Read The Generation Game Online
Authors: Sophie Duffy
The Generation Game
The Generation Game
is inspired by Sophie’s childhood growing up in a sweet shop in Torquay. Sophie is the winner of the 2010 Luke Bitmead
Bursary and the Yeovil Literary Prize. She currently lives in Teignmouth, Devon with her husband and three children.
Legend Press Ltd, 2 London Wall Buildings,
London EC2M 5UU
[email protected]
www.legendpress.co.uk
Contents © Sophie Duffy 2011
The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.
ISBN 978-1-9082480-1-5
eISBN 978-1-9082483-2-9
1
All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely
coincidental.
Edited by: Lauren Parsons-Wolff
Set in Times
Printed by CPI Books, United Kingdom
Cover designed by Gudrun Jobst
www.yotedesign.com
Author photo © Fiona Riches
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to
criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Please forgive any dramatic license in the representation of the show,
The Generation Game
, which I appreciate is a national institution. I would like to offer my genuine
thanks to Bruce Forsyth, Anthea Redfern, Isla St Clair and the late Larry Grayson for having a special place in my childhood. This novel, among other things, is a salute to their services to
showbiz. I hope that by the time of publication Brucie will have his knighthood [And as the book went to print, he did].
Thanks are due to the following people for their support, feedback, encouragement:
To Elaine Hanson and Tiffany Orton, Luke Bitmead’s mother and sister, for their belief in me and my writing. To Legend Press for their enthusiasm and hard work. To Debbie Watkins and Liz
Tait, who’ve been there from the start, and to Katie Glover for her later appearance. To the original Wink who introduced me to
The Generation Game
.
To my teachers, Jean Whatling, David Milnes, Jan Henley and Graham Mort. To Lancaster University MA cohort 2002-2004, in particular to Carol Anderson and Ren Powell. To Exeter Writers. To my
literary godmother, Margaret James. To Louise Rattenbury for that early read. To Margaret Graham and the Yeovil Literary Prize. To Ruth Kirkpatrick for that trip to Bulgaria for research that had
nothing to do with this book. To my house groups past and present. To Teignmouth Library Bookseekers.
To my mum for her love, support and vacuuming. To my children, Johnny, Eddy and Izzy, for putting up with a distracted mother and her lack of vacuuming. To Niall for being with me all the
way.
To my two dads:
Stephen Nigel Stenner 1933-1978
and
Ralph Albert Parry Pritchard 1924-2007
Life is the name of the game
Bruce Forsyth
Chapter One: 1965 — Family Fortunes
Chapter Two: 1969 — Dragon’s Den
Chapter Three: 1969 — New Faces
Chapter Four: 1971 — This is Your Life
Chapter Five: 1971 — Shooting Stars
Chapter Six: 1972 — Saturday Night Takeaway
Chapter Seven: 1972 — The Apprentice
Chapter Eight: 1975 — Come Dancing
Chapter Nine: 1977 — Summertime Special
Chapter Ten: 1978 — Gladiators
Chapter Eleven: 1980 — Blind Date
Chapter Twelve: 1981 — Bullseye
Chapter Thirteen: 1982 — Have I Got News For You
Chapter Fourteen: 1984 — University Challenge
Chapter Fifteen: 1987 — Jeopardy!
Chapter Sixteen: 1992 — You’ve Been Framed
Chapter Seventeen: 1997 — I’m a Celebrity – Get me out of here
Chapter Eighteen: 1999 — It’s a Knockout
Chapter Nineteen: 2005 — Runaround
Chapter Twenty: 2006 — I Love Lucy
Chapter Twenty One: 2006 — Bob’s Full House
Oh dear. How did that happen?
Last time I looked, I only had myself to worry about. Now I’ve got you. Another person. Yesterday you were hidden away, tucked up inside me, completely oblivious to what lay ahead. Now
here you are, floppy and exhausted, the biggest, scariest journey of your life over and done with. All screamed-out and sleeping the way babies are supposed to on a good day.
So what now? Where do we go from here, you and I? Backwards, I suppose. To the beginning. While you are quiet and still and here in my arms. Before they chuck us out and send us home.
Home.
But where to start? Where is the beginning exactly?
Long before the bags I packed full of nappies and cream and teeny-weeny babygros. Before the hairy ride in the taxi over the speed bumps of East Dulwich banging my head on the roof while the
Irish cabbie recited his Hail Marys. The tracks I played on my iPod, full blast to drown out the noise I couldn’t help making. The Best of The Monkees. Hearing those voices and tambourines
took me back to a time when I had a best friend in all the world who I thought I was going to marry. Who I thought would be there forever. Who taught me that everything changes. (A Monkees
compilation was as far as your father got involved in your birth. That and the quick leg-over that was lost somewhere amongst the ravages of my fortieth birthday.)
Long before then. Right back at the beginning, my beginning, way back when I was held for the first time in my mother’s arms.
Were my fingers ever that small? My toenails? Was my skin ever that smooth and wrinkled at the same time? My hair that fluffy? My grip that tight? My nose that squashed?
Did my mother hold me and wonder these very same things?
I can’t answer these questions.
And try as I might, I can’t tell you everything that went before. Everyone I could’ve gone to for help, for answers, has gone, is lost – in one way or another. But I’ll
tell you what I can. I’ll tell you about the people who loved me. Who brought me up somehow, against all odds.
I’ll tell you about Lucas, the boy I was going to marry.
I’ll tell you about your father (though I’d rather not).
And I’ll tell you about a little fat girl called Philippa.
I’ll tell you my story. Our story. Because there’s nothing worse than wondering. Knowing is always better.
Family Fortunes
On the 29th day of July, 1965 I arrive in the world – a brightly-lit poky delivery room high up in St Thomas’ Hospital – amid a flurry of noise. The doctor is
shouting at the midwife, the midwife is shouting at my mother and my mother is shouting so loudly, her screams can probably be heard across the Thames by the honourable gentlemen in the Palace of
Westminster, possibly even by the Prime Minister himself, if they weren’t on their holidays. In fact, my mother is so busy screaming, she doesn’t seem to have noticed that I am already
here. But I am. I have arrived in style, waving a banner, heralding my birth. I am happy to be here even if she isn’t so sure. I’d put up some bunting and have jelly and ice cream if I
could.
(It is years later before I find out the truth: that I am in actual fact yanked out of my mother with a sucker clamped to my head, her (ineffective) coil clenched in my tiny fist. I am lucky to
be here at all.)
I spend the first week being manhandled by stout nurses in starchy uniforms. They poke me and prod me and tip me upside down for no apparent reason. They bring me to my mother every four hours
(‘Baby’s feed, Mrs Smith! Left side first!’) and whisk me away again to be comprehensively winded and gripe-watered before I’ve even had the chance to take a good look at
her or to have loving words whispered in my newborn ears. Instead I have to lie on my tummy in a little tank in a large room. I am one of many. The others cry a lot. I give up and join in.
When I am seven days old, I am brought to my mother’s bed. It is empty. She is sitting in a chair next to it, reading a magazine. She looks quite different fully clothed. She has long legs
and red lips and green eyes and smells of something other than the usual milk. The nurse hands me over hesitantly, as if I might explode in the wrong hands. But these are the right hands. My
mother’s hands.
‘Time to go,’ she whispers to me after the young nurse has gone. ‘You’ve been here long enough.’And she embarks on her plan to smuggle the pair of us out of St
Thomas’, swaddling me in a yellow blanket despite the sweltering August heat (‘Always keep Baby warm, Mrs Smith!’). Not an easy operation as the sergeant major of a sister is of
the belief that new mothers are incapable of doing anything more strenuous than painting their fingernails.
But my mother, I am already discovering, is a skilful liar. She convinces a stranger in a pinstripe suit – lost on his way to visit an elderly aunt – that his time would be better
spent posing as her husband and my father (the first in a number of such attempts). He is only too happy to oblige and, at a carefully chosen moment when Sister is making tea, the young nurse
relinquishes Mother and I into his control. We follow meekly behind him, down squeaky corridors and ancient lifts until at last we are out through the front doors and into my first gulp of fresh
air (well, semi-fresh, this is London after all).
