Tying Down The Lion (3 page)

If I speak, just to mention feeling car-sick, Mum says, “No talking, Jacqueline. Dad has to concentrate.”

I wish I could sit next to Dad while he’s so happy. Gillian is allowed in the front seat of their Corsair, but that’s because her mother is so huge that Gillian’s dad wouldn’t be able to find his gear-stick.

“Is there a problem with the brake?” Mum asks, unwrapping Dad’s cigarettes and passing one through to the front for him, stretching to post it into his mouth before Grandma snaffles it.

“No problem at all, Bridge,” Dad reassures her, feeling for his matches.

At least they aren’t arguing, but the car responds with a thud from underneath, making us all look down, even Dad, which is a bad idea because we drift into the middle of the road just as a bubble-car is trundling past.

“Missed that by a gnat’s whisker, son,” Grandma says, pulling out her cotton reel and snapping off a thread. She strums it between her teeth like a Jew’s harp, continuing her commentary in between twangs. “Christ, lad, you’re on a hill, mind. Ooh, watch it. The rag-and-bone-man’s horse is thundering up behind.”

“Hardly thundering, Grandma,” I point out. “Bridgewater Boy is past fifty, dawdles if he spies a privet hedge and has two arthritic knees.”

He has to spin a U-turn—Dad, that is, not Bridgewater Boy—because we’re driving the wrong way down a one-way street. And off goes Grandma again. “Watch out lad, you’re arse-about-face here. Oh Christ alive, now you’re face-to-face with the coalman’s lorry. Is he cheering you on? Oh I see, that’s his fist. Tch, tch, shall I give him a black look?”

In the shadow of the coalman’s rage, Dad executes a fifteen-point-turn and the car limps on like a beaten dog.

“Come on, lad,” Grandma says. “You’re driving like an old woman.”

“You’ve changed your tune, Ma. You were saying I’d kill us all before we set eyes on a white cliff. And here I am, driving as if a dozen eggs were perched on the bonnet, and you’re still bloody well moaning.”

“Well cover me with breadcrumbs and grill me ‘til I’m toasted,” Grandma says. “I’m just worried we’ll miss the bloody boat. And talking of missing things, I’ll not be able to go to Elsie’s cheese-and-wine now.”

“She’s deliberately having it while you’re away, Ma,” Dad says.

Grandma sniffs. “She said she’s got that pricey cheese with ruddy great holes in it, but I expect she’d have handed me an inch of mouse-trap on a bone-dry cracker.”

“Grandma,” Victor adds, “you can’t go to a party without an invitation.”

“True,” I chip in. “Gillian did that once and Tessa Horlock’s mother was too polite to send her away. Gillian won all the games, and by the end every child was in tears because she’d burst all the balloons with a pickled-onion fork.”

On the clapometer for holiday-spirits, we’d be hovering around the halfway point if Dad wasn’t frowning at the gear-stick.

“I must have a go at changing to third,” he says. “But this clutch is a bugger. And now I can’t let go of the wheel to stub my fag out.”

“Why not, Dad?” Victor asks, perching his tin Sitting-Bull and General Custer on one knee to fight the plastic Dalek pointing his plunger at them from Mum’s handbag. In his world, even cowboys and Indians join forces against strangers from outer-space.

“Just can’t.”

Dad’s face is pressed to the windscreen now and his leathery hands are gripping the wheel for dear life.

“Have you forgotten how to drive, Dad?” I ask him. “It’s like the Cycling Proficiency. As soon as Gillian passed, she forgot to squeeze her back-brake before her front. She did a full-speed victory circuit around the playground, somersaulted over the handle-bars and catapulted into the long-jump pit.”

It was a soft landing, so I didn’t feel too bad about enjoying the sight of a friend in trouble. If she’d been me, she’d have felt the same.

“There’s always dog’s muck in sand,” Grandma adds, as if that’s the moral of the tale, and it probably is.

Mum says, “Let your father drive without all this destruction, Jacqueline.”

“You mean distraction, Frau Schweinhund,” I whisper, staring at the road lines to take my mind off the blistering heat, cigaretty car-fragrance and my hopeless mother. I think about being married. I’m cooking prawns, or something equally exotic, for my husband, Peter. I’m wearing a cocktail dress. Not a prawn-cocktail dress. In fact, even more exotic than prawns, I’m actually tipping a Vesta curry onto the best plate. He’s wearing flares and lighting candles. My white boots tap on the lino. I can smell the crispy noodles. Or maybe we walk to somewhere romantic like
Le Pomme Frite
restaurant in Upper Bakewell Street. Just as Peter’s beautiful lips are about to kiss my hand, Dad shouts, “Jesus wept!”

The car shudders and swerves. Other drivers honk their horns. “Cor!” Victor shouts, gripping onto my arm with both hands. We finish with a gravel-exploding hand-brake skid into a lay-by with an ice-cream van.

Everyone gasps. Grandma’s teeth slip out.

“Can I have a Kinky, Dad?” Victor asks, pointing at the van.

“Only girls have those,” I tell him. “And they’re ninepence anyway.”

“But this is a holiday,” he whines. “I’ve brought eleven wounded Arapaho to glue back together. I’ve been saving them for this. Holidays are for doing everything you want.”

“Look, Mum and Dad had to cash in their Winston Churchill death-crown just to buy petrol,” I point out.

“No one’s having anything,” Dad says, sounding jittery. “I didn’t mean to stop here.”

“Roy, dear,” Mum says, “are you all right?”

The cold breath of a Bad-Moon girl is tickling the back of my neck, unless that’s because of Peter kissing me. I’m never sure of the difference between love and fear.

“Look, we’re getting on the ferry if it’s the last thing I do,” Dad says, taking out a cigarette.

“I have no doubt, dear,” Mum says, reaching forward to pat his arm.

Thank Lennon for that.

“Mum’s foot’s on your centre-console, Dad,” Victor yells.

They both smile at him. It’s revolting how small boys manage to charm grown-ups. But he pushes them too far.

“Can we go to the fair on the way?”

“No, we bloody can’t, Victor,” Dad says. “This holiday isn’t something we’re doing for fun.”

“Victor, there’s more chance of Winston Churchill climbing out of his coffin and giving us a velvet bag full of death-crowns,” I tell him.

“Honestly, young man,” Grandma says, ramming her teeth home. “Your dad’s as white a peeled potato and there you are in a buggering chair-o-plane, if you please.”

“Can’t get this stubborn-arsed thing going again anyway,” Dad mumbles, lighting the cigarette with one hand and pulling out the choke with the other.

We all wait.

In her super-quiet voice, Mum says, “
Ach du liebe Zeit, mein Liebling
.” I think it means, “Bloody hell, mate.” Just a bit more loving.

Mum changes places with Grandma ‘for navigation purposes’, but really so she can hold Dad’s hand on the gearstick. It won’t last. They once made up at the start of
Opportunity Knocks
and fell out again before the clapometer. Just as the applause reached a crescendo she hurled his toad-in-the-hole at the wall. As Hughie Green announced the winner, we watched it slide down and belly-flop on the lino.

Victor and I hunt for our comics to take our mind off Grandma eating Liquorice Allsorts and easing her foot out of her new Shebas to saw off her corn.

When Victor opens
Commando
, she pauses the amputation. “Hey lad, I expect your mum’ll want to read that, eh?”

“Why? This is a war comic. Just for boys,” Victor tells her, indignant that a female person might turn his hallowed pages.

I give her a glare. “You shouldn’t keep on, Grandma.”

“Well, my daughter-in-law’s a Sausage-Eater. No denying it.”

“But she wasn’t in the War, was she? She didn’t fight England, Grandma. Nor did her family. They were too busy staying alive in Berlin.” I pause for breath, uncertain of the details.

Grandma pokes her dentures, releasing the miniature blue bobbles from her Allsort and spitting them into her hand.

“Plus, Mum hates sausages.” Victor feels this clinches it.

“It’s just words, lad. Like Jerry or Hun. Amounts to the same thing. Foreign.” Grandma lights up a Senior Service and coughs like a miner, her massive chest billowing like a pair of blimps.

Thankfully Mum is busy telling Dad that when she says, “go straight on”, she means, “take left-fork”.

I turn to
Mandy
. I swear fourteen is too old for this comic, but Mum thinks I’m too young for
Petticoat
magazine. It pushes girls on too fast, she says. I think she’s holding me back as usual, frightened I’ll read it and elope. Or worse, start plucking my eyebrows.

At this rate, I’ll never progress from daydreaming. My future husband could be walking past our house this actual moment and I’m stuck in the scorching car, wearing two courtelle twin-sets that make me look like a librarian in
Peg’s Paper
or a sad woman in an advert for Beecham’s Pills.

After a desperate flick through the car handbook, Dad starts the engine and we lurch into the traffic again.

“Bloody brake,” Dad mutters. “I put my foot down and there’s nothing there.”

“Are you mixing it up with the crutch, Dad?”

“Clutch, Victor. No, of course not. The clutch is under my left foot. Feels like fresh air under my right.”

“Dad,” Victor says, “how will you drive without a brake? I mean, what if a dog ran into the road because its lead snapped? What if a hippy threw himself off the bridge again? What if a bomb dropped and a crater opened up?”

“The dog and the hippy would fall into the crater before we hit them,” Dad says, coasting to a stop outside the turf-accountant and pulling a crumpled newspaper from his car-coat pocket.

“Will we reach the boat in time?” Mum asks, clutching her side.

“Course, Bridge. Don’t fret.”

The shop door is open, and Dad is busy watching Trixie in her tartan mini climb onto the table to reach the blackboard where she chalks up the racing results. I would sell my brother for a pair of her long shiny boots, but Dad calls them jack-boots, as if wearing them would encourage me to march about annexing something. But I bet the Gestapo didn’t wear white patent.

To reach the top of the board, Trixie does a little hop, which flips the skirt right up. Her bosom creates a total eclipse over her clipboard.

“Dad, the lights are green.”

Dad just puffs his cigarette, grinning at the perfect view and at his great road adventure ahead. For a moment, his life is pure magic.

“People are hooting, Dad,” Victor shouts. “You’re sticking out.”

“All right, hold the bus,” Dad says, crushing out his cigarette. “Sit round properly,” he adds, even though we are. He drives backwards and forwards a few times to fit into the parking bay, making the starts and stops with the hand-brake.

“Hold on to your teeth, Nell,” Mum says.

“That Trixie buys frozen faggots. I’ve seen her in Mace’s.”

“You shouldn’t judge her for that, Ma,” Dad says, feeling for his wallet.

“I don’t judge anyone, Roy. I’m just saying she should get up off her big blonde arse and learn to make her own gravy.”

Dad glances at Mum. “Hey, don’t judge blondes.”

“If it’s from a bottle it doesn’t count,” Grandma says with a sniff of finality. “And Germans are different from everyone else anyway,” she adds.

“Ma, give it a rest.”

“Ooh, now I’m thinking of Stan’s fresh faggots. Heaven. Do you know, last time I was there, Elsie gave me macaroni cheese from a tin? Tried to kid me it was her own, but I heard the can-opener. Slopped it into her fancy Pyrex, sliced a couple of tomatoes on top and flashed it under her grill. If that’s home-made, then I’m Mandy Rice-Davies. And talking of rice, I don’t like it. Elsie gave me rice from a packet. Blood and sand, it was all colours! It had raisins and toadstools in it.”

Dad leaps out, his brown crimplene trousers detaching from the warm vinyl like a tangerine being peeled.

“Shall I get in the driver’s seat?” Victor whispers.

“No, you bloody shan’t,” Dad says, reaching back in for the keys.

“I said we wouldn’t be going anywhere,” Grandma says, winding down her window to hear the results of the two-thirty at Haydock.

“We bloody will be,” Dad calls over his shoulder as he hurries inside, holding his car-coat together and jingling in that strange way men do when they run. “I’ll speed up to forty soon.”

“That’ll be handy when we’re dodging bullets,” Grandma shouts after him, taking out her knitting and a Chelsea bun.

“What are you making, Grandma?” I ask, not really interested, but the alternative is knocking down Red Indians for General Custer.

“A matinée jacket,” she announces, holding up a pattern with a picture of a gargantuan infant squirming inside a dreadful cardigan.

We all sigh and fan ourselves, Grandma’s corset creaking under the strain and Mum’s appendix preparing to detonate. A frantic fly pummels the windscreen, too demented to escape through an open window.

“Bridge,” Grandma says, “I don’t mind saying I’ve got the jitters about letting Roy loose abroad. The roundabouts go the other way, Elsie says. And he only passed the last test because he gave the examiner a dead-cert for the Gold Cup.”

“He only failed the fourth time because the examiner was foreign. He misunderstood half the instructions,” Mum says.

“He understands you, Bridget.”

Grandma snaps off a length of knitting-wool to lever the currants out of her teeth.

“Grandma, Mum isn’t a proper German,” Victor shouts, vexed. “She can swear in English, and she knows ‘God Save the Queen’.”

“Enough,” Mum says. “We will all stay in one piece.”

“Unlike your Berlin,” Grandma says, searching for cigarettes in her enormous navy handbag.

I watch Trixie teetering on the edge of the table, about to jump down. Dad catches her and she wobbles so much when she lands, she nearly takes his eye out.

“Jayne Mansfield was killed in a car crash. Death traps, they are.”

“Nell, that was in America. They don’t drive Morris Travellers there.”