The advertising manager was troubled by these direct questions, but the speed of his uneasy smile suggested he knew they were coming. Without slowing his pace on our brisk walk to the pub, he nonchalantly pointed into the centre of the car park.
“It’s over there, parked near to the delivery vans I think,” he mumbled, starting to walk a little quicker
“The black sporty looking one with alloy wheels?” I asked excitedly – thinking to myself, could this be my chariot?
“Err no...” he replied, “the one next to it – in err… green.”
At this point I fully understood his hesitation – the inexpensive, box-like carriage situated next to the black dream machine was a small olive green Austin Metro. Not the prettiest vehicle, in fact rather ugly. These cars combined a reputation for general underperformance with an inclination to rust. Still, think positively, I told myself, this was a free car – and like my old dad had always told me – it would get me from A to B. Closer inspection however, would reveal that while it would get me (eventually) to B, this would always be achieved at considerable personal embarrassment.
The car had been specially branded for the Echo, with enormous, white lettering written over much of its olive paintwork. I had to check it out two or three times before I fully appreciated the consequences of the liveried panels splattered along both sides of the four wheeled ‘Miss Lincolnshire Echo’ stallion. I’d only been provided with the former promotional girl’s free vehicle as my company car. Apparently the winner of the annual Miss Lincolnshire Echo beauty competition was unable to fulfil her duties and had resigned, meaning her prize of a promotional car could be passed on to whichever poor sap was foolhardy enough to accept the unfilled vacancy in the advertising department. Oh my God - was I going to have the mickey taken out of me, back home under the shadow of the steelworks. The Echo assured me they would of course arrange to have the word ‘Miss’ removed from each side of the vehicle, but since this was effectively a glued-on vinyl, dirt and dust simply stuck to the edges where the ‘Miss’ word once was – drawing even more attention to the sides of this bloody awful car. Although it was sold to me as a temporary situation until there was sufficient funding for a replacement vehicle, I ended up travelling back and forth to Lincoln in that rust bucket for years.
Fortunately time travelled much faster than that embarrassing car during my stint at the Echo. Not only was the work satisfying but Annie and I were feeling really settled and enjoying every aspect of the lifestyle we were building for ourselves. Having transport enabled us go on short trips at the weekend and travel down south to visit my mum during longer breaks. Mum thought really highly of Annie and always reinforced everything that was good in our relationship. She once told me that she believed my girlfriend was the one person in the world who was capable of bringing out the best possible version of myself.
During this, the happiest of periods, Annie and I belonged to a tight knit group of about a dozen close friends which consisted of Stuart, Faye, my youngest sister Kirsty, a few of Annie’s old school friends and a couple of my work colleagues. Because my oldest sister Erin, the sensible one had recently emigrated to Spain, we had started to see a lot more of Kirsty who’d not only moved from Harrogate to York, but had also shared with us that she was gay. This was something that Annie had suspected for years. My sister’s easy acceptance into the wider group was especially welcome, because through her I was able to keep track of what was happening with family members and old school mates.
It would be this same tight knit group of friends who in 1991 would all receive an invitation to attend the wedding of Mr & Mrs Charlie Mellor, the same ones who, the following year would hear how thrilled Mrs Mellor and I were to discover we were about to become parents.
* * *
After baby Hattie was born, Annie and I knew our already strong relationship had been transformed. We were no longer simply a couple but had suddenly become a family. Parenthood was intrinsically satisfying. Our baby’s arrival demonstrated we’d met our recent goal to become ‘slightly more grown-up’. Here was our most splendid achievement. I felt incredibly proud of Annie, and was immediately filled with an overwhelming desire to protect both my girls. I was mindful little Hattie represented the living manifestation of the love Annie and I had for each other - physical evidence of our unbreakable union. I was also taken aback by just how much additional capacity for unconditional love was still in the tank to give to our gorgeous little daughter. Bringing our new born baby back home from the hospital, the whole house felt more alive, filled with a sense of crackling in the air. Every undecorated room seemed to sparkle a little more with an indescribable charge which you could almost touch. Fatherhood was a very big thing.
Hattie provided me with a defining moment which for once wasn’t related to how inept I’d been at something. Instead this particular milestone event represented everything I could truly be proud of. I was grateful my baby girl brought with her a sense of future history. Watching her sleep in her cot, I decided my new role in life was akin to being in the NYPD – I too was there to ‘serve and protect’. My purpose was to look after Hattie’s emotional, moral, social and financial needs and keep her safe from harm.
Smug self-satisfaction was however quickly erased on the journey back to work following a week’s paternity leave. Overwhelmed and overtired by the enormity of it all, I fell asleep at the wheel of the car, skidded across the road, smashed through some fencing panels and ended up, rather shaken in the middle of a muddy field. I wasn’t badly hurt, but the car was a bit of a mess and needed towing to a local garage. Thirty short minutes after setting off from the house, I was back home with the girls. Parenthood, it seemed, had increased my ability to put other’s needs ahead of my own, but done nothing whatsoever to improve my driving skills.
The only negative emotions I felt in relation to fatherhood were the ones I never expressed. Ones which I assumed I shared with all new parents. Lying in bed as Annie tried to catch up with some sleep between night feeds, I would frequently be troubled with a real sense of dread. What if something should happen to Hattie? What if something were to harm her? What if she was ever taken away from us? Finally what about all the responsibility which goes with parenthood? – If we really are the builders of our children’s destinies, then was I going to be any good at mixing the required mortar?
We enjoyed being a family unit immensely and in 1994, Hattie was provided with a little brother called Toby to play with. With two small children to look after, everyone tended to gather at our house in the evenings, rather than us having to rely on babysitters. Conscious we didn’t want our two toddlers watching groups of grown-ups drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes in their vicinity, we all took turns to nip into a poorly constructed extension which we used as a utility room. This modest add-on to the main house contained a fridge, freezer, washing machine, ironing board and all the cleaning equipment. It was a cramped environment which had no insulation and was consequently bitterly cold throughout the long winter months. Despite these drawbacks, it was separate to the main house and allowed us to isolate the rest of the building in order to enjoy private discussions and act once again like indulgent students. More and more of us gravitated towards the utility which soon developed a reputation for being our party room. On many nights nine or ten adults would jostle forwards in the hope they’d be able to secure one of a handful of broken wooden stools stacked in the corner of this little icebox. Wobbling on their unstable legs, lucky recipients would hunch together under inappropriately positioned shelving units, while everyone else sat down in front of them on the cheap corded carpet tiles. Every so often a couple of responsible adults took turns to make sure the kids were sleeping peacefully elsewhere in the house and by the time they got back, their seats had always been taken. Music blared out of a cheap tape player and the hours flew by as we shared stories, Budweiser and Silk Cut cigarettes.
Although a few of Annie’s old school friends had gravitated back
to Scunthorpe after university, the majority were forced to leave area in search of work. Some of these would return every few months to see their families. When this happened, we always looked forward to their calls in anticipation of a rare night out, or if this wasn’t possible, a rowdy trip to the utility room. Allan Hewitt was one of these infrequent visitors. Annie had known him since sixth form and although he was in the year below, he had ingratiated himself with many of her male friends through his interest in sports. A fanatical Castleford Tigers rugby fan, he was both exuberant and boisterous, a bloke’s bloke, who presumably got rid of whatever frustrations he had, playing amateur rugby at the weekends. I have to say, I wasn’t overly impressed with him on our opening meeting.
Allan, who was a big lad, introduced himself by shaking my hand a little too vigorously and saying the immortal lines, “Allan Hewitt, Assistant Distribution Manager from the town of Dudley, pleased to meet you.”
This laughable greeting was a great way of delaying the discovery that he turned out to be a very likeable fella, someone who was as easy to talk to as he was to wind up.
It wasn’t just the formality of his introduction which threw me. He also dressed very conventionally, nothing like friends I’d previously selected for myself - who, thinking about it, all tended to look like rejects from an unknown seventies rock band. Sometimes he used naff sounding phrases like ‘chill out’ and seemed very uncomfortable in female-only company. His saving grace was his lacerating sense of humour. As one of the best story tellers I’d met, I enjoyed listening as he built up a joke to its side splitting conclusion. I loved the way he was able to laugh at himself and therefore took full advantage of this by ribbing him whenever I had the chance. Getting to know him better, I could see that while the moustachioed Allan worked hard to project an ‘ordinary Joe’ kind of image, he did have one or two idiosyncrasies of his own. Even after we’d known him for a while, he never once sent us a Christmas card– not a big deal I know, but I was curious as to why, particularly when we always made the effort.
“Hey Allan, how come we never hear from you at Christmas?” I asked
“What do you mean? You always hear from me at Christmas – I come over to see Mum and Dad every year and I always let you know when I’m in town,” he said.
“No, I mean hear from you at Christmas,” I said, nodding my head towards all the greetings cards on the fireplace. “It’s not a big thing, but we always send you and your parents a card and yet to this day, we’ve never had one back. Annie wondered if it was a religious thing, or if we’d upset you in some way?”
“You have never sent me a card.”
“What?”
“You may have sent one to my Mum and Dad in the past, but you have never sent a card to me.”
“I can assure you I have, many, many times - birthday cards too, all posted to your home address.”
“A-L-L-A-N, repeat it, A-L-L-A-N - what does it spell?”
“Are you serious?”
“I’m very serious about this. If someone sent you a letter, say to a Chris instead of to you, you’d probably not even bother to open it right?”
“Erm, I suppose…”
“Well I’m just the same. My name is A-L-L-A-N – with two Ls. Each one is as important as the other. It’s how you spell my name. I was christened Allan, not Al, or Alan. If someone can’t be bothered to get it right, I can’t be bothered to read it. It’s a principle I’ve applied for years, even with the senior managers at work. If a memo arrives inviting me to a meeting and it’s addressed to ‘Alan Hewitt’, I assume it’s for someone else and don’t turn up. It doesn’t take people long to realise they need to remember the extra L.”
This was typical of him. Allan liked rules, they made things easier – you knew where you were with a simple operating procedure. This black and white nature bled into other areas. Men who tucked pens into a shirt top pocket were, according to the Rules of Allan, ‘Unambitious losers’. I never thought of him as sexist, although he was adamant women shouldn’t be allowed to be lead singers for rock bands (guitar and drums were fine). As a distant descendant of the Buchanan clan from near Loch Lomond, the most amusing of his blind-spot for me was his uncompromising approach towards people from Scotland.
“Don’t know what it is, just can’t stand ‘em.”
In the interest of our friendship, I decided to keep as quiet about my own heritage as Allan had done about his extra L. However I did nearly choke when I heard the news that his haulage firm were forcing him to relocate from his base in the Midlands to a Scottish distribution centre based near Livingston.
People warmed more easily to Allan’s partner Stacey who was blessed with a kind and positive nature. Her glass was always three quarter full and by choice she preferred to walk on the bright side of the road. Not ‘pathologically perky’ in a way which grates like a trainee hotel receptionist on their induction week; just slightly more upbeat than the rest of us. On form ‘Stace’ was capable of eclipsing the physically sizable Mr Hewitt with her infectious laughter and charitable mind set. Enthralled by other’s backgrounds, she remembered details and put new acquaintances at ease without ever being intrusive or pushy. She was the sort of woman who built long term friendships effortlessly. According to Stacey, the first thing which drew her to Allan was his outgoing nature. She liked his decisiveness, pleased that she always knew where she stood with him.
Her previous ‘serious’ boyfriend had been, “A dithering and possessive little boy, who never wanted to go anywhere,” so Allan probably represented everything he wasn’t.
Allan, on his part, summarised his own attraction to Stacey by saying that he knew the two of them were “… socially compatible. I noticed that she was a great cook and seemed less erratic than the other girls in our hall. All in all … she was low risk… a safe investment.”
The four of us had a lot in common. They too were a young couple with a growing family who’d met when they were students. Only geography prevented the four of us getting any closer. Livingston was a very long drive and after their transfer so far up north, it was more common for only Allan to travel the long journey back, to support his elderly parents. If they did come over as a couple, we would link up with Stuart and Faye and then all go out for a drink. Stuart, Allan and Annie would reminisce about local people and local places while Stacey, Faye and I would share our worries about being regarded as someone else’s appendage – known only as someone’s partner, an outsider who would always struggle to prove their own worth because they weren’t born in the area.
Before getting to know Allan better, I assumed we didn’t have much in common. His distribution and logistics background had trained him to always deliver the single most expedient answer to any given problem, an approach which was very much at odds with how I liked to work. It was true that we both liked a laugh and had a slightly dark sense of humour, but otherwise our responses to problems and people always came from a very different place. This was fine - Stuart Jackson and I were hardly synchronised in our thought processes. The quality which I did find redeeming with Allan was that I always felt he had my back. Perhaps this was a trait which he’d refined over time, through the spirit of camaraderie prized in the various amateur rugby league teams he had been involved with, but whatever its origins I always believed Allan was true to his word and exceedingly loyal to those he had befriended.
As this trust grew, so did the rapport between us. Over time two particular connections between us would go on to bolt us together. One of these unifying interests turned out to be Echo &The Bunnymen. Realising Allan was a fan of the group provided him with instant kudos. I was amazed and delighted when it became clear he was an even bigger devotee than I was. In my mind, anyone who liked the group was both informed and discerning. His admiration for a band, who’d split up in the eighties and had remained relatively unknown to many provided us with a powerful fixative - a common interest which would bond us together for years to come.
Notwiths
tanding the fact that Allan was not exactly famed for his ability to readily put himself in another person’s shoes; it didn’t take him too long to realise the subject of sports was never going to be a fertile source of conversation for us. As a heterosexual male you are supposed to be genetically predisposed to want to discuss aspects of the last footie match for hours on end; to have lots of opinions about the comparative skill levels of every single player. Problem was, I found most team games a bit dull and Allan could see that this was never going to happen.
However, keen to build on our initial discussions, we made an important early substitution (from the benches). From now on, the Bunnymen would be our team. This made perfect sense - over the years we’d both worn their shirts and collected their programmes. Sometimes they played well, other times they played dreadfully; whatever the outcome we’d always remained loyal. When they later went on to reform in the mid 90s, they released their first album in ten years, heralding a triumphant return to form. Back as an active band, meant that Allan and I could discuss management tactics and celebrate whenever they beat other groups to achieve chart success. As replacement musicians came and went we were inquisitive about their respective pedigree, their skills and their acumen. We had the same interest in the band’s set list for the gig, as followers of our ‘national sport’ have about the pre-match game plan. Most of all we revelled in the excitement of seeing our boys in their natural arena. We welcomed opportunities to be crammed into a small confined space with hundreds of fellow supporters who had also paid over the odds to chant familiar verses and cheer at their idols. Whichever way you looked at it, our shared experience seemed remarkably close to that of the average football enthusiast.
Coincidences are funny things. It is easy to read more into them than is actually there. In a way they can be ensnaring – perhaps suggesting there is a divine meaning behind certain spooky events, a cosmic connection or some kind of invisible driver pushing things together in an unexpected way. The truth is of course probably far less paranormal. I have to keep reminding myself about this, because the next connection between us turned out to be an even bigger shock. Allan Hewitt knew Pennie Fenton.
Drowning in the Shallow End Page 12