Birthday. Alan Sillitoe

      

      Birthday

      Alan Sillitoe

       Copyright

      Flamingo

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      Published by Flamingo 2002

      First published in Great Britain by Flamingo, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 2001

      Alan Sillitoe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

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      Source ISBN: 9780007108831

      Ebook Edition © MAY 2010 ISBN: 9780007387250

      Version: 2014–09–15

       Dedication

      IN MEMORIAM

       June Sillitoe

      Table of Contents

       Cover Page

       Title Page

       Dedication

Part One

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

       FIVE

       SIX

       SEVEN

       EIGHT

       NINE

       TEN

       Part Two

       ELEVEN

       TWELVE

       THIRTEEN

       Part Three

       FOURTEEN

       FIFTEEN

       SIXTEEN

       SEVENTEEN

       Keep Reading

       About the Author

       Praise for Birthday:

       By the Same Author

Copyright

       About the Publisher

Part One

       ONE

      Arthur dropped gear going downhill.‘Trams clanked through here once upon a time. Then you got tracklesses. Now there’s ordinary buses. But it pays to have your own car. Saves hanging around.’

      Brian’s bedtime reading, set in the smokey-hot olive groves of Greece, was a potent antidote to the sight of his home town. ‘I like driving from London in a couple of hours, to call on the family whenever the mood takes me.’

      ‘We’re always glad to see you,’ Arthur said. Trains at one time grumbled up and down the double line through Basford Crossing, from the main station in town to populous colliery places such as Bulwell and Kirkby and Sutton-in-Ashfield,not to mention Newstead, which Brian had noted long before he knew of the Abbey and Byron.

      ‘Coal smoke used to reek as if it would cure the flu,’ Arthur told Avril, out for the first time since her bout of chemotherapy. ‘Even when it makes you cough enough to think you’d got TB it was a tonic for us.’

      ‘I’ll bet it was,’ she said wryly.

      Shops selling food and cheap clothes, ironmongery and paraffin, had been packed around the crossroads. A public library gave shelter to a few down and outs in winter while they read the papers, and those with nowhere to lay their heads at night could trudge to a workhouse not too far up the road. A park for sitting in on sunny days had a pond at the