Young Wives' Tales Read Online Free PDF

haven’t got an overly pronounced morbid streak. They know how to do a good funeral in Liverpool, some of the best parties of my childhood. Still, I don’t blame my sis too much. Clawing for middle-class respectability is an arduous job. One slip and years of ballet classes and brown-bread-eating are undone in an instant. Besides, I’m not above a bit of reinvention myself. I like the possibilities it offers.
    It strikes me that an enormous huddle of kids, like this lot, creates an enormous amount of noise (which is to be expected) and an odd smell (which takes me by surprise). It’s not an absolutely gut-churning pig of a smell, like nappies or vomit. Christ, I’ve got a whiff of those kid offences against mankind just walking down the high street. There should be a law against it. What is it with these mothers? Do they lose their sense of smell along with their sense of style when they have a sprog? Mother Nature needs to revisit the blueprint. But these kids coming out of school don’t smell of vomit, crap or even pee; they smell of dust,mud, powder paint and kid sweat. This would be foul except they also smell of freedom, which makes the rest of it vaguely acceptable. You can smell the autumn wind in their hair.
    I push past the kids and walk into the school, which seems very different and yet exactly the same as the school I went to three decades ago. My local primary school was a 70s prefab concrete box. This school is ancient by comparison, purpose built in 1908, according to the engraving above the doors. The school has separate entrances for boys and girls and real wood floors and all that. My school had parquet flooring in the hall and lino in the classrooms, which, I dare say, was considered the utmost in modernity at the time. We had blackboards and noticeboards, now they have whiteboards and overhead projectors. I peer into the classrooms and note that the minute chairs and desks are the same, as is the scuzzy carpet in the corner of the room where fidgety bums are forced to rest for the duration of Once Upon A Time until Happily Ever After. The crap we feed the youth of today, eh?
    I wander along the corridors, hoping to stumble upon the headmaster’s office, when I’m accosted by some middle-aged woman who bossily demands to know why I’m in the school and who I am. It takes short seconds to completely charm her. I explain that I’m Craig Walker’s best friend.
    ‘Mr Walker, the headmaster?’she asks.
    ‘He may be Mr Walker, the headmaster, to you, Miss –’I pause.
    ‘Mrs actually, Mrs Foster.’She simpers as she says that. I look incredulous and mutter something about all the most beautiful women always being snapped up first. I pretend that I’m musing to myself but of course I ensure I’m plainly audible. To get this straight, I have absolutely no intentions on the very plain Mrs Foster but I can’t resist flirting with her. I find women so easy to please that I feel it’s almost my duty to do so. God knows there isn’t one of them, however ugly, that can’t be flattered and convinced that they are God’s gift to mankind. And they say men are arrogant.
    ‘He might be Mr Walker to you but he’ll always be Wheelie Walker to me. It’s a little-known fact, but your Mr Walker was the king of the chopper on our estate; when we were lads Wheelie Walker was a wonder.’
    It never harms to big-up your mates; women like that too, they see it as magnanimous. In fact Craig was known as Weedie Walker or Weeie Walker and he was scared shitless of riding his chopper, climbing trees, being in bat and just about all other boys-own stuff. But no one is going to look good if I say as much. Christ, I don’t want Mrs Foster to think I hung out with saps.
    ‘His is the first door on the left after you walk through the assembly hall. If you get as far as the music room you’ve gone too far. Do come and find me if you get lost or if there’s anything else I can do for you.’
    She smiles bashfully.