Monday morning, the beginning of the week, and Billy’s first day of freedom. What a wonderful feeling when he woke up and realized that he didn’t have to go rushing off to join the traffic jams to work. Instead he could have a leisurely breakfast and do a spot of shopping with Laura. The only problem was that he hated shopping. The low patience threshold (LPT) syndrome that Laura had spoken of applied to that as well as to his driving. Perhaps that should be qualified. When Billy said he hated shopping, he didn’t mean all shopping. He didn’t mind going round the supermarket with Laura because in some ways it was like a sociological study.
That morning, he picked up a trolley and began pushing it, or tried to, because as usual he got the one with the wobbly wheel and a will of its own and a determination to turn right when he wanted to go left. He enjoyed wandering along the aisles as Laura selected sundry items from the shelves. Whenever her back was turned, though, he seized the opportunity to include one or two things that took his fancy, like pitted green olives, cambozola cheese, white lump crabmeat, Haagen-Dazs ice cream, pressed cod roe and prawns. The trouble was that as he put them into the trolley, she put them back on the shelf. However, she didn’t see the Supercook
Chocolate Ice Cream Shaker that he hid behind the vegetables.
‘Shopping with you,’ she said,‘always costs twice as much as my regular bill. You pick out items I wouldn’t buy in a month of Sundays.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s probably a reaction to having spent so many years abroad going without luxuries.’
Being in a supermarket and seeing all the activity going on around him invariably got him speculating. He liked to watch the people as they went about the business of making their selections from the bewildering display of goods on the shelves. Choice! That was the operative word nowadays. Seemed it was necessary to have fifty kinds of this and fifty kinds of that to choose from. Supposed to improve the quality of life but all it did was cause confusion. It wasn’t enough that shoppers were offered, say, a few varieties of coffee. Instead a whole range from across the world was put out on display. How different from those far-off childhood days in Collyhurst when a thing like coffee had been practically unknown and a cup made from a bottle of chicory Camp Coffee, the one with the picture of the bearded and kilted Scotsman sitting outside his tent, was considered very special and the height of luxury, a sure sign that a family was thriving. Only a few families were so fortunate. Billy’s family was seen as prosperous since his father was a porter in Manchester s Smithfield Market and was able to bring home a wide assortment of fresh fruit, vegetables, and fish. Especially fish. Haddock, cod, or plaice. Fish seemed to feature at every meal.
‘Silver ’ake! That’s where our Billy gets his brains from,’ his mam claimed when he’d passed the scholarship to go to grammar school. She had one or two strange ideas like that on the benefits to be derived from various foods. Porridge for strength (she was influenced no doubt by the picture of the hammer-throwing Scotsman on the packet), stew to put a hning on your stomach, and crusts for curly hair.
OXFORD COUNTY LIBRARY
But families who had the wherewithal to go to the corner shop and pay for their groceries were a rarity. Living on tick or ‘putting it in the book’ was an accepted way of life. Even that was beyond a family where the father was on the dole and relied on Public Assistance. Such didn’t know where the next meal was coming from and the kids often went hungry.
Collyhurst people’s poverty, however, was as nothing when compared to that of the peasants of Machakos in Kenya where Billy had worked for five years as a secondary school teacher. There, peasants couldn’t afford to buy anything in a store and for survival depended entirely on the meagre food they were able to cultivate on their ‘shambas’. When they first returned to Britain, both Laura and he found a visit to a supermarket a traumatic experience, seeing so many trolleys piled high with groceries and luxuries. Mentally, they were still in Africa, a waste-nothing Third World, and they had great difficulty adjusting to a society where there was so much extravagance and excess. When it came to choice in Kenya, the local store had only a limited selection of goods on offer and shoppers who could afford them considered themselves fortunate to get even those. New-laid eggs, for example, were like gold and when news went out on the grapevine that Suleman’s Store had received a consignment, there was a mad scramble to be first in the queue. And, if you were lucky enough to buy half a dozen, somehow they tasted better than when there was a glut.
Billy shook off this reverie and looked round the supermarket - and what did he see? A bunch of harassed husbands following their wives like a lot of trained puppy dogs while she tripped along throwing stuff into the trolley that he was pushing, stuff that he was going to have to pay for and carry when they reached the check-out.
Laura navigated the way in and out of the aisles, with Billy in tow. They were held up a few times because of
bottlenecks caused by some dreamy old couple not knowing where they were. Why can’t trolleys, Billy wondered, be issued with bells or car horns so as to avoid collisions? They’d have proved useful that particular morning in the clash between two bull-headed ladies who got into a blazing row over who had right of way. Give a certain kind of woman a shopping cart, he mused, and she became one of Rommel’s panzers.
‘Would you mind backing up so I can get through?’ the big-breasted lady with the peroxide hair snarled. Obviously a tank commander.
‘Why should I?’ snapped the other woman, threatening to charge with her heavily loaded cart. ‘I was here first.You back up.’
The busty lady responded by ramming the other’s vehicle and, had it not been for the intervention of a male assistant, there’d have been a nasty case of trolley rage.
There are some pretty weird people wandering around, Billy reflected; though maybe the other people consider us weird. What he found fascinating about people-watching was that in many ways it was like seeing a cavalcade of one’s own life at its different stages. Here was a young couple with a bawling kid sitting up on the front of the trolley, just like their own situation not all that long ago. Over there was an old couple bent double and using the trolley not simply to carry their purchases but as support to keep themselves upright.That could be us in a few years’ time, he thought. Then there was the sight of a forlorn figure of an old lady or a lonely old man shopping for one. That could be Laura or me in the not too distant future. Best not to think about it today, he told himself. It’ll happen soon enough.
So, Billy didn’t mind the supermarket. It was the other kind of shopping he loathed. The kind which brought him face to
face with a stroppy assistant.
★ ★ ★
The day after the supermarket visit, Billy walked across to Didsbury village.
His first visit was to the local Happy Returns Travel Agency where he paid a deposit for a six-day coach tour round the south of Ireland with Wolfhound Coaches Limited. The staff there were friendly and welcoming, as was only to be expected; after all, he was handing them money.
As he went down Wilmslow Road, it began to drizzle, the sort of Manchester drizzle that soaked you through and through, and to make matters worse, he hadn’t brought a mac. His next port of call was the bank, and irrational though it may seem, banks made him feel apprehensive. His nervousness went back to the early fifties. In those far-off days, when Laura and he were flat broke, he could never borrow money from them, not even for a worthwhile purpose. As a young married man and father of a baby son, he’d applied to his local bank on Stockport Road for a loan of £20 to pay his fees at Manchester University where he was studying for a degree as an evening student.The manager turned him down because he felt that Billy was not a good risk because he’d married too young.
‘In our bank,’ the manager had preached, ‘we do not encourage our employees to marry until the age of twenty-five as we consider marriage before that to be improvident. As you married at twenty-two, I must reject your application.’
Billy had had to go cap in hand to Duncan, his father-inlaw, for a loan. Something he hated doing.
And if they’d been overdrawn by a fiver, they used to get a letter charging them £15, money they didn’t have. Now they were a bit better off, the banks were always wanting him to take out a loan. He could have a loan, it seemed, as long as he could prove he didn’t need it. A bank’s a place, he thought, that’ll lend you an umbrella when the sun’s shining but will want it back as soon as it starts raining.
This morning the business he had with the bank was a
simple transfer of funds from Scotland to his current account in Manchester. His savings which had recently been augmented by his pension lump sum were deposited in a Glasgow bank, an account he’d opened when he’d worked at a teacher training college in Kilmarnock.
He joined the line to wait his turn. Queuing was a thing that the stoic British had learned during the war. Then whenever you saw a queue, you automatically joined it even if you didn’t know what it was for. Anyway, in this bank, there were two lady tellers on duty, one young, pretty and smiling, the other middle-aged, sour and frosty-faced. Of course he got the latter.
‘Yes, and what can we do for you?’ she asked.
‘I’ve written a cheque on the Clydesdale Bank and I’d like to transfer one thousand pounds to my current account here. I’ve completed a paying-in slip.’
‘You can’t do that,’ she said immediately. ‘You can’t do it without your passport.’
‘Why do I need my passport? I’m not going anywhere.’
‘How do we know you are who you say you are?’
‘Because I’ve been a customer of this bank and of this branch for nearly twenty years and you should know me by now.’
‘I’m from head office and I don’t know you.’
‘That’s the trouble with banks today,’ he said. ‘Too impersonal. Everything’s done by computers and cash machines.You’ve lost the personal touch. When I was a young man, I had regular, sometimes weekly, contact with the bank manager and he was always asking to see me. He was concerned about me and he knew my face well. Anyway, you have my signature on file so you can check that.’
‘How do we know you didn’t find the Clydesdale chequebook in the street? We must have proof of identity. We must have your passport.’
‘Not everyone has a passport and, anyway, I could have
forged one, for all you know. There are a lot of crooks about nowadays, if we’re to believe what the papers tell us.’
Billy realized he was beating his head against a brick wall and it was useless arguing. There was nothing for it but to go and get his passport. He was dealing with a cold, impersonal robot and there was no use fighting it. He strode out, quivering with rage. Speechless and pale with the effort of bottling it up, he tramped back home through the rain, mumbling incoherently to himself. God is testing me, he thought.
As he stormed through the house to fetch his passport, Laura sensed that something was wrong. Perhaps it was the white round the gills that gave the game away.
‘What’s happened?’ she asked anxiously.
‘Don’t ask,’ he seethed.
After a frantic search, Laura and he found the passport amongst insurance documents and other old records in the chocolate-biscuit tin labelled ‘Important Papers’. There were even his old wartime papers, and he wondered if the teller might like to see those too.
He trudged back to the bank and once more joined the line and waited for attention. Without a word, he handed the passport over to Frosty-Face. She examined it to make sure it was genuine and not out of date, then finally accepted his Clydesdale cheque.
‘I wonder if you might want to see these documents too?’ he said witheringly as he handed them over his identity card, ration book and sweet coupons.
‘No need to be sarcastic,’ she said. ‘Anyway, the cheque won’t be cleared for another five days,’ she added with a glint of triumph in her eye.
Billy left the bank fuming. So, this is what retirement’s all about, he thought. Maybe my poky little office back at the college wasn’t so bad after all. But I really will have to watch it, he told himself, I’m becoming a crotchety old man.
His next errand was the chemist’s and after his fracas at the
bank he was not in the best of moods. He wanted only a few items but had to wait while the assistants dealt with a crowd of people clutching prescriptions. Billy had been suffering from blocked sinuses and Laura thought she might be coming down with a cold, so he wanted to buy a few things to relieve the symptoms. Patiently he hung around until a middle-aged female assistant was free to deal with his requirements.
‘I’d like a large packet of blackcurrant-flavoured Beecham’s powder, a large box of paracetamol capsules and a Sinex nasal spray.’
‘I can’t serve you with all them items together, luv,’ she announced as if addressing the village idiot. Billy wondered if she was in some way related to the lady at the bank.
‘Why not?’
‘It’s dangerous to take all those at once, luv.’
‘I haven’t the slightest intention of taking them all together, but what if I were? That would be my own business. Besides, what’s to stop me from getting the forbidden items at the other pharmacy round the corner?’
‘No need to get shirty, luv,’ she said menacingly.‘Anyway, I’ll have to consult the pharmacist for his advice.’ Billy liked the use of that word ‘consult’, as if she was a medical specialist of some kind.
By now, the verbal exchange had attracted the interest of the waiting prescription holders who were becoming excited at the prospect of a bit of theatre.
The assistant called up to the pharmacist who had his pilldispensing laboratory three feet above floor level so that he could look down on the inferior mortals seeking his ministrations.
‘Can this old chap here be served with Sinex, Beechams, and paracetamol all at the same time?’ she asked loudly.
From his eyrie, the chemist inspected Billy over his pincenez to check that he was not a junkie, a drug peddler, or a
potential suicide. Reassured, he gave permission for the purchases. Reluctantly, the assistant handed over the drugs, obviously thinking she was dealing with a moron and so Billy pulled a simpleton’s face, mouth open, tongue hanging out.
‘We have to make sure, luv. In this business, we can’t be too careful. You do understand that you’re not supposed to take them all at once.’
Apart from anything else, Billy strongly objected to being addressed as ‘luv’, as he didn’t know the woman from Adam, or Eve as the case may be. A foreigner hearing this term of endearment would have assumed that he and the assistant were intimate friends or lovers. ‘Luv’ was not the only term he hated, though. There were other expressions of assumed intimacy adopted by all manner of people. Words like ‘mate’ or ‘chum’ or ‘pal’ for example. He was amazed at how many of these close associates he appeared to have acquired lately. The window-cleaner called at the house and asked,‘Could I have a bucket of warm water, mate?’ He took his car to be serviced and the mechanic said, ‘Right, mate, leave it over there.’ It seemed he was mate to a vast array of workers and shop assistants. Had these people forgotten how to address their customers courteously with expressions like,‘Good morning, sir. How can I help?’
Still in the pharmacy, he turned his attention to the optician’s section of the shop to make his next purchase.
‘I’d like to buy a pair of spectacles, strength one point five,’ he told the young lady assistant,‘but I’ve looked all round the counter and I can’t see them for looking.’
‘That’s why you need glasses, pop,’ she smirked, looking round the shop for appreciation of her scintillating wit. As she handed over the specs, she repeated the slight. ‘There you go, pop.’
Billy paid for the glasses and got out of the shop quickly, still smarting from that word ‘pop’. What did she mean? Pop! Sure, I’ve got silver hair - it runs in my family, my dad had
silver hair before he went bald — but it’s going a bit far calling me ‘pop’.The cheeky young madam!
He crossed the road, and saw reflected in a shop window a decrepit old codger hobbling along, shoulders hunched. Now there’s a man who deserves the title ‘pop’, he thought. On taking a closer look, he saw that it was himself. What’s happened to that 21-year-old Adonis I carry round in my head? he asked. When did this happen? I must have aged overnight like the portrait of Dorian Gray.
The experience worried him for the rest of the day and when he got home later he solved the problem by steering clear of mirrors, so avoiding sight of his own reflection. In the bathroom, they had a large six-foot mirror which did nothing for his self-esteem, and he made a mental note to remove it. When it came to shaving, he concentrated on the particular part of the face he was dealing with and studiously refrained from looking at the face as a whole because when he did, he was horrified to discover that it was his own father looking back at him. And not the young version either but the old man with the bloodshot eyes and the furrowed face.
Chapter Four