It was a cool enough evening to have the fires in the tap room of the Green Dragon well stoked. There were a dozen or so outsiders in but they were all regular Saturday attenders and well known to the locals. All had a pint in front of them and they were looking round to see who was going to start with the first tale.

“I thought I was the one getting old,” said Pete, “but Peggy has been down in the cellars after mice and must have got something on her coat she wanted off.” Peggy was the vagrant tortoise shell cat who a couple of years ago had moved in to the Green Dragon and refused to move out. She earned her food and vet’s bills too by eliminating the vermin in the cellars though fresh contingents came in each winter to avoid the cold outside. Pete had all her bills put down on the tax returns as a business expense. “She’s been chewing bits out of her coat for a couple of days now despite Gladys attempting to give her a brushing and combing. There’re patches of fur all over and Gladys is going mental about it. Earlier today she said she was sick, and I quote, ‘Of that damned cat purfulling everywhere. It wouldn’t be so bad if she’d do it in just one place.’ It took me a few seconds to work out that purfulling had nothing to do with purring and was actually pur fulling. Like I said, Lads, age is creeping up on my lass, though I admit to referring to Peggy as that cooking fat when I tripped over her on the cellar stairs.”

“Women are gey quaire cattle,(1) Pete. I mind I was out with one of my daughters in law shopping one day many a year since. It wasn’t long before Christmas and I was looking for something to buy Elsie. We were in a cheap spot called ‘Superdrug’ that selt(2) mostly household tackle because she was doing her weekly shop. At the front there was a basket of hot water bottle covers fashioned to look like various animals, and some of them were like gorillas. Now, Elsie has been into monkeys all her life, and I don’t need any smart arsed comments about that, Lads. So I bought one. I don’t know what it cost, but I do know it was gey(3) cheap. My daughter in law, and I can’t mind which one of the boys’ missuses it was, wrapped it up for me. Bugger me, Elsie called it James, and she maintains to this day it was the best present I ever bought her. She’s still got it, and the granddaughters play with it like a doll. Like I said, Women are gey quaire cattle.”

“Aren’t they just, Bill.” After casting his mind back to not long after the time Gladys moved in with him at his house on Glebe street Pete resumed. He could barely keep his face straight as he was telling the tale. “I mind Old Florrie McFearon as we lived next door to for a while. We lived in a terrace of four on Glebe Street and she and Bill her old man and we lived in the middle two. She was a queer looking auld biddy(4) wi just the one tooth in her head right at the front sticking out of her top jaw, out and for’ard. We got on okay with the pair of them. Like all good neighbours we didn’t live in each others’ pockets, but if we’d ever needed help we knew all we had to do was ask. Florrie and Bill have been away(5) many a year now, but I learnt a good few lessons from the pair of them. I’m not saying the party walls between the houses were thin, but I swear downright you could watch folk change their minds through the walls. The pair of them were round eighty, but they did enjoy themselves. Bill was pretty quiet, but hell fire even at that age Florrie was a screamer. The most important lesson I learnt from them was that you’re never too old to enjoy a bit of a tumble, even if it is with a bit of fluff young enough to be your daughter.”

Through the laughter Gladys could be heard saying from behind the bar in the lounge, “I’ll get you for that, Pete.”

“See what I mean, Lads? I’m on a promise already! And it’s nowhere near last orders yet. By the bye I ordered a couple of dozen sets of dominoes a few days ago. Some sixes, nines and twelves(6) too. I thought they’d be here for today, but they’re not.”

Charlie indicated that he would take up the telling of tales. “I used to drink in a pub at Lately Common called the Comfortable Gill. Johnny Giles was the landlord in those days and he was an ex coal miner. The place was decked out with pit paraphernalia, Davy lamps and Patterson lamps abounded. I mind one Sunday lunchtime I was having a couple of scoops(7) there in the lounge because none of the lads were in the tap. There had recently been a pit disaster in the news. I don’t think it was in Britain, but I’m no longer certain about that. We were talking about pit accidents. Leigh, a nearby town had had a dozen pits in the recent past and a lot more than that in days long past. Leigh had three parallel streets all about a mile long, and most of the men who lived there were colliers. I mind one was Gordon Street and another Glebe Street, but I don’t mind what the street between them was. I know that at one time there was said to never be a time where there weren’t dozens of houses with all the curtains drawn, which indicated a death in the family, usually from a pit accident. We were discussing pit accidents and there was talk of canaries and firedamp. Firedamp was a gas mostly composed of methane, released particularly by bituminous coal, which could cause an explosion. Canaries are more sensitive to firedamp gas than folk and they took them down the mines in cages. When one fell off it’s perch they knew it was time to get the hell out of there and keep going till the canary recovered.

“We talked about Johnny’s safety lamps which don’t pose an ignition risk because the flame is inside a copper gauze in the case of a Davy lamp, and in a Patterson lamp, which was a later development, inside twin copper gauzes. The flame won’t travel through the gauze. Johnny had a couple down off the wall and took a few apart to shew us how they’d developed over the years. Patterson lamps have an externally operated flint striker too, so if the flame went out you could safely relight it. We talked about the dangers of not just firedamp explosions, but those posed by organic dusts too, which of course includes coal dust. I telt(8) of my chemistry teacher sticking a glass tube into a jar of lycopodium powder, which is the dried spores of the club moss plant. The spores contain oil and the powder given the right conditions is explosive. My teacher scared us witless when he blew the powder through a Bunsen burner flame to produce a short lived fireball that made a hell of a noise. It was more like an explosion than a flame. I remarked any organic powder that fine was potentially deadly and that it was easy enough to find. Somewhere round a circular saw the super fines would accumulate, and the finest grades of baking flour were almost as good.

“I mind telling of an O’ Level chemistry textbook we used at school written by Liptrot and Pode with a picture in it of the outline of a man on the roof of a wine cork factory in Spain after a cork dust explosion. Thing was it wasn’t the outline of a man. He was still up there blasted flat onto the roof. I mind a man in the pub asking me, “So if a fine dust were blewn into say a fan it would be explosive?” He had an Irish accent and I was instantly on my guard and gave a non committal answer. The troubles in Ireland were bad at the time, and somehow I knew he was talking about the air intakes to Royal Ulster Constabulary police stations which had recently been in the news for having dynamite threwn in to them, and I was looking at an IRA(9) member if not a recruiter. Once you go that way the only way out is in a pine box. I took no further part in the discussion and left after a supposed visit to the gents.”

The tap went quiet waiting for someone to say something. Charlie interrupted the silence to say, “Me telling those tales has brought back a few more memories which if you’re willing I’ll recount?”

“Go for it, Charlie. Whatever, you know we’ll listen with interest, Lad. You’ve been more than okay so far.”

Charlie nodded with a little relief before starting. “My gran bought her meat from a Coöp butcher’s van that came round once a week. I can’t recall the butcher’s name, but when I was a few years short of secondary school he asked if I’d like to ride on the van with him. He did a kind of circular tour which could drop me off at the end of Landcut Lane where my grandparents lived when he’d done. Everything in those days was done in old units. Sixteen ounces to the pound, fourteen pounds to a stone and he used stones for the potatoes, onions and carrots that he selt as well as meat and eggs. I mind he selt postage stamps too. Twelve pennies to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound.

“I loved the old money. Farthings with a wren on the back were a quarter of a penny, ha’pennies with Britannia or the golden hind on the back were half a penny. Pennies, some thin and black with Victoria’s head on them. Some were so thin there was hardly anything left of the queen’s head or whatever had been on the reverse side. I even saw some so thin and black you couldn’t tell the obverse side from the reverse side. Silver round three penny pieces that my gran used to hold her stockings up with when the original rubber on her suspenders perished. There were no tights in those days. Then there were the newer twelve sided bronze three penny pieces. Both the types of three penny pieces were called threppnies or thruppnies. After that came the silver coins, tizzies which were six penny pieces and shillings too. Florins, two shilling pieces and half crowns which were worth two and six or two and a half shillings. Crowns, five shilling pieces, were legal tender, but I never saw one in circulation. Mostly they were collected, the sort of stuff folk with money bought for their grandchildren. Victoria, Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII, George VI and Elizabeth II, they were all there, their heads on the coins, we had history in our hands, in our pockets. Nowadays kids have only ever seen coins with Lizzie's head on em, it's no wonder nowt's real to them any more.

"I never met any one who could do mental arithmetic as fast as Granny’s butcher. He could look at a long list of stuff, most including stuff weighed to the nearest sixth of an ounce at all sorts of prices per pound and reckon it in seconds. The reason he used sixths of an ounce was because three new pennies or six new ha’pennies weighed exactly an ounce. When I say new I mean the old currency that was used prior to decimalisation on February the fifteenth nineteen seventy-one, but recently minted coins with no wear on them to reduce their weight.

“Part of his tour was past my two great aunties’ houses on Lords Lane. They were two old widow women who lived in a pair of isolated semis both of whom had lost their husbands in the Great War. I’d heard them described many a time as batting for the other side, but they’d been dead many a year before I realised that referred to them being suspected of being lesbians. Looking back I don’t think that was true. They were just a pair of lonely sisters who’d managed to find a man when they were young and were too old to find another after they lost them to Flanders’ fields. There was so great a shortage of men after the war the competition for them was fierce and they were ten maybe fifteen years too old by then. They treated me wonderfully and it was years before I realised I was the nearest they’d ever come to having a child of their own. It’s enough to make a grown man weep.

“Time for another, Lads? I’ll get em in. What was that word you used about the sides of coins, Charlie, and what does it mean?”

“Effectively obverse refers to the heads side and the tails side is the reverse side, Alf.”

Gustav said, “I was going to ask that too.”

When all were supplied with another pint, Charlie continued. “I mind loads of bits and pieces about my Uncle Michael, and my cousin Mikey, none of them of any great significance, but taken together they paint a picture in my mind that has never faded. Like a lot of my family they were farmers and they were very alike and constantly at odds. I mind the pair of them shouting at each other across the farm yard, over something so trivial I can’t mind what it was now, ‘If you weren’t my son I wouldn’t employ you.’ ‘And if you weren’t my dad I wouldn’t work for you.’ They were both big powerfully built men, and I mind my Auntie Lily saying, ‘You can calm them both down, so please stop them from actually hurting each other, Charles.’

“Mikey was awful strong and he’d won the cricket ball threwing and the welly(10) threwing competitions at school sports day since the age of twelve. I saw him regularly pick up half a brick and threw it at a rat across the farm yard, maybe twenty yards, and kill it on impact. One day we couldn’t find a bottle jack which we wanted in order to mend a puncture on a tractor rear wheel. It was only a small tractor, but it was still impressive to see Mikey put his arms around the wheel and lift it up for me to slide a block under the axle. I didn’t realise it at the time but Uncle Michael would ask me to do things Mikey had refused point blank to do. Mikey was three years up on me and had a lot more sense than I did even if I were a lot cleverer than he. I mind my uncle getting me to lift a really heavy, cast iron, root chopping machine up on the lower links of a tractor, which took the tractor to just about the balance point of turning over on the back axle. Uncle Michael was swearing at me for being a useless coward when I dropped the hydraulics and put it back down. I telt him to get in the cab and do it his self, but if I were doing it I was going for some weights to put on the front end of the tractor because the experience had frightened me badly. Badly enough to tell him if he didn’t like it he could fuck off.

“That was the point at which Uncle Michael started to treat me like a man. I put quarter of a ton [560 pounds] of tractor weights on the front of the tractor and then the job was easy and safe. A few years later Uncle Michael had a stroke and he became much more difficult to deal with. He was a problem for Auntie Lily and her three girls, and Mikey avoided him. I didn’t. I gave him the usual treatment I’d given him for years by then: the same level of cantankerousness that he gave me. Maybe we were a pair of kindred souls, I don’t know, but we got on okay. I mind one day Archie the vicar had called and gone, the pair of them had drunk a glass of my uncle’s whisky and discussed Dickens, an author they both enjoyed. Uncle Michael had a complete collection of Dickens’ work. Little Dorrit was the subject of that day’s discussion as I recall. I’d always been a prolific reader, but I’d never made any secret of it to my uncle that I lothed(11) Dickens.

“Uncle Michael was giving my auntie a hard time after the vicar had left, so I telt him, ‘Stop being a pain in the arse, Uncle Michael. I’m going to give you a shave and take you out of the house to give everyone a break from your bad temper.’ Auntie Lily, and my cousins Mikey and Gemma with her husband David lived at the farmhouse then. Rosie and Alice had married and moved out a few years before. As he started to protest I telt him, ‘And don’t bother giving me any slaver(12) because you know I’ll ignore you.’ I used to shave Uncle Michael every ten days or so, usually to a load of complaints which were more because he felt obliged to complain than because he objected. After his shave I telt him, ‘At least you look human now, even if that is a lie. Now I’ll help you put on a clean shirt, because that one’s filthy. After that get your sticks and get to the Landrover. Don’t bother telling me you need help, because you don’t. I’ll help you get into it, but that’s all I’ll do for you.’ All the time my Auntie was trying not to smile and my cousins had left to avoid laughing.

“Uncle asked me, ‘Where we going?’ ‘Warrington to price a job. Just up your street you tight fisted old bugger.’ That gave him something to look forward to and calmed him down. Like I said maybe we were kindred souls. The job went fine and we got a decent price agreed on. On the way back the diesel light was flashing. I knew we’d not got enough in the tank to get home, but he was for pressing on home where there was a tank of diesel that was cheaper than buying it retail. ‘You’re pushing if we run out,’ I telt him. ‘I’m stopping at the garage at Risley for fuel.’ ‘That’s top price there,’ he protested. I responded with, ‘It’s twenty quid for a breakdown service or twelve miles to walk home if we run out. I’m good for walking that far. How about you?’ He grumbled all the way to the service station which was opposite the Nuclear Authority’s three buildings. Much to his annoyance I put five gallons in. I can’t remember what it cost, but typically he offered the woman half. I smiled and drove off. He said, ‘That was good, free diesel you should have filled up.’ I completely spoilt his day when I telt him I’d already paid her and he owed me the money.’

“I mind one time at the Harrow Inn in Culcheth. At the time I was bucking(13) a lass called Karin Hill, even her parents called her Bina though I don’t know why. Her mum was Francine as had the chip shop on Church Lane. Mikey had just started going out with a lass called Judith who was a cousin of his, and we’d agreed to meet the girls at the Harrow. We walked in to see Judith sitting on David Lowton’s knee. They were heavy petting. David was also a cousin of Mikey’s. Neither were my cousin, I was related to Mikey’s mum Lily not his dad Michael. I said, ‘Come on. Let’s go, Mikey.’ We were close, and I was the only one who ever called him Mikey, everyone else called him Mick or Mike. I thought he was going to twat(14) me one, but he was my best mate, not just my cousin, and he was gutted,(15) so despite the risk I tried again. ‘Let’s go, Mikey.’ I was very relieved not to wake up in hospital when he said ‘Aye. Lets go.’ We went to the Cherry Tree on Common Lane for a drink where big as he was I made sure he needed a taxi to get home. As far as I’m aware he never bothered with a woman again.

“Another time at the Harrow Inn, a Friday night it was, I had just ordered a round of drinks, eleven pints of bitter with a bottle of brown ale each and a pint of Guinness for Warren, when I accidentality knocked a lad next to me at the bar spilling no more than an eighth of an inch of his pint. ‘Sorry, Mate,’ I said. ‘Let me get you another to go with that one.’ But he wasn’t up for having it. He wanted trouble and started verbally working himself up to fighting fever. I recognised the signs, so before he was ready to fight I knocked him out by slamming his head on the bar. Unbeknownst to me he had four mates who started towards me. Unbeknownst to them I had eleven mates, and all holy hell broke loose. Mikey who had no problem with me taking on a couple of lads was seriously upset at four to one, so he ripped the juke box off the wall and threw it into the opposition. It only took one of them out, but it continued out of the window onto the car park facing Church Lane. I’ve telt you Mikey was a big strong lad and before taking the three remaining lads out he said menacingly, “Reet, Ah’ll a thee, an thee, an thee.”(16) They all followed the juke box. We couldn’t drink in the Harrow for years, not till the spot got a new landlord.

“I mind when we were kids going to the Cherry Tree where the off beer(17) was completely separate from the pub, just a kiosk set into the building, where completely illegally they’d sell anyone anything no matter how young you were. I also mind as a kid going to the youth club on Church Lane where Jimmy the DJ, a completely insecure man who could only relate to kids, regularly played ‘Speedy Gonzalez’.(18) The place was referred to as the Black Shacks, but its proper name was I believe the Black Huts.

“At the bottom of Church Lane was the Pack Horse Inn opposite the parish church. At lunchtime we’d sneak out of school to the Pack Horse because they’d sell us a single cigarette and a match. Too, they selt Players Weights which were a brand of untipped cigarettes where in most places twenty were whatever weight the pack was supposed to be, but every cigarette in the pack was a slightly different thickness. The Pack Horse had never selt them in packets and had continued selling them loose by weight. It also selt black twist, a pungent pipe tobacco that came as foot long sticks half an inch thick that had to be cut off finely with a knife and rubbed before smoking it, and a dozen or more varieties of snuff too. The Players Weights, the twist and the snuff were all selt by weight using a very sensitive set of tobacconist’s scales. The church was nearly a mile from the centre of the village then, but a few hundred years before it had been the centre of the hamlet. Years later I mind me, Mikey and who ever I was bucking at the time getting banned from the Chat Moss Inn at Glazebury. God alone knows why. Mikey was a peaceable sort unless someone threatened any he cared about at what he considered to be unreasonable odds. He’d let me fight my own way out of any number of situations he thought were fair enough. I was out on the arm, and who goes looking for a battle when they’ve got a lass with them?”

“I always thought of my mum’s dad as squeaky clean. Then at the age of thirteen I got a job working for Harold Fairclough. I’d lied about my age, I’d said I was fourteen. Fairclough’s was a medium sized road building concern. I’ll no doubt tell you lot of tales about working there, but this is about my grandpa. I knew they’d not believed me when I’d said I was fourteen, so I’d not understood why they gave me the job. A week or so later the general foreman who’d been at my interview asked me, ‘What’s your dad’s first name, Son? Your face seems familiar.’ ‘Gordon,’ I replied. ‘Never heard of him. What about your granddad?’ ‘John Thomas Edmund, but everyone calls him Jock,’ I replied. ‘Well I’ll be damned! I thought I recognised you when we interviewed you. That’s why I said I’d take you. We knew you weren’t fourteen from your National Insurance Number, but I don’t have a problem with any one who lies to get a job. At least it means they want a job badly enough to take chances to get it. Your granddad and I were apprentices together. I was an apprentice chippy(19) and he was an apprentice stone mason. So, you’re Jock’s grandson. How’s the old buzzard going on?’

“ ‘Grandpa’s doing fine,’ I replied. ‘He wound up his own firm, and he’s working out Grappenhall way at the moment for Harold Pett and looking forward to retiring in just over a year.’

“ ‘Aye me too. We were both born in August nineteen hundred. Pass him on my details and we’ll have a craic and get drunk together, Son. Christ, I mind the times when we were working together in the days of World War Two meat rationing when we’d go into Manchester or Liverpool before dawn with a handful of grain. We’d scatter it on one of the squares and wait for the birds to come down at first light. We’d have the net over hundreds of them in seconds. By nine o’clock they’d be pluckt and on the butchers’ counters marked up as fresh wood pigeon, even if they were starlings at half the size and half the price. Meat was meat in those days and no one gave a damn where it came from or what it was. The main thing was getting aholt on it(20) at all.’ The things I learnt about Grandpa from him were amazing, but at the end at least I knew my Grandpa was no different from those of my mates. I suppose kids always think their family is boring. It just that they hear the stuff that goes on the families of others, but have to wait to for years to hear all the scandals in their own family.

“We were building what years later would be referred to as the Sankey Way. It was at Great Sankey. Originally there was a huge housing estate of mostly derelict old back to back Victorian houses on the site. None had been lived in for years and they probably hadn’t been fit to live in when they were new. They were demolished by a couple of JCBs,(21) a dozer and a dragline machine referred to as a 10RB. There was a much bigger version called a 22RB, and a 1RB was a joke name for a man with a shovel. After the demolition rubble had been taken off site we commenced building the huge roundabout that would provide for easy access to and from the main roads and nearby Warrington town centre. I remember the site engineer, George, a goliath of a man. He was black as coal and said he was Nigerian. One time he had a couple of us follow him with a fourteen pound sledge hammer and a couple of steel pins with points on one end. The pins were about two and a half inches in diameter, like a scaffold tube but solid.

“George took his theodolite and a ranging rod and walked away from us to set up. After consulting his note book he determined where we should knock the first pin in. I knocked it down maybe six inches and that was it. The other lad who wasn’t much older than me had a go, and he got nowhere either. George was swearing at us as a pair of useless weak fools and he took a swing at it with the sledge. The sweat was pumping out of him, but the pin didn’t go in any further. I swear the pin was beginning to bend before he gave up on it. I later remembered that George had ordered a couple of waggons of concrete too many for the kerb races(22) round the island and he’d had a machine driver dig a hole for it to be dumped in. That pin must have had six foot of high quality concrete under it.

“We’d been telt that all utilities had been isolated on the site. Even at that age I wasn’t gullible enough to believe that. The machines on the job dug up live water pipes, live gas mains, running sewers and most spectacularly an electricity cable four inches thick that vaporised half the bucket on the back actor of the JCB. I mind the driver saying, “Am I glad the machine was on rubbers and not a track layer.” He meant it was a machine on tyres which are an insulator rather than a machine on metal tracks.

“I mind being sent shopping with a dumper to fetch chips, [US fries] pies and a whole host of other stuff. Eggs, bacon, sausages and stuff the Irishmen cooked with lard over a fire on their shovels after having scrubbed them clean with a brick under running water. I also went to fetch the papers from the newsagents which included a few top shelf magazines which was my first experience of looking at that sort of stuff. In the cabin where we ate was a Union notice about pay. I mind it said trades men were on six shillings and seven pennies an hour and labourers on six shillings and one penny an hour. I was on half pay, three shillings and half a penny an hour. There was only one bus an hour early in the morning that took me from Mum’s house in Glazebury to Warrington, I could either be at work half an hour early or half an hour late, and late wasn’t an option. We started work at seven. I was paid a bit extra to open the compound up and get the tea boiler on before anyone else started work. One day I arrived at work to be shouted at by an old woman who lived nearby because she said she’d been woken up in the middle of the night by us working. No matter what I said about no one working at night she wasn’t calming down any, and when the bosses arrived she had a go at them. Turned out some lads had turned up at about three with an eighteen wheeler low loader trailer, loaded up the dozer and nicked(23) it.

“At the far end of the site we were building a bridge over the Sankey Brook which was reputed to be the most heavily polluted waterway in Europe. I’d read in the paper it was so acidic it dissolved steel rivets on the barges that used its lower reaches. The lads working on that bridge had to wear respirators because of the fumes coming off the water and drew hazard money for that.

“A few years later I was working in the summer holidays on the M62 which crossed a corner of the Chat Moss peat bog. The section of the M62 that we were joining up with was the section at the Worsley interchange that eventually became part of the M60, the Manchester ring road, but I’m going back at least thirty years before that. I was still just a kid really and I did what I was telt. I worked in a gang whose ganger man was Sean. Sean was a pisshead,(24) but he was easy to work for. He’d work fifty hours a week in a suit, get pissed(25) in it over the weekend, sleep Mondays and a few Tuesdays too, and buy another suit for the following weekend. The spread, as the site was referred to, ran from the bridge at Holcroft Lane which was near Glazebrook down to the Worsley traffic interchange, maybe ten miles. There was a company bus that started out in Leigh that picked me up outside Mum’s at six thirty. I was nearly the last to be picked up. It was summertime so it didn’t get dark till late. The bus didn’t leave the site till seven thirty, so because the spread was in the middle of farm land if you didn’t have a car you worked the overtime whether you wanted to or not.

“One time we ran out of stuff to work with and were mostly just leaning on our shovels. Sean would keep an eye out for any traffic which meant someone from the office was approaching. ‘Okay, Boys, start to brush that gutter and look busy.’ We must have swept that tiny pile of dust twenty miles backwards and forwards before what we were waiting for arrived. Looking busy was the key to survival. Mostly what we were doing was installing the main drains which were spun concrete pipes twelve feet in diameter and they went thirty feet below the road surface. Each section was certainly no more than three feet long and they sealed against each other with massive black rubber O rings. They were lowered down into the trench by a crane and jockied into place by man power using big levers. Every so often a vertical pipe was set on the top of the drain run for a manhole so they could be inspected if necessary. Our section of the drain was finished quite quickly and after that the work became dangerous. The drain took water away from the Chat Moss which was like a huge sponge and I was telt it ended up in the Manchester Ship Canal, which seemed reasonable to me because there weren’t many waterways that could take the volume of water the drain carried when full.

“When it rained whatever water fell on the moss came out in that drain because the moss was holding all the water it could. If you poured a pint of water on the top a pint came out at the bottom. When it rained there was a roaring sound as the water came down the drain usually at full bore and you didn’t have much time to get out. The problem was the manhole rings had arrived with no steps in them so we had to put them in. There was always a bit of water in the drain so we wore wellington boots, goggles, a face mask and ear defenders and had a rope tied round our waist so we could be pulled up in an emergency. We drilled the two holes for each step with a one inch tungsten carbide drill bit in a rotary compressed air drill. The drill was virtually solid steel and very heavy. The only way you could use it was a man at the top took the weight of it on a rope tied to it. In the manhole it was loud, thick with dust and concrete bits from the drilling were constantly bouncing of your goggles. Once done the steps were pushed in the holes and mortared in. We drew hazard pay for doing the job.

“On one section of the job a housing estate on the outskirts of Irlam backed up to the spread. I was telt it was a suburb of hell without the amenities. The first thing we did on arriving at work was clear out the manhole tops from the bottom of the manholes. Three hundred weight of cast steel [336 pounds] each. We also had to retrieve some of the reducing plates from where ever the kids had dumped them the night before. The lowest section of the manholes were six feet in diameter then a reducing plate went on top of that with a thirty inch hole in it for the smaller rings to go on top of. Those plates were nine inches thick and weighed round a ton apiece [2500 pounds] I mind many a lad on the job saying we should put the bloody kids on the payroll.

“Most of the workforce were Irish, and they were a great bunch to work with. They always played a card game called Twenty-five in the cabin if we were rained off. I never met an Irish man who didn’t play it. They were a crazy set of lads, I mind a cow coming down the spread one time and I never asked where all the beef was coming from that we were eating for the best part of half a week. Great lads, but bad bastards to cross. They caught a scouser [someone from Liverpool] stealing from a lad’s coat pocket hanging up in the cabin. The lad wasn’t Irish, but that was a no no as far as the Paddies were concerned. That was where I was first made aware of the rule, ‘The company is fair game, but you never touch a working lad’s stuff.’ They took it in turns to beat the bejesus(26) out of him and he didn’t come to back work after that.

“I don’t know, certainly twenty years later, maybe even thirty I had a couple of young lads fitting some Marley vinyl flooring in our kitchen. You know how the craic goes, Lads. I was talking to the boys about working when I was their age, and one of them said, ‘You worked for my dad, Paddy Buckley, on the M62?’ ‘I certainly did, and his brother Michael too.’ I replied, ‘How’s the old bugger going on?’ ‘He’s been away ten going on eleven years now. Michael was his cousin not his brother, though I have always called him Uncle Michael,’ ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Son,’ I said. ‘Paddy was a hard man, but you knew exactly where you stood with him. I mind some idiot upsetting him and he threw him down a twenty foot culvert. Another time he chased some poor sod up the batter(27) in a Landrover. I can’t say I liked your dad, but for sure I respected him. He was too big a bloke not to. Having said that he made sure that the job met all the dead lines and we got all our bonuses. He didn't have a problem going head to head with the bosses to make sure we got the extra that had been agreed if we delivered ahead of time. I mind one time he telt the bosses that if they didn't pay for the three days we were ahead he'd tell the boys to do fuck all for three days since that would put us all square. Like I said he wasn't always a likeable bloke, but the boys on the 1RB were always a hundred percent behind him.’ ‘Aye. As a boy I didn't always like him, but I always knew where I stood with him’ he said with a grin. ‘For sure his hand was a heavy one and all my brothers would tell you the same, though he was as soft as butter on a sunny day in Mam’s hands.’

“The Warrington Unitarian Academy was founded in 1745 as a dissenting place of learning. It was at one time the only non Church of England establishment in the country and as such dons did not have to be ordained to lecture there. It was only operating for about thirty years. Due to much needed road widening at Bridgefoot near the bridge over the river Mersey which the Academy was in the way of it was decided to move the entire six hundred ton [1,344,000 pounds] grade two listed building nineteen meters [60 feet] in nineteen eighty-one. There had been a statue of Oliver Cromwell, who had lived in the building at one time, just outside the building since eighteen ninety-nine. The statue was removed for safe keeping and later replaced in front of the newly sited Academy. Warrington was a critical place because before the Runcorn bridge was built its bridge was the first available crossing point on the river Mersey on the way up river. The Bay Horse Inn at Warrington is said to have been Cromwell’s head quarters for a time. I mind as part of the road widening the approaches to the bridge had to be widened too. I read in the local paper the appeals from the Council for anyone who had ever worked putting utilities or services under the road surface to contact them with any details they could remember. There must have been hundreds of pipes, cables and wires in the bridge because it was the only way across the river for miles. The bridge was completed in nineteen fifteen and I think a lot of the records were either lost or maybe they were never recorded in the first place.

“The Mersey is tidal at Warrington and there used to be two huge factories on the banks. Lever brothers who made household stuff like washing machine powder and Thames Board who made paper, cardboard and boxes. I mind seeing four foot of pinkish foam on the river that I was telt came from Lever Brothers. I was telt it was corrosive because the board factory dumped waste acid in the river. If the tide was out mostly the stuff went down stream and it was fairly concentrated. If the tide were in the waste got diluted a lot more but a breeze would blow the foam over the embankment onto the street. I know all the buildings round there were clean at the bottom and the dirt only started a few of feet up. The stone work was eaten away where it was clean probably by the acid. There were few environmental controls in those days and most companies just paid the rather small fines treating them just as another operating cost. I recall reading in the Warrington Guardian, which was housed in the Unitarian Academy building for some time, that a seal that swam up the Mersey to Warrington had to be put out of its misery because of what the water had done to it.

“How come you remember all this stuff, Charlie? Dates and everything.”

“Mum was into local history, Dave. Grandpa originated from Oban but Gran was a Warrington lass, though she was three-quarters Scottish. I used to listen to Mum telling tales of the area for hours at a time and I always did have a good memory. I mind Mum said Warrington could have been a greater city than Manchester and Liverpool put together. It seems that there was a group of folk with money who ruled the area with an iron fist. She always referred to them as the Watch Committee, but I don’t know if that was an official thing or not. Over the years they’d stood in the way of and blocked all sorts of things because it wasn’t what they wanted. The first proposal for the Manchester ship canal was that it would end at Warrington, but they blocked it. The ship canal was then doubled in length and cost and terminated at Manchester. The monied folk who’d stood the cost of building the canal were bitter and were determined that Warrington would get no benefit out of the enterprise. If the docks had been at Warrington the money that poured into Manchester due to the docks in the heyday of the empire would have ended at Warrington like the ship canal. The new northern rail nexus at Crewe was built in eighteen thirty-seven, but originally Warrington was suggested as its site: blocked.

“Same again with Ringway airport at Manchester, originally Warrington was the proposed site: blocked. I don’t know when it was proposed to turn the long closed Warrington Academy into the nucleus of a full blown modern university. The building is only small, so I suspect the idea was a non starter unless the ideas was that the Academy would give some kind of of academic respectability and history to a university mostly elsewhere round the town. I’m not sure, but after being blocked I think the project was taken to the University College of North Staffordshire in nineteen sixty-two when it became the University of Keele. The site is at the village of Keele and was the Sneyd family residence and estate when the family were the local squires. The original family mansion is part of the university’s buildings. The M6 which is the western United Kingdom’s main north south transport road stopped just short of Warrington at the A50. Nowadays it runs all the way north to Glasgow. The problem was the building of the Thelwall viaduct which went over the River Mersey and the Manchester ship canal. I’ve heard that the problem was the watch committee didn’t want the bridge and it should have been open to traffic years before nineteen sixty-three when it finally opened. It’s just short of a mile long. Nowadays there are two bridges. The new one opened in nineteen ninety-five. The original bridge carries north bound traffic only now and the newer one southbound. It’s a lot safer than the original arrangement which had no hard shoulder on either side.

“I know a lot of what Mum telt me about Warrington’s Watch committee was widely believed to be true in the town, but much was deduction and conjecture because such folk don’t publicise their activities and the truth is hard to come at. Though what I’ve telt you was what she and a lot of others believed the facts will probably never be known, and there will certainly be many details where the reality of events are different from what is believed.”

“For someone as doesn’t usually say much, Charlie Lad, you have an awful lot of interesting things to talk about. Good tales, Lad.” The rest of the men were all nodding in agreement with Sasha.

“Beats me how you remember it all, Charlie,” said Alf said again.

Sasha looked at Alf and explained, “I’ve telt you before, Alf. It’s like you and the contents of Machinery’s handbook. It’s stuff he understands and is interested in. When it’s like that it’s hard to forget stuff. You can for example give the size of any letter drill to a tenth of a thou and a hundredth of a mil. Most folk think that’s weird, but like I said it’s what you understand and are interested in.”

Sasha said, “Just a small one, Lads. It looks like supper’s nearly ready. I’d been after a small masonry crusher for a few years, but I’d not been able to source one in the EU never mind the UK at any price. Rather than pay a fortune to have all the masonry from my rebuilding of the house taken away I decided far better to crush the stuff and use it on the yard, the garden paths and the road that runs round the back of my out buildings. I reckoned that if we crushed the rubbish like concrete first and laid it we could used the crushed brick, which was all red, on top and that would look decent enough. So I looked farther afield, India and China. India wasn’t that much cheaper than Europe. I later realised they were selling on Chinese products at highly marked up prices. I eventually contacted ‘Felicity Wang’. If you believe her first name was for real then good for you. She was happy to deal with me and said the crusher would be four hundred and eighty-five quid including shipping to my address, and as soon as they had the money they’d cast it up.

“I was disappointed because I was expecting one off the shelf and I thought making one would take forever, but three days later she sent me an email shewing my casting all build up and ready for shipping. It was three weeks on board the ship going to Felixstowe. Then the problems started. The crusher was locked up in a bonded ware house at Felixstowe docks and I couldn’t get it out without an IORI number, because I’d imported something from outside the EU. That is an acronym for Economic Operator Registration and Identification. I applied for one which took a fortnight. The joke was I am VAT registered and my EORI number was the same as my VAT number with the letters UK tacked in front of it. I was punitively charged for importing the crusher and for the bonded warehouse storage. Then I was charged VAT on the lot, although I did recover the VAT later.

“By the time I had that crusher back to my place it was a two thousand quid machine. It came with a five horse power three phase electric motor, but I had Alf mount it on a trailer and marry it to a twin Hatz diesel engine I bought from the military surplus auction at Honeypot Lane Grantham. Alf did a real good job on it including a soft start centrifugal clutch which meant even if there was something jammed in the jaws it would start. It’s very efficient and can crush beach cobbles even when it’s just ticking over. A two gallon tank of diesel seems to last for ever. All in all the crusher set me back three grand. On the plus side, I’ve put thousands of tons [millions of pounds] of masonry through that machine over the years, and it has saved me a fortune, not to mention the cost of road stone and other material I haven’t had to buy. I still don’t understand why one should be taxed on expensive stuff coming in from abroad. To me all tax is theft by a government made up of folk who have been thieving off the rest of us for thousands of years.

Tony who was a dentist from Keswick and a regular Saturday evening visitorwho had telt a few tales before said, “I imported a beeswax foundation sheet roller from China, Sasha, but I got a much better deal than you. The price of a foundation roller in the EU was going on for two grand, which at the time was serious money. My lass was called Katie Lo. She said the roller would be just shy of five hundred quid delivered to my house, She also said, if I were happy to accept a no warranty sale, she was happy to declare to the UK customs that what I wanted was a commercial sample of no retail value, which meant it would be subject to no UK import tax, nor any VAT [government Value Added Tax at 20%]. I was almost in love with the lass. Eventually it arrived and despite a small amount of hassle with the UK tax folk Katie proved to be correct: no tax.”

Supper was brought through by Gladys and Harriet and was Corned Beef Hash with Aggie’s pickled red cabbage and and Harriet’s home made sauerkraut. After half an hour or so and some time to acquire another pint, it was back to the tales.

The Grumpy Old Men knew who Jimmy was. He was a regular visitor on Saturday evenings, but so far had only listened. He looked to be in his early fifties or late forties and was a widower who’d remarried. Hayley his second wife looked to be in her early thirties or possibly even her late twenties and as usual she was in the lounge enjoying herself with the ladies. Jimmy was a solicitor and Hayley a secondary school teacher who taught chemistry. They lived in Carlisle where they both worked. Jimmy indicated he’d got a tale, and encouraged by Sasha he said, “As you can see I’m a small fat man. I was also a small fat kid and even at school I knew games and PE teachers only existed to torment and humiliate small fat kids. We had a games teacher, Jones he was called, who’d been capped playing prop for Wales.(28) He was a massive bloke. He enjoyed hurting kids. He’d be gaoled today for child abuse. I’m not a vindictive man, but I wasn’t sorry when I heard he’d died.

“I saw him many a time have a kid bending over at the far end of the gym and run at him the full length of the gym with the biggest gym shoe he could find, he’d whack the kid on the arse so hard with the shoe his feet would leave the ground. He always did it in front of the rest of the class to instil fear in us. And it worked we were all terrified of him. Mind that could also have been because we’d all been the kid bending over many a time too. I hated bullies and thugs then and I still do. I’ve never had a problem with corporal punishment per se, but the problem is it gave a licence to folk like Jones. It was never administered fairly and it was noticed by us all that he never hit any of the kids who were good at sport no matter what they did. I know some kids stopped going to school because of him and others were taken to other schools by their parents. The trouble was in those days every school had its Jones if not more than one.

My dad had me go to a different school to avoid Jones. At my new school I had another Welsh teacher by the name of Morgan, he taught geography as I recall or maybe it was history. He had a secondary rôle to do with the cross country running team and he supervised a lot of the field events in the summer term. I may have been small and fat but even then I had strong hands and arms. It was a bit of a rough school I went to and there were lots of fights. The other lads always said that in a fight with me, it was wise to box not wrestle because once I’d grabbed hold of someone it was all over because they’d never be able to make me let go of them. ‘Don’t let him lay hands on you.’ was the advice given to any new kids arriving at school. I mind one summer, I was thirteen that year, Morgan was supervising the shot put, but he made the mistake of giving me too small a shot for my age group which I said nothing about. In my defence I did suggest he move his car for safety. I mind him scoffing at me, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Boy. My car is perfectly safe at that distance from here.’That was just before I put the shot through his passenger side front window. Ye gods that was satisfying.”

There was a lot of laughter at that and Bill said, “I love it when the little guy comes out on top it doesn’t happen near often enough. Good tales, Jimmy Lad.”

Denis volunteered to tell a tale. “When I was an undergrad I drove a cab at weekends to help the finances out a bit because Belinda wasn’t earning much as a student nurse and we all know how overpaid they are. For the best part of a couple of years I’d regularly picked up an elderly Irish man called Liam from a residential home on a Sunday and taken him to his daughter’s a few miles away for the afternoon and later dinner. Liam needed two sticks and a bit of help to walk, so I knew his daughter and son in law quite well from having helped him into and out of the house. Not quite as often I’d taken him home at maybe nine-thirty. Now mind I come from a hard line Presbyterian back ground and my missus is from a staunch Catholic family. Though neither of us give a stuff about religion we both understand what it does to some folk. I’m basically a republican at heart, even though some of my early acquaintances would put me up against a wall for that. I got to know the old man from Limerick well and we’d had pretty deep discussions concerning politics and religion. He knew I was married to a girl of Catholic extraction from Donegal, and he’d said many a time, ‘For a Protestant, you’re a very fair man, so you are, Driver. But perhaps you’re no more a Protestant than I am a Catholic these days.’

“One Sunday he telt me when he was a boy of six he’d seen the British army drag a priest out of his church and the officer shoot him through the head with his revolver on the church steps for refusing to reveal secrets he heard from suspected IRA terrorists in the confessional. It was obvious he’d been deeply affected by the incident and still was. I was saddened when I met his daughter in the town after not seeing Liam for a few months and she telt me he had died. She telt me, ‘I’ve been keeping an eye out for you because not long before he died Dad made me promise to give this to you.’ She opened her handbag [US purse] and extracted something. She handed me a point four-five-five inch revolver shell casing. I recognised it to be of the type used in British army officers’ Webley service revolvers. The same revolvers that were used in World War One and in Ireland at that time. It had been mounted in a clasp which had a key fob ring on it. ‘I don’t know where it’s from, but I know Dad had had it from long before I was born. He said you’d know what it was. He thought a lot of you and on his death bed he reminded me, “‘Make sure you give it to the taxi driver and tell him I said, ““You’re a very fair man, so you are.”” ”’ Do you know what it is?’

“ ‘Aye,’ I replied, ‘I know all about it. I’ve never laid eyes on it before, but I’ll tell ye what your father telt me.’ I telt her the tale which she’d never heard before. We were both crying as we hugged each other.” Denis put a hand into his jacket pocket and passed his truck keys round for all to examine the fob.

It was a quiet group who started arranging the dominoes. They were all decent men who had no time for bigotry of any persuasion, and a number of them had had problems resulting from religious intolerance. However the shadow cast over them by Denis’ tale soon passed and they settled down to domino battle where there was no quarter given nor expected.

1 Women are gey quaire cattle, women are very strange creatures.
2 Selt, sold.
3 Gey, very.
4Auld biddy, old woman.
5Been away, dead.
6 Domino sets are common in sets of 28 going up to double six, 55 going up to double nine and 91 going up to double twelve.
7 Scoops, beers.
8 Telt, told.
9 IRA, Irish Republican Army. A terrorist/resistance group, which depends on your politics, that operated after the partition of Ireland till the peace process was established. There are still splinter groups that have not accepted the peace.
10 Welly, wellington boot.
11 Lothed, archaic version of loathed only in use in parts of northern England and Scotland.
12 Slaver, pronounced slavver, in this context back chat or giving some one a hard time verbally.
13 Bucking, not what it sounds like. The word is old and doesn’t necessarily carry any carnal overtones. In today’s terms more nearly squiring or escorting. A buck was a term used in regency times for a young man of fashion
14 Twat, in this context the word is used as a verb meaning to punch or hit. The implication is a serious blow. The word is similarly used as in, ‘Give a good twatting with a hammer. That’ll make it move.’
15 Gutted, seriously upset.
16 ‘Reet, Ah’ll a thee, an thee an thee.’ Buryloan, [Glazebury], dialect for ‘Right, I’ll have you, and you, and you.’ meaning I’ll take the three of you out, as in knocking the three of you out.
17 Off beer, the department that selt alcohol for consumption off the premises. Licensing laws were different in those days and very different for consumption off rather than on the premises. So often the department that selt alcohol for consumption off the premises, the off licence or off beer in the local vernacular, was not part of the establishment and had its own door so one did not have to enter the pub where folk were drinking.
18 Speedy Gonzales is a 1961 David Dante alias David Hess song about Speedy Gonzales, the fastest mouse in all Mexico.
19 Chippie, carpenter or joiner.
20 Getting aholt on it, getting hold of it, buying it.
21 JCB, a particular make of back actor machine [US back hoe] with a big front bucket.
22 Kerb race, the heavy concrete footing that kerb stones at the edge of a road are bedded on.
23 Nicked, stolen.
24 Pisshead, a drunkard.
25 Pissed, drunk.
26 Bejesus, an Irish expression used as an intensifying word. Typical usages are to beat the bejesus out of someone and the scare the bejesus out of someone.
27 Batter, in this context the steep slopes of a cutting. The word as used by tradesmen in the UK refers to a slope. In a tapered factory chimney the bricks are said to be laid ‘on the batter’.
28 Capped playing prop for Wales. An internation rugby player. A player is said to be capped when they make an appearance at an international game. Props are usually the biggest and strongest members of the forwards and thus the entire team.