The Fry Chronicles Read Online Free PDF

Puffs for now, we don’t need another bowl,’ he would say in my friends’ heads or, ‘One chocolate bar would be ample.’ Or ‘Gosh, look, there’s some money. Tempting, but it isn’t ours.’ I never had such a guard on duty.
    Actually that isn’t quite true. Where Pinocchio had Jiminy Cricket I had my Hungarian grandfather. He had died when I was ten, and ever since the day of his going I had been uncomfortably aware that he was looking down and grieving over what the Book of Common Prayer would call my manifold sins and wickedness. I had erred and strayed from my ways like a lost sheep, and there was no health in me. Grand-daddy watched me steal, lie and cheat; he caught me looking at illicit pictures in magazines and he saw me play with myself; he witnessed all my greed and lust and shame; but for all his heedful presence he could not prevent me from going to hell in my own way. If I had been psychopathic enough to feel no remorse or religious enough to believe in redemption through a divine outside agency, perhaps I should have been happier; as it was I had neither the consolation that I was free of guilt, nor the conviction that I could ever be forgiven.
    Grandpapa.
    In gaol, everyone inside rolled their own cigarettes. A week’s wages could buy
nearly
enough Old Holborn or Golden Virginia tobacco to last the seven days until next payday. The cigarette papers, for no good reason that I could understand, were the usual Rizla+ brand, but presented in a buff-coloured pack with the words ‘H M Prisons Only’ printed at an angle across the flap. I hoarded as many of these as I could and contrived to smuggle them out on my release. For years afterwards I would refill these from the standard red, blue and green Rizla+ packs commercially available on the outside and enjoy the bragging rights of being seen with prison-issue rolling papers. Pathetic. I want so much to go back and slap myself sometimes. Not that I would pay the slightest attention.
    As the prison week ended and the less careful inmates began to run out of burn they went through a peculiar begging ritual that I, never one to husband resources either, was quick to learn. You would spot someone smoking and slide ingratiatingly up to them. ‘Twos up, mate,’ you would wheedle and if you were the first to have got the request in you would be rewarded with their fag-end once they had done with it. These soggy second-hand butts,whose few remaining strands of precious tobacco were all bitter and tarred by the smoke that had passed through them, were as a date palm in the desert, and I would smoke them right down until they burnt and blistered my lips. We all know the indignities to which enslaved humans will submit themselves in order to satisfy their addictions, whether for narcotics, alcohol, tobacco, sugar or sex. The desperation, savagery and degradation they publicly display make truffling pigs seem placid and composed by comparison. That image of myself scorching my mouth and fingertips as I hungrily hissed in a last hit of smoke should have been enough to tell me all I needed to know about myself. It wasn’t of course. I had decided at school, when it had been borne in on me how hopeless I was at sport, that I was a useful brain on top of a useless body. I was mind and spirit, while those around me were mud and blood. The truth that I was
more
a victim of physical need than they were I would angrily have repudiated. Which just goes to show how complete an arse I was.
    Tragic hair. Tragic times. Taken some time between school and prison.
    After a month or so of remand in Pucklechurch I was at last sentenced by the court to two years’ probation and released back to my parents. This time around I managed to enrol myself at a college and to sit for A levels and the Cambridge entrance paper. †
    Prison appeared to have marked the lowest point of my life. The suicide attempts, † tantrums and madness of my mid-teens seemed to be over. Back home in