Stairlift to Heaven

by Terry Ravenscroft

  Atkins stopped the car and turned to Harrison. “You dirty, smelly-arsed twat,” he said. I couldn’t have put it better myself, although I might have added a few more expletives.

  “Sorry,” bleated Harrison. “I’ll pay you for the trousers of course.”

  “Too bloody right you will,” said Atkins. “Now get out of the car and take them off, I’m not putting up with that stink for another twenty odd miles.”

  “I can’t sit here without trousers,” protested Harrison, rather primly, considering what he’d just done.

  “Nobody’s asking you to sit there without trousers,” said Atkins. “So shut up and do exactly as I say. Get out of the car. Take off the trousers you have shit in. Go to the wall at the side of the road and throw them in the field. Try not to hit a sheep. Then go to the boot of the car, which I will open for you, take out another pair of my charity trousers, put them on, and get back in the car.”

  Harrison got out of the car and did exactly as Atkins had instructed him until he got as far as going to the boot of the car, whereupon Atkins, instead of opening it for him, set the car in motion in a fair imitation of the driver of a getaway car in a bank robbery, leaving Harrison stranded and trouser-less in the middle of the road.

  “That’ll teach the bastard to shit in my trousers,” said Atkins.

  Hargreaves, who by now had also woken up and taken an interest in the proceedings, protested. “You can’t just leave him in the middle of the moors!”

  But Atkins could. And did. Like I said, Atkins can be quite uncompromising if you get the wrong side of him and shitting in his trousers is definitely not the way to get the right side of him.

  Apparently, according to Hargreaves, who I rang later for possible news of his friend, Harrison had eventually been given a lift back by the driver of a passing car, but only after about fifty cars had refused to stop for him, presumably because he was wearing a sweater, socks and shoes but no trousers, a bizarre outfit even for Yorkshire. Even then he had only managed to obtain a lift after assuring the driver of the car that he wasn’t a sheep-shagger, and after offering him twenty pounds for his trouble. Serve him right too.

  ****

  June 1 2006. COUNTDOWN.

  That toe rag Ron Atkinson was in Dictionary corner on Countdown this week. I didn’t watch it, but I hope it went like this....

  THE COUNTDOWN STUDIO. THE URBANE DES LYNAM AND THE UBIQUITOUS CAROL VORDERMAN ARE IN THEIR USUAL PLACES, ALONG WITH RON ATKINSON.

  DES: And now for a little light diversion from the normal Countdown fare; a special game for our special guest for the week. Consonant please, Carol.

  CAROL: N.

  DES: Consonant.

  CAROL: G.

  DES: Another consonant.

  CAROL: R.

  DES: Vowel.

  CAROL: I.

  DES: I’ll try another vowel please.

  CAROL: And that one is E.

  DES: And a final consonant.

  CAROL: And we complete the word with another G. So that’s N..G..R..I..E..G.

  RON: That’s only seven letters.

  DES: Six actually, Ron. Now all you have to do is arrange them into a well-known word. At least a word well-known to you, that is. And here’s a clue - it isn’t ‘Ginger’. And your time starts….now!

  RON: Er….Greign?

  DES: No.

  RON: Ignerg?

  DES: No. I’ll give you a clue, Ron. It starts with an N.

  RON: Nergig? Is Nergig a word?

  DES: No. It starts N I G.

  RON: Ngireg? I’m sure Ngireg is a word.

  DES: No.

  RON: Sorry then, no idea. So it looks like its early doors for me then.

  CAROL: Oh I’m sure you can get it if you try, Ron.

  DES: It starts N I G G E. You’ve only got one letter to put in.

  RON: Sorry. No idea.

  DES: Say the word, Ron.

  RON: No.

  CAROL: Say it Ron.

  RON: Look you guys I’ve only just managed to worm my way back onto mainstream television, give me a fucking….give me a flipping break will you.

  DES: Say the word Ron.

  RON: No.

  CAROL: Say it - and I’ll promise not to appear on any other television programmes apart from Countdown ever again.

  RON: Not even for that.

  DES: Say it Ron, or we won’t ever invite you back.

  RON: Er….er….Ashley Cole.

  DES: What?

  RON: Well he’s a nigger, isn’t he….shit!

  ****

  June 14 2006. A BUDDING ENTREPRENEUR.

  Having not visited Yorkshire for ages I went again a few weeks after our York trip, this time to Sheffield to pick up a water pump for the garden pond. I chose to wear the sports jacket I’d bought in York, the one Atkins said made me look like a bookie. I asked The Trouble how I looked in it. She said, “You look like a bookie.” I wasn’t surprised; she shares the same star sign as Atkins, Capricorn the Idiot. Besides, there are worse people to look like than a bookie; in my experience bookies always look as prosperous as they actually are, which is very prosperous.

  I managed to buy the water pump without anyone coming up to me and saying ‘I want a fiver on Lucky Charm in the 3.30 at Redcar’ and nothing else of interest happened worthy of comment until I stopped on the way back.

  My trip took a little longer than expected and I’d started to feel a bit peckish as it was well past my lunchtime. The countryside route, partly through my home county of Derbyshire, was not short of hostelries offering pub grub - a Chef & Brewer, a Beefeater and a Happy Eater amongst them - but these places invariably promise more than they deliver, as I’ve found to my cost. Apart from that it always seems to take forever for your food to arrive and I wanted a quick fix. A tip - avoid like the plague any pub that advertises ‘fare’ spelt ‘f...a...y...r...e’. If they can’t spell the word ‘fare’ there’s a very good chance they can’t cook either.

  Ahead of me I spotted a mobile snack bar parked up at a lay-by, the sort of thing at which lorries pull in, although there were none there at the moment. A sign said ‘Hot Food, Cold Food’. Just the ticket, I thought, and drew in. The proprietor was at the hatch. He was wearing a relatively clean white overall and not scratching his belly or picking his nose or anything, always a good sign. There was no menu advertised so I asked him what he had to offer.

  “Bacon barmcake, egg barmcake, sausage barmcake, bacon, egg and sausage barmcake,” he rattled off.

  “I was looking for something cold?”

  “Sorry mate, haven’t got anything cold.”

  “Your sign says ‘Hot Food, Cold Food’,” I pointed out.

  “Yeh, ham barmcake, cheese barmcake, cheese and ham barmcake. But I’ve run out. Hot day, had a run on cold stuff,” he said, then added, doing his best to make it sound tempting. “The bacon, egg and sausage barmcake is very nice.”

  “I don’t doubt it for one moment,” I said, “But it isn’t cold, is it.”

  He thought about it for a short moment then said: “You could wait for it to go cold.”

  What enterprise! What ingenuity! I certainly wouldn’t have got such a response if a branch of Chef & Brewer had run out of cold food, neither from the Chef nor the Brewer. “Sorry sir, there’s nothing I can do about it,” said apologetically, rather than matter-of-fact, if I were lucky, but more probably I’d have got a silent and disinterested shrug of the shoulders. Not from this man though. His entrepreneurial skills had kicked in immediately the problem had presented itself, and he had overcome it with ease. Britain could do with more men of his ilk; they are to be encouraged.

  I encouraged him. “A bacon, egg and sausage barmcake, please.”

  Not a second over two minutes later this Alan Sugar of the highways slid an orange-yolked fried egg onto the crispy bacon and plump pork sausage he had already placed on the bottom half of the barmcake, then joined the two halves together. Two minutes, mind. It would have taken at least
half-an-hour at a Happy Eater and even then there’d have been something wrong with the egg, apart from its yolk being a sickly pale yellow.

  “Don’t blow on it,” I admonished him.

  “I was helping it to go cold,” he explained, a little hurt.

  Helping it to go cold! Alan Sugar? Here was another Richard Branson in the making! “That’s all right, I’ll have it hot,” I said.

  It was quite delicious too.

  ****

  August 14 2006. TEENAGE AFFAIRS.

  ‘Burton’s old flame tells of affair at 14’, screamed the headline in the Sunday Times.

  It struck an immediate chord with me and I read on with great interest. The article told the story of author Rosemary Kingsland, now ‘an attractive woman in her early sixties’, and of her clandestine affair with actor Richard Burton when she was only fourteen. Apparently nobody else knew about the romance at the time and she has told nobody since, but now she ‘wants the truth to be known’.

  In the absence of any corroborative proof of their liaison some people might consider Mrs Kingsland’s revelations to be a bit iffy to say the least, especially as being a writer she could easily have made up such a story; however I am not one of them, not least because a similar thing happened to me in 1956 when I too was a fourteen-year-old.

  At the time I had gone to stay with my Aunt Polly and Uncle John in Los Angeles for a while. Like most boys of my age at that time I was madly in love with Marilyn Monroe, so imagine my great joy when one day I happened to spot her in a Hollywood diner having a coffee. Shyly I approached her and asked her for her autograph. She was even lovelier in real life than she was on the silver screen. She was very friendly and unaffected and after we’d chatted for what seemed ages she asked me if I’d like to go back to her place for a coffee. I said that she’d only just had a coffee but she told me not to be silly. Ten minutes later we were making love on her big pink bed. Over the course of the next week we made love a further fifteen times. She told me that I was a very good lover, not quite as good as President Kennedy but better than Bobby, which I thought wasn’t bad for a fourteen-year-old whose only previous sexual experience had been with his soapy hand whilst sat on the lavatory.

  Our affair might have gone on for longer but one day when I had gone down to the drugstore to get a soda for Marilyn I happened to bump into Natalie Wood. I mean literally bump into her. As we picked ourselves up our eyes met and we were immediately attracted to each other and when my hand accidentally touched one of her breasts as we dusted ourselves off it was all that was needed to bring us together. Our affair started just five minutes later. Our intention had been to go to Malibu where Natalie had a beach property but we were so attracted to each other we couldn’t wait and ended up on the back seat of her open top white-wall- tyre pink Cadillac at the side of the freeway, screened from prying eyes by a roadside billboard advertising Pepsi-Cola.

  We eventually did make it to her beachside property where we spent the next four days making love and relaxing in the Californian sunshine. Four days might have become four weeks but on the fifth day, whilst I was taking an early morning stroll along the beach, guess who I should meet? Greta bloody Garbo. That’s right, the same Greta Garbo who once ensnared Peter Cook. All thoughts of a life with Natalie were put on hold when Greta told me she wanted to be alone with me, and of course the moment she was alone with me we made love. We spent a blissful, passionate, six days together but then sadly it was time for me to return to England as I had exams coming up.

  As is the case with Rosemary Kingsland and Richard Burton I have never told a soul about my affairs with three leading Hollywood film stars until now. Again as with Mrs Kingsland I was never seen with my lovers and nobody knew or found out about us. A final coincidence is that my lovers too are now dead and unable to either confirm or deny any affairs we may have had in the past. But Rosemary and I know the truth.

  ****

  November 3 2006. BEST BEFORE.

  There can’t be many people who can boast that they have their own beefsteak maturers, but happily I am one of them. Actually everyone in the country has their own beefsteak maturers but very few of them are aware of it. Let me explain.

  In my home town, as is the case in many other towns up and down the country, we have a Co-op Late Shop. Why it is called a Late Shop is a moot point. The majority of people, but by no means an overwhelming majority, maintain it’s called a Late Shop because it stays open later than most retail outlets, in fact until 10 p.m. each day. Others however, Atkins and myself amongst them, hold that it’s because the check-out queues move so slowly that whenever you shop there it makes you late for whatever you intend to do next. Atkins further maintains that the ‘Late’ part of the name is probably a synonym for dead, as the checkout queues are so long and inert that one could die whilst waiting in them. On one occasion when I was in a Late Shop queue I thought this had actually happened when the woman in front of me collapsed to the ground in convulsions, but it turned out she was a diabetic who had been in the queue for so long she’d missed her insulin injection.

  However the Co-op Late Shops, for all their faults, and death by check-out queue is but one of them, have the saving grace of being superbly efficient steak maturers. They are not aware of this of course, otherwise they would immediately put a stop to it and make themselves inefficient in this regard too, so as to bring it in line with everything else they do. In the meantime though, for the reader who wishes to avail him or herself of their unbeatable steak maturation service, here’s how you go about it: -

  Never buy any of their cuts of steak at the full price. Wait until they reach their ‘Best before’ or ‘Sell-by date’ and have a ‘Reduced to clear’ sticker attached to them. By this time the steak will have lost the bright red colour it had when first put on the shelves about ten days previously and will now be a very dark red, almost black colour, fully matured and ready to eat. These steaks are not only very easy to come by but have the added advantage of having been approximately halved in price - typically a steak that started life at £3.99 will now be priced at £1.99.

  One might be tempted to think that given the choice of un-matured bright red steak and matured dark red steak at half the price that people would jump at the mature steak. The truth is that the majority of people wouldn’t buy the dark red mature steak at any price, as they equate its colour with the steak having gone off. In fact the reverse is the case as the dark red colour of the steak is the signal that it is now ready to eat.

  Indeed the ‘Best before’ date is a misnomer and should if anything read ‘Worst before’. This is not my opinion but a fact. Many years ago I asked the owner of an excellent restaurant how it was that his sirloin steaks were always so tender whereas the steaks at many other restaurants, and the steaks I cooked at home for that matter, were nowhere near as succulent. I suspected he had access to some secret outlet of superior steak but this turned out not to be the case, the steak he bought being of good quality but no better than could readily be obtained by anyone. He took me into his kitchen and through to a cool, dark pantry. Hanging on hooks from the ceiling were thirty or so full sirloins and other cuts of steak. They ranged in colour from bright red to almost black. “These are fresh in,” he said, pointing to the bright red sirloins. Then he indicated the ones that were almost black. “In about two weeks they’ll be that colour. And when they get to that colour, and not a moment before, they’ll be fit for the table.”

  I’ve never forgotten that lesson and over the years it must have saved me hundreds of pounds. Not only that, it has meant that the steak we have at home is always wonderfully tender and juicy. So the next time you pass through the butchery department of a supermarket and see steaks with a ‘Reduced to clear’ sticker on them don’t turn your nose up at them, snap them up. Bon Appetite.

  ****

  November 17 2006. AN EVENING WITH JOAN COLLINS

  In the Sunday Times Culture section yesterday I spotted an advert in the forthcom
ing concerts pages - ‘An Evening with Joan Collins. UK Tour 2006. With special guests 4 Poofs and a Piano’. Below the heading was a list of venues where Miss Collins and the 4 Poofs, along with their piano, would be appearing. I wondered briefly how the 4 Poofs have been able to resist a slight change of musical instrument in order that they might call themselves ‘4 Poofs and an Organ’.

  Miss Collins’s nearest port of call to me is Manchester Bridgewater Hall on 10th May. I shan’t be bothering. I’ve already spent an evening with Joan Collins, or part of one. Furthermore it wasn’t as a member of the audience but seated right next to her.

  The occasion was when we were both guests, along with others, on the radio programme ‘Saturday Night at Quaglino’s’, a live chat show that was broadcast in the early eighties from Quaglino’s night club in London’s West End, and hosted by Ned Sherrin. Whether Quaglino’s, or indeed Ned Sherrin, is still around, I’ve no idea, but probably not.

  I was on the show because at the time I was a scriptwriter on the News Huddlines and we’d recently published a book of scripts from the show. Along with another Huddlines writer Laurie Rowley I was there to plug it, which we did unmercifully and at every opportunity.

  I’m not sure why Joan Collins was there, but the late Leonard Rossiter was a guest also (before he was late of course), so it might have been something to do with the Cinzano television commercials. I forget.

  I was seated next to Joan, along with the other guests, at a large round table, set more-or- less in the middle of the night club where all the night clubbers could get a view of us. It crossed my mind that here might be an opportunity to progress from being a humble scriptwriter to a film star if I could impress Miss Collins in some way.