The Growing Pains of Jennifer Ebert, Aged 19 Going on 91

by David M. Barnett

Genres: Family Life; General Fiction

Synopsis

Nineteen-year-old Jennifer is regretting her hasty move into Sunset Promenade, an unusual retirement home taking in students to save money. Despite their differences in age, Jennifer and the older residents thrive and embark on a series of new adventures. But when Sunset Promenade is threatened with closure, cracks begin to show, and this quirky group of friends must work together to save their home.

The Growing Pains of Jennifer Ebert, aged 19 going on 91 is a funny, warm and uplifting novel about the importance of friendship, the value of community, and how it's never too late to have the time of your life...

Perfect for fans of Ruth Hogan, Mike Gayle, Jules Preston, Julie Cohen, Gail Honeyman and Nick Spalding.

*******************

Read by David Thorpe
(p) Orion Publishing Group 2018

A heartwarming comedy about unlikely friendships and community. Fans of The Wisdom of Sally Red Shoes by Ruth Hogan, The Man I Think I Know by Mike Gayle, The Map of Us by Jules Preston, Together by Julie Cohen, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman, and Checking Out by Nick Spalding will love this.

Release date: April 26, 2018

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 304

Sample

The look she is going for is Lauren Bacall.

That was the plan, anyway. Blood-red lipstick, come-hither eyes and hair with waves to knock the sea legs out from under any man. What Jenny Ebert has achieved, after four hours on a packed train and thirty minutes standing in the hammering downpour, is more drowned rat. The midnight-blue silk dress she’d bought for a song at a charity shop near home and poured herself into seems to have hitched up and twisted in all the wrong places, and she’s sure it’s shrunk in the rain, meaning she’s in danger of pouring herself out of it. The shoes-to-die-for are slowly and sadistically killing her. And the fog of hairspray she’d employed to keep her hair ice-cool and Hitchcock-blonde is now running in chemical rivulets down her forehead and into her eyes, stinging them and blurring her vision.

Jenny looks down at her bags and considers digging in them for either her umbrella or her anorak. Would Bacall do that? No, she would not. She’d probably have a dozen men fighting to hold umbrellas for her. She looks around but there’s not a Humphrey Bogart in sight on the concrete apron in front of Morecambe train station. Instead there are small knots of students waiting with their few new starters cases and cardboard boxes of kettles and toasters and books. Those who didn’t have the luxury of parents to drive them straight to their halls, or second and third years who are returning on this cold and wet October morning to already established digs.

Which of these will be her new friends, she wonders? She looks around the gathered tribes, the goths and the emos, the loners and the geeks. Mentally she puts a cross by each of them, looking around for people like her. People like she is now. The cool people, the night people, the ones for whom style and class are effortless. Oh, that reminds her. She opens the small black leather handbag dangling from her shoulder and pulls out the packet of Gauloises and a Zippo lighter. Attention to detail, that’s the thing. She doesn’t even smoke, not properly, but she’s been practising, just enough that she doesn’t lapse into a choking fit on the first drag now. As nonchalantly as possible, Jenny pulls a cigarette from the pack and hangs it loosely from those blood-red lips, flicking the top on the Zippo.

The lighter is advertised as wind- and rain-proof, and it does indeed burst into flame, cool and blue just like her. But the cigarette is already sodden and won’t take, and it gets even wetter when a cab pulls up sharply in front of her, its tyres sending a shower of rainwater over her from the puddles forming on the tarmac in front of the station building. Jenny coolly gives the cigarette one more try, sucking on it hard as it catches reluctantly, and immediately lapses into a choking coughing fit.

The driver leans over and winds down the passenger window, looking her up and down. ‘You’ll catch your death, standing there like that.’

‘Yes,’ gasps Jenny, the puddle-water dripping from her nose. She coughs one more time, so hard she thinks she might throw up. ‘No thanks to you.’

‘The university is it, love?’ The driver, a big man in his forties, estimates Jenny, brushing the crumbs of a just-imbibed pasty from a belly straining the buttons of his shirt. ‘Cutting me own throat here, but there’ll be a minibus along in a minute going straight to the campus. Free for students.’

‘I’m not staying on campus,’ says Jenny, and through the open window hands him a scrap of paper bearing the address of her new home. ‘Not yet. They’re still building the accommodation blocks. I’m staying here until it’s finished.’

She realises she’s talking too much. Sultry and mysterious, Jenny Ebert. Sultry and mysterious.

He looks at the piece of paper for a second and then shrugs. ‘OK.’ He reaches under the dashboard and pulls a lever; the boot clicks open. ‘Let’s get your stuff in the back.’

Jenny watches as he loads up the boot with her cases, but she keeps a tight hold on one green sports bag, clanking metallically. ‘I’ll carry this with me,’ she says.

‘Family silver, is it?’ laughs the driver. ‘Let’s get you moving, then.’

Jenny climbs into the back seat because that’s what Bacall would do. She wouldn’t sit up front, even in a knackered old Vauxhall Astra, because she had class. The driver gets into the driver’s seat and punches the buttons on the dashboard meter. ‘Bloody awful weather.’ On the dashboard, beside his meter, is his hackney carriage licence, sporting a washed-out photograph that makes him look as if he’s being hunted by the police for escaping from prison, and the name: Kevin O’Donnell.

Jenny looks out of the window at a gaggle of girls with stripy tights, face piercings and blue and pink hair falling over the shoulders of their uniform black T-shirts. As Kevin pulls away from the station forecourt he says, ‘You’ll be going out to the pub tonight, drinking snakebite and black? That’s what students drink, isn’t it? Snakey and black? You a first year? Never went to university myself.’

Jenny sighs with the realisation that she isn’t going to get through this drive without conversation. She glances at his meaty left arm as he changes gear, at the faded tattoo that says MOIRA on a banner wrapped around a heart that is dripping with blood. She wonders if this is because he loves Moira, or because he hates her, because she squeezed his heart dry. She looks back through the window at a squabble of seagulls rising up noisily over the black slate roof of a down-at-heel hotel. ‘Second year. But I’m new to the University of North Lancashire. I did a year at Loughborough but I’ve transferred.’

‘Never been to Loughborough,’ sniffs Kevin as they turn on to the seafront. ‘East Midlands, innit? Never been there. Always strikes me as a boring sort of place, the Midlands. Neither one thing nor the other. Is that why you left? Too boring?’

‘Too close to home.’ The sea is so far out Jenny can’t see it beyond the expanse of dark, wet sand that stretches out beyond the blue metal railings interspersed with bright red lifebelts.

The driver nods. ‘Away from the old mum and dad. What’ve they gone and done to piss you off?’

‘They talked too much,’ says Jenny, which is the sort of thing a femme fatale would say.

It seems to work because Kevin says nothing for a long time, but then he points across towards the passenger window. ‘See that statue? Eric Morecambe.’ He starts to sing tunelessly. ‘Bring me sunshine, da-de-dah. Bring me sunshine, do-de while. What you studying, anyway?’

Jenny cranes her neck to see the black statue, right hand up behind the entertainer’s ear, left leg cocked up behind him, framed against the grey sky, until it disappears out of sight. ‘Film studies. I’m hoping to specialise in film noir.’

‘Film noir,’ says the driver admiringly, and Jenny isn’t sure if he’s mocking her or not. ‘That sounds grand. Like I said, I never went to university. Didn’t have the brains. What’s film noir, then, arty French stuff?’

‘Crime movies from the forties and fifties. Some from the thirties. Mainly American, a few British.’ With a slight feeling of alarm, Jenny realises they are heading along a lonely, deserted road which she doesn’t remember from last time she was here. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Got to take the old coast road. Nobody uses it much since they built the bypass. But there was a landslip last month – half the bloody access road to your new place fell into the sea. You’ll have to go up to the house from the front. Be there in ten minutes. Crime movies, eh? Funny old thing for a girl like you to be into.’

Out to the left the beach goes on and on until it meets a thin thread of sea. Well, not so much a beach, more of an almost endless expanse of mud. When she came to check the place out in summer they said there was a bus that ran along the coast road and into town, right to the university. She wonders who else will be living at the accommodation, wonders if they’ll be her sort of people.

‘Not much for you young ’uns to do out here. Nearest pub’s a good two miles away. That’s if the Cross Keys is even still open.’ He reaches on to the dashboard and hands her a card. SANDPIPER TAXIS. He passes it over to the back then rummages in the storage space in his door, overflowing with used tissues and chocolate-bar wrappers, and tosses her a biro with a chewed end. ‘That’s us. Write my name on the back. Kevin. You and your mates want taking into town for a night out, give us a call. Ask for me. I’ll make sure you get special rates and get you back safe and sound.’

The taxi slows and pulls in against the pavement on the long, deserted road. ‘I’m sorry,’ says Kevin. ‘This is as far as I go.’

When Kevin and Jenny have pulled her bags from the boot she stands on the narrow pavement, cracked and uneven and pitted with sandy puddles, and feels the salty spray driving off the Irish Sea over the roof of the old Vauxhall Astra, stinging her cheeks and lips. She wonders if salt water is ageing or preserving; if she stood here long enough, facing the tumultuous waves, would she end up prematurely ancient or be forever nineteen? Behind her she feels the oppressive weight of the rising land and the old house that perches on top of it. It’s almost as though the very shadow of the house cast by the faint October sun that is sluggishly emerging between the rain clouds has weight and substance. Her blonde hair whipping about her face in damp tails, she says conspiratorially, ‘Is that because there are dark doings up at the old house? Stories that people tell in whispers? I bet if it was night-time you wouldn’t even bring me this close.’

He slips her notes into the breast pocket of his short-sleeved shirt and gives her a handful of change, and frowns. ‘No, love. I mean, I don’t think so. Just a normal place. I mean, this is as close as I can get due to that access road being out. I’ll give you a hand up these steps with your bags.’

Jenny clutches the sports bag to her chest. He grins. ‘Apart from the family silver, of course. Probably wads of cash in there, I bet. Costs a lot to go to university these days. They did grants for people back in my time, but I never went to university, of course.’ He taps his temple with a thick forefinger. ‘Not got it up here, me.’

At the top of the steps Jenny pauses to catch her breath and look up at the house. It is in the Gothic Revival style, probably once the home of some rich Victorian mill owner or coal magnate, built to overlook the storm-tossed sea. It’s constructed of sturdy stone, darkly weathered by the elements, that seems black in the lee of the building. Over a set of weathered double doors there’s a portico and tall, thin windows above offering glimpses of the staircase that turns up over the four storeys. To the left is a high-peaked gable on which sits, lopsided, a tarnished finial four metres tall. To the right is a rounded turret above a wide, angled bay window fitted with small, square-latticed windows.

In one of these windows Jenny sees the woman.

She is half hidden behind the thick curtains, but Jenny sees a halo of pale hair surrounding a thin face, her figure dressed in a black high-necked dress, an archipelago of pearls at her throat. She is looking down at Jenny, who suddenly feels self-conscious and puts up a hand to smooth her wind-blown hair. When she looks back, the woman has gone.

Kevin dumps her bags in the porch of the grand doorway. ‘This is just temporary, did you say?’

Jenny nods. ‘Only until they get the new accommodation blocks opened.’

He waggles the card she’s still got in her hand. ‘Well, just remember, I’m at your service. You can always rely on Kevin.’ He stands back and looks up at the house, and shakes his head. ‘Great time you’ll have. Making new friends, going out on the lash. Lovely. I never—’

‘You never went to university,’ says Jenny. ‘Yes, you said.’

He nods. ‘Right. Well, cheerio, then!’

Jenny watches Kevin head back down the stone steps and execute a U-turn in the deserted road, the taxi dwindling into a dot along the long, straight, empty road that separates the wide, endless beach glittering with oily pools of seawater from undulating dunes swaying with tall grasses. Morecambe is at one end and Silverdale at the other, and in between there’s nothing.

Nothing apart from the house, perched on top of a craggy rise overlooking the road and the beach, roosting there like a muster of crows, trailing a zig-zag flight of precisely thirty-nine steps from the flagged terrace in front of the building down to the coast road; and a rusty gate hanging from a post beside a wooden sign that has been weathered and warped by years of spray and wind and rain, occasionally baked by the sun into crisp, fragile boards, the painted words illegible now.

Taking a deep breath, Jenny hefts her bag more securely on to her shoulder and drags her cases across the gravel. Far to the left there is a tangle of orange temporary fencing, bringing an abrupt end to the road that has barely begun arching away from the big house. Beyond there is a black chasm, three or four metres wide, and then the road sweeps down and behind the grounds. She wonders whether it will be fixed before she goes to the proper accommodation blocks in town.

Hauling the rest of her bags over to the ones Kevin deposited on the broad stone step in front of the doors, Jenny pulls her phone out of her pocket. No 4G; she’s barely got any ordinary signal. Stuffing it back into her coat, she considers the ancient bell-pull by the doors and the faded card, encased in Sellotape and pinned to the flaking wood, which she can just about make out says NO HAWKERS OR COLD-CALLING. If any door-to-door salesmen made it this far, they should get a medal, never mind an order for toilet brushes. Jenny bites her thumbnail for a moment, then knocks once, hard, on the door.

Her knuckles make a dull, almost imperceptible sound, but the door swings open, revealing the cool, tile-floored reception area she remembered from summer. The wide mahogany desk in front of her is unmanned. Dark doors to the left and right are closed; there is one wedged open behind the reception desk, leading to a narrow corridor. Beside the desk the staircase sweeps up and turns to the left.

There is nobody here. Jenny frowns. She’d have thought at least someone would be there to meet her. She wonders if the others have arrived yet. She glances back at the main door and pulls it closed. Should it be unlocked like that? Wondering which way to go, Jenny is drawn by a thump and a volley of shouts to the door on the right. Putting her cases and bags against the desk, she listens at it for a moment, then twists the handle. She can hear voices from inside the room, and cautiously pushes at the door until she can peer quietly round it. Are these her new housemates?

Jenny takes a deep breath. This is what it has all been leading up to, all the pain, all the big decisions, all the careful reinvention of herself. A new start, with new people, and a new Jenny Ebert. She puts her head into the room, just so she can see them.

They are all ancient, occupying that sprawling age group that could be anything from sixty to a hundred. All of them.

She’s in the right place.

‘There’s a cream cracker under the settee!’

The young man with a shock of black, curly hair and a pained look on his face holds out his hands. ‘No cracker! I hoovered this morning!’

Edna Grey sighs. He’s a good boy, Florin, but he’s very highly strung. And extremely easy to wind up. Edna has just let herself into the day room and settled down on the sofa in time for Mrs Slaithwaite to point at the other couch and claim sight of the non-existent cracker.

Edna says mildly, ‘She is just having a joke with you, Florin.’

Florin implores Edna with his hands. ‘But I hoovered, Mrs Grey! I always hoover!’

‘There’s a cream cracker under the settee!’ repeats Mrs Slaithwaite, sitting in her usual chair by the fireplace with her huge hams of arms folded over a long, shapeless cotton dress, her white hair wispy on her ruddy head.

Florin pulls a face at Mrs Grey and drops to his knees in front of the wide sofa. Joe, Mr Robinson and Mrs Cantle are sitting on the sofa, and Florin peers between the stockinged legs of the latter. Mrs Cantle giggles. ‘Ooh, you are awful, Florin.’ The sofa faces the ornate fireplace, the carpet overlaid with a Chinese rug in muted colours. Florin waves his arm underneath the furniture. ‘No cream cracker, Mrs Slaithwaite. It is as clean as a whistle.’

Mrs Slaithwaite harrumphs and turns her attention to the television on the wooden cabinet beneath the wide bay window. Edna looks back at Florin. ‘She always says this. It’s from an old television programme, before your time. She is just having fun with you.’

Edna considers the occupants of the settee. Mr Robinson has a short back and sides, his grey hair flattened over his head with pomade, a thin moustache beneath his hawkish nose, and is wearing a green knitted waistcoat over a buttoned-up shirt and a tie sporting a regimental crest; Mrs Cantle, thin and birdlike in a pale blue cardigan, is staring absently at three crushed paper handkerchiefs in her gnarled hands; and Joe – Ibiza Joe, he likes to be called – is a spectacled man with a shiny bald pate but long hanks of hair hanging from the back and sides of his head to a coarse-looking multi-coloured poncho.

‘Hoovered, my left bollock,’ says Mr Robinson, with what Edna has come to realise is his customary brusqueness. ‘He’s a lazy little swine, that one.’

‘No!’ says Florin in anguish. ‘Mr Robinson, that is not nice.’

‘Second Lieutenant Robinson to you, boy.’ He directs a pointing finger and frowning stare at Florin. ‘Lazy. Little. Swine.’

Joe turns his gaze on Mr Robinson ‘Give it a rest, Robbo,’ he says. ‘The lad hoovered. I saw him myself.’

‘Has anybody seen my jewels?’ says Mrs Cantle. Edna smiles to herself. Good work, Margaret, she thinks. ‘I’ve only got three here. I had four. Someone’s taken one of my jewels.’

Mr Robinson snorts. ‘Bloody jewels. They’re dried-up snot-rags.’ He juts out his jaw. ‘And don’t tell me he’s hoovered, Joe, you bloody hippie. They’re all the same, that lot.’ He turns his gaze back to Florin. ‘Lazy little swine.’

Florin ignores him and crouches down in front of the old lady, who is shaking her head at her balled-up tissues. ‘Mrs Cantle. These are not jewels. These are handkerchiefs.’

‘Bloody nut-jobs!’ shouts Mr Robinson. ‘Handkerchiefs, love, hand-ker-chiefs. Listen to the lad. Though if they were bloody jewels, he’d probably have them off you. Can’t trust his lot as far as you can throw ’em!’

‘Mr Robinson!’ says Florin.

‘Second Lieutenant!’ he fires back.

‘Mr Robinson, that is not nice. It is racist.’ Florin folds his arms and stands in front of him. ‘And do not get yourself worked up. Remember your angina. Have you had your medication this morning?’

‘Robbo,’ says the other man, Joe, cleaning the lenses of his glasses on the corner of his poncho. ‘You are getting a bit over the top.’

‘State of the bloody world today,’ mutters Mr Robinson. He looks around. ‘Bloody angina tablets. Where’s the Daily Mail? And don’t call me Robbo. That’s what the lads in the regiment called me.’ He points a finger at Joe. ‘Proper men. Not bloody peaceniks like you.’

‘Can someone help me push the chairs back?’ says Florin. ‘The yoga lady will be here soon.’

‘Oh sweet Jesus,’ says Mr Robinson. ‘The bloody yoga lady.’

Mrs Cantle stops counting and puts a hand to her mouth. ‘Oh. How long will the yoga lady be here? I’m expecting my son to come to visit today.’

Florin crouches down in front of her again and takes Mrs Cantle’s tiny, bony hands in his. ‘We have no visitors in the diary for today. I’m sorry. Maybe it is tomorrow?’

‘I’m sure it was today,’ says Mrs Cantle, shaking her head.

Mr Robinson puffs his cheeks out and blows air loudly through his lips. ‘He’s not coming. He’s never bloody been, has he? We don’t even know if he exists. He might be as made-up as your bloody jewels.’

Mrs Cantle glares at him. ‘He is coming! He wouldn’t just let me come here and not visit!’

Mr Robinson folds his arms. ‘Give over, love. We’ve all just been left here. Nobody ever comes to visit any of us. We’ve been taken to the edge of the world and dumped. You, me, Ibiza bloody Joe over there, all of us. Nobody wants us and we’re all alone. Sooner you can face up to that, the quicker we can all get on with the business at hand.’

‘And what’s that, Robbo?’ says Joe. ‘What’s the business at hand?’

Mr Robinson shrugs. ‘Waiting for a lonely, lingering death. What else is there?’

There’s a long silence punctuated by a dull crack and everyone looks towards the TV just in time to see a black plastic remote control bouncing off the screen. ‘Mrs Slaithwaite!’ screeches Florin. ‘You nearly broke the television!’

Mrs Slaithwaite sets her lips in a grimace and folds her arms over her ample bosom. ‘It’s not like there’s anything on worth watching.’ She holds Florin’s gaze, then indicates the sofa with a nod of her big head. ‘Anyway. There’s a cream cracker under the settee.’

Florin makes a sound like an elephant and closes his eyes, breathing deeply. Then he retrieves the remote control. ‘Does anybody want Judge Rinder on before the yoga lady comes?’

‘Judge Rinder my left bollock,’ says Mr Robinson, finally locating the Mail under Mrs Cantle’s behind and tugging it out ferociously. ‘I can’t believe we fought a bloody war for this.’

Before the room descends into shouting chaos, Edna addresses them all. ‘We’ve also got the students arriving today. I have just seen one from upstairs. Young woman. Very nicely dressed, I should say. Not like most of the young ones today.’

Mr Robinson rattles the pages of the Mail. ‘Oh God, is that today? I don’t know what the Granges are thinking of. What a stupid bloody idea. Fill the place with kids? It’s supposed to be a rest home. Rest being the operative word. What sort of rest are we going to get with students tearing up and down the corridors?’

‘I’m quite looking forward to it,’ says Joe, which Edna expects him to. She might have only been at Sunset Promenade two weeks, but she’s getting something of a handle on the residents. Mr Robinson is a reactionary old fool who thinks the world and everything in it has been designed purely to annoy him. Mrs Slaithwaite is a bad-tempered old woman who delights in causing others misery. Joe is a teenager trapped in the body of an old man, constantly trying to relive his glory days. Mrs Cantle … Edna glances at Mrs Cantle, studiously counting her balled-up tissues.

From the corner of her eye Edna notices that the door to the day room has been slightly ajar, and that there’s been someone quietly watching them. The girl. The one she saw from the window. Curious clothes for a young girl. It was a lovely dress, but didn’t look too good on her, like she’d been sleeping in it. Hair like a bird’s nest. And whoever told her she could walk in those heels …

‘I understand at least two of them are Chinese,’ says Mr Robinson. He shakes his head as though this is a personal slight. ‘I mean to say—’

‘I think it will be good for you all,’ says Florin. You can say one thing for the lad, thinks Edna. He works like a horse. He’s the main carer at Sunset Promenade, does all the cooking and cleaning, while the owners, the Grange brothers, seem to spend most of their time locked in their little office, as far as Edna can tell, arguing. Probably about money.

She looks around the day room, at the large mirror over the fireplace, at the curtains hanging from the wide bay window, at the mismatched collection of rugs scattered across the floorboards. It’s a big house and there aren’t many residents. Edna wonders how it can possibly be financially viable. The short answer, of course, is that it isn’t, which is why they’re filling up the empty rooms with students. But it’s an odd set-up. For starters, they don’t charge a lot of money to the residents, not a quarter of what most places ask. And they don’t demand you sell your home, if you have one, to pay for your care. Not that anyone else apart from her owns their own place, from what she’s gathered in the past two weeks. They’re all hard-luck cases, seemingly hand-picked by the Granges, as though the brothers are performing some kind of labour of love. The whole thing is very haphazard and lackadaisical. With the number of rooms in Sunset Promenade they could be making a lot more money if they took referrals from the local social services, but they don’t seem to do that. And while this place is a bit remote – Edna glances out of the window to see black clouds rolling in from across the Irish Sea – the land it’s on is probably worth a small fortune.

Still, she supposes the Granges know what they’re doing. It’s not for Edna to question their methods, just to be glad that they’ve allowed her to come and stay. She isn’t at all sure what she would have done had they not welcomed her here, not sure at all. The others, Mr Robinson and Joe and Mrs Slaithwaite, said she was lucky to get in, that the Granges were very fussy about who they took on as residents.

Nonsense, she’d said. There’s no such thing as luck.

There’s only good planning.

Edna looks at the others in turn. She wonders if they know how old they all look, and then decides they don’t. Without a mirror in her sightline, she herself forgets that she’s almost eighty-eight. No one feels old, not when they’re all sitting together like this. Not in their heads. It’s only when you see that reflection, or you try to move, that you realise you’re not as young as you were. That’s what people say, isn’t it? I’m not as young as I was. Nobody says, I’m older than I used to be.

Mr Robinson pats the sofa and gently pushes on Mrs Cantle’s bony back, looking behind her. ‘Has anybody seen my magnifying glass?’ he says. ‘You know I can’t read the paper without it.’

‘You don’t want to read that rag,’ says Joe. He shuffles forward on the sofa and reaches for his cane, leaning on the chair arm. ‘Ooh, give us a lift up, Florin, lad.’

Florin obliges, carefully helping Joe to his feet. The old man stands there, resting on his stick, catching his breath and shaking his head.

‘It’s there, Joe, you bloody hippie!’ declares Mr Robinson, leaning rudely across Mrs Cantle to snatch up the big magnifying glass that the other man has been sitting on. As he does so, Mrs Slaithwaite makes a loud belch.

‘Them sausages you serve up for breakfast don’t do for me,’ she scowls at Florin.

‘My son does lovely sausages,’ says Mrs Cantle wistfully, then begins to cry quietly. ‘I’m sure he’ll come to visit today. Where are we, anyway? Is it Corfu? Or Egypt?’

‘Bloody hell,’ mutters Mr Robinson, peering through his magnifying glass at the newspaper. ‘Bloody Egypt.’ . . .