Happy Endings by David Cook

Author:David Cook
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2017-07-30T14:00:00+00:00

DRAMA

There wasn’t any money, but it did happen to be Thursday, which was a payday. Morris’s mother had known money would be needed, but she had assumed, as often she did, that God would look after His own. Now it was Thursday. God was looking after His own, but she was not among them.

Morris’s mother was to appear as The Manageress in a performance by the Biggleswade Amateur Comedy Club of A Lightly Boiled Egg by Gertrude Jennings. She had first created the role of the sadistic tea-shop manageress five months before at the Church Hall, and the play had been so successful that the Biggleswade Amateur Comedy Club had been asked to repeat it at Cranfield Working and Social Club, ten miles away.

Unfortunately Morris’s mother had sold her black dress to a neighbour, and the neighbour had cut it down to fit herself. Also the woman who had supplied the crockery had moved away. And as for the three-tiered cake-stand which was so important to the plot - well, the fact was that nobody had been able to find the three-tiered cake-stand : it was assumed that some over-enthusiastic lover of the drama had decided to keep it as a memento.

Morris’s mother had promised to supply all these things. When the hired bus arrived at six thirty p.m. to carry the Biggleswade Comedy Club to Cranfield, she was expected to be ready, wearing her black dress and carrying her props. Luckily it was Thursday, the day Morris’s father got paid.

Morris might have been at school, but his mother liked the company. His father was painting an aerodrome. He sat in one of those little troughs by the side of the hangar, and was pulled up and down by pulleys. It was like bridges : once you had finished, you started again. The work was not exhausting, and its chief drawback was the amount of lead contained in the paint, which seemed to give Morris’s father indigestion.

The aerodrome was sixteen miles away, nine miles into Hitchen, and seven on. Morris’s father would be paid at twelve thirty, but he did not finish work until five thirty. He had rejected the idea that he should leave work and come home the moment he had received his pay packet. He had already done this on three consecutive Thursdays, and his employers had suggested that it was not a practice in his or their best interests.

Morris was sent on a tour of the neighbours to ask if any of them wanted shopping done in town. Only Mrs Richards required anything: she required a pair of knitting needles, Size Nine. The money she gave Morris provided him and his mother with the fare to Hitchen. One and a half, single. The rest of the way must be walked. Morris’s family never troubled with return tickets in those days or any other.

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