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lipstick.
    “Oh indeed. And if she stands with her left cheek facing the sun, you can see black hairs sprouting from a mole the shape of a Scottie dog. Yes, a terrible thing, spite.”
    Mrs Pither’s Nazi-spite seems to brighten our cloud even more. Dad bursts our eardrums with occasional bouts of yodelling. Mum unfolds maps, saying such unhelpful things as, “Should you not be on this wavy blue line, Roy?”
    “Doubt it, Bridge. That’s the Thames.”
    Eventually, Victor tires of the yodelling and even of the drive. His bare legs are stuck fast to the seat and one of T-K’s has pinged off and flown into Grandma’s foot-well. I did try to tell him men couldn’t do the splits.
    “It’s like driving to a funeral, Dad,” Victor says.
    “And we’ll be heading straight to yours if you don’t pipe down.”
    “Blood and sand, lad,” Grandma adds. “Any slower and we’ll be in reverse. I’ll be back in Audette Gardens in time for Crossroads .”
    “Is this trip one-hell-of-a-gas, Mum?” Victor says, watching a Lambretta buzz by. “Because Dad told me it would be.”
    “Can you not drive faster, Roy?”
    “Oh, hoity-toity,” Grandma says. “Your patience is wearing thinner than a cream cracker, Bridge. Ooh, have you been eating your calves-foot jelly again? I swear I can smell hoof. Beats me why you don’t have a British bacon buttie like the rest of us.”
    Mum ignores her. “How are the brakes, Roy? Mein Gott , I think sometimes we will not set a toe in Berlin.”
    “Ooh, if only Hitler had said that about the Sudetenland.”
    “Ma, stop it. Bridge, just hold the bus, love. Climb down from your Panzer. The brake’s as sweet as a nut. It’s your appendix I’m thinking about. Softly, softly, the doctor said last time, didn’t he? Not too much excitement. If I go haring off like a rocket it could give you a relapse. You’ll never get there then.”
    “Mum,” Victor pipes up, “your appendix is a hand-grenade. If the pin is pulled out you’ve only got seconds. You don’t want to detonate it, do you?”
    “Spot on, Victor,” says Dad, who has coached him. “Think of it that way, Bridge. A hand-grenade inside your guts. No wonder I’m sticking to twenty miles an hour.”
    “More like two,” Grandma says, pulling her knitting apart to pick up a dropped stitch. “And to think I was terrified. I’d be more scared on a milk float.”
    Everyone except Grandma is too hungry to be pleasant. When Mum asks Dad if he definitely picked up the Deutschmarks from the hall table where Grandma keeps her battalion of china ladies and he says he asked her to put them in his wallet, the stew really starts to simmer. It’s all how-am-I-supposed-to-find-anything-among-that-crinoline-mob? And you-know-I-would-never-touch-your-wallet. Reasonable enough. Then we have why-is-everything-always-left-to-me? Followed by some-of-us-were-busy-unblocking-the-toilet. Inexplicably, this leads to it-wasn’t-me-who-forgot-to-defrost-the-turkey (four Christmases ago). But it reaches the point where Grandma has to tie her headscarf around Victor’s ears and I hear the German word for arse-hole.
    Tears are burning my eyes because my parents actually do love each other. Dad doesn’t really think Mum’s a know-all who blames him for everything. And Mum honestly doesn’t hold Dad responsible for Victor ending up in Casualty last Christmas. It was all the fault of the Space-Saving Easy X-tend table.
    We only use it once a year because it’s a nightmare to unfold. The flaps must be released at the same precise moment or else they jam. Last year, Dad lost patience with them and instead of getting his toolbox out, he drank a lot of Bristol Cream. While we were eating the turkey at the sloping table, Victor’s drumstick glided into his lap. He had just coated it in steaming gravy.
    Until nine o’clock that night, almost to the end of The Black And White Minstrel Show , we waited in Casualty with his sizzling thigh glistening from