No! I Don’t Need Reading Glasses! Read Online Free Page B

room and the corridors saying, in a loud voice, ‘I think there’san elephant here! Oh look, there’s some elephant poo on the floor, how disgusting … there
must
be an elephant here … but a very pongy elephant …’ and there’d be a burst of giggling from the cupboard – ‘but I can’t
hear
an elephant, so perhaps it isn’t here …’
    At this point Gene makes a trumpeting noise from the cupboard and I say ‘Good heavens, could that be an elephant!’ and I look everywhere, and I look behind the sofa and say ‘No elephants here!’ and then behind the chair and say ‘No elephants here!’ and Gene still trumpets from the cupboard and finally, exasperated, he whispers loudly, ‘Granny! Look in the cupboard!’ and I say, ‘Funny, I’ve never heard an elephant call me granny before, I’ll go and look …’ and open the door and he bursts out and we laugh and then he says, ‘Let’s do it again. You be the elephant this time …’ and I’m stuck in the cupboard making elephant noises.
    Oh dear, oh dear. I’m crying again. All over my keyboard.
Later
    Ohdearthetearsseemtohavedonensomethingtomykeyboard andthespacebarwon’twork.Iwilltrytodryitoutwithmyhairdryer.
15 January
    MY BIRTHDAY!
    Even though I’m now sixty-five, I still feel the same kind of childish excitement about my birthday that I used to have when I was three. I can almost hear my voice going back into those flirtatiously lisping tones of a little girl. It would be more appropriate, perhaps, to say: ‘It’th my birfday!’
    Penny shudders whenever her birthday comes round, and says she can’t bear getting older, but I still adore my birthday. I remember my great friend Hughie saying, before he died, when he was discussing how he wasn’t frightened of death: ‘So many of my good friends have gone down the plughole I really don’t mind following them down the same plughole.’ And nor do I. Young people wring their hands at the thought of death, and rightly, because they just can’t imagine it and therefore dread it. What they don’t realise is that as you get older it gets less and less frightening until finally, if the really old people I know are to be trusted, they often say things quite cheerfully like, ‘Well, I’ve had a good life! If I don’t wake up tomorrow it won’t be the end of the world!’
    The science master at the school where I used to teach has just emailed me, which was very decent of him (makes up for the disgusting brew he rustled up at the retirement party), an old school friend remembered as well, and I got another card from Angie, Bella, Perry, Jim and Squeaks, saying, ‘Have a good one! Come soon! Xxxxx’
    Hunted in the bin for the envelope and found the postmark too blurred to read. So again: ????
    After the postman had been, I counted and I’d got twelve cards. Penny sent me one with a picture of a birthday cake on it covered with candles which read: ‘The more candles on my cake, the hotter I am!’ But my favourite was of a rabbit lying on its back, surrounded by little bunnies scampering all over her. ‘Too old to carry on, too young to stop’, it read. I got a card from Gene, too. He’d done a picture of a rocket going into space, with a small circle with an arrow at the bottom and writing which read ‘WERLD’. And I got a telephone call from him saying ‘Happy birthday, Granny, I love you! Have you got my card? We made you some peppermint creams and I’ve saved one for you.’
    Jack took the phone from him and asked if I was okay and I lied through my teeth and said I was absolutely fine. (I realise now that though mothering appears to stop when children leave home, what one’s actually required to do, for the rest of one’s life, is to reassure one’s grown-up children that one is