That's Another Story: The Autobiography Read Online Free PDF Page B

door and let myself in. It was also home to a succession of pet rodents that I kept when aged about eleven and where I attempted to breed a couple of my best mice for business purposes. I pinned an advert on to the garage door for passers-by to peruse. It read: FOR SALE, ATTRACTIVE DOMESTICATED BABY MICE, TWO SHILLINGS EACH, OR TWO FOR THREE AND ELEVEN, PLEASE APPLY AT GATE ROUND CORNER. The breeding programme went rather better than I had anticipated and within a couple of weeks there were eight or nine tiny brown mice, no bigger than a thumbnail but able to jump at least three or four inches in the air. Before I could separate them they had bred and bred again. I remember only one small girl and her friend calling at the middle door and enquiring about the mice. However, when they clapped eyes on them they wanted a reduction in price, claiming, ‘They’m brown! They ent proper pet mice. Pet mice am white.’
    ‘Yes they are. Pet mice can be any colour.’
    ‘No they cor. I bet ya caught them in your house. I’ll tek two for a bob.’
    Needless to say there was no sale. I then became increasingly desperate as their numbers grew and soon the advert was changed to: FOR SALE, ATTRACTIVE DOMESTICATED BABY MICE. TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE, A SHILLING A THROW. APPLY THROUGH GATE AT SIDE. But no one did and to add insult to injury people kept crossing out bits of my advert to alter the meaning. We had: FOR SALE, ATTRACTIVE DOMESTICATED BABY MICE, A SHILLING TO THROW THROUGH GATE AT SIDE. Another was: FOR SALE, ATTRACTIVE DOMESTICATED BABY, A SHILLING, or we will THROW THROUGH GATE AT SIDE.
    Finally I came down one morning to find that the babies, whose multiplication was now way out of control, had eaten an escape route out of the little wooden box in which they were being kept, presumably because of overcrowding, and had disappeared into a very convenient, tangled heap of assorted piping that my father had dumped on the shelf next to them. Despite my not inconsiderable attempts to capture the little creatures - time after time, blocking both ends of a pipe, only to find that there was another pipe leading off it, out of which they had escaped - I managed to catch only two or three. For years whenever we went out into the back place there was the sound of tiny scurrying feet across the stone floor or up over the wooden shelving.
    Upstairs, there were three bedrooms. My parents’ room was at the front corner of the house and it looked down on to both Bishopton and Long Hyde Road. In the corner stood a large, mahogany wardrobe where our Christmas presents were hidden every year, so a quick recce in about the third week of December would usually give the game away. It was where I came across my beloved red and yellow scooter, upon which for years I went everywhere. Most people eventually graduated to bicycles but I was not allowed one as my mother thought they were ‘death traps’. I think if I were young today I would definitely be one of those kids hanging round city centres with the crotch of my jeans dangling at mid-calf, a good three inches of bum cleavage showing at the top, and a skateboard permanently welded to my person.
    My parents slept in a creaky old bed with a dark, walnut headboard and it was into this that I would creep every Saturday morning, once my mother had gone out, to cuddle up to my dad and, much to his annoyance, check his back for spots. On several occasions, seeing him get out of bed, I thought I had caught a glimpse through the flies of his pyjamas of something odd hanging around his nether regions. I subsequently asked my mother whether he was ‘the same as me down below’ because it certainly didn’t look like it and this needed clarification. She instantly looked away and, with what seemed like not a little irritation and impatience, but what I now see as total embarrassment, she said, ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes . . . Yes.’ I thought the yeses were never going to stop and, in my