They Tuck You Up,Your Mum And Dad..

I can't make my fortune with a misery memoir. "A Child Called "Clumsy"." isn't going to shift many units. Although I was frequently belaboured around the head with heavy sarcasm by my father. My mother's weapon of choice was an industrial-strength dirty look.The only time I was locked in a cupboard was by me; when the window cleaner caught me sprinting along the landing in my liberty-bodice, I dived into the airing cupboard , and got wedged.We had enough to eat, in a potatoey way.  Although my mother sometimes didn't. I only found out decades later that she used to say that she had eaten earlier,when my father was out of work, and there wasn't enough to go around. She hadn't at all. Bar the odd appalling period when my Dad was made redundant, they both worked all their lives. Dad was an office manager.He went to work in a suit. He had a briefcase.  He was consequently paid much less than our neighbours, who all worked in English Electric,and could do overtime. However, he brought home endless staples,and the occasional batch of typing sheets,when companies changed their headed paper style. My mother was a Post Office Clerk, for many a long year. No perks there,although she did once bring home a studded rubber thumbstall.My brother instantly wore it on his nose.Those were innocent times.

However, my Dad had a curious list of things he would spend money on.These included suits, a car, a television, and holidays. They did not include "things for the house".He didn't like people being in the house, and "was buggered" (his strongest epithet),if he was going to spend money on carpets, sofas, washing machines,or indeed, anything, for the possible pleasure and convenience of anyone else.Almost everything we had was handed down from my Mum's sister, who had married a successful businessman. Everything else was ingeniously fabricated by Mum.So we had floors covered in lino samples begged fron carpet shops. Our curtains were often ruggedly individualistic, and our bedlinen interestingly mismatched. Not really "Her Benny", though,is it? Sometimes my Dad, motivated by parsimony and fuelled by delusional articles in the Reader's Digest, would Do It Himself. He was particularly keen on high-risk activities with electrical goods; and would happily festoon the house with loops and bundles of wiring,going nowhere. When Dad  died, an electrician was the second person my Mother called. A wry Irishman, he trotted round the house with frequent exclaimations featuring Jesus, Mary and Joseph, before expressing the opinion that it was a wonder the rest of us had survived. He  assumed, I think, that my Dad had perished in one of his attempts to wire up the spindryer to the ceiling light, rather than of  "natural causes". The washing machine was another holy terror. Reasonably benign early in  the cycle; it became vicious towards the concluding stages, leaping about the kitchen emitting sparks,and making  noises like a dying bear. We would all hide from it, mounting chairs or kitchen surfaces. He also  enjoyed dismantling discarded wireless sets,but never mantled them again. "Fancy throwing this good wireless away!", he would exclaim, getting the screwdrivers and soldering iron out. After a few hours of tinkering ,in which he usually hurt himself and dropped solder on the dog (who eventually learnt to hide under the sideboard when it saw the toolkit coming out), he would silently put the bits in a bag, stow it away in the kitchen cupboard with all the others, and stalk off to the British Legion.

Frighteningly, he was in the Engineering Corps, during the War. My mother often remarked upon this marvel.We used to entertain ourselves, during the frequent losses of power brought about by his electrical experiments, by weaving tales in which Dad persuaded  the Germans that he was a wireless operating expert from Stuttgart, and irrepairably buggered up Lord Haw Haw's broadcasts with a small soldering iron.Hitler was said to be fond of dogs.My Dad would have dropped solder on them, and offered to do the wiring at the Wolfsschanze.