Read Misadventures for Free Online

ACKIE
    I was twenty-three and secretary to the Managing Director of a bank in the City. Jackie was a twenty-year-old clerk working in the banking hall of the same bank.
    J ackie was very popular and had made close I friends with most of her colleagues. She was engaged to be married and had planned a honeymoon in Spain. On the Friday before her wedding day various members of staff sewed ‘L’ plates onto the back of her coat and ribbons onto the front. She was presented with an expensive glass clock as a wedding present from everyone in the bank.
    Jackie didn’t return to the office two weeks later as expected. Her new husband phoned her supervisor to say she was ill. Twelve days passed and he phoned again with the terrible news that Jackie had died.
    We were told that Jackie had been taken ill on honeymoon. A doctor had been called but he couldfind nothing wrong with her. On their return to the UK Jackie’s condition did not improve. She was examined twice in hospital but still no one could find any explanation why she was unwell. A few days after her last hospital visit she died. The coroner’s verdict was that death had been caused by the contraceptive pill she had recently started taking.
    Her friends in the office were in tears and those on the pill were saying, ‘That could have happened to us.’

1968
D AVID
    David was a twenty-year-old police constable living in a police section house in London. He was an only child and was born in Cheltenham. Gloucestershire, where his parents still lived. I was twenty-three years old when I met him and we went out together for several months.  
    O ne wintry Saturday evening David was on duty in Knightsbridge with several other policemen. One of the officers came up to him with a civilian by his side and said to David, ‘This feller has been caught stealing, guard him until I come back to you.’ David took the man’s arm and led him into a shop doorway. Whilst standing with his prisoner David noticed a drunk staggering up the road. He turned to the thief and said, ‘Wait here while I pick up this drunk.’ David walked up to the drunk, arrested him, and returned to the shop doorway, to find his prisoner was no longer there. He looked around him and saw theman running at top speed down Knightsbridge. David immediately blew his whistle and, after the intervention of his colleagues, the thief was once more in police custody.
    Â 
    One weekend in early summer I drove to Cheltenham with David in my black Hillman Imp car, having been invited to stay for the weekend with his family. I found his parents to be very warm and friendly and his mother had quite obviously spring-cleaned the house for our arrival. Unfortunately this spotless image was shattered over dinner as I watched her stub out her finished cigarette in her used dessert plate.
    Â 
    During my stay I met one of David’s friends, who was a local policeman. He asked David, ‘What are your chances for promotion up in London?’

1968
E RIC
    He was thirty-three. I was twenty-three. We met at a dance in the winter. He lived in Ruislip. Regardless of the snow and ice he would drive across London to take me out three times a week. We dated for two months.
    E ric told me he had recently been engaged to a girl and they had bought a house together in Ruislip, living as man and wife. As his fiancée got on so well with his mother, it was decided she should move in with them permanently, giving up the tenancy on her small council flat.
    Unfortunately for Eric his fiancée’s feelings changed towards him and she ended their relationship, returning to London to start her life afresh.
    Eric said to me, ‘Now I’m buying a house and I’m stuck with my mother living in it.’

1969
P AT
    Pat was twenty-six. She lived at the bottom of my street with her eighteen-year-old brother and fifteen-year-old sister. Their parents were dead and Pat was legally her younger