The thrills and spills of self-employment! Tim Melrose moves to Scotland and becomes involved in the community life of Ashiestiel Green. Here, First-Class Freda talks him into all kinds of trouble, ending with the inevitable disaster of the Easter Pageant.
Excerpt
In a one-man band, everybody plays piano. And in a one-man business, everybody does the post run: which is why I’m striding out across our village green, carrying the weekly bundle of mail to the local post office.
“Looks like you bin busy, Timothy Melrose!” our Post Mistress remarks. Don’t be fooled for a moment. First-Class Freda isn’t complimenting me on my work rate. Far from it: she just wants to see who I’ve been writing to.
“All a part of the daily grind,” and I drop the letters on her counter.
Freda takes each envelope in turn, weighs it carefully, and then stamps it with a resounding thump. We are now at package number eight. “Had a cousin, once,” Freda tells me. “She wrote letters – almost every Christmas.”
“Always nice to get a letter,” I smile back and make a note to keep that gem on ice until my next job-seek interview.
“Even better when they come by first class post,” Freda reminds me.
And that’s exactly why we call her First-Class Freda. Ages back, when we first set up shop in Ashiestiel Green, Freda had refused to sell me a second-class stamp. “Old Jim won’t pedal up to Paddy’s place for peanuts,” she had told me in her distinctive Cornish drawl. “First class only, thank you,” as if a less-expensive stamp might have downgraded Old Jimmy’s professional status.
Mind you, in all our time round here, I’ve yet to come across anyone called Paddy or any sign on any gatepost that might suggest where he’s living. But does it matter? With our Freda, it’s a first class stamp or nothing.
In her teenage years (or so I heard), our Post Mistress had lived in Truro. Then, on a girls-night-out in Falmouth, she became romantically involved with an Able Seaman. And when he was posted to Rosyth, she chased him north to splice his mainbrace, in a manner of speaking. But once his frigate had disappeared behind an iceberg in the Arctic Sea, her Jolly-Jack had decided that he preferred the icy waters of the North Atlantic and never even sent her a Bye Love, See U Later card – by first-class stamp or any other form of postage.
And so she stands behind Post Office counter, waiting and watching, just in case her beloved Jack should find himself in Ashiestiel Green one afternoon and wander into Senga’s mini-market by mistake. (Or so local gossip has it.)
First-Class Freda must be in her sixties. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Always pleasant: favours the darker blues, especially in winter when she goes for the kind of padded jacket that her Jack might have used on crows-nest duty.
But Freda’s major hobby is the Green, its funny little ways and everyone who passes through it. She sees it as her responsibility to know everything about anything (which accounts for her interest in my mail). From her vantage point behind the counter, she can watch the village as it goes about its daily business and keep a log of everything that has, is, or should be happening as the day wears on.
Apart from selling first class stamps, Freda’s shop is kind of general-purpose establishment, with an accent towards leisure. All the usual postal bits and pieces are there – pencils, pens, bottles of ink, all kinds of envelopes and jiffy bags, yellow stickies, giant rolls of parcel tape and tubes for sending rolled-up paintings to your granny. She also stocks an all-age/all-occasion shelf of greetings cards, two racks of paperback books and, within the last few weeks, has included a selection of just-released videos in her range of attractions. Freda believes that you can learn a lot about your neighbours from their choice of viewing.
“You watch him, Tim,” she said one afternoon. She was referring to the space vacated by a recent video-borrower who (even as she spoke), was scuttling across the Green, probably in search of a VCR. “He’s a top-shelf man,” she added with a sideways glance.
Purely in the line of what’s-she-on-about, I checked that shelf: Sound of Music, the Rambo series and a handful of Carry On specials were clearly on view. I wondered what the customer had discovered in the darker corners of this cultural treasure trove.
It’s easy enough to find your way around Ashiestiel Green. If you stand at the Post Office door, Senga’s mini-market is on your left, Wullie’s dry goods shop (where nails are still sold by the handful) is on your right while Alicia Weatherall’s pride and joy, the white-walled Bonnie Prince with its rustic thatch and nest of smoking chimneys, is dead ahead. And behind its Good Food Daily sign and up the hill a bit, you’ll find Davie Dexter’s garden centre.
So, without breaking the practiced rhythm of her stamp-and-drop-it-in-the-sack routine, First-Class Freda can watch you buy your milk, bread, Heinz Baked Beans and other daily necessities from Senga - then cross the green to get a tin of Sunburst Yellow for the rabbit hutch from old Wullie. And early callers to tap room of the Bonnie Prince will be noted in the log for future reference.
However, should you then decide to trot up the hill to buy a potted plant for auntie’s birthday – or visit the church, the village hall or the library (which are down the lane a bit and round the corner) - you are probably out of range. But I wouldn’t bet against a paid informer phoning back to Mission Control with the intimate details.
I’m not sure exactly how much she knows about the way we make a living. By now, she must have realised that Carrie and I work from home (in a neat little cottage, three bedrooms and a garden, halfway up the lane to Davie’s place). And now and then, she may see either of our daughters when they call in to see us.
Carrie and I have nothing to hide. After all, most days she sees me in T-shirt and joggers, walking our dog round the green. And she knows I use the golf course every so often. She found this out when someone grassed about the wicked slice that put a brand new Top-Flite golf ball clean through one of Davie Dexter’s greenhouse windows. On top of this, she knows I generate a lot of post – but doesn’t always know what’s in it.
Our way of life is no big secret: I’m a freelance trainer. Office products: mainly I develop outlines for training programs. And once in a while, I deliver a day or two of on-site instruction. One day, I’ll explain it to her – but I don’t have time right now.
“Seven pounds and twenty-two pence,” Freda tells me, having added up the various items on her pocket calculator.
“Should be able to manage that,” I tell her, making a show of searching for the money.
“Can’t be easy,” Freda continues. Now that we have finished the business of the day, she can start to build towards her secondary theme. “Not with Christmas just around the corner.”
Oh Freda – please! We’ve only just had Hallowe’en! And we haven’t finished with the nightly fireworks by a long chalk. “Perhaps I should have written to Santa Claus as well,” and I turn to go. But it’ll never be that easy to escape from First-Class Freda.
She will never give up. One day – and that (she hopes) may be tomorrow - she will find the magic button that will answer all her questions. She tries a flank attack. “Davie’s needin’ help with his Christmas trees,” she tells me.
Another job in wellies? Well, why not? Since we agreed on compensation for the greenhouse window situation (and I repossessed my brand new golf ball), Davie and I have got along quite well. For example, back in April, when a job-seek exercise had required a back-up sack from the depths of the post van, Freda sold my body to his garden centre for a couple of weeks of bagging compost. At £3 an hour (cash in hand), shifting several tons of Davie’s Super-Gro organic fertiliser had helped to fill a shortfall in the household budget.
“What’s he paying?” This is my standard response to any offer of work.
“Same as always.”
“In cash?”
“But if you don’t fancy Christmas trees,” she goes on, “there’s always Mrs Weatherall.”
Yes, Alicia the unbelievable, she who rules the Bonnie Prince with an iron dish cloth. In the past, when work has been thin and hard to find (and poor old George has blown his back again by shifting one too many barrels on a Sunday morning), Mrs Weatherall (as she prefers to be called) has used my services to help her out behind the bar. Although her hourly rates are modest, the freebie pints and old steak pies for Kandi have helped us make it to the next job-if-you-want-it phone call. At a guess, Mrs Weatherall is in her fifties. Small and dynamic, she’s the kind of woman who inspired the Desert Rats to push Rommel out of the North African desert. Not exactly a Lilli Marlene – more of a Jack Russell with attitude.
But we mustn’t be unkind: it was thanks to Mrs Weatherall that we came to live in the village in the first place. “Bar work?” I ask Freda, always hopeful.
“Not quite, my dear,” Freda smiles, knowing she has hooked her victim. “Mrs Weatherall needs a bit of help with the village Nativity Play.”
Read more about A Click Away From Chaos and Leslie Cameron HERE.
Copyright 2008 Leslie Cameron. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
Post a Comment