As Sasha walked in to the Green Dragon with Stan he said, “You know what, Stan, I think I’ll try a Double Diamond just for the hell of it.”

Stan shrugged his shoulders and said, “OK, Sasha, but if your going for something different I’ll join you, but Double Diamond, no. It’s just a pale ale, and not that good in my opinion. I’ll have a Theakstone’s Old Peculier.(1) That’s an exceedingly good brown ale with a nutty taste. As to whether it’s worth the price I don’t know, but three bottles will fill a pint glass and I’ll give it a go.”

“Go on then, Stan, I’ll try that too. I only wanted something different. You reckon we’ll want another?”

“Aye, but take it slowly. It sneaks up on you.”

The weather was reasonable and the Grumpy Old Men were looking forward to a good night. There were a dozen and a half outsiders in the taproom. The regulars were hoping for something a bit different, but were happy to accept a tale from Sasha if that were all that was forthcoming. Pete was threwing coal on the fires and a few decent sized logs to follow before saying, “I’ve got a poxy tale that I’d rather leave till next week to give me time to work on it, but if there’s none going for it I suppose it’ll do.”

Charlie, a normally silent man who was always willing to pay for a round of drinks, to the surprise of all said, “I’ll tell the tale of me growing up and how I came to live here if anyone wants to hear it?”

“Good lad, Charlie,” Sasha said. “I’ll buy for you. Gladys a round please, and put it down to Charlie, but on my slate.”(2)

After the beer was passed around, John said, “Get a couple of those bottles of cactus juice I brought back from Mexico out would you please, Gladys.”

With a pint of their preferred ale and a tequila in front of them Charlie began. “I was born in what was southern Lancashire, but which after the Governmental fuck up of nineteen seventy-six is now supposed to be northern Cheshire. I’m proud of being a Lancastrian and will never accept that where I was born is in Cheshire, after all we did win.(3) I was born in a house fifty yards north of the Chat Moss railway bridge in the village of Glazebury, known locally as Buryloan, which means the lane where folk are buried. Glazebury is a ribbon village on the Leigh to Warrington road. For a long time it was so isolated that it had developed its own distinctive dialect, referred to as Buryloan too, which was not readily understood by foreigners, which meant anyone not from there.

“During the civil war and interregnum(4) when Cromwell’s head quarters were at the Bay Horse Inn in Warrington, where one can still get a pint, there were tunnels connecting local churches for the protection of the Catholics. My granddad was a brickie who went down them working when he was in his twenties. They were repairing them so they would be safe to use as a tourist attraction. In Cromwells' time there'd been an ongoing battle on the moss lasting months where thousands on both sides died. Chat Moss like other mosses of Lancashire is a peat bog, passable when dry and deadly when wet.

“For the last century or so there’s been huge quantities of salad stuff grown on the moss, mostly lettuce of dozens of varieties but radish, celery and beetroot too. The peat soil is black, absorbs sunlight and it’s warm enough to grow crops all year round. Depending on the variety they get from four to six plantings a year. What we call Cos lettuce are called Manchester lettuce in London and London lettuce round Glazebury because most goes down to the London wholesale markets. I don’t like them because to get them to grow they use a lot of nitrate fertiliser. They can be a yard high and they’re dark green and bitter as hell from the nitrate. Waggons transport it five days a week. The joke is if you buy a lettuce in Manchester, which is twelve maybe fifteen miles away, chances are it’s been down to London to be sold at one of Covent Garden, Brentford, Spitalfields or Stratford markets, and come back. But the highland beef sold in Glasgow goes under the hammer at Smithfield market in London and fish sold in fishing ports is auctioned at Billingsgate London.”

“Sounds about right, Charlie,” said Harry. “I’ve been carrying the same stuff both up and down the country for years. A lot of the time it’s never even been taken out of the container. Next time you’re on the Motorway take note of what’s going north. You’ll see the same stuff going south too. Still I’ve made a good living out of long distance [US over the road driving] and often been glad it never occurs to the pen pushers to make a few phone calls before the waggons set off. The down side is that haulage all has to be paid for, so stuff is dearer, but hell you can’t have it all.”

Charlie nodded and carried on. “Like a lot of lads, as a teen I went down with the waggons for a few quid to help the drivers unload. No pallets then, and a waggon carried fifteen hundred cardboard boxes with a dozen lettuce in each. Thank god the days of wire bound wooden bushel boxes were over before my time. When I was older I drove a waggon down there myself for one summer. All those old markets went years ago to be replaced by new Covent Garden. The old ones were all built for horses and carts and were a nightmare to get an eighteen wheeler round, so we used to leave in the afternoon to get there early evening when there were few waggons at the markets because if you weren’t out by midnight you’d still be there at six. Tachographs had been in use for a while and we always carried a few spare boxes to take back because loaded with perishables gave us an extra two hours to drive which meant we could do the return trip in one go.

Alf asked, “Was that legal, Charlie?”

“I’ve no idea but seeing as I wasn’t licenced to drive a big one I wasn’t fussed. Like all the others I learnt by driving wagons on fields at haymaking and harvest and manoeuvring them in farm yards. It was excellent training. I never had a lesson in my life, and once I was old enough to take the test I passed first time. We didn’t go down on Saturdays and Wednesdays because there were no markets on Sundays and Thursdays. We used to get given all sorts of stuff in sometimes huge quantities, stuff that wouldn’t keep to sell on Mondays and Fridays. I think every woman in Glazebury made wine, jam, jelly, chutney, pickles and the like with free fruit and veg. I got given half a ton of redcurrants once. I dropped them off at the village shop and told David there to give them away to any one who wanted some. He told me they’d gone in an hour. Devon, who drove his own waggon, often went down in convoy with me shewed me a really good Chinese take away just on the outside of the north circular. We often stopped there to eat on our way back. We’d bought our food from there often enough to be recognised by the staff. We used to eat together in one of the waggons. One day I gave them a crate of celery and a couple of boxes of apples. They knew we were waggon drivers, and after that we were invited to eat in the back and served a full meal. I kept giving them fruit and vegetables, and we never paid for meals there again.

“The moss provides a short cut from the A57 passing from Manchester to Warrington via Irlam and the A574 Warrington Road through Glazebury. To those who are sober and familiar with the moss it presents no problems, but it is potentially deadly if intoxicated after a night out, and folk still just disappear from time to time. As a reminder of the civil war a skeleton in antique armour was found chained to tree in the middle of the moss woodlands in late 60s. Weapons, armour and skeletons were still being found in moss fields when I was a child. They still are, and most local farms have a collection of muskets and swords. There were so many dead during the Civil war that bodies were burried where they were found in shallow graves, and the entire area was legally consecrated as a graveyard not long afterwards. During WWII there was an act of parliament obliging all landowners to plough and sow with food crops for the nation. There had to be a special act giving the moss fields and any around them the right to harrow seed in so as to avoid a plough bringing human remains to the surface.”

“I’ve heard of the place, Charlie. There was a TV program, maybe five years back, about a crane factory there.”

“That was Coles Cranes, Bill. It’s not there any more, but it was between Mum’s house and the railway. Like a lot of the local lads and men, I did my share of grave digging in the cemetery of the local church. When I lived there the vicar was a man who liked a glass. He was as pissed as rat when he married one of my sisters and left bits of the service out. But he was a decent sort and well thought of because he’d help anyone out no matter what their religion or even if they didn’t believe in anything. The grave plots were all family plots and could take six coffins, three deep and two side beside. The ground wasn’t moss, but it was next door to it, very soft and coffins moved in it. Over the years a few had disappeared altogether. When a grave was needed to be dug, the sexton took his sounding rod, which was just a fancy name for a ten foot length of half inch reinforcing steel usually put into concrete, and sounded the grave to see how deep the first coffin was down. As I said they weren’t all there so his records might not be correct.”

“How does a coffin disappear, Charlie?” Alf asked in perplexity.

“The blokes on the allotments [US community gardens] told me when there’d been a lot of rain the ground became like a really thick liquid and there were slow currents in it which would move the coffins. They wouldn’t have moved far even over a few decades, but you couldn’t tell in which direction they’d gone. The soil on the allotments was even more fluid and two or three feet down was constantly changing. They knew that from when they were double digging, which they did every few years to improve drainage and aeration. You’d know more about that than I would, Alf.”

Alf who had four highly productive allotment plots replied, “Yeah, that makes sense, Charlie.”

“Anyway, if it were a new grave the hole had to be eight feet deep, so that when full with six coffins the top of the topmost one was two feet down. That’s the legal requirement. That meant shuttering the sides with three-quarter inch shuttering ply and four by twos [US two by fours]. It was far too dangerous not to, and you always worked in at least pairs. One night the vicar came into the tap room of The Red Cat and said, ‘I’ve screwed up, Lads.’ Like I said he was a decent sort. ‘I’ve a funeral tomorrow, and I forgot to tell Bill about it.’ Old Bill was the sexton, organist and caretaker at the church. ‘So I’ve no grave to bury the poor soul in. I’ll make it worth your while if you dig it overnight. Bill says you’ve to go four feet down and he’s borrowed some site lights.’ A lad called Gerry said, ‘I’ll dig for you, Archy, but it’s a fucking evil night so you’d better chuck in a couple of bottles of ‘keep you warm’. How about the rest of you? Four feet down, if four of us go at it we’ll have it done before daylight.

“I and a couple of others said we’d dig. Archy, whose real name was Archibald, which was kind of appropriate for a vicar, said, ‘George, better make that four bottles of Johnny Walker for the lads.’ There was only the butcher’s shop between the pub and the church, and George, the landlord, said he’d leave the back door open for us so we could get a drink when we’d done. It was raining stair rods and blowing a howling gale that night. At about ten to eleven we donned white PVC coated Souwesters(5) and tied our hats down to the capes. We collected the gear from the church store and Bill shewed us where to dig. ‘There are four coffins down there and both the top two were buried nigh to fifty years since, so go easy lads.’ We knew what he meant. The coffins would be rotten, and believe me you do not want to have anything to do with a body that’s been buried for fifty years. The reality of it is nothing like forensic pathology TV shews would have you believe.”

Sasha said, “I’ve seen world war two mass graves exhumed to give the bodies a decent final resting place. That would have been in the nineties and it was grim. The smell of the bodies is appalling. There is a massive amount of science involving the dead. What the hell makes someone go into that line of work completely escapes me.”

Charlie nodded and continued. “It was a pretty straight forward job. The digging was easy as the soil had been dug before, and with four of us taking it in turns to dig and throw the soil up, and emptying the whisky bottles, we had near enough done the job by half three. Never for an instant did the rain let up and we were grateful for the cover that Bill had put over the hole. He’d always maintained it was legit, but seeing as it had Norweb written all over it, it clearly had belonged at one point to the north western electricity board. Given that we’d two old men in the village who’d worked for Norweb, we suspected it had been liberated in a good cause, and kept our opinions to ourselves. Fifteen minutes before we’d finished the cover lifted and blew aside. One of the lads dropped a fallen headstone on it to prevent it going any farther and we continued. That was when things started to get interesting.

“We’d got down to the coffin lid, and Rob was shovelling the loose soil off and threwing it up. Standing at the foot of the coffin as he lifted the soil all the weight was transferred to his feet and the lid started to rise at the head end as his feet went down. Rob, shovel and soil were out of the hole within a second. He was gibbering and shaking as he pointed to the hole. He’d have run had Ron not restrained him. As Ron, the most experienced of us, explained and Rob lowered the level in a bottle of whisky by what would have been an indecent amount under any other circumstances, Rob started to calm down. The three of us finished the job and left Rob working on emptying the bottle.”

The old men were laughing and shaking their heads. All were old enough to have been scared witless at least once in their lives and whilst it was amusing, not a one of them thought to criticise Charlie’s mate Rob.

“Then it got even better. Old Joe was seventy-three and the village drunk. I don’t think he’d been entirely sober for years, certainly not in my lifetime. Joe was lurching past the church on his way home as I came out of the hole, which was at the front of the cemetery next to the pavement [US sidewalk]. Like a lot of walls in the UK, the graveyard wall at the edge of the pavement was maybe eighteen inches tall and had been topped by iron work fixed into holes in the coping stones with molten lead, but the railings had been cut off at the beginning of world war two. The metal wasn’t critical to the war effort as the war office had said at the time. Years later it came out it had been done just to impress on the public that the war was going to hurt and Hitler had to be taken seriously. Never thinking about it, I shouted, ‘ All right, Joe?’ that being the standard greeting. Seeing me coming out of a grave wearing a white PVC trousers, cape and hat, Joe started running. I’m sure he hadn’t moved that fast in years. The four of us, Rob was feeling better having seen someone else scared shitless, were chuckling as we made our way to the pub. Much to our surprise, the fire was roaring in the taproom and Janie George’s wife appeared and said, ‘Get yourselves warmed up a bit, Gentlemen. Fifteen minutes, and breakfast will be on the table. Archy said to feed you a full English and he’d pay.’ That breakfast was one of the most welcome meals I’ve eaten in my entire life.”

“Another round, Lads?” asked Pete. All in agreement, Pete went behind the bar to start pulling pints, Denis stacked the fires, the rest of them cleared the empties from the tables, and Stan started washing them behind the bar. It was twenty minutes before Charlie resumed.

“The 1830 Manchester to Liverpool George Stevenson railway line, Mum said George was an umpteenth great grand uncle of ours through our father, ran over Chat Moss and was said to have been built on cotton. Many believed that to mean cotton bales were placed on the route and when they stopped sinking the track was laid over the top of them. The truth was much more prosaic. It was the money from the cotton trade that paid for the enterprise.

“When I was a child the trains stopped wherever someone put their hand out to draw the driver’s attention. The Chat Moss Inn at Glazebury was at the bridge where the line passed over the A574. The tiny back room was officially designated as the ticket office. The platform at the Chat Moss Halt was a mere fifteen yards long. We used to stop the first train in the morning at just before five and help load the milk churns at the farm platforms by the side of the track for a free ride into Liverpool. Twenty miles which took two and a half hours. We’d spend the day in Liverpool and get a free ride back. I only remember a couple of times going the other way into Manchester.”

“You could stop local trains in Cumbria like that before Beeching,”(6) Stan said.

“All the local buses had a notice in the driver’s cab that read ‘Beware Glazebury bridge! Only approach in the middle of the road.’ The bridge was a low arch and all the buses, which were blue Leigh corporation buses, had dented top corners at their fronts. The original railway bridge over the A574 built in 1828 was blown up in 1971 to be replaced by a more modern bridge with a rectangular profile. The new bridge had been prebuilt around the old one and the road had been dug out to give a greater height clearance. The dip had to have pumps to avoid flooding and when the pumps failed the village was isolated as in heavy rain the road flooded at Lately Common too, which was just south of the A580 East Lancashire Road. My mum’s house, on the far side of Coronation Avenue from the bridge, was the nearest house that was allowed to be occupied during the procedure. Mum made a good bit of money from the reporters and camera men who were hanging out of her bedroom windows at the time of the explosion. We were all considerably better off after she married one of the photographers, who I believe didn’t escape from her bedroom for some time after the bridge had gone, though he’d sent his photos off via a taxi ordered by Mum. David was a nice man and a brilliant step father to all six of us. The original cast iron plate that had been attached to the bridge that read Chat Moss Bridge was acquired by the Chat Moss Inn and still hangs over the bar in the tap room.

“None of us knew our dad. He’d disappeared before any of us could remember him. However, we had a lot of maternal family in the area, including great three uncles who farmed four farms as a collective business at Risley which was maybe eight miles south of Glazebury going towards Warrington. The farms were all off Silver Lane which was a left turn just before the Noggin pub on the way south. Silver Lane was a private road that led past the old salamander yard. Salamanders were a kind of clay brick that were often laid over underground electricity cables. They looked like a flat house in profile, a wide base, two short sides which went up at an angle to make a five sided profile. They had ‘Electricity’ sunk into the two ‘roof sides’. Past the brickyard, where Old Mike the tramp [US hobo] had been sleeping for years, were a dozen farms four of which were farmed together by my three uncles and their families. I have fragmented memories of the farms. Mick a dangerous, big, long coated, and permanently chained yard dog, Panda a big, leggy, friendly yard dog who was obviously black and white, turkeys that frightened me to death, and eggs with lion stamps on them. My Aunt Tilly and Uncle Jim and others whose names I can no longer remember. All that’s gone now, the farms and the brickyard. First the M6 motorway, then Warrington new town ate up the land. The little bit that remained of Silver Lane was blighted by travellers and fly tippers and eventually blocked off by the Council.

“But I mostly remember it as a young child when Walt the horseman slept over the stables. He came as a boy for work sixty or more years before when my uncle’s grandfather farmed the property, and he’d never left. He was treated by my relatives as one of the family and they ensured all other workers knew that. I regarded him as my uncle’s elder brother, and I think that was how the family regarded him too. Certainly he was involved in all decision making on the farm, for he was clever and his ideas made the farm more profitable. But at heart he was a horseman. Once I saw him shew Major, the huge Shire stallion, a leaning oak gate stoop,(7) after Major had a good look he led him away and backed him up to the stoop, slapped it with his hand and said, “There, Lad. There. A good kick mind.” Major kicked the stoop with a hind leg exactly where Walt had slapped it, which nearly brought it vertical. Walt inspected the stoop and said, “Again, Lad. Again.” That brought it vertical. Walt dropped a pile of rubble and brick bats(8) down the side of the stoop and the job was done.

“I remember when I was maybe four, being put on a cart pulled by Queenie, the eldest mare. The cart had quarter of a ton of oats in sacks and was going to the mill at Glazebury for the oats to be rolled. I felt so big taking Queenie to the mill all on my own. There was little traffic then, and though I didn’t know it Queenie had been taking oats to the mill for many more years than I’d been alive, and I couldn’t have made her go anywhere else. I was lifted down at the mill and given a glass of milk and a slice of pound cake(9) by the miller’s wife whilst the men took the sacks away to have the oats rolled, resacked and put back on the cart. Then we went back to the farm. I was a very happy child, and I realised years afterwards it does not take much to make a child happy, but it has to be real and it has to be caring. All the folk I knew in my childhood really cared, and it wasn’t because I was a child, it was because I was one of them, a human being. They cared equally for outsiders who moved in and became one of them by their commitment. Those who remained apart from the local community they despised, for why had they gone there if they didn’t wish to become one of them.

There were nods and sounds of agreement around the taproom, and Gladys said, “It’s called love, Charlie. Men are embarrassed by it, but women know it’s the only thing that matters to a child, boy or girl, and they need it to thrive.”

Perhaps surprisingly Sasha added, “As do men too, Gladys. Women understand it at the deepest level, for it is part of being a woman. Men may be uneasy about it, but we do know that it is the truth.” Gladys nodded at his expression of what few men could articulate, for she knew most women understood that about men, and the ones whose relationships lasted understood that like all women, who had limitations simply because they were women, men were no different. It was just that their limitations were different.

Charlie continued. “My mother’s parents lived at Risley a few miles down the road towards Warrington. Grandpa was a builder and had built several houses there in the days before Warrington new town absorbed it and the new road bypassed the village. His first house that I remember was on the corner of Landcut Lane, number 772, opposite Moss Lane. Landcut Lane ran through the fields and eventually passed the two big houses of my great aunts and back onto Warrington Road at the UKEA bad bends. He built a house behind 772 for the parents of a farmer who’d made millions from fast food establishments at Blackpool. I suspect both Landcut Lane and Moss Lane are both long gone now, but I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. Later when my grandmother couldn’t manage the big house that was 772, he built 740 further down the road which was known locally for its multi-coloured roof tiles. I’d helped him build both and learnt a lot from him doing so.

“Whilst I was a boy when my grandparents lived at Warrington Road, across the road was Risley Admiralty. The Admiralty was a wartime industrial estate that was colossal and dedicated to the war effort. Before marrying my father, my mother had worked there making instruments for Ferranti that would be fitted into aeroplanes fighting the war. By nineteen fifty ‘The Admiralty’ was desolate. In its heyday it had three train stations, and a regular, frequent and complex bus service. But when the war ended in 1945 it just stopped. The workforce was redeployed and it immediately started to decay. Built rapidly and and as cheaply as possible, by the time I knew it even the door and window frames were rotten. It was a good place for kids who weren’t bothered about where they should or shouldn’t be playing to have fun. Eventually it had rotted and fallen apart so badly it wasn’t fun any more. It's all part of the new town now.

“Then they built Risley remand centre, a place for those charged with serious crimes who were awaiting trial but had been refused bail. Trouble was security wasn’t too good. There were any number of escapees who simply got on the number 46 bus at the bus stop outside the place that was there for visitors. I’d have been in my middle teens when, seeking work during the summer holidays, I got the job with Security Providers. We were putting up a perimeter fence around the existing one at the remand centre. We put up slippery plastic walls with a five foot diameter circular top all the way around the place. Then we fastened Hescoil razor wire over the top of that. Tell you that stuff is evil. To install Hescoil we had to use cherry pickers and high lift platforms. As a result of that I could see the luxury that the prisoners, sorry remandees, lived in. Those walls were obviously to keep silly buggers like us that worked for a living out. I don’t know when but eventually it became a prison.”

“Ain’t that the fucking truth,” said Pat. “I once tried to find out how much I was paying in tax to keep those bastards in a lifestyle I could only aspire to for most of my life. And guess what? The figures were not available, though I don’t doubt some weasel of of a talcum knackered southern jessie knows the truth of it.”

Sasha laught and said, “Keep going, Charlie. You seem to have hit a nerve with Pat.”

“I was studying hard to get a place at a decent university to study mathematics, but most of my spare time I worked with my distant cousin Mick, who was Uncle Michael’s only child and going to inherit his farm down Farley Common a mile or so south of Mum’s house. I was the one with the brains, and I got us a contract baling shredded security paperwork from Risley atomic [UKAEEHQ, United Kingdom Atomic Energy Establishment Head Quarters] which we sold at Chelford mart mostly to pig farmers for bedding. Mick bid successfully on an old static baler that ran on TVO(10) at an auction which made us more money and we started baling pea haulm(11) from local farmers for which we sold for feed. We also baled bracken and the like from the moss farmers in the process of converting the last few tens of thousand acres of moss into agricultural land. We sold that for bedding which all in all made us a goodly bit of cash too.

“Working with Mick was fun, but I was studying all the while and had no intention of being a farmer. Eventually I went to Upsalla to study, and though I returned for family funerals I had no reason to return to Glazebury after Mick died in a motor accident. He’d never married, so hadn’t left any children I’d have felt a responsibility for, and I’d met Susanna by then. She did her nurse training at Alder Hey children’s hospital Liverpool, but she came from Maryport and that’s why we came here. All the folk I’ve ever come across since from anywhere near Warrington sound like they come from Liverpool. Unreasonable maybe, but I don’t like the thieving cunts, and I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks about that. Susanna went to a nurses’ meeting not long ago about stereotyping. The woman giving the talk, who was clearly a left wing liberal, said that it was unacceptable stereotyping to think that all scousers were thieves. Susanna stuck her hand up and said, ‘My husband doesn’t think all scousers are thieves. He knows they are. He’s worked with thousands of them and as far as I’m concerned he knows what he’s talking about. You obviously don’t.”

As Sasha poured more tequila there was a considerable amount of laughter at that, Susanna was a feisty lady who was as non PC as Charlie, but the consensus of opinion was that those from Liverpool, scousers, could not be trusted. As Bill said, “I worked on the motorway construction gangs for twenty-five years and the scousers were the only bastards who would steal off a workmate. The rest of us regarded the company as fair game, but a mate’s stuff was off limits.”

“That’s it lads,” Charlie said. “Or at any rate it’s all I can come up with right now.”

“Bloody good one, Charlie. Well worth waiting for,” said Stan to the agreement of the others. Another round and more tequila with the shuffling of the dominoes was the prelude to the end of another enjoyable evening.

Notes

1 Theakstone’s Old Peculier. Yes that’s how it’s spelt, and it was sold in bottles containing one third of an imperial pint which is 6⅔ fluid ounces. Though that’s probably gone metric now and about 190ml.
2 Slate, tab, credit account.
3 We did win. An elliptic reference to the War of the Roses (1455-1485) fought between the House of York whose emblem was a white rose and the House of Lancaster whose emblem was a red rose. The battle was for the crown and the Lancastrians won. It is still common for Lancastrians to make such comments and most of the rest of the population understand what they are referring to especially those from Yorkshire.
4 Interregnum, period between execution of James I (30/01/1649) and the return to the throne of Charles II (29/05/1660). Oliver Cromwell’s rise to power following the Civil War.
5 Souwesters, extreme wet weather over clothes comprising a pair of trousers, a cape or jacket and a wide hat often referred to as a Mae West. They were the normal clothing for deep water sea fishermen.
6 Richard Beeching closed 2,363 stations and 5,000 miles (8,000 km) of railway line in 1963, 55% of stations and 30% of route miles, to stop the vast losses the railways were incurring on behalf of the tax payer. Beeching was a much vilified man for doing so, and still is, but he was in a hard place. The motorway network was expanding and there was a lot of money to be made from road transport by influential folk who wanted the railways closed down as competitors. Beeching was made a Lord for his work.
7 Gate stoop, a gate post. The hinge stoop, from which the gate was hung, was much bigger and heavier than the slam stoop, which the gate locked or closed into.
8 Brick bats, broken bricks, a term often used for a half brick, hence the term ‘a quarter bat’ meaning a quarter of a brick.
9 Poundcake, a very old recipe. A pound each of flour, butter, egg and sugar, usually baked in loaf tins.
10 TVO, tractor vaporising oil, similar to paraffin. The engine was started using petrol and once hot switched over to TVO which was heated usually by the exhaust manifold to assist vaporisation.
11 Pea haulm, what ever is left over after a pea crop has been taken by a combine harvester. A nutritious bulk animal feed.