How I Killed Margaret Thatcher by Anthony Cartwright

on the back step, holding me as a baby, my grandad’s rose bushes on one side, with shadows angled across the wall. She is about to smile, not quite ready to pose, happy; her eyes are happy.
    We went to Stratford and walked by the river, looked at the Shakespeare statues, then we went on a boat and looked into the gardens of the big houses and my mum and dad imagined living there. My mum had long brown hair then; I remember her looking with wonder and anger at a grey hair she pulled from her head. She wore dresses that she made herself with big prints on them like butterflies or flowers. She had made all the curtains and bed covers for our new house and kept material in the cupboard under the stairs along with her sewing machine. When she cleaned at the solicitors, she had to tie her hair back in a ponytail or put it in a net, which she hated. She hated that job. She did it to get some extra money in because we had a mortgage to pay. It was my dad that wanted us to get money together and move again when he got another job.
    They’d been married for ten years. I was born nine months after they got married. When I was a baby we’d lived all together at my nan and grandad’s, all of us in the back bedroom that I’d fallen out of. We moved to the Perry Court flats and had a balcony that looked back up to the castle and over all the works at Cinderheath and down towards Tipton. Then we moved to our house the autumn after the baking hot summer.
    My dad grew up in Quarry End. It wasn’t there any more. They blew it up in a big explosion to join the two quarries together.
    Pity they day blow the folks from theer up an all, my uncle Eric had said, before he was banished. Then he said, No offence, Francis, to my dad. I day mean yow.
    I remember no one seemed that sad to see Quarry End go except the people who’d clung on there until the end, like my granny, my dad’s mum, living in part-demolished terraces with the quarries eating at the foundations of their houses. I liked it. My granny died before they’d have finally moved her out. She had nowhere to go. I remember going up there with my dad. He had to meet his brothers at the house to divide up my granny’s stuff. My dad didn’t like his brothers. We had to burn most of it; the furniture had woodworm and all the clothes and blankets were too dirty for anything else, not even rag and bone. We all stood round the bonfire and the smoke mixed with the dust that used to come from the blasting and cover everything with a light grey powder. That was what it was like up there, dusty and foggy, so to an eight-year-old boy it felt like monsters might come round the corner of every building. While we had the fire burning a fox came along the road with all her cubs in a line behind her; they were all grey from the dust in their fur. She came right by the fire and the men and sniffed at what was going on. One of my dad’s brothers, Harry, I think, who went to live in Worcester, worked on the oil rigs for a time, threw a brick right at it and the fox stood there and stared, like the wild things had taken over.
    The road used to wind between the quarries, the new one and the old one, and the houses used to run on either side of the road at the top of the hill. That one narrow road was undermined slowly by the working, so that eventually the back yards of the houses were nearly at the quarry edges. My dad could remember when the new quarry had been much smaller and there’d been a farm with horses where the big hole was now. Although it was just two long lines of terraced houses, Quarry End was a separate place with shops and pubs in the row, and yards out the back where people kept chickens and pigs. I’m not sure my dad’s mum, my granny, ever left Quarry End.
    People were scared to go up there if they didn’t know any of the families. They said you’d get beaten up or killed and thrown over the quarry or fed to the pigs. That