by Bernard Ross
One Friday night Mick was in his cups as we were totting up the weeks takings, making up the wage packets and divvying up our own shares. I’d been away for a day doing a show with Mal and Irish Mick started on about how he was the one carrying the business and how I was just taking him for a ride. I could read the danger signs enough to see that this could rapidly end up with me getting a good hiding so I took the line that discretion is the greater part of valour. Mick kept at it and though we didn’t actually come to blows it was an acrimonious slagging match and as I was intent on avoiding throwing petrol on the metaphorical fire I didn’t make much effort to defend myself or argue my side of the story. Mick may have been drinking but the following day he was able to remember the whole conversation and took my lack of defence as an admission that he was right. Our relationship was strained from then on, with constant digs at me about how I couldn’t make it on my own and that he was the driving force and saviour of the partnership.
A couple of weeks after this argument Mick started “walking out” with Marie Grady and shortly after that they decided to get married. Their engagement was short and sweet and within a couple of months they were husband and wife. At their wedding they announced that they were moving to a new town to start their married life. He was leaving the partnership and going to set up afresh. I was now the sole owner of the business (total value of assets; not-a-lot!) and, full of bonhomie, he wished me well on my own.
I carried on as before. I wasn’t going to let Irish Mick run my life or ruin it. I kept the company going, successfully and continued appearing in Mal’s show as and when he needed me.
After the close camaraderie of the fun fair and the support of the partnership I was getting a bit lonely. The casual lads came and went and there wasn’t time to really get to know customers. I was beginning to feel a bit left out of life; I was twenty four, good looking, mature, intelligent and on my tod. On top of that it was a pain being the only person trying to run the business.
Chapter 33
Another End
Mal got in touch and asked me to appear as a top man on a three night show at a civic hall near Birmingham, about twenty miles from my digs and business. I turned up and helped the lads set up and then we all went to the pub. The barmaid, Althea, was a looker and we got chatting. She came along to the show and our relationship blossomed; she was a rare divorcee with two kids aged eight and ten. She managed a dress-shop by day and worked in the bar at night, after last orders she would go home to the nice little flat she had above the dress shop. At thirty six she was twelve years older than me, but like me, she was lonely; the 1960s were a tough place for a divorced woman, and not many guys would be happy to take on two of someone else’s kids. After a whirlwind romance we got married in a registry office and that was the end of my travelling days; I’ve moved in to the flat with Althea and the kids.
A couple of months later I got a parcel from old Mrs Grady, my former landlady, now Irish Mick’s mother-in-law. She had found some small things of mine that I’d left in my digs and was returning them. With them came a letter; Mick was now a changed man, he was much gentler and slower to lose his temper. This had come about when, one evening, he and his wife were leaving the pub when a man bumped into Marie. Characteristically, Mick had lost his temper, and when the man claimed that it was simply an accident, Mick had head-butted him. The poor man had fallen straight backwards, cracking his head on the edge of the kerb-stone and lying stone still, a pool of blood growing behind his head. The people who had seen the event immediately rushed in to administer first aid, it appeared that the man was dead and the group immediately turned on Mick, as did Marie. Luckily, after a minute or two the guy proved not to be dead when he started groaning and managed to sit up, but the shock of thinking that in a split second of rage Mick had killed a man, brought home to him how close he had been to a very long prison sentence (bearing in mind that the death penalty for murder had only been abolished a couple of years before). The man hadn’t pressed charges and Marie had accepted Mick’s road-to-Damascus conversion and so all was now well.
I never saw Irish Mick again but just settled down to married life and running my own business. The latter remained successful in its own small way. The former was a disaster! But that, as they say, is a whole different story.