Saturday night had rolled round again for the story tellers in the Green Dragon. The weather had taken a turn for the worse, and unlike the previous Saturday when it had been almost warm enough to be drinking outside on the rear veranda there was a biting east wind and Pete had lit both fires in the tap room after lunch and turned the central heating up in the best room a couple of degrees an hour ago. [2ºC ≈ 4ºF] The company was gradually arriving. Most were wearing heavy overcoats and cursing the weather. “Supposed to be summer damn it. I thought we’d be outside this week enjoying a barbecue supper,” said Dave.

Pete was cheerful as he said, “Aggie ordered all the stuff for a barbecue, but it’ll be cooked in the oven I’m afraid. Forecast predicts worse for the next two weeks. Still it’s a excuse to get some of Pat’s poteen(1) out to counteract the chill.”

“Did someone mention my name?” was heard from the hallway. The accent was Irish.

As Pat came in Pete said, “We were speculating whether it was cold enough to justify breaking out a couple of bottles of your poteen, Pat.”

“A damned fine idea, son. I wish I’d thought of it myself. Get them out, me boy, and the glasses too. It’s nowhere near cold enough to be drinking mountain dew(2) out of the bottle.”

By the time the company was all there there was a line of shot glasses on the bar filled with mountain dew and the men were ready for some entertainment. An outsider(3) who was a regular on Saturday night asked Pete, “May I try a glass?”

“Ask Pat, it’s his liquor,” replied Pete, “It’s not for sale.”

“Surely,” replied Pat. Put the price of a whiskey(4) in the kid’s Christmas party collection box. Pour your man a glass, Pete.”

“Well seeing as we said we’d pick up on the medical theme from last week I’ll give it a go,” said Paul after he’d threwn a couple of logs and a shovel of coal on one of the fires, before going to do the same on the other one. “You want me to go first, Geoff? Seeing as you’ve got a couple of tales.”

“No. Tell you what, I’ll start, Paul, then you give me a spell(5) and I’ll tell the second one after you.”

“Ok.”

“I’ll start with a short tale from when we lived Folkestone way and I worked at Dungeness B. There was a load of stuff in the media about the effects of long term use of the pill at that time. Karen had been on it for twelve years and decided that was long enough. She wasn’t sure that she’d never want another child and I had no views one way or the other so she decided to try an IUD. If she was happy about that I was happy too. I told her if she got pregnant I was happy for her to decide whether to have it or a termination. We’d agreed years before if there was anything wrong like Down syndrome she would terminate the pregnancy. If she didn’t she knew I would be gone, and I’d leave the country and her on her own to rear it. So Karen went to the quacks and had her IUD fitted. Now bear in mind this is all with hindsight which is perfect vision.

“A couple of years later she started with PID, a catch all term for Pelvic Inflammatory Disease that means something a woman gets in her lower abdomen that hurts and they haven’t got a clue what it is. She’d had God alone how many days off work with it and it was excruciatingly painful some of the time. Fortunately, her word not mine, as a nurse she was paid work or play.(6) A few years, maybe five or six, went by and she decided no more kids. I said that was ok with me. She decided to have the IUD removed and since she was older than me by a good bit she said it made sense for her to have her tubes tied not me to have a vasectomy. She explained she was sneaking up on menopause and if something happened to me she would be unlikely to be able to give another man children, but if something happened to her I would still be able to give another woman children. Again I just said ok.

“Now Karen had always had a metal allergy. She painted the studs of her jeans buttons with nail varnish or her skin broke down where the stud touched her. Likewise with the hooks and eyes on her bras, and she’d never managed to find earrings other than twenty-two karat gold ones that didn’t affect her ears. I’d played safe and bought her some twenty-four karat ones from an Indian colleague with jewellery connections back home years before. She’d been to see our family doctor and he’d booked her an appointment to have it done. That’s when it hit me. I remembered reading that the some of the clips or rings used in the procedure had a thin layer of copper on them and given Karen’s sensitivity to metal told her it would be stupid to have that done. She needed to check and insist on no metal clips or rings or not bother.

“Karen told our doctor what I’d said and he reared up on her questioning my knowledge as compared with his and said the amount of copper involved couldn’t possibly cause a problem and she was just making a fuss over nothing. I believe she told him her husband was clearly a far more intelligent man than he and certainly understood allergies and immunology better than he did. It was her body not his and we would he changing doctors immediately with a complaint going in about his ignorance and arrogance to the local area health authority. That was before she left slamming the doors behind her. When she arrived home still steaming mad and told me the tale the whole thing hit me and I cursed my stupidity that had caused her so much pain for so long. IUDs are metal coated, may hap only a few atoms thick, but it was almost certain that that had been the cause of her PID, and I’d known they were metal coated years before she had one fitted. Karen had already had hers removed and went on to have her fallopian tubes cut rather than clipped and she never suffered from PID again. Funny thing that bloody doctor’s name was Leech.”(7)

After Geoff had finished, Pete said, “Give it five, Paul. I’ll clear and wash the empties. Looks like we may need them. I’ll get a round in when I’ve done.”

“Ok.”

After they all settled down, Paul started by saying, “Going right back to the beginning, with the benefit of hindsight, Vera drove her car into the railings at work when going on a night shift. She didn’t know how it had happened, but she’d just not stopped at the end of the parking bay, and was shaken up by it. She couldn’t remember what had happened and the others at work had got her out of the car and said she wasn’t really all there. She stayed at work till her shift ended because she was frightened of what I’d say if she came home in the middle of the night. Silly bugger. The car was fine and a mate and I straightened out all the railings. I did a bit of cut and weld and the hundred year old railings were in better nick than before she pushed them over and that was the only vertical section of the hundred and twenty metres of railings. After a week or two we forgot all about it.

“Fast forward a year, Vera had started to suffer from vertigo and the pills were just about controlling it. Her niece was getting married and she caught the train because she didn’t fancy driving a hundred and fifty miles. I stayed at home, so I’m telling you what other people told me. The wedding went off ok, but at the reception she passed out with what appeared to be a fit. She hadn’t had more than a couple of glasses and it was nearly two in the morning. Fortunately she was caught and eased to the floor and there were three nurses within yards of her. At one point they were about to administer CPR. [Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation] The ambulance took her to the nearest casualty, Warrington Infirmary. She insisted no one rang me up, which Marie, my sister in law wasn’t happy about, but Vera is her elder sister by eight years and Marie usually does what Vera tells her. Vera was released at eight on Sunday morning after having had a battery of tests done, none of which shewed anything. They’d told her they would forward all the paperwork to our family doctor.

On Sunday afternoon the family went to the groom’s parents for another party with a late lunch. There was a marquee in case the weather was bad, but all was fine. That is till Vera passed out again and seemed to have a series of at least three fits. The local hospital was Wigan, but on being told she’d been at Warrington earlier the ambulance took her back there. Marie’s husband Nick rang me. I fed my stock early, packed a bag with clothes, shoes and all her spare tablets for Vera and set off for Maries’s house in the Land Rover. Nick was there and he said Marie was with Vera at Warrington. I grabbed a coffee and followed him to the hospital. We went in separate vehicles so I could stay and he could take Marie home who’d had virtually no sleep in two days.

It was early evening when I reached Vera’s bedside and she looked ok. Tired, but ok. Marie looked knackered and I told her to go and get some sleep. “I wet myself.” were the first words out of Vera’s mouth when we were on our own.

God knows what she expected me to say. I was just glad she was still alive. “Good job I brought some clothes then isn’t it,” I said. “I’ll see if you can have a shower, and put some fresh clothes on.”

The nurse wasn’t too happy, “She can’t shower on her own and we’re short staffed.”

“I’ll help her,” I said. The nurse didn’t seem happy with that. “Is it a women’s facility or can anyone use it?” I asked.

“Anyone. It’s a single shower.”

“I’ve been married to that woman for more than forty years. She’s had six kids she insists I fathered, and I doubt she’s up for making another in a hospital shower. So what’s the problem?”

The blushing nurse said, “It’ll be ok,” and hurried away after telling me where the shower was.

Vera had her shower and dressed. She was tired but mercifully the vertigo wasn’t bothering her, so she didn’t need any help either to shower or more to the point to stand. I tracked down a polythene bag for her other clothes. She’d no idea how long she would be kept there and she was hungry because they’d not let her eat earlier till she’d been seen by some doctor or other. A nurse said she could eat now, but there was no food available in the hospital. The kitchen staff had all gone home, the cafeteria was closed and all the shops too. Un-bloody-believable isn’t it, a major hospital that services in excess of a million folk with no food. I left and found a service station still open, it was on the point of closing, and bought some sandwiches and a pile of fruit juice cartons for Vera for later. I bought two carry out coffees that were still lukewarm when I got back. No one had any idea how long Vera was going to be in there, so she said that I may as well go home. Turns out she had an abnormal ECG, but no one knew any more than that about it.

It was nigh on two in the morning when I got home. I thought about throwing her clothes in the washer, but decided against it because if I washed them wrongly I’d get shouted at. I rang Vera when I got up at eight, but she knew nothing more than when I’d left, but she told me what cycle to wash her clothes on. I carried on as usual and rang a couple more times in the day, but still no change. Marie rang me at six that evening and said Nick had gone to pick Vera up from hospital. Apparently they’d not wanted to release her, but she’d insisted because she lived so far away and wanted to go home. They still had no idea what caused it, but gave her a prescription for anti-epileptic drugs just in case. I arrived at Marie’s at gone nine and it was half twelve when Vera and I got home.

Some wedding! However, the fun for us hadn’t even started. I informed the DVLA [Driver Vehicle Licensing Authority]. They said if a doctor hadn’t told Vera not to drive she was ok. Vera’s insurance company said if DVLA said she was ok to drive she was ok. We didn’t trust either of them to take the same view if anything happened, so Vera stopped driving. After three visits to a neurologist, all at different places and all about as far as you can get and still be in the county and Cumbria is a big county, nothing had been determined. By then Vera was on four different pills and one of them, Methotrexate, is a dangerously powerful chemotherapy drug also used for severe arthritis and for cancer treatment. Methotrexate can have profound side effects. The cardio man had an implanted heart monitoring loop recorder, which was about the size and shape of a packet of Wrigleys chewing gum, buried above her left breast, and she was told she’d be seeing him for at least three years. Bearing in mind she was also seeing the gynae folk concerning an ovarian cancer issue and a condition called lichen sclerosis, some one about her vertigo, the hearing specialists and the arthritis folk too, we were spending a lot of time at Carlisle infirmary. Vera joked when this is all over we’ll miss it, so maybe we’ll have to call in at A&E [ER] so we don’t get withdrawal symptoms. Then the cardio man said there were occasional irregularities in her heart rhythms. Like how I asked. He started to give me an explanation, but I interrupted and asked, “Are you saying the potassium sodium ion exchange after a neuron has fired isn’t reversing as quickly as it should, so it can’t carry the next pulse quickly enough to trigger the next heartbeat on time?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying. How do you know about that?”

“I read a lot and forget next to nothing. What causes it and is it treatable?”

“It’s called long QT and mostly it’s genetic, but I can’t say for sure. I’ll take some samples and send them off to the geneticists who’ll get back to you. Probably in three months.” I looked up long QT on the internet. It seems there are at least four different gene sites that can cause it but most cases were of the one kind and that one had been subject to a lot of investigation.

It was six months before we heard from the genetics people. An eighty mile round trip to visit Whitehaven hospital. Opened in the sixties it reminded me of an abandoned second world war army camp. And the visit was pointless. It could all have been sent in a letter. Yes, Vera had got long QT. It was the most common type and she could just drop dead from it if she stopped taking one of the pills. We figured it all out, it came to her via her dad and there were a number of her family it had probably killed when long QT hadn’t been ‘discovered’. Her sister was tested for it and she didn’t have it so her offspring and grandchildren didn’t need testing. None of ours have it, so it stops with Vera because her sister is her only sibling.

Eventually we got her off all the unnecessary pills including the Methotrexate and the loop recorder has been, to use the medical jargon, explanted. In three years it had never picked anything up. We haven’t been to the hospital for a couple of years now and we don’t miss it, but at least we’ve worked out what happened when Vera drove into the railings at work. If the heart isn’t triggered to beat, the brain runs short of oxygen and if short enough a blackout occurs. At the wedding it was the excitement, enjoyment and dancing that required more than usual oxygen, oxygen that wasn’t there. Somewhere in the middle of all that lot we both retired, so trips to the hospital weren’t the nightmare that they once had been and Vera has stopped driving. The whole bloody lot took over five years.

“What about the cancer and that other thing, Paul,” asked George.

“The ovarian cancer business was scary, they call it the silent killer, but it turned out to be a false alarm. Scared the hell out of us both for the best part of a year though. The lichen sclerosis cleared up with a course of steroid cream, but Vera’s still takes tablets and painkillers for the osteoarthritis and others for the vertigo. The hearing man calls once a year to reprogram her hearing aids. A bad few years, but that’s what happens when you get old. Still Vera reckons that one of the few good things about getting old is that most of the folk who know most of the really embarrassing things about you are dead. Gladys, another round, Love, please.”

“I’ll get these, Gladys,” said Alf.

I’ll tell the next one if you like, Geoff. I’ve just remembered something. It’ll give you a bit of time to remember the details. Or you take it now if you’re ready?”

“You go now, Sasha. Thanks. But I still don’t understand how you can just remember something and minutes later start telling the tale.”

“Lots of practice, Geoff, and remember I come from a folk who mostly couldn’t read and write when I was a kid, so story telling came naturally and of course not being able to write things down encourages a good memory.”

I used to live at Seagrove, before I moved to where I am now. It was Easter Sunday, but I’ve no idea what year. I did something to my neck, pulled a muscle or trapped a nerve, I’m not sure but the pain was wicked. Elle was staying well away from me because I can be dangerous under those conditions. I tend to react and say sorry afterwards.”

“You saying you’d have hit Elle, Sasha‽” Alf asked incredulously.

“No, but I’m not saying I wouldn’t.”

“Leave it, Alf,” cautioned Denis.

“The pain was so bad I was desperate. Despite it being Easter Sunday I rang the local casualty, [ER] but hell this is Cumbria, and all they had was one doctor on duty with a four hour queue in front of him. I got the yellow pages out and started ringing all the physio numbers, both of them. There was no reply from the first, but to my surprise the second answered and told me to come immediately. His place was at Stent Hill on the corner of the main street and Trumpet Road.”

“Is that that Doctor Death the old bloke knew when you went for the angiogram?”

“That’s the one, Stan. Hell what a road that was. You have a choice from where I lived thirty-five miles on decent roads or twelve on steep single track country lonnings(8) heavily used by eighteen wheelers and huge agricultural tractors. I was in a hurry and took the lonnings. Fortunately I met little traffic. I went weekly for a six month(9) and wasn’t always so lucky, but then I was never suffering that level of pain again. As I pulled up to park next to the huge corner building with a newly refurbished exterior and new slates on the roof, I saw a huge bloke hunched over going in. He looked like Quasimodo. It turned out Doctor Death did the physio for the local rugby league team, The Wath Brow Hornets. I got used to seeing doubled over big blokes coming in and saying, ‘I’m playing in four days, Doc, you got to get met sorted by them.’ I have to say whatever his nickname was he was bloody good. He told me he was originally a registered mental nurse, Elle says you can always spot them, and he’d done the physio training about twenty years back. He was a character all right, but like I said he knew what he was doing.

“He took me into an examination room and turned a machine on that was the size of a small freezer. It was on wheels and made a loud buzzing noise. I took my shirt off and he manipulated my neck. I was getting ready to kill the bastard when he said, “Ok. I can fix that.” He put some sticky pads on my back, arm and chest, and said, “I’ll turn it up to find what you can handle. Tell me as soon as it’s one more than you can take and I’ll turn it back one.” The sticky pads contained electrodes and my muscle were jumping all over the place. Five was just about tolerable, six had me jumping, so five it was. He set a timer for fifteen minutes and said, “Relax, lie back and I be back when the buzzer sounds. Shout if you want me.” For fifteen minutes I was pulsed at I suppose one second intervals by the big buzzing box via the pads which made my muscles twitch. After the first half a minute of the pulses the pain had dropped to a level that was easy to cope with. When the buzzer sounded, he came back fiddled with the box and said, “Another fifteen minutes.” This time it wasn’t a pulsing that made my muscles twitch but a constant low level buzzing that was much easier to cope with.

“He only charged me sixteen quid. I went back twice a week for a month and weekly thereafter but he dealt with my pain. Doctor Death or no we need more folk like that around. He’ll be long retired now, and I don’t know if anyone still runs the business. Nowadays that buzzing box of his has been replaced by a Tens machine the size of a mobile phone that you can buy off ebay for three eighty-nine from China.

Geoff waited for the tables to be cleared and fresh beer provide before starting on his second tale of the evening. “Karen had reacted badly to a bee sting, so I moved the hives I had in the garden to one of my out apiaries expecting that to solve the matter. However, her arm swelled up badly when she was stung by a wasp. Bee stings don’t bother me. Sure they hurt for a few seconds, but that’s it. I’ve only been stung by a wasp a few times in my life, but it hurts like hell for a couple of days. Even Anthisan cream, you can only get the spray in the UK by buying it on the internet from abroad these days, only dulls the pain to acceptable levels for twenty-four hours. Our GP [family doctor] referred Karen to an immunologist who took blood samples and instructed our GP to prescribe an EpiPen which is an injection which contains epinephrine. EpiPen is used to treat severe allergic reactions, anaphylaxis, to insect stings or bites, foods, drugs, and other allergens. I had to know how to use it in case Karen was not able too. Karen had to have the pen on her at all times. The pen has two doses in it. If the first one doesn’t produce results you twist the plunger and inject the second dose. They are different now, but that’s how it was then.

“Early the following year Karen was stung by a wasp and had less of a reaction than I would have done which puzzled us. Later that year when out walking she was bitten by three horseflies. A few days later when picking raspberries she was stung by a wasp on her forehead. Nothing happened for a couple of hours, then her face began to swell. I used the EpiPen, both doses, but by the time we arrived at casualty [US, ER] her head was the size of a pumpkin, her eyes were no longer visible and she was off her head rambling incoherently. Her skin was stretched so tight it looked like it would split. They rushed her away and I was told an hour later she had needed cardiac resuscitation and had nearly died, but was now stable and I could see her.

“Karen was in the hospital for two days. We went to see the immunologist which was when I remembered that both severe reactions to the wasp stings had been preceded by horsefly bites. He reckoned Karen had probably been sensitised to the wasp sting by the horsefly bites and asked that Karen had blood taken immediately if she was bitten by a horsefly again and that it be sent to him. Karen agreed, but we moved and she’s never been bitten by horseflies or stung by a wasp since, though she still carries a pair of EpiPens and has them replaced every two years.”

“Bad thing that anaphylaxis, Geoff. I was at school with a lad in the late sixties called Douggie McDonald who unknown to him ate a chocolate containing Brazil nuts. In seconds he couldn’t breath, and he was swelling up all over. His head went like a pumpkin too. He’d have died but for one of the older kids being a Saint John’s Ambulance trainee. He took a biro [ball point pen] pulled the middle bit out and pushed it through Douggie's throat into his wind pipe so he could breathe through the pen tube. Apparently it’s a trick they’re taught. The ambulance took Douggie away and he was in hospital for a week as I remember it. He’ll have that scar on his throat for the rest of his life, still it’s someting to talk about.” Frank shrugged and added, “But at least he’s still around to talk about it.”

Things went quiet as all considered Frank’s tale and how thin the line between life and death could be. The silence was broken by Gladys announcing, “Supper time, Gentlemen. It’s your barbecue, but, due to the change in the weather, cooked in the oven and served inside off a couple of kitchen trolleys. There’s chicken pieces, steak, sausages, bacon ribs, Aggie’s own burgers, corn on the cob and chips just for a change. You’ll need to have plenty of space on the tables because there’s melted butter for the corn and pinda saus for the meat. That’s Indonesian peanut sauce, Gentlemen, and for the philistines a jug of gravy. At a special request from Sasha there will be no salad.” There was laughter at Gladys’ last remark as despite salad never being on the supper menu all knew what Sasha thought of what he referred to as ‘bloody rabbit food’. “It’ll be on the tables in five minutes, so start piling the empties on the bar please.”

“I’ll deal with it, Love,” Pete said. “Stan, nip and get some salt and pepper would you please?”

After supper, which all had agreed was exceedingly tasty and even better value at two pounds, the tables were cleared and glasses refilled prior to resumption of the main business of the evening. It didn’t matter what was on the Saturday supper menu it always cost two pounds. Gladys said it all evened out in the end and she didn’t have to mess about with giving change that way. No one was volunteering anything, and it looked like Sasha was going to have to finish the evening’s tales off with one of his inexhaustible supply.

“Is that it then, Lads? Sasha finishes the tales and then it’s time for dominoes and a fresh pint?” asked Pete.

One of the regular outsiders, the one who’d had a glass of poteen, coughed and said, “Can any one tell a tale? I’ve got a couple of short ones to do with hospitals I could tell if I may. I’m Clive McNamara by the way.”

Sasha grinned and said, “Pull up a chair, Clive. Pete, fetch the man a drink. I’ll stand for it.”

Pete said, “Not this one you won’t. This one’s on the house. Guinness(10) isn’t it, Clive?”

“Please.”

After a minute Pete returned and said, “There you go.” Clive was elderly but looked to be in his early sixties rather than seventies like most of the Grumpy Old Men.

“I’m going back maybe forty years or perhaps a little less. My mate Dave Woolly rode a BSA 650 Super Rocket, which was actually a 646cc engine not a 650. Dave was a self employed sparks(11) and I was a self employed central heating engineer: a glorified plumber. We laboured for each other when work was scarce. I was suffering a shortage of work at the time and he’d wanted help putting in a bid for installing sanitary towel incinerators in the girls toilets at the local secondary school, which had been an all boys secondary modern school but was about to become a coeducational comprehensive. For those in need of explanation it’s simple, a boy’s only school for the bottom end became a mixed school for all abilities. The joke is we’d put the bid in a fortnight before and we’d been so cheap that Dave had been asked if there was a mistake. The next bid up had been thirty times ours, and we’d gone as high as we’d dared. We hastily cobbled a letter together explaining a zero was missing off the end. Eventually we won the job and learnt a lot about bidding for local authority contracts in the process, but after our discussions and Sunday lunch Dave left my house to post the letter.

As he pulled off a kid on a push bike rode in front of him. Dave wasn’t even doing five miles an hour, the bike went over and Dave hit the tarmac with his bike on top of him. The kid disappeared never to be seen again. Dave couldn’t ride because he’d hurt his elbow. He threatened me with death if I ever told anyone what had happened. I was riding an Ariel square four at the time and took him to the local hospital. The Xrays shewed he’d chipped a bit off his elbow. He was told pain killers and time would sort it out. Whilst Dave was in Xray I was waiting in the casualty waiting room when a bloke came in with what I can only describe as a completely flat and bloody face. The weather at the time was a bit windy, and it seems a garage door had been grabbed by the wind and hit him in the face. “It was only a bit of wind,” he kept saying. I had to laugh because it was only a bit of wind that brought the Cutty Sark clipper carrying tea from Shanghai to Britain in a hundred and seven days and carrying wool from Sidney to Brittany in sixty-seven. That’s that one. I said it was only short, and it’s not very interesting but I thought it funny at the time.

“Some folk will never understand the power of the elements, Clive. City folk are even worse than country folk. A nice little tale. What about the other one?” Stan asked.

Clive looked around at the smiling, encouraging faces and said, “My wife Claire and I were waiting in casualty. I’ve no idea why now because it must be twenty years ago at least, probably thirty. There was a harassed young mother with three kids in front of us and the oldest was playing up. Running around, screaming and jumping up and down on and off chairs and paying no heed to his mum at all. I could see she was on the verge of tears. Claire said to me, ‘Why doesn’t she smack that child? It’s no wonder kids are out of control these days.’

“I said, ‘Easy for you to say, Love. You’re a nurse. This is your kind of territory. You’re not intimidated being here. That young lass has gone to the front, given her name and address, and is probably terrified that if she disciplines that child in anyway she’ll have social workers knocking on her door taking her kids away.’

“I went up to the young mother and said, ‘I understand how you feel. Would you like me to calm him down for you?’ She did no more than nod. I picked the seven or eight year old up by the scruff of his coat collar and with his feet six inches off the floor said quietly but menacingly, ‘Your mum is a nice lady and loves you. I’m not nice, I’m not a lady and I certainly don’t love you. If you don’t calm down and be quiet I’ll smack your arse so hard you’ll not be able to sit down for a month and I’ll have blisters on my hand. There are ill people in here, some of them in pain and they don’t need you to cope with as well. Now be a good lad, sit down next to your mum and shut the fuck up. Ok?’ At that I pushed him down into the chair next to his mum. The thoroughly terrified little shit cowered next to his mum with barely a whimper.”

The laughter round the room took a couple of minutes to settle, but Alf said, “All lads need putting in their place from time to time by a bloke who’ll take no shit. I hate to even think what kind of a monster I’d have grown up into if my old man hadn’t kicked my arse from time to time. All lads are the same.”

Bill added glumly, “You’d be gaoled for that today, but that’s why so many young men are complete idiots. It’s not that they’re unemployed, they’re unemployable. Lasses are just as bad too now, but in a different way. I read a while back in the paper that adolescent male elephants are harassing other animals and have killed a few folk because all the big bulls who used to keep them in their place have been shot for their ivory. Sounds depressingly familiar doesn’t it. You did that laddie a favour, Clive. Though I doubt he’ll ever realise it.” There was a murmur of agreement before Clive continued.

“The mother said, ‘Thank you. His dad is not going to be happy about his behaviour. I appreciate the help, and it’ll give Josh a laugh.’ She turned to her son and said, ‘Say thank you to the gentleman, Paul. He’s just saved you a smack from your dad.’

“The kid did as he was told, and I returned to my seat and my gobsmacked wife. That’s it. Not much of a tale, but I’ve been wanting to tell someone about that for years.”

Pete said, “Good one, Clive. Well worth the beer. We could do with more tale tellers joining in. You play dominoes, Lad? I’ll partner you.”

After everyone had gone home Pete told Gladys about Clive and said, “We could do with a bit of advertising. A sign at the front saying something like The Green Dragon home to the Grumpy Old Men’s Society, tale tellers welcome.”

“Mmm, I work on it, Love. I’m sure Dave said his brother, or maybe it was his brother in law, did a bit of sign writing. I’ll ask Lucy.”

Word Usage Key.

1 Poteen, Irish moonshine with no duty paid on it.
2 Mountain Dew, familiar name for poteen.
3 Outsider, term for one who doesn’t live locally.
4 Whiskey, the correct spelling for Irish whiskey. Scotch is spelt whisky.
5 Spell, a rest in this contest.
6 Paid work or play, getting paid even when one is off sick. This is normal for public employees in the UK as long as one has a doctor’s sick note.
7 Leech, an old colloquial term for a doctor deriving from the medicinal application of leeches.
8 Lonnings, lanes.
9 A six month, a common old usage, compare with a fortnight (fourteen nights) and a senight (seven nights) the former in common usage all over Britain and the latter in parts of northern Britain.
10 Guinness, a dark Irish beer.
11 Sparks, electrician.