The Second Life of Sally Mottram

by David Nobbs

  Conrad looked at the two ladies and grimaced with mock embarrassment.

  ‘He has ideas,’ continued Stanley, ‘and I’m glad to say that we have decided to put him in sole charge of what we must now call the Potherthwaite Flood Control Plan.’

  ‘Or, as I prefer to call it, the Potherthwaite Flood Avoidance Plan,’ said Conrad.

  ‘This has nothing to do with any significance in any period of years since the last flood. It could happen any time. It may not happen for another twenty years. It might happen tomorrow,’ said Stanley.

  ‘Oh Lord,’ said Marigold, and Conrad threw Stanley a reproving look.

  Stanley Willink led the small group round the back of the supermarket, following the course of the river. On their left now were the allotments, and then the riverside path became the scruffy little street with its houses scheduled for demolition.

  ‘Is there any particular reason why these houses are scheduled for demolition?’ asked Sally.

  Conrad and Stanley exchanged another look. It seemed that this one was Stanley’s turn.

  ‘Under Conrad’s master plan,’ said Stanley, ‘these are the only houses whose safety from flooding he cannot guarantee. Isn’t that right, Conrad?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Conrad. ‘Besides, they’re just simply in the way.’

  He led them round the back of the condemned houses towards the Potherthwaite Arm of the Rackstraw and Sladfield Canal. The Potherthwaite Arm, five and a quarter miles of badly maintained, absurdly narrow canal, was not a jewel in the crown of the British canal system, but nothing about it was less elegant than its end, which was just a stagnant dribble in a featureless marsh. Stanley halted at the edge of the marsh. A shy heron, disturbed by their approach, flew off with slow, resigned flaps of its great grey wings.

  ‘Any comments?’ Stanley asked Conrad Eltington. ‘Any reason why you’ve brought us on this walk today, and disturbed that lovely heron?’

  Conrad nodded.

  ‘Ladies?’ he said. ‘Any ideas?’

  Sally guessed the answer. It wasn’t exactly rocket science, but in a sudden surge of affection for Marigold she said nothing. She wanted her friend to have a chance to shine in Conrad’s eyes.

  And Marigold, in the remorseless light rain, with the legs that had graced a hundred bar stools now encased in wellington boots, on the edge of an unattractive marsh from which the only lovely thing, a heron, had been driven away by their approach, suddenly felt it extremely important that she should impress Conrad.

  ‘You’re going to build a channel from the river to the canal,’ she said, ‘and I suppose some sort of sluice gate that you can open to divert the water. Once the canal is cleared, it’ll take a lot of extra water, which can be released downstream into the water meadows if there’s a threat of the river breaking its banks. Sort of thing.’

  Conrad tried to hide how pleased he was by her reply, but his childish delight seeped through and its childishness revealed to her that he was much more fond of her than he had shown last night.

  But all he said was, ‘Just so.’

  They walked on. A lone red kite circled above them as their four multicoloured golf umbrellas moved slowly across the marsh to the point where, on the southern end of the canal, the towpath began. As they walked on, the dribble of water grew. Stanley Willink explained to Sally and Marigold that the water for the canal came via underground pipes laid in early Victorian times to catch the waters pouring down off the southern moors.

  Conrad indicated where the sluice gates would be, where the course of the relief cut would lead. Now the canal became more like a large pond, or even a small lake. This was the famous winding hole, scooped out to provide a turning circle for the narrowboats. Here, when the clearance of the canal was completed, Terence and Felicity Porchester would turn in readiness for their journey back to the mooring that they hadn’t been able to reach for what was now ten years. Conrad explained where the necessary reinforcements to the banks of the winding hole would go. Sally knew that all this should give her a feeling of reassurance, but it didn’t. The scale of the works revealed to her the scale of the threat, and, if it didn’t work, the scale of the damage to all her plans. Her eyes met Marigold’s, and she knew that her friend was thinking the same thing. This little river could destroy all their great work. This little river could wreck the Transition of Potherthwaite.

  Beyond the winding hole, the canal proper began, with the towpath on the southern side, and a dirt track to the north. They passed the spot at which they would soon have been going under the new bridge, if the plan for the second supermarket had not been thrown out. Here the track became a road, flanked by old houses in bad repair, two of them empty and threatened with demolition.

  Behind them, and below the level of the canal, stood the Canal Basin, that tiny, dark, cobbled square, its old houses looking down with Victorian disapproval on the prostitutes parading their wares below them.

  They carried on along the towpath towards the Quays, with the dark grey slates of the town shining in the rain on the other side of the cut. There was Sally’s new flat, which occupied the whole first floor of a three-storey converted late Georgian warehouse. How characterful it looked, but how badly the window frames needed painting. In front of it, Terence Porchester was lying on the roof of his narrowboat, his great frame overhanging the edge, his thick arms stretching out to reach the sliver of deck that ran round the side of the boat. Felicity was crouched down on the roof behind him, holding his legs with ferocious concentration. One slip from her, and he’d be in the drink, and not the kind of drink that he liked.

  He waved cheerfully, a dangerous act.

  ‘Don’t wave,’ shouted Felicity urgently.

  ‘Got to, darling. Friends,’ said Terence. A thought struck him. ‘Don’t you bloody wave. Mending a leak,’ he told the four walkers. ‘Wretched climate. Be a nice place, this, if it wasn’t for the rain. Fancy a glass of bubbly, cheer yourselves up?’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Conrad, ‘but another time. We’re working.’

  ‘Bad luck,’ boomed Terence.

  After they had finished their reconnaissance, Conrad and Stanley took Sally and Margaret to lunch at the Weavers’. It was clear to both Sally and Stanley that today Conrad and Marigold were getting on significantly well. It was also clear to both Sally and Stanley that nothing whatsoever was going on between Sally and Stanley.

  At the end of the meal, when the others ordered coffee, Sally said that she must go. ‘The Transition won’t happen on its own,’ was her passing shot.

  She wanted a coffee, to gee her up, but not with the others. She wandered to the place that she suddenly realized was her favourite haunt in town – the warm, reliable, blessedly ordinary Kosy Korner Kafé.

  Lucy Basridge was sitting with a Diet Coke at a quiet table towards the back of the café. She was reading a book. Like her, it was very slim. She seemed to Sally to have changed, though. She looked more solid. She looked as if she had matured in the eleven months since she had spoken out during the march. She still had her ring and her stud, but her hair was its natural gold again. Sally was surprised to find how keen she was to speak to her. She hoped Lucy would become Ben’s girlfriend. He needed a girlfriend. That was the only subject in the whole world on which she agreed with Ben’s father.

  She took her coffee – goodness, how she needed the thrust the double espresso would give her – and walked slowly towards Lucy’s table.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘It’s Lucy, isn’t it?’

  Lucy looked up. Sally knew immediately that she had been reading the book properly, with concentration, and wasn’t happy to be interrupted. She knew too that it had been a bit crass to interrupt.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’m Sally Mottram.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  Sally had experienced conversations that had started better than this.

  ‘I’m a friend of Ben’s,’ she said. It came out sounding like a piece of code, with
a hidden meaning.

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  Despite all her good intentions, seeing Conrad and Marigold, in the flesh, getting on so well over lunch had made Sally feel isolated and lonely, and now she heard herself saying rather to her horror, ‘Do you mind if I join you?’ It was wrong, she was interrupting, but she just did not want to sit on her own, the only element not kosy in this Kosy Korner. How could Lucy have said, ‘Yes. I do’? But Lucy said, ‘No. Of course not,’ and Sally couldn’t say, ‘Thanks, but I’ve changed my mind.’

  Now that she was sitting there, she felt that it would look odd not to speak.

  ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘A play.’

  ‘Ah.’

  There was a silence between them that went on just slightly too long.

  ‘Good,’ said Sally. ‘That’s good.’

  How patronizing was that?

  ‘Is it good?’

  This was terrible. How old are you, Sally?

  ‘I’ve just started it.’

  ‘Oh. And now I’m stopping you getting on with it.’

  ‘It’s all right. My concentration’s broken now anyway.’

  Shit.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t matter. I’ve gotta split anyway.’

  Sally wondered if Lucy was playing truant. She didn’t look as if she was, but you never knew.

  ‘Miss Spreckley told me to choose some plays from the library and read some in my study lesson.’

  Lucy had answered Sally’s thought. Was she a mind reader?

  ‘She wants me to direct a play.’

  ‘That’s great. That’s fantastic.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Lucy stood up. She was taller than Sally had thought. What was she now? Sixteen?

  ‘I really do have to split,’ she said.

  It was now or never.

  ‘I gathered from Ben that things hadn’t worked out too well … you know … between you.’

  ‘Oh. Maybe.’ Lucy didn’t say ‘So what?’ but her eyes did. And she was entitled to. What business was it of Sally’s? What on earth was she doing?

  ‘No. It’s just that I saw you together. I’m very friendly with Ben – I like him a lot, I think he’s very talented, and …’

  Sally could think of no way to end her sentence, but she had to say something.

  ‘Maybe you could do a play for me, for the festival,’ she said.

  ‘What festival?’

  ‘The Potherthwaite Festival.’

  ‘I didn’t know there was a Potherthwaite Festival.’

  ‘There wasn’t. There will be.’

  ‘Cool. Yeah, maybe. Cool. I really do have to split.’

  Sally hardly saw Lucy move. One minute she was there, the next minute she wasn’t. Sally felt about a hundred and thirty-six years old. Her wish that Ben was her son had shocked her, and now what was she doing? Trying to find a suitable partner for him. Not only behaving as if she was his mother, but as if she was his interfering cow of a mother at that. Sam and Beth were her concern. And Alice. When the Transition had been fully set in place she’d step away from it and begin to look after her own family. She should never have started it.

  If only Sam and Beth lived nearer. If only Alice wasn’t at the other side of the world.

  Oh, come back, Alice. Please.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  The remorseless passage of time

  Autumn slid slowly, inexorably, painfully into winter. It does. Short days in a dark valley. The weather grew colder. It does. But the onset of this winter felt very different from the last one, to Sally. It would be wrong to exaggerate the number of people who were actively involved in Transition activities. Some people used wild words like ‘half the town’. But, as winter’s grip hardened, Sally had expected that the number of helpers would drop off, as in the previous year. Not so. In fact to her amazement the reverse happened. To a man, and woman, the active helpers refused to be beaten, in a Pennine town, by a mere winter, and other people, noting the indomitability of the helpers, were driven by guilt, or shame, or pride, or sheer good nature, to join in. The bypass would soon be completed. Stretches of the canal were clear. The whole thing had gathered momentum.

  A competition for the design of the park was held, and it was won by a quiet and apparently unambitious young man in the council’s Parks and Gardens department. Sally had actually met him when she had tried to persuade Barry to get Mottram & Caldwell to sponsor a roundabout. Barry had told her that Tom Caldwell had no vision and thought it a waste of money. After Barry’s death she had discovered that he had never even told Tom. Many and often trivial were her moments of disillusionment. The young man was called Fred Burns and perhaps he wasn’t as unambitious as everyone thought. He changed his name to Frederick J. Burns, resigned from the council, and set himself up as a bespoke landscape designer. Volunteers began to prepare the ground for his vision. Others, perhaps fearing a two-tier Potherthwaite, worked on improvements to Baggit Park.

  The council reopened the Royalty Suite at the back of the Town Hall. Here prominent citizens held dinners to raise money for the Transition cause. They couldn’t hold an exhibition of live dodos, but they could rescue the dinner dance from extinction. With every little lift in the public mood, more money was raised. Raffles were generously supported. Even on the Baggit Estate, the Hugh Gaitskell Memorial Hall became the seat of a monthly horse-racing evening. And Sir Norman, as promised, matched every penny. A committee was set up to decide what to do with the money. It was independent of the council though with one councillor from each major party on the committee. Largely due to Sally’s excellent man-management skills and even better woman-management skills, the committee worked well. A subcommittee of the committee was set up and it surveyed all public buildings in the town, allocating money from the fund for their renovation by the town’s craftsmen. Sally deliberately let slip by accident on Radio Pother that she would suggest a memorial of thanks to all craftsmen or craftswomen who had helped under this scheme. Once they knew this, every craftsman and craftswoman in the town volunteered.

  The thing to be in this newly environmentally conscious town was a provider of solar panels. Suddenly they became a status symbol, and within months more than half the houses in Oxford Road had them.

  Another great environmental scheme was the recycling of urine. Special devices were installed in the town’s public conveniences, enabling the urine to be siphoned off, treated, stored, and used to fertilize what arable land there was. Several pubs joined in. The Dog and Duck put up a board which announced, electronically, its gallonage. Currently it stands at 893. Drinkers will cheer when it flicks to 894. When it reaches 900, all hell will break loose, and there will be a free fish-and-chip supper for the lucky urinator. At the bottom of the board were the chalked words: ‘British Urine – British Measures – No Litres Here’. The town’s buses – repainted green, of course – carried the simple slogan: ‘Pee For Potherthwaite’. One night five buses were deformed with the added words: ‘And Shit For Sheffield’. Luke Warburton, the prime suspect, produced dated photographs that showed him in Amsterdam on a stag night that weekend, but who can believe any photograph in the digital age? The more he proved he hadn’t been there, the more people believed he had. Lucy, of course, was also suspected. She grew really angry when accused, shouting that she always kept her promises, and in the end most people believed her. But in fact nobody worried too much about this very mild obscenity, and the Chronicle, without mentioning the potentially offensive word, even went so far as to state that, if the one recycling project was sound, why not go for the other one as well? Food was expensive. Why not put a bit back with the end product?

  Several towns, notably Totnes in Devon and Lewes in East Sussex, had created their own banknotes, and now Potherthwaite followed suit. The alliteration in the words ‘Potherthwaite Pound’ proved effective, and lots of shops agreed to participate in the scheme. People who used these shops knew that the shop observe
d the principles of the movement, sold only food that was healthily and humanely produced, and supported the local economy whenever possible. Another competition was held to decide the design of the notes, and it was won by a lady interior designer who lived in the loveliest of all the old houses on the Quays, for her colourful representation of a semi-mythical, semi-historic Saxon do-gooder called Povver the Magnanimous, whose name was said to be the original source of the names of the river, the valley and the town.

  As the winter drew to its end, Sir Norman returned from Bermuda rather earlier than usual, and Sally visited him as planned, drank two glasses of the most marvellous manzanilla, enjoyed her roast red deer while Sir Norman tucked into his scrambled eggs, told him every detail of every initiative, and felt that her visit had been a success when her plate at Sunday lunch contained not one, but two individual Yorkshire puddings.

  Not only that, but when she left he actually came to the front steps, stood there in the biting wind and spoke at some length.

  ‘Tiptree is not a man suited to social life,’ he said. ‘Put it this way. If I needed an emissary to represent me at some royal event, I would not choose him. In fact he is eminently suited to hermitude, if there is such a word, and if there isn’t it should be invented specially for him. I do respect his judgement, however, so when I sent him to Potherthwaite to vet you – oh dear oh dear, how awful that sounds – and he informed me that you had impressed him, his statement impressed me more than somewhat. In casual moments over my scrambled eggs during my solitary dinners I wondered just how impressive you must be to have impressed him so. I invited you here and found you to be even more impressive than I had dared to hope.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And now, this weekend, as you’ve revealed to me the progress of your great work, I have found you more impressive than ever.’

  ‘Well, thank you.’

  A few days later, Sally had a visit from Ben Wardle. His complexion was ashen, he had black bags under his eyes, he looked too thin, but at least he wasn’t shaking.