The Case of the Cow that Mooed in the Night

When I was nine, a judge diagnosed my dad with Burglary and sent him away for some prison therapy. When he came back he said the warders had been very nice and he felt much better. Then he looked longingly at his shotgun and Margaret Thatcher mask, put his head in his hands and wept. He repeated this ritual every day at a quarter to tiffin. “One bank at a time,” he would say, “one bank at a time.”

At school they said my dad was a loony. The kids thought so too but were more sympathetic; some of them had dads of their own. My best friend Pectin whispered shyly that his father had Monogamy, and Willis the Bruce announced that his dad suffered from Night Shifts. Hymie thought his dad was probably Jewish. We looked at each other. “We’d better form a secret society,” we said in unison.

First we needed a name. ‘Fuck’ and all anagrams thereof had already been bagsied by French Connection for writing on the clothing of teenage girls, so we reluctantly settled for SOD – Save Our Dads. Then we made our secret yodelling sound and went home for tea and knees-up.

Next day I kept the doctors occupied by pretending to have fallen over and hurt somebody’s knee. While they were filling out the paperwork, the other little sods rounded up the dads and gave them a good poking to. The dads promised never to do it again. The doctors were annoyed that children had solved the loonies without them, but we were all miles away at the time so nobody got hurt. After that we were happy forever, just in case.