Читать книгу Round the Bend онлайн

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"Do you spend it all?"

I shook my head. "I've got a good bit saved up." I hesitated. "I was saving up for furniture."

Ted was the only one of the family still living at home; he was just eighteen and due to go off for his military service pretty soon. He worked for a firm of contractors and Dad had had him taught to drive, so he was all set to be a truck driver. We had three bedrooms in that house; when I was a boy it had been Dad and Mum upstairs in one room and the girls in the other, and for us boys there was a room downstairs built out behind the scullery in the garden. It was a good big room, and it had need to be because four of us had slept together there when I was a boy, in two beds. Ted had got the girls' room upstairs, and Dad and Mum had titivated up the big old room for me, colourwashed it and all when they heard I was coming home; they'd gone to a lot of trouble over it, working at it over the week-end. I slept there that night, comforted a bit by memories of childhood, and although I stayed awake some time, I did sleep.