05 Please Sir! by Jack Sheffield Read Free Book Online Page A

would be blessed with a grandchild.
    Ruby and Ronnie shared their council house at number 7 School View with their other four children. Duggie, a twenty-six-year-old undertaker’s assistant with the nickname ‘Deadly’, was content smoking his Castella cigars, playing with his Hornby Dublo train set and sleeping on his little wooden bunk in the attic; twenty-one-year-old Sharon had just got engaged to the local blond-haired adonis Rodney Morgetroyd, the Morton village milkman; nineteen-year-old Natasha was an assistant in Diane’s Hair Salon, and eight-year-old Hazel, a happy, rosy-cheeked little girl, had just moved up into Sally Pringle’s class.
    As Ruby made her way home, she wondered if her life would always be one of toil in order to keep her family fed and healthy. There were too many days now when her bones ached and she simply wanted to sit down and shut out the world.
    When she walked into her house, the sight that met her eyes was a long way from the elegant Christopher Plummer asking the demure Julie Andrews to dance.
    ‘Ah’m proper poorly, Ruby,’ complained frail, skinny Ronnie as he sat in the kitchen with a sweaty sock round his neck, a bread poultice on his chest and his feet in a bucket of hot mustard water. ‘An’ ah’m sweatin’ cobs,’ he gasped. ‘Ah feel as though ah’ve gone three rounds wi’ Giant ‘Aystacks.’
    Ruby ignored his plaintive cries and took a tin of sucking Victory V lozenges from the cupboard, rubbed off the dust from the lid on Ronnie’s bobble hat and popped a sweet into his mouth. ‘Suck that, y’soft ha’porth, an’ shurrup!’ said Ruby and went upstairs to find her best dress. ‘Ah’m goin’ out.’
    ‘Where to?’ croaked Ronnie.
    ‘Never you mind,’ said Ruby and she slammed the door.
    On the High Street, Johnny Duckitt thought he ruled the road as he parked his 1975 four-door Vauxhall Viva. It was a recent purchase for £1,195 from Charlie Clack’s garage and Charlie had thrown in a free car radio for good measure. In his knee-length leather jacket, tight stone-washed jeans and carefully coiffeured hair he imagined himself as a cross between sixties pop star Billy Fury and country and western singer Johnny Cash. After flicking a comb through his lacquered quiff, he lit up a Peter Stuyvesant luxury-length filter cigarette and waited in his car outside Nora’s Coffee Shop. As he blew smoke rings through his open window he reflected on the conquests in his life. There had been so many … but Ruby had been different. For some reason she had resisted his charms and he had never forgotten her.
    Johnny had worked at the Butlin’s holiday camp in Filey on the east coast of Yorkshire in the sixties. He had strutted around with his red coat and baggy cream trousers and was always introduced as ‘Seaside Johnny’ to his adoring fans. His rendition of Frankie Vaughan’s ‘Green Door’ regularly received a standing ovation. It was a carefree life and, for Johnny, every week meant an influx of holidaymakers and a new girlfriend.
    In 1938 Billy Butlin had bought 120 acres of land at Hunmanby Gap near Filey for £12,000 and created one of the largest holiday camps in the country. At its peak there were eleven thousand holidaymakers and a railway station had been built near by to accommodate the huge weekly influx of visitors. It was on a balmy summer’s evening over twenty years ago that Ruby had arrived at that station and two days later she danced with Johnny in the spectacular Viennese Ballroom. While Ronnie was propping up the bar and Ruby’s mother, Agnes, was looking after young Andy, Racquel and Duggie, Johnny saw his chance. After a wild ride on the Big Dipper they held hands tightly on the ‘Thrill of Thrills’, followed by a lazy circuit of the boating pool in a little rowing boat with the number 48 painted on the side. Ruby had felt like a princess in the arms of this handsome Butlin’s redcoat and when he had tried to steal a kiss she found