Free A Twist in the Tale by Jeffrey Archer Page B

am only
interested in the real thing,” she told them haughtily.
    Neither Gerald
nor Walter cared for Angela’s opinion at the time, both boys still being more
interested in medals than the views of the opposite sex.
    Kellogg’s offer
of free medals ended on January 1st, 1950, just at the time when Gerald had
managed to complete the set.
    Walter gave up
eating cornflakes.
    Children of the
Fifties were then given the opportunity to discover the world of Meccano . Meccano demanded eating
even more cornflakes and within a year Gerald had collected a large enough set
to build bridges, pontoons, cranes and even an office block.
    Gerald’s family
nobly went on munching cornflakes, but when he told them he wanted to build a
whole town – Kellogg’s positively final offer – it took nearly all his friends
in the fifth form at Hull Grammar School to assist him in consuming enough
breakfast cereal to complete his ambition.
    Walter Ramsbottom refused to be of assistance.
    Angela
Bradbury’s help was never sought.
    All three
continued on their separate ways.
    Two years
later, when Gerald Haskins won a place at Durham University, no one was
surprised that he chose to read engineering and listed as his main hobby
collecting medals.
    Walter Ramsbottom joined his father in the family jewellery business and started court- ing Angela Bradbury.
    It was during
the spring holiday in Gerald’s second year at Durham that he came across Walter
and Angela again. They were sitting in the same row at a Bach quintet concert
in Hull Town Hall. Walter told him in the interval that they had just become
engaged but had not yet settled on a date for the wedding.
    Gerald hadn’t
seen Angela for over a year but this time he did listen to her opinions,
because like Walter he fell in love with her.
    He replaced
eating cornflakes with continually inviting Angela out to dinner in an effort
to win her away from his old rival.
    Gerald notched
up another victory when Angela returned her engagement ring to Walter a few drays before Christmas.
    Walter spread
it around that Gerald only wanted to marry Angela because her father was
chairman of the Hull City Amenities Committee and he was hoping to get a job
with the council after he’d taken his degree at Durham. When the invitations
for the wedding were sent out, Walter was not on the guest list.
    Mr and Mrs Haskins travelled to Multavia for their honeymoon, partly because they couldn’t
afford Nice and didn’t want to go to Cleethorpes . In
any case, the local travel agent was making a special offer for those
considering a visit to the tiny kingdom that was sandwiched between Austria and
Czechoslovakia.
    When the newly
married couple arrived at their hotel in Teske , the
capital, they discovered why the terms had been so reasonable.
    Multavia was, in 1959, going through an identity crisis as
it attempted to adjust to yet another treaty drawn up by a Dutch lawyer in
Geneva, written in French, but with the Russians and Americans in mind.
However, thanks to King Alfons III, their shrewd and
popular monarch, the kingdom continued to enjoy uninterrupted grants from the
West and non-disruptive visits from the East.
    The capital of Multavia , the Haskins were quickly to discover, had an
average temper- ature of 92 F in June, no rainfall and
the remains of a sewerage system that had been in-discriminately bombed by both
sides between 1939 and 1944. Angela actually found herself holding her nose as
she walked through the cobbled streets. The People’s Hotel claimed to have
forty-five rooms, but what the brochure did not point out was that only three
of them had bathrooms and none of those had bath plugs. Then there was the
food, or lack of it; for the first time in his life Gerald lost weight.
    The honeymoon couple were also to discover that Multavia boasted no monuments, art galleries, theatres or opera houses worthy of the
name and the outlying country was flatter and less interesting than the fens of
Cam-