Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

A game of dominoes turns ugly

The mood was lightened by a reference to shrinking testicles

Things could be about to turn ugly... Photo: ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images 
issue 20 September 2014

I’m round at Amy and Bill’s for Sunday afternoon tea. Amy and Bill are my in-laws, kind of. When I was courting their daughter, I used to spend most of my spare time sitting around Amy and Bill’s kitchen table. She was 15 when I started going round there, I was 26, and I suppose if I were an old TV entertainer or disc jockey, I should be tidying up my affairs before officers from Operation Yewtree beat a lively tattoo on my front door. But Amy and Bill welcomed me in to their family from the start. If they had an objection to my courting their daughter, it was to my social class rather than her age. I can remember Bill grumbling that he would have preferred that his daughter went out with someone of her own class, which I suppose is rural working class.

Amy and Bill used to live in a tied cottage that smelt sweetly of the cow manure Bill brought home on his overalls every day.

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