The Grumpy old men were back in the taproom of the Green Dragon Bearthwaite and ready for another session of tales, jokes, history, fantasy and outright fabrication. The weather was cold but not excessively so, and the fires were well stoked to provide warmth. There were rows of dogs with their noses on the fenders dozing in the warmth and Pete was pulling pints. He’d put a couple of whisky bottles labelled Farm Distilled Calvados from Normandy on the bar indicating it was there for any of the old men to drink should they be inclined to take the risk. He’d acquired a few five litre plastic containers of the corrosive spirit when on holiday four summers ago, and decanted it off the lees into empty spirits bottles.

When all were seated and ready Alf asked, “You said you’d tell us about the rebuilding of your place sometime, Sasha. I know we’ve heard bits and pieces of it, but I’d like a round tale of it. Any chance?”

Sasha nodded and said “Okay. Well I bought the place from that lad from Wigan who’d only lived in it a year or two before going back to live at his mum’s. Anderson his name was. He said he was a builder and maybe that was so, but he may have been okay with Edwardian and Victorian brick built properties, but he was completely out of his depth on a spot like mine which was at least four hundred years old and built with beach cobbles set on wetted down clay and straw mix. If you mind he swerved for that dog and killed some poor sod in the resultant head on crash. I gathered he was never the same after that and his missus left him. Like I said he went back to Wigan, but his wife stayed up here. She lived in one of the villages near Aspatria I was telt. But that’s all decades ago, and I only met the bloke once. That was the first time we looked the place over. The next time we looked at it his mate from Maryport shewed us round, and I did the deal with the owner over his mate’s mobile phone. I mind it well because the phone was one of the first ones available and it was the size of a house brick. Twenty five grand he was asking, I offered sixteen and we settled on seventeen and a half or eighteen and a half. I can’t mind which now. Elle would know. He’d been trying to sell for a couple of years after he moved out and nobody had even looked at the spot till we came along. The house was in terrible condition and deteriorating rapidly. The out buildings were even worse. I don’t think there was a fence on the place that was stock proof. Most of the wire was rotted through in places and on the ground and you could push a finger through most of the posts.

“What decided you to buy the place, Sasha? All the locals knew the house was falling to pieces. And most of the out buildings hadn’t had a roof since before I was born. I mind the house roof collapsing when I was still at school. It had had a series of tenants who’d not looked after it and we all expected a few decent storms would see it off. At that point it wouldn’t have been worth ten grand for the land because it hadn’t had anything done with it for over fifty years. My dad said it could have been over a hundred since it had seen a plough, because no one bothered even when the second world war farming orders were in place making farmers put everything under food production. and old Peabody, Alan’s granddad mind not his dad said it wasn’t worth the trouble of fencing it for the grazing because the fields had been taken over by whins (1) and there was bugger all grazing on the spot. Most thought the best thing was to let the buildings tumble down and recover the entire site as farm land with a dozer. It was a hell of a shock round here when you bought the place and had Alec Graham clear the old hedge and fence lines and put in new sheep netting and barbed wire fences not just round the boundary but round all the fields too. It was an even bigger shock when you cleared the whins in less than two years with that flock of over a hundred goats.”

“I bought the place, Stan, because of where it is. No neighbours. I knew I could sort it all out with minimal grief from locals and more importantly the planners and building control too. Funny about the land. After the goats had stripped all the whins back to thick stuff and some of it was four or five inches in diameter which I selt for a good price to artsy fartsy types I selt the goats and had Alec cut what was left of the whins down to the ground with a chain saw. I couldn’t see the point in ploughing it so Alec chain harrowed it for me to rip up what he could of the whin roots. Alan Peabody approached me with regard to renting the grazing. We agreed a price as long as it was only sheep not cattle, and on condition he took the sheep off long enough for me to chain harrow the land every year for the foreseeable future. Alec went round picking up all the whins the harrows had ripped out and painting the stumps of what remained with concentrated glyphosphate. I only wanted sheep on the land because they would eat any green whin as fast as it appeared whereas cattle would ignore it and allow it to recover. Five years later there was no whin anywhere, the grass was in good heart and I telt Alan he could graze cattle too if he wanted. He’d only have been in his twenties I think when I first met him, but it’s what now? Forty years later, and he still has the grazing and does all my fence and gate maintenance for me.”

“Aye. He’s always said you’ve done well out of each other over the years without having to pay any land agent their fee for handling the grass letting. And any farmer is always glad of a neighbour who’ll put straying animals back in a field regardless of whose stock go in whose field. And I know he’s always been happy to trade meat for work on your spot, which keeps Vince in work and happy. Still that’s in keeping with Bearthwaite isn’t? Negotiate a fair deal and don’t pay anything to third parties who do nowt. At least Vince kills and butches(2) your meat for a fair price and it’s hard graft(3) butching a beast.(4) I hate estate agents, they’re nowt short of parasites.” There were any number of men nodding in agreement with Stan’s remark.

“Anyway back to the house. Everything was painted in high intensity wood stain. I know that’s what it was because I found the tin. Everywhere inside the house was as dark as a the inside of a black velvet bag. The kitchen was so dark you could see bugger all. On the day we moved in Anderson’s dad was picking up the last of his stuff and loading it all onto a waggon. When he saw me take the forty watt light bulbs out and replace them with one fifties he said I was ruining the ambiance. Ambiance my arse. I knew the house was in bad fettle, but I wanted to see exactly how bad what I’d bought was. The first thing the light shewed up was the state of the ceiling in the kitchen. It was wooden planked with inch thick boards, and I reckoned that stain was all that was holding it together. That was the first inkling we had of the extent of the woodworm. Still I got a week’s burning out of the kitchen ceiling, planks and joists both. That was the beginning of the big burn which lasted years. The thing that puzzled us was the place was full of moths about three-quarters of an inch long. We couldn’t figure out where they were coming from, but every morning every surface in every room was covered in loads of them mostly dead.

“My roof was a disaster in waiting. A lot of it was made from centuries old second hand ship’s timbers probably sourced from the local ship breakers that closed over two hundred years since. Most ships were only built to last thirty to fifty years and there was probably a ship breaker in every port once. A lot of the timbers were wood wormed to hell and no longer structural. Eventually I replaced every piece of wood in the house with tanalith pressure treated timber. There was little active wood worm in the house when we bought it because there was bugger all left for them to eat, most had probably starved to death long since. Most of the wood in the house you could crush to powder between your fingers. There was a six by three soft wood strut under the ridge piece that had been installed maybe twenty or thirty years before, but it was crumbling and the weight from the ridge had pushed it down through the wormed floor boards below. As a result the ridge had collapsed.

“I welded a four by three RSJ(5) to an Acrow jack.(6) The entire thing was twenty-eight feet long with six foot of potential extension, long enough to reach from the concrete floor of the ground floor kitchen to the fallen ridge and then jack it back to where it should have been. I had to knock holes in both the kitchen ceiling and the bedroom ceiling above it to put it in place, mind that wasn’t difficult. I bolted an eight foot long six by three oak timber to the top of the Acrow and jacked the ridge back up again using the screw on the Acrow and a secondary Acrow on a pair of eight by four foot three-quarter inch sheets of shuttering ply to take the load on the upstairs floor whilst I adjusted the pin on the big Acrow up to get another bite on the job. For the last foot I wasn’t strong enough even with a six foot bar on the Acrow thread to turn it any more, so I took the weight off it onto the secondary Acrow, pulled the pin, dropped the Acrow and used a hydraulic jack to take it up four inches too high. Same as before took the weight on the other Acrow, removed the jack, screwed the main Acrow back up and when I let the weight back down the roof ridge settled to where I wanted it.

Alf grinned and said, “At the time there were a lot of folk who wondered how you’d put the roof ridge back.”

“Yeah well, Alf, it wasn’t difficult, but it took an entire day. Old Lawton who lived nearby was a retired carpenter. He said he was eighty-four at the time, and he telt me when he was a boy his dad had reroofed the building, but Wabberthwaite the owner, a man notorious as a niggard, had telt him to leave the original roof timbers on and just retimber over them which explained why there were two sets of rafters in the roof a foot apart. The owner had supplied second hand timbers to reroof with which my neighbour’s dad had telt him were wormed and only fit for fire wood then. Old Lawton also telt me he minded another time the woman of the house, whose name he could no longer mind, giving him a drink of water from the well when he’d have been maybe five one hot sunny day. Upstairs there were two bloody great A frames supporting the roof that were clearly made from ships’ timbers because they were made of of pitch pine and every piece tapered from one end to the other. In the end they made great logs and burnt damned hot. Only trouble was they were at head height and both of us acquired regular forehead bruises till I took them out.”

Phil added, “Cecil Lawton was the village undertaker till he died when his nephew Casper took over the business. Casper had been working with him for years and I think when Cecil’s hands got bad with the arthritis Casper took over making the coffins.”

“Aye that’s right, Phil,” said Alf. “I’ve been casting up brass coffin handles for Casper every now and again for years now. They get taken off before a coffin is buried and then reused, but they don’t last forever and I remelt up the old ones after a few uses. Sorry, Sasha. Keep going.”

“Eventually I used every piece of that roof, and every other piece of wood in the house along with the stands from Workington dog racing track, the wood from a local social club which was a wooden building and all the wood from that house a quarter of a mile away when Jonny Whiteson bought the place, demolished it and built a new house on the site. I had the heat out of the lot of them to warm my house and provide hot water as they went up the flue.

“Long before I reroofed, we’d only lived there a month or so, we had a serious storm, steady winds of over eighty miles an hour gusting at over a hundred and ten. We get all the winds funnelling off the Solway plain. They come straight through past Northern Ireland and bounce off Snaefell on the the Isle of Mann to hit our coast, and there’s nothing to slow the winds down between us and Greenland and Canada. Elle was at work, she worked nights in those days, and it would have been past ten in the evening. I was upstairs listening to the wind gusts pulsing and getting bothered. It’s the pulsing that’s the problem, it the timing is right, or maybe I mean wrong, each pulse pushes the roof a bit higher and eventually it fails. It’s called resonance and it’s what caused the destruction of the Tacoma Narrows bridge over Puget Sound in the state of Washington on November the seventh, nineteen forty. The film of it failing is on youtube. It’s like pushing a kid on a swing, you wait till the swing has just gone over the highest point before pushing and that builds up the amplitude of the swing.”

“How do you mean, Sasha?”

“What? It makes it go higher more easily, Alf. I admit I was bothered watching the roof lift up and down in time with the gusts. I was right under it when a few minutes later it went up and kept going. I lost a quarter of my roof, which at least saved me the trouble of removing it. I had planned on starting reroofing from the other end of the building in three months but started at the end with no roof immediately. The roof by the way ended up behind the house destroying some very expensive cast iron antique garden furniture which upset Elle, so I just replaced it. Elle happy, so issue solved. Another pint, Lads?”

“I’ll get em in, Sasha,” Phil said standing up. “You pull em, Pete, and I’ll fetch em over? And I’ll let those dogs out for run.”

After all had another pint Sasha resumed. “It was my plan to raise the height of the rooms which required the walls to be four feet higher at the back and the same height all round eventually. I wasn’t planning on bothering the local authorities about the matter, so I didn’t want the roof taking off till I’d built the walls up. First I took the cobble walls out and rebuilt them with footings and a damp proof course up to the original height. Then I jacked the roof up with a dozen one ton hydraulic car jacks and built the walls up as I went. Then I started replacing the roof which led to some amazing experiences. At one point we had six inches of snow in the upstairs bathroom and we were singing ‘raindrops keep falling on my head’ in the front room with a roaring fire and a glass in our hands watching the drops falling into the dozen or more buckets on the floor and the odd drops hitting our heads. Even Elle wasn’t bothered when she had enough to drink.”

“What you lived in the house the whole time?” Asked Eric.

“Certainly did. Where where did you think we lived?”

“I assumed you bought a big caravan [US trailer] whilst you did the building.”

“No. That house is eighty foot long and thirty-five front to back. Two rooms deep and five wide. It’s bigger than most terraces of five houses. And that’s not including the two storey attached workshop which is twenty-five foot square. Although originally the house was only two storey at the back it’s two storey at the front now too. When we worked on one section we lived in another.”

There were a number of the old men who’d moved into Bearthwaite since Sasha had finished his work on the house and though not much surprised by his and Elle’s somewhat different approach to house renovation they hadn’t been aware of the circumstances. Most were smiling in surprise.

“The whole experience of renovating the house was astonishing. We took out a colossal chimney stack in what we used as our living room, and I mean colossal, fifteen feet by six all cobbles. God alone knows why it was that big because it only serviced a small fire. It wasn’t even carrying two flues. In a cavity built into the stack we found a child’s shoe and a small bell. Both apparently traditional mediaeval things built into buildings, especially fireplaces, to avert daemonic influences. My research said it was only ever one shoe not a pair. I’ve still got the bell and the shoe.”

“What were they like, Sasha? And how old do you think they were?”

“Nowhere near as old as the back of the house, Bill, because the stack was build in the front part of the house which was probably about two hundred years old. The bell is about three inches tall and two across at the bottom. The shoe is, as you’d expect, all leather. It’s about four or five inches long, quite narrow so possibly a girl’s shoe. It has relatively high sides and looks to be half way between a shoe and a boot. Call round some time and have a look. If a few of you come round one evening we could make a night of it. I’ve a few sets of dominoes, and Elle will be happy to put a supper on. Tell the girls and let them and Elle organise it and have a gossip session too.”

The old men were all nodding and looking forward to what they knew would effectively be a week with two Saturdays in it.

“The house had no foundations. The walls were made by depositing a double row of beach cobbles most fifteen to eighteen inches in diameter straight onto the ground. They hadn’t even removed the sod. You could see it as a black layer just under the cobbles. The walls were built of slightly smaller beach cobbles on top of the double row and were about eighteen inches thick. There was the odd cobble much bigger than that. We came across one over three feet long about nine feet up in a gable end that was at least half a ton. [500Kg, 1120 pounds] How they got it up there over four hundred years ago baffles me. Why they did so rather than use it at ground level baffles me even more, for all they’d have had would have been men, horses and sheer legs with blocks and tackles. It would have been dangerous work, but still in those days they’d just have put more men on the job and men were cheap, far cheaper than horses or even a good dog. We found that the beach cobbles of which the walls were built had been set in wet clay mixed with straw, not mortar. Centuries later the clay had dried to dust and blown out. It was a technique referred to as clay dobbing or dabbing. Every time the wind blew there was a fine layer of clay dust coating everything in the house. The house was draughty and every time you wanted a cup or a plate you had to wash the dust off. Elle refused to do any further house work because it was pointless and gave me an ultimatum, ‘Sort it out, or I’ll just pile all the dirty dishes in the sink till we need them.’

“Rendering the walls would have been a nightmare. The cobbles meant the walls were anything but flat, and trying to put anything up on a wall made of cobbles is an even bigger nightmare. Even drilling them using SDS(7) masonry bits in a powerful industrial hammer drill is a long, difficult and tedious process. So bit by bit I knocked the walls down removed the cobbles, dug proper footings for a foundation and built new walls using cement blocks. A four and a half inch insulated block on the inside, that’s a block with two inches of insulation keyed to it, then a two and a half inch cavity and an outer skin of nine inch blocks. All together an eighteen inch cobble wall replaced by an eighteen inch modern cement block, insulated cavity wall with a damp proof course which the cobble wall didn’t have. Nowadays they don’t allow insulated block you have to use those sheets of insulation foam like Kingspan and Xtratherm, but then they don’t have eighteen inch walls like I do. I’ve done the insulation calculations and my walls are well better than current building regulations.”

Alf was nodding as he said, “Putting up a shelf on a cobble wall is a right bastard of a job.”

Sasha continued saying, “The footings were fun. All of the footings went down at least three feet to get to something solid enough to pour concrete onto, though even that wasn’t that good and required steel reinforcing mesh to be any good. On one corner of the house to get the footings down on to something even approaching solid we had to go down ten feet to dig out the silt. If you stood on the silt you started to sink into it. It was clear that at some time in the past the entire area had once been a beach on the edge of the Solway which was now maybe twenty miles away across the plain. All the footings were four feet wide to spread the loading for as I said none of the ground was much good but that corner was the worst. I shuttered the sides because it’s scary being in a hole that far down. Remind me some time and I’ll tell you about putting in the new septic tank which we went down fifteen feet for. I decided that the corner needed more than the usual reinforcing mesh because the concrete was coming up like a pair of staircases as it moved away from the corner. When Alec Graham and I had worked our way round the boundary hedges of the property we’d pulled out bicycle frames and bed frames amongst all sorts of other stuff in the hedges. The metal we’d just threwn in a heap waiting for me to find time to weigh it in at the scrap yard sometime. That didn’t happen. That corner was reinforced with anything I could lay my hands on from out of the hedges and a lot more besides. It was a good way of cleaning up the place and a cheap way of bringing the footings at that corner to the same level as the footings everywhere else, about three feet below ground level.”

“I like it. Bed frames, bikes and old fencing as reinforcing in concrete. I’ll give you this, Sasha, you’ve got style.”

“Thanks, Harry. At the back of the house there’d been a buttress supporting the wall, or at least that’s what it was supposed to be doing. To look at it was two and a half feet wide and five feet deep at its base sloping up to nothing at the eaves. The left over straw from the dobbing after the clay had blown out and the nesting material put there by the resident mice had caught fire at some time in ages past in the wall. The soot and blackened cobbles provided the evidence for that. That had compromised the stability of the wall, hence the buttress. Problem was the buttress was a four and a half inch single brick shell filled with rubble and probably completely useless. When the back wall came out so did the buttress. I reckon given that the bricks the buttress shell was made from were of a modern machine made type but of a size that hadn’t been used for years the buttress was probably built some time round nineteen hundred.

“There was a single storey five foot deep lean to extension out of the ground floor bedroom which was at the back of the house and led to an en suite bathroom at the front of the house. The lean to was corrugated, asbestos cement sheet roofed and the gable it went through was supported by an inadequately sized RSJ. I decided to extend the lean wall to to the front of the house and take both extension and lean to up to replace the existing gable end with a new gable five feet further out. I scaffolded and sheeted the entire gable and frontage so none could see what I was doing and in doing so extended the ensuite bathroom to be five feet wider. Someone later said, “I see you knocked the lean to down.” Folk see what they expect to see. Also behind the sheets I extended the existing kitchen eight feet to the side which squared the building off and enabled me to access the rest of the building from inside. That’s the bit that’s now the workshop. That required extra roof tiles. I used the new tiles along the front five rows and used older ones to roof over the kitchen ‘extension’. I got questions from the council because someone had telt them I’d moved the frontage five feet towards the road, but the photographs I’d taken proved that to be nonsense. It was not noticed that I’d squared the kitchen off because it looked right, like I said folk see what they expect to see. Funny thing, originally the bit of the workshop that’s farthest from the house must have been a separate building that wasn’t built quite parallel to the house. At some point the space between the two buildings had been incorporated into the structure and roofed over. That must have been before Cecil Lawton’s dad reroofed the spot because there was the double set of timbers on the roof. The extra space was seven foot wide at the back and ten and a half at the front which made for interesting building.”

Stan added, “I mind at the time folk saying Sasha had knocked that lean to down, but I never heard a whisper of anything else. I guess he’s right. Folk see what they expect to see, but he’s a crafty old bastard for playing on it.”

It wasn’t quite a smirk on Sasha’s face but it was perilously close to it as he continued. “The entire front of the house was a single storey extension built at least a couple of hundred years ago. The roof sloped up to the ridge, but it wasn’t in a straight line. There was a change in the angle where the front of the original building had been. The space above the kitchen which was at the front of the house was completely closed in. We went upstairs at the back of the house to break into it to discover there was an old timber door way complete with wooden latch that had been bricked in. It was maybe three foot wide and four high like a typical barn hay loft entry. That was how we knew the front was a later addition to the house because that doorway must have been on the outside of the building originally. The space inside above the kitchen which was five foot high at the original house side going down to nothing at the eaves was filled with old hessian sacks and paper potato sacks. The floor was wormed to hell and unsafe so I went in very carefully. My intention was to knock down all remaining wood and the sacks into the kitchen. When we’d removed the planked kitchen ceiling we’d found there was another ceiling or maybe that’s a floor eighteen inches above it. As soon as I touched the sacks one mystery was solved. That’s where the damned moths were coming from. Thousands flew up, there was a cloud of them. Still all the wood and sacks didn’t last a week in the solid fuel Rayburn cooker and we never saw one again.

“I knew where I was going with the entire development and so built the new chimney stack, six feet by four carrying two twelve inch flues to four feet higher than the new ridge would be. The chimney footings projected four feet all around the proposed new stack and were heavily steel reinforced and two feet thick. I built the stack with nine by nine inch solid concrete bocks and infilled with sulphur resisting cement concrete. I had two twelve inch internal diameter pipes which I laid the concrete around and gradually pulled them up as the chimney rose. Obviously the whole chimney had to be scaffolded as it went up. Any number of folk asked why was my chimney so high. Eventually as the front wall went up a bit at a time, jacking the roof and building the front wall below it the chimney ‘shrank’ in height as the roof was jacked up around it. I was telt several times, “I knew you’d have to reduce it.” However they were all incomers who’d had silly ideas about what rural life was like. As soon as they realised the floods cut them off from time to time and if they wanted the pumps on they’d have to pay for it they started moving out. None are left now. Only a few of the silly bastards had noticed the extra row of windows in the new storey upstairs front wall, and I telt them that they mustn’t have noticed the tiny windows, and that I’d built the new blockwork to accommodate decent sized windows to let a decent amount of light in. Like I said, folk see what they expect to see.”

“I thought you don’t tell lies, Sasha,” Alf said with a smile thinking he’d caught Sasha out.

“I don’t or at least I try not to. What I said was true. They hadn’t noticed the tiny windows because there weren’t any, and I had built the new blockwork to accommodate decent sized windows to let a decent amount of light in.” Alf and a number of the others were smiling at Sasha’s manipulation of the truth.

Stan said, “I got sick of those bastards, Sasha. Always complaining about something. Cockerels crowing, lambs bleating, shite on the road at muck spreading time and things changing. I telt one woman of course things were changing idiots like her were living here. They should have stayed where they were before. Still none will sell to any like them any more. If someone needs to sell we’ll all chip in till a couple from here or at least from a farming community wants to buy us out. It’s a decent investment and means we don’t have to put up with city shit heads.” There was a decided murmur of agreement with Stan.

Sasha who’d set up the mechanism for the locals to do that in order to help an elderly couple sell up to go to live with their daughter’s family and enable Denis to sell his small holding to move to into the old couples holding at Bearthwaite, which took nearly a twelve month, just nodded before continuing. “As I’d expected local building control eventually catcht up with me. Now that was a farce. The main man was too fat to climb a ladder, so the roof structure was inspected from the ground which gave me endless opportunities for bullshit. I said it had all been completed six years before which meant they couldn’t do anything because too much time had elapsed. Then they sent a young bloke. He was as thick as pig shit and I should know because I taught him A level mathematics, and becoming a building inspector hadn’t given him any more intelligence. I had a bit of grief from them over my new workshop, but it was nothing I couldn’t work round and the matter has been closed for years now.

“I must say I think the planners are all idiots with no sense of what looks right or attractive. One of their most common reasons for refusing planning permission is because they say the development will detract from civic amenity, in other words they think it will be ugly. That obscenity at Workington that the locals call Perry’s palace after the council leader when it was built has to be the ugliest building in the county. Allerdale House is its official name and it’s the council’s office block, though the planners and building control are no longer in there because the place was too small, or more likely they’ve taken on too many useless bastards the public shouldn’t have to be paying for. It’s true what’s been said many a time, doctors can bury their mistakes, but architects’ mistakes are a bit more permanent.”

After a round had been sorted out the men looked around and Eric who had just turned sixty started, “I telt you ages since I didn’t get on with Shauna’s parents in the beginning. It was none of my doing, her dad had heard some bullshit about me from a mate of his at work who didn’t even know me and he’d believed it. I just ignored it till young Jimmy came home crying one day. We’d done something together that he’d enjoyed and had wanted to tell his granddad about it. He used to sleep over at his grandparents’ place pretty often, they only lived half a mile away. His granddad had shut him up saying he didn’t want to hear anything about me. I had never even considered stopping Jimmy spending time with them and I didn’t them, but I was hopping mad. I telt Shauna to get her coat. I telt her, “We’re going to have a chat with your dad and if he doesn’t apologise to you I’m going to knock seven shades of shit out of him.”

“Ah knockt on, an as he answert the door I set, ‘Ye owe yer dochter an apology, an ifn she does nae get et ah’m gang te knock seven kints o shit oot o ye, and tha’ll be tha for e’er. Er ye se sma a mon tha ye’re willin te dae tha te the lassie ye shaer a bed wi, who a least has the sense te visit us an spen time wi the boy she loves? Ah’ll dae et te ye because ah care aboot ma lassie an ah’m feckin sick o ye upsettin a wee laddie who’s don nothin te deserve yur cuntish behaviour. Dinae tek et oot on hem, tek et oot on mey ifn ye’ve the balls te try et. He was no mah boy, but wey’ve decidet te be father and son because wey want te be. Ifn ye dinae tell mey reet the noo tha ye’ll no shut him op any mere when hey wants te tak aboot things hey’s enjoyt daeing wi his dad, and whether ye like et or no tha’s mey, ah’ll mek sure ye ne’er see hem agen te hurt hem. Noo what’s it te be? A feckin guid hidin an a dreich future wi your missus upset wi ye, or bey a mon an admit ye med a mistek, apologise te your dochter tha’s noo ma lassie, an at least try te bey civil aboot mey te your grandbairn. If ye chose the latter, ah’ll bey mon enoof te let bygones be bygones and nothin bat regards ye will e’er pass ma lips te the boy. Ah’ll gie ye twa minutes te make a decision. Mek the reet yan and ah’ll call ye dad, mek the wrong yan and ah’ll dae ma damndest te mek ye hurt for a month. Your twa minutes starts the noo.’ [This paragraph is at the bottom in plain English]

“I’d met Shauna down here when I was eighteen and never went back to live in Glasgow again. We were wed inside of twelve months. By then most of the time in those days I spoke near enough like the northern English, but when I was under stress I spoke like I was a Glaswegian with no experience of the south. It was a shock to Shauna that I not only threatened to sort her dad out but that I did so in the dialect that I did. I didn’t realise for years that my speech itself made her dad think I was a gangster from Glasgow.

“Years later I mind one evening when all had been fine with Shauna’s dad for a long time. My mother in law had died a couple of years before, but my father in law had never really come to terms with that. I think he was just passing time waiting to join her at the time. He was staying with us along with Cath, my sister in law and Mick, her husband for a week during the summer. Shauna and Cath had put Cath’s kids to bed and the adults were enjoying a drink and conversation. I’d opened a bottle of cask strength [60% by volume] Laphroaig and my father in law was decidedly worse for wear. As the alcohol loosened his inhibitions he started to apologise for his behaviour years before. As far as Shauna and I were concerned the matter was over, but I think he needed to make his peace with himself. He was a big Irishman, six three and well over fifteen stone, [over 210 pounds] and there was no way Mick and I could get him to bed upstairs, so I suggested putting him in Shauna’s and my bedroom. We used the en suite bedroom down stairs. The two of us helped him and got him standing by the bed, but he was gone even if standing. He had his back to the bed so I put my hand to his chest and pushed. He went backwards and keeled over. It looked like he was falling in slow motion, and Mick was still laughing when we joined the lasses. Dad had fallen across the king sized bed, and all we’d done was take his shoes off. When I got up the following day he hadn’t moved. He had a good sense of humour and I mind years before him telling me, ‘Take a good look at my missus, Son, because that’s what you’re buying. Don’t come crying to me in years to come when you realise you made a big mistake because you’ve been warned.’ I also mind one time he telt me ‘Everything gets harder as you grow older, Son, except the only thing that matters that is.’ I mind her shriek of shock, as my mother in law hit him and said, ‘Joseph!’ That I think was the only time I ever heard him called anything but Joe.”

Harry indicated he’d tell a tale. “You all know the bad bend on the road that runs through where I used to live before I came here. There are width restriction signs of six foot six at each end of the road and warnings about the bend. Maybe ten years ago a Polish waggon driver had wedged his waggon which was an eighteen wheeler with a sixty foot trailer on the bend between the barn and the wall. Usual bull shit, ‘The sat nav told me to do it.’ I don’t know how long he’d been driving, but he’d no idea how to reverse his rig. I telt him to get out and I’d do it. I hitched a chain to the arse end of his trailer by wrapping it round his rearmost axle and pulled it free with a tractor. I jumped in the cab before he could and backed the rig up from off the bend and back round the smaller bend. I should have backed it up and onto the main road because it took him over an hour to reverse three hundred metres on a straight road and he butchered the verges on both sides all the way. I was later telt that it took him half an hour to back the trailer on to the main road. Oversize waggons having to back up from the bend was becoming a commonplace event, but another Polish driver with a waggon the same size about a fortnight later was trying the same trick. I went out and telt him there was no way he’d get it round. He said he’d try it. I don’t have a word of Polish and he didn’t speak English, but he understood what I was saying when I telt him I was going to ring for the Police. He wasn’t as bad a driver as the other guy, but he wasn’t any good. It took him half an hour to get back on the main road. Those two trailers are the only two I’ve ever seen that long other than on the motorways. However we were getting so much damage done to the property especially the barn on the corner that had been there nigh on two hundred years by over size waggons that we decided to sell up and move. That’s why we came here.”

After Harry had finished Paul started. “I was halfway through my A’ levels and still living at Mum and Dad’s place in Malvern. That year I had a summer job chopping up trinitrotoluene, TNT. I’d have been seventeen. I was working for ICI somewhere in the midlands, I can’t mind where now. The stuff is the most widely used high explosive in the world both by commercial outfits like mines and quarries and the military too because it’s so stable. You can’t set it off by hitting it or by setting it on fire. The usual trick is they use a tiny quantity of something that’s so unstable you can set it off by thinking about it as a detonator. They used to use fulminates which are so unstable they used to say you could always tell a chemist who'd done early fulminate research by his missing fingers, and the fewer fingers he had the longer he'd been working on the stuff. I don’t know if they still use the stuff at all because most modern detonators are based on lead azide. The detonator sets off a small quantity of something a bit more stable but still pretty dodgy. That’s referred to as the primary gain, and it in turn sets off a larger quantity of something even more stable, the secondary gain which is what sets off the TNT. Sometimes there's only one gain not two. We worked in a stainless steel clad room which had a load of twelve inch holes in the floor. The TNT came in via a chute in big irregular chunks from the part of the site where it was made. The biggest pieces were maybe a couple of feet long and a foot thick, but most were no bigger than a foot in any direction.

“The stuff was vaguely pink, someone telt me that was due to impurities and that the pure stuff was pale yellow. It was a soft waxy solid like those firelighters you can buy. If you put a match to it it burns like a firelighter but it won’t explode. We chopped the stuff up with axes till the pieces were small enough to go down the holes in the floor and using a brush we swept all the small bits down the holes too. I never saw it but there were steam pipes round the pipes that the holes were connected to. The stuff melted as it went down and was completely liquid by the time it reached the bottom. I believe the liquid was poured into shell casings which were vibrated to make sure the pour was solid with no voids or bubbles in it. That was so the explosion was even and not more powerful on one side. Funny thing was when I went back to school my A level chemistry teacher didn’t believe me because he said TNT was a liquid. I telt him he was mixing it up with trinitroglycerine which is a liquid and far more unstable that TNT. The following lesson he admitted he’d been wrong and I was correct. Christ that tasted sweet. It’ll all be a fully automated process now I suppose with no summer jobs to be had for kids which is a shame really.”

Alf said, “I’ll tell a really short one. Am I glad I live out in the sticks with folk of sense. I weighed in a trailer of scrap at the scrapyard from Jacob’s place last week. Jacob is Ellen’s younger brother and he went with me. There were two lads that worked in the yard squaring up to each other because one was telling the other who was a stacker truck driver to move a pallet of old car batteries so I could back in for him to unload me with the magnetic grab. There was well more than enough room for me so I just backed up. The crazy thing was after I’d been unloaded and weighed off on the weigh bridge the two of them were back to squaring up again. Jacob and I left in a hurry before either of them thought to involve us in it. If that’s what living in a town does to you you can bloody well keep it for me.”

Denis said, “Talking of idiots, I mind reading somewhere a long time ago that in the early part of the twentieth century the US military funded a lot of work into IQ testing. They were interested in trying to match up recruits and what they had them doing and had concluded IQ was the single most reliable indicator. An interesting conclusion of the work was that any one with an IQ below eighty-three could not be trained for anything, no matter how much time was invested in them. In those days the US military was used as an educational and training tool for the many who’d had little schooling. For all I know it may still be. It was seen as of social benefit since on release from the military the veterans would have been trained in a trade they could feed themselves and a family with in civilian life. I always wondered what the truth of it was because my mate Jonas had a younger brother David who had Down syndrome and although I’d no idea what his IQ was I’d taught him to read and write. He went to a special school who’d telt his mum he’d never be able to read and write. David was into dinosaurs and collected the dinosaur cards that came in boxes of tea. I think they were Brooke Bond tea, but lots of tea companies packed collectable cards in those days. We used the cards instead of books. It was slow, but he learnt to read and write, and some of those beasties had long names. David was good with animals and went on to work full time for a local farmer who’d been employing him at weekends for years. Dobson, the farmer, telt me he was one of the few folk who could handle his bull and he did it easily because the bull was happy to follow him about like a dog. I know David used to collect sweet clover for the beast as a treat, but I’d seen him handle it with no clover and it wasn’t all cupboard love. I’ve read that the average IQ of Down affected individuals is about fifty, but it is widely variable and some with mosaic Down syndrome have IQs of round the hundred mark, which is said to be the average in the general population, but I still wonder about the truth of what was said about having an IQ of eighty-three or less.”

John indicated he’d carry on with a tale and said, “On a completely different subject, about fifty years ago I found a young little owl suffering from cold. That’s little owl as in the species Athene noctua, not as in referring to its size. I found it in a wood on the ground when out walking and it would have died if I’d left it. I decided to take it to the owl sanctuary that was out Awlsome way or maybe it was Redvale. I don’t remember any more. What a place that was. The first trick was getting past the half dozen swans patrolling the car park that seemed to be intent on keeping all visitors in their cars. I went into a barn and there were hundreds of owl of every species imaginable perched up on rails running round the building. I got there just in time to see an old woman dumping a box of what she later telt me were live day old male chicks from a local hatchery. They only wanted the female chicks to sell on to egg producing battery farms. In a matter of seconds those owls had swooped, were back on their perches enjoying a snack and there wasn’t a chick in sight on the ground.

“I explained why I was there and she said to bring the box into the house. Like I said that place was an eye opener. Every room in the house had perches high on the walls, looked like wooden curtain rails to me. Every perch was packed with owls. She must have had hundreds if not a few thousand. Everywhere was covered in bird shit. In the front room was a big cage maybe eight foot square and six foot high. It was covered in newspaper. There were two arm chairs in it, and it turned out that’s where she lived. The rest of the place was given over to the owls. She telt me most of the birds were eventually returned to the wild. I mind she had one that had only one wing and she said he lived with her permanently and was her favourite. A pet she called it. She was dressed in rags. I suspect she spent every cent she had on the birds. I handed over the minute fluffy ball of seriously bad attitude, little owls are notoriously bad tempered, and she went into paroxysms of delight. Under any other circumstances I’d have suspected her of having a spontaneous orgasm. I gave her a tenner for the funds and turned to go.

“That’s when I saw the girl. Somewhere between ten and twelve to look at but probably older because she looked underfed. She was dressed in what appeared to be a hessian flour sack with holes cut for the neck and arms with a piece of hay bale twine for a belt. That and wellies. There was a look of helplessness and hopelessness on her face that haunts me to this day. I wondered was she a daughter, a granddaughter or just a waif and stray taken in like the birds? I truly have no idea. I still wonder if I did right not informing social services, but I didn’t because everything I knew about them telt me they just made kids’ lives worse. I can’t help but wonder what happened to her and what she is doing now.”

Frank said, “A few years back I was at the steel yard collecting pallets. They ring me up every now and again to say there’s a worthwhile load for me. I get the firewood plus anything else they want taking away that is of use to me and they don’t have to pay for a skip to dump the pallets in. Pallets are mostly air and you don’t get many in a skip that costs you a hundred and fifty quid. I’d just loaded all the easy to cut up thick stuff into my fourteen foot trailer, the one with the cage sides front, sides and rear, when a bloke turned up in a saloon car. He objected to me taking all the good stuff and said I should let him have it and I should take the pallets. Now pallets are okay, but they are time consuming to cut up and you need to be damned careful or you’ll get seriously hurt, and they don’t last five minutes. You have to sit over the fire constantly loading it up. I said the firm had rung me up to collect the stuff, I did the job regularly and for me it was a sixty mile round trip. I added I was damned if I was giving him anything. There was nothing left that would fit in his car, so he disappeared muttering curses. The four foot skid which was three and a half inches square I was holding may have had something to do with him backing down. I used to think I could be obnoxious, but I don’t any more because there’re far worse than me out there.”

Tony and his wife Beth were regular Saturday night visitors. He and Beth were dentists who lived near Keswick. Beth always came with him and enjoyed herself in the best room. Tony was a bee keeper of many years experience having kept bees since childhood. “I once sold four hives of bees to a bloke in south Wales. I agreed to deliver them for a suitable price. I couldn’t borrow a trailer from anyone I knew who had one because they were all in use or awaiting repair. The bloke had paid me up front so I was committed. The best I could do was borrow my sister’s mini van. I’d kept bees a long time, but travelling two hundred and fifty miles over poor quality B roads with four strong colonies of clearly angry bees just behind you is not good for the nerves. I got them to where they were going. The last two miles were over a bumpy farm track and the bees were roaring. The bloke and I, and I can’t remember his name, offloaded them onto his prepared hive stands and I advised him to leave them till the following afternoon before he let them out. I like bees, but my return journey was far less stressful.”

“Supper in three minutes, Gentlemen,” Gladys announced. “Corned beef hash with Aggie’s own pickled red cabbage tonight. I’d appreciate it if you cleared the empty glasses away please.”

Half an hour later after supper had been cleared away Gladys said, “I’ve a bit of a tale that may amuse you if you want to hear it. If you do I’ll tell you why I’m telling you when I’ve done.”

Gladys rarely had much to say, but had in the past added to Pete’s tales, and she could tell a tale. Pete just looked at Sasha who said, “Have at it, Lass, you’re the Landlady, so you don’t need to ask permission ever.”

“Well, I was chatting with Veronica Peabody, Alan’s wife, the other day and she was telling me a couple of things from when they were courting. I’m not talking out of turn because I asked if I could tell you and all she did was laugh and say that since hundreds of folk had had the tales from her I could tell any I wanted to. It seems when she was a girl she wasn’t much of a hand at cooking. She wasn’t particularly interested and though her mum was a good cook she wasn’t a patient woman, and any woman will tell you when teaching kids to cook you need patience, and you need a lot of it. Her mum telt Alan one day long before they were wed that when she’d been ill and in bed with it she’d telt Veronica what to put in the pan to make a pan of lobby(8) for the family. A while later she smelt burning and asked Veronica how much water she’d put in the pan. ‘Water? You never telt me to put in any water, Mum,’ Veronica replied.”

There was a lot chuckling at that before Gladys continued, “Veronica went on to say that Alan telt his brother once, ‘I’m not saying she can’t cook, but she once managed to burn the ice on a block of frozen soup from out of the freezer.’ You know Enid Alan’s first wife died young. When Veronica met him she was eighteen and he’d four kids. Eventually she had another four. But the funniest thing she telt me was the first time she tried her hand at pastry making which wasn’t long after they’d wed, Alan’s six year old telt her, ‘This pastry tastes like sellotape(9) smells, Mum’ ” At that there was a lot of laughter. Gladys finished her tale by saying, “Young kids can be trusted to tell it like it is, thing is often you don’t like it. Strange thing is Veronica eventually became a Cordon Bleu chef at some fancy hotel in Lancaster or maybe it was Preston, so that’s maybe why she wasn’t bothered about me repeating the tales.

“The reason I’m telling you is Aggie is feeling her age, and five o’clock starts for breakfasts and half past nine suppers aren’t doing her any good. Veronica will be doing dinners and putting on suppers a couple of days a week from next week. I’ve telt her and Aggie to work out the details between then, so she may well be covering some Saturdays. Aggie says she’s a morning person so she’s happy to continue doing breakfasts and lunches. Veronica’s only doing the two days a week to start with so we can both see how it goes, but I’m hoping Veronica will take over doing dinners and suppers eventually, and I’m looking for someone to do relief cooking for both Aggie and Veronica to give them at least a couple of days a week off.”

Frank who was Aggie’s husband said, “Like the rest of us the newness has worn off Aggie and she gets tired, but she wouldn’t even think about cutting back her hours till Gladys found someone to cover for her. She saw it as dropping Gladys in it. She’s like an old plough horse, but I’d rather she didn’t drop between the shafts.”

The men all nodded, for that was entirely in keeping with Aggie’s character, and they were glad at the arrangements for her sake.

“Is that it?” asked Stan looking around for half a minute. “Okay, dominoes it is.

“I knocked on the door and as he answered the door I said, ‘You owe your daughter an apology, and if she doesn’t get it I’m going to knock seven kinds of shit out of you, and that will be that for ever. Are you so small a man that you’re willing to do that to the woman you share a bed with, who at least has the sense to visit us and spend time with the boy she loves? I’ll do it to you because I care about my lass and I’m fucking sick of you upsetting a young boy who’s done nothing to deserve your cuntish behaviour. Don’t take it out on him, take it out on me. He was not my boy, but we’ve decided to be father and son because we want to be. If ye don’t tell me right now that you’ll not shut him up any more when he wants to talk about things he’s enjoyed doing with his dad, and whether you like it or not that’s me, I’ll make sure you never see him again to hurt him. Now what’s it to be, a fucking good hiding and a bleak future with your wife upset with you, or be a man and admit you made a mistake, apologise to your lass that’s now my lass, and at least try to be civil about me to your grandson. If you chose the later, I’ll be man enough to let bygones be bygones and nothing bad regards you will pass my lips to the boy. I’ll give ye two minutes to make a decision. Make the right one and I’ll call you dad, make the wrong one and I’ll do my damndest to make you hurt for a month. Your two minutes starts now.’

1 Whins, gorse, Ulex europaeus, and othe species too.
2 Butches, butchers.
3 Graft, work.
4 A beast, specifically refers to cattle when used thusly by rural Cumbrians.
5 RSJ, rolled steel joist, a heavy steel H or I section girder.
6 Acrow, Acrow jack or Acrow prop, a specific make of adjustable support. A telescoping steel tube in a steel tube with four inch coarse adjustment using three-quarter inch steel pins going through holes in both tubes and fine adjustment using a quarter inch screw thread. The top and bottom have six inch square quarter inch thick steel plates with holes for nail or screw fastenings welded on. They can take a loading of 7KN [700 Kg or 1540 pounds.]
7 SDS, The initials SDS stands for Slotted Drive System or Slotted Drive Shaft. It is a mechanism which enables positive drill bit location whilst allowing the drill to move in the chuck whilst under power. It is particularly effective in hammer drills.
8 Lobby, a traditional stew with many regional variations. A dish born out of poverty, the heart of it is poor cuts of beef, onion, carrot and a lot of potatoes. The meat requires long slow cooking and the dish is finally seasoned usually with salt and pepper. Many modern recipes include other vegetable and herbs.
9 Sellotape is a British brand of transparent, polypropylene based, pressure sensitive adhesive tape. It is the leading brand in the UK. Like Scotch Tape in Canada and the US, Sellotape has long been a genericised term when referring to any brand of clear adhesive tape.