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Copyright © Patrick Thompson 2003
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Source ISBN: 9780007105236
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780007571765 Version: 2016-03-15
Contents
For Mum & Dad
Where do I start? Things don’t have convenient beginnings, things overlap and collide.
Perhaps it started like this:
Veronica was on her way home, carrying bags of shopping. She was travelling by bus because we are back in the days when families had only one car, if they had one at all. She’d got bags of vegetables and foodstuffs we’d fail to recognize now. She was going to have to make them into something, not just empty one packet or another into the microwave. Microwaves aren’t even a rumour. Microwaves are still science fiction. We are back in the early seventies.
The bus was crowded, and people jostled. The young people didn’t hand over their seats to young women with heavy bags anymore. Everyone was smoking.
She’d left her son at home, but he’d be fine. He was old enough to look after himself. His father would be at work until six, and then doing office work at home until midnight. She’d be cooking for the three of them.
That was how it was, and it wasn’t likely to change. Germaine Greer might not think so, but Germaine Greer wasn’t living on housekeeping in the West Midlands. It was easier to be radical when you had enough money to give up the day job. It was no trouble to be a free thinker if you had nothing urgent to think about.
Sometimes she wished she’d taken after her mother, who had been in charge of her own household. The understanding had been that her father had been there to bring in money. He was subservient to the female line. They’d been emancipated before emancipation.
She hadn’t, though, and that was all there was to it. There was too much about her mother that was too uncomfortable.
If there was a genetic component to that – which seemed unlikely, as her mother’s brand of strangeness was unscientific and didn’t