It was a quiet night in the Green Dragon and there were no outsiders in the taproom. A cool but not cold evening was unusual for the time of year, but the storm that had blown in was blowing fifty mile an hour winds with gusts of up to seventy-five mile an hour. It was dangerous to be out and most of the men in the taproom had arrived on their own. Their wives had stayed at home.
When all had a drink in front of them Denis said, “Pete, get a couple of bottles of that Tequila I brought back from Mexico out will you. We might as well enjoy the stuff on a night like this. I’ll tell the first one. Alf, a long time ago, when I first moved up here, I mentioned threatening some idiots who were trying to get money out of me because they thought I was the previous owner of my house. You mind that?”
“Aye. You said something about Belinda having cousins in the IRA, and Sasha told me to drop it when I asked about it.”
“Well seeing as there’re just us here and no outsiders I’ll tell you what I meant.”
“You sure about this, Denis?” Sasha asked.
“It’s ok, Sasha. It happened a long time ago and Belinda is ok about it now. The tale is really in two parts which only came together years later as a result of a perfectly unrelated conversation with Belinda’s cousin Kate. The first part of the tale goes back to when I was in my early teens. You all know I went to a public school called Repton near Derby, yes?” There were agreements all round as Denis had told numerous tales about his school days. “It would have been in sixty-seven or sixty-eight. There was a robbery of a stately home somewhere, I can’t recall where. There were several old masters stolen. Paintings worth huge amounts of money. The press was full of it. A while later the gang were rounded up and it turned out that the theft had been done by an IRA cell. The leader’s mistress was a high society girl who had provided the guy with all the information they’d needed to do the job. The only reason I remembered it all was because I went to school with her cousin. Most of the cell were members of a family, a father and his four sons. They lived on a farm in county Galway and based all their operations out of there. There was a joint operation with The RUC and the Gardai that levelled the farmhouse and buildings to the ground. There was nothing more than a few inches above ground level left. That was that. I wasn’t particularly interested and forgot all about the matter for over fifty years.
“Belinda as is obvious is Irish and keeps in regular contact with a large number of her relatives. Her family is like most folks’, full of the bizarre. Her granny had married three times. Her first husband died at the Somme. Her third husband died in a mining catastrophe, and she knew all her family from both those marriages. However, nothing was known about the second husband. It was not known how he had died nor anything about whether there had been any offspring of the marriage. It was known her granny was Irish and all three of her husbands had been Irish too. Belinda like her cousins kept in touch with the family that still lived in Ireland. Her cousin Kate was looking into the second marriage and Belinda was interested enough to keep in weekly contact by phone. Kate live near Dover. I warned them both that such investigations could prove to be traumatic, especially regarding Irish families, but they ignored me. Kate’s mother Katherine was still alive then, she was a hundred and three but in full possession of her faculties. She’d always refused to say anything on the matter but eventually gave Kate enough information to find out about their relatives.
“Kate tracked down the family. It seemed that their grandmother’s second husband had simply disappeared with his four young sons, and in order to feed her family their grandmother had registered him dead from an accident at work and bigamously married Belinda’s grandfather, the third husband. Katherine was a daughter of the first husband. Kate was on the phone to Belinda when I heard them talking. I recognised enough from their conversation to realise the family was the gang that the cousin of boy I went to school with had been involved with. Kate was amazed that I knew more of the matter than she, and I referred her to the newspaper articles of the day. It seemed Kate and Belinda had four cousins who had spent the best part of twenty years in the H blocks of the Maze prison for terrorism. I did warn them. Both are still shocked by the matter.”
“Are they in contact with their cousins, Denis?”
“No. They never attempted to make contact. Apparently Katherine was, but she died a couple of years later.”
"What happened to the second husband?"
"He was shot by the British army in some sort of a paramilitary operation years before Kate found out about their cousins."
There was a profound silence after that, and eventually Alf said, “I’ll tell you about what I remember of Old Cooper from when I was a boy.” Old Cooper had long been dead, but his reputation for parsimony and tight dealing still lived on. “Old Cooper rented a small farm, about thirty acres, from the local council. The council has been gone almost as long as he now, replaced by the new larger administrative units in seventy-six. I used to earn a few bob down at my Uncle Frank’s farm in those days. I’d have been in my early teens. The first thing my cousin Frank and I did every morning was go down to Cooper’s place to tow start his tractor because he wouldn’t buy a battery and it was bad manners to refuse to do it. He didn’t live there, and he used the farmhouse as a big chicken shed along with the dozen or more derelict cars on the place.
“Combine harvesters had been around for twenty years by then, but he had three old thrashing boxes on the place all made of wood. He had a fascinating philosophy regarding bills. He told me he didn’t pay them, because and I quote, ‘I don’t pay bills, big uns I can’t afford to pay and small uns I can’t be bothered with.’ He was a sitting tenant so couldn’t be evicted as long as he paid the rent, but as soon as he died the council bulldozed the house, set fire to the thrashing boxes, had the cars removed and sold the place to a developer who built a housing estate on the place. He was a pain to everyone, but probably a better neighbour than the bloody townies that live on the estate now. At least he never complained about cockerels crowing and being disturbed by lambs baaing. Bloody townies, if they don’t like it here they should go back to living in the towns. There’s one damned old woman used to walk past my place every morning and she put complaints in to the police, the council, and the RSPCA because she was frightened of my buff Orpington cockerel. Hens have wandered free on my spot for three hundred years I know about. That cockerel is so vicious that Ellen picks him up every night and carries him under her arm to put him to roost with the hens. Most days there were logs all over the road because she picked them off my wood pile to throw at the cockerel. She complained to me one day and got really upset when all I kept repeating was, ‘I’ve nothing to say to you.’ I think the silly cow thought she’d get me into a row so she could tell folk how I’d insulted her. Still it’s all resolved now.”
“How so, Alf?”
“She died. Like I said, resolved.”
Gladys announced, “Supper time, Gentlemen. Chicken and mushroom pies with sweetcorn in green coriander sauce and chips just for a change. Probably not buff Orpington though.”
After supper Eric asked Alf, “Your Uncle Frank was the poultry man out Long Resteth way wasn’t he?”
“That’s the bloke, but the farm is nearer to Upper Thremble than Long Resteth. My cousin Frank farms there now. Uncle Frank's been away many a year now, though Aunt Lilly lived to be nigh on a hundred. Uncle kept hens, Guinea fowl, ducks, geese, turkeys and raised rare birds for a few zoos too. My cousin still does. I went to school with my cousin Frank, he’s a couple of years up on me. We both earnt a good bit of money finish plucking when we were lads, especially at Christmas time. They have a team of women handling the plucking machines. The women drop the dead birds in a temperature controlled water bath to loosen the feathers for a couple of minutes then they’re put in a rotating drum with rubber fingers that take most of the feathers off. We used to pull out the wing and tail feathers that the drum machine didn’t remove. Some of them are so tight you have to use pliers to get them out. I’d been doing it for a couple of Christmases when Uncle Frank said the man that did the killing was ill and he asked my cousin if he was up for it. Frank turned green, but I said I’d do it. Uncle asked me if I’d ever done it before. I said no, but if I was shewn once it would be no problem, because I’d killed rabbits bred for meat.
“You drop the birds head first into a row of buckets with no bottoms in, knock em on the head with a bat to stun them and use a penknife to cut the artery in the neck. They bleed out into the trough below. The blood goes to a pharmaceuticals company, but I've no idea what they do with it. Frank said he'd heard it was something to do with artificial hormones, but he wasn't sure. After bleeding out, they're taken to the warm water tanks prior to plucking. It was easy money, far easier work than pulling tail feathers with pliers. I did it for a few years. I only stopped after I married Ellen and I needed the time to do my spot up.”
The men had the dominoes out after that and settled down to their game and Tequila.
