GL Doña Crawshaw...
PC Paula. I told you my name’s Paula. There’s Poles, Greeks, Lithuasians, Ukeranians, even Belgians. And there’s only about eight people work there on a normal day. There’s a crane driver, two blokes in lorries and about four labourers who drive the dumper trucks. Then there’s the gaffer, of course, but even he’s not local. He comes in a four-wheel drive down the motorway every day. And they’ve made such a mess of the place. It was so nice after the pit closed. They’d landscaped it all and planted trees. When you looked out of our back bedroom window it was just like being in the countryside. It could have been a golf course. It’s changed now. Now there’s a foot depth of mud across the road all the way from the Kibble Club as far as the level crossing. It’s a disgrace, if you ask me. It was just as bad when the pit was open, but at least in those days there was work for the men. But they had to close that pit. They said it had geology, and when a pit’s got geology its days are limited. It costs as much to get the coal out as you can get when you sell it, so it wasn’t economically viable. Mind you, in spite of its geology, it reopened after the strike and then they broke the production record each year for five years running. You see it showed that Mrs Thatcher was right all along. I always said she was right. In public, of course, they’d chastise you for voting for her, saying you were a traitor to the working class. But then most of them had voted for her as well. But then we weren’t working class any more, were we? We’d bought our own houses. We had mortgages. We had cars, television, washing machines...
PM Video cameras?
PC That’s right. Those as well. And so when Mrs Thatcher came along and said we could buy our own houses, of course we were going to vote her in. When you’ve got your own house you’ve become middle class. You’re somebody. Not just another green door along the row. I mean, if you look down our terrace today, there’s one with a porch on the front, there’s a couple that’s stone-clad. One’s been painted pink - less said about that house the better - there’s two blokes living there - together! A couple have had an extension and there’s two more having erections in the back garden. It wouldn’t have happened without Mrs Thatcher, though you could never have convinced Donald Cottee. He was a communist you know, a real firebrand, one of those extremists. We were all so shocked when he worked through the strike, but then he was maintenance. And Mrs Thatcher was right about that as well. You have to be aware that everything’s in a market. You can’t carry on paying miners a fortune out of the public purse to produce coal that a: you can’t sell and b: you could buy from elsewhere cheaper. It just doesn’t add up. Eventually the free market has to come home to roost. It’s all to do with competition. The ones that can do things cheaper will succeed because they can keep their costs down. So the pit had to close down. It couldn’t go on. That’s why it’s ended up again as a drift mine. Coal is now so expensive it’s worth mining again. And now all those pits in Poland have closed down, they’ve got to get it from somewhere. And of course now it’s feasible, because the costs are so much lower. The wages they’re paying on that site are a disgrace. If a fellow went off the social to go and work there, he’d take a pay cut! And that’s why all the jobs go to those Youkeranians and the like. They’re willing to work for less than us British so they get the jobs. Personally, I think it’s a disgrace. They shouldn’t be allowed in to take jobs that should go to us Brits. They shouldn’t be allowed to pay those low wages, even if there’s people willing to take them.
PM Mrs Crawshaw...
PC Paula.
PM Mrs Crawshaw, if I may interrupt...
PC Don’t worry, I’m used to that. My Pete does it all the time...
PM We are particularly interested in Donald and Susan Cottee...
PC As I’ve already said, we’ve had hardly anything to do with them for twenty years. We’ve hardly even said hello on the street. But there’s gossip, of course. There always is. You get to know. In a village like ours, your neighbours know what you had for breakfast, and they know it the night before! The whole village knew they were leaving. It was the talk of the place for weeks. I’d say that everything they did was common knowledge just hours later. No-one really spoke to them, but everyone wanted to know what they were doing. They were something of a laughing stock...
PM Laughing stock?
Ser el hazmereir de la ciudad, Sir. A smile of new enlightenment crossed Pérez Molino’s face.
PC As I was saying, it was as if they were publicly pilloried, permanently. It was convenient for the rest of us, of course, because if you had something in your own life you wanted to keep quiet, you could always gossip about the Cottees to change the subject. In a way, they became public property. That’s the price you pay, I suppose, for standing out from the crowd, for being different, for wanting to be different.
PM In reality they were like local celebrities?
PC I suppose they were, but celebrities that no-one wanted to copy. So when everyone else was trying to copy the things they see on the television, a couple like the Cottees didn’t. They were always trying to do something different. They separated themselves off from the rest of the village. They did it deliberately, of course. They thought they were a cut above....
PM Cut above?
Sobresalir sobre los demás, fuera de lo común. Paula Crawshaw was now so much into the swing of things that she correctly anticipated her cue to continue.
PC That’s it - all toffee nosed and stuck up. At least she was. He was on another planet. And when they bought that rusty old tin can of a mobile home, you could see where they’d been for twenty minutes afterwards, because it left a cloud of exhaust fumes like smog. He painted its name along the side, you know. Rosie, it said, just above where Swift Sundance was written in one of those curly script things they use for hotel menus. After all those years, you couldn’t keep a decision as major as that to yourself, could you? They were both coming up to their pensions. He’d retired early. He’d been on the club for...
PM On the club?
It means he was officially on sick leave from work, Sir.
PC He’d been off sick for months. He had something wrong with his back. They’d done loads of tests but hadn’t found anything. Talk was that he’d become a bit of a slacker, that he didn’t want to work any more but wanted the benefit to tide him over to retirement. She’d never really worked, never had a full-time job. We didn’t know what she managed to do with her time, because the house was never that clean, not that any of us ever saw inside it... Don, of course, was always doing things, always doing some course or other. He’d done everything under the sun, even astronomy, politics, of course. He was Don, after all. But then he got into trouble with the police. He’d turned green. He and his mates got involved with a campaign to stop them building a power station or something over towards the coast. He was even on television a couple of times being interviewed. He became a bit of a star for a while. It went round the village like greased lightning...
PM Greased lightning?
Fast, Sir.
PC Everyone was talking about it. Donkey Cottee on the tele, who’d have thought it? And then when he thumped that policeman and finished up in court, he was on tele again, but this time for all the wrong reasons. He was a complete laughing stock in the village. It went on for a few months. There was a lot of controversy about what they were doing. There was a power company building those great big windmills and Don and his mates were objecting, saying that they were an eyesore. And there were some people in big houses nearby that were on his side, real nimbys, if you ask me...
Paula Crawshaw actually paused for breath here. She had really got into the swing of things. She had actually anticipated Pérez Molino’s need to question me on the meaning of the term, nimbys. As a consequence, he had no need to speak, because Paula Crawshaw turned to look at me and thus delivered the prompt on his behalf. What followed was not predicted, howeve
r. Nor was it, at the time, particularly memorable. Looking back, now that I have reviewed the material from the day’s proceedings, I now consider this to have been a slip on his part. He should never have raised the issue at this stage. Nimby, Sir, is an acronym standing for ‘Not in my backyard.’ It has become a much-used expression in Britain in recent years. It means that people always oppose things that are planned to be built close to where they live.
PM Ah, yes, just like what happened with the planning application for The Castle site.
Paula Crawshaw had already begun before his words were complete. Had they actually been heard in full by the other council members, I have no doubt now that certainly García López would have pursued them. As things turned out, this revelation was lost until later. It was an error to raise it, but the challenge was ducked anyway.
PC But what happened was that they let Don and his mates do all the up-front stuff. They just provided weight of numbers. It’s convenient, when someone else will do the dirty work for you, isn’t it? Well after he’d been on the tele three nights running, Dulcie said she’d never have anything to do with him again. It was no surprise, because she hadn’t spoken to either of them for years anyway. But he never lived it down. Now he was not just the scab who had worked through eighty-four, he was the idiot who got himself arrested while poking his nose into things that were none of his business and not the business of ordinary folk anyway. Suzie got depressed. She was depressed to start with, what with her being ill, the operation and her treatment.
PM She had breast cancer, I understand?
PC That was it. I don’t like to say the word, myself. She’d lost all her hair, when they gave her chemo and then radio, and she was as sick as a pig for a week after each session. I mean, you are, aren’t you? You think you’re getting cured, but it makes you sicker at first, and it goes on for ages. Some people just give up, you know, but Suzie seemed to come through in the end. She did get very depressed, though. And for a lot of people the depression seems to be harder to cope with than being ill. It’s the depression that makes you sick. It affected Suzie like that. She hardly went out of the house. She never showed her face for ages. And then the news went round that they were selling up and moving to Spain. “Good luck to them,” is what people said. Good riddance is perhaps closer to what they meant. The Cottees were well known for having been to Benidorm loads of times, but not for several years. It was after Don really got into his studying that they started staying at home. And, of course, most people don’t go to places like that any more. They don’t want down-market places like Spain. They go to cheaper places like Cuba, Thailand, Dominican Republic and other countries like Goa and Fuckit - there’s an awful lot goes there! The booze is so cheap... So when they finally cleared off in their mobile home, I’d say that nobody missed them. Suzie looked terrible, though. She had lost so much weight. Her hair grew back, but it stayed thin and straggly. And of course Don’s politics got him into trouble every time he opened his mouth. He was so cantankerous. He had to criticise everything that he heard. He’d just wade in, quoting books on this, journals on that, firing figures and facts like the Shoot Out At The OK Coral.
PM OK Coral?
A gunfight amongst cowboys, Sir. And in the nineteen fifties, a film, Sir, a popular film where several people were killed. Things like that don’t happen in real life. Burt Lancaster played the good guy, as ever. Kirk Douglas also played his part.
PM A true story?
There was a real gunfight in 1881, in Tombstone, Arizona. A family called Earp was involved. The Earps were real people. But as ever, when Hollywood took hold of it, it became something it never had been. The fiction became a phrase used to indicate a big showdown. Again Paula Crawshaw took her cue merely from the tone of my voice.
PC Well they had no friends, Don and Suzie, and they had no family either. Don’s parents died some years ago. His dad was a right heavy smoker and got cancer. His mother just withered away a few months later. Suzie’s parents were in a home, I remember. Her father died a broken man. He never really recovered from the depression he had when their business failed. He was never the same again, so it must run in the family. But of course we didn’t know them. They used to live on Punslet Road, right over the other side of Bromaton. That’s why Suzie never really settled in. She was always an outsider. But there was one thing I will always remember her describing, and that was when her mother died. It really affected her badly. She’d been in a home and then got cancer. I don’t know what kind of cancer it was, but it was something slow and progressive that was gradually making her more and more poorly. It got to the stage when the home said they could no longer cope with her needs and she had to move. She refused at first and then when they shifted her, she refused any more treatment. Suzie had her at home for a few weeks and a district nurse visited, but she couldn’t cope. She was too ill. There was a period of indecision. I remember hearing from the nurse how Suzie used to burst into tears whenever she came out of her mother’s room. This, of course, was a few years ago. Then they said she could go into a hospice. They used the word ‘respite’ a lot. Well, you know about those places. We all know what happens, no matter what they say in the papers. The story was that Suzie had stayed over with her, slept beside her bed. It took just over a week from start to finish. Suzie told everyone she knew how it happened. She told them several times. It was as if she couldn’t let it drop, even after the funeral. It had a massive effect on her, seeing how the nurses are so sweet and kind, seeing to everything so calmly and always smiling and, at the same time, pumping morphine in ever increasing amounts into the patients to keep them sedated while they die. They don’t give them anything to drink, you know. It takes about five days. Suzie said, on the day of the funeral, that if ever she got into that state she would never let anything like that happen to her. And, I’m sure you know, the last time she was back home, she went to hospital for her check-up and she was diagnosed.
PM Diagnosed with...?
PC Not with anything. She already had something. We’ve just been talking about it! We all knew what she had and so did she. Well the doctor diagnosed her, gave her a few months at best, so the story goes. That was when Dulcie told her mother she was in the family way. And so for Suzie that was a double blow. She gets diagnosed by the doctor just after her daughter has brought back some unhappy memories.
PM But when the Cottees decided to leave Kiddington, why did they choose Spain, why Benidorm?
PC They wanted to live a dream, just like all the rest of us. They didn’t have the money, but again like everyone else, they didn’t let that get between them and their ambition. But people were laughing at them again. We all knew they hadn’t been there for over twenty years and that last visit had ended in tears. They’ll be back in a month is what people were saying...
PM Did Susan Cottee ever mention the fact that she knew Michael Watson was still living here? We have reason to believe that this knowledge might have motivated her return.
PC Look, as I’ve said, we’ve had nothing to do with them for years. And anyway, I’ve not heard Mick Watson’s name cross her lips since... for decades, at least since the last time we were all on holiday here. I have no idea what she might have been thinking.
PM Mrs Crawshaw, I am glad you mentioned the Cottee’s previous visits to Benidorm. It is the one they made in nineteen eighty-one that interests me. We have just been discussing that particular holiday you had together with them. Your husband was most forthcoming. Please can you tell us your version of what happened?
The silence was sudden, unexpected, deafening and seemingly endless. Paula Crawshaw sat stock still, her face quite blank apart from the eyes whose gaze darted rapidly from one council member’s face to another. There wasn’t a sound in the room. Her breathing was utterly silent where her husband’s had been a noisy wheeze. The stenographer’s keypad had nothing to record, pens had nothing to scratch on paper.
Paula Crawshaw’s bulk protruded beyond the seat of the chair and the only movement her frame seemed to allow was the gentle rise and fall of her vast tattooed upper arms. These emerged bare from the intended loose pink top that stretched and strained across her vast torso. I could not suppress the imagined sight of her on holiday in Benidorm, making her way to the British bars in a motorised mobility scooter, its open storage basket stuffed with chocolate, with Paula steering one-handed to facilitate the enjoyment of a large ice-cream, while in transit to her next plate of chips.
PM Can you describe, Mrs Crawshaw, what you did on that holiday?
Again, silence reigned. Paula moved slightly, readjusted her weight. The chair and the boards of the raised stand beneath it gave a giant, ear-splitting creak. She reached across her body to scratch her left arm, just below the Hell’s Angels tattoo that covered the shoulder.
PM Mrs Crawshaw, do I take it that you do not wish to testify in this hearing?
Pérez Molino gave her ample time to reply. Perhaps he waited too long, because surely what happened next could have been avoided. It was García López who interrupted.
GL Doña Crawshaw...
PC Paula.
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 57
