Frankie and Stankie Read Online Free PDF Page B

which you stick with Gloy and you draw a stamp in the corner with a smiley king face on it.
    One day, towards the end of her first year, Lisa has learnt to do invitations as well, so they write out lots and lots of invitations for people to come to tea the next afternoon, and post them through all the neighbours’ doors. It takes them all day to make the invitations and the envelopes. They draw flowers on all the envelopes. Everybody comes to tea. There’s Paul and Alice Carter from Manchester with their three boys, and the Notcutts and their sons, Simon and Martin, and John and Dornacilla Peck from Canada who have aDIY built-in wonder-kitchen in their bungalow because John is a handyman and Dornacilla can make Baked Alaska. There’s Dr Garjinsky from Poland and Dr Leberman from Germany, and Ken and Jean Hill, and Peter Bullen in his stripy blazer, and Professor Raymond Sands from Nottingham via Sweden, and Wendy Jones with her pregnant Welsh mum and her little brother Owen in baggy rompers. And there’s Mrs Taylor the Estate housekeeper who says she’s Swiss when she’s really German, because that way people don’t refuse to give her a job – and Mrs Taylor needs a job because nobody has ever clapped eyes on Mr Taylor.
    The girls’ mother has nothing in the house to feed anyone, except for half a packet of plain biscuits and a pound of Five Roses tea, but all the visitors sit on the grass and chat while the girls’ mum tries to hide her embarrassment and sends Lisa flying out to the Overport grocer’s shop. Lisa comes back with milk and Romany Creams and two big chocolate Swiss rolls.
    At the Overport shops there are two grocers, but their mum always makes them go to the same one because she once saw a cockroach in the other one. On the way to the shops you nearly always pass Ralph who lives in one of the big houses along Ridge Road. Ralph used to go to the daffy school. Now he’s got too big, but he’s still a member of the local Scout Cubs, so that when they have processions Ralph marches along at the back in full regalia, swinging his long arms, even though he’s two heads taller than all the other Cubs in the pack, who, year by year, move upward and onward to become proper Scouts.
    By the time Dinah starts school she is weedier and more asthmatic than ever, and so is her mum. It’s Dinah’s infant asthma that first triggered her mother’s asthma because she was trying so hard to carry her tiny baby’s burden instead. Now she finds the humid Durban climate doesn’t suit her. She’s lost some of her bloom and she’s got as thin as a stick. Her pretty blonde hair has gone a bit matt from ill-health and also from all the obligatory post-war perms. These are hit-and-miss affairs and sometimes Dinah’s mum comes back from the hairdresser in tears, with the ends of her hair all burnt and yellow. Sometimes she tries to perm her own hair with a kit called a Toni, that has two bottles of stinky ammonia solution and a re-usable bag of little plastic shapes like cartoondog bones. Dinah is very frail and catches everything. Then, whatever it is, it always turns to bronchitis. Ill-health makes a bond between them. For her mother, Dinah is always Poor Little Dee, an endearment which is accompanied by anxious looks and the wringing of hands.
    â€˜I am so worried about you,’ she says.
    Dinah learns to love all her mum’s smothering concern and special treatment. She hates the feeling of waking up in the night not able to breathe, but she reaches out for the pills on her bedside table: one tiny Ephedrine tablet and half a Luminal. The Ephedrine dilates her bronchial tubes but leaves her heart banging violently against her ribs. The Luminal is a tranquilliser to stop the palpitations. What she likes is to be tucked up in bed with her mum on days when she can’t go to school – that’s once they’ve both stopped struggling for