Free Fruit and Nutcase by Jean Ure Page B

have a quiet life. During the day he is on guard in a bank, wearing a uniform and keeping an eye open for armed robbers. It is a great responsibility, guarding all that money, and I think Nan ought to let him rest when he comes in instead of keeping on at him the way she does.
    What she mostly keeps on about is
me.
At least, that’s what she kept on about while I wasthere. All about my manners and my language and how I hadn’t got any decent clothes and look at my hair, it was just a mess, and “How am I supposed to take her anywhere?”
    And Grandy just sat there and grunted, and puffed on his pipe, and you could tell he didn’t really want to be bothered. Or maybe he didn’t think I was quite as bad as Nan made out.
    I thought at first I would never survive. I worried all the time about Mum and Dad and how they were managing without me and whether Mum was still crying and whether Dad was flying off the handle. And then at the weekend they telephoned me. I spoke to Mum first. She was still a bit tearful but she also giggled quite a lot as well.
    She said, “Guess what? You’ll never guess! We’ve gone back to school! Me and your dad … we’re going to parenting lessons. Learning how to be good parents.”
    She said that Cat had called round, and when she’d heard what had happened she’d arranged for Mum and Dad to take these classes.
    “They’re ever so good,” said Mum. “I’m really learning how to do things properly.”
    And then Dad came on and said, “How aboutthat, then? Your mum and dad doing lessons! We’ll be different people, Mand, when you come home. You won’t recognise us! We’ll be model parents, we will.”
    I told this to Nan and she just sniffed and said, “That’ll be the day.” But then she added that any improvement had to be better than none.
    After that, I began to feel a little less despairing and to believe that perhaps Nan really might let me go back home sometime. I still said my prayer with the special bit added, but now I only said it twice a day, once when I woke up and once before I went to sleep. I thought that if Mum and Dad were learning how to be model parents, perhaps I ought to make a bit of an effort to be a model granddaughter so Nan wouldn’t be ashamed of me any more.
    So I tried. I really, really tried! But Nan wasn’t in the least bit grateful. Like, for instance, when we went shopping I said to her, “I’d better check your shopping list. Make sure you haven’t forgotten anything.” That’s all I said, just trying to look after her, like I do with Mum. She nearly jumped down my throat!
    She said, “What do you mean,
check my shopping list,
you bossy little madam? I’ll checkmy own shopping list, thank you very much! I don’t need your assistance. I haven’t gone senile yet, you know.”
    Then another time I caught her doing sardines on toast for Grandy’s tea. Sardines on toast! At the end of a hard day’s work, guarding the bank! I knew I had to warn her. I said, “You really ought to give him a proper man’s meal, Nan. They don’t like just having bits of stuff on toast.”
    Whew! If I hadn’t have had this really thick skin, her eyes would have bored through me like lasers. I’d have had all holes.

    She said, “Are you presuming to tell me how to feed my own husband?”
    She really didn’t like me trying to help her, so after that I thought I’d help Grandy, instead. But even he didn’t seem to appreciate it. Like one Saturday we went into town together and he was going to get some paint for doing the inside of the house and he actually bought
three different colours.
He got this goldy colour for the ceilings and green for the windows and white for making little lines round things. He said that Nan had chosen them.
    “She likes the place to look nice.”
    I was horrified. I said, “But Grandy, it’s ever so much more expensive using all those different colours! It’s really wasteful. You ought to stick to just one. It works out