Four Short Tales
Copyright Don Phillips 2005
No part of this publication may be used as a story line for any kind of moving picture, video or animation without the express permission of the author.
Introduction
We moved to rural Spain over twenty years ago. We did not want to live in a Brit community so we chase the ancient city of Elche as our location. This meant that we had to learn Spanish and spent two evenings a week at night school for the first two years we were here. We had bought a four bed roomed villa on three thousand square metres of ground and spent the first five years turning it into a garden. Once that was done I looked for something else to do and turned to woodwork and writing. These four short stories were published in various Spanish produced local English Language newspapers, so if you were in Spain when any one of them was published you may just have read it before. Please enjoy them.
Don Phillips
The Butcher’s Wife’s Tale
Whatever else anyone in Crannington ever said about George Pockington, and there were much said about him once he was put safely under the soil, they all agree that he had ran a damn fine butcher’s. He had always provided the best meat in the county and, even if you did have to make sure the weight you got was the weight you had paid for, there was never any argument about the quality. It was always the best. Some said it were the best butcher’s in the North of England, but that were said mainly by folks as had never been out of Yorkshire and knew no different. However, the consensus opinion, and that’s what really counts in these matters when all’s said and done, was that he at least the was the best butcher in the South Riding, bar none. And could give a lot outside it a run for their money. But that was all the good that was said about him, for apart from that redeeming feature he had always been a mean and tight fisted little m.
George had only stood five feet and two inches tall, but folk could be often heard to say that he had contained in that little body, all of the greed and meanness lacking in his three older brothers. For the other three lads were as meek and mild as you like, by Yorkshire standards at any road. They were open-handed and generous with their opinions and occasionally their money, if you caught them at the right moment in the bar at the Goodfellows Arms. But George was different and I should know. My name’s Jessie Pockington that were Jessie Alderman before, and I was wed to his elder brother, Alfred, before the good Lord took him from me so suddenly and him only fifty nine. If you want proof of what I am saying then just look at the way George cheated his brothers out of their rightful inheritance.
There were, as I have already mentioned, four of the Pockington brothers. Cyril was the eldest and apart from George he was the only other one to have any nonce, a good head for business as you might say, although I’ve a sneaking suspicion that his wife, Doreen was always the real brains behind him. The other two, my Albert and poor Jeffrey, him that was killed in a car accident up on Shapmire Fell at the tender age of thirty-one, were both great big softies. Gentle giants they were who could be conned by any one who put his mind to it.
Oh, they could be lions on a Saturday afternoon on the Rugby League pitch with the whole of the town there cheering them on, and more than once I have seen one of them slip a swift and brawny right fist into the opposition forwards face when referee was on the blind side, but in the main they were just great big teddy bears. Not that I ‘m complaining you understand. I was married to my Albert for thirty-four years and very happy years they were too. No giving you what he considered was the correct amount for housekeeping and then off to spend the rest in the Goodfellows Arms with him. Not Albert. He was a loving and considerate husband and a man who would trust anyone. But it was me that had to keep us in order financially and his brother Jeffrey was the same according to what his wife Iris told me. And that was our downfall.
You see, their father, Cuthbert Pockington, had been a man of substance in Crannington, that’s where we all lived you know, and Cuthbert Pockington had followed his own father into the butchery trade. He was an only child you see and he got it all when the old man died. He made a success of it as well. He started with just the one shop in Crannington and by the time he’d been going five years he had bought out the only other butcher in town and was looking outwards to the neighbouring town of Oakley Moor. By the time we were putting on the black for him, when I was still only engaged to his son Albert, he owned four butchers shops and had a half interest in an abattoir. Not bad for a man who once spent more time in the corner with a dunce’s cap on his head than any one else in class. But you don’t have to be intellectual to make money, do you, only single minded. Anyway, there were the four brothers left with a nice little business of a shop each and for a while we all lived well, until young George took a hand.
Now George was what his mother always referred to as an after thought. Meaning she hadn’t intended to have any more, but had reckoned without the effects of their first holiday abroad and some Spanish Sangria. Anyway, he was only sixteen and still at school when old Cuthbert Pockington was taken, so had no say in what went on after the funeral. He lived at home with his mother while the other three got in a manager to run his shop until he was old enough to look after it himself. George was always different from the others. Old Cuthbert’s other three sons were great big strapping blokes who looked like butchers, where as George was a midget by comparison. His father used to blame the Sangria that had been instrumental in his appearance for his lack of size. Look at the Spaniards he used to say when folks remarked on George’s lack of size, they’re nearly all little blokes and they’re always guzzling Sangria. What George thought of it I don’t know, but later events lead me to believe it might have upset him more than a little and made him vow to show the world that size can be irrelevant, because although he may have been a midget he was the brains of the family.
He was only one of the lot who went to Grammar School and then on to Night School to learn about all sorts of things that seemed at the time to have nothing to do with the butchery trade. Financial Management and Planning was one I seem to recall and there were one or two others that I can’t remember. Anyway, the upshot of it was that when he was ready to take his place in the business it wasn’t behind the counter with a cleaver in his hand. Not George. He came in on the financial side. He was soon responsible for the buying of all the livestock for the abattoir and the pricing of all the meats and other products in the four shops. The other brothers continued to run one each with George employing two assistants to do the manual work in his as he were busy with financial matters and besides, he wasn’t exactly built for swinging a cleaver. Pretty soon the money was rolling in, we were all living the good life, and that’s when things started to go wrong.
The first thing that happened was that George wanted them to buy the other half share in the Abattoir, so they could have a monopoly and dictate the price of carcasses to all the other butchers in the area. The other three brothers thought this smacked of sharp practice and weren’t interested, but under pressure from George they agreed to sell their one eighth shares in the business to him. They were big simple lads and it never occurred to them to ask him where he was finding the money as we were all doing all right at that time, but the thought did cross my mind that perhaps he had been taking more than his fair share from the business as I was inclined to look at young George a bit sideways right from the first. He was a bit too cold blooded and calculating for my liking.
Well, within two years he owned the Abattoir and his first move was to increase the price of carcasses by over ten percent. When he first told the others they were not too concerned. That is until they realised that he meant to charge them an extra ten percent as well and then they were not so happy. There were
the nearest thing to a fight in the family I have ever witnessed with Cyril even taking hold of George’s jacket by the lapels and picking him off the floor before the other two calmed him down. George was furious about it and swore Cyril would be sorry for man handling him, for he were fierce proud and hated for anyone to show him up or draw attention to the fact there were only tuppence halfpenny of him. So from that day on there was bad blood within the family, at least on George’s part, as the other three would have soon cooled down. The upshot was that the business was split up with each of the brothers taking one shop each and all buying their meat where they thought best.
Then Jeffrey got killed in that new sports car he had bought with the profits he had made in the good times. He’d only been married two years when it happened and his wife, Peggy, was just a young slip of a thing at twenty-four and with no living relatives apart from an old aunt somewhere up in Scotland, and she was ninety two. Young George took to helping her to run the business and we all thought that he was after marrying her to get the shop for nothing, but we were wrong. What he did was give her the loan of one of his staff. I say loan, but knowing George I dare say it was her that was paying the wages. This arrangement went on for about a year, but she had no real heart for it and she finally gave up and sold out to George. The first the rest of us knew about it was when his name went up over the shop.
My Albert had some right guilty moments that he hadn’t been a bit more caring about his dead brother’s widow, but at that time we had enough problems of our own. Two daughters to get wed, the local textile mill closing down and taking the money from our customers pockets and the ever increasing prices George was charging us for our stock. Cyril was in the same boat as his shop was also in Crannington, which were practically a ghost town since the mill closed and folk had taken to only eating meat on Sundays. In the end, after holding out ten years longer than we should of, we both bowed to the inevitable and sold out to George, who closed one shop and turned it into bedsits leaving the other as a viable proposition. He had beaten us all.
Cyril had sold out for more than financial reasons. Being the eldest he was now over sixty, and had developed Rheumatoid Arthritis. As he got older it got worse and he was more and more confined to a wheel chair. Then he got some other complication that I never really understood, but the upshot was that he weren’t reckoned to have very long to go. He had to sell his house as he was now permanently confined to the wheelchair and buy a bungalow with special conversions and wider doors and such, so that he could get around. As our part of Yorkshire was in the throes of depression he lost money on the house and then fitting out the bungalow cost him a sight more money than the house had fetched and very soon stripped away all his spare brass. Then his wife, Doreen did something that amazed me and Albert. She went to George and asked him to lend them twenty thousand pounds. To us it were like jumping in the sea when you know there is a shark about.
At first it seems that George had just gaped at her as the two of them had not spoken for nearly ten years with their lawyers taking care of any details of business between them. Then he laughed in Doreen’s face. What on earth did she think she was playing at? What was she going to use as collateral as he, George, certainly wasn’t about to give them any money. Doreen said she wasn’t about to ask him to give them money. She was going to sign over the deeds to their apartment in Malaga as surety against the loan. The apartment was worth about thirty five thousand pounds and on Cyril’s death it would go to George lock, stock and balcony. She produced the deeds and said that George could examine them.
Now Cyril and Doreen’s apartment was news to the rest of us. We knew that him and Doreen had been going off to Malaga for fifteen years or more, but we never knew they owned an apartment there. I must confess I were a bit put about when I heard, as I assumed the only reason they hadn’t told any of us about it was because they didn’t want us asking to borrow it, and I thought that were right mean of them.
Anyway, George being careful as he always was, got a bloke in the Rotary who spoke a bit of Spanish to examine the deeds, which were all in Spanish of course and he made some enquiries about property prices in Malaga. He found that two bedroom apartments in the area where this one were located were worth quite a lot more than thirty five thousand. Then his pal in the Rotary came back and said the deeds looked genuine to him from what he knew of it. So George gave Cyril and Doreen the twenty thousand and Cyril and Doreen had a contract drawn stating that on Cyril’s death any interest they had in the apartment would revert to George and the two signed it all legal like in front of the Notary in Meddlestone.
It was three years later when Cyril died and from what I saw of the medical bills in that time the twenty thousand must have just about seen him out. Still, at least it meant that the bungalow was left to Doreen free and clear along with any money they had managed to hang on to from the good times. This meant that all three of the older brothers were under the ground as my Albert had passed on the year before and now the youngest brother had it all. It used to choke me to see him driving about in his big Jaguar with the special built up seat so that he could see where he was going.
It was a cold and windy day when they buried Cyril and there were just the three of us widows, the Vicar and George at the graveside. He had never married. Too mean to share anything with anyone, that one. And as soon as funeral was over, probably before, George booked his flight to Malaga to go and claim his property. I wasn’t there myself but I wish I had of been. You see it turned out that the apartment was a timeshare and was only Cyril and Doreen’s for two weeks of the year, every year until Cyril died. After that it went back to the property company to be re-let. With Cyril’s death his interest in it was officially and legally terminated. As were George’s.
Of course George tried hard to get his twenty thousand back from Doreen, but she maintained that she knew nothing of the agreement that Cyril had made with George about the Malaga apartment until he had died when she went through his papers and read the agreement for the first time. She maintained that any quarrel George had about it was with Cyril and he was dead. George had not let it go of course and had put his solicitors on it and threatened that he was going to have his money even if it meant throwing Doreen out of her bungalow.
The whole business must have really hurt him where he lived because out of the blue, while going over the accounts with his shop manager one day, he suddenly dropped dead from a heart attack. He was just fifty-two years old. Of course without him to push it on his feud with Doreen just died a death. He obviously hadn’t reckoned to go so young and had never made a will, but it turned out that his assets came to over half a million pounds. It all had to go to probate of course and then the taxman had his cut, but in the end, as his only living relatives his three brothers widows shared out what was left. We’ve actually got an apartment in Malaga now. All paid for.