A Young Man's Passage Read Online Free PDF Page B

of them, many albinos, darting all round the place. I imagine some kind of pest control had to be called in eventually.

    ONE OF MY mother’s friends was Doreen Eldridge. She had three children too, and this coincidence made their friendship both inevitable and practical. I liked Doreen a great deal and it would brighten my day to hear her tap on the door and call:
    ‘Yoo-hoo! Only me!’
    I was a mere child, of course, and Doreen had come to see my mother, not me. I was acknowledged, patted and ignored as they settled down to morning coffee and biscuits. But this did not matter at all. In fact, it was all to the good, for Doreen’s discourse was not about nappies or Jimmy Young, it was always up-to-the-minute scandal and revelation about people we knew, or repetitions of overheard conversations with sizzling punchlines. There was never a dull moment when Doreen popped in, and I would quietly and unobtrusively play with my farmyard animals or pretend to be reading a book while listening to the latest gossip. Thus by the age of eight I was a veritable Who’s Who of Teddington Babylon, and as shocked as anyone by the particular goings-on of a woman, nay harlot, called Shauna (not her real name), whose activities enlivened many a morning’s coffee break.
    Doreen’s main asset was imagination – a startling originality that swept her along faster than most could keep up with. She spoke very quickly, spilling the words out in no particular order, and the listener had the task of unravelling and ordering them if any meaningful communication was to be made.
    Her appearance, however, was not disordered. She was tall and painfully thin, and from my position at floor level I would wonder at her long, sinewy legs, wound round each other like plaits of soft toffee. As she talked, Doreen would often sew. Nearly all her clothes she made herself; she would create summer dresses from curtains, aprons from summer dresses, tea towels from aprons and dusters from tea towels.
    Doreen (also known as Do-Do) treated her children with the same brisk vivacity that she treated everything else. She would break off in mid-sentence to call ‘Nick!’ (her youngest) from across the room, then, continuing her conversation, she would hold the struggling infant firmly by the shoulder while the forefinger of her other hand was busy clawing at his nose to remove some lumpy discharge.
    As Doreen had a weak bladder, she was obliged to get up at frequent intervals throughout the night. Even this she turned to practical advantage. When she got up at 6 a.m. she would wash and brush her teeth before returning to bed for the final hour of rest. This would save time later on, and five minutes after the alarm clock went off she was up and dressed and shovelling breakfast into her children. Lunch would be over by noon and tea on the table at half past three in the afternoon.
    If in the summer we went on a trip to the local open-air swimming pool, it was important to Doreen that we be the first to arrive. We would find ourselves sitting by the pool before it was warm enough to change into swimming costumes, and sleepy-eyed we would watch the attendant clean the scum from the water’s surface.
    I don’t remember Doreen ever being depressed, but she was frequently ill and unable to carry on at the usual frantic pace. She was asthmatic and slept with an oxygen cylinder by her bed. Sometimes she would seem to run out of breath, and I remember her groping in her handbag for a small plastic contraption she called her ‘puffer’. She would place one end of this in her mouth and inhale, and then her breathing would be easier. As well as asthma, Doreen seemed prone to all sorts of other afflictions. A superficial finger wound became septic and her finger was amputated. For Doreen this was a great talking point and she would waggle her stump in the air and shriek with laughter. Bronchitis and influenza also seemed to enter and depart her body as they pleased. The