t know the meaning of the word patriotism. Look at us. Knocked out of the World Cup by a load of Polaks. The Krauts going mad in Munich. It’s a bleeding national disgrace.’
‘Come on, Dad. When your mate, Stanley Matthews, was playing we were beaten by the Yanks.’
Dad does not like this. ‘Sir Stanley Matthews if you don’t mind, Sonny Jim. That was the atmospheric conditions, wasn’t it? They made them play up the side of a mountain, didn’t they? Our lads weren’t used to it. I don’t call that football.’
‘Do give over, Dad,’ says Mum. ‘How do you like the beefburgers?’
‘I don’t reckon them boiled, I can tell you that.’ Dad did not see Mum straining the cabbage over them.
‘Just as you like, dear. I thought it might make a change.’
Mum does not bat an eyelid. ‘Eat up, Timmy. Your rice is all ready.’
Already ruined, I can see that. Once it starts making a bolt for it over the side of the saucepan you can reckon that it has given up the ghost.
‘I don’t know if I can manage it, Mum,’ I say, patting my stomach in a way that I hope suggests satisfaction with the excellent fare that has already been provided.
‘Go on. I know you can find room for it. I’ll put some golden syrup on it like I used to when you were a little boy. You remember how he used to love hot, sticky things when he was a kiddy, Dad?’
‘Yeah.’ Dad’s face adapts a thoughtful expression and I can sense his disgusting mind working on some tasteless descent into vulgarity.
‘Just a little bit, Mum,’ I say hurriedly, ‘I think I put on some weight in the army.’
‘I was thinking how thin you looked.’ Mum thumps down an enormous helping of what looks like petrified frog’s spawn. I do wish she would not use the spoon with which she dishes out the beefburgers. ‘There you are. Rice is the stable diet of the Chinese, you know.’
‘This lot looks as if it’s seen the inside of a stable and all,’ complains Dad. ‘Gordon Bennett! How do you manage to get it like that?’
‘I did what it said on the side of the tin,’ says Mum, patiently reading from the label. ‘ “Brown and crisp on the outside, moist and tender in the middle.” ’
Dad claps his hand to his head. ‘Gawd, give me strength! That’s the steak-pie tin, isn’t it? Can’t you even read from the right bleeding labels?’
‘Oh dear. It must be my glasses,’ says Mum.
‘Yeah, you want to stop filling them to the brim all the time,’ snaps Dad.
‘It wouldn’t be a surprise if I did turn to drink, the way you go on at me,’ sniffs Mum. ‘If the food isn’t good enough for you, you’d better give me some more house-keeping money.’
‘I daren’t do that,’ says Dad. ‘All you’d do is buy bigger tins.’
‘At least the print on the labels would be larger, Dad,’ I say helpfully.
‘Don’t you turn against me, now,’ sobs Mum. ‘I try and do you something nice when you come home and this is all the thanks I get.’
‘See what you’ve done now?’ snarls Dad. ‘You’ve made your mother cry. As soon as you’re through the door you’re spreading misery and unhappiness. If what you get here isn’t good enough for you –’
His voice drones on but it is a track from an LP I have heard a million times and the words disappear like raindrops into snow. I am meeting Sid round at his Vauxhall pad and I am not sorry when the time comes to steal away with Dad’s voice melting in my ear and a fistful of Rennies belting down to put out the fire in my belly. I am also looking forward to seeing sister Rosie again. When Sid last talked about her she had started up a couple of boutiques and was doing all right for herself. Ever since her little brush with Ricci Volare on the Isla de Amor she has been a different woman from the one that used to hover in front of Sid like the pooch on the old HMV label. I feel sorry for Sid. It can’t be nice for a bloke to see his wife doing something on her own – especially when she starts doing better than he is. Ever since the Cromby Hotel, Sid has been marking time if not actually going backwards while Rosie has been coming up like super-charged yeast. How will I find the girl who was voted Clapham’s ‘Miss Available’ in the balmy days of 1966?
The short answer is – thinner. Rosie’s tits seem to have evaporated and the skin is stretched over her face like the paper on the framework of a model aeroplane. She has also done something with her eyebrows – like got rid of them – and her barnet is closer to her nut that I can ever remember it.
‘Got to go out, Timmy love,’ she says, kissing me on the cheek. ‘Sidney will give you a drink. Must fly. See you again.’
Her voice is different, too. Not exactly posh, but sharper. It carries more muscle, somehow.
Sid looks relieved when she has pushed off. ‘What’s your poison?’ he says.
I am a bit disappointed with the surroundings. I had been expecting signs of loot, but they don’t even have a cocktail cabinet. The booze is laid out on a tray and that rests on a table which is definitely on its last legs. Peppered with worm holes and dead old-fashioned looking. Most of the stuff they have got must have come from a junk shop though the carpet is nice. Probably took up all their cash.
‘I’ll have a light ale, since you’re asking,’ I say.
Sid looks uncomfortable. ‘We don’t have any light ale. There might be some lager in the fridge.’
I look at the tray and he is right. It is full of bottles of gin and vodka and something called Noilly Prat. That sounds nice, doesn’t it? Just the kind of thing you would like to offer your mother-in-law.
‘Let’s go round the boozer,’ I say. ‘Where’s Rosie pushed off to?’
Sid is already helping himself to a large scotch. ‘She’s gone to look at one of her wine bars.’
‘Wine bars? She given up the boutiques, has she?’
Sid took a deep swig at his drink. ‘She’s got these as well as the boutiques.’
‘What is a wine bar, Sid?’
‘It’s like a boozer, but they only sell wine.’
How diabolical! My blood freezes over when I hear his words. I mean, I don’t mind a spot of plonk on the Costa Del Chips, that is the place for it, isn’t it? But in your own local – and pushing out the native product! It hardly bears thinking about. How could Rosie do such a thing? It must be a blooming disaster.
‘Making a bleeding fortune,’