Rags, Bones and Donkey Stones (Sequel)

by B A Lightfoot

  Book Two

  Chapter 21

  Sitting on top of three truck wheels stacked in the corner of the yard, acrid smoke floating around his head, Liam stared despondently at the still smouldering pile of what had been, up to last night, his business. A charred beam stretched across from the side wall and rested on the soot blackened, twisted metal top of his truck cab. The steel body, painted a glorious green after he had bought it two years ago, had been turned by the intense heat into a seascape of red and grey. The throbbing in the side of his head was becoming more severe as he was engulfed by tidal waves of despair. A beachhead of cracked slates, clinging precariously to blackened joists, sloped down to the still smoking skeletal frame of the back of the vehicle. The shelving that was still standing at the end of the burnt out building had cabbages, cauliflowers, celery and tomatoes, all glistening black as if decorated by the hand of a malevolent artist. Alongside this display of jet black baubles, yesterday’s output of new laid eggs had erupted into a sea of phlegm. It had been a stroke of good fortune for them when they had picked up all the hens last year from the widow of a farmer, and they had been a godsend during the last two months whilst meat had been scarce through the foot and mouth outbreak. The cattle market had been closed and even tripe was hard to get.

  His son, Billy, who had recently celebrated his seventeenth birthday by successfully asking Amy Benson for a date, sat on the floor with his back to the whitewashed wall. He had worked hard alongside his father to build the business and now it had been destroyed whilst they had lain in their beds. ‘What do you reckon has been going on here then, Dad? Just as we were getting going and doing alright, then this happens.’

  ‘I don’t know, son. There must have been a fault with the truck or something. There’s nothing else that could have caused a fire like that but accidents do happen. That’s finished it for us. We’re back where we started with nothing.’

  Billy’s eyes blazed and he thumped the tyres that Liam was sitting on. ‘No, we’re not finished, Dad. We’ve worked too hard for the last few years to let it all go just like that.’

  Liam looked at his son, surprised at the burst of passion. ‘I wish for both of our sakes that I could think differently, Billy, but look at it. The best that I could do is to go back on a handcart selling bundles of charred firewood. We’ve nothing. It’s all gone up in smoke.’

  ‘Well, first of all, we haven’t got nothing. There’s Mam’s business in the shop. That wasn’t touched by the fire. I know it’s not much but it will keep us going.’

  ‘We’ll be back on the breadline again. We can’t get this business going with no truck and I haven’t finished paying for that one yet. Look at it now.’

  ‘You know, it might be alright for a few spares. Mam says that we have a little bit put by.’

  ‘Aye, and as she says, it’s for a rainy day. We’ll need that to survive on and hope that we can both get jobs sometime.’

  ‘Dad, there are some of these Crossleys laid up in the yard of the gas works at Albion Street. They’re knackered but they reckon it’s not worth getting them fixed. The iron works are not taking the coke off them these days with things being so quiet. You can buy decent ones for next to nothing at the moment so we should go and buy two of those from the gas works. We could get Callum to fix them up for us.’

  ‘Two! What would we do with two trucks? We haven’t got any business left for even one truck.’

  ‘Yes we have, Dad. We have still got the customers that we built up and there are still the lads on the allotments; a lot of them depend on us now for the money that they earn. And we will use the second truck to expand. You have been talking about going to see the farmers up on Astley Green. Go and get them sorted out for some extra supplies and we will expand out into Sale and Altrincham. Perhaps we could get stalls on Cross Lane and Bolton Markets.’

  ‘God, you’re racing ahead a bit, Billy. We’ve got nowhere to work from and it would take most of our money to rebuild this. By the time that we got set up again we would have to start from scratch. All the shops would have gone somewhere else.’

  ‘I’ll go and get some of the lads who have bikes and get them to go round the shops. They can tell everybody that we have had to close for a few days but we will be back delivering again next week. You could go and see Callum and see if he can get an hour off work.’

  Liam was surprised by his son’s spirited determination. He had a will to fight that he hadn’t realised was in his make up and his mind was quick and agile, seeing beyond the smoking pile of rubble in front of them. He felt bolstered by his son’s strength and youthful exuberance. He had seen Brig’s steely willpower in his son before, keeping his head down and getting a job done no matter what problems he faced. Now he recognised some of the bouncing dynamic that had been the hallmark of his own youth. ‘Billy, it’s great to see you having all these ideas, and I don’t want to be like a wet week, but there’s still the problem that we have no building to work in. We can’t store perishables in the open air.’

  ‘We do have a building, Dad. We have the big shed that we rent next door for the hens. And by the way, that was the other point. This wasn’t an accident. Half the hens from next door have gone missing and the rest are dead with their necks broken.’

  After the two policemen had called and made notes of the damage to the shed and the vehicle, pointed out the scorched remains of the paint tins under the burnt out wreck, which Liam couldn’t explain, and inspected the corpses of the poultry, he had set about tidying up. Bridget had arrived but left the shop closed and they spent the next few hours cleaning, moving the damaged timbers, stacking the slates and putting the dead hens in sacks. Bridget said that they would share them with friends and family.

  He told her about Billy’s angry determination not to give up and about his rather frightening ideas to come back bigger than ever. She smiled and put her arm round his shoulders. ‘Go with him, love. That is just the way that you would have reacted when you were that age. Trouble is that life has knocked you about a bit since then so you are a lot more cautious. This has been very important for Billy, working alongside you, getting to know the dad that wasn’t at home for nearly five years. He does understand quite a bit of what you went through and he is very proud of you, especially the way that you have battled to get our lives back together over the last few years. And whoever did this, let’s just go out there and prove to them that the Murphy family are not easily vanquished.’

  Liam looked at his tough but beautiful wife, her brown eyes eager and determined; beguiling looks that hid a rugged fighter, an enticing charm that belied a steely intransigence. ‘Let’s give it a go, love,’ he said, giving her a hug. ‘We’ll stand or fall together as a family.’

  The small wooden door in the back wall rattled and Billy came bursting in. ‘Eh, Dad, one of my mates just came back from seeing the shops…, oh, hi Mam, bit of a mess, isn’t it? and he said that when Meredith’s delivered to Bodell’s on Broad Street this morning, the driver offered him some hens for cash. He asked the driver where he got them from but he said that he couldn’t tell him that. I’d bet a pound to a penny that they were ours.’

  ‘I thought as much. It was probably their goons who punctured the tyres a couple of weeks ago. Right, come on then, Billy. Let’s go and see if we can have a chat with Callum. You go and open the shop, love. We’ll need every penny we can get.’

  Over the last few years, Liam had taken to visiting Nellie Grimshaw on a fairly regular basis. Although she always questioned him closely about the business, he had found that her advice was useful, her counsel steeped in experience and common sense. She had often steered him away from some of the potentially damaging ideas that he had suggested. ‘Stick to the knitting, son,’ she would often say, a comment that Bridget had thought amusing, but the significance of which he had found too elusive. He now felt less tense when he was with her and she seemed to enjoy his more spontaneous responses and reacted with her own firebrand repartee.
He had even ventured to ask her about the picture that he had found though she had just told him haughtily that he should be asking that question of whoever’s suit it was and that, as he was no longer with us, that might be a bit of a problem. He had thought to question Epiglottis further on the matter but was reluctant to promote such an emotional response again. When he had mentioned the episode from the NorWest to Nellie, she had stared rigidly ahead, enquiring only as to the real name of this man of letters. Liam couldn’t remember; the nickname had become the accepted title for the man whose life consisted of playing out so many different roles that a name had seemed unnecessary and inadequate.

  Nellie, however, remained an enigma. She told him of her experiences in fighting with the suffragette movement, of times spent in prison, of how the degradation of the forced feeding had been replaced by the humiliation of the Cat and Mouse Act. She nurtured a burning resentment of the upper classes and the manner in which they exploited the working people. When Liam had told her about Major Fforbes-Fosdyke and how he had used his position as landlord to violate young women and girls, she had clapped with delight when she heard how his father had flogged him, almost exploding with pleasure when he told her the circumstances of the Major’s death.

  Nellie had talked a little about Harry Grimshaw’s hardware shop but there seemed to be a clear dislocation between the level of that business and the overt displays of opulence around Nellie’s house. She had once surprised him with a question as to how Callum’s courtship of Jean Peterson was progressing. He knew that he had probably mentioned Callum when talking about the business but didn’t recall having mentioned Jean, about whom he knew very little anyway. After that, he had made a point of listening to the little snippets from Bridget so that he could pass them on to Nellie. When on one occasion he had taken Billy with him on a visit to her house, she had patted the lad affectionately on the cheek and told him that he had a tongue like his Uncle Pat’s. She had then cautioned him to make sure that he turned his gifts to good advantage and didn’t become a charming wastrel like his uncle had been.

  He went to see Nellie in the afternoon of the day following the fire. He wanted to hear what Nellie thought about his suspicions and to see how she responded to the idea of him buying two vehicles. ‘You go and sit down, lad,’ she said as she ushered him down the hall. ‘I’ll go and put the kettle on and we’ll have a cup of tea.’

  His was served in the pint pot which, he assumed, had been Harry’s and she had already put in the requisite two sugars that he now had. She put a small plate of digestive biscuits on the table in front of him alongside a place mat for him to put his mug on. ‘You’ll be here to talk about the fire?’ she asked as she eased herself down on to her high backed, Victorian chair. Nellie leaned forward and picked up her china cup and saucer and raised it to her mouth. Almost every finger had a ring on it. She saw him staring at her hands and she smiled. ‘I’m off to a reception in town later so I thought that I would put on a bit of a show. Some old friends from London will be there. Served time with one of them,’ she chuckled. ‘Haven’t worn them for years because Harry wasn’t so keen,’ she added, almost apologetically.

  Liam realised then that she was clearly dressed for some special occasion. She had on a full length dress with a leaf pattern in muted colours, her hair drawn up and held in place with a silver clasp covered in pearls. ‘You look very nice, Nellie, but you will have to watch out for yourself in Manchester. There are some pretty unsavoury characters that hang about up there at night.’

  ‘Don’t you fret, lad. I’ll be alright. It’s a car door-to-door. It’s the old sots when I get inside that are the problem.’

  ‘The old…? Oh, sots did you say?’ Liam teased. ‘You look a real knockout, Nellie. I think it might be some of the young sods, sorry, sots that you will have to look out for.’

  Nellie’s eyes lit up, her face relaxed as she enjoyed his small impertinence and Liam had the worrying sense of familiarity, that he must have seen her around before the war and now the memory was gone. It was happening quite often. Bridget was having to remind him of names when they bumped into people; Betty Somebody-or-other, who had been brought up in the same street as him and had been the first to demonstrate the anatomical differences between the genders; Stan Bradshaw from his school class; Florrie Crabtree, a childhood friend of Eddie’s wife who had lost her husband in Gallipoli and was struggling to bring up the two lads and a girl that were his legacy. It was funny, though, that he had remembered Beattie Bountiful. The throbbing pain was starting up again.

  ‘How bad was it then, the fire?’ Nellie demanded.

  ‘Oh, yes. Everything has gone, the truck, the stock, everything. Even the hens. They all had had their necks broken and half of them had been taken away.’

  Nellie replaced her cup and saucer on the table and picked up a biscuit. ‘How many would that be then?’

  ‘Oh, twenty, I would think. Perhaps twenty five.’

  ‘Ah, two or three of them it must have been. Not your casual thief. They must have been sent.’

  ‘Well, we thought that perhaps that was the case.’ Liam went on to explain the actions that Billy had taken and the report from Bodell’s on Broad Street. Nellie listened attentively and when Liam outlined the plan to rebuild and expand the business, her eyes lit up and she clasped her hand into a gilded fist.

  ‘Yes, do that. Hit them whilst they are worried.’

  It took Liam a few moments to understand the implications of Nellie’s comment. His small business could hardly be troubling a well established company like Meredith. ‘Nellie, if they are worried then that can only be because we are affecting their business and, if that’s the case and we become more successful and damage their sales even more, they will hit back even harder. And if we do well, we could be putting some of their lads out of a job. That’s not what I want to be doing.’

  ‘Liam, stop wallowing in such misguided proletarian morals. What consideration do these people deserve if they will stoop to commit such criminal acts against their own types? If you succeed then you will take on more workers and, anyway, you are giving better food at lower prices to the folk who really need it. Things are tough enough for families here with the engineers being out. Now there’s talk that the cotton workers might be doing the same.’

  ‘Hang on, Nellie, I can’t save Salford with a few cabbages and potatoes.’

  ‘You can do your bit to help and people do respect you for what you have achieved in the last few years. Meredith doesn’t deserve to succeed. He is a cheating old rogue who gives the small shopkeepers a bad deal with high prices and poor produce. And if the small shops go direct to the market they get the cold shoulder because the market traders are afraid of losing Meredith’s business. Anyway, what will your Billy think if you are not prepared to stand up and fight when you have been treated like this?’

  Liam picked up his mug and sipped his tea slowly. ‘You are right, Nellie. I know that. It’s just that when you have been through what we did in Turkey and France, you have an almost blind loyalty to people of your type. My whole system kicks against the idea of putting other lads out of work when they are probably desperate for the jobs.’

  ‘They were not worried about you and your family when they set fire to the trucks and the shed were they? Treat as you find, that’s what I say.’

  ‘You’re a hard hearted woman, Nellie Grimshaw.’

  ‘Hmmph. It’s not all a bed of roses, you know. There’s only so much being pushed around you should take before you kick the buggers back.’

  Chapter 22

  Shifting uneasily as he inspected the pictures in the hall outside the General’s office, Chopper rehearsed in his mind the main points of the news that he was about to relate. This was going to be a difficult interview and he knew that the result might be that both he and Isaac Jefferies could lose their jobs. There was an old sepia image of a much younger Fforbes-Fosdyke, still only a junior officer at the time, posing in what was probably
an Indian palace. Along with some other officers, they surrounded a lavishly dressed native who was clearly the owner of the palace. Another showed him amongst a group of officers against a background of an African jungle.

  Chopper’s life had been transformed since the General had taken him on. Now he was putting it all at risk. He had moved up to Seedley with his reunited family and he had been occasionally entrusted with special assignments reviewing business proposals from ex-serving soldiers. His common sense and rather surprising arithmetical skills had served him well and he had learnt a great deal in the process about evaluating the ideas put forward. Some of them were just out-and-out foolish, others illegal, but many contained the grains of a good prospect. The General, however, made things difficult, insisting that any business that he helped to finance should have the capability of taking on one disabled ex-serviceman for every ten people it employed. An engineering company that he owned on Whit Lane had shown remarkable flexibility in adapting machinery so that it could be operated by men who were lacking in either an arm or a leg. ‘It’s all about preserving their dignity, Hennessy. They have sacrificed a lot for our country and now it is up to us to give them something back.’ Chopper often wondered how much of his philanthropy was driven by guilt over what his son had taken away from so many, but he never dared to challenge the old man’s philosophy.