by Ripley, Mike
I sneaked a look at the CCTV around the edge of Mrs Singh’s sari to make sure that the shop was empty, then turned back to the beer shelves and spoke over my shoulder, dead casual, while running a finger across the shoulders of a row of bottles.
‘Haven’t you got any of that French lager, Mrs S.?’
When I didn’t get a reply, I turned and saw that she was staring at me.
‘You know, that cheap beer in the little bottles. Mr Singh let me have a couple of cases last month.’
‘Don’t know what you mean,’ she said sullenly. ‘We’ve got what you see.’
‘I can’t see it. You know, the stuff that comes from France in the dumpy bottles. Mr S. let me have a case for a fiver last time I was in.’
‘Then come back when my husband is in,’ she snapped. ‘He’s got his receipts for everything here. All the receipts. Come back later tonight.’
‘Hey, it was never this difficult to get a drink when I lived round here,’ I said with a big smile, but it cut no ice.
‘Come back later. Tonight. After dark.’
I saw that she had taken a fold in her sari and was twisting it with both hands as if she was ringing water out of the material. It wasn’t worth pushing it.
‘Okay, Mrs S., I’ll pop back. Take care.’
She said nothing but I felt her watching me through the closed-circuit cameras until I reached the door.
As I opened it, I noticed that the fingers of my right hand were filthy with dust.
I once had a old and distinguished friend (still have, if he’s not in prison somewhere) who used to drive trucks across Europe for Heavy Metal bands. I’m talking serious articulated lorries here, not pick-ups or Transits or ten-tonners. It was a rule of thumb amongst Heavy Metal bands that you could never have enough trucks, for sound and lighting gear, and stage props, and a band on tour with less than three was definitely on the B-list.
On one trip he was driving through a village in a mountainous region of a certain Central European country when he had to slow to a crawl to avoid a flock of sheep blocking the road. The young shepherds, and he swears none were over ten years old, made obvious signs that they wanted cash hand-outs from the man in the big truck who was obviously richer than they were. Naturally, as any good ‘transport tech’ (they’re not called roadies any more) would, he ignored them. In the next village, a couple of kilometres down the road, there were no sheep but there was a flock of young lads who shouted and gesticulated at him and threw things at the truck. Not noticing any physical damage, he kept going until the next village where he had to stop because the local cops were waiting for him. They pointed to the fresh blood on his hubcaps and headlights and, part in broken English and part in pantomime, accused him of running over a sheep, which was still a hanging offence in those parts. Despite pointing out that a fair number of hen feathers were lodged in his front bumper, where some unfortunate fowl had been whacked, it cost my mate a £200 on-the-spot fine instead of the loose change he could have got away with two villages back.
Nothing like that happened to me as I drove down through Deptford the next morning, not even in Greenwich, or ‘Dome City’ as it was known thanks to the Millennium Dome which, once complete, would bring everlasting prosperity to the area once someone could think of something to put inside it.
I don’t know why I was letting Amy spook me. I was perfectly safe inside my London black cab even if I was venturing outside London and crossing the M25 which serves as a modern-day moat for the capital fortress, keeping out its natural enemies such as farmers, fox-hunters and all those vegetable smells the countryside generates.
It was only Kent after all; the garden of England, famed for Canterbury Cathedral, Romney Marsh (though I knew people who thought he was a footballer), the young Charles Dickens, hops, orchards and probably lots more.
Oh yes, I remembered, it was maidens. That was the other thing it was famous for, Kentish maidens. Or at least I was pretty sure that was right, but then I hadn’t taken even a recreational drug for months, so what did I know?
By then I was on the M2, a beautiful, scenic piece of motorway which bypassed all the boring places like Rochester and Chatham where nothing of interest had ever happened, and I was on a clear run to Canterbury. This was usually about the place where decent, law-abiding citizens realised that they had got on the wrong motorway and they should actually have been on the M20, not the M2, which takes them straight to the Channel Tunnel. Unless of course they were actually going to Canterbury, say they were an archbishop or something.
I wasn’t – going to Canterbury, that is. At the end of the motorway I turned off towards the north coast, Whitstable and Herne Bay and the steely grey mirror of the North Sea. The local tourist bodies probably called it the Kentish Riviera or similar. Londoners called it the mouth of the River Thames.
It’s a coastline of islands, or ‘isles’ – of Grain, of Sheppey, of Thanet – some of which are islands, some of which aren’t – famous for its bird sanctuaries and its oysters. Maybe it was the oysters which attracted the Romans and explains the fact why you can’t walk far without tripping over the remains of Roman pottery or pottery kilns, iron works and even a fort, at Reculver. Or maybe the Romans brought the oysters with them as a sort of take-away in case they didn’t like the native grub. I forget.
I found Seagrave sandwiched between Whitstable and Herne Bay, which was something the Romans hadn’t done as it hadn’t been there then. The town – and it was just about big enough to be called a town – was basically nineteenth-century overspill, perhaps, given its name, as a place where people from Whitstable and Herne Bay went before they died. With a name like Seagrave it should have been a natural for a Charles Dickens novel but even he seemed to have missed it. There were no oyster beds there, it didn’t have a harbour as such, it could not boast miles of golden sand, there wasn’t even a funfair. There was no obvious sign of heavy industry and the bungalows which dotted the sea front were desperately in need of a coat of paint. The place didn’t seem to have a lot going for it; but then it did have Seagrave’s Seaside Ales.
The fact that there was a brewery there at all was not that surprising given that the Victorians went through a spell of building breweries designed to be solid enough to last a thousand years. They found that, as in politics, a thousand years is a long time.
Victorian engineers thought they had the technology to build just about anywhere and deep, thickly insulated wells to get at the local water table were not seen as a problem even at the seaside. Sadly, they underestimated the power of the sea and, within a generation, many brewery wells had been breached and contaminated with salt water. Unless it had access to other sources of water, the brewery was doomed, which is why only a handful of them survive on the coast itself.
It was not the fact that there was a brewery in Seagrave that was surprising, it was that there was still a brewery there, and still there since 1849 according to the date woven into the wrought-iron gates of the main entrance.
The gates were probably original. Certainly the main entrance into the brewery yard was. No company would have been allowed to build a brewery from scratch there today, shoehorned as it was between a supermarket and a library on what passed for the town’s main drag, Seagrave’s High Street. But then the Victorians probably built the brewery first, then the town around it.
I could always have asked the white-haired old man who opened a window in the gatehouse and yelled at me. He looked old enough to know.
I slid down Armstrong’s window and cupped a hand to my ear.
‘I’m sorry?’
His face seemed to fill the open sash window and his white moustache bristled impressively. I wondered what rank he told people he had held in the war. I wondered which war.
‘No one here’s called for a taxi,’ he shouted although we were only about two feet apart.
‘I’m not collecting, I’m visiting,’ I shouted back.
He consulted a green clipboard, then wave
d it at me.
‘No brewery tours booked for today.’ He was going a lovely shade of rose pink as he yelled. Maybe I shouldn’t have been revving Armstrong’s engine so much. ‘You have to make an appointment.’
‘I’m not here for a tour and I do have an appointment.’
‘Whom with?’
I let the pedal up from the metal.
‘With Mr Seton,’ I said smugly.
‘Which one?’ he snapped back.
‘How many have I got to choose from?’
I only said it to wind him up. I didn’t think for a minute he would rise to it, but he did.
‘Well, Mr Wilfred only comes in on the second Friday of the month these days.’ He held up a hand and began to count them off. ‘Mr Hubert is in court today . . .’
‘Oh dear, how sad,’ I said.
‘He’s a magistrate,’ he replied, glaring at me. ‘And Mr Edgar is on his annual skiing holiday.’
He put his head on one side, his mouth twisting into a smile, waiting for me to make my move.
‘So that just leaves Mr Murdo,’ I said, nodding as if agreeing with him on some fundamental piece of philosophy. ‘And I think you’ll find he’s expecting me. The name is Angel and I’m representing Rudgard and Blugden. I was told he liked people to be punctual.’
I had been told no such thing but it sounded impressive, or at least I hoped it did to the gatekeeper.
Something worked. With reluctance, he looked at his clipboard, then he looked at me and then he looked over the length of Armstrong then he looked back at his clipboard. Then he shook his head and levered himself to his feet. When he emerged from the gatehouse he was wearing a peaked cap to go with his brown uniform jacket and trousers. I had just known he would be.
He rattled a couple of bolts and pulled on the gates until they swung open on small iron wheels which had worn grooves in the concrete yard, but he himself remained smack in front of Armstrong’s radiator.
‘Park over there,’ he shouted, pointing to a corner of the yard, ‘in the space marked “Visitors”. Health and Safety regulations require me to tell you that if you park anywhere else you could put yourself and your vehicle at risk. This is a working area and our dray lorries are constantly loading and unloading. The company can accept no responsibility. Someone will come and collect you from your . . . vehicle.’
I gave him a big smile as I accelerated by him, missing his toes by at least an inch, and aimed Armstrong across the brewery yard to where an ancient Citroën Safari was parked in one of two painted rectangles labelled ‘Visitors’.
I swung Armstrong round and reversed into the space next to the Citroën on the basis that it is always safer to park facing the direction of departure in case you need to make a quick exit.
I turned off the engine and looked at my watch in disgust.
I had been in a brewery for almost thirty-five seconds and nobody had offered me a drink yet.
There were two flat-backed lorries and a real dray, a horse-drawn one (though no horses), in the brewery yard. All were standing empty and there was no sign of anybody working anywhere though there was a distant hum of machinery from somewhere inside the brewery buildings and a really quite comforting smell of sweet, warm malt in the air.
As I locked Armstrong, I scoped the place to try and get a feel for the layout and locked on to a sign on a thick oak door across the yard which read: ‘Sampling Cellar’. That seemed the obvious place to start, but I had taken no more than three steps when a voice behind me growled:
‘Mr Angel? The offices are this way.’
It felt like the first time you are caught browsing the Erotica section in the bookshop; by your mother.
She was old enough to be somebody’s grandmother and formidable enough so that you didn’t feel like mentioning it. She wore a cardigan around her shoulders like a cape and a double string of large fake pearls so long she could strangle you without taking them off. Only a very short, black leather skirt and black tights and high heels belied the image of ‘Miss Prim, the Secretary’ from a pack of Happy Families cards. But then, she had pretty good legs, so why not show them?
I didn’t mention that either. I just said:
‘Oh, thank you. I’m here to see Murdo Seton.’
‘Yes, I know. Mr Murdo is waiting for you in Reception. This way.’
I followed the leather skirt up half a dozen stone steps and through a door which could have come from any Victorian suburban villa. It even had a brass knocker and a letter box.
Once inside, it felt like a Victorian villa. There were gas mantles on the wall, a long wooden high-backed bench like a church pew and a wrought-iron fireplace in one wall which had a coal fire in it. I mean like burning, with heat and smoke and flames. Not something you saw in London these days, outside a museum.
The walls were decorated with a series of posters advertising beer. I could have quenched my thirst in a long hot summer with a ‘Golden Harvest’ pale ale, seen the harvest home with a ‘Hazel Nut Brown’, put my feet up at Christmas with an ‘XXXmas Barley Wine’ or sipped a ‘Seagrave Oyster Stout’ whenever there was an ‘r’ in the month. From the style of the artwork, I guessed all the posters dated from the 1930s and judging by the yellowing and crinkled edges, were almost certainly authentic originals.
The message they transmitted was a crude, sentimental image of an England that had long gone: healthy young bodies playing ball on the beach, threshing machines and skylarks at harvest time, red-faced old codgers knocking back barley wine under the Christmas tree. Who, even then, thought such images would actually make people thirsty?
I looked at my watch: two and a half minutes and still dry. Unbelievable.
The rest of the Reception area was dominated by a telephone exchange and a giant lectern. The telephone exchange was exactly that, one of the old fashioned exchanges with wires and plugs and flashing lights which told you a line was open or a call was coming in. There was even a headset with a bakelite microphone resting on a rack of switches.
The woman who had shown me in saw a circular light flash on the board and said ‘Excuse me.’
She put on the headset, sat down behind the wooden-framed board and inserted a plug.
‘Seton and Nephew, Seagrave’s Seaside Ales. Good morning.’
It was spooky. As she sat down and pushed her chair in, it was impossible for a visitor to see the short skirt and her legs. The only view was of her top half, complete with cardigan and string of pearls, and if you didn’t look too closely at her makeup and the hairstyle, she fitted in perfectly. It was a good trick. Visitors suddenly felt they were in a time machine rather than a brewery and it took their minds off the fact that they had been there over five minutes and still not been offered a drink.
‘I’ll put you through to Telesales,’ she was saying, though if she’d received an order by carrier pigeon I wouldn’t have been surprised.
I looked again at the lectern and realised that it wasn’t a lectern as it was too big, too wide and tall-backed to have ever fitted in a church or a lecture hall. I then twigged what it was – it was a post desk, the stand-at sorting desk where a Scrooge or a Marley or a Uriah Heep would open all the post before anyone else in the firm got a look-in. Not only did the person opening the mail get first crack at any incoming cash or cheques, they also knew exactly what was going on and were thus in a position of power.
Recognising the post desk for what it was would have got me an automatic place on the panel of experts on The Antiques Roadshow were it not for the give-away that there was a very tall man standing behind it opening the morning’s post with a long, ivory-handled letter knife which was attached to the desk by a long brass-link chain.
He was hypnotised by what looked like a bank statement but he eventually noticed me standing there. It was probably the sound of my tongue swelling at the back of my parched mouth which attracted his attention.
‘Oh, Mr Angel, do forgive me. How rude. Sorry. Welcome.’
He too
k a pace towards me, holding out a hand and not realising that he still held the letter-opener in the other. The brass chain ran its length and snapped before he got to me, the chain whipping behind his left leg.
‘Ow! Dammit! Oh, not again.’
The woman on the switchboard raised her eyebrows and shook her head as she plugged into another call.
‘Seton and Nephew, Seagrave’s Seaside Ales. How can I help you?’
The tall man – and he was tall, at least six feet six if not seven – rubbed the back of his leg with his bank statement and hobbled towards me, still holding out his right hand. In that position I was able to make eye contact with him.
‘I’m Murdo Seton,’ he said.
‘Roy Angel. Are you the Seton or the Nephew?’
I said it for the sake of making polite conversation, but he took it like a question on Mastermind.
‘Er . . . no . . . well, not the original one of course. The Founding Fathers were brothers, Othniel and Ezra Seton, and the firm was supposed to be called Seton Brothers but Ezra died in a tragic accident when a vat of porter burst and flooded the cellars.’
He saw the look in my eyes and mistook it for interest.
‘He drowned. In the brewery’s test brew. Quite tragic.’
But at least he got a drink, I thought.
‘So Othniel Seton brought his brother’s son into the firm, even though he was only ten at the time. It’s been called that ever since and the present board is actually descended from that nephew. My uncle, both cousins and myself are all from Ezra’s side of the family, not Othniel’s.’
‘They died out?’
From thirst, probably.
‘No, they were all girls.’
The woman on the switchboard was shaking her head quite violently now and looking at her watch. I had the bizarre thought that maybe she’d been working here for thirty years and still hadn’t been offered a drink.
