The Football Results, by Harold Bickerstaff

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

My father could lift a hundredweight sack of flour onto his shoulder without bending his knees, and he could not read. I did not know the second thing until I was twelve, although I suppose I had known it for years in the way that children know things, without putting words to them.

He had always had reasons. His glasses were upstairs. The print was too small. The light in the kitchen was bad. On Sunday afternoons he would hand me the newspaper and say, ‘Go on, our Billy, give us the football,’ and lie back in his chair with his eyes closed while I read out the results, and I thought it was a treat he was giving me.

The letter came on a Tuesday in a long brown envelope with a window in it. My mother was at her sister’s in Wigan. My father turned it over twice on the table, then propped it against the teapot and sat looking at it while his tea went cold.

‘Your eyes are younger than mine,’ he said at last, and pushed it across.

It was from the mill. I read it out slowly, because the words were long ones: owing to the reduction in orders, the management regretted, with effect from the end of the month. I got to the bottom before I understood what it meant, and then I looked up.

He was not looking at me. He was looking at his hands, flat on the oilcloth, and I saw that he had understood long before I had, from my voice probably, from the way I had slowed down. And I saw something else too, which made my face go hot: that he had never needed his glasses, and that the light in the kitchen had always been perfectly good.

Neither of us said it. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked. Outside, the coalman’s horse went by and stopped and went on.

‘Well,’ my father said. ‘Well, then.’ He got up and put the kettle back on, though the pot was still half full. With his back to me he said, ‘You’ll not mention it to your mam. I’ll tell her myself.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Nor the other thing.’

I looked at his back, at the big shoulders under the braces, and understood that we were not talking about the mill any more.

‘No, Dad,’ I said.

He nodded without turning round. Then he reached up to the shelf, took down Sunday’s newspaper, which was still lying there, and dropped it on the table in front of me.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Give us the football.’

What impressions does the writer create of the relationship between the narrator and his father? How does the writer create these impressions?

You must refer to the language and structure used in the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.