This is the first part of mystery. ( around 700 words)
Billy Nobody who was born into poverty in the 1950s to 1960s in Manchester UK. The protagonist ( Billy) Is determined to leave poverty behind for him and his family. No matter what it takes to achieve his goal.
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Thank you Alan
Billy always knew he would have to sleep four-in-a-bed when he was old enough to understand how poor his family was. He was never sure from one night to another which or whose bed he would be sleeping in, but it didn’t seem to make any difference because the mattress and bedding were always wet from his brothers and sisters pissing the bed every night.
He grew up as the fourth child in a family of thirteen. The eldest was Maureen, but she was not his father’s daughter; she never lived with them. Next in order of age came David, Arthur, myself, Linda, Michael, Susan, Patricia, Carol and Beverley. They also had another sister Karen who they never saw as she was put up for adoption a few days after her birth. Billy was the only one with a second name -‘NOBODY’ - and he had no idea why. The family joked that their parents must have planned to have another son after Michael, but they didn’t, so they used the ‘leftover’ name for Billy. The family were well known in the area but not in a good way. They were the ‘Whittaker tribe’ and poor with it. Everyone knew, and not everybody liked it. They lived in a three-bedroomed council house in Baguley, Wythenshawe, South Manchester, built as a ‘garden city’ in the 1920s to house inner city Mancunians away from the dirt and grime of Manchester.
It sounds good, but it wasn’t really for a family as big as Billy’s. They were squashed in, four and five to a bed: not a happy experience if the bed was wetted. When it was time to go upstairs to bed, the kids would grab coats from the downstairs bannister as these were their ‘blankets’ for the night. Furious fights would break out for the limited supply. The bedsprings would creak, and the flocks and feathers used to fill cheap mattresses would fly as the siblings launched and hurled themselves at each other furiously.
Billy’s father worked in a steel mill for twelve hours a day. He couldn’t have had much of a life - the same thing day in, day out. He was a well-built man, strong as an ox. About six feet with little hair; this could have been because of all the worries he must have had trying to raise all the family on a poor man’s wage. There wasn’t any such thing as holidays or trips out. Billy didn't ever recall seeing him and his mam out together. Dad died at forty-five (Billy was thirteen years old), leaving his mother (who was not in the best of health) to cope with all her children alone. The youngest child, Beverley, was not in good health either. In 1968, aged seven, she died of a hole in the heart.
Sunday morning in his household was bath day. This, however it, was a daunting experience for Billy as it would take place in the kitchen at the back of the house. His dad sat him on top of the kitchen sink with poor Billy’s feet immersed in hot water. The bottom half of his body was washed with carbolic soap. ‘Stand up!’ his father would snarl, while he washed the remainder of his filthy body, ‘you’re not going out to play until I’ve scrubbed you down with this soap!’ Bily would wriggle in protest.
‘Either you keep still, or I will hold you down while I scrape the dirt off you!’
Growled his Dad.
It was like a Dickensian scene. Unfortunately, they didn't have any money for curtains to cover the kitchen window, and this, of course, would be the time when Billy’s friends Norman and ‘Dirty Barry’ would come around the back and knock on the door to see if he was playing out. They had to pass the window and view poor Billy fully exposed to the entire world ‘in all his glory’. He could hear them laughing and ducking up and down underneath the window; one of them gobbed on the glass, it ran down the window pane like a broken egg yolk. ‘Ask your daddy to wash this off the window once he’s washed your arse!’ Dirty Barry mocked.
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