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Copyrights reserved by the author. If you are in doubt, please click on 'Copyrights' and read the details. SPIKE continued "Er, do you know how to work it?" I said softly as I touched the machine carefully as if it might suddenly turn around and bite me. "How hard can it be?" Uncle Spike snorted. Promptly he sat down at the machine, grabbed a shirt, one of his, from the top of the laundry basket which stood close by and shoved the sleeve under the foot of the machine. "Just a ---" I think Maureen must have a had a better idea of what was going to happen next. She was too late, his foot hit the pedal. Brrrrrrrrrr! "Bugger!" The machine had neatly stitched a seam across the sleeve of Spike's shirt at elbow height. As it was an overlocker it had also neatened the seam and trimmed off the excess material, which in this case was the lower end of the sleeve. Maureen and me just burst out giggling like a pair of kids. At the youth club disco, I was a star turn. I wore a silky emerald green blouse which Maureen had bought on impulse a few weeks before only to discover that she had misread the size; it fitted me perfectly. I was so guileless that it is only recently that the suspicion that Maureen bought the blouse especially for me has only just started to form. She also kitted me out with a pair of high-heeled shoes, which were not exactly the height of fashion but under the long skirt, they did not show enough to matter. I think that I did have one or two dances with Robby, but I do remember that I went home with a guy called Mick who looked a bit Warren Beatty. After that first outing, there was no stopping me, and I became a regular at the youth club discos. Later as I grew in confidence and experience, I frequented the kind of clubs and pubs where my maturity ensured that my age was never questioned. I also spent many a happy Saturday afternoon with Uncle Spike, Maureen, and the overlocker preparing yet another new outfit. My Mum died when I was eighteen; it was cancer. The progress of her illness was shockingly quick; the more so because she concealed the early stages even from herself. By the time she finally presented herself to the doctor there was little to be done except to relieve the pain. By then Bob was married, with two small kids, and he was living in the neighbouring town in a smart three bedroomed semi. Brian was living in South Africa, working for a construction firm; and Barry was well on his way to gaining his doctorate at Birmingham. Brian had been the last of the boys to leave home, and he had been gone for just over six months. So I had finally gained a whole suite of two rooms all to myself. Yet I had still been spending more of my spare time at Uncle Spike's than at home. Me? I had left school by then and was engaged to Tim. I had a job at Lawson and Co., a local estate agent, and Tim was a plumber's mate. We were saving up to get married, so we didn't go out much. More often we would spend Sunday afternoon together at Uncle's where Spike and Tim, happy as pigs in clover, ransacked their way through decades-old accumulations of stuff, while Maureen and me sipped our way through an illicit bottle of cheap sherry. We giggled like kids as we poured over old photo albums or else swapped girlie stories. Once or twice during the week, Tim came round to my house and we passed the time together in the Boys' room planning our forthcoming marriage. Even after Brian left home that room was still, and always would be, the boys' room. There was a smell of sweaty socks in there, which no amount of ventilation could disperse. All the same, it was a welcome addition to my personal space. My own tiny room being large enough for the swinging of cats only if the said cat was not too fussy about a bruised nose. The boys returned home for the funeral, which was conducted under a sullen sky which threatened rain but failed to deliver. At the wake, I sensed an unspoken feeling that there was unfinished business. Things that needed to be said and could not be voiced. There was a small, but tangible, edge of hostility aimed squarely at me. Maybe I was just being paranoid, I don't know, but I cannot escape the fact that I felt it. In some degree of course, it was me feeling guilty. Guilty about the fact that I hardly knew my mother, and now I never would. Dad died a couple of years later of a stroke. He lingered for two weeks in hospital before passing away quietly in his sleep. By then I was married and had given up work to look after Jason who was by then six months old. I was all set to go to the funeral when I got news that Maureen had slipped on an icy pavement and broken her hip. I don't care if it was callous or not, but for me the living take priority over the dead. I had seen Dad in hospital before he died and I had said my goodbyes to him there and then. He was just a shell. There was no one at home. I had held his limp and lifeless hand, squeezed it, and spoken to him, staring into his eyes. I saw nothing in them that gave me cause to believe that he understood what I said. I told him what I wanted to say anyway. The next day the hospital telephoned me to say that he was dead. Anyway, I missed the funeral. That went down well with the boys, even though I'd organised it all; booked the undertaker, reported the death to the registrar, paid for the flowers, phoned all-and-sundry to inform them of the arrangements. It was just unlucky that I couldn't be there in person. I haven't spoken with Bob or Brian since. They ignore me. What, for whatever reason, was not allowed to occur after Mum's funeral, finally matured on the day my brothers buried their father. I still send them a card at Christmas, I never get one in return. Barry keeps in touch. In some measure he, at least, seems to understand me. When Maureen was killed five years ago, I thought that Uncle Spike was going to die of a broken heart. I was badly cut-up about it too; but for an accident of birth, Maureen could have been either my Mum or my sister. When she died I felt as though I had lost both a mother and a best friend. Uncle Spike was seventy-two and the burden of widowhood seemed too much for him to bear. My two sons, Jason and Ryan, were by then, eleven and nine respectively. Tim and I had divorced in 1990 but my boys still see their Dad on alternate weekends. On the other weekends, me and the boys spend a large part of our Sunday at Uncle's. The boys love Spike and he adopted them as happily as he had adopted me. Of course Maureen enjoyed spoiling them too, always making sure that she had large bags of sweets, platefuls of cakes and their favourite fish fingers, chips and beans available for tea. They called her Nana Maureen and they were devastated by her sudden death. The tragedy changed them in unexpected ways. They insisted on attending the funeral to pay their last respects. I was initially against their intentions, but Spike changed my mind. "If they want to come, poppet," he said to me. "You mustn't stop them." "But --". I worried, unnecessarily I suppose, that a funeral was too powerful a thing for children to cope with. "But, nothing", Spike said firmly. "Never make the mistake of treating children as children. They're not children, really. They're just small people with a lot to learn. The real children are the grown ups. They're the ones who think they've learnt it all and don't realise they haven't learnt a thing. You've got to accept that they're old enough to decide things for themselves. When they say that they want fish fingers for tea it doesn't mean that they feel like having fish fingers. It means they want them. They have decided. So if they want to go to the funeral, you have to accept that they have decided on that too. It's no use you worrying about it. A funeral is a terrible emotional ordeal but they won't see it that way. We won't know how they see it, but you can bet they'll see it a lot differently to you and me. And they'll learn something which, just maybe, might make them better people." I allowed myself to be convinced. The boys were solemn during the service and both of them shed a few shy tears at the graveside. I watched them tensely, sure that, at any moment, they would break down with a fit of the horrors. It never happened. There were not many mourners. None of my brothers showed up, although Brian and Barry both sent wreaths and condolences cards. Tim took a day off work to attend, and one or two neighbours came too, but that was it. Maureen had no living relatives apart from me and mine. The loneliness of the affair saddened me. Afterwards, in Uncle Spike's cramped, stuff-filled, kitchen a half-dozen of us raised small glasses of sherry to drink a toast to Maureen's memory; I allowed the boys a thimbleful each, because they asked for it. To judge from their expressions as they drank it, they didn't like it. It took Uncle Spike a couple of years but he slowly regained his zest for life --- and bargains. One day about two years after Maureen's death he summoned me. "Look!" He said, as I let myself in through the front door. I looked. I was speechless. He was like a child on Christmas day, only if anything, more excited. "Remember how we used to say we ought to go into business? Well, now we can." Remember? How could I forget? He was talking about those Saturday afternoon sewing bees. After his early mishap with the shirt, Spike, who hated to be left out of anything, had taken over the overlocker. He became far more adept at machining than either Maureen or me but as a team, we were perfect. Maureen did the cutting out and pressing; I did the designing and pinned up the pieces, and Uncle Spike raced down the seams with the overlocker, never puckering a seam that wasn't supposed to be puckered. Over the years we grew ever more ambitious and we would often talk, fancifully. That had been seventeen years ago and here he was still nurturing the dream. I was lost for words. Wedged into his front room were more than half a dozen assorted rag-trade machines. He grabbed my elbow while my jaw was still working up to finding something to say. "Come on through to the kitchen, Poppet, and see what you think of the business plan." That was new. Business plan? Uncle Spike? The combination seemed unlikely but I was to be seriously surprised. He had the kitchen table cleared of the usual stuff and it was instead strewn with books and papers. Over tea he showed me things I had never dreamed of. In all the years that I had known Aunty Maureen and Uncle Spike I had never given a thought as to their finances. Spike always seemed, at least to me, to simply muddle through life. Now he showed me record books which he had kept over the years. The book-keeping methods left a lot to be desired, but once he showed me his unique method I saw that he had made quite a few substantial profits on some of his bargains. Most of the cash thus generated had gone into a building society account from which there had been precious few withdrawals--the last being a thousand pounds or so for Aunty's funeral. Uncle Spike had worked for the council for forty years before he retired, he had a good pension, his house was paid for; I was surprised to discover that he was quite well off. "It's no good to me," he said, meaning the five-figure sum in the building society. "I can't take it with me, and it's all going to you anyway, when I'm gone." "But I don't want it, Uncle," I said, meaning it. "Don't talk bloody nonsense," he said abruptly. "Look!" I looked. It was a business plan; a bit crude, but good enough to see that it described a viable prospect. He had done a lot of work. He had the particulars of a small industrial unit that was available for rent. He had a list running to thirty or forty pages of A4 detailing likely customers for the proposed business's products. He had a produced a sort of cashflow chart showing how the business could be in profit within six months of start-up.
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