The Squashed Man Who Married a Dragon Read Online Free Page A

what superhuman efforts were required, when on occasions she would comment on being left alone without me. As then I hadn’t worked out how to be in two places at once. Weekends we worked together on our newly acquired property and Angela slept in an old wooden drawer, out of harm’s way. We achieved many and mighty works, until our first home was ready for occupation.
    From the outside there was a very small, trim, front garden raised up from the road, complete with a new rustic porch and climbing rose. It was almost chocolate box good! We got the bright idea of getting a sandblaster in to clean up the stone work, not the nice old weathered outside, but inside the house.
    Here we had knocked off all the old dodgy plaster on one wall, from floor to upstairs ceiling. After sandblasting it took three weeks to very carefully point up between the hundreds of irregular shaped stones.
    Then our good friend Rob made a natural wood, open tread staircase. This went against the now lounge stone wall which continued up in stonework to the ceiling in the bedroom above. This looked very effective, and at night the carefully positioned spotlights made this wall and stairs into something of a really special feature.
    Tom Davies, a neighbour and benevolent friend, who lived near the flat, was a contracts manager for a large local construction firm, and when a dance hall was being demolished he arranged, and delivered as a present, a load of sprung maple floor boarding. This was very much needed and appreciated because, although the cottage had floor joists, it had no upstairs floor boards at all.
    Another friend, Brandon, a playmate and next door neighbour from early childhood, lent his strong back to the cause by squatting in the open fireplace, with a very large slab of sandstone on his shoulders, whilst I fiddled around with the side stones. Together we created a very simple but attractive feature fireplace.
    Although I shouldn’t say it the place came together very well, our hard work and ideas were well rewarded and next door to a pub too!
    The boy was coming good and only forty seven more years to go……my pin-up girl had struck gold.

THE OPEN ROAD
    There are times, few and far between, when I do like to feel superior to Victoria, and being seven years older gives me the opportunity to be generous and with a wonderful sense of helping my star girl to become as wise, and for a short while, on the same level as myself. Then I step back in a self-sacrificing way.
    So it was with driving, we spent many happy moments with a long handle brush, sitting side by side in the kitchen practising gear changing, and synchronising feet and hand movements, later in an old Ford van then onto real driving.
    Two or three lessons only, with a lucky driving instructor, possibly a Masonic friend of her father, a smile or two at the test man and there she was, passed first time and ready for the road.
    Vicki never became a Rotary type driver, the polite, ‘after you’ approach was dumped for the formula one ‘out of my way’ spirit, no gap was considered too narrow for her car to fit through, and no parking space was ever too small. All in all she is a really competent rally type driver, a typical Taurean.

LAST OF THE LOVEY DOVEY
    BIGTIME
    At this stage in life, I had just cracked £1,000 a year barrier, and with a firms car too. It was amazing what you could do on twenty pounds a week.
    We had married on a humble fourteen pounds a week, five pounds went in housekeeping – rather handsome I thought and I tried to keep it to five pounds for as many years as possible. I do remember going to Blackpool with my brother Martin to look at the newly opened TVR works (he being single bought himself a TVR Vixen in kit form) but I spotted an unfinished fibreglass speedboat hull tucked away in a corner of the factory. Twelve pounds and it was mine. Englishmen have sailing in their blood; even those of us who live nowhere near