Chapter 11

For a concussion patient, Lorraine’s aunty’s friend didn’t dither.  A week later, Ronnie Poole was furrowed and huffing over a letter from Howard Teece & Thomas, civil litigation and personal injury solicitors.  He took a slug of coffee, slapping the mug down, huffing some more when the steam hazed up his reading glasses.

This man had looked the same at forty, and would likely look the same at eighty.
He prodded at the intercom, scowling when he wasn’t answered for a good minute – and then not by the voice he sought.

‘Lance – Warwick surfaced yet?’

‘No, sir, he isn’t here.  I was just passing his office when I heard the phone go.’

‘Humph – started living in a student time zone already, eh?  Well when he puts in an appearance ask him to pop up, would you?  The wretched woman’s got lawyers involved now.’

‘Certainly sir.’

Ronnie despised the current ‘sue it’ culture, in which blame must be apportioned for every piffling accident, and being accountable for one’s own clumsiness was apparently no longer an option.  He tossed the letter into his burgeoning in-tray, sick of looking at it.

He was sick of a lot at present.  There was Warwick’s piss-taking timekeeping too, and general contempt.  See, Dad, was his message, I’m a dispensable employee.  Were he not the MD’s son, disciplinary procedures would figure – and Warwick knew it.

Ronnie propelled back his chair and went for a needless little storm around his office.  He had other preoccupations today, it being the anniversary of his father Walter’s death.  One of the few days a year when he took the unthinkable indulgence – a lunch hour – for some serene contemplation in St Andrew’s churchyard. 

On these sharp January days, Ronnie was a month off his twelfth birthday again, the scared kid following Walter’s coffin.  Ghosts of councillors, other luminaries and non-luminary neighbours crammed the pews – and there was his mother bawling in an ostentatious black hat.

Eulogy after eulogy rippled over Ronnie.  He’d preserved to this day the yellowed Dudley Herald obituary.  ‘…a passionate Black Countryman and a compassionate politician.’  Ronnie just remembered the gentle dad who took him fishing and bought him his first bike.

He paced the carpet now, pausing at the window that overlooked his car park, dotted currently with his staff’s cars but soon to be thronging with those of his customers.  A humdrum vista, but one he’d never taken for granted.  Ronnie mused on how he’d prospered to this – as he always did when he thought about Mom and Dad.

Walter and Elva Poole were both pushing forty when their only child, Ronald, arrived – having married relatively geriatrically for the post-war period.  Walter, a Tory councillor, was formerly a placid bachelor, his free hours devoted, in lieu of a wife, to public service – and the odd pint with his work pals from Thomas Dudley Limited.

Elva Hodgkiss, meanwhile, was far less at ease with her unwed status.  Which was phrasing it mildly, living as she did with cantankerous parents who made daily snide comparisons with her siblings’ marriages and offspring.

Her undoing, though, was her high sights.  The only men with charm – the only men with shirt collars – who frequented the Struggling Man, where she worked as a barmaid, were married, caddish, and non-local.  Travelling salesmen and the like.  With them, Elva’s standoffish blowsiness dissolved; she was all husky flirtation and yards of cleavage.  Which invariably led to activity in their temporary bedrooms that would have shocked those locals she spurned, who judged Elva ‘a frigid ’un and no mistake.’

But she was never quite enticing enough to be more than yet another lay to these suave itinerants.  Each fruitless tryst progressively soured her, and Elva usually attacked the gin on these occasions.

Only when Councillor Walter Poole chose her pub to canvas in did her longing to escape home become realisable.  Walter was esteemed on Dudley County Borough Council: an earnest orator on housing and the new National Health Service.  A somebody.  Incredibly, a single somebody.  Images of rats up drainpipes befitted.

Walter was seduced despite himself.  He’d never been a womaniser.  Some of his earthier workmates made ‘nancy’ slanders – but he simply had interests in life, which lay outside the bedroom.  Elva, still clandestine in her drinking at that stage, was flattering company for a self-deprecating chap.

They married in 1949; Ronnie was born the following year.  A Black Country politician’s wife, though, turned out to be not quite the cosseted queen Elva hoped.  Oh, she name-dropped about his civil title (as, fifty years later, did her grandson Ben), but it mortified her that her Walter was on the cistern production line at Thomas Dudley Ltd, and their matrimonial home was a mildewy council house in the Netherton suburb of Dudley neighboured by ‘common slatterns.’

‘I like it here,’ Walter would argue in the soft but resolute tone that could make dignitaries from all parties all ears.  ‘I’ve lived in Netherton all me life, the folks round here am salt of the earth.  Besides, we can’t exactly afford a palace, love, not now as we’ve got the bab.’

‘The bab’ grew up witnessing his mother’s erosion in gin.  Elva became brazen and belligerent in her drinking.  She let her once prided-in looks descend into music hall caricature: adopting a fag and pinny as her uniform.  The spivvy men at whom she occasionally still hurled herself scorned her now.  The crockery cupboards were virtually vacant – their contents having been hurled, during various rows, at the husband and son she now despised.

Elva maintained her snobbery; her ‘fish out of water’ delusions.  In her more depressive sessions, she could be found lunging around the yard bordered by the houses, shrieking about the ‘low class bitches’ who neighboured the Pooles.  Ron grew up hearing ‘Ooh, it’s a shame for poor young Ron,’ though also acquired black eyes in many a schoolyard bout with the sons of these maligned women.

When Walter passed away from peritonitis in 1962, Ron knew he was on his own.  He shopped, he cooked; he was lucky in possessing a resourceful personality, and being son of the neighbourhood embarrassment had thickened his skin to rival the rhinos in Dudley Zoo. 

Elva used widowhood as an excuse to flood herself in even more booze and sobbing.  She forgot Ron’s twelfth birthday.

‘You selfish little shit,’ she screamed when he dared mention it, ‘I’m in mourning, in case you hadn’t noticed.  What d’you expect – fancy gifts, wrapped in silk ribbons?’
When, a few months later, the bitch sold his fishing rod and boyhood toys (‘to pay the rent,’ she claimed, though her gin stash noticeably grew after that sale), he was thankful after all that she’d bought him no presents if such would have been their fate too.

Good job she wasn’t alive in the age of eBay, was Ron’s sardonic present-day observation.

‘When I’m wealthy and successful,’ he resolved, ‘I’ll get myself the best fucking fishing rod money can buy.’ 

And he did.  Though fished with it all of twice because by then he’d tired of the pastime.  He’d only bought it because he had the wherewithal – yet another thing he did just for the sake of it.  The costly rod was now in Ben’s possession.

Simply surveying his car park now made Ronnie feel like King.  Working for someone else was never his destiny.  When, at sixteen, he left Hillcrest school with a clutch of CSEs, his first job as Gloria Corns’ underling at the Teddy Gray factory was not his proposed career.  Neither was the evening stint he later took at the Queen Mary Ballroom, a nightspot within the grounds of Dudley Zoo.

The Queen Mary – initially just a haven from his mother during the hours he wasn’t making sweets – proved a priceless networking spot.  It was in that bar he first heard whispers about the new shopping precinct being constructed in Dudley town centre.

His bar work by then had instilled in Ronnie people skills which he’d started to contemplate plying in a shop environment.  His years of cooking at home had engendered an interest in foods, their origins and ingredients – and shopping for Mom had opened his eyes to the profusion of frozen produce and so-called ‘TV dinners.’  He mulled how he might gross such a fortune from food as to preclude him having to cook his own dinners ever again.

At only twenty-one Ronnie was one of the first lessees at this new Churchill Precinct.  He supplanted his bike (which Elva had known better than to sell, it being Ron’s transport for work and errands) with a seemlier Ford Anglia, and saved doggedly for a mortgage.

Soon thereafter Ronnie said a final goodbye to Elva and her misguided ‘Yow’m a fool, Ronnie Poole’ rhyme.  He gave notice to the council, and became the Poole family’s first homeowner.  His small terrace in the village of Upper Gornal was chosen for its equidistant location between the shop and the Tettenhall area of Wolverhampton, where he was plotting a second, far larger Chill Cabinet.

Ronnie loved the Wolverhampton branch’s size, its just-out-of-the-town site on a former field, and the fact its success represented the paying-off of a brash gamble.  He made it the headquarters, whose carpet he was currently wearing out.

Best of all, it was here Ronnie recruited a blonde checkout girl called Janice Grocutt.  He smiled now, recalling her interview: her magenta mini dress, her sex-comedy sauciness and references from Woolworths.

There had been no other woman since – despite the odd goad from pals with mistresses.  A floozy was one perk Ronnie Poole considered pointless.

‘Got no need to go out for a burger when I can get the tenderest peppered steak at home.’

Ronnie and Janice married at Dudley Register Office; Warwick was born a telltale six months later.  Ronnie opened a third store, in Kingswinford, and then followed Ben, then prosperity, and ultimately The House.

‘Afternoon!’  Ronnie was back in spiky boss mode as his elder son meandered in, bloodshot-eyed, unshaven and still knotting his tie.

‘Lance said you wanted to see me.’

‘Good night last night?’

‘Yes, thank you.’  Warwick smirked, adjusting the knot and folding his collar down.  His eyes met Dad’s in an 'I’m sure you didn’t ask me up to enquire about my social life' stare.

Ronnie proffered the Howard Teece & Thomas mail.  ‘Bloody Maxine Sloper wants two grand or she’s taking us to court.’

‘Well I say pay the old bag off and be done with it, ‘Warwick dropped the letter back on Ronnie’s desk after quickly scanning, ‘that way you keep out of court and get Ms Sloper off your back.’

‘Off our backs, Warwick.’  Ronnie scowled over his glasses.  ‘You are still my assistant director, and frankly I’m dismayed by your submissive attitude.’  Warwick pulled a scolded-schoolboy face.  ‘“Paying off the old bag” constitutes an admission of guilt in my book.  What kind of message does a two-grand cheque send out to the woman?  Whose supermarket is she going to fall over in next week?’

‘If the chip hadn’t been swept up in good time, we are guilty, aren’t we?’

‘If it was actually there in the first place, of course.  I rounded up everyone who was on duty at the time.  Keeley swears blind she’d been down that aisle less than a minute before Ms Sloper went arse over tit, and saw no chip.’

‘So you cast misgivings upon the plaintiff’s veracity?’  Warwick caricatured Dad’s long words.   Ronnie frowned again.  Warwick was displaying a sly streak to his make-up.  The boy had the supercilious look of a swot who was first to hand in his homework.

‘I suspect she’s lying, yes.’  I may not have read many fancy books, son, but you needn’t think you’ve flummoxed me.  ‘She’s one of these “Where there’s blame, there’s a claim” types.  Probably staged it.’

‘Took the chip in with her, you mean?’

‘I put nothing past anyone anymore.  Couple of the girls reckon the chap with her looked a bit of an oddball too.  Young, oafish type – not sure if he was her son or her boyfriend.  Come in!’

Lance came beetling in.  ‘Sir, I’ve got Nicola from Nathan Lillicrap on line three.  Sorry to interrupt, but she’s only got ten minutes and she’s out at court for the rest of the day.  I tried to put her through, but you’re on do not disturb.’

‘Thank you, Lance.  Good thinking.  Yes, I’ll speak to her.’

At thirty-four, Lance Longman, the operations director, was without a wife, girlfriend, boyfriend or discernible life outside work.  He did aeons of overtime and, paralytic at the last Christmas do, had embarrassingly declared to Ronnie: ‘You’re my hero, sir!’

But he crackled with initiative.  Nathan Lillicrap & Co were the family’s longstanding solicitors, yet Ronnie doubted Warwick would have thought to phone them – even had he shown up punctually this morning.

Yes, come October, Lance – with his shaving rash and his soft Wolverhampton twang – would make a fitting successor to the scholastic Warwick.  With his promotion, though, would have to come changes.  No more of that calling me ‘sir’ cobblers, for a start, Ronnie determined as he lifted the phone.