How I Killed Margaret Thatcher by Anthony Cartwright Page A

didn’t really happen. Well, it happened once, which is where the story came from.
    A man was walking from Blackheath to visit his sister on Kates Hill and instead of carrying on down Rowley Road or starting through White Heath and then past the Four Ways and up and over to the Hangsman’s Tree and that way, he decided to walk up through Quarry End. He didn’t know anybody up there and work was slow at the quarries, so the men were stood on the doorsteps and at the door of the pub and because they didn’t like the look of the man they started calling him names and hitting him. The man ran off and they chased him, a big group of them now, twenty or thirty, kids and grown men; that was how they did things up there, all together. The man must have been in a panic because he turned off the road down one of the lanes that ran off into the blackberry bushes and chicken coops and he went falling over into the quarry and broke his neck. Some of the gang climbed down and dragged the man out, but they didn’t know what to do with the body. The police didn’t go much to Quarry End but they’d probably turn up for something like this. So they fed the man from Blackheath to the pigs. The pigs ate him up. The best sausages used to come from Quarry End and after that people used to joke that it was because of what they fed the pigs on. It was no joke, though. The police came from Dudley and found some of the man’s bones in the pig trough. Nobody said anything. Nobody got arrested. My dad told me that his dad was one of the boys who did the chasing.
    The best days at the caravans are the ones when we don’t drive anywhere. I wake up early because the sun comes in through the orange curtains early in the morning and makes the room glow. I lie awake while my nan makes a cup of tea for us all. Sometimes I sleep in our caravan, sometimes in my nan and grandad’s. My bed is in the same position in both. I wriggle down the bed a little bit and move the curtain with my feet so I can look out and see the line of the sea and the sky and the tops of the waves. Even when the sun isn’t shining it’s good. You can watch the grey waves and the seagulls as they fly across the space in the window between the curtain and the window frame. When it’s raining it’s even better because you can snuggle down in bed and hear the rain hitting the roof and the sound of the kettle boiling and usually the waves are white and foamy and they hit the sea wall and come splashing into the caravan site. If it rains in the day I don’t mind. I sit in the corner and read or write in my exercise book or chat to whoever’s around. Some days when it rains we go for a drive and look at the mountains and castles that appear through the mist.
    I walk with my dad and grandad to get a paper and anything else we might want for breakfast, like more eggs. The shop for the caravans is part of a farm and the eggs are laid by the chickens that live up the hill. I walk up and see them sometimes. After breakfast we go on another walk along the beach past where the sea wall runs out and there are the rock pools where me and Ronnie caught his pet crab. Afternoons, we all play on the beach in front of the caravans and that’s when there’s a big game of cricket or football. We go in the sea, if it’s hot, and I run back and forth through the waves as they foam up the sand.

‘ ‌ In Britain, we have a tradition of facing the severest tests as a family, working together to meet and overcome adversity.’
    â€Œ
    She stopped all the little children from having milk.
    My mum lifts her head up from the ironing and says this to me while I line up my Star Wars figures on the table.
    What?
    You asked me why Margaret Thatcher was selfish, why we don’t like her. When I was a little girl all the children got given milk to drink every morning at school. As soon as Margaret Thatcher was in charge of it, she