The Last of the Bowmans

by J. Paul Henderson

  ‘I don’t remember my father ever saying anything derogatory about them, Mrs Turton. Are you sure you’ve got that right?’

  Mrs Turton nodded. ‘You can’t blame people for feeling the way they do, Gregory, and I certainly didn’t blame your father. If they’d tried to fit in more and become more westernised, I don’t think there’d have been a problem. But very few of them have done. That’s why Barry says we should celebrate those that have – people like Lenny Henry.’

  ‘Lenny Henry’s British,’ Greg said. ‘And his parents were from Jamaica, not Pakistan.’

  ‘Yes, but you know what I mean, Gregory. He’s fitted in, hasn’t he? And he’s always got that nice smile on his face. If I’m honest, though, I can’t say that I find him particularly funny. I watched him on television the other week and I didn’t laugh once. I wouldn’t have bothered, but the Radio Times gave him a good write-up and described him as a comic genius. I think that was stretching it a bit. They probably only said that because his show was on BBC1.

  ‘I mean he looks like he should be funny, doesn’t he, but he’s not – or at least I don’t think he is. Barry likes him though, and he’s forever shouting out Katanga! That’s one of his catchphrases. Now what the Dickens are the names of those other two characters of his that Barry goes on about?’ Mrs Turton studied for a moment and then announced their names triumphantly. ‘Delbert Wilkins and Theophilus P. Wildebeeste! Barry says they’re funnier than Mr Pastry.’

  Greg glanced at his watch.

  ‘I’m not sure I agree with him there, though,’ Mrs Turton continued. ‘In my opinion, Mr Pastry was a lot funnier. But Barry’s a lot more forgiving than I am, believe it or not, and he always looks for the positives in people. He’ll find something good to say about anyone – even Robert Kilroy-Silk. He doesn’t like the man’s politics – they’re a bit too left-wing for Barry – but he does give him credit for having tidy hair. And Barry says that even if I don’t find Lenny Henry funny, I should still give him his due for the work he does in Africa for Comic Relief and his Premier Inn adverts.’

  ‘And the fact that he was a trailblazer for other black comedians, I suppose,’ Greg said.

  ‘I’m sorry, Gregory, but I don’t allow words like that in this house.’

  ‘What words?’

  ‘You know very well what I’m talking about. Words like B-L-A-C-K,’ she said, spelling out the letters. ‘It’s racist.’

  ‘But he is black, Mrs Turton, and what’s more he’s probably proud of being black. Black’s a positive word – just like white. It’s not being racist to say a person’s black.’

  ‘I think we’ll have to disagree on that, Gregory, but while you’re in my house I’d appreciate it if you didn’t use that word.’

  First Jean telling him how to behave under her roof and now Mrs Turton! What the hell had happened to free speech in his absence? He looked to see how much of the foul-tasting brew was left to drink and was disappointed to find his cup still half full. He was about to drain it when Mrs Turton continued the conversation, as if the intervening unpleasantness had never happened.

  ‘Anyway, going back to what I was saying, Gregory. Barry says that we should celebrate newcomers who make an effort to fit in, and he wrote to the company that makes Robertson’s Golden Shred to try and get them to back one of his ideas. He said that now they’d stopped putting paper golliwogs behind their labels, maybe they should consider putting photographs of people like Lenny Henry and Moira Stuart there – Barry was as upset as anybody when Moira lost her job for being too old. She wasn’t even pension age, you know.’

  ‘And what did Robertson’s have to say about this?’ Greg asked, incredulous that Barry could be so blind to the mores of the time.

  ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t think they took him seriously,’ Mrs Turton said. ‘They just wrote back thanking him for his interest in Golden Shred and asked him if he’d tried any Hartley’s jam recently.’

  Greg dissolved into laughter and started to guffaw uncontrollably. Mrs Turton stared at him po-faced.

  ‘I don’t think it’s anything to laugh about, Gregory,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter with you – are you on drugs?’

  ‘No… no, Mrs Turton,’ he gasped. ‘I think I’m just tired. I didn’t sleep very well last night.’

  Still smiling, Greg drained his cup, winced involuntarily and then gathered himself. He stood, thanked Mrs Turton for her hospitality and then moved towards the door. ‘You don’t want to frisk me before I leave, do you?’ he asked light-heartedly.

  Mrs Turton declined his offer with a straight face and said that she’d know soon enough if anything was missing.

  As Mrs Turton closed the door behind him, only one thought passed through her mind. Whatever Gregory might have said to the contrary, there was no doubt in her mind that Mr Bowman’s youngest son was still taking drugs. ‘Poor Mr Bowman,’ she said quietly to herself. ‘He’ll be turning in his grave.’

  She picked up the phone and called Barry.

  Rather than return to his father’s house, Greg chose to put as much distance between him and Mrs Turton as possible and headed for the pub. The rubbish that woman talked. Why, he wondered, had he sat there so placidly while she’d intimated his father was a racist and that, by dint of his vocabulary, so too was he? And that son of hers suggesting he was a thief, and her that he was under the influence of drugs. Jesus Christ!

  The Brown Cow was as it had always been. It had withstood the calls for modernisation and remained an establishment where people could drink in peace without being distracted by loud music and the noise of fruit machines. He ordered a pint and moved to a corner table. There were only two other people in the pub and they too were sitting alone, one reading a newspaper and the other puzzling over a crossword.

  He’d been there only a few minutes when Ian Collard walked through the door wearing a neck brace. He saw Greg and brought his pint over to the table.

  ‘Is it all right if I join you, Greg, or would you prefer to be alone? You look to be deep in thought, young man.’

  ‘Please do, Ian,’ Greg said, pulling out a chair for him. ‘What happened to your neck?’

  ‘Car crash,’ Ian replied matter-of-factly. ‘Hit from behind when I was driving Margaret home from the Beech Hotel. Hedgehog runs into the road, I brake hard and the car behind goes slap-bang into the back of me. Car got off light, but the old neck took a bit of a hammering. Brace probably makes it look worse than it is though.’

  ‘How’s Margaret? Is she okay?’

  ‘Margaret’s fine but the marriage is on the rocks! Not really,’ he laughed. ‘I was just joking when I said that. We are having a bit of a disagreement though. She wants me to call a personal injury lawyer and make a claim for compensation. I’m refusing point-blank – just like your dad would have done. I’m a traditionalist, Greg, and I don’t go in for that kind of thing.

  ‘Margaret does though. She watches daytime television – too much for my liking – and sees adverts telling people to contact them on a No Win No Fee basis. I don’t believe in it. It’s not the culture I grew up with and it’s not a culture I like. And your father didn’t like it either. He said it encouraged untruths and personal irresponsibility, and stoked the belief that you could always get something for nothing if you blamed other people for your stupidity. It drives up the costs of car insurance too. My own premium went up over twenty per cent last year. Can you believe that?

  ‘Anyway, I’m not claiming and that’s that! Besides, I think the accident was my fault. I know it’s human nature to brake for a living animal – unless you’re driving a lorry load of pet food, that is – but even so, I should have looked in my rear-view mirror before I braked. I didn’t give the car behind me a snowball’s chance in hell. To cap it all, it turned out that it wasn’t even a hedgehog I braked for: it was a brown paper bag that someone had screwed into a ball
and thrown out of their car window.

  ‘And I’ll tell you another thing, Greg: I read in the newspaper the other week that there are more claims for whiplash in this country than any other country in Europe. No one’s going to tell me that British necks are weaker than continental ones – we’d have never won any wars if that was the case. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s a con is what it is and the only people benefitting from it are those ambulance-chasing lawyers. I’ve no time for them, and neither had your dad.’

  He took off his hat, placed it on the chair next to him and ran his fingers through his thinning hair.

  ‘Apart from my dad, I think you and my Uncle Frank are the only people I know who still wear hats,’ Greg commented.

  ‘I’m afraid hat wearers are a dying breed, Greg. Your dad had a nice trilby, though. Always wore it when he went out. And, if he painted outside the house, he wore a flat cap. If I’m not mistaken it was made of moleskin.’

  ‘Corduroy,’ Greg corrected. It was the cap his father had been wearing the previous evening.

  ‘Two things I wouldn’t want to be making today are hats and ties. No one wears them anymore. Your dad did though. Even after he retired from work he still wore a tie, irrespective of whether he was inside or outside the house. He said he was trying to set an example. Are you staying at the house, by the way? Margaret says she’s seen a car parked in the drive.’

  ‘Yes, I’m helping Billy get it ready for sale.’

  ‘Good luck to you with that then. The market’s tough these days. There was a time when any house in the Grove sold in a couple of weeks and for its asking price. Those days are long gone, Greg. People still ask for those prices, but they don’t get them. That’s why you see so many For Sale notices in the same gardens for months on end – sometimes years.’

  ‘You haven’t by any chance got a crack in the back wall of your house, have you?’ Greg asked.

  ‘I’m glad to report that I haven’t, young man. I presume you have. Is it horizontal or vertical?’

  ‘Horizontal.’

  ‘Shouldn’t be too much of a problem, then. Vertical cracks are the ones you have to worry about. How big is it?’

  ‘It runs the full length of the back wall and into Mrs Turton’s. I gather Barry owns her house now.’

  ‘He owns it all right but he doesn’t maintain it. Mrs Turton’s got a right cheek complaining about our wall when her own windows are practically falling out of their frames. Have you seen her since you’ve been back?’

  ‘I went round for coffee this afternoon.’ Greg replied.

  ‘And how was she?’

  ‘Put it this way, Ian: if you ever decide to add another three feet to that wall of yours, I’ll give you a hand.’

  ‘Hah! That’s a good one, that is,’ Ian laughed. ‘Wait till I tell Margaret that.’

  They chatted for a while longer, mainly about Mrs Turton and her Christian bones, and then Ian drained his glass. ‘I’d best be getting home, Greg. Margaret’s going to be wondering where I’ve got to. Can I give you a lift anywhere?’

  Greg thanked him but declined. He waited while Ian left the pub and then went to the bar and ordered another pint of beer and a plate of sausage and mash. He glanced at the clock behind the bar.

  ‘How long will the food take?’ he asked the woman who’d taken his order.

  ‘No more than fifteen minutes, love. Are you in a rush?’

  ‘Not particularly,’ Greg replied. ‘But I have to be somewhere at eight.’

  ‘A hot date?’ she smiled.

  ‘More like an appointment with death,’ he said, returning her smile.

  China

  When his father appeared that evening, Greg was staring out of the back window. The views from the house were panoramic and Greg could see the sprawl of the city below him and the moors rising in the distance. Like Rome, the city had been built on a series of hills, but there the comparison ended.

  ‘It looks like an old carpet that’s been left out in the rain, doesn’t it?’ Lyle said.

  Greg turned quickly. Even though he was expecting his father, the voice still made him jump. Lyle had changed clothes and was now wearing a black paloma long dress and a trilby.

  ‘So, what do you think?’ Lyle asked, giving him a twirl.

  ‘It becomes you, Dad – as long as you’re not expecting me to dance with you.’

  ‘I’ll spare you that pleasure, Greg. The only person I could ever dance with was your mother. If I danced with another woman I’d always lose my rhythm and forget the steps – tread on a good few toes, too.’

  Greg turned to look through the window again. ‘What happened to the city, Dad? It never used to be like this. When I first went to America and people asked me where I was from, I was always proud to tell them. I used to say that if you had to live in a northern industrial city then there was no better place than this. I’m not sure I’d say that now.’

  ‘I guess it lost its way,’ Lyle replied. ‘When your Mum and me first came to live in the house, we could look out of this window and count up to three hundred mill chimneys – one supposedly big enough for a man to drive a horse and cart around the top. In the days before the city went smokeless, you could see smoke belching out of all of them. The air quality wasn’t up to much and we used to get some real pea-souper fogs in the autumn, but somehow the pollution was reassuring. You knew that the city was working and that people had jobs.

  ‘There are no jobs now – not to speak of anyway. The city had all its eggs in one basket and once the woollen industry was gone there was nothing to take its place. Most people today seem to drive taxis for a living. You see long lines of them in the city centre – sitting there for most of the time – and people climbing into them who don’t look as if they’ve got two ha’pennies to rub together. Beats me how they afford them.’

  Greg turned the conversation to one of his two outstanding questions. ‘Tell me, Dad. Why are you talking with an American accent?’

  ‘I didn’t know I was,’ Lyle said. ‘But I guess things change when you die. I still can’t believe I got knocked down by a bus. I used to cross that road practically every day.’

  ‘You were drunk, Dad, and you crossed at a blind spot.’

  ‘Drunk! How could I have been drunk? I don’t drink.’

  ‘You accidentally drank some white spirit. You put your paintbrush in the antibiotics and drank from the wrong glass – or that’s what people think happened. What’s the betting you weren’t wearing your glasses?’

  ‘Well, I’ll be,’ Lyle said. ‘I thought it tasted a bit sharp… And no, I wasn’t wearing my glasses. Who in the name of King Arthur wears glasses when they’re painting?’

  ‘Usually people with bad eyesight.’

  ‘I didn’t come here to debate my eyes, Greg. I want to know what you’ve been doing to fix the family.’

  ‘Jesus, Dad! You only told me last night that there was something to fix, and I’ve been busy all day. Besides, Billy’s in Denmark and won’t be back until Friday. I phoned Uncle Frank though and I’m seeing him on Thursday.’

  ‘What day is it today?’

  ‘Monday.’

  ‘What’s wrong with seeing him tomorrow or Wednesday?’

  ‘I’ve got a structural engineer coming to have a look at the crack in the wall tomorrow morning and three estate agents in the afternoon. I suggested Wednesday to Uncle Frank, but he said that was his day for fish and chips and that Thursday would be more convenient. It’s not as if I’ve been sitting on my backside all day.’

  ‘Sorry to nag you, son, but I’ve only got twenty days.’

  ‘And nineteen of them are still left. We’ve got plenty of time.’

  ‘If you say so,’ Lyle shrugged. ‘So tell me: what did you do today?’

  ‘I made appointments, ran errands and had coffee with Mrs Turt
on.’

  Lyle smiled. ‘And how’s Mrs Turton keeping?’

  ‘As usual, not to herself. I don’t even know why she bothered inviting me round. She thinks I’m a thief and accused me of being on drugs.’

  ‘And were you?’

  ‘Of course I wasn’t! You know I stopped taking drugs after Billy’s wedding.’ (If not the absolute truth, Greg’s answer was nearer the truth than a lie.)

  Lyle smiled his approval and then laughed. ‘That reminds me,’ he said. ‘Mrs Turton once accused the couple opposite her of dealing drugs. She called the police and told them that strange people were calling at the house all hours and that there was a pungent smell every time the garage door opened. They sent a van with lights flashing and six policemen climbed out. All they found were hundreds and hundreds of scented candles. It turned out the couple had a Yankee Candle franchise. Ha!’

  ‘I wonder why that doesn’t surprise me,’ Greg said. ‘By the way, you didn’t get off scot-free. She practically called you a racist.’

  ‘That’s balderdash! The only thing I ever said that might have given her that impression was that there were too many Scottish people on television – and there are, especially in the weather and sports departments. Frank thinks so too.’

  Greg doubted the wisdom of citing Uncle Frank’s views as proof of anything, but let the matter pass. ‘She never mentioned that to me. She was talking about newcomers, which I gather is her codeword for immigrants. She even accused me of being racist because I used the word black when I was describing Lenny Henry.’

  ‘That woman!’ Lyle said shaking his head. ‘She’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, that’s for sure, and she’d do better not listening to that son of hers. The older Barry gets the weirder he becomes. It wouldn’t surprise me if he had a Nazi uniform hanging in his wardrobe.