The Bad Mother's Handbook Read Online Free PDF Page A

throwing on clothes as he spoke. So it must
be all right, then. But why don’t they tell you sex can be
so bloody embarrassing ? I have to admit, it isn’t like I
thought it would be. Perhaps I don’t love Paul enough,
or perhaps it’s me. Either way, I need some answers and
I think I know where to get them.

    *

    T HE QUESTION IS , is Nan telling the truth? And if she is,
what then? I have to, have to find out.
     

Chapter Two
    BY GOD, Bill were a clever man. I don’t know what he saw in
me. Sometimes, when he was a lad, they sent him home early
from school because he’d done all his work. Teacher used to
say, ‘Hesketh! Come out with your sums, an’ if they’re not
finished, you’re in trouble.’ An’ he’d go up to t’ front and it’d all
be done, all correct, and he’d be sent home at half-past three
instead of four. He should have stayed on, he had a ’ead for
learning, but he had to leave at thirteen for the wage, same
as me.
    So he went down the mines, like his father had, and hated
it. He never got any proper rest. In the evenings he used to go
to Bob Moss’s grocer’s shop and pack orders, then tek ’em
round in a wheelbarrow. Then he started with TB and that was
it, off to the Co-Op Convalescent Home at Blackpool, where
he met his fiancée. Her name was Alice Fitton, she lived up
Chorley way, and she was a bonny woman. She was brokenhearted
when he finished with her to start courting me. I
should have felt sorry but I didn’t. I had what I wanted. I’d seen
the way my mother suffered and I knew the value of a good man.
    After we married he got a job at Cooks’s paper mill, and
took up with Bank Top Brass Band, playing tenor horn. He used
to say they were one of the finest second-class amateur bands in the league. They practised every other day in a barn over the
smithy, and paid a penny a week into funds. Once they played
at the Winter Gardens at Southport in front of an audience of
four thousand, and won a cup, it were t’ first time ever. The conductor,
Mr Platt, was overwhelmed. By the time they got back
home it was past midnight but he insisted they play Souza’s
‘Semper Fidelis’ as they walked through the main street. ‘I don’t
think as we’d better. We’ll wake everyone up,’ Bill had said.
‘Well, then,’ Mr Platt told him, ‘we’ll tek our shoes and socks off.’
    His chest stopped him playing in the finish; there was the
TB, and he’d been smoking since he were thirteen. It kept him
out o’ t’ war too, more or less; he stayed at home and was an
ambulanceman for th’ Home Guard. We were never short of
crepe bandage in this house. But it were his lungs that killed
him in th’ end. He was only sixty-three. We’d been married
forty-two years. And it was a happy marriage, oh it was. Except
for the one thing.

    *

    Where do you go to get the answers when you’re
seventeen? Well, you start by pushing your way through
the Enchanted Forest of people around you who think they know the answers: parents, teachers, solve-your-life-in-twenty-minutes-magazine-article writers. Mum thinks
ballsing up her own life makes her an expert on mine
(now where’s the logic in that ?), but what she fails to see
is that I am about as much like her as she is like Nan,
i.e. not at all. To look at us both you’d think I’d been
found under a hedge. Bit of a relief if I had been, in some
ways. It would certainly explain a lot.
    Dad, of course, is conspicuous by his absence. Oh, I know where he lives, and it’s not so far away, but if I
turned up on the doorstep and started asking for Advice
about my personal life, he’d have kittens. It’s not his field.
Anyway, I think I scare him.
    Teachers, they mean well, most of them, but they just
see everything in terms of exam results, as if your ‘A’-level
grade print-out will have magically at the bottom a projected
CV to tell you exactly where you’re going next.
‘A A B B,