Cat O'Nine Tales: And Other Stories (3 page)

“I hope you
come back and work in
Cleethorpes
,” Chris blurted
out.

Chris and Sue
Haskins were married a year later in St. Aidan’s parish church.

After the
wedding, the bride and groom set off for Newhaven in a hired ear, intending to
spend their honeymoon on the south coast of Portugal. After only a few days on
the Algarve, they ran out of money. Chris drove them back to
Cleethorpes
, but vowed that they would return to
Albufeira
just as soon as he could afford it.

Chris and Sue
began married life by renting three rooms on the ground floor of a
semi-detached in Jubilee Road. The two milk monitors were unable to hide their
contentment from anyone who came into contact with them.

Chris joined
his father on the buses and became a conductor with the Green Line Municipal
Coach Company, while Sue was employed as a trainee with a local insurance
company.
A year later Sue gave birth to Tracey and left her
job to bring up their daughter.
This spurred Chris on to work even
harder and seek promotion. With the occasional prod from Sue, Chris began to
study for the company’s promotion exam. Four years later Chris was appointed an
inspector.

All boded well
in the Haskins household.

When Tracey
informed her father that she wanted a pony for Christmas, he had to point out
that they didn’t have a garden. Chris compromised, and on Tracey’s seventh
birthday presented her with a Labrador puppy, which they christened Corp. The
Haskins family wanted for nothing, and that might have been the end of this
tale if Chris hadn’t got the sack. It happened thus.

The Green Line
Municipal Coach Company was taken over by the Hull Carriage Bus Company With
the merger of the two firms, job losses became inevitable, and Chris was among
those offered a redundancy package. The only alternative the new management
came up with was the reinstatement of Chris as a conductor. Chris turned his
nose up at the offer. He felt confident of finding another job, and therefore
accepted the settlement.

It wasn’t long
before the redundancy money ran out, and despite Ted Heaths promise of a brave
new world, Chris quickly discovered that alternative employment wasn’t that
easy to find in
Cleethorpes
. Sue never once
complained and, now that Tracey was going to school, took on a part-time job at
Parsons, a local fish-and-chip shop. Not only did this bring in a weekly wage,
supplemented by the occasional tip, but it also allowed Chris to enjoy a large
plate of cod and chips
every lunchtime
.

Chris continued
to try and find a job.

He visited the
employment exchange every morning, except on Friday, when he stood in a long
line, waiting to collect his meager unemployment benefit. After twelve months
of failed interviews, and sorry-you-don’t-seem-to-have-
thenecessary
-qualifications,
Chris became anxious enough to seriously consider returning to his old job as a
bus conductor.

Sue assured him
that it wouldn’t be long before he was once again promoted to inspector.

Meanwhile, Sue
took on more responsibility at the fish-and-chip shop and a year later was made
assistant manager. Once again, this tale might have reached its natural
conclusion, except this time it was Sue who was given her notice.

She warned
Chris over a fish supper that Mr. and Mrs. Parsons were considering early
retirement and planning to put the shop up for sale.

“How much are
they expecting it to fetch?”

“I heard Mr.
Parsons mention the figure of five thousand pounds.”

“Then let’s
hope the new owners know a good thing when they see it,” said Chris, forking
another chip.

“The new owners
are far more likely to come with their own staff. Don’t forget what happened to
you when the bus company was taken over.”

Chris thought
about it.

At eight thirty
the following morning, Sue left the house to take Tracey to school, before
going on to work. Once the two of them had departed, Chris and Corp set out for
their morning constitutional. The dog was puzzled when his master didn’t head
for the beach, where he could enjoy his usual frolic in the waves, but instead
marched off in the opposite direction, toward the center of the town. Corp
loyally bounded after him, and ended up being tied to a railing outside the Midland
Bank in the High Street.

The manager of
the bank could not hide his surprise when Mr. Haskins requested an interview to
discuss a business venture. He quickly checked Mr. and Mrs. Haskins’ joint bank
account, to find that they were seventeen pounds and twelve shillings in
credit. He was pleased to note that they had never run up an overdraft, despite
Mr. Haskins being out of work for over a year.

The manager
listened sympathetically to his client’s proposal, but sadly shook his head
even before Chris had come to the end of his well-rehearsed presentation.

“The bank
couldn’t consider such a risk,” the manager explained, “at least not while you
have so little security to offer as collateral. You don’t even own your own
home,” the banker pointed out.

Chris thanked
him, shook him by the hand and left undaunted.

He crossed the
High Street, tied Corp to another railing and entered Martins Bank. Chris had
to wait for quite some time before the manager was able to see him. He was
greeted with the same response, but at least on this occasion the manager
recommended that Chris should approach Britannia Finance, who, he explained,
were a new company specializing in start-up loans for small businesses. Chris
thanked him, left the bank, untied Corp and jogged back to Jubilee Road,
arriving only moments before Sue returned home with his lunch: cod and chips.

After lunch,
Chris left the house and headed for the nearest phone box. He put four pennies
in the box and pressed button A. The conversation lasted for less than a
minute. He then returned home, but didn’t tell Sue who he had an appointment
with the following day.

The next day
Chris waited for Sue to take Tracey off to school before he slipped back
upstairs to their bedroom.

He took off his
jeans and sweater, and replaced them with the suit he’d worn at his wedding, a
cream shirt he only put on for church on Sundays, and a tie his mother-in-law
had given him for Christmas, which he thought he’d never wear.

He then shone
his shoes until even his old drill sergeant would have agreed that they passed
muster. He checked himself in the mirror, hoping he looked like the potential
manager of a new business venture. He left the dog in the back garden, and
headed into town.

Chris was
fifteen minutes early for his meeting with a Mr.
Tremaine
,
the loans manager with Britannia Finance Company. He was asked to take a seat
in the waiting room. Chris picked up a copy of the
Financial Times
for the first time in his life. He couldn’t find
the sports pages. Fifteen minutes later a secretary ushered him through to Mr.
Tremaine’s
office.

The loans
executive listened with sympathy to Chris’s ambitious proposal, and then
inquired, just as the two bank managers had, “What security do you have to
offer?”

“Nothing,”
replied Chris without guile, “other than the fact that my wife and I will work
all the hours we’re awake, and she already knows the business backward.” Chris
waited to hear the many reasons why Britannia couldn’t consider his request.

Instead Mr.
Tremaine
asked, “As your wife would constitute half of our
investment, what does she think about this whole enterprise?”

“I haven’t even
discussed it with her vet,” Chris blurted out.

‘Then I suggest
you do so,” said Mr.
Tremaine
, “and fairly quickly,
because before we would consider investing in Mr. and Mrs. Haskins, we will
need to meet Mrs. Haskins in order to find out if she’s half as good as you
claim.”

Chris broke the
news to his wife over supper that evening. Sue was speechless.

A problem Chris
had not come up against all that often in the past.

Once Mr.
Tremaine
had met Mrs. Haskins, it was only a matter of
filling in countless forms before Britannia Finance advanced them a loan of
£5,000. A month later Mr. and Mrs. Haskins moved from their three rooms in
Jubilee Road to a fish-and-chip shop on Beach Street.

Chris and Sue spent their first
Sunday scraping the name
PARSONS
off
the front of the shop, and painting in
HASKINS:
under new management.
Sue quickly set about teaching Chris how to prepare
the right ingredients to make the finest batter. If it was that easy, she kept
reminding him, there wouldn’t be a queue outside one
chippy
while a rival a few yards up the road remained empty. It was some weeks before
Chris could guarantee his chips were always crisp and not hard or, worse,
soggy. While he became the front-of-house manager, wrapping up the fish and
dispensing the salt and vinegar, Sue took her place behind the till and
collected the takings. In the evening, Sue always brought the books up to date,
but she didn’t go upstairs to join Chris in their little self-contained flat
until the shop was spotless and you could see your face in the counter-top.

Sue was always
the last to finish, but then Chris was the first to rise in the morning. He
would be up by four o’clock, pull on an old tracksuit and head off for the
docks with Corp. He returned a couple of hours later, having selected the
finest cod, hake, skate and plaice, moments after the trawlers had docked with
their morning catch.

Although
Cleethorpes
has several fish-and-chip shops, it was not
long before a queue began to form outside Haskins, sometimes even before Sue
had turned the closed sign round to allow the first customer to enter the shop.
The queue never slackened between the hours of eleven a.m. and three p.m., or
from five to nine in the evening, when the sign would finally be turned back
round–but not until the last customer had been served.

At the end of
their first year the Haskins declared a profit of just over £900. As the queues
lengthened, the debt to Britannia Finance diminished, so they were able to
return the loan in full, with interest, eight months before the five-year
agreement ended.

During the next
decade, the Haskins’ reputation grew on land, as well as sea, which resulted in
Chris being invited to join the
Cleethorpes
Rotary
Club, and Sue becoming deputy chairman of the Mothers’ Union.

On their
twentieth wedding anniversary Sue and Chris returned to Portugal for a second
honeymoon. They stayed in a four-star hotel for a fortnight and this time they
didn’t have to come home early. Mr. and Mrs. Haskins returned to
Albufeira
every summer for the next ten years.
Creatures of habit, the Haskins.

Tracey left
Cleethorpes
Grammar School to attend Bristol University,
where she studied business management.

The only
sadness in the Haskins’ life was when Corp died. But then he was fourteen years
old.

Chris was
enjoying a drink with some fellow Rotarians when Dave
Quenton
,
the manager of the town’s most prestigious post office, told him that he was
moving to the Lake District and planning to sell his interest in the business.

This time Chris
did discuss his latest proposal with his wife. Sue was once again taken by
surprise and, when she recovered, needed several questions answered before she
agreed to pay a return visit to Britannia Finance.

“How much do
you have on deposit with the Midland Bank?” asked Mr.
Tremaine
,
recently promoted to loans manager.

Sue checked her
ledger. “Thirty-seven thousand, four hundred and eight pounds,” she replied.