CONTENTS

      Publisher’s Note

       Title Page

       Chapter One

       Chapter Two

       Chapter Three

       Chapter Four

       Chapter Five

       Chapter Six

       Chapter Seven

       Chapter Eight

       Also Available in the Confessions Series

       About the Author

       Also by Timothy Lea

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       CHAPTER ONE

      Forty-eight hours I am stuck inside Enid, give or take a few – and by the end of the experience I would rather give than take, I don’t mind telling you. Of course, I am referring to Enid, my lorry, and the length of time I spend in a snow drift on the Pennines, not to anything more unwholesome. Not that there is a lot more unwholesome than spending forty-eight hours on a load of uncured sheepskins. Of course, I do have Shirl – I have to laugh when I write that – have her? We practically write a new sex manual together. What a woman! Once she gets to like you she is no slouch in finding ways of demonstrating the fact. One thing about those sheepskins, they are warm – I mean, the sheep wouldn’t wear them if they weren’t, would they? – and snuggled up together in the middle of them it is easy for the natural curtain of modesty that separates two young people to be drawn aside to reveal the elementary life force that surges like a mighty torrent beyond the cottage window. Sorry about that but when you’re stuck in a snowdrift with a randy bird, a Worcester Pearmain and a bar of fruit and nut, your mind does tend to go off into the poetical. I mean, as an experience it can have its longueurs. Don’t get me wrong. As regular readers will know, I am not averse to a spot of in and out. The trouble is that after forty-eight hours I am all-in and ready for the out.

      It would have been even worse if the bloke from the sports car had not joined us. At first I think it is one of the Long Horns that has been sheltering against the back of the lorry – as it turns out, I am not so far wrong. I don’t want to go into details because I find it too humiliating but he and Shirl strike up an instant understanding. I don’t mind too much because I am able to get stuck into his barley sugar. Without that, I think I might be in a worse way than I am. By the time they get us out I am noshing the caster sugar at the bottom of the tin.

      No doubt you recall the build-up to these incidents? I describe it in an account of my experiences as a lorry driver entitled, perhaps not altogether surprisingly, Confessions of a Long Distance Lorry Driver. Readers of that tome will recall that Lady Luck has not risked a hernia through bearing me large slices of good fortune of late. The load of glasses I was carrying north went west and there is a strong likelihood of extreme unpleasantness with brother-in-law and partner, Sidney Noggett, when I eventually limp back to the Smoke.

      When the snow plough gets to us, Shirl decides to travel with the bloke in the sports car. Simon Masterton is what I think his name is. He plays no further part in the story but I thought you might like to say goodbye to him. Shirl clearly reckons that they have something very big going for them and I think I have already alluded to what that might be. As far as I am concerned, Shirl turns off faster than the time switch on a Scotsman’s central heating system and once again I am shocked by the changeability of women. They are like the weather. You never know what they are going to do next. I thought I was the best thing that had ever happened to her until Simon Jumbo-Parts shoved his long conk over the tailboard.

      I have more bother when I get to Hull where I am supposed to be delivering the skins. At first they refuse to take them. I am not a little narked because I have spent a lot of time fluffing them out. It is a bit insulting, isn’t it? I mean, they are not supposed to be cured and they niffed more than a bit when I took charge of them. Maybe I ought to change the Cologne I use. It makes a mockery of one’s programme of personal freshness. Frankly, I can’t see what the bloke is getting so worked up about. The sheep have it away in them, don’t they? I would like to point this out but I can’t give too much away about those two torrid – and rather horrid – nights without weakening my position.

      In the end I threaten to shove them through the office letterbox one by one and the bloke throws in the sponge. Once I have used it to his satisfaction, he agrees to accept the skins.

      As I drive back to London, a fresh worry invades my already over-occupied mind: the effect that my unexpected absence will have had on Mum and Dad. We say a few harsh words to each other but basically we are very close. I expect that Mum will be nearly distraught with worry and that Dad will be having to struggle to keep a grip on his emotions. I had better postpone my showdown with Sid and get straight round to 17 Scraggs Lane, the ancestral home of the Leas in the burrow of Clapham – that’s what we call our street now because of all the high-rise flats around it. You feel as it you are underground. I park the lorry beyond the line of abandoned cars that starts outside our front door – actually, a lot of them aren’t abandoned. Sid has borrowed them to come and see us and nobody has found them yet. Sid does have the Rover but it is always in the garage having the dents taken out of it – I keep telling him that he shouldn’t drive at the traffic wardens like that.

      I hope that Mum does not burst into tears or anything. Of course, it would be quite understandable if she did. Her only son snatched back from the living hell of the north; the new ice age denied another victim, and all that – but I still hope she does not do it. It might start Dad off. He is not as reserved as people think. I remember him crying when Nobby Stiles took out his false teeth after the 1966 World Cup – I mean, of course, when Nobby Stiles took out his own false teeth. He never had a go at Dad’s – though I wouldn’t have put it past him if Dad had looked like scoring. Then again, when Bambi’s mother copped it in the film of the same name. You couldn’t blame him for that. I don’t reckon anyone could sit through that and not start feeling for something to blow his nose on – that is what I told Carol Farmer at the time, anyway, though she still had me thrown out of the cinema. She was a funny girl. Her right hand never knew what her left hand was doing and always seemed surprised to find out.

      I press the front door bell and listen to the silence. Dad brought home a Multi-Vibe Temple Chime from the lost property office where he goes to sleep during the day but he has clearly not got around to fixing it up yet. Wait a minute! I tell a lie. There, nailed to one of the peeling door jambs is the aforementioned M-V TC looking like a rusty xylophone. Beside it hangs a mallet. I can imagine the whole thing appealing to Dad’s sense of refinement and grandeur. Although a convicted socialist