They say that bad luck comes along, like London buses, in threes but Billy didn’t go for that superstitious mumbo-jumbo. When he’d nearly set the kitchen on fire, it was an accident, not an omen or a sign of bad luck. Laura had gone to town to do some shopping and he’d been left to make his own lunch. Something simple, so he thought he’d boil a couple of eggs. He’d just put them in the pan and lit the stove when the phone rang. It was Titch. He was a real chatterbox and kept him talking. When Billy got back to the kitchen he found the place thick with smoke.The pan had boiled dry and the smoke had ruined the wallpaper and the ceiling tiles. The eggs were as hard as rocks but he hid them in the bin and made a peanut butter sandwich. No big deal. Could have happened to anyone. He switched on the fan but it didn’t deceive Laura.
‘I can’t leave you alone for a minute,’ she said. ‘The kitchen will need redecorating.’
‘It’s the first time it’s happened,’ he protested.
‘What about the time you were running a bath and went to answer the doorbell. That cost us a pretty penny to clean up the mess.’
Sometimes he wished she didn’t have such a good memory.
Laura never accused him directly though. She usually made
snide remarks like, ‘Somebody left the tap running in the bathroom’ or ‘Somebody left the fridge door open’ or ‘Somebody forgot to lock the garage door’. Since there were only two of them living in the house, the ‘somebody’ could only be one person. Billy!
When their ancient Morris Oxford broke down and required serious and expensive work on it to get it through its MOT, he thought that maybe there was something to the three-in-a-row luck theory after all. Although the car had given reliable and faithful service for many years, a major repair job was inevitable to keep it on the road. All the same, it was money they could ill afford and there was no alternative but to keep it on hold. They hoped there were no more big expenses around the corner.
Shortly after this, it was their wedding anniversary. They usually celebrated by going out for an a la carte dinner in a city restaurant but this time they thought they’d do something different. They booked a bus trip to Blackpool where they planned to walk along the famous Golden Mile and perhaps do a spot of shopping in the area around the Winter Gardens. The newspaper headlines that morning seemed pretty depressing, all about some Russian nuclear reactor at a place called Chernobyl being on fire. But then Russia seemed an awful long way off and not really their concern. Besides, they were so looking forward to their day at the seaside. They boarded the single-decker bus and were surprised to see that there seemed to be only two other passengers that day.
Blackpool held so many memories for them. For Billy it was a mixture of good and bad associations. There had been the wartime evacuation to Bispham where he had shared a billet with Titch and Oscar and where the landlady, Mrs Mossop, had helped herself to some of their rations to feed her own family; there had followed the move to the headmaster’s bungalow at Cleveleys where the food was better. Then later in life in the fifties, Billy and Laura had brought their young
family for a happy week’s holiday at the Squire’s Gate holiday camp.
‘I remember that week so well,’ Laura said when he reminded her. ‘On the first morning, the manager announced that we had to wear the camp badge at all times as proof that we were bona fide residents.’
‘And two-year-old Matthew lost his on the sands,’ Billy laughed, ‘and was sick with worry for the rest of the week, fearing he wouldn’t be allowed back into the camp. He wasn’t happy till we got him a new one from the camp office. All water under the bridge now,’ he sighed.
Their anniversary trip went like clockwork. It was a lovely day, the bus was on time, and within the hour they were dropped off outside the famous tower.
‘I shall collect you at this same spot at three thirty,’ the driver told them. ‘Please don’t be late and I shall have you back in Manchester by around five o’clock.’
Their day at the resort was most enjoyable. They did their shopping and in the market picked up many bargains, including of course the compulsory stick of Blackpool rock; they had lunch in Hill’s Restaurant where many years before Billy had once dined with his old father during the war. It had been 1941 and Billy found that thinking about it brought a whole lot of memories flooding back. It was amazing how a particular smell or piece of music could so evoke a scene and the associated emotions. In his head, he could still hear the voice of Deanna Durbin singing, ‘Waltzing, waltzing, high in the clouds’. He recalled that the purpose of the old man’s visit had been to bring a precious gift for the headmaster, Brother Dorian, namely two dozen eggs to be shared by the dozen evacuees living in the billet. After their lunch, there had followed a crazy vertiginous ride on the Big Dipper, his father still clutching the bag of eggs. The priceless cargo eventually reached the Brother’s hands intact but none of the evacuees got to see a single egg.
Their day in Blackpool was soon over and it was time for Billy and Laura to make their way to the rendezvous for the journey home. Anxious not to miss their bus, they were in the agreed place at three fifteen. It began to rain but they couldn’t complain because it had remained fine for most of the day. Three thirty came and went but there was no bus. Furthermore, there was no sign of the other two passengers who had come with them.
‘Perhaps they were Blackpool residents returning home on a single ticket,’ Billy said.
At three forty-five they became concerned; at four o’clock they began to worry. When four thirty came round with still no sign of their transport home, they reluctantly gave up. The bus wasn’t coming. There was nothing for it but to walk the two miles to the nearest bus station in Talbot Road where they found there wasn’t anything back to Manchester that day until 8 p.m. What to do with the time until then as it was still raining? Billy remembered there was an Odeon cinema on nearby Dickson Road and they decided to while away a couple of hours watching whatever film was playing there. Ten minutes of the movie was enough to fill them with horror. To say the theme was warped and bizarre was an understatement. The plot concerned a lover who was so obsessed with a girlfriend who had jilted him that he cut off her limbs one by one, leaving her as just a torso with a head. As they came away to catch their bus, Billy couldn’t help remarking, ‘That film was sick, sick, sick and so is the world that could think up such a plot. If there’s such a thing as reincarnation, I pray to God that He’ll send me to another planet next time around.’
Later they were not surprised to learn that critics had lambasted it as ‘the worst film ever made’. Nevertheless it was hardly the ideal way to end their anniversary celebration. It was the fourth piece of ill luck on the trot. Surely things had to change for the better soon.