A Little Bit on the Side (4 page)

They had already passed the cottage a number of times on their own country walks. Well maintained, but unimproved and totally original, it probably dated from the late fifthteenth century. Timber-framed in unpainted oak it was two-storied, but long and low, with upper rooms that would have been a torment for anyone above modest height. Only the roof looked as though it might have been a modern eighteenth century alteration in tiles now multi-coloured with the growth of lichen and algae.

The door at which they knocked looked ancient and original: massive as though to withstand a siege. Hanging from three black metal hinges wider than Jack’s wrists, its thick oak planks were heavily studded with black iron nails, and darkened and pitted by weather and the wear and tear of centuries.

It was opened by Jim to a narrow, oil-lit passageway that ran through from front to back with doors off either side. Even when they were inside with the door shut, their breath still hung in the air, and Jack could see that on the inside of the door the clenched iron of the nails was white with the penetrating frost.

‘Don’t hang your coats out here,’ said Jimmy. ‘They’ll be frozen solid when you leave if you do. Bring them through.’

He opened one of the inner doors, and Celia welcomed them in to a good-sized living room, still oil-lit, but warm with the glow of a wood-burning stove supplemented by a long radiator on the back wall.

‘Something to warm you after the walk,’ said Celia, holding out two large glasses of wine.

‘Vintage parsnip from Ada Sutton,’ said Jimmy. ‘Almost the last of the Barton originals up in the village — a quid pro quo for a little electrical work I did for her.’

It was as they sat sipping Ada’s wine and warming themselves before the glowing log-burner that Jimmy made his original disclosure to Jack, and over the course of the meal he had a little bit more to say about the parallel economy that flourished on and around the hill.

‘It’s all fairly low-level stuff by your standards I suppose, but it’s everywhere. Cash with nothing recorded is preferable of course, but barter’s almost a way of life, not only with the farmers but with the traders. Everyone’s ready to do a deal. The ladies’ hairdressers used to have a sign pinned up:
This establishment will negotiate payment in any form of exchange cash, goods, services etc — just have a word with Peggy.
It was taken down when you arrived …. Felt sure I could trust you,’ he added with a smile.

‘I only wish the rest could,’ said Jack, ‘And as far as we’re concerned they can put the notice back up as soon as they like. Kate won’t shop them, will you love?’

He took a long pull at the glass of elderberry wine that wound up the meal before continuing.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t do this job if I didn’t wear two hats. What comes across my desk is business, just business — nothing personal, as the Mafia used to say. But despite popular misconception we aren’t the Stasi, and outside the office I’m one of the boys, so to speak. Wouldn’t do to play the game myself of course, but apart from that …’

He left the sentence unfinished, but then added, ‘Although I often wondered what I’d do if I had a really good offer.’

‘Well I’ll noise the good news abroad,’ said Jimmy, ‘I mean about the two hats, not you waiting for a good offer, but they’re a suspicious and cautious bunch, and it might take quite a while.’

He topped up the stove with a few more logs, handed them each a glass of what Jack took to be Calvados, and through an increasing booze-induced haze Jack and Kate learned a little of their hosts’ time on the hill.

‘We bought this place in the late fifties with a little unexpected help from Celia’s father,’ said Jimmy.

‘Family and friends thought I’d gone bush when I went off with Jimmy just after the war,’ said Celia. ‘Roedean girls weren’t supposed to do that sort of thing were they? But Miss Tanner, our headmistress, wasn’t snobbish and didn’t encourage the girls to be; although I’m not altogether sure she would have approved of Jimmy — bit too radical for her. Anyway the school’s evacuation to Keswick broadened my horizons, and as soon as I was eighteen I volunteered for the Wrens, and that really knocked off the rough edges. Even so at first none of them could see the bargain I saw. Could they my big, bold hero? But they came round.’

Jimmy gave her a smile and took up the story, ‘This place was sound when we came in, but a bit run down. Since then I’ve altered the inside to install a few comforts of modern living, without detracting from the charms of the old. The wood burner runs the few radiators we need, and I had the phone and power lines laid on at some expense after a year or so, but we’d got used to the lamplight by then and still prefer it down here. Use the electric upstairs though. As for other basic needs, our water comes sweet and cool from our own well, and my own variation of the earth closet provides for calls of nature. Ever heard of Henry Moule?’

Jack shook his head.

‘Wonderful man — sadly neglected. Invented the first earth closet: deserved a Nobel prize for service to humanity. Very efficient, no water wasted, and an end product that goes straight into the veg plot. Everything recycled and fully self-sustaining. Never properly developed though. I’ve got a copy of his pamphlet somewhere,
Manure for the Millions — A Letter to the Cottage Gardeners of England.
I’ll dig it out and you must come over some time in daylight and read it. Then I’ll give you a tour of the place, and you can try the thunderbox for yourself — very relaxing.’

Jack smiled at Jimmy’s enthusiastic presentation of his idiosyncratic sanitary arrangements, and then as it was well past mid-night, they thanked them both for an enjoyable evening, put on their coats, and by the hard and frosty light of a moon now out from behind the clouds, walked back home across the meadows.

The sense of affinity that Jack felt for Jimmy was clearly mutual, and as the two wives also enjoyed each other’s company the four ended up getting together at least a couple of times a month, and in the course of their meetings with the Gillans, they learned a lot more of the background of their seemingly ill-assorted neighbours.

Born in the twenties Jimmy was the third son in an Irish Catholic family swollen by the arrival of yet another young gift of God every couple of years. Home had been a cramped, narrow three-storied house just a few streets away from the docks on the east of the Mersey in the heart of a predominantly Catholic community, and he talked of his life there as one that fell rather disappointingly short of genteel poverty. The house would survive the war, but disappear soon after in the subsequent slum clearances.

His father, the fourth child of seven, five of them boys, had left home and come over from Ireland in 1919 having fallen out with his brothers following a bitter argument over politics.

‘When do they ever argue about anything else in Ireland?’ said Jimmy, ‘And at that time it was particularly bad in the County Cork. Brother against brother, “with us or against us” in many cases, though I don’t think it was that bad for the old man. By the time I was aware of that sort of thing they were in touch again.’

‘Have you ever been over to meet the family?’ asked Jack.

‘Not as an adult, but when the two of them went over in the summer of ‘39 they took me with them. A couple of months earlier Dad got news that his father had died It was the only time I saw him cry. But he couldn’t get over in time for the funeral, and so we went a couple of months later, and met up with almost all of them.’

‘Was that back to the farm?’

‘No, not at first. By then most of them had moved to Dublin or Cork city for the work. It was just Michael left running the farm with his sons, and my grandfather living in Dublin with Seamus until he died. So that was where we went.’

‘Your grandmother was dead then?’

‘Gone before I was born. Worn out by hard work and ill health Dad said. We had a run down to see Michael though. Meant it to be just a day trip from Dublin, but when we got to Millstreet we were told that the train we arrived on would be the only one back in about an hour’s time. Michael insisted we stay over. Wouldn’t take no for an answer, and so one night eventually became three. No phones on the farm of course in those days, nor with Seamus in Dublin, but Michael managed to get a message back to Seamus via the guard on the train. It was a bit like that in Ireland in those years.’

‘Sounds rather attractively old-fashioned and informal,’ said Jack.

‘You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen the rural poverty,’ said Jimmy. ‘But I won’t go into that…. Learned a little about an Irish family get-together though after Michael got the message out to a few cousins and neighbours. My God they put some stuff away during those three nights: got to sneak a drop or two myself: the first of many to follow.’ Before continuing he topped them up with some more of the Calvados.

In Liverpool his father had met Kathleen, from another Irish family, and married her after a courtship that would have been thought indecently short in the old country, but occasioned no comment in Liverpool. Good Catholics that they were the union was soon blessed with a son, followed promptly by another: then a hiatus of almost three years before Jimmy arrived.

Jimmy talked lovingly of his father as a sentimental, quiet and unassuming man seldom in really good health, but who managed nevertheless to hang on to his job when all around were losing theirs, and bring home enough to keep them off the breadline with just a little to spare. Of his mother he spoke with a total lack of affection.

‘She was the worst sort of canting hypocrite. Kept up all the Catholic appearances in church and with the neighbours, but was a hard-hearted, scolding bitch at home and a secret drinker. Boozed away what little spare Dad brought back that would otherwise have given us a bit extra. Poor bugger scarcely had enough left to buy his few fags.’

When old enough to leave the maternal nest, Jimmy attended the local Catholic school during the week and the local Catholic church on Sunday.

‘Religion dominated our lives spiritually and physically then,’ he said, ‘Couldn’t get away from it even at home, as the bloody church loomed over the wall at the back of the yard.’

He grew up in the thirties to see his two older brothers pass seamlessly from school to unemployment, with no apparent hope of anything to come in the future, and then despite his youth, for reasons he could never seem to articulate precisely to Jack, he began gradually to question the very basis of his religious indoctrination.

‘I could never quite understand why I changed,’ he said, ‘As the rest of the family stuck with the faith through thick and thin. Dad seemed quite untroubled by the way I was going, but that was the end of it with my mother, and whenever Dad wasn’t around she’d find any excuse to knock me about a bit.’

The advent of war, and an early raid on Liverpool in which a younger brother and others died when a bomb fell on the junior school shelter, brought about Jim’s final severance with formal religion, when he walked out of the requiem mass for his brother.

‘Couldn’t stand all that Catholic cant, but I knew there was no going back after that,’ he said, ‘And by the time she got back home from the mass I’d put together my few bits and pieces and left. I was too young to enlist, but I went along to the shipping office, lied about my age, and got a berth on a ship leaving for the States. They weren’t asking too many questions about age for the merchant fleet, and that’s where I stayed for the rest of the war.’

‘That must have been a hell of a culture shock for a teenager,’ said Jack. ‘How old were you then sixteen, seventeen?’

‘There or there abouts,’ said Jimmy. ‘And yes it was. I went in just in time to catch the U-boats’ happy time on the North Atlantic. At first I was scared witless, frightened to sleep at night, but after a while you get to accept it, though it’s always there as a nagging thought when you’re not busy. I was lucky though in bunking up and messing with a pretty good crowd. I learned a lot from one or two of them. Introduced me to a few books the Catholic fathers wouldn’t approve. Politics and social comment I mean, not smut’

Celia was serving in Bristol when Jimmy’s ship put in there in 1944. They met at a dance and enjoyed each other’s company, met again the following evening, and kept in touch afterwards, meeting whenever they could when Jimmy’s ship was back in the UK.

‘We realised early on that we were two of a kind,’ Celia told them, ‘And eventually he had his wicked way with me … You probably know what it was like in wartime.’

‘Only by report,’ said Kate. ‘We were both a touch too young, but it all sounds eminently sensible to me. Not sure it was all that different when our time came though… But not so intense perhaps.’ Celia had the feeling that there was a note of regret there, but the moment was soon gone, and she couldn’t be sure.

With the war over, they said, they snuggled down together like every conventional couple, apart from tying the knot formally. Jim got a job that gave him some training and good experience with electrical work, plumbing and carpentry. Celia went on a secretarial course, and studied weaving and painting at evening classes, but that phase of their life only lasted a little over three years. After all the stresses and noise of the war both felt they wanted to get completely away from it all and try something out of the ordinary.

‘Ended up going over the top rather, and taking on a croft in North Uist,’ said Celia.

‘We must have been raving,’ said Jim. ‘It was a ravishing spot we found though. Wildly beautiful when the weather was right: fantastic bird life and good trout and salmon fishing. But in the long run all we ended up doing was wasting away what little money we’d saved, and with the best will in the world there was a limit to the one pleasant way of getting through those interminable northern nights.’

‘We’d got no phone of course,’ said Celia, ‘And without being able to speak to me from time to time Mummy got so worried she wrote in the spring to say that she was coming up to satisfy herself that we were OK. Wouldn’t take no for an answer, but it turned out to be a complete farce. I went to meet her at the ferry hoping I could persuade her to stay at the hotel, but she wouldn’t have it.’