OTHER THAN KATE, my youngest sister, who lives in the Lake District, the Martin family hasn’t moved far from where we grew up. Sal is running the pub in Kirmington, I’m a few miles away and Stu, my brother, is a few miles in the other direction. Since my dad retired, in April 2018, Stu has taken over the running of the truck business and changed the name to Martin Commercials. He has a couple of blokes working for him, including our cousin, Nick.
I don’t see Stu often. I’m busy and he’s living the job now, too, so he doesn’t have much spare time either. I wasn’t sure how he was going to do when he took over. He’s been a retained firefighter for years, one of the part-timers who work other jobs, but do shifts on call and are paid for their time. If there aren’t any calls they still get paid, but how busy they are, and how many calls they get, depends on the area they’re in.
Back when I worked for my dad, which is going on for ten years ago now, I felt me and my dad would do anything to get the job done on time, working our bollocks off, but when my brother’s beeper went off he’d clear off, however busy we were. Retained firefighters are dead important, I realise that, and he was doing a service to the local community, even saving lives, but I won’t lie, it still did annoy me a bit.
I didn’t work with Stu for that long, perhaps a couple of years, before my dad sacked me after I was pulled for having bald tyres on the works van I was driving. Stu’s still a retained fireman now, but he has realised he can’t run the truck business and be a firefighter, so he’ll have to pack it in.
Stu asked our dad to ask me if I’d give him a hand in the yard, but I’m too busy and he’d have a job beating the place I’m working. I enjoy it too much and have a good craic. I probably have a better time at work than I would if I was working on my own stuff full-time at home in the shed.
I didn’t give Stu a straight answer, but knew I didn’t want to do it. It’s nothing to do with not wanting to take orders from my younger brother. I take orders where I am now. Perhaps I’ve learned not to mix family and work. It’s different with Sal and the pub, because, as I’ve said, I have absolutely nothing to do with the running of the place. She does what she wants and makes all the decisions, never asking me for my opinion. That’s how I wanted it. I wouldn’t know where to start and that’s why I say the Marrowbone and Cleaver is her pub. I don’t want Stu going out of business and he won’t do, because he’s not shy of work. He doesn’t need me.
When my dad retired part of me thought he’d be waiting to die, because he’d had so many years of graft, but it’s the opposite. He’s that busy he can’t believe he had time to work. As well as helping with the maintenance side of the pub, he’s tidying the church up, tidying the war memorial, making sure the bushes are cut. He wants Kirmo to be the best kept village in the area. Mum’s still working three days a week as a nurse. She grew up in the same Caistor area, too, not ten minutes’ drive from where me, Sharon and Dot live now.
Kate, who is the only one of my immediate family who doesn’t live in North Lincolnshire, is definitely a Martin. She used to be a race mechanic, now she’s trained up to be a paramedic and she’s a retained firefighter, too. She was called out to work on the fires on the Lancashire moors that made the news during the summer of 2018 when I was writing this book. She’s got three young uns; she just gets on and does it. It shows it isn’t just me who works.
I have written about my mum’s mum, Granny Kidals, also known as Double-Decker Lil, and her late husband, my granddad Walter, in previous books. I used one of Walter’s sayings for the title of the second book, When You Dead, You Dead.
Walter has been dead for a good few years and in January 2018 Lil passed away, too. She was 93 when she died. That is a bloody good innings and she had all her marbles right until the end. She fell over, at home, didn’t even break anything, but she went into hospital, caught something while she was there, then got pneumonia and next thing she was dead. Pneumonia, the granny fucker, that’s what they call it. It fucked my granny. She should have gone into hospital to get better, but shit happens.
Ninety-three years old! And she had a stroke when she was 40. She was probably the least fit of all my grandparents and she lasted the longest. I went to see her in hospital and she couldn’t get about or owt, but she was on great form mentally. She still loved her gossip. Have you seen this? Hurmmmm, what’s your mother doing? That noise, Hurmmmm. It could be the start of a telling off or the beginning of her sharing some gossip. My mum makes that noise, too. She obviously got it from Lil.
My granny’s house was a nice place, a bit tired, but nice, with about three acres behind it. I said I’d buy it, to keep it in the family, but one of her sons, my mum’s brother, thought he could get more than it was valued for and put it on the market, but sales kept falling through at the eleventh hour. I wanted to buy it for the right reasons, but I’ll leave them to it.
It was the house Lil and Walter had bought in the 1940s, when Walter had got the ferry over the Humber, from Hull, then cycled the 18 miles to see it.
The service for Lil was at Nettleton church, in the same village she’d lived in all her married life, and she was cremated at Grimsby Crematorium. It was a pretty small do and more of a celebration of life than a sad affair. If I can make it to anything like the same age I’ll be over the moon.
It’s good going the way Lil went, I reckon. Everyone’s got to go, but I wouldn’t want it dragging on for months or years. She was struggling to live by herself and she didn’t want to go and live in a care home. She liked her independence. There was nothing sad about it, other than my mum has lost her mum. Lil had had a hell of an interesting life. She lived through the Second World War; married a Latvian former Nazi conscript; brought up five children, saw all those grandkids being born …