It was teeming it down and blowing a hooley outside. The wind was pulling air up the chimney and through the logs on the open fire in the tap room of The Green Dragon so fast that Gladys had had to throttle the blast gate of the chimney, or the wood wouldn’t have lasted any time, and despite it only being a few degrees above freezing outside the room would have become uncomfortably hot. The weather forecast had said winds in excess of fifty miles an hour with sixty-five miles an hour gusts, and Gladys the barmaid, who was now the landlady and lived above the public rooms of The Dragon, was wondering how many of her usual crowd of the old men that formed the core of her Saturday night drinkers in the taproom would venture out for beer and stories.

The pub was now well known for the free entertainment provided by the Grumpy Old Men’s Society who met on Saturday evenings to swap yarns and tall stories, and they drew quite a crowd of drinkers. Usually their wives were to be found engaging in far more genteel conversation in the best room. As Elle, Sasha’s wife put it, “I’ve been listening to Sasha weave reality and fantasy into ‘the new truth’ as he puts it for most of my life. When I go out I find talking about our latest great grand children to be far more interesting.”

Despite initial appearances to outsiders, Gladys was very fond of the old men who were a kind and charitable bunch, even if they had reached the point in their lives where as Sacha put it, “You reach my age and time’s precious. I’m not wasting it being polite to idiots, so I just tell them to bugger off. These days I’m just covered in what the fuck, and I get bad attacks of it from time to time that cover everyone around me too.” However, she needn’t have worried, one by one, starting with her husband Pete who been working with Alf down at his workshop and went upstairs to shower and change, they arrived looking like drowned rats.

Eventually Sasha arrived and said, “Put my whisky bottle on the bar, Gladys, there’s a good lass. And a line of glasses for the lads. They’ll need it to warm up. No need to bother with it just tell them to help themselves. I’ll have a couple of fingers myself.” Sasha grinned as he held his hand up to shew her with his middle two fingers curled into his palm and his index and little fingers extended.

Thinking to put on over on Sasha, Gladys put a half pint glass [US readers that’s ten ounces not eight] on the bar and said, “That do?”

Sasha picked up the bottle and half filled the glass saying, “Better get another bottle, Love, and pour yourself one when it suits.”

Gladys shook her head, but went for another bottle. She’d join them in a drink later, but only after last orders had been called. Sasha drank single malt whisky, usually Highland Park, and had a couple of cases kept for him at the pub. Pete emerged, looking more the thing now, poured himself a far more moderate dose of Sasha’s medicine and said, “Cheers, Sasha. You two bring out the very best in each other you know. I’ve never managed to get Gladys that wound up.” He turned as half a dozen of his friends appeared, took off their dripping coats, hung them up with their hats and turned to the bar. “Sasha’s setting up a line of whisky glasses to take the chill off you lads. Denis throw a couple more logs on the fire and a shovel of coal to help them out will you? While you’re there I’ll pour your glass.”

After ten minutes of general chat they were just waiting for Gerry. He appeared after another couple of minutes looking decidedly unwell. “You don’t look too happy, Gerry. What’s up?”

“Went to the dentist. Bastard put me through hell and then took an hundred and fifty off me for doing it, Denis.”

“Here drink this. It’s out of Sasha’s bottle. It’ll make you feel better. It’s quality anaesthetic. But you’re dealing with that dentist entirely the wrong way, Gerry. Had a pretty bit of fluff in a white coat did he? A dental nurse to pass him his stuff?”

Gerry took a mouthful and said, “Thanks, Sasha, that hits the spot. Yeah, bit of a kid, Denis. Looked like she just left school. Why?”

Sasha refilled Gerry’s glass saying, “You look like you need it, Lad.”

Denis answered Gerry’s question. “It’s all part of the con, Mate. That ‘dental nurse’ has no qualifications at all. She’s only there to make you take the pain and be macho about it. You need to get that dentist telt. Just tell him in front of her, ‘She’s pretty enough, but it won’t work because if you hurt me I’ll cry anyway, and her being here won’t make any difference.’ Then you pull your ace out of the hole.”

“What do you mean, Denis?”

“Lean back in the chair, grab him by the nuts and say, ‘Now we’re not going to hurt each other are we?’ Tell you, Man, it works every time.”

By the time the laughter had died down George had got a round of pints in and the men were settling down for some serious entertainment. Sasha told Gladys to leave his bottle on the bar.

John asked, “I’ll have a go at a tale if that’s ok, Lads?”

John was usually a quiet bloke who said little, but all deferred to Sasha to answer. “Good lad, John. Where’s Jess?”

Jess was John’s dog and she usually accompanied him to the pub. “She put her nose out of the front door, turnt tail and hid under the stairs. Margaret said she’d got more sense than to go out in this. But what does she know? She’s next door knocking back brandy with the other lasses who all turnt out too, weather or no weather.” ‘The other lasses’, like the men had an average age nearer to seventy than to sixty, and, as the men all knew, would have had no intention of missing their Saturday night gossip session where after the latest on babies, whose granddaughter was pregnant with the latest addition and who was ill had been thoroughly discussed would return to their favourite topic: the ridiculous behaviour of their menfolk.

Sasha asked, “What you got for us then John?”

“I went down to Salford with George last week. He’d bought a seven burner gas range off ebay for Christine to use for canning and preserving in their back kitchen, so she didn’t have to use the Rayburn in the kitchen. That way she could leave stuff overnight in stead of having to clear up and put it all away when she wanted to cook a meal and then have to get it all out again the day after. He asked me to go with him because I lived there years ago and knew my way round. I even knew where Cobden Street was which was where this cooker was. He’d rung them up to say we were coming and all was in order. He wasn’t sure it would fit in the back of his Defender so we took that fourteen foot trailer of his.”

George smiled and said, “I’ve got racks for the saws, tools and stuff for tree felling in the back, so there’s not as much space as in most. Even if I took the tools out I wasn’t prepared to take all the racks out because they’re all bolted down. It costs more in diesel pulling the trailer, but what the hell.”

John continued, “Any of you guys ever sit in a Defender for two and a half hours? My arse was numb, tingling and in pain long before we got there. They aren’t seats in those damn things they’re bench pews with a thin bit of covering on top.”

Sasha grinned and asked, “Why do you think I drive a Discovery, not a Defender? All the benefits of a Landrover with comfort, power, torque, four by four off road capability, safe pulling ability and, note and, proper car seats and decent windscreen wipers not being the least of it. Take the seats out and the bodies off and my Disco is the same as George’s Defender. The price you pay is it’s not got quite as much room in the back which doesn’t bother me. The biggest load I carry in the back is Elle’s monthly supermarket shop. Anything else goes in the trailer.”

John picked up his tale,“Telling you if George ain’t got piles now he bloody soon will have. Anyway we made our way to the M6, and just kept going till Haydock, that’ll be just short of a hundred miles of motorway, and came off on the A580, the East Lancs. It goes straight into Manchester via Salford. That’s where my problems started. I knew exactly where Cobden Street was, but they’ve blocked off so many roads, made some one way, of course the wrong way for us, that even though I got us to within twenty yards of the place we covered another thirty miles before I found a way into it. I’d no idea where I was going or even where I was half the time there’s been that much redevelopment. In some places entire areas had been levelled and they’d just started again.”

George nodded and said, “I could see the Cobden Street street sign on the other side of a barrier that went straight across the road.”

“The place had changed a lot,” John said. “That area has always been poor and run down. Sort of place poverty stricken immigrants and students live in. When I lived down there the most recent batch of immigrants were Asians, mostly Pakistanis, but presumably they’d got on their feet and moved on. I didn’t see many students, but the latest residents were all African, and I mean African not Afro-Caribbean. I think I read a while back there’d been an influx from West Africa.

“But the place was just the same, watchers on every street corner providing lookouts for the dealers. Only difference now was they all had mobile phones. Folk just shimfing(1) past you acting dead nonch like,(2) like they’re not interested in you at all. You can feel the eyes everywhere. It’s always been like that. Some one told me before the Asians lived there it was a Jewish area but the dealers were there even then. Then of course the Jewish immigrants got on their feet and moved out, probably to Prestwich and Whitefield and the Asians moved in. It’s how it works in the big cities. We wanted number twenty-four, which should have put it on our right hand side.”

“How did you know that, John? You didn’t remember that did you?” Pete asked.

“No, but unless streets are very old, in which case all bets are off, as you go out of a town the odds are on the left and the evens on your right. In this case what few numbers there were were spray painted on the old factory doors. The place looked like it was derelict from the state of the buildings, but there was an obvious hive of activity going on there. George was shitting himself as we slowly drove past looking for twenty-four.”

George shrugged and said, “The last time I’d felt like I was in the cross hairs of a rifle sight I was in uniform in Northern Ireland, but I had a load of mates who could shoot back there. Scary. I didn’t like it at all.”

The men looked back at John who said, “I was used to it. Even in a place like that there are rules. Don’t do anything sudden or unexpected. Try to let the guys on the street corners with the mobile phones figure out, one you’re not anybody official like plod(3) and two why you’re there. If they know you're just two working lads delivering or picking something up nothing will happen to you. So when we pulled up I got out the of the Rover and walked up to one of the watchers and asked, “You know where number twenty-four is, Mate? I’m picking a cooker up to take back to Carlisle. It’s a spot that reconditions them.

“He pointed to a building and said, ‘It’s round the back, Mate. You’ll have to shout to get anybody’s attention.’ I thanked him and by the time I got back to the Rover he was on his mobile and most of the eyes had left us in particular and were just generally watchful. George didn’t look quite as shaky either. It took a while, but we finally found someone, but he didn’t speak English. The lads that worked there were talking in some language I didn’t recognise. I know it wasn’t Swahili. Like I said, probably West Africans because Swahili is widely spoken in East Africa in over a dozen countries. The boss did speak English. Interesting place. They had hundreds of spare parts for cookers of all makes and models, gas as well as electric, all salvaged out of old ones stacked up in piles all over the place.

“While we were there a white English woman in her late thirties came in and asked for a new grill pan for her cooker. The guy asked her for details of her cooker, disappeared and fetched three different ones back in less than a minute. She pointed to one and said, ‘That’s the one.’

“The guy said, ‘Two quid, Love. If it’s not right bring it back and I’ll swap it for another. Bring the broken one and I’ll know for sure what you need.’ These guys were fitting in just fine. There was over a dozen of them stripping stuff down and cleaning it before putting it with the others. There was a score or more electric cookers on test with various meters attached, and there was a bag of new gas jets on a workbench next to some flue emissions test gear to measure carbon monoxide and dioxide levels, some of which was testing gas cookers with all the burners lit. The test gear was expensive quality equipment, so I concluded they knew what they were doing.

“We identified the cooker George had paid for and fair play to the man(4) he made sure all the parts were with it and that everything was bubble and then shrink wrapped and safe from any potential transport damage. We were going to carry it to the trailer, but he shouted in his own language and two lads came with a bogey, lifted it on and took it to George’s trailer. We strapped it down and headed for home. I could see George was glad to get out of there.”

George admitted, “I couldn’t live like that. I could feel the potential violence all the time. Even when John had spoken to the guy on the corner it was still there. John had told me a couple of years before about a pub called The Penny Black not far away where you could buy hand guns on demand and an AK within forty-eight hours with as much ammo as you’d got cash for. Bloody right I was glad to get out of the place.”

“I asked George where he wanted to eat, cos I knew where there were a couple of Little Chefs that served Olympic Breakfast on the way out of the city on the A580. Seemed like a good idea to the pair of us, but the first was now a mobile phone shop and the second was burnt out. George was still shaken and wanted to get the hell away, so we decided to get ripped off and eat shite in a motorway fast food joint on the M6. Ain’t being ripped off and eating shite the fucking truth. We ended up eating all day breakfasts at Forton(5) services. I say breakfasts because we had two each and even that didn’t require the giblet expansion space(6) of two extra holes on the belt that a Little Chef Olympic breakfast needed.

“What a load of bullshit they sold. Who in their right mind wants to eat nut cutlets, quorn(7) drummers and other vegan obscenities. Why does veggie(8) crap need to masquerade as a piece of meat? Why can’t it look like a poxy nut or a bloody fungus? At least that way you’d know it was shite right at the outset. And I for one don’t want my food fat reduced. A full English breakfast is supposed to have extra grease and double cholesterol. Anyway, it was my turn to pay, and two breakfasts apiece which didn’t fill us gave me some shrapnel change out of forty-five quid. I had no issues about paying, it was just the luck of the draw and hell you got to eat, but were we glad to get back into civilisation again. We both agreed we should have pressed on and eaten at Tebay(9) on the tops. Sure it’s expensive there, but it’s no more so than Forton, and at least it’s proper food, not just packer that fools your belly into thinking you’ve had something to eat.”

“Time for the pies, Gentlemen. Mince and onion this week,” Gladys announced. “Someone pass the plates and cutlery out and I’ll fetch the tray and a pan of peas. Pete, fetch a jug of gravy from the kitchen will you please, Love.”

Half an hour later they’d eaten and cleared up.“Now that hit the spot, Gladys, thanks. Nice simple decent proper food.” The others agreed with John and Gladys smiled knowing most of them were not exactly what others would call adventurous eaters, though Sasha was reputed to eat almost anything.

“I’ve another if you like, Lads,” John said when they were looking at each other to see what was going to happen next. Sasha was always good for a tale in an emergency, but they knew he was encouraging them all to give it a try.

“Fair enough,” said Stan. “You’ve done alright so far, John, have at it.”

“You know I’ve helped George out with the odd tree job from time to time. This was year before last. Summer time it was.” John was a tree surgeon who had retired early due to arthritis.

“Easter,” said George. “If it’s the one overlooking the bypass.”

John nodded and continued, “That’s the one. The tree to come down should have been taken down before the new houses were built. I still think George was crazy for taking the job. From what we understood every other tree surgeon in the area had looked at it and walked away. George charged them double and added on a couple of hundred for me for the day. We earnt it. The tree was a beech may be four or five foot in diameter at the base, twisted in growth and had four main branches two foot in diameter each about thirty to forty foot up. The worst case scenario was two new bungalows being flattened if it fell wrongly and there was a fence under one of the branches. There was whore of a lot of weight in it and a lot had to come off before we even considered felling it.

George was up in that tree all morning taking weight off it. We had ropes and pulleys rigged all over the shop and were taking the little stuff, no more than a foot across out for hours. We had lunch and kept going. I must have dragged ton after ton of it out of our way. Finally we managed to rig a line on the big branch over the houses. There was nothing on it by then, just the branch was left, but like I said it was two foot in diameter. We took it off in two or three foot pieces each lowered to the ground on the rope. At that point we both reckoned it was fellable. George rigged a rope high up and we ran it through a couple of pulley blocks to get more mechanical advantage. The free end we had to his land rover winch to control its direction of fall and we had proper chocks on all four wheels.

“The plan was I operated the winch as George felled the tree. Idea was, as it came free the winch would pull it over away from the houses pivoting on the hinge as George did the cut. The notch cut ok. The wedge came away no problems. I took up the tension on the winch and George moved behind the tree to start the felling cut. Once the saw was in deep enough he drove home the wedges with a fourteen pound mell(10) and continued cutting. Then all holy hell broke loose. I said the tree had grown twisted, we didn’t realise the grain was spiralling about forty percent of the way round the tree. The twist wasn’t visible on the outside and we only found out when we logged it. [US bucking] The locked in stresses released by the felling cut must have been tremendous.

“Damned tree just ripped the hinge out and turned a quarter circle before it came down. I wasn’t near enough to get hurt, and George had got somewhere to run no matter what happened. The tree must have still been way out of balance which compensated for some of the twist. We got lucky, both unhurt and no damage to anything. It fell in between the houses and one branch ended up a couple of feet above the fence. It moved the Landrover thirty-odd feet. That winch had no chance of doing anything. We looked at each other, and I shrugged my shoulders and said, ‘You can’t lose them all either, but hell that was lucky.’ I think we both got the shakes a couple of hours later.

“It wasn’t due to lack of planning, skill or knowledge. It was the way the tree was which simply couldn’t have been anticipated, but lads have died under circumstances like that.

“Six months after that George asked me to go and look at a copper beech with him. It was five going on six feet across at the base with a foot deep, six inch wide, spiral split going up forty feet and over half way round you could get your whole arm in never mind your hand. There was a three foot branch over the ridge of the house which was a three hundred year old grade one listed building(11) and the tree had a TPO on it. The local authority had said nothing noticeable could be done to the tree.”

“What’s a TPO, John?”

“A tree preservation order, Alf. It means you can’t touch it without authorisation, and the so called competent authority, that’s some tosser from the council with a degree in squirrel pickling or some other equally dubious conservation skill, tells you exactly what you can and can’t do. They’ve got photos of every specimen tree with a TPO on it, so you can’t do anything they don’t sanction and get away with it. Tell you you there just isn’t enough money in the world to tempt me to sleep in that house, and I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway. I walked round the tree once before saying to George, ‘You are fucking joking, Mate? There is no way you can do anything to that tree without risking taking the entire house out. No one in their right mind would climb into it, and even it you take that branch off in foot long pieces from a platform the released stresses could drop the entire tree on the house. Didn’t you learn anything from the other one? If you do the job, George, I ain’t doing it with you. The only safe way to do it involves a thousand ton crane and a twenty thousand pound bill.’ Luckily George agreed.”

“So what happened, John?”

“It’s still there, Gerry, and every storm we get could be the one that brings it down on the house because that’s what will do it one day for sure, if it’s not dealt with. Then the local authority won’t have the tree or the house, but the planners who deal with listed buildings and the environment or whatever they call themselves these days who deal with TPOs don’t talk to each other. Usual governmental nonsense.”

Stan looked at the clock and asked, “You did well, John, good craic. Dominoes, Lads? Gladys set em up please, Love. I’m paying.”

1 Shimfing, loafing, skulking but in open sight, especially of someone casing a situation so as to take dishonest advantage of it, or one actively engaged in dishonest activity like a lookout.
2 Acting dead nonch like, acting in a very nonchalant manner, but in reality being anything but disinterested.
3 Plod, pejorative term for police. Mr. Plod was a fictional bumbling police officer in the Noddy series of children’s books by Enid Blyton.
4 Fair play to the man, to give credit where it is due to the man.
5 Forton, a motorway services run by a large ‘restaurante’ chain.
6 Giblet expansion space, stomach room.
7 Quorn, a UK meat substitute product also sold in Europe. Quorn contains the mycoprotein derived from Fusarium venenatum a fungus grown by fermentation.
8 Veggie, vegetarian.
9 Tebay, a one of a kind locally owned and managed services serving local produce that is on the top of hills going from Lancshire into Cumbria. Tebay is in Cumbria and at about 1000 feet above sea level. It is noted for the quality of its food and service.
10 Mell, a maul or sledge hammer.
11 Listed building, a historically important building that may not be altered in any way without official approval. They are listed as grades one, two and three, with grade one being the most important.