Timothy Lea - Confessions of a Plumber’s Mate

I have more bother when I get to Hull where I am supposed to be delivering the skins. At first they refuse to take them. I am not a little narked because I have spent a lot of time fluffing them out. It is a bit insulting, isn’t it? I mean, they are not supposed to be cured and they niffed more than a bit when I took charge of them. Maybe I ought to change the Cologne I use. It makes a mockery of one’s programme of personal freshness. Frankly, I can’t see what the bloke is getting so worked up about. The sheep have it away in them, don’t they? I would like to point this out but I can’t give too much away about those two torrid – and rather horrid – nights without weakening my position.

In the end I threaten to shove them through the office letterbox one by one and the bloke throws in the sponge. Once I have used it to his satisfaction, he agrees to accept the skins.

As I drive back to London, a fresh worry invades my already over-occupied mind: the effect that my unexpected absence will have had on Mum and Dad. We say a few harsh words to each other but basically we are very close. I expect that Mum will be nearly distraught with worry and that Dad will be having to struggle to keep a grip on his emotions. I had better postpone my showdown with Sid and get straight round to 17 Scraggs Lane, the ancestral home of the Leas in the burrow of Clapham – that’s what we call our street now because of all the high-rise flats around it. You feel as it you are underground. I park the lorry beyond the line of abandoned cars that starts outside our front door – actually, a lot of them aren’t abandoned. Sid has borrowed them to come and see us and nobody has found them yet. Sid does have the Rover but it is always in the garage having the dents taken out of it – I keep telling him that he shouldn’t drive at the traffic wardens like that.

I hope that Mum does not burst into tears or anything. Of course, it would be quite understandable if she did. Her only son snatched back from the living hell of the north; the new ice age denied another victim, and all that – but I still hope she does not do it. It might start Dad off. He is not as reserved as people think. I remember him crying when Nobby Stiles took out his false teeth after the 1966 World Cup – I mean, of course, when Nobby Stiles took out his own false teeth. He never had a go at Dad’s – though I wouldn’t have put it past him if Dad had looked like scoring. Then again, when Bambi’s mother copped it in the film of the same name. You couldn’t blame him for that. I don’t reckon anyone could sit through that and not start feeling for something to blow his nose on – that is what I told Carol Farmer at the time, anyway, though she still had me thrown out of the cinema. She was a funny girl. Her right hand never knew what her left hand was doing and always seemed surprised to find out.

I press the front door bell and listen to the silence. Dad brought home a Multi-Vibe Temple Chime from the lost property office where he goes to sleep during the day but he has clearly not got around to fixing it up yet. Wait a minute! I tell a lie. There, nailed to one of the peeling door jambs is the aforementioned M-V TC looking like a rusty xylophone. Beside it hangs a mallet. I can imagine the whole thing appealing to Dad’s sense of refinement and grandeur. Although a convicted socialist – I have never been able to find out what all the convictions were for – he nicks Country Life from the doctor’s and on one occasion even made a toilet paper holder out of a cover. He would get an upper class thrill out of wiping his bum on the contents pages if they were not so shiny.

Feeling like the geezer who bashes the gong at the start of those old J Arthur movies I have a go at the Temple Chime and step smartly to one side as it crashes to the ground. Hardly has the first note rung out and the third piece of piping bounced halfway across the street than the front door bursts open and I find myself face to face with Dad. His bloodshot eyes gaze deep into mine and I see a look of haunted anguish that makes my worst fears come true. Here is a man living on the very edge of reason. A man practically unhinged by the return of a well-loved child given up for lost. ‘Dad!’ I say, throwing my arms around him.

‘Get off me, you git-faced twit!’ shouts my father. ‘Have you gone round the twist? Look what you’ve done. Do you know how much those things cost in the shops? Oh my Gawd!’

So saying, he casts himself on the ground and begins trying to retrieve pieces of the Temple Chime. Much as the thought distresses me, it is clear that its multi-vibes will never again be harnessed into one glorious ringing note.

‘I’m all right, Dad,’ I say, comfortingly.

‘You’re all right?’ screams Dad. ‘Who told you that? Let me know and I’ll have him certified. You’re not all right! You’re the most destructive little sod that ever drew breath and unemployment benefit.’

‘Dad! Please!’ I say. ‘Think of your heart.’

Dad shakes his head. ‘Every time I look at you, I wish I’d listened to your mother.’

‘Why Dad? What did she say?’

‘She told me to stop it!’ says Dad bitterly.

Before I can decide whether to question Dad more closely on this delicate subject, Mum appears carrying a dustpan and brush. She, at least, looks as if she has got her feelings under control. It is strange, but I have often noticed how women, who are supposed to be the weaker sex, can often show tremendous resolution in times of stress.

‘It’s fallen down again, has it?’ says Mum. ‘I told you it should have been fixed up properly. You ought to have got an electrician in.’

‘I’m back, Mum,’ I say.

‘I’m not made of bleeding money,’ says Dad. ‘Those blokes cost a fortune. It would have been quite all right if clumsy clot here hadn’t laid his lazy, no good hands on it.’

‘I’m back, Mum,’ I repeat. ‘From the snowdrift.’

‘You can’t blame him, Walter,’ says Mum. ‘The milkman had it down as well. It shouldn’t be hanging there, that’s the long and short of it.’

‘From the snowdrift on the desolate Pennine Hills,’ I say. ‘Mickle Fell.’

‘My bleeding door chimes fell, and all!’ says Dad. ‘What’s the matter with you? Why can’t you think of other people for a change?’

I am beginning to understand that concern for his door chimes has temporarily blinded my father to my absence. It is sad but not totally unexpected. I swallow my disappointment and turn to my mother. ‘Mum,’ I say. ‘I don’t wish to appear melodramatic but I have been lost for two nights in one of the worst blizzards the north of England has known. Have you at any time during that period experienced any feelings of what I might describe as unease?’ I watch my mother’s face consider the question for a moment and then shape itself into an expression of extreme distress. Perhaps I was too blunt.

‘Oh!’ she says. ‘Oh, no!’

Immediately, I feel guilt-stricken. I should have bided my time; let her come to terms with my return in her own way. ‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ I say. ‘I didn’t mean –’

‘What’s the matter now?’ says Dad peevishly.

‘His supper’s been in the oven for three days,’ says Mum.

I would not mind so much if she did not still expect me to eat it! I mean, I never reckoned her corn beef fritters much at the best of times. After three days in the oven they taste like coke butties. One thing I will say for them, they don’t crumble in your pocket – they rip the lining to pieces but they don’t crumble. I smuggle two out and I can’t force them between the bars of the drain they are so tough.

One thing I am surprised to learn, when Dad has stopped fretting about his chimes, is that we have been invited to supper by sister Rosie and brother-in-law, Sid. Not only supper but during a weekday, too. What is more, Rosie refers to the meal as dinner and thoroughly confuses everybody. Dad does put in a token appearance at the lost property office, most days, to see if there is anything worth nicking and Mum is quite likely to be queuing up for her favourite seat at the bingo during what we call dinnertime.