A Pocketful of Holes and Dreams (20 page)

One day, I opened the door to find two policemen standing there. One looked me up and down before speaking. ‘Morning, young man. Is your father at home?’

‘No he isn’t,’ I replied. ‘How can I help?’

There was a moment’s silence. ‘We need to speak to Mr Pearce.’

‘Yes, that’s me,’ I informed them.

‘I don’t think you understand, young man. We need to speak to Mr Pearce, the owner of the house.’

‘That’s me,’ I said with pride. After a short while, I finally managed to convince them that I was indeed Mr Pearce, whereupon they explained that they had come out because the alarm was going off in the shop.

They weren’t the only ones who found it hard to believe that such a young family could own such a grand house. It took us a year to put our stamp on it and make it really feel like our home. In the middle of all this, Gina announced some more good news – she was expecting our second child. The pressure was now even greater than before to make a success of our business.

19. By the Seat of My Leather Pants

It was the early part of December 1982, and I was on my regular once-a-week journey from Liverpool to London with my part-time driver, George, at the wheel. I was looking for good-quality stock for the Girls Talk sale, which always started the day after Boxing Day. It had to be something different that would make us stand out from the rest of the competition. By five o’clock that day, I must have visited between twenty and thirty factories all over London, and I had managed to fill three-quarters of the van with pretty good deals. By now, we would normally be heading back for Liverpool, but something was bothering me: there was something missing, and I felt we could do better.

Then it hit me. I gave George instructions to drive us across London to Brick Lane, near Spitalfields Market in the East End, where I’d bought leather trousers before. Brick Lane was not for the faint-hearted; it was a maze of dingy streets and poorly lit, narrow alleyways leading off the main thoroughfare. It was a bit like how you imagined a casbah to be, with doors in the narrow streets leading to small factories. The dark alleyways outside were always full of shifty, slightly menacing-looking characters.

We arrived as it was getting dark, and I soon found myself face to face with Rashid, the owner of the leather factory I’d come to visit. He hadn’t changed too much, and apparently neither had I, as there was a clear look of recognition on his face. ‘Mr Jeff, greetings,’ he said, gesturing towards his office. ‘Please come, sit and have a tea.’ That’s how we’d always started off our business negotiations.

After we’d drunk our tea, he asked me what I was looking for. ‘Girl’s leather pants,’ I replied, ‘at a very cheap price. I need them for my sale.’ For regular stock, I normally paid £35 per pair and then sold them for £70. But I now wanted to pay no more than £17 per pair, to sell at £35 in the sale.

‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘I would go out of business, it would ruin me. Mr Jeff, the raw leather costs me that much! Are you mad?’ He was good.

We continued in this vein for the next twenty minutes, me bartering for the best deal but making no real progress. So I decided to use my ace card. Putting my hand into the inside pocket of my overcoat, I pulled out £1,000 in used £20 notes bundled together with an elastic band. ‘Rashid,’ I said, pointing to the money, ‘it’s getting late, and I want to finish our business. I am quite serious about the leather pants, so if you want any of that money, show me some cheap stock.’

This had never failed to work in the past. There was no way he was going to let me go back to Liverpool with all those lovely pound notes. Grabbing the money off the table, he raised his tunic and stuffed it into a money belt around his waist.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘Come with me, Mr Jeff.’ I couldn’t stop smiling as I followed him upstairs. The cash-on-the-table trick had worked again!

After climbing three flights of narrow stairs, Rashid led me into a small, dark room. In the corner was a pile of leather pants in all colours and sizes, literally just thrown one on top of the other. Pointing towards them, he said, ‘You can have these for £20 a pair. Good-quality leather, nothing wrong with them.’ I started to examine them carefully for serious faults such as rips and holes. Years in this game had given me an ‘experienced eye’ and I was not easily fooled. But this time around, the only problem I could find was that all the side zips were broken. After checking them all, I counted seventy-two pairs, a real treasure!

Throughout my inspection, Rashid had stood quietly to one side, his eyes never once leaving me.‘You must be joking,’ I said. ‘£20 a pair when they’re all faulty? They can’t be worth more than a fiver in this condition!’ I had found that starting at the lowest price was often the best way to plant doubt in the seller’s mind and would help me get a price I wanted. ‘The colours are horrible,’ I continued, ‘and the sizes …’ I paused for effect. ‘They are all big sizes!’

‘There’s nothing wrong with them,’ countered Rashid, a note of anxiety in his voice.

‘Nah, nothing good here,’ I said, feigning disinterest.

‘They look good to me.’ Once again, Rashid sounded hesitant. ‘£15 a pair then,’ he offered.

Putting on a poker face, I looked him straight in the eye. ‘No, I’m not interested, and to be honest, I can’t think of anyone else who’d be daft enough to buy seventy-two pairs of faulty trousers!’ Putting my hand out towards him, I continued, ‘I’m sorry, but if you could hand me my money back, I’m going to head off now. I have a long drive ahead of me.’

Rashid lowered his head to one side as if in deep thought. ‘Make me an offer,’ he said.

‘£10 a pair,’ I replied, ‘that is my last and final offer. £10, take it or leave it.’

Poor Rashid – his face looked as if he had just received some tragic news. I started to make my way downstairs, still pretending not to be interested, when I was stopped by a shout: ‘OK, Mr Jeff, all right, it’s a deal.’ He stood at the top of the stairs, a defeated man.

Within twenty minutes, my van was loaded and George and I were setting off for Liverpool. As we turned the corner, I started to laugh. ‘What’s so funny?’ George asked.

‘My mother taught me well,’ I replied.

We finally got home in the early hours of the morning. Gina, who was now six months pregnant, had not been able to sleep and got out of bed as soon as she heard the van pulling up. Opening the door, I was greeted by a rather tired and slightly annoyed wife. ‘Where have you been?’ she demanded. ‘Do you realize how late it is? I’ve been worried sick, thinking something might have happened to you!’

‘I’ll tell you all about it over a brew,’ I said, and as we sat there sipping a hot cup of tea, I told her about the deal – and about what I’d decided to do with the leather trousers.

On the journey home, I’d been thinking, as usual, of ideas that would make us stand out from all the other shops in town. ‘I’ve had an idea,’ I told Gina now. ‘Rather than sell these leather trousers at £35 a pair, making a £25 profit, I want to sell them for £1 a pair.’ I paused, waiting for the explosion that I knew was coming.

‘You can’t be serious,’ Gina replied, looking at me as if I’d lost my mind. ‘Nobody sells leather trousers for £1 a pair. Think how much money we could make if we sold them for £35 each – about two and a half thousand pounds! And they would still be a fantastic bargain; half the normal price. You just can’t be serious.’

‘Just think of the publicity,’ I argued. ‘Selling leather trousers for £1 a pair would make us the talk of the town. It’d never be forgotten.’

I could see it was going to take a while to bring Gina round to my way of thinking. In the meantime, I found a local man to replace all the broken zips. He charged £1 per pair. I couldn’t help smiling at the irony of it – he was charging the same price for a zip as I planned to sell the trousers for!

It took a few days, but I eventually managed to get Gina to agree that the loss more than justified the potential publicity. We knew it was a gamble, so to try and minimize the risk, I placed an advert in the
Liverpool Echo
, which appeared on 24 December, wishing all the Girls Talk customers a merry Christmas and thanking them for their support over the past year. And of course the advert was also publicity for our sale on 27 December. It stated that, in addition to all the fabulous half-price bargains that would be on offer, we were also going to be selling leather pants, reduced from £70 to £1. If anything was going to grab their attention, it was going to be that!

On Christmas Eve, we started reducing all the old stock and introducing the new stock brought in for the sale. We had eight staff working for us by now, all lovely young girls, and naturally enough, they each wanted a pair of the leather pants. I explained to them, however, that I would rather wait and see what happened on the first day of the sale; they agreed that this was fair. In the afternoon, with everything ready for the after-Christmas sale, I told the girls to go home and wished them all a Happy Christmas, and started closing the shop down for the next two days.

Overcoat on, shop alarm set, I locked the front doors and was just about to pull down the steel shutters when I noticed a young woman sitting on the ground with a blanket around her shoulders. I asked her if she was all right, wondering what she was doing there.

‘I’ll be all right if you’ve got a black pair of size ten, leather pants for just £1!’ she said.

I looked at her, still not sure what was going on. ‘Yes, we will have leather pants for £1 in the sale, and I’m sure there’s at least one pair of size tens!

‘That’s good,’ she said, pulling the blanket further up around her shoulders and huddling down into the blanket. This was frustrating. I wanted to get into my car and home, and yet I was standing here having a conversation with some strange young girl who was sitting outside my shop in the middle of winter with a blanket wrapped around her.

‘How did you find out about the pants?’ I asked, wondering if the
Liverpool Echo
had made a mistake and put the wrong date in the advert.

‘
The Echo
,’ she replied.

‘Well, when did it say the sale was starting?’

‘The day after Boxing Day,’ she answered.

I couldn’t help myself, this was totally weird. ‘Well, then why are you here, sitting outside the shop with a couple of days to go before the sale starts?’

‘I want to make sure that I get a pair of leather pants for just £1,’ she said.

By now it was dark, cold and starting to snow. It was also Christmas Eve, a time when people are usually at home with their families, getting ready to enjoy Christmas.

‘You can’t be serious,’ I said. I was getting irritated. She was just not listening. Injecting a more forceful tone into my voice, I told her, ‘I have got seventy-two pairs of leather pants. Go home now and then come back at five o’clock on the morning of the sale. That’s all you need to do!’ She didn’t move. ‘You must be mad,’ I finished. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, other than goodbye, and headed off to the car park.

When I drove past the shop ten minutes later, this solitary figure was still sitting there. She looked so sad, alone on a cold, dark night, with wet snow all around her. In the car, I couldn’t stop thinking about her, comparing the situation with my own.

I knew Gina and Katie would be waiting for me. It was so wonderful coming home any day of the year. But at Christmas it was even more magical. As I opened the front door, Gina welcomed me, with Katie in her arms, and gave me a hug and a kiss. Katie was just over two years old, a great age for climbing all over me and calling out, ‘Daddy.’

Putting Katie on my back for a piggyback, Gina and I headed for the kitchen, while I told her about the girl who had set up camp outside our shop. I don’t think she really believed me, as she laughed and looked out the window, noticing that the snow was starting to stick. ‘I’m sure she’ll have gone home by now,’ she said. ‘Come on, dinner’s ready. And Jeff? Will you stop talking about work!’

We had a lovely dinner, settling down in front of the fire and watching television afterwards. But hours later, I found myself still thinking about the girl outside the shop. Was she still there? Was she all right? So once Katie was tucked up in bed, I told Gina that I was going back to the shop.

‘I feel like Ebenezer Scrooge,’ I said. ‘Here we are, all nice and cosy, and she could still be out there in the freezing cold. If she is, I’m going to promise her a pair of leather pants on the day of the sale, and then send her back home. The only way I’m going to be able to enjoy Christmas with my family is if I know she’s OK.’ I gave Gina a kiss, and set off, promising that I wouldn’t be much longer than an hour.

The weather outside was bitter, the snow now turning to sleet. As I turned the corner and got closer to the shop, I could see boxes lined up on the ground outside. Pulling up alongside the pavement, I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were now twelve people, all sitting inside cardboard boxes to try to keep warm.

As I stepped out of the car, the girl who had been there earlier shouted out, ‘That’s him! That’s the owner of the shop. The man I was telling you about.’

Suddenly, I found myself being bombarded with questions: Did I have a size fourteen in brown? Had I a size twelve in black? Were they really £1? The noise and the commotion were starting to worry me. The last thing I needed was the police to turn up, thinking there was trouble. Holding my hands up, I raised my voice so as to be heard. ‘Calm down, everyone. I’ve got seventy-two pairs of pants in all different colours and sizes. You don’t have to stay here. Come back on the day of the sale. It’s not starting for three days!’ I pleaded and pleaded with them to go home. But no, they were determined to stay put! It seemed there was nothing I could do.

Getting cold myself now, I decided to get back into the car. Looking at them all huddled together in now-wet boxes, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for them, at the same time thinking that they had to be mad to stay out all night in the freezing cold. With these thoughts in my mind, I started the car and headed back out of town. Driving home, I spotted a fish and chip shop near the city’s Adelphi Hotel, so I went in and ordered twelve portions of fish and chips and twelve cans of Coke and drove back to give them to the people in the queue, asking each one to go home as I did. Still, no one moved.