Last Day of School by Jack Sheffield

Author:Jack Sheffield [Sheffield, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473597822
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2022-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

Forty-five-year-old Alma Blenkinsopp had led an interesting life.

She lived in Thirkby market town and was a keen member of the Liberating Spirit Evangelical Church, a happy-clappy place of worship. There was lots of arm waving, hallelujahs and a Cliff Richard lookalike who had learned to play three chords after receiving a Bert Weedon Play in a Day guitar book from his Aunty Maureen.

Brought up in the school of hard knocks in West Yorkshire, hers had been a life of derring-do and taking chances. In the sixties she had worn a Mary Quant miniskirt, read Homer’s Iliad and sung Joan Baez protest songs. On a Ban the Bomb march in London she had met the handsome Digby Winfield, an old Etonian into stocks and shares. Sadly, he was also into gambling, drugs and chorus girls and after a tempestuous liaison she moved back to Yorkshire to become an Avon lady.

Ding-dong went each doorbell until one day the wealthy builder, Stanley Blenkinsopp, answered the door. After that it was ding-dong in the bedroom. In The Cock & Bottle pub Stanley presented her with a port and lemon and an engagement ring and they were married three months later. After Stanley died of asbestosis at the end of the seventies, Alma became a wealthy widow.

In the early eighties she wore her Greenham Common poncho with pride but was still searching for her true identity. It was when she was making decisions concerning Ovaltine or Bournvita followed by Garibaldi biscuits or custard creams that she realized life had lost its bite and had been replaced by a numbing routine. That was until one evening she was staring at her reflection in her bedroom mirror. She was wearing her new range of black lingerie when the idea came to her.

‘I’ll write a book,’ she said.

As her mother had once said, ‘Our Alma doesn’t do anything by halves.’

At lunchtime in the staff-room Pat had brought in her Food Aid Cookery Book. ‘I thought you might like this, Vera. There’s a royal cookery page with Lady Diana’s favourite recipes.’

‘How kind. Thank you so much.’

‘I know this will appeal,’ said Pat. ‘Lady Diana’s Watercress Soup.’

‘Perfect,’ said Vera.

‘Well, it would be if Lady Di has anything to do with it,’ said Sally, our anti-royalist.

‘I think she’s a lovely woman,’ said Marcus. ‘Just a shame she married Charlie-boy.’

‘I have some sympathy there,’ said Anne. ‘Sorry, Vera,’ she added with an apologetic smile.

‘Oh, look at this,’ said Vera. ‘Prince Charles’s Sorrel Soup. It says here he grows sorrel at Highgrove.’

‘Or perhaps it’s his head gardener,’ said Sally with a hint of irony. ‘Also, I heard he missed eating plums in Balmoral last summer so he spent six thousand pounds for a case to be flown from London to Scotland.’

‘I remember that,’ said Marcus. ‘It worked out at twenty-five pounds per plum.’

‘How the other half live,’ muttered Sally as she returned to her magazine and an article about Bruce Willis being voted the world’s sexiest man.

Vera was used to this type of banter and sat back to read Terry Wogan’s foreword to the book.

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