At My Mother's Knee Read Online Free PDF Page B

window, 'and help
me get rid of the bloody thing.'
    Indicating for me to hold open a bin liner that she just
happened to have with her, she dropped the dead cat into it,
instructing me to dispose of the corpse in the bin chambers of
the block of flats on Sydney Road.
    'Serves it bloody right,' she sniffed, as she hurried back
indoors before the neighbours saw her. 'It must have eaten
something.'
    It wasn't until a few weeks later, when I was searching in the
scary recesses of the cupboard under the kitchen sink for a tin
of shoe polish, that I came across the evidence that let the cat
out of the bag, so to speak. Hidden behind the assorted
bottles and tins that gather under kitchen sinks I found a tin of
Kitekat and a half-empty medicine bottle containing an
extremely suspect concoction.
    I confronted her with the evidence.
    'Give me that bottle,' she said, snatching it out of my hand.
'You haven't got any on your skin or drunk any, have you?' she
added, starting to panic.
    'Did you poison that cat?' I asked, looking her straight in the
eye.
    'Don't be so stupid,' she retorted, feigning outrage, and
claimed that the cat food was for 'that poor undernourished
creature that sometimes comes in the back yard' and that the
dubious contents of the bottle were for 'the drains'. Who did I
think I was?
    Did this Birkenhead Borgia poison that unfortunate cat? She
always hotly denied it but I still have my doubts. I wouldn't
put it past her. She hated that cat with a passion and couldn't
have, wouldn't have, stood by and let it destroy her beautiful
garden and all the hard work she'd put into it without a fight.
Then there was the killing of 'her robin', an act that I think
finally tipped her over the edge and sounded the death knell for
the poor moggy. As she herself was wont to say, 'Desperate
times call for desperate measures.'
    An Alsatian dog was kept permanently chained up in the back
yard of a house to the rear of ours and it barked incessantly,
twenty-four hours a day. All the neighbours complained, the
couple who owned the hound were reported to the RSPCA, the
police were called out when it escaped one day from its backyard
prison and supposedly attacked George Long , but still nothing was done about this poor dog who barked all day and
all through the night. After we'd endured two years of sleepless
nights, the wretched hound was found dead one morning
in strange and inexplicable circumstances.
    At the time I was temporarily delivering papers for Henshaw's , our local newsagent-cum-grocer's. Eileen Henshaw liked to adopt a superior attitude, the sort she imagined befitted
a grocer's wife. My mother said she was common and that
she gave herself airs above her station. She was forever bragging
about her son's scholastic achievements and the fact that
he went to a grammar school. 'The teachers reckon the way
he's going on it'll be head boy for him in a few years,' she'd say
to my mother as she sliced into a lump of Cheshire cheese with
a length of wire. 'He's a child prodigal,' she'd add, picking
crumbs of cheese off the board and chewing on them, smiling
pityingly all the while over the counter at me.
    'Common cow,' my mother would say on her way home,
'you'd think she ran Harrods instead of a shitty backstreet
midden.' My mother hated going into Henshaw's but it was the
only shop locally that sold newspapers. She didn't go in there
often, she usually sent me instead. She much preferred to shop
at Mrs Profitt 's, but that good lady had sold up and gone to
live with her daughter, selling the house-cum-shop to the
couple who owned the dog.
    Every Wednesday Mrs Profitt made her own meat and
potato pies in her little kitchen behind the shop. Her pies
had the distinction of being the 'talk of Tranmere' and
deservedly so, for I've yet to taste a better one. Her other claim
to fame was finding a tropical spider in a box of Fyffes
bananas. As she took the lid off the box and pulled aside
the straw, a hairy-legged monster hopped out and