“Conditional?” I asked. “What are the conditions?” And then he seemed totally confused.
“None that I can think of,” he said, the daft ha’peth.
And so now The Castle has real chips. I had the same song and dance when I suggested we sell variose pukka pies and chicken nuggettes for the kids, so we could compete with Lorraine’s Plaice, the fish and chip restaurant in the alley down the road. He wouldn’t make a decision on any of that either, not without running it through his sandwich spreadsheet. Now he’s got doors so he can hide.
But these weren’t the only times he’s withered. I’ve been fiddling with the turns, trying to set up a higher class of show to attract more up-market punters. I wanted Tia Pepe out from the start, but there were others that didn’t come up to scratch. There’s an important point to make here, however. I’m conscious that this blog of mine is both a memoir and record of how I turned a business around from near failure to astounding success. So I have to take a moment to make an important point about how to manage the turns in a club.
A mistake that nearly all people in business make is to aspire to the best. People with restaurants want the best ingredients. Taxi drivers want the best cars. Club owners want the best turns. But in fact you have to cut your cloth.
Necessity can be the mother of invention. Take the case of the taxi driver. Who can make money running a Ferrari as a taxi? I ask you. Not only will buying the thing bankrupt you in the first place, you’ll spend more on petrol than any fare. You might be able to work a niche market - what a good phrase! - but you won’t get much business running around Punslet or Bromaton, because there’s precious few niches in such places. You might get work down south, where they’ve got plenty of money alongside a comparable lack of brains, but even there I doubt there’s room for a couple of Ferrari taxis in the whole of London.
Now it’s the same with turns in a club. Don’t buy the Ferrari. Don’t even aspire to it. You might have a name throughout the town for having the best singer, the best comic, the best live sex act, and you might fill the place. But if the acts are that good, your punters will spend all their time listening and watching, not drinking. The turns have to be good enough to perform, but never good enough to captivate, otherwise the punters forget to buy their bevvies! To know the road ahead, ask those coming back! I asked around. I looked at the places that got the crowds and took note of who they employed. But I also asked the staff about who did the real business across the bar. It’s only when you put two and two together that you make four.
The Beni-Beatles and The Elderly Brothers pack them in elsewhere, but they weren’t on our schedule, so the first thing I did was sign them up for an hour each on alternate nights. I did a partnership with The Wookey Nookey so that the acts get work every night from them or The Castle. Where there’s a will there’s a way. Competition might be the market’s solution to maximum efficiency, but it comes nowhere near cooperation in the process of making a profit. Business is done by agreement, not conflict!
The Award Winning, Original Abba Cliché was also an obvious outfit to sign up. I wouldn’t say they’re the best thing since sliced bread, but they’re topical. I reckoned that Mad Maori and Zero Zulu, as seen on TV, would add a bit of variation, while the Full Monty Tribute alongside the Polynesian Magic Fire Snake Show would together develop a theme. Sue Joseph’s Drag Show was the perfect lead into Cocks Of The North, the male strippers, while Chanzaville’s Number One Vocalist, Star Of Twenty-Eight Consecutive Seasons On The South Pier, Me Anonymous No Name, was the perfect inoffensive, catch-all for the peak-hour. My idea was that he would do My Way at the end and get all the bingo ladies feeling fancy free enough to go for an extra strip. Obviously we then needed a sing-along eyes down, all snowballs must go session before Kinky Karen, Mondays and Wednesdays, or Randy Sandy, rest of the week, pursued their respective orifices before the live sex act got down to it. Early doors, of course, we needed a straight singer and a clean comic, followed by a belly-dancer and a gay conjuror. Keep it simple!
But would Mick say “yes” to any of this? “I’ll have to think it over” was all he would say. Time and time and time again, even repeatedly, I asked him. “Mick,” I said, “we need breasts, chicken, alongside breasts, Kinky Karen and Randy Sandy, in The Castle. They are complemental.” And would he say “yes”? “I’ll have to think it over,” were his words. It’s the first time I’ve ever known Mick Watson hesitate when there were breasts on offer.
Well, it took an argument or two, but I got what I wanted. I always do. But Mick’s attitude foxed me. Did he really want The Castle to succeed? Sometimes you would have thought not. And here we are just a couple of months later and we have already reclaimed the grey hairs early doors, brought the families in for the peak hours and just about cornered the Extreme Hen and Ultimate Stag niche into the small hours. Plus we now have a roaring lunchtime trade because all the Brits flock in to get away from the fresh vegetables, salads and seafood the hotels serve up. Even the Dutch are turning up. Personally, I’ve never served so many burghers.
I’m not going to let Mick have his hat-trick. I’m going to stand up for what I want, stand up and be counted: one! What I need is what will work. Suzie Mullins is going to succeed at The Castle. Suzie Mullins is going to create the business she would have made out of Mullins The Milliners, if only she’d had the chance. No, Mick Watson will get no hat-trick out of me. He’s had a left shoulder and a lost year in the 1980s, a year lost to me as a result of a fling I should never have flung. Whatever happened to that little... Well, let’s not go into that one.
The shoulder was my fault, as was the other one, I suppose. A frosty night on the back of a bike when you’re too young to know what you want is one thing. A whole fortnight of fulmination in a foursome and then a sexsome on a half-board package, all conducted in a state of constant semi-booze on a litre of gin a day, not counting the wine boxes and the beers, was quite another thing. Sometimes amnesia can offer relief. No wonder our Dulcie ended up in such a mood. We never saw her. I will always remember that night with Pete Crawshaw and his missus in the Benidorm Palace when I daren’t tell Donkey the real reason why I had to stay behind with Mick to reconsider my options. An ounce of invention is better than a pound of cure, but I had clearly not been to the right shop. Well, bitter pills have blessed effects and hindsight is always twenty-twenty. And it was a bitter pill, but it proved a blessing in disguise because it took me back to my Don in the end. I should have known better.
Well it looks like it’s going to be a year to remember. Mick ratted on me a second time and I am not going to allow him a third opportunity. This time I am on my guard. When he says he has to wait to make up his mind, I am not going to be tempted to ask what might prompt him to do things quicker. I know I’m in control this time, so I am continuing to play hard to get. On both of the other two occasions, it was me that agonised over what to do. This time it’s me that knows the score. It’s me that’s pushing the limits. If he says he has to sit and think, then it means that I am still in control. And I intend to keep it that way.
Twenty Six
A note on pronunciation would be apposite... - Donald examines the relationship between spoken and written language. He identifies a disjunction between them, indicating that attempts to write dialect quickly reduce to the patronising. He observes how those who speak in dialect rarely read in it and uses this to draw conclusions about the truth of particular people’s words and draws conclusion about the location of power.
A note on pronunciation would be apposite. It is a strength of the internet that anyone in any country, of any colour, race, religion, creed, dietary regime or popular music preference can access the material I post. This very strength, however, is also something of a weakness, an Achilles heel in the physiognomy of the network’s universality. For it means that much that is specific to my curriculum vitae, my life circumstance, experience, persona, culture or
musical taste will be lost, not ignored or rejected, but simply missed by my readers. You can hardly blame the archers if they miss a target they don’t know to exist. So, in the interests of accuracy and experience enhancement, I will offer some pointers on oral reproduction.
I come from Kiddington. You may have gleaned that from a text that has referred to the association a thousand times already. Now Kiddington is in West Yorkshire, in the midst of what we used to call the West Riding. “Riding is another word for a third”, said Mrs Cartwheel in another of her geography lessons. “Our great county, the largest and, we all know, the best in the land, is divided into three pieces so they are called Ridings.”
“Is that like Little Red Riding Hood?” Geoff Watson asked. He was not the brightest.
We all laughed. I don’t know why we laughed because, with the benefit of fifty years of hindsight, it was a perfectly logical question for an eight-year-old to ask. Education today would give him an enhanced grade for transferability or creativity or both on the basis of the link he made. In those days, however, we called it stupid and he blushed. I thumped him in the gut below the level of the desk and then told him to shut his goral mouth or I’d knock his depascent teeth out. It was always with pride that Mrs Cartwheel presented her geography of the pink bits of the globe, the British Empire that was. And it was with even greater pride that she extolled the virtue of her beloved Yorkshire, the great county outside whose confines she had never lived, hardly even ventured.
But that’s where we were, riding high, mid-Riding in the largest county in the proud country that ruled the pink world, the only world worth knowing. We were the middle kingdom, the centre of a universe we learned we had a perhaps divine right to rule.
Our area was truly central, just to the east of Bromaton, the town that maintained its superior status despite the imposing presence of the giant Punslet just to the north. Bromaton’s east was coal country: its west was wool, its stone mills originally driven by water that flowed fast down moorland valleys. South was more coal, but soon this gave way to steel. Punslet was the truly big town, but it was a place that most of us loathed because it was filled with people with whom we could not identify: their accent was different. They weren’t like us and that’s all we knew.
It was coal that made Kiddington and its brother villages unique. Coal was a big, heavy industry, but there was a limit to the number of people you could effectively wind up and down the gullet of a single pit in a single day. There was also a limit on how much product you could lift up the same oesophageal tract, so the pits grew to a maximum sustainable size and not beyond, at least until the fabled new pits of the nationalised, wholly mechanised era. It was as if the older pits became as defunct as the idea of bell-mining that had left its pre-industrial depressions across the common. They were technologically non-viable.
“Watch out,” the old codgers used to say to one another as they trod home in their clogs off the shift. “When that new super pit the other side of Ribthwaite opens up, it’ll be curtains for Kiddington and others like it. It stands to reason,” came the impeccable logic. “We’ll be surplus to requirements.”
But when my mate Geoff Watson and I sat side by side before Mrs Cartwheel’s edifying instruction, each village had its pit, had its shaft, had its winding gear in its tower, had its cage, its shifts, its miners, its slag heaps, its Club, its team, its brass band, its male voice choir. It had its May Queen, who was actually female, its cricket team, its church magazine and its chapel, not to mention oodles of fish and chips. Most of the villages were home to two to five thousand people, rarely larger. Below ground the workings used to inter-connect. You could descend in Kiddington, for instance, and do your shift on a face as far away as Ribthwaite. But your time in transit on the underground railway was paid at only half the face rate, and the further you travelled, the longer it took. So you worked longer, or earned less, until the day, dreaded by most, when the body could no longer handle the spade and thus you could no longer be called a ‘getter’. From that day on, if you were lucky, you were raised to a new life at the surface, but denied the dark, an exclusion that cost half your pay which, contrary to later propaganda, was never that much. You never saw any of those southern bankers trying to get down the pit!
Like all specialised human activity, mining generated its own vocabulary. It was in P102, Vocabulary Specificity Related To Niche Roles In The Mode Of Production, that I examined this phenomenon. Mariners, of course, have had a lasting effect on our language. There’s about face, turn around, amidships, keel haul, walk the gangplank and shiver me timbers for a start. Agriculture was always a winner as well. I’ve ploughed that furrow often enough. But coal, wool, cotton, iron, steel and plumbing have all had their influence on the language. They all had their words. In coal’s case the lexicon now sounds strange. Cage, winding gear, getter, snap-tin, roadway: in many ways they aren’t even specialised.
But it was not in the area of vocabulary that the accent has been preserved. It’s the intonation that counts plus, of course, a handful of definitive pointers, such as the definite article glottal stop, the surreally indented ‘t’ and an archaic second person singular, in all its forms.
What really impressed the course tutor about my essay on our local accent was my inversion of perspective, a modification that went considerably beyond the brief. Instead of analysing my West Yorkshire mining village twang from a conventional standpoint, I wrote the whole piece in dialect and analysed received pronunciation as if it were the special case. She was impressed, so impressed that she gave it a tick, a great big tick that went all the way through. She commended me on my invention, but pointed out that in fifteen years of tutoring P102, she had never before awarded a mark of zero, such was my achievement. It didn’t matter in the end. Later on I picked up loads of marks in the orals, all of which I did in my dialect.
An interesting example of the specificity of our twang is the word aslafta. Dr Swinton, my tutor, was particularly taken with the word. In fact, when I later explained it to her, she admitted that things started to make a little sense. Aslafta is one of the most frequently used and useful words in Kiddington. It signifies obligation, an act or practice that must be accomplished, either for personal reasons or as a result of employment considerations. It is, of course, a contraction. In RP it would equate to, “I must”, or more accurately, “I shall have to” or “I will have to.”
“Aslafta go down t’cellar steps to fill t’coal scuttle,” would be commonly uttered just after stoking the kitchen fire. Note I don’t attempt to write gu instead of go, or ter instead of to. That would be pedantic. In the case of aslafta, however, the term would be unrenderable in its complete and expanded form, a form that is simply unknown in Kiddington dialect. The words, “I will have to fill the coal scuttle,” intoned as written, would undoubtedly have prompted the comment, “’Ark at ‘im,” since the inappropriateness of their sound would have protruded like an injured tactile member. Aslafta would never be written, of course, and, when read, the complete form would always be pronounced as written. The same practice would apply to the much used terms ‘inti’ and ‘intshi’, both related to the recently widespread southern form, ‘init’, a sound that Kiddingtonians would always pronounce as ‘intit’, complete with a pair of indentations capable of piercing softwood.
Now you can’t hide a Kiddington accent. It sticks out like I sore pouce, you might say. Equally, you can’t imitate it. There’s nothing worse than a method actor trying to be pure Yorkshire mining village and having the method but little of the practice. They might get the front of mouth delivery, but they never master the glottal stopped definite article, nor the explosive t. Try it out with a line like “Tom and Terry went to t’market” and you can tell an impostor in nanoseconds, except that the average Kiddingtonian would need the better part of a minute to say it.
There is a vocabulary as well. The wooden fence that surrounded my grandda
d’s allotment was made of palings, pronounced without the ring at the end, of course. Palin’s would only be written, however, to indicate something belonging to Mr or Mrs Palin. Taties, them tubers that formed the staple diet, were either old ‘uns or new ‘uns, the former being called peelers and the latter scratters. And scrat was what chickens did in the muck with their feet. Taties, by the way, rhymes with Katy’s and not, as north of the border, with fatties.
Words with -ight are also definitive. You can always tell a Kiddingtonian from his -ight. Sight, as you might expect, rhymes with kite - or might, except the latter is usually pronounced mun, more properly moan, which is a common activity in the village. Light and night, however, both rhyme with sheet, while right sounds like rate and fight, fate, which it usually indicated. A sentence such as, “There were a right fight last night - it were a rare sight”, takes you anywhere you want. “There were a rate fate last neet - it were a rare site” is what it sounds like in Kiddington, with all the t’s exploding like cream crackers.
I’ve already explained that a macker is a brick, but did you know that pikelet is crumpet? That’s crumpet that goes in the mouth, not the type that wiggles along the street pursued by pointing pikes. A scuffler, meanwhile, is a piece of bread, despite the fact that a playful scuffle was usually called fratching. Those who remember pounds, shillings and pence and thus had to learn twelve times tables, will also remember a tanner, worth sixpence and not to be confused with a tenner, which was a piece of brownish paper and was worth a fortune, being a ten bob note, currently fifty pence, and represented about a week’s wages.
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 26
