Pete was behind the bar as Sasha entered the taproom and he greeted Sasha with, “Evening, Sasha. What do you know?”

Sasha could be a somewhat literal in his understanding of the vernacular and after a moment for thought he smiled and said, “Sky’s blue, water’s wet and women have secrets.” After laughing he added, “And the West Coast fish and chip shop is always being asked for steak puddings but unfortunately they don’t sell them.”

Pete had just finished pulling Sasha’s pint and as he pushed it over the bar he said, “Run that one past me again, Sasha.”

“When I first came to the UK I discovered steamed steak and kidney puddings were a northern dish, but they tended to be local to particular areas. Every chip shop in an area would sell them but fifteen miles away could be a steak and kidney pudding desert. Now we cook something similar at home, but with a mixture of meat and all offal not just kidney, and I’m rather partial to them. When Elle and I first came round this way looking for a property we tried a different place for lunch each time. Pubs, cafés, restaurantes and take aways, we tried them all. That day we stopped at the West Coast chip shop. Elle wanted fish and chips, [US fries] and I asked for a steak and kidney pudding with chips peas and gravy. Now Silloth on Solway has been a holiday resort since Victorian days. The town was deliberately planned and built with that in mind.

“There’re six major caravan [trailer] parks and who knows how many minor ones round there, so you’d expect the local traders to take advantage of whatever trade there is. Right? The woman in the chip shop kindly explained to me, ‘We’re always being asked for them, but unfortunately we don’t sell them.’ I settled for a steak pie, chips, peas and gravy, but when we left to eat our lunch in the car we just cracked up with laughter. After all, any rational person who had a chip shop and the slightest amount of business sense would sell what they were always being asked for. That was nearer thirty than twenty years ago, yet whenever we go anywhere and ask for something being telt,(1) ‘We don’t sell them,’ whatever it is we asked for, still cracks us up.”

By this time half a dozen of the old men had arrived and Sasha had to promise to tell the tale again when they’d all arrived.

Sasha retold his tale and moved on with another immediately. “When we moved in we inherited two old cats with the place. They were being fed by an old woman who walked that way with her border collies every day. We started feeding them and they were obviously glad enough to be in the warm of the house. At first we put them out at night, but they didn’t want to go and eventually they became house cats. We’d had them to the local vets and discovered they were already in their system. Smokey was previously known as Smokey and the one we called Tom was previously Sid. Tom was sixteen and Smokey an adult queen sixteen years before when they first encountered her. Smokey had been spayed but Tom was an entire who’d lost the sight in his right eye the year before in one of his battles. The eye was not properly healed. We had him neutered and his eye treated because at his age he wasn’t going to be winning many battles and the damage tom cats do to each other when fighting is awful. Tom’s eye healed properly and unlike Smokey who took everything and everyone on her terms Tom turned into a very affectionate old rogue. Due to their age neither were particularly active hunters and the place was over run with vermin, so come summer we decided since we had stock, and where there’s stock there’s feed and hence vermin, we needed reinforcements.

“I rang a number for what called itself The Cat’s Protection League. That was weird conversation. I telt the lass what the situation was and she said they’d got three semi feral queens that had all been spayed and had their inoculations and the two from one farm were black and white and the other from a different farm was black. ‘Brilliant,’ says I. ‘I’ll take all three.’

“She was taken aback by that and I had to explain I had a small holding and more than enough space. I needed a vermin control squad and they would be safe and looked after properly. She didn’t seem keen for me to have the third cat, but I insisted and said I’d shew her round the property if she liked and she would be able to see what I meant. Then she started asking me who lived at my place and I said just myself and my Elle. She said they could bring the cats round that evening and asked if Elle would be in. I said yes, but she was working that night and would be leaving at quarter to eight. She wasn’t happy at the idea that she’d be on her own with me but said she and a friend would deliver the cat’s. She nervously asked if I could cover their costs for the fuel as they’d be travelling over eighty miles in all and their budget wasn’t big and depended on donations. I said no problem and I’d give a donation to their funds as well. She said they’d be there before Elle left for work.

“My place isn’t easy to find and despite my very clear directions, which she’d written down, they got lost and it was nearly ten when they arrived. The women were in their middle to late thirties and clearly a couple, and nervous as hell. Heavens above knows what they thought I may do, but they probably met all kinds of weirdos. Anyway I shewed them what they could see as it was gloaming and asked if fifty quid would do. They were pole axed when they realised I meant fifty per cat and even more so when I gave them the money in cash not a cheque. They were doing something I approved of, and God knows what it cost to have the three cats spayed and given their injections. Even if they had a supportive vet working for free the drugs would have to be paid for. They gave me one of those record booklets for each of the cats with the details of their jabs in. I didn’t think the money was excessive, they certainly wouldn’t leave the country and retire in Barbados on it.

“In those days the property was nigh on a ruin with a none too clever roof over the top. We let them out of their travelling boxes in the only securable room in the house to get used to a new home, or so I thought. We couldn’t get anywhere near them, so we left their food just inside the door, the litter trays to the side and left them alone. I had to sign some piece of paper promising to treat them well and love them. I signed it. Idealists, but what can you do?

“I telt a couple of lads about them a few days later. I must admit I was still amused at their reaction to being on their own with a man, but maybe the lasses had reason to be afraid, and it’s certainly not for me to judge them or indeed anyone. They were well known locally and were described to me as the lesbian cats’ protection super heroes. Now I’m sorry but in my book there are no female heroes. I’m no ist of any normal description. I like to give everyone a fair crack of the whip. In my book, sexists, racists, homophobes, transists, intolerant bastards in general are all inadequate folk looking for someone to put down to make themselves feel better, though I admit to being an intolerantist so maybe I should exterminate myself after I’ve rendered them all down for bio diesel.

“I’m prepared to say that trans men are obviously capable of being heroes, but women and that includes trans women, no. It’s an affront to grammar: a solecism. Women are heroines, not bloody heroes. Yeah, I know I’m intolerant of poor grammar too, despite not being perfect myself. You can blame me being a pedant on age if you like, but the moment PC interferes with good grammar you can shove it where the sun doesn’t shine for me.

“The two black and white cats were either sisters from different litters or mother and daughter. They had all been given long silly names, but we renamed them. The black one became Lark, the larger black and white one Dink, due to a moment of nostalgia on the part of my good lady, and the small one Flash. On day three I went to feed them and only Flash was there. I was completely puzzled as to where the other two had gone, so working on the assumption the others had escaped to outside the house I decided to let Flash out too. Easier said than done. Of the three Flash was the most frightened of folk, and there was no way I could catch her or make her go the way necessary to get out of the house. I left the door open and put the food in the middle of the room. Flash was obviously eating, drinking and using the litter tray, so I didn’t worry, but I kept my eyes open outside for the others. I gradually moved the food nearer the door and eventually to outside the door next to the staircase. The staircase led to a now closable room in which I thought I could catch Flash to release her.

“Trouble was there was no way I could get to the door to close it before she could run back to the room upstairs she obviously considered to be a safe haven. I had to be able to close the door remotely. I had the food at the far side of the room from the door and stood a fourteen pound sledgehammer on the end of its shaft with a string tied to the head. I waited till Flash was eating and pulled the string. The hammer end fell against the door and closed it with sufficient force to engage the latch. That trick still makes Elle laugh. Once I got close to Flash she froze with no scratching or biting. I carried her outside and saw her run and hide in the overgrown garden.

“So far so good. Unfortunately that was when I discovered the other two had hidden in the floor space of the upstairs room which they had accessed via a missing floor board to the side of the hot water cylinder. Those two were nowhere near as timid as Flash, so I left the doors open and saw them head for the undergrowth Flash had gone into. We left food out for them. It was being eaten, but by what we weren’t sure. It was two days before we saw it was the three cats taking the food. It was a dry summer and, and it was another two days before I discovered they were hiding in the then dry culvert that ran under the road. We fed them, moving the food closer to the house and eventually to the back door.

“It wasn’t long before Lark and Dink were eating inside and happy to toast in front of the front room fire. Flash eventually came in with the others, but it was a couple of months before she became a fireside cat too. Semi feral to completely fireside in three months. Using the cat flap in the back door they went out hunting most nights and when we stoked the solid fuel stove in the morning the first task was the routine crematorium operation with the varied collection of rats, mice and other dead beasties they’d thoughtfully left in the kitchen for disposal. All five of those cats went to the great fireside in the sky years ago now, and even some of the next generation have joined them. I keep shoe boxes in a spare room that I keep that sort of thing in for cat coffins, and they’re all buried in the orchard.”

Sasha was obviously a little upset and lost in memories. He was known to be a generous man, but all knew his early life had made a hard man of him too, except where his cats were concerned.

Geoff said, “I tell the next one if some one gets a round in.”

“My shout,” said Bill nodding to Gladys behind the bar.

Once the beer was organised and the empties returned to the bar, Geoff started, “This is a tale I heard a few years ago, it was Linda the vet from Ashton that telt me. Now she’s a big lass and calls a spade a spade. She’s from the arse end of Glasgow. I like her because she’s bloody clever and has a wicked sense of humour. She’s into quizzes and is on the Red Lion’s team. Truth is she is the Red Lion’s team, and she doesn’t need the rest of them. She’s why they’ve won the league for the last six years on the belt end. She was called out one night to a coo(2) that had been calving for sixteen hours by Jerry Postlethwaite. Now we all know what a miserable tight wad he was, he’d a charged for friendship if’n he’d had any friends. I swear the few folk that turned up to his funeral were only there to check he was really deed.(3)

“Linda telt me, ‘I give him the bollocking of all fucking bollockings for leaving it so late to call a vet and that he was lucky the coo was nae(4) deed too. I telt him because he'd left it so late the chances of getting the calf oot(5) alive were next door to nil.’ ”

Alf interrupted and said, “I’ll bet the thought of the vet’s and the knacker’s(6) bill to pay and no calf to sell put the fear o’ God into his wallet.”

A ripple of laughter went round before Geoff resumed. “Jerry was too tight to have electric in any of the out buildings and Linda was working by the light of a Tilly lamp, one of those that works on pressurised paraffin and gives off more heat than light. Linda had only just put a hon(7) in the coo, and Jerry had was trying to see what she was doing. Linda telt me like as not Jerry was hoping to be able to do it himself next time and save the cost of a vet. Well she’d been working for a few minutes and Jerry asked how she was doing. She telt him she’d do better if he pulled the light away a bit because he was setting fire to the hairs on her arse.”

It took a few minutes for the roars of laughter to die down. They all knew Linda, and she was a well respected woman in the world of farm livestock veterinary medicine which was dominated by men. She was bigger than most men, as strong as an ox and a very feisty lady. It was exactly the sort of thing she would have said under the circumstances and they could hear her saying it in her almost unintelligible Glaswegian accent.

“The calf did nae make it and she ended up having to cut it up inside the coo to have it away. She telt Jerry it was his fault for having AI(8) semen from a Begium Blue bull used on a Holstein heifer in order to make more money off a bigger calf. He did nae deny it because she telt him said she’d been telt he had by Florrie the AI lass. Makes sense because Joseph Tarleton over Fairlees way has had his Belgium Blue bull slaughtered for meat. He telt me himself he’d never used it on heifers but his vets bills were too high due to problems caused by over big calves, and even the easy calvers in his milking herd had a hard time of it. He wouldn’t sell it on to give someone else the problems, so they ate the bugger. I saw the thing any number of times, and I’m no saying it was the biggest bull in the county, but it was the biggest one I’ve ever seen.”

“Aye. Joseph always was a decent bloke, but he paid long money for that bull, so it must have hurt his pocket,” remarked Stan.

“He telt me, it was in the way of an experiment, and if you couldn’t stand the loss you’d no business trying it, so doubtless it’s tax deductible and probably on the insurance too. He’s a canny old bugger.”

There was a bit of general conversation after that and Gladys said they may as well leave it a while as supper would be ready in ten minutes. “Aggie’s put a new supper on this evening. Cornish pasties and baked beans, Gentlemen. Though I have to tell you they can’t be legally sold as Cornish pasties because as far as I’m aware the Green Dragon is in Cumbria not Cornwall, though they were baked by Aggie this morning to a traditional Cornish recipe with onion, potato, swede [rutabaga] and local beef all seasoned with salt and pepper and in shortcrust pastry made with half butter and half beef dripping. She’d appreciate some feedback concerning the seasoning please.”

After supper had been cleared away, Gladys telt the pasties could stand a little more pepper, beer glasses refilled and everybody settled, Sasha picked up with another tale. “A few years back, maybe a month before Easter it would be, a car pulled up at my place and two blokes got out. I was ready for telling them whatever they’d seen it wasn’t for sale. It get a lot of unsavoury types offering to do all sorts of things, like clear the scrap or give me a joke price for one of the old vehicles that I keep for spares. One of them addressed me by name and explained who he was. I’d done business with his father in law a while back, so I asked him what I could do for him. He asked if I had any pigs for sale. The two guys were Polish and they wanted to buy a pig for Easter, seems it’s a tradition where they hale from to make hams and sausage for Easter.

“I explained about the law on slaughtering your own meaning only you could eat it. You couldn’t legally sell it on into the food chain. The one doing the talking looked around and asked, ‘It’s only for family and friends, but who would there be to know?’ My kind of folk. I agreed and we went to look at the three sows I’d got at killing weight. He pointed at a sow and asked, ‘That one. How much?’

“Without doubt he knew pigs, it was the best of the three. “Two hundred. I’ll kill it for you, but you do the rest at that that price,” I replied.

“ ‘My other friend is butcher,” the so far silent one said. ‘He kill. He do all time in Poland. Two hundred pounds for pig?’

“Two hundred yes. When?”

“ ‘Next Sunday morning. Ten ok?’

“Ten’s fine. See you Sunday.” We shook hands and they left.

“Now I’ve got a Brno nine mil humane killer I bought off the internet direct from the small arms factory in Czechoslovakia, so I got everything ready. The manufacturers guarantee it can knock an ox or a farm horse down, it’s got at least four times the shock power of a two-two stun gun, so a pig is nothing. I bought it with two hundred rounds and I’d got less than fifty left, so I’d killed over a hundred and fifty sheep and pigs with it and I’d only ever used one round per kill. The three came round on time on the Sunday. The third one spoke no English at all. He asked via the one whose father in law I’d done business with if I had anything he could work on to keep the carcase off the ground. I asked if a couple of pallets would do him. He said that would be excellent, so we went for them and put them behind the buildings where no one could see us. I shewed him the stun gun, but it was clear he didn’t want to use it. After a flurry of Polish his mate asked if he could borrow a hammer. ‘How heavy?’ I asked. The lad suggested five kilos, so I gave him a choice of a seven and a fourteen pound sledge. He hefted them both to get the feel of them and took the seven pounder over to the pallets.

“That lad surely knew how to handle a big pig. He slipped a loop on a rope round a back leg and I opened the gate to let them out of the field. He never pulled her anywhere, but he stood so she could only go forward. It took time, but he was patient with the sow. There was plenty of lush grass about so she eventually went behind the buildings to the pallets. I telt the boys about the law again and said, ‘If you pay me now, you are killing your own pig and that is completely legal.’ After translation, all three thought that was hilarious and the butcher said something which sounded familiar. I said, ‘Yes. I’ve done it before.’

“The usually silent one said in Russian, ‘You speak Russian?’

“I replied in Russian, ‘I’m from Siberia.’ They all spoke Russian to some extent so after that we had an enjoyable morning mostly telling lies and jokes.

“That butcher was good at it. One bat on the head with the sledge, and I’ve killed enough to know he hit it in exactly the right place, and the sow was down and the hammer hadn’t hit the ground before his knife went in its throat at just the right place and the pig bled out in a matter of seconds. I’ve seen it done as well many a time, but never better. That pig knew nothing, no stress, no pain, nothing, far better than at any abattoir. We used to kill horses and cattle in a similar fashion back home but with a two a half kilo lump hammer and a cold chisel in just one blow. Done by some one who knows what they’re doing and cares about the animal it’s as good as it gets in terms of animal welfare, just as good as with a hunting rifle, but without the expense in a place that has no money.”

“Why do you kill horses, Sasha?”

“Usually they were old farm horses and beginning to suffer. The meat was never wasted. It was all eaten, Stan.”

“What’s it taste like?”

George replied with a grin, “Like camel. I’ve eaten both when I was in the mob.(9) Tastes good, not like anything you find in a supermarket, but in a curry meat’s meat.”

“The lad asked for a bucket of warm water, which after I’d provided it he set to to dehair the pig. He used a propane blow lamp and something that looked like a cross between a pull type garden hoe and a paint scraper to take the singed hair and outer skin off. He’d nearly finished when he ran out of gas so I got him another cylinder. As he went he kept washing the charred hair and scrapings off. By the time he’d finished that carcass was completely bristleless and looked pristine which you don’t often see on a pig with black skin, mine were about fifty fifty black and white. What surprised me was the bits he didn’t want. He kept the head including the ears, but cut the last inch of the snout off. The tail he didn’t want. I just put everything he didn’t want that I could use in a bucket.

“Meanwhile one of his mates asked if he could borrow a spade to bury the guts. I laught and said throw them over the fence the pigs will deal with them which shocked them all. The butcher cut all the trotters off which went in my bucket. He gutted the pig and I had the lungs which didn’t surprise me, but when he held up the kidneys and asked, ‘You want?’ I was surprised. They were amazed at how little time it took the pigs to make the guts disappear, and asked me what I would do with the stuff in my bucket. ‘Eat them,’ surprised them. I could see they were thinking Russians will eat anything. You know how the English tell Irish jokes and Americans tell Polish jokes, well Poles tell Russian jokes, though I think they are actually the same jokes. I telt them in hard times we used to hunt Poles to eat, and though flavourless they did prevent starvation. Laughing all the while the butcher finally chopped the sow in half down the spine, and it had been a well spent couple of hours.

“When I went back in the house, Elle asked me which pig they’d had. ‘The one that ate your cauliflowers,’ I replied.

“Good. Serve the bloody thing right,” she said. She’d been trying to grow cauliflowers for years, but the slugs, cabbage white caterpillars and pigeons had meant she’d never managed to grow even a small one. That year she’d managed a dozen decent sized ones that were growing well. That pig escaped from the field, she watched it go straight to her cauliflowers and she couldn’t stop it eating the lot in less than a minute, by the time she’d found a stick to whack it with the cauliflowers were gone. She hated that pig. She’d have preferred to eat it herself, but was happy enough with the outcome.”

Stan laughing with the rest said, “Tell you lads, don’t ever upset Elle, she’s much worse than Sasha. I’ll get em in. Denis, I’ll partner you if you set em up.” Tales over they were set to finish the evening with the usual domino games.

Word Usage Key

1 Telt, told.
2 Coo, cow.
3 Deed, dead.
4 Nae, not.
5 Oot, Out.
6 Knackers, those who collect ‘fallen’ stock for rendering. They deal with animals that can’t be sold into the human food chain. They are in the main the only legal way open to most farmers to dispose of dead animals in the UK and they are expensive. There are other legal methods that are not widely available and there are of course illegal methods too.
7 Hon, hand.
8 AI, artificial insemination.
9 In the mob, in the armed forces, usually meaning the army.