“What does it mean, Dad?” asked Frank. “Why is she sorry?”
“Because she has left.”
“She’s not coming back?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Your mum has gone to live in a big house with a small man.”
“But…!”
“I’m sorry, Frank. I tried my best for her. But my best wasn’t good enough.”
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
“I need a huggle.”
“Me too.”
Father and son held on to each other tight, and they cried and cried until they could cry no more.
To his credit, Dad never said anything bad about his wife – or by this time ex-wife – but Frank felt deeply hurt that his mother had left without even saying goodbye.
Even though she now lived in a huge house, Mum never invited her son to stay. Not once. When she forgot her son’s birthday for the second year in a row, Frank was in no hurry to see his mother again. Weeks and months passed without any contact, and then it became unthinkable to call her. So he never did. Frank never stopped thinking about her, however. It was confusing because, as much as she’d hurt him, Frank still loved her.
Dad lost so much after the crash. Not just his leg, but his wife too. Soon he was about to lose something else dear to him.
His job.
Gilbert loved being a banger-racing driver. It was all he’d dreamed of from when he was a boy. Despite his pleas, the track owners banned him from racing ever again. They blamed him for the accident, and never wanted to see him back on the track. What’s more, they told him it wasn’t safe for him to race cars with only one leg.
So Dad tried and tried to get a different job, any job. But jobs in the town were scarce, and a man with a wooden leg always found himself at the bottom of the pile.
Dad was used to being a hero, but now he felt like a zero.
Two cold Christmases came and went.
As time passed, Frank became increasingly worried about his father. Sometimes he would find the man sitting alone in an armchair, staring into space. Often Dad wouldn’t leave the flat they lived in for days.
No one beeped their horns any more when they walked down the street, and now they couldn’t afford to go to the pie and mash shop, let alone be given double helpings.
On Frank’s eleventh birthday, Dad bought his son a huge race-car set. The boy loved it.
It was the best toy ever. Dad even painted one of the miniature Minis with a Union Jack so it looked just like Queenie. Together they would play with it late into the night, re-enacting Dad’s famous victories on the track.
However, as much as he loved it, Frank worried where his father, who’d been unemployed now for a couple of years, had got the money from to buy it. Frank knew that very few children had toys like these. Race-car sets cost hundreds of pounds. And Dad didn’t have hundreds of pounds.
Soon after Frank’s birthday, groups of hard-faced men started banging on the door of the flat.
THUD! THUD! THUD!
They would wave pieces of paper and bark about “unpaid debts”. Then they would push past Frank and force their way in. Once inside, the men would pick up anything they thought might be worth something, and march out with it. First it was the TV, then it was the sofa, then it was the boy’s bunk bed.
One time Frank wouldn’t answer the door and they simply smashed it off its hinges. That day they took the toy race-car track.
After these visits, Dad would become full of sorrow. A look of despair would cross his face, and he would sit in silence. Frank would do his best to cheer up his sad dad.
“Don’t be down, Dad,” the boy would say. “I will get all our stuff back one day. I promise. When I’m grown up, I will become a racing driver just like you.”
“Come here, son, and give us a huggle.”
The pair would embrace, and everything would feel all right again. They may have been poor, but Frank never felt poor in his heart. The boy didn’t mind that his jumpers had so many holes in them they were more hole than jumper. He never cared that he had to carry his books to school in a plastic bag that always broke. Soon it became normal that they had just one working light bulb in the flat and they had to move it from room to room at night.
That is because the boy had the best dad in the world. Or so he thought.
