No. 1

I got three letters; one from Dad, another from Mum, and the third from Andrew.

Mum’s letter disturbed me; it was uncharacteristically drawn out and struck me as emotional. She ended it with, “Thank you for being our son,” a phrase which puzzled me a great deal. She’d picked up on comments I’d made in my last letter home about my the moving house business and she feels her intuitions have been proven right and I’ve now been left “high and dry,” with nowhere to go. She mentioned Andrew and I having similar interests: “you could do all kinds of things together.”

The final paragraph declares that, “Dad once told you to look out for yourself first and I think he’s been proved right. If you don’t look after no. 1, no one else will.” As I said, the letter disturbed me but also touched me and made me laugh with its almost childlike innocent questioning phraseology. “It’s quite uncanny how you all think like us. Should we be proud or sad, do you think?”

She also mentioned Nanna P. and her messiness and that Nanna B. is bitter about our Calverdale holiday, saying, “Who wants to go on holiday to look at a lot of bloody cows!” Says Mum, “I feel sorry for her and her sort, don’t you?”

I know she doesn’t like writing letters and the fact that she penned such a lengthy one shows how worried she must be. So tonight I rung her up and reassured her, although she sounded doubtful. She also mentioned that Nanna P. has had her X-rays and is nervous about the results, and recently had £90 stolen by a conman who bluffed his way in to her flat by claiming to be a council workman. He asked her to put her finger on the kitchen tap to check for drips and left her standing there while he raided her purse.

I rang Andrew tonight too. In his letter he offered to buy me a ticket to Bracknell Jazz Festival as a birthday present. I wonder if this was partly inspired by Mum’s anxious ‘phone discussions with him about me? He told me he’s buying a 550cc Suzuki and will have it in time for the Festival.