Timothy Lea - Confessions of a Private Soldier

‘I don’t know how people go on having this stuff to lose,’ I say. Mum nods her head in agreement.

‘Your father hates to see anything going to waste, that’s the trouble. Every time they have a sort out down at the office he brings it all back here.’ Mum’s use of the word office is significant. She reckons it sounds posher to refer to her old man as working at ‘the office’ rather than ‘the lost property office’. Mum is a bit of a social climber on the side and for that reason, if no other, my latest lapse must have been a very choking experience for her.

‘How’s Dad taken it?’ I ask.

Unfortunately I am staring at the harpoon gun when I speak and Mum is swift to take the opportunity to misunderstand me.

‘The usual way. Slipped it under his mac. Didn’t you read about it in the papers?’

‘What happened, Ma?’

‘It went off in the tube and pinned him to the ceiling.’

‘Ooh! Ma! Was he all right?’

‘He didn’t suffer any physical injury. Some ruffians took advantage of his situation to steal his wallet and undo his braces.’

‘That’s not nice, Mum.’

‘It was terrible. He thought they were trying to release him and then they suddenly got out at Clapham North and left him with his trousers round his ankles. He couldn’t move ’til the train got to Morden.’

‘Didn’t anyone else try and help him?’

‘No. He said they all took one look at him and went in the next compartment.’

Diabolical, isn’t it? Still, I suppose, when you think about it, it’s not every day you see a bloke pinned to the roof of a tube train by a steel bolt with his trousers round his ankles. It could give you a bit of a turn, couldn’t it? Not the kind of thing to send you home whistling if you were escorting your best bird back from the Granada, Tooting.

‘How is Sidney?’ I ask, eager to switch the conversation from my mother’s unfashionable ailment and father’s misfortunes.

For the uninitiated I had better explain that Sidney Noggett is my poxy brother-in-law and a frequent contributor to most of the misfortunes that befall me. He has an unpleasant habit of coming out of every situation smelling of violets whilst the odour that surrounds me is of a rather more earthy nature.

‘You should see him soon,’ says Mum. ‘He said he’d pop in before dinner.’

‘What’s he doing now? Still in clubs, is he?’

‘I don’t know, dear. You’d better ask him. It seems to change so often I can’t keep up.’

That does not surprise me. Sidney’s business ventures are seldom of the long-term variety. Either bankruptcy or the police – or sometimes both in a muck sweat, dead heat – always seem to catch up with him.

‘And Rosie and the kids?’

‘They’re very well. Rosie is going to dancing classes.’

‘She’s left it a bit late, hasn’t she?’

‘Not ordinary kind of dancing. This is all about finding the Zen or something.’

‘What was that, Mum?’

‘It’s no good talking to me. You’ll have to ask her. She should be here later.’

Sister Rosie has been becoming more and more of a handful since she started reading the colour supplements and watching BBC2 and I am not surprised to hear that she is into some new kind of self-exploration kick.

‘Every Thursday, down at the British Legion Hall. They get a very nice class of person there. They’ve all got little French cars.’

I can imagine. It is always the ones who should know better who get tired of pottery classes first. Before you know where you are they are doing ‘O’ level French and knitting red, white and blue mittens for the laundry man. After that it’s anything goes and the privet eaten down to navel level by the milkman’s horse.

Rosie was always a bit of a raver but in the old days she had the decency to feel guilty about the way she was carrying on. Now she reckons that she has the same right to get her end away as a bloke. Disgusting, isn’t it? I feel a lot of sympathy for Sidney. In fact I think it is one of the things that keeps us together. I mean, if us blokes don’t stand shoulder to shoulder and stick up for our rights we could find ourselves in the same situation as the Yanks: millions of big-mouthed women trampling all over us.

‘Where are they living, now?’ I ask.

‘Vauxhall. Rosie wanted to be near the West End. They bought an old house and gutted it. Must have cost them a fortune.’

I feel like pointing out that it cost Sidney a fortune but I do not pursue the matter. Deep down, where no one in his right mind would dream of looking, I know that Mum is a woman, and they are basically all the same.

‘I told them they were fools,’ says Mum. ‘Do you remember when they had that lovely place at Streatham? I never knew why they gave that up.’

‘Because Sidney was skint at the time. He goes up and down like a blooming yo-yo. You don’t want to worry about Vauxhall, Mum, it’s very fashionable at the moment. It’s going up.’

‘Most of what I’ve seen is coming down,’ sniffs Mum. Poor old thing. She doesn’t understand that all the nobs are fighting to live in places that the people who live there are fighting to get out of. She would reckon she had moved into Westminster Abbey if you offered her a flat in Wimbledon. She does not realise that people want to be near the art galleries and theatres and all the other places they never go to because there is something on the telly.

‘The kids all right, are they?’

Mum’s face assumes the expression of doting joy that is always reserved for her disgusting grandchildren.

‘Jason is doing ballet now.’

‘Blimey. Is Rosie trying to turn him into a poofter? They haven’t given up hopes of having a girl, have they?’

‘He’s got a natural bent, that child,’ says Mum, reproachfully.

‘That’s what’s worrying me. I haven’t forgotten him on that diabolical telly programme.’

‘I don’t want to hear a word against little Jason.’ Mum gives a tell-tale sniff. ‘At least he hasn’t broken his mother’s heart yet.’

‘Yes, yes,’ I say hurriedly. ‘And talking of heartbreak, how’s Dad? Hard at it as usual, I suppose?’

‘No need to be sarcastical,’ chides Mum. ‘Your father hasn’t been very well lately. One of his old war wounds has been playing up.’

Quite what my father did in the war has always been something of a mystery to me. Fire watching has been mentioned but I think it was mainly the one burning in the grate of 17 Scraggs Lane. Certainly I don’t think he ever traded bullets with the enemy. Cigarette cards, maybe, but not bullets.

‘What injury, Mum? Writer’s cramp from trying to get his post war credits?’

‘Don’t mock,’ says Mum, coldly. ‘You’re in no position to point the finger. You haven’t exactly brought lustre to the family name.’

‘Lustre’ is a most unusual word for my mother to use and I can only assume that she lifted it from a furniture polish advert on the box. I got my education that way.

‘I know, Mum,’ I say, humbly. ‘I’m going to try and make amends.’

I mean it too. I know I have been a disappointment to my parents since I first got done for nicking lead, diabolical decision though it was. I saw three fellows loading lead on to a lorry and they asked me if I would give them a hand. Said they were collecting for the church roof. Trouble was that they were stripping the lead off the church hall. Not knowing the religious landscape of the parish – and being a bit of a twit into the bargain – I was the mug who landed up in the South Western Magistrates’ Court.

I am about to enquire after Dad’s whereabouts when the man himself appears as Mum makes a discreet exit. He emerges from the kitchen clutching the carved up copies of the TV Times which serve as bog paper in the Lea mansion. I think it advisable to point out that Dad has been doing his stuff in the outside throne room beyond the kitchen and not – no, you could never have thought that, could you? Still, I suppose if you knew Dad as well as – no, it doesn’t matter. Anyway, there he is: five foot ten and a half inches of temporarily relieved depression centred over South West London. He looks down at my legs as if he expects to find a ball and chain around one of them and tosses his head contemptuously. I wonder if he is going to make his joke about ‘the return of the prod-it-all son’ but he restrains himself.