by Tony Bassett
We had made it clear we would remain friends and he could call round any time he wanted. Yet I would miss him.
One clear advantage in letting him move concerned our legal position with him. I had put to the back of my mind the prospect the police would be unhappy if they probed his immigration status and found he had stayed with us.
It had been nerve-wracking when the detective sergeant called round. But with Yusuf gone, we could no longer be accused of acting wrongly - could we?
That evening, I was able to drive the Mondeo right into the caravan park, which was located behind the main pack-houses. Although it had been specified as being a caravan, it was probably better described as a park home, which Yusuf was to share with three others. Besides the beds, there was a kitchen with a cooker and fridge, a bathroom with a shower and toilet and a communal area with a television.
He introduced us to his three fellow-tenants - all men - who were aged twenty-one, twenty-six and twenty-eight. They were a jovial group of friends who appeared to like Yusuf, patting him on the back and trying to make him feel welcome. Looking back, it is possible one or two of them might have held reservations about him. He was, after all, from a different country from them. However, in front of us, they did not show it.
Anne had bought milk, eggs, bread and some tinned food from a supermarket for Yusuf while he was at work. She had also decided to donate to him some of our saucepans and a small frying pan which we rarely used.
Before leaving him, she cleaned out a cupboard in the caravan’s kitchen and placed his food in it.
When it was time for us to depart, I hugged him and assured him once again he could visit us at any time. In return, he invited us to call round on him at his new home whenever we wanted.
Anne kissed him on the cheek and hugged him before we both walked away in quiet contemplation.
I thought I noticed a tear in Anne’s eye as we got into the Mondeo for our journey back to the cottage. She was certainly in a rather emotional state. However, she insisted a speck of dust had been blown into her eye by the breeze.
Whichever was the case, I can say categorically we were both a little upset at the departure of our stowaway.
Later that evening, Miles Benton was in fine form when I went for a drink on my own in the Merry Friar. The publican reminded me of a Victorian industrialist with his curly white hair, neatly-twirled white moustache and straggly white beard. He was a stout man of medium build who projected a commanding presence.
‘Bob, did you hear about the man who spent all his life driving limousines,’ he said, as I sipped my second pint. ‘When he retired he had nothing to chauffeur it. That’s unlike the man from up our road who was run over by a steamroller. He was chuffed to bits. He was in wards three, four and five at the Kent and Canterbury.’
Over the years, he had developed a simple philosophy. He felt, if he could make his cus tomer s laugh, it would produce a happy atmosphere and, as a result, his profits would rise.
‘Here’s another one,’ said Miles. ‘I was chatting to a friend about holidays. He said: “Where’d you go this year?” I said: “Greece.” He said: “Did you have the shashlik kebabs?” I said: “Yes, I suffered from that for a whole week!”’
I have been a friend of his since we moved to the village. Miles is a sincere, straight-forward man. You always know where you stand with him. If there is a crisis, he will always offer to help. If a small injustice is done, he will shake the walls of Jericho to put things right. In that way, he exhibits the same moral probity as Anne.
After drinking two pints of bitter and ordering a third, I took the fifty-one-year-old landlord aside.
‘Miles, one of your regulars is called Knight, isn’t he?’
‘Gordon Knight. He lives just a few hundred yards away along the main road. It’s the house with the antique lamp in the window. Why d’you ask?’
‘I’ve heard he had a big row with my next-door neighbour, Stephen Rigden, the guy who was found dead last month.’
‘Oh, I know what you’re on about. Yes, Gordon was whinging to me about that fellow Rigden. Your neighbour claimed he hadn’t done a proper job. Said there was a problem with the guttering and a load of water was gushing down an outside wall. Your neighbour wasn’t very happy about it. He got another firm into finish the job and only paid Gordon half the money. He still owed six hundred pounds, according to Gordon.’
I discovered the police had visited the fifty-nine-year-old roofer’s oak-beamed Victorian cottage. Knight left the detective in his front room for a few minutes while he went to fetch the original invoice from another room, along with a letter from Rigden declining to pay. When he returned, his visitor was flicking through the pages of the roofer’s accounts book.
‘I’ve heard that Gordon had red pen markings against three names - Stephen Rigden, Lucas Sharp and someone called Couchman,’ Miles explained. ‘He was forced to admit these were three men that owed him large sums of money. He was considering whether to call in debt collectors.’
‘You don’t think...’ I began.
‘No, of course not. Don’t get me wrong. He’s a big bloke and he can look after himself. I’d a problem getting him to leave the bar one evening and it took three of us to point him in the direction of home. But, as he told me the other day: “I needed that bloke Rigden alive so I could get me money. He’s no good to me dead.”’
‘How did it end with the police?’ I asked.
‘They just left it at that. Said they’d copy the documents and send them back to him. Said they might drop in on him again.’
I finished my third pint and walked out into the cold evening air. The street lights along the narrow road sent a faint orange glow into the night sky.
I was deep in thought as I wandered back to our cottage. What was the significance of the three names found in the roofer’s address book? Had Knight told the truth? Or had he lost his temper and gone round to Rigden’s house to try to extract his money? Had he attacked the client in his own home?
I decided it was unlikely the man had been killed in a row over six hundred pounds. Yet curious things sometimes happen.
10
The fading sun was beginning to dip over the horizon as Anne and I drove towards the farm on the last Monday in September. It coloured the darkening sky with a reddish hue.
As we parked behind the main offices, the air was filled with the rich scent of fruit and the aromatic smell of hops which drifted over from farmland across the road.
Anne was taking her first evening class and she was nervous.
Sue Wickens had supplied her with some text books and exercise books as well as a good supply of pencils. She had been allocated a room previously used for storing crates. The walls had been redecorated in magnolia and the floor was covered with a new, light-brown carpet. A large blackboard and easel had been set up beside an office desk for her, while four rows of desks and seats had been installed for the pupils.
It looked as if one of the farm managers had bought a job-lot of second-hand school desks and chairs from a shop.
One by one, members of her first class of pickers and packers began to venture in for the three-hour lesson. I sat discreetly at the back, keen to see how her teaching style would compare with mine.
By the time the session began at half-past six, we counted twenty-six students - fifteen women and eleven men. Yusuf had been one of the first to arrive. He handed an exercise book and text book to every student as they entered. Then he sat down at the front, close to his teacher.
As an initial exercise, she got each student, in turn, to say their name and give details of their age and town of origin.
She wrote down the information and then checked the names against a company list.
As the evening continued, she taught them English words relating to their work - such as na
mes of fruit, types of fruit, parts of trees and words used for factory equipment. She had obtained most of these terms in an email from Sue Wickens. She wrote the words on the blackboard and then got the class to say each one out loud in unison.
Yusuf emerged as the keenest student. It was clear he had benefitted greatly from the assistance Anne had given him and he appeared more proficient in English than the other scholars.
‘Right, class. What are “nutrients”? Anyone?’ Anne asked at one stage. Yusuf’s hand shot up.
‘Things that give the trees food so the fruit can grow,’ he said.
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Nutrients provide nourishment in order to provide life and growth. What is “canker”?’
‘A fungal disease of the apple,’ said Yusuf, before she had even finished the question.
‘That’s right, Yusuf,’ she replied. ‘And what is “controlled-atmosphere storage” - normally simplified to “CA storage”?’
Yusuf’s hand was raised again.
‘Yes, Yusuf?’
‘It’s managing oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and temperature to make the apple store best for the apples.’
‘That’s correct. It’s a means of providing an atmosphere best suited to the particular variety of apple and ensuring the fruit do not ripen too quickly. Well done, Yusuf.’
I mumbled at the back: ‘Anyone else know anything about apples?’ Three of the students turned round and smiled, but none of Yusuf’s classmates appeared to share his enthusiasm and the session continued in the same fashion.
When it was finally over, I could see the experience had had a major impact on Anne. She looked drained after standing up for more than three hours and trying to explain the intricacies of the English language to the group - some of whom appeared reluctant to learn.
‘It was tougher than I thought,’ she told me, as I lay next to her in bed that night. ‘It’s not just two sessions a week. There’s all the lesson preparation and I’m also expected to set homework. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to carry on with it.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I told her, trying to sound encouraging. ‘Teachers often feel like that at the start. As things progress and you notice improvements in their language skills, you’ll find it rewarding and you’ll realise taking this job was the right move for you. I thought you did very well.’
Life can be strange. I have decided, after thirty-four years on this planet, that although I have more knowledge than I did as a child, I have no greater level of comprehension. My philosophy breaks down into a simple phrase: The more I know, the less I understand.
I will give you an example. Two months ago Yusuf was camping out in Calais with other destitute young men desperate to start a new life in Britain. He took a life-or-death decision to travel across the Channel as a stowaway.
Now his world had been transformed. He had just moved into his own home - albeit, one he shared with three other people - and he had been head-hunted for the position of farm messenger, a post he had launched into with his customary energy.
We invited Yusuf round to the cottage for tea on Sunday, the fourth of October. It was ten days since he had moved out. We felt sorry for him. We wondered if he might be lonely.
But as he tucked into egg and cress sandwiches and cupcakes in our front room, we discovered he was enjoying life. He had been accepted as a trusted and reliable member of staff at the farm and all his workmates enjoyed a laugh and a joke with him, except for one - Lucas Sharp.
Sharp was an accounts supervisor who had inexplicably taken an instant disliking to our friend. The more the staff lauded Yusuf, the more Sharp’s loathing intensified.
I knew little about thirty-five-year-old Sharp at this time, but over the coming weeks I learned a lot more. He was the beloved nephew of Jane Taylor, a wealthy widow with three sisters - one of whom was farm secretary Sue Wickens.
Jane, whose late husband had been a successful builder, was a long-stay hospital patient who, inexplicably, doted on her nephew. She allowed him to use her thatched cottage as a leisure retreat while she was away.
But instead of taking his wife and sons there for relaxing weekends, the wretched man was in the habit of taking his married lover there, we soon discovered.
The cottage next to farmland at the end of a country lane was an ideal place for a lovers’ tryst.
The two-bedroomed property, in the remote hamlet of Chivingden, was surrounded by trees and a high hedge which cocooned it from the prying eyes of neighbours and dog walkers.
After a brisk walk up the lane - which rejoiced in the rather unimaginative name of The Street - a pedestrian would arrive at this picturesque dwelling. Often the only sound you would hear would be birdsong, drifting through the air from nearby trees, and the toll of the bell from the nearby church. Visitors would detect a faint aroma of Kentish wild flowers - particularly honeysuckle and phlox.
After Yusuf began his new job, Sharp was to annoy him in the same way a scavenging wasp irritates a party of picnickers. Every time Yusuf had cause to enter the accounts office, Sharp would make an insulting remark. He would joke: ‘Watch out! Here’s the camel herder’ or ‘Hold onto your money, it’s peasant boy.’
Somehow Yusuf managed to rise above it. He declined to respond, but I knew he was deeply hurt by these remarks. No one at the farm supported Sharp’s bullying ways and some of the staff resented his behaviour.
A few days after our conversation with Yusuf over tea, we discovered another new development in our friend’s life - he appeared to have found a girlfriend.
Anne had spotted him walking around the farm hand-in-hand with a twenty-one-year-old Romanian girl, who went by the name of Kristina Petrescu.
I was glad to see his life had changed so dramatically in such a short space of time. He had faced years of struggle in his homeland, he often told me. Now he had the promise of a stable and happy future.
We found out about Yusuf’s romance after Anne’s second English class. As usual, he had been the star pupil, asking dozens of questions and providing dozens of answers.
Anne noticed a slight change in his personality. He was more self-assured, more confident. As the students filed out of the classroom at the end of the session, she began to understand why.
Kristina, a girl with a sallow complexion and long, dark, curly hair, took his hand and was momentarily seen staring into Yusuf’s eyes.
When Anne returned home, she was more solemn than normal. When I asked how the class had gone, she at first said simply it had been ‘the usual.’
It took a few minutes of questioning before she admitted Yusuf had a girlfriend. Eventually, Anne opened up and described the young lady who had caught our friend’s eye. Anne did not seem happy for him and I could not conceive why this was.
‘I’m concerned about the girl. That’s all,’ said Anne. ‘Perhaps she’s too young for him.’
‘Come on!’ I said. ‘He’s twenty-three and she’s twenty-one. The ages are just right.’
‘But he’s an old twenty-three-year-old, while she seems very immature. She’s always interrupting the class by giggling. He wants to get on and his career’s looking up. He’s now the farm messenger, and he’s doing very well, by all accounts. I’m just concerned she may hold him back. She may turn out to be a bad influence.’
Then I thought I detected a tear beneath her right eye. She bent down to stroke the cat.
‘He didn’t even ask after Fiesta,’ she murmured.
It appeared to me while I had, in many ways, been glad to see Yusuf move on with his life, Anne was taking his departure rather badly.
I decided this was just a sign she had still not moved on since the death of our beloved Alfie. Perhaps Fiesta was not filling that void. Maybe we would have to consider getting another dog, I thought.
Around this
time, I heard from friends of friends there was a furious row at Lucas Sharp’s home in Broad Oak, Canterbury between him and his thirty-two-year-old wife Gemma - who attended school in the 1990s at the same time as Anne.
Sadly, it took place in front of their children at about ten o’clock at night - a time when the two boys should have been asleep.
I know some of the details because one of the boys, twelve-year-old William --who was Lucas’s step-son -- was in one of my History classes. Gossip travels through a school faster than a toupee flying off in a hurricane. I blame paper-thin walls in the social housing.
‘You’ve been with that floozie again,’ Gemma was reported as saying. ‘I can smell her on your clothes.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ was his quick riposte.
‘I know you’ve been with that Bennett woman. Don’t she know we’re married or don’t she care?’
‘I was working late,’ he apparently claimed.
‘Then why wasn’t you answering your phone?’ she demanded.
It is claimed that Gemma then made several allegations about her husband’s conduct with the Bennett woman - all of which he denied. But she then went on to say: ‘I’m not putting up with this any more. Either you end your grubby little affair or you can kiss goodbye to your marriage because I’ve had enough!’ Evidently, she added: ‘If you hang around with that blonde bitch any more, I’m going to do for you,’ or words to that effect.
A few days later, Anne was nearly involved in a car accident when she arrived to hold an English class. She was driving the Mondeo through the farm entrance when she had to brake hard to avoid colliding with a gold-coloured Toyota Land Cruiser. Harsh words were immediately exchanged.
The driver of the other car was an attractive blonde woman in her late twenties that Anne learned later was Rosie Bennett. She was accompanied in the passenger seat by a man she recognised as Lucas Sharp. He had interrupted one of her lessons for some matter of minor significance and Yusuf had later identified him as Sharp.
