Read Online The Gropes by Tom Sharpe - Free Book Online Page B

much for Mrs Wiley. It swept aside the last vestiges of her romanticism. She’d rather Esmond became a rogue – a dashing rogue naturally – than a bank manager like Horace.
    ‘If you think … if you think your father makes money being a bank manager … well, let me tell you that Albert makes four times as much as your father. He’s a rich man is Uncle Albert. Whoever heard of a rich bank manager?’ She paused and found another argument. ‘Besides, your uncle will give you a reference and they were saying only the other day that what young people need nowadays is work experience. Having work experience does you more good than anything else.’
    Which didn’t help to persuade Esmond. Caught between his mother’s public adulation and his father’srejection, a rejection that had reached the point where he had tried to stab him with a carving knife in a drunken frenzy, he was now to be subjected to his Uncle Albert who was as embarrassing to be with as his mother was. And who was, as his father had said repeatedly, as crooked as any second-hand car dealer who ever welded two insurance write-offs into one single-owned Cavalier. To add to that, he lived in Essex.
    In any case, his mother’s reaction to the mention of Rosie Bitchall had so obviously supposed he was in love with her that it made him cringe and squirm with disgust. He wasn’t in the least interested in the wretched Rosie. In fact, he was unique among his peers in being rather revolted than attracted by the whole notion of sex.
    This was Esmond’s wake-up call. The only good thing to have come out of the past twenty-four hours was that it had given him important things to think about, primarily the obvious need to avoid being anything like his parents. After years in which he had done his utmost to fulfil their conflicting expectations for him and had so obviously failed, he was now determined to be himself. Who that self was he had no idea, or only vague and fleeting ones. As a boy he had been subject to a host of temporary impulses that came and went of their own accord and over which he had absolutely no control. One moment he was going to be a poet – his mother’s fondness forTennyson’s ‘The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls’ and the fact that as a child she’d overdosed him on Rupert Bear had given him the gift of scansion and the curse of automatic rhyme – then a few minutes later the contrary impulse to be a bulldozer driver and smash his way through hedges and generally destroy things had swept poetry aside. He had once seen a demolition team on television bring an enormous factory chimney crashing to the ground by removing bricks at the base which they had replaced with wood and had then set fire to, and the idea of being such a demolition expert fleetingly appealed to him. It spoke to something within him in much the same way his drum-beating had: it expressed the violence of his emotions and his overwhelming desire to assert himself somehow. Unfortunately, he had no sooner arrived at this notion of selfhood than it too was swept aside by the feeling that he had been put on earth to do something more important and constructive than blow up chimneys and demolish things.
    And now becoming a bank manager had lost its appeal for him too. Not if it meant getting up at six in the morning and coming home drunk after nine at night and not even making as much money as Uncle Albert. His future had to hold something better than that.
    For the first time in his life Esmond had begun to think for himself.

Chapter 11
    At the end of the week, after enduring many sleepless nights, Vera drove Esmond to her brother’s flash bungalow near Colchester, all the way stressing the importance of behaving properly and not telling Auntie Belinda about Daddy getting drunk and trying to attack him with the carving knife.
    ‘That’s something nobody but us must ever know about,’ she said. ‘As you know, your father’s been under a lot of strain lately. And