A Little Bit on the Side

A LITTLE BIT ON

THE SIDE

John W O’Sullivan

Copyright © 2012 by John W O’Sullivan

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 978 178088 1591

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Printed and bound in the UK by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall

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CONTENTS

A Little Bit on the Side

1    Half Ox, Half Fox

2    The Gauleiter

3    Ian Hamilton’s March

4    Add a Pair of Dagging Shears

5    There’s Something Funny Going On

6    Corrupting an Officer of the Crown

7    A Sort of Secular Absolution

8    It Takes it out of a Man, this Life Everlasting

9    Ah, Take the Cash in Hand

10  Poisoning the Wells

11  Kate’s ‘Dear John’ Letter

12  Barlow Scandals of 1493

13  The Old Adam Still Stirs the Loins

14  A Little Touch of Josie in the Night

15  We’re All Bloody Plutocrats Now

16  A Debacle in Venice

17  Known to all Posterity for Amorous Dexterity

18  Eastgate Villa: Im Chambre Séparée

19  So Goodbye Dear and Amen

‘I suppose you realise that all the locals knew what you did for a living before you even moved into the place?’

Jack looked up in surprise at his questioner. About half-an-hour earlier Jimmy Gillan had asked him how he and Kate were settling in to country life on Barton Hill, and Jack had expanded at some length on the problems they both seemed to be having in making anything other than arm’s length contact with their immediate neighbours, let alone the wider community.

Kate had been received and civilly served in the local shops whenever she went into the village, but had been puzzled when the butcher asked her if she would like a receipt when she paid cash for an unusually large order of meat for their week-end visitors. She’d also found it strangely difficult to get beyond anything other than trivial day-to-day exchanges in her conversations with the women. It had all been rather unsettling.

Jack’s experience in the local pub mirrored Kate’s: everyone polite, but distant and reluctant to engage. So much so that eventually he’d taken to having the paper with him, and sitting for a read while he enjoyed his solitary pint. It had been much the same when they went together to the Christmas Gala evening in the village hall: not cold-shouldered exactly, but not warmly welcomed either. They’d eventually assumed that that was how it was with all incomers to Barton Hill, and that things would in time get better. Now it all made sense.

Barton Hill - they’d chosen the place for its remoteness. For almost forty centuries its inhabitants had lived out their lives and gone to their graves in isolation and obscurity. To its dreary, treeless heights few ventured even in summer, and there were no permanent settlements, just a scattering of tumble-down huts to provide a temporary shelter from the bleak winter fogs or scouring winds for those few unfortunates whose business called them there from time to time to oversee the unhappy flocks of sheep that roamed the barren heathland pulling hopelessly at its thin grasses or, overwhelmed by the futility of it all, as a thinking sheep might perhaps express it, slumping down in sickness to die alone beside one of the bronze-age burial mounds. They were poor benighted creatures, long-shanked, shallow-chested, wild of eye and short of breath: the sheep were little better.

A few hundred feet below the heights, where the heathland ended and the topsoil thickened a little, the settlements began: just a few makeshift homesteads here and there at first, and then, a little lower down the hill, the hamlets and villages. But even here, hemmed in by a maze of deep lanes, narrow roads and rough and rutted byways, the age-long isolation and remoteness had nurtured a close-knit, inward-looking and determined people in whom self-reliance and suspicion of the unfamiliar was bred in the bone: the communities of the hill were not such as extended the hand of friendship readily to strangers, as Jack had cause to know.

The slaughter of the Great War may have thinned out the ranks of their working men, but little else happened to change the old ways of life on the hill until 1939 and the coming of a new war, when the outside world began increasingly to intrude.

New roads arrived, and old ones were improved to carry men and machinery to the hill’s 1700 foot summit, and within months its age-old silhouette, unchanged since the last ice-age glacier melted away to the north, was broken by the elaborate structures and latticed masts of a radar station and the straggling buildings of an anti-aircraft battery. And with access improved, more contractors arrived to scrape away the thin topsoil and quarry the ancient underlying rock for yet more roads and airfield runways in other parts of the county.

With the introduction of conscription and direction of labour that came with war many of the Barton men, and in due course the women, felt the full impact of the demands of the state for the first time in their lives. And when the war was over they returned to find that much of the old isolation had gone, and other radical changes were not long in following.

Barton village had always been the highest point on the hill where life could be lived with a tolerable degree of comfort, but even there life had been demanding and hard until the years following the war brought the introduction of many basic services that had previously been missing. One after another they arrived within a relatively short space of time: piped water first, then electricity, and finally main drainage and the domestic comfort of a flushing water-closet.

Not that the latter was embraced with the same whole-hearted enthusiasm by everyone. There were, it is true, a few who were considered to have gone too far when they had their WC installed inside the house. The majority, however, evincing a degree of fastidiousness remarkable in folk who lived so close to the basics of nature in so many other ways, thought such intimacy with the natural bodily functions was carrying things a little too far. It wasn’t natural or healthy, they said, to have all those smells and stuff inside where folks were living, and for such as these a Gerry-built annex tacked on to the house was the preferred option.

And inevitably there were a few stout individualists who condemned all such innovations out-of-hand as the self-indulgent excesses of a modern world of which they wanted no part. For them the water from their own well was sweeter than mains, the light from their oil or gas lamps softer than electric, and their earth closet in a well -ventilated garden privy a true place of easement by comparison with the cramped and noisome boxes that most of the village now endured.

‘Expensive and wasteful,’ thundered old Tom Sutton, their spokesman. ‘Just paying to flush away good muck for the garden. I’ve used it, me Dad used it, and his Dad too, and we none of us come to harm. Bit draughty in winter, but in summer I can sit with the door open, have a bit of a smoke and a think, and just watch the veg grow. Who could ask for more?’

Eventually most of the community did, but not Tom, who persisted to the very end, and so entered into legend when one bright morning of early summer, some ten years after the end of the war, he failed to return from his post-breakfast regular, as he called it. At first Ada, his wife, thought that he was just having his usual early morning potter around the veg plot, but when he wasn’t back by eleven for his tea and second bite she began to worry. Tom never missed that, so she left her housework and set out to find him.

Ada always said afterwards that when she saw the door to the privy standing wide open she knew right away what she would find: and there Tom was, still sitting four-square on the scrubbed deal seat that he’d sat on since he was a boy. With his shoulders resting easily against the back timbers of the privy and his head dropped down on to his chest he might just have been asleep, but Ada knew otherwise, and from little signs and his few comments had indeed been half-expecting to lose Tom for a year or two.

If the Barton women felt deeply, they had been brought up not to show it: excessive displays of emotion were in general frowned upon. Folk were expected to ‘bear up’ in such circumstances, and true to the Barton code Ada bore up well. She stood for some moments shedding a few quiet tears, and then bent to pick up Tom’s pipe, long since cold like Tom himself, and tidy up his trousers, still crumpled round his ankles. By herself, however, she could do nothing more, and so leaving Tom undisturbed she set off to break the news to her neighbours and seek assistance.