Tying Down The Lion by Joanna Campbell Read Free Book Online

sort like Auntie Freda who leaves her bristles in the wash-basin.
    ***
    Grandma announces every shop-sign and pub-name we pass.
    “They’ve moved all of them since I was last this way,” she keeps saying.
    “Who’s they?” I ask her.
    “People,” she says. “People who move things. Look, there’s The Green Man. He definitely used to be further along.”
    We stop to eat the remainder of our picnic—Grandma found the cheese-and-HP sandwiches before we left Oaking—on a patch of brown grass next to the car. The sun disappears and we all flop on the prickly ground, too glum to get the rug out of the boot, although Grandma hauls out the tiny milking-stool she always takes on picnics.
    Dad would usually whisper, “She looks like a heifer perched on three cocktail sticks,” and Mum would wink at him. But the air is still so stiff from the car-squabbles you could slice it.
    No one speaks. While we wait for the picnic food to be unwrapped, Grandma crams a pink coconut Allsort into her mouth and lights up a Senior Service. She makes those throat sounds and puffs out those sing-song sighs old people always have to make when the conversation dries up.
    But once the wicker basket is emptied out, the plastic picnic-plates distributed and the greaseproof paper unfolded, Grandma launches into attack.
    “Ugh, strike a light! Tastes like a clod of German earth,” she says, flinging Mum’s homemade pumpernickel into the cow-parsley. “And it looks like cackers, Bridge. The constipated kind.”
    Mum mutters some German words I try to memorise. I don’t blame her. She’s had to suffer all kinds of disgusting English food. She didn’t heave after a basin of winkles. Or even after a dish of Grandma’s Gooseberry Surprise. And the surprise is, it’s inedible.
    “Nell, do you want a piece of my Herman-the-German cake or will it give you stomach-pain in the car?” Mum asks in her strained voice, not even trying to pronounce stomach properly.
    “What she means is,” Victor tells me, “will it make Grandma erupt like Vesuvius?”
    I smile, trying to be sisterly while Mum and Dad are not speaking.
    “There is also cold chicken schnitzel, Nell.”
    “Bridge, when will you get the hang of meat? Ooh, I could just sink my teeth into a bit of cold pork and soggy crackling.”
    “I still have much to learn about foreign food, Nell.”
    “We’re well aware of that, love. Hold the bus a minute, English food isn’t blooming well foreign. But honestly, it’s still like war rations at times with all those dried-up kugel buns of yours, whatever they are when they’re at home.”
    Mum searches through the tartan bag, utterly defeated. I nudge Grandma hard. I have to or she can’t feel it through the whalebone. She takes the hint.
    “If there’s a pilchard bap, Bridge, I’ll have it. No onions mind. They get me inflating and I’ve not got my good stays on. Can’t trust these Woolworth’s poppers.”
    “Only corned-beef, Ma,” Dad says, handing her a sandwich wrapped in a Sunblest wrapper.
    “Oh, that’ll do. At least I can see the meat in yours. Elsie gets a hundred and ten slices out of a tin and one of them’s the white fatty lagging on the end. I don’t know. Married to a master-butcher and the scrawny old bird’s as tight as a fish’s arse.”
    “Have a potato crisp, Nell.” Mum says, offering the bag.
    “Thanks, duck. You’ve not put on a bad spread, I suppose. Better at picnics than you are at the stove. Lawks, those chicken dumplings last night! The pawnshop could hang three of those up on an iron bracket. Good as any stonework.”
    This is a top-notch compliment—the bit about the picnic anyway.
    “She’s really creeping,” Victor whispers. “She’s trying to make Mum happy again.”
    “This is better than Elsie’s kidneys would have been,” Grandma says. “She won’t open her sherry when I’m there, you know. Doesn’t like Stan and me singing ‘Blue Moon’. Dry old do, it is. I’m glad I