Denis got everyone's attention by banging an empty pint pot on the bar, which Gladys promptly took off him to refill. “All right, Lads, listen up. After twisting his arm for no more than a twelve month, Sasha’s finally got Geoff to agree he’s been holding out on us. We’ve all heard bits about where he lived before, but tonight he’s the main course, and is giving us the whole tale. He’s naturally nervous never having had to lie, sorry, Sasha, create the new truth for so long before. Just make sure he doesn't runs out of ale and run dry and he’ll be fine. Geoff, our attention is all yours.”

Geoff looked like a coney caught in the headlights, but nearly draining his pint in one he pulled him self together and began. “Before I lived up here I lived down in Folkestone which was a bit of a culture shock for a laddie from Ullapool. Karen’s near to three years older than me, and we’d been living together for maybe six years. I was a trashed divorcee when I met Karen, got nothing because the courts had cleaned me out. No job, no money, just an education I couldn’t use because my head was in bits. I was living rough when Karen took me in, she does that with waifs and strays.

She lived in a rented council house. A single mother just shy of thirty she was when I moved in. She was a good Catholic girl who believed you couldn’t get pregnant the first time. Well you can, and it cost her her job as a student nurse, and when I met her she was living with a seven year old and on the rock and roll. That’s the dole, benefits, Alf. Not an over auspicious start. But it got better, I went back to university for more education, and she restarted qualifying for her nurse training.”

“How come she had to do that, Geoff? Why couldn’t she pick it up where she left off?”

“The entry qualifications had gone up, Eric, so they wouldn’t let her. She had to go to night school to get two more GCSEs before she could start. She took three to play safe and got three Bs. She’d already passed English language, English literature and French, and needed five, so she figured maths would be handy because it’s a basic qualification, human biology would be easy for her because she knew the stuff, so it would be like a refresher, and a mate of hers who’d done sociology the year before had told her any adult who’d read a paper once a week would find it a breeze. I bottled out on teaching her maths, cos we might as well have broken up then and there.” Geoff was looking more relaxed as his memory cast back in time.

“I made Karen go for her driving licence, again I refused to teach her for the same reasons I refused to teach her maths. I got her lessons with the local British School of Motoring and she passed second time around. She started her nurse training at Canterbury which was maybe fifteen miles away. I had to take her to work and pick her up to start with, but I found her a car and things became a lot easier for both of us. We were doing ok, had a bit of spare money and were thinking in terms of buying a house. Karen found it, a repossessed property a few miles away. It needed a bit doing to it, but I’m handy with tools, so it was just a question of finding the money. Now don’t laught, but it had been empty for over three years and the asking price was twenty four thousand.

“I offered twenty and we settled on twenty-one and a half. Scottish Amicable building society were prepared to lend us twenty thousand over twenty-five years, so all we had to do was find the fifteen hundred pound deposit. Karen and I reckoned we’d got just under three hundred. I filled the mortgage application forms in first and where it said ‘Value of any other debts’ I put nil. Then I took out a bank loan for the full fifteen hundred. I reckoned if I were going to go to jail for fraud I might as well go for fifteen hundred as twelve. I told Karen it was legal because I’d filled the mortgage application in before applying for the bank loan. You never know I might even have been right. I should have asked to borrow at least twice that.

“The mortgage went through, we got the house, and moved in. The idea of that much debt terrified both of us. I qualified and got an interview at Dungeness B. They’d asked me about my feelings concerning radioactivity, said of course it was higher there than elsewhere, but within safety limits and the job I was applying for meant if I got it I’d be wearing a badge at all times to monitor what I was exposed to. Christ, tell you lads, we’d been living off Karen’s wages, and everyone knows how highly student nurses are paid. We’d decided no more kids ages before, and I’d have worked in the bloody core for the money the job paid. I got the job and inflation went through the roof over the next couple of years. Karen qualified and got a job as a staff nurse where she’d trained in Canterbury, and as our salaries went up in line with inflation twenty grand soon became very small beer.”

Geoff took a pull on his now refilled glass and continued, “The whole business of that bloody house was weird from start to finish. The central heating system had been drained and wouldn’t fill. I determined where the blockage was and set out to replace the blocked pipework. I could see three twenty-two mil pipes side by side under the floor at the top of the stairs and needed to break into the cold water pipe. There was a cold, a hot and a gas feed to the boiler. I could see the three pipes side by side under the floor in the bathroom near the hot water cylinder, the cold water tank and the header tank for the central heating. Unfortunately the joints were soldered not compression fittings so the blow lamp came out.

“Cutting a long story short I set the glass resin bath on fire by breaking a joint open on the gas pipe. The gas pipe had been completely twisted around the other two. They were properly aligned when I finished the job before the new bath went in. Every damned job I ever did in that house was similar, undoing the work of some complete idiot.

“And the place was spooky too. Karen swears somebody stroked her backside when she was just about to get in the bath. Thinking it were me she told me to stop messing about, but there was nobody there. I was in the garage which I’d set up as a workshop. She said she never felt frightened, but never said whether she enjoyed the phantom feeler or not.” The laughter took a while to die down. Karen was a pretty forthright lady and even Gladys was trying to work out how Karen would have regarded the incident. “Another time she said she was out in the garden and saw a red haired man in the kitchen. She shouted to me to find out what was going on. I went in and there was no one there.

“A few days later we were talking to a neighbour who was telling us about the previous occupants. It seems the woman had married twice and her first husband had died there after drinking paraquat weed killer from a lemonade bottle in the garage when he was drunk. Karen asked what he looked like, and as we were told I watched her face pale. It was the red haired man she’d seen through the kitchen window.”

“You saying you believe in ghosts, Geoff?”

“You saying you’ve got the balls to tell Karen she’s delusional, Alf?”

“No, I see what you’re saying. Ellen scares me badly enough. Your missus is…, nah you carry on, Geoff.” Gladys, behind the bar, was smiling at Alf’s strategic withdrawal.

“The street was a cul de sac with a lollipop island at the bottom. There were early fifties council houses with alternating pairs of semi-detached with terraces of four round the island at the bottom. Higher up the road the houses were smaller and newer and all private. I was told there’d been older houses there but they’d been knocked down twenty years before and the new houses were all owner occupied. Most of the fifties houses were in private ownership too by then, due to Thatcher’s right to buy policy. We lived at the bottom on the right. The neighbours were a queer lot. There was a pair of elderly Jehova’s Witnesses who thought I’d been got at by someone they referred to as Nimrod. Whatever. Our house was a semi and the old couple of trainee corpses who lived next door were ok, but conversation was difficult as both were deaf and didn’t often wear their hearing aids. Their breakfast conversations must have been truly scintillating.

“Next to us was a terrace of four, now that was inhabited by a very strange lot. Next door was a couple in their fifties. Neither of them worked and both smoked like chimneys. She was red haired, short and fat, and on sunny days would sit in a deck chair out at the front in her mismatched gray bra and knickers with her skirt tucked up into her knickers like little girls used to do for gym at primary school, only they didn’t have foot long bright orange hair hanging down from their armpits. Her old man in contrast was six foot tall and skinny and an obsessive gardener. He always wore a green all in one overall with matching uniform cap that came from the local dairy which he’d never worked for.

“He dug a pond out for fish in his front garden and in doing so uncovered the gas main. Apparently someone rang the gas authority. Next thing I knew the ‘orange utang’ from next door was screaming for for all the neighbours to hear that she’s going to sort me out for blowing him in! She nearly knocked my front door in and started in on me before I’d opened it. I heard her out and said, “Is that it? Why the hell should I care what you do. I’m the only one in the entire street working and, unlike the rest of you, I haven’t got the time to mind anyone’s business but mine. I suggest you go home and hand in your notice for your job at the pub before I do blow you in to the social security and the tax man. I heard later the male died from lung cancer. No, Stan. I didn’t blow her but somebody did, and doubtless that was laid at my door.

“Next door to her was Dick the shit, then Mick the thief, then an old biddy who lived with her grandson we called Shoeshop because his name was Reebok. Ree-bloody-bok can you imagine it? Who would curse a baby with a name like that? Mind I’ve heard worse. The local paper did an interview with a single mum on a nearby estate who despite being told it was a sexually transmitted disease had insisted on naming her daughter Clamidia, because she liked it.”

The taproom broke down into gales of laughter at that point. Even Gladys had completely lost it and it took a lot to disturb the imperturbable calm of the quintessential barmaid. Stan said, “Your getting to be damned good at this damned fast, Geoff, but I’m not having that.”

Jerry said, “I’m sure I heard that on the radio in the car. Be a good few years ago though.” Eventually calm was restored and glasses refilled. Geoff resumed.

“Across the way was Pinhead who told me because the site of the houses had been a swamp that had been filled in with two hundred years of municipal rubbish the houses had all been built on special ‘basises’ - yes that not a mistake, lads, that’s what he said. Then there was Lady Wasp. I’d kept my bees in the garden for maybe five years then and no one had noticed. That day she came banging on my front door screaming there were millions of my bees in her bathroom. Ok, I’m not completely unreasonable, so I went to look. It could have been a swarm worth money to me.

“Two wasps, two bloody, poxy wasps, that’s what I saw. I came down and asked, “Did you actually see the bees yourself?” To be told when her six year old granddaughter told her about the bees she’d been too frightened to go up and look. I just walked away. She demanded to know what I was going to do about it. I told her, ‘Nothing. The wasps are your problem not mine. As for your fear, I have enough trouble dealing with my own neuroses yours are your responsibility.’ I had already opened the window and they’d flown out, but I didn’t tell her that.

“Long before we left, the house was immaculate. Karen had done a really good job with all the furnishings which I admit I’d been irritated by at the time, but I saw what she was getting at when it was done. We’d both been promoted a few times and had spare cash. We were thinking about moving because we didn’t like the neighbours as you probably gathered from the soubriquets I’d given them, and we wanted a house with a bit of land because we were getting more and more into growing our own. Then the offer of the job at Sellafield came up on a hell of a lot more money, and we were glad we hadn’t done anything about another house down there. Soubriquets are like nicknames, Alf.

“Life was difficult for a while. I’d had a month in which to accept or turn down the new job. No brainer. I accepted it and took two weeks holiday and the seven days they gave me to find a house up here.

“Like I said I worked at Dungeness B nuclear power station and came up here for a better job at Sellafield. My new job was likely to be a bit more travelling depending on where I managed to find a house, it was only 20 miles before, but the increase in salary would more than make up for it and I was within ten years of retirement when I moved. That is I was till the bastards at the department of works and pensions put the retirement age up and I had to do another year.” There were nods of commiserations, for a few of the men had fallen victim to the same event.

“Karen carried on working and I lived up here in a small bed and breakfast hotel that did evening meals too while I looked for a place to live. I found four for her to look at on her days off, and she agreed the one I like suited her too. The mortgage on the house in Folkestone was a joke by then, so we didn’t have to sell it to buy the place up here and we thought it would be easier to just pay the mortgages on both houses till we were settled.

“We put an offer in and after a bit of haggling it was settled and I lived in the bed and breakfast for three weeks while working here and then moved in. Karen worked her notice and was up here a fortnight later. She decided not to work for the NHS and went into the nursing home sector. She’d found a couple, Jane and John, who wanted to buy our old house but were going to rent the place first. Karen had worked with Jane, another qualified nurse, who’d agreed to let us store some of our stuff in the garage till we were ready to go down with a hired van and bring it back north. Seemed perfect. It was the beginning of a decade long nightmare.

“Gladys, another round, Love, and one for yourself. Give me the nod when you’re ready with the pasties and I’ll get Geoff to stop at an appropriate place.”

“Right you are, Denis.”

The look of disgust on Geoff’s face gave the audience to understand something unpleasant was coming. “I went to give John a hand moving his stuff. I had a van on hire anyway. He’d said no need to bother and I never thought anything of it. I was a bit taken aback by their place. The kitchen was a squalid disaster zone, looked like the cooker hadn’t been cleaned in months, but John made some excuse, and looking back the truth was I wanted to think well of them, and I forgot about it and never said anything to Karen. Everything went fine for maybe fifteen months, the rent was paid into the bank. Then the payments stopped. I tried ringing up but nobody answered the phone. Then there was no ring tone. I contacted the phone company and was told the phone had been cut off for non payment of bills.

“Karen wanted to know what we did next. ‘No choice,’ I said. ‘Go down there.’ Karen was a matron of a nursing home then, so time off was problematic, money wasn’t any more but time was. Eventually we managed to get a few days off together and promptly spent seven hours to do the four hundred miles to Folkestone. Nobody answered the door, and it was double locked, so my key didn’t work, but I was sure someone was in. So I said through the letterbox, “One way or another, I’m coming through this bloody door. You choose. Open it, or I’ll use a sledgehammer for a key.” The door opened. Fuck me! The stench pole axed me. I thought I could cope with almost anything, but what I’d walked onto defied belief. Jane was crying. Her grossly overweight twenty old year old daughter was dressed in a bra, thong, make up that had been applied days ago and nothing else, at tea time for Christ’s sake! She looked and stunk like a whore who never bothered to get dressed, or washed, so as to be ready for work at a moment’s notice. Maybe she only put the bra and thong on for our benefit, who knows. Karen went into the front room with Jane.

“I went through the house like a tornado. My house was a slum. It looked like a squat. There was bugger all furniture and no beds upstairs just mattresses on the floor and dirty clothes scattered everywhere, and it stank to high heaven. The kitchen was worse than the one she’d left. I was raging. The daughter followed me into the kitchen, said John had left her mum and she was upset. ‘Up-fucking-set. I’m upset. I’ve an eighty thousand pound investment here I worked damned hard for, and you bastards have trashed it and turned it into a fucking doss house.’ ”

“I got promises to start paying off the debt and I bought a fifteen pound hob from B&Q to replace the burnt out cooker and wired it up. I said if the money wasn’t with me in six weeks. I’d throw them out on the street. On the drive home Karen was gutted. I told her about the place they’d left and she couldn’t understand it. She told me, ‘Jane was a qualified nurse, always dressed well and certainly didn’t smell.’

“ ‘Yeah well, she stinks of booze now,’ I said. We never heard from them again. Six weeks later I rang an estate agent down there told him the score and asked him to look into it and get them out if they were still there.

“The estate agent rang me that evening, said the house was empty, filthy and the front door was wide open. He’d had a locksmith change the locks and I needed to get the place cleaned up before selling it. He said industrial cleaners would be necessary and they would charge about a thousand quid, and he would send me the new keys through the post. I intended to sell the place, so I told him to keep a key. I also said I had to go down with a van to collect the last of my stuff anyway, so I’d deal with the cleaning. Apparently Jane had told the neighbours they were leaving in six weeks. She seemed to think I’d given her six weeks during which she didn’t have to pay rent. I’ve often wondered if I’d helped John do a daytime flit from the previous place still owing rent.

“Ok, Geoff. Pasties, mate.” The group broke up for a bite to eat.

It was three-quarters of an hour later when having eaten, visited the back, and ensured a fresh supply of refreshment Geoff continued.

“I’d had a hand with some work at the new house from a local lad, Timmy. Timmy was five foot nothing, thinner than a whippet and stronger than a horse, so I asked him if he was interested in the cleaning and did he know anyone else. ‘Me, the wife and daughter will do it at the usual thirty-five each for the day. They’re not working either, so would appreciate cash too, Geoff.’ I’d always paid Timmy cash because he was out of work, no skin of my nose is it. Timmy would have been fifty-ish then. I knew Sheena his daughter was twenty-two because Karen and I went to her birthday party in the dance room at the Red Lion.

“I’ve no problem paying cash, Timmy, but it’ll be a bloody long day. It’s seven hours there in the car, seven back, and I’ve told you what we’re going to find. How’s a ton apiece sound? I’m not taking Karen. She thought the bitch was her friend.”

“Ok. Let me know when you want us, so we don’t have a bevy the night before.”

“We went down overnight in a seven and a half ton box van. It took eight not seven hours. We took sleeping bags and Timmy and I took a spell each behind the wheel while the others tried for a bit of shut eye in the back. The house was worse than it had been when I’d last seen it. There was all sorts of stuff left behind. Timmy asked what he could have, I told him, ‘All my stuff’s in the garage. Anything else is yours if you want it.’ ”

“When we were there I heard my name being called, but it was Dick the shit, so I ignored him. I did that three times before Timmy said, ‘There's a bloke shouting you, Geoff.’ ”

I couldn’t ignore him then. He started gabbling at me all sorts about my tenants and when they’d left. I knew all of the neighbours would have been in for a look round with the door being left open, and Mick the thief would have had anything of value. I was still mad as hell fire. I’m not the easiest of blokes to start with, and him fishing for juicy bits of information made me worse. So making sure all the other nosy bastards, who were trying to look like the reason they were out at the front had nothing to do with me being there, could hear I shouted, ‘I did nae fucking like ye when ah lived here and nothing’s changed.’ That shut him up, and made me feel better, but it was quarter of an hour before the others stopped laughing enough to be able to work.”

It was only five minutes before Geoff could get back to his tale.

“We decided to load the van with all the rubbish first and take it to the dump. The women had taken a load of cleaning gear down with them and said they’d start up stairs and threw the rubbish down. Timmy went up to clear rubbish and the next thing I heard was, ‘For fuck’s sake!’ He’d found a bin bag full of dirty knickers. That was the last bag any of us opened. We cleared the rubbish, took it to the tip and started loading the van. We’d done that by early evening, but the cleaning was only about three-quarters done.

“ ‘Up to you,’ I said. ‘I’ll get us all in at a bed and breakfast and we can finish tomorrow, or the four of us press on and do the cleaning. The electric lights work and I brought some spare one fifty watt bulbs. Your call.’ ”

“They all agreed we carried on and got the hell out. Timmy’s missus, Beryl, asked, ‘You two ok to drive if we carry on?’ We both nodded and said whoever wasn’t driving could sleep sitting up in the front. The back was full to the roof.

“On the way back Timmy said, ‘I’ll get free beer telling this tale for a bloody long time, Geoff, but you’re going to have to learn to speak your mind. That bloke’s face was a bloody picture when you fucked him off.’ ”

“When I got home I said to Karen, ‘Well that’s that. I saved three maybe four hundred quid, but I should have gone with the industrial cleaners.’ I don’t know how they’d done it, but the central heating system was bollixed and had to be replaced and half the house electrics were buggered. It wasn’t on for me to go down and do the work, so it cost a bloody fortune. I made money on the house but not as much as I should have done and it wasn’t easy money. They cost me twenty grand in the end. I’d have been thirty-two I think when we bought the place, and we were there for twelve years. When the place was finally sold we were relieved it was over.” There was braek at that as Gladys came round with a tray of pints and cleared the tables.

“Trouble was, was it hell as like over. It was only just beginning. Karen’s car insurance was up for renewal and she elected to pay it by standing order. That’s a credit agreement and she was turned down. I paid it up front, but looked into why it had happened. Turns out Jane had used Karen’s name to buy stuff from all over the place, catalogues and the like, and never paid for them. I got copies of the agreements, and Jane had used our old address, Karen’s name, the same place of work they used to work at, but her own birthday. The only way to clear Karen’s name was to report it as a crime to the police. Karen didn’t want to, but it was do that or pay Jane’s debts, all eighteen grand of them, or be prosecuted. Karen changed her mind. It took twelve months to get the folk owed money to back off and another four years to clear Karen’s credit rating with the credit rating agencies, Experian, Equifax and Callcredit. Still leaves a bad taste in my mouth thinking about it. My brother James had the right of it when he said, ‘I told you it was a bad idea going south. They’re different and you will regret it.’ ”

“Aye that’s true enough, Geoff.” Stan had spoken but the others were in agreement.

It was with a wicked grin that Geoff said, “He was talking about going to work in Glasgow which is what? A hundred and fifty north of here. But I’m damned glad to be here not down there.”

“What do you reckon, Sasha? Is he any good?” Eric asked.

“Hell yes, but inexperienced. He needs to learn to be a little more frugal with the truth and to drag out the interesting bits. But surely Geoff’s a teller of tales in the making. What say you, Denis?”

“I agree but he’s suffering from a terrible weakness like all of us.”

It was Tommy who asked, “What’s that then?”

But it was Gladys who answered with a self satisfied tone in her voice, “He’s frightened of Karen.”

It had been a relatively short session but a good one and the men returned to their usual evening’s activity, playing dominoes whilst attempting to drink the cellar dry, ably assisted of course by Gladys.

NOTES.

The Right to Buy was enshrined in Her Majesty’s Housing Act 1980. An act of Parliament giving tenants of local authority housing the right to buy the property at substantial discount. The discount became larger the longer they had lived in the property. Margaret Thatcher was the prime minister at the time.

A bevy, a serious drink.