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Authors: Marina Lewycka
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lookout for a chance to break free. ‘
Answers to the name of Wonder Boy
.’ The black and white cat in the picture looked cross and confused. I peered into the shrubby area where the feral moggies dwelled, but I knew the cat, like my bike, would never reappear.
‘Hello, Bertie!’ called Mrs Crazy from her balcony. ‘How’s your mum?’
‘Fine!’ I shouted back.
‘I saw her took away in an ambulance.’
‘Just a twisted ankle. Nothing serious.’ The lie sprang easily to my lips – too easily, as it turned out.
Mother and Mrs Crazy had once been friends, but the latter had bought her flat from the Council in 1985 with some small savings from her late husband’s gambling proceeds, and Mother had never forgiven her. She claimed that all the troubles in Madeley Court dated from the break-up of public ownership when private speculators had got their claws into the estate and started it on a downhill spiral, for which grasping coiffure-obsessed fruitcakes like Mrs Crazy and Mrs Thatcher were personally to blame.
Mrs Crazy’s pretensions once she became an owner-occupier were particularly annoying to Mother, the wrought-iron window guards, the hanging baskets, the royal-blue front door and ostentatious brass knocker an affront to Lubetkin’s purity of line. The final blow came when Mrs Crazy, with support from Legless Len, mounted a coup that ousted her from the Chair of the Tenants Association. She’d always regarded Madeley Court as her personal fiefdom because it was named after her first husband, Ted Madeley, who’d wooed her and
married her in 1952. Or 1953. She was vague about the dates, but his photo, framed in walnut, still hung on her bedroom wall. He was a big good-looking, dark-eyed man, who bore an eerie resemblance to moustachioed George Clooney in
The Monuments Men
. In fact he was only a few years younger than her father when she’d first met him at a Labour Party rally in Finsbury Town Hall in 1951. She was nineteen years old, sitting in the audience with her dad, and Ted was up on the platform smiling darkly alongside Harold Riley, Aneurin Bevan and Berthold Lubetkin, who was firing off on all cylinders about the right of working-class people to a decent home for life. Labour lost the election in 1951, but Ted Madeley won Lily’s heart.
‘It was love at first sight,’ Mum reminisced, sherry glass in hand, half a century later. ‘Only problem was, he was married with two girls, twins they were, Jenny and Margaret, dark haired like gypsies. You’d have guessed he had a bit of gypsy in him.’
They had moved into Madeley Court together soon after. ‘Berthold got the flat for me,’ said Mum. Later I read that the block was not completed until 1953. There were other inconsistencies in her stories, but as a boy, I was swept along by the glamour of it all, and never stopped to question the details.
I took the photographs down from the walls one by one and stowed them in a cardboard box with her papers in the boiler cupboard. There were bright squares on the faded wallpaper to mark where they’d been. Inna Alfandari, I supposed, would have her own photos to bring.
Violet: Pictures
At the weekend, Violet sorts out the photos she has brought from home: her parents wind-blown and smiling on High Low above Hathersage; her dad with Grandma Alison in front of Edinburgh Castle; her Nyanya Njoki surrounded by all her seven grandchildren; their garden in Karen with Mfumu, her dog that she’d left behind; Kinder Scout purple with heather; her and her friend Jessie wearing stupid hats on a school trip.
As she Blu-tacks them on to the wall, she thinks about the two sides of her family, black and white, far and near, poor and comfortable. Her two cousins on her father’s side are tall, blonde, willowy girls a few years older than her who read Music and Art History at Oxford. They work in the arts, shop at Zara, laugh toothily over lunch, and are generous with invitations and free tickets. On her
Answers to the name of Wonder Boy
.’ The black and white cat in the picture looked cross and confused. I peered into the shrubby area where the feral moggies dwelled, but I knew the cat, like my bike, would never reappear.
‘Hello, Bertie!’ called Mrs Crazy from her balcony. ‘How’s your mum?’
‘Fine!’ I shouted back.
‘I saw her took away in an ambulance.’
‘Just a twisted ankle. Nothing serious.’ The lie sprang easily to my lips – too easily, as it turned out.
Mother and Mrs Crazy had once been friends, but the latter had bought her flat from the Council in 1985 with some small savings from her late husband’s gambling proceeds, and Mother had never forgiven her. She claimed that all the troubles in Madeley Court dated from the break-up of public ownership when private speculators had got their claws into the estate and started it on a downhill spiral, for which grasping coiffure-obsessed fruitcakes like Mrs Crazy and Mrs Thatcher were personally to blame.
Mrs Crazy’s pretensions once she became an owner-occupier were particularly annoying to Mother, the wrought-iron window guards, the hanging baskets, the royal-blue front door and ostentatious brass knocker an affront to Lubetkin’s purity of line. The final blow came when Mrs Crazy, with support from Legless Len, mounted a coup that ousted her from the Chair of the Tenants Association. She’d always regarded Madeley Court as her personal fiefdom because it was named after her first husband, Ted Madeley, who’d wooed her and
married her in 1952. Or 1953. She was vague about the dates, but his photo, framed in walnut, still hung on her bedroom wall. He was a big good-looking, dark-eyed man, who bore an eerie resemblance to moustachioed George Clooney in
The Monuments Men
. In fact he was only a few years younger than her father when she’d first met him at a Labour Party rally in Finsbury Town Hall in 1951. She was nineteen years old, sitting in the audience with her dad, and Ted was up on the platform smiling darkly alongside Harold Riley, Aneurin Bevan and Berthold Lubetkin, who was firing off on all cylinders about the right of working-class people to a decent home for life. Labour lost the election in 1951, but Ted Madeley won Lily’s heart.
‘It was love at first sight,’ Mum reminisced, sherry glass in hand, half a century later. ‘Only problem was, he was married with two girls, twins they were, Jenny and Margaret, dark haired like gypsies. You’d have guessed he had a bit of gypsy in him.’
They had moved into Madeley Court together soon after. ‘Berthold got the flat for me,’ said Mum. Later I read that the block was not completed until 1953. There were other inconsistencies in her stories, but as a boy, I was swept along by the glamour of it all, and never stopped to question the details.
I took the photographs down from the walls one by one and stowed them in a cardboard box with her papers in the boiler cupboard. There were bright squares on the faded wallpaper to mark where they’d been. Inna Alfandari, I supposed, would have her own photos to bring.
Violet: Pictures
At the weekend, Violet sorts out the photos she has brought from home: her parents wind-blown and smiling on High Low above Hathersage; her dad with Grandma Alison in front of Edinburgh Castle; her Nyanya Njoki surrounded by all her seven grandchildren; their garden in Karen with Mfumu, her dog that she’d left behind; Kinder Scout purple with heather; her and her friend Jessie wearing stupid hats on a school trip.
As she Blu-tacks them on to the wall, she thinks about the two sides of her family, black and white, far and near, poor and comfortable. Her two cousins on her father’s side are tall, blonde, willowy girls a few years older than her who read Music and Art History at Oxford. They work in the arts, shop at Zara, laugh toothily over lunch, and are generous with invitations and free tickets. On her
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