The Life of Lee (30 page)

Behind the bar, aged eighteen, at the Bell pub, in Scarborough.

We went on the assumption that, as it was summer season in a seaside town, she would easily pick up a job. Heather is a very clever woman and she’d had a job as a secretary in London, but had taken leave to sort things out at home.

For the life of me, to this day I have never fathomed why a beautiful, perfectly sane woman like Heather took a chance with me. But, like she always says to me, she fell in love with me on that day we landed in each other’s arms at the fairground. I am her fella and will be till the day we die.

To us, Scarborough was the best place on the planet. I worked hard at the pub, stocking up, lifting, carrying, cleaning and serving drinks to mostly Scots, Geordies and Mackems, a cross section of people who made the atmosphere in the pub electric. They’d arrive by the coachload, packing the town throughout the summer on day trips. They transformed Scarborough into a bustling, loud, exciting place with every pub, café and amusement arcade jammed full of families and groups of men and women hell-bent on having a good time.

Heather had managed to find a job working at the John Bull Rock Shop around the corner from the pub. To top it all, the amazing landlady who ran the place had a small room free above the shop, and Heather I rented it from her. Life, we thought, just could not get any better than this. It wasn’t much, but we were together and we were able to eat and we had a roof over our heads. Scott at the pub was also very nice, giving me overtime to make my money up.

The only drawback was that the rock shop would close around eight o’clock, when I’d just be starting my evening shift, so we never really saw a lot of each other. But we did have one day off a week and would always spend it getting the train up the coast to Whitby or down the coast to Bridlington for the day. They were both beautiful Victorian seaside towns. Sometimes we’d even make the slightly longer journey inland over to the ancient town of York. That became a place we would visit time and time again. It turned into our ‘just between us’ town. Our days out always felt so special because we knew we only had the one day together.

I’d decided to ask Heather if she would like to get engaged. I loved her from her head to her toes – not her feet, mind you, just the toes – and couldn’t ever see myself with anyone else. I hoped against hope she felt the same, so I set about putting a small amount to one side each week in order to afford a ring. I knew it would be difficult as Heather did all our finances and if there was even one penny missing she would spot it quicker than a tightwad. It would be hard as we had to pay the rent and buy food each week. Plus, the whole reason for going to
Scarborough in the first place was so that I could save enough money to get me through the last year of college and show my parents I was capable of something.

I’d been eyeing up a beautiful ring in a jeweller’s window just around the corner from the rock shop. I’d stand for ages on my way to work imagining myself handing it to Heather. I’d picture her wearing it with a tear in her eye, not because it was too tight or because she’d had a terrible reaction to the metal that made her hand swell up to the size of Pat Jennings’s, but because she loved it.

If I’m honest, it looked the most substantial ring in the window for its price. All the others looked cheap, but this one appeared expensive. If I could get enough money together, that would be the ring I would get for Heather – a difficult task as it was a lot of money to us at the time, £13.99. It may not sound a lot now, but to us then it was a fortune. To me it looked like something Richard Burton might give to Elizabeth Taylor. Liz would throw it directly in the bin, but he still might give it to her.

After weeks of painstaking, covert money-hiding operations to keep it a secret from Heather, I managed to siphon off enough to buy the ring. So while I knew she was busy at the rock shop, I made a trip to the jeweller’s. Once there, I did have second thoughts; I felt guilty as the money I was about to blow would in fact have come in very handy, but there you go. There was no stopping me now.

Back then, the best-known jewellery chain was probably Ratners. The Scarborough branch of Ratners was always busy, packed full of customers all gagging for its range of affordable-to-the-masses bling. And, today, I
was one of them. I had £13.99 exactly burning a large hole in my bar-staff-issue trousers.

I purchased the ring. My plan was to present it to her on our day off in York. We caught the train as usual. The whole journey was a torment for me; I found it so difficult to restrain my anxiety about what might happen when I handed her the ring. She might say no, I thought. My nerves will show through and surely any moment now Heather will realize there’s something wrong and confront me. I won’t be able to hold back. I’m a terrible liar.

We arrived to a beautiful summer’s day, and the streets of York were packed with day trippers and tourists. We did our usual thing of strolling around the town, chatting and fantasizing about what we might do if one day we ever had the chance to walk into one of the many lovely old-fashioned shops that sold all kinds of luxurious food and ornaments, and actually buy something. Then we made our way through the many lanes and dreamed about having our own house and what it might look like. Finally, we ended up at a pub, shared a lunch and treated ourselves to a pint of John Smith’s bitter and a glass of wine.

All I needed to do now was manipulate it so as to get Heather into York Minster, the massive Gothic cathedral that dominates the town. Persuading her that there was something inside that she might find interesting was difficult as Heather has never been interested in history, but I managed it.

I knew about the great stained-glass window at one end of the Minster, having done a project about it at art college, but I never imagined it would be as amazing and
beautiful as it was. We sat quietly on a stone bench beneath the massive window that depicts the journey through life until death. As Heather looked up in awe, I tried my best to explain the window’s incredible illustrations. Then I did a little scoot around with my eyes and noticed the tourists had thinned out. At last, we were alone – this was my chance. I fumbled about and produced the ring. Shaking, I opened the small fake-suede box and asked Heather to be my wife.

I wasn’t fully prepared for her reaction. She just seemed to stare at me for a long time. Then tears began forming in her huge eyes and running slowly down her blushing rosy cheeks. Interestingly, she was not actually saying much, apart from the odd murmur. She would go to say something, then stop, pause and wave her hand in the air like she’d just put a hot potato in her mouth.

I looked on with keen anticipation, waiting for some sort of answer, even a sign that things were going well. But it was a bit like the process of watching a fax machine trying to receive a message that had got stuck in the system. She suddenly pointed up at the window and let out a little squeak, pulling a face of terror. Then she snapped her hand over her mouth to stop the noise, frantically began shaking her head and burst into tears again, fanning her face in an attempt to cool herself down. I remember thinking, ‘Blimey, hot, cold, then loads of moisture. It’s like sharing a seat with a Russell Hobbs kettle.’

But then she threw her arms around me and began crying into my shoulder. So I wrapped my arms around her, held her tight and spoke quietly into her ear.

‘I’ll take that as a yes then, shall I?’

Thinking about it afterwards, perhaps I shouldn’t have said that, because that’s when the floodgates really opened and I got the full Niagara Falls. It’s just an expression of emotion, you might say, and I’d agree. But this was accompanied by a lot of quite loud and – to anyone who didn’t know what was going on – very disturbing wailing and sobbing noises.

I’m sure you’re aware of the acoustic ability of the inside of a large church to amplify even a light whisper into a ZZ Top farewell concert with extra speakers. That’s fine and hunky-dory if you have your face buried in someone’s shoulder and out the way, as Heather did. But it’s not so brilliant if, like me, you have your face on full show. The place was frigging teeming with tourists who were giving me some very accusing looks. They must have thought that I’d just given Heather some terrible news.

‘You bastard,’ ‘Son of a …’, ‘Nice one, pal.’ Those were just a few of the sarcastic remarks from some of the passing visitors I had to put up with. In a cathedral, no less!

That evening we huddled together on the couch in the tiny living room of the flat before I had to drag myself away to do the evening shift at the pub. The trip to York and the presentation of the ring had added something a little extra to our relationship. Every time I looked at Heather, she would already be staring back at me, smiling and fluttering her eyelashes, and in turn I would be proudly smiling back with a grin that a Cheshire Cat would be jealous of. We were nuts for each other.

Me and Heather after getting engaged. We were the happiest people on the planet – although she’s smiling, you can’t see the gleaming Ratner’s ring in the picture!

Heather appeared very proud of her ring. Later, I couldn’t help noticing that whenever she was in the company of other people, she would make sure the hand with the ring on was always visible, so as to invite enquiries about the new shiny object on her finger. Then, as soon as anyone took the bait and asked, ‘Oh, what’s that on your finger, Heather?’ she’d immediately dismiss it as if she had no idea what they could possibly be referring to.

‘Sorry? Where? What do you mean? What ring?’ she’d say with surprise, looking everywhere around the room but the direction of her hand. At the same time, she made sure she kept the hand with the ring in full view of the onlooker.

‘I didn’t mention anything about a ring,’ they would protest.

‘Oh really, I could have sworn you said something about a ring,’ Heather would answer.

Whenever she was working in the rock shop, for example, she’d always volunteer to reach up and get something off the shelves for someone. ‘Half a pound of bonbons, please.’

‘Let me get those for you.’ Up went the hand with the ring on it.

‘What’s that you’re wearing?’

‘Sorry? What? Ring? Oh! That old thing! Bonbons, you say?’

Some years later, we were watching the TV news when the newsreader started to talk about Ratners, the high-street jeweller’s. I nudged Heather in recognition.

‘Remember? That’s us, that is.’

‘Yeah.’ Heather stared proudly down at her ring. But then the expression on both our faces began to change, as the newsman went on with the story. We were dumbfounded to hear that Gerald Ratner, the head of Ratners, had given some speech in which he joked to the crowd that the company sold crap and that he couldn’t believe people actually bought it. The news footage showed that the whole room fell about in fits of laughter, as people cheered and whooped. We looked at each other, stunned, then slowly down at the ring on Heather’s finger.

By my reckoning, that bloke from Ratners may have joked that he sold crap, but so what? It gave lots of people like us with not much money a chance to buy a little bit of the dream. In my opinion, people shouldn’t have slagged him off. He was a great bloke – without him, perhaps millions could never have afforded the chance to fulfil their desires.

Heather still wears that ring to this day. It may have only cost £13.99, but to us it’s completely priceless.

My and Heather’s wedding day – 22 September 1984. Have you noticed the bouquet covering the ring!

27. The Lady is a Vamp

A couple of months later, we had settled into life in Scarborough. Heather worked days in the rock shop, while I did the lunchtime sessions at the pub for Scott, did a bit of extra work in the cellars or the back yard, then skipped off back to our flat we had now made really cosy. I always made sure I was just in time to meet Heather closing up the shop. We would then sit and have something to eat together before I’d give her a big romantic kiss and scoot off to do the evening shift back at the pub. Then there was the odd half-hour here or there during the day when we could sneak off and grab a cup of tea together in one of the many cafés that stretched along the seafront next to the amusement arcades.