STORIES|An Act of Love
Early days in Glasgow
Gracie and Hamish. She was Grace really but she thought it didn’t have enough clout. ‘For a start, it’s only one syllable. That’s no’ enough for a proper name. And it’s a soft sound too, there’s nothing there to make an impact. It’s faded away the moment you’ve said it. So I made it into Gracie. I know that’s a soft sound too but it hangs around a wee bit longer. Lots of folk shorten their longer names, or somebody does it for them. But I would never ha’ done that. Gracie Mackay, that’s me, there’s four syllables there, with a nice mix of sounds and a strong rhythm to hold ‘em together.’
Hamish couldn’t really have cared less what people called him as long as they also said ‘And now what are you having?’ Most people called him Jim but that wouldn’t do for Gracie. She was the only one who called him Hamish, always, and seriously. ‘Jim is another little name that’s over and gone too quickly. There’s nothing to it. Jim. It sounds like a punctuation mark, like a wee full stop.’ A few of the East Anglian folk they later lived among might call him Hamish occasionally, especially after a few drinks because, to them, it was a joke kind of name. It was no joke to Gracie. ‘They can call him whatever they like. For me it’s always Hamish and it always will be. I respect the name and I respect the man. He’s my Hamish. Hamish Mackay.’ For Gracie it was much more than a mere name. It was a statement of his identity and a statement of her love.
To engage the old similes that never fail, these two smoked like chimneys and drank like fish. They weren’t too fussy about their fags but their drink was exclusively Whiskey, Scotch Whiskey, only and always. ‘With just a little water in there, if you please, but not too much. We don’t want to bruise it.’ Over time, both products can affect the quality of the consumer’s voice. This was certainly the case with Gracie whose voice was forceful and low. If you heard her speaking to someone standing behind you, you’d be surprised on turning round to find it was a woman talking.
And she coughed a classic smoker’s cough. Not one of those spasms, a gasping paroxysm of continuous hacking and wheezing that you thought might end her life before she’d finished coughing. This was more of a series of short, sharp, hacking bursts, as though trying to clear the throat of a trapped, compacted cluster of iron filings and brick dust. Hamish’s voice seemed to have suffered much less. He had a much higher, lighter and quieter voice to start with and he still had it. And despite his parallel consumption, fag for fag, scotch for scotch, he managed without a great deal of coughing. And, as we’ll see, he could still sing.
How these two came to be together had never been completely clear. There was a vague picture but no specific details. They were asked the question often enough, but whether you asked them separately or together their individual versions were never mutually corroborated. Knowing them and their proclivities it was bound to have involved a few whiskies at some event or other. They may have met at someone’s party, a wedding or a funeral, a firm’s dinner dance, a concert or a coach trip, or just - and much more likely - in one of the many Glasgow bars and pubs where they spent so much of their spare time. ‘W-eeell, we both used to use the Tower Bar in Helen Street. It might have been there. What d’you think?’ ‘O-oooh, it could have been but I’m not really sure. I went off that place when old McBride died.’ ‘I do remember seeing you in the Saracen’s Head on Gallowgate.’
‘Ah, now, Gallowgate. There was more than one Saracen’s Head on Gallowgate, y’know. It once had more than eighty pubs along there, between Glasgow Cross and Parkhead Cross. More than any other street in the whole city of Glasgow. That’s more than two miles of pubs. It could have been anywhere along there.’ ‘Do you mind cousin Will’s second wedding? We were both there. Was that the first time we got together?’ ‘I do. Didn’t we end up at Ramsay’s Bar afterwards?’ ‘Och, I thought we all went to The Gantry after that one.’ And so it would go on, damaged memories never coinciding, though sometimes coming pretty close, but never, never a convincing hit. It didn’t matter. They both enjoyed the reminiscence, taking them back to their home city and back to their early years. For anyone listening it was a great way to learn the names of many of the Glasgow pubs and to marvel at how many they had each known intimately.
Their working lives were quite different during those years. Gracie worked in the secretarial department of the Central College of Commerce, teaching waves and waves of sixteen year-old girls shorthand and typing. Apart from hairdressing and catering, this was a popular route for girls leaving school. In the days before there was a computer screen on every desk you could always take those skills to a bank, an insurance company or any firm’s offices. They were the ticket to a nice clean job, steady pay, nine to five, not too far from home, with the possibility of advancement in time as you gained experience. Gracie understood the value of her work to these youngsters. Her students liked and respected her and her colleagues loved her. She knew what mattered and, being a natural communicator, made an ideal teacher.
We can call him Jim now. Apart from the singing, which he did with dance bands, small groups or just with a pianist in the pub, Jim had never known what he really wanted to do with his life. He could give a passable imitation of Frank Sinatra and knew all the standards inside out. But it was a very big leap from fronting a Saturday night dance band to making a career out it, singing as a full time occupation, a leap which Jim himself knew would be too much for him. He’d sung in most of the pubs he’d used if there was a pianist present, up and down the Gallowgate and anywhere else. It was a pretty sure means of being bought most of your night’s drinks, especially at the weekends. They knew the songs they liked and Jim simply had to sing them, time and time again. ’Ah, wee Jimmy! You’ll be giving us Old Blue Eyes again, will you? Chicago would go down a treat.’ ‘Coming up, boys. Just a little water in there, thank you.’
And Jim loved it. A mild, quiet, self-effacing character, not at all gregarious like Gracie, he loved the singing, the drinks and the company but above all the sense of being accepted and respected, even liked, by a large number of people. They all knew him if only superficially, nodded to him on the street and all called him Jim, a simple relationship, a feeling of belonging which his otherwise cautious and withdrawn nature would normally have denied him.
The day job was at Montague Burton, the grand bazaar of gents’ ready made clothing, jackets, trousers, suits, shirts, ties and, later on, shoes and accessories that graced the High Street of practically every town and city in the land. In Jim’s day, they were in the big building on Buchanan Street, opened in 1929, with the characteristic mock-marble Ionic columns and pilasters that made Burton’s shops instantly recognisable anywhere. He was there every day they were open, especially Saturdays when they turned over more business than in all the previous five days put together. Those quiet weekdays were dull, tedious and empty. Jim spent much of his working day out at the front entrance, having a quiet smoke, watching the local world go past.
Late on Friday afternoon wasn’t at all bad, but Saturday was boom time. Wives came in, dragging their reluctant husbands, to get the man fitted up with something smart and new for a wedding, a funeral, a christening or just because he’d had that shirt on his back for more years than she cared to recall. Left to himself, he’d have worn it to shreds. As Jim observed, there were always just as many women as men in what was exclusively a men’s clothing shop. On the weekdays, it was nearly all women, giving themselves a preview of what they would have to force their men to come in and buy next Saturday. And Saturday brought in the young blokes too. They didn’t have to be dragged in by anyone. They wanted something smart and sharp and new for that very night, something to impress the gaggles of girls clustered strategically near the bar at dancehalls like the Locarno, Barrowland, popularly called The ‘Land, or The Albert, widely known as the ‘Last Chance’.
Jim himself, surrounded every day by Montague Burton’s best, was a very natty dresser indeed. The term ‘dapper’ could have been coined just for him. So he presented an authoritative figure to his customers, even if they thought his person-to-person style lacked a bit of the expected sales-related dynamism. ‘I think that will do you nicely, sir’ was about as thrusting an approach as Jim could manage. But in his own dress, he was a living, walking advertisement for Burtons. Everything was immaculate, though not necessarily to everyone’s taste when all put together on his very thin frame. Jim would parade a jazzy jacket with contrasting handkerchief in the breast pocket, restrained shirt in a single colour, no checks though stripes occasionally, patterned tie in bright colours, cuff links and plenty of cuff showing, immaculately creased trousers with turn-ups in a range of tones to set off the jacket, and the shiniest pointed fashion footwear in reddish-brown.
It was from this off-the-peg world of male apparel that Gracie transported him. Having met him heaven knows where and become his eternal companion, she knew her Hamish was worth so much more than selling clothes in Burtons for the rest of his days. There had been a shortage of teachers during the 1960s which was expected to continue into the early 70s. With his employment background in a large national business she saw Hamish as a natural recruit for the teaching profession. In those days, the lecturer salary scale would respect the years you had worked in a relevant line of employment. With his Burtons years taken into account, Jim could start well up the scale. Pleased to see the possibility of escaping at last to something much more worthwhile and much more lucrative, he accepted her analysis of his future without too much thought of its implications and enrolled at teacher training college. As it turned out, completion of his course coincided with Gracie landing a promoted post in the business department of a college in Norfolk.
Forging a new career
Practically from her first day in the new college, Gracie made it known wherever it mattered that she had a husband with a sound career in retail behind him and a newly acquired teaching qualification. There he was, she would say, sitting at home, just waiting for the right vacancy to appear so that he could make his valuable contribution to helping all these young people up the employment ladder. In fact, he was probably getting up towards mid-day for his breakfast and then slipping quietly round to The Woolpack, The White Horse or The Friend in Need for a few gentle bevies, a few fags and a chat with the locals. Despite his diffident style, Jim always managed to become absorbed into the camaraderie of those who preferred to spend most of their afternoons in the public bar, betting on the occasional horse race being shown on the telly and gently allowing the day to proceed until tea time.
They saw him as something of an oddity, even a ‘character’, this modest Glaswegian, who broadly shared their approach to life, or much of it and, above all, presented absolutely no threat to them. He wasn’t pushy or arrogant, he didn’t know it all and rarely suggested that he knew very much at all. Now and again one of them would give the word that there was a bit of ‘second hand’ goods available, a transistor radio or an electric razor going for only a few quid. Or a couple of shirts still in their plastic wrappers, a pair of shoes in their box, a big tin of salted peanuts, a car battery or – much more important – a few bottles of Haig whisky. Jim could usually take one of those off their hands, reinforcing his place with them if not entirely of them.
Jim’s comfortable installation among this company was not to last as long as he might have expected, imagined or wanted. This tranquil existence was suddenly interrupted for ever in the month of May. This was the time most teaching types eager to move on and improve their prospects elsewhere did so, unleashing a swathe of vacancies all over the country and into the swollen Situations Vacant columns of the Times Educational Supplement. Gracie’s college being no exception it was apparent that there would be a vacancy for the following September in her department. They would need a new lecturer in ‘O’ level Commerce and similar subjects to teach 16 year-old girls following the intensive one-year courses in typing and shorthand some of the basic ins and outs and procedures of the business world they were soon to enter.
Gracie began her lobbying immediately, having lunch with her head of department more often, proclaiming Jim’s undoubted talents to anyone who would listen at any opportunity. ‘You’ll appreciate, the poor wee man’s just hanging around at home every day, his talents being wasted. He must be the man for the job.’ ‘You know, he worked for years for Burtons. Now if they don’t know all about commerce, I don’t know who does.’ And even chatting up the principal at coffee breaks: ‘I suppose you know I have an ideal person at home right now for that vacancy. He’ll be applying the minute it’s advertised in the Times Ed. You’ll not need to look any further than Hamish Mackay.’
The astonishing thing was that they didn’t look any further. Five well qualified and experienced candidates duly appeared for interview – along with Jim. The selection panel comprised the principal, the deputy principal, the head of department, a member of the board of governors and an emissary from the county education department. This fine collection of accomplished minds rigorously conducted and analysed the usual demanding series of questions and answers. They tested each candidate with a tough theoretical situation and reviewed their suggested solutions. They probed each individual’s predictions of where they hoped to find themselves in five years’ time. And when it was all over, what did these proud guardians of our educational standards do? They selected Jim. As the personnel handbook prescribes, the others were politely thanked for attending, wished the best of luck in their future endeavours and assured that their expenses claims for travel and accommodation would be met without delay. Typically bemused but typically compliant as fate dealt him another good hand without him really having to lift a finger, Jim had got the job.
By the end of the month his appointment was confirmed in writing, his starting position on the salary scale identified and his teaching timetable all wrapped up to begin after the summer vacation. They gave him a brief list of potentially useful reference books, a massive sheaf of notes kindly provided by the departing colleague and a box of visual teaching aids they were sure would come in handy once he got going. To all intents, the preparation for his new job had been more or less done for him. And so, with the long summer spreading ahead, Gracie and Jim made a few trips up to Glasgow to catch up with old friends and family in familiar watering holes.
Jim’s forthcoming salary would nearly double their income so they splashed out on one or two luxuries and had their small house re-decorated. For the rest of the holidays at home they spent much of their spare time locally, mainly in The Woolpack, The White Horse and The Friend in Need where Gracie was not unpleasantly surprised, though surprised nonetheless, to find that her Hamish was really quite well known in these public bars of a weekday afternoon. Just occasionally, shortly before they went home for their tea, someone would even ask him to sing a snatch from one of Sinatra’s classic repertoire. ‘How do they know you do Old Blue Eyes, Hamish?’
Summer with its gentle pleasures was over. With the new autumn term, Jim began his new career. It was a far cry from the largely passive business of assessing a man’s critical measurements and getting him grudgingly into a new jacket or trousers and then complimenting his wife on her splendid choice. Now, for several hours a day, Jim would be face-to-face with a group of up to twenty girls aged sixteen or seventeen, following a variety of secretarial courses which included the essential ‘O’ level Commerce for which Jim was thought to be so superbly qualified. His charges were sharp, sparky, full of limitless energy and likely, guaranteed even, to find the mechanics of basic commercial practice among the last things they could ever imagine having to engage with.
Those who constructed the departmental timetables were well aware of this. No one in the department would want to have a class with these students during the final hour of the day, especially not the final hour of a Friday. So that is exactly where they put most of the ‘O’ level Commerce. After the exacting disciplines of learning typing and shorthand throughout the day with tutors who stood for no nonsense whatever, they saw that last hour as a release, a single period when all their energies were focused on getting out of college and preparing for the coming evening’s action. This hour corresponded to what the bar staff in pubs called ‘the graveyard shift’, that dead time between three o’clock when the lunchtime crowd had gone and five when the early evening lot came in for a quick couple on the way home from work. It would need a lecturer with a monumental strength of character, a stimulating imagination and a regime of cast iron control to hold the attention of those girls for one entire hour at the end of the day and embed in those restless minds the essential functions of an invoice, a bank statement, a credit note or the many other tedious mysteries of the commercial world.
Jim was not that lecturer. He never would be that lecturer. He never could be. In that ill-fated September began a long stretch of years where Jim’s working life narrowed itself down to looking forward to the end of the hour, the end of the day, the week, month, term and academic year. His evenings, weekends and vacations were the golden times. In between, it was puzzlement, quiet humiliation, and a mildly despairing sense of inadequacy. Gracie could not have given him more support and encouragement, telling him that he could see it through, he had only to grit his teeth and get himself to the end of the session. And, naturally enough, when the weekend arrived, or the weeks of vacation, his spirit was restored sufficiently to help him into the next phase of utter discomfort. ‘Ay’, he would say, ‘when you look at it from the outside, it’s no’ so bad after all.’ ‘Well, there you are, Hamish’ Gracie would reply. ‘Ye just have to get it in perspective. After all, we all have our bad days, don’t we?’ Jim never said any more about it to Gracie, sipping a wee dram or two with her, but thought to himself that he probably had rather more of those days than most of the others had.
Colleagues working in adjacent classrooms at four o’clock could not avoid hearing the soundtrack of Jim’s tragic attempts to get the girls through the hour and even help them to understand the subtle distinctions between debit and credit. His high-pitched voice, never shouting, but becoming increasingly strained and mildly querulous, rose above the background noise of the girls’ shrill voices calling and shouting across the room. They would hear the grinding, banging and scraping sounds of desks and chairs being re-positioned from one side of the room to the other, crashing into the wall, being piled high on top of one another, being knocked to the floor to delighted screams and applause. They weren’t getting at Jim particularly. They didn’t dislike him. It wasn’t personal. They’d have been much the same with anyone at this time of day, except that most other lecturers would know how to control them better, and they would have conformed.
Amid all this hubbub and mayhem, Jim would be standing at the front, holding up one of the useful items from the box of visual aids he’d been given. It was a giant cardboard model of a cheque. ‘Now, girls, this is a cheque. You put the date in here where it says ‘Date’. So what’s the date today, anyone?’ No one in the room had heard a word. Jim paused for a while, just in case they decided to sit down and be quiet and listen to him. There was no likelihood of that happening. ‘Now, girls, this space is for the payee. Does anyone know what a payee is?’ They still hadn’t heard a word. He paused again, a bit longer this time. ‘No? Well that’s the person you’re paying the money to, so you put their name in there.’ Longer pause. ‘Now, girls. This is where you write the amount of money in words. D’you see?’
And so it dragged on until, as five to five approached, Jim realised that he’d got to the end of the cheque and the end of yet another lesson. He’d told them what every single space on a cheque was for and what they should put in it, and it had taken him just over fifty minutes to do. At this moment he looked pointedly at his watch, a clear signal to his students that the class was over, and as he struggled to say, yet again ‘Now, girls . . .’ the mad rush for the door erupted into the corridor, and they were gone. Sighing with relief, Jim would restore the classroom furniture to some sort of order and move off briskly to a place where he could light a cigarette.
Some colleagues were sorry for him, naturally on account of their warm respect for Gracie. Others were not so sorry, feeling that he simply shouldn’t be in the job and finding it hard to imagine how the senior management people, including the head of their own department who was no fool in anybody’s book, could have appointed him in the first place. Like his students, they were not anti-Jim specifically. They felt there was something wrong with the system or the decision-making process that could allow anyone so lacking in the necessary skills and competence to have that job at all. As the years rolled on his reputation around the college had become a gentle, inoffensive joke. Some colleagues feared that the ridicule levelled at Jim, kindly though it may have been but ridicule nonetheless, could be rubbing off on them and their entire department. The more ambitious among them felt this more acutely. One of them finally grasped the nettle and went to see the principal.
‘You can’t make a decision properly until you have all the relevant facts before you. You need all the necessary pieces of information to ensure that your decision is not flawed. This is why it takes so long.’ While life rarely allows us that sort of luxury, that was how the principal, a benevolent, gentle, avuncular Methodist from the northeast of England who tended to see the best in everyone, defended his frustrating and diffident way of making decisions. By now he was working out the final few years of his career before retirement and avoiding confrontation and boat-rocking at all costs. Senior colleagues were constantly driven mad by his chronic hesitancy particularly when faced with decisions that only he could make. When it had come to the interview panel which appointed Jim you could imagine him apologetically saying something like: ‘Well, really I’d like any of them, or all of them even, to get the job, if only that were possible.’ Presumably in the event he had yielded to whoever made the strongest case for Jim’s appointment.
‘Ah, Jim Mackay, eh? M-mmm.’ There was silence for some time while a faint, slightly mysterious smile developed itself upon the principal’s face. ‘You know, no one actually dislikes old Jim at all. He’s never done anyone any harm. I don’t think he ever could. He’s utterly harmless, he does his best and even his students, year after year, have never made a single complaint against him. At least he manages to keep those girls in the classroom during the last hour of the day.’ ‘Yes, but is he really any good for those girls? What are they learning? That part of their course achieves nothing. And what about the reputation of the department, even the college? Isn’t that a concern that needs attention?’ ‘Well, look. I’m not the sort of person who goes around sacking people or forcing them to resign. In any case, simple incompetence on its own has never been grounds for dismissal in our trade. We’d have quite a few vacancies in this place if it were. Coupled with some form of serious misconduct and repeated reports of it would be another matter entirely. But we’re never going to see that from Jim, are we?’
‘Listen,’ continued the principal, having actually, and remarkably swiftly, decided to do something serious that only he could do. ‘I’m going to tell you this, but it must go no further. Some time ago I was at a conference where I bumped into Tom Mitchell who was director of the college in Glasgow where Jim did his teacher training. ‘Do you still have Jim Mackay on your staff?’ ‘Well, yes, we do. But he’s not doing terribly well, you know. I recall you gave him a reasonable reference, one we might call ‘neutral’, I suppose, but the truth is that poor old Jim simply isn’t cut out for the job.’ ‘I know, a difficult case. In a way it was a pity he was so nice to everyone. If we’d all detested him, it would have been so much easier. But we didn’t have the heart to refuse him a reference and rather hoped he would grow into the job, given time.’ ‘But how on earth did he manage to complete the course and be awarded his certificate?’ ‘Ah, now, not a word to anyone about this. Jim’s written assignments were generally less than satisfactory, to put it generously. But his teaching practice sessions were agonising, and towards the end of the course his tutor told me he would have to fail him overall. He’d already told Jim that this was the likely result and Jim said that would be OK, he’d simply enrol and take the course again. That was out of the question. Another year with Jim in the group, highly likely to reproduce his previous performance in every way, would be more than anyone who’d taught him could possibly bear. The only solution was to give him a basic pass, award him his certificate, and show him the open door to the wider world. You may well have been mystified about his passing that course. I’ve been puzzled since then over how your selection panel ever managed to give him the job.’
It seems mean to blame Gracie, to say that it was her fault that he’d come out of Burtons and gone into something for which he was so totally unsuited. Yes, it had been her idea from the very start and, once he’d accepted it, she had encouraged and supported him every inch of the way. Without her intervention he would probably have been content, though not exactly happy, to remain at Burtons for the rest of his working life. At least, there he knew what to do and could do whatever they required of him. To Gracie that would never have been good enough. Her grand idea for his future was not the result of a closely examined rational process: she may have seen his inadequacies but had never considered their possible consequences. It had really been very simple: she was successful in the teaching and so could he be. It was so much more than just a well-meaning impulse, though it was certainly that. It was the deepest thing she could do for any other person. For her man, Hamish, it was an act of love.
In her late fifties, Gracie died of lung cancer. Given her life style, the cause of death surprised no one. The fact of it devastated everyone who knew her, none more than Jim himself. Alone now in their little house, just down the road from the college where they’d worked, he was without his very best and only real friend, his essential prop, the guiding hand that had led him so gently through most of his uncertain life. Now the still, confident centre of their home together was gone, without whom it could never really be home again.
Some wondered how Jim would manage now. As many expected, lacking any obvious alternative, he carried on at the college, ploughing yet again through the dismal routines of commercial practice for his girls who either knew most of it already, or didn’t know it and believed they would never need to. Periodically colleagues and acquaintances would suggest, with increasingly positive emphasis, that the early retirement route might be the best thing for him now. It would release him from the worries of the job and, at his age, he would get a lump sum as well as immediate payment of his pension, which would continue for the rest of his life. Obviously it would be noticeably less than his salary but the house was paid for and his everyday needs were relatively modest. He might even find some undemanding part time job if he found he needed more cash. And so, with no more reflection than when agreeing to Gracie’s suggestion that he enlist in the teaching profession, he readily accepted this equally well meant encouragement to leave it. And so that summer term closed along with Jim’s teaching career. The latter was marked, with some relief all round, by a small, quiet but warm farewell party in a function room at the town’s old coaching inn in the market square.
Even quieter days
Jim’s life, the rest of it, now lay there ahead of him, waiting for him to occupy that great expanse of time with doing something, going somewhere, doing something else. Where work at Burtons or with his girls had previously occupied the daytime hours, his entire day – and night, for that matter - was now completely his own, to do with exactly whatever he wanted. The trouble with this new freedom was that he didn’t know what he wanted to do from one day to the next, any more than he had known years ago what he might want to do with his life. Apart from the singing and the bevies he had no interests and without Gracie no real friends. He would bump into a former colleague in town now and again, but none of them would want to spend much more time with him than it took to exchange a few routine pleasantries.
At first he was to be seen around town, never less than perfectly dressed, walking along in his typically slightly timid way, more often on his own but sometimes, it was reported, in the company of a younger woman, one who also took considerable care over her clothing, as well as her hair and make-up. He was rarely seen with the same woman more than two or three times, but it became clear that somehow Jim was meeting and keeping company with a variety of local unattached women who had temporarily attached themselves to him. No one doubted that, in his company, they would certainly have seen the interior of The Woolpack, The White Horse and The Friend in Need. He may even have met them in one of those.
Gradually this tendency fell away and Jim was generally seen in town on his own. Always as dapper as ever, he walked now with eyes down, slowly and tentatively as though unsure of precisely where his next step should go. Alone now, his days settled into a pattern of late rising followed by an elastic afternoon at The Friend in Need. Like many of its regulars, he appreciated that this was unquestionably the cheapest pub on his side of town. For many years The Friend had been one of those small pubs that no one had managed to make into a really sound and viable business. A long line of landlords had given it a go and then moved on having lost whatever little they had put into it. Someone with a dodgy background would arrive in town with a bit of cash, enough to buy the next week’s or month’s supplies from the brewery, hoping The Friend could provide him with a bit of profit and a cleaner future.
There was usually a slightly tacky mystery attached to them, never saying where they came from or what they’d been doing lately. Shreds of information slipped out piecemeal but never anything like the full story. Now and again there was the serious drinker who’d always longed to have his own pub but, like the others, without the slightest idea of how to do it. You could always tell when the latest proprietor was approaching collapse: prices would plunge, the afternoon happy hour would last all evening and the pork pies and pickled eggs were thrown in for nothing. What The Friend needed was an experienced landlord with sufficient funds for a complete renovation and redecoration job, particularly directed at the totally unreformed 1950s kitchen and toilet facilities.
There was a small drifting element in the town’s population, drifting that is between one cheap pub and the next. They weren’t exactly derelict but going that way, never begging but just clinging on, living in a hostel or a doss house, so having a more or less fixed abode as well as the bar of The Friend in Need. Like Jim, they fully appreciated the nourishing effect of a much extended happy hour. Cheap wine and cheap cider did the job for them and The Friend was just the place for those. There were only three or four of them here, always identifiable by the heavy overcoat that each one wore, every single day whatever the weather. The coat was their protection against winter’s cold, probably also their blanket at night, essential should they ever have to sleep rough. The coat was their most valued, and possibly their only, possession. They never took it off.
Jim was well looked after here. He had his regular place on the low padded bench seat at the circular window table a couple of steps from the bar. Not that he ever needed to go that far. Among the regular afternoon drinkers were two or three who had informally appointed themselves as his minders. They could see how vulnerable Jim might be during a long session to being tapped up for a loan, being helped to smoke all his cigarettes or harassed in some other way by strangers. One or other of them would always be sitting on a high stool at the bar within reach, so his next drink was ordered for him and carried to his table. They would even walk him home when it was clear that his journey would probably be fraught with difficulty. By now, due to the singing, he was mainly Frankie rather than Jim and anyone who was trying it on with him, pretending to be his long lost friend or the friend he really needed, would soon be told: ‘Just keep your distance from Frankie if you don’t mind. He’s our man, Frankie is, and we look after him. D’you see what I mean, eh?’ ‘Oh, no offence, mate. Not me. I just thought . . .’ and the offender would melt away.
At times, one of the drifters would need to leave his latest residence, often against his preferred inclinations. And now Jim, the kindest and most tolerant of men, ever receptive to the needs of fellow members of the camaraderie of the grape, the hop and anything distilled, was about to become their benefactor. It was Reg, probably the oldest of the overcoats – he had an old hat, too – who first raised the subject, speaking generally to those congregated round the bar, doubtless hoping someone would offer a useful suggestion about another doss they knew of somewhere nearby. He made no direct or even oblique approach to Jim or to anyone else, simply a fraternal appeal for help from those who understood his situation.
‘It’s Mrs Whatsername, down the street, you know, where I’ve been staying. She’s a bit too keen on the money side of it for me, so really she’s asked me, no, she’s told me to find somewhere else, and not to hang about over it.’ Heads nodded, soft sympathetic growling sounds were heard. Several knew this little scenario only too well, being more than once on the receiving end of it themselves. Jim listened, slowly lit a fag, took another sip of the Haig and said, to the considerable surprise of the bar: ‘You know, I’m rattling around in this wee house all on my own. I’ve got plenty of room there if you need somewhere to settle. It’s only just up the road from here.’ And so it was, though most at the Friend had never known exactly where Jim lived or what his exact circumstances were. There were three small bedrooms, a kitchen, front room, dining room at the back and all the usual offices. How many people could you pack in there if they weren’t too fussy? And even walking at Jim’s pace you could be in The Friend in ten minutes flat.
Reg accepted gladly. He slipped off to give Mrs Whatsername her notice, which he performed with some pleasure. On his return, he took up his usual place near the bar and gave Jim a long smile, confirming their new arrangement. When the day’s session was judged to be over, the two of them walked up the road together to install Reg in his new accommodation. And so, gradually as the quiet word got around, one drifter after another came to favour Jim’s place over anywhere else they’d been living recently. Not really surprising since, as long as they made their own arrangements for eating, Jim charged them the absolute minimum to cover the basic services. Without any real effort, he had become the semi-detached caretaker of a kind of halfway house, almost a commune of like-minded individuals. Some of them stayed long term, like Reg. Others came and went, and any new vacancy was made known discreetly down at The Friend. They had an informal but effective screening procedure when a prospective new lodger was applying for shelter. Jim would ask Reg what he thought and Reg would consult the other two or three who might have come across the new face. ‘Knew him over Boston way a couple years ago. Met him on the bulb lifting job. Seemed alright to me.’ ‘I think that bloke’s Polish. Works like a navvy. Probably clean the house for you if you ask him.’
On the whole, the right bloke got the place. There were times of tension, of course, especially once they were all back from the pub late in the evening, but there were never any fights. Reg saw to that. Being larger and older than the others he had a natural authority that Jim would have found more than useful in his commerce classes. They would sit in the front room, never closing the curtains, and you could see them sitting there in a group, all in their overcoats winter or summer, Reg’s hat dominating, having their last drink or two before passing out in the armchair, or staggering off to sleep elsewhere in the house. Jim may have been with them on occasions, mainly if he couldn’t quite make the stairs that night, but generally he left them to it, went upstairs, locked his bedroom door and slept.
There were only two serious rules at Jim’s house. Don’t bring in any women, fairly unlikely anyway, and try to keep the place reasonably clean. The second rule was hard to enforce. These blokes knew one another up to a point, but only through rubbing shoulders in the pub. They had not chosen each other’s company, but had fallen in together simply through their shared lifestyle. Not strictly friends as such and, except when one of them might want to celebrate an unexpected opportunity to earn some money, they rarely bought anyone else a drink, except to say now and again ‘Oh, and one for Frankie’. As each kept to himself and preserved his distinct individuality they were most unlikely to work together to keep Jim’s place clean and tidy. Old newspapers, fast food wrappings, empty bottles and cans, overflowing ashtrays, bits of stale uneaten food, all the basic detritus of their everyday living, were always someone else’s, so why should anyone pick them up and put them in the bin? Increasing quantities of this stuff piled up in geological layers. When Jim could bear it no longer he would spend a morning after they had gone out, shovelling it all into black bin bags, thinking that he must tell them all firmly that this was something they ought to be doing. The trouble was that Jim had never told anyone anything firmly in his whole life, and even when he asked Reg to speak to them about it, no slight improvement lasted very long.
It wasn’t just this. The effort of life in general was slowly wearing Jim down. Whatever energy and will power he may ever have had were draining away. The lifetime’s smokes and drinks were catching up with him. Apart from still wanting to appear well dressed, the most positive preoccupation of his entire life, he just couldn’t be bothered any more. If he felt like making the effort, he would step delicately down to The Friend. If the power wasn’t there he’d stay in, slumping, snoozing, sleeping in front of the telly, reading yesterday’s tabloid paper, and later sipping at the Haig.
Always slim he had now become positively skeletal. His doctor encouraged him to eat more, and more often, but in the end and knowing Jim’s overall condition he suggested that he sell the house and use the proceeds to help pay for living in a nursing home instead. He’d have a room of his own, good regular meals and people there to look after him. For the last time in his life, Jim again heard someone else’s advice about his own future, and he accepted it. The social workers duly arranged a place for him at a residential home, a huge former village rectory to the south of the town, and he was moved in. Here he could finish his days in a warm, clean, caring environment, free at last and for ever of the pressures and tensions of his former life.
The FOR SALE sign went up and the drifters drifted away. They’d had a good deal. The young builder who bought the house found the interior so degraded that he virtually gutted the place and started again from scratch. When people stopped on the street to ask how the work was going, he would tell them that the most amazing thing, that he’d never seen anywhere before, was the upstairs lavatory. In use for a very considerable time by a group of inebriates with uncertain aim, the floorboards surrounding the base of it had almost completely rotted away. The only thing keeping it in place was the strength of its own plumbing connections.
If anyone had asked at The Friend in Need where Jim might be these days, Reg and the remaining drifters would have ignored them. In their world, you didn’t answer that kind of question. You never knew who was asking. And so, no one who had known Jim locally would know where he was living now. Nor would they have known when he died, or even that he had. And if any trumpets had sounded for him on the other side, nobody in this town would have heard them.