Sweet Tooth Read Online Free PDF

elliptically about their starry main verbs, but in the letters pages no one was in any doubt. The planets were out of kilter and the letter writers knew in their anxious hearts that the country was sinking into despair and rage and desperate self-harm. The United Kingdom had succumbed, one letter announced, to a frenzy of akrasia – which was, Tony reminded me, the Greek word for acting against one’s better judgement. (Had I not readPlato’s Protagoras ?) A useful word. I stored it away. But there was no better judgement, nothing to act against. Everyone had gone mad, so everyone said. The archaic word ‘strife’ was in heavy use in those rackety days, with inflation provoking strikes, pay settlements driving inflation, thickheaded, two-bottle-lunch management, bloody-minded unions with insurrectionary ambitions, weak government, energy crises and power cuts, skinheads, filthy streets, the Troubles, nukes. Decadence, decay, decline, dull inefficiency and apocalypse …
    Among the favoured topics in letters to The Times were the miners, ‘a workers’ state’, the bipolar world of Enoch Powell and Tony Benn, flying pickets, and the Battle for Saltley. A letter from a retired rear admiral said the country resembled a rusting battleship holed below the waterline. Tony read the letter over breakfast and shook his copy noisily at me – newsprint was crinkly and loud back then.
    ‘Battleship?’ he fumed. ‘It isn’t even a corvette. This is a bloody rowing boat going down!’
    That year, 1972, was just the beginning. When I started reading the paper the three-day week, the next power cuts, the government’s fifth state of emergency were not so far ahead of us. I believed what I read, but it seemed remote. Cambridge looked much the same, and so did the woods around the Cannings’ cottage. Despite my history lessons I felt I had no stake in the nation’s fate. I owned one suitcase of clothes, fewer than fifty books, some childhood things in my bedroom at home. I had a lover who adored me and cooked for me and never threatened to leave his wife. I had one obligation, a job interview – weeks away. I was free. So what was I doing, applying to the Security Service to help maintain this ailing state, this sick man of Europe? Nothing, I was doing nothing. I didn’t know. A chance had come my way and I was taking it. Tony wanted it so I wanted it and I had little else going on. So why not?
    Besides, I still regarded myself as accountable to my parentsand they were pleased to hear that I was considering a respectable wing of the Civil Service, the Department of Health and Social Security. It may not have been the atom-smashing my mother had in mind, but its solidity in turbulent times must have soothed her. She wanted to know why I had not come to live at home after finals, and I was able to tell her that a kindly older tutor was preparing me for my ‘board’. It made sense, surely, to take a tiny cheap room by Jesus Green and ‘work my socks off’, even at weekends.
    My mother might have expressed some scepticism, if my sister Lucy hadn’t created a diversion by getting herself into such trouble that summer. She was always louder, feistier, a bigger risk-taker, and had been far more convinced than I was by the liberating sixties as they limped into the next decade. She was also two inches taller now and was the first person I ever saw wearing ‘cut-off’ jeans. Loosen up, Serena, be free! Let’s go travelling! She caught hippiedom just as it was going out of fashion, but that’s how it was in provincial market towns. She was also telling the world that her sole aim in life was to be a doctor, a general practitioner or perhaps a paediatrician.
    She pursued her ambitions by a roundabout route. That July she was a foot passenger off the Calais to Dover ferry and was interrupted by a customs official, or rather, by his dog, a barking bloodhound suddenly excited by the aroma of her backpack. Inside, wrapped in