Terms such as ‘daft as a brush’ are still used in common and polite conversation, though ‘thick as a brick’ might be more common. In current parlance, an extra word is usually infixed in both cases, the terms thus becoming ‘daft as a baccaceous brush’ or ‘thick as a bumicky brick’. And, by the way, Kiddingtonians also never use the word ‘those’, ‘them’ being the correct form, but never in writing.
The second person singular in verb conjugation is not something that most English communities have retained. It remains in common use throughout the mining areas, however. Thee, thou, thy, thine and tha’s are all preferred forms, with you only ever being used to address the middle classes, and then usually pronounced “yer”, but never written that way. Normally they all sound roughly the same, the simple ‘tha’. “How’s tha doin’?” or “Where’s tha bin?” are common forms, but the reader should bear in mind that the pronunciation is always important, with doin’ having a u sound in the middle, while ‘where’s’ rhymes with weirs, which, like rarefy, is a word that hardly anyone can spell. It also rhymes with beer, which is spelt quite differently, and also usually included in an answer to the question, “Where’s tha bin?”
But the definitive verbal placer is the familial sigh, the ‘ah’ of identity. Ted might be anybody, but ‘ah-Ted’ is Uncle Edward. We have a Ted in the van on the next plot in the La Manca Caravan Park, but no matter how friendly I might get with the bloke, he could never be ah-Ted. John, Joe, Sue or Sarah might be known, recognised, even acknowledged on the street. But ah-John and ah-Joe are family, as are ah-Sue and ah-Sarah, the latter sounding like a flashing moonlighter. Lass is another generic term to refer to a family member. But ah-lass is Kiddingtonian for wife, and it should not be confused with the word ‘alas’ that usually follows it.
Now what is so interesting about this cultural heritage of language is that it’s purely oral. Any attempt to write it down is doomed to failure. Please excuse my woeful and embarrassing efforts in this entry. Even Kiddingtonians themselves never do it and never have done. I can remember writing a composition about where I had been in my school holidays and presenting it to Mrs Cartwheel. It came back with ‘an harbour’ crossed out in my description of the port of Jest and the comment “You might say an ‘arbor, but in English we write a harbour!”, which of course was wrong. But this does illustrate how correct the average Kiddingtonian tries to become when venturing into print. “As tha bin darn t’pit toneet after ah-lass sore thee?” would be read as nothing but gobbledegook. Say it and it’s understood, but on paper it simply has to be, “Have you been down the pit tonight after my wife saw you?” and, given the content of the remark, it would probably precede a punch in the gob.
And what is also crucial is that even a Kiddingtonian reading the attempt to render the vernacular on paper would read it with standard pronunciation. Write “Ah’s tha doin’?” and a Kiddingtonian would read it as “How do you do?”
Now these musings do have a point. They are not merely my rambling nostalgia gone mad. It’s this inside knowledge of the specificity of Kiddington language that has raised doubts about Mick Watson’s dealings with Suzie in relation to The Castle. In reality, he seemed to be running the place down, since his main interest was Paradise. Fair enough, we said, but it’s a shame to see a Benidorm institution like The Castle going to rack and ruin. There’s so many Kiddingtonians that have fond memories of the place that it’s like seeing part of our culture destroyed. So, as you know, Suzie made her suggestion to resurrect it and Mick finally agreed to let her manage the business.
She’s been hard at work ever since then and, frankly, she’s turned the place right around. Takings are up. Audiences are up. There’s a buzz around the place again, just like the old days. They’ve recruited new staff and increased the hours of the ones who were already there. To say they are happy would be an understatement. In just a few months, she’s got the place on its feet again. We’ve done some decorating, done the place out, no less. All the broken fittings have been fixed. We’ve had no budget, but we’ve put in the graft ourselves alongside the help of the bar staff who have all done unpaid overtime, though it has to be said that Suzie has offered them a share of the increased profits as a motivation, a move that was recommended in the book ‘Ten Ways to Prosper in Business’ that we picked up second-hand in one of the English flea markets in Benidorm. Rule one helped: “Make more money,” is what it said and that’s what she’s been trying to do.
The crucial point here is the reference I just made to the difference between speaking and reading. We speak fluently in our accents. We read - especially aloud - stiltingly in RP, sometimes tinged with the sounds of dialect, but never with the vocabulary or the full-blown music of its sound. It’s like the difference between a canapé and jam spread thick on a slice of Warbuton’s. Some of the sounds are still there - no Kiddingtonian can ever suppress that t - but when read, the words take on a foreign feel, like imports bulging through the homogeneous layer of home-grown twang.
I only needed to listen once to be sure. Suzie had her suspicions and had explained them to me beforehand. I didn’t let on what I would use as my yardstick. I didn’t even hint at the idea of accent laced with vocabulary, or even the other way round. All I did was sit and listen. I listened as Suzie asked that noctivagant roup of a jabot, Mick Watson, whether she could pay off Joe Storey, the Michael Jackson Tribute before nine and the Bernard Manning look-alike after ten-thirty, on the grounds that they’d been found together inebriated under a palm tree on the beach with a young boy mutually attached, in favour of Strictly Come Prancing, the carbon copy duo of people doing what they can’t do. I heard everything. She had already raised the idea with him, and he had told her that he would have to go away and think about it. That’s what he always does, Suzie says. “I’ll have to go away and run projections. I can’t offer an opinion just like that. These are major decisions and take time.” Or words to that effect... “Look, Suzie”, he said, “if tha wants me to give thee an opinion rate now, toneet, then it’ll be nay, cos I ant ad time to do t’sums!” And with that he disbursed his pay for the staff and made himself scarce. That was the live act on Thursday.
Then, just as Suzie had predicted, a day and a half later she rang him to ask the same question again. Over the phone he replied, “Suzie, dear, I have had time to think things over and I can now answer your query. You may change the acts as per what we discussed. The change may be made forthwith, according to the agreement in your manager’s contract.” There was no t’, no thee, thy, thou or tha, no ah-Suzie, no pub, paling, pikelet, scratting or pismire. He was reading it. He has no spreadsheet, no profit and loss account, no SWOT analysis, no risk analysis software or project planning. Let’s say that his analysis had known no critical path! What he’s got, which he never mentions, is middleman status. He makes no decisions. He has no say. Someone else is running him. The reason why he can’t offer a decision is that he has to go and ask someone else’s permission. He does that by email and then he reads the answers back to Suzie verbatim. Mick Watson is just a pawn, or even a porn, given his line of business. He’s as straight as a safety pin is our Mick Watson. Someone else controls The Castle, Paradise and, no doubt, all the other aspects of whatever business that windage[15] Watson and his gorgeous goal of a sidekick have their digits inserted into. And that includes whatever it is that Phil Matthews is printing on behalf of whoever it is who comes to stay in Olga’s nuclear shelter. Of that I am now sure.
15 Possibly literal, easily deflected. I propose to footnote no more of these terms, believing that they are merely expletive substitutes and that any associated meaning is merely coincidental - ed
Twenty Seven
It was in H826, Historiography Of Modern Industrial Lifestyle... - Donald reflects upon the mortal and associated mortality. He contrasts current mores with those of the past. He describes working relations at The Castle and reflects on how truly momento
us events affect us. He recalls Suzie’s illness and concludes that working is doing her good.
It was in H826, Historiography Of Modern Industrial Lifestyle In European Serfdom that I began to understand something about the human condition. If the essence of humanity is to be mortal, then the final stink of the human is mortality. Ultimately ironic is the realisation that prediction and predictability play roles, but their effects are precisely the inverse of the expected. In an era when death was all around, but whose encounter was unpredictable, it dominated ordinary people’s lives to the extent that it could be ignored, since its omnipresence could be taken for granted. It was something that could appear out of nowhere at any time to transport an individual to a place they would rather not go. It was a daily, perhaps hourly possibility. It was an era when you couldn’t even trust your lunchtime sandwich, an age when much more than mere salmon mousse threatened devastation, but also an age when sustenance was never guaranteed, so any opportunity had to be gulped down without question. Thus untamed fate was constantly challenged, and fortune put to continual test.
But at the same time, even contemporaneously, though it was a time to live for the moment, one instinctively planned for eternity. This was a position whose future attainment was taken almost for granted either in a familiar heaven that surely awaited or, more probably, in a painful hell where the suffering merely continued, as depicted in those wonderful old paintings from northern Europe that I studied as part of the course. You could imagine the contemporary conversation between those subjects depicted on the canvas. “Hi, Dave, how was it for you today?” “All day in that cauldron being boiled in oil. Third time this week... How about you?” “It was another day with that pole up my artichoke. It’s the nail through the neck tomorrow. C’est la mort.” “They say I might be on testicle squashing next week... It keeps them happy, I suppose. It’s a good job they’ve never cottoned on to the fact that we have no corporeal existence, so nothing hurts.” “Hence the soft cushions... Don’t worry, Dave, there’s a group of ex-physicists just come in and they have a theory that eternity is not as long as we first thought.” Meanwhile, until that binary decision of fate was revealed, daily actions repeatedly condemned everyone to a vividly real suffering, a tormented hell that they called life. At least that’s the way we see it from the comfort of central heating.
Contrast such attitudes with contemporary norms. Nowadays mortality is something we choose to ignore. We luxuriate in a comforting present, an eternity of guaranteed existence. We live, paradoxically, in an age when threat is all around us. Every spoon of sugar, all forms of egg, not to mention the dreaded meat, with its own association with death, or indeed anything that might ever have grown in the ground and thereby have contacted something ‘dirty’ and thus will need washing in five changes of mineral water, or any product that might have grown up a tree exposed to bird peck, on a hoof, or in water might poison, maim, corrupt or even disorient us, change our behaviour, question our morals or integrity or both, or perhaps even make us flatulate or promote halitosis. Anything sanctified by a supermarket or blessed by plastic wrapping is, of course, to be consumed with abandon, after religiously reading its ingredient list, energy potential and vitamin content, of course, without regard for how it might reshape us, as long as it’s not near its use-by date. A consequence is that, in an era when we are all green and professedly intent on eliminating all unnecessary consumption, we demand that all fresh produce has to be packaged because we need somewhere to write the description telling us what it is and the date beyond which it becomes poison. And we need that because we can’t smell it to see if it’s off. In addition to dietary restriction and food allergy, most people seem to be so afraid of life in general that they only want to experience it via the medium of electronic device. Life thus leaves us surrounded by perceived threat, but constant explanation screens out mortality to a place where its very existence no longer merits even momentary consideration. Until, that is, it screams to be noticed. Then you may not ignore. But by the time we are eventually confronted with an issue of some substance, we are worried out, unable to react or respond.
Now I’ve been at a loose end in the evenings since Suzie took on The Castle, so I have had many hours to sit and contemplate. During the day I can ride off into the mountains on my Raptor, explore tracks and find my way around the more remote valleys, but in the evenings I tend to hang around at home writing my blog. I’ve been down to The Castle a few times, but Suzie doesn’t want me under her feet. She wants to do things her way, without any even well-intentioned meddling from me. And I’ve been a spectator enough times already. There’s a limit to how many times you can take Tia Pepe and his act, not to mention Randy Sandy, who becomes more of a turn off with every exposure. When she achieved the wrong side of sixty she lost some of her attraction, in my opinion.
But The Castle has been a life-blood for Suzie. I am very proud of what she has done. She took to the task from day one and is still determined to make a success of the place. The staff have warmed to her and done everything she has asked, except, of course, Phil Matthews and Karen who still do their own thing in that upstairs room of theirs. They operate behind locked doors. Nothing ever seems to go in or out. If that’s a printing business, then they must be printing small quantities of thousand dollar notes, because there’s hardly ever bundles of anything in evidence. They are doing things on the internet, of course, but they’ll never let you see the websites they claim to have made.
Now I have always been one to give people the benefit of the doubt. I am charitable, even naive when it comes to opinions about people. I’m not judgmental, or prejudiced, racist, homophobic or even anti-vegetarian. Invariably I give the intertonic ostinatos the benefit of the doubt. But I can’t help thinking that with those two, Phil and Karen, there’s something wrong. They have too easy a life.
I never trust people whose manner or presentation never varies. I don’t care what he’s worth, but when that bigwig, that capitalist, him with all the companies and fingers in everybody’s doings comes on the tele to give his opinion on how successful he is, I always think he looks exactly the same. He’s like a Golden Delicious treated with ethene and then waxed to heaven. He doesn’t age, rot, bruise or alter in any way. That same lock of wavy hair still droops to the same degree over the forehead, the beard and tash trim never quite intrudes onto the lip and the hair is ever-pristine, as if set with a can and a half of lacquer. He always both looks and sounds like he’s just come back off a Caribbean cruise and he probably has because he no doubt owns the boat and probably the island!
But I can’t trust him. He’s got no human variability, no partially-revealed weakness you can prise open to reveal who he might be. His perfection excludes, maintains the distance that allows him to dominate, to stand apart so that he can regard his fellow beings primarily as a source of profit rather than fellow travellers.
Now Phil Matthews and Karen are like that. She does an odd hour behind the bar, but she doesn’t put her heart and soul into it like the others. She’s going through the motions and nothing more. And then she disappears back upstairs into that room to rejoin him, the door closes and they don’t reappear until they lock up and leave. I’d be surprised if they didn’t sleep there occasionally. Come to think of it, I’ve never heard either of them mention anything about where they live. They could commute from the moon every day for all we know. And, of course, they aren’t on The Castle’s payroll apart from a few bob in the hand when she does her occasional hours, so even Suzie knows precisely nothing about them. They turn up every day - often at weekends - disappear into their room and ‘work’. And since the nose around I got on my first visit to the club, I’ve not seen the inside of that room of theirs. They hold the only keys. I don’t think that even Mick has one. They even clean it themselves, so they tell Suzie.
And speaking of cleaning, Maureen Sourpuss is another one. She’s been around The Castle for years, she says. I d
on’t remember her from years ago, but she says she’s been around since the seventies. If you get a peep out of her it’s a cause for celebration. She does the cleaning and she’s good at it. Occasionally, she stands in behind the bar, if there’s someone off, for example, but she always looks as if she’s lost a pound and found a penny, she can’t add up and can’t remember the first order if the punter asks for something else. I said to her the other day as she rode her vacuum cleaner like a broomstick, “Maureen,” I said, “if your bottom lip droops any lower, you’ll trip up over it!” Now I laughed. She smiled, but mumbled, “Debellate off.” It was muted, but it was clear. Now that surprised me.
What also surprised me was when I spoke to a couple of the bar staff, they swore blind that she is only in her fifties. She looks seventy. Her skin is drip white, looks like it’s not seen sun in a century, which is a bit strange when you live in Benidorm. She’s freckled, which is unusual because her hair is jet black. But then that’s probably dyed, pulled to either side of her centre parting so severely it looks like it’s held down with half a ton of Brilliantine. She’s like a barrel balanced on a pair of tomato boxes, and has a bust the size of a sack of melons. I wonder how she walks without falling flat on them. Her centre of gravity must be about six inches in front of her navel.
But again just like with Phil and Karen, you always get the impression that there’s more going on inside Maureen’s head than she will admit to. She seems worn out by life, prematurely aged, unlike our Suzie, for instance, who is ten years her senior but looks younger. At least she did...
Maureen never seems to say more than three words at a time. I’ve never met a woman who’s so quiet. She never talks about herself, which is pretty unique in this day and age, and when she does strike up, her voice drifts off into a hesitant mumble in a second or two as she turns away to pursue something evidently far more important than inter-personal communication. It’s as if there’s another person in control deep inside her that’s telling her to shut up. Maybe she’s better with women. The last time I walked past her, though, she pinched my behind. When I turned to face her, she was looking the other way, obviously trying to deny that anything had happened. But there was a glint in her eye and just a hint of a smile.
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 27
