How I Killed Margaret Thatcher Read Online Free

of the class and his work got put on the wall, a mess of felt pen and my family’s ambitions.

‘ ‌ And I would just like to remember some words of Saint Francis of Assisi which I think are really just particularly apt at the moment. Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.’
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    Where there is discord, she said, on the glowing television set while everyone ate their fish and chips. Where there is doubt. There was a picture of Saint Francis up above the telly, next to the family photos. My nan ended up taking the picture down out of shame, so Saint Francis didn’t have to look. You could see the outline of the frame for years afterwards. Where there is despair.
    We used to visit Saint Francis’s Church on the other side of the town to see the stained-glass windows of Duncan Edwards. There’s a window with him in his England shirt and another in his Man United one. I took my own boy, Joshua, to show him. I remember how proud we were that the world’s best footballer had come from Dudley, like it said something important about all of us. I liked the way the sun came through the windows and the gentle red light that the United shirt cast on the floor. Though there are many numbers , the window said, yet there is one body . We knew that it meant you had to stick together. We used to tell each other how, even though he had such terrible injuries, he’d lived for fifteen days after the crash and that the doctors had never seen anyone as strong and brave. That was what you had to be like if you were from Dudley. I remember thinking that if I had died and gone to heaven, I’d have got to play football with him, probably. My ambition then was to get the older boys to let me play in the game on the big playground at school.
    I thought Saint Francis was from Dudley too, for a time, because it was my dad’s name maybe, or because of these visits to the church. I thought that Assisi was another area like, say, the Wren’s Nest or Sledmere or Kates Hill. I used to imagine him talking to Jennie Lee, the budgie; or to Caesar the Alsatian that padded up and down behind the gate at the Ash Tree and used to wait for me and Ronnie to come and run sticks along the railings to send him into a child-eating frenzy; or to the giraffes at the zoo. It was a while later, when I chose to do a school project on Saint Francis, to the delight of my nan and Sister Marie Antoinette, that I found out that Assisi was in Italy. We had to do all the work in a scrapbook, with pictures and cut-outs and different writing exercises. I kept my projects for years afterwards: The Life of Saint Francis, Dudley Zoo, Fossils of Dudley, A History of the Ashes Series, The Gunpowder Plot. Most of the other kids used to pick cars or horses, that kind of thing, so usually I’d win a prize, although one year Paul and Jermaine did a complete cartoon strip of that match that finished Man United 3 –West Brom 5 , so they won.
    I remember reading their comic open-mouthed it was so good, almost as good as Johnny’s paintings, like I was turning the pages of a holy book. I can see one page even now, with GOAL! written in thick black lettering and Laurie Cunningham bursting from the letter O like he would run off the page and across your lap, Man United defenders lying at his feet.
    I wonder what happens to these relics; imagine civilizations piecing together shards of the stained-glass windows and scraps of Jermaine’s illustrated manuscript ages in the future. One of Jermaine’s sons used to come into the pub for a while. I told him his dad was a good artist once and he just laughed and said, Piss artist. Jermaine moved to Birmingham and I stopped speaking to Paul Hill after he put me in hospital. But all this came years later. Me and Little Ronnie tried to do a comic strip of