Read That's Another Story: The Autobiography for Free Online Page B

nightmarish saga that lasted - although in the latter years it was rarer - through to the beginnings of puberty. Every night I begged God to spare me the usual morning humiliation of having to confess to my mother that I’d ‘done it again’ and met with her angry, exhausted despair. ‘Oh Gaaard, she’s done it again!’ she would repeat to no one in particular. Every night I stretched my pyjama bottoms to bursting point with a raggedy old towel or sometimes an old pyjama jacket of my father’s as a makeshift nappy, which more often than not I managed to circumvent, only to wake up in my own wretchedness at the familiar stench of ammonia and the cold, soggy tangle of pyjamas and sheets. How my mother managed, going out to work full time as she did, with three children, Grandma and no washing machine, is simply unimaginable to me. Today the sheets would be whipped into a machine, then into the tumble-dryer and be back on the bed before a person could say ‘incontinence pad’. Instead they had to be boiled in a bucket on the gas stove, rinsed, put through the mangle in the back yard and then transferred to the washing line, in all weathers, maybe taking days to dry.
    The whole thing made staying at friends’ houses out of the question unless my mother had words and this brought its own shame: the whispered conversations in the hallway as we were about to leave; the little laugh that served to cover my mother’s own shame; the friend’s face as she greedily cottoned on to my deep, dark secret and then no one mentioning it, culminating in my not daring to allow myself to sleep at all and so returning home exhausted. The only time my bed-wetting didn’t provoke my mother’s wrath was that Christmas when Auntie Agnes came to stay.
    At the opposite end of the upstairs landing from my parents’ bedroom, past the stairs to the attic and the bathroom, was the back bedroom into which I moved after my grandmother passed away, the scent of her skin hovering long after she had gone. It was an L-shaped room and, with the airing cupboard in the corner and the toilet next door, there was a continual and somewhat comforting sound of dripping, whooshing and ticking of pipes. There was a sash window looking out over the back yard, the garage, and across into Waller’s shop on the other side of Wigorn Road, a windier, longer, busier road than either Bishopton or Long Hyde Road, which ran along the back of the house. It was here that I lay in the very dark, wood-framed single bed that my grandmother had died in, listening under the covers to Radio Luxembourg on my father’s big blue Bush transistor radio, until late at night when a hand smelling of Boots soap and fags came and retrieved it from down beside my bed.
    It was here one awful autumn in 1967 that I lay for a whole month in mourning and disbelief at my being ‘packed in’ or ‘dumped’, as they would say today, by my first love, a chap called Bob. Not turning up for work, I endlessly pored over his letters (he had gone away to college), which I kept in an old sewing box under the bed, called my Bob Box. It was a relationship that was never consummated, its physical side consisting of a lot of snogging to the Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’ and well-mannered groping in Bob’s front room, either when his parents weren’t in or were keeping a discreet distance in the back kitchen.
    In fact the only time we could have done the deed was when a group of us from school, who my parents thought were all girls, spent a weekend in a caravan on a windswept site somewhere in mid-Wales, the boys turning up later after our dads had dropped us off. Bob and I spent hours in frenzied snogging on a very narrow bunk once the lights went out but in an act of gallantry he placed the sheet between us, so that should his passion reach uncontrollable heights there would be this crisp, white contraceptive to save the day. However, it wasn’t to be the sheet that eventually cooled our