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    Disraeli Avenue
    Disraeli Avenue
    Disraeli Avenue
    Ebook156 pages1 hour

    Disraeli Avenue

    By Caroline Smailes

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    About this ebook

    A novella from Caroline Smailes featuring characters from her critically acclaimed debut, In Search of Adam.

    The houses on Disraeli Avenue all looked the same, the same shape, the same size but behind each coloured front door there was a story, a secret, a need. Bill Williams is lost, Aunty Maggie longs to be young and attractive, Crystal is searching to find out more about Adam. Tales of debt, infidelity, incest, love and loss all combine and weave into a mosaic of working class life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateJun 26, 2014
    ISBN9780007468348
    Disraeli Avenue
    Author

    Caroline Smailes

    CAROLINE SMAILES lives in the North West of England with her husband and three children. The Drowning of Arthur Braxton is her fifth novel. She can be found at www.carolinesmailes.co.uk and twitter.com/Caroline_S

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    • 5/5
      Behind closed doors, there are many secrets. We all have secrets. We hold on to them tightly, even if they burn our hands, knowing that they must never see the light of day. Released into the light, these secrets could heal one life and shatter another. We will take our secrets to the grave, taking comfort in the fact that no one will hear them, that no one will know them. That no one will know who we really and truly are. This is how things have always been. In Disraeli Avenue, there are lots of secrets; lots of hidden truths buried like treasure. Some are like soft golden coins, shining in the light and begging to be heard. Some are like rubies with sharp edged teeth, waiting to bite the hand that dips into them and draw blood. In her new novella, Caroline Smailes returns to Disraeli Avenue, the setting for her amazing debut novel In Search of Adam. During In Search of Adam, we got to know the inhabitants of Disraeli Avenue through the eyes of Jude Williams. Now, Smailes is giving those inhabitants their own voice. Disraeli Avenue consists of thirty-four vignettes, thirty-four insights into the lives of the people who make up Disraeli Avenue. Having read and fallen in love with In Search of Adam, I was worried that I might not like Disraeli Avenue. I didn´t think anything could compare to the perfection that Smailes reached with In Search of Adam. Well, I´m happy to admit I was very wrong indeed. In Search of Adam was fantastic; Disraeli Avenue was so much more than that; it was better. It´s a hard task to give thirty-four individual people their own distinctive voice. Most seasoned authors struggle with this for years and never manage to create distinctive voices. Thankfully, Smailes achieves this with aplomb. Told in diary entries, text messages, letters, receipts, invoices and more, Disraeli Avenue is an intimate and revealing look at the people that make up a neighbourhood; the people that live close to one another never really knowing who their neighbours are. For those of you who have not read In Search of Adam, you can breathe easy: it´s not necessary to have read In Search of Adam to read Disraeli Avenue. But I can guarantee after reading Disraeli Avenue that you´ll want to read In Search of Adam to see where it all began. Though the subject matter may be grim, covering topics such as death, suicide, sexual abuse, theft, love, friendship, family and more, the novel is incredibly well written and will pull you in. You will need to keep reading to find out whom you will meet next, whose voice you will hear. Whose life you will get to see into, just for a moment. You will not be able to put this book down. Each chapter brings a new voice, just begging to be heard. I found this to be one of the novella´s strengths. Smailes has created a tapestry of people, a real live neighbourhood that must surely be around the corner. You start to recognize the different people that populate Disraeli Avenue as they appear in other stories, other vignettes. What´s more, you come to know them. To care for them. Once again, Smailes offers us a study in human nature, a study in what really makes people tick and comes out on top. She isn´t afraid to pull any punches either. There is a vibrancy to her words that leaps off the page and that makes Disraeli Avenue all the more amazing. I was incredibly moved by this book. I laughed, cried, shouted. I cheered. This book moved me in so many ways, touched so many different emotions. It has been a long time since a book has done that, has reached down into me and pulled at my heart. I feel I know the people of Disraeli Avenue and I know that they will haunt me for a long time to come. So come and visit Disraeli Avenue. You may never want to leave.

    Book preview

    Disraeli Avenue - Caroline Smailes

    Number 9

    Bill and Jude Williams

    Green front door

    Green garage door

    Yellow car

    KON 908V

    In Search of Adam

    Two years, six months and twenty-one days before I was born, my parents moved to New Lymouth. From a block of flats that were as high as a giant. My mother’s house was brand new. It was shiny. Spick and span. There were two new estates being built in New Lymouth. The housing estate that I was to live on and another one. They each had four parallel streets and formed a perfect square on either side of the main road.

    On this Coast Road, there were ‘The Shops’. Dewstep Butchers was also New Lymouth Post Office and displayed a smiling pig’s head in the window. New Lymouth Primary School. My primary school. Was a perfect E-shaped grey building with a flat roof. Mrs Hodgson (Number 2) told Rita that many cuckoos were put in nests on that roof. I didn’t understand. New Lymouth Library was on the Coast Road too. It was a rectangle. Like a shoebox. Inside the library there were eighty-seven Mills and Boon novels and three Roald Dahl books. There were signs everywhere. ‘Absolute silence at all times’. The grumpy librarian liked to read her Introducing Machine Knitting magazine. I read the first chapter of Danny, the Champion of the World twenty-seven times. I read all of Matilda and The Twits. Thirteen times each. Brian’s newsagents stretched across 127–135 Coast Road. Inside the shop I heard gossip being tittled and tattled, as I stood looking at the jars of delicious sweets.

    Rhubarb and Custard. Chocolate Raisins. White Gems. Aniseed Balls. Coconut Mushrooms. Brown Gems. Cola Cubes. Pear Drops. Cherry Lips. Liquorice Comfits. Toffee Bonbons. Jelly Beans. Edinburgh Rock. Pontefract Cakes. Pineapple Chunks. Sweet Peanuts. Scented Satins. Sherbet Pips. Midget Gems. Sweet Tobacco. Chocolate Peanuts. Toasted Teacakes. Rainbow Crystals. Sour Apples. Lemon Bonbons. Unable to decide. I wished that I had the courage to ask for one from every one of the twenty-five jars.

    On the other side of the Coast Road there were five really big houses. My class teacher, Mrs Ellis, and Mrs Hughes the local librarian lived in two of them. I didn’t know who else lived there. The children in those houses didn’t go to New Lymouth Primary School with me. The children in those houses didn’t play foxes and hounds around the estate with us local bairns. I walked down that road on my way to school. I peered into those large houses. I stopped walking to stare in. I tried to look past the fresh flowers in the window and I thought about all the nice smelling things that would live inside.

    The Coast Road ran a slope from New Lymouth down to the Lymouth seaside. The estate that I lived on was at the top of the hill. As the road continued up, it travelled through a number of similar estates and villages. Signs warned drivers when they were leaving one village and arriving in another. My father said that the ‘nearer yee lived to the coast, then the richer yee were’. We lived about a ten-minute walk from the coast. I’m not quite sure what that made us. All I know is that, when my mother was alive, my father talked about one day living on the sea front. The houses there were enormous. Five storeys tall. They went up and up and up to the sky. You could stand on the roof and your head would be in the clouds. I thought that really important people lived in those kinds of houses. People like the Queen could live there. A hacky lad in my class at school lived in one, with about twenty other children. His mother and father hadn’t wanted him. They, the twenty other children and the hacky lad, lived in their mansion that looked out over the beautiful Lymouth cove. They were very very lucky. They must have been very very rich. They must have been the richest people in England.

    Lymouth Bay was shaped like a banana. There was a pier at each end and three caves lived in the cliff. Just over the left pier. Sat tall on a throne of rocks. There was a lighthouse. The most beautiful. The most elegant. A white lighthouse. Legend had it, that hundreds and thousands of small green men with orange hair lived in it. I never saw them. But. Paul Hodgson (Number 2) had seen one buying a quarter of Toasted Teacakes in Brian’s newsagents.

    There were one hundred and twenty steps to climb down. One hundred and twenty steps before touching the grey sand. The sand was unhappy. It looked poorly sick all the time. A green handrail wove next to the steps. I never had the courage to touch it. The paint was covered in carved initials, decorated with lumps of hardened chewing gum and topped with seagull droppings. Yackety yack. Hundreds and thousands of lumps. Hacky yack yack. Paul Hodgson (Number 2) told me that his uncle caught an ‘incurable disease’ from touching that handrail. He said that his ‘uncle’s hand had dropped clean off’. I wasn’t going to risk it.

    To me, the Coast Road seemed to go on for ever and ever and ever. I was told that it was a perfectly straight road, which travelled from the seafront and through four villages. You could catch a bus on the Coast Road. The road passed by my school, up the slope, close to my house and then on through village after village into lands that were unknown. Into lands that sounded magical and exciting. North Lymouth. Marsden. Hingleworth. Coastend. Mrs Hodgson (Number 2) told me that Coastend was ‘famous for its cheapness of tricks’. A magical place.

    I lived in Disraeli Avenue, in between Gladstone Street and Campbell-Bannerman Road. The neighbours all said it dizz–rah–el–lee (four chunks) Avenue. My mother’s house was a semi-detached on a street with 31 similar-looking houses. They looked identical but I knew that they weren’t.

    There were differences. Thirteen had red front doors. Seven had green front doors. Five had blue front doors. Seven had yellow front doors. The garages matched the front doors. Except for Number 17. Mr Lewis had a yellow front door and a green garage. I didn’t know why.

    green,

    red,

    red,

    yellow, green, red, red, yellow, yellow, green, red, red, red,

    green, blue, blue,

    red,

    blue,

    green,

    yellow, red, blue, blue, yellow, green, green, red, red, red,

    yellow, red, yellow.

    I wanted the numbers to fit better. I wanted the colours to fit better.

    It should have been sixteen red front doors. One half. Eight green doors. One quarter. Four blue doors. One eighth. Four yellow doors. One eighth. It was simple. The colours could look really nice. I had worked it all out.

    red,

    red,

    green,

    red,

    green,

    red,

    blue,

    blue

    green, red,

    yellow, red, green,

    red, yellow, red,

    red, green, red,

    green, red, blue, blue,

    green, red, yellow,

    red, green, red,

    yellow, red, red.

    I wasn’t happy with Mr Lewis (Number 17). His colours didn’t match. Maybe he didn’t realise. I wished that I had the courage to talk to him about it.

    There was a little wall in front of the garden. A dwarf wall. A dwarf wall for Snow White’s friends to play on. There was also a drive for my father’s Mini. There was a garden to the front and a slightly larger one to the back. The front lawn was just big enough to squeeze onto it a folded tartan picnic blanket. The soil surrounding the perfect square of grass was always packed with flowers. I watched the flowers. I noted them all in a little lined book. It was green and lived on my windowsill. Thorny rose bushes, coordinating colours and then down to a mixture of blossoms. Depending on the month.

    Gaillardia ‘Burgunder’.

    Shiny red flower,

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