A
PATIENT
MAN
S. Lynn Scott
Copyright © 2018 S. Lynn Scott
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For Desiree and Tobias
Beware the fury of a patient man.
John Dryden
Contents
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1
Life being what it is,
one dreams of revenge.
Paul Gauguin
The man who murdered my mother lived at the end of our street. We didn’t know him well. Hardly at all, in fact. He was retired, living contentedly with his quiet wife and, until the momentous event that changed the course of all our lives, he was a nonentity to us, a cipher, just one of the vast army of little old men living with their little old wives in little old England.
I was just eight years old when the first thing happened.
That was half a lifetime ago and of course, I am not now the child I was then. ‘Life piled on life’ has intervened. It has educated me, despite my occasional resistance, and it has matured and mellowed me. That boy who was all feeling and reaction still exists as a small voice within me but learning and experience has squeezed the passion from him. I don’t know if I am really the better for it. I should be. At least I am alive. And free.
I also don’t know much about the ‘butterfly effect’ but I do know that one small event that should not have touched me or mine at all created a seismic change that altered all the course of my life. My own boy will be eighteen in a few weeks. His youth has been comfortable and secure. Mine was not.
I lived with my family on Canvey Island. Canvey is a scrubby expanse of low-lying land and salt marsh situated in the muddy waters of the Thames Estuary, not far from the brash seaside resort of Southend. Island is a grand designation for an area that is only separated from the mainland at high tide, but islanders we believed ourselves to be. At low tide, an adventurous soul with a stout pair of Wellington boots and a strong pair of thighs, who is prepared to do battle with the glutinous, grasping mud, can make it on foot to Benfleet station on the mainland and be on their way to London in very few minutes. However, the island is also served by two bridges and to use one of them is almost always a much better option.
Canvey was then an eccentric little island boasting a quaint Dutch heritage, a lively population of East End Londoners escaping the city smog, and a vast petrochemical site on one side of the island lowering darkly over a colourful mini-seaside resort on the other. The oil refinery, now long defunct, was in my youth a big feature both on the political and the actual landscape. I remember the huge tanks and steel towers as a constantly brooding presence on the outskirts of my life and, mingled with the scent of petroleum that lent to the air a sort of oily warmth, they were comfort and home and the equivalent of a warm embrace to the eight-year-old me. I doubt if many shared my enthusiasm though. The refinery was considered by most who lived under its long-reaching shadow to be a catastrophe waiting to happen.
In fact, Canvey Island was a very exciting place to live in the 1970’s. I thought so anyway. Lying below sea level in the Thames estuary and riddled with salt marsh creeks it was always at risk of flooding and so, in the distant past, Dutch expertise had been brought in to drain the brackish land and build protective dikes. Their efforts had made the island habitable, but even so dire consequences were predicted when, not if, another storm like the great North Sea Storm were to strike. That angry tempest had united with high tides to drown many helpless Islanders and had devastated and scarred the little community. In 1976 therefore, we lived on a knife edge believing that should we be lucky enough to survive the devastation of imminent flood then it was surely inevitable that the IRA, or failing those murderous conspirators, an innocent spark, would ignite the gas and oil in the vast storage tanks on the east of the island and blow the little Victorian sea-side resort to hell and back.
I found these possibilities rather exciting than otherwise and looked forward to either, or preferably both, with eager anticipation.
When I was that snotty nosed boy, running wild over the island, pretty much all the houses were small ramshackle bungalows, cheap little erections with bags of character but few comforts. Some of them were lovingly tended and, as is so often the way the world over, some were not.
We, however, lived in one of the burgeoning new builds off Smallgains Avenue and from my bedroom window I just about see in the distance the many masts of yachts and dinghies piercing the grey sky above the shabby moorings of the creek that led to the estuary that led to the sea. Our honey-colored detached house was next to one of the grass-covered sea walls, beyond which was an expanse of marshy greenbelt, kept as a potential reservoir in preparation for that exciting flood that was expected at any moment. Beyond that was the Holiday Park with its tiny ‘chalets’, caravans, glamorous nightclub and outdoor swimming pool. To me, this park was a land of delights, all of them forbidden. It was, therefore, one of my favourite haunts and, although they tried very hard to keep me out, it was easy to get in and I contrived to spend an inordinate amount of time there.
Bert and Peggy lived at the other end of our road, on the same side as us and about ten small houses away. Bert appeared to my young eyes to be incredibly old. He was grey, spare, craggy and bent with thin white hair worn a little too long, watery pale blue eyes, framed by ugly glasses, and a sharp, hooked nose. He shuffled rather than walked and yet, thinking back, he was probably not much more than sixty and, despite his gait, was wiry rather than frail. He smoked of course. Hell, everyone did in those days. Even I cadged fags when I could and had no compunction in smoking them jauntily as I practiced my man of the world swagger along Canvey Seafront. Smoking was grown-up and glamorous, and I saw no correlation at all between the cigarette hanging from my young lips and Bert’s fingers which were yellowed with nicotine or the racking cough that wheezed from his waist-coated chest with wearisome regularity. He had a neat little front garden and a neat little car th
at he kept very clean and, when the weather was good, he could be seen tending them both or taking his neat, little wife to the shops. He appeared to be on good terms with all his neighbours, apart from Mrs. B in the house opposite, but more of her later.
He was not the sort of man that you would think of as a murderer, or as someone likely to cause immeasurable suffering and yet he most definitely did both. And he did it coldly and deliberately, taking pleasure in the suffering he caused. Whether you with your fine, educated, well informed twenty-first-century morality will consider his actions evil, however, remains to be seen. But I know where I stand.
His little wife was the cause. The innocent cause I will freely admit and to her attach no blame unless you consider an unshakable belief in forgiveness and redemption to be a criminal tendency. It is my experience that when Christian values are taken to extremes, as they were in this case, they can have unintended and quite catastrophic consequences. If you ask me, the road to hell is most definitely paved with good intentions.
Well, however that might be, Peggy was a quiet, plump woman who knitted non-stop and wore an apron and heavy-rimmed glasses very similar to her husband’s. They were National Health, of course. She kept house for her husband and I don’t think she had ever done anything else since she married. They came from a generation where women did keep house. It was their raison d’etre, or so they had always been told, and anyway, Peggy was a natural homebody, keeping their little house neat and their garden pretty and her husband’s every need catered for.
We lived at opposite ends of the same street, but it might as well have been at opposite ends of the world for all we had in common. I saw them often. I was a boy who wandered freely, usually over the sea wall and down to the muddy shores, but I found interest everywhere. With a sort of innocent voyeurism, I had acquainted myself with every house and every occupant in the street.
The Briggs lived in a semi diagonally opposite us and they had four loud children, all possessed of red hair, long freckled legs and a quite astonishing degree of stupidity. Mr. Briggs, who was lean and careworn, worked on the buses and blowsy Mrs. Briggs was having an affair with his brother who didn’t work at all. Curiously none of the intriguing love-triangle had red hair. I often saw the tattooed brother creeping in through the side gate after dark and always leaving a few minutes before Mr. Briggs arrived home. It was difficult to put an innocent construction on such behaviour. Or to work out exactly how she managed such a flagrant affair under the very noses of her flame-haired brood, but then, as I have already mentioned, they really were very dense.
The rest of the street was made up of ordinary people such as you would have found on any street in England at that time. For example, the Joneses at Number 59 both worked in a supermarket in Basildon. They had two young children who went to my school and appeared to me to be disgustingly angelic but as I was the polar-opposite it is probable that they were subject to the usual childish naughtiness. Jack and Rosemary lived next to them, another retired couple, who were hale and hearty, played Bingo regularly and went on holidays to Benidorm a lot. They occasionally spent time with Bert and Peggy but not often as I don’t think Peggy liked Bingo or foreign travel, so they didn’t have much in common.
A family with an enormous Alsatian dog moved into the house opposite us in the year that I am writing of. They had been to America and consequently, I found them irresistibly exotic. The oldest girl was about my age and had very long brown hair. I fancied myself in love with her and tried to strike up an acquaintance. My lovelorn technique consisted of following her around at a distance for a couple of weeks and, when that only elicited a few dark-eyed frowns, I began throwing small clods of earth at her. Just to attract her attention and impress her with the sincerity of my feeling, you understand. Sadly, the young lady did not succumb to my charms.
Otherwise, there were plumbers, bookies, cleaning ladies and builders.
Apart from the results of my investigative eavesdropping, I had no more intimate knowledge of the Freemans or of anyone else in the street for the simple fact that we, my family I mean, were largely shunned by them all. Different as they all were from each other, with different levels of income, education, and experience, we were more different. Not in race or religion or even opportunity for education but certainly in experience, and in language.
To put it in a nutshell, we were dirt common. And we used a lot of bad language.
We were treated with extreme wariness by them all and that suited us just fine. Our immediate neighbours had once or twice protested about something or other. Once it was too many old cars on the pavement when my brother decided that he could fix them up and flog them for a fortune, despite knowing nothing about mechanics. On several other memorable occasions, the cause of irritation was my sister playing the latest agonised power ballad at teeth-jarring volume whilst suffering through a breakup with one of her many spotty boyfriends. I was targeted because I enjoyed catapulting paper pellets at cats or dogs and, if I thought I could get away with it without being caught and subjected to pain, people. Perhaps more than any of us Mum upset people by telling them to bugger off, or variations on that theme, if they annoyed her in any way and I have to say that her temper had what could be described as a hair trigger.
Dad didn’t do anything much to bother anyone as far as I am aware but even so his mere presence on the street annoyed the largely law-abiding neighbours. He had a reputation, you see. Not a good reputation but one based on dark rumour and misconception mingled with just enough truth to both outrage the quiet community and to terrify it. If anyone of the four of us pissed off the neighbours too much Dad would pop round to ‘ave a quiet word’, they would prudently change their mind about calling the police or reporting us to the council, we’d lay low for a day or two and then it was business as usual. Don’t get me wrong, we never meant to get up anyone’s nose. We just lived large and exuberantly and, on the whole, if they didn’t bother us we didn’t bother them…often.
Anyway, to get back to Bert and Peggy. My family never had any dealings with them that I was aware of. They were at the end of the street and far enough away to be pretty much unaffected by the worst excesses of Mum, Dad, Sarah, and Gary. Me they did know by sight because I had once shied a few stones at their front window for no reason that I can remember and, as a result of tripping over their evil-eyed cat as I made my escape, I had had my ears soundly boxed by Bert. It was fair enough. I didn’t hold a grudge against him for that and once I got a reaction I lost interest in them, although the cat did become a favourite catapult target for a while. To be fair to myself, I ought to point out that whilst I don’t really like cats I didn’t ever go out of my way to hurt the damn things. They were merely challenging as a moving target.
I didn’t know until much later that Bert had been a school teacher and before that had ‘done something in the war’. Most of his generation had ‘done something in the war’ of course, so I doubt if many bothered to ask him what and, from everything I could find out about him later, he never talked about it at the pub or with any of his cronies. Only his mate, Ern, who called by every now and again for a cigarette and a chin-wag was likely to have known and he was as close-lipped as Bert himself.
So then, this was the man who murdered my mother.
Before you start to believe that it must have been some accidental event that quiet Bert and his sweet wife were inadvertently caught up in, let me tell you that the killing of my mother was as cold-blooded in its cruelty and as coolly calculated as the most heinous crime you can imagine.
2
Stronger than lover’s love is lover’s hate.
Incurable, in each, the wounds they make.
Euripides
The first thing that happened was that Bert and Peggy won £882,000 on the Football Pools. That was worth a great deal more in those days than it would be now. For us, in little Canvey Island in the Thames, it was unimaginable riches, un
told wealth.
The rumours started to circulate that someone on the island had won the Pools one warm, calm afternoon in June. Initially, it was treated with bluff scepticism by some, but with a resigned bitterness by most, who knew it wasn’t them and wished it was. It could not be kept a secret of course, and within hours the whole island knew it was true and that Bert and Peggy who lived in the little bungalow at the end of our road were, to all intents and purposes, millionaires.
This was unprecedented. It was earth-shattering. I will come to how it was received in our household later when I have introduced you to my family members, but the island buzzed with excitement and curiosity, and in the roads around us women, men, teenagers, and children gossiped over fences and hedges, in shops and on street corners. In pubs, gruff men marvelled over their pints and that evening the bingo sessions in the old cinema were played with unwonted verve and passion accompanied by a fervent hope that the luck that had showered down upon one tiny house on the island might just have spilled as far as Canvey Island’s bingo hall.
Bert and Peggy looked awkward and smiled uncertainly as they received their cheque in front of the cameras. Bert, speaking for both, said they hadn’t decided what they would do with the money and they were very pleased to win it. Then they shrank away and hid behind the closed doors of their cosy home and only Ern and one or two other of their closest cronies were admitted.
Boy-like I was spellbound by the unfolding drama, by its excitement and its possibilities. I played truant from school, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, and secreting myself in bushes, behind fences and even up the only tree grown strong enough in the reluctant, salty soil to support an energetic boy, I watched as people came and went away without gaining admittance, as flowers of congratulation were delivered and as journalists, persisting in their attempts to get an interview or a photo of the lucky couple, were repelled by the locked door and tightly drawn curtains.
A Patient Man Page 1
