isn’t it? So, Jace. Looks like we’re doing the dishes again. Wash or dry?’
The whole of Great Britain’s like it’s Bonfire Night and Christmas Day and St George’s Day and the Queen’s Silver Jubilee all rolled into one. Mrs Thatcher appeared outside 10 Downing Street, saying, ‘Rejoice! Just rejoice!’ The photographers’ flashbulbs and the crowds went crazy; she wasn’t a politician at all, but all four members of Bucks Fizz at the Eurovision Song Contest. Everyone sang ‘Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves, Britons never never never shall be slaves’, over and over. (Has that song got any verses or is it just one never-ending chorus?) This summer isn’t green, this summer is the red, white and blue of the Union Jack. Bells’ve been rung, beacons lit, street parties’ve broken out up and down the country. Isaac Pye had an all-night happy hour at the Black Swan last night. In Argentina riots’re being reported in the major cities with lootings and shootings and some people’re saying it’s just a matter of time before the junta’s toppled. The Daily Mail’s full of how Great British guts and Great British leadership won the war. No prime minister’s ever been more popular than Premier Margaret Thatcher in the entire history of opinion polls.
I should be really happy.
Julia reads the Guardian, which has got all sorts of stuff not in the Daily Mail. Most of the 30,000 enemy soldiers, she says, were just conscripts and Indians. Their elite troops all raced back to Port Stanley as the British paratroopers advanced. Some of the ones they left behind got killed by bayonets. Having your intestines pulled out through a slit in the belly! What a 1914 way to die in 1982. Brian Hanrahan said he saw one prisoner being interviewed who said they didn’t even know what the Malvinas were or why they’d been brought there. Julia says the main reasons we won were (a) the Argentinians couldn’t buy any more Exocets, (b) their navy stayed holed up in mainland bases, (c) their air force ran out of trained pilots. Julia says it would’ve been cheaper to set every Falkland Islander up with their own farm in the Cotswolds than to’ve gone to war. She reckons nobody’ll pay to clean up the mess, so that much of the farmland on the islands’ll be off limits until the mines’ve rusted.
A hundred years, that might take.
Today’s big story in the Daily Mail’s about whether Cliff Richard the singer’s having sex with Sue Barker the tennis player, or whether they’re just good friends.
Tom Yew wrote a letter to his family the day before the Coventry was sunk. The letter made it back to Black Swan Green, just a few days ago. Dean Moran’s mum read it, ’cause she was Tom Yew’s godmother, and Kelly Moran got the details out of her. Our navy men thought the Falkland Islanders were a bunch of inbred bumblers (‘Honest,’ Tom wrote, ‘some of these guys are their own fathers’), like Benny the dimwit handyman from Crossroads on TV. They even started calling the islanders ‘Bennies’. (‘I’m not making this up – I met a Benny this morning who thought a silicon chip was a Sicilian crisp.’) Soon everyone in the lower ranks was saying ‘Benny’ this and ‘Benny’ that. When the officers found out, an order was issued to get the men to stop using this name. The men stopped. But a day or two later, Tom was hauled over by his lieutenant, who demanded to know why the crew were referring to the locals not as ‘Bennies’ but as ‘Stills’. ‘So I told the lieutenant “Because they’re still Bennies, Sir.”’
Dad was half wrong, half right about the landscape gardener doing a runner. When the company stopped answering their phone, Mum drove to Kidderminster but there was only a broken chair in an empty office. Wires stuck out of the walls. Two men loading a photocopier on to the truck told her the firm’d gone bankrupt. So the rockery rocks stayed on our driveway for two more weeks, until Mr Broadwas got back from his holiday in Ilfracombe. Mr Broadwas does some gardening work for my parents. Dad sort of elbowed Mum out of the rescue operation. At eight o’clock this morning (today’s Saturday) a lorry with a fork-lift truck pulled up outside our house. Out of the cab got Mr Broadwas, and his sons Gordon and Keith. Mr Broadwas’s son-in-law Doug drove the fork-lift truck. First, Dad and Doug took down