Describing an auspicious occasion – a party in a pub – which demonstrates the wholesomeness of life amidst the usual waste and humiliation
You wouldn’t have thought so, but the range of temperatures here in town can be pretty extreme. It can get all the way up to the seventies on occasion in July and even on a winter’s afternoon, when the sun’s out, you sometimes see young men sitting outside pubs in their shirtsleeves. In February, on a good day, on a bright day, outside the Castle Arms it’s like a playground: little groups, little huddles, jackets off, joking and having fun. In our town such an opportunity is not to be missed: the sun here always tends to go to our heads.
But, alas, the unseasonably warm weather has not been good for my old friend Billy Nibbs: in the heat, the smell coming out of the skips and those big metal bins can be pretty stiff. In the summer you can actually smell the dump from the car park outside the Plough and the Stars, which is two roundabouts downwind, where all attempts at landscaping have failed to solve the problem. A few scented-leaf pelagoniums on the windowsills and some sweet william outside in huge terracotta-plastic planters are no match for the stench of the accumulated waste of our town. Goodness knows what people are putting in there: Billy spends half his time redirecting gardeners with grass cuttings to the GREEN WASTE ONLY bins, and the other half directing householders with stinking black plastic bags away from the NO FOOD WASTE bins. People do seem to be ashamed about their rubbish, or confused. There’s been talk of recycling – one of the town’s councillors, Mrs Donelly, no less, who has a cousin in Canada, is very keen; she says that’s what they do over there – but whether this will solve the problem of people’s shame or increase it, it’s difficult to say. No one wants to be reminded of their own waste: to have to separate it all out would simply be embarrassing. We’d rather future generations sort it all out for us – and Billy, of course.
It may just be the sweat and the bins, then, that make Billy smell so, but it may also be the ham. Billy Nibbs is addicted to ham. Absolutely addicted; there’s no other way to describe it. He lives by himself and has never been that interested in cooking, and after a few years he found he’d got into a routine. Every night on the way home from work he buys his bacon for his breakfast from Tom Hines, our one remaining butcher, and every morning he eats it straight from the frying pan, mopping up the juices with a slice of bread, dispensing neatly with the need for a knife, or a plate and, indeed, for any washing up whatsoever, since the frying pan will always do for the next day, and the next; and then for lunch he has a ham sandwich with mustard, and for dinner he usually eats at his mum’s, or at Scarpetti’s, the Italian late-night café in Market Street, which is no longer owned and run by Italians, Mr Scarpetti and his family having eventually returned to their native land like most incomers within a short time of having arrived here, once they realise that our town is, in fact, like every other small town on the face of the earth and no better than what they’ve left behind, unless, of course, it’s a civil war or state torture, and even then it can be a tough decision to decide to stay. We have no actual culture to speak of and no cuisine, unless you count the tray bakes and the microwave morning sandwiches from the Brown and Yellow Cake Shop. We can boast no local beer even, let alone a wine, and we have no town square, our festivals extend only to the traditional half-hearted summer parade and fireworks – Frank Gilbey’s attempts to organise a jazz festival a few years ago having ended in disaster – and we are not known for the warmest of welcomes.* But Mr Hemon, who now owns Scarpetti’s – and who is Bosnian – has stuck it out for eight years and it looks as though he’s going to stay, and he does a fair imitation of Billy’s mum’s sausage, chips and beans. In honour of his predecessors Mr Hemon offers espresso coffee – two heaps of instant instead of one – and keeps a bowl of Parmesan on each table, along with the usual condiments, and believe me, if you’ve never sprinkled grated hard Italian cheese on one of Scarpetti’s legendary big breakfasts with two fried slices, then you really haven’t lived, in our town.†
I think maybe it is all the pork that gives Billy that funny smell, because he smells the same all year round, so it can’t just be the heat. As you get older there’s no doubt food can play havoc with your system: Davey Quinn, I know, for example, hasn’t eaten a Chinese takeaway for years, after a night out in south London which started in a pub, went on to a club, and ended up with a couple of tin-foil tubs of hot and spicy Cantonese which wouldn’t usually have bothered him, certainly not while in his teens or twenties, but which left him in his early thirties unable to breathe and writhing around, choking up whole sweet-and-sour pork balls, and he ended up in casualty having his stomach pumped, and he can only remember that the stuff they pumped in looked black and the stuff they pumped out was yellow, and he stank for weeks afterwards. He has never again touched chicken in a black-bean sauce: the food of all our youths denied for ever to him. I myself – like most of us – have had to give up kebabs.
Davey waited a while after his return to town before calling in to see Billy Nibbs, and he hardly recognised him when he finally caught up with him – he had to do a double take. Billy these days looks exactly like his father, Hugh – right down to the thick black beard and the shiny steel-toe capped boots. Hugh ran one of the four butchers that used to exist on Main Street – not a single one remaining now, leaving only Tom Hines on High Street, who is not and never was the best, whose sausages are thin and greasy, whose chops and mince are too fatty, whose joints are overpriced and who has abandoned all pretence of providing dripping, black pudding, or the cheaper offal, the standard fare of the traditional family butcher, and who has opted instead to sell his butcher’s soul for the likes of hot and spicy Cantonese ribs, ready-stuffed chickens and pre-wrapped bacon from a wholesaler based in Swindon. Hugh was much the better butcher and famously bearded, a man who’d hung on to his facial hair right through the Seventies, when beards were still popular and even admired, when even Tom Hines had worn one, to hide his many opulent chins, and right on into the Eighties and through the Nineties, when beards became more scarce and rather frowned upon, certainly by people buying meat, perhaps because there was always the suspicion of some flecks, some tiny filaments stuck somewhere in there, although Hugh was scrupulous about washing the beard every night with Johnson & Johnson baby shampoo, to retain its softness and to try to be rid of that distinctive high, minty, slightly gamey smell of freshly butchered meat.
Hugh’s dying wish, that he’d had written into his Last Will and Testament, was a surprise for his wife, Jean, who’d begged him for years to update his image: ‘I INSTRUCT,’ ran the rubric, ‘on the event of my predeceasing my wife, that my beard be shaved.’ It was not the strangest request or instruction that the family solicitor, Martin Phillips, had had to incorporate into a will – you’d be surprised what secrets you can hide from your family and what you might want eventually to reveal. Even us little people can keep big secrets. In his cups and among friends, when he’d loosened up after a few holes and a few gin and tonics in the golf club, Martin Phillips would sometimes boast of being the keeper of the keys to the skeleton closets of the town, but he never revealed his secrets and he never told tales.* No one would have believed him anyway.
When Hugh died, Martin Phillips carried out his instructions to the letter – he brought in Tommy Morris, the barber on Kilmore Avenue, our last proper barber, who refuses not only women but who won’t cut children’s hair either, not until they’re sixteen and old enough to decide themselves exactly how short they want to have it, and who usually charges £2.50 for a wet shave with a cut-throat razor, although on this occasion he waived his fee – so when she visited her husband for the viewing, Jean was able to kiss Hugh’s smooth cheek for the first time in thirty years and her tears glistened upon his face. At the crematorium Billy had read a poem. There was not a dry eye in the house.
Billy had always been a keen reader, Marvel comics mostly when we were young, but in his teens he had moved up to literature and it wasn’t long before he started writing the stuff himself. I can still remember clearly the first poem he ever showed me. We must have been about fifteen. It began:
The sun doesn’t shine
way down in the blue.
In the deep sea of liquid
dark memories come on cue.
I’m no literary critic, but I didn’t think it was too bad and I told him, and he was encouraged, and so I feel now, on the publication of his first book, that I have in some small way been instrumental in the bringing to public attention of a new voice.
The launch party was just recently, in the Castle Arms.
Billy was there, of course. And his mum Jean was there. Davey Quinn was there. Bob Savory was there. Davey is effectively working for Bob now, in the kitchens at the Plough and the Stars, and it seems to be going OK. He’s only working as a kitchen porter, part-time, but it’s a start, it’s something to help him get back on his feet. Davey must have worked at two dozen different jobs during the twenty years he was away, and in a dozen different places, so he was used to starting over. He did a lot of bar work at first, way back when, and then he was in Berlin for a while, when there was a lot of work on the sites after the Wall came down, and then he was in Holland on the tulip farms, and then he had a go on the campsites in France, and then it was back to England and the usual casual jobs, the temporary, the unsuitable and the strictly cash-in-hand: he was variously a care assistant, a windscreen fitter, a supermarket shelf stacker, a warehouseman and a bouncer. He drove a bus, he did security, he did landscaping and he did ventilation installation. He preferred jobs where he didn’t have to think: he lasted only two weeks in tele-sales and he did his best to avoid computers. He worked for six months for Otis Elevators, which was a great job and was pretty much the summation of his career: full of ups and downs and going nowhere. It was a rootless existence and he wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Things haven’t been easy for Davey since he returned. He’s been staying with his parents, and it’s never good for a grown man to be thrown back upon the mercy of his parents. Mr and Mrs Quinn are good people but it’s hard not to judge your children when they’re under the same roof as you and you have to see them every day, and they’re old enough to make their own mistakes but should know better, and Mr Quinn, Davey Senior, has had to bite his tongue on many occasions, from the breakfast table to lunchtime, dinner and beyond, and he is not a man used to having to withhold his opinions. He has been trying to persuade Davey to join him in the business, a painting and decorating business, a business started by Davey Senior’s own father, Old Davey, way back in the 1920s, and a business which provides a good living for Davey Senior and no fewer than three of Davey’s brothers, Daniel, Gerry and Craig. But Davey is holding out. One of the good things about leaving town all those years ago was that he didn’t have to join the family business and now he’s back he has no intention of doing so.
It’s been a difficult couple of months, then, but Davey has picked up with a lot of old friends and a lot of them were at the book launch. Sammy the plumber was there. Francie McGinn was there. Francie’s wife, Cherith, was hosting the Ladies’ Bible Night so she couldn’t make it, but Bobbie Dylan was there, chatting to Francie, and it was nice to see them both looking so happy. Bob was between waitresses, so he was there too. All the old crowd. There was also a photographer from the Impartial Recorder – actually, the photographer, Joe Finnegan. Joe calls himself a ‘lensman’ and he likes to say – to himself, if no one else – ‘I don’t take sides: I take photos.’ He’d turned to photography late in life, after the failure of his picture-framing business, a lovely quaint little place on Market Street, two doors down from Scarpetti’s, where Joe never seemed to do much actual picture framing but instead spent most of his time chatting to old friends, and so, of course, he couldn’t compete with the real professionals, with the much bigger and glitzier chain store, Picz ‘N’ Framz, when it opened up at Bloom’s, which has its own car park and a trained staff, and a wide range of ready-framed prints and posters, in many sizes, ready to hang. Also, to be honest, Joe liked a drink.
So Joe was snapping away, half cut, with his Leica, which is not a hobby camera, but with which he somehow still managed to produce the standard hazy amateur mugshots for the paper: a grinning Billy with his arm draped round Frank Gilbey, our ex-mayor; a grinning Billy with his arm draped round Frank’s daughter Lorraine, shying away; Billy with his mum; and Billy with all of us. It made a full-page spread in the Impartial Recorder. My favourite photograph of the evening is one of Billy cheek to cheek with our old English teacher, Miss McCormack, who’d made it to the launch even though she’s moved up-country now to live with her sister, Eileen, and to look after their elderly father, the big Scotsman Dougal, in his declining years, even though she is strictly teetotal and claims not to have visited a pub since her sister’s engagement party over forty years ago, a party that famously ended with Dougal McCormack, a fervent Methodist, knocking out his prospective son-in-law when the young man had indulged in rough talk and ribaldry. The young man seems consequently to have thought twice about marrying into the family, for the two sisters became spinsters and were frozen in time. Miss McCormack looks exactly the same now as she did twenty years ago when she was teaching us, which may be proof, as she had always insisted, that literature is one of the higher virtues and is good for you, like classical music, and art, and Guinness, of which there was, of course, plenty at the party – draught and bottled – as well as sparkling white wine. It was a good evening. Everyone who was anyone was there.
The only problem was: there were no books.
There were plenty of sandwiches: egg, cheese and ham, laid on by Margaret, who runs the bar at the Castle Arms. (Bob Savory, needless to say, was not impressed with the spread and since he has made it a rule never to eat the competition he was stuck on cocktail sausages and crisps all night, which is hardly enough to sustain a man through a heavy evening’s drinking, and by eight o’clock he was drunk and bitter and complaining about the mere look of the sandwiches, about how presentation was everything in catering and how that was something that people round here had never really understood, how a chiffonade of parsley and a squeeze of lemon could make all the difference, and how we all got the food we deserved, which was certainly not Quality Food for the Discerning Palet, and if Billy had only asked, he said, he’d have done him a deal, and we could right now be eating chicken tikka with crisp lettuce and mayo on granary, or fresh buffalo mozzarella with roasted vegetables in a tortilla wrap, although to be honest most of us preferred plain ham and cheese with a pint, but we didn’t like to say so.)
Billy had put £100 behind the bar for drinks and Margaret, who’d known Billy since he was born, and who had always bought her meat from Billy’s dad, Hugh, twice a week all her adult life, had silently added another £50 of her own, to keep the evening flowing. She’d always had a special place in her heart for Hugh, a strong man whose big forearms and black beard had reminded her of her husband, a merchant seaman who’d gone missing overboard in mountainous seas in the Atlantic, aged just twenty-seven. Margaret had never remarried, had never had children and she ran the best bar in town: there was hardly an adult male who hadn’t enjoyed his first under-age drink under her watchful gaze, and who in later years hadn’t felt the lash of her tongue and the threat to drink up and go home or have you no home to go to? Margaret was, everyone agreed, one of the old school. She’d had a cancer scare a couple of years ago, and regulars at the Castle Arms had raised over £1000 and sent her on a Christmas Caribbean cruise, which she had to pretend she’d enjoyed, but which she’d hated. The sea reminded her of her husband and she’d spent most days sitting in the boat’s main bar – Bogart’s – telling people all about her own little pub back home. The ship’s bartenders, of course, grew to love her and showed her everything they knew about mixing cocktails, for which there had never been a big demand in the Castle Arms, but when she came back there was a brief fashion for Gimlets and Gibsons and Singapore Gin Slings, and for a time Margaret stocked almost as much angostura bitters as she did good Irish whiskey. Frank Gilbey liked to boast to his friends at the golf club that Margaret made a better dry martini than he had tasted anywhere in the world – and he had tasted a few.
Margaret belonged in our town. She belonged behind the bar.
Billy’s was the first book written by someone any one of us actually knew, the first book written by someone, from our town, in fact, in living memory, although we do, of course, have the usual roster of nineteenth-century hymn writers and minor poets, whose work for the most part expresses repressed sexual longings and deep theological confusion, and quite often the two at the same time.
Fill thou our life, Lord, full in every part,
That with our being we proclaim Thee,
And the wonders of Thine Art.
Come quickly, O Lord Jesus,
That the world may know Thy Name,
Fill our ears, Lord, and our eyes, Lord,
That our hearts may know no shame.
Fill the valleys and the mountains,
Inspire us with Thy sweet breath,
Till all Israel’s sons proclaim Thee,
King of Glory, raised from death.
(Nathan Hatchmore Perkins
McAuley, 1844–1901)
These were not words that any self-respecting teenage boy could sing in a school assembly without blushing or laughter. Nathan Hatchmore Perkins McAuley – a minister, apparently, who had lived in the old manse on Moira Avenue, which had gone with the ring road and which was now the site of eighteen starter homes – was inadvertently responsible for more detentions than any other single individual in the whole history of Central School.
One former pupil at Central, Tom Boal – stage name, Big Tom Tyrone, even though he wasn’t actually from Tyrone – had obviously enjoyed and remembered the Reverend Mr McAuley’s deep apprehendings and had somehow ended up on the folk circuit in Greenwich Village in the 1960s, singing about longings of his own. Turning to Country, he had recorded several albums in Nashville in the 1970s and he toured occasionally and had returned one year to town, for his mother’s funeral, and had come in to school as a special favour to an old friend, our history teacher, the notorious motorbike-riding and leather-jacket-wearing Gerry Malone, a man who’d been known to do tapes of the Grateful Dead and the Band for favoured boys in the sixth form. Mr Malone introduced Big Tom Tyrone as a contemporary of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, people we all thought were dead, or hippies, or myths, like the Greeks and the Romans, and certainly it was a surprise for us to meet someone so obviously old and yet so utterly unlike our parents: he might as well have been Odysseus, or Elvis Presley. None of us who were there will ever forget Big Tom Tyrone’s long, thinning hair and his cowboy boots and his acoustic version of Nathan Hatchmore Perkins McAuley’s ‘Fill thou our life, Lord’, which he turned into a sleazy twelve-bar blues with a bottleneck middle section whose effect of longing and moaning came about the closest that most of us had ever heard to the sound of a woman in the act of lovemaking. The school’s headmaster, a Brylcreemed man, a Mr Crawford, the predecessor of the current incumbent, Mr Swallow, was furious and ended assembly early. Girls hung around after the assembly for autographs – some of the better-looking girls too – and Big Tom Tyrone happily signed, in exchange for a kiss, and he must have been in his fifties at the time, I suppose, the age of our own fathers. We couldn’t believe it. Billy and Bob and me had decided by that lunch break that we would form a band. We lasted about six months before we split, suffering from the usual musical differences and the lack of a drummer, and it was then that Billy turned seriously to poetry.
Billy’s book was being published by a firm who had advertised in the Impartial Recorder, which Billy had foolishly taken to be a recommendation. The Impartial Recorder also carries advertisements for psychics, money trees, life coaches, ‘The Truth about Israel – the Key to World History’ booklets, and ‘Hard-To-Believe-But-It’s-True-We’re-Giving-It-Away-Today-And-Today-Only-Its-An-Unbelievable-And-Unrepeatable-Bargain-But-All-Stock-Must-Go!!!’ furniture stores, cut-price supermarkets and wood flooring specialists. Billy had submitted his work by post, enclosing a small fee, and he had received a letter in reply just a week later, much different from the replies he usually received from publishers: it described his work as ‘original’, ‘extraordinary’ and it went on to use the kind of adjectives which Billy had secretly known for many years might properly be applied to his work, but at which he had blushed on reading and rereading. As well as its obvious literary merits the book, he was told, in the opinion of the publishers, could be a major commercial success. The publishers believed that they could guarantee reviews in national newspapers, magazines and literary journals, and prominent displays in all the major bookshops. Because of the extra distribution and publicity costs that this would involve, they wondered if they could possibly ask Billy to contribute about £1000? Out of this sum Billy would receive two free copies and he had an option to buy another 500 at a greatly reduced rate. The publishers said the initial print run was going to be about 1000: an enormous number for a first book by an unknown author.
Billy had inherited some money from the sale of the butcher’s shop and its fittings after Hugh’s death, so he gladly paid up, sat back and waited, and he believed for a long time that he was actually going to see the book.*
But after the humiliation of the bookless book launch, days turned to weeks and then to months, and there were still no books received, and Billy’s letters and telephone calls went unanswered, and in the end Billy decided he was going to have to go and see his publishers personally. He wore a suit and tie, as for a business meeting, asked for a day’s leave from the dump and took the train.
* We were renowned at one time, of course, for our annual Bicycle Polo tournament, held out on the fields that people called the Bleaches, which were used many years ago for bleaching linen, but which have long since been buried under the Frank Gilbey roundabout on the ring road. The tournament had been founded by Field Marshal Sir John Hillock in 1933. Like Tolstoy, the Field Marshal took to cycling in old age and became an enthusiastic advocate of the sport. His bicycle polo team, the Rovers, sponsored by Raleigh, had achieved some small national fame, and the tournament had brought crowds to the town every May Day until 1947, when tragedy struck: a young man, Elvin Thomas, just twenty-one years old, who had survived Tobruk, died from a punctured lung sustained from an injury caused by a loose spoke during the tournament finals. The Field Marshal disbanded the team and bicycle polo has never been played again in town.
The highlight of Frank Gilbey’s inaugural and one-and-only week-long jazz festival, meanwhile, a few years ago, was a performance on the Saturday night by Chris Barber and his band, the keepers of the flame of British trad jazz. No one at all had turned up to hear them play and they went home without even opening their instrument cases. Frank had had to bail out the festival from his own pocket.
† Tiberio Scarpetti and his family lasted here for nearly ten years, which is not a bad innings, actually, for incomers, but unfortunately they were ten years too late for the worldwide craze for espresso bars, which had orginally sent the older Scarpetti brothers out into the world to make their fortunes – Domenico to Australia, Bartolo to Los Angeles – and twenty years too early for the coffee shop revival, which meant that in the end Tiberio, the youngest of three brothers, who had a lot to prove but who had drawn the historical and geographical short straw, returned to his home town of Termoli in Italy with nothing except his Gaggia machine and a lot of unsold stock of fizzy mineral water and canned ravioli. Tiberio had worked like a dog for years, turning what was once Thomas Bell’s dank, dark little hardware shop, ‘Whistle and Bells: All Your Hardware Requirements’, on Market Street into our own local little Italy, all black-and-white tiled floors, indoor plants and mirrored walls, with a state-of-the-art red Formica counter. He held out for a long time against offering chips with everything and all-day frys, but in the end he gave in and lost heart. He’d kept a bowl on the counter for tips and when a decade had passed without a single person ever placing so much as a penny in the bowl he knew it was time to pack up and leave: this was not a place Tiberio intended to grow old. His daughter Francesca remains, of course, married to Tommy Kahan, but Tiberio has never been back to visit, has never even been tempted; he has sworn never to return. The sign above the door of the café still says Scarpetti’s, but apart from the Parmesan and the Nescafé espressos there remains no other indication that this was ever the town’s Italian quarter: Pukka Pies™ have long since replaced the ravioli. Mr Hemon’s only improvement on Tiberio’s original decor has been to put up tourist board posters on the walls showing scenic sights in Bosnia, but all meals come with chips.
* Actually, there was one that he let slip, when he was on a camping holiday with the children in the south of France, many years ago, and he’d got into conversation one evening with an expat at a bar near the campsite, and somewhere into the second shared bottle of the local red he confessed that he was a solicitor and started complaining to the stranger that the worst thing about his job was always being asked to pad people’s insurance claims and become party to petty frauds, and he happened to mention to the expat the name of a client, Trevor Downs, from up there on the Longfields Estate, whom Martin believed to be faking his own whiplash injuries. Some time later the expat happened to mention this story on the telephone to his brother, who happened to be a minicab driver in Glasgow, who then happened to mention it in turn to someone in the back of his cab who turned out to be Trevor Downs’s wife, Tara, in Glasgow on a shopping spree funded by her husband’s considerable personal injury income. It may be a small world, but it’s also a messy one, thank goodness: in the retelling of the story the name Trevor had been translated into Terry and the Downs had disappeared, which is the only thing that kept Martin Phillips from being sued and out of hospital. These days compensation claim racketeering is so widespread and so common, even in our town, where everyone seems to have slipped and fallen, that Martin no longer even bothers to mention it, even when abroad.
* It exists still only in typescript, the book. The only two poems of Billy’s ever to have seen the light of day were published in the first edition of the magazine The Enthusiast (PO Box 239, Bangor, BT20 5YB, www.theenthusiast.co.uk). The first of these poems, ‘To the Reader’, seems to be some kind of uncompromising envoi:
Listen: you don’t like it, then leave.
My aim has only ever been to be popular
with the less sophisticated type of audience,
especially in the suburbs and provinces.
The second poem, ‘I’m Nobody, Who Are You?’, runs to over a hundred lines and considerations of space obviously preclude us from reprinting it here, but readers who have attended Robert McCrudden’s popular Creative Writing class (Poetry) I or II at the Institute, or similar, might be able to detect throughout this longer work the influences of Arthur Rimbaud, George Herbert, C. P. Cavafy, Geoffrey Chaucer, Hart Crane, Bertolt Brecht, John Berryman, Emily Dickinson, the Gawain Poet, William Blake, A. E. Housman, Francis Ponge, Marianne Moore, Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, or Pam Ayres.