The Squashed Man Who Married a Dragon (6 page)

When she's not administering pain and suffering she's being helpful. This is a cross between the Inquisition and a display of sheer brilliance, but to be fair she does many times find the thing I've been looking for, for at least days if not longer. I have lost my big screwdriver, the one with the yellow handle, can't find it anywhere, looked high and low; haven't lent it to anyone – broken it – or thrown it away. I have tried calling to it in a gentle and coaxing way – tried creeping silently up to the tool box and quickly opening the lid hoping to catch it asleep – nothing works.

‘What have you lost' she says in the patronising, motherly way some women adopt. I explain – ‘Where did you have it last?' What a dumb-arsed question is that? If I knew I'd go there wouldn't I?

She means well but it's now the inquisition method, ‘What…. . were…you…doing…last…time…you……used…. it?' she says as though talking to some half baked, sub normal dumbo, who has just climbed out of the compost heap. ‘I…don't…. know'…so it goes. It's best not to upset her or she won't work the miracle. Off she goes, like a hunting dog to retrieve a shot down game bird.

Before I can find my newspaper or even sit down, she's back. ‘What's this?' she says waving in triumph my big yellow handled screwdriver. ‘Where was it?' ‘On the windowsill where you left it. ' This is par for the course in our lives. She ‘bless the great one' finds everything, the down side is the scorn. ‘You don't look properly' but I do – I go back to the cupboard or toolbox three or four times, sometimes even moving things around to aid the search – but when she gloatingly finds it – there it was after all.

Once, just once it happened, when it was my turn to shine, and what a fabulous and mind blowing moment it was. Her engagement ring had shed it's one and only stone. I could understand the emotional and tender love that women have for their diamond engagement ring. This was a seismic catastrophic event – SHE reduced to the size and level of ordinary people. She was accepting defeat. She would never find such a small thing, worse than a needle lost in a field of thistles. My hour had come. I re-traced her known steps throughout the day, bent over double and on all fours. I looked as I'd never looked before. In the end sheer brain power took me to the utility room – which has a concrete floor, plenty of clutter, a bit of a cold and uncomfortable room for hours of diligent searching.

Then there on the floor it was, on its own, tiny, defenceless on the edge of a black hole…never to be seen again. I marched to her in triumph, chest swelling, head held high, claiming my moment. For a brief while I was nearly acknowledged. Almost thanked!

It's never happened since and probably never will again – but that feeling of being a human and of value was……. beyond measure!

The slower, less frantic country living produces some great characters and sometimes with amusing ways of tackling life. The day after we had a big party, we had masses of rubbish, dozens of packing boxes, party rubbish, any amount. We were expecting the refuse collectors, then the ‘dustbin men'; a good relationship with these guys helps life flow more easily. So when our collection wagon arrived, not long after breakfast; the crew got out, and to meet them were dimple pint glasses of freshly poured beer, lined up on the front wall. A fine greeting and much appreciated.

Our first postman, another friendly character, had some misgivings about our garden gate, something was not quite right in his eyes, had I failed to fix something or what I can't remember, but he turned up one day with his own tool box and fixed it, as well as keeping us informed of all the fruity gossip.

We made a mistake by asking him if he knew a good local plumber. Well, he says, before he became a postman he was in fact a plumber, “What's the problem?” The downstairs toilet is immediately below the family bathroom, somewhere between the ceiling and the floorboards is a small leak. ‘No problem at all', he will do it on Saturday. Bless the man. It won't take long which is good to know as we have guests coming for a dinner party.

Around lunchtime our man appears, work is now in progress, and all should be finished long before our guests are due. Suddenly a lot of noise……, cries of pain…. . and some very attractive oaths with colourful words ring out. Our helpful and friendly ‘postman/plumber' has come through the floor/ceiling, one leg and boot making a new and interesting feature in the downstairs toilet, pain and suffering are making extraction a difficult and slow business

Hail Betty – ‘Betty the Milk' – now here was the most incredible character, in her creaking van, bump started, tied together with bailer twine, sacks, straw and all sorts of God knows what inside, silently coasting down the hill to grind to a halt at our front gate. Betty would heave her not inconsiderable figure out. Dressed in very thick country clothes, she would bustle her way round to the back of the van for the milk bottles. Constantly talking, repeating everything twice and asking questions, that only she could answer. She was unique and had a generous nature. ‘Will it rain?' and ‘Do you think it will rain?' ‘I don't know, I don't know'. She was in every way one of life's happy oddities.

A few seasons later, the intervals between our milk bills got longer and longer. Vicki asked for the milk bill, Betty was never without an excuse ‘I'll do it after the hay's in' or ‘I will do it, I will do it, I must do it'. ‘I will, I will'. After a few months she kept saying ‘You'll not run away' so my wise girl put the money aside in a Building Society account. Vicki was not going to be caught without having the money, plus she kept a detailed record of all milk bought. From time to time we really pushed for the milk bill which was mounting up in a big way. Summer became winter, spring back to summer, time rolled on, whenever we mentioned payment it was pushed aside. Vicki even told Betty one day that the money mounting up in the Skipton would soon cover the weekly cost out of interest alone, not quite true, but Betty just laughed it off.

One day Betty called all of a fluster, saying ‘Accountant feller says I've got to be paid' Total it up and give us the bill – it still took another week before it came — 1977 – 1983 £1,053. 06. The next one was 1988 – 1992 £1,319. 43. For a family of four these bills were worth keeping so I framed them together with a photo of Betty, sadly she's no longer with us.

From mole catchers to emptying the septic tank with tractor and spreader, to our farm neighbour, whose most modern equipment was the cattle grid, life was good. We enjoyed hay time – the old fashioned cutting, turning, drying and bailing, not the new great big black plastic giant drums. We are lucky to have memories of the last lingering farming ways, old and slower country style. The largest dairy farmer round us nowadays has masses of cows, they are never seen nor do they see the outside world.

I could not and would not say a word against my mother in law, but neither could I ever remember having an inferiority complex before. In some tenuous and abstruse way the two factors are bound together, inseparable and inter-locked for life, so there we are!

I am afraid I failed the mother-in-law test very early on, not really surprising when you realise what a family of achievers her family have turned out to be. Like any mother she was justifiably proud of her sons and daughters. So when she did her grand tours, staying with each and every family in turn, she would naturally recount the achievements and highlights of one home to the next. In my case I think her visit was more to check on whether I was keeping her daughter to the desired standard, and to encourage me to greater efforts.

Malcolm, her eldest son, for example, was now on ‘the board', chief over many companies, hundreds of people and was fully in charge of the Southern Hemisphere. A man of unquestioned abilities, had he chosen politics he would by now have been a senior statesman. Youngest son, Chris, was head-hunted and fought over by IBM & Microsoft, his salary it was estimated was in telephone numbers and on expenses trips to Brazil, etc. Even the other sons-in-law, Richard and Bumper, were similarly praised. Superb new executive houses in expensive areas of Oxford and Scotland. They had holidays in exotic places, shopping in London and taking in the shows, lives bathed in sunshine.

I could only grovel and promise to try and do better in future. I had imagined that she might make up little white lies about me, like owning great tracts of Lancashire moors and riding out to hounds with the Salford Hunt, but no.

So I thought up and staged a face saving plan. The moment she approached the front door, the first thing she heard was the Hoover. I was always, always hoovering the very moment she arrived. Over fifteen years or so, it must have made some impression on her. I can imagine as she toured the country, she could report something good about Vicki's husband. Spotlessly clean carpets – tries but……. not up to scratch really.

It wasn't as though we were desperate to fill up long idle hours, when we were lying around twiddling our thumbs. Nor was it a driving competitive urge to outdo each other in a sporting way, it was more a together thing really when we just decided to dedicate ourselves to golf. This was perhaps an unfortunate decision, although pleasant enough at first. We learned to play at a very pretty nine hole course out in the wilds near to home. We might have borrowed a teach-yourself golf book, but lessons were never considered. Everyone plays golf!

Of course, I expected to be good at it, certainly on a par with anyone else, for some reason and I still don't know why I didn't reach my full potential.

We used to take sandwiches and a flask of coffee, and went round twice sometimes, but only on dry sunny days. Although, the ‘bountiful one' often and very generously said ‘go on, have another shot' I couldn't produce the great golf that was in me. My father-in-law used to quote ‘Drive for show, putt for dough' in encouraging tones, it didn't help. At last after a year or two of humbling myself there followed a most unbelievable poor iron shot and hitting the ‘dearest one' hard on the hip, not entirely my fault – she had walked on ahead slightly, in the confident belief that I would be driving up the fairway.

My place at St. Andrews vanished altogether. The dream of fame and fortune – Ryder Cup team glories evaporated, and on the next hole, I buried my driver, and an iron, and maybe a few more clubs into the top of a very handy low stone wall. This resolute and positive action probably saved me from heart attacks and who knows what else.

Squash was the next sport to hold our attention for a while. There wasn't a woman in England who couldn't beat me. Men, I can lose to with grace and not too much pain. The odd off-day or pulled muscle are acceptable reasons to lose. Richard, my brother-in-law and I believe a very good squash player, told me in confidence that if he ever thought he could lose to a woman opponent, ever – he would break his own arm before the game ended.

Well, that's all very well, but what am I to do? Until one day I found a friend of ours who admitted on oath, that he had never ever played squash, didn't know the rules or anything. This was my chance to shine. So one brave night I booked a court and feeling reasonably confident showed Peter the rudiments and some of the rules.

For the first two games, I knew what it felt like to be a winner, king of the court, champion material and then to show his gratitude for my coaching he beat me in the third game. Somehow quite without realising it, the wall caught my racquet, it smashed to smithereens. Now I am no longer a player, team or otherwise. I run on my own. There in solitary state, rain, hail, sleet or snow out and over the fell I go.

Over the sporting years with the aid of our long-time Wigan friends, we would meet up every month or six weeks and have dinner with Rob and Janie, Dave and Pam. Pam was one of Vicki's school friends – sadly she died, far too young – but not without enjoying our many years of friendship, the six of us used to meet for dinner at each other's houses. After a few years, we hit on the idea of cooking dishes of other countries, working our way from A to Z – some countries were a little difficult, but it worked well, and we enjoyed some exotic food, we also had our after-dinner knock-out competition – snooker, clay target shooting, table tennis, etc. The constant winner was D. G. L. to save David's blushes. This man is a natural sportsman with hand and eye co-ordination over and above the normal, too good for us to put up with. So we decided next dinner party we would include a darts championship to even things up a bit, what hope have you got when the man arrives with not only his own darts in presentation package, but his competition dartboard and to top it all his own rubber ocky mat as well!

One summer we took a motoring holiday in France, just the two of us, sneaking away like a second honeymoon, in her new red Ford Escort cabriolet. It rained and rained each and every day. It poured down all through the country, through the Dordogne and on to the south, even in Carcassonne it still rained.

Vicki had bought her very tiny blue and red bikini, the one with the little red string ties at the side, which I had briefly seen in the bedroom, but was it going to be needed? We drove on south to the Mediterranean at Frontignan on the Cote d'Amethyste, here we lay at last on the beach, the tiny bikini, the body beautiful and me, then down came the rain. After that she declared France a ‘no go' zone – and later it wasn't on the option list when we bought a home abroad. We drove back up through France, the hood of the car going up and down for the odd five minutes between showers.

We tried Spanish, Portuguese and Greek Islands for summer holidays and had some great times. Twice we went to Corfu – the year we went back there, we chose a hotel with great care, it had to have attractions and plenty going on to suit our young daughter, thirteen year old Katy, who didn't want to spend too much time with us. Of all the bikini clad bodies on the beach and complex; the tiny blue and red, side tied bikini caught many eyes including a Greek man, the organiser of the Miss Corcyra event.

When the evening of this contest, which would have done credit to the organisers of Miss World, arrived, this Greek sought out my other half, demanding to know why she wasn't entering. Claiming that she was considerably older than most of the girls didn't let her off the hook. And our new found friends round our dinner table kept on encouraging her in a big way. So a bit against her two score years' judgement she reluctantly agreed.

The stage was a raised ‘U' shaped walkway with flood lighting, background music and a beautiful, warm Greek evening. The contenders were announced, interviewed with ‘deep and searching questions'. They then walked round this ‘U' shaped catwalk towards a young Greek Adonis – who sat at the other end. When he was sufficiently stimulated he would make his choice known. The event came alive in a professional type way except for Katy who had buried her embarrassed self under a group of her own age.

All the girls looked superb and paraded round like true professionals. One young woman looked especially alluring, doing a gymnastically one-legged spin at the corner – whilst extending her other leg out in front of herself – very enticing, but still the stubborn Greek didn't react. When it comes to ‘our' turn – the woman had a plan. She would be partly covered in a beach wrap, and in a more modest white bikini walk slowly along the boarding (she had done some small time charity modelling in the past). At the turn towards the home straight, let her wrap fall and trail it along behind her as she glided towards the Greek.

That was it – he leapt up, rushed across, picked her up (Liberty taker) this Miss Corcyra. To every ones applause and cheers. She was fated and crowned, given flowers, jewellery and champagne. Of course, I was very proud of Miss Toned and Tanned, but I felt a little glow of smug satisfaction, that some part of the glory was in fact down to my years of polishing the bits and bobs to maintain perfection!