Millom in the Dock (4 page)

The King and
I. He offered me a Knight hood, it had a bobble on top.

***

For capturing
the chickens he left an old wig on the floor and waited behind a
nearby bush, armed only with a strawberry net, both of which he had
brought in his Aladdin’s Cave of a handcart. Mind you, this hunting
method made an awful mess of the hairpiece, which people who saw
him hunting thought he wore afterwards, and for good reason. You
see he just rubs his head a lot when working out discounts, giving
him that shiny bit. So please, should you ever get to meet him,
don’t whatever you do say “could I please have the chrome dome
discount?” you see it isn’t big, it isn’t hard or even clever and
you will definitely blow away any chance of actually getting the
huge discount … which he managed eventually to decide on, not to
mention come to terms with massive mental and scalp pain. This then
was the beginning of Ferguson’s (almost the entire length of)
Wellington Street shop. He did very well selling full body sheep
wool overalls to the miners as it was freezing down’t pit. This is
the origin of the M expression “Woollybacks”.

For the wives
he did a nice range of black and white handbags. Sometimes he would
do a brown or brown and white designer range for the posher mining
folk from such middle class mud tracks as Lowther Road. He also
spent time domesticating the animals by strapping splints to their
agile legs and, also to the cows’ tails. That is the reason why
cows and sheep all walk rather stiffly now. It is a mystery how a
gentle man like Arthur managed to tame the sheep, being the
ferocious predators that they were. Up t’t North where all this
happened, sheep farmers put rowdy sheepdogs in pens with ‘I take no
shit from sheep dogs and rams. I reckon, if he had been around and
not causing grief upstairs, Sharpo would have been the man to put
in a pen with one of these ferocious sheep. There would have
been
,
as Sharpo would put it, blood, snot
and wool flying, but you would receive a tamed, slightly
traumatised sheep ... and so cheap at a groat a time. Can’t you see
him in your mind, sat on
a
furious sheep’s
back doing the Woolly Rodeo ... sometimes it’s useful being five
foot seven. Just think if he had been banished earlier:

God: “I enjoy
these woolly rodeos, fills in Saturday afternoons.”

Peter: “Agreed.
We should start hotdogs, Butterkist and fizzy drinks.”

The fangs and
beaks he evolved by making the animals chew pork scratchings on a
24/7 rota. The pigs were similar to sheep in their habits, yet
weren’t I don’t suppose, all too pleased at being the abrasive for
fangs? The claws on the sheep and the pigs were dealt with by
giving the breeding animals sandpaper boots over the years. Flight
in the chicken populace was abolished by …

Feeding them
really well and limiting exercise

Clipping their
flight feathers and

Hypnosis

All this
history and evolution from M … boring eh!? (Mind you, we are in
another dimension).

The chickens by
the way were sold as boilers or roasters (I don’t know the
difference) ‘with’ giblets! Because they were good big fit birds,
he had a sign on the counter next to them … GM chicken here. It
stood for ‘Get More’ chicken for your money here. It was in
preparation for the competition. It may have meant something else
if he had owned a chemistry set and a devious, sinister mind and,
been in another dimension. He also ventured to Haverigg, a small
seaside village one mile from M, built a boat and thus created the
local whaling ‘fleetlet’. He would sit quietly on his boat and ride
the swell and, when he spotted a sperm whale pod (named because of
the spermaceti oil which is derived from the beast); he would
attract the mammals by throwing bits of bread into the water and
waving his arms. He also had one of the first washing-up liquid
bottles in the town which, he used to shoot a jet of water into the
air just like a spouting whale, in order to attract the pod over
for a bit of social spouting.

The bread was
made in a clay oven in a baker’s shop on Holborn Hill, by another
early settler (and earlier riser), Ken Thompson, a local master
baker (great bloke Ken!).

The whale meat
was sold on the quayside. Local fishwives would cry at his prices,
he would say “Oh stop blubbering will you!” another M first (boring
eh!?). He would then, because of the recently settled Harveriggite
fishwives incessant wailing, drop his prices on some of the less
popular cuts such as fins. He would then proceed to lay them out on
the boats sail, after first removing it from the boat of course.
This clever action stopped the fishwives wailing and, caused a
buying frenzy. These frenzies happened in January hence ‘January
Sails’. Yet another M first! Zzzzzzzz!

Arthur had been
sustained all this time with good cooking by his lovely wife Cissy.
I don’t know too much about Cissy’s origins except to say that I
once heard a story that she was the runaway daughter of a trader
from the American Deep South … The Mississippi Delta to be exact.
She became known as … Missy Cissy from the Mississippi Delta. If
customers to the shop managed to say it perfectly 6 times, quickly,
they received the whopping discount. Arthur would try his utmost to
distract by waving his arms and dancing a jig hoping the bemused
customer would become confused and lose the discount. Cissy, a
generous soul who loved giving THE discount, would just batter him
one and, send him sulking into his office at the rear of the shop
where, he could spy on people and shop assistants through his
mirror strips. They built a big detached house on top of a hill by
a track, what is now called Fairfield Road, it has a turret so that
Arthur can regularly survey his kingdom (customer base). Cissy and
Arthur have two children Mark and David (Dave is one of my biggest
fans). Mark’s was a normal uncomplicated birth, except for the fact
that his moustache tickled a little … according to Cissy, whom I
interviewed under deep hypnosis. Dave’s birth though, during a
violent electrical storm, was via an immaculate conception. Dave
would agree to this except that by immaculate conception I mean …
Cissy used Immac and Arthur was late each time coming home from the
shop (which I’ve put down to nerves). Cissy nagged him a little for
making her wait but, nonetheless, some souls demand physical life
in order to have the experience of giving less discount hence, Dave
Ferguson was cruelly unleashed into an unsuspecting consumer
world.

Gee! Thanks
Cissy and Arthur.

Dave has three
nines on his head now, which were sixes as an adolescent and mere
threes as a cute child. Well, I think they’re nines now? Or … maybe
I looked from the wrong side of his cranial circumference the last
time he bowed to me in grateful thanks for something or other? Just
for being his friend, guru, mentor and psychiatrist most probably.
Who knows? Still perspective can be a dangerous thing depending on
how you look at it. For the slower among you the last sentence was
a very sophisticated joke. Worry not though they don’t get it in
Coventry either. But that’s how it all started, unfortunately
though the town evolved so far without any Divine help, maybeeeee
ooohhh into the Victorian era? History not being my strong point …
then stopped M’lud!

M’lud: “Very
interesting Mr Lassut, thank goodness for Cissy and Arthur Ferguson
and their huge profitable shop on Millom’s Wellington Street. I
think we should give them a free advert at this point”.

KING ARTHUR
FERGUSON’S SHOP

WELLINGTON
STREET

Cow handbags
‘still’ a speciality

Buy one, get
one FREEsian

Hurry offer
ends soon, can’t last for heffer

Farmer’s
special: wild sheep training by Sharpo ... cancelled.

Comfy horsehair
foot cover sales on … while socks last

Mentally
excruciating 1% discount with this page!

(Cancelled if …
you know why)

That must be
the best AD you’ve ever AD Arthur.

M’lud: “And now
Mr Lassut, just before we finish this first session, could you
please tell us the reason why the iron ore mines closed back in the
sixties?”

Certainly
M’lud.

Well ladies and
gentlemen of the Jury, dear reader; again I have two short
versions. The first one being …

“The mines
became uneconomical.”

Pretty simple,
straightforward and politically boringly official but … wrong and,
not to mention … borriinnggg times ten.

The true
version which I will now recount was, once again, purchased by my
good self using the popular local liquid currency. This time I did
really well to hold the memory during a disturbed sleep in
someone’s flower bed. As would be obvious any town which relies on
mining is sat atop a honeycomb of tunnels. The closure was due to a
ferreter of all things. He was out hunting rabbits one day and,
found two holes in one of the fields. He had a minor problem
though, one purse net … two holes. The problem was compounded by
the fact that the holes were ten and one bit feet apart i.e. more
than one body length. Hmmmmm! Luckily he was fairly clever and,
placed the purse net over one of the holes. The other? Well in it
he placed a brick which, was just a weeny bit larger than the hole
and, jumped on it until it was about two inches lower than the
surface. He then placed clay over the top and patted it down; the
Incredible Rabbit Hulk wouldn’t have got out. In went the ferret,
over the hole went the net and out came dinner … home went he;
happy as a pig in sh …

Well, over time
down’t mine shafts, the miners ate their pasties, sarnies, pickles,
spring onions, cockles, mussels etc., and in the evenings drank
copious amounts of beer. This mixture does have an effect similar
to an internal Hiroshima (or Sellafield) on the intestines with, a
grand finale the next day. Similar to a reverse wired Dyson cleaner
during a power surge. To allow for this a hole had been poked
through the roof of a suitable shaft to allow fumes to escape into
the atmosphere … it was the unbearable stink which caused the mines
to shut down, plus the fear of having lit candles. They didn’t need
canaries M’lud.

So who knows
what now inhabits the old, cold, long closed mine shafts? Does it /
they (?) have a nose(s)? But then again, what does it matter? What
is now important is the living community above the surface, the
good people of M, not the ghosts in the honeycomb catacombs.

M’lud: “Thank
you Mr Lassut, it is now eleven a.m. Court will recess and resume
again at one thirty”.

Clerks: “All
rise for M’lud”.

***

ANYONE FOR
BOWLS?

Millom Bowling
Green is the domain of the old wise ones (hold back a little on the
wise, you have it). So what would be interesting in the other
dimension concerning a bowling green?

This section is
dedicated to my old bowling mates Gary Maggs and James Wearing
(Mouse).

1.30 p.m.

“All rise for
M’lud”.

He sits.

M’lud, before I
really get stuck into the Prosecution I would like to tell of the
appreciative care given to those who (pear) shaped the town … the M
old folk. The loving care given through relaxing sporting
activities provided by the Council is second to none because, these
are the people who have managed to keep the town well behind the
times (with no Divine intervention of course), therefore giving it
the edge when it comes to romanticism and dark night ‘Shaw Kite’
lit dinners (pronounced Sh … how … ‘later’) not to mention, an
extremely high skill factor in the noble art of ‘bowls’.

M’lud: “Ah yes”
Bowls! A very skilful game. What is Shaw Kite by the way? I haven’t
heard that term before”.