Forsaking Anna , livre ebook

Troubador Publishing Ltd - M. Hutchison G.

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74 pages

English

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What is it like to lose your job and to become unemployed? What is it like having to cope with the loss of your self-respect and your sense of identity? Although this is what happens to the book's narrator he is determined to deal with these evils in his own way. Unfortunately, despite his best efforts, both his personal circumstances and his love-life seem to be going from bad to worse. Almost in despair, he goes to seek advice from one of the new friends he has made. To his surprise, he learns that Ivor, is a prominent member of the UKGB, an organisation that is strongly opposed to Britain 's membership of the EU. Even worse, to his horror, he learns that Ivor is about to use explosives to further this cause.What is at stake here, he finally begins to realise, concerns not merely his own precarious position in life, but the self-respect and the sense of identity of the whole nation. He has to do something, anything! But the choices he is then faced with are overwhelming. Is he to forsake Anna, the woman he loves, or betray his friend to the police. Which is it to be?

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Politics

Political

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	28 mars 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781838598594
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Copyright © 2020 G. M. Hutchison

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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Contents
chapter one
chapter two
chapter three
chapter four
chapter five
chapter six
chapter seven
chapter eight
chapter nine
chapter ten
chapter eleven
chapter twelve
chapter thirteen
chapter fourteen
chapter fifteen
chapter sixteen
chapter seventeen
chapter eighteen
chapter nineteen
chapter twenty
chapter twenty-one
chapter twenty-two
chapter twenty-three
chapter twenty-four
chapter twenty-five
chapter twenty-six
chapter twenty-seven
chapter twenty-eight
chapter twenty-nine
chapter thirty
chapter one
Someone who owns, in the full sense of the word, a nice house, in a nice district, who has a very good job, and a healthy credit balance at the bank, can’t possibly have the same view of the world and have come to the same conclusions about things in general as someone who rents a not very nice house, in a not very nice district, who has a low-paid job and can’t makes ends meet.
The gap between these two kinds of people is enormous, in spite of the fact that they are likely to have had a very similar basic education. Both can read and write, can belong to a similar racial and religious group, and can be citizens of a country that they feel they belong in, and of which they are usually quite proud.
He, of all people, now knew how true this was and he had given the matter much more thought than he ever had before. What great conflicts had arisen, what great evils had been done, he supposed, as if it was an entirely new idea, because one group of people couldn’t properly understand the problems or the aspirations of the other? In his own particular case, very few of the problems he faced now were the same as the ones he had worried about as recently as two or three months ago.
Once being in possession of a bank account from which the withdrawal of a sum equivalent to a whole year’s rent, not just this month’s, would have made no significant difference to his overall circumstances, he didn’t know if this fact should make him feel worse or better. Worse, for having got into such a situation as this in the first place, or better, because he didn’t really belong in it.
He felt a little ashamed of the great feeling of relief that came over him when, having done all his sums again, he calculated that he could quite easily pay the rent on this occasion if he cut down on some other less important items. That these less important items would become more important as the need for them arose was a line of thought with which he was becoming all too familiar, as was the way in which it was affecting him.
For the first time in his life he could see how supremely important this matter was, that paying the rent was something that lay at the heart of things. If you didn’t pay it then you had at once a serious threat hanging over your head, a serious threat indeed. For the first time in his life he had begun to think seriously about what it might be like to be evicted. In theory at least, and almost but not quite yet in practice, he had reached a point where being evicted had become something that could actually happen to him.
Trying at all costs not to get the matter out of proportion, he could see that viewing the plight of homelessness in the way that he was now being forced to do didn’t show him up in a very good light. To have reached his age without ever thinking that such a thing could actually happen to someone like him didn’t say much for his knowledge of the world or, for that matter, his ability to survive in it.
How could he have been the person that he had been for all these years without realising how much he really had in common with all those people who were lower down, many of them much lower down, on the social scale than he was?
But he stopped short of condemning himself outright for being the person that he had once been. He had been brought up to be like that and he felt strongly that the fact he had now become one of the people he had previously looked down on wasn’t altogether his own fault.
Not much of what had happened could have been avoided, he told himself, as he thought of the things which had brought on the catastrophe.
He hadn’t gambled or drunk away all his money or anything like that. It wasn’t much, but it was the first thing he could say with absolute certainty. In other words, he hadn’t been overcome by the effects of some terrible craving that had clouded his judgement, even if the results of what had happened had been pretty much the same in financial terms. He had still ended up with nothing. What part had he played, then? Hadn’t he just been unlucky? he pleaded with himself. The business could very well have been successful and the fact that it hadn’t been wasn’t because of any great failing on his part or on that of his business partner. No one could have predicted that demand would fall as suddenly and as much as it had. And even when it had, the market had soon righted itself. It had only been a blip in the overall picture.
The big, long-established companies had found little difficulty in weathering the storm. At worst they had laid off a few people, at best they had behaved as if nothing had happened. In both cases they had continued to pay all their bills and make the most of this downturn in the market which, for a smaller company like his, had spelt disaster.
‘If only’ was the phrase which he knew usually prefixed a lot of the thinking of people like himself, whose whole financial world had come crashing down around them, and for a while he himself couldn’t stop using it either. The idea of providing leasing finance to enable people to buy equipment they sorely needed but didn’t have enough money to pay for outright had been quite sound. It was still quite sound, but to mortgage your own house to help fund the idea was much less so. If only he had seen this at the time, seen it as clearly as he could see it now, would he still have gone ahead with it? he kept asking himself.
At his age the possibility of getting back to where he had once been was remote. The expensive big flat that he had once owned, that he had for so long taken for granted, that had been situated in one of the best areas of the city, that he had felt he belonged in, was situated in an area that was lived in by people who were all very much better off than he was now.
People who had once been his neighbours, his equals in most respects, were now his superiors in that particular way. They were people who would look down on him now if they knew where he lived. He was quite certain of this, because hadn’t he himself once been one of those superior people, and didn’t he still think like one of them? Poor people were to blame for their misfortune. It was their own fault that they were poor. If you lived in one of those poorer areas you were in some way deserving of it, and what right did he have to feel that he was one of the very few of those people who were not deserving of it?
Or could he, nevertheless, still be one of those superior people, at least because he thought and felt like they did? Or was he to redefine his sense of identity and bring it into line with the facts. Which of those two people was he to be?
One thing was certain, he was never going to get his big flat back. The almost astronomical sum he had been sitting on when he lived there had disappeared. The luck which had been his earlier in life when he had inherited the flat from his parents and the luck which had sent its value soaring skywards had definitely run out. If only he had been fully aware then of what he knew now. He had been off to a pretty good start in life. Why couldn’t he have been sensible and held on to what he had?
But he was determined not to go down the road of self-recrimination. Such a thing would only serve to weaken his resolve to get back on his feet. He would just have to do the best he could. And wasn’t he already doing just that, in making sure that he wasn’t going to fall into arrears with the rent?
At the same time, he knew how pathetic this sounded. The whole world was trying to pay the rent, in one way or another, and he was trying to make a virtue out of an everyday occurrence just because the threat associated with non-payment was for him such an unusual experience. He could see that he was scraping the bottom of the barrel in his efforts to hold on to his self-respect and his sense of identity. He knew, even at this early stage in his predicament, that he was going to have to do a lot better than this merely to survive, far less if he was to recover, or even make a come-back of some kind.
He cringed at his use of the word ‘come-back’. He wasn’t some great ex-champion thinking about how to get his title back. He wa