A Grumpy Old Man’s Tale 38 Bearthwaite Invests Even More in Itself
Harriet’s brine fermented dill cucumbers and the various other vegetables that Alf had given her to try, on condition he had the first opportunity to taste them, had been well received when presented with suppers in the Green Dragon. So much so she needed to produce them on a larger scale. Lucy Wannup who owned the village grocery store with her husband Dave had been asked by women who were shopping if she selt them as their menfolk had been asking for them after having tasted them in the pub. She went to speak with Harriet with a view to finding out if it would be possible to produce them in sufficient quantity for them to have some to sell in the shop. Harriet telt her, “In China they produce them in huge glazed pottery containers, they must be five to ten gallons in capacity. The advantage of a big container is they can take whole vegetables like cucumbers. Not having to cut them means they remain crunchier. I wonder what fermented courgettes [zucchini] would be like? The fermenters have a ring of pottery round the top to fill with brine too, and an upside down bowl in the brine makes an air lock. I’ve seen them on Youtube. I suppose a plate with weights on it would serve to keep the vegetables submerged. It didn’t shew how they did that on the clips I watched. Steven Menzies that studio potter out Allonby way could easily make one to try. You want to give it a go, Auntie Lucy? We could try it with bought in frame cucumbers and whatever we can lay our hands on locally this year and use ridge cucumbers from Uncle Alf and his mates next year. I fancy trying radishes and small turnips.” Harriet shrugged her shoulders and said, “I don’t know why. A lot of what I’ve seen fermented in China was leaf greens of all sorts, but I fancy trying stuff with more substance than leaves, though sauerkraut is good.”
“Yes, we’d have to start somewhere and that seems as good as anything else. You may as well start with what you fancy doing. Try the courgettes too. I suggest we ask Celia if she could make the fermenters, after all she’s one of us. She’s one of Vince and Rosie’s grandkids and wants to make a living threwing pots. She’s making some big pots with no bottoms for forcing rhubarb, celery and the like for some of the blokes on the allotments using clay from the roadside where it used to slip onto the road in heavy rain. She says it’s not particularly good clay, but it’s good enough when she adds crushed brick to it. Some of the demolition men have allotment plots and when they crush old bricks for the tracks the fine material gets left on the concrete area where the crusher operates. In return for a few of her forcing pots they shovel a couple of tons [4500 pounds] of the fines onto a trailer for her with their tractor and deliver it to her studio for her. She sieves the fines using an old vibrating potato riddle that Alf modified for her to separate the size of stuff she wants which she says is called grog.(1) The clay, grog and a bit of water are all mixed by a machine called a muller, that again, Alf made from something else. The dust and bigger stuff she doesn’t want the demolition men collect and it goes onto the tracks. It’s all done by the ton easily by machine, so your fermenters shouldn’t be a problem for her to make at a reasonable price. If she makes the fermenters she would know exactly how big to make the plates and could glaze some weights for you too. She lives with Jude Levins who’s a grandson of Alice and Phil and her studio is in one of the outbuildings at the mill. Alice reckons she’s going to be a granny before Easter, but neither Celia nor Jude have mentioned it yet, so keep that to yourself. They just set up home together, maybe ten days ago, in one of the small two up two down terraced houses on Glebe Street where your dad used to live, back of the old allotments site. Jude’s a plumber, but his three brothers are all in the building trade too. The four of them gutted his place and completely modernised it before the couple moved in. Alice telt me the brothers are all of an age where they’re looking to settle down, and they’ve bought a house each and have started doing the same with them. However, back to your fermenters. You’ll be doing all the work, so I’ll pay for the first one. If it works we use any profit to pay for the second one. Any extra money required you pay. You okay with that?”
“Aye, that seems more than fair of you. How did you find out all that about Celia and Jude?”
Lucy chuckled and replied, “I spend most of my days, all day, working in the shop which is just another way of saying gossiping with my neighbours about my neighbours. I imagine there’s not much Alice, Rosie and I don’t know about what’s going on. Amongst us we probably talk to every woman in the village over a week, and what one of us knows we all know. It’s a major mechanism for knowing who’s not doing too well and may be in need of some help. Never mind, Harriet, give it time and you’ll become a middle aged gossip too, just like the rest of us.”
The pair laught and went about their respective businesses.
As usual the kerosene tanks in the village had all been filled ready for winter by a convoy of articulated [eighteen wheelers] tankers and Sasha had Murray deal with the single invoice at the pre negotiated bulk price which was at a considerable discount. A few years ago Sasha had discovered that the villagers had been buying their heating oil from several different suppliers. After a village meeting in the church all had agreed to allow him to negotiate a better deal from a single supplier. His strategy had been simple if brutal. In a letter written by Murray, who was a retired accountant and dealt with the villagers’ collective financial matters, to all the local suppliers and several others from further afield, he’d stated how much the entire village required in a typical year and that he was looking to source it all from a single supplier to deliver to various places all of which were on average closer to each other than a hundred metres, which after Covid had reared its head had included filling Sasha’s tankers if required.
They were invited to submit a price that they would guarantee for further deliveries within twelve months when the contract would be up for renegotiation with all suppliers. Perhaps not surprisingly a large tanker transport firm that bought their supplies from the largest refinery in the UK(2) said they would agree to supply at the same price that they sold to all their other major customers at, but the price could not be fixed, for the refinery’s costs were subject to severe fluctuations beyond their control and hence so were theirs. If the price went up to their other customers it would go up by the same amount to Bearthwaite. When Murray was relating their offer to Sasha he was telt to close the deal. Murray passed the appropriate shares of the cost on to the Bearthwaite residents though the poorer inhabitants were not aware that Sasha had instructed him they were not to pay the full amount and to save any embarrassment they were to be invoiced for the amount they had paid for at the correct price per litre.
By contrast the similar letters that Murray had sent to suppliers of solid fuel had resulted in the best deal from Geoff, a relatively small coal merchant who operated from a yard sixty miles as the crow flies to the east of Bearthwaite, call it eighty-five by road. He only ran six three axle rigid(3) waggons, but still had a large number of customers in the west of Cumbria where he used to be based. He already supplied many households in Bearthwaite and said he could offer a better price as a result of supplying them all, but an even better price if in return he could store some ready bagged coal in the old quarry where he currently had coal tipped that belonged to Bearthwaite. He explained that if, as often happened, he had orders for more fuel out west than he could transport on a single waggon, the ability to deliver what he could transport and then pick up the rest from Bearthwaite whilst he was not far away would save him a hundred and seventy miles worth of diesel and a second trip out west possibly only part loaded the following day. Murray advised Sasha to agree and the deal was struck. Thus all the villagers had full coal bunkers and Murray paid Geoff for Sasha and distributed the costs to the Bearthwaite households on the same basis as their oil costs.
Geoff bought his supplies from CPL, the largest supplier of smokeless fuel in Great Britain and the Bearthwaite supplies intended for the quarry fuel dump were delivered directly there by CPL articulated tipper waggons. The waggons drove into the quarry backed up to the pile tipped their loads, and were gone in a matter of minutes. Geoff was invoiced by CPL for the fuel and passed the price on to Murray at cost who dealt with it. Geoff came to an arrangement with Murray whereby some local men in need of work bagged up coal from the loose heap for him using a spare set of scales. Geoff paid the men for their work and Murray for the Bearthwaite owned coal, again at cost. It was a satisfactory arrangement to all parties. Sasha asked Alf to find a second hand hopper bag loader so the men could load the hopper with the tractor fitted with a front end shovel. The loader shut off automatically when a bag contained fifty Kilogrammes [110 pounds] and could fill a bag in seconds. There was not a huge amount of work available for the men many of who worked part time at a dozen or more local activities to make a living, but what there was was welcome.
The quarry, despite still being a working quarry in use providing local building stone, had been referred to as the old quarry since the new quarry had been established nearly two centuries ago. The new quarry site had been submerged when the reservoir had been constructed over a century ago. The old quarry had supplied the stone for Gustav’s brewery refurbishment and extension to enable the newer portions to match the older parts. It had also supplied the stone required for the library school and Community Centre building that stood on the site of the old church hall. It was a large site, now owned by the Bearthwaite Property Developments Company, and was used for storing demolition clearance materials and all sorts of previously used metal that was seen as potentially useful material rather than as scrap.
Murray had been the only buyer of bottled propane gas in Bearthwaite for years, and he bought it by the artic load, mostly in 47 Kilogramme [103.4 pounds] bottles, from the producer, Calor Gas, at wholesale price. It too was delivered to the old quarry and Murray sold it on to the villagers for what he on behalf of the Bearthwaite Village Community Ownership Company had paid for it which was substantially less than what they could buy it for any where else.
Those who used wood as fuel had more than adequate supplies to see the winter out. The wood had been cut, stacked to dry and ultimately delivered by a couple of dozen village men and boys over the last few months. Much of the wood was demolition timber that was acquired by locals who worked as contractors in the demolition and site clearance business. They were paid for demolition and site clearance and the poorer quality hard core they crushed to maintain the road into Bearthwaite which was largely unmetalled, and any remaining was used for local farm road maintenance. Much of the better quality masonry was piled up for subsequent usage though some was crushed for immediate use on the road. The fines from the better crush was what Celia received. Metal was either reserved for potential use or weighed in as scrap and useful timbers were kept dry in local barns along with any cut firewood surplus to immediate requirements. However, a lot of firewood came from the hardwood trees the villagers had started to plant over forty years ago. More trees were planted every year, mostly on bits of land unsuitable for anything else. The villagers had begun to coppice the trees for fuel when the first planted were ten years old. Every year there was more wood available and some trees provided willow and hazel wands used by Gillian and a few others to produce baskets, sheep hurdles and other products. The small brash from difficult sites was chipped in situ and spread on the ground, but some that was from sites easier to access was chipped into trailers to be used as soil improver on local farms and the allotments. A small quantity was bundled to be used as kindling and of course fuel for the celebration bonfire parties held on the green where there was a large area set aside for bonfires.
A huge number of trees had been planted down the sides of the Bearthwaite access road all the way up to the base of the fells to stabilise the banks, for as one left the village on the right hand side the land rose steeply for four hundred feet of fractured clay and rock before levelling out as a marsh for a few hundred metres [¼ of a mile or so] till one reached the base of the Needle Fells. Years ago heavy rain would often wash thousands of tons of clay subsoil and rock onto the road rendering it impassable till the rain stopped and it was safe to deal with the problem. The left hand side of the road, though of more moderate a gradient, had if anything been worse. For twenty feet to the left of the road the ground was a bank barely a foot higher than the road which had drainage grikes cut through it at regular intervals for rain to drain off the road into Bearthwaite Beck which ran between the bank and the more moderate climb of a couple of hundred feet that lay at the base of the much steeper side of Flat Top Fell.
As one travelled away from Bearthwaite the road dropped slowly but constantly in elevation till half a mile from where it met the main road it climbed maybe sixty feet or so over The Rise. However, as the road dropped the land and beck to the side remained at more or less the same elevation. Eventually the beck and bank disappeared and for a mile and a half the road was significantly lower than where the beck ultimately delivered water to with nowhere else to go to other than onto the road or to seep agonisingly slowly into the ground at the base of The Rise that trapped the water in the valley. Although light rain sank into the ground surrounding the beck before reaching that point, heavy rain forced by the pressure of the full beck behind and uphill of it ran back onto the road and flooded it for miles. Under really heavy weather conditions the water at its highest could be eight feet above the road at that point. Too, the rushing flood waters in the beck washed away the level ground at the roadside and undermined it too which historically had led to total collapse of the road every few years. In years gone past the sub soil and rock slides from the Needle Fells side of the road had been used to replace the ground washed out on the Flat Top Fell side of the road.
The cost of a modern engineered solution had been out of the question, so the villagers had resorted to the ages old soft engineering methods. Pointed willow stakes known as spiles were driven into the banks which were lined with woven willow gabions filled with rocks and clay planted with willow, alder and whatever else would survive the water. Eventually the tree roots had stabilised the ground on both sides of the beck enabling grasses and scrub to grow, further stabilising the ground. The beck itself was rendered much more resistant to erosion by the roots of the invasive phragmites reeds they’d planted along its entire length. That the reeds had to be controlled by a JCB with a ditching bucket on its back actor every few years was considered to be far less onerous than major road repairs often every other year. The road had remained more or less intact ever since, though a little of the fractured clay still found it’s way onto the road. Till recently it had been spread where ever it had been least inconvenient. Now it was delivered to the mill for Celia’s use.
Mostly the road was a single track with passing places and little of it was metalled. Legally it was an unadopted road that the county did not maintain and was not a public right of way. A court case centuries ago ago, based on the even then ancient principle of ‘Custom and Usage’, had deemed it to be a private road on land that was owned by the land owner who had owned the entire Bearthwaite valley as one of his lesser holdings. The land was deemed to reach to the feet of the fells on either side of the road. Flat top Fell was owned by Crown Estates who rented out the grazing to local sheep farmers and Needle Fells was in private ownership and maintained as a grouse shooting moor. None of the authorities could insist on accessing the road nor Bearthwaite village without a magistrate’s warrant. With the breaking up and sale of the least profitable parts of the estate to pay death duties, Bearthwaite village had passed into the ownership of its residents and the road was a pan handle the maintenance of which the county had insisted to be the responsibility of the village as a whole. That had been accepted and it had legally transferred ownership of the pan handle to the property owners of Bearthwaite who had recently signed it over into the ownership of the Bearthwaite Village Community Ownership Company which widened its ownership to every adult over the age of eighteen who lived at Bearthwaite whether they owned property or not. That had been seen as a clever move by Bearthwaite residents, for it meant locals would always be the majority shareholders and thus always maintain control of the access to their homes. The road was maintained by the Bearthwaite residents as a superior quality farm track which was why most of the Bearthwaite vehicles were high ground clearance four by fours.
The usual deal that the Bearthwaite demolition and site clearance team worked with was that site clearance meant just that, total site clearance, which wasn’t without its problems. The glass that came from demolition sites, mostly broken window glass, had been a cause for concern for years. The men had to work to feed their families, so had to clear the broken glass, and the quarry had been the only place to dump it at a price they could afford to pay, i.e. nil, and all else was dumped there as well. The men had been relieved when the Bearthwaite Property Developments Company had purchased the old quarry with just their kind of usage in mind, for their work was seen by all as a community endeavour, for a lot of the materials that had ended up in the quarry had been of great use to the village, and as many had agreed ‘The price was right,’ but they had been using the quarry without permission for years and had expected that one day that would catch up with them. The glass had been piled up out of the way in a heap that was getting bigger every year. It was admixed with a considerable amount of old mortar and masonry fines and considered not sensible to sort through it. What little wood that had been in it was burnt out from time to time, but the problem had remained till Alf had suggested to crush it for sand. Someone had asked, “But what about all the masonry in it?”
Alf had replied, “What about it? Concrete, insulation block, brick and old compo(4) will all crush for sand too. It doesn’t make sense to crush that sort of stuff just to make sand, but if it gets rid of the glass and turns it into something useful it makes perfect sense. Use it in low grade concrete, for farm yards, barn floor and the like. Just make sure any odd bits of glass that failed to be crushed properly get pushed down below the surface and it’ll be fine. It’d be okay mixed fifty fifty with clean sand in foundations if you throw a bit of reinforcing steel in it, use up some of the steel in that pile over there. Glass crushers aren’t that expensive even new. You can get PTO(5) driven ones and hook ’em up to the arse end of a big tractor for power. Your pile isn’t that big. A couple of lads with a tractor fitted with a front end shovel would clear it in a week. Problem solved.”
For a couple of years some of the local building trades men had been discussing building a large building in the quarry from the materials there to avoid having to take timber worth keeping and firewood elsewhere to keep it dry. Machinery could be parked under it out of the rain and they could process demolition material, especially firewood, out of the rain too. It had been decided that as soon as they had what they needed building would commence. The footings had already been dug by Tony and his machine and the foundations laid by Freddy and the gang that had worked with him on Gustav’s brewery. The footings had used up what was left of the sand from the glass pile and a lot of steel that they had originally intended to take to Moss Bay Metals in Workington to weigh in as scrap. Bill had said, “It’s got to be worth a hell of a lot more to us as rebar(6) than as scrap, Lads, and think on we’ll be working in the dry soon which has got to be worth our share of a bit of scrap money.”
The articulated trailers Sasha had bought to tide the village over possible problems during the Covid lockdown were full and had been inspected and serviced by Alf and were housed in the now extended boat shed on the green. Thus kerosene, diesel and petrol supplies were available if needed. The old quarry had several hundred 47 Kilo propane cylinders stored there and several thousand tons of Bearthwaite owned coal tipped there ready for emergency use, as well as Geoff’s bagged up reserves, and spare barns all over the valley were stocked with dry wood. It was now a normal annual event. All that was required was a couple of goodly sized demolition jobs to provide the rest of the materials for the new quarry building.
Saturday evening had rolled around again. The rain had stopped and the flooding on the road to Bearthwaite had receded to less than a foot deep, so it was passable with care, but the weather had turned cold with a chilling wind. The bitter north easterly caused it to feel much colder than the thermometer indicated. There had been a frost every night for a week and the last few nights had seen the temperatures drop to minus five Celsius [22℉] with the ground remaining frozen during the day.
The central heating in the best room at the Green Dragon kept it delightfully warm and the fires in the taproom had two piles of sleepy dogs in front of them. There was barely room on the fenders for another nose. As Pete was pulling pints he asked, “As our resident horticultural and weather expert how long is this cold spell going to last, Alf?”
“Unfortunately the USB port on my crystal ball is well and truly shafted at the moment, Pete. I’m awaiting delivery of another, but it’s coming from China, so I don’t expect it to arrive any time soon. According to the Meteorological Office as quoted on the BBC(7) ten day forecast this was never supposed to happen. They said it would continue to piss it down and remain warm, and given all the signs I agreed with them. We were both wrong. They’re now predicting another fortnight of cold, and I’d agree but for this wind. I reckon it could blow it all away in a few days, four or five. However, the truth is your guess is as good as mine.”
“How you going on with your new hedge, Græme?”
“Well the trees have grown fine, Sasha, and I planted them between two rows of sheep netting with chicken wire at the bottom to keep them safe from rabbits and deer. I was originally planning on removing the outer fence, but thanks to Allerdale and my neighbours who’ve never stopped complaining about something they know I have a Landscape and Countryside Improvement grant for, so it’s beyond their control, I’ve decided to leave it where it is. I discussed what to include in the hedge with Natural England, and I went massively over what they even considered possible thanks to help from interested neighbours and their relatives. I’ve included over fifty species native to Cumbria, with a dozen and a half providing the birds with food. Golden, red and black bullace, bird and Cornelian cherries, wild crab apples and pears, haw, sloe, holly, hazel, chestnut and walnut and even more bush, climbing or scrub berrying species like ivy, honeysuckle, guelder rose, rose briars, and brambles. Most of the saplings came free from locals who were interested to help and one of my neighbours gave me three young trees with established mistletoe on them. She insisted on helping us plant the hedge. What more can a man do? My hedge is three-quarters of a mile long and the only new hedge for miles and certainly the only one to get the wildlife grant that I did. I’ve decided I’m going to remove the inner fence, not the outer, so as to be able to maintain it. Childish I know, but that’s how I feel about it. I don’t bother anyone and I’d like the same in return.”
“Your neighbours are all retired are they?”
“Aye. Mostly why?”
“That’s all they’ve got to do all day, Lad: mind some other bugger’s business, in this case yours. I’d ring up the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Mormons and a few other groups of religious nutters asking for a visit to discuss bible matters on their behalfs. After all you are concerned about their immortal souls aren’t you? And even if the law sussed you out there’s fuck all they can do about it other than try to give you a lecture which you don’t have to listen to. Make the bastards frightened to leave the house in case they get waylaid by some rabid lunatic with a serious dose of religion they won’t be able to shake off easily who desperately wants to know if they have taken the lord Jesus Christ as their personal saviour. Give them something else to think and worry about other than your hedge. Tell you, Lad, it works every time. I use the technique on cold callers trying to sell me something by pretending to be an evangelist. Before they get into their selling spiel I have ’em desperate to get the fuck out of my company.” At that there were gales of laughter, but it wasn’t a complete surprise, for. Sasha was known for creative solutions to unusual problems.
Liam who was a retired mathematics teacher said, “I’ll start us off, Sasha. I’ll take as my topic education and it’s value. Now I’ve always believed that a little education is without doubt a dangerous thing and even if not dangerous it can definitely prove to be embarrassing. I’ll give you some examples, the first one from someone who should have known better. The tale goes that a man received a letter concerning the increase in the fees at the extremely expensive private school his son attended. The letter asked if he would be paying by monthly direct debit or would he prefer to pay per anum. His reply was that he would prefer to pay through the nose as usual.”
“You’ll have to explain that one to me, Liam.”
“It hinges on the spelling of the word annum, Alf. Per annum with a double en in the middle means yearly. Per anum with a single en is derived from the word anus and so he was being asked if he wanted to pay via his arse. His reply was witty, since paying through the nose implied he thought he was already being charged an extortionate amount. The point being the letter was from an expensive educational institution that should as I said have known better. A second example is provided by a conversation between two middle aged divorced women who were members of a widowed, divorced and separated club that held its weekly meetings in a local pub. The first asked, ‘I saw that bloke at the bar chatting you up last night, Edith. Anything come of it?’ Her friend replied, ‘There were no sparks flying, Jackie. He asked me out, but I politely reclined.’ You okay with that, Alf?”
“Yeah. I get that because it’s more at my level.”
“My last example is a conversation I overheard in a supermarket queue between two women when a word completely new to me was used. They were talking about those steak pies you can buy in a tin that Fray Bentos and others make. The first woman asked, ‘Was that pie any good, Amy, or haven’t you tried it yet?’ The reply was, ‘Not bad, Betty. Handy to have one in, but a bit dear though for something so pastriffey.’ It took me a while to work out that pastriffey was an adjective meaning something with a lot of pastry in it, on it or what ever. I must be a bit thick because Betty clearly understood at once. Like I have said before if you don’t know how to spell a word exactly and what it means it’s best not to use it, and getting too creative with language can shew you up as a bit of an illiterate in the eyes of those who are literate, and it’s unlikely you’d ever get to know that’s what they think about you.”
“What’s for supper tonight, Pete?”
“I’m not sure, Doug. I heard talk of it being battered cod, chips and peas before it turned cold, but I suspect it’ll be something warming instead now. I’ll ask one of the womenfolk.” Pete who was behind the bar walked through to the lounge and on his return said, “I was right. They’re leaving the cod for warmer weather. Now it’s steamed steak and kidney pudding with mashed potatoes, mashed carrots and gravy followed by steamed treacle pudding and white sauce. Gladys said if that doesn’t warm you up nowt(8) will. Seemingly they were going to use Holland’s puddings, but the delivery was seriously short, so Aggie and Harriet set to and made a few hundred starting with the pastry at six this morning. They’ve decided since the deliveries are becoming unreliable, rather than having to deal with a last minute crisis on a Saturday morning again they’re going to sack the distributor and make all they need themselves earlier in the week when they can take their time over it. Aggie added that since they were on it they were making a load to freeze ready for next time too.”
Vince remarked, “So that’s why they wanted more suet and the steak and kidney as a rush job at eight this morning. Harriet rang me at home before I left for the shop. I had to include ox hearts(9) and lambs, and pigs kidneys as well as the usual beast(10) kidneys to make the order up because I didn’t have enough to make up the weight with just beast trimmings and kidneys which is what I usually provide her with. I could hear that lass of yours shrugging on the phone as she telt me, ‘Just make sure there is the right weight, Uncle Vincent, and we’ll make sure it tastes good,’ Pete. She’s right about that distributor, typical bloody white van man,(11) inconsiderate as they come. He used to buy sausage, pies, haggis and the like off me, but he started not to turn up to collect them, and I’d have them left on my hands. I sacked him a twelve month ago maybe longer.
“She’s a canny(12) one isn’t she? She telt me a while back that no matter how many turkeys I bought off Alan Peabody she’d take what ever was left after Christmas to make Stroganoff with. There’re always some left over in the new year, and even if I butch(13) ’em they’re difficult to sell because folk have had a bit of a sickner of turkey by then. I usually end up mincing a lot of the breast meat along with the trimmings for the lasses as work behind the shop to make pies with which barely covers my costs, and scraping the leg meat off the spurs(14) in the drumsticks before mincing it is a thankless task given I’ll make nowt on the deal. She telt me to cut the meat off the bones leaving as much on the bones as I considered desirable for the lasses to make the broth and soup with. When I asked her, ‘What about the spurs, Harriet?’ She said, ‘I’d put all the drumsticks in the soup and cook the spurs out, Uncle Vincent, cos I’d rather save the time, and I don’t want the work taking the spurs out any more than you do.’ Sure I’ll lose a bit of money on that, but it’ll make my life a whole lot easier. The lasses will be able to have the spurs out of the legs after the boiling with no bother. They’ll just glide out. We’ve continued making broths and soups to give away to those in need, so throwing the drumsticks in the soup pan will just mean we make a bit more and there’ll be more meat in it than usual. Phil and the allotment lads are still providing what else the lasses in the back need free too. That was one of the better ideas to come out of these Saturday night bull sessions. I’ll box and freeze the meat in suitable quantities for Harriet to take with a decent discount for solving my annual problem for me. The Peabodys are happy, I’m happy, Harriet’s happy and the folk that need the soup will be happy too. Doubtless we’ll all be happy when stroganoff is on the supper menu. We need more of this kind of joined up, forward thinking that benefits us all.”
Alf said, “That’s why a few of the lads started growing mushrooms of several different types. Dave asked if it were possible and some of them thought it had two chances, and were prepared to give it a go. It turned out to be easy enough, and it meant less stuff bought in during Covid. Dave and Lucy still take everything they can grow. It’s a decent cash crop too. That was when some of the kids started growing bean sprouts for Lucy in empty coffee jars which gives them a fair amount of pocket money, though at the moment the kids are scouring the valley for sweet chestnuts for Aggie to cook and salt for the bar. I’ll find out how much mushroom Harriet needs for the stroganoff and make sure she gets given enough. The lads that grow them are all in here now, so I doubt that will be an issue as they’re all fond of a decent supper.” Folk looked round to see various men nodding in agreement.
Pete continued, “It seemed while they were making the suet pastry for the steak and kidney they decided to make more and change the pudding from apple crumble and custard to steamed treacle pudding with white sauce. Gladys sent them one of the mature chambermaids to help out, so Aggie could go home at lunchtime. Gladys knew if Harriet hadn’t any help, or even if she had one of the younger lasses helping her, Aggie would have insisted on staying, but she’s getting on and though none wanted to take her dignity away from her we’d rather she doesn’t push herself more than is sensible. The new arrangements are she works five mornings a week, six till twelve, because she prefers that, but she goes home at lunch time. The staff can’t prevent her coming in at five, but they can make sure she goes home at twelve.”
Frank, a retired shepherd, who was Aggie’s husband said, “Thank Gladys for me, Pete. My old girl’s like a bloody old plough horse. Willing enough, but not enough sense to know when to stop. I keep telling her she has nothing to prove any more and needs to rest up in the afternoons to properly enjoy the craic(15) and the drink of a nighttime on Saturdays. She only goes along with me because she likes a glass, but she’ll never admit that I’m right.”
“What you up to these days, Alf? Still sorting out the bits for the Levens lads doing up the rest of the houses on Glebe Street?”
Alf replied, “Aye, but it’s not just Glebe Street they’re doing now, but all four of the streets behind the old allotments. Allotments Row, Demesne Lane and Pastures View are up for total renovation too, some eighty odd houses in all. Over the last couple of years, the Bearthwaite Property Developments Company managed to buy all the ones that weren’t already in private hands and occupied, and Elle has contracted the Levens brothers who own four of the houses to modernise the rest too. She’s had words with all the owner occupiers and has offered to completely modernise their houses too at cost. They all accepted her offer because none of those houses are in good condition and they need time and money spending on them. There are enough decent houses round the village for them to live in whilst their houses are sorted out, and the lads are happier that they can get on with the houses an entire street at a time. They’re starting with Allotments Row at the front and moving backwards, so then it’ll be Glebe Street, Demesne Lane and finally Pastures View at the back.
They’ve got a good few local mates in the trade working with them, and the Jarvis girls are will be doing the painting and decorating. Mark and Mason are doing the roofing, so it shouldn’t take too long to have the structurally better houses ready for living in. The houses farthest from the village at the west end backing up to the fells are in the worst condition, especially the roofs. We’ve a few thousand slates in the quarry but Mason telt me they’ll need more, so I’m looking. They’re completely shelling the houses. The wiring is in terrible condition and is just being ripped out, but Jude is taking out all the old plumbing as intact as he can. A lot of it is in surprisingly good condition. The old half inch internal diameter pipe and fittings are compatible with the new fifteen mil outer diameter pipe and fittings, but to use the three-quarter, inch and inch and a quarter pipe I’ll have to supply Jude with some end feed conversion pieces which I’ve hundreds of on the shelf. The three-quarter fittings I’ll bore out to twenty-two mil. The inch I’ll probably bore out to twenty-eight mill and I’ll make some internal reducers for the inch and a quarter fittings to take twenty-eight mil pipe too. It’s not difficult and it should save the Bearthwaite Property Developments Company a deal of cash that they don’t actually have. Probably it’ll be the apprentices that will do the lathe work.
“The onerous bit is on Jude not me because it’ll all take him a bit longer than a straight forward job using new stuff. He’s dropping all the old plumbing, pipes, fittings, cylinders and back boilers too, off at my workshop for me to go over with a list of what he wants in total. As I said, a lot of the old stuff I can fettle, and there’s a lot I can make, but there’ll still be a good bit I’ll have to buy for him. Elle insisted they do it that way to keep the costs down, so we have some housing stock that youngsters just setting out can afford to rent or buy. The boys are in agreement because it’s what they did with Jude’s house. He’s already moved in with Celia, and it’s what they planned on doing with the other three too. I got a really good deal for him on all the central heating radiators from a firm in Yorkshire. Completely modern steel radiators with modern style radiator tail pieces to connect to. Like a lot of stuff they’re currently stored in houses with watertight roofs. However, I’m getting sick of idiots selling stuff on Ebay and you’ve no idea exactly what it is the fools are selling. Jude needed some straight lock shield radiator valves with fifteen mil(16) compression connections on both ends incorporating a radiator drain.
“The idea was the valves would fit vertically into the pipe work below the radiators using a fifteen mil tee to connect to the radiator tailpieces which have a fifteen mil spigot end. I couldn’t even track down a straight lock shield valve with a drain, and I had a lot of problems tracking down straight valves with no drain but fifteen mil compression fittings on both ends. Now most lock shield valves are right angled and have a vertical compression fitting at one end to take fifteen mil pipe and a male threaded horizontal fitting at the other end to fit a captive female half inch BSP nut on a radiator tail piece. Problem is there are two common styles of radiator tail piece both of which have a male half inch British Standard Pipe thread at one end which screws into a UK domestic radiator. The older style has the captive female half inch BSP nut at the other end to fit the male thread on the valve, but the more recent type of rad tail terminates in a fifteen mil spigot to connect to the valve which has a fifteen mil female compression fitting to suit which was what I needed.
“Trouble is most valves selt have useless pictures or generic pictures of something similar and you can’t tell which type you are buying. It’s made more difficult because valves are selt with rad tails and the pictures invariably shew the two connected, and you can’t work out the nature of the connection from the picture. I spent hours on the internet before I found straight valves that shewed the tails separate. God alone knows what it cost me in time to buy the valves at four ninety-nine apiece. Why are folk so stupid? When I sell owt it’s crystal clear what I’m selling, and the result is I always sell stuff within forty-eight hours. When I buy stuff that isn’t what I thought it was I give crap feedback and then folk get upset. Since I’m standing the financial loss I consider it reasonable they stand the shit I give them. Idiots. What really winds me up is the time it costs me. A week to take delivery of the wrong gear then back to searching the bloody internet again. If you aren’t fit to be in business you deserve to be put out of business. Wankers.”
“Calm down, Alf. Have a pint and a glass of chemic too. Your blood pressure clearly needs both. Matter of interest what about the radiator drains?”
“Thanks, Pete. A good idea. As to the drains, like I said I couldn’t find a straight valve with a drain incorporated. Angled valves yes, straight no. I found some A type drains with a fifteen mil spigot on the end that fit into a standard fifteen mil equal tee. It’s not the perfect solution because it looks clumsy and amateurish, but at one ninety-nine apiece for the drains and one sixteen apiece for the tees that’ll have to do. I could make what Jude needed, but I can’t justify the time and hence cost involved.”
Alf took a deep pull on his pint which nearly emptied it and Harriet who was behind the bar said, “There’s another pint here for you, Uncle Alf. I’ll pull as many as required, Gentlemen.”
After emptying his glass and his poteen too, Alf said, “Thanks, Harriet pet,” before continuing with his fresh pint and his grievances concerning the plumbing industry which due to his arrangement with the Levens brothers he was up to his ears in. “In a similar vein, another thing that used to wind me up is the general lack of availability of plumbing fittings. Loads of less commonly used fittings that used to be easy to get aholt on(17) at any plumbers’ merchant are now not available, not even from China nor India. Compression crosses and corner fittings are not available in any size never mind reducer sizes, and you can just forget about conversion sizes. Inline drains, same again, but at least a drain with a spigot in a tee does the job. Talking about drains, why does anybody bother to make type B drains? They leak around the spindle as soon as you back the seal off the seat to operate them and type A drains with a gland on the spindle don’t. It only costs a few pence to machine a groove in the spindle to fit an O ring, so why bother making owt(18) else?
“How come it doesn’t wind you up any more, Alf?”
“Because I’m making money out of it, Vinvent. If a compression fitting I want is not available I cast it in brass and machine what needs doing. Olives [US ferrules] and nuts are standard and cheap if you buy in bulk, but if I have to I can make them too. Mind I have boxes of ’em from knackered fittings on the shelf. End feed soldered fittings are even easier to make from braised up tube. If I want a female end I sweat it up with a torch and use a swage on it. You can do it on unheated pipe, but unheated pipe is half hard and harder work to swage and there’s a danger of splitting it. If you heat the pipe gey hot and leave it to cool slowly on its own it becomes softer and stays that way, so it’s more ductile and easier to swage without the risk of splitting it. I’ve got patterns to cast brass swept tees, wies, [Ys] corners, crosses, five ways, six ways and loads more besides, including some multi part patterns with the ability to provide fittings at any given angles. If it’s to go somewhere it won’t be seen it’s often easier to just drill out a piece of brass. As far as I’m aware I’m the only one selling stuff like that and as a result the price I can get for them on Ebay means I can afford to sell them locally to folk like Jude for what I consider to be a half way reasonable price.
“I also sell conversion fittings from not just old imperial sizes to modern metric sizes, but any given size to any other given size, it’s only a question of what size you bore ’em out to for compression fittings and swage tube out to for end feeds. I’ll be doing a lot of that on the old stuff that Jude has left at my place, so that it’s all compatible with modern pipe and fittings. I’ll need to make sure that all the pipe that is reused hasn’t worn thin with use. Really old pipe which all of that is has a greater wall thickness than modern stuff so it should be okay, but I’ve a gadget that can measure wall thickness from the outside. It’s usually only a problem where the water had to change direction suddenly like at bends in the pipe or at fittings like elbows and tees. Slow bends, slow elbows and swept tees and wies are a lot less of a problem than tighter bends and the tighter fittings that are all you can buy these days.
“I used to produce the more common stuff in batches of a hundred and box ’em up on the shelf ready to pack in a jiffy bag and ship, but I have to batch ’em up by the thousand these days. Anything really oddball I can make, usually by butchering and braising standard fittings I’ve had in my junk pile for decades. A couple of years ago a bloke from Essex whose sister married a bloke from the east coast had heard about me somehow. He rang me up to see if he could have a couple of sixty degree twenty-two mil end feed crosses made with two females on one long side and two males on the other. God alone knows what he wanted them for. I didn’t ask because I didn’t want the job, so off the top of my head I said a ton apiece, [£100, $125]. To my surprise, he didn’t blink at the price and asked, ‘How soon can I have them if I transfer the money now?’ Seemingly he put the word out, and I’ve been making a tidy bit of money since then from making custom fittings and sending them all over the country. Crazy thing is I’m starting to receive orders from the continent too. I refuse to believe I’m the only bloke in Europe capable of making a living out of producing stuff like this. You’d think there’d be capable lads in some parts struggling to get by who’d be every bit as able as I am with a workshop wouldn’t you?
“It’s crazy, but apparently it’s difficult to get replacement rubber seals for plumbing drain fittings, and what there are are stupid money for a pair, like a tenner [$13] a pair stupid. As a result I’ve a permanent posting selling seals of any size on Ebay. All they are is a circular flat piece of rubber with a small hole in the middle, and most of them are well less that twenty-five mil [an inch] in diameter. I used to make them from old inner tubes out of tractor tires, but these days I use nitrile rubber sheet which is far more resistant to thermal degradation. I punch them out with a piece of metal tube filed on the outside to a sharp edge and sell ’em in packs of ten for a fiver [$6.50] with free postage. I stick ’em in a zip lock bag in a standard letter envelope and they go with a second class stamp, cost 68pence. [85 cents US] Metal tubes of every size are easily available, mostly gey(19) cheaply from the scrapyards, despite the price of scrap going up and down like a whore’s drawers. To make anything odd sized you take a smaller tube heat it and swage it to what you want and then sharpen it, and a multi size leather punch puts the appropriate sized hole in the middle easy enough. Tell you, Lads, a man who can use a workshop with a lathe and a milling machine can always make a decent living from outside idiots who can’t wire a plug.”
That was the brutal reality that had made Alf a wealthy man. The same Alf who had been an educational reject all his early life when he’d been at school. He may not have been clever in any conventional sense, but he’d been aware of that brutal reality and its implications for himself long before he’d reached double figures in age. He’d always been clever with his hands and had no problems learning anything that was relevant to his manual skills. He’d mastered trigonometry long before his contemporaries because it was necessary to be able to use his dad’s lathes and milling machines to make complex parts. The mathematical complexities of differential indexing(20) had been transparent to him by the age of twelve, and it was how he’d created a one hundred and twenty-seven hole dividing plate(21) to create the one hundred and twenty-seven toothed gear necessary to enable the cutting of accurate metric threads on his dad’s imperial lathe.(22) A diving plate with a hundred and twenty-seven holes on it was not available and so it had to be made. His memory concerning matters horticultural and technical was vast simply because they were what he was good at and enjoyed doing. He was a little sensitive concerning what he perceived as his stupidity, but his friends regarded him as a mechanical genius whose mind worked very differently from theirs. Even Bertie, his grandson who had a first class honours degree in mechanical engineering, a masters degree in electrical engineering and a PhD in metallurgy who worked with him regarded him thus too.
Ellen would never admit it, but it was his incredible manual skills coupled with his amazing mental abilities, though none other than she recognised the latter, that had made him so desirable as a boy and later as a man to Ellen that she’d been prepared to ignore possible family disapproval by marrying Alf who was her first cousin. She was three years older than Alf and had become interested in him at the age of nine when she was beginning to blossom. She was astute enough to realise then that six year old Alf had been interested in her and in her blossoming. From then on he’d been a marked man, and at sixteen she’d seduced the underage Alf to stake her claim to him because at nearly seven feet tall, built like a truck, yet kind, considerate and gentle, he’d never been a fighter, and, despite being nowhere near school leaving age earning good money, a lot of other girls were interested in him. That he only had eyes for her she was aware of, but she considered pregnancy would seal the deal. Sylvia was born before she was seventeen and they were married on Alf’s sixteenth birthday. In the end none had cared that they were cousins.
Alf’s mother had always worried a little about his future because the school said he was really slow and would never amount to nor achieve anything, so she was happy that Ellen had taken up with her son, for she believed Ellen would look after him in a way she no longer could. Alf’s dad had never worried about him because he was convinced Alf would continue make a good living with his hands. Alf worked with his Dad who realised his son was a machinist of a calibre he couldn’t even aspire to be, and one day his workshop and all he owned would become Alf’s. In his eyes his son was assured a future few could look forward to. His other children were cleverer in the accepted sense and had made their far more conventional ways in the world, but Alf was the son closest to his heart and he had never had any concerns.
Ellen’s parents were of a similar mind set concerning Alf to that of their wayward daughter. Alf was respectful and looked after her, he was a hard worker and from the age of thirteen he had been happy for her to handle their joint finances with a view to saving for a place of their own, and he clearly made Ellen happy. Their shared grandparents, Ellen’s mum and Alf’s dad were siblings, were of the opinion that the pair knew what they were doing, they were sober, responsible, good parents and sensible enough to ask for help when they needed it, so what was there to worry about? Ellen’s view of her future married to Alf had been correct. In the early days of their relationship they’d had very little money, but they had always had some because Alf considered working for money to be of greater significance than going to school where he achieved nothing. He was a poor attender and the school weren’t over bothered by that any more than he was. That he was considered to be a conscientious and thorough hard worker meant he was never short of work.
Ellen had earnt money as a knitter and seamstress long before she went to secondary school aged eleven and eventually it was what she did for a living as well as providing her family with clothes. Her confidence that Alf would make sure her children would never go short of anything that mattered had not been misplaced. In her own way she was every bit as clever as her man. A lot of folk thought their relationship an odd one, but neither were bothered because they made it work and it suited themselves and their children.
“You seen these before, Alf?” The speaker was Jack one of Jude Levins’ brothers who was a joiner and doing the woodwork and UPVC window fitting on the houses the brothers were refurbishing. As he spoke he passed a piece of plastic over to Alf. It was maybe eighty millimetres long, twenty five wide and four or five thick. The black piece of plastic injection moulding had a grooved rough surface on one side with a raised lug on one edge and the characteristic injection moulding hollows on the other, though there were grooves on the bottom that matched those on the top which ensured when stacked two or more of them would lock rather than slip on each other.
“Clever, but as you know, Jack, hot melt glue will do the job just as well. It only has to stop ’em moving whilst you tap the bottom bar in.”
The piece was passed round and someone asked, “What is it?”
Barry a middle aged carpenter of a generations old local family replied, “It’s a spacer used for packing under double glazing units to lift then to the right height in the frame. I’ve never seen one with a lug on before, but as Alf said it’s a clever idea. Alf you can explain.”
Years before Alf had come up with a mechanism to ensure the plastic spacers that lifted double glazed glass units to fit in the frames stayed where they were supposed to be. It was a simple idea that prevented double glazed units from shattering when fitted. When fitted a double glazed unit had to be lifted by the plastic spacers to the appropriate height to fit within its frame. If during the fitting process any of the spacers were moved slightly too deep within the frame such that they were within the gap between the two panes it guaranteed a failure. It was an easy mistake to make. It was not a problem till the bottom inner glazing bar was installed which as a result of the wrong placement of the spacer then pressed the outer edge of the inner pane against it. The glass pane was then stressed and ultimately would crack usually immediately, but sometimes not for even as long as a year or two. Alf realising the problem used a blob of hot melt glue on the inner edge of the spacers which prevented them moving outwards during the glazing process. It was a trick all local window fitters had used for years and all knew the idea came from Alf.
“When you fit a double glazed glass unit in the frame you work from the inside. If you push a spacer at the bottom away from you, which is only too easily done without realising it when you lift the glass and offer it up to the frame, it can get trapped behind the glass and the pane cracks when you fit the bottom glazing bar. Years ago I started to use a blob of hot melt glue on the top spacer in a stack of them to make sure it couldn’t happen. This lug serves the same purpose. Like I said. Clever.”
“Some body is probably making millions out of this, Alf. An idea you dreamed up what? Twenty or more years ago. It’s not right, Lad.”
“Yeah, maybe, Barry, but the poor bastard lives with his millions up to his eyes surrounded by scum he can’t trust. I live here, and I wouldn’t trade places with him for free ale for life. I learnt that from my old man when he came up with an idea some one else did make millions out of.”
“What was that about, Alf? Sounds like a good tale. Your dad was a crusty tempered old bugger, but a gey decent bloke. He never said much about it, but all knew he prevented many a Bearthwaite family from going hungry when times were hard.”
There were numerous voices agreeing with Vince and Stan said, “I miss old Jim, so tell the tale, Alf, but hang on till I get a round in and we’ll have a glass of rare tackle to go with it.”
After the usual glass collection, pint pulling, topping up of shot glasses and passing round of the collection box for the children’s Christmas party Alf looked around and started.
“To understand this properly you need to know a bit of social history, mostly to do with the relationships between folk like us and plumbing, and to arrive at that understanding I’ll have to tell you a load of history about plumbing and central heating and some workshop technical information too. You still sure you want to hear it?”
Eric in impatient tones said, “I want to hear the tale, Alf. You’ve telt us some gey queer stuff over the years, but none of it was boring and all of it was relevant to the way we all live, not just folk as grow and fettle stuff like you. After I’ve refilled my glass pass the bottle to Alf for a top up so he can start, Stan.” There were murmurings of agreement. Stan topped Alf’s glass up himself and nodded to him to make a start.
“It was back in the early sixties when Britain was finally beginning to emerge from the post war austerity and economic down turn when town and village folk too were starting to think about central heating, which was pretty well normal on the continent by then. Till then an open fire in the front room with a back boiler for domestic hot water was what most folk lived with if they were lucky. Many didn’t have a back boiler for hot water and heated a pan on the stove or the open fire. I mind my gran used to cook chips [US fries] in a pan of fat on the living room fire, a lot of women did in those days because that was all they had. Every now and again the pan spilt which was exciting and occasionally tragic. A lot of folk like us had a kitchen, a living room, two bedrooms upstairs and some of us slept downstairs. We were considered well off because Dad could make sure we had enough to eat, even if we did get tired of eating eggs and veg. Bacon or sausage was a treat, and when dad killed an old laying hen, he raised his own chicks, it was a bloody feast day. The best meal of all was coney but that didn’t happen often because as soon as one was seen it was in somebody’s stew pan. Wealthy folk possibly had a solid fuel stove in the kitchen with a back boiler, but in those days I didn’t know any one who had one of those.
Ice forming on the inside of bedroom windows at night in winter was normal, and most kids slept at least three to a bed for warmth. Last thing at night you went to the outside outhouse, because there were no inside crappers in those days. If you wanted a pee in the middle of the night you had two choices. If you were male you went outside and pissed in the bucket, if you were female the bucket was in the kitchen. Dad took the buckets to the allotments for the veg first thing every day The outhouse was what’s called a dry toilet these days, coming back into fashion with the tree huggers and friends of the Earth types they are, but you can keep ’em for me. Me and my bothers had to empty ours on Saturdays and take the nightsoil down to Dad on the allotment. We’d bring back some buckets of soil with us. One went down the crapper and was levelled to shit on, the others were left for sprinkling on it after you’d had a shite. A lot of folk don’t know how lucky they are these days. I do and I’m grateful. I don’t miss wiping my arse on a square of old newspaper from the pile that had been nailed to the back of the shithouse door one little bit.
“The government were getting worried about the cost of the ill health and deaths caused by that. Only cities and towns had water closets and sewers then. I’m maybe over stating it, big villages had ’em too, but places the size of Bearthwaite certainly didn’t. Despite the reservoir Bearthwaite didn’t have water piped into the houses till some time in the early nineteen thirties, before then there were a dozen standpipes in the village and the outlying houses and farms used wells. The village didn’t get sewers till the eighties when the treatment works was built at the bottom end of the valley. In Great Britain a hugely disproportionate number of our old folk died during the winter mainly from lack of adequate food and heat, and our child mortality rate was generating bad publicity for the UK government abroad.
“Our child mortality rate is in line with other developed western nations now, but I know the UK still has more old folk die in winter than in summer. It’s in the papers every year. It’s not a hell of a lot more these days, but more folk dying before their time is still more folk dying before their time regardless of how few it is. At the time, the sixties I mean, the result was there was a huge amount of tax money poured into home improvement grants, a lot of which was for central heating. It was decades before the home insulation grants were dreamt up, but that I reckon was more to do with global warming, green house gasses, international conferences, world opinion and other political bullshit than from a genuine concern for the health of ordinary folk. Don’t get me wrong, Lads, I’m all for cutting down energy usage because it makes sense to play it safe and it’s cheaper too. If the scientists are wrong about global warming we’ve lost nowt. If on the other hand we do nowt about it and the scientists are right we’re stuffed. It’s just the political hypocrisy, and, if you’ll pardon the pun, the hot air spouted and wasted by the politicians that gets right up my nose.
“Anyway back to the sixties, a fire or a stove with maybe a back boiler that only heated hot water for the kitchen was as much as a lot of folk had. All of us that lived here then can remember bath night in the tin bath in front of the front room fire and it was no different for millions of others either. Our bath night was Sunday. On Sunday afternoons my brothers and I had to fetch a load of wood in for the fire ready for bath night. Mum’s cooking pans were all out in the kitchen to fetch hot water in from the sink tap for the bath, and whilst we were fetching fire wood the girls were airing towels for us all to dry off with and clean clothes for us to put on afterwards. The day after was Monday and Mum and the girls did the washing whilst we boys fetched more firewood. I recall we fetcht a lot of firewood in those days. Many folk had only had a bath once a month and some once a year or never. When we complained about it Mum said it was because we had standards. I’ve often wondered what she’d make of me having a shower at least once a day.
“A hot water system in those days heated by a back boiler always used a direct system copper hot water cylinder. That’s where the water that comes out of the hot tap has actually been through the back boiler. The hot water was heated directly by the back boiler. If you want to instal central heating radiators you can’t use a direct system because the rust from steel radiators taints the water making it not fit to drink. Too, in a direct system the radiators would quickly corrode through since hot water is constantly being drawn off and replaced with fresh oxygenated water which once heated eats steel. Even with an indirect heating system to protect the steel of the radiators you have to add corrosion inhibitor which you really don’t want coming out through your taps [US faucets] as the water can be pretty black. I don’t know if it’s toxic, but I wouldn’t want to chance drinking it.
“In areas with sewers a lot of folk had a bed room partitioned and a bathroom installed with the grey water outlets going into the sewer. There were grants for that too. In the early days the grants only covered part of the costs and a new indirect copper cylinder with a copper heat exchanger in it was more expensive than many folk could afford even with the grant. The heat exchanger sat in the cylinder surrounded by the water it was heating with two brazed connections to seal it to the cylinder where it passed out through the cylinder wall. Some manufacturers used tank connectors tightened up before the cylinder was finally assembled. The two connections from the heat exchanger were made to the back boiler or other water heating system which had its own water feed and safety mechanisms.
“The usual arrangement was that as for the previous direct system the domestic hot water was fed by a gravity system where hot water from the heat source expanded and became less dense causing it to rise to the top of the heat exchanger where it lost heat into the bulk of the cooler water in the cylinder, cooled and became denser causing it to fall back to go through the heat source again. The hot water that circulated via the central heating radiators was a forced system that utilised a pump. Water that went through the heat source, the heat exchanger and the central heating radiators did not mix with the domestic hot water supply. It was indirectly heated. Dad worked out how to convert a direct cylinder into an indirect cylinder at a price folk could afford. He made a coil former to bend pipe he’d softened by heating that produced a coil maybe a foot in diameter with several turns of pipe, may six or eight I can’t remember now, though there are a couple of coils in the workshop somewhere. The two ends of the pipe were left straight for feed and return connections to pass through the cylinder wall. The trick was getting it into the cylinder and sealing it once it was in.
“Prior to the seventies Britain used four imperial plumbing pipe sizes for domestic systems. Half inch, three-quarters, inch and inch and a quarter all ID(23) pipe measurements, but by the early seventies they had been superseded by three metric sizes, fifteen, twenty-two and twenty-eight mil all OD(24) pipe sizes. I suppose the first coils Dad made must have used three quarter or inch pipe, most likely three-quarters, but I can’t remember, and I was only a child then. By the time I was old enough to discuss engineering with him imperial plumbing was just history and all the coils I remember helping him with were made from twenty-two mil pipe. I know he made a set of swages to make imperial and metric pipe compatible because there was a lot of the old stuff still fitted in houses and any new work had to marry up to it. I still have them and I possibly use one every few years even now if I’m working on a really old system.
“Maybe ten years ago I came across an unopened box of a gross of old three-quarters tee connectors that Dad must have bought in the sixties because they used the finer thread that was in use then and was replaced before my time with the coarser thread still in use today. I can’t remember anything being selt by the gross.(25) Boxes have all contained a hundred in my memory. That was too much money’s worth to weigh in as scrap, so I bored the bodies out a touch and drilled the nuts both to suit twenty-two mil pipe, replaced the olives with new twenty-two mil ones and I’d a box of twenty-two mil fittings for less than an afternoon’s work and well less than a fiver’s worth of new olives. You have to be more careful using them because the fine threads are easier to cross thread and being brass which is gey soft a cross threaded fitting is knackered unless you fettle it by building the threads up with braise and recut them using taps and dies or a lathe. Anyway back to Dad and his coils.
“He used a trepanning tool to drill a twenty-six mil hole at the top of the direct cylinder and a thirty mil hole at the bottom to suit the coil. He brazed a brass male tank fitting a few inches back from the coil flow end and fitted it with a heat proof fibre washer. He fed that end in from the bottom hole before winding the coil in and wiggling it to come out of the top hole. Another fibre washer, a bit of sealing compound and a nut on the tank fitting and that was the upper connection water tight. The tank fitting brazed on the lower return end of the coil passed in through the bottom hole, and to secure it he used a thick brass washer too big to go through the hole. The washer was split from the outside right through to the middle. When placed on the pipe the cut was pushed into the cylinder edge so one side of the washer was inside the cylinder and the other side was outside it. When it was turned it was all inside the cylinder. A pair of fiber washers, more compound and a tank fitting nut and the job was done, one indirectly heated cylinder, for about a tenth of the cost of a new one that usually only took half an hour to install. Not quite as efficient as a commercial version which had a cylindrical heat exchanger of annular cross section resulting in a larger heat transfer area, but it worked and it worked well.
“Years later I was telt that long after he’d been making and fitting the things, IMI, which was then part of ICI, had patented them under the name of ‘The Sidewinder’ because of the way they were wound into the cylinder, and he’d made nothing out of it. Did he invent them? Probably not, but I doubt if IMI did either. I suspect the concept had been around possibly for centuries. Doubtless the IMI version was prettier and more efficient than his. They were said to be made of thinner copper tube which would have aided heat transfer a bit. When I telt him about it he said he knew and didn’t care because he and Mum were doing okay, not going short of owt and he doubted Mum would have been happy living in Birmingham which was where IMI was located. The clincher for him I think was when he added, ‘And the beer’s shite down there.’ ” At that there were roars of laughter from the locals who’d all known Alf’s dad and they could almost hear him saying that about the beer. “My only regret is the old bugger’s not still with us to enjoy the Bearthwaite Brewery’s brown bevy.”(26) Alf raised his glass and said, “To you, Dad.”
At that all those who’d known him raised their glasses and said, “To you, Jim.”
“Just to bring things completely up to date and perhaps full circle too, Lads. I’ll possibly be be converting all those direct cylinders that Jude is dropping off at my spot to indirect ones starting as soon as I’ve worked out what the best way to go in terms of cost and time will be. I’m waiting for a price on a hundred commercial annular heat exchangers from the manufacturers. Either I make sidewinders and install them because as far as I could find out they’re not made any more, or I cut the cylinders open to install the commercial heat exchangers before braising them back up again, or then again I could just buy new cylinders at probably a hundred and fifty quid each delivered.”
“What’s it likely to be, Alf?”
“I’ll possibly be making sidewinders, Jack. It’s all a question of time versus money. The unpalatable truth is that owt you can think of is doable with the right tools which you can make if need be. The issue is is it worth the time, effort and cost of doing it. I suspect buying heat exchangers will be a non starter due to cost and the time the job will take. As I said, the cylinder would have to be cut open, the exchanger installed and then the cylinder braised together again which I reckon would take longer and be more expensive than fitting a sidewinder coil. A six coil sidewinder can be made with a six metre [twenty foot] length of twenty-two mill pipe which will be more than adequate to do the job in a small house in terms of heat transfer. I reckon I can buy a hundred twenty metre lengths delivered direct from the manufacturers for well less than twenty quid each. On the other hand I’ve some very good contacts in the metal recycling industry, that’s upper class scrap dealers, who often have large quantities of ten foot lengths weighed in because the ends have been damaged, typically run over by a stacker truck in a plumbers’ merchants warehouse. The merchants who weigh them in reclaim it on their insurance. Major metal recyclers sell that sort of stuff on to folk like me gey cheap by weight.
“The last lot of copper pipe I bought I paid bright copper scrap price plus ten percent for, and one end of the three metre [ten foot] lengths had less than three inches damaged which I swaged back to shape again. It’s possible that I could pay a lot less than twenty quid for the copper pipe for a sidewinder. Of course then I’d have to collect it which is a cost for fuel, braise two ten foot lengths together and unlike a new cylinder they would then need insulating and to do a proper job of it is not cheap no matter how you do it, so it all needs weighing up, but twenty quid for pipe and possibly the same again for insulation would be a top end figure. You can forget the cost of the rest of the bits because I’ll recover them from Jude’s stuff or my scrap pile. Maybe a bit for braising rod and gas but I can braise with propane and compressed air, so I’ll get a propane cylinder from Murray’s stock whenever I need one. A lot of the work can be done by the apprentices supervised by Bertie whilst I’m tracking stuff down and doing the more complex things. The apprentices can certainly make and fit the sidewinders into the old cylinders, but maybe buying new cylinders and having them do something else is the way to go. I don’t know and I’ll probably change my mind a dozen times before I actually do anything.”
“Supper will be here in ten or fifteen minutes, Gentlemen. Harriet and Veronica are in the kitchens loading the trolleys at the moment. Home made steak and kidney puddings mashed potatoes and carrots with gravy followed by steamed treacle pudding and white sauce. And may God have mercy upon your bellies. Without doubt it’ll fuel your internal furnaces, but the walk home may take a little longer than usual. I suggest you prepare the tables.” At that Gladys left to supervise supper in the lounge.”
“Right, Lads. You heard the landlady. Let’s have the glasses on the bar for washing and refills organised. Clear all unnecessary objects off the tables. Some one let the dogs out, so supper isn’t interrupted. Shut the back door, but keep listening for them scratching to come back in. No need to worry about that as the door is clad with a stainless steel sheet courtesy of Alf. I’ll start washing glasses if some of you will pull pints and deal with the money.” At that Pete collected some glasses and started washing them. Gustav and Dave started pulling pints and Stan and Bill collected money.
Gustav said to Wilf, who worked for him in the brewery, “Take over here will you, Wilf. I’ll put another barrel on. This one’s empty. We seem to be going through it faster than usual tonight.”
It was only a couple of minutes after the beer, the glasses, the new barrel and the tables were organised before Harriet came in with a trolley loaded with plates and cutlery. “Sort your own plates and eating irons out, Gentlemen, please. I’ll go for the food. Be careful with the plates, they’re straight out of the plate warmer and gey hot.”
Harriet returned with another trolley loaded with steamers full of the steak and kidney puddings which was closely followed by Veronica pushing in another with huge pans of mashed vegetables. “I’ll leave this with you, Harriet, and fetch the gravy.” Five minutes later the taproom was silent other than for the sounds of cutlery rattling on plates.
Ten minutes after that Alf stood to slacken his belt a couple of holes. He was closely followed by a dozen or so men doing the same thing. “I had to do that to make room for the treacle pudding,” Alf said to no one in particular.
“I think that has set and caused my ribs to stick to each other so badly some of them have crossed over to the other side, but like Alf I’ll manage the pudding,” an outsider announced before adding, “I’m Will, by the way.”
Another outsider said, “I think I’ll fast tomorrow, but hell that was good, but then it always is here. I’m Clayton.”
Harriet and Veronica appeared with their trolleys and started clearing plates and serving equipment away. As usual there was no food left over. They’d both commented any number of times it didn’t seem to matter how much food went into the taproom none ever came out which they considered a a boon and a blessing for unlike with the food served in the lounge they never had any left over to deal with. Aggie used the unserved food from the lounge to provide breakfasts for the farm workers who came in first thing to eat and to collect their lunches and thermos flasks that Aggie had ready for them. “We’ll be back in a minute to finish clearing up and your pudding will be being dished up in about five minutes. Mum and Aggie are dealing with the lounge.” Pete nodded to Harriet as the two women left.
“It always beats me how those lasses can serve, clear and serve again so quickly, Pete. Even when it’s a hundred meals it only takes them minutes.”
“They are highly organised, Vincent. And have a dozen or so trolleys. It’s all ready to go before they start serving anything. All the dirty dishes are left on the trolleys till we close. Then they get stacked into the dish washer cages and are lined up on the conveyor to go through the washer. It’s all automatic. As a cage comes out it lines up on the drainer to dry and another goes in. The early morning kitchen staff unload the dish washer cages first thing the following day. Harriet bought the extra trolleys and the new dish washer system because after the extension was built trade kept getting more busy on Saturday evenings. If it continues we’ll have to serve supper in the dining room or even in the dance hall.”
The pudding arrived and the two women served it up in a matter of two or three minutes. Veronica announced, “There’s a bit of pudding left and a jug and a half of white sauce, so help yourselves, Gentlemen, for we’d rather there were none left to have to deal with, or you’ll be eating local bacon that tastes of treacle. If any wants any more let me know for there is sure to be some left over in the room.”
A couple of minutes later Bertie, who was every bit as big as Alf, said, “I can handle a bit more. Pass me that sauce jug over will you, Simon?”
Alf immediately said, “See I telt you Bertie ate more than me.”
“So you’re not going to have any more then, Granddad?” Bertie asked in guileless tones.
When Alf replied with great dignity, “I didn’t say that, Son,” there were gales of laughter as the sauce was passed over to him.
Once supper was over and cleared away Sasha asked, “So has any one got a tale for us? I can fill in, but I’d rather listen to someone else.”
Stan replied, “Maybe not exactly a tale, but I was watching the news some time this last week and there was a report about a single mum down south somewhere who’d lost it with her crying baby. I don’t know how old the lass nor the baby was. As soon as I realised what the the report was about I moved to turn it off, but I heard the baby had died before I reached the TV remote. I don’t need to hear the details about that sort of stuff. I think that’s kind of obscenely and grotesquely voyeuristic. It’s more than enough for me to know that she lost it and the baby died.”
Sasha said, “That’s how I feel about the holocaust. I don’t need details pushed into my face to know what happened and I won’t watch or read fictionalised accounts, so I’ve never seen Schindler’s List nor read Exodus. I consider that to be commercial exploitation of human misery of the worst kind. That crosses my moral Rubicon. It’s a step too far, Alf.” Sasha said the last at the look of puzzlement on Alf’s face. “So I’m with you on that one, Stan. Interestingly, in the Netherlands the papers don’t report any incidents of child abuse. You’ll get two lines of bald fact. They’re not censored in any way they just refuse to give those bastards who perpetrate that sort of crime any publicity which is what they reckon they crave. It’s the same with incidents like mass shootings where some one runs amuck with fire arms in a school or a shopping centre, terrorist incidents too. Their view is take ’em out or take ’em down and lock ’em up and do it quietly. Then forget them and if necessary threw away the key. They argue it is a rare event and children do not need to be scared half to death by such. They believe that the media attention such events receive in the UK makes kids think it’s going on everywhere all the time and it’s clearly not. Sorry for interrupting, Stan.”
Stan smiled and continued, “No problem, Sasha, but I reckon the Dutch have got it right. Well that report got me to thinking. When we were babies if we had a screaming fit on us Mum used to harness us in that big Silver Cross pram that gets passed round the family to whoever needs it at the time and push it down to the bottom of the garden out of earshot. You’d probably have your kids taken off you today for doing that, but at least she stayed sane and there was no risk of her battering us, and mind she had Dad, and a whole pile of family and friends nearby. She wasn’t a single mum having to cope with it all on her own. Folk have got their ideas arse upwards these days. Everything seems to be about some mythical standard all parents should have to measure up to meet the grade as a perfect parent. There’s no more such thing as a perfect parent than there is as a perfect child.
“What they should be considering is what exactly can a imperfect but reasonable human being take or be expect to take as a parent. Some times a baby will scream all day. Doctors can’t always provide an explanation for it, and they certainly don’t have any magic potions that stop a baby screaming. A baby’s cry is designed by evolution to be impossible to ignore, and logically it affects women more than men. Any parent can only take so much. I reckon that’s why some babies get battered and even killed. They still make those big prams near Skipton somewhere. A big pram and a long garden is sometimes the secret to sanity as a parent, especially mothers. Too, I mind Mum used to put both of us in the pram and collect a week’s shopping down in the town when we lived near Keswick. It would all fit on the rack under the pram and the wheels are so big she said even when she was expecting it was effortless to push all the lot uphill on the way home.”
There were nods of understanding all round the room, but Alf summed up their beliefs as a community when he said, “I’m not saying that could never happen here. Never is a bloody long time. However, though I do believe what you’re saying, Stan, there are other things to consider too. You said she was a single parent. We have single parents too, Bertie here was one for a while when yon outsider took off leaving him with the kids, but they are never on their own here. We have a community that looks after all of its members even the ones we don’t particularly like, maybe even especially those.
“I telt you what it was like when we went down with chicken pox as kids. We’d have all been under eight or nine. I was six. Seven of us, my siblings, all my cousins and I were all at Mums, so we’d all catch it and get it over with. All put to bed in one double bed, four littlest at the top with the two youngest in the middle to prevent them falling out of what was quite a high bed. I was on the outside at the top, and the three oldest were at the bottom. We were were all bathed together in front of the fire. It was like a production line with two women supervising bathing and older kids helping little ones get undressed, dried and dressed again ready for bed. There was no way we wouldn’t all catch it. That’s how it was handled in those days. Mum, my aunties and my grannies all took it in turns to look after us. They helped each other. Dad was always giving veg and eggs from the allotment to folk who had the need. He telt me times out of mind, ‘It may be us in need one day, Son.’ I do the same, as do all the other lads on the allotments. As Vincent reminded us, the lasses help him out at the shop, so he can provide free soup and bone broth to families as need it. The lads and Phil give them the veg and barley to go in the soup. It’s how it is here. Not every one is wealthy here, but none is ever alone nor suffering shortage, for there is always help. My family was and is no different from any other that lives here.
“That alone would stop a mum getting that desperate, because she could get a break and get away for a while. Millions of kids all over Britain, not just the kids living in cities, don’t even have a concept of what a father is beyond being a sperm donor. They grow up and live in completely dysfunctional families on the social.(27) They live in social deserts where the communities were completely destroyed generations ago, possibly by their own greed, and now they’re paying the price for it. A dead child, a mother off her head with grief probably banged up in gaol for years who will never forgive herself. Chances are there’s nothing the law can do to her that’s anywhere near as harsh as what she’ll be doing to herself till the day she dies.
“For sure the politicians have never helped. I mind a few years back when there was talk of bringing back the married couples tax allowance. The single parent organisations and gay so called communities were up in arms about it saying it was discriminatory. I say so called communities because clearly their ideas as to what constitutes a community have nothing in common with mine. The biggest single thing I recall about the media ruckus was a politician, of what flavour I have no idea, stated at a press conference that it was no part of British politics for a government to attempt to change the structures of British society by means of tax reforms nor by any other means. I mind thinking to myself at the time, ‘If not then what the fuck is the purpose of the government since it interferes with everything else.’ My parents taught me to value what we have here, especially Dad.”
“Wow, Alf. That was deep.”
“I don’t think so, Stan. It just seems kind of obvious. We all know the differences between here and outside. We have never conceded control of our lives to anyone, neither the aristocracy who owned everything years back nor the politicians who came after then. Taking personal responsibility for yourself and your community is the only way to live with any degree of dignity and pride. It’s one of the hardest lessons every Bearthwaite teenager has to learn, and why most of them eventually come home to live. If outsiders wish to live like we do they’re going to have to take back ownership of their lives and their communities and not rely on politicians and bureaucrats hundreds of miles away who don’t give a stuff as long as they get their share of whatever is on the gravy train at the time. If they expect politicians and bureaucrats, both in London and locally, to do anything for them they’ll be waiting a long, long time, and it’s never been any different. I’m for another pint and a glass too, but first I’ll threw a few logs on the fires.”
“Do you get the impression that Alf doesn’t think too highly of politicians and bureaucrats, Dave?”
“Nah, he’s just having a bad day, Stan. Fill him up with chemic and he’ll be fine.” The laughter that filled the taproom was loud, but it had a brittle quality to it too.
Gustav passed several bottles of different spirituous liquors from the bar saying, “Calvados, grappa, raki, genever, hostage rum(28) and something that Græme obtained from his mate, take what you want.” At that he picked up the collection box and passed it to Bertie who passed it on. All the locals were aware that the superb tasting liquors that Græme obtained from his mate were in fact illegally distilled by himself, but in front of outsiders the fiction of his mate was maintained for safety.
Too, the matter was never discussed in front of Michael Graham the local police sergeant who was Bearthwaite born and bred out of respect for his professional requirement to be unaware of such things, which didn’t stop him sampling the rare stuff and even owning some some in the cellars. Pete handled such things with great discretion. Typically a theoretical discussion concerning the drinking qualities of whatever had just been obtained would be started in front of Michael. Michael would later make an innocuous remark concerning something else, say, ‘I saw a skein of a couple of hundred geese flying over the reservoir earlier this evening, Pete. Are they a bit earlier than usual arriving this year?’
Pete would reply, ‘I saw some too, but I didn’t think there were that many. A couple of hundred you say, Michael.’ And the matter was dealt with. The conversation could be about anything, coneys, lambs, flocks of yellow hammers, you name it. They were rather good at making Michael aware of what was available and establishing his requirements without ever mentioning it. Michael’s wife Mavis would give Gladys a couple of hundred pounds saying it was their contribution. To what she wouldn’t say, and Michael then had two hundred pounds’ worth of high proof rum in the cellar.
Sasha reached for a bottle of grappa topped his glass up and passed the bottle on, saying, “Any one new fancy a go? Doug, how about you?”
“Well, I have something, but it’s not exactly a tale, rather a recollection of an event when I was a student. Will that be okay?”
“Aye, Lad, and if you feel the tale goes better with a bit of story tellers licence mixed in don’t let it become corrupted by being too much like the real thing. Most of us here wouldn’t recognise reality if it slapped us in the face like a yard of fresh tripe.”
There was a lot of laughter at that and Stan added, “And Dave would be the one to know.”
After the laughter faded Doug took a heavy slug of Calvados and began. “Years ago maybe, nineteen seventy, at the University of Keele I was in a chemistry practical class in a ground floor lab when another undergraduate student dropped a full one litre glass bottle of bromine which broke when it landed. There are several points of interest about the incident. Bromine is damned dangerous stuff. It’s a liquid at room temperature, but it has an appreciable vapour pressure which is to say it fumes like hell. The fumes are a choking brown gas that is a major irritant to the skin, eyes, mouth, nose and lungs. Like I said it’s dangerous, much more so than it’s close relative chlorine which was used as a poison gas by the Germans in the first world war. That bottle should never have left the laboratory preparation room, and certainly never been handled by an undergraduate student. Normally the lab technicians put a small quantity of stuff as dangerous as that in a much smaller bottle for undergrads to use.
“Also, the design of the laboratory was appalling because as you entered the lab from the main hall the emergency fume cupboard switches were on your left and your right. Those switches turned on all the fume cupboards and the emergency air extraction fans to the entire lab. Fume cupboards are places you can do unpleasant experiments in safety. That lab had in excess of a couple of dozen of them. They have a toughened glass front that slides up and down and you only push them up enough to enable your hands to work inside. They also have an air extraction system and can’t close completely. The rule is the fronts are down against their stops when not in use which enables the fan system to pull air in from the lab at the three or four inch [75-100mm] gap at the bottom and vent it outside over the roof. That way fresh air is pulled into the lab from outside via ventilation louvrès designed for the purpose. Just past the switches the lab narrowed to a corridor because there were two emergency showers, one on the left and one on the right. They were to be used in the event of someone needing to wash something off themselves immediately or someone who had caught fire needing to be extinguished and were operated by large handles hanging down from above. The space between those open fronted shower rooms was down to maybe eight feet. The bromine bottle was dropped just inside that eight foot gap so the way out was blocked.
“The next thing of note was the emergency exit, exit note not exits, at the back of the lab was locked with a chain and padlock. That was explained afterwards to be because undergrads kept opening the emergency exit from the inside leaving it open to allow entrance afterwards. I pointed out that there were mechanisms to prevent that which still provide emergency exits. It was fortunate that it was a ground floor lab because to get out I broke a window with a lab stool and we all left that way after clambering over a lab bench to reach the window. I immediately ran round to the main entrance and turned the emergency extraction fans on. At the investigation I was heavily criticised for breaking the window. I too was an undergrad at the time, but I left Keele for Manchester University at the end of the university year because of the criticism.”
There was a lot of comment, but the general view was the powers that be had behaved like typical bureaucrats. They had the power, students didn’t, so it must be a student’s fault.
Pauli, who was an irregular attender on Saturday evenings, had never telt a tale before, but seeing the approval at Doug’s tale he felt emboldened enough to say, “I’ve a similar tale that would be maybe from the early eighties. I was in a second floor [US 3rd floor] polymer chemistry lab at Manchester Polytechnic as it was at the time, it’s Manchester Metropolitan University now. The fire alarm went off. Now I take all fire alarms seriously. In my teens I’d been rescued by a fireman from a high rise block of flats. Being carried over a fireman’s shoulder down an extremely high ladder flexing in the wind with smoke swirling round you and crackling flames sounding to close for comfort is not an experience you ever forget.
“I made my way down the designated escape route which led to an exterior fire escape. It was like a glass box on the end of the building just containing stairs, and there was a route to it from every floor except the first floor [US 2nd floor]. The building was I think six floors high. All floors were science departments except the first which contained the finance department and had it’s own fire escape. When I and a number of others reached the ground floor [US 1st floor] the door was bolted which locked it. The door had a small hammer chained to it which was intended for breaking the tubular glass bolt that prevented the door from being used to access the building from outside. I picked up the hammer to break the bolt and a porter said, ‘You can’t do that. It’s only a fire drill. Someone must have forgotten to remove the bolt.’ There was no way I was going up back to the second floor, probably sixty feet of stairs, to find an alternative way out. ‘Fuck that,’ I replied breaking the bolt. I was sent a bill for it which my solicitor dealt with.”
“Sounds about right, yet again,” said Doug. “Put this in the collection box for me, someone. I’ll try the raki this time.”
After shot glasses and pints had been freshened up and a number of the old men had returned from the gents, Barney, who was an outsider but a regular Saturday evening attender said, “I’ll try my hand at telling a tale in a similar vein, but involving tragedy too. And I’ve a couple of really short things to add after that. It too would have been in the early eighties when there was a butadiene gas leak leading to a fire and a subsequent explosion in the west harbour area of Amsterdam. I don’t know how many persons died, but I believe it was eight. Some from the Amsterdam fire brigade and some from the company’s internal fire brigade were lost to the incident. The company concerned made polymer powder amongst other things. The powder was transported round the site down metal tubes. There was a real danger of static building up and causing a dust explosion and all along the pipes were lightning conductor size copper earth straps connected to it at close intervals to bleed off any build up of static charge. These straps were about fifty mil by ten. [2 inches by ½ an inch] I was not there when the tragedy occurred, but I was telt about it and I do remember the earth strapping when I was there a few years later because I was servicing it and replacing a lot of it. The staff there were still understandably nervous about any fire risk. I’m an electrical maintenance engineer and the firm I was working for at the time did a lot of that kind of work. It’s only when you see stuff like that you realise how dangerous seemingly ordinary processes can be.
Connected to that in an obscure kind of a way. A friend of mine shewed me a huge spanner one time that was part of his works tool kit. Like all his work tools it was phosphor bronze. He worked at a petroleum refinery and he explained phosphor bronze tools don’t create a spark in contact with steel. Last, another friend who worked for ICI in some kind of a chemical plant, I believe they made explosives, told me all the workers there wore wooden clogs with rubber soles for similar reasons. I mind he telt me the clogs were made by Walkley’s clog mill in Hebden Bridge which is the only custom made clog mill in the UK. That’s it. Sorry it wasn’t more interesting.”
“Nay, Lad that was fine. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in telling of the lives of ordinary working blokes, and those lads that died fighting that fire and in the explosion deserve to be remembered, and doubtless they were our kind of folk just trying to get by in a hostile world. We may not know their names, but there’s many a man here who tragically lost a mate under different but similar circumstances at work and will feel for them and their families and mates. It one of the reasons we meet here. Even Sasha tells the truth occasionally, though I’m not sure about Dave.” At Vincent’s final words there were hoots of laughter including from Dave.
Denis moved to behind the bar and asked, “Another anyone?” When that was dealt with he said, “Time for a lighter note I think. Years ago not long after I met Belinda we were having dinner at my flat. You all know the deal, full on romance, soft music, candle light, flowers, good food, chocolates and champagne and the hope of a bit of afters. I’m usually pretty good opening bottles of sparkling wine. I ease the cork out and don’t let it fly anywhere, and usually I don’t spill a drop because I don’t have the kind of money nor the ostentatious, wasteful temperament that formula one racing folk do. I well and truly screwed that one up. I wasn’t fast enough to catch the cork and it flew across the table like a bullet right into my belovèd’s left nipple. She telt me she had the bruise for ten days. And before any asks. No I never did see the bruise, nor was I allowed to kiss it better, but to this day when I open sparkling wine she leaves the room. She tells me she is immediately wary of any male who says ‘Trust me,’ and in all the years she’s been married to me I have never given her any reason to trust me.”
Amidst the laughter Dave asked, “Is that true, Denis?”
“Aye. It’s true. Ask Belinda. She’ll tell anyone about it, though the way she relates the size of the bruise is I think a gross exaggeration due more to story tellers licence than reality. Seemingly the bruise was bigger than her boob and she was as buxom a lass then as she is now.”
Dave nodded and said, “Since we’re now onto the ridiculous I’ll tell a tale that was related to me years ago by a bloke who said it was a tale about his dad. It’d be some time in the late fifties or early sixties, but I don’t know to this day if it was a wind up or not. I don’t know enough science to be able to tell. His dad he said had lost all his teeth to three incidents, one a rugby match which his team won, two a motor bike incident which he definitely lost and three a dray horse’s arse and a stable wall. His head was between the two when the horse decided to rub its arse on the wall presumably to relieve an itch. I suppose you could call that one a draw since presumably the horse had no malicious intent.
“His dad according to the tale had a very powerful jaw action and wore out his first set of dentures in less than a month. The super tough replacement set took him six months to grind flat. At huge expense his next set were stainless steel, which the bloke telt me got him a bit of grief at school, which only stopped when he telt the other kids if they didn’t stop he’d ask his dad to bite them. Now his dad was some sort of top scientist and used to work at various research establishment all over the world. This incident purportedly took place in Switzerland at that CERN spot. He said that they use massively powerful magnets there and when they turned it on his dad’s teeth left his mouth at considerable speed. Now I originally thought that stainless wasn’t magnetic, but I later found out that some kinds of stainless are and some aren’t. Even if it were just a yarn it’s always seemed funny to me. Can anyone cast any light on the likelihood of there being any truth in it at all?”
Denis replied, “The rugby, the motorbike and the horse, yes I can buy into those, and I know that years ago dental materials weren’t as tough as they are now and for a while some teeth were made in stainless steel. There are thousands of alloys referred to as stainless steel. They are all made because of their different properties, but broadly speaking they fall into three categories, austenitic, ferritic and martensitic. However, I don’t know whether those teeth were made from austenitic stainless, which is by far the most common type manufactured and in the main is non magnetic, or not. Yes, CERN uses hugely powerful magnets, but their fields are tightly focussed into the workings of whatever machine they are a part of, mostly particle accelerators I believe. I’m no expert, but as a result of what I do know I think the last part of the tale, though amusing, is unlikely to be true. Sasha?”
“I agree entirely with you, Denis, for similar reasons. I too am no expert in the field, if you’ll pardon the pun, but it is my belief that even were it possible to generate such a powerful field over any significant distance it would be extremely dangerous other than focussed on the beam and there would have to be stringent safety procedures in place to prevent such an incident as you described. And mind some folk have stainless steel implants as a result of bone damage. It is extremely difficult to produce fields that strong and they can only be produced over very small distances between the poles of the generating magnet which have to be very close together. Such a set up produces very little leakage of field from between the poles and any leakage would be many orders of magnitude less powerful even at a few cebtimetres [an inch] away its focus.”
An outsider asked, “What’s an order of magnitude?”
Sasha replied, “One order of magnitude would be a tenth, two would be a hundredth, three a thousandth, and so on. As the order goes up by one the strength decrease to a tenth of what it was before. It can be used the other way round too, but whether becoming less or more the factor by which it does is always ten.”
“Okay. Thanks. I get that.”
Dave sighed with regret before saying, “Ah well! I almost wish you two hadn’t telt me that, but it was fun believing it could be possible. Any one else got a tale or is it time to get the dominoes out?
Charlie said I’ve a short one, more a series of observations really. It was Denis mentioning stainless steels with different properties that triggered the memories. This is about wood not metal, specifically oak. All of us who’ve ever worked wood know that green oak isn’t too difficult to work, but it gets harder and more difficult with age as it dries out. Dry oak needs very sharp tools to work it with any ease. I read an article in a wood carvers’ magazine years ago about a lass who was commissioned to carve rural life tableaux into the ends of centuries old oak pews that were in a rural church down south. Her descriptions of carving it and the effect it had on the cutting edges of her chisels and gouges were eye opening.
“Many a year ago, I’d have been maybe fourteen so that puts it in the early fifties. My uncle Michael was building a barn and round the back of a building he’d a piece of oak he intended to use as a major structural beam. He said it was originally a ship’s timber and was at least five hundred years old, but he’d no idea how it came to be on the farm, for his granddad had remembered it being there when he was boy. That timber was going on sixty foot long and twenty-four inches by eighteen inches, though characteristically of ships’ timbers it tapered slightly. The supports for it were in place and god alone knows what it weighed but my cousin Mick and I lifted one end into place with the back actor of a JCB(29) and then did likewise at the other end. Easy, or so we thought. Trouble was we couldn’t put a nail or a screw into it. Even high tensile steel masonry pins just bent. Every screw hole had to be pre drilled and it took a week just to get the rafters fastened to it.
“I also mind one time Mick shewing me a fence post on the farm. All the fence posts on the farm were oak heartwood that was a couple of centuries old, and all in as good a condition as the day they were first sunk into the ground. This post had a knot in it and with time it had bent sharply about fifty degrees at the knot, but after it had been repositioned so the top was vertically above where it entered the ground it was still perfectly serviceable, just not quite as tall as the others. I don’t know how many times the barbed wire had been replaced on those posts but I do know we had to pre drill holes for the staples to fasten the wire.
“Last, my uncle had a pile of massive bog oak trees from off the moss at the back of the big barn. That’s weird stuff because it looks to be purple and I suppose it could be thousands or even tens of thousands of years old rather than hundreds and you can’t put masonry nails in that either. He’d intended it for firewood, but a chainsaw went blunt on it in minutes. It wasn’t till long after my uncle had died that Mick bought a hellishly expensive chain with tungsten carbide teeth that we made any dent in the pile at all. That’s it, but even if that oak wasn’t as hard as steel there wasn’t a lot in it. Dominoes? Partner me, Sasha?
After the guests had retired to their rooms and the locals had left, Sasha, Pete and Gustav were drinking Highland Park, a positively genteel and almost ladylike beverage compared with what they had been drinking earlier, and discussing matters of import when Gladys came in and said, “Join the three of us in the lounge, and you’d better bring a couple of bottles of that. I’ll have some, Sasha, or this that out of my case? I’ve got the Asbach and the Courvoisier out on the table. Elle has something to say.”
“Well, well, well! Gladys has a case of Highland Park in the cellar. Did you know that, Pete?”
“No, but I do now, Sasha.”
“I’m warning you, Gentlemen. If you drink it you’ll have to replace it, and I’m not drinking any of that rotgut you lot insist on addling your brains with.”
The three men followed their instructions, all had a good idea what they were about to discuss, and though they were okay about drinking in the best side they knew not even Gladys would be truly comfortable sitting down for a drink and conversation in the taproom. Though she be the landlady, it had always been a male only space, though there were tales that went back a couple of centuries and more that ladies of a very old profession had long used the taproom to meet the itinerant pack pony men who used the valley in summer as a short cut to cross the county to Caldbeck using the steep and dangerous millennia old trail that led out of the valley head and was now only used as a recreational scramble by the physically fit seeking adventure. Tommy Dowerson the Bearthwaite postmaster had written and bound a guide book of local walks including the route closely following Alfred Wainwright’s(30) style using sketches drawn by his wife Sarah from his photographs.
Elle waited till the men sat down before saying, “First, Stephanie, Chance and the children. The adoption hearing now has a date. It’s three weeks away. I’ve lined up a registrar for the wedding here a week on Tuesday. We have less than ten days to have everything ready, and I want a party that night in the Dragon dance hall. Gladys and Harriet agree and will handle the details. We want a party because we could do with one now the nights are drawing in to cheer us up.
“Sam and I went to speak to Adalheidis Maxwell and she was bowled over when Sam telt her she was trans herself and there were a number of trans women living here with no issues. She was in tears of joy for our entire meeting which took most of last Wednesday afternoon. She’d like to look at the flat Stephanie occupied in the old vicarage and move her things in as soon as she can. I agreed. I telt her about Gustav’s job offer and that it was only temporary till her affairs with the Law Society were finalised and still crying she said she’d accept anything if she could just live in peace. She asked if she could have an advance as a loan from her salary to pay for some care during her recovery from her GRS in London before travelling north. I suggested we get her to Bearthwaite as soon as possible after she left hospital and telt her she would be nursed in her own home with no charge by local fully qualified nursing staff. She found it hard to accept but agreed. I didn’t mention it, but I want her flown up and taken by a vehicle she can lie down in from the airport to here as soon as possible. Alf said he’d organise borrowing an ambulance. Sam said she’d go down there to accompany her on the trip back. From what Sam discovered she is highly intelligent and a first class solicitor. I also wish to give her a golden hello of say at least ten thousand which if necessary I’ll pay myself. I don’t want this one to get away.
“Next. I want to make more money available imediately for the modernisation of Allotments Row, Glebe Street, Demesne Lane, and Pastures View. We need all those houses sorted out as soon as possible because we’re going to need them if we don’t want some of the older youngsters to leave. I want the word put out they’ll be available very soon. I want to tell the Levins brothers to source everything through Alf. He has the contacts, the patience to ratch through thousands of Ebay entries and elsewhere too, but most importantly I’ve never met anyone who can bargain like him. I want to authorise him to use two hundred and fifty thousand [$300 000] to start with and to submit the receipts to Murray. I’d like to know how much he can can buy for the money, so Murray can estimate how much more he’s going to need to finish the job and I can make sure it’s available. The sooner those refurbished properties have occupiers paying rent or mortgage the better. If need be rather than lose the kids we subsidise them.
“Regarding Lizzie Caldbeck and her husband Jeremy. We all agree Lizzie is exactly what we are looking for. She wants a family, but feels too financially insecure to risk it, but her biological clock is ticking so loudly you can hear it. It’s up to you, Gentlemen, you’re the ones to weigh Jeremy up, but the womenfolk approve of Lizzie. However, regarding the old granary, for little money as compared with the renovations behind the old allotments, the upper stories can be converted into a mix of three and four bedroom flats and some bedsits too for those leaving home, which will give them some independence with all the support they are used to still in place here. My idea is the entire ground floor [US 1st floor] be converted to the restaurant, complete with a small dance floor. I suggest once we have Jeremy on board we set up a meeting between him and Jacqueline our tame architect. I want the Levins brothers to boss the job even if they don’t actually do the work themselves because I’m telt by all our men in the building trade that their work is of the highest quality and they wouldn’t accept anything less from anyone working under their oversight. Most of those men are either semi retired or unavailable due to pressure of work they’re doing and have agreed to undertake. Again I suggest we get Alf to do the buying. Ellen says he’s getting tired and Bertie is taking a lot of the weight off his shoulders. Bertie’s taken on another apprentice, so that’s the third. He’s looking for a fourth, and said the two older ones are already doing a lot of the routine stuff with minimal supervision. Bertie says they have a good future in front of them as first class engineers and he wants Alf to slow down, so doing the buying will at least be less physically tiring. I think that’s all I’ve got to say. If any one has anything to add now or later please tell me. I’m sure I’ll have missed a trick somewhere, but we need to at least get things under way soon.”
It was clear Gladys and Harriet had already discussed things over with Elle and she was presenting their combined case. Sasha shook his head and said, “The money is nothing. There comes a point where you have to put it on the table and make your mind up. I think we are at that point. I’m sure things will arise that we’ll have to deal with. I equally sure that we will deal with them. We always do. I’ve nothing to add, Love.”
Pete added, “We’ll do whatever we can to support the lads doing the work and assist the womenfolk to help their menfolk. If it helps we can have bait(31) put up for any that want it and deliver to the site. We’ve got a couple of dozen bait boxes and thermos®(32) flasks available too. But I’m up for a party.”
Gustav laught and said, “Anything for a good bash, Dad?”
Pete recognising his own words from long ago being quoted at himself replied, “Aye, Son. Anything for a good bash.”
Gustav looked thoughtful and said, “We need our own architect. Is Jacqueline married? Could she you think be in need of introductions to some available men or women of professional promise? Or do we need to look elsewhere?”
Gladys spluttered and said, “Gustav, you are becoming as manipulative as the bloody Cossack.”
Equably Gustav looked at Pete then Gladys and said, “Be reasonable, Mum. A man needs more than one teacher.”
Harriet who’d said nothing to that point said, “I think Mum is just worried by the rate at which you are learning from those teachers, My Love.”
The six plotters stood and said good night as they drained their glasses before Sasha and Elle hand in hand went through the front doors of what was effectively the Bearthwaite Council Chambers. Gustav locked the front doors of the Green Dragon behind them. Pete and Gladys had already left for bed as he turned. Harriet held her hand out and said, “Bedtime. Something tells me tomorrow is going to be a long day, Love.”
1. Grog, is added to pottery to reduce shrinkage and cracking in pottery as it dries. It also aids workability. It has been made over the millennia from many things but crushed potsherds, fired clay failures and old clay bricks have been commonplace. Today some highly sophisticated grogs are formulated for specific uses, but essentially their function is what it has always been.
2. The largest refinery in the UK is the Esso refinery at Fawley in Hampshire. It is about 350 miles due south of Bearthwaite Cumbria. Esso is known as ExxonMobile outside the UK.
3. A rigid waggon is one that is not articulated and does not pull a trailer mounted on a fifth wheel coupling.
4. Compo, derived from composition, refers to both lime and cement mortars.
5. PTO, Power Take Off, a drive shaft from the tractors engine that powers other machinery.
6. Rebar, vernacular for steel used to reinforce concrete.
7. BBC, British Broadcasting Corporation, Britain’s state funded broadcaster.
8. Nowt, nothing.
9. Ox heart, traditional term for a cow’s heart.
10 .Beast in this context refers to a cow.
11. White Van Man, a relatively recently coined UK pejorative expression originally referring to the archetypal inconsiderate drivers of delivery vans which tend to be white. The expression has become so widely used that it now refers to being inconsiderate generally, not just behind a steering wheel.
12. Canny, astute.
13. Butch, dialectal form of butcher, a verb.
14. Spurs, turkeys, especially turkey stags, [males] have bony reinforcements in their lower leg muscles referred to as spurs, which are ossified tendons. One end is usually flat and thin becoming rounder and eventually becoming pointed at the far end. Even though they are seventy-five to a hundred millimetres [three or four inches] long they are difficult to extract from raw meat muscle which is tightly connected to them other than by scraping the meat off them with a knife. There can be a dozen or more in each drumstick. Pheasants and other game birds have them too as did many dinosaurs.
15. The craic or crack, a term for news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation.
16. Mil, millimetres.
17. To get aholt on, to get hold of, to purchase.
18. Owt, anything.
19. Gey, very.
20. Differential indexing, a method of precisely turning the work piece in a lathe, here a steel diving plate to be drilled with a circular set of holes, by a given fraction of a full turn.
21. Dividing plate, a circular disk with holes in it at regularly spaced fractions of a circle used to control the turning of a lathe’s work piece by that fraction. Commercial dividing plates have many such circles of holes on a single plate. A full set of such plates, usually thee or four of them, enable division to be carried out to any fraction of a circle up to about a hundredth. It was at one time relatively commonplace for craftsmen to manufacture their own at need often to enable a lathe’s work piece to be rotated by a single degree or as here to enable metric screw cutting on an imperially calibrated lathe, i.e. a lathe with an imperial lead screw, say 4, 8 or 10 threads per inch.
22. The significance of this is 127 is a large prime number and given that an inch, 1000 thousandths of an inch, is 25.4mm, after the only common factor, two, has been divided out the ratio in integers of 5000:127 is what remains. (1 000 : 25.4 ≡ 10 000 : 254 ≡ 5 000 : 127). To set up a lathe for screw cutting the tool advancement along the axis has to be geared correctly to the rotation of the work piece. This is achieved by setting up a series of gears referred to as change gears between the two on the lathe’s facility to so do. For a lathe manufactured with an imperial lead screw, which controls the advancement of the cutting tool along the lathe’s axis relative to the turning of the work piece, to cut metric threads one of those gears has to be of 127 teeth. In practice in many hobbyist workshops close approximations are used. CNC has rendered this unnecessary, but many older lathes remain in service that require such a gear.
23. ID, internal diameter.
24. OD, outside diameter.
25. A gross, twelve dozen, 144.
26. Bevy, beer.
27. The social, Social Security.
28. Hostage rum, illegally distilled Caribbean rum. A term used amongst smugglers in the Caribbean islands.
29. JCB, a popular back actor and shovel machine in the UK. Back hoe, US.
30. Alfred Wainwright, the one name above all others who has become associated with walking in the Lake District. His seven-volume Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells, first published in 1955–66, has become the definitive fell walkers guidebook.
31. Bait, workman’s mid shift meal. The term baggin is also used.
32. Thermos LLC is a US company that manufactures vacuum beverage containers as well as other insulated food containers. The word thermos has become a term used generically for vacuum flasks regardless of the manufacturer.
Comments
Thank you ....
Eolwaen for another fine GOMT that demonstrates what a small community can achieve with a source of funds and benevolent leadership and with throwbacks to village history. Interesting that access to the village is by a community owned road, unadopted by the local council, so unwanted people 'visiting' the village can be prosecuted for trespass in civil court. A great read.
Brit
Another great chapter, but…
The extensive discussion of plumbing components was a bit too much to be of any real value to me. IMHO it could have been left out without any adverse effect.