Gordon Williams Read Free Page A

out his darts with an open petulance often found among simple, masculine men. “How does ’ee afford Trencher’s then, what they’m say the rent be, Norman?”
    “Twelve guinea a week, I hear. More’n some folk get for feedin’ whole family.”
    “He seemed a nice enough bloke,” said Harry Ware, the landlord. The men made a joke of this landlord’s impartiality.
    “Oh aye, ’ee’s a friend o’ yourn so long he’m not short o’ a bob or two.”
    Harry Ware had grown used to the sarcasm and the jeers and the insults which formed most of the conversation of his customers. They were people who liked nothing better than to put something ‘over’ on somebody else, friend or foe didn’t matter. Harry Ware had bought the Dando Inn because it was so small and so far out of the way of crowds. He and his wife had thought it would give them a nice easy living after several years in a busy place on a main road not far from Torquay. He had been a grocer in Sunderland, where he was born, before going into the licensed trade. Although he had lived in the West Country for more than twenty years he didn’t really understand the people. In this he showed greater intelligence than many allegedly cleverer men, for he knew he didn’t understand them. If you came from anywhere else in England, these thicknecked, round-faced West Countrymen were regarded almost as clowns; they had a reputation for being the most obsequious and servile and obedient soldiers in the nation. They would touch their forelocks or salute an officer and take the most ridiculous order without question when a Geordie or a Taff or a Scouse or a Jock would argue – or fight.
    Yet beneath this stolid, almost bovine exterior, he knew there were dark twists in their minds. A Glasgow Jock was quick with his fists but these men were different, they could go for years without showing emotion and then... their blood was said to be very old, going back to ancient days. He was always very careful. These men were his regulars and he more or less lived off what they spent every night. On Saturdays and Sundays other farmers and villagers increased his takings, but without the men in the bar that night he could not make his week’s wages.
    Tom Hedden had a small farm, only fifty-one acres which heworked alone with the help of his fifteen-year-old son, Bobby. Then there was Bertie Scutt, who lived off his wife’s ten family allowances and the unemployment pay he drew between intermittent spells of casual work. Chris Cawsey was about twenty-two, he worked as a mechanic as the Compton Wakley garage; Harry Ware thought there was something almost girlish about Chris Cawsey even though he owned a motor-bike and wore big leather belts with fancy buckles.
    Phillip Riddaway was the biggest man present, a thick lump of a farm-worker with a big round red face and hands like a bunch of bananas. Phillip worked for Colonel Scott at the Manor Farm. Everybody knew he was thick in more ways than one. Sometimes Chris Cawsey and Norman Scutt – Bertie’s son – would tease him to a point where an ordinary man would have lost his temper, but Phillip never did. The more they laughed at him the more he seemed to like them.
    Bert Voizey was a carpenter and, it was said, an expert poacher. An insignificant looking man, he had a reputation for being able to snare foxes with wire and whenever a local farmer was infested with rats he would be called in to clear them for a flat price of two pounds. He had some recipe of his own for poison.
    Norman Scutt was Bertie’s oldest son, although in the bar they spoke to each other like mates rather than father and son. Harry Ware didn’t like Norman, who wore his hair in some new fancy style with long black sideboards. For one thing Norman fairly often got drunk (something the other men rarely did, it being a matter of pride not to show it), but apart from that, he had a record. His last sentence had been nine months for burglary and before that