Going Commando Read Online Free PDF Page A

across the road by Aunt Lily who visited religiously with her large brood of kids. I remember vividly how she would place her false teeth on the chip paper as she simultaneously ate her fish and smoked Lambert & Butler cigarettes.
    After lunch, all of us would sit to watch the wrestling on World of Sport , my gran and aunt manically knitting in metronomic time with the ebb and flow of the action. Should the baddies, Giant Haystacks or Mick McManus, get the upper hand over any of her favourites, my gran’s needles would suddenly stop their click-clacking as she leaned forward to look at the telly, bug-eyed, and use the sort of language that at any other time of the week she’d describe as ‘rude’.
    Once the wrestling finished, the room would fall deathly silent as if a mute button had been pressed on the household. Grandad had to listen intently to the football results while he filled in his pools coupon. If a mouse farted, it would get the belt. If a gnat suppressed a sneeze, it would get the belt. If any of us children so much as audibly exhaled, we would get the belt.
    There was no reason for it. Bob Colson, the resultsannouncer, would always imply the result through his intonation, and we kids could pick up who’d won a given fixture before he’d finished reading it out (either that or we could just look at the results on the screen).
    However, this was of no concern to my grandad. One day, after a poor run of around three weeks of not getting belted, I made the mistake of laughing at a fart from my elder cousin. Let’s face it, any 10 year old would when they’re not supposed to. Even with his belt at the ready, my ten-year-old self was too quick for grandad, eluding his grasp as I ran upstairs. He didn’t follow like he usually did. Eventually, holding my breath and listening out for the tell-tale sound of a creaking stair, I peeked out of my bedroom door. No sign. I crept back down the stairs, hoping he wasn’t lying in ambush, and returned to the kitchen that was festooned with skinned rabbits hanging from a washing line.
    Grandad was sitting on a chair, looking pale – his miner’s tattoo, an Indian ink-blue crack caused by a large block of coal falling on his head years earlier – seemed more pronounced than ever. He was rubbing his bald head and breathing deeply. My gran scolded me back upstairs. It was the last time I ever saw grandad. He had suffered a stroke while trying to chase me. He died later that evening.
    After his death, our prize-winning garden fell into disrepair and the house seemed to wither with age – as did my gran, who chain-smoked her way through her single-parenting responsibilities with little money but too much pride to ask for help. She’d be up chopping wood for the fire before I rose until I decided, aged eleven, that it should really be my job.Unfortunately, so was the cleaning up of dog shit that was a trip hazard around the dining room.
    The upshot was that I was farmed out between aunts and uncles more often, especially during the school holidays, to alleviate the child-rearing pressures on my gran. I felt like a wartime evacuee when sent to the West Hull villages, and my time spent amongst the greenery of the Yorkshire Wolds opened my eyes to the wonderment of rolling hills, tree climbing and river rafting – all alien pastimes to a kid surviving the concrete jungle. I suddenly felt alive, with fresh air detoxing my lungs, and realised the books I’d been brought up on were just the prologue to real life.
    June, or ‘Mammy June’ as I began to call her, visited more often. She now lived about a mile away, and so would call in on the occasional Friday evening en route to nightshift at the nearby chemical works. There was still not much of a bond between us, but she did seem to take more of an interest in my life and even came to see me play the title role at my primary school production of Jonah and the Whale .
    I’d visited her just once at her house on a rough