Countless minor tasks are completed during a police-officer’s daily round, each in itself a small thing, albeit of great value to the person who is helped. One feature of this work is that it provides a vivid insight into the private lives of others.
One example which occurred on my patch at Aidensfield involved Awd Eustace, whose real name was Eustace Wakefield.
His problem was that he could not light his fire, a fact which came to my notice early one winter morning. The house next door to his was empty for three months while the owners were overseas, and I was keeping an eye on it. This meant regular visits to ensure it hadn’t been broken into or vandalized, and it was while examining the rear of this house that I noticed Eustace. He was chopping sticks just over the separating fence, so I said, “Good morning.”
“Morning.” He was a slight man with long, unkempt grey hair and was stooped with age. Ragged old clothes, over which he wore a tattered cardigan, attempted to protect him against the icy winds of winter and he wore woollen gloves without any fingers. He was hacking away at some small logs and chopping them into kindling sticks.
“That’ll warm you up,” I said, mindful of the Yorkshire notion that the act of chopping sticks warms you twice — once when chopping them and again when blazing on a fire.
“It would if Ah could get that bloody fire o’ mine going,” said the little fellow. “Damned thing, it won’t draw. Them sticks is wet, mebbe.”
“They look OK to me,” I peered across the fence to examine them.
“Ah’ve tried and tried this morning,” he said. “Damn thing won’t blaze so Ah can’t even boil me kettle.”
“I’ll come round,” I heard myself make an offer of help.
There was no wonder his fire wouldn’t ignite. It stood no chance. His grate was part of an old range of the Yorkist type. It had an oven at one side and a centrally positioned black leaded grate some two feet above floor level. At the opposite side of the oven was a hot water tank; this was built into the fireplace and fitted with a brass tap to draw off the heated water. A small can with a wire handle hung from that tap, and a kettle of cold water waited on a swivel hob.
But the grate was overflowing with ash. It was inches deep within the grate itself, but the tall space below was also flail. The ash spilled and spread for a distance of about a yard into the dusty room. Directly on top of all this, he had tried to light his pathetic fire; the evidence was there in the form of charred newspapers and sticks, with odd lumps of coal uselessly placed.
“It’ll never go with all that muck underneath,” I kicked the accumulated ash with my boot. “It needs cleaning out, you need a draught for a fire to blaze. You’ve choked it to death!”
“Oh,” he said as if not fully understanding this elementary fact.
“Where’s your shovel?” I asked and he produced a battered one from its place near the sink. I began to scoop shovelfuls from the huge pile of ash and soon had enough to fill his dustbin. After a few minutes of this dusty, hectic work, during which I removed my tunic and cap, I had his fireplace cleaned out and had added a layer of thick dust to that which coated all his belongings.
“Right,” I said. “Paper and sticks next.”
He had a store of old newspapers in a wall cupboard and brought in some of the sticks he had been chopping.
“You ought to get some more chopped,” I suggested, “and put them in this side oven to dry. But these aren’t bad, they’re dry enough.”
I laid his fire then went out to his coal-house. But it was almost bare. In one dark comer were a few lumps of coal, scarcely enough to last out this day. I managed to scrape sufficient for my task and laid it on the fire, applied a match and very soon it was blazing merrily.
“I’ll tell the coalman to call,” I said to Eustace, taking his kettle and weighing it in my hands to see if it was full. It was, so I turned the swivel hob over the blaze so that the kettle would boil for his pot of tea. “You’re nearly out, you’ll need some today.”
“Ah’ve no money,” he said. “Ah’ve no money for coal … ”
“Your pension’s due on Thursday, isn’t it?”
“Aye, well, t’ coalman might wait a day or two then.” As I stood before the welcoming blaze, I was well aware that this old man was poverty-stricken. The tiny back room, which served as lounge, living-room and kitchen, was dismal and virtually bare. The only furnishings were an old armchair with the stuffing protruding, a battered table and one old kitchen chair. There was a small, well-worn clip rug before the fire, but the stone floor was otherwise bare and in one comer there was a large brown earthenware sink with a cold water tap. The wooden draining-board contained all his crockery; it had been washed and stacked there until required. The bare walls had been distempered years ago and never cleaned or papered since.
The toilet, which was a WC, was outside next to the coal-shed and there was another room downstairs, but I did not go in, nor did I venture upstairs. It was plain to see that Awd Eustace lived in desperately poor accommodation with no money to spend on luxuries or even the basic necessities of life. I felt sorry for him and promised to look in from time to time.
When I left, he seemed happier and the kettle was beginning to sing. Later in the day, I came across the coalman as he was making some deliveries in Elsinby and asked him to drop a few sacks into Awd Eustace’s shed. This he promised to do. I explained about Eustace’s pension and the coalman was quite happy to wait for his payment.
From that time onwards, I made a practice of popping in to see old Eustace, but he never improved his ways. He never cleaned out his grate and always had trouble getting a fire going, so I became his regular grate-cleaner. Sometimes, I would stay and sample a cup of weak tea but he seldom chatted about himself. I did learn, however, that he had no family, except for a brother who lived somewhere in the Birmingham area. They’d never communicated for years. To earn a living, Eustace had worked on local farms all his life, labouring and doing odd jobs. He’d retired about twelve years ago, and had come to spend his final years in this tiny house.
Then one day I called and there was no sign of him. A bottle of milk stood on the doorstep and immediately I feared the worst. I knocked several times, then forced my way in and found him dead in bed. It is unnecessary to dwell upon the formalities that followed, except to say that he died of natural causes. A few days later, a solicitor contacted me. He asked me to be present as he searched Eustace’s home for personal effects and documents. And the result was astounding.
We found twelve Building Society passbooks, each containing the maximum deposit of £5000; there were bags of bank notes under the bed and stuffed in his cupboards; a sack half-full of gold sovereigns, and share certificates galore filed neatly in a battered suitcase. For a police constable, whose salary was then about £650 per annum, this was a fortune. The wealth in this hovel was staggering.
Awd Eustace had left a fortune and I expected it would go to his brother. Eustace had always existed on the smallest amount of money; putting all his savings away in stocks and shares, and in the building societies. The house was his own too, and so he could have lived a very comfortable and happy life. Why he chose to live in such lowly conditions, I do not know but there were many like him.
One old character always sat and read by the light of a candle, and once when I called to see if he was all right, he welcomed me into his room, settled me in a chair, and then blew out the candle.
“Thoo dissn’t need flight of a candle just ti chat,” he said, as if in explanation. “There’s neea point in wasting good money.” And I learned later that the same old man, who’d been left a lot of valuables by his well-to-do father, was quite content to barter a silk tie in return for a cabbage, or an exquisite piece of china for a few eggs. It was rumoured he could be seen in the light of his candle as he counted his piles of money, but I never witnessed this.
There were many similar instances of Yorkshire canniness in the handling of money; it has often been said that if
a coin fell over the side of a ship with a Scotsman and a Yorkshireman on board, the Yorkshireman would be first into the water to retrieve it. There is no doubt that some Yorkshire folk are very careful and this trait was noticeable among police-officers and their wives.
There were, and still are, some very tight-fisted policemen and some equally careful wives. It must be said that the policeman’s wage at that time was very poor and those with growing families did find it difficult to manage, myself included. Many made skilful economies but some went to extreme odds. I knew one lady who bought an electric washing-machine after months of careful saving, and then, in order to use it, sat up until after midnight so she could take advantage of cheap electricity. The burning lights probably cost more than she saved — unless she worked in the dark.
Another had a similar line of thought. Her parents bought her a washing-up machine, a fine piece of equipment which washed all her pots. But the woman worried about the cost of running it; the thought of massive electricity bills so horrified her that she decided to run it during the night. In this way, the cheaper electricity could be utilised to the full and the machine would be used only when it was completely full of dirty pots.
The snag was that the family had only one set of crockery. When all the pieces were dirty, they were placed into the machine and the family had to wait until next morning before they could be re-used. The mother would not hear of the machine being used during the daytime, so she bought a second set of crockery. But as one set was used at breakfast, another at lunch and some pieces casually during the day, two sets were not enough. So she bought a third set, with a few spare mugs and plates …
The result was that during the night hours, her washing-up machine, filled with three full sets of crockery from breakfast, lunch and tea, rumbled along on its cheap power. I don’t know what it cost her in spare crockery and I often wonder if she thought she was being economical.
Inevitably, with circulating tales of such tightfistedness, (a state of mind which is very often regarded as common sense by its perpetrators) there are discussions as to which person, within our knowledge, is the meanest. All men know the fellow who will never buy his round in a pub; who coasts downhill in his car to save petrol or who always uses the office telephone to make his calls. Invariably, though, there is one person who becomes a legend in his own lifetime so far as tightfistedness is concerned. The police service is just as prone as any other profession and in our case, such a man was Police Constable Meredith Dryden.
Of middle service and approaching his forties, he sported a ruddy, moon-shaped face and a nice head of dark, curly hair. He’d been reared in a village on the Yorkshire Wolds, and was as careful as any man I know. He did free-wheel his private car down hills to save petrol, and did switch his house lights off each time he left a room, even for five minutes: what he saved on electricity was spent on replacing baffled bulbs. He grew his own vegetables which he sold to his wife at market prices; made all his family use the same bathwater to save on heating costs, and even cut his own hair.
When he first came to my notice, he was stationed on the coast, but was later transferred to Brantsford, just along the road from Aidensfield and Ashfordly. His reputation preceded him; long before Meredith arrived, we heard about his legendary meanness and wondered how he would get along with the happy-go-lucky members of Ashfordly section.
One of his habits quickly manifested itself. He got others to run errands for him on the grounds that it both saved his boot leather and obviated a lot of the aggravation that followed his miserly actions. I came across this one day when I was in the tiny police office of Brantsford. Meredith was sitting at the typewriter and a young probationer constable was at his side.
As I entered, midway through one of my motorcycle patrols, Meredith said to the youngster, “Paul, nip down to the newsagents, will you? Get me a copy of the Yorkshire Post — I can read it over my coffee break.”
Eager to please, the lad put on his cap and off he went; I made some coffee as Meredith worked, and by the time the kettle had boiled, Paul had returned with the newspaper.
“Thanks,” said Meredith, not offering any payment to the youngster. We chatted over our coffee, and Meredith scanned the newspaper. Then, when we’d finished, he handed it back to the lad.
“Thanks, take it back to the shop. Tell ‘em I’d gone when you got back.”
And so the young policeman was faced with the embarrassing choice of either taking back the paper, or keeping it himself. He kept it, but he learned not to run any more errands for Meredith the Miser, as we named him. In the office, he collected bits of string and old envelopes for use at home and on one occasion when a lady came collecting for the Red Cross, Meredith slipped a threepenny bit into her box, and then made an entry in his official notebook to the effect that he had done so. This was complete with the date, time and place of the transaction.
“You never know when folks are on the fiddle,” he said earnestly. “I’ll check that the money has gone to the right place, just to be sure.” And he did.
We had heard that Meredith used his tea-bags several times before throwing them out and that he made his wife wait until the shops were on the point of closing before entering to make her purchases of perishable goods. That way, she often got the tail-end bargains of the day, such as cheap fruit and vegetables, or damaged tins of stuff. On the topic of housekeeping, word had reached us that his wife, Ruth, had to make a weekly request for the precise amount of cash she needed, whereupon Meredith would draw the cash from the bank.
Just how precisely his mind operated was revealed to me one Friday morning. On another of my motorcycle routes, I popped into Brantsford Police Station with some reports for signature, and Meredith was there.
I brewed some coffee and brought two cups into the front office. We sat and talked for a few minutes about our work, then I stood up and said, “Well, Meredith, I must be off. I’ve work to do and people to see.”
“That’ll be tuppence,” he said, “for the coffee.”
“No,” I tried to correct him, “we pay into a fund for the coffee, both here and at Ashfordly. Sergeant Bairstow collects it — I’m up to date with my payments.”
“I know, but we ran out of office coffee. This is my own — I brought it in for today, for myself. You owe me for one cup and some milk. Tuppence.”
For a moment, I thought he was joking, but the expression on that florid face told me he was serious. I handed over two pennies.
“Going far?” he asked, as I replaced my crash helmet, still smarting from his actions.
“Briggsby eventually,” I said, “and then Thackerston.”
“You couldn’t do a job for me, could you?” The request was pleasant enough. From an ordinary person, there would have been an instant and positive response, but as this was coming from Meredith the Miser, I had to consider all the likely consequences.
“What sort of a job?” I was wary of the things he had asked others to do.
“Cash a cheque for me at the bank before you leave town?”
After a moment’s reflection, I agreed. I needed to cash one of my own for housekeeping, and so it would not be a hindrance. Meredith gave me a cheque for £6 13s 2d, and I said I would be happy to cash it.
It transpired that this was for his wife’s housekeeping that week. I had no problem cashing it for him, but I now realised that it was true that Meredith did calculate the week’s housekeeping allowance literally down to the last penny. Furthermore, he regularly went shopping with her when his duties permitted, his purpose being to ensure that she bought the cheapest goods without exceeding the tight budget he imposed. If possible, she had to save from her allowance. We began to feel sorry for poor Ruth Dryden.
Then Meredith had an apparent flush of generosity because he invited Alwyn Foxton and his wife for a day’s outing on the moors. Alwyn had been at training-school with Meredith and was perhaps his closest companion.
“It’s my birthday on Sunday,” Me
redith had told him. “I’m forty. Life begins at forty, so they say. I thought you and Betty, and me and Ruth, could have a day out on the moors to celebrate. I’m off duty that day. We’ll use my car and we’ll stop and have lunch at a pub, and then take things as they come.”
I do know that Alwyn was surprised by this invitation, as indeed everyone was, and he agreed to go on the outing. For the rest of us, as mere onlookers, it did seem that Meredith had mellowed and that the onset of forty had opened his mind and his wallet.
The historic outing was scheduled for the second Sunday in May and I recall that it was a beautiful day with clear skies and bright sunshine. The countryside was at its best, with fresh, new greenery along the hedgerows, colourful flowers in abundance both in the wild and in the rustic gardens, and a barrage of birdsong to complete the idyllic picture. The outing should be wonderful; I wished I was going (albeit not with Meredith), but I was performing a local duty that day.
It would be about a week afterwards when I next saw Alwyn, his grey hair perhaps a few shades whiter and his face drawn with anger. He had an envelope in his hand.
“Are you all right, Alwyn?” I asked. At that moment, I had forgotten all about the moorland outing and was concerned for his health. He did look pale and sick, and I had a feeling it was connected with the letter in his hand.
“No I am not!” he fumed. “The bloody man!”
I did not know what to say or how to react, but he said, “You know that bloody man Meredith the Miser?”
“Yes,” I said tentatively.
“You were there, weren’t you? When he invited me and Betty to have a day out with him? It was his birthday.”
Constable Along the Lane (A Constable Nick Mystery Book 7) Page 11
