Stairlift to Heaven (4 page)

All went smoothly on the return journey until we had been travelling for about an hour, Atkins and I chatting about this and that and listening to the radio whilst Hargreaves and Harrison slept off their booze in the back seat. Then suddenly, about a couple of miles after passing through Penistone and entering the bleak moorland of that area, Harrison awoke, farted loudly and shat himself. “Bloody hell I’ve filled my trousers!” he announced, totally unnecessarily, for the smell was both immediate and appalling.

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.