‘Cute’ was how Ruth described my pig story. I puffed out my chest and shook her hand. ‘I can live with that’ I replied. Writing fortunes have been made on less. I also said ‘Thank you’ twice.
The small back street café on the edge of a large city is a good place to hide. Only once has someone said ‘Are you…’ before I interrupted, saying ‘No’. The man spent the rest of his stay in The DoughMother looking across when my head was down, pen in hand, scribbling like this. The world has enough celebrities without me joining the list..
I don’t make a fortune but I live. Okay I lie. If it wasn’t for my part-time job and supportive wife I’d be in the gutter, where I was 10 years ago. This is the real story I have yet to write. The trouble is that from this distance I’m no longer sure that anything I say or write will be true.
Gwen will read this and laugh. ‘We’ve been married 19 years. How can you?’.
‘Easy’ I will reply, ‘I’m a writer, that's what I do. I turn facts into half-truths before reimagining them as fiction'.
The trouble is I’m also an ex-politician, so the truth doesn’t come easy — that is what the man and others see and vaguely remember. If I do tell my story I will call it Last Bus Home. Most of the time I missed the last 35 home having one last long snog with Gwen, knowing the Trent depot staff bus would catch up with me as I walked. I would hear the deep roar of its Leyland engine, put out an arm and the driver would stop and take me to the bottom of my road. We would chat on the way. It helped being a union man. That would make a good title too because if I had to choose one stroke of good luck (after Gwen of course) it would be Wally Grainger asking me to join The Union on the Friday I got my first pay packet containing £2.12s.6d (£2.62½p in today’s money). I was 15.
This is another fib of sorts. Wally didn’t ask me, he told me, explaining ‘It’s a closed shop, so you don’t get a choice’. I didn’t argue. My Uncle Dave in Harlow, Essex, was a PTU branch secretary (this bit is 100% true) and he told me to go along to union meetings — which I did. That day led to so many things. At 16 I became ‘Branch Minutes Secretary’, so I had to brush up pretty quick on what grammar I could remember from my secondary modern schooldays. My step-father Jimmy brought home an old upright Olivetti typewriter from the hospital where he worked as a porter (another true bit, which my step-sister Rita can confirm) so I could type my minutes. The Union sent me on a week long summer school ‘Correspondence course’ and the rest is history, as some say.
And what about the ‘gutter’ bit? Well, it’s true and it isn’t. I was pissed at the time and Gwen shouted ‘Never again. Understand?’ as she hauled me to my feet — which is why I sit in The DoughMother drinking coffee.
© Robert Howard – 4 December 2020
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