A Grumpy Old Man’s Tale 58 The Heller of All Hellers
All Alyssia knew was that she had been adopted as a new born. She didn’t know where she’d been born, not even whether it was a hospital, a private nursing or maternity facility, at home or as an emergency at a hospital casualty unit [US ER] wherever her mother had happened to be at the time. She had no idea who her mother was never mind who her father had been. At her adoption the magistrate had sealed the child’s records with the approval of Social Services whose records were handed over to the court for sealing along with all other records in the court’s secure central records vault in London. There were digitised copies of all such records, but they were all held on a stand alone system that had no facility to be connected to anything other than the nearby printer. The entire system was also in the central vaults. Only the natural parent or parents could request that they be unsealed and who she or they were was itself sealed. Only upon application for unsealing would the parent(s) name(s) be available to whoever was checking that the applicant had the right to make the application. Should the checker them release the parental identity (ies) they would be prosecuted for perjury, for they had sworn an oath that they would keep all and any information that had been sealed sealed. If they disobeyed the law they would be looking at a minimum of ten years gaol time. All she had was a virtually blank birth certificate with her name and date of birth on it, and RESTRICTED written across it in large, uppercase, red letters. When she’d applied for a duplicate copy that was exactly what she received, a copy of what she already had.
Alyssia’s first adoptive parents had died in a motor vehicle accident when she was nine. She believed they had never been told anything about her history, but she didn’t know that for certain. Her first adoptive parents had been adequate parents, but had believed they couldn’t have children of their own. Not long after the adoption her mother discovered she was pregnant. She went on to have a family of four. After her discovery of her first pregnancy Alyssia became a second class child. She was fed, clothed and housed, but never loved. After their deaths when Alyssia was nine her adoptive mother’s sister took in her four adoptive siblings, but she wouldn’t take Alyssia. She’d said, “That ill begotten orphanage brat has never been part of my family.”
Such friends as Alyssia did have, mostly from school, all believed that Alyssia’s adoptive aunt was jealous of Alyssia’s amazing good looks for as Janet, one of her friends had said long before the road accident, “The kindest thing anyone ever said about your sisters is that they are plain, and for sure your brother is as ugly as sin, not even a desperate girl would be interested in him.” It was unfortunate, but in truth Alyssia’s sisters could never be considered to be pretty. They had faces that in a boy would have been considered to be forceful, or full of character, even if like her brother ugly, but in a girl they were just ugly and they clearly took their looks from their mother, and her sister was just the same. Alyssia had much more than a pretty face. She had beauty in every aspect of her being including a polite and gracious manner that had been due in no part at all to her dead adoptive parents who were not the sort of folk that any wished as a friend. Their daughters could only be described as catty and obnoxiously hostile and their son as unpleasant and aggressively combative. At school the girls had been called the ugly step sisters, a reference to the Cinderella færie tale, and their brother was known as Quasimodo with attitude, which referred to the Victor Hugo character in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.(1) Then Alyssia lost even those few friends as she was moved from one foster home to another repeatedly, all but one of the moves involving a change of schools too.
Alyssia had languished in the lack of care of several sets of indifferent foster parents to whom foster children simply represented a source of income. At the age of eleven she was adopted by Peregrine and Harvey Forster, a couple in their late thirties from Bearthwaite, and for the first time in her life she’d been loved as all children should have the unconditional right to loved. Her life after that was full of fun and she’d become on kissing terms with Garson Bell just before she turned twelve. Eight years later Alyssia had married Garson. At twenty she was a beauty in her form, her bearing and her nature. At her wedding Alicia her mother in law said to a friend, “Just looking at her she could be a princess. She has it all. I’ve telt Garson how lucky he is, not because she is gorgeous, but because she’s such a sweet natured lass. Even Garson’s sisters say so, and thank goodness they’ve started modelling their behaviour on hers. It makes them much pleasanter every day of the month, and chocolate can only go so far.(2)” Her friend had just nodded for Garson’s sisters were known to be difficult especially when, as their brothers would have it, they were taking in a tour of the neighbourhood on their broomsticks.(3) That Alicia’s daughter in law was named Alyssia was regarded as more than amusing by the women of Bearthwaite because of the mix ups that it had caused. Mix ups that Alicia had telt of many a time to a group of giggling women on Saturday evenings in the bestside of the Green Dragon.
Once Alyssia reached eighteen she asked for her records to be unsealed. She was refused by the magistrate who had sealed the records because he stressed she was not entitled to request the unsealing of the records because her name was not included on the sealed list of name(s) as to who could unseal them, and he refused to say whose names were on that list.
When Alyssia reached twenty-three she’d been married to Garson Bell for three years, and had a two year old son named Gordon and a daughter on the way she intended to name Fern. She petitioned the court again for the records to be unsealed. By this time the original magistrate had died and so another had to hear the petition. Alyssia simply wished to know who she was for both herself and her children. The fact that the records were sealed was a thorn in her side because it posed far too many questions about her past. Question she wanted answers to. The replacement magistrate, Celia Darling, whilst sympathetic said her hands were tied, the original magistrate must have had reasons for making the decisions that he had and she had to respect those reasons even though she was not party to them. However, Alyssia had James Claverton representing her. He’d looked into her case, and was familiar with such information as was available to look into. Unlike Alyssia’s previous representation he’d recognised the critical rôle played by Sarah Harbell, the Social Service case worker involved in the original adoption proceedings. She’d retired at the age of forty-two not long after the adoption and her previously rather ordinary middle class typical life style had been replaced by that of an independently wealthy woman. He’d subpoenaed Miss Harbell who’d been stopped at Heathrow airport on her way to a holiday in Spain. When she’d been stopped she was served with the subpoena.(4) James was always thorough and she’d been told if she boarded her flight by the time it landed her access to all and any of her funds would have been frozen.
In court James led the court through the events of twenty-three years before. He was not he said trying to unseal records that he truly believed had been sealed for good reason by means of any appeal to the court’s sense of right or wrong. He was not trying to unseal them by any claim to a moral right to do so, though he was certain that his client had such a moral right. He was asked what he was trying to claim and he explained that he would prove that his client had a legal right to have the records unsealed. He put Sarah Harbell, the Social Service case worker, in the witness box and questioned her deeply and aggressively as to her lifestyles both past and present, and how she was funding her current lifestyle He was reminded from the bench by the magistrate that this was a family court not a criminal court and that Miss Harbell did not have legal representation and such a line of questioning would not be tolerated unless he could justify it immediately to the court in terms of its remit.
“It is my intention to prove that Miss Harbell was paid to remain silent as to those records. She is now my clients only available avenue to discover her past. It is my contention that the moneys funding Miss Harbell’s current lifestyle is bribe money that enabled her to retire and live lavishly, and furthermore it is money effectively stolen from my client. Money that had my client had the opportunity to establish a relationship with one or both of her parents that money would have been spent on her. Miss Harbell has illegally intended to permanently deprive my client of her inheritance which the law states is the definition of theft. This is as you said, Ma’am, a family court not a criminal court and indeed Miss Harbell has no legal representation. I suggest she get such legal representation very soon because regardless of her evidence here I shall be filing the results of my findings before a criminal court. Before I am asked why am I wasting the court’s time with a matter that is clearly out side its remit―”
The magistrate said a weary, “At last. I thought we’d never get too it,”
“Just so, Ma’am. I pray you allow me to remind us of the rights of a minor to legal representation. It has always been the case that a child is entitled to legal representation in any matter concerning the safety, well being or custody of that child. If they do not have such the court is legally obliged to appoint a legal representative. There is no record of that in the open records of my client’s adoption proceedings where at the very least the name of her counsel should have been recorded. I would like to know why it was not, clearly some person or persons prevented a minor from accessing her right to legal counsel and the presiding magistrate must have been a party to that, for he broke the law in not ensuring my client had legal representation when clearly as an infant she could not represent herself. That in itself, even without the sudden increase in the level of affluence and spending that said magistrate enjoyed from immediately after the case was heard, indicates a stench of corruption in the jurisdiction of his local bench of magistrates, but that is for them to investigate as they will have to now I have raised the matter and it is a matter of public record. If they don’t look into the matter it will naturally be looked into by a higher authority, who may just choose to look into the matter anyway before a finger is pointed at them. I submit to the court as evidence of that claim said magistrates banking records both before and after the case, Ma’am. I also submit to the court similar records pertaining to Miss Harbell’s finances.
“Miss Harbell has admitted being paid to look the other way when my client’s rights were ridden over roughshod. Miss Harbell has suggested that my client’s mother was a drug abusing homeless prostitute who gave up her daughter for adoption at birth, which was why her name was not on the list of persons who could unseal the records, though Miss Harbell’s evidence for that is based on hearsay rather than substantiated facts, or indeed anything she could reasonably have accepted at the time as the truth. Who my client’s father is, who is probably paying Miss Harbell via that bank administered trust fund with no link back to him, remains unknown. Why he is bothering to pay her is also unknown. A man who gets a drug abusing prostitute pregnant would I assume under normal circumstances just shrug his shoulders and walk away. The answers to these unknowns lie in those sealed records which my client has a legal right to examine. Yes my client has been an adult for many years, but legal representation when she was a baby would have prevented any miscarriage of justice from happening, and it is certain such a miscarriage of justice did happen, for denial of representation is by definition a miscarriage of justice. When my client first petitioned the courts to unseal her records five years ago, had she had legal counsel as a infant that counsel would have ensured, as is normal procedure, that my client’s name was on the list of persons who had the right to have the records unsealed. She would have been able to exercise that right once she achieved her majority at eighteen. I am saying to the court that, aided and abetted by a UK court my client’s rights were stolen and she has a legal right, not a moral right, to have those records unsealed. As her counsel I am petitioning the court for that to be done. Not to be taken under consideration, but undertaken this day to comply with the law. It can be done, it should be done and it must be done.
“I do understand that in the unlikely event of a matter of National Security or a similarly grave matter being involved there may be a justifyable reason for those record to remain sealed. So I petition that the court as represented by yourself, Ma’am, and I, for I am bound by all the same oaths that you are, examine the sealed records and we come to a decision as to how to proceed prior to my client being allowed access to them.”
“That does seem eminently reasonable with no legal reason to refuse you petition, Mr Claverton. I wish solutions to all such cases could be arrived at as expeditiously and with as little acrimony.”
In her chambers after having perused the sealed files Mrs Darling was fuming. “Outrageous!” she declared. “Absolutely outrageous! How do you intend to proceed from here, James?”
“I want these records unsealed and made available to my client immediately. I shall counsel her to keep her peace(5) on the matter till I discover what the Home Office,(6) and the Lords Onnersbury and Greenoaks are prepared to offer by way of compensation. If it isn’t enough or they insist on her silence as part of the deal there’re always the tabloids who will get hold of the story sooner or later, so she may as well sell it to them. If it comes to that I shall hand the matter over to my colleague Adalheidis Levens, who is well known for her ability to defend those who are unable to defend themselves, to take in hand regarding the negotiations for either compensation or media access to the records. Since Alyssia’s father’s political party is no longer in power and he is no longer a shadow front bencher never mind the minister of defence I can’t see that there is any valid reason to claim a matter of National Security is at stake. I can’t actually see that there ever was one. This was simply a matter of two powerful and wealthy men abusing their positions and taking advantage of the ignorance of a rather silly daughter of one of them who made a mistake and the innocent new born daughter of that silly daughter and the other man, an innocent who contributed nothing to this travesty of justice. Of course if Lord Onnersbury had been a man and admitted the affair to his wife there would doubtless have been painful consequences and if Lord Greenoaks had allowed his daughter to rear her daughter under his protection they’d have been laught at for a while, but the news always moves on and it takes the pubic with it. I don’t accept that there were valid reasons why Alyssia’s mother was not empowered to unseal the records nor will anyone else. Miss Harbell will be paid till her death by the slush fund, I hesitate to call it a trust fund, set up by the then Home Secretary’s(7) staff, at which point the residue will revert to the treasury. For sure she’ll be vilified in the media, but we all have to live with the consequences of our actions.”
“This is not going to reflect well on either the government or the opposition, James.”
“Fortunately, Celia, neither of us are employed nor paid to represent either of them, and as I said we all have to live with the consequences of our actions. As for the forthcoming general election, neither party will be seen to have clean hands in this matter, so let the chips fall where they may.(8) As for Lord Onnersbury his political career will be over, but it’s no loss to the nation to lose a man such as he, for though a politician he never was anywhere near becoming a statesman. I doubt very much whether Alyssia will seek contact with him though she probably will write to her mother. Either way, I’m not in the business of propping up corruption nor abuses of power.”
“No more am I, James. Are we agreed Alyssia is to be allowed to read these documents in my chambers in your presence, mine too if she requests it, and after your counsel she determines what she does with the information?”
“Yes, but I insist she is allowed to take copies. The originals of course belong to court, but the information on them does not.”
“Naturally. Now let us return to the court room and I shall close the case in her favour without any explanations, other than that explanations will follow when Alyssia deems that to be acceptable. It has been good to reacquaint myself with you, and I would rather we did not loose contact with each other again, so I’ll give Hayley a call and we can arrange dinner some time. I’ll probably have to bully Bill into a suit. Much as I love the man he’s become really difficult now he’s retired. From choice he’d spend all his time dressed like a tramp in the garden with his roses and a pair of secateurs if I let him get away with it. However, this weather has put three feet of snow over the entire garden and he’s no idea what to do with his time. Since his heart attack he can’t take the cold at all so he spends most of his life in the library throwing logs on the fire and complaints at the dogs about his vegetable plot not being prepared properly for the upcoming season. He’s read the print of all his gardening books, and he lurks around the letter box waiting for his gardening magazines to arrive. Unfortunately he’s never really been interested in anything else.”
“I know someone he can chat with over the internet who is a fanatic gardener and allotment grower. Alf Winstanley has his own breed of potatoes called Bearthwaite Queen. In his own words he describes himself as as thick as a brick and a peasant. In reality he’s a highly intelligent country man, and though he has virtually no formal education he is a genius engineer and plantsman. I’ll ask him to give Bill a text and they can take it from there. Tell Bill I’ll give him a two gallon bottle of cask strength Cyanobacta, which doubtless he has heard of and been unable to acquire, when he turns up dressed for dinner. I imagine that’ll make him a bit more amenable.” The pair who’d been law students at university together were chuckling as they returned to the courtroom.
As expected Auld Alan Peabody had as usual been spot on with his predictions for the Bearthwaite winter. Indeed, immediately after the balmy days of the Indian summer were over the initial cold snap of the winter was a heller that became worse and worse by the day. Folk watched the mercury plummet and wondered just how far it was going to go. In fact with the hindsight of the following spring the winter had been the heller of all hellers in all modern recorded history, not just at Bearthwaite, but over the entire northern hemisphere. However, despite the cold, the Bearthwaite winter solstice party had been excellent, though adults and older children had had to keep a very close eye on the young. Not far from the huge bonfire on the village green, Alf Winstanley had said to the dozen or so men he was drinking and eating with, “It may well be cold enough to freeze the nuts off a brass monkey,(9) Lads, but at least it’s dry and the wind is a flat calm. These ribs are damned good ain’t they?”
After saying that he threw his mutton rib bone, now devoid of anything edible, into the bonfire, reached for yet another off the makeshift table, dipped it into a bucket of warm sauce, winked at the teenagers who were managing the barbecue and said to the men, “Pass me that bottle one of you if you would please. I need a top up. Tell you, Lads, if ever we needed an excuse for supping(10) chemic(11) we’ve got a damned good one now.” The night of the solstice it was minus eighteen point nine Celsius [-2·02℉] at its coldest, but as was fairly normal after the solstice the weather became colder not warmer. According to Joel Williams, the Bearthwaite weather guru, on average the coldest day of the year since record keeping began at Bearthwaite was, as for many other places, the fifth of February, and typically the weather got gradually colder, more or less, all the way to the fifth and then started to warm, usually slightly more quickly than it had dropped going into the winter.
Over the winter as things became colder than ever before the record UK low had moved from place to place, mostly somewhere in north east Scotland, but eventually at the winter’s end Braemar in north east Scotland reclaimed the title of having the lowest ever recorded temperature in the British Isles having experienced minus forty-five point six Celsius [-50.08℉] over night on February the fifth at three minutes past four in the morning. It was no surprise to the Bearthwaite residents when it reached minus forty-one point one Celsius [-41·98℉] over night on February the fifth at fourteen minutes past four in the morning at Joel Williams’ weather station on Bearthwaite Green which was the coldest temperature of the winter at Bearthwaite. Jym Peabody’s daughter finally made her appearance at just that time. Jym had originally intended to name her Alexia, but subsequently wished to celebrate her birth and the turning point of the winter. She’d asked for advice on the matter from her friends, and Aggie to much laughter had said it certainly wouldn’t be appropriate to name a lass Frigid, especially if one wanted her to love her mum once she discovered its other meaning. Alaska, Siberia, Yakutsk, Scandiaca,(12) Arctora and many other wintery names too had been discussed. In the end Jym had chosen Hope because she said from the coldest ever experienced at Bearthwaite one could only hope for better times for her daughter, and one of the Islands in the bitterly cold arctic archipelago of Svalbard was called Hopen. Twenty-five minutes after Hope, Young Alan arrived into a world that was already better than the one his elder sister had entered, even if only by a little.
At the city of Yakutsk Siberia the lowest temperature of the winter hit minus ninety-two point one Celsius [-133·78℉], which was a global record low for a city though minus ninety-six point four Celsius [-141·52℉] had been recorded in an isolated valley some fifty-two kilometres [32½ miles] from the city. The talk was that when the next serious winter arrived the temperature would dip below minus one hundred Celsius [-148℉]. When Tasha had been telt by Sasha that many thousands had died in Vladivostok the place of her birth she’d cried for days. Knowing that it was only due to the kindness of strangers who’d owed her nothing that she was alive at Bearthwaite and not dead at Yakutsk made her feel worse. Thinking, ‘Why was I so lucky and others not’, haunted her waking hours and dreams too for weeks. The only thing that brought her out of her misery bordering upon depression was receiving the news that the school teacher who’d saved her from gang rape, and as she now was aware murder by the state too, had survived with all his family. It was strange to her that she was even happy and glad that Blackbeard and his gang of smugglers who’d hidden her from the authorities and escorted her safely to Adio and Alerica’s boat at Split had all survived safely too. Brutal they’d been, but she now understood why and how that had been necessary to keep her alive.(13) Psychologists they weren’t, but they understood fear, anger and resentment and their consequences on human behaviour.
The cold at Bearthwaite, and at most of the rest of the British Isles too, lasted till the March the twenty-fifth, five days after the Vernal Equinox, before it rose above freezing, and that was only for a few minutes after noon. For what could reasonably be described as warmer weather folk had to wait another fortnight till the ninth of April to deliver some sunshine that actually felt warm. By the middle of April the weather was glorious and there were so many weddings called at short notice that many Bearthwaite folk, not just Chance and Murry the Bearthwaite registrars, knew the words to the Bearthwaite ceremony by heart. “In a hurry to get the parties in before the weather goes shite on us again. Then again it always seems odd when the baby has a saining(14) before the wedding, so maybe there was a need for them to get their skates on,”(15) Dave had caustically remarked to much hilarity. Most of the couples involved had been living as man and wife for some time, but had indeed put off the ceremonies till better weather meant all could enjoy the celebrations outside, and a goodly number of the women were clearly already in the family way(16).
Gustav passed the newspaper over to Harriet at the breakfast table and silently indicated that she should read the front page. There it was in banner headlines. DEATH OF A MONSTER. Harriet scanned rather than read the paragraph underneath the photograph that covered most of the front page. She turned to the inside pages seven and eight to see what facts, rather than sensationalised nonsense written purely to titillate the palates of the herd,(17) could be gleaned from there, but it was just a rehash of the initial trial a few months before. The death of Barbara Nancarrow, Peter and Brigitte’s biological mother, in HMP Holloway(18) as reported was short on facts, long on speculation and even longer on speculative titillation. What little information that was available boiled down to her death from an overdose of opioids. Known to be a heavy drug user, the speculation was about her being supplied with pure fentanyl, which was a death sentence because at fifty times more potent than heroin, and a hundred times more so than morphine, heroin was aspirin like and positively benign when compared with fentanyl, which was a manufactured opioid, not one naturally occurring in any plant material. Like a number of other related drugs it was a powerful and effective painkiller used by the NHS(19) for patients mostly dying from cancer. That it was a legitimately used drug by the medical profession meant there were legal supplies of it in various places, and despite tight security it could be stolen. Worse, it wasn’t that difficult to manufacture, mostly from widely used legitimately non controlled precursors, though in most countries the authorities kept track of who was handling those precursors and what they were using them for.
Brigitte entered the breakfast room followed by Peter who saw the paper on the table and said, “I read the news on my phone before I got out of bed. I didn’t bother reading the article because it doesn’t matter.” He turned to a puzzled looking Brigitte and said, “She overdosed in prison, which will save the cost of a major trial won’t it and doubtless make a lot of kids happy. We knew it would be either the drugs or someone would stick a knife in her. That’s that, and it means it’s all over and I shan’t have to do anything about her.” Whilst in prison the police investigation had turned up evidence as to Austell, her dead husband, and Barbara’s involvement in all manner of criminal activity including supplying children who’d illegally entered the country for whatever purpose persons with enough money desired. Even in a women’s prison, or perhaps especially in a women’s prison, that could only lead to death unless kept in solitary confinement. “The official report will be published eventually, Brigitte, but to be honest I don’t care enough to be bothered about reading it.”
Brigitte smiled, gave Peter a thumbs up with both hands and said, “Result!” before reaching for a piece of toast, and asking, “Pass the honey over, Peter, please.” Harriet and Gustav glanced at each other still finding their children’s complete indifference to their biological parents difficult to accept. They were so indifferent that it couldn’t even be described as callousness. Sure they hated them and wanted both of them dead, but their hatred wasn’t something that could stir their emotions. That they had only ever referred to them using pronouns had always seemed bizarre even if understandable.
Peter had once said to Gustav before Austell’s death, “If they ever get out of goal I’ll probably be going in for killing the pair of them, but I can’t see it will be necessary. They’ll both be killed inside long before I’ll have to do anything about them.” After Austell’s murder by another prisoner in custody Peter had said, “At least this way he’s all over and I reckon long before we are asked to appear as witnesses against our mother we’ll hear that she’s dead too. Either someone will kill her in gaol or she’ll die from an overdose inside. I know drugs are readily available in every gaol in the country. We’ll be fine. We’re just waiting to hear she’s dead too. It won’t be long.”
Pete came in and asked, “Any chance of you giving me hand with some drums of akvavit, Peter? I want to move them to where you and you friends can bottle it for me, but I don’t want your gran giving me a hard time for tekin chances with my back again. There’ll probably be about eight hundred of the two gallon [9litre, 4½ US quarts] bottles from thirty-six drums. Adio left in a hurry said he was going somewhere warm, actually what he said was, ‘Any god damned place will do as long as it’s above freezing’. Alerica telt your mum he was probably going to Mexico or somewhere round there where he could pick up a load of tequila. There are laws that only permit bulk export to certain places under stringent conditions. The Mexican government want it bottled in Mexico to ensure quality is maintained because it’s a valuable export to them. I suppose that means a valuable source of tax revenue. Adio told his contact that he wasn’t prepared to handle owt in bottles because that made it too risky to land anywhere and he’d rather collect hostage rum in drums from the Caribbean. He walked away from the deal and did what he’d said he would do. He telt me not long afterwards that the tequila smugglers over there weren’t very bright because he’d never had any trouble with Los Federales, as he called the police over there. It was just a question of paying the appropriate gratuities. He quoted his now infamous expression to me, ‘Bribes are always cheaper than taxes.’ A year later he was asked would it do in brand new unused grey two hundred litre drums the same as were used for some agricultural products because that made the exporters safer from the police over there. They’d expected him to want it in wooden barrels. Adio loves those grey drums, so I expect that’ll be where he’s on his way to as we speak.”
“Lobsters, Granddad?” asked Peter.
“Aye. Indeed. Lobsters.”
“What have lobsters got to do with tequila?” asked a very puzzled Brigitte.
Pete explained, “Any damaged drums are used by lobster fishermen all over the world to make cheap durable lobster creels with and from any farther away than a few yards [metres] the creels and the drums look the same. In any particular area there are hundreds if not thousands of drums and creels in various stages of conversion all over boats, docks, warehouses and washed up ashore all over the place which makes life very difficult for the authorities trying to catch folk like Adio. Adio even has a couple of creels, so he can catch a few lobsters for Alerica, himself and the crew to eat when he’s in port. He keeps them tied down on deck where every one can see them right next to the game fish fishing rods. The majority of those drums are grey, but some are blue and both make good creels. Adio will only carry drink in the grey ones because they are much harder for the customs folk to spot in the sea.”
“Sure no problems, Granddad. I’ll help. You need the stuff bottled in a hurry?”
“No rush, Son. Saturday morning as usual will be fine. All I really want is a couple of dozen bottles for Saturday evening.”
“We’ll have done the lot by then. The lads will be happy to do it. I think some of them are running out of money and there’s not much work about in this weather. The farm lads have got the animal feed delivery work stitched up.”
It was Saturday evening and in the taproom of the Green Dragon Inn at Bearthwaite the men had just settled down with their pints and were looking for someone ready to start the tale telling off when a couple came in via the back door. The man was dressed well but in women’s clothing and his partner was an appealing looking young woman known to all the locals as Jordan. “Who is your friend, Jordan?” Pete asked reaching a hand out to shake hands with a hugely built, middle fifties looking man dressed in a warm looking classic, obviously custom tailored, woman’s tweed skirt suit wearing suitably matching, expensive looking, made to measure, women’s brogues, atypically with an elegant two inch block heel. Despite his clothing, the man looked like a man, a big and well built man who had the appearance of a man well able to handle himself if matters deteriorated into a fight. Despite his size he appeared distinctly nervous dressed in women’s clothing, but Pete’s greeting and the approval of his presence by the other men there seemed to settle him considerably.
Jordan had been a frequent, if somewhat irregular, Saturday visitor for a couple of years. He cross dressed and appeared to be a small, five foot two blonde who could pass anywhere as a woman, till that was he opened his mouth and his basso profundo voice was heard. Jordan replied, “This is my mate, Stephen, Pete. He was a bit reluctant to come with me, but I twisted his arm and here we are. He came with his missus who’s next door. I wasn’t sure I could get here because of work, so I came separately, and we met by chance in the corridor just outside the taproom. So now as I wanted to I can shew him in and introduce him.” Jordan was dressed in a long velvet frock, stiletto heels and was immaculately made up to the nines(20) without in any way going over the top. A cross dresser he was, a drag artist he was not. After removing his overcoat to hang it up his fur stole had joined it. Jordan had a noticeable, but not ridiculously sized bosom in his frock. All in all a remarkably pretty young woman to all outward appearances.
“Bearthwaite Brown, Lads?” Stan enquired from behind the bar.
“Please, Stan,” Jordan replied. It was no surprise to see Stephen handle his pint like a man accustomed to it who had regular practice, but many of the outsiders were surprised to see Jordan do the same.
“I don’t suppose you’d have a decent tale to tell would you, Stephen? We’ve been running a bit short on stuff that happened somewhere else recently, and if it were amusing, or better yet good for a damned good laugh, we’d really appreciate it. There’re no rules about the tales you can tell, Lad. Funny, true, outright lies, though you’d struggle to compete with Dave there, or færie tales, for a new tale to tell the grandkids at bedtime is always welcome here. Political, religious, grossly offensive, whatever, Lad. All isms and ists are fine in tales here, though we’d get a bit upset if you ran to intolerance in your actions. If you’ve a tale to tell, just up and out with it. That right, Lads?”
There was a roomful of men agreeing with Alf and Jordan said, “I told you that’s how it is here, Stephen. It’s genuine. Here, Bertie. Just throw it in the kids Christmas party collection box. Don’t bother with any change, for we’ll drink it all eventually, and Stephen probably could do with some of the rare stuff to settle himself down. I’ve warned him about the liquor here, but go easy on him to start with.” As he spoke Jordan pushed a twenty pound note towards Bertie who without any reaction did as he’d been telt, and poured two glasses of Cyanobacta for Stephen and Jordan. A spirit glass in the taproom of the Green dragon was more or less the same as a proverbial Highland dram, to wit a quarter bottle [⅓ of an imperial pint, 6⅔ fluid ounces, 190ml].
Stephen, obviously an experienced man with a spirits glass as well as a pint pot,(21) drank half of the contents of his glass, which would have been a mouthful the equivalent of a couple of doubles in most places and smiling said, “Hell fire! That is tasty, what I call a man’s drink with a decent bite to it. I presume from what Jordan has told me it’s the local liquor. And it’s only two quid for that glass‽ Remarkable!”
Hastily Pete said, “Nay, Lad. It’s free. The two quid was a gift you made to charity. It has to be that way to comply with the law. Though actually Cyanobacta is legal to be selt, but a lot of other stuff here isn’t. HMRC(22) know all about the Cyanobacta because we sell it all over the place by the tanker load and in two hundred litre drums as well as bottled, but the stuff drunk in here is cask strength and we don’t sell that to outside, only the forty percent. This is fifty-five point something, most batches are between fifty-two and fifty-three and a half. I reckon somebody must have cocked up at the distillery, though we seem to be getting a lot at fifty-five percent recently. Mind it goes down just as easy as fifty-two percent.” Pete held his glass up so as to see the light through it and said, “Not bad at all is it?”
“Hello, Jordan. Who’s your friend?” asked Brigitte who’d just entered with a degging can(23) full of water.
“Hello, Brigitte. He’s Stephen.”
“Hello, Stephen. I’m Brigitte, Gustav’s eldest daughter. Pete is my granddad.” At that Brigitte filled the dogs’ water bowls and said, “I’ll be back in a minute with the kibble,” before leaving. Yet again Stephen was amazed at the seemingly total acceptance of Jordan and himself. Jordan had telt him that he was amongst friends when at the Green Dragon, but he’d not totally bought into that believing Jordan to be suffering from some wishful thinking.
After finishing his glass, Stephen pushed his glass forward for a refill and said, “I think it’s incredible that a place like this exists. There are plenty of places in cities where cross dressers can go. Not all are totally safe, but I’ve never had a complete non reaction from a child like that before. Some of the lads at work know I dress, and they’re not all nice about it, but I’m the senior partner in in a very small security outfit, and if it came to it I could knock seven shades of shit out of any and all of them, or just fire them, so they mostly leave me alone. I haven’t exactly got a tale to tell, but I can perhaps amuse you with a couple of daft things about my missus. Daphne knows all about my hobby as she calls it. We met when she was a girl and got married when she was eighteen and was working as a nurse. I was twenty-one. She knew about me dressing back then and wasn’t bothered and still isn’t. She says it’s cheaper than me playing golf and me dressing like a woman is better than me going round undressing other women. I get her point of view and respect it and am grateful too. She always painted science fiction and weird fantasy pictures for illustrating books and articles and sculpted and painted weird animals in clay to match for a hobby which earnt her a few extra pennies on top of her salary. Eventually she packed in nursing and turned her hobby into a job though a good bit of her work is done on her computers creating digital images images these days. I reckon few women are that tolerant. Jordan told me you already know his ex buggered off because she was jealous of how good he looked when dressed. At least I’ll never have that problem.
“The other evening Daphne was talking about her new debit card. Our bank has recently changed card provider and she’d never used hers before. It’s not often she uses a card and she burnt her credit card years ago because she didn’t want the bother of looking after it. I don’t think she’s used her debit card for years. Usually she asks me for money and if I haven’t got enough I get her some from a hole in the wall machine.(24) Having no kids means we’re not short of money. I’m no control freak, it’s just that she can’t be bothered with it and prefers me to get cash for her because unlike her I actually know my PIN(25) number and how to operate an ATM.(26) I thought she said, ‘I’d better take my new card with me next time we go shopping, so I can check it’s okay whilst you’re still around,’ which was a bit of a shocker. I know I’m fifty-three, but I expected to be around for a few more years yet. I remonstrated about that wondering what she knew that I didn’t. Like I said, years ago she worked as a nurse for a few years, so maybe I thought she’d spotted signs of incipient mortality that I wasn’t aware of. Anyway I remonstrated with her about it, and it turned out that either she’d screwed her words up and added the word still, or I’d mentally inserted it into her words. It’s not that funny but it had us laughing for a while and breaking out into laughter every now and again for a couple of days.
“My second thing is just an example of one of those in jokes that all couples who’ve been together a while have. A while back Daphne got some steak out of the freezer that she’d frozen with the label on it so as to know what it was if she didn’t get it out for some time. Presumably she’d bought it in a supermarket in one of those plastic boxes that contain fifty percent air and to cut down on the space it used in the freezer she’d cut the label off and slapped it on the meat before putting it in a carrier bag. Like a lot of folk we probably keep stuff in our freezer for far longer than we should, and stuff regularly turns up at the bottom that neither of us can remember ever having seen before never mind having put in there. She wanted to cook it in the oven from frozen, but part of the label was plastic and that bothered her. I took the joint off her and ran some hot water from the kitchen tap over the label and it just washed off. Daphne then said her standard expression that she uses when ever something like that occurs. ‘That’s why you went to University.’ Another time I’d been bulk cooking a dozen or so fruit crumbles. As usual the Aga was on. Unlike a fan oven its oven is one of those where it’s a lot hotter at the top than it is at the bottom. I’d a crumble on each of four shelves. Once the top one was cooked I took it out and moved the remaining three up one shelf and put an uncooked on in at the bottom. I know that doing it that way I can take the top one out ten minutes later. It’s like a production line. Once they were all out Daphne said, ‘We’ve been stupid really. We should have had the electric oven on as well then we’d have been done in twice the time.’ She meant to say we’d have done them twice as fast. When I said, ‘No, Dear, we’ve have been done in half the time,’ she said ‘That’s why you went to University.’ She’s been saying it for years usually taking the piss out of(27) me, but sometimes like then out of herself. Like I said not terribly funny to anyone else, but it makes us laugh.”
Dave said in response, “May be not, but I’m gey glad to hear it’s not just Bearthwaite lads as have to live with that sort of response from her indoors,(28) Stephen Lad. That’s definitely worth a free supper and another few glasses of brown and chemic.”
“Well,” said Pete as the men settled down after the activities of a usual break in proceedings had taken place which included a visit to gents for those who felt so inclined which provided opportunity for escape for any newcomers uncomfortable with the taproom environment for whatever reason, “I see some of the snowflakes have gone. Obviously not as broad minded as they thought they are were they?” He turned to address Jordan and especially Steven before saying, “I have a damned good memory for faces, landlords have to because it can save a deal of trouble if you get rid of it before owt happens, and I’ve never seen any of those blokes who’ve disappeared before. With a bit of luck we’ll never see them again. Unlike you, Stephen, none of them added owt to our enjoyment of the night, so we’re missing nowt. I’ll tell you all the local lads are hoping you’ll be back wearing whatever the hell you like. Just keep telling a tale every now and again please, and you’ll mek us all happy. Jordan does and many of them have been about his experiences in cross dressing spots. Some were good, some funny, and some mekt a few of the lads want to go and give some bigoted twats a bit o’ hands on counselling round the back. I’m not claiming we understand blokes like you because we don’t, but that doesn’t matter. Good manners, tolerance, honesty and a sense of humour, especially the ability to laugh at yourself, they’re what matter here, and you’ve exhibited all of those the night. By the bye my missus says you should buy a brooch to go on the lapel of your jacket, she said preferably a jewelled brooch styled after a heather sprig. I know nowt about such tackle, but she said if you’d like to spend a few minutes with her after closing time before you go to your room she’ll tek you into the office and have a look on the internet with you if you like. My missus is Gladys, though I suspect my daughter Harriet and her lass Brigitte as you’ve already met will go with you to argue the toss about style. If you tek ’em up on it I’d be prepared to waste an hour, sorry I meant invest an hour, on the job.”
Vincent indicated he’d something to say, “If those sheep had been left on Needles Fell in this they’d all be long dead and deep frozen too. Mind, even with the guts inside ’em they wouldn’t be going off in this. Years ago I read that you are not allowed to be buried on Svalbard because it’s too cold for bodies to decay in the ground up there and that means any pathogens in a body will still be active centuries after death. I don’t know, but in those days I suppose they’d have had to chip a hole in the frozen ground, or wait till summer for the ground to be soft enough to dig, and even then they’d hit the permanently frozen ground not very far down. There is a graveyard there where, back at the end of the first world war, nineteen eighteen it would have been, when that Spanish flu pandemic was killing millions all over the world they buried the seven folk as died there from it. They reckon it killed somewhere between forty to a hundred million folk all over the world. I couldn’t find out why the number was so vague. You’d think they know how many it killed a bit more accurately than that wouldn’t you?
“I read the seven bodies were dug up, exhumed them they call it, mostly in the interests of safety because given enough time repeated freeze and thaw cycles of the soil above the permafrost(29) can bring bodies to the surface. Frost heave(30) they call it. The picture I saw shewed blokes, well I think they were blokes but it was impossible to tell, doing the job dressed in those sealed hazmat(31) suits with air cylinders on their backs. They also want to try to understand the flu better to see if that could help mek better flu vaccines. It said the corpses would be almost as fresh as when they buried ’em a century before. Ghoulish I calls it. Svalbard is that spot where that bank that keeps samples of seeds(32) is because the cold helps to preserve ’em. I’ve seen it referred to as the Doomsday Vault because they keep samples there so that we can start all over again after we inflict Armageddon on ourselves. Some references I came across called the spot Spitsbergen(33) rather than Svalbard.”
Deaths of folk due to the winter were known to be high outside the Bearthwaite valley though none had occurred there. Joel Williams had done some research on human deaths due to bad winters and his results were not really surprising. “Official figures admit to a hundred and fifty deaths due to the cold of the nineteen forty-seven winter. A mere fifty are attributed to the winter of sixty-two. I couldn’t find a figure for the winter of eighty-two. Both those numbers seem ridiculously low as compared with what the Office for National Statistics refers to as excess deaths due to winter which occur every winter. It’s really hard to work out what any set of numbers is actually referring to and even harder to work out what they mean. On the ONS(34) website there is a set of statistics which it freely admits is in development and not to be relied upon as numbers will change with time. Those statistics currently state that in England and Wales, I couldn’t find figures for Scotland or Northern Ireland, from nineteen eight-eight to twenty twenty-two two hundred thousand and nine hundred and seventy-two persons had deaths associated with cold. That averages at just short of six thousand a year over thirty-four years. Now, unlike the idiots who work for the media I do know that that doesn’t say all those folk died of cold, but I’m buggered if I know what it does say. I’m even less certain what that has to do with what this last winter has done in the way of causing folks’ deaths. What I can say with confidence is that there must have been any number of folk, especially older folk, out there who died because they lived in shite accommodation and didn’t have enough money to eat properly and stay warm.”
Joel changed from talking about folk dying to livestock, mostly sheep, dying. “Yet again Auld Alan Peabody’s predictions have proven to be more accurate than anyone else’s, and as numerous folk have said, ‘A least he admitted he didn’t know when there was no way of telling. He never fed us bullshit’. Deaths of stock, especially sheep caught out and trapped by snow on high ground, over the entire UK are known to be horrendous, even though there are no numbers available as yet to give a nationwide picture. When I looked into it I discovered that official data concerning sheep losses in the past were conflicting and anything but consistent. No surprises there, Lads. I’m only giving you information that I found on official websites. One website gives graphs which indicated that the nineteen forty-seven UK flock was about twenty million sheep. It gave yows,(35) wethers(36) and lambs all separately, but I added ’em together, and I could be out by say a million either way because I took the numbers as best as I could from the graph. Another site said three million sheep perished in nineteen forty seven, and yet another said twenty percent of the national flock perished that year. Three million out of twenty million is fifteen percent, and twenty percent of twenty million is four million. Either way that’s a hell of a lot of dead sheep. The same website that gave graphs of the UK flock numbers from nineteen forty-five to nineteen seventy-one gave the nineteen sixty-two UK flock to be about thirty-four million.
“That same web site said that average deaths of sheep in nineteen sixty-two were about ten percent which means some three point four million sheep perished, but other websites say that the nineteen sixty-two losses were less than the nineteen forty-seven losses due to lessons having been learnt. I automatically distrust any kind of folk who talk about lessons will be learnt or have been learnt, because we’ve all seen it happen over and over again concerning all sorts of things and we know that it means an official whitewash is taking place and everyone involved has learnt bugger all and they ain’t going to either. Official websites say that the UK flock is still about thirty-four million sheep. You can mek what you like of that data. I couldn’t find anything on sheep losses in the winter of nineteen eighty-two, and I can’t help but wonder why. Alan reckons and I see no reason to disagree that somewhere between a quarter and a half of those thirty-four million sheep will have been lost by the end of this winter. He says the upper figure is more likely than the lower one and he wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up much higher than that. I suspect it’ll be a bloody long time before we find out, and the worse it was the longer it’ll be before we hear owt. I also reckon that when we are given some figures they’ll be buried in a report that’s nowt but frigging gobbledegook and no bugger will be able to mek head nor tail of it. The media of course will sensationalise it to hell and what they say probably won’t bear any resemblance at all to what actually happened, or come to that to what the report will say happened.”
Dave added, “One thing that should be obvious to all of us here is that we’ve lost bugger all stock thanks to Auld Alan. He telt me last week that once he’s gone we need to listen to Joel and do what he says because given a bit of experience he’ll be every bit as good as hisel because Joel’s got his memories all wrote down and he has the modern science to go with it all too. He also added that he’s not planning on going anywhere till his youngsters have got Cumberland pigs totally reëstablished, so he can enjoy a decent breakfast. Which he said would be at least another decade.”
Once the laughter died down Vincent said laughing as he said it, “I read in the paper that they reckon meat is going to be gey scarce and expensive out there.”
“Ah well,” said Ɖackaman, “at least we won’t run short on meat, especially mutton. Not even if next winter is worse than this, and far be it from me to encourage poaching, mostly because it’s not necessary, but seeing as we’ve got plenty of hay and any number of lads more than willing to deliver it to the feeding sites, it seems an easy enough matter to tempt venison by the ton on land we don’t own to take a walk onto Beebell land that we do own. I was talking to John Finkel the conservation officer the other day and he said that since the deer were wild it was perfectly legal for us to provide hay for them using hay baited, lightly sprung, one way gates to trap deer inside our land at which point we own ’em since game belongs to whoever owns the land they’re on at the time. He said we need to improve our stock by eating the poorer deer and allowing the better ones to breed which will increase our food supply. It will also provide us with the nuclei of quality deer herds to move onto fenced and managed land as Bearthwaite buys more land. Nobody is going to criticize us for feeding emaciated, starving deer that none else values in any way at all.” It took a while for the quiet laughter to fade as all the locals were thinking about the ten thousand or so sheep that had legally been removed from illegally grazing Beebell land on Needles Fell straight into freezers all around the village which had taken five and a half weeks to accomplish in all.(37) Too, John was correct in that there were large herds of unfed, starving, unmanaged deer that roamed the fells, and at least the rangers fed and culled deer as a managed food resource. No Bearthwaite managed deer starved to death as happened all over the fells every hard winter.
“What’s for supper, Harriet?”
“Haggis with bashed neeps and tatties,(38) Uncle Alf. Obviously you all know where the haggis came from.” After the laughter quietened Harriet added, “The neeps have got some carrot in maybe one part in four because they needed used. Like the taties the vegetables were grown here. The taties are Bearthwaite Queen, the neeps are a variety called Magres grown by Uncle Frank, and the carrots are a heritage variety selected by Auntie Dagmar and her ancestors they call Billy, but they don’t know just how many generations it is since the original Billy was around. There’s some gravy too for them as want. Pudding is steamed marmalade suet pudding with custard. As usual the suet is from Uncle Vincent, and all dairy products are from the Peabody dairy. The exact provenance of the citrus fruit in the marmalade is a little uncertain, because most came from the Covent Garden Market and were given to us by the stall holders who wanted rid because they thought they would spoil before they could sell them and then they’d have to pay to have them dumped. Only some of the boxes had labels identifying the varieties they contained. For any who’s interested Auntie Christine has a record of what she does know. I’m not sure which of our waggon drivers delivered what to there, but they were loaded up with produce to bring back for free. All peel from citrus fruit used in the village gets taken to Auntie Christine’s kitchens and most of it ends up in marmalade. The rest is candied for use in baking. This marmalade is from the first batch to be made with the sugar beet sweetener Auntie Christine’s staff mek. I like it, and so do the shepherds and wallers that eat breakfast here. They even use the sugar syrup in their tea and say it tastes no different from sugar crystals. Auntie Alice sells it in refillable plastic bottles in the shop now. The flour is milled at the mill from local grown grains, and the bread was made and baked there. It’s buttered with Peabody’s best butter. Not that they produce owt other than best.
In the best side of the Dragon Elle asked “What persuaded you to come here for the weekend, Daphne?”
“The old man wanted to come. His friend Jordan likes it next door in the taproom. He’s been here many times before and he loves coming here. He says it’s not just the stories, it’s the welcome and everything.” Daphne hesitated before adding, “And he feels safe here.”
Brigitte tumbled immediately, “You’re Stephen’s wife?”
“Aye for my sins, but he’s a good man, and I’ve never seriously regretted marrying him. I’m still happily married and a lot of the women I knew who years ago looked down on me for taking up with Stephen are now divorced, getting older, bitter, lonely and ready for a pair of cats.” Seeing some bewildered faces she said, “Stephen is a cross dresser. He’ll be in the taproom having a good time with men his friend Jordan regards as friends who treat him the same way. He’s wearing a pair of gauchos that are cut so full it looks like a skirt right down to the floor, sort of like full length culottes, with a silk blouse and an embroidered bolero jacket that looks kind of South American. He still looks like an MMA all in wrestler and is as tough as one too, but he’s happy. His friend Jordan, who dresses too, but who can pass as a woman anywhere till he opens his mouth to speak when the gravel drops out, has spent weeks persuading him to come here for his first time, but he’s on his own tonight because at the last minute Jordan had to cancel due to something happening at work. A week ago I decided that since Jordan enjoyed the night out so much, and I knew Stephen was seriously interested, I’d try it too, so I booked the room for Stephen and myself. After Jordan had to cancel I kind of bullied Stephen a bit to see it through. However, I’m having a good time, so to quote Arnie in Terminator, ‘I’ll be back.’(39)”
Gladys telt Daphne, “Stephen’s not dressed like you said, Daphne. He’s wearing a tweed skirt suit with a matching pair of women’s heeled brogues, and he’s with Jordan who we know well.”
“When Jordan rang us at home at the last minute and said he probably wouldn’t be able to make it that had Stephen really worried. However, I virtually pushed Stephen into the car. I suppose Jordan managed to avoid going to work somehow. Stephen must have decided to change after I came downstairs. Most women I know, including me, have an awful lot of clothes. Not Stephen, but that skirt suit is genuine Harris tweed and cost a small fortune. All his clothes are the same, he doesn’t have wardrobes and wardrobes of them but what he does have is all the ultimate in quality. He should have been a woman because his dress sense is far better than mine. However, he’s a hundred percent man. He just likes dressing up in what other people call women’s clothes, but he doesn’t see it that way. He says, ‘I’m a man. They’re my clothes, so by definition they’re a man’s clothes.’ I suppose he does have a point.”
Gladys said, “I said he should have a jewelled heather brooch for the lapel of that jacket and offered to look on the internet with him after we close. Would you like to join us?”
“Who will be there?”
“Me, possibly Harriet if her lasses don’t need attention, Brigitte, Stephen and you if you wish. Harriet is my daughter and Brigitte is her daughter, so it’s just family.”
“Please I’d like that.”
The women in the room were talking about the sheep in their freezers. Alice said irritably, “I don’t know why we have the meat in the freezers when we could just pile it up outside and it’d get even colder than in our freezers. Freezers working on maximum setting only go down to minus fifteen [5℉] and it’s way colder than that outside twenty-four hours a day at the moment.
Zuhr said, “My freezer is huge and there’s no way it would fit into the kitchen. It’s outside in Ken’s workshop and I’ve just left the lid up. It’s not even switched on. I was looking for some broccoli the other evening when I discovered a big bag of some kind of offal. I don’t know what it is, and I’d like to try cooking with some, but I don’t know what to do with it. Has anyone any ideas?”
“How big is the bag, Zuhr? What weight would you say?”
“Maybe the same as a bag of potatoes, Veronica, probably twenty-five kilos?” [56 pounds].
“That’s about four stone. [25Kg, 56 pounds] We know it won’t be lights, hearts and probably not liver either because Vincent used all the lights and hearts up in haggis, and probably most of the liver too if not all of it. So the chances are it’s kidney.” Veronica went to the bar for a note pad and scribbled a few numbers before saying, “That’s going to make a very large meat and kidney pie, Ladies. Sixty possibly eighty gallons of pie filling. I suggest using mutton(40) rather than beef or bife(41) because it’s what we’ve got a lot of. If a goodly few of us went down to Christine’s kitchens to do it we could use her equipment and can the lot and enjoy the gossip whilst we do it. Fifty-six pounds of kidneys will need probably two to four hundred weights of meat [100–200Kg, 224–448 pounds], another fifty-six pounds [25Kg] of onions, half a stone [3Kg, 7 pounds] of dripping from Rosie for browning the meat, some flour for thickening and whatever seasonings we fancy or more likely are available. Lets go for say a minimum of a hundred gallons, that’ll fill four hundred and fifty one litre bottles [450 US quart jars] which isn’t even anywhere near a full load for Christine’s canner. Maybe we should put the word out to see if there’s any more kidney around or owt else as we could use up. Whatever meat is used it’s all got to be canned for ninety minutes if we’re using one litre bottles. Maybe Christine has something that could go to make up the load. Dried beans or peas of some kind would be an idea. They take ninety minutes when done in litres too and if bottled are pre cooked, so they are far more convenient to use than when dried. If we cooked up the mix, spices and all in one of her huge pans and dipped it out with her long handled, spouted lading cans(42) to pour into the jars it wouldn’t take us long to have it all ready for bottling. A dozen or more of us could make a day of it. It’s something to do and there’s not much fun to be had in this weather and it will stop some of our teenage lasses complaining they’re bored. You up for that, Zuhr? When we’ve done you can take what ever you want to make a meat and kidney pie. If you’ve never done that before one of us will go to your spot for some gossip and help out.”
“What are lights and bife?”
“Lights are lungs, Lass. A critical ingredient in a good haggis, and haggis doesn’t come any better than Vincent’s gran’s gran’s mum’s receipt. You enjoyed it before when it was on for supper and it’s on again the night. Bife is what the kids called bison beef, they kind of squeezed the two words together. It’s a fair bit leaner than beast beef, which is from cattle, so a different name is appropriate. It soon caught on, so even Vincent uses the term now.”
“I’d really enjoy a day out cooking with some company. I’m not desperate to empty my freezer because there was so little in it that when the children came round to fill it with sheep I took all my food out and they put it back on the top for me when they’d finished. If any one needs some space in theirs bring some meat round to my house and put it in my freezer. It’s a huge one that Ken said he bought not long before I met him. I asked him why he bought such a big one and he said―”
Aggie interrupted saying, “Because the price was right!”
“How did you know?”
“Murray bought them, over two hundred of them all the same size. The company went bankrupt, so he got them gey cheap. He just bought the lot and worried about what to do with them when Harry and his mates delivered them. All the ones that none wanted at the time are on the second floor of the Bobbin Mill next to the dentists’ full of sheep. I live near you, Lass, so when I’ve seen my Frank home safe I’ll pop round to your spot to confirm it is kidney and set the ball rolling. I’ll have to do that first because he’ll be obliterated as usual. He just doesn’t seem to able to tek his drink the way he used to, but does he drink any less? Does he heck as like!”
“What if it’s not kidney?”
“You’d recognise heart right?” Zuhr nodded. “So it’s not heart which means all else it could be would be liver and if it is we’ll just make liver and meat pie. It’ll work, don’t fret. I’ll put the word about that we’re looking to bottle a full canner load of meat and kidney pie filling and meat and liver pie filling, and we’ll have all the ingredients we need and all the help we need too by this time tomorrow. Women will go through their freezers looking for owt they can tek out. Now after all that mental exercise reckoning numbers, Veronica is sure to need another glass of punch, so just to be friendly I’ll keep her company. It’s nowhere near late enough yet for me to start on the mothers’ ruin, that’s gin, Lass. A queue of giggling women formed and Aggie did stalwart service with the punch ladle till they all sat down to find something else to talk about.
Ada asked, “It’s well past the usual pig killing time of year, but we had a barrow as was a third again the size of all the others. It had reached as big as it was going to get gey quickly and was bullying the others off the feed. If we’d let it carry on none of them would have grown any, so we sent it off to Vincent. Has anyone had any of the Furness pig products from Vincent yet? And if so what did you reckon to it?”
Aggie replied, “The Cumberland sausage was excellent, but that Furness sausage was far too fatty for my taste, Ada, but my Frank can’t have enough of it. And the breakfast lads, the shepherds and the wallers, reckon the sausages and the fatty bacon have been kissed by angels. I had to ration ’em to two rashers of fatty bacon apiece or I’d not have had enough to go round. They grumbled about not having three rashers, but a third rasher of Sam Shaw’s Gloucester Old Spot cut twice as thick as usual calmed ’em down. I had a few too many sausage for three apiece, but I cooked the lot and dished out three and a third each. The bread I fried in the fat that had rendered out just evaporated, so I kept frying bread till there was no more fat to fry it in. Vincent minced more than the usual amount of a carcass for sausage and added some fatty pieces from other breeds too to help it go round. You’ll never have a problem selling your pigs, Lass. General opinion among the men who do hard graft is how in hell’s name was the breed ever allowed to die out into extinction when they provided just the right breakfast for a working man to last through till bait(43) time. And it’s all thanks to you. What gave you the idea in the first place?
“After Percy my old man died I couldn’t cope wi’ wearing weeds(44) and folk expecting me to follow him in short order. I needed something to do and I was reading a book about pigs. I knew where there were some cross bred pigs that were said to have a lot of Cumberland in the bloodline, so I started from there. It surely taxed my brain enough to prevent me going downbank. It’s true I did all the initial breeding work and paid for all the DNA testing, but without Grant’s lads I’d have had to give up due to lack of money, lack of help and lack of energy as I got older. Too, that was when the winter started to bite and my feed bill was going through the roof. Grant and Jym’s youngsters had Auld Alan finance me because they wanted to breed Cumberlands, and trust me those three lads may only be bits of kids still at primary school, [less than 11] but they’ve got more than enough energy to see that all as needs done gets done. Then I met Hugo, and I ended up as Mrs Hugo Peabody and I came to Bearthwaite with what were then my nineteen not quite Cumberland pigs. Beebell bought my farm off me complete with all except my personal stuff and the pigs. They have some young couples running it now as a dairy farm with Guernseys and English Longhorns. I’m using the income off the money to make sure my pigs are a success. The capital is invested with Beebell. Vincent and I had issues calling the fatty sausage Cumberland sausage, not for legal reasons, but for identity and honesty reasons. However, since I’d recreated them away in Furness and the purists insisted nowt can come back from extinction I decided to call them Furness pigs, though a lot of folk are calling ’em Peabody pigs now. So the fatty sausage became Furness sausage.”
“Will someone please explain in more detail? The Cumberland pigs were extinct. Then they were not and then they became a different pig. How is all that possible?”
“It’s not that complicated, Daphne. The Cumberland was a pig that was gey common hereabouts at one time. This neck of the woods(45) was a part of where they’d originated. Bearthwaite was in Cumberland before nineteen seventy-four, it had been for centuries untold. Hugo’s granddad telt me he remembered his dad keeping them and the Peabodys have been farming in the Bearthwaite valley since forever. He remembered eating them too. The Cumberland was in the local parlance a girt big bugger and it had a lot of fat on the carcass. In the days when agricultural labourers worked every hour their masters telt ’em to for next to no pay and rations were even thinner than the pay, fatty bacon was a necessary fuel source to keep body and soul together. Fatty bacon was the term used for a slice of fat that had little or more often no lean in it at all. It was fried just like any other rasher of bacon, but it was high in the calories that a farm labourer required to last a day out. After the second world war [1939–1945] Cumberlands fell out of favour and labour laws came in to offer at least a tiny amount of protection to farm labourers, but farming had changed, the horses had disappeared and tractors had taken their place, there was no longer employment for vast numbers of farm labourers any more. A farm that had once employed two or three dozen men and three teams of horses now employed three men and a tractor. The second world war finished the changes that had been done to rural employment and farming practices that the first world war [1914–1918] had ushered in. Tastes changed too, the market demanded smaller leaner pigs and the Cumberland went extinct in nineteen sixty. The last one died at Bothel which has got to be less than forty miles from here.
“I read up on everything I could find about the Cumberland and managed to obtain a samples of Cumberland DNA from museum specimens. I bought up all the pigs I could find that supposedly had Cumberland in their bloodline. I had them all DNA tested and selt off all the ones that were said to be Cumberland derived but the tests proved weren’t to a local butcher. I talked to DNA experts and pig experts too and started breeding. Every piglet farrowed(46) I had DNA tested and I started getting closer to the museum Cumberland DNA. I’d got to a ninety-nine point nine six percent match which sounds good, but it’s actually miles away. Humans, bonobos(47) and chimpanzees share ninety-eight point seven percent of their DNA and they are completely different. I was trying to recreate a breed of pig which would probably share near enough a hundred percent of its DNA with some members of every breed of pig on the planet. Certainly zero point zero four percent was a huge gap. Then I and the pigs came here. Now we are so close to the museum samples of Cumberland DNA that the DNA lab can’t hardly tell the difference. After various legal problems which caused us marketing issues I changed the name to the Furness pig as I said. The Furness pig isn’t yet an accepted breed, so we can call ’em what we like. It’s still considered to be just a mongrel, but that will change with time, probably in about twenty years or so, but the fact is from a genetics point of view the Cumberland pig is back. It’s been done by close inbreeding, which works because you can always eat your mistakes, after all they’re just a few more cross bred, mongrel pieces of pork. Some folk call ’em the Peabody pig which Auld Alan says is the Peabody legacy, but the rest of the family are happy to settle for calling ’em the Furness Pig.”
As Aggie sat down she said, “You’re looking tired, Veronica. I don’t believe that bit of reckoning took that much out of you. Not anticipating a surprise present in a few months are you?”
“Give over, Aggie. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I’m not expecting. I’ve just not been getting enough sleep due to one of the peacocks. Noisy bugger can’t tell the time and just to mek sure he doesn’t make any mistakes he starts up long before I’ve had my sleep out. Every damned morning, well middle of the night really, without fail. Never misses. Bloody thing ’ll have to go.”
“I’m sorry, Veronica. I was warned, but I hadn’t realised how bad they could be.”
“Not your fault, Annalísa. It wasn’t one that you bought in for the kids. The Peabodys have kept peafowl since the early eighteen hundreds according to Auld Alan. This one is one of our raising, but I have a solution.”
“What’s that?” asked Daphne.
“I had a word with Alex, my eldest. He’s an obliging son and will do what is necessary. I did think of fencing off the yard and the area near the house and having their wing feathers clipped to prevent them flying over the fence, but that would prevent them roosting on the house roof when the weather improves a bit. At the moment they roost in one of the barns where they are safe from owt as fancies a taste of peafowl like a hungry fox. That’s why they usually roost on the roof. I’ll sort it all out tomorrow and the family are looking forward to Sunday dinner with yon screeching bugger as the guest of honour.”
“What you’ll eat a peacock‽”
“Aye. It’s what we keep them for, though I’ve often wondered if they’re worth the trouble with the racket they make. Well I do till I taste the next one. Absolutely delicious, and they’re an awful lot quieter on your plate than they are on the yard.” Veronica chuckled and added, “I reckon it’s the gravy as does it.”
“I’ve only ever seen pictures of them. Are their tails as fantastic in real life as in photos?”
“Definitely. Their tails are properly speaking called their trains, and unless they don’t know you’re there that’s all you’ll ever see of them and always from behind. Peacocks live for display and if any one or a peahen is about to look at them their trains are up as they strut about. Strutting is the only word for it. Their display is best seen from behind and if you try to go around them to see from the front they keep turning so you can only see their full glory from behind. Vanity isn’t in it, it’s instinctive. Like I said peacocks live for display. The hens are much more restrained and a soft brown colour with white under feathers. They have metallic green feathers on their necks and a crest too. Ours are very protective mums like they are in the wild, though I’ve heard some that are kept in captivity can be really poor mums. The old man reckons it’s because they don’t have enough room to be peahens in so their natural behaviour suffers. Come round some time, Daphne. See for yourself. Bring Stephen. He can dress any way he likes anywhere round here. Some of the kids may ask why, kids are like that, but he’ll get no abuse or grief.
“How is Alyssia now the court case is all over, Perry?”
“It’s difficult to say, Elle. I know that in her mind I am Mum, the only mum she has ever had. I know nothing will ever change that. In Gordon’s mind none else other than Alicia and I are ever going to be Granny. She always wondered about her history, and even if as Jimmy warned her may prove to be the case if she followed the matter up her mother turned out to be a drug addicted prostitute who likely died homeless on the streets she just wanted to know. She accepted that like as not even her mother didn’t know who her father was. My Harvey is the only dad she has ever known and she was always happy about that. She went through a long phase of being a proper Daddy’s lass. It’s not as obvious these days, but even I know it’s still the truth. Even at the wrong end of the month she always would do for Harvey without complaint what I’d get a load of grief and a week’s worth of sulks for if I asked her to do it for me. That was hard for a while, but I reckon I grew up too when it was pointed out to me that I’d been no different once. So I accepted some lasses are like that and used my head. If I wanted her to do something for me that like as not she wouldn’t want to do I did what my mum did. I had Harvey ask her to do it. If this little lass of hers she’s carrying turns out the same doubtless she’ll eventually work out the solution too.” There was a lot of laughter in the bestside at Peregrine’s words because at least half of Bearthwaite’s daughters were daddy’s girls. It was known that some of Auld Alan Peabody’s daughters, now in their seventies, still were, especially seventy six year old Garette, Alan’s eldest child, who despite having three children to unknown fathers had never married. If she’d ever telt any who her children’s fathers were it was said it would only have been her dad.
“Once that magistrate who’d had the file sealed refused her access when she was eighteen, all he’d done was ensure her determination to find out where she’d come from, because she reasoned that there must be something worth finding out about if folk with power and authority were so determined to prevent her from finding it. After that she was teken up with courting, then the wedding and Gordon’s arrival. She was expecting again when she got into a completely fluke conversation with Hayley, Jimmy’s missus. Hayley said that her history was family court stuff and Jimmy was an expert on it because he’d specialised in family court matters for decades and he didn’t just do divorces despite that being what he was mostly known for. She suggested that Alyssia had a word with Jimmy. Jimmy went to war for her and won her the right to see the file. Jimmy has her copy of it all on his computer. Alyssia didn’t want it on hers because she isn’t too mindful of security. I’ve no idea what she found out and she’s said one day she’ll tell me. Probably in a few months she said because by them the world will know. I don’t know what that means, but I suspect it means a major media interest. I suggest nobody asks her about it because if you do you’ll get a reaction you’ve never seen from her. The last person who pressed for details she ended up telling ’em to eff off, and she didn’t tell me who that was. That was a surprise to me because she’s always so pleasant to everyone, even folks who don’t deserve it.
“She said that Jimmy had telt her to sit on matters for a twelvemonth till she was sure how she felt and that way she wouldn’t do owt she’d later regret. That seemed sensible to me because I don’t think she’s worked out how she feels about things. Garson isn’t saying whether he knows about it or not, and he gets much nastier about it when he’s pressed than Alyssia does. I approve of that because it means he’s being a proper man and looking after my little lass. It’s obvious that she’s a lot happier for knowing whatever she does know and that the mysterious big black hole that was her past has now gone. She always was a happy lass right from the day she walked into our house and into our lives, but looking back I can now see that she was never a contented lass. She hid it well, but her contentment now shews that it was missing from her life before. I’ve no idea where this is going to take us, but I don’t have any worries about our future as a family. I believe the biggest problem in her life at the moment is the arguments she’s having with Garson over the little lass’ name. They both want a Viking name and despite poring over Noëlle and Jacqueline’s list(48) from the library they haven’t found owt they can agree on yet. I reckon that if that’s the biggest problem in anyone’s life they’re doing all right.” At that there were murmurs of agreement from all round the room. The local women had just been telt whatever they were entitled to know and anything else was clearly a private matter for the while. All was as it should be. If Peregrine, usually known as Perry, was happy with matters that was all that mattered.
Harriet announced, “Haggis with bashed tatties and neeps, Ladies, with a drop of gravy if you like. Not in keeping with tradition over the border, but most of the men insist on gravy, so it’s available. The haggis are made by Rosie’s staff in the back of Vincent’s butcher’s shop. The potatoes are Uncle Alf Winstanley’s variety, Bearthwaite Queen, and the neeps are a commercial variety grown here called Magres. There is some carrot in the neeps because it needed used. The carrot is a heritage variety called Billy. The steamed marmalade suet pudding is made from local marmalade using a variety of citrus fruits from the Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market in London. All dairy products are from the Peabody dairy and all flour is from local grain milled at Auntie Alice’s spot down the way a bit. Unlike the men who insist on gallons of custard with their pudding, which is available if required, I suspect most of us will prefer the barely pourable cream from the Peabody Jersey herd. There is a rather splendid, extremely dry fino sherry to accompany the haggis, or a dram of a whisky of your choice, or indeed owt else we have on the premises. The dessert wine to accompany your pudding is, according to our importer Uncle Adio, Greek, pink and very sweet made using a varietal of muscat grape the name of which I have written down somewhere. It’s powerful, sixteen percent I believe, so be careful because it’s not pop. It goes down extremely well with the choux pastry petit fours to finish with, which will of course require more cream.
“Goodness me, Harriet. Is that what those tablets Sun gave you have done to you in what a week?”
Harriet laughed as she readjusted Þórfríðr to obtain a better latch(49) whilst her sister Solveig didn’t seem happy at the disturbance. “Only six days and a few hours I think, Elle. But I became this size on the third day and I could feel me filling up which was a really strange sensation. The tablets didn’t seem to do anything at all for those first three days then somewhere about four o’clock I suddenly knew they were working, and by ten that evening I looked like this. When I think how long it took me to grow them in the first place it’s actually quite scary. Is my experience normal, Abbey?”
“Pretty much, Harriet. The tablets you were prescribed are fast acting, but only under certain circumstances. You must have had well established and developed breast tissues before taking them because they don’t work well, if at all, on undeveloped breasts. Small breasts yes, even flat chested mature women, but undeveloped breasts no. It’s a matter of the maturity of the breasts which is totally independent of their size. It’s pointless to use them on for example a buxom trans woman who needs to nurse, but who has not been on hormones for long enough to develop mature breast tissues. And that set of circumstances does happen. In such cases there are other tablets that will work, but they can take up to three weeks before they do, because before inducing lactation they have to develop at least some mature breast tissues. Regardless of what tablets are taken, even the cheap relatively ineffective ones prescribed by the NHS, dry nursing speeds the process, and without it for some women the tablets just don’t work at all. It’s not at all clear why that should be, but it is known beyond all doubt to be so.” Seeing some puzzlement Abbey added, “Dry nursing is where the mother allows the baby to suckle even though she has no milk. Eventually when the screams of frustration become more than she can take that’s the time to offer a bottle of formula or better another nursing mum can take over. Which is what we always arrange to happen here.”
When the babies were nodding Harriet took Solveig and a bar towel before putting her over her shoulder gently rubbing and patting her back to wind(50) her so she would have a good sleep. Brigitte took Þórfríðr and a bar cloth in case of any regurgitated milk and winded her too. Seeing the look of Brigitte’s face Aggie laught and said, “Not for a good few years yet, Lass.”
“I wasn’t even thinking about it, Auntie Aggie, but now you mention it I suppose Ron and I could get a few practice runs in some time.”
Amidst the laughter Gladys said, “You walked right on to that one, Aggie. You know she’s as sharp as a tack.”(51)
“You still helping out with pop flavourings, Brigitte?”
“Mmm. Certainly am, though Maya is doing it full time. We can’t wait till the plants really take off in the warm. The smell in those hot houses will be amazing. We’ll be picking elderflowers too from all over the valley for the elderflower champagne, but there’ll be hundreds of us doing that because Uncle Clarence needs loads of flowers for a decent sized batch. He’s got orders for several thousands of bottles and orders are still coming in. The carrier that Aunties Madeleine and Christine and Uncle Vincent use has offered a really good price to deliver cases of six as long as there’re enough of then to make up a full pallet, no matter where each individual case is going. Dad reckons he’s after the entire brewery and distillery business. He runs a decent company and offers Bearthwaite as a whole a really good deal so Dad is just waiting for an opportunity to discuss the matter. At the moment we’re growing carob, sassafras, ginger, turmeric, lemon grass and liquorice root, but we’re still looking for other fragrant and flavourful exotics and semi exotics. The allotmenteers are growing dozens of temperate climate botanicals for us, so we should have a remarkable range of pops. Maya and I are busy trying to think of decent names for the new pops and hundreds probably a thousand children are too, so we should have some good ones in time for the summer visitors. I’m trying to think of one based on war time rationing for the rose hip flavoured pop. We’re having the legality of Beenaberry(52) pop looked into for our blackcurrant pop. When we have some fruit from the carob trees we’re going to try a carob, which tastes like chocolate, blackcurrant pop and call it Carobiner(53) with a mountaineering scene on the label, and Popates of the Carob Bean as been suggested as having a pirates of the Carobbean connection.
“You don’t look very happy, Abbey Lass. Maybe you should prescribe yourself something.”
“I’m fine, Alice, honestly. It’s Arathane I’m bothered about. He spends most of his days and nights too prowling round the streets of towns and cities, some of them far away. It doesn’t matter how many kids he finds and rescues the ones he finds frozen stiff haunt him. I’m worried that one of these days he’ll find one too many and his mind will go. He’s been doing it for twice as long as anyone else and it shews. I know some of his team are already bothered about him and they try to go in first and if it’s bad they won’t let see whatever it was they saw. I won’t let him text me any more because I can’t tell how he is from a text, and when he phones me he sounds hollow, empty, like his soul has been sucked out. I just don’t know what to do. I don’t want to stop him because I know how important he is to those kids out there and to Bearthwaite too. Abigail has said she’ll put some pressure on him to take some time off and go out there in his place. He’s due back on Tuesday and she’s going to tackle him then with Raven and Harwell as back up.” At that Abbey sniffed, blew her nose and wiped her eyes.
Elle asked very gently, “How many has he found who succumbed to the weather?”
“Fourteen and he said the last three didn’t look old enough to go to school. He was at breaking point then. That was this Monday just gone in Bristol. He’s in Reading today.”
“You need Sasha, Dear. Abigail obviously, but Sasha will do more good than Raven and Harwell together. I’ll send him round to talk to you tomorrow, okay? I won’t tell you not to worry because that’s insulting, but have a couple of brandies before you go home to help you sleep.”
“I don’t understand what you talking about, and what is happening?”
Elle looked at Gladys who answered the stranger’s question. “As you probably gathered from her answer that she gave Harriet about nursing, Abbey is one of our GPs.(54) Her husband Arathane is a senior Bearthwaite ranger. He, Raven and Abigail are Harwell the head ranger’s seconds in command. The rangers mostly help the fencers to maintain our perimeter fences and are our security force. Arathane leads a team of highly specialised, capable and resourceful persons who spend a lot of time searching towns and cities looking for homeless children who need taking off the streets and to be given care and a decent life. The police and Social Services are completely aware of what they do, and the NCSG, a major adoption agency, is heavily involved. The team had been doing what they do for a long time before this winter hit us, but the cold is killing some of the children, so Arathane and the others feel under pressure, and every death they come across they take personally and they blame themselves for not being there in time. That of course is not reasonable, but it is understandable. They have brought hundreds of children here to find families, school and the care that they should never have been deprived of elsewhere. They have been out there since before the freeze with only tiny breaks back home and they have done as much as they can. Now it is time for another team to do their work and for them to rest.” The room went silent as folk, both locals and outsiders, absorbed Gladys’ words.
“Bloody excellent that supper, Lads. How much more haggis have we got in storage from those sheep, Vincent?
“I’m not too sure, Frank, because there’s god alone knows how much of what still in freezers all over the village. Several tons I imagine, but we’ll know better when we have enough room at the Bobbin Mill to start storing more meat there. The van lads are shifting a load of all sorts six days a week along with the lamb and the mutton, and the lasses we’ve borrowed the freezer space off will be mighty glad to be able to reach their own stuff without having to ratch through a couple of foot of sheep to get to it. However, you’ve no need to worry about us running out for a year or five. Right from the beginning we said to all the lasses who had their freezers filled with sheep that they could just tek whatever they wanted whenever they wanted it for whoever wanted to use it. They’ve been distributing it round the village and cooking some for some of the old folk too, but, despite Christine’s canning staff and their helpers canning and bottling stuff out of freezers to ease a bit of pressure twelve hours a day six days a week, we haven’t used anywhere near as much as I’d thought we would by now. Mind the venison from the highlands has added to the problem. Three artic box trailers of it there was and that made a hell of a load of haggis too.
“When we did the wholesale sheep slaughter we ran all of the blood off into sixty litre plastic drums for freezing. All the drums were stacked in freezer rooms down at the Bobbin Mill though later they were stacked just outside seeing as it was more than cold enough. Some of the lasses as usually work in the back of my shop have bin working down at the Bobbin Mill mekin it up into black puddings of a few different types. They are near enough done wi’ that now and it’s selling well though there’re tons in storage yet. I keep seeing on the news that in places supermarkets are running out of grub because the roads are so bad they ain’t getting the deliveries, and the price of meat is going up, and that’s helping the van lads out no end to clear whatever they tek out. They never bring owt back. However, we seem to be doing okay here. Ain’t it wonderful to have good neighbours who want to feed you till it comes out of your ears. Shame so many of ’em went pop(55) ain’t it?” The laughter took a while to dissipate, so advantage was taken of the time to collect, wash and refill glasses, pass the chemic round and visit the back.(56)
“Feeling chuffed after tekin on the courts themselves are we, Jimmy?”
“Not really, Dave, but I am feeling chuffed about beating ’em though. The one thing I hate most is where the law has been twisted into serving the ends of some criminal, petty or otherwise. It stinks, and the law literally and deservedly gets a bad name. One of the worst consequences of that is that anyone connected with the law suffers a loss of public trust and the public becomes less likely to be prepared to become involved, or embroiled as they would see it, in matters that need the attention of the law. That ultimately means villains who should be behind bars are free to continue with whatever despicable things they should be stopped from doing. Bringing the law into disrepute is legally what it’s referred to, but in reality it’s just putting the law up for auction and the highest bidder gets what they want. It’s nothing new. It could reasonably be argued, and I do so argue, that the very concept of law itself was actually invented by the wealthy and the powerful purely so they could get all their own way. Think about the history of the law as it was applied to Bearthwaite folk for a moment. When the Gershambes ruled here they owned the spot, and a lot more too, some in the county and a lot of land down country too, and they were the law. They hanged folk and raped lasses of all ages whenever it suited them at one time. I’ve heard some of the older residents here refer to the green as ‘Gallows Green’, not so much now, but the likes of Auld Joey and Auld Alan still do.”
“Aye” mumbled Auld Joey from his usual seat in the corner near the fire in his almost incomprehensible dialect, which some of the locals quietly translated for the outsiders as, “All did yance ower.(57) It’ll not be a two hundred year since a Gershambe last did so here. All for a coney to feed starving kids, though like as not the bastards took a deal of pleasure out o’ doing it, for deservedly they had that reputation, and their womenfolk were worse than the men. Whenever ony on ’em(58) were about in those days a wise man kept his head lowered if he wanted to keep it. There is a tale of so lang since(59) that none knows how lang since it were that a certain Lady Seraphina Gershambe as was a well developed lass wi’ girt big bags and a arse te match(60) when she was nobut(61) fourteen had her men servants drag a young lad of about her age that she fancied a bout of bullin(62) wi’ out of the hovel where he lived. They stripped him and tied him to a tree neked.(63) It was a full moon night and she danced neked in front of him bouncing her bags(64) in his face and handling his tackle(65) when she was nae rubbing hers agin(66) him. When the lad’s tackle rose to the sight she had him teken down and laid face up tied inside the back of a hay wain.(67) She forced herself about the lad and had him repeatedly till he could do nay mere,(68) which the tale says took a while, for lads of that age have a lot of stamina when a lass is involved. She untied the lad and went home with the blood from her maidenhead still on her thighs and accused him of rape. Her brothers found the lad and after wethering(69) him spent the rest of the night torturing him before finally hanging the poor bastard as the sun came up. The tale says she became full of arms and legs(70) as a result of her activities under the moon and she was kept close by her family once she was shewing. Once the bairn was born it was smothered by one of her mother’s ladies in waiting and disposed of. Seemingly Lady Serephina married well not long after. None knows the truth of the tale, but for generations all believed it to be true of the murderous, fornicating bitch.”
“Do you believe it to be true, Joey?” asked Stan.
Joey spat into the fire, finished his glass of chemic and pushed it forward for someone to refill. He didn’t answer the question till he’d half drained his glass when he said, “Summer afore last, a Peabody heifer(71) as was abullin(72) did ower(73) a thousand quids worth o’ damage getting to a bull. There’s only one thing as will quiet a heifer in need of her first bull, and that’s her first bull. Ask Annalísa on it. A saga was said of it at the time. Annalísa knows it and has turned it into English. The poor bastard as the lass’ brothers hanged was named Sven Winstanley. Like as not a relative o’ Alf’s.” It was clear Joey was going to say no more, so the conversation reverted to the previous topic, but the locals all knew if it were a saga originating at the time of the events that meant that the tale as told today was exactly as it had been told at the time. Joey clearly believed it to be the literal truth and doubtless it was.
Sasha changed the subject by asking, “What is Alyssia going to do now she knows who her biological parent’s are, Jimmy?”
“My advice was to do nowt for a twelve month, Sasha. To just think on the matter till she knows her own mind clearly. Alicia, Garson’s mum, agrees and between ’em she and Peregrine, Alyssia’s mum, will give the lass all the support she is going to need. It was a shock to her learning that she wasn’t just a baby dumped into the system by a crack head whore, for that was what she expected and was ready for. However, the right of it is first and foremost she’s a Bearthwaite lass which I reckon to be a better pedigree than owt from anywhere else. You all know there was a government cover up concerning abuse of an infant’s rights when a solicitor was not appointed by the courts to protect her rights because Alyssia has said so. I’m not going to tell you any more than that till it’s all done and dusted.(74) Adalheidis has started negotiations for compensation from the government and the other bastards involved. She has started from a demand of twenty million. I suspect she’ll settle for twelve, may be.
“She’s given them three months before she initiates a paparazzi feeding frenzy for first rights on the scoop which she reckons will net more than the twenty, so she’s not bothered if they settle out of court or no. I suspect she’d rather it were no. As usual she and Annalísa are out for blood on behalf of Alyssia’s kids and future kids. I asked the pair of them why when Alyssia was so comfortably fixed here. Annalísa replied, ‘Because we can, and it’ll put our politicians on the map as folk as can’t be bought which ’ll do them no harm when it comes to election time.’ Adalheidis replied, ‘They have to be taught they can’t get away with this sort of abuse, and especially abusing Bearthwaite folk this way.’ If any of you want to tackle either of the Bearthwaite Solicitatoruses(75) for more information please feel free to do so, and may the best woman win. I suppose Annalísa and Adalheidis are right, but I always feel dirty after dealing with cases of abuse even though I’m always fighting on behalf of the victim or victims.”
“Aye. That I can understand, Lad. Here tek this to wash some of the dirt off with.” At that Alf pushed a glass of some pale amber looking toxin that by repute came from Normandy towards Jimmy amidst a lot of laughter. “And I’m not going anywhere near either of that pair when they’re out for blood because according to Bruce and Matt they’re far worse then than when they’re on a broomstick.” That caused even more hilarity amongst the men, for if Alf had ever been afraid of anything it was being cried at by Ellen when she was being difficult. All the older men were aware of what he’d suffered when Ellen had hit menopause. They were also aware that Alf had said at the time. ‘It’s rightly named, Lads, because it gives men reason to pause to psych themselves up before entering the house after a hard shift just in case there’s an even harder shift awaiting them from her indoors once they step through that front door. Dad telt me in days long gone a man wi’ a lass riding her broomstick would throw his hat in through the door before entering the house. If it was chucked back out he didn’t bother tekin his chance wi’ her indoors and went straight to the pub to get pissed enough to be able to ignore her when he finally did go home.’ That Alf considered Annalísa and Adalheidis to be worse than that gave most of the local men reason to pause to think. They all reached the same conclusion, that it would be wiser and much safer just to wait till their womenfolk said something concerning Alyssia. The outsider men correctly assumed that the Bruce and Matt referred to were Annalísa’s and Adalheidis’ husbands.
Sasha said, “Whatever happens, Jimmy, that was a job well done, so well done, Lad.”
The shouts of “Well done,” went round the taproom for a minute or so as glasses were filled with a variety of dodgy spirituous liquors from just about every corner of the globe, though the liquor from Normandy was proving to be so popular that Peter and a couple of his friends went down into the cellar to retrieve a case apiece before they ran out in the taproom.
“Where are we regards the fuel situation, Bertie?”
“We’re more or less there, Harry. We buy bottled(76) oxygen, acetylene and argon for oxy and electric welding, but we buy no bottled gas now other than those. We do use some bottled fuel gas besides acetylene, but it’s biogas(77) not propane. We use it for gas axing,(78) but we produce the biogas from digested shite and compress it ourselves, and if it’s just for cutting we use compressed air rather than oxy. Compressed air is a hell of a sight cheaper than oxy because we don’t have to buy it in, and it can be used straight from the compressor or from a gas bottle. An air biogas mix is fine for brazing and even welding some lower melting point metals.
“Petrol and diesel we have no need of, for they’re history here, though all our vehicles and a lot of our plant(79) too can run on diesel if required. The few petrol engines we use are running on an alcohol oil mix that we make. The alcohol is produced by brewing sugar beet, that some of our farmers grow, with a very high alcohol concentration tolerant yeast that Græme breeds. All yeasts produce a proportion of methanol and higher alcohols. The higher alcohols and a few other nasties that come over with them are often collectively referred to as fusel oil.(80) Most yeasts don’t produce much methanol or fusel oil and it’s perfectly safe to drink in beers or wines because the concentration of nasties is so low. Distillation with heat gets rid of all the nasties because you collect the methanol off first and then collect into a new receiver flask the bit you want, the ethanol fraction, leaving the fusel oil in the still. Distillation by freezing is decidedly dodgy because it only removes the water when you take out the ice which is pure water, all the nasties left are behind in the ethanol and are concentrated by the process. The super high tolerance yeast produces more of the nasty by products in quite large amounts that you wouldn’t want to drink along with the ethanol not even in beers or wines, but they’re fine in fuel so you can collect everything that comes over into the still receiver. When Græme and Jean-Claude distil the brewed beet mash they mix the distillate with a trace of oil to act as a lubricant and voila petrol substitute. It’s actually a lot more complicated than that, but that’s the outline of where we’re at.
“Diesel has now been replaced completely by rape seed oil and the bio diesel we make from it, again the rape is grown by our farmers. We’ve long since taken a lot of lessons from Swedish and Canadian engineers in how to run on biodiesel and even straight rape seed oil in temperatures like these. It’s easy enough if everything is kept warm, fuel in the tanks, fuel lines and the engine too. They developed ways of doing that decades ago. We started with what they had, but developed all in ways that are more suitable for us here. We can leave a waggon outside in the coldest weather we’ve had and the engine will start with just one turn of the key. Demolition wood, coppiced wood and brash blocks(81) have taken over from coal and other bought in solid fuels which are now history. If need be we can increase the burn temperature by forcing air through the fire. We’ve always produced our own electricity, but these days we rarely use small generators because the hydro and wind power are so convenient and usually available.
“It’s only been during this cold calm weather that we’ve had to rely on other sources, mostly the large generators running on biogas or rape seed oil . So far we’ve only had to use biogas. As for heating we get a lot of that from solar panels that we make ourselves. Even in this weather they’re doing a bit of good in the few hours of daylight when the sky is clear. Basically the issue of fuel is over, it’s virtually all produced here with next to nowt bought in from outside, as I said aside from welding gasses. We’re still improving on insulation to retain heat in buildings, but mostly it’s been sorted for a good while. Regarding supplies to see us through the winter we’ve at least two years’ worth in store. Everyone has enough fuel readily accessible for at least a month, but whenever the weather is fit the hedgers, ditchers and coppicers are delivering more to top house supplies up. That’s so they don’t have to do it in a white out blizzard. We’re still buying lubricant oils like for sump oils but using centrifugal by pass filters keeps the oil super clean and it lasts a hell of a site longer and then it’s still of use in the workshops. The cake that we tek out of the centrifuge bowls gets brock up and added to the brash blocks mix. We’re still working on how we can produce our own lubricant oils. It’s only a mater of time before we succeed.”
Out of nowhere Dave asked, “So answer me this, Lads, why does it take three witches on broomsticks(82) to mek a pot of tea?”
“Go on Dave, I’ll buy it. Why does it take three witches on broomsticks to mek a pot of tea?”
“It just fucking does, right!” As Dave screamed the answer in a falsetto voice the taproom collapsed in laughter. There had been no warning of any kind. He’d just quietly and reasonably asked the initial question. That nothing Dave ever did or said when in tale telling mode was ever reasonable had only occurred to them after his reply.
“Oh Christ! I need a fresh pint and a glass of chemic, and I’m praying that Maybel doesn’t get to hear that I laught at that. Well not for a few days any road. I should be safe by Wednesday.” Without saying a word it was a smiling Sasha who pushed a bottle of Cyanobacta towards Rory.
“I’ll tell you another if you like that’s just as close to home. There was this auld bloke, let’s call him Dave, who was sitting in the taproom of his local, Let’s call it the Green Dragon, which was somewhere in northern England not far from the Scottish border.” As Dave looked around there was a sea of faces already grinning. “Now this Dave was getting on and he said to his mates, ‘You know as I get aulder(83) I’m finding I only need three shops these days. Specsavers,(84) Boots(85) and Greggs,(86) but it’s not all bad because you could say my life is filled with specs and drugs and sausage rolls.’ ”(87)
All in the taproom were shaking their heads and not a few were wiping tears of laughter from their eyes. Many were old enough to understand the reference directly from their memories, but even those who weren’t were familiar with the expression ‘Sex and drugs and rock and roll’.(88)
“Where the hell do you get ’em from, Dave?”
“The fount of all truth, lies, wisdom and bullshit, Alf. The internet where else? The trick is wading through it all to find owt that’s useful.”
“What’s the score with the fish in the beck, John? I heard that it was frozen right down to the beck bed,” asked Vincent.
John replied, “Nearly but not quite. Both the lower and upper reaches of the beck have frozen almost to the bottom. It looks looks like there’re six inches [15cm] of water below the ice, but the fish and other creatures will have survived in that unfrozen water at the bottom. That water will be at about four degrees [39·2℉] because that’s the temperature at which water has its maximum density, so it sinks to the bottom and freezes last. That’s why water freezes from the top down. At four degrees the metabolisms of all aquatic life really slows down and they need far less oxygen than usual, so they can survive at the bottom of frozen bodies of water. As any can see from the village green, the force in the ravine has been a spectacular icicle display since not long after the winter started. The fish and whatever else is in the village pond will have retreated to the centre of the original pond which will be between six and eight feet deep, so they will be fine. Bearthwaite water has three feet [1m] of ice on it in places and at least a foot [30cm] of ice everywhere, but various folk have been keeping tiny areas ice free on all our waters using direct heat and hot water or steam rather than using force on the ice to avoid stunning anything. That avoids toxic methane gas produced by decaying matter on the water bed building up and dissolving in the water. It works remarkably well for some distance away from the holes in the ice because the holes keep the methane and remaining water at atmospheric pressure so the methane comes out of the water as a gas and escapes via the holes.
“If the ice on the top of the water is allowed to form a complete seal the methane pressurises under the ice and that pressure makes it dissolve into what is currently a very small volume of water which produces a concentration sufficient to kill fish and invertebrates too. The hole only has to be small and it only has to be open for a short while for the methane to come out of the water as gas again and escape after which the water at the bottom of the holes can be left to ice over again which it does quite quickly. We fill the holes with loosely packed straw as an insulator to prevent too much of the water at the bottom of the hole freezing. We cover that with a sheet of plywood to add another layer of insulation and to stop any wind blowing the straw away. The sheets are weighted down with rocks to prevent the ply from being blown away. That way it doesn’t take too much heat and effort to melt the ice at the bottom and release methane again. We remelt the ice to release methane every three or four days. Some of my lads and lasses took a small bottle of biogas and an air pump to power a gas torch to melt holes in the ice at the top end of the reservoir last week. Once they melted through, the methane coming off set afire and kept burning for over a quarter hour which saved us considerable biogas.
“Small birds have suffered grievously in this cold. Many have frozen to death whilst perching on branches, but dozens of folk have helped myself and the gamekeepers to provide feed for them. The mill folk roll grain and seeds for us which we mix with high energy, partially rendered fat that Vincent’s staff mek for us, mostly from sheep fat seeing as how much of it we’ve got. We’ve been feeding them in numerous sheltered places and that has saved thousands possibly tens of thousands of them. Even the shy birds are coming to the feeding stations even when there’re folk about. Any we find immobile but still alive we tek ’em down to Hamilton’s spot to recover. Often an hour in the warmth of someone’s coat pocket does the trick, and long before we have the opportunity to drop ’em off with Hamilton’s staff, they have upped and flown off. It’s too early to say how the smaller mammals are faring, but we are hopeful that they’re nested up in dried grass and leaves. We’ve piled up loose bracken and straw from brock up bales in the woodlands where they usually are at this time of the year as additional protection for them. We haven’t seen many dead small mammals or birds on the ground, but that’s to be expected as the carnivores are desperate for food and will be eating all the carrion they come across. We’re feeding the foxes, badgers and other carnivores that are usually active in winter including the raptors, as you can probably guess mostly on sheep.
“We’re all grateful to young Aoibhe Halifax who telt Vincent and his slaughter crew to keep all the entrails and owt he couldn’t use for our feeding stations rather than sending it to the compost pits. She’s only fourteen, but has been helping my lads and the game keepers out since she came here from Ireland. That was a damned smart move on her part because pure meat ain’t good for a lot of carnivores. They get a lot of their vitamins from the stomach contents of the small herbivores and the like that they eat. Vincent had it all packed in drums to go into freezer rooms at the mill. By the time we needed the room for the sheep meat it was cold enough outside to leave the drums in Mother Nature’s great cold room. There’s not much of the entrails left now. Again we’re hopeful that we don’t lose too many of the carnivores to the cold. The ospreys are safe enough down in Africa at this time of year, but if this lasts as long as Auld Alan says is possible they may have a gey short breeding season when they return and they may not manage to raise chicks to the point where they can fly south like their parents next back end. If that happens we’ll just have to do what we can even if it means live trapping and netting them and keeping them in captivity till next year when they can fly south with the others at the back end.
“As all must be aware there has been a total loss of electricity provision from the hydro turbines, because we didn’t wish to drain the reservoir in order to protect the life in the water, but multiple other sources of electricity have been available, notably our windmills up on the tops though they aren’t providing much if owt in the current calm. Folk were advised how to minimise their electricity usage, and rather than say boil an electric kettle quickly to boil a kettle somewhat more slowly on the kitchen stove which since it keeps their houses warm and provides them with hot water too will have been going anyway. Most lasses keep one of the big old fashioned kettles that used to be hung over the fire topped up and at the back of the stove. It doesn’t tek it long to boil if they pull it forward to over the middle. Alf’s lads are flattening the kettle bottoms so they have better contact with the stoves. Some they weld a piece of three eighths inch [10mm] steel plate to the bottom. Any in really bad fettle they cut most of the bottom out and replace it with a piece of the plate welded in. It seems that new kettles of the same type can be bought from somewhere in India for peanuts. They haven’t been made in Europe for going on a century. Murray has ordered a couple of thousand of ’em. The stoves only use wood, brash blocks and the like for fuel which as Bertie just said are in more than plentiful supply.”
All the locals were aware that the real reason for turning the hydroelectric turbines off was because it was far too cold for it to rain and the reservoir water under the ice was being conserved to flood the lonning with should that be necessary as a defence measure. Too some of the water cannon were available already linked up to the connections that would provide liquid water from under the reservoir’s ice cover. The hoses were empty so they couldn’t freeze. They were available in case any should essay invasion across the iced over lonning or even using vehicles that could operate on liquid water in warmer weather. It had already been decided how to empty and dry the hoses after they had been used to ensure they would be ready for use again. Plans were in hand to ensure that in future water on the lonning could not freeze over such that it was safe enough to drive or walk over. Snow mobiles and jet skis would be as easy to deter as speed boats and wheeled vehicles using the water canon.
“Okay, Lads. Settle down. Any else got owt they want to say before we have at it with the dominoes? No? Right. We seen to have an acute shortage of chemic, so if a couple of you will sort that out, and we need folk to collect glasses, wash ’em, refill ’em and collect coin whilst I run around like a dervish wi’ a damp rag. Do dervishes actually that do you think? Run around wi’ damp rags I mean.”
A quarter of an hour later the earlier noise and bustle was gone. You could have heard a pin drop in the taproom as the men concentrated on the serious matter of total annihilation of their opposing pairs. Pete as he normally did offered to partner the newcomer, for he believed it was a part of being a good landlord to ensure that all, even the newcomers, were made welcome and left having had an enjoyable evening. He’d always maintained that it was good economics to ensure that such customers returned, but all knew his real reason was simply because he believed it to be good manners. Pete, to his surprise discovered Stephen was a first rate player, unlike Jordan who freely admitted he always pitied whoever had offered to partner himself as an act of charity. He was becoming a better player under the intense coaching he received, but it was a painfully slow process. Stan asked, “You’re damned good, Stephen. You play often, Lad?”
“Not really, Stan. I enjoy the game, but I don’t know any venues where you can still play. All the old style pubs as were round us once are discos or karaoke spots now selling beer that’s not fit to drink. Usually it’s super chilled. I don’t like my beer warm, but I don’t want to see bloody icebergs in it either.”
There were sounds of agreement going round the room and Max, one of the hedgers and ditchers asked, “So you’ll be back them?”
“If I’m welcome.”
“Don’t talk bollocks, Lad. I’d like to partner you sometime. I might actually win a few games against some of these sharks that way. You telt a decent tale. You can certainly tek your drink and you recognise and appreciate a good pint in a proper pub. Know what would have tipped the balance in your favour if we hadn’t a bin certain?”
“No what?”
“The dogs. They ignored you, just like they ignore us unless they want owt. If a bloke comes in here that’s not right, the dogs won’t settle and they constantly keep an eye half open to see as nowt untoward happens. You ever seen a bloke chesst(89) by three or four dozen dogs of every breed imaginable, mostly sheepdogs, but lurchers bred for chessing(90) conies to tiny yorkies(91) bred for ratting under hen sheds too? No? Well we were laughing a six month later. Oh, it’s twenty-odd years back. It’ll probably be another twenty years before it happens again because this spot doesn’t exactly attract a lot of wrong uns. It was when old Jasper there was but a pup. How old is Jasper now, Joey?”
Stephen couldn’t make out a word of what the ancient shepherd had said, but two double handfuls of fingers and another two fingers gave him the required answer. The sagacious border collie looked as old as the venerable Joey, but even for a long lived breed like the famed sheep dogs twenty-two was a goodly innings, for seventeen or eighteen was more usual, and it was now a long time since his fabled sense of smell had provided the coneys that Joey and his peers had eaten up on the fell tops enabling them to stay up there for months at a time.
As the locals collected coats, hats scarves and gloves and the guest went upstairs to their rooms Brigitte came in and said, “Mum’s gone upstairs to check on the babies, Steven, and Gran says I’ve to tek you to the office. Gran’s teken Daphne with her.”
When Stephen entered the office he saw his wife and Gladys staring at a slowly scrolling screen that displayed a selection of nothing but jewelled brooches that all looked wonderful to him from a distance. In his mind’s eye he could see what they would look like against his tweed jacket lapel. Daphne put her arm through his and said, “Sit you down, Love, so you can see better.” Seeing more detail from closer to the screen he only really liked four of them, but one stood out way above the rest, and so did its price. He was about to try to say he’d leave it thinking he’d be able to raise the money for it within a few months, but Daphne said, “No, Love. We’ll go to Edinburgh next week and see if it looks as good in the flesh as it does on the screen. If it does we’ll have it.”
“We can’t afford to spend twelve thousand pounds on a piece of frippery just because I like it.”
“Not true, you maybe don’t wish to spend twelve thousand pounds on a piece of frippery just because you like it, but I do, and I like it too. If you decided on a piece that you considered to be cheap enough but considered it to be a second rate piece I know as well as you that you’d never wear it, so you wouldn’t buy it in the first place. I think it’s lovely. The tiny rubies look just like heather flowers and those really dark emeralds for the leaves are almost not there. It’s a very discreet piece exactly in keeping with your idea of good taste. I knew you’d like it. I told Gladys that having seen it you’d either work out how to justify paying that much for it to yourself or not choose a piece. So decision made. There’s no room here for your silly pride. Bedtime. I’m tired and I’ve had a lovely evening. It’s years since I ate haggis. I’d forgotten how delicious it is, and I don’t recall any as delicious as what I ate tonight, and it’s the first time I ever met the person who made it. Call it a present to both of us to celebrate finding the Green Dragon. Every time we see it we’ll remember tonight which will be nice for both of us.”
After they’d gone Brigitte said, “They’re a lovely couple aren’t they? Do you think the money really matters so little to Daphne? That was a very Bearthwaite type attitude she had, Gran.”
“I would imagine the money was nothing at all to her, or Stephen either come to that. About an hour ago something nagged my mind, so I looked in the guest register. She’s Daphne McKendrick. She does illustrations of fantasy and science fiction for books and magazines and creates images and models for films to be based around. They refer to folk like her as concept designers and she’s one of the best, if not the best. It’s said that she maintains the fiction that she works in an office in order to protect her privacy. There is very little known about her. I suspect that her fictional life is to protect Stephen rather than herself. Probably in return for the protection that he affords her.”
“Is she famous, Gran? Where does she actually work?”
“She’s incredibly famous in the film business and fabulously wealthy. I don’t know where she actually does her work, but a lot of it is for Holywood film studios. Her name appears in the credits for just about anything made since she was in her late twenties, even in films you would never suspect used special effects. A decade or more ago she gave a very rare interview. She said she’d been married to the same man since she was eighteen and that was all she was prepared to say about him. Just how she manages to stay below the paparazzi radar is not known. I suspect Stephen manages that, and something Pat said as he left about Stephen being able to handle himself(92) right well made me suspect that he is not just her husband, but her bodyguard and in charge of all her security too. As with all guests we shall respect their privacy. What they choose to tell us is one thing. Prying is altogether another. Now back into the bestside to conclude the evening.”
None of the visitors had gone home in the dark. There weren’t many who had braved the roads and those who had had booked rooms, so they could return home in daylight. After closing time when the locals had left for home and the visitors for their rooms the usual eight, who despite their disparate origins all considered themselves to be family, were gathered together in the bestside. Abruptly Peter said, “John and Josey Finkel’s youngest son Ross has been interested in the ring trains since the family moved to Bearthwaite. He’s gey clever and has started asking questions I don’t really want to answer without approval to do so. It’s obvious he’s understood a lot of how it works. I know he’s only ten just short of eleven, but I want to let him in on it because he could help me to develop it. That’s how clever he is. The problem is maintaining discretion. He’s okay because he doesn’t talk much. Lindsay his eldest brother as goes out with Taial says he spends a lot more time thinking than he does talking, and I’m sure he’d reveal nowt to anyone if he promised not to. However, if his mum or dad lean on him to tell them what’s going on it’s not reasonable to expect a lad of his age who is a decent lad to keep secrets from his parents. Any ideas anyone?”
Sasha replied, “If I explain to John an outline of the situation I’m confident he will be fine with that, even if Ross said that he didn’t wish to tell his dad the answer to a question because he’d promised to keep his mouth shut. John is naturally discreet. It goes with the job of conservation officer, he has to keep secrets regarding rare and endangered species of which we’ve got more than our share here, and he’s always said their best protection is for outsiders not to be aware of their existence. I don’t know Josey other than to say good morning to. Elle, Gladys, Harriet, Brigitte any of you owt to say about Josey?”
The women looked at each other and indicated Harriet was to speak. “Josey works as Grayson Smith’s assistant. He is not just our educational psychologist he functions as a psychologist for all the kids we take in and he’s very good at it. Some of them are in need of serious support and help because of what they’ve been through. Josey is aware of everything that he is and is appropriately discreet. She also provides a lot of that support and help to a lot of children who have a need to have their extreme vulnerability kept secret from all, especially their peers. I know it’s different when we’re talking about a woman’s own kids as opposed to some one else’s, but I’d say if she understood why she had to refrain from pressing Ross further when he said he wasn’t supposed to tell her whatever it was she’d asked about she’d be fine with that. Mum? Gran? You anything to add?”
That Harriet had referred to Elle as Gran had made all there smile. Gladys asked, “So who explains to Josey? It has to be one of us or we have to involve someone else which is neither wise nor something we wish to do. I suggest, Elle.”
Elle shook her head and said, “I think not. I believe Harriet would be best, because she would be seen by Josey to be a mum protecting her son Peter which Josey as Ross’ mum would be able to relate to if he were to be involved. I don’t mind having a chat about how to approach the matter, Harriet, but I do believe you should be the one to raise the issue with Josey.”
Brigitte said, “Ross needs a girl friend too. That way he’d spend more time with her than any else and most girls aren’t interested in stuff like like that. Even Violet, despite going out with Peter and being well into the Model Railway Society, isn’t interested in what makes the models work. She enjoys watching them operate, but doesn’t care about the technical stuff. The moment someone starts talking about anything more technical than a switch turning the streets lights on she starts falling asleep. I’ll find someone. Saoirse(93) would be good. She’s pretty and she’s clever but not interested in science stuff. She likes animals, but I think a lot of that is because she’s lonely some times because she thinks in Irish not in English. If Ross did go out with her he’d start learning Irish because he’s like that, and he’s clever enough to learn it in next to no time. It’s a perfect solution. I’ll deal with it.”
Sasha asked, “You okay about that, Peter?”
Peter nodded and replied, “I didn’t wish to do owt till all of you were okay about it. So, yeah, that’s cool, and I think Brigitte’s idea is a good one too because I can hardly ask him to go anywhere with Violet and me, but asking him and Saoirse to go would be okay.”
28531 words including footnotes.
1 Quasimodo is a fictional character and the titular character of the novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) by Victor Hugo.
2 A reference to chocolate being believed to ameliorate the effects of PMS on women at the difficult part of their menstrual cycle.
3 An expression used by Bearthwaite men when women are being difficult due to the menstrual cycles. Taking in a tour of the neighbourhood implies being difficult with everyone.
4 The term subpoena is from the Middle English suppena and the Latin phrase sub poena meaning “under penalty”. The subpoena has its source in English common law and it is now used almost with universal application throughout the English common law world. However, for civil proceedings in England and Wales, it is now described as a witness summons, as part of reforms to replace Latin terms with Plain English understandable to the general public.
5 To keep one’s peace, to stay quiet despite wanting to say something.
6 The Home Office, is often known as the ministry of the interior in other nations. See Home Secretary below.
7 Home Secretary. The Secretary of State for the Home Department, more commonly known as the Home Secretary, is a senior minister of the Crown in the Government of the UK and the head of the Home Office. The position is a Great Office of State, making the home secretary one of the most senior and influential ministers in the government. The incumbent is a statutory member of the British Cabinet and the National Security Council. The position is known as the interior minister in many other nations.
8 Let the chips fall where they may, to allow events to happen without trying to change them usually used to suggest that one is willing to accept a result, whatever it may be.
9 Crude and profane remarks connecting brass monkeys and the cold are commonplace and widely understood amongst UK men.
10 Supping, dialectal drinking.
11 Chemic, strong liquor.
12 Scandiaca and Scandiacus pertain to Bubo scandiaca also known as the polar owl, the white owl and the Arctic owl, possibly known to most as Hedwig Harry Potter’s owl in the Hogwarts tales by J. K. Rowling.
13 See GOM 54.
14 Saining is a Scottish word once widely used in northern England too for blessing, protecting, or consecrating.
15 To get their skates on, to hurry.
16 In the family way, pregnant.
17 The herd, in this context a pejorative reference to the general public.
18 HMP Holloway, His Majesty’s Prison Holloway is a women’s prison.
19 NHS, National Health Service.
20 To the nines is an idiom meaning to perfection or to the highest degree. In modern English usage, the phrase most commonly appears as dressed to the nines or dressed up to the nines.
21 Pint pot, a twenty fluid ounce beer glass.
22 HMCE, His Majesty’s Customs and Excise, the tax man.
23 Degging can, a watering can. Degging is watering usually plants. A word more commonly associated with Lancashire rather than Cumbria, but the word is used in Cumbria.
24 Hole in the wall machine. ATM.
25 PIN, Personal Identification Number.
26 ATM, An Automated Teller Machine is an electronic banking outlet that allows customers to complete basic transactions without the aid of a branch representative or teller. Anyone with a credit card or debit card can access cash at most ATMs just about anywhere in the world.
27 Taking the piss out of, making fun of.
28 Her indoors, a reference to a man’s wife.
29 Permafrost or permafrost zone, the region of the ground that is too deep down to thaw even at the warmest time of the year.
39 Frost heave, frost heaving, is an upwards swelling of soil during freezing conditions caused by an increasing presence of ice as it grows towards the surface, usually from the permanently frozen soil beneath it known as the permafrost zone.
31 Hazmat, general term derived from hazardous materials, which could be dangerous viruses as here, asbestos or anything else too.
32 The Svalbard Global Seed Vault (Norwegian: Svalbard globale frøhvelv) is a secure backup facility for the world’s crop diversity on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago. The Seed Vault provides long term storage of duplicates of seeds conserved in gene banks around the world. This provides security of the world’s food supply against the loss of seeds in gene banks due to mismanagement, accident, equipment failures, funding cuts, war, sabotage, disease and natural disasters. The only two withdrawals to date have been due to the war in Syria in 2015 and 2017.
33 The best word to use from a Norwegian’s point of view is Svalbard, which has Nordic roots and is the official name. The word Spitsbergen is fine, but it is worth being aware that it is a name that the Russian government is trying to make popular for political reasons. The archipelago has traditionally been known as Spitsbergen, and the main island as West Spitsbergen. During the 1920s, Norway renamed the archipelago Svalbard, and the main island became Spitsbergen. Nine main islands make up Svalbard. They are Spitsbergen (the largest), North East Land, Edge Island, Barents Island, Prins Karls Foreland, Kvit Island (Gilles Land), Kong Karls Land (Wiche Islands), Bjørn (Bear) Island, and Hopen.
34 ONS, the Office for National Statistics is the executive office of the UK Statistics Authority, a non-ministerial department which reports directly to the UK Parliament.
35 Yows, dialectal ewes.
36 Wether, a castrated ram. Most male sheep are wethered at a few days old if not at birth. Wethers are easier to handle and gain weight faster than rams.
37 See GOM 49.
38 Bashed neeps and taties, mashed swede [rutabaga] and potatoes.
39 I’ll be back is a catchphrase associated with Arnold [Arnie] Schwarzenegger. It was made famous in the 1984 science fiction film The Terminator. Schwarzenegger uses the same line, or some variant of it, in many of his later films.
40 Mutton, adult sheep meat.
41 Bife, kind of a portmanteau word coined by Bearthwaite children derived from bison beef. Pronounced b + eye +f. IPA baif or bᴧif.
42 Lading can, a tin can, usually containing two or three quarts, [2or 3 litres, 2½ or 3¾ US quarts] used for taking hot water out of a boiler. Also, a smaller vessel, often graduated for volume, used by traditional grocers for measuring goods such as sugar or rice from bulk to retailable quantities, also known as a piggin which more often referred to boat bailing container with a handle.
43 Bait, middle of a shift meal.
44 The term widow’s weeds refers to the black clothing worn by widows during the Victorian era, which dictated a strict etiquette of mourning that governed both their behaviour and their appearance following the deaths of their husbands. The word weeds derives from the Old English word for robe, dress, apparel, garment or clothing.
45 This neck of the woods, this locality.
46 Farrowed, born. Cows calve, ewes lamb, and sows farrow. Farrow has roots pre 900 relating to a piglet or a litter of piglets.
47 Bonobo, a species of great ape found south of the Congo river. Chimpanzees are found north of the river. They are two similar looking apes only recognised as different species in 1929. Perhaps their most obvious differences are behavioural. Bonobos tend to be more peaceable and their troops are led by females.
48 See GOM 55.
49 A nursing baby is said to latch onto the breast. A good latch is where the nipple is in an appropriate position in the baby’s mouth to enable effective nursing. It usually involves a substantial portion of the areola and even the breast being in the baby’s mouth. Suckling on the nipple is not a good latch and will lead to a frustrated, hungry baby and a sore mother.
50 Winding a baby is the process that allows the air that has been taken in with the milk to be burped up which enables the baby to have relief from any discomfort and so sleep.
51 As sharp as a whip, intelligent, but especially quick witted as here.
52 Due to the possible legal implications with the owners of the Ribena® branded blackcurrant drinks.
53 Carobiner, a blend of carob and Ribena®, a play on the word carabiner. A carabiner is a coupling link with a safety closure, used by rock climbers.
54 GP, General Practitioner, a family doctor.
55 Went pop, went bankrupt.
56 The back, colloquial term for the gents’ lavatory. Only used by men.
57 Yance ower, dialectal once over, often associated with children’s bed time stories as once upon a time.
58 Ony on ’em, dialectal any of them.
59 So lang since, so long ago.
60 Girt big bags and a arse te match, dialectal great big breasts and a arse [US ass] to match.
61 Nobut, literally nothing but.
62 She fancied a bout of bullin wi’, she fancied having sex with.
63 Necked, naked.
64 Bags, a reference to a cow’s bag or udder. She was bouncing her breasts in his face.
65 Tackle, genitalia, usually male, rarely female too as here.
66 Agin, against.
67 Wain, a waggon or cart.
68 Nay mere, no more.
69 Wethering, castrating. A wether is a castrated ram. Joey is a retired shepherd.
70 Full of arms and legs, pregnant. An expression only used by men.
71 Heifer, an unmated cow that has never been put to a bull and has hence never had a calf. In some parts the term is also used for a cow pregnant with her first calf.
72 Abullin, a female bovine bulling. A cow is said to be bulling when at the appropriate part of its oestrus cycle to become in calf. Cows at that time make characteristic, and very loud, mooing noises in order to attract a bull.
73 Ower, over.
74 It’s all done and dusted, it’s all over.
75 Solicitatoruses, a portmanteau word coined to imply a combination of solicitors and large carnivorous dinosaurs as in tyrannosauruses. Jimmy is referring to Adalheidis and Anneliese.
76 Bottled gas, is gas in cylinders. The cylinders are often referred to as bottles.
77 Biogas produced by anaerobic digestion of sewage and or vegetable matter is approximately 60% methane and 40% carbon dioxide. Natural gas, is about 97% methane. Methane is the chemical name for the hydrocarbon CH4.
78 Gas axing, metal cutting using oxygen and a fuel gas like acetylene or propane, or as referred to here methane.
79 Plant refers to engined machinery for example as used in the construction and road making businesses. Static plant refers to machinery where the engine purely powers the machine and the machine can not move under it’s own power, though it may be mounted on wheels for towing.
80 Fusel oil, a mostly European term, also called fusel alcohols or fuselol, are mixtures of several higher alcohols. Higher alcohols are those with more than two carbon atoms in the molecule. Fusel oil is mostly pentan-1-ol which has five carbon atoms arranged in a straight chain with the alcohol (OH)group on an end carbon atom. There are eight pentanols, isomers, which all have different carbon atom arrangements. Pentanol is also known as amyl alcohol and is produced as a by product of alcoholic fermentation. The word Fusel is German for bad liquor.
81 See GOM 46.
82 A witch on a broomstick is a Bearthwaite expression used by men to indicate a woman exhibiting pre menstrual behaviour.
83 Aulder, older.
84 Specsavers are a national chain of prescribing opticians.
85 Boots are a national chain of prescribing pharmacists.
86 Greggs are a national chain of bakers noted for their sales of pies, pasties, sausage rolls and other take away to eat on the move products.
87 A sausage roll is a savoury dish, popular in current and former Commonwealth nations, consisting of sausage meat wrapped in puff pastry. Although variations are known throughout Europe and in other regions, the sausage roll is most closely associated with British cuisine.
88 Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll is a song and single by Ian Dury. It was originally released as a Stiff Records single, with Razzle in My Pocket as the B-side, on 26 August 1977.
89 Chesst, dialectal chased. See the game of chess in GOM 24.
90 Chessing, dialectal chasing. In this case coursing rabbits and hares.
91 Yorkies, Yorkshire terriers, tiny dogs that have been bred for ratting for centuries.
92 Able to handle himself, able to fight well.
93 Saoirse, pronounced seer sha, IPA siːrʃa: or siːrʃa.
