05 Please Sir! (6 page)

‘Seaside Johnny, Miss Evans.’

‘Seaside Johnny?’ I said.

‘Yes, Mr Sheffield,’ said Ruby. ‘’E were t’new bingo caller las’ night an’ ah’ve not seen’im f’years.’E used t’work at Butlin’s back in t’sixties.’ She resumed polishing the door handle thoughtfully. ‘An’ ’e’s jus’ come back t’live in Easington an’ opened a second-’and shop. Do y’remember’im, Miss Evans?’

‘I certainly do, Ruby,’ said Vera. ‘He used to have a stall on Thirkby market selling old paintings and bric-à-brac.’

‘That’s reight,’ said Ruby with a smile. ‘’E loved ’is art, did Johnny.’E’ad pictures all round’is’ouse –
Wrestler’s Mother
,
Laughing Chandelier
,’e’d gorrem all.’ With that she picked up the wickerwork basket from under my desk, emptied the offcuts of sticky-backed plastic and torn manila envelopes into her black bag and dragged it out into the corridor.

When the door was closed, Vera resumed checking the carbon copy of an order form for large tins of powder paint and bristle brushes. Quietly, she murmured, ‘Oh dear.’

‘Problem, Vera?’ I asked.

Vera didn’t look up. ‘No, Mr Sheffield … Well, I hope not.’

Morning school went well. In my class, ten-year-old Sarah Louise Tait wrote a wonderful poem, Debbie Clack’s reading age caught up with her chronological age and Theresa Buttle finally cracked long multiplication. However, in Jo Hunter’s class, life wasn’t quite so smooth and a dispute had broken out.

‘Oh, Terry!’ exclaimed Jo.

‘Ah never took’er pen, Miss,’ pleaded Terry Earnshaw.

Jo shook her head sadly at the absence of correct grammar. ‘No, Terry: I
didn’t
take her pen.’

‘That meks two of us what never took it, Miss,’ said Terry, quick as a flash.

‘Oh dear,’ said Jo. ‘Come on, girls and boys, back to our health education lesson … Now, who can remember, what are the bowels?’

Benjamin Roberts immediately raised his hand. ‘A, E, I, O, U,’ he shouted eagerly.

Jo sighed deeply. ‘A good try, Benjamin,’ she said, ‘but … actually …’

In the High Street, Ruby had enjoyed a relaxing morning in Diane’s Hair Salon. After deciding on a cut-price ‘Farrah Fawcett’, she had set off back to school wearing her favourite headscarf and feeling as though she had just got eight draws on Littlewood’s pools. Although it crossed her mind that Farrah Fawcett didn’t have to mop the hall floor and put the dining tables out, she was grateful that her caretaker’s contract had been increased by an extra four hours per week and she knew the money would come in handy to feed her large family.

Finally, at half past twelve, Ruby hung up her overall in the caretaker’s store, tightened the knot on her headscarf and tapped lightly on the open staff-room door. ‘’Scuse me, Miss Evans,’ she said.

Vera looked up from her
Daily Telegraph
crossword. ‘That’s all right, Ruby,’ said Vera. ‘I was just studying this anagram.’

For a moment, Ruby was puzzled. She hadn’t seen Ted the postman deliver any anagrams that morning.

‘Ah’ll be getting off, if it please, Miss Evans,’ said Ruby. ‘Ah need t’check on my Ronnie.’

‘Why is that, Ruby?’

‘’E’s got one o’ them colds that men get.’

‘I see,’ said Vera. ‘So … just a sniffle then.’

‘That’s reight, Miss Evans.’

‘Any sign of a job on the horizon?’

‘My Ronnie’ll never knuckle down an’ get a proper job, Miss Evans. It’s not in ‘is nature,’ said Ruby. ‘Ah know that now.’

‘Oh dear, Ruby, I’m so sorry.’

Ruby shook her head. ‘Sometimes ah wish’e would sling’is’ook, but then ah took’im f’better o’ worse, so ah’m stuck wi’ ’im.’

‘But how do you,’ Vera searched for the right word, ‘…
feel
about him, Ruby?’

‘Well … ah do
luv
’im, Miss Evans – allus’ave, allus will. M’mother used t’say y’can’t pick
who
y’love, it picks you.’

Vera smiled. ‘She’s a wise lady, Ruby.’

‘She is that … Well, ah’ll be off then, Miss Evans. See y’later.’

‘OK, Ruby.’ Vera shook her head sadly and wondered what would become of her downtrodden friend. She really did need something to cheer her up.

Ruby was deep in thought as she walked down the cobbled school drive. The distant forest at the foot of the Hambleton hills glowed with autumn gold but Ruby was too preoccupied to notice. She knew that her unemployed husband, Ronnie, would continue to drink the same considerable volume of beer regardless of the cost. To make matters worse, there was talk that Miss Golightly in the General Stores & Newsagent was about to raise the price of a loaf of bread to thirty-one pence. The outlook for Ruby and her family looked bleak. As she closed the school gates and turned towards home, Jo Hunter and Vera watched her from the staff-room window.

‘I feel so sorry for Ruby,’ said Jo sadly.

‘So do I,’ said Vera. ‘She needs something to lift her spirits.’

Our forty-eight-year-old caretaker was married to unemployed Ronnie, whose life revolved around his racing pigeons, the bookmaker and Tetley’s bitter. They had six children. ‘The first’n’ last were accidents but ah love’em all,’ she had once said. Her elder son, thirty-year-old Andy, was in the army and her eldest daughter, twenty-eight-year-old Racquel, lived in York with her husband, a factory storeman. Racquel worked as a packer in the Joseph Rowntree chocolate factory and every Friday she delivered a free bag of Lion bars to her mother. ‘’Ere’s y’little treat, Mam,’ Racquel would say and Ruby would give her a hug and an expectant look. ‘An’ no, Mam, ah’m
not
pregnant.’ Then Ruby would go into her cluttered kitchen to make a mug of tea and pray that one day she would be blessed with a grandchild.

Ruby and Ronnie shared their council house at number 7 School View with their other four children. Duggie, a twenty-six-year-old undertaker’s assistant with the nickname ‘Deadly’, was content smoking his Castella cigars, playing with his Hornby Dublo train set and sleeping on his little wooden bunk in the attic; twenty-one-year-old Sharon had just got engaged to the local blond-haired adonis Rodney Morgetroyd, the Morton village milkman; nineteen-year-old Natasha was an assistant in Diane’s Hair Salon, and eight-year-old Hazel, a happy, rosy-cheeked little girl, had just moved up into Sally Pringle’s class.

As Ruby made her way home, she wondered if her life would always be one of toil in order to keep her family fed and healthy. There were too many days now when her bones ached and she simply wanted to sit down and shut out the world.

When she walked into her house, the sight that met her eyes was a long way from the elegant Christopher Plummer asking the demure Julie Andrews to dance.

‘Ah’m proper poorly, Ruby,’ complained frail, skinny Ronnie as he sat in the kitchen with a sweaty sock round his neck, a bread poultice on his chest and his feet in a bucket of hot mustard water. ‘An’ ah’m sweatin’ cobs,’ he gasped. ‘Ah feel as though ah’ve gone three rounds wi’ Giant ‘Aystacks.’

Ruby ignored his plaintive cries and took a tin of sucking Victory V lozenges from the cupboard, rubbed off the dust from the lid on Ronnie’s bobble hat and popped a sweet into his mouth. ‘Suck that, y’soft ha’porth, an’ shurrup!’ said Ruby and went upstairs to find her best dress. ‘Ah’m goin’ out.’

‘Where to?’ croaked Ronnie.

‘Never you mind,’ said Ruby and she slammed the door.

On the High Street, Johnny Duckitt thought he ruled the road as he parked his 1975 four-door Vauxhall Viva. It was a recent purchase for £1,195 from Charlie Clack’s garage and Charlie had thrown in a free car radio for good measure. In his knee-length leather jacket, tight stone-washed jeans and carefully coiffeured hair he imagined himself as a cross between sixties pop star Billy Fury and country and western singer Johnny Cash. After flicking a comb through his lacquered quiff, he lit up a Peter Stuyvesant luxury-length filter cigarette and waited in his car outside Nora’s Coffee Shop. As he blew smoke rings through his open window he reflected on the conquests in his life. There had been so many … but Ruby had been different. For some reason she had resisted his charms and he had never forgotten her.

Johnny had worked at the Butlin’s holiday camp in Filey on the east coast of Yorkshire in the sixties. He had strutted around with his red coat and baggy cream trousers and was always introduced as ‘Seaside Johnny’ to his adoring fans. His rendition of Frankie Vaughan’s ‘Green Door’ regularly received a standing ovation. It was a carefree life and, for Johnny, every week meant an influx of holidaymakers and a new girlfriend.

In 1938 Billy Butlin had bought 120 acres of land at Hunmanby Gap near Filey for £12,000 and created one of the largest holiday camps in the country. At its peak there were eleven thousand holidaymakers and a railway station had been built near by to accommodate the huge weekly influx of visitors. It was on a balmy summer’s evening over twenty years ago that Ruby had arrived at that station and two days later she danced with Johnny in the spectacular Viennese Ballroom. While Ronnie was propping up the bar and Ruby’s mother, Agnes, was looking after young Andy, Racquel and Duggie, Johnny saw his chance. After a wild ride on the Big Dipper they held hands tightly on the ‘Thrill of Thrills’, followed by a lazy circuit of the boating pool in a little rowing boat with the number 48 painted on the side. Ruby had felt like a princess in the arms of this handsome Butlin’s redcoat and when he had tried to steal a kiss she found she couldn’t resist. It was a day she would never forget.

In Nora’s Coffee Shop, Johnny bought two frothy coffees and Ruby sat opposite him at a corner table. There was a long silence until Johnny said, ‘Yer ‘air looks nice, Ruby.’ It was an opening line he knew never failed.

‘Ah’ve just ’ad it done. It’s a
Farrah Fawcett
.’

Johnny carefully avoided a look of surprise. ‘It’s lovely, Ruby,’ he said.

‘Johnny … what ’appened t’you?’ she asked. ‘Y’said y’d write.’

‘Ah’m sorry, Ruby,’ he said. ‘Truth is, ah never ‘ad
confidence
like your Ronnie. Ah never
seized t’day
, so t’speak. Ronnie ‘ad lasses ‘anging on ‘is every word. Ah were allus a quiet ‘un, staying in t’background.’ Telling lies was as easy as breathing for Seaside Johnny.

‘But y’were a
Redcoat
, Johnny, y’were on t’stage,’ said Ruby in surprise.

‘That were jus’ an act, Ruby,’ said Johnny. ‘It weren’t real … it weren’t
me
.’

‘Ah kept that postcard y’sent me of t’Sunshine Chalets,’ said Ruby. ‘Then ah ’eard y’went an’ married that erratic dancer from ‘Alifax … an’ ah never saw yer again.’

Johnny smiled. ‘She were an
exotic
dancer, Ruby, but y’reight … she were
erratic
an’ all. It didn’t last long.’

‘Ah’m sorry, Johnny,’ said Ruby.

‘No need, Ruby. Ah were eighth out o’ ten kids … ah never knew what it were like t’sleep alone till ah got married,’ he said with a grin. ‘It were a relief when she’d gone.’

Ruby stared at her dumpy work-red hands. ‘But did it mean owt … you an’ me?’

‘Course it did, Ruby. Ah could never forget you in that Tunnel o’ Love,’ said Johnny with the sincerity of a politician.

‘But we never went on t’Tunnel o’ Love: it were shut,’ said Ruby, looking puzzled.

‘Oh yes, ah remember now,’ said Johnny quickly. ‘It were that other one that y’liked.’

‘Thrill o’ thrills, it were, as ah recall,’ said Ruby.

‘Ah remember it well,’ said Johnny.

‘Ah’m glad y’do, Johnny. It were good t’feel, well, sort of
wanted
.’

Johnny looked sadly at Ruby. She had always been different from the others but now he knew why and, perhaps for the first time in his life, his selfish heart knew remorse.

At the end of school, Ruby came into the school office to collect the litter from the waste-paper baskets. She spotted the vase of roses on Vera’s desk and sniffed appreciatively. ‘Oooh, these are lovely, Miss Evans,’ said Ruby. ‘Teks me back.’

‘You like roses, don’t you, Ruby?’ I said.

‘Ah do that, Mr Sheffield,’ she said. ‘Ah ’ad roses on m’wedding day an’ that time we ’ad that little party in t’school ‘all.’ She sighed and shook her head. ‘Now me children are m’bed o’ roses … an’ ah luv’em all.’

‘I love roses as well, Ruby,’ said Vera. ‘They’re so …
romantic
.’

Ruby picked up her galvanized bucket, leant on her mop and looked thoughtful. ‘
Romantic
, Miss Evans? Ah remember romance wi’ my Ronnie but that were a long time ago – so long it’s ‘ard t’remember – an’ after that … well … we jus’ med babies.’

Vera gave a wistful smile as Ruby trotted off to mop the wood-block floor in the school entrance and I wondered about their different lives.

Meanwhile, Julie Earnshaw was in her kitchen dishing up fish fingers, chips and mushy peas to Heathcliffe, Terry and Dallas Sue-Ellen. She was thinking about the new bingo caller who had been keen to talk to Ruby Smith and she wondered why. However, with children like hers, the opportunity for private meditation was rare.

‘Where are me other three dads, Mam?’ asked Terry as he poured tomato sauce on his chips.

‘Y’what? Y’ve only got
one
dad, y’soft ha’porth,’ said his mother, looking offended but secretly recalling a few old boyfriends from her youth.