Noisy at the Wrong Times Read Online Free PDF Page B

towards their children; the more besotted by them they are, the more frantic they become when their behaviour is in danger of doing them harm.
    There were four of us brothers in the fatherless family home, and all were swift to invite punishment, but even swifter to seek to avoid it so Mum needed strategies and she had to be fast. If she couldn’t get herself across the room quickly enough to deliver a manual pounding, she was not averse to broadcasting in our direction whatever was within her reach. Her throwing arm was lethally accurate, and she would launch fusillades of shoes, chairs or ornaments across the room as we crashed through furniture and doors in a frenetic bid to escape the artillery that was exploding off the walls around us. Shoes in the seventies were dangerously synthetic, with thick platform soles of dimpled plastic that could travel through the air at speed. Orthopaedic sandals had wooden soles that could either be used to smack or, better still, cast across the room like pine nunchucks. The heavy glass ashtray on the coffee table was often used, but so was the coffee table itself, which meantyou had to dodge both the lump of glass with blue bubbles in it as well as the table. I was forever grateful that we couldn’t afford a television with a remote control and the television itself was rented, so she dare not throw that, although she could have if she so desired. The New York Yankees would have taken options on Mum were they to spot her potential. She could curve any object a yard left or right, which meant half-open doors offered little protection; Mum would still hit you with a Mr Sheen tin even when pitched from the unseen corner of the lounge. A curious shortfall in her skill meant she found it harder to score a direct hit the closer she was to you because she threw things too hard. But then, if she was within a yard or so, she had other means at her disposal.
    Hands.
    I think the expression “heavy handed” was first coined for Mum. The strike of her hand didn’t as much sting as stun. Flesh wasn’t flushed with redness from a slap; it was in spasm from blunt force injury. From time to time, when her hands were sore from the latest burn or from hand-washing a full load of boys’ clothes, she might corner you as you sat on the sofa, plastic shoe in her grip, in which case the best defensive position was lying on your back with a foot in the air as the first point of defence, very much as a goalkeeper narrows the angle for an attacker. As she flailed away at you with a four-inch platform shoe, you were able to wave the foot about, forcing her to change her slant. After a while, she worked out a new and viciously rudimentary strategy: hit hard on the sole of the foot being proffered so willingly into her firing line. If there was anything more painful than wearing one of those plastic shoes, it was being hit on the foot by one of them, and even as a child, stung into a fit of wailing tears, that particular irony was never lost on me.
    Being the recipient of such tough love never seemed toalter our behaviour, but it probably kept its scope to reasonable proportions. Of course, so much of what we did was never tied to us and I will forever be thankful for that. And if we spent a lot of time avoiding a smack from our mother, we exhausted even more dodging one from various characters on the estate. The tattooed loon who was forever doing up his custom car, sullying the tarmac with oil for a ten metre radius from his front door, never found out it was me who smashed the windscreen of his prized asset.
    To this day, I have a curious passion for the flight of objects, a primitive pleasure in the arc of a ball or the flat hover of a Frisbee. It is why I can never play ball games with my kids in the garden because I will just
have
to smack the ball into the garden three doors down, just to see it fly. On one hot afternoon, bored and looking for trouble, I sent a stone sky high with my old tennis racquet,