Enquiry - By Dick Francis Page 0,35

letters for me in the mailbox on my front door, including one from my parents. I unfolded it walking up the stairs, feeling as usual a million miles away from them on every level.

My mother had written the first half in her round regular handwriting on one side of a large piece of lined paper. As usual there wasn’t a full stop to be seen. She punctuated entirely with commas.

Dear Kelly,

Thanks for your note, we got it yesterday, we don’t like reading about you in the papers, I know you said you hadn’t done it son but no smoke without fire is what Mrs Jones the post office says, and it is not nice for us what people are saying about you round here, all airs and graces they say you are and pride goes before a fall and all that, well the pullets have started laying at last, we are painting your old room for Auntie Myfanwy who is coming to live here her arthritis is too bad for those stairs she has, well Kelly, I wish I could say we want you to come home but your Da is that angry and now Auntie Myfanwy needs the room anyway, well son, we never wanted you to go for a jockey, there was that nice job at the Townhall in Tenby you could have had, I don’t like to say it but you have disgraced us son, there’s horrid it is going into the village now, everyone whispering, your loving Mother.

I took a deep breath and turned the page over to receive the blast from my father. His writing was much like my mother’s as they had learned from the same teacher, but he had pressed so hard with his ballpoint that he had almost dug through the paper.

‘Kelly,

You’re a damned disgrace boy. It’s soft saying you didn’t do it. They wouldn’t of warned you off if you didn’t do it. Not lords and such. They know what’s right. You’re lucky you’re not here I would give you a proper belting. After all that scrimping your Ma did to let you go off to the University. And people said you would get too ladidah to speak to us, they were right. Still, this is worse, being a cheat. Don’t you come back here, your Ma’s that upset, what with that cat Mrs Jones saying things. It would be best to say don’t send us any more money into the bank. I asked the manager but he said only you can cancel a banker’s order so you’d better do it. Your Ma says it’s as bad as you being in prison, the disgrace and all.’

He hadn’t signed it. He wouldn’t know how to, we had so little affection for each other. He had despised me from childhood for liking school, and had mocked me unmercifully all the way to college. He showed his jolly side only to my two older brothers, who had had what he considered a healthy contempt for education: one of them had gone into the Merchant Navy and the other lived next door and worked alongside my father for the farmer who owned the cottages.

When in the end I had turned my back on all the years of learning and taken to racing my family had again all disapproved of me, though I guessed they would have been pleased enough if I’d chosen it all along. I’d wasted the country’s money, my father said; I wouldn’t have been given all those grants if they’d known that as soon as I was out I’d go racing. That was probably true. It was also true that since I’d been racing I’d paid enough in taxes to send several other farm boys through college on grants.

I put my parents’ letter under Rosalind’s photograph. Even she had been unable to reach their approval, because they thought I should have married a nice girl from my own sort of background, not the student daughter of a colonel.

They had rigid minds. It was doubtful now if they would ever be pleased with me, whatever I did. And if I got my licence back, as like as not they would think I had somehow cheated again.

You couldn’t take aspirins for that sort of pain. It stayed there, sticking in knives. Trying to escape it I went into the kitchen, to see if there was anything to eat. A tin of sardines, one egg, the dried up remains of some port salut.

Wrinkling my nose